Rod Dreher's Blog, page 22

A preview of what’s to come for us all:

Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau has invoked special emergency powers to confront the trucker convoy, which has been blockading major cities and highways in protest against the cross-border vaccine mandate imposed by the Canadian government.

The law, the Emergencies Act, written in 1988, has never before been used. It gives Trudeau’s administration special authority for 30 days to restrict movement, freeze financial accounts (including personal bank accounts and cyptocurrency transactions), and direct citizens to certain actions, such as the forced towing of the trucks.

“The government has invoked the Emergencies Act to supplement provincial and territorial capacity to address the blockades and occupations,” Trudeau said at a press briefing Monday.

After rallying for what they’re calling “medical freedom” in Ottawa, the capital of Canada, the truckers expanded their demonstration to other locations while a cohort stayed behind to keep protesting in the city. Protestors have been erecting tents and camps and picketing with signs to pressure the government to acquiesce.

Some of the departed trucks caused traffic gridlock last week on a busy trade bridge connecting Windsor, Canada, to Detroit, Michigan. About a quarter of goods between the countries are transported over this bridge.

Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland said Monday that the government could use the Emergencies Act to cut off the financial pipelines of those involved in the blockades.

“As of today, a bank or other financial service provider will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account without a court order. In doing so, they will be protected against civil liability for actions taken in good faith,” Freeland said.

Convoy organizers first had their capital disrupted when crowdfunding platform GoFundMe booted them as a customer, claiming that the truckers had engaged in unruly behavior and violence that violated their terms of service. The protestors then switched to Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo.

Freeland specified that crowdfunding sites and the payment service providers must be approved by the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), the national financial intelligence agency. These companies are also required to report large and suspicious transactions to FINTRAC.

“The illegal blockades have highlighted the fact that crowdfunding platforms, and some of the payment service providers they use, are not fully captured under the Proceeds of Crime and Terrorist Financing Act,” Freeland said. “We are making these changes because we know that these platforms are being used to support illegal blockades and illegal activity which is damaging the Canadian economy.”

Technically, the government can exercise the Emergencies Act only if there is a crisis that cannot adequately be solved by the local regions of the country or by any existing federal legislation.

“It is now clear that there are serious challenges to law enforcement’s ability to effectively enforce the law,” Trudeau added. “This is about keeping Canadians safe, protecting people’s jobs, and restoring confidence in our institutions.”

Safety! Of course. Keep this in mind when you see how the young are being taught that an “unsafe space” is intolerable. Whatever you think about the Truckers’ protest, this is going to be the reason that and the means by which a future American regime will use to punish its enemies — especially once we go to a cashless society. From Live Not By Lies:

“China is about to become something new: an AI-powered techno-totalitarian state,” writes journalist John Lanchester. “The project aims to form not only a new kind of state but a new kind of human being, one who has fully internalized the demands of the state and the completeness of its surveillance and control. That internalization is the goal: agencies of the state will never need to intervene to correct the citizen’s behavior, because the citizen has done it for them in advance.”

He is talking about Beijing’s pioneering use of artificial intelligence and other forms of digital data gathering to create a state apparatus that not only monitors all citizens constantly but also can compel them to behave in ways the state demands without ever deploying the secret police or the threat of gulags (though those exist for the recalcitrant), and without suffering the widespread poverty that was the inevitable product of old-style communism.

The great majority of Chinese pay for consumer goods and services using smartphone apps or their faces, via facial recognition technology. These provide consumer convenience and security, making life easier for ordinary people. They also generate an enormous amount of personal data about each Chinese individual, all of which the government tracks.

The state has other uses for facial recognition technology. Television cameras are ubiquitous on Chinese streets, recording the daily comings and goings of the nation’s people. Beijing’s software is so advanced that it can easily check facial scans against the central security database. If a citizen enters an area forbidden to him—a church, say—or even if a person is merely walking in the opposite direction of a crowd, the system automatically records it and alerts the police.

In theory, police don’t have to show up at the suspect’s door to make him pay for his disobedience. China’s social credit system automatically tracks the words and actions, online and off, of every Chinese citizen, and grants rewards or demerits based on obedience. A Chinese who does something socially positive—helping an elderly neighbor with a chore, or listening to a speech of leader Xi Jinping—receives points toward a higher social credit score. On the other hand, one who does something negative—letting his or her dog poop on the sidewalk, for example, or making a snarky comment on social media—suffers a social-credit downgrade.

Because digital life, including commercial transactions, is automatically monitored, Chinese with high social credit ratings gain privileges. Those with lower scores find daily life harder. They aren’t allowed to buy high-speed train tickets or take flights. Doors close to certain restaurants. Their children may not be allowed to go to college. They may lose their job and have a difficult time finding a new one. And a social-credit scofflaw will find himself isolated, as the algorithmic system downgrades those who are connected to the offender.

The bottom line: a Chinese citizen cannot participate in the economy or society unless he has the mark of approval from Xi Jinping, the country’s all-powerful leader. In a cashless society, the state has the power to bankrupt dissidents instantly by cutting off access to the internet. And in a society in which everyone is connected digitally, the state can make anyone an instant pariah when the algorithm turns them radioactive, even to their family.

The Chinese state is also utilizing totalitarian methods for ensuring the coming generations don’t have the imaginative capacity to fight back.

Now the Canadian state is learning from the Chinese … and the American state will learn from the Canadians.

This is why I wrote Live Not By Lies — to wake up Americans who are, or are likely to be, dissidents from the emerging soft totalitarian regime, and show us ways to prepare. Read the signs of the times!

The post Justin Trudeau, Safety Totalitarian appeared first on The American Conservative.

The philosopher Peter Boghossian and I are doing a public event together later this week in Budapest. It will be recorded and put on YouTube; I’ll post a link when it’s done. Peter and I were talking the other night about things we might discuss, and we agreed that it would be interesting to bring up the controversy over Sam Brinton, the LGBT activist and public sadomasochism enthusiast who was recently hired as a senior nuclear waste bureaucrat at the Department of Energy (Brinton has a nuclear engineering degree from MIT). I wrote about his case here and here last week.

(Note: if you are one of those liberals who have your nose out of joint because I am talking again about that Brinton freak, I advise you to look away if it’s going to trigger you. You know good and well that if you were reading a blog praising Brinton’s boldness in confronting bigots, you’d be thrilled. If you have something useful to say in criticism of what I write below, then I’ll publish it. But if all you intend to do is whine about conservatives like me criticizing Brinton, save your words, because I won’t post them.)

Peter’s general view, stated on Twitter, is that if Brinton’s kinky sex life doesn’t interfere with his job performance, people shouldn’t care about it. My view is that this kind of thing is rather a big deal. I talked about it at length in those previous posts, but in brief, I think Brinton should not have been hired in the first place because he is an in-your-face activist.

On his website (see one of my previous posts for the link), he talks about how he likes to wear women’s clothing into the workplace as a way to provoke people into having “conversations” about LGBT matters. To me, that is a classic sign of exhibitionism, and in the woke professional environment we now have to deal with, this amounts to bullying. Brinton is daring people to object, or to show the least discomfort, so he can “educate” them. According to his past testimony, he hates his fundagelical parents because they allegedly forced him to go to conversion therapy. Assuming that’s true — and there are questions about it — he is taking out his anger at his parents on everybody else. A figure like that is toxic in the workplace. If Brinton were a loud, aggressive fundamentalist Christian evangelist who bragged that he enjoyed provoking people into having conversations about their religious beliefs, he wouldn’t get hired by most places because he would constantly be stirring up trouble. I’m a conservative Christian and I wouldn’t hire such a person.

But Brinton happens to be an activist for a cause of which cultural and professional elites approve, so he not only gets a pass, his peacock strutting probably helps him out professionally.

Plus, I believe that Brinton’s sadomasochism is a sign of a sick mind. Remember (see the previous links), he engages in something kinksters call “pup play,” in which he is the sadistic “master” of masochistic men who behave like dogs. In one of the articles to which I linked, Brinton and his then-lover talked about how the lover doesn’t always like to stop pretending he is a dog when Brinton sodomizes him. Pseudo-bestiality, in other words. If they did this behind closed doors, it would be something that we would need to learn how to tolerate, as the cost for living in a free, pluralistic society. But Brinton parades his perversion openly, and demands that we approve. I think he’s a sicko.

More broadly, I believe that Brinton’s BDSM behavior ought to be sharply stigmatized, because it should be discouraged. Let me ask you this: if Brinton’s kink was “race play” — a BDSM category that revolves around racialized sexual humiliation — and he had a record as a public advocate for that, would he stand a microsecond’s chance of being hired as a senior manager at at federal agency, or anywhere? I just read an essay by a gay black man who was called a n*gger during sex with a white man who was engaged in this, and it left the black man feeling ashamed that he went along with it. He goes on in the essay — I won’t like to it here, but it’s on HuffPost if you’re interested — to say that “race play” is dehumanizing:

To understand the true nature of racism is to acknowledge that it isn’t just the act of doing mean things to people because they’re different. It’s a worldview in which anyone of another race is something less than human.

Well, yes. But you know what else is dehumanizing? A sexual fetish in which you pretend to be a dog, and enslave yourself to a “master” who has sex with you.

We have a strong interest as a society in keeping the most inhuman and destructive passions intrinsic to our nature suppressed. Did you know that there is a such thing as a Nazi fetish, and “Nazi play”? How would you feel about hiring Brinton if he were into that, and went public with it? Don’t we, as a society, have an interest in strongly discouraging people from taking sexual pleasure in their darkest fantasies? We can’t police people’s minds, of course, but we can and we should stigmatize their public expression of these fantasies. It is in society’s interest to make Nazism taboo. It is in society’s interest to make racial humiliation taboo. It is in society’s interest to make bestiality and pseudo-bestiality taboo. Yes, people will continue to do whatever they will do, but they will at least keep it hidden.

The point is this: those who claim that what someone does sexually, even if they publicize it, should have nothing to do with their employment status, don’t really mean it unless they also affirm race play and Nazi play. Do you really think a public Ku Klux fetishist or Nazi fetishist should not be judged unfit for employment because of their public kinks? What about someone whose kink was “pedophile play,” with consenting adults who play-act as children? Would that be too much?

My point is that I think the standard progressive claim that public expressions of sexual desire should not be stigmatized is empty and hypocritical, because almost nobody is willing to be consistent in permitting anything-goes — and that’s a good thing! Lines will be drawn; the only question is, where, and on what basis?

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations work is a helpful approach to understanding how we think about this stuff. Here is a basic explanation of the idea:

Moral Foundations Theory was created by a group of social and cultural psychologists (see us here) to understand why morality varies so much across cultures yet still shows so many similarities and recurrent themes. In brief, the theory proposes that several innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, thereby creating the unique moralities we see around the world, and conflicting within nations too. The five foundations for which we think the evidence is best are:

1) Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

2) Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulated the theory in 2011 based on new data, we emphasize proportionality, which is endorsed by everyone, but is more strongly endorsed by conservatives]

3) Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”

4) Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.

5) Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

We think there are several other very good candidates for “foundationhood,” especially:

6) Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor. We report some preliminary work on this potential foundation in this paper, on the psychology of libertarianism and liberty.

Haidt et al. found that in the West, liberals evaluate phenomena morally with the Care/Harm and the Fairness/Cheating criteria only. Conservatives, by contrast, use all five. (I don’t know about the sixth one, which has been added to the list since I last checked on Haidt’s work, but my guess is that both liberals and conservatives use it.) Haidt has said that this is why conservatives tend to understand the way liberals think while liberals don’t get how conservatives think.

If liberals only see 1, 2, and 6, then it’s easy to grasp why they rally behind Brinton. Yes, what he does strikes many people as weird, but his partners are consenting, and who is he harming? Besides, we need to be fair to him and let him express his identity. To force him to be closeted about his kink, which is at the core of his identity, is an offense against his individual liberty.

From a morally conservative point of view, though, what Brinton advocates for and symbolizes is profoundly degrading, and intends to subvert the social and moral order. His liberty to do what he wants to do has to be bounded by considerations of the common good (that is, our interest in maintaining a healthy, stable social order), and the fact that other people with whom he will share the workplace may feel offended and oppressed by his activism, given his previous statements that he dresses with sexual outrageousness for the sake of provoking. Don’t they get a say here? Does their desire to be free from what they consider to be a form of intimidation at work count for nothing? If Brinton came to work dressed like a normal person, and kept his activism and his kink to himself, that might be one thing — though I suppose the Bostock decision by SCOTUS would make it impossible for fire him for being kinky off-hours.

The key point is that sanctity/degradation and authority/subversion are at the heart of Sam Brinton’s public display and his activism. Per Haidt, liberals generally don’t see those things as at issue (and I would say if they do, they cheer for radicals like Brinton for scandalizing conservatives and subverting conservative sex-and-gender paradigms).

Now, you don’t have to share the moral foundations of conservatives, but you do have to understand that you share a society with us, as we do with you. Sam Brinton is intentionally provocative, and goes as far as he possibly can to exhibit his kinks. He knows that he is a subversive figure, and he has built a public profile on that. This is not about his being gay; most Americans, even conservative ones, have come to terms with that. There is a very big difference between simply having same-sex desires, and being an extreme kinkster like Brinton. If Brinton were one of the heterosexuals who engaged in this stuff, it would change nothing. This rather is about extremely deviant sexual behavior being normalized, even valorized.

Do we want to live in a society where this happens? I do not. Sam Brinton and his pup-players have the liberty to do what they like behind closed doors. But they and their allies want to shove it in everybody’s face, and demand that we approve. If I had my way, Brinton’s BDSM activism, including his going to college campuses to try to talk students into degrading themselves sexually in this way, would render him hard for normies to employ, for the same reason it would if he were a public advocate for BDSM “race play” and BDSM “Nazi play” — or if he were a member of the Ku Klux Klan. A decent society has to stigmatize some things, even if they are legal, to protect itself by discouraging people from giving in to their destructive passions.

Our problem is that the cultural left is in control of our institutions, in particular the narrative formation within and among institutions, and it operates only on a care/harm, fairness/cheating, and liberty/oppression basis, with implicit or explicit contempt for we for whom authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation are important moral foundations. This is why we can’t have nice things, at least not together.

By the way, my podcast partner Kale Zelden and I talk about Brinton and many other things on this week’s episode, just posted:

The post Sam Brinton & Moral Foundations Theory appeared first on The American Conservative.

I tweeted over the weekend that I need to learn more about the Canadian truckers’ protest. While I am strongly sympathetic to them, that sympathy is, I hate to admit, not particularly well-informed. I mentioned in the tweet that I was really annoyed in 2020 at the kind of liberal who was unquestioningly sympathetic to all the Black Lives Matters protests, no matter how problematic some of them were, on grounds that racism is bad, so we shouldn’t look to close at all the protesters. As much as I favor the truckers in principle, I don’t want to be the right-wing equivalent of those people, I tweeted.A Canadian reader responded via e-mail (ellipses are in the original):

Hi Rod… saw your tweet about your uncertainty about full support for the “truckers” (which most protesters are not at this point). I’m Canadian and have been following the protests and the media coverage of them.I think your uncertainty is a realistic response. It is simply not always clear whether the protesters deserve support. Uncertainty is actually a sensible place to be.Points to consider:1.  the protesters represent perhaps 10% of Canadians–their view, which is not anti-vax but anti-mandate/ restrictions, is a minority view, but one held by a reasonable number of people. Yet the majority of Canadians, elite and non-elite, really dislike the protests, and think the protesters are in the wrong.2.  Overall, I think the lesson of the protests has been that govts did NOT consider that they were limited in any way by the views of a minority… there was a kind of assumption that they could do what they, the elite, thought best, esp. given majority support and expert opinion. They thought they could insist that everyone go along with the authorities, the experts, and the majority. So they ignored the minority that was signalling resistance in many ways for a long time… and that led to this crisis. It’s a reminder that, even given majority support, there can be a cost to persistently ignoring/ erasing the views of a minority…3. the protesters are definitely the non-elite, a combination of working class and others up to the middle middle class, such as farmers, owner operators, and so on. This is definitely about class – non-elite versus elite.4. Trudeau has handled it badly, as I’m sure you know.5. There is a masculinity archetype at play here– I visited the local protest in my own city and was struck by its machismo, and I think there is a certain amount of this observable in much of the video of the various protests. Andrew Sullivan wrote about masculinity in some current issues (Rogan, J Peterson, the truckers) and I think this makes sense– Canada is very “safetyist” and this in part a reaction to that. That Trudeau embodies a kind of feminine energy has been one aspect of his ineffectiveness here. I think this is partly non-elite masculine response to a society-wide denigration of the masculine… a refusal to go along with that denigration and its various manifestations.6. as a Canadian, I see the deep influence of American culture on this protest, more than on most protests… this is coming into Canada via internet/ social media. The phrase “Make Canada Great Again” is NOT rooted in Canada or any mythology of past greatness as the US has, it just draws on MAGA. Same with the stress on “freedom,” a word with huge resonance in the US but not much to date in Canada. We see here the power the internet is having over culture, in multiplying the already strong US influence that used to come only through TV/ movies.7. Great coverage and comments on the protests by journalists Jonathan Kay and Matt Gurney– good sources.8. Huge backlash against the protesters from the entire elite, professional class, and so on. (almost everyone I know ). The protesters are being demonized by the media and large numbers of Canadians. Mostly the protesters are ordinary folks, not troublemakers, but there may be some trouble brewing in Ottawa among some protesters, something to watch for.9. The protesters are the opposite of BLM/Antifa — keeping places clean, doing as little damage as they can, working / cooperating with police to a reasonable extent. Focusing on their own forms of ethical standards, crowd control, enforcement of respect for others etc.10. The closing of border crossings is a BIG problem for Canada and for  working people, including truckers … this gets the protesters the politicians’ attention but is likely a bad strategy because it does too much damage.11. In the refusal to leave/ cease occupying downtown Ottawa and in the closing of border crossings, I personally perceive a delight in the discovery that they can wield power rather than a genuine fight against tyranny. I think this temptation to wield power and try to shut down parts of the country is a kind of hubris– it’s a negative temptation that ought to be resisted. It helps no one.Those are just a few random thoughts. I feel some sympathy for the protesters, but also a deep concern that they have gone too far, they should have unwound the protests after making their point, and they should stay away from the borders. Democracy relies on people voluntarily following society’s rules; it cannot rely on enforcement, because full enforcement would be too costly, it requires authoritarianism. The protesters have discovered that they can get away with a lot because no one wants anyone to get hurt, and Canada doesn’t have sufficient police and military to enforce all the rules all the time. But the result of this is going to be more police and military, especially at the borders, to keep trade moving… Canada depends on trade with the US. That’s not a good outcome. And that’s not even considering how difficult it is going to be to get the protesters out of Ottawa–clearing border points is not going well, but it is easy compared to clearing downtown Ottawa, and we all fear people will get hurt…

I appreciate the perspective. I invite other Canadian readers to share theirs in the comments section.

The post What About The Canadian Truckers? appeared first on The American Conservative.

I want to take the liberty of republishing here the latest missive from the journalist David Rieff, a man of the Left who despises wokeness, taken from his Substack newsletter, titled Desire and Fate. I want you to subscribe to it — I think it’s free, but then, I would pay to read David anyway. I don’t think David’s views are those of his late father, Philip Rieff, but this beautiful, gloomy passage is worthy of Rieff père — which for me, is really saying something:

(With apologies to Christopher Caudwell – the British Marxist critic, not to be confused with the American conservative writer Christopher Caldwell):

Studies in a Dying Culture #1

Only 8% of university students in the UK are enrolled in humanities subjects. This is the context in which the culture wars are being contested: as Borges said of the Falklands/Malvinas War, it is a case of two bald men fighting over a comb. This does not mean the issues in dispute are unimportant. Far from it. The madness of Woke and the barbarous inanities of “anti-racism’ (please note the inverted commas!) are well on their way to destroying high culture in the Anglosphere and probably in parts of Latin America and Western as well, even if in those regions there is the kind of cultural pushback that has all but disappeared in the Anglosphere. This is because most of the Right in the US, Canada, and Australia is no more committed to high culture than it is the preservation of the environment, whereas as in Western Europe and Latin America high culture has not for a century at least been largely a monopoly of the Left, if not a monoculture, to use a phrase the critic Harold Rosenberg once used to describe Jewish intellectuals. In contrast, from Borges to Houellebecq a conservative tradition remains alive in Western Europe and Latin America, whereas in the Anglosphere, once one gets past Chesterton, Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy, the cultural pickings are slim indeed.

For all that, though, in fifty years it is likely that these culture wars will seem like the last spasms of a fish flapping desperately in its last moments on the deck of a fishing trawler than it will the existential ideological and ethical conflict it so often appears to be today. Let us for once be honest: what is on offer in terms of contemporary culture on both sides of the Woke/anti-Woke battle line today is a penumbral shadow of the culture of the past. This is not to say that there are not people of talent in both camps. But if we are being rigorous, it is simply a fact to say that the greatest days of Western culture are behind it. There is nothing unusual in this. Cultures and civilizations are as mortal as human beings. The great Renaissance historical and politician Guicciardini says somewhere that a citizen must not mourn the decline of their city. All cities decline, he writes. If there is anything to mourn it is that it has been one’s unhappy fate to be born when one’s city is in decline.

A lover of high culture should nonetheless be clear-eyed about the quality of what is being produced today. At its best, it is good, not great. But a believer in the great Woke cultural revolution should be equally clear-eyed: the fantasy that culture can be largely representation of the historical unrepresented or that testimony is art is a consoling fiction. In some ways, the Woke fantasy is a kind of infernal mix of Blake and Mao Tse Tung: the cult of experience fused with the cult of cultural revolution. At its worst, Woke culture is just Western fantasies about the authenticity and nobility of the tribal and the premodern, this in a time when racial identity has never been more in flux, and the intermingling of the races more and more the norm (look at who American Jews and Japanese-Americans marry for the extreme end of this). For “my race/people my spirit will speak,” wrote the great Mexican thinker José Vasconcelos (it is hard to convey the exact meaning in English of the Spanish word “raza”). But the Woke and the “anti-racist” are tying themselves to the mast of an essentialist understanding of identity just as it is vanishing into air.

If there is a new culture waiting to be born, it will not be born of Woke and “anti-racism,” of Neo-Tribalist nostalgia, and notions of race that, typologically though of course not hierarchically, would have pleased the worst early 20th century White Supremacist scientist. But nor will Western high culture ever ascend to the heights that so many times, and so gloriously, it reached in the period between the Renaissance and the middle of the 20th century. That race has run its course. And the point is that somewhere, deep down, everyone knows this. Given that, why in God’s name would one want to study a subject in the humanities. There are, of course, material reasons for the death of the humanities as well. But one must be materialist, but not too materialist here – allegro ma non troppo, as it were. The old culture is dying, and what purports to be its successor has come into the world stillborn.

As important as it generally is to vote conservative, we are not going to vote ourselves out of this crisis. The core of it is cultural. Do you see American conservatives producing a vital culture today? The progressives have all the cultural energy, but are creating what Philip Rieff called “deathworks” (defined by Carl Trueman as “the act of using the sacred symbols of a previous era in order to subvert, and then destroy, their original significance and purpose.”) Their cultural works are parasitical on the creations of a living culture. They mostly destroy that which gives life.

Do you see why I’m so committed to the Benedict Option concept? The West is dying … and if Christianity is not going to die with it, we Christians have to take radical action to create resilient ways of living, in the same way that the early medieval Benedictines did.

Anyway, subscribe to Desire and Fate — I think this link will allow you to do so.

The deeper I get into my current book project, the greater the significance I give to this incredible engraving by the Genoese artist Luca Daum, who, as regular readers will recall, gave it to me after my 2018 talk in Genoa. He approached me and told me in broken English that he had been praying in his studio that afternoon when the Holy Spirit told him to go hear the American speak, and give him this engraving:

 

It’s titled “The Temptation of St. Galgano”. I won’t go into all the details again — you regular readers know this story — but in brief for those who are new to it, Galgano Guidotti was a 12th century Tuscan who was passionate and violent. His mother prayed for him to return to God. He had a miraculous vision one day while out riding his horse. A voice told him to put down his sword — a symbol of his disordered passion — and leave the world to serve God. Galgano told the voice it would be easier for him to plunge his sword into the nearby rock than to do what the voice asked. So he brought the blade down on the rock — and it went in. He was instantly converted, and became quickly known as a holy man. When he died, bishops and abbots came to his funeral. The Vatican still has the written documents from the investigation into his cause for sainthood, which got underway soon after his death. The cardinal who investigated it was able to speak to many people who knew Galgano, including his own mother, who testified to the reality of the miracle. He was canonized in the 1180s.

You can still see the sword in the stone, inside the church the local bishop built over the rock after Galgano’s death. It is protected by thick plexiglass. In the year 2000, Italian scientists investigated the phenomenon, and could not explain it. From The Guardian:

Galgano Guidotti, a noble from Chiusdano, near Siena, allegedly split the stone with his sword in 1180 after renouncing war to become a hermit. For centuries the sword was assumed to be a fake. but research revealed last week has dated its metal to the twelfth century.

Only the hilt, wooden grip and a few inches of the 3ft blade poke from the hill, which still draws pilgrims and tourists to the ruins of the chapel built around it.

‘Dating metal is a very difficult task, but we can say that the composition of the metal and the style are compatible with the era of the legend,’ said Luigi Garlaschelli, of the University of Pavia. ‘We have succeeded in refuting those who maintain that it is a recent fake.’

Ground-penetrating radar analysis revealed that beneath the sword there is a cavity, 2m by 1m, which is thought to be a burial recess, possibly containing the knight’s body. ‘To know more we have to excavate,’ said Garlaschelli, whose findings have been published in Focus magazine.

Carbon-dating confirmed that two mummified hands in the same chapel at Montesiepi were also from the twelfth century. Legend has it that anyone who tried to remove the sword had their arms ripped out.

In English legend the sword Excalibur is pulled from a stone by the future King Arthur, heralding his glory. In Galgano’s case the miracle signified humility and holiness.

What is Galgano’s temptation in Luca Daum’s drawing? To take his eyes off of God and look down to the ground. The seed he planted in rocky soil — the sacrifice symbolized by his sword — produced abundance (the tree atop the mountain). The image of the Eucharist in the tree branches is a sign of God’s veiled but Real presence, like the sun in the sky. This iconic image tells us that to sacrifice for God — to submit one’s will to higher things — is a precursor to fruitfulness. The temptation is a serpent with a human face, trying to convince the saint to take his eyes off of God and look at Man, crawling around in the rocky soil. But that would mean spiritual death.

Note well that this image does not advocate for a pristine, bloodless spirituality. The fruits of Galgano’s sacrifice — of allowing the holy to light his world and show him the way — are made manifest in the material world. Galgano renounced the world in a way very few are called to do. But all of us are called to subordinate our selves to God and His will. If we do that, we live by the Tao, and fulfill our telos. If not? Well, look around you.

Luca Daum is retelling the story of the Fall here — a story that is ever-relevant. I want you to think about the engraved image in light of what David Rieff writes. David is not a religious man, but you don’t have to be religious to interpret this image in a purely cultural way. Western culture today is built not on Christian faith, but on enthroning Man and his passions. We have cut the lifeline to the transcendent, and are dying on the vine. The point is obviously not that being a religious believer is sufficient to being an artist and culture-creator; religious kitsch proves that is untrue. Nor is that point that we lived in Eden when our civilization was Christian, but rather that our felt connection to the transcendent world gave us meaning and fed us with spiritual energy that allowed us to create. We could only see our immanent world as it is through the light provided by the Transcendent.

In Warsaw a couple of years ago, a Polish historian told me that our culture is like a kite: if it is bound to the ground with a tense string, the kite can soar high, but if the string is cut, the kite will not be free to keep ascending, but will fall to earth. This is a metaphor for our time. We refuse grounding in the Holy, and find ourselves living on our bellies, on hard rock.

UPDATE: The Dante translator Andrew Frisardi writes:

Purgatorio is a story of redemption through a change of heart that leads to confession, renunciation, and contrition. The characters Dante encounters in it are souls of people who had opened their hearts to the spirit, to God, before they died – even just before they died – and who are therefore free from the self-obsessed, desecrating, and egocentric perspective of Hell.

Yes, exactly. Without God, we worship ourselves, and eventually create Hell.

The post The Saint, The Kite, And The End Of Culture appeared first on The American Conservative.

Tonight I was at a private event in Budapest at which I met the country’s Justice Minister, Judit Varga. We had a long conversation. I tell you, if you put this woman on American television, most Americans would think she was the sanest and bravest person they have seen in public life in ages. She is blessedly normal.

I was talking to her in the presence of a couple of other Americans, and though I can’t speak for them, I feel confident that we agree that it is astonishing that such a normal person — a mother of three — can be in such a position of power in a country. This is my second time in Hungary, and like the first time, I am astonished by how fortunate these people are here to have a government that is so in touch with the views of ordinary people. Tonight I did the Thomas Friedman thing, and asked the cab driver taking me to the event to tell me what he thought about the upcoming election. I told the driver, a middle-aged man who told me his daughter, a pharmacist, was fired by her company for refusing to take a third Covid injection, what his view was of the upcoming election. He said, “Well, I’m a nationalist. My father suffered under Communism, so I support our government.” You will never hear from men like him in Western media reporting about Hungary. How likely are you to get the perspective of an Arkansas mill worker in the Times or the Post? Same deal here.

Look, readers: if you have the opportunity to come to Hungary and see for yourself what it’s like here, please do. The reporting in the American media about Hungary is about what you would expect if The New York Times or the Washington Post sent reporters to Louisiana or Alabama. They think people here are malicious fascist hicks ruled by a dictator. In fact, they are so ordinary and common-sense that you can hardly believe it. Earlier this week, I had coffee with a British expat Christian who said he moved here some years ago because he couldn’t bear what his native country was becoming. Hungary is not paradise — there are no paradises — but it is the Texas of Europe: a place where common sense reigns in the face of overwhelming wokeness.

I’m not trying to convince you to be pro-Hungarian or pro-Fidesz, the ruling party. I’m trying to convince you to view US media reporting about this country with deep skepticism. These people, the Hungarians, are among the only ones in Europe who are standing firm in defense of the things that most American conservatives believe. They are the only ones standing firm in defense of things that old-fashioned classical liberals believe. They are anti-woke.

The other visiting American conservative there — someone some of you would know — and I were telling the Hungarians how deeply into decadence our country has gone. In my experience here, it is hard to make them understand how deep the rot has set in. They still want to believe that America is what we once were: a beacon of liberty and sanity. Sorry, friends, it’s not true.

When I got home just now, a lawyer friend in the US sent me this story about the American Bar Association. Read it and rage. Excerpts:

Legal education is about to undergo a revolutionary change, with the American Bar Association poised to mandate race-focused study as a prerequisite to graduating from law school. It’s another instance of woke ideology being forced on the nation, and may necessitate that states revisit the ABA’s government-granted near-monopoly accrediting power.

This race-focused educational mandate is being forced on law schools through the American Bar Association’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar (ABA). Much of ABA’s power stems from the federal government. Law students must attend schools whose accreditor is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education to receive federal student loans. The ABA is the only federally recognized law school accreditor.

Yet, ABA’s accreditation power doesn’t depend only on federal law. Graduating from a law school accredited by ABA is required in almost every state for applicants seeking admission to the bar. All 50 states recognize ABA accreditation. With only a small number of exceptions, most accept only ABA accreditation.

Why governments gave the ABA near-monopoly power is disputed. Some say the purpose was to guarantee quality legal training. Others argue that, like any guild, the ABA’s primary motivation was to limit competition.

Whether or not ABA accreditation previously ensured quality, the ABA has become partisan, using its power to promote an ideological agenda.

Read it all. 

This is how the soft totalitarianism I write about in Live Not By Lies is taking hold: not through the government, but through the licensing power of private associations. This is one reason why we cannot vote ourselves out of this crisis — not if our politicians are unwilling to press private associations to abandon wokeness.

How much more of this are we Americans prepared to take? When are we going to get the lawyers’ version of the truckers’ convoy?

I’m telling you, the Hungarians are on our side. We should be on theirs. Today a Hungarian friend sent me links to a series of leaked videos published in a pro-government newspaper showing three prominent George Soros affiliates admitting to the fact that Hungary’s image is actually – and deliberately – distorted in the international media.

Andrej Nosko earned his PhD in Political Science from George Soros’s Central European University. He worked for the Open Society Foundation until 2018 as a director. Watch:

https://videa.hu/videok/magyar-nemzet/hirek-politika/andrej-noskointerju-Q2nBVS9vCHxiFbOc

https://videa.hu/videok/magyar-nemzet/hirek-politika/andrej-noskointerju-2.-LCK1hxqOJEbTOcFv

https://videa.hu/videok/magyar-nemzet/hirek-politika/andrej-nosko-az-elfogult-kampanyrol-XDXE04sR5DjWjmKb

https://videa.hu/videok/magyar-nemzet/hirek-politika/andrej-nosko-az-elfogult-kampanyrol-f98bTqTAWGswbK3a

Dalibor Rohac is a Senior Fellow at the neocon American Enterprise Institute. He was also affiliated with the libertarian Cato Institute, which  received funding from George Soros. He ran for office on the 2020 General Elections in Slovakia as a candidate of the liberal PS/SPOLU party, which is indirectly supported by Soros.

https://videa.hu/videok/magyar-nemzet/podcast/brusszelben-nagyon-megkonnyebbulnenek-brusszel-rohac-R6rqpkIhPTRO1P2p

https://videa.hu/videok/magyar-nemzet/podcast/bulgaria-es-romania-korruptabb-korrupcio-5XFs7JslpffBVOIv

Márton Asbóth is a manager at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, an NGO regularly receiving funding from George Soros. People who work for the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union are often referred as “independent experts” by the international media, the UN and the European Union.

https://videa.hu/videok/magyar-nemzet/podcast/bulgaria-es-romania-korruptabb-korrupcio-5XFs7JslpffBVOIv

https://videa.hu/videok/magyar-nemzet/hirek-politika/asboth_2-zGSNhaputpbi1rxJ

What these leaked videos reveal are consonant with my experience here. The European Union and the globalists in the US foreign policy apparatus flat out lie or distort reality, and the only way Americans have to get information about what’s happening here in Hungary is from the media and from institutional actors captured by globalists. American conservatives should understand that you cannot trust elite US conservative institutions to tell you the truth about what’s happening in Hungary or among the nationalist parties in continental Europe.

Take a look at this 2021 speech by Judit Varga, the justice minister. Does this woman sound like a fascist to you? Or a common-sense politician?

The post Hungary, The Ally We Conservatives Don’t See appeared first on The American Conservative.

As a follow-up to my post about the Sam Brinton controversy — and I hope you will go back there and read the important update I just posted — here is the first part of the chapter about Eros in The Benedict Option:

The opportunity to work is a gift from God that, when rightly employed, serves life and draws us back to Him. However, if work—or family, community, school, politics, or any other good thing—becomes an end in itself, it turns into an idol. It will eventually become a prison, a desert, even a graveyard of the spirit. These things only serve the truth and human flourishing if they are icons through which the light of Christ shines forth, making them a means by which the kingdom of God flourishes.

So it is with sex, a divine gift that, cherished properly, becomes a source of joy, abundance, and flourishing—of the couple and their community. When bound to God’s purposes, sex unites a man and a woman physically and spiritually, and from that fertile union new life may come, creating a family.

But if we use sex in a disordered way, it can be one of the most destructive forces on earth. Look around you at the suffering of children brought up without fathers, the scourge of pornography destroying the imaginations of millions, the families broken by infidelity and abuse, and on and on.

For a Christian, there is only one right way to use the gift of sex: within marriage between one man and one woman. This is heresy to the modern world, and a hard saying upon which hearts, friendships, families, and even churches have been broken. There is no core teaching of the Christian faith that is less popular today, and perhaps none more important to obey.

It’s easy to get why secular people don’t understand the reasons for Christian sexual practices: many Christians today don’t understand them either. For generations, the church has allowed the culture to catechize its youth without putting up much of a fight. The Benedictine life offers a better way.

Why should Christians pay attention to teaching on sexuality of monastics, who live in chastity? Don’t they hate sex?

Of course they don’t, no more than they hate good food because they often fast, hate words because they live in great silence, hate families because they don’t marry, or hate material things because they live simply. We should listen to the monks on sexuality for the same reason we should listen to them on wealth and poverty: because their asceticism is a testimony to the goodness of those divine gifts.

Remember that all Christians are called to live with some degree of sexual abstinence. Benedictines commit themselves to a life of sexual purity as part of their radical discipleship. Their celibacy testifies to the sanctity of sex in the Christian cosmos as the property of the married state alone. And their example of bodily purity transforming the erotic instinct into spiritual passion demonstrates to laypersons that living within God-ordained bounds of sexuality, even in the most extreme circumstance is not only possible, but necessary to enjoy the fullest fruits of life in Christ. As Wendell Berry puts it, “the point about temperance, including sexual discipline, is not that it reduces pleasure, but that it safeguards abundance.”

The radical witness of Christian monks is a special grace to lay Christians in these times. There is no other area in which orthodox Christians will have to be as countercultural is in our sexual lives, and we are going to have to support each other in our unpopular stances. We have to understand the rich Christian view of sexuality, understand how the Sexual Revolution undermines it, recognize our own culpability, and be prepared to fight to keep our children orthodox.

Sexual practices are so central to the Christian life that when believers cease to affirm orthodoxy on the matter, they often cease to be meaningfully Christian. It was the countercultural force of Christian sexuality that overturned the pagan world’s dehumanizing practices. Christianity taught that the body is sacred, and that the dignity possessed by all humans as made in the image of God required treating it as such.

This is why the modern re-paganization called the Sexual Revolution can never be reconciled with orthodox Christianity. Alas, that revolution has toppled the church’s authority in the broader culture, and is now shaking the church itself to its foundations. Christians living the Benedict Option must commit themselves resolutely to resistance, and to helping each other do the same.

I once heard an Evangelical woman, in a group conversation about sexuality, blurt out, “Why do we have to get stuck on sex? Why can’t we just get back to talking about the Gospel?”

Christianity is not a disembodied faith, but an incarnational one. God came to us in the form of a man, Jesus Christ, and redeems us body and soul. The way we treat our bodies (and indeed all of Creation) says something about the way we regard the One who gave it to us, and whose presence fills all things.

As the Benedictines teach, one of our tasks in life is to be a means by which God orders Creation, bringing it into harmony with His purposes. Sexuality is an inextricable part of that work.

Wendell Berry has written, “sexual love is the heart of community life. Sexual love is the force that in our bodily life connects us most intimately to the Creation, to the fertility of the world, to farming and the care of animals. It brings us into the dance that holds the community together and joins it to its place.”

This is more important to the survival of Christianity than most of us understand. When people decide that historically normative Christianity is wrong about sex, they typically don’t find a church that endorses their liberal views. They quit going to church altogether.

This raises a critically important question: is sex the linchpin of Christian cultural order? Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the factor that gives—or gave—Christianity its power as a social force?

Though he might not have put it quite that way, the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. Rieff’s landmark 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic analyzes what he calls the “deconversion” of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been underway since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people—least of all Christians—recognized.

Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the Sexual Revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s demise. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture and redirecting the erotic instinct was intrinsic to Christian culture. Without Christianity, the West was reverting to its former state.

It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among The People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” Chastity—the rightly ordered use of the gift of sexuality—was the greatest distinction setting Christians of the early church apart from the pagan world.

The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what a person does with their sexuality cannot be separated from what a person is. In a sense, moderns believe the same thing, but from a perspective entirely different from the early Church’s.

In speaking of how men and women of the early Christian era saw their bodies, historian Peter Brown says the body
was embedded in a cosmic matrix in ways that made its perception of itself profoundly unlike our own. Ultimately, sex was not the expression of inner needs, lodged in the isolated body. Instead, it was seen as the pulsing, through the body, of the same energies as kept the stars alive. Whether this pulse of energy came from benevolent gods of from malevolent demons (as many radical Christians believed) sex could never be seen as a thing for the isolated human body alone.

Early Christianity’s sexual teaching not only comes from the words of Christ and the Apostle Paul, but more broadly, it emerges from the Bible’s anthropology. The human being bears the image of God, however tarnished by sin, and is the pinnacle of an order created and imbued with meaning by God.

In that order, man has a purpose. He is meant for something, to achieve certain ends. When Paul warned the Christians of Corinth that having sex with a prostitute meant that they were joining Jesus Christ to that prostitute, he was not speaking metaphorically. Because we belong to Christ as a unity of body, mind, and soul, how we use the body and the mind sexually is a very big deal.

Anything we do that falls short of perfect harmony with the will of God is sin. Sin is not merely rule-breaking, but failing to live in accord with the structure of reality itself.

The Christian who lives in reality will not join his body to another’s outside of the order God gives us. That means no sex outside of the covenant through which a man and a woman seal their love exclusively through Christ. In orthodox Christian teaching, the two really do become “one flesh” in a way that transcends the symbolic.

If sex is made holy through the marriage covenant, then sex within marriage an icon of Christ’s relationship with His people, the church. It reveals the miraculous, life-giving power of spiritual communion, which occurs when a man and a woman—and only a man and a woman—give themselves to each other. That marriage could be unsexed is a total novelty in the Christian theological tradition.

“The significance of sexual difference has never before been contingent upon a creature’s preferences, or upon whether or not God gave it episodically to a particular creature to have certain preferences,” writes the Catholic theologian Christopher Roberts. He goes on to say that for Christians, the meaning of sexuality has always depended on its relationship to the created order and to eschatology—the ultimate end of man.

“As was particularly clear, perhaps for the first time in Luther, the fact of a sexually differentiated creation is reckoned to human beings as a piece of information from God about who and what it meant to be human,” writes Roberts.

Contrary to modern gender theory, the question is not Are we men or women? but How are we to be male and female together? The legitimacy of our sexual desire is limited by the givenness of nature. The facts of our biology are not incidental to our personhood. Marriage has to be sexually complementary because only the male-female pair mirrors the generativity of the divine order. “Male and female he made them,” says Genesis, revealing that complementarity is written into the nature of reality. Easy divorce stretches the sacred bond of matrimony to the breaking point, but it does not deny complementarity. Gay marriage does. Similarly, transgenderism doesn’t merely bend, but breaks the biological and metaphysical reality of male and female.

Everything in this debate (and many others between traditional Christianity and modernity) turns on how we answer the question: is the natural world and its limits a given, or are we free to do with it whatever we desire?

To be sure, there never was a Golden Age in which Christians all lived up to their sexual ideals. The church has been dealing with sexual immorality in its own ranks since the beginning—and, let’s be honest, some of the measures it has taken to combat it have been cruel and unjust.

The point, however, is that to the pre-modern Christian imagination, sex was filled with cosmic meaning in a way it no longer is. Paul admonished the Corinthians to “flee sexual immorality” because the body was a “temple of the Holy Spirit,” and warned them that “you are not your own.” He was telling them that their bodies are sacred vessels that belonged to God, who, in Christ, “all things hold together.” Sexual autonomy, seemingly the most prized possession of the modern person, is not only morally wrong, but a metaphysical falsehood.

But our perception of that truth diminished long ago. Now, we are on the far side of a Sexual Revolution that has been nothing short of catastrophic for Christianity. It struck near the core of Biblical teaching on sex and the human person, and has demolished the fundamental Christian conception of society, of families, and of the nature of human beings. There can be no peace between Christianity and the Sexual Revolution, because they are radically opposed. As the Sexual Revolution advances, Christianity must retreat—and it has, faster than most people would have thought possible.

In 1996, the Gallup polling organization conducted its first survey asking Americans what they thought of same-sex marriage. A whopping 68 percent opposed it. In 2015, just before the US Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision proclaiming a constitutional right to gay marriage, Gallup’s poll revealed that 60 percent of Americans now support same-sex marriage. This number will rise steadily as older generations die and make way for younger generations, who overwhelmingly favor LGBT rights.

Research shows that Millennials, both secular and religious, favor gay rights by enormous majorities. Those who have disaffiliated from Christianity say that the faith’s negative attitudes towards homosexuality were a major factor. Strong majorities of Millennials who identify as Christian believe the church must change its views.

That being the case, you would think that churches that have liberalized their teachings on homosexuality, like Mainline Protestant denominations, or downplayed those teachings, like progressive Catholic parishes, would be booming. They’re not. If anything, they are cratering faster than the more orthodox.

Future historians will wonder how the sexual desires of only three to four percent of the population became the fulcrum on which an entire worldview was dislodged and overturned. A partial answer is that the media is to blame. Back in 1993, a cover story in The Nation identified the gay-rights cause as the summit and keystone of the culture war:

All the crosscurrents of present-day liberation struggles are subsumed in the gay struggle. The gay moment is in some ways similar to the moment that other communities have experienced in the nation’s past, but it is also something more, because sexual identity is in crisis throughout the population, and gay people—at once the most conspicuous subjects and objects of the crisis—have been forced to invent a complete cosmology to grasp it. No one says the changes will come easily. But it’s just possible that a small and despised sexual minority will change America forever.

They were right. Tying the gay rights cause to the Civil Rights movement was a strategic master stroke. Though homosexuality and race are two very different phenomena, the media took the equivalence for granted, and rarely if ever gave any opposing voices a chance to be heard.

Though the unrelenting media campaign on behalf of same-sex marriage was critically important to its success, it wasn’t the most important thing. Americans accepted gay marriage so quickly because it resonated so deeply with what they had already come to believe about the meaning of heterosexual sex and marriage.

We have gay marriage because the straight majority came to see sexuality as something primarily for personal pleasure and self-expression, and only secondarily for procreation. We have gay marriage because the straight majority, in turn, came to see marriage in the same way—and two generations of Americans have grown up with these nominalist values on sex and marriage as normative.

To be modern, as we have seen, is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition. As philosopher Charles Taylor writes, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).”

Gay marriage and gender ideology signify the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because they deny Christian anthropology at its core, and shatter the authority of the Bible. Rightly ordered sexuality is not at the core of Christianity, but as Rieff saw, it’s so near to the center that to lose the Bible’s clear teaching on this matter is to risk losing the fundamental integrity of the faith. This is why Christians who begin by rejecting sexual orthodoxy end either by rejecting Christianity themselves, or laying the groundwork for their children to do so.

“The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling,” Rieff writes. By that standard, Christianity in America is in mortal danger.

If a remnant wants to survive, it must resist the Sexual Revolution. But how?

If you want to read the whole thing, you will need to buy a copy of The Benedict Option, which turns five years old this March.

The Brinton controversy reminds me of a famous incident from the life of W.H. Auden — a wise and cultured gay man of whom it is impossible to imagine approving of the mainstreaming of what Brinton stands for — when he lived in Manhattan in 1939, shortly after the Nazis invaded Poland and started the Second World War. I will quote below from the book Auden And Christianity, by Arthur Kirsch:

If you are convinced that Sam Brinton is wrong, and that all values are not a matter of personal taste, then on what do you base your own values? Even if you can’t easily explain that moral intuition, you need to think about it. The only two answers are either a) your revulsion is based on pure prejudice, and needs either to be abandoned, or at least neutered; or b) there really is something profoundly evil at work here, and you had better return to the Church — not in a halfhearted way — and work to strengthen it as a bulwark and refuge against the suicidal decadence of the post-Christian West.

There is no third way, not that I can see. You can either have Sam Brinton, or you can have Jesus Christ, but not both. You can have either barbarism (defined as the release of passions), or you can have civilization. You can have death, or you can have life. The hour is late. The signs of the times are flashing neon.  You must choose.

UPDATE: Matt in VA — who, if you don’t remember, is a partnered gay man — is back with a doozy comment:

There are many problems with this, but I’d say the main one is that all this talk of monasteries and that sort of thing suggests a type of Western Christian that gets rarer by the day. I mean a Western Christian who doesn’t 100% believe in feminism and women’s liberation or indeed honestly believe in any real differences between the sexes that a feminist wouldn’t wholeheartedly agree to. Men and women are equal, except for the ways in which women are better, is something feminists and respectable Western Christians 100% agree to, at a level so deep I don’t think there is anything that can be done about it.

It is absolutely true that Western Christianity has foundered on the issue of sexuality. And it is because Western Christianity has swallowed whole the view of women that feminists have — as victims/as people who cannot possibly be held accountable for their own actions and choices in the same way men are. The man has, ultimately, to deal with things and take the responsibility; it is just too much to expect that the women ever do it, too *hard.* It would not be unfair, no matter how much it makes respectable decent people cringe, to say that western Christians are utterly whipped by modern/contemporary sexual politics. I find it very tedious when conservatives make the point about how gay rights activists conflated the racial Civil Rights movement with the gay rights movement despite the two things being very different; this is something that the Right enables every day, because they treat the Civil Rights movement as more holy and more sacred than the most basic traditional Christian understandings about things as basic as the differences between men and women. Of course everybody in our society runs the Civil Rights playbook to advanced their interests; it is the Right, I’m afraid, who make that work every time, because the Right really does treat it as more holy and sacred than vast parts of the religion even the most religious profess to believe. As many right-wing cultural critics have noted, the conservative of the past century always just ratifies/reifies the changes made by the left; he conserves whatever the left has introduced, rather than conserving the things he claims to value, or the actual Eternal Verities.

Here’s Richard Hanania in his very, very good piece about how the feminisation of our culture and politics has changed it:

But there’s also a hypocrisy of the right. Actually, it’s more a hypocrisy of centrists, who will present studies showing that, believe it or not, men and women are different, but then argue that we should “treat everyone as an individual.”

Think about how strange this is. We don’t say this about other group differences. “So what if on average children are more impulsive and make worse decisions than adults? Some children are more mature than adults, therefore abolish all age requirement for voting, sex, etc. and treat everyone as individuals.” If an alien species came to earth and was found to significantly differ from humans on nearly every important cognitive trait, it wouldn’t make sense to expect them to assimilate to human institutions and not fundamentally alter how they work.

At the same time, the argument against giving in to more emotional women is that truth is actually pretty important and if feelings get hurt on the way there, too bad. But of course I’d think that. I’m a man, and one at the extreme tail ends of both disagreeableness (high) and neuroticism (low). If I was the type who responded to difficult ideas by “literally shaking,” I could well have a different opinion. But it would be the job of the rest of society to steer me away from thinking too hard about political or philosophical issues, and towards private pursuits where my hypersensitivity would do less harm.

More:

But I also believe that, to a large extent, conservatives wish they were facing a more masculine form of authoritarianism. Men know what to do when other men try to oppress them. They resist and fight back. But who wants to participate in a struggle where women’s tears are what you need to overcome? Men can feel invigorated after a fistfight with another man, even when they lose! Nobody feels that way after arguing with his wife.

This can also explain the weird melodramatic way in which conservatives understand foreign policy. Why were conservatives, who have basically been pessimists about the state of their society and where it has been going since the 1960s, such enthusiastic supporters of foreign adventures in places like Vietnam and Iraq that meant absolutely nothing to the future of the United States? Why are so many who think they’ve lost their country still desperate for an existential struggle against China?

There is no doubt in my mind that Richard Hanania has gone from being completely unheard of to rapidly being referred to by many because he is one of the few people willing to write things like this and put his own name on it. Of course, anonymous people have been saying stuff like this for a long time, but conservative Christians have no interest in it, it’s too mean, it’s not nice. How can we, in this day and age, say something that is not flattering to women? In just this way, we see how shallow, conventional, and middle class so much of conservative Christianity has become. The Left, say what you like about it, is at least not so terrified of somebody somewhere not liking them/of the possibility of conflict.

There is an absolute wealth of good writing about how men and woman are just not the same, and a feminized politics is not the same as a masculinized one, and we can bang our hands against the wall all we want for as long as we want lamenting things, but it won’t matter if we cannot bring ourselves to face these facts.

Why has Christianity in the West been so utterly routed when it comes to sex and sexuality? Because Christianity in the West is currently going through a bad period where it cannot and will not admit to itself the truth about the fact that men and women are not the same and that — gasp! — *both* sexes have their good points and their bad points, their strengths and their failure modes. There is such a contrast between reading someone like GK Chesterton when he writes about men and women, and reading some awful dreck produced by contemporary Christians now, which ALWAYS does the same thing: “Men, why won’t you man up already — you are *failing* Good Christian Women by not stepping up and doing what is needful. Women are *tired*.” And of course, by “man up,” what is meant is be a bourgeois provider and middle-class good corporate cog or entrepreneur, be “reasonable,” cut your hair and your lawn and don’t displease the homeowner’s association. The talk of monasteries and the like is supposed to represent a willingness to be totally committed and even radical — but in fact what it represents is the continued desire to run as far away from conflict as possible, to find some place to hide from the changes that keep coming. The essential characteristic of the bourgeois is how risk-averse he is, how fearful of real conflict and of stakes.

That Richard Hanania bit about how conservatives wish they were dealing with Stalin or a chest-thumping dictator or some other Big Bad Man type is exactly right. Conservatives have absolutely NOTHING in their arsenal when it comes to dealing with relentless nagging, weaponized bad faith, borderline personality disorder, or the other ways in which female armies advance. It is just a total rout. Christian conservatives *agree* with feminists about how terrible are all the ways in which men have traditionally/historically fought back or held their own, and Christian conservatives join with them, unilaterally disarm, and then despair at what follows in the wake of that. The whole “marketplace of ideas”, or “let’s debate” approach to the public square and establishing values …. what is there to even say. Imagine having dealt with a bpd woman for even one second and thinking that there is some kind of neutral “marketplace of ideas” where we rationally hash things out. I suspect having had a bpd parent is responsible for how completely and utterly allergic I am to any idiotic Intellectual Dark Web “we can win things by Debating!” nonsense. Weaponized bad faith is a superpower. Women beat men *every time* when it comes to ingroup-outgroup ostracism, relentless stigmatizing and hysterical conformism, and all the weapons that are most effective in middle-class contexts. It’s absolutely true that for the vast span of human history, when want, scarcity, isolation, etc., meant life was more precarious, men had the upper hand, via their superior strength and ability to use violence, their greater abilities to secure food and shelter and protect it from being taken away, etc. But in a domesticated, docile middle-class context, the man is at a disadvantage (Camille Paglia is very good on this). To be sure, in some sense, men have only themselves to blame, and the only response would still seem to be “man up” — but of course, what “manning up” actually means and entails is the central question. This is the “waiting for barbarians” feeling, the desire for some men who are actually men to come riding in and horribly, bloodily rescue us from our predicament; this is what Hoellebecq’s Submission is about — “teach us to be men again” — and what a huge portion of the energy, such as it exists, on the moribund Right is about.

If you don’t like homosexual male excesses — what is the only thing that has ever worked at curbing them? The very stigmatization and threats of harsh punishment that conservative Christians faint at even contemplating. OK, I get it, you need plausible deniability, but do what the Catholic Church did and turn over the sodomites to the secular authorities for the actual corporal punishment — but you have to be at least willing to do that. The church doesn’t have to be the hangman, but you have to be willing to make sure *somebody* is the hangman. The conservative of the past was somehow able to say “never darken my doors again” to wayward daughters, or at least to make them think he might be capable of saying it ( just the threat is very often enough); the conservatives who are actually interesting to read and worth learning about, like Phyllis Schlafly, were *unafraid* to be “mean.” If you always wilt in 5 seconds in front of women’s tears or hysterics (and, look, I don’t mean to be dismissive, women’s emotional abuse is an absolute superpower, they are ten, twenty, a hundred times better at deploying it than men are), you can’t be surprised if sexual relations and sexual matters go to hell rather quickly.

I 100% agree with Richard Hanania’s assessment that the root of American conservatives’ sociopathic foreign “policy” is sexual. This is the kind of analysis that we need much more of, but instead of course all we get is dried-up Reaganism from the right and utterly moribund Soviets-praising-Lenin-style “black women’s s*** smells like lavender water” dreck from the left. The right/conservatives are utterly lost because they believe in liberalism’s stories about the liberation of victim groups and how that liberation (from tradition, religion, biology, family, age-old societal and cultural structures) is ultimately good– and even though they don’t like it when the Civil Rights playbook is used to run game-winning touchdowns on transgenderism, etc., they still ultimately agree that it’s more important that Civil Rights be *the* untouchable sacred lodestone of the society, no matter how many L’s they rack up. Thus the desire to use force against enemies they really still feel they can beat, like the very male Taliban or whatever, or China; thus the fears — which are really hopes, I think — that what is happening in our society and culture will finally get so bad that it will look like the *masculine* terrors of the 20th century, like Communism or whatever, because at least then we’ll know how to fight it. Whereas you don’t fight your wife, it’s not worth it — you just give in to her every time.

Incidentally, a big part of why significant numbers of women are so unhappy and hysterical is precisely *because* so many men are so checked out, nihilistic, and disengaged. The men do not want to deal with the women, because women really are a challenge and an adventure, meaning they are difficult, scary, and you can get really hurt. It’s not for the risk-averse (which is why conservatives’ message to men, “be a bourgeois”, is horrible and cruel advice). The knight, the dragon and the princess all play essential roles in the story and you cannot simply have the princess without fighting the dragon–you will get nothing. You cannot be a bourgeois who makes a business deal or arranges a cell phone contract and expect to get the woman–you will get something else entirely. It is silly to believe that women want what the loudest and most prolific ones in our current cultural moment say they want. They obviously do not. Again — the whole “we’ll meet in the marketplace of ideas and earnest and baldly state our positions” is so engineer-brain-male as to be autistic. This may be some people’s life, but it is not life, and anybody who appreciates art and beauty knows that. Nothing is more fundamental to all of the oldest and most basic stories, the myths and fairy tales, than the idea that *seduction* and temptation is a million times more powerful than some boring earnest nerd talking about the invisible hand or whatever. If in a story there is a box that shouldn’t be opened, or an apple that shouldn’t be eaten, it WILL be opened, and it WILL be eaten, or else there is no story. Nothing is more powerful than seduction and temptation. You have to approach the entire women question differently from the way our think-tank politics approaches things.

The tired pieties of feminism intensely bore me, but certainly it’s true that women are not passive damsels in distress patiently waiting for men to Step Up and provide for them. That particular old trope is quite false, or at least quite rare to find in reality, and is a product of male fantasy. But many other old tropes are of course certainly real, such as the shrew, the harpy, the fishwife, or what the very first woman, Eve, represents. As long as conservatives essentially agree with feminists about women — that there are zero differences between the sexes except for the myriad ways women are better than men — there can be no progress anywhere on any of this. This is not to say that gender ideology, gay male communal-sewer sexual culture, or the like, are good, or even acceptable, or that the disgust and dismay about these things is unwarranted or unmerited. But nothing is going to change, about this entire trajectory, as long as the essential element of sex — THE sexes — is something that people cannot be honest about.

The post Sam Brinton & The Choice We Face appeared first on The American Conservative.

Sam Brinton is an MIT graduate who is both a queer activist and a specialist in handling nuclear waste.  And he is the Biden Administration’s latest hire at the Department of Energy as the Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition Deputy. 

What a colorful life Deputy Brinton has. He is a “pup handler” — that is, a gay man who leads other gay men who pretend to be dogs. What’s that all about? Let this profile in Metro Weekly fill you in. Excerpts:

IN THE PUP COMMUNITY, handlers function the same way dog owners do, keeping a watchful eye on their charge and reining in the pups if needed. It’s the handlers who train the pups and teach them discipline, doling out rewards or punishments based on good or bad behavior.

“Think of any bio-dog,” [Pup] Gryphn says. “You can train them. It’s this ‘go do this’ reward system, just like a bio-dog. So let’s say you’re playing fetch, you throw the ball, the pup picks it up, brings it back, and drops it at your feet. You’re going to reward him, whether it’s petting him or anything like that.

“Or, let’s go to an extreme,” he continues. “Let’s say you’re doing pup play around the house and the pup decides to pee on the floor. Obviously the pup is going to be punished for that. Typically, when we’re being humans, it’s ‘Why would you correct me in front of so-and-so? That’s wrong, don’t do that. Don’t speak for the next five minutes,’ something like that.”

Just like the pups they are tasked with watching over, some handlers need to enter their own headspace when engaging in puppy play.

“My headspace is equivalent to the mom who sees her kid in danger, or the dad who wants to teach his son how to play football,” says Nubi’s 27-year-old handler, Sam [Brinton]. “It’s the concept of the teacher and nurturer…. My job is to make sure that while he’s in headspace, I’m keeping him safe.”

More:

Others have polyamorous or open relationships in their personal lives that allow them to have a kink partner who is separate from their real life spouse or partner. Depending on the spouse, they may either shun pup or other fetish scenes entirely, or slowly be brought into the fold after becoming more comfortable with their significant other’s bedroom preferences.

“One of my friends was married to his husband, and had a sir outside of their relationship,” says Gryphn. “That sir eventually decided that ‘My collar would be best served by your husband,’ so now his husband has become his sir.”

An alternative arrangement works best for Sam and Pup Nubi.

“Pup and I have what I feel is one of the most ideally perfect connections between our personal and kink life,” Sam says. “Both of us have other partners, so we come into this space, and then we come out of it, knowing the boundaries of where your kink and non-kink relationships begin and end.”

Of course, even among partners, two individuals will approach sex from different perspectives. Sam needs to mentally distance his sexual activity from the pup scene, but for Nubi, it’s easier to stay in character.

“I actually have trouble when we transition from pup play to having sex,” Sam explains. “Like, ‘No, I can’t have you whimper like that when we’re having sex,’ because I don’t want to mix that world. It’s interesting, because he doesn’t have to come out of pup mode to have me f*ck him. I personally have to bring him out of pup perception for me. But then I’m still treating him as a submissive to me.”

“I get self-conscious very easily,” says Nubi. “So being in pup headspace in the bedroom keeps me very focused on exactly what’s in front of me, so it sort of serves a function in that respect.”

The Biden Administration’s newest nuclear waste deputy would like the world to know that back then, his boyfriend could still pretend to be a dog when he sodomized the lad. Can you believe that some people think that’s weird? More:

“One of the hardest things about being a handler is that I’ve honestly had people ask, ‘Wait, you have sex with animals?’” Sam says. “They believe it’s abusive, that it’s taking advantage of someone who may not be acting up to a level of human responsibility…. The other misperception is that I have some really messed up background, like, did I have some horrible childhood trauma that made me like to have sex with animals.”

Other outsiders may not have a sense of personal space, believing they can touch or grab the puppies as they wish.

“I have three separate tails. I have my show tail, which attaches to my belt, and I have two other tails, which are insertables,” Gryphn says. “This is something I feel very strongly about. I have been in the center of a bar, elbow-to-elbow, and someone has grabbed my tail — and it was my show tail — and yanked on it. I stopped everything I was doing in mid-sentence, turned around, and educated the person about it.

Read it all. 

It’s important to note that Sam Brinton has not been outed here. For years he has been up front about his kinks, for which he has advocated, in part as head of governmental relations for The Trevor Project. Here he is instructing people about the importance of pronoun usage:

He has worked his way up through the progressive establishment. This is what it means to have Democratic Party governance now: a freak show. None of those people recognize it as a freak show. Appointing to the federal government’s nuclear management agency a weirdo who puts his wing-wang up the rear end of men who pretend to be dogs, and brags about it to the media, is just another day of celebrating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

But yes, by all means, let’s us Americans lecture the rest of the world on how backwards they are. Not like us in Weimar America. I suppose America has always had its freaks, including its sexual freaks, but in our progressive paradise, they now they get to run the government.

UPDATE: Someone asks in the comments section if I’m not just guilty of pointing and sneering, “Look at the freak!” Several others want to know what the public sexual life and proclivities of this Brinton person have to do with whether or not he can do the DOE job (I noted in the first sentence of the post above that he holds a degree from MIT; this cat isn’t an Oberlin gender studies grad, for sure). Here is the answer to those and related queries. But first, a little more about Sam Brinton.

Here’s something from a favorable 2017 college newspaper account of a talk he gave on the Rensselaer Polytechnic campus. It shows how activists like him work: they disarm normies by making them sympathetic (“shedding tears, not blood” is how I frame it), and then evangelize for perversion. Read on:

This past Monday, I went straight from my Data Structures test to an open discussion in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies with political activist and nuclear policy expert Sam Brinton. I walked in around 8 pm and immediately saw Brinton. He was wearing all black, except for his red, glittery heels, and the words “Ropes, Whips, & Kinks, Oh My!!” were projected onto the wall behind him.

He began by addressing the description for the event that we had all seen online. I went in expecting a talk about his political experiences working to end conversion therapy, sexuality, and the LGBTQ community, mostly because that is what the description told me. Brinton dispelled this, describing the event as “modern sex-ed” and “an exploration of kink.” He began by giving us the history of kink and sex education, including the Kama Sutra, the making of taboo by Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud, the “Leather Era,” and the rise of the term BDSM. Brinton stressed the importance of consent and communication, along with its contribution to healthy relationships and its ability to lower psychological stress during sex. The video Tea Consent by Blue Seat Studios was recommended to anyone with questions about the subject.

On the subject of kinks directly, Brinton explained the difference between headspace and physical types of play. Headspace involves the use of a mental state, and includes kinks like adult babies and diaper lovers, primal play, humiliation, degradation, and pup play. Physical play, on the other hand, involves the use of toys and objects to set the scene. This includes the more widely known kinks, including bondage, impact play, flogging, and temperature play.

After the presentation aspect of the talk ended, we moved onto a question session. Throughout the entire talk, Brinton was open about his experiences, the kinks he partakes in, and the nature of his relationships. He left us with countless anecdotes, like how he enjoys tying up his significant other like a table, and eating his dinner on him while he watches Star Trek. Upon being asked about how long he knew he was into kink, he explained that it wasn’t necessarily from birth, but that his kinks manifested in nonsexual ways. Once he started having sex, he got bored with the idea that he couldn’t control the whole experience, which led him to the idea of domination. He also expanded on his experiences with pup play, the differences between kinks and fetishes, and how to safely choke one’s partner.

We then moved onto demonstrations. Brinton taught us about bondage, starting with wrist restraints and ending with harnesses. He took volunteers that he used to demonstrate the rope tying techniques, and others to demonstrate them on himself. I got to leave the room saying that I tied Brinton, the nuclear advisor to Donald Trump, into a harness and that I now know the basics of bondage. He also passed out ropes to the audience and encouraged us to practice on each other.

When the demonstrations ended, he invited us to come play with his toys or talk to him more. The entire audience went up to the stage, and Brinton graciously explained the purpose and proper usage of each toy. He even demonstrated the use of a carbon fiber rod on those who were interested, and the marks he left on my arm lasted for a few days. He told us more stories, some about working in Washington, D.C., the few times he helped Michelle Obama pick out shoes, his efforts to end conversion therapy, and his experiences as a dominatrix.

I enjoyed every second of the event. It was informative on a subject that is often viewed as taboo, and I felt comfortable and safe the entire time. Brinton filled in the gaps of my Google searches and mediocre sex education in high school in the best way possible. He has given these kinds of talks at Rensselaer in the past, and I hope they continue into the future.

If you dig around online, you can see that there are people who seriously question Brinton’s account of having been subject to savage conversion therapy by his Southern Baptist parents. I’m not going to link to them here, because I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out where the truth lies. But I saw enough to say that I wouldn’t trust this drama queen’s account as far as I could throw him. Him telling the college students above that he was an adviser to Donald Trump, and that he went shoe shopping with Michelle Obama — I believe they are lies.

He also openly says, on his website, that he uses his nuclear background to gain access to senior corridors of power, to influence leaders to accept the full panoply of sexual deviance:

You might believe that Brinton’s capacity to do the DOE job has nothing to do with his kink activism, but he doesn’t share your belief. He believes that it is good and right to gain access to senior levels of government, and use that access for advocacy. Anybody inside DOE who has to work with this guy now should be on notice that he is going to be watching them for signs that they don’t affirm him in every way — and he will make trouble for them. Guaranteed.

We live in a culture in which Brinton is not seen as a failure, but as a success. He rode to fame by denouncing the conversion therapy he alleges that his parents forced him into. It’s a story that’s too good to check, I guess, but maybe it’s true. Assuming that it is true, and what he endured was exactly as bad as he said, then that atrocity in no way justifies his perversion today, or his advocacy for perversion. But Brinton understands well our therapeutic culture, and how confronting elites and young audiences with tales of troglodytic religious conservatives behaving badly serves as a Medusa that paralyzes moral judgment.

Here in Weimar America, we long ago left behind the labeling of any behavior as perversion, or any judgment or shame on sexual matters. What do you think “Pride” is about, anyway? Most normies think that it’s about helping the fellow normie gay man or lesbian co-worker or neighbor live without harassment — something that many conservatives (like me) would support. But that is the camel’s nose under the tent. In 1993, I was living in Washington and covered the big, million-person gay march on the Mall . There were a lot of normie gay folks there. But I was shocked to see so many people just like Sam Brinton, who probably was just a toddler then. This world had been invisible to me. I saw lots of BDSM men (masters and slaves). I saw a group of “faeries,” including one man who had a tree limb inserted in his anus and fastened to his torso, dragging it around like the train of a wedding dress. I was sure that once these images made it onto TV, it would set back the LGBT rights movement.

But they never made it onto TV. The images of the march that the national media showed were carefully curated to eliminate all the non-bourgeois people. The media understood well what had been obvious to me on the Mall that day: that if the American people had an accurate image of the crowd that day, they would have been horrified. Around the same time, I recall that Jerry Falwell, I believe it was, was under fire for broadcasting on his show, without commentary, clips from a DC Gay Pride Parade, featuring floats filled with people like Sam Brinton. Falwell was assailed as a bigot, simply for showing images of the actually existing Pride parade.

Thirty years later, the pervs that LGBT leaders and media allies feared would set back the movement if people saw them are now hailed as symbols of liberation, and welcomed into government.

See, this is why we are probably going to lose the struggle over transgender normalization. Where is the cultural energy to push back against it? Today it’s transgenderism. What will it be tomorrow? Sam Brinton gives you a clue.

He’s an important figure too because his public career as an activist illustrates the genius of their approach: if you fail to approve of anything this minority says or does, then you have literal blood on your hands. You can bet that Sam is going to be as provocative as he can be in his new role at DOE, and dress as he wants to dress. His supervisor is going to be scared of him, as will all coworkers who have even the slightest discomfort around him, given the way he dresses, and the things he says. They will know that Sam Brinton has the power to destroy them professionally by his accusations, and that he is not afraid to use it to advance the cause. He will be impossible to fire, too, because he will scream “HATE!” if they try to do it.

Brinton being embraced by the Biden administration in this way is all part of the campaign to normalize all sexual deviance in the broader culture — and it’s working. According to a 2020 Gallup poll, the needle has moved dramatically on queer self-identification among Millennials and Gen Z:

I suspect the B — bisexuality — is doing a lot of work there, but you can see in the dramatic differences between Generation X and subsequent generations the effect of the post-1993 cultural campaigns. There is simply no place left in elite culture for any kind of stigmatization of sexual aberrance, except (for now) with pederasty, and bestiality (but then again, Sam Brinton and his pup players are working their way around to that, explicitly).

You think this is just a liberal thing? You’re wrong — it’s an elite thing. Remember the case of Thomas Donnelly, now Giselle Donnelly? Back in 2018, Donnelly, a longtime neocon foreign policy hawk based at the American Enterprise Institute, came out as a transgendered woman. He had divorced his wife, and fell into a relationship with a dominatrix who became his second wife — and led his transition to “Giselle”. I wrote about it in 2018, noting that Donnelly’s coming-out was celebrated with a sympathetic profile in the Washington Post. Excerpt from my post:

This paragraph of the profile jumped out at me. It’s about how Donnelly, having divorced his first wife, met the woman who is now his (her, whatever) second wife: Beth Taylor, a Navy veteran who runs a studio in DC that helps men transition to presenting themselves as female:

Giselle and Beth shared a love of national security, wine, gender fluidity and BDSM. They soon began dating, and last year they were married. Those close to them who missed this time in their lives will soon be able to see it up close and personal. For about two and a half years, a film crew followed them and documented their relationship, along with Giselle’s gender journey.

National security, wine, gender fluidity, and sadomasochism. American as apple pie.

More:

AEI President Arthur Brooks and Vice President for Foreign Policy Danielle Pletka told me their decision to support Giselle was a simple one, since she’s the same person dedicated to the same principles that made her a good fit for the institution all this time. “We are proud that she is part of the AEI family,” they told me.

You cannot get more Establishment Conservative Washington than Arthur Brooks and Danielle Pletka. They are in the Inner Ring. And they ratify Thomas Donnelly having become Giselle Donnelly. You may think this is a wonderful thing, or you may think this is a terrible thing, or you may not know what to think at all. But you must recognize that this event happening at one of the top right-wing institutions in Washington is a very big thing indeed.

Let me explain a little bit more. A regular liberal commenter points out that Donnelly’s strengths as a national security analyst don’t depend on whether or not s/he is transgender or a sadomasochist. Donnelly was interested in gender fluidity and BDSM before transitioning, after all.

Of course that’s true — but beside the point. Only a tiny number of people will ever know who Donnelly is, or care about Donnelly’s work. There were no doubt people within conservative Washington institutions who were interested in gender fluidity and sadomasochism long before Donnelly went public. The point is that the Donnelly transition, and the way it’s being rolled out to the public, is enormously symbolic, and represents a meaningful shift in the Overton Window — that is, what is permissible to talk about and think about.

For one, ours is now a culture in which a predilection for kinky sex is no longer something that one keeps private, out of a sense of shame, or because one feared the judgment of others, but now just a quirky part of one’s identity. This is what happens when the masses read Fifty Shades Of Grey (125 million copies sold) and begin to think of kink as normative. Again, you might think this is a good thing or a bad thing, but the point is, it’s a major cultural shift.

For another, as I say in the headline, the Giselle Donnelly phenomenon represents the institutionalization of the transgender revolution. Think of it: a 65 year old man who has spent his life as a national security hawk working among conservative elites, as a fixture in one of the two most powerful right-of-center think tanks in Washington, now says he’s a woman, and presents himself as such. Those same elites — represented by Brooks and Pletka — embrace his transition uncritically. This signals to the rest of official conservative Washington that this is not only okay, but expected of them. If you are a social or religious conservative who objects to what kinkster hawk Donnelly has done, you are now officially at odds with the leadership of the conservative Inner Ring. You will find yourself marginalized — not openly, not at first, but it’s going to happen, and happen faster than you think.

It is going to be quite interesting to see how official conservative Washington responds to the Sam Brinton hire. I bet response is muted to positive. Why? Because though what Brinton represents is being championed by liberals, and he is a progressive hero, objecting publicly to people like Brinton and what they represent is something that is no longer done in elite circles, even among conservative elites. By the time the Boomers and the Xers die out, there will be no one left to object.

Meanwhile, as I’ve said, this is radically changing our society. Read the Rensselaer Polytechnic story: the young are being taught, and accepting the teaching, that perverts like Sam Brinton are liberating and sympathetic figures, figures that incarnate possible futures for themselves. Is this what you want for your children? Because we are all going to get it.

We need to all realize — and I’m talking to myself here too — that classical liberalism is not going to save us from this decadence. I have long resisted the implications of this conclusion, because I really do want to live in a world of relative tolerance. I am not as confident as others that this is the natural end point of liberalism, because we lived within classical liberalism for centuries without this kind of thing. What is becoming clear to me is that this is what classical liberalism is when separated from Christian faith, or at least from a metaphysical/religious structure that sets boundaries within the classical liberal framework. This is what the Founding Father John Adams meant when he said:

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”

And here we are today: post-Christian, and plunging into decadence because we have unbridled our basest passions. If Sam Brinton kept his base passions hidden, that would be one thing. But he parades them, has built a lucrative public profile and career on them, and openly exploits them for cultural and political hegemony. When Brinton was in short pants, his predecessors in the movement appealed to liberal values of tolerance and individual dignity to open the doors to people like him. Now that they are in command of the culture, there will be no more liberal tolerance, only compelled affirmation of the kind of deviance that was unimaginable a generation ago to most people.

There is a spiritual component to this, of course. I will write more about it in a subsequent post, but let me remind you of something I posted here last year. A couple of years ago, a young man began coming to our church in Baton Rouge. He later left town, and I don’t know what happened to him, but in his short time with us, I learned a lot from him. He was in his mid-twenties, and had left a sex cult that followed the teachings of occultist Aleister Crowley. He told me he had been molested by a babysitter as a child, and the trauma of that experience forced him to leave the cult when he realized that in order to advance in it, you had to be willing to perform acts of increasing sexual perversion, including molestation. Crowley believed in what he called “sex magick,” which meant that through a systematic violation of every sexual taboo, the practitioner asserted the primacy of his own individual will, over and against Christianity and the Biblical order. I won’t link here to the kinds of things the Crowley cult does, but it’s not hard to find.

The young man told me how, once he exited the cult, he could see that the world Crowley (d. 1947) envisioned in his writings had largely come into being. It was a world in which individuals were “liberated” from sexual taboo, and believed that they discovered their true selves through assertion of the will via sex acts, especially ones that Christian culture perceives as disordered or otherwise perverted. The young man told me that Crowley is not known to most Americans, but his principles of sex magick are now completely mainstream, thanks mostly to the entertainment industry.

After that conversation, I did some research into Crowley and his teachings. I don’t recommend it unless you have a strong stomach, but the young man was absolutely right. Sam Brinton may not have any idea who Aleister Crowley is, but he is an avatar of Crowleyism, and of mainstreaming Crowley thought and practice. I advise you, reader, to wake up.

The post Biden Puttin’ On The Dog appeared first on The American Conservative.

I wish I had something hopeful to say about the situation between Russia and Ukraine. I ask nearly everyone I meet over here in Hungary, which borders Ukraine, what their take is, and the gloom is uniform, though not apocalyptic. Nobody wants this war, but few people — I haven’t met one, but maybe they exist — believe it can be avoided. The general view goes something like this:

1. Russia will invade Ukraine. At this point, it’s inevitable, and it’s going to produce bad things, including a likely refugee crisis for Hungary and other states that border Ukraine.
2. Russia will swiftly overwhelm Ukrainian forces.
3. Europe will do nothing, because Europe can do nothing. It is too militarily weak to intervene if it wanted to.
4. And most Europeans don’t want to, for four reasons.
a. Many of them recognize that Russia has a legitimate right to demand that Ukraine stay out of NATO.
b. Many of them recognize that the historical relationship between Ukraine and Russia is very complicated,
making it not the case that this is a simple, clean-cut matter of one nation invading another sovereign
nation.
c. Russia has a legitimate right to expect that Ukraine will stay out of NATO.
d. Europeans know that if they antagonize Russia, they will end up freezing during winters as the Russians
cut off gas, upon which many European nations are dependent.
5. The Europeans know they can’t count on America here.

When I hear some version of that last point, I chime in to say that they’re right, but that America has no business risking World War III with Russia over Ukraine. And then I explain how America has been at war for two decades now, draining ourselves in misguided wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans can’t stand the thought of our old Cold War enemy Russia appearing to push us around, but deep down, there’s no stomach for war. And besides, who made us the sole arbiter of international relations? If Russia asserting its geostrategic interests on its own border amounts to pushing America around, then what kind of international order is it that lets the United States determine what other nations can and cannot do?

Remember the legendary Sovietologist and US diplomat George Kennan, who counseled realism in dealing with Russia, to protect America’s interests? Here’s an analysis speculating on what Kennan would say today, if he were alive:

Look, I don’t want Russia to invade Ukraine either, and am literally praying on and off throughout the day for peace. The Ukrainian people have had to suffer horribly at the hands of Moscow over the last century, and I don’t want them to suffer more. But this is the new world order we live in: a post-American world order, in which the United States is a diminished power on the world stage. One of my interlocutors this week pointed out that the French in particular don’t want this Ukraine war, and that the French tried to warn the US administration to stay out of Iraq back in the early 2000s. “Yes, and we hated them for it,” I replied. “But they were correct.”

It is so difficult for Americans to come to terms with the idea that we are no longer what we were. Many of us react to this Russia-Ukraine thing with jerking knees. Liberals can’t believe that we are going to allow the thuggish Putin to get away with brutalizing a sovereign country. Conservatives hearken back to Cold War simplicities, and rail against “defeatism”. Both sorts of hawks squawk “Munich!” as a way of closing off deliberation about the wisdom of risking war with Russia over Ukraine. Again, if you were around in the early 2000s and paying attention, this Munich thing showed up a lot in debates over the wisdom of going to war with Iraq. If you were against it, well then, you were nothing but a Yankee Neville Chamberlain. This is how the American people were talked into that stupid war of choice, or talked ourselves into it.

We Americans are not accustomed to not having our way on the world stage. This is not because we are somehow evil, or uniquely hegemonic; this is how great powers behave. We hide our own hegemonic impulses from ourselves by talking about our mission to spread freedom and democracy throughout the world (but only the kind of democracy in which the people vote in ways of which we approve; should the Hungarian people vote in this spring referendum to back their country’s LGBT media law, US officials will denounce the result), but the people around the world who are at the receiving end of our kind of freedom-and-democracy-promotion are less deluded by our pretenses.

Look at what the leadership class in the United States — in the government, in the military, in the political parties, in the universities and think tanks, and in the foreign policy and national security apparatus — did these past twenty years. We turned Iraq from a police state ruled by a vile anti-Iranian dictator into a puppet state of the Iranians. After spending between $1 trillion and $2 trillion dollars on the Afghanistan project, to say nothing of the human cost to dead and wounded American troops, the US left in humiliation last fall, with the Taliban back in power. Meanwhile, our own country is falling apart. We Americans are increasingly at each other’s throats. Income inequality has become much worse. Infrastructure is crumbling. Deaths by drug addiction and, more broadly, despair, are skyrocketing. Violent crime is way up. Our southern border is out of control. And on and on.

And now, the American people are supposed to follow the same leadership class that wrecked our prestige and power over the past two decades into a foolish and unnecessary showdown with a nuclear power over the fate of a country that is on the nuclear power’s own border, and that has historically been a part of that country for centuries? Really, we’re supposed to do that?

None of this, mind you, is to say that Russia is right to invade, or to threaten to invade, Ukraine. It is rather to say that I find it impossible to see what America’s vital interest is in risking war with Russia to try to prevent this from happening. It is not in America’s interest to rattle its saber in this part of the world. It is not 1992 anymore. Russia is stronger than she was then, and America is diminished, mostly by our own foolishness. On the Right, Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul warned us repeatedly over the years about the cost of interventionism, but we didn’t listen (and, as ever, I accuse myself of this prior to 2008 or so). Now we have to live with the consequences of the bad choices we made then, and no amount of blustering and wishful thinking can make things different.

Ask yourself: is this same leadership elite that is pushing progressivist racism and gender ideology at every level (including politicizing the military), waging culture war on a huge number of ordinary Americans whose damnable sin is to be white, male, heterosexual, and/or Christian, and presiding over the slow-motion ruin of our country really to be trusted in this new conflict? If in the unlikely event that we got into a shooting war with the Russians, who do you think is going to be on the front lines? Deplorables, mostly. Men (and maybe some women) for whom the emerging woke social and economic order does not work, but who are expected to salute the ruling class and prepare to risk their lives for … Ukraine.

(You might say: What about black American soldiers in Vietnam? They went to fight, even though parts of America were living under apartheid. Yes, they did go to fight, because as draftees, they had no choice. But had they been draft resisters, I say today that they would have been damn right to have demanded to know why they were being sent abroad to fight this war of choice on behalf of a ruling class that either oppressed them at home, or didn’t do enough to lift the yoke of injustice from their necks.)

This is a radical thing for a conservative like me to say, but the past two decades have radicalized me to a certain extent. In my book Live Not By Lies, I talk about how the Marxists never could really get a foothold in imperial Russia, until the Tsarist government’s bad handling of the 1891-92 famine revealed a degree of incompetence that shook the faith of many Russians in the system. For me, that has happened with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the 2008 financial crash, and now the establishment’s intellectual and moral collapse in the face of wokeness, in which the elites in every institution surrendered their beliefs in bedrock American values for the sake of … what, exactly?

Below are symbols of the American ruling class, the ones who are trying to rally us to stand against Russia in Ukraine. These are their sacred causes. This first tweet went out seven weeks after the international humiliation of the way we withdrew from Afghanistan:

 

And this infamous one, of course, went up less than three months before the last American soldier left Afghanistan, and the Taliban took over the government:

 

Do you believe that these people, our leadership class, know what they are doing? Do you believe they have the best interests of the American people at heart? Or are they so blinded by ideology that they keep leading us down blind alleys? At what point will the rest of us wake up and realize that these people do not know what they are talking about, and are going to keep hurting us?

Again, I do not want to see Russia invade Ukraine. I want diplomacy to solve this crisis. I believe the US meeting Russia’s legitimate demand that it abandon its insistence that Ukraine has a future in NATO is key to this, and should happen. Overall, though, I’m not all that interested in what’s best for Ukraine. I’m not all that interested in what’s best for Russia. I’m significantly more interested in what’s best for our European allies, but not nearly as interested as I am in what’s best for the United States of America. The choices we Americans have made over the past two decades, both in domestic and foreign policy, and in both public and private life, have rendered us weaker, and no amount of wishful nostalgia can erase that. We need to focus on rebuilding at home. We are not going to vote ourselves out of these multiple and varied crises, but it would help if we would at least replace the failed leadership we have now with political leaders who are willing to fight the manifold decadence endemic in our institutions, defend traditional American liberties, and stop trying to defend all the borders of its global imperium.

Over drinks this week, a Hungarian interlocutor who is sadly resigned to Russia’s invasion said, “From over here, it looks like you Americans have a huge number of problems at home. You are internally weak. It’s not as bad as western Europe, but it’s still pretty bad.” How could I argue with that? Could you? He wasn’t engaged in Magyar triumphalism — Hungarians seem to me to be well aware of their country’s challenges — but only pointing out that fewer and fewer foreigners look to America and see a model of what they want to be. This is a big change in my lifetime, but hey, we did it to ourselves, and are doing it to ourselves.

 

The post Alas, The New World Order appeared first on The American Conservative.

A couple of writers for Foreign Affairs say that male nationalist leaders are scared of women. Excerpts:

The wave of patriarchal authoritarianism is also pushing some established democracies in an illiberal direction. Countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders, such as Brazil, Hungary, and Poland, have seen the rise of far-right movements that promote traditional gender roles as patriotic while railing against “gender ideology”—a boogeyman term that Human Rights Watch describes as meaning “nothing and everything.” Even the United States has experienced a slowdown in progress toward gender equity and a rollback of reproductive rights, which had been improving since the 1970s. During his presidency, Donald Trump worked with antifeminist stalwarts, including Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, to halt the expansion of women’s rights around the world. And despite the Biden administration’s commitment to gender equity at the national level, Republican-controlled states are attempting to reverse the constitutional right to abortion, which is now more vulnerable than it has been in decades.

More:

It is not a coincidence that women’s equality is being rolled back at the same time that authoritarianism is on the rise. Political scientists have long noted that women’s civil rights and democracy go hand in hand, but they have been slower to recognize that the former is a precondition for the latter. Aspiring autocrats and patriarchal authoritarians have good reason to fear women’s political participation: when women participate in mass movements, those movements are both more likely to succeed and more likely to lead to more egalitarian democracy. In other words, fully free, politically active women are a threat to authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning leaders—and so those leaders have a strategic reason to be sexist.

Understanding the relationship between sexism and democratic backsliding is vital for those who wish to fight back against both. Established autocrats and right-wing nationalist leaders in contested democracies are united in their use of hierarchical gender relations to shore up nationalist, top-down, male-dominated rule. Having long fought against social hierarchies that consolidate power in the hands of the few, feminist movements are a powerful weapon against authoritarianism. Those who wish to reverse the global democratic decline cannot afford to ignore them.

It is an article of faith among the baizuocracy (academics, NGOs, elite journalists) that to disagree with what they think is good is a sign that you are a hater. Don’t like abortion or genderfluidity? Hater! Question globalist dogma? Phobic! And so forth. It’s a way of psychologizing away political and cultural differences, so that you don’t have to engage with them.

Here in Hungary, the presidency of the nation is about to be awarded by parliament to Katalin Novak, Hungary’s longtime family minister. The Justice Minister is Judit Varga. Both women are very strong and able. I’ve never met Varga, but anybody who has met Novak knows that she is no shrinking violet. Both women are talked about in political circles here as potential heirs to Prime Minister Viktor Orban when he decides to leave politics, or is sent down by voters. You would think that these strong conservative women leaders would negate the thesis of this article … but see, its authors, Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks, both of Harvard, are way ahead of you:

One way that autocratic and illiberal leaders make a gender hierarchy palatable to women is by politicizing the “traditional family,” which becomes a euphemism for tying women’s value and worth to childbearing, parenting, and homemaking in a nuclear household—and rolling back their claims to public power. Female bodies become targets of social control for male lawmakers, who invoke the ideal of feminine purity and call on mothers, daughters, and wives to reproduce an idealized version of the nation. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has argued that women are not equal to men and that their prescribed role in society is motherhood and housekeeping. He has called women who pursue careers over motherhood “half persons.” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government has similarly encouraged women to stop trying to close the pay gap and focus instead on producing Hungarian children.

Across the full range of authoritarian and semiauthoritarian regimes, sexual and gender minorities are often targeted for abuse, as well. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people are seen as undermining the binary gender hierarchy celebrated by many authoritarians. As a result, they are frequently marginalized and stigmatized through homophobic policies: Poland’s “LGBT-free zones,” for instance, or Russia’s bans on “LGBTQ propaganda” and same-sex marriage. Beijing recently went as far as banning men from appearing “too effeminate” on television and social media in a campaign to enforce China’s “revolutionary culture.”

Despite their flagrant misogyny—and, in some cases, because of it—some authoritarians and would-be authoritarians succeed in enlisting women as key players in their political movements. They display their wives and daughters prominently in the domestic sphere and sometimes in official positions to obscure gender unequal policies. Valorizing traditional motherhood, conservative women often play supporting roles to the masculine stars of the show.

See? To these Harvard professors, women like Novak and Varga are Uncle Toms. The Left’s playbook never changes.

The thing is, they really do believe this. They imagine that the values of elite, educated, professional-class liberals are so obviously correct that the only reason one dissents from them is that one is a fool, or wicked.

A reader of this blog suggested in the comments section that we take a look at this 2017 lecture by the journalist Christopher Caldwell, explaining Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It really is valuable. Caldwell, the veteran Washington journalist, explain where Putin comes from, and why many Russians supported him, and do support him. It mostly has to do with the way Putin restored order to the country after the crazy 1990s, which beggared millions of ordinary Russians, and allowed for the rise of oligarchs. That, and Russia’s humiliation over NATO’s Kosovo war on Serbia, Russia’s Slavic ally. I suggest watching the whole thing, but I have cued it up to a part that explains Viktor Orban, and some other nationalist leaders demonized by Western liberals:

Caldwell says that Putin is — or at least was when he delivered this lecture in 2017 — is a symbol of those who don’t agree with the international American-led system. Even if you don’t agree with most of Putin’s policies, that fact that he won’t submit to the system wins him sympathy. Caldwell: “I would say that generally, if you like the international system, if you like globalization and the new economy, you’re going to consider Vladimir Putin a real menace. If you don’t like it, if you believe it has failed, then you’re going to have a certain sympathy for him. Putin has become a symbol of the sovereignist side in the battle between sovereignty and globalism, and that turns out to be the big battle of our time, as our own recent election shows.” (Remember, this was 2017, after Trump’s election.)

This is exactly how to see Viktor Orban. If you believe in globalization, in wokeness, in the worldview of Harvard professors and multinational corporations, then you’re going to consider Viktor Orban a menace. If you don’t, then even if you don’t agree with everything Orban says, he remains a potent symbol of resistance.

What if you are a normie Republican who doesn’t agree with wokeness, but who goes along with the rest of the US establishment line? Well, what good have you been in stopping wokeness mandated by American and international institutions? Like him or not, Viktor Orban fights, and not only fights, he often wins. He’s not playing around, like so many American politicians of the Right, who sound populist themes, but who can usually be counted on to side with the Establishment, against the interests of their own voters.

Yesterday I had coffee with a friend I had made when I was here last summer, an expatriate from western Europe who moved here for business, and loves it. He said, “The truth is, Viktor Orban is the closest thing we have to the leader of the free world right now.” I asked him to explain that. He said that Orban is the most visible head of state in North America or Europe who “stands for the things the West has traditionally believed.” And then this man told me about how the conservative party in his home country capitulated on key cultural issues, because the only thing it cares about is the economy. He said it was willing to surrender to the cultural agenda of the Left because that’s what the business interests who run the party wanted. Not this man. He’s for Orban, because the people back home who are ruining his country — both the socialists and the establishment conservatives — hate Orban, and hate him for the same reason they hate men like my friend: because they are social conservatives who believe in national sovereignty, not diktats from Brussels.

Last night I went to an event where my friend Mark Krikorian, the immigration hawk, was interviewed before an audience at Matthias Corvinus Collegium. I met there an American conservative who just arrived in the city to do a fellowship. He said that it seems to him that Hungary is becoming to the American Right (and European national conservative Right) what Republican Spain was to the Left during the 1930s. I’ll buy that. Good. Come to Budapest, young conservatives, and see for yourself what’s going on.

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I’m sorry, but we are living in Clown World:

The Biden administration is set to fund the distribution of crack pipes to drug addicts as part of its plan to advance “racial equity.”

The $30 million grant program, which closed applications Monday and will begin in May, will provide funds to nonprofits and local governments to help make drug use safer for addicts. Included in the grant, which is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, are funds for “smoking kits/supplies.” A spokesman for the agency told the Washington Free Beacon that these kits will provide pipes for users to smoke crack cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, and “any illicit substance.”

HHS said the kits aim to reduce the risk of infection when smoking substances with glass pipes, which can lead to infections through cuts and sores. Applicants for the grants are prioritized if they treat a majority of “underserved communities,” including African Americans and “LGBTQ+ persons,” as established under President Joe Biden’s executive order on “advancing racial equity.”

Here is a link to the Biden executive order prioritizing “equity” in government benefits programs.

What does a “safe smoking kit” include? So glad you asked:

Mouthpiece: This is the most important thing in the kit. A cut sparkplug fits nicely onto a stem. Using this prevents you from getting cut, burnt and infected lips and HCV exposures.

Rubber Bands: Wrap these around the end of the stem to prevent lip burns (be aware that with hear these occasionally melt and snap).

Triple Antibiotic Ointment: First Aid for sores. Do not use for burns.

Alcohol Wipes: Use these to clean mouthpieces and pipes, especially if you a are sharing equipment.

Antiseptic Towelettes: Use these to clean off our hands (and your John if you are doing sex work).

Chore Boy/Brio: Use this as a filter in the stem. After repeated heating choy becomes hot and brittle and can be sucked into your throat. This provides an opportunity for you to be exposed to diseases, especially during unprotected oral sex. Change out your choy often.

Screen: 1 inch screens are used as a filer in the stem. These are better than choy since they last longer.

Vitamin C & E: Vitamin C helps lessen fatigue and crashing. Vitamin E will help cuts, sores and burns heal.

Condoms (lubed and unlubed): Use lubed condoms for vaginal and anal sex, use unlubed for oral sex.

How is this fair to white male heterosexual crackheads like Hunter Biden? I ask you.

UPDATE:

It’s Mostly False because it’s completely true. pic.twitter.com/FRvqTUMfCJ

— Josiah Neeley (@jneeley78) February 9, 2022

Typical Snopes. The Administration is handing out crack pipes to addicts to “reduce harm,” but is prioritizing the distribution of crack pipes to queer and BIPOC addicts. Big difference!

The post Back Of The Line, Cishet Honky Crackhead! appeared first on The American Conservative.