Rod Dreher's Blog, page 24

Goodness, GOP senators are mad at Tucker Carlson for his antiwar stance on Ukraine. Excerpt:

Republican senators are unmoved by Tucker Carlson’s relentless warpath against support for Ukraine — even as it widens an existing rift in their party.

A “relentless warpath” against … war. Genius. More:

The Fox News prime time host and others on the far-right have excused and even rationalized Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine and downplayed its relevance to U.S. national security. And while GOP senators are shrugging off his name-and-shame campaign, Carlson’s views are permeating the GOP base in a way that could undermine Republicans’ efforts to emphasize cross-party unity as they seek to deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“On individuals up here who are decision-makers, I don’t hear any disagreement about the position Russia is in,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a brief interview. “Russia is the aggressor. … Ukraine has every right, as a sovereign nation, to have their borders respected. Russia’s not doing that.”

The disconnect between the GOP foreign policy establishment and the pro-Donald Trump base of the party on the value of intervening in foreign quagmires isn’t new. But the crisis in Ukraine is exposing the widening gulf between the two camps when it comes to committing U.S. resources in support of fledgling democracies under siege by authoritarian regimes.

In recent days, Carlson has attacked Republicans who are pushing for a stronger response to Moscow’s aggression — slamming Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) as “ignorant” and Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) as “a moron masquerading as a senator” and “pompous neocon buffoon” simply for advocating long-standing GOP orthodoxy when it comes to Russia.

Carlson has even defended Moscow’s buildup of troops along the border with Ukraine — and President Vladimir Putin’s rationale for it — in a stark departure from the tough-on-Russia posture that has defined the Republican Party since the start of the Cold War. Meanwhile, Ukraine remains under active threat from an invasion that some are warning could be just the first domino to fall in Eastern Europe.

Simply for advocating long-standing GOP orthodoxy when it comes to Russia. Golly. It’s almost like the writer here (for Politico) hasn’t thought about how the past twenty years — including the disastrous war of choice in Iraq launched by George W. Bush, and the botched occupation of Afghanistan — has destroyed the faith of many conservatives in GOP orthodoxies, or competence.

In his Fourth of July address in 2003, following the US victory over Iraqi forces, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, one of the Republicans quoted in the Politico piece griping about Tucker Carlson’s big mouth, said:

What the evildoers will never understand is that America cannot be destroyed by weapons, armies, or terrorist attacks. No matter how many weapons they try to make, no matter what secret schemes they concoct, no matter what buildings they attempt to destroy, as long as the dream of freedom lives on within our hearts, America endures as a beacon of light shining for the entire world to see.

Sen. Cornyn supported the Iraq War, as did I, and as did most conservatives (except for the founders of The American Conservative, denounced by Bush White House speech writer as “unpatriotic conservatives”). Back in 2003, I would have swooned over that rhetoric, which was even more purified in President Bush’s second inaugural address, including these lines:

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

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

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

It has been a long, steep learning curve since then for we on the Right, regarding the judgment of our leaders on matters of war and peace. Ron Paul was widely seen on the Right as a nut for his antiwar views when he was running for president. The first major presidential candidate to openly criticize the Iraq War was Donald Trump, at the 2016 GOP primary debate in South Carolina. The crowd booed him. But he was right — and a year later, he was president.

In 2019, the Washington Post published the Afghanistan Papers, secret Pentagon documents revealing that the military brass knew for a long time that the Afghanistan war was unwinnable, yet kept pushing for more money and troops from Congress. Here is a link to the reports in the Post, which begin like this:

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

The Post had to file a lawsuit to get access to these documents, which lay bare the corruption, stupidity, and mendacity of American elite leaders, especially in the military. More:

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”

Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.

More:

The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

All of this was made public in 2019. Have you seen Republican senators (or Democratic senators for that matter) rising up to demand accountability from the Pentagon for the lies the generals told to Congress over the years? I have not. Yet these same Republican senators are scandalized when a conservative TV host showers contempt on their leadership over Russia and Ukraine, whose dispute threatens to draw American troops into conflict.

My view is that Ukraine should stay out of NATO, and Russia should stay out of Ukraine. How about we don’t go involve ourselves in another foreign war we don’t understand, at least not until we hold our generals and the foreign policy establishment responsible for having royally screwed up on the last ideological adventure they had with the lives of other people? The problem here is not Tucker Carlson. The problem is that GOP foreign policy and national security elites have forfeited their expectation of deference by conservative voters. From the Politico article:

Some GOP senators rolled their eyes when asked about Carlson’s attacks and indicated that the far-right Fox host isn’t impacting their calculus on an emerging legislative path, even as his views are picking up steam among the base.

“I get great intel briefings and we have trusted advisers that provide many points of view. And I would say I’m pretty well educated on this subject,” Ernst, a combat veteran, said when asked about Carlson’s attacks.

How can Sen. Ernst be sure that she is being told the truth by the military and the CIA, given what we now know from the Afghanistan Papers? How can any of them? Until we see proof that the Republicans in the House and Senate care about the disgusting lies told by the generals and others in authority over Afghanistan, I don’t blame anybody for thinking that the judgment of a cable news host is more trustworthy on this potential war than that of elected GOP officials. After twenty years of lies and abuse of American troops and American taxpayers to fund Washington’s foolish wars, their credibility is zero. That doesn’t make Tucker Carlson right on Ukraine and Russia, but it does make him worth listening to more than these senators who deferred for years to the bellicosity of the Washington Blob, against the best interests of their country and their constituents.

I commend to you this sarcastic take from last Friday’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” in which Carlson mocks the war crowd among our political class and media elites. You might hate Tucker Carlson for whatever reason, but you should ask yourself why it is that it falls to a conservative cable host to lead the antiwar opposition here. Where are the liberals? Is the only thing they’ve learned from the past two decades of US warmaking that wars are only bad if they are launched by Republican presidents? It is quite curious that a liberal DC publication like Politico is carrying water for war-friendly Republican senators, against a mouthy conservative cable host who has the audacity to cast doubt on the judgment of the Washington Establishment. Watch this, and join me in thinking that Carlson’s contemptuous tone is exactly what the Blob deserves:

The post Tucker Carlson Vs. The GOP War Party appeared first on The American Conservative.

Father John Jillions, a liberal Orthodox priest who was once the Chancellor of the Orthodox Church in America, recently delivered a lecture criticizing conservative Orthodox Christians — including, by name, Father Chad Hatfield, rector of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, and me. You can watch the whole thing here. Its title: “Preserve the Fullness of Thy Church”: Fighting Fundamentalism, Defending Dialogue and Reclaiming Catholicity.

I want to address Father Jillions’s specific criticism of me (Father Hatfield can speak for himself, if he chooses to do so).

He begins his lecture by quoting without naming him a senior Orthodox priest who criticized liberal Orthodox journals The Wheel and Public Orthodoxy as subversive of Orthodox truth, and lamenting that the Orthodox bishops don’t act against them to defend the truth. But Orthodox priests and laity need to know what’s going on (said the unnamed clergyman), and how these subversives work.

Then Fr. Jillions (henceforth “Jillions”) lights into Fr. Hatfield, criticizing him sharply for a lecture he delivered to seminarians, warning them about challenges from the Zeitgeist — including from theological liberals within the Orthodox Church — and urging them to hold strong in defense of Orthodoxy. He faults Hatfield for inviting “the well-known Orthodox controversialist Rod Dreher” to give the prestigious 2021 Schmemann Lecture at St. Vladimir’s seminary. Jillions was a signatory of a letter of protest over my speaking invitation, an epistle that criticized me as an apostle of “politicized religion.”

Interesting choice of words. I have never tried to align the Orthodox Church with the Republican Party (which I left in 2008 in anger over the Iraq War and the GOP’s close alignment with Wall Street). What the liberals who signed that letter mean is that I am firmly against liberalizing the Orthodox Church on LGBT matters. This is 100 percent about LGBT. Jillions goes on in the lecture to quote something I wrote in response at the time, in which I said that I don’t engage in “dialogue” with liberals whom I judge not to be seeking “good faith” engagement. I call doing that “a waste of time.”

Jillions said that the most disturbing part of my lecture was my urging no dialogue with progressives within the church. “Dreher and company view engagement as contamination,” he says. Hatfield and Dreher are accused of being “fundamentalists” because  where our view prevails, “Communion is broken, and the Church’s catholicity is compromised.”

Jillions concedes in his lecture that there is Biblical precedent for breaking off dialogue, but “it is a danger to prematurely decide who is an enemy of the Church” Later in the lecture, he says fundamentalists want to run away from their opponents, or roll over them. We prove that we are “individualists” guilty of “the sin of the Reformation.” Fundamentalism, in his definition, is  “anything that undermines the catholicity of the church”

Again, I can’t speak for Father Chad Hatfield, but my guess is that he and I feel strongly about this because both of us have experience with the deceitful ways certain liberals — especially those advocating for overturning orthodox teaching on homosexuality — use the concept of dialogue. Father Hatfield was once an Episcopalian, and I, as you know, am a former Catholic. We have both seen exactly how this works. They use hazy language to disguise their true intentions, and appeal to principles of openness, mutual respect, and so forth to gain a foothold in church institutions. And then, once they have come into power within the institutions, the dialogue ends, because The Church Has Spoken. The people who were once upholders of orthodoxy within the institutions now find themselves marginalized, and even persecuted.

The late Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus understood this dynamic well. He derived from it Neuhaus’s Law, which holds that wherever orthodoxy is optional, it will eventually be proscribed.

In the Catholic Church, which was once my home, the tireless LGBT advocate Father James Martin has enjoyed brilliant success by pushing for overturning the Church’s long-settled doctrines on homosexuality, while using language like “love,” “compassion,” and other terms that disarm opponents. And to my knowledge, the Jesuit has been very careful never to directly deny magisterial Catholic teaching on homosexuality. But then, he hasn’t had to. I think the genial and intelligent Father Martin represents something deeply destructive, but I credit him with being a skilled and effective revolutionary within the Catholic institutions.

I don’t want to see the same thing come to Orthodoxy. At this point, the pro-LGBT advocates are almost all intellectuals, and are a minority. But bishops — all bishops, in all churches — typically want to avoid controversy. If the Hatfields and the Drehers can be set apart as “controversialists” who are opposed to dialogue and the “catholicity” of the Orthodox Church, then we can be safely ignored. Eventually we will be marginalized, and the Orthodox Church will be queered. It will happen as sure as night follows day. I have seen how this works, and I am sure Father Hatfield has. A few years ago, I gave a talk at a Catholic university, and was told by closeted conservative faculty there that they would not dare to cite the Catechism on sexuality, or quote the words of Pope Francis, for fear of being denounced by students for creating a hostile classroom, and then thrown overboard by the woke administration.

This really happens. Faithful orthodox Catholics are fighting a rearguard action now to defend the truth within their own church. Orthodox Christians need to know what’s coming for them too — and who is leading the charge.

Y’all be good — I’m about to get on a plane for Budapest. See you on the other side.

UPDATE: Good morning from Heathrow. Real quick, I want to clarify that I am all in favor of dialogue about how best we as the Church can live out the Church’s authoritative teachings in the contemporary world (on sex, including LGBT, and everything else). That’s a very different thing than a “dialogue” about whether or not we should change the clear teachings. If you listen to Father Jillions’s speech, you’ll see that it’s a classic example of progressive obfuscation — the kind of thing that well-meaning priests and laity who have never dealt directly with it can easily fall for.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about how one of these progressive advocacy organizations, Orthodoxy In Dialogue, issued a public statement calling on the Orthodox bishops to stop condemning abortion, normalize homosexuality and transgenderism, and to repent of past statements critical of LGBT. Read it and see for yourself. These people use “dialogue” the way old Soviet front groups used the word “peace” during the Cold War: to conceal their real aims and disarm those who defend the tradition and the truth.

The post The Problem With ‘Fundamentalists’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

You will have heard about the McMinn County (TN) school board that removed Art Spiegelman’s great graphic novel Maus, about the Holocaust, from the eighth grade history curriculum on grounds that it is inappropriate for kids. Here’s the transcript of that school board meeting. The main objections were that the graphic novel has some curse words in it, and a drawing of a nude figure. The transcript is worth reading, especially these bits:

Steven Brady: When we see something on television that is a direct quote from an actor or a president, something where it has that inappropriate language, they will blur it out or white out parts of it or they will bleep it.

Tony Allman: I understand all that, but being in the schools, educators and stuff we don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff. It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff, it is not wise or healthy.

Julie Goodin: I can talk of the history, I was a history teacher and there is nothing pretty about the Holocaust and for me this was a great way to depict a horrific time in history. Mr. Spiegelman did his very best to depict his mother passing away and we are almost 80 years away. It’s hard for this generation, these kids don’t even know 9/11, they were not even born. For me this was his way to convey the message. Are the words objectionable? Yes, there is no one that thinks they aren’t but by taking away the first part, it’s not changing the meaning of what he is trying to portray and copyright.

Tony Allman: I understand that on tv and maybe at home these kids hear worse, but we are talking about things that if a student went down the hallway and said this, our disciplinary policy says they can be disciplined, and rightfully so. And we are teaching this and going against policy?

Melasawn Knight: I think any time you are teaching something from history, people did hang from trees, people did commit suicide and people were killed, over six million were murdered. I think the author is portraying that because it is a true story about his father that lived through that. He is trying to portray that the best he can with the language that he chooses that would relate to that time, maybe to help people who haven’t been in that aspect in time to actually relate to the horrors of it. Is the language objectionable? Sure. I think that is how he uses that language to portray that.

Tony Allman: I am not denying it was horrible, brutal, and cruel. It’s like when you’re watching tv and a cuss word or nude scene comes on it would be the same movie without it. Well, this would be the same book without it. I may be wrong, but this guy that created the artwork used to do the graphics for Playboy. You can look at his history, and we’re letting him do graphics in books for students in elementary school. If I had a child in the eighth grade, this ain’t happening. If I had to move him out and homeschool him or put him somewhere else, this is not happening.

Julie Goodin: Even for me Mr. Allman, you know I have an eighth grader and even if you did pull this book I would want him to read it because we have to teach our kids. Are these words ok? No, not at all that is not acceptable, but the problem is that we are 80 years removed from the Holocaust itself. I just think this is a grave starting point for our teachers. I am very passionate about history, and I would hate to rob our kids of this opportunity. Are we going to be teaching these words outside of this book as vocabulary words? No, you know me better than that Tony Allman.

Tony Allman: I know and I am not being argumentative, I am just trying to wrap my mind around because if a student sitting in the cafeteria decides to read this out loud and complete the sentences, what are you going to do? It’s in the book you’re teaching them so what are you going to do?

Melasawn Knight: We can say that the students know what that means, but they know what that means if they have been exposed to it prior to. The B word doesn’t have to mean that unless you have been exposed to it before. It’s not like we are teaching that or exposing them to that. We are trying our best to redact the best we can and follow the law and that is what we felt like we have done to address the concerns of that language, the best we could. We think it is a valuable book and most of the supervisors here have read it.

More:

Jonathan Pierce: I ask that you go back to your Hoard’s Dairy example. Not one time do I see a vulgar word in that paragraph there. My objection, and I apologize to everyone sitting here, is that my standard no matter, and I am probably the biggest sinner and crudest person in this room, can I lay that in front of a child and say read it, or this is part of your reading assignment. I’ve got enough faith from the Director of Schools down to the newest hire in this building, that you can take that module and rewrite it and make it do the same thing. Our children need to know about the Holocaust, they need to understand that there are several pieces of history, Mr. Bennett, that shows depression or suppression of certain ethnicities. It’s not acceptable today. We’ve got to accept people for who and what they are. I’m just an old country school board member and I think in our policy it says the decision stops with this board. Unfortunately, Mr. Parkison we did not go through the complaint process that’s also in our Board Policies.

But Rob, the wording in this book is in direct conflict of some of our policies. If I said on the school bus that I was going to kill you, we would be bringing disciplinary action against that child. Again, I am the biggest hypocrite, but I wouldn’t want to go to court that day. And somebody lay this book down and say look it was taught in the classrooms. Therefore, Madame Chairman I’m going to bring this to a head. I started it so I am going to bring it to a head. I move that we remove this book from the reading series and challenge our instructional staff to come with an alternative method of teaching The Holocaust.

Mike Lowry: Second.

The vote was 6 to 4 to remove Maus.

This is shameful. We are a stupid country. My 10th grade daughter read about this story yesterday, and said that she read Maus when she was a lot younger, and she understood that it was about the mass murder of European Jews — and she didn’t even notice the foul language or nudity (nudity of animals: the Jews are drawn as mice, the Nazis as cats). She’s right. The skull-cracking idiocy of this is that the schools of McMinn County are trying to teach eighth graders ABOUT THE MASS MURDER OF SIX MILLION, but six school board members believe that the occasional appearance of foul language in the narrative (the objectionable words were “bitch” and “goddamn”) is too much for their little ears, and nude mice representing the humiliation of human beings before their execution might eroticize their delicate sensibilities. What do these school board members think the Holocaust was? Spiegelman’s drawings are nowhere near the horror of actual photos of what the Nazis did:

Notice what that one school board member said about how they would not tolerate a kid on the school bus saying “I’m going to kill you,” so why should they tolerate it in literature presented to middle schoolers? Good Lord, where do you even start with that?! In the conservative classical Christian school where my kids attend, the kids read The Odyssey in seventh grade. Odysseus commits adultery with the goddess Calypso and the witch Circe as part of his ten-year journey home. Teachers handle these themes with care and attention. Besides, in our hypereroticized culture, kids can and do learn far more about sex and sexuality (to say nothing of foul language) every day. It’s crazy that grown-up school board members are so prissy that they want children to learn about the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis, but to do so without seeing four-letter words or the suggestion of naked mice.

Do you want more information on how thick this board is? Look at this, from the transcript:

Mike Cochran: It doesn’t matter, it’s in the curriculum, all this stuff keeps popping up. So, I want to read it, you guys can fire me later, I guess.

I’m just wild about Harry,

and Harry’s wild about me

The heavenly blisses of his kisses,

fill me with ecstasy

He’s sweet just like chocolate candy

Just like honey from the bee

Oh I am just wild about Harry,

and he’s just wild about me

One of the discussion questions is define what this word “ecstasy” means. My problem is, all the way through this literature we expose these kids to nakedness, we expose them to vulgarity. You go all the way back to first grade, second grade and they are reading books that have a picture of a naked man riding a bull. It’s not vulgar, it’s something you would see in an art gallery, but it’s unnecessary. So, teachers have gone back and put tape over the guys butts so the kids aren’t exposed to it. So, my problem is, it looks like the entire curriculum is developed to normalize sexuality, normalize nudity and normalize vulgar language. If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it. You put this stuff just enough on the edges, so the parents don’t catch it but the kids, they soak it in. I think we need to relook at the entire curriculum.

School board member Mike Cochran thinks “I’m Just Wild About Harry” — a foxtrot written in 1921, one century ago, for a Broadway show! — is a subversive plot to eroticize the innocent schoolchildren of McMinn County.

The whole thing is utterly humiliating. Shame on the McMinn County school board.

But look, this kind of thing happens all the time, in liberal places. They’re not objecting to four-letter words in Maus, or rodent ta-tas, but to equally ridiculous ideas, concepts, art and literature that offend progressive sensibilities. I’ll happily trade you the McMinn County school system for Yale, Harvard, and the pantheon of woke US universities. Just last week in Seattle, a progressive school board removed Harper Lee’s antiracist classic To Kill A Mockingbird from the required reading list because it upset some progressive parents. Idiocy. Total philistine idiocy.

Back in the year 2000, I wrote a piece (no longer online) about how in my home state of Louisiana, the Catholic diocese of Lafayette had banned the work of Flannery O’Connor because black students and parents objected to her using racial epithets in her stories, which were set in the Jim Crow South. I wrote:

The Catholic Church teaches that our moral and intellectual failures may sometimes be excused by something it calls “invincible ignorance” — an absolute incapacity to understand that what we’re doing is wrong. The plea of invincible ignorance seems just about the only hope for Catholic parents in a southern Louisiana town who succeeded this summer in banning from a local Catholic high school the work of the woman widely held to be the greatest Catholic fiction writer of twentieth-century America.

But for their bishop, the head of the Diocese of Lafayette, who set aside common sense, basic fairness, and intellectual integrity to crumble to the parents’ bullying — well, in his case it looks more like willful ignorance, and that leaves him with a whole lot of explaining to do. Thanks to Bishop Edward J. O’Donnell’s abject surrender to the forces of political correctness, a southern Catholic school — Opelousas Catholic High — has the dubious distinction of being the first recorded school in America to ban the southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor.

In fact, the bishop’s edict goes further. The parents of black students at Opelousas Catholic had demanded that O’Connor’s collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, be removed from reading lists because it contains characters who use the words “nigger” and “pickaninny.” And Bishop O’Donnell, in ordering the elimination of O’Connor’s volume, directed that “no similar books” replace it: All books containing those racial epithets are forbidden, regardless of context.

Mark Twain? Gone. William Faulkner? A dead letter. Black authors Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, even local writer Ernest J. Gaines? Banished without reprieve.

“Basically, anything that has to do with race is off-limits,” said Arsenio Orteza, the teacher whose assigning of O’Connor to his eleventh-graders sparked the furor. “Think of how much American literature that leaves out. Maybe The Scarlet Letter is the way to go, and I’ll have to hope there aren’t any adulterers who object in the community.”

I hardly need to list here examples of contemporary progressives being just as pigheaded and blind as the McMinn County school board.

What is wrong with us? Seriously, the childish urge to censor without any understanding of context is baffling. This comes from the zero tolerance movement, which says that anything that raises the slightest objection, or is even the tiniest bit deviant from the straight and narrow, must be banned. This arose when the public lost confidence in authorities to use their own discretion in punishing infractions. This quickly led to the death of common sense.

It’s a hard problem to solve today. We plainly cannot trust teachers in every instance. We have far too many recent examples of activist teachers trying to mainstream Critical Race Theory and gender ideology without parents knowing, thus abusing their authority. On the other hand, is the alternative really to have school board members showing themselves to be prisspot ignoramuses, denouncing hundred-year-old show tunes and a highly acclaimed illustrated story about the Holocaust on grounds that seem more like the Saudi morals police than men and women of the West?

I really don’t know how to fix this. Nobody trusts anybody else. If my kids were in McMinn County public schools, I would be mad as hell (sorry, “mad as heck”) over the Maus imbroglio. But does that mean I believe the judgment of teachers is always to be trusted? Not remotely. A combination of the zero tolerance mentality, hysterical sensitivity to offense, and the loss of a common culture with common standards, all brought us to this point. What’s going to get us out of it? No clue.

One good thing that could come out of it: if you haven’t read Maus, or shared it with your older children, please do.

The post In McMinn County, ‘Maus Raus!’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Earlier today, I was interviewed by a Christian television show. The reporter asked me how the churches have received Live Not By Lies. I told him we had sold over 150,000 copies in just over a year, and that I hear anecdotally about individuals and churches preparing, but that overall, it seems that most American churches, and American Christians, prefer to console themselves with the idea that everything is going to be just fine if we keep doing what we have been doing, only with more heart. This, I said, is dangerously naive.

Well, late this afternoon, I had an extraordinary telephone conversation with a friend who is a senior state leader in a nationally prominent Evangelical denomination, one that skews conservative on LGBT issues. He just returned from a conference, and said, “I think you need to know what the next front in the culture war is.”

My friend told me that pastors in five different churches in the southern region of his state reported at the conference the same phenomenon. They have had strangers come and join their congregations, and six months or so later, come out as transgender, and demand their rights as official members of the congregation. It has happened to so many of these churches, in the same period of time, that they believe it is part of a concerted effort to undermine those churches. I don’t have permission to give identifying details of the denomination and the particular state, but my friend told me that there is serious concern among the denomination’s lawyers that these undercover trans activists have found a legal way to force these congregations to capitulate on trans issues, or face ruinous lawsuits.

“There are a lot of churches in our denomination that don’t have a lot of money,” my friend said. “If they get sued, they won’t have enough resources to even defend themselves.”

My friend said he just met with the pastors of this region, who have all been poleaxed by this. Many of them are barely able to understand gender fluidity as a concept, much less figure out how to deal with it from a faithfully Christian point of view. They are sitting ducks, according to my friend. He said that on the advice of lawyers, the congregations are rewriting their bylaws to protect themselves from this kind of sneak attack.

He went on to say that most of the people in his denomination believe that being a Christian is mostly about holding certain cultural beliefs (including politics) and being nice. “They can’t understand why people don’t like them, and they think that if they’re nice, they’ll win people over,” he said. “I have tried to explain why this isn’t true, but most of the leaders in [my denomination] don’t want to believe it. In ten years, this church is going to look very, very different.”

My friend and I talked further about how diabolical this strategy is by trans activists. It sounds crazy, because it is crazy. If I did not know the man I was talking to, I would have trouble believing it. But look, this is not a rumor: again, this man I talked to today spent the last few days talking face-to-face with the pastors who are dealing with this, trying to help them understand what’s happening. My friend is pretty savvy about this kind of thing, but this left him shaken.

This is the reality that traditional Christians in this culture have to face today. We know that Generation Z is likely to be the first generation in American history in which a majority will not be affiliated with a church. We also know that Generation Z is far more liberal on sexual morality, and far less liberal when it comes to tolerating dissent. I suggested to my friend that it is going to take most of the Boomers dying off for church leaders to have a clearer picture of the peril that conservative Christianity is facing. He agreed. He told me that he is deeply discouraged about the future of traditional Christianity in his denomination and in his state, saying that the leadership in so many churches prefer to keep their heads buried in the ground, because they can’t emotionally accept the reality of what is happening.

You have been warned. If you are a leader in a traditional/conservative congregation, denomination, or Christian school, I strongly urge you to contact Alliance Defending Freedom and get information on how you can protect yourselves legally. And if you have the financial resources to help ADF, please give generously, so they can help imperiled churches, religious schools, and individuals.

And please, prepare yourselves, your families, and your churches. Do not wait for your congregation’s or denomination’s leaders to take the initiative. It’s not likely to happen. Father Kolakovic faced the same indifference from the Slovak Catholic bishops in the pre-communist years. They didn’t think persecution of the church could happen in their country. Father Kolakovic knew otherwise, and built a network of resilient believers — and when the Iron Curtain fell, they were ready. If you’ve read Live Not By Lies, or plan to read it, here is a free downloadable study guide for your group. 

UPDATE: An experienced religious liberty lawyer e-mails to urge churches to join the ADF Church Alliance. 

The lawyer says that every church absolutely must have updated their Statement of Faith and related bylaws for the post-Obergefell era. If churches do not have detailed, clear “theologies of the body” that are written down, they will be vulnerable. You cannot wait until you get sued or challenged to address the issue. Do it now. Contact ADF for more information.

The post Secret Activists Queering Evangelical Churches? appeared first on The American Conservative.

The actor Michael Rapaport has been chronicling on his Instagram open shoplifting in a Rite Aid store in his neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Now it is reported that that particular Rite Aid is closing because the thievery makes it too expensive to do business there. Now in that neighborhood, which is not poor at all, will be down a drugstore. All the people who get their prescriptions there will have to find somewhere else — and they had better hope that the owners of other drugstores in the neighborhood don’t also decide to shut down because it’s too expensive to do business there, sustaining high levels of shoplifting.

The shoplifting sprees have been happening in other cities too. I’ve seen lots of videos of them, and all of the videos I have seen feature black thieves. I can’t say that these incidents entirely involve black people, or mostly involve black people. All I can tell you is that the videos I have seen show shoplifters who are black, exclusively.

This reminds me of a conversation I had about ten years ago after I moved back to Louisiana. I had gotten to know a man who was a senior executive at a large grocery store chain here. I had been reading about food deserts — neighborhoods without supermarkets — in poor black neighborhoods, and when I learned what my new friend did for a living, I mentioned to the man, who is white, that this phenomenon seemed unjust to me.

He responded by asking me if I thought that grocery stores made a habit of declining opportunities to make money. Well, I said, I guess not. So, he said, the reason there are so few grocery stores in poor black areas is because it is not cost-efficient to open them there, on account of high levels of shoplifting. Nobody in his company wants to deny poor people, especially poor black people, the opportunity to spend their money buying food from them. But they have had to shut down some stores in poor black areas, and have decided not to open new ones in others, because the rampant shoplifting made it too costly to operate.

But, he said, nobody can say that out loud. They would be accused of racism, and blaming the victim, he explained.

Watching these black shoplifters on video ransacking drugstores and other businesses over the past year brought that supermarket executive’s statement back to mind. Readers, can you point to any data that either back up or knock down what this executive told me? I’m not having much luck finding any. Whatever the case, the neighborhood where Rapaport’s doomed Rite Aid sits — E. 80th Street at First Avenue — is predominantly white, and like I said, not poor. But now the residents are going to have to live through what honest poor black people live through, because of the thieving minority making life harder for everybody. And though I can’t possibly know the ethnic makeup of the staff at that particular Rite Aid, when I lived on the East Side of Manhattan in the late 1990s, drugstore staffs were mostly black and Latino. Now, all the men and women who work at that store hard-hit by thieves are going to be out of work. I’d bet money that they are mostly, and maybe entirely, black and brown people — working folks who are trying to support themselves and their families, but who are being made to suffer because of these petty criminals, and a government that has decided that their jobs, and the quality of life of people in that neighborhood, are not worth defending.

Must be awesome to live in a city governed by progressives.

The post Rapaport’s Doomed Rite-Aid appeared first on The American Conservative.

Y’all know I am a sucker for pop culture trash. Over the weekend, some visiting friends introduced me to Mr. Delicious, the short-lived cartoon spokesman for Rax, a fast food chain whose business was declining in the early 1990s when it tried to turn things around with a bizarre ad campaign featuring “Mr. Delicious,” a middle-aged animated loser who spoke of how eating at Rax helped him deal with his various crises.

Mr. D was a deeply weird dude. Nathan Rabin writes:

It only gets darker, sadder and weirder from there. In another radio spot, Mr. Delicious regales us with the details of his “bout with midlife crisis in 89.” He goes on to explain, with the perfect note of soul-deep self-loathing. “Fortunately (Mr. Delicious) was able to sell the Porsche back to the dealer. But much to his chagrin, he discovered that custom-designed hair weaves are non-refundable. Same for the rotating glitter disco ball he installed in his basement and that vacation to Bora Bora he took with those two young “friends” that left Mr. Delicious feeling empty and unfulfilled, unlike the robust sandwiches baked potatoes and refreshing drinks on the Rax menu for only 99 cents each.”

In another spot, Mr. Delicious alludes to the pain of his vasectomy. This, to try to sell fast food. What’s he got in that valise? Parts of Mrs. D’s torso? You wouldn’t be surprised — Mr. D is bizarre, man.

Here is a four-minute rundown of the psychotic management of the Rax brand, culminating in the Mr. Delicious character.

If you want to know more — and of course you do! — here is a 13-minute mini-documentary Rax corporate made to get its franchisees and employees excited about Mr. Delicious. I beg you to watch this, and imagine the mindset of the geniuses who thought this would work:

Shortly after the Mr. D campaign launched, Rax filed for bankruptcy. As Mr. Delicious says, “Dickety-dee!”

The post Dickety-Dee, RIP appeared first on The American Conservative.

Neil Young now has an ally in his fight against Spotify over Joe Rogan’s show:

On Friday, the singer-songwriter posted a statement, titled “I Stand With Neil Young!”, to her website announcing the decision.

“I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify. Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” Mitchell wrote. “I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”

That Mitchell would openly support Young’s stand against the streaming giant should come as no surprise; the singers, who both got their start in the Canadian folk scene, have been friends for nearly six decades.

The move comes just several days after Young first demanded Spotify pull his catalog over claims that the company was actively promoting the spread of misinformation about vaccines and the Covid-19 pandemic — particularly via the massively popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.

“I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines — potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them,” the “Southern Man” singer wrote Monday in a since-deleted post on his website. “They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Spotify can survive the loss of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, two past greats who have not been relevant to popular music for many years. But if this becomes a trend in showbiz, Spotify will be in trouble.

On the other hand, Joe Rogan’s podcast draws over 11 million listeners monthly. His is the most popular podcast in the English-speaking world. It’s easy to see why when you listen to it. He actually listens to people, and is not keen on following the herd. You don’t have to agree with Rogan to find him interesting and important. It’s really ironic that these leading voices of Sixties culture — Young and Mitchell — have decided that Joe Rogan needs to be silenced, and that they’re going to do whatever they can to shut him up.

I’m not a regular listener to anybody’s podcasts, but boy, it chaps my a*s that these Boomer censors are trying to force Rogan off of Spotify. This is how the Left rolls these days: silence the heretics. They don’t even care if they know what they’re talking about. Here is Chloé Valdary calling out Trevor Noah for faulting Rogan and his guest Jordan Peterson for saying something Bad, even thought they actually were agreeing with Noah’s point of view!

My God, Did Trevor not realize that this was precisely Rogan and Peterson’s point, that this rule is stupid, and that blackness and whiteness are made up things? Did the Daily Beast not realize it either? Are all ya’ll just doing things for clicks??

Sighhhh. https://t.co/btqKuLB0Jx

— Chloé S. Valdary (@cvaldary) January 28, 2022

I’m only an occasional listener to Rogan’s podcast, and any podcast, but seeing the enemies the man has made, and that they oppose him by trying to get him cancelled, makes me eager to defend him, even though I strongly disagree with him on some things (e.g., drugs, porn, Bernie Sanders). Joe Rogan has a right to be wrong, and I have a right to hear him and his guests be wrong, if I want to. Of course Young and Mitchell have the right to pull their music from Spotify, but do they really want to start this war? As artists, do they really want to put themselves in the position of playing self-righteous censors (because that’s what they’re trying to do: compel Spotify to cancel Rogan’s show).

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell once dwelled in the pop culture niche now inhabited by Joe Rogan. I wonder how they would have reacted had Bing Crosby and other top crooners of the previous generation tried to get their record labels to throw them off because he believed they were a bad influence on society. Well, they have become hypothetical Bing Crosby. I don’t care if younger musicians love or hate Joe Rogan, but I do hope that they don’t follow these crotchety, censorious Canadians’ lead in using strategic self-cancellation as a new weapon in the culture war. This will not end well for any of us.

The post Joe Rogan Vs. Censorious Boomer Gods appeared first on The American Conservative.

News from the world of Kansas jurisprudence:

The Kansas Supreme Court accepted a disciplinary panel’s ruling that a county judge violated rules of judicial conduct when he shared nude photos of himself on a site called “Club Foreplay,” but declined Friday to take any additional action affirming or rejecting the finding.

In March, the Kansas Commission on Judicial Conduct determined that Russell County Magistrate Judge Marty Clark breached ethical standards when he shared nude photos of himself with another couple on “Club Foreplay,” an online dating site for swingers.

Clark resigned from the bench in May. Because he had already stepped down, the court said that it would accept the commission’s decision and take no further action.

I commend to you the opinion of Kansas State Supreme Court Justice Caleb Stegall, a friend of mine for almost twenty years, and one of the original crunchy cons. Caleb is a staunch religious conservative, but he comes out defending the disgraced magistrate. Justice Stegall’s commentary begins on Page 13 of the Court ruling. In what is surely a first in the annals of legal history, the Justice cites both René Girard and Austin Powers. Justice Stegall uses the ruling in part to discuss how technology and norms around surveillance (including self-surveillance) are wreaking havoc on the idea of privacy.

Here is an excerpt:

Today’s case illustrates that one consequence of elevating judges to the “supreme” arbiters of society is that we will endure bizarre replays of age-old religious controversies concerning the qualifications of priests to administer religious rites. See Cardman, The Praxis of Ecclesiology: Learning from the Donatist Controversy, 54 Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Soc’y of Am. 25, 26-27 (2013) (detailing the history of the Donatist sect which looked to the “moral worthiness of the minister of a sacramental action,” explaining that some bishops became “unworthy to minister” sacraments once they were determined to have “tainted” themselves).

Or consider another, more mundane example—the panel’s finding that Judge Clark’s picture project was “public” simply because those pictures could one day be made public. This definition of “public” cannot withstand the application of either common sense or the law. See K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 21-6101(f) (defining a “‘private place'” as where one may reasonably expect to be safe from uninvited intrusion or surveillance). In fact, what happened here looks a lot like what our Legislature has recently outlawed as “revenge porn” or “nonconsensual pornography.” See K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 21-6101(a)(8) (prohibiting dissemination of “any videotape, photograph, film or image of another identifiable person 18 years of age or older who is nude or engaged in sexual activity and under circumstances in which such identifiable person had a reasonable expectation of privacy, with the intent to harass, threaten or intimidate such identifiable person, and such identifiable person did not consent to such dissemination”). It appears to me that the Examiner and the Commission have unwittingly made themselves accomplices in one man’s effort to exact revenge against Judge Clark by “disseminating” his nude photographs and images of his sexual activities in which he had an expectation of privacy. See K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 21-6101(a)(8).

Would the Examiner and panel ever have used such disparaging and salacious terms along with such intimate and detailed descriptions to characterize the lives and practices of other, more socially accepted, sexual minorities? Would the Examiner file a case on such questionable legal grounds, for example, based solely on intimate photographs of a Kansas judge handed over by a spurned homosexual lover? What about photographs of consensual but unconventional sexual practices engaged in by a heterosexual married couple given to the Examiner by one of the spouses after a nasty divorce? Or is this simply the age-old game of the powerful scapegoating people who have no real constituency or friends in high places?

I may be an unexpected defender of “consensually non-monogamous” judges— and I have no difficulty condemning adultery as morally destructive—but above all else, the rule of law condemns the arbitrary and unaccountable power of the state to pick winners and losers, reward friends and punish enemies, and protect its own interests above the public’s. Such abuses and the hypocrisy they reveal are the real threat to the legitimacy and integrity of the judiciary. The rule of law is not so weak it will collapse in the face of a few bedroom peccadillos or the occasional clownish, embarrassing episodes of official misadventure. But it is not so strong it can long endure the misrule of arbitrary double standards—which amount to a special kind of breach of the social contract.

An objection may be quickly raised that the moral content and quality of the personal character and integrity of our public officials matter. And more, that if a person becomes a public official like a judge, that person has agreed to make his or her private life a matter of public interest. There is real truth to this. But it is a grave mistake to think that either the Commission, the Examiner, or this court represent the mores of the public—mores which, as every honest political observer would admit, prove to be inscrutable at times. Indeed, even if such mores were knowable, by what right would we claim the authority to enforce the moral qualms of the public of its behalf?

None of this means that within our system of government public officials are immune from either criticism or sanction for their private behavior and personal character. They are not. Judges are not. There are two clear and available political means for the public to express its own moral qualms about a public official’s private behavior and character—sexual or otherwise. At the ballot box [in Kansas, magistrate judges are elected — RD] and in an impeachment proceeding.

… Nothing in my opinion today should be read to conclude that I think Judge Clark should have remained a judge. My judgment is more limited—if a public official is to be removed from office or otherwise sanctioned for lawful private conduct unrelated to the performance of his or her public duties, that sanction must be procured through political means. It is not our role to decide for the public what counts as sufficiently acceptable character for the job.

I never would have expected Caleb Stegall to defend a magistrate who is a swinger in his off-hours, but this ruling seems principled and important. Judge Marty Clark disgraced himself, and his resignation was in right order. But Justice Stegall raises vital questions about privacy, and the nature of the judiciary. In standing up for a sad-sack swinger whose conduct was not illegal or related to his role as a magistrate, the justice is standing up for the right of privacy, and for the principle that judges are human beings.

The post Swinger Judges Are Only Human, Baby appeared first on The American Conservative.

Twenty years ago, neocons denounced as traitors to America those Americans, like Pat Buchanan, who opposed the Iraq War. Today, they’re denouncing us on the Right who oppose war with Russia as Neville Chamberlains. Here’s Matt K. Lewis in The Daily Beast, criticizing “MAGA tough guys”:

Donald Trump has conquered the GOP as a cult of personality, but the body politic is still trying to reject the foreign objects of Trumpism. As Russia masses troops on Ukraine’s border, an unresolved schism on the right has been exposed: the Russian bear.

In one corner are the Reagan Republicans who don’t trust Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB agent, and who believe it’s dangerous to allow regimes to invade their neighbors. In the other corner are the America Firsters who would sit on their hands if Russia invaded and occupied Ukraine.

Ah, see what he’s doing here? When did it become America’s responsibility to decide which nations are “allowed” to do what? An notice the sleight of hand here: To believe that the US has no business getting involved in this particular dispute between Russia and Ukraine is, in Matt Lewis’s view, to be universally in favor of regimes invading their neighbors. There might be some of us on the Right who are universal anti-interventionists, but I can’t think of any of them. Speaking for myself and those I know among the right-wing critics of US aggression in the Ukraine case, we think that putting America between Russia and Ukraine is unwise. But if these neocon hawks can successfully brand us all as global appeasers, they don’t have to make the case for intervention in a dispute that most Americans don’t believe is our business, or at least not worth risking war over. 

More:

More recently, [Tucker] Carlson suggested NATO was to blame for Russia’s actions. “Imagine if Mexico fell under the direct military control of China, we would see that as a threat of course,” Carlson explained. “That’s how Russia views NATO control of Ukraine. Why wouldn’t they?”

It’s ironic that this isolationist strain is gaining traction (according to Gallup, the number of Republicans calling Russia an ally or friend rose from 22 percent to 40 percent between 2014 and 2018), even as the right increasingly fetishizes political machismo.

For years, foreign policy hawks invoked the icon of appeasement, Neville Chamberlain, to emasculate their more dovish liberal opponents. Today, the macho men on the right are arguing that an illegal incursion by an authoritarian regime into a European nation-state isn’t our business. It’s Chamberlain’s folly delivered with a confident Churchillian swagger.

But why is this happening now? There are multiple reasons, including either grudging or explicit admiration for Vladimir Putin, whose dictatorial strongman persona exhibits many of the stereotypical attributes of masculinity.

This is childish. The idea that the only reason American conservatives would oppose putting the US on a war footing with Russia over Ukraine is a desire to suck up to macho Vladimir Putin is as stupid as it is offensive. Did Matt Lewis not observe the catastrophic foreign policy and military failures of the US in the past 20 years? Does he not get that many of us do not trust the judgment of our foreign policy and Pentagon elites? Might it just be the case that we have the sense to look at the regional map, and our history books, and understand that Russia and Ukraine’s connections are ancient and intimate, and that Russia has vital interests there that we do not?

More:

Among the “America First” isolationist right, there’s also the argument that Putin is fighting for Christian values, while our “woke” U.S. military is the “armed wing of the Democratic Party,” part of a leftist cabal indoctrinating our young people into godless Marxism.

Consider a recent essay by Richard Hanania, president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI), arguing that Russia’s 2013 gay propaganda law caused American progressives to turn against Russia. “Russian opposition to LGBT triggers American elites more than anti-gay laws and practices elsewhere because Russia is a white nation that justifies its policies based on an appeal to Christian values,” he wrote.

According to this worldview, hostility towards Russia is a proxy war against Christian conservatives in America (and it would be disproportionately fought by Christian conservatives from America). As conservative writer (and avowed fan of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban) Rod Dreher writes, “Hanania is right—this cold war with Russia is an extension of the culture war within American society, waged by elites against the American people. Once you understand that, and once you understand which class the American soldiers who would fight this war if it ever went hot come from, you are in a much better position to grasp the pro-war propaganda in our media.”

In other words, to support Putin is to support Christianity, and to support America is to support secularism and sin and leftism.

Again, this is not only offensive, it’s stupid. First of all, to call Orban a “Hungarian strongman” is telling. This is propaganda-speak. Orban is the elected leader of a democratic country. He is facing re-election prospects this spring, against a strong opposition. If he loses, he will go into opposition. Only in the minds of Western liberals and neocons is Orban a “strongman”. Do not listen to these people. They lie.

Second, Hanania’s point, which I support, is that Western elites have a particular hatred for Russia because it is a historically Christian, European (or semi-European, depending on your point of view) great power. As I wrote in the piece to which Lewis links, western European governments came down like a ton of bricks on Hungary last summer, after the Parliament there passed a law restricting LGBT media aimed at minors. French president Macron made a statement characterizing Hungary as defiling European values — even though same-sex marriage rights were unknown in Europe until the Dutch became the first country to grant them, in 2001. There really is something about the LGBT issue that drives Western elites to the extremes. Back in 2016, under the Obama administration, a friend who received a Fulbright scholarship sent me documents from the State Department orientation for Fulbright recipients, in which they were instructed that they were to be ambassadors for LGBT rights abroad. This, even though the Fulbright scholarships are meant for research. This, even though some of the Fulbright scholars were headed to countries that are far more conservative about such matters than the US, and that the US generally expects Fulbrighters to respect the values of their host countries. But not on LGBT. Why do you suppose that is? Some of those same countries do not have US-style protections for religious liberty and other core liberal values. The State Department doesn’t expect Fulbrighters to become ambassadors for religious liberty (nor, in my view, should it). But LGBT folks are a Very Special Privileged Minority in the eyes of Western elites.

Lewis is lying like a second-rate propagandist when he characterizes my view as “to support Putin is to support Christianity, and to support America is to support secularism and sin and leftism.” I am neither a supporter nor an opponent of Vladimir Putin as a general matter, nor would I call him a defender of Christianity per se. Sometimes he is, sometimes he isn’t — but that is beside the point. I have written that I hope Russia does not invade Ukraine, and that this dispute should be worked out diplomatically. I think Russia’s demand that Ukraine not enter NATO is a reasonable one, given the strategic realities of the region. NATO should give written guarantees to Russia on that point as a way of defusing this conflict. And Russia should stand down and stop threatening Ukraine. The Finlandization of Ukraine is not ideal, but as I see it, it is the best realistic outcome to avoid war.

My point in that earlier post, the one criticized by Lewis, is that our elites can’t see Russia (or Hungary) as a normal country with normal interests — interests that may diverge from our own, but that does not make them uniquely evil, or worthy of our contempt. In the European Union, Viktor Orban doesn’t expect the rest of the EU to follow Hungarian policies, which were decided by a democratic vote of democratically elected representatives of people whose views are somewhat more conservative than, say, the average Belgian’s. But the EU demands that Hungary change its laws to abandon a standard that was held throughout Europe until 2001. What sense does that make? For that, the Dutch prime minister has said he wants Hungary kicked out of the EU. I certainly do not believe that being a conservative Christian obliges one to support Vladimir Putin’s attitude toward Ukraine, or Vladimir Putin’s policies at all. However, you would be naive to fail to understand the contempt most American elites have towards socially conservative governments of Central and Eastern Europe, because of their stances on LGBT issues. It’s part of the overall demonization of those countries by government, policy, and media elites.

As it turns out, Lewis does nod slightly towards the effect that the quagmires the neocons led us into having an effect on the Russia doves among us (like me):

To be sure, in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan it is understandable that many Americans are afraid of being drawn into another quagmire. But the opposite impulse—the desire to retreat from the world (or looking the other way while bullies dominate other countries)—is equally dangerous and provocative.

As Neville Chamberlain belatedly learned, Munich was an illusory, temporary fix. Bullies have to be confronted at some point.

Again, I’m not suggesting that Ukraine’s border is an existential threat to America. But the notion of favoring Vladimir Putin, who is cynically using the Russian Orthodox Church for political purposes, over your own country, is absurd. Looking the other way at an authoritarian aggression will only invite more aggression.

And the urge to do so is turning America First elites into today’s Neville Chamberlains.

When these people start bleating “Munich!” and “Neville Chamberlain,” you should know that your pocket is being picked. They said the same damn thing about Iraq — and they still are! As Andrew Bacevich wrote last year here at TAC on the 20th anniversary of 9/11:

The temptation to weigh in proved too much for former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz to resist. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he seconded the call for persistence. Wolfowitz looked forward to the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 as “an occasion for defiance, and for pride in the Americans who fought, sacrificed and successfully protected our country for two decades from further mass-casualty attacks,” something that twenty years ago had “seemed impossible.” Viewed from this perspective, the Afghanistan War had contributed to a larger strategic success.

Even so, there is more armed conflict to come. The war on terrorism will continue, Wolfowitz believes, and it “is going to be very long.” As an incident in that long war, Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan compared with Neville Chamberlain’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938. To drive home the point, Wolfowitz quoted Winston Churchill, implicitly suggesting that with a dose of Churchillian leadership from the White House, all would be well.

What Kagan, McMaster, Petraeus, and Wolfowitz share in common is an aversion to data. The costs incurred by the United States in its Global War on Terrorism—upwards of $8 trillion expended, thousands of U.S. troops dead, tens of thousands more wounded—go simply unmentioned, as does the fact that those costs will continue to accumulate.According to one authoritative estimate, by 2050, the expense of caring for post-9/11 U.S. veterans will reach between $2.2 and $2.5 trillion.

Though the execution of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was a total botch, Biden’s decision to stop America’s bleeding there was a correct one, and a courageous one. But Wolfowitz, one of the Iraq War’s architects, is calling Biden a neo-Neville Chamberlain. These people, the neocons, are shameless.

What does it mean to “favor Vladimir Putin over your own country”? Is this how the neocons characterize opposition to US militancy over Ukraine? How disgraceful. This is like the woke accusing anyone who criticizes the madness of Ibram Kendi of being racist. This is attempting to close off debate about an issue of extreme importance to our war-exhausted country by tarring as cowards those hesitant to worsen the conflict, and skeptical about Washington’s aims. Natalie Dowzicky, writing in Reason, says:

With a little less hubris and a little more realism, the escalation of the Ukraine affair could’ve at least been mitigated. But the foreign policy establishment seems to have forgotten how to do a cost-benefit analysis. The risks of this conflict simply outweigh Ukraine’s importance to U.S. foreign policy.

Sen. Chris Coons (D–Del.) wants “the sorts of sanctions that we use to bring Iran to the table.” But Russia controls a significant portion of global energy markets—nearly 40 percent of Europe’s gas imports—so permitting Iran-like measures against it would have disastrous effects. Economic sanctions on Russia were futile in 2014 when it invaded Crimea, and there’s no reason to believe that they would provide a deterrent effect now. More often than not, U.S. sanctions hurt American economic interests without changing the target’s behavior in the slightest.

Meanwhile, American military aid worth more than $200 million has reached Ukraine. This weapons dump has been justified a few different ways, ranging from the idea that it will change Putin’s mind to the notion that it will give the Ukrainian military a real chance against potential invaders. In 2021, the U.S. sent $650 million worth of weapons and military equipment to Ukraine—the most since 2014—and it clearly didn’t deter Putin from surrounding Ukraine on three fronts. It’s hard to believe that sending even more equipment into Ukraine will do the trick.

Defending Ukraine has never been about Ukraine, Michael Brendan Dougherty argues in National Review, but about defending “liberal world order.” The chief argument of the Russia hawks, like former President of the World Peace Foundation Robert Rotberg, is that failing to protect Ukraine from Russia would mean the U.S. is dishonoring those who fought in World War II. That the U.S. would be putting its hard-earned “superpower” status at risk. This is an exaggeration of disastrous magnitude.

“The world is paying a high price for relying on a flawed theory of world politics,” writes Harvard University’s Stephen Walt in Foreign Affairs. Russia sees Ukraine as a strategic imperative. Ukraine will never be as high on America’s list of foreign policy priorities as it is on Russia’s. And the situation in that region will never become a fight to crown the next global superpower.

People who throw out slurs like “Munich” and “Neville Chamberlain” at realists over Ukraine are not interested in a cost-benefit analysis. We should have known that twenty years ago, before we went into Iraq. Today, there is no excuse for any of us not to know that these people cannot be trusted. Recognizing that does not make Putin a hero, or even a good man. But then, moralizing foreign policy (as with the infamous “Axis Of Evil” speech neocon David Frum wrote for President G.W. Bush) is often the enemy of clear thought and reasoned discourse.

The post For Neocons, It’s Always Munich appeared first on The American Conservative.

From Los Angeles, news from the Chosen People (I speak, of course, of the Transgendered):

A Los Angeles County judge on Thursday ordered Hannah Tubbs, a transgender California woman, to serve two years in a juvenile facility after she pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl in 2014.

Before doing so, the judge criticized far-left District Attorney George Gascon, whose office declined to prosecute the repeat offender as an adult.

Tubbs, 26, recently pleaded guilty to molesting the girl in a women’s bathroom eight years ago when Tubbs was two weeks away from turning 18. At the time of the crime, she identified as male and went by James Tubbs. She did not identify as female until after she was taken into custody, according to prosecutors.

“Tubbs is 26 years old. Unlike George Gascon’s false narrative, she is not a ‘kid,'” L.A. Deputy District Attorney Jon Hatami, assigned to the Complex Child Abuse Unit, told Fox News Digital.

“There was evidence presented at the juvenile proceedings which showed that Tubbs sexually assaulted two young girls in different incidents in the past. The child victims will suffer lifelong trauma. Tubbs also has prior violent convictions and conduct as an adult.”

Prosecutors say Tubbs walked into the bathroom of a Denny’s in 2014 and grabbed the 10-year-old by the throat, locked her in a stall, and put her hand down the girl’s pants. Tubbs stopped when another person walked into the restroom, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Because Tubbs began identifying as female after she was taken into custody, and Gascon refused to try her as an adult, Tubbs was sentenced to two years in a juvenile facility.  In L.A. County, juvenile facilities can house both females and males, but in separate areas. Tubbs will be housed with the females.

More:

“Because of George Gascon’s blanket policy against transferring any juvenile to adult court, even if the 17-year-old rapes or murders an innocent child, James Tubbs will not have to register as a sex offender, will not spend any time in county jail or state prison, will be 26 and housed with juveniles for a very short period of time, and will be released with no probation or parole monitoring. The victims will get no justice. The public will get no safety,” Hatami said.

This 26-year-old penis-having sex criminal lummox will be housed with juvenile females, because the judge’s hands have been tied by the woke DA, and the laws of the crazy liberal state of California. How long will normal people put up with this insanity? Hannah Tubbs is a man. “She” was born a man, and a man “she” will always be. And “she” — he — is a child molester. A child molester who is coddled by the Soros DA of Los Angeles, voted into office by liberal Los Angelenos.

Meanwhile, as if it didn’t have enough to worry about, the Catholic Church now has to watch out for transgendered pseudo-males applying for seminary. From Catholic News Agency:

Bishops should consider requiring DNA tests or physical examinations to ensure that all seminarians are biological men, said Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki in a recent memo sent to the members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

“Recently, the Committee on Canonical Affairs and Church Governance was made aware of instances where it had been discovered that a woman living under a transgendered identity had been unknowingly admitted to the seminary or to a house of formation of an institute of consecrated life,” said the memo. Listecki is the chairman of the USCCB’s canonical affairs committee.

In one case, said Listecki, “the individual’s sacramental records had been fraudulently obtained to reflect her new identity.”

“In all instances, nothing in these individuals’ medical or psychological reports had signaled past treatments or pertinent surgeries,” he added. None of the biologically female seminarians received Holy Orders, said Listecki.

A reader who teaches at a major American seminary, whose name I am withholding, writes to say:

The issue of transgendered biological women applying, gaining entrance to, and attending seminaries in the US is back in the, or a, spotlight. A google search makes it apparent that primarily, if not exclusively, conservative Catholic sources are reporting it. It would seem easy, at a glance, to pick out the suspicious characters, the “Pats” if you will.

Julia Sweeney as “Pat”

We have, for example, about [100-150] students in our seminary program and I am 99% certain that none of them are biologically female, though a handful, at least, are fairly odd characters. Sometimes being a weirdo–not fitting in–which may include a natural effeminacy, can lead someone to consider the priesthood who otherwise wouldn’t. And that man can become a good and holy priest, even if he remains an awkward person at the far end of seminary formation. Something similar could be said for men with homosexual tendencies successfully struggling to manage their urges, which is probably a significant slice of any Catholic seminary population today.

But a biological female pretending to be a man is surely a different…animal. Part of the wider issue is that seminaries experience a significant degree of pressure to please the bishops who send men (?) to them for formation. At the same time, seminaries can (and should) be usually blamed for graduating (= recommending for ordination) deviants, perverts, and sickos that have somehow made it through the five to seven years of intense spiritual and intellectual formation (I would even say scrutinization) that graduation entails. It’s really a tight spot: bishops can choose where they send their men (?) for formation. Given the low numbers of men (?) actually interested in the priesthood, one bishop pulling his guys (?) from your seminary can have a devastating effect. I wanted to bring to your attention this bizarre situation–rare yet revealing another facet of the crisis that is also status quo–seminaries are facing in the US. To my mind it captures well the apocalypsis Western civilization is facing, and traditional Christianity therein.

Can you imagine that it has come to this? And we just sit back and let it wash over us. Seems like Pope Francis’s Vatican might be rolling merrily along with the contemporary currents.  The analysis from the Tablet (UK) is excited by the change of direction:

Pope Francis has not formally “changed” any official teaching but he’s opened the way to a more inclusive and pastoral approach to gay and lesbian people, and his letters encouraging those ministering to them are highly significant.  It is the opening of a more “synodal” approach to this issue, where the Church listens, learns and opens up new pastoral avenues. Personnel changes at the Vatican’s doctrine office, announced on 10 January, also suggest movements are afoot.

Here is a story from the UK’s Daily Mail. Andrew Sullivan says correctly that you won’t see this in American papers, which are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Trans-Industrial Complex. Excerpts:

Sharing a locker room with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has become a point of contention for some of her University of Pennsylvania teammates, who feel uncomfortable changing in the private space with someone undergoing gender transition, the DailyMail.com can reveal.

‘It’s definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,’ one swimmer on the team told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.

 Lia has told her teammates that she dates women.

While Lia covers herself with a towel sometimes, there’s a decent amount of nudity,  the swimmer said. She and others have had a glimpse at her private parts.

She stated that team members have raised their concern with the coach, trying to get Thomas ousted from the female locker room, but got nowhere.

‘Multiple swimmers have raised it, multiple different times,’ the UPenn swimmer said. ‘But we were basically told that we could not ostracize Lia by not having her in the locker room and that there’s nothing we can do about it, that we basically have to roll over and accept it, or we cannot use our own locker room.’

‘It’s really upsetting because Lia doesn’t seem to care how it makes anyone else feel,’ the swimmer continued. ‘The 35 of us are just supposed to accept being uncomfortable in our own space and locker room for, like, the feelings of one.’

Of course not. Lia Thomas is a total narcissist who, like so many other male-to-female transgenders, expects the entire world — particularly women in the world — to shut up and accept their own humiliation, and the theft of their opportunities to excel in athletics. This should never, ever have been an issue — and wouldn’t be if the United States weren’t governed by a morally corrupt elite.

Meanwhile, the Washington state legislature is working on a bill that would extend abortion rights to transgendered men.

And this from Canada:

Just received this from my son’s school. He also informed me that now with Oh Canada each morning, on the screen there’s a Canadian flag followed by a Black Lives Matter flag and then the trans flag. The level of indoctrination in Canadian schools is absolutely ridiculous. pic.twitter.com/kwDAeGlsTT

— Mia (@_CryMiaRiver) January 26, 2022

The only thing that is going to stop this is parents who finally get sick and tired of the abuse and the craziness, and start speaking out — and filing lawsuits, like this California mom,and like these Florida parents. About the Florida case, the Washington Examiner writes:

The parents of a Florida elementary school student are suing their daughter’s school district after their child attempted to commit suicide following the school’s efforts to orchestrate her secret transition to a male gender identity.

The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida and claims that the daughter of Wendell and Maria Perez, a sixth grade student at Paterson Elementary School in Fleming Island, Florida, had adopted a male transgender identity at school with the support of administrators, who hid the girl’s gender dysphoria from her parents.

It was not until the Perezes’ daughter, identified as A.P. in court filings, attempted to commit suicide on school grounds for the second time in as many days that the Perezes were notified about their daughter’s male gender identity, the lawsuit says.

“Prior to the [suicide attempt], A.P. had not exhibited any signs of gender confusion or questioning of her biological sex,” the lawsuit says. “In fact, just before the incident she had told her mother that she believed that people who say they are transgender have a problem with their minds because ‘if you’re a boy, you’re a boy, if you’re a girl, you’re a girl.’”

The court filing says that A.P. and the school had sought to keep her parents in the dark regarding her transgender identity due to their Catholic faith, which teaches that sex and gender are immutable.

Folks, it will not stop until we force it to be stopped. This cannot be done painlessly. The woke have established their tyranny not by shedding blood, but by shedding tears. This is what it means for the therapeutic to have triumphed: it means 26-year-old male sex criminals who claim to be women get to live with juvenile females in jail. It means that women’s athletics are being destroyed by biological males, and women must shut their mouths and accept it. It means that the schools propagandize our children to hate their bodies, and then conspire to change their sex and deceive parents about it.

Enough. Enough! Fight the power! If you don’t know what your kid is being told at school, you had better find out. This California woman thought her daughter would be safe from gender ideology at a Catholic school — but she was wrong.Read more:

In May, the Pride Student Union at our daughter’s Catholic school announced that it would have another formal meeting on gender identity, the club president’s favorite subject.

As is the case with all school clubs, a faculty member was required to attend each meeting of the Pride Student Union. Given the number of meetings focused on gender ideology, this faculty member—and therefore the Catholic school—approved of teaching an ideology that is antithetical to the Roman Catholic Church.

I asked the club’s leader to stop emailing my daughter, as we believed that this club was indoctrinating my daughter further into the gender cult.

I met with the school principal, who I’ll call Ms. K, and the school’s chaplain, Father B. I told them my daughter’s story. I begged them to help me. Instead, they simply offered excuses.

Principal K and Father B said that the Pride Student Union’s most recent formal meeting on gender had not been sanctioned by the school, and may have occurred without faculty oversight. But I know that the faculty member was invited to an earlier meeting on gender, so I was skeptical.

Principal K and Father B tried to argue that the club doesn’t “teach” anything. I disagreed.

They went on to say that they couldn’t control what students do on their own time. They went so far as to compare the gender meetings to off-campus parties that weren’t sponsored by the school. It was obvious to me that they wanted to distance the school from the club to protect themselves from possible legal ramifications.

I asked Principal K and Father B to remove my daughter’s address from the club’s email distribution list. That request was denied. Students could join any club regardless of parents’ wishes.

I asked if they were aware of the information being presented at Pride Student Union events, specifically the formal meetings on gender, or whether they had queried the faculty monitor, the club president, or any members.

Neither Principal K nor Father B would answer that question, waving it off as if I had no right to be concerned. Yet, Father B told me that my daughter needed the club. He warned me that she might commit suicide without it, and said she needed a place to make friends.

I asked what Father B knew of my daughter. The school chaplain had never met her.

Father B. is just one step ahead of Pope F., sounds like.

And by the way, even if your kid is in a solid school, don’t think he or she is safe. Central European countries are socially conservative about LGBT matters compared to Western ones, and kids usually don’t hear this stuff in school. But they’re all being indoctrinated via social media. I’ve written before in this space about the Slovenian Catholic father who told me in Ljubljana last summer that his 12 year old daughter was suffering acute psychological distress because some older American teenagers she contacted over her smartphone had convinced her that she had better choose the correct gender. It had not occurred to this father and his wife that by getting their daughter a smartphone, they were opening her up to toxic strangers who would colonize their young daughter’s mind.

How certain are you that this isn’t happening with your kids?

A reader e-mailed to say that the average member of Generation Z has been raised on social media, with their information regimen carefully curated by Big Tech, and the indoctrination supported by schools, cultural institutions (high and low), and every entertainment source. With the woke controlling all the institutions, the question isn’t how could that generation be so far to the Left, but rather, how could it not?

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