Rod Dreher's Blog, page 16

This is true:

List of things that are suddenly considered “right wing”

-Skepticism of the Pentagon
-Skepticism of corporate media consensus
-Skepticism of regime change operations
-Skepticism of weapons-funneling operations
-Skepticism of punitive sanctions
-Skepticism of World War III

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) March 18, 2022

Along those lines, anything that deviates in any way from the Narrative — even simply to attempt to understand what is going on — is denounced as pro-Putin, pro-Russian, etc. Even though I always say that I support Ukraine in this war — not because I think Ukraine has a fine government, but because I stand with a small nation against the warmongering of a larger one — and even though I praise Zelensky for his great valor (though condemn him for the propagandistic lies he tells to try to drag NATO into this war), and even though I routinely condemn Putin for his unjust aggression and repression of antiwar dissidents at home … I still get crap from some readers, like the accusation that I “always” defend Putin and condemn Zelensky. I don’t think readers who do this are being cynical. I think that they have so plugged their brains into the Narrative Machine that they really do see this conflict as one of Uncontestably True Facts.

Here is a true fact:

A half-dozen ongoing uncontrolled population-scaled Milgram experiments in conformity and obedience ongoing at once

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) March 18, 2022

Here’s a trigger warning for sensitivos: I am going to attempt to explain something to you about why not everybody in the world hates Putin. This does not mean I endorse his invasion (see above). This is about trying to get the nuance of what’s happening here — what it means, and what it is likely to mean, and what it means more deeply. This is, in part, an explanation of why I am unwilling to join the mob. I know that trying to understand one’s opponents, or enemies, is considered an impure act by many today, but there will be some of you for whom this is a valuable experience. It was only the day before yesterday that all good classical liberals knew that listening and understanding is not the same thing as endorsing. This is a valuable principle to live by.

Yesterday Putin gave a fairly frightening speech, in which he spoke of the demonization of Russians by the West (true, alas), said that Russia is being “cleansed” of a Western “fifth column,” and denounced oligarchs who live abroad as traitors to the good Russian folk who live at home. It was a demagogic tour de force — as if Putin hadn’t created, and didn’t sustain, the oligarchs, and as if he didn’t have a $99 million superyacht. Nevertheless, it’s important to consider why this demagoguery might be effective. He’s building on a deep and longstanding fear and loathing Russians have for the West, and using it to deflect anger at him for crushing the Russian economy with his foolish Ukraine war.

But there’s more to it than that. Let’s consider this “news analysis” by NYT correspondent Stephen Erlanger.Excerpts:

Mr. Putin’s concept of a nation is an ethnic and autocratic one, in contrast to the Western idea of a multicultural state built on civic responsibility, the rule of law, and individual rights. To be an American, many have suggested, it is necessary simply to swear allegiance to the flag, obey the law and pay your taxes.

Erlanger thinks this is self-evidently a good thing. There are many Americans who think this is a terrible thing! This deracinated, placeless understanding of the nation is historically aberrant, a feature of postwar modernity, but is considered to be the ideal by the ruling class in the US, the European Union, and among the globalist Davos class. It is true that the US is a multicultural society, and we have (so far) been able to make it work, though as the scholar of ethno-demography Eric Kaufmann has observed, America is going to face a difficult period of shifting from having a dominant ethnic minority (whites) to one in which no minority dominates.  From an essay Kaufmann published in 2019; don’t skip over this — it’s important:

We need to talk about white identity. Not as a fabrication designed to maintain power, but as a set of myths and symbols to which people are attached: an ethnic identity like any other.

In the West, even without immigration, we’re becoming mixed-race. This is not speculation, but is virtually guaranteed by the rates of intermarriage occurring in many Western countries. Projections reveal that faster immigration may slow the process by bringing in racially unmixed individuals, but in a century those of mixed-race will be the largest group in countries such as Britain and the United States. In two centuries, few people living in urban areas of the West will have an unmixed racial background. Most who do will be immigrants or members of anti-modern religious groups such as ultra-Orthodox Jews. The reflex is to think of this futuristically, as bringing forth increased diversity, or the advent of a “new man.” But, if history is our guide, things are likely to turn out quite differently. Many people desire roots, value tradition and wish to maintain continuity with ancestors who have occupied a historic territory. [Emphasis mine — RD]

I would wager that Stephen Erlanger, as a New York Times correspondent and member of the globalist cultural class, does not know many of these people. I would also wager, on the basis of this news analysis, that he fears and loathes them. That old Cajun man in the photo above? I bet if he’s still alive, that he holds opinions that would make Stephen Erlanger and his colleagues shit their New York pants and want to see him crushed. I know lots of old men like this, and not-so-young men. You know who’s going to go fight the war if the US gets involved? The same ones who fought the last wars: that old man’s grandsons.

More Kaufmann:

The loss of white ethno-cultural confidence manifests itself in other ways. Among the most important is a growing unwillingness to indulge the anti-white ideology of the cultural left. When whites were an over-whelming majority, empirically unsupported generalizations about whites could be brushed off as amusing and mischievous but ultimately harmless. As whites decline, fewer are willing to abide such attacks. At the same time, white decline emboldens the cultural left, with its dream of radical social transformation. The last time this blend of ethnic change and cultural contestation occurred, in fin-de-siècle America, the anti-WASP adversary culture was confined to a small circle of bohemian intellectuals. Today, the anti-majority adversary culture operates on a much larger scale, permeates major institutions and is transmitted to conservatives through social and right-wing media. This produces a growing culture-war polarization between increasingly insecure white conservatives and energized white liberals.

The Western tradition of opposing one’s own culture begins with the so-called “lyrical left” in the late 19th century, which lampooned bourgeois values. After the First World War, the cultural left turned against the nation, to the point that by 1930, according to the liberal George Orwell, “in left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman.” In the more diverse United States, the lyrical left’s critique took the form of an attack on their own ethnic group, the Anglo-Protestant majority, whom they saw as oppressing European immigrants and enforcing puritanical laws such as the prohibition on selling alcohol. In the 1960s, this countercultural movement, which I term left-modernism, developed a theory of white ethno-racial oppression. Its outlook superseded the logical, empirically grounded, left-liberal Civil Rights Movement after 1965 to become a millenarian project sustained by the image of a retrograde white “other.” Today, left-modernism’s most zealous exponents are those seeking to consecrate the university campus as a sacred space devoted to the mission of replacing “whiteness” with diversity.

It’s important to have people criticizing their own group: What Daniel Bell termed the “adversary culture” spurs reform and creativity when it collides with the majority tradition. But what happens when the critics become dominant? In softer form, left-modernist ideology penetrated widely within the high culture and political institutions of Western society after the 1960s. This produced norms that prevented democratic discussion of questions of national identity and immigration. The deviantization of these issues in the name of anti-racism introduced a blockage in the democratic process, preventing the normal adjustment of political supply to political demand. Instead of reasonable trade-offs between those who, for example, wanted higher or lower levels of immigration, the subject was forced underground, building up pressure from those whose grievances were ignored by the main parties. This created a market opportunity which populist right entrepreneurs rushed in to fill.

Ethno-cultural change is occurring at a rapid rate at precisely the time the dominant ideology celebrates a multicultural vision of ever-increasing diversity. To hanker after homogeneity and stability is perceived as narrow-minded and racist by liberals. Yet diversity falls flat for many because we’re not all wired the same way. Right-wing populism, which champions the cultural interests of group-oriented whites, has halted and reversed the multicultural consensus which held sway between the 1960s and late 1990s. This is leading to a polarization between those who accept, and those who reject, the ideology of diversity. What’s needed is a new vision that gives conservative members of white majorities hope for their group’s future while permitting cosmopolitans the freedom to celebrate diversity.

Read the whole thing. 

Kaufmann is a British scholar who studies this stuff, but he has been denounced by some on the Left as making excuses for racism (an English academic friend who knows him told me recently, “You cannot imagine what they’ve put him through”). But Kaufmann is right. He’s trying to point out social, psychological, and political realities that must be dealt with, even though the ruling class does not want to deal with them. Putin’s attack on Ukraine, and the immensely powerful Western response to it, is already causing spasms of liberal and neocon triumphalism, which will make it far more difficult for them to understand what it going on within their own societies. And it’s making a lot of knee-jerk conservatives in the US who are reverting to militaristic type fail to understand that they are being played by the same elite ideologues who are making culture war on them and their institutions and ways of life.

Putin is exploiting these realities and forces for his own advantage. But he’s not making this stuff up out of whole cloth. More from Erlanger’s piece:

“What Russia is doing is not just making war against an innocent nation here,” said Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale who has written extensively about Russia and Ukraine, but attacking assumptions about a peaceful Europe that respects borders, national sovereignty and multilateral institutions.

How quick the West is to forget that the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia did not respect borders or national sovereignty, and was illegal under international law (the UN did not authorize the action). NATO did it claiming humanitarian intervention as its casus belli. Nobody can deny that the Kosovo situation was a serious humanitarian crisis, but Russians know perfectly well that the West has no intention of respecting borders, national sovereignty, or multilateral institutions when it decides its interests. Ask the Libyans and the Iraqis about that too.

I remind you again: I am not justifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which I regard as cruel and unjust. I am trying to show you that the Western narrative here is self-serving.

Erlanger cites the Christian ethnonationalism of Putin and his theoreticians as behind the Ukraine invasion. From what I understand, he’s not wrong, and I join fellow Orthodox Christians — including some in Russia — in deploring how the Putin has subordinated Russian Orthodoxy to his imperialist aims. But even that is not so simple, given that Kyiv/Kiev is the birthplace of Russian Orthodoxy (in the year 988) and of the Russian nation. It seems that Ukraine has been hotly contested territory for the entirety of it history, and has only been a distinct state with the coming of the Bolshevik Revolution, when Moscow declared it to be the “Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.” This doesn’t make Russia’s invasion right, but doesn’t it complicate matters?

More importantly, I have to say: if you don’t think that Western ideas of liberal democracy, sexuality, capitalism, multiculturalism and the rest are an aggressive ideology, and indeed an ideology we are prepared to fight for economically, diplomatically, and militarily, you are deluded.

President George W. Bush, in his second Inaugural Address to a nation at war in the Middle East, said:

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

This is armed utopianism, justified with religious rhetoric. We do it all the time, but we don’t recognize it as such, because we have convinced ourselves that what we believe in is neutral, and is obviously true. A liberal Democratic president would not likely have used the God talk, but he would have said the same thing in progressive terms, using words like “diversity,” “equity,” and so forth. My point here is that people who are outside of the American and EU ruling class hear things like what Erlanger and his interviewees say, and roll their eyes. They’re not wrong to. Putin’s being wrong about Ukraine does not make Timothy Snyder, The New York Times, and all the Davos men and women, right.

Erlanger:

In Europe, too, Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, has promoted Hungarian identity and nationalism despite censure from Brussels. He has handed out Hungarian passports to ethnic Hungarians in Romania and other countries, who are allowed to vote in Hungary, giving him, so far, an electoral edge. But Mr. Orban faces parliamentary elections next month, and his long, close relations with Mr. Putin have hurt him politically, even as he has moved quickly to support European Union sanctions on Russia and welcome Ukrainian refugees.

Oh boy. Once again, American ignorance of history shows itself. Why are there so many ethnic Hungarians in Romania, far western Ukraine, Slovakia and Serbia? Because until 1919 and the Treaty of Trianon settling World War I accounts with the losing Austro-Hungarian Empire, parts of those nations were Hungary. Suddenly Hungarian people found themselves living as foreigners in what used to be their own land, because the victorious Western powers dismantled Hungary and gave two-thirds of Hungarian lands to other countries. A century later, this is bitterly resented here in Hungary today. I am neither praising nor condemning the Trianon Treaty, but you have to understand that Orban is not doing this for cynical reasons. Hungarians living in those lands really do see themselves as part of the Magyar nation.

Erlanger:

Mr. Putin has done more to build Ukrainian nationhood than anyone in the West could have done, Mr. Krastev said. “Putin wanted to be the father of a new Russian nation, but he is the father of a new Ukrainian nation instead.”

I think this is true, but look, do Erlanger and his interview subjects understand the irony here? Do they imagine that Ukrainians are Slavic Swedes? They are rather conservative, as are most people in this region, and they certainly can be ethnic chauvinists. For example, do you know why Hungarians, though helping Ukrainian refugees out of humanitarian concern, do not fully buy into the Ukraine-worship in the West? Because prior to the war, they battled with the Zelensky government over what Hungarians regard as brutal and unjust treatment of Hungarian minorities living in Ukraine. Since at least 2018, the Kyiv government has been trying to suppress the use of Hungarian in schools attended by minority Hungarians. The Ukrainians also have a case for their side; they want to suppress ethnic separatism. Again, I don’t want to take sides here — it’s not my place to do so — but I want to point out that the world is not nearly as simplistic as the Narrative would have you believe.

Erlanger is trying to smear Viktor Orban as a Putinist, which is standard operating procedure for the Western media. It is fair to say that Orban has been close to Putin, relative to other European leaders, but do you know why? A lot of it has to do with the fact that Orban and his party, Fidesz, are the party of people who, to use Eric Kaufmann’s phrase, “desire roots, value tradition and wish to maintain continuity with ancestors who have occupied a historic territory.” They correctly see the globalist EU ideology as a direct threat to that, in that globalism seeks to abolish borders and peoples, and their particular traditions, to create a frictionless capitalist entity. The Orban supporters are proud to be European, but don’t understand why, in order to be part of the European community of nations, they have to surrender their roots, traditions, and desire to maintain continuity with their ancestors who have occupied the Carpathian Basin since the ninth century.

There are other Europeans — French, Spanish, Italian, and others — who feel the same way about their own peoples and traditions. These people are slandered routinely in the media and by Brussels as “far right.”

Here is something that went out today on Twitter by the new president of Hungary (the president is a ceremonial position; the political leader is the prime minister):

As long as we have free hands and free will, we cannot be subdued. This is the very basis of our #sovereignty. I will never surrender our national sovereignty. #ElectionSpeech #PresidentialElection pic.twitter.com/L2QqocEahs

— Katalin Novák (@KatalinNovakMP) March 18, 2022

Fidesz — Novak is a leading Fidesz politician — holds that the EU’s dictates are trying to undermine the traditional family, and with it Hungarian sovereignty. They are correct about that. And look, Vladimir Putin is flat out a warmongering autocrat, but he’s correct when he attacks LGBT ideology promoted as a sacred value by the Western ruling class. Again and again I say unto you: some things are true even though Vladimir Putin believes them.

None of this is to justify Putin’s attack on Ukraine. But it is to explain why the story Americans are hearing in the media is not the whole story, and why we should be wary. One more bit from Erlanger:

But now Ukraine, which also fought and suffered under the Nazis, is using the same tropes against the invading Russians. For Ukraine, Mr. Krastev said, “this is their Great Patriotic War.”

Wait … what?! Many Ukrainians openly collaborated with the Nazis — and frankly, given what Stalin did to them in the Holodomor, it’s not hard to understand why. The Azov Battalion is the main Ukrainian force defending Mariupol now from the Russians. It is openly neo-Nazi — and this is not even in dispute. Again, if I were Ukrainian, I would probably swallow my fear of and disgust with the neo-Nazis and be glad they were fighting against the invaders — but we Americans have no excuse for pretending that Ukraine is free of the taint of Nazism.

Putin is manipulating his own people into supporting his disastrous war. But our leadership class in the West is up to something quite similar, and you need to know that.

You need to know that in part because you should not allow yourself to get caught up in liberal triumphalism, such that you miss what’s happening in your own country (I’m talking to my fellow Americans). A friend from back home sent me this clip this morning, saying he wants it played at his wake one day:

My friend is not a rural farmer, but a highly educated urban professional who is sick of what he regards as the ruling class and the overculture’s demonization of people like him and their culture. He’s one of the conservatives I’ve been telling you about who reach out to me and say that they are not interested anymore in defending a regime that despises them, and systematically works to dispossess them of their culture and tradition, and their replacement by liberal market ideology. This is a similar sentiment that this left-wing Quebecois folk band Mes Aïeux sounded a long time ago in the song “Dégeneration”:

Take a look at this English-language cover by the Georgia musician David Mathewes, from five years ago:

Now, if you watch the “Bury Me In Southern Ground” video, you’re going to see an old video clip that shows some white Southern male mud-riding in his pickup truck, with a Confederate flag flying. You might think, “I KNEW IT! RACIST!” He might be … but not necessarily. Personally, I think that the Confederate flag is too tainted by slavery and white supremacy to be displayed in good faith, and I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it as a sign of respect to black Southerners. But I also know that there are Southern whites today who do not regard it as a racist emblem; rather, they regard it as the only sign available to them to show affirmation of their particular culture, especially as it is widely despised by US cultural elites.

But you know what they might also see? The flag of a weaker nation that claimed independence from a stronger nation, which then made war on the weaker nation to forcibly reunite it to the motherland. Me, I am glad the South lost the war because that was the only way to end slavery, but I am not at all persuaded that the South had no right to secede in the first place. Southern whites who fly the Confederate flag may wonder why Ukrainian nationalists with far-right, racist convictions get a pass by right-thinking American liberals for fighting Russians in the name of their nation, its culture, and its independence, but no liberal will ever grant that a white Southerner can be proud of his culture — despite the profoundly evil parts — and display their flag, or even look upon certain statues.

History and culture are not simple stories.

Whatever you think about the rebel flag, and whatever you think about Putin and his rhetoric, don’t lose the broader picture here of the war going on far outside of Ukraine. It is a culture war, and it is relentless. The aggressors see themselves as liberators — but they are lying to us, and lying to themselves. It should be easy for conservatives to decide to fight hard politically against liberal forces that are coming into the schools to try to colonize the minds of children to hate their ethnicity and hate their bodies and families via gender ideology. This is a fight against dispossession and degeneration (in the sense that the Quebecois song above means). And if you do, they will understand what they have to learn from the way Viktor Orban fights for the same things in his country. Unlike US Republicans, he usually wins.

Finally, I acknowledge that it might seem weird for me to be singing the praises of nationalism and sovereignty (cultural and otherwise) as a foreigner enjoying the hospitality of Budapesters. I see no contradiction at all. I am a proud American, and indeed a proud Southerner. I also love traveling the world and meeting people from cultures not my own, and learning from them. I think the French ought to be able to say how people in France should live, just as Hungarians should be able to protect their own heritage and traditions, as should Ukrainians, and everybody else. This is messy, and some things cannot ultimately be reconciled. Nevertheless, I think part of being truly cosmopolitan is recognizing and honoring local particularity. I don’t want Hungarians telling us Americans how to run our country, and I don’t think it’s our place to tell them the same.

In fact, this morning I was talking with a Hungarian friend at the Rudas Baths about the upcoming election. He says Orban will win, and he wants Orban to win. He think Orban will keep Hungary out of the war. He said, “You can see how beautiful Budapest is today, but I assure you, it didn’t look like this 25 years ago. We had to live with all the damage from the [Second World] War, because we were too poor to build it back. And if Hungary gets involved in this war, Russia will beat us, and we will suffer.”

He went on to say he hopes Orban wins because the opposition is eager to surrender even more sovereignty to Brussels. He said that nobody in Brussels cares about Hungarians, or anybody else in this part of Europe. “They pass laws governing us, but they don’t know us, and they don’t like us,” he said. “They treat us as a bunch of ignorant, uncultured Eastern Europeans who need to be taught how to be human. We have been through this before, you know. I’m telling you, when we see Brussels, we see the new Moscow. Wokeness is another form of Communism. We can all see that.”

“I have just the book for you to read,” I said.

“Who are they to tell us that we are backwards bigots because we believe that men have penises, and women have vaginas, and that you aren’t an aardvark just because you identify as one?” he said. I laughed at the line, but he wasn’t trying to be funny. He said he cannot understand what gives people from the more liberal cultures of western Europe the right to stomp into Hungary, Poland, and other more conservative Central European countries and order them to surrender what they believe, and have always believed, about family, sex, and sexuality.

I told my friend that I completely agree, and that we are dealing with the same kind of thing in the US. Unlike in Hungary, though, we don’t have many Republican politicians who have the guts and the brains to fight it. This, I told him, is broadly about dispossession, cultural and otherwise. The Left — and the neocon Right — doesn’t see this, because they are so supremely confident that their version of justice is the correct one, and the only reason anyone could possibly disagree is because they are Bad People — racists, bigots, fascists, Orbanists, Putinists, you name it.

He nodded, and said, “That’s it: dispossession.”

One more thing: I’m really past the point of tolerating bad-faith criticism (e.g., “You always defend Putin!”), so if that’s all you bring to your comment below, save your efforts, because I’m going to spike your remarks before they appear.

UPDATE: Michael Brendan Dougherty is well worth reading on the self-deception of the liberal triumphalists who assume populism and nationalism are over now.

You watch: when Viktor Orban wins the April 3 election, people who trusted the Western media’s assurances that Orban is being hurt with voters by his relationship to Putin will be left sputtering that Orban must have cheated. He simply must have, because they don’t know anybody who voted for him. Maybe they can call Bono for consolation and verse.

The post Dispossession & The Ruling Class Narrative appeared first on The American Conservative.

You will remember that I posted the other day about accusations made against Mark Galli, the retired editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, who allegedly sexually harassed women on staff. Galli denied some of the allegations, and said the others were misunderstandings for which he would love to have the opportunity to apologize and ask forgiveness.

Since then, I am told that the publisher of Galli’s recent book about his conversion to Catholicism has withdrawn the book from the market — this, even though the accusations against Galli have not been proven, and Galli has had no formal way to challenge them. In the comments thread under that initial post, some people said that the allegations against Galli seemed fishy. Today I received communication from an Evangelical academic who wrote to say that Galli’s reputation has been destroyed, though he (Galli) has had no chance to defend himself. The academic wrote to say:

I don’t think it’s right to treat someone as guilty based on allegations that have not undergone the scrutiny of due process. Galli outright denies the worst of these allegations. Even though CT is acting sacrificially to publish these allegations, it’s not fair to anyone to treat the accused as guilty based on allegations alone. Especially since, as I read the story, some of the more serious ones do not seem to have other witnesses to the events alleged.

He may end up being proven guilty of all of it. I just feel like we don’t have enough to go on to definitively condemn the guy. Galli has been roundly and irreversibly condemned on the basis of these allegations alone. He is cancelled at this point, and it doesn’t matter whether the allegations are true or substantiated. That’s wrong.

And I’m saying that as someone who doesn’t know Galli and doesn’t appreciate his evangelical-lefty-friendly tenure at CT. I’m reserving judgment.

This statement from [CT CEO Tim] Dalrymple doesn’t fill me with confidence:

“In other words, as Guidepost expressed so well, we overemphasized the intent of the perpetrator and underemphasized the impact on the recipient. Divining intent is always a dubious enterprise, but sexual harassment is sexual harassment whether or not it is sexually motivated.”

CT brought in Guidepost, an outside consulting firm, to help it figure out how to deal with the matter. You can read the Guidepost report by following a link in this editorial by Tim Dalrymple.The academic continues:

Here is Guidepost’s sixth recommendation to CT. It doesn’t fill me with confidence either.

CT should develop an actionable plan for recruiting and retaining women and diverse candidates, with a goal of increasing the representation of women and diverse candidates at all levels of the company and communicate the plan to CT employees and the CT Board. This may include a refresh of a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee or other group where CT employees can help strategize and assist in concrete steps to develop a diverse culture under the support of CT leadership.

One more thing from the Guidepost report. This is important:

We wish to make clear that in stating that we find the accounts of Female Employees A and B and others to be credible, we are not reaching any legal conclusions. Guidepost is not a law firm and did not undertake any legal analysis of whether Former Employee 1’s alleged conduct, if proved, would constitute harassment under any applicable local, state, or federal laws or regulations and we are not providing any legal opinion or legal conclusion about that alleged conduct.

In other words, even though Guidepost thinks the people making allegations are credible, they are not making the case that Galli is guilty. This report does not establish Galli’s guilt in any way. It merely analyzes whether CT’s procedures for handling accusations were sound.

This is what I don’t like. He’s being treated as guilty without due process. I’m sorry, but a Guidepost review is not a due process adjudication of his guilt or innocence. It’s just not. But he’s going to be cancelled and treated as guilty on the basis of allegations alone. It’s a done deal at this point. And it’s wrong.

And keep in mind, this can happen to any of us. If someone makes an allegation against you, it doesn’t matte what your intent is. The only thing that matters is how the accuser feels. Their allegation alone will ruin you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Guidepost’s own report to CT says that their investigation is not designed to determine Galli’s guilt of innocence. They are only looking at whether allegations are credible and whether CT handled them properly. That’s it.

Due process involves presumption of innocence, right to face your accuser, opportunity to mount a defense, rules of evidence, witnesses, etc. This Guidepost investigation is not doing any of that, nor are they claiming to do any of that. On the contrary, they state that they aren’t doing that.

In the court of public opinion, Galli is guilty. He will never escape that verdict because in our current climate, it only takes an accusation to destroy a person. If it’s an allegation of sexual abuse or harassment, the allegation alone is the end of the matter.

Okay, sorry. Another item from the Guidepost report. This sounds like a woke HR employee wrote it:

The culture of CT does not appear to be dominated by sexual harassment or abuse. However, according to several interviewees, sexism does exist at CT (as it does at many other workplaces, both religious and secular) and is a systemic problem that needs to be addressed. Female CT employees who we interviewed stated that they had been subjected to various unconsciously sexist behaviors by men in the CT workplace, including being patronized, belittled, interrupted, talked over, and micromanaged. Several women told us that they felt they were deliberately omitted from decision-making, with one woman stating that “men go to men all the time and women are told to do what the men decided.”

It is possible that CT’s flawed institutional response to harassment allegations could have been influenced, in part, by unconscious sexism.

UPDATE: A reader e-mails:

I don’t know anything about Galli apart from what you have written and quoted. And I don’t read CT, and am not really interested in their perspective. But about your academic friend’s final point and the Guidepost report of women employees alleging“systemic” and “unconscious” sexism etc…

Jordan Peterson talks about this from time to time. When men deal with men, there are rules governing that behavior that all understand. When conflict arises, at the final stretch, men fight with each other to resolve it. This is not permissible when men are dealing with women peers. Moreover, the possibility of career-ending allegations of sexism etc. are always latent in these interactions. So how is business supposed to get done now? This isn’t some arbitrary norm of the patriarchy, but rather rooted deeply in human evolutionary psychology. The genealogy of these phenomena go back probably hundreds of thousands of years. It is therefore safe to say that the deck is now stacked against men who have to work with women as peers. The only safe course of action is capitulation and deference in every instance. Which isn’t a good way to run anything.

Like everything else in the orbit of Western culture, this won’t end well.

UPDATE.2: Another reader, this one an academic, writes:

I am completely amazed that CT would release the findings of a human resources investigation. HR is not the FBI; they are not trained to sift through evidence, there was no opportunity for cross examination, and many of the allegations may be interpreted as the result of inculcating in employees a hypersensitivity about activities that in the past would’ve been seen as a minor annoyances but not sexual-harassment. If it were me, I would go balls to the wall lawsuit against Christianity Today, since they essentially have destroyed my career for the rest of my life.

UPDATE.3: Reader William Anderson comments:

Note that Galli already was trying to establish the DEI atmosphere at CT, not only in the workplace, but also in the pages of CT. It has been well-known in evangelical circles for many years that only leftist positions are acceptable for publication at CT, whether one writes of science, abortion, sexuality, etc. Conservatives have known for years that their submissions are unacceptable.

I point this out because we are seeing a larger pattern in evangelical organizations. First, the pressure to bow to the Left becomes stronger. Second, sooner or later, an “incident” or “series of incidents” allegedly will occur that “proves” the need for the organization to move even further to the left, which it usually does. What conservatives fail to understand is that the Left never is satisfied and will demand even more concessions. Having taught at Christian colleges, I am familiar with the pattern and the results.

Reader Muzan-e:

This is the sort of thing that chills me to the core:

Some years ago, we fired two female employees for sexual harassment. Their victim was a high-schooler, working for us over the summer as many local kids do. They were finding him in the kitchen or in stock and subjecting him to the sort of overtly, aggressively sexual questioning that wouldn’t be welcome at dinner parties, let alone the workplace. Obviously this cannot, must not, be allowed to continue. But this is what gets me —

As best we could determine, this had been happening for almost two weeks.
He was a very shy, quiet young man and he was afraid of telling management; of ‘making a fuss’.
If it had come down to testimonies, it would’ve been the word of two senior employees with established records vs one temporary hire.
And the stuff they were saying to him? You could repeat it in front of a jury of 12 and — keeping in mind their record, and that it is two of them against one of him — it would’ve sounded outrageous. Absolutely unbelievable.

We got extraordinarily lucky: another employee overheard it happening, peeked around the corner to see who on earth was talking like this, and phoned us immediately. We fired both women that day. Later, going through the camera footage, we could see it happening on other occasions — but it looked innocuous. If not for that one employee…

It chills me, man. That we might never have known; that if the circumstances were just slightly different, it would’ve been extraordinarily difficult for him to prove. I am a firm, lifelong believer in innocent until proven guilty — but when it’s a matter of words, when it’s a touch that will leave no physical mark… What then? We might hope for corroboration in the form of previous incidents, but when those are the same?

The post More On The Mark Galli Affair appeared first on The American Conservative.

Oh dear Lord, this is a thing. This is a thing that exists in the world. Via Bono and Nancy Pelosi:

Ireland’s sorrow and pain
Is now the Ukraine
And Saint Patrick’s name
Is now Zelensky

great stuff Bono thank youpic.twitter.com/aOVjbHY4Qq

— ℮oin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) March 17, 2022

Here’s the poem Bono wrote:

Oh Saint Patrick he drove out the snakes
With his prayers but that’s not all it takes
For the snake symbolizes
An evil that rises
And hides in your heart
As it breaks
And the evil has risen my friends
From the darkness that lives in some men
But in sorrow and fear
That’s when saints can appear
To drive out those old snakes once again
And they struggle for us to be free
From the psycho in this human family Ireland’s sorrow and pain
Is now the Ukraine
And Saint Patrick’s name now Zelensky

I have favored Ukraine in this war, and hoped that they drive back the Russian forces. But thanks to Bono, and his ultra-cringe St. Patrick’s Day poem, maybe I was wrong.

Lord, Bono. I was at a U2 concert in Philadelphia in either 2010 or 2011, can’t remember. He made us all sing happy birthday to Nelson Mandela. I thought, and do think, that Mandela was a hero, but man, how I hated Bono’s moral preening. “Am I buggin’ ya? Am I buggin’ ya? Wouldn’t want to bug ya.” Just shut up and sing, ya dope.

Poor Zelensky, caught between Vladimir Putin and Bono.

The post Bono Zelensky Ultra-Cringe appeared first on The American Conservative.

In the comments to the crackpot Yale Law students post, my good friend JonF suggests that this is not a big deal, really, that the protesters will grow up to mature into normalcy, and pose no threat to common sense. I pushed back, saying that may have been true in our generation (we’re the same age, Gen X), but that pattern changed with the Millennials, who marched through the institutions and changed them.

Here’s a chilling — seriously, chilling — example from the medical profession. John Sailer, on the National Association of Scholars website, writes:

In October 2021, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American Medical Association jointly released its 54-page Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narratives and Concepts, which received widespread criticism for its ideologically-charged language and recommendations. The guide suggested physicians update their language using “equity-focused alternatives,” trading terms such as “vulnerable” for “oppressed” and “disadvantaged” for “historically and intentionally excluded.”

The AAMC now plans to release “diversity, equity, and inclusion competencies.” The National Association of Scholars has acquired the pre-publication version of these competencies (see below). Drawing from Advancing Health Equity, these competencies encode the watchwords of identity politics as official standards, for both students and medical professors. If medical schools adopt these competencies, they will establish social justice activism, along with a controversial set of political beliefs, as de facto professional requirements for students and faculty.

Under development for more than a year, the competencies take the form of educational standards, different skill benchmarks for distinct stages of a physician’s education, designed to facilitate “curricular and professional development” and “formative performance assessment.” They come at an opportune moment, as medical schools around the country have promised extensive training and curricula in diversity, equity, inclusion, and “anti-racism.”

Sailor cites numerous examples of DEI already being absorbed into medical school curricula, and says this new document means it will be more prevalent. More:

While they might satisfy accreditors, these competencies will deal a blow to medical education. They will force students and physicians to embrace social justice activism, prompt schools to evaluate students and faculty based on their adherence to a controversial set of beliefs, and ensure the violation of academic freedom.

Read it all — and check out the primary source documents embedded in the presentation. We are creating a system of medical education in which scientific facts are understood through the framework of rigid political doctrine. This is a sham. This is a betrayal of science. Look at some excerpts from the proposed standards, taken from the primary documents:

“Belonginess”? Right. Anyone sitting in a medical school classroom, whether faculty or student, who questions any of this ideological claptrap and its relevance to the practice of medicine is going to understand perfectly well the cost to them of speaking out against it. This is classic totalitarian practice: labeling slavery as freedom, and repeating it so often that people come to believe it.

Because of DEI, a lot of people are going to DIE, or suffer. From Live Not By Lies:

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

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

How long will physicians be able to counsel people to lose weight for the sake of health, without being condemned as “fatphobic” thought criminals? You laugh, but this is coming. The United States built one of the best and most advanced health care systems in the world. We have problems with it, for sure — but now, ideologues are going to tear it apart to advance a political religion. This is not theoretical; this is actually happening. And who dares to stand up to it?

The post DEI Will Cause People To DIE appeared first on The American Conservative.

A reader recommends this great Unherd piece by the liberal writer William Deresiewicz, who originally wrote it for an unnamed magazine that is “politically neutral in theory,” but had been drifting Left, like the rest of the media, and which ultimately, therefore, rejected it. It’s about “escaping American tribalism,” and it begins in a way that speaks directly to my experience:

One summer afternoon when I was 23 — this was in 1987 — I was twiddling the dial on the radio in the apartment I was subletting on 114th St. when I stumbled on a station that was unlike anything that I had ever heard before. They were in the middle of a story about the Appalachian Trail, profiling some of the people who were hiking its two thousand miles that year. The reporting was calm, patient, intelligent, allowing the subject to find its own shape, unfolding slowly, minute after minute, like the trail itself.

What is this, I thought? What portal had I fallen through? I’d been raised on 1010 WINS, “all news all the time,” blaring the same rotation of headlines, weather, traffic, and trivia, in 40-second increments, for hours at a stretch. The piece that I had happened on that day went on, improbably, for over 20 minutes.

The program I was listening to was called All Things Considered, on a network with the unfamiliar name of NPR, short for National Public Radio. I was immediately hooked. In no time flat, I’d put it on whenever I was home. Morning Edition as soon as I opened my eyes, All Things Considered when I got back in the afternoon, Fresh Air during dinner. I fell in love with Robert Siegel’s wit, Renée Montagne’s voice, Scott Simon’s charm. These people got me. They shared my interests, my outlook, my sensibilities. For the first time, I felt myself reflected in the public sphere. “NPR,” I put it to a friend a few years later, “is my home in America.”

And that’s the way it was for over 30 years, through the advent of Talk of the Nation and This American Life, of On the Media and Here & Now. NPR became the soundtrack of my life — when I drove, cooked, ate, exercised, did laundry — three or four hours a day, every day.

I’m about the same age as WD, and though I found NPR in high school, a bit earlier than he did, my reaction was the same. I was more liberal back then, but I didn’t listen to NPR because of its gently liberal politics. I listened for its sensibility — because I felt like I was being invited to a conversation with smart and kind people who read books, and who noticed interesting things. It was the soundtrack to my life, even through the 1990s and first decade of this century, as I became more and more conservative. I tried listening to conservative talk radio, but it said nothing to me. I would rather listen to, and disagree with, the liberals of NPR, because there was usually something interesting going on there, and they didn’t insult my intelligence.

Boy, is that over — for WD too. He writes about how the network has surrendered to progressive propaganda and advocacy, such that it has become unlistenable. This is really true. The only time I can bear to listen to it now is when I’m in the car, and can’t put on a podcast. And even then I can only take it in small doses. Inevitably the sob story about the plight of wheelchair-bound trans lesbian immigrants of color being erased by Republican evildoers comes on, and off goes the radio. It is hard to explain to younger people how good NPR used to be, and how far it has fallen into leftist propaganda. As WD writes:

Overnight, the network’s entire orientation had changed. Every segment was about race, and when it wasn’t about race, it was about gender. The stories were no longer reports but morality plays, with predictable bad guys and good guys. Scepticism was banished. Divergent opinions were banished. The pronouncements of activists, the arguments of ideologically motivated academics, were accepted without question. The tone became smug, certain, self-righteous. To turn on the network was to be subjected to a program of ideological force-feeding. I was used to the idiocies of the academic Left — I had been dealing with them ever since I started graduate school — but now they were leaking out of my radio.

I write about NPR maybe more than I should, but it is from a position of a spurned lover. Funny, but the friend who first introduced me to NPR back in the early 1980s ended our forty-year friendship because though I publicly supported Trump’s second impeachment (the post 1/6 one), in so doing I said that Trump had done some good things as president. That was enough to cause her to trash four decades of friendship, which she ended by sending me a text. She is a faithful NPR listener still, and is the kind of fanatic to which that network’s programming caters. Wokeness has ruined NPR as surely at is has ruined the mind of my former friend.

WD explains that he started listening to various podcasters, Left and Right, because they were interesting. More:

But I didn’t start listening to them because I felt I had a civic duty to expose myself to opinions I disagree with. I started listening to them because I couldn’t stand the bullshit anymore. Because I needed to let in some air. They make me think. They introduce me to perspectives that I hadn’t entertained. They teach me things, and they are usually things the Times or NPR won’t tell you.

I have learned about the lab-leak hypothesis before it became an acceptable topic of discourse. About the lunacy of transgender orthodoxy (“affirmative therapy” for small children, the “cotton ceiling”). About the real statistics on police killings of unarmed black people (according to a Washington Post database, the number shot to death came to 18 in 2020, 6 in 2021). About the truth about Matthew Shepard (who was murdered, by a sometime lover and another acquaintance, over drugs), Jacob Blake (who was shot while stealing his girlfriend’s car, kidnapping her children, resisting arrest, and trying to stab a cop), and Kyle Rittenhouse (who worked in Kenosha, had a father who lived there, and was out that night, however misguidedly, to protect property and provide medical assistance).

More broadly, I have learned of the emergence of an alternative ecosystem of independent-minded journalists, experts, and thinkers, many of them exiles, voluntary or otherwise, from the established media. They are free of institutional allegiances. They are unintimidated by the Twitter mob. They are committed to free inquiry and free speech. They are unafraid of debate. For the first time in a good long while, I feel myself reflected in the public sphere. I have a home, once again, in America.

Read the whole thing — there’s a lot more to it, all of it good. I am not much of a podcast listener, but I know that I am in the minority in that way, in my social circles. How about you? Who are the voices you listen to now as relief from the predictable “Four legs good! Two legs bad!” bullshit?

It’s telling that of the people that Deresiewicz recommends, only John McWhorter gets published regularly in a mainstream media source. All the rest are too independent-minded, too unpredictable to be placed among the herd animals of the MSM.

The post Bill Deresiewicz’s Escape To America appeared first on The American Conservative.

A black law professor at Georgetown wrote in the Washington Post that Jussie Smollett, the felonious hoaxer, should not go to jail? Why not? Excerpts:

I don’t believe Jussie Smollett but I recognize when a Black man gets railroaded through a justice system that is out to get him. A rich entitled actor is hardly the most sympathetic face of reform. Still, Smollett’s case demonstrates that when powerful elites decide they want a Black man locked up, nothing and nobody — not even the elected prosecutor — will stop them.

Butler believes Smollett committed the crime, but thinks he shouldn’t pay for it because he’s black? Really? Really. More:

Sending a Black gay man to jail for lying about being attacked will not encourage hate crime victims to come forward. Instead, it sends the message that they, rather than their assailants, are subject to being incarcerated if authorities don’t believe their stories. The most victim-sympathetic response would have been for the police to express disappointment in Smollett’s false report, but to let the community know that other allegations would receive the same intense response that Smollett’s had.

Butler’s argument is that they singled out poor gay black famous Jussie to be made an example of. Nowhere does Butler acknowledge why that might be. It’s because Smollett made the rounds of national talk shows to discuss how he had been beaten by two mysterious MAGA supporters, and how he was the face of the victims of white supremacy. He exploited his celebrity and the nation’s racial sensitivity to boost himself and to gin up hatred of Trump supporters. That’s why he had to be made an example of.

Well, it looks like Georgetown law professor and self-appointed tribune of the celebrity oppressed Paul Butler has received his fondest wish:

Convicted felon Jussie Smollett was ordered to be released from jail on Wednesday pending appeal of his 150-day sentence that went into effect last week for staging a hate crime hoax against himself and lying to law enforcement about it.

“The one-page order issued by the Illinois Appellate Court on Wednesday afternoon stated that Smollett was to be released from the Cook County Jail after signing a $150,000 recognizance bond, which would not require him to post any money,” the Chicago Tribune reported. “The only explanation offered in the order was that Smollett has never been convicted of a violent offense and would have completed his sentence of incarceration well before his appeal is decided.”

Smollett was sentenced on Thursday of last week to 150 days in jail, followed by 30 months on probation, and ordered to pay $120,000 in restitution and $25,000 in fines during his sentencing.

The Chicago Tribune writes:

His attorneys, however, had much to say: They were “very elated” that an Illinois appeals court had ordered Smollett released pending his appeal, were eager to try to overturn his conviction, and were adamant that sensational media attention and political machinations thwarted Smollett’s chance at a fair trial.

“We’ve been complaining about the disparate treatment of African Americans in the judicial system,” attorney Nenye Uche said. “Regardless of what you think about this case … the real question is, should Black men be walked into jail for a Class 4 felony? Shame on you if you think they should, that’s a disgrace.”

The “sensational media attention” that Smollett himself generated! And yes, they played the race card. They want Jussie out of jail because he’s black.

Why did the judge in his trial sentence Smollett to 150 days in jail? Saith the Tribune:

Smollett’s attorneys tried in vain to get Linn to stay the sentence pending appeal, but the judge declined, saying that while the wheels of justice turn slowly, “sometimes the hammer of justice has to fall.”

Yes, it does. Go back and watch the archived coverage of Smollett’s hate hoax. The media initially believed his ridiculous story without question, no doubt because if confirmed their prejudices. They boosted this creep Smollett, who lied about all of it. This wasn’t just a local story, but a national one, precisely as Smollett knew it would be, owing to his celebrity. You bet an example had to be made of him. Read the timeline of this case to remind yourself of how far he took this lie.

I suppose he could ultimately be compelled to serve his sentence, but I find it impossible to believe that if he were a normal man, and not a black gay celebrity, that he would receive such kid gloves treatment by the Illinois appeals court. To be a black gay liberal celebrity, though, is to hit the ruling-class trifecta in sacredness, though. If Jussie were trans, the state would have sent a Rolls-Royce limo to pick him up at the jailhouse.

Ask yourself: if Smollett were a straight white celebrity who pulled a hate-crime hoax falsely accusing unnamed black men of attacking him because of his race, and making the rounds of national TV to bemoan hatred in this country, is there any chance an Illinois court would be so soft on him? Hell no — and it shouldn’t be! It doesn’t take much imagination to come up with the column Georgetown Law professor Paul Butler would write about such a figure. But see, our ruling class has certain priorities. I’m old enough to remember the case of Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan indigenous activist and 1992 Nobel Peace laureate, who was exposed as a liar. Though she disputed the allegations, it’s almost certain that Menchu had not suffered the oppression she claimed in the biography that made her famous (she later claimed, “It’s a testimony, not a biography”). I remember at the time her fraud was exposed, some left-wing commentators said that even if Menchu’s story wasn’t factual, many Guatemalan women suffered oppression, so the story should be accepted as a different order of truth.

Similarly with Jussie, it appears, he might not have been telling the truth, but black and gay men, and black gay men, are oppressed somewhere, so we should go easy on him, because of white supremacy.

This is how our ruling class sees it.

The post Jussie Smollett Released appeared first on The American Conservative.

I never watch TV in my Budapest apartment because the set only gets Hungarian channels … or so I thought. I found CNN on it, and decided to watch some of its war coverage. I turned it off after watching an interview with a retired US military officer who now is part of a think tank. It was stunningly bad journalism. The think-tanker offered nothing but rah-rah for the Ukraine resistance, and claimed that by not losing, Ukraine was winning. The interviewer never challenged any of it, not in the least, and boosted the guest’s point by quoting statements from Russian POWs — a mistake I regrettably made a couple of weeks ago, forgetting that promoting propaganda statements made by a POW is a violation of the Geneva Convention, and should never be taken as truthful, given that they are likely made under duress. But the narrative being sold in this segment was: Ukraine is winning this war, and we just need to believe more in their cause.

Maybe Ukraine is winning this war, but that is by no means obvious to anyone who looks at the battlefield map. I want a media that does its best to tell me what is actually going on in the world, not one that manufactures consent. That’s what Russian state media does, right? Why do you need state media when our private media in America are happy to take a party line without being told.

Take a look at this from a White House press conference:

This is wild pic.twitter.com/CNZZ1wVzcz

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) March 16, 2022

These reporters are not interested in the news; they are interested in goading the White House to get more involved in the war on behalf of Ukraine.

I turned the TV off after that. It made me furious. This is bad, warmongering, propagandistic journalism. I posted about it on Twitter, and one of my followers there said that Fox News is the same way, except when Tucker Carlson is on. I wonder if this is what the paleocons and the antiwar leftists thought back in 2002 and 2003, during the march-up to the Iraq War and its early stages. I recall hearing back then from a friend of mine, a longtime journalist and a military vet, furious over what he regarded as the media’s surrender to the urge to propagandize on behalf of the war. I thought of him at the time as an eccentric middle-aged liberal. Now I’m an eccentric middle-aged conservative, in the same sense.

Ross Douthat explains why populism is in philosophical disarray in the wake of the Putin invasion (the reversion of normie conservatives to pre-Trump hawkishness is a sign, he says), but warns liberals that they would be fools to think that Russia’s invasion solves the problems of our decadent society. Excerpt:

Last week, for instance, the Russia scholar Stephen Kotkin told The New Yorker’s David Remnick that Putin’s invasion disproves “all the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China.” With the West rallying to a resilient Ukraine, “all of that turned out to be bunk.”

What was bunk was the idea that Putin’s Russia represents some kind of efficient postliberal or traditionalist alternative to the problems of the West, and one whose military could simply steamroller Eastern Europe. But all those Western problems remain: American power is in relative decline, China’s power has dramatically increased, and none of what I, as a self-appointed expert on the subject, would classify as the key problems of American decadence — demographic decline, economic disappointment and stagnation, a social fabric increasingly shadowed by drugs and depression and suicide — have somehow gone away just because Moscow’s military is failing outside Kyiv.

Since those problems are crucial to understanding where populism came from in the first place, it’s reckless for liberals to declare victory based on shifts in the international order while simply waving domestic discontents away. Populism’s poor fit for this particular moment has given an opportunity to its enemies and critics. But they will squander the opportunity if they convince themselves that the external challenge has somehow made the internal crisis go away.

Once the copium and the hopium blasts from TV, and the happy bellyfeels they give the American public, go away after this war ends, we will still be left with all the problems we had before Putin sent his tanks across the border. What has changed over the last three weeks is that our collective attention has been redirected and focused on an easy enemy to hate. That won’t last.

If you are one of those, liberal or conservative, who is comforted by the West’s response to Putin, let me dispel it by showing you something that should horrify anybody who cares about the future of free speech in this country. It’s a clip from a Yale Law School event, sponsored by the Federalist Society, in which a conservative Christian lawyer, Kristin Waggoner, and a liberal atheist lawyer, Monica Miller, came together to discuss areas of common ground in defending First Amendment rights. It degenerated into a debacle because, get this, Yale Law School students. In its story, the Washington Free Beacon has video of a student mob trying to disrupt the event inside the room. After they were thrown out by a law school professor who told them to “grow up”:

The protesters proceeded to exit the event—one of them yelled “Fuck you, FedSoc” on his way out—but congregated in the hall just outside. Then they began to stomp, shout, clap, sing, and pound the walls, making it difficult to hear the panel. Chants of “protect trans kids” and “shame, shame” reverberated throughout the law school. The din was so loud that it disrupted nearby classes, exams, and faculty meetings, according to students and a professor who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Ellen Cosgrove, the associate dean of the law school, was present at the panel the entire time. Though the cacophony clearly violated Yale’s free speech policies, she did not confront any of the protesters.

At times, things seemed in danger of getting physical. The protesters were blocking the only exit from the event, and two members of the Federalist Society said they were grabbed and jostled as they attempted to leave.

“It was disturbing to witness law students whipped into a mindless frenzy,” Waggoner said. “I did not feel it was safe to get out of the room without security.”

As the panel concluded, police officers arrived to escort Waggoner and Miller out of the building. Three members of the Federalist Society say they were told that the Dean of Yale Law School, Heather Gerken, called the police, though the law school declined to comment on who asked for extra security. The Federalist Society did not call the police, the group’s president confirmed.

Lest you think this was a small, disruptive minority, the WFB goes on:

In the two days following the panel, more than 60 percent of the law school’s student body signed an open letter supporting the “peaceful student protesters,” who they claimed had been imperiled by the presence of police.

“The danger of police violence in this country is intensified against Black LGBTQ people, and particularly Black trans people,” the letter read. “Police-related trauma includes, but is certainly not limited to, physical harm. Even with all of the privilege afforded to us at YLS, the decision to allow police officers in as a response to the protest put YLS’s queer student body at risk of harm.”

Signed by 417 students, the letter also condemned Stith for telling the protesters to “grow up,” and the Federalist Society for hosting the event, which “profoundly undermined our community’s values of equity and inclusivity.”

Monica Miller, the progressive lawyer targeted by the mob, responded:

Miller told the Free Beacon she was taken aback by the email—not least because the Supreme Court case she was speaking about had been hailed as a victory for civil rights groups.

The case, Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, involved a public college in Georgia that prevented a Christian student, Chike Uzuegbunam, from proselytizing on campus. After he graduated, Uzuegbunam sued, saying his First Amendment rights had been violated.

At stake in the case was whether plaintiffs could sue over past constitutional violations that did not result in any economic harm. The 11th Circuit had answered no, setting a precedent that could foreclose a wide range of lawsuits—not just those related to free speech and free exercise, but also to civil rights.

“A lot of our clients are LGBT,” Miller said. “If that ruling stood, and LGBT rights were violated in the South, we wouldn’t be able to help them.”

For her part, Kristin Waggoner pointed out that these students are future federal judges (a vastly disproportionate number of federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, come from either Harvard or Yale law schools), and that this is a very bad sign for the First Amendment. I remind you of what a closeted Christian law professor in an Ivy League law school told me back in this 2015 interview:

I spent a long time on the phone last night with a law professor at one of the country’s elite law schools. This professor is a practicing Christian, deeply closeted in the workplace; he is convinced that if his colleagues in academia knew of his faith, they would make it very hard for him. We made contact initially by e-mail — he is a reader of this blog — and last night, by phone. He agreed to speak with me about the Indiana situation on condition that I not identify him by name or by institution. I do know his identity, and when he tells me that he is “well-informed about the academy and the Supreme Court,” I assure you that from where he sits, and teaches, and from his CV, he is telling the truth.

I will call him Prof. Kingsfield, after the law professor in The Paper Chase. 

What prompted his reaching out to me? “I’m very worried,” he said, of events of the last week. “The constituency for religious liberty just isn’t there anymore.”

Like me, what unnerved Prof. Kingsfield is not so much the details of the Indiana law, but the way the overculture treated the law. “When a perfectly decent, pro-gay marriage religious liberty scholar like Doug Laycock, who is one of the best in the country — when what he says is distorted, you know how crazy it is.”

“Alasdair Macintyre is right,” he said. “It’s like a nuclear bomb went off, but in slow motion.” What he meant by this is that our culture has lost the ability to reason together, because too many of us want and believe radically incompatible things.

But only one side has the power. When I asked Kingsfield what most people outside elite legal and academic circles don’t understand about the way elites think, he said “there’s this radical incomprehension of religion.”

“They think religion is all about being happy-clappy and nice, or should be, so they don’t see any legitimate grounds for the clash,” he said. “They make so many errors, but they don’t want to listen.”

To elites in his circles, Kingsfield continued, “at best religion is something consenting adult should do behind closed doors. They don’t really understand that there’s a link between Sister Helen Prejean’s faith and the work she does on the death penalty. There’s a lot of looking down on flyover country, one middle America.

“The sad thing,” he said, “is that the old ways of aspiring to truth, seeing all knowledge as part of learning about the nature of reality, they don’t hold. It’s all about power. They’ve got cultural power, and think they should use it for good, but their idea of good is not anchored in anything. They’ve got a lot of power in courts and in politics and in education. Their job is to challenge people to think critically, but thinking critically means thinking like them. They really do think that they know so much more than anybody did before, and there is no point in listening to anybody else, because they have all the answers, and believe that they are good.”

On the conservative side, said Kingsfield, Republican politicians are abysmal at making a public case for why religious liberty is fundamental to American life.

“The fact that Mike Pence can’t articulate it, and Asa Hutchinson doesn’t care and can’t articulate it, is shocking,” Kingsfield said. “Huckabee gets it and Santorum gets it, but they’re marginal figures. Why can’t Republicans articulate this? We don’t have anybody who gets it and who can unite us. Barring that, the craven business community will drag the Republican Party along wherever the culture is leading, and lawyers, academics, and media will cheer because they can’t imagine that they might be wrong about any of it.”

He went on to say:

There is a bitter irony in the fact that gays coming out of the closet coincides with traditional religious people going back into the closet.

“Gays have legitimately said that it’s a big deal to have laws and a culture in which they have been forced to lie about who they are, which is what you do when you put them in the position of not being able to be open about their sexuality,” Kingsfield said.

“‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ forced them to segment off a part of their lives in a way that was wrong. What they don’t realize today is that the very same criticism they had about ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ can be applied to what is happening now to Christians: you can do what you like in private, but don’t bring who you are into the public square, or you can be punished for it.”

On the political side, Kingsfield said it’s important to “surrender political hope” — that is, that things can be solved through political power. Republicans can be counted on to block the worst of what the Democrats attempt – which is a pretty weak thing to rely on, but it’s not nothing. “But a lot of things can be done by administrative order,” he said. “I’m really worried about that.”

Read it all. I hadn’t even started writing The Benedict Optionat that point, but the professor told me in that conversation that I needed to get busy on it, because the idea is important to Christian survival in the world now being born.

Anyway, the key point here is that the way the abhorrent Yale Law students behaved in a protest supported by a strong majority of Yale Law students, is a sign of steep decline. These hateful people are tomorrow’s ruling class. You may never meet any of them, but once they ascend into the ruling-class institutions, they are going to affect the lives of all of us.

If you’ve never read the Substack newsletter of the English novelist and essayist Paul Kingsnorth, The Abbey of Misrule, do yourself a favor and buy a subscription. I’m not sure how much of his latest essay is behind the paywall, so I’m not going to quote it at length. Kingsnorth is a recent Christian convert who has spent his career writing in defense of small, local places, and environmental protection; it’s no accident that he was chosen to write the introduction to a recent collection of Wendell Berry essays. Most of his writing could fit comfortably on the non-ideological Left. But he writes that a few years ago, when he praised a film that celebrated the lost old England of village life, he was widely denounced as a racist and a Nazi by people who had once been his champions. It staggered him, and it took him a long time to recover. Kingsnorth writes:

The more I dug into this, the more something else became clear: the Internet mobsters resisting these new demons, though they presented themselves as champions of the marginalised and overlooked, just happened to have interests which aligned with those of the Machine.

It had become clear enough on my travels as a young writer, just as it had in my environmental and political activism at home, that the one thing that really put a spoke in the wheels of the rolling globoculture of consumer capitalism was a connection to place. People who dwelt in strong communities, who lived non-consumerist lives outside the market system: these were the Machine’s greatest enemies. These were the people and communities that the Black Ships of globalisation had dedicated nearly two centuries to uprooting, enclosing, scattering and corralling within the bounds of the market system. Now though, just as they were supposed to have been defeated, they seemed to be rearing their heads again, opposing the culture of inversion and the economics of transnational capital that lay behind it.

The kind of mob that came after me was not what it declared itself to be. It was not the righteous fury of the Wretched of the Earth rising up against reaction and prejudice. It was the beneficiary class of the age of the Machine defending its turf, and it had the language now to do it: a jargon-heavy lectionary of wokespeak which posed as liberatory rhetoric, but which actually oppressed and colonised anyone, of any colour, in any place, who so much as questioned the new status quo. The laptop class; the PMCs; the new puritans; the urban elites: whatever you called them, the culture of inversion was not rising from the bottom of society, but being directed from the top.

Kingsnorth says that these elites really do think the rest of us are, well, deplorable. This, he says, is class warfare, and it is being carried out on behalf of global capital. This is why we have Woke Capitalism. One more:

Amongst the growing and increasingly baroque list of cultural codes we are instructed to adhere to today, it is oikophobia – a performative and often racialised self-loathing – that is the central signature of the cultural elites. ‘Strategic white-bashing’ by a largely white haute-bourgeoisie is one of the weirdest manifestations of the new order, but it is not as irrational as it might look. Rather, it is a signal. Just as the promoters of the new anti-racism declare that ‘not being racist’ is not enough, so the same people can never be content with simply ‘not belonging’. We must demonstrate that we are anti-belonging if we want to show that we reside among the Good People. Only a declaration of independence from our own place, history and culture will mark us out as true children of the Machine.

If all modernity’s revolutions haved acted, as I’ve previously rashly claimed, as ground-clearance operations for the Machine, then the ‘culture war’ is the latest iteration, the revolt of the elites is its proximate cause, and the clumsy and divisive pseudo-ideology of ‘wokeness’ is the mask that the Machine wears as it eats us. Globalised, top-down and universalist, waging war against all limits, borders and traditions, the West’s new ideology is a perfect fit with the needs of capital. This is why it is promoted, funded and disseminated by universities, NGOs, think tanks and transnational corporations. This is why you will hear the same language being parroted around the world, as American, British, French or Irish elites talk about ‘whiteness’ and ‘decolonisation’ and ‘diversity’ in identical vocabulary transmitted to them through their identical corporate smartphones.

Not sure if you have to be a subscriber or not, but read the whole thing if you can — and if you can’t, subscribe; you won’t regret it.

Whatever America once was, it no longer is. You watch that Intercept collage of White House reporters attempting to drive the president towards war, and you dip into CNN and watch a network following the same line, and you ask: who does this benefit? Not ordinary people — the kind whose sons and even daughters will be sent to fight Russia, if we get involved. They will be putting their lives on a line to defend a regime increasingly directed by people like the privileged brats of Yale Law School, who will be moving in the years to come into positions of real power, which they will use to push around and to crush anybody who gets in their way.

The British conservative writer Ed West writes today about what he calls “the oikophobia of the Right” — that is, the hostility to their home countries some people on the Right have developed. He writes:

They don’t hate their inheritance like the radical Left, but they hate what their home has become, where progressives wearing the skin of the civilisation they have killed, like a zombie western civilisation. They also feel that any victory will only further strengthen those in charge.

That perhaps explains why so many populists have badly misjudged this conflict. As Eric Kaufmann wrote this week: ‘I watched as Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance defended Putin, or adopted the Kremlin’s critique of Ukraine’, Carlson calling it a ‘pure client state of the United States State Department’. While there are claims for a realist case ‘tempering Ukrainian demands and accommodating reasonable Russian security concerns, the inability of some to reject the moral equivalence of Ukraine and Russia was glaring.’

Like oikophobes in times gone by, some on the Right have created an imaginary foreign country to reflect on their own society’s shortcomings. ‘The perception that Russia is a masculine, white, Christian country unafraid to stand up for its traditions forms part of its appeal to conservative populist thinkers,’ Kaufmann writes: ‘“Putin ain’t woke,” Steve Bannon said last month. “He’s anti-woke.” The Russian President’s 2019 interview with the Financial Times, when he declared that liberalism has “become obsolete” clearly impressed many Western conservative populists. Against Drag Queen Story Hour and self-flagellation about the sins of the past could be set Putin’s macho, Christian, nationalist Russia. Clearly, some populist elites took the bait.’

Well, I was never pro-Putin, in the sense that I saw him and his government as any kind of model for Americans, though when he said something of which I approved, I praised him. In this case, I have said that his invasion was wicked, and that I hope he loses — but that I also expect Putin’s loss to rally illiberal leftism in Europe and North America. Though Ed West doesn’t bring my name up, I am fairly oikophobic in a narrower sense. He writes:

Fear of progressive hegemony is not unreasonable. What conservatives (and some liberals) worry about western society is not just that it’s decadent, but that its decadence is inherently intolerant. In this pink police state it is ‘forbidden to forbid’ — sometimes on pain of imprisonment, or at the very least loss of employment.

While the MI6 head’s comments about LGBT rights seem inane at worst, far more telling was the defence made by one member of the intelligence agency, who said: ‘Racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia and other forms of bigotry are some of the biggest drivers of nationalist and fascist behaviour which directly lead to wars of aggression. People miss the bigger picture by trying to compartmentalise these issues, it’s all connected.’

‘It’s all connected.’ Those are not heartening words, especially if we enter a new cold war with Putinism as the opposition ideology, perhaps treated with more hostility than even communism, because communism was at least credited with beating Hitler (and given a pass for its noble intentions). Already, there is even a hint of the 1950s in the search for alleged Russian assets within.

Western sanctions against Russia have been compared to ‘cancelling’, a disturbing analogy because, as well as losing their job or facing public humiliation, some people in the West viewed as extremists have already had their bank accounts taken away. The global online economy gives the powers-that-be tremendous power to unperson people, or whole states. Woke capital has been weaponised by the Ukrainian war; and while for now we mostly agree it is on the side of the angels, we can’t always be sure in future.

Read the whole thing. I cannot pretend to believe that whatever my country, the country I love, does is right, simply because it is my country. The wickedness of Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping doesn’t make America automatically good. We Christians must be very careful not to be idolaters. I grieve over what America is becoming, but I see no point in sitting back rending our garments, as opposed to reading the signs of the times and preparing for what’s coming. You know what’s coming? Yale Law students on the federal bench, interpreting the Constitution to dismantle free speech and religious liberty. More sexualizing of children, more woke racism, more Woke Capitalism, more using financial instruments to punish dissenters, more concentration of power in the tech industry and its deployment to control people and compel them to be compliant to the Machine. More war. More porn. More manufactured moral outrage and hatred of dissent. More living by lies.

The post Oikophobia & The Machine appeared first on The American Conservative.

I was genuinely shocked and distressed when I saw this news today, in Christianity Today:

For more than a dozen years, Christianity Today failed to hold two ministry leaders accountable for sexual harassment at its Carol Stream, Illinois, office.

A number of women reported demeaning, inappropriate, and offensive behavior by former editor in chief Mark Galli and former advertising director Olatokunbo Olawoye. But their behavior was not checked and the men were not disciplined, according to an external assessment of the ministry’s culture released Tuesday.

The report identified a pair of problems at the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism: a poor process for “reporting, investigating, and resolving harassment allegations” and a culture of unconscious sexism that can be “inhospitable to women.” CT has made the assessment public.

“We want to practice the transparency and accountability we preach,” said CT president Timothy Dalrymple. “It’s imperative we be above reproach on these matters. If we’re falling short of what love requires of us, we want to know, and we want to do better.”

In separate, independent reporting, the CT news editor interviewed more than two dozen current and former employees and heard 12 firsthand accounts of sexual harassment.

Women at CT were touched at work in ways that made them uncomfortable. They heard men with authority over their careers make comments about the sexual desirability of their bodies. And in at least two cases, they heard department heads hint at openness to an affair.

More than half a dozen employees reported harassment from Galli or Olawoye to a manager or HR between the mid-2000s and 2019. But neither leader was written up, formally warned about their inappropriate behavior, suspended, or otherwise punished. There is no record that Christianity Today took any corrective action, even after repeated complaints of nearly identical offenses.

“The culture when I was there was to protect the institution at all costs,” said Amy Jackson, an associate publisher who left what she said had become a hostile work environment in 2018. “No one was ever held accountable. Mark Galli was certainly protected.”

Read it all.

In a written response, Galli denies most of this. Excerpt:

Some parts of the story are, therefore, accurate, and I’m troubled that I distressed any women, or men for that matter, by anything I said or did.  But the fact of the matter is that I never in 30 years ever approached a women with the intent of sexually harassing, intimidating, or “hitting” on her. Never. But some women believe I had done that, and for that I’m regretful.

As anyone who has read this newsletter knows, I am sometimes apt to write something that I later recognize was confusing or misleading, and I am forced to retrace my steps to clarify. This has also been a character flaw in my interactions with people that crops up now and then, as anyone who has worked with me can testify. So that point in the article is fair as far as it goes.

But I was stunned to read the piece and discover that there were a number of incidents reported that either never happened or the context in which they happened was left out. Just three examples among many: It is said that I lingered over a woman’s bra clip and that my hand got caught in her bra. Never happened. It is said that I “felt up” a woman. Never happened. It is said that I said aloud that I like to watch women golfers bend over. Never said it. So amidst the stories in which I can see I genuinely offended or confused some women, there were allegations that just mystify me.

I don’t know what the full truth is, though even giving Galli the benefit of the doubt, it is hard to deny the large numbers of current and former CT women employees making the same allegations. I would prefer to pass this story by, in part because I slightly know Mark Galli, and like him, but it would be hypocritical for me to do that, given that I have praised Galli in this space in the not-too-distant past. It was about an essay he wrote as an ex-Evangelical (he’s now Catholic), about how elite Evangelicals have sold out to the world. I cited in my blog post Galli’s saying that when he was at CT, the magazine often shied away from taking positions that might encourage fundamentalist Christians, therefore embarrassing its staffers in front of the secular world. Then I cited this passage from Galli’s essay:

Another example was [CT‘s] accommodation to a more radical feminist worldview. Once I wrote a draft of an editorial arguing that traditional traits associated with masculinity (like competition, aggressiveness, etc.) were not intrinsically toxic but needed in every human community (and, yes needed to be moderated!). The reactions of three key staffers (one male and two females) was shock and fear; they assumed I was justifying such things as wife abuse, even though in my draft I twice condemned the phenomenon. I put the editorial aside for the time being because it was not worth the staff dynamics I would have had to navigate at the time, since I sensed their anxiety would be shared by many other staffers. I hadn’t recognized how much fear and suspicion of masculinity pervaded the hallways.

I cited that as a jumping-off point to discuss how Evangelicals and Catholics who come to visit our Orthodox parish often say that they are drawn to its unfeminized liturgy and spirituality. It’s a hard thing to explain, even to myself, but Orthodoxy manages to be masculine without being macho. I’m not quite sure how that works, but this is something widely observed by American converts to Orthodoxy. I think a big part of it is that the Orthodox Church does not exist to make you feel good in your okayness. Its approach is therapeutic, but in the sense of, “pray, fast, confess, repent — this is the sure way to healing handed down from the Fathers.”

Anyway, re-reading that passage from Galli’s October 2021 essay in light of today’s news is jarring. I hadn’t recognized how much fear and suspicion of masculinity pervaded the hallways he wrote back then. I took that at face value, because I’ve seen the same thing in environments where educated young women are present. But now I wonder if the “shock and fear” on the faces of the female CT editorial employees was not so much fear of masculinity as shock that Galli would be saying those things, if they believed he was a serial sexual harasser.

If Evangelicalism has a problem with being overly feminized, then the accusations against Mark Galli do not make it go away. But they do make it harder to take masculinist critics seriously. When the Catholic Church went through its reckoning with pervasive sexual abuse by the clergy, and cover-up by the bishops and others running the institutions of the Church, it did not negate the Church’s moral teachings about sexuality, including homosexuality. But it did blow up the credibility of those proclaiming the teachings, making it much harder to hear them and take them seriously. Nobody wants to hear a Catholic bishop who looked the other way while gay priests were molesting boys talk about the importance of chastity. Similarly, nobody wants to hear a high-profile former Evangelical talk about the hostility to masculinity within elite Evangelical culture when he stands accused of sexually intimidating women in the workplace, and repeatedly.

I have a couple of male Christian friends who, in their private lives, are dealing with epic cases of what you might call “toxic femininity.” It happens. Because all people are sinners, there is no reason to think that women are less likely to sin, and to sin in ways that are more characteristic of female temperaments, than men are to sin, and to sin in ways that are more typically masculine. I find that the older I get, the less I understand about men and women and what makes them treat each other in particular ways. It’s weird, because usually the more wisdom you gain, the clearer things are. But assuming that Mark Galli is guilty of the allegations laid against him (and remember, he denies some of it), then why would a man — especially a married Christian man — behave that way? Even if you had those desires for women, surely a mature older Christian knows better than to act on them. Similarly in the two private cases I reference earlier, it is exceedingly difficult to understand why Christian women would say and do the things these women are saying and doing to damage the men in their lives? In all these cases, everybody professes Christ, but that profession seems to restrain no one from causing sexualized distress and pain to others.

I have no answer for any of this. But I’m grateful that we can talk about it, instead of sweeping it all under the rug for the sake of protecting institutions. I hope you will read CT president and CEO Tim Dalrymple’s apologetic editorial about the situation. It strikes me as exemplary, both in terms of disclosure, and in how the institution under his leadership (he came aboard in 2019) handled the matter.

UPDATE: There’s some interesting pushback in the comments section against the idea that Galli is guilty of anything other than offending the too-delicate sensibilities (they say) of certain women at CT. A characteristic comment:

“More than half a dozen employees” and “12 firsthand accounts” do not equal “large numbers of current and former CT women employees”. How many women worked at the place over those 10+ years?

Several years ago I noticed that the harassment training at my large company changed: it went from harassment being defined as something objectively offensive to whatever a particular woman might get upset about. Given that this is the standard, everyone is bound to say something that upsets someone else eventually. I’ve never read CT and I know nothing of Mark Galli. I’m just a suspicious middle aged attorney who thinks this is more than likely a bunch of horses!t. Not that it will turn out that way; accusing someone is 95% of the battle in the current climate. Accused = guilty to a large number of people in 2022. As for me, call me when these women have proven what happened in court and been awarded damages, and then I’ll believe them – not before. I’m old fashioned that way.

The post Mark Galli Accused Of Sexual Harassment appeared first on The American Conservative.

A characteristically interesting and provocative comment from Matt in VA, left on the West, Still Declining comments thread:

One of the mistakes that American conservatives make most often and most consistently is confusing liberalism and leftism with weakness. That conservatives continue to make this mistake over and over again even when liberals are grinding them into the dust and tossing them in the ashcan of history just shows how important it is to conservatives, how it undergirds their entire worldview, to believe this, I would say, very un-Christian idea that right makes might.

Even today in the year of our Lord 2022, when small minorities like gays have stomped sexually traditional American Christians in to the ground politically, we get these assertions that a nonbinary and trans army is a weak and feeble army, that pajama boy leftists are pushovers, etc. We also see claims that “traditional” rural and exurban communities are safe and Orderly, while liberal/Democratic areas are unsafe, with the implication being that the people of those areas are too weak or compromised to create conditions of order.

But something that I have seen borne out for my whole life is that liberalism and leftism are stronger than conservatism and traditionalism, and generally win any contest, at least sooner or later. One *must* abandon this idea that the correct or the truer Way is the stronger way, at least in this life. The conservative or traditional position on the purpose of marriage may be the best one, the most honest, the most tested, the most rational and the most beautiful, but like many beautiful things, it is quite delicate in itself as a *force* in our world. The degree to which it must be shored up, promoted, protected, ingrained in children nearly from birth, normalized, etc is quite astonishing. Yet conservatives seem to have this impression that such ideas or values can “win in the marketplace of ideas” simply by being baldly stated over and over, without any sort of real power or force being brought to bear, when all of the venal worldly benefits and sticks and carrots are on the other side.

The US military could devote fully 40% of its training to inculcating the deconstruction of the gender binary and the promotion of Kendian anti-racism, and it would not necessarily make the military “weak,” not so long as America continued to have the incredible amounts of $$$ it has. Now, I know, movement conservatives will reply that we have all this money because we have the best values (free enterprise, free trade, freedom to do business), and so our hugely dominant financial position demonstrates our moral superiority. This really is how movement conservatives think! The line in the Bible about camels passing through needles’ eyes is one that American conservative Christians just absolutely have no interest in whatsoever even as they accuse liberal Christians of being selective in their readings of the Gospels. But the reality is that atomizing, commodifying, annihilating consumer capitalism, or whatever you want to call it, leads to worldly power that few can resist, and that power is *real*, and it is certainly not Christian, nor is it “rational” in a secular sense, to continue to insist on this idea that that sort of worldly power is really “weakness.”

Conservatives are very attached, emotionally attached, to the idea that their values are the values of strength, manliness, forthrightness, the John Wayne values. They are attached to the values of the frontier, the sphere in which every man may need to be the law unto themselves; they are attached to the values of a space in which women are not a serious or viable force. Thus we see the *incredible* weakness of conservatives: they have NO skills or abilities to resist forms of power or aggression or coercion that, absent from frontier conditions, are nevertheless very present in the city/in civilization. What might work in frontier conditions will not work in conditions of domestication or in conditions where the space in which one moves is *owned.*

The world in which one operates, if one is a wolf, is very different from the world in which one operates, if one is a domesticated dog. The wolf’s life may be nasty, brutish, and short, and the domesticated dog’s life may be significantly longer and significantly easier, but there is an entire transmutation and reversal of all values (so to speak) here — is what the domesticated dog has obtained worth what has been lost? The conservative looks at the wolf, and compares it to the French bulldog, and says, here is no contest at all. But if enough French bulldogs are harmed, and their owners pass a law legalizing the shooting of wolves from aircraft, traps, homing devices so that the wolf dens can be found and the wolf pups massacred, etc., perhaps in fact it is no contest at all, in the other direction. Perhaps another way of putting this is that the conservative still believes in the “silent majority” and thinks he has the masses on his side. There so often seems to be little or no understanding of what it means when you cannot count on that or assume that, when you have to operate in a hostile information environment or under a *regime* that is hostile. Again, this fantasy that the values and tactics of the frontier are the only applicable or important ones; but this just does not pertain most of the time for most people.

I am very convinced by arguments that the West is in moral and — especially — aesthetic decline, but over and over again I see conservatives taking this intellectual shortcut or falling into this intellectual trap and asserting that that means the West is *weak* or about to collapse or at least to falter, and I do not see that at all. Moral and aesthetic decline, increasing dishonesty and vapidity, etc., do not mean worldly power is about to drop or disappear. Where on earth is it promised that right will make might? Don’t people understand the self-flattery and indulgent thinking that is amply demonstrated by the idea that the United States is rich and powerful due to having the right beliefs and values and ideals? Perhaps our dominant position in the world is in fact evidence that the opposite might be true? OK –one hears it — this sounds like Leftism, and conservatives and the Right wing are by definition not Leftists, so of course they don’t see things this way. It is Leftists who say the USA is powerful and therefore bad — exploitative, unjust, greedy, etc. To which I would say, it is just as great an error to automatically ascribe power to desert, as it is to ascribe power to greed or megalomaniacal dominance. To be sure, there is something annoyingly ungrateful about the leftist who sneers at his own homeland and preens over his attachment to the alien and distant; but there is something off putting about the smug bourgeois too. The fact that it’s gross to see the leftist indulge in conspicuous telescopic philanthropy does not mean that it’s not also gross to have to listen to the self-congratulation of the soft-handed middle class — épater les bourgeoises may be tiresome but there’s a reason it’s also effective.

The truth of the world, I think, is that there are always dangers on both sides; there is always a Scylla AND a Charybdis. There is the danger of Communism on one side, but there are the dangers of out-of-control financialization and commodification as well. There is the danger of narrow and bigoted provincialism, and the danger of cosmopolitan atomization and disintegration. The danger of rigidity so inflexible the whole system breaks, and the danger of flexibility that preserves and sustains nothing at all.

Again, it is possible to imagine a US military that gives over ten or twenty times the amount of time and resources to promoting the Democratic Party platform to its members, without it necessarily being the case that this “weakens” the military or the standing of the US in the world. The question is whether the $$$$ is there or not, and how others stand or compare in regards to that money. Evolution and survival of the fittest are *amoral.* That which is good and noble and beautiful may go extinct, while that which is horrible may survive or even thrive. Beautiful, noble, exotic species of birds and beasts may disappear in huge numbers, yet the virus persists. The horrible, poisonous “marketplace of ideas” god that American conservatives worship (or, at least, assume) is a false god–the “best idea” does not necessarily win, the most cursory look at the history of the world tells us that. “All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” The nearly total capture of all American institutions by the progressive worldview and mindset does not automatically or necessarily mean that these institutions will weaken, only that they will transform. This transformation can indeed come with even greater strength, as the progressive worldview is optimized for making money and is indeed fanatically devoted to the worldly and venal values of money and vulgar status. It would be strange indeed for an ideology that is structured around promoting the interests of multinational corporations and international capital over all else (including real differences of religion, tradition, sex, etc.) to lead directly to *weakness* — one might expect the internal contradictions of such an ideology or its disintegrating and atomizing qualities might eventually lead to problems, but not that it would immediately bring about weakness!

Thoughts? As ever, remember that my citing someone’s comments does not mean I agree with them all, only that I find them interesting and worth considering.

The post Leftism Does Not Mean Weakness appeared first on The American Conservative.

Last night in Budapest, I went to a small dinner arranged for visiting American students. There I saw a grand Hungarian lady I know stand and raise a glass in tribute to “the Russians”. This high-spirited lady comes from an aristocratic family who had been completely dispossessed by the Soviets and their Hungarian and Czechoslovak lackeys. She suffered exile for many years, and after returning, spent many years and enormous resources (whatever she had left) reclaiming and restoring the family house that the Russians stole from her parents. Yet here she was, drinking to Russians. Why? Because she is a woman of the world, and recognizes that the greatness of Russian culture is not the same thing as the cruelty of the Russian state. And because, as she explained, even in exile she gained some good things. She ended by raising her glass, and saying, “Na Zdrovie!”

I thought: that is what it means to be cultured. This woman has all the right in the world to be consumed by hatred for all things Russian, but there she is, pointing out by example to these young Americans the value of not allowing hate to consume your understanding. The courage it took to stand at a table in these times, in front of strangers, and pay tribute to the Russian people is no small thing. But then, the immense suffering her family endured at the hands of the Russians and their Magyar and Czechoslovak servants earned her the right.

I thought about her this morning when I read Prof. Gary Saul Morson’s impassioned condemnation of those in American and European life who have lost their heads in spasms of anti-Russian bigotry. Excerpts from the Russia scholar’s essay in First Things:

There is another way to silence opponents today: Claim an issue is one of “moral clarity,” a phrase that signals the question is “settled” and allows for no further discussion. In such cases, facts don’t give rise to a narrative, the narrative determines the facts. When an issue is declared “morally clear” in this way, the implication is that only the immoral could entertain the slightest doubt. The world divides neatly into good and evil. There can be no conscientious skeptics. And when people are unqualifiedly evil, anything one says about them or does to them becomes justified.

As a specialist in Russian literature and thought, I am more than familiar with this way of thinking. It is how the Soviet Union operated. Once the Party ruled on a topic, gray areas vanished. That is why every vote of the Soviet parliament was unanimous and elections offered only one candidate. The very idea of disputable questions was a bourgeois mystification, designed to keep the working class from acting decisively in its interest. By the same token, all issues became zero-sum games. In first-year economics, one learns that in any unforced transaction both sides benefit or they would not make the exchange, but in Marxist-Leninist thinking, one side’s gain is necessarily the other side’s loss.

Yes, this is how it works under our soft totalitarianism. More:

But as with the cancel culture of recent years, the further one goes, the more virtuous one feels. Whatever assertion favors the right side must be accepted and whatever action harms opponents must be justified. True enough, official Russian propaganda transmits outrageous lies and the regime suppresses dissenting voices. Does it follow that everything said by the Ukrainian government and sympathetic observers must be true—or that anyone who calls for the skepticism normally applied to all partisan sources must be a Putin supporter? Should we, too, banish dissenting voices?

In the spirit of moral clarity, anything “Russian” has become immoral. … Some Russian performers and public figures now must publicly declare opposition to Putin in order to perform. How long before Jewish performers and academics will have to declare their opposition to Israel, or Muslim ones to whatever Muslim land we are presently fighting?

Oh, it’s coming. Morson lists a number of cancel-Russia initiatives, and outright attacks on innocent Russians in the West, of which I had not heard. One more quote:

If Russian history teaches anything, it is that such “moral clarity” has no limits. If all right is on one side, then anything—literally anything—one says or does is justified. Indeed, to stop short of the most extreme measures is to indulge evil, which means risking the charge of complicity. When Stalin sent local officials quotas of people to be arrested, they responded by demanding still higher quotas. It was the safest thing to do to prove one’s loyalty. No one ever secured his position by calling for less severity to enemies. When everything is black and white, sooner or later everyone is at risk.

Read the whole thing.

It is a savage irony that the same totalitarian spirit that animated the Soviet Union, and which has been adopted by the postliberal Western left to serve its ends, is now being used against all things Russian — and people here are so busy enjoying the pleasure of hate that they don’t even see the hypocrisy. Again and again, I warn you that the kinds of things identified in Live Not By Lies are going to become more general in the wake of this Russian invasion. When I was a kid, we had an actually liberal Left that pushed back against these primitive instincts to hate indiscriminately those we identified as enemies. Now the Left leads the charge — now against Russians and their culture, but before that against races, religions, classes of people, and others they deem evil — and too many on the Right, at least in the case of Russia, are going right along.

I can anticipate what some of you will say: “Why are you spending so much time defending Russians when Ukrainians are dying under Russian bombs?” The answer is simple: because very few people need to be convinced that Russia’s war on Ukraine is wicked, and deserves condemnation. A distressingly large number of people need to be convinced that it’s not okay to demonize all Russians, and all things Russian, in reaction to Putin’s unjust war.

Morson ends by quoting Solzhenitsyn’s warning that the line between good and evil runs not between peoples, cultures, or anything like that. The line between good and evil runs down the center of every human heart.

I saw this horrifying statement today in which a Ukrainian broadcaster, upon finding out that a friend of his in the army had been killed, wept and quoted Adolf Eichmann favorably, saying that the children of one’s enemies — in this case, Russian children — must be murdered.

fakhrudin sharafmal on ukrainian channel 24 quoting adolf eichmann & calling for the killing of russian children, translation in next tweet pic.twitter.com/WbPQYRpm9g

— Russians With Attitude (@RWApodcast) March 15, 2022

pic.twitter.com/7P4EgUeUms

— Russians With Attitude (@RWApodcast) March 15, 2022

It’s horrifying, and nothing justifies that. One reason Russian troops are now in Ukraine, with the majority support of the Russian people, is because the Putin government has spent years propagandizing ordinary Russians to hate Ukrainians. Hatred breeds hatred. Yet watching the clip, and reading the translation, I thought about how I would feel in that situation. I remembered once sitting at my desk at National Review, back in 2002, months into writing about the Catholic sex abuse scandal. I wasn’t much older than that Ukrainian guy appears to be (which is to say, I had much less self control back then). I read about a particularly horrible case, and found myself wishing that someone would shoot the abusive priest dead. And then I let my mind drift into fantasizing about how a vigilante squad could start kneecapping clerical pederasts. That would stop the abuse, surely, and deliver justice for victims.

Then I caught myself, and repented of my evil thoughts. I was wrong to entertain those kinds of thoughts, though even from this distance in time the impulse to vengeance is not alien to me. You have read me saying here in this space since the Russian war on Ukraine began how bitterly I regret allowing my vengeful passions to overtake my judgment back in 2002-03, and therefore backing the Iraq War. Being civilized requires us to go to the utmost to restrain ourselves. In Dante’s Purgatorio, the pilgrim Dante finds himself on the terrace of Wrath as he makes his way up the mountain. There the Wrathful are purged of their tendency to indulge themselves in anger. The terrace is a ledge on the mountain where the Wrathful dwell in heavy smoke and a shower of sparks — this to mimic the effect of anger (e.g., it clouds our ability to see clearly). I wrote about it here. In this canto of his Purgatorio, Dante blames the unchecked wrathful passions of his fellow Tuscans for the war and calamity that has befallen his native land. Marco the Lombard, one of the Wrathful suffering purgation there, tells Dante that if we would restore peace and order to the world, we have to begin by restoring peace and order to our own hearts.

This is a lesson that I, personally, cannot learn often enough. I am in no position to lecture anybody about unbound wrath, because it is one of my besetting sins. All I can tell you is what I have learned from my mistakes, and what I have learned from the wisdom of literature, and the Christian religious tradition.

That tradition includes, above all, Orthodox Christianity. It has been in Orthodoxy, which I’ve practiced for almost 17 years now, where I first learned about battling sin as an exercise in restraining the passions. (To be clear, all forms of Christianity teach the concept of sin, but in my experience, Orthodoxy has the most articulated model of sinfulness coming from disordered passions.) I first encountered it in reading the Kyriacos Markides book The Mountain Of Silence, an introductory book about Orthodox spirituality that played a key role in my own conversion. The key figure in the book is “Father Maximos,” the name Markides gave to an Athonite priest-monk who went on to become Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol, Cyprus. Father Maximos explains that sin begins with negative thoughts (logismoi) that attack us, and tempt us. If we allow them to penetrate, they will plant a seed that will blossom as sin. From the book:

It’s sad for me to quote “Father Maximos” this morning. I headed out for the Budapest airport to catch a flight to Cyprus, connecting through Munich, to go interview him tomorrow. But there was an epic traffic jam as we neared the airport, and I sat in traffic for an hour, in the taxi. I missed my flight, and it wasn’t possible to rebook for today. I have missed my chance to meet and interview the great spiritual teacher. I was feeling pretty angry and disappointed over it, but then sitting down to write about the Russia thing when I got home, and going back to Father Maxime’s teaching on logismoi, set me straight. And thinking too about how the Hungarian lady paid tribute to the Russians, even though the Soviet government made her and her family suffer, because even in exile they found good things, turned me around, and now has me trying to find the blessing hidden in my botched journey to Cyprus. Though Orthodoxy is not exclusively a Russian thing — the overwhelming majority of American Orthodox are in the Greek tradition — I came to it via the Slavic path. The great gift of Orthodox spirituality, including Russian Orthodox spirituality, would have been lost to me had I chosen to demonize all things Russian.

Look, I’m not going to say that we should look for the good side of Russia’s war. That would be cruel and inhuman. (And I’m certainly not comparing frustration over a missed flight to rage over friends and family lost in a war, except in the most general way!) But I am going to say that we must somehow try to bear the grief and suffering coming from it without losing our humanity. We must do what we can to allow the Holy Spirit to transform our rage into good, as grace did in the heart of the great Hungarian lady. This is not humanly possible, but with God, all things are possible.

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