Rod Dreher's Blog, page 6

Overheard an interesting conversation at dinner last night in Budapest between two expats. Both are strongly opposed to the Russian invasion. One, “A.”, said that he can’t bear that people think of Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero, given that Zelensky was revealed by the Pandora Papers release to be as corrupt as the Ukrainian leader he displaced by running on an anti-corruption platform. Indeed, as I checked later, Zelensky really is a rich oligarch who hides his fortune offshore. Excerpt:

Actor Volodymyr Zelensky stormed to the Ukrainian presidency in 2019 on a wave of public anger against the country’s political class, including previous leaders who used secret companies to stash their wealth overseas.

Now, leaked documents prove that Zelensky and his inner circle have had their own network of offshore companies. Two belonging to the president’s partners were used to buy expensive property in London.

The revelations come from documents in the Pandora Papers, millions of files from 14 offshore service providers leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with partners around the world including OCCRP.

The documents show that Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, set up a network of offshore firms dating back to at least 2012, the year the company began making regular content for TV stations owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch dogged by allegations of multi-billion-dollar fraud. The offshores were also used by Zelensky associates to purchase and own three prime properties in the center of London.

The documents also show that just before he was elected, he gifted his stake in a key offshore company, the British Virgin Islands-registered Maltex Multicapital Corp., to his business partner — soon to be his top presidential aide. And in spite of giving up his shares, the documents show that an arrangement was soon made that would allow the offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now belongs to his wife.

And yet, countered “B.”, Zelensky really has shown himself to be heroic in defying Russia. A. agreed with that.

So, two things are simultaneously true: Zelensky is a crook, and Zelensky is a hero. It can happen; ever seen Schindler’s List? Don’t be surprised if that $40 billion we’re sending him ends up in the pockets of his pals, is all I’m saying.

And I’m also saying that this kind of corruption is simply part of life in this region of the world. Doesn’t make it right, but that’s how the leadership class rolls, everywhere. An American diplomat once told me that his countrymen of the left and the right come over and impose their own culture-war narratives on these post-communist countries, when the real story is the corruption of, well, everybody. The big anti-corruption crusader Zelensky turns out to be the same as those he trashed. Postcommunist dog bites postcommunist man. Shocked, shocked, etc.

Not just here, though. I met last year an American who works in the oil business worldwide. He told me that the two most corrupt places he’s ever done business (in terms of how. you had to grease palms to get things done) were Ukraine and Louisiana. Gumbo is better than borsht, if you ask me.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

“Don’t be surprised if that $40 billion we’re sending him ends up in the pockets of his pals,”

Not a penny will leave the Beltway. You see, help for Ukraine has to be built first — here. Ever wondered why there was such bipartisan support for the measure to the tune of appropriating even more than asked for? A brazen wealth transfer. It’s not Zelensky’s pals who are lining their pockets. In the US, interest in the war will start fading. The goods have been delivered. It’s monkey pox time!

The post No Clean Post-Communist Hands appeared first on The American Conservative.

Hello from Budapest. I had planned to fly to Vienna later this week with my son Matt, but when I called American Airlines last Friday to see if I could use miles to upgrade to the next class of service, I discovered that they had no record of me buying a ticket for myself. The error, alas, was mine. There were no seats left on Matt’s flight. The only way I could get to Austria before Matt, or on the same day as Matt, was to fly to Budapest early, spend a couple of days with friends, then take the train. Which is what I’m doing. A First World Problem if ever there was one! But at least I have the gift of being able to visit Budapest friends.

On the flight over, I finally finished one of the most remarkable books I’ve ever read, or could ever hope to read: The Matter With Things, by Iain McGilchrist. It’s quite long — I don’t know how many pages it is (I bought it on Kindle), but the book itself, in two volumes, weighs 7.44 pounds — and it requires dedication, but it is hard to overstate the rewards of this book. I have been writing about it at length on my Substack newsletter, and will be devoting more attention to it there in the coming days.

How to describe it? First, if you’re interested in McGilchrist’s work — he’s a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, and cultural critic — go to his website, Channel McGilchrist, where you can read lots more, and watch videos. The Matter With Things is a book about brain hemispheres, the nature of matter, and how we know the things we know. On the Channel McGilchrist web page for the book, it says:

The Matter With Things, the new 2-volume book from the author of the widely acclaimed The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (over 100,000 copies sold worldwide).

Is the world essentially inert and mechanical – nothing but a collection of things for us to use?Are we ourselves nothing but the playthings of chance, embroiled in a war of all against all?Why, indeed, are we engaged in destroying everything that is valuable to us?

In this landmark new book, Iain McGilchrist addresses some of the oldest and hardest questions humanity faces – ones that, however, have a practical urgency for all of us today:

Who are we?

What is the world?

How can we understand consciousness, matter, space and time?

Is the cosmos without purpose or value?

Can we really neglect the sacred and divine?

In doing so, he argues that we have become enslaved to an account of things dominated by the brain’s left hemisphere, one that blinds us to an awe-inspiring reality that is all around us, had we but eyes to see it. He suggests that in order to understand ourselves and the world we need science and intuition, reason and imagination, not just one or two; that they are in any case far from being in conflict; and that the brain’s right hemisphere plays the most important part in each. And he shows us how to recognise the ‘signature’ of the left hemisphere in our thinking, so as to avoid making decisions that bring disaster in their wake.

Following the paths of cutting-edge neurology, philosophy and physics, he reveals how each leads us to a similar vision of the world, one that is both profound and beautiful – and happens to be in line with the deepest traditions of human wisdom.

It is a vision that returns the world to life, and us to a better way of living in it: one we must embrace if we are to survive.

Prof. Ronan Sharkey of the Institut Catholique in Paris, writing in The Tablet, said:

In a new book of remarkable inspiration and erudition, a retired consultant psychiatrist who lives on the Isle of Skye argues that we have become enslaved by an account of ‘things’ dominated by the brain’s left hemisphere, blinding us to an awe-inspiring reality that is all around us

Though not quite yet a household name, Iain McGilchrist is leading a quiet but far-reaching revolution in the understanding of who we are as human beings, one with potentially momentous consequences for many of the preoccupations – from ecology and health care to economics and artificial intelligence – that weigh on our present and darken our future. Not the least surprising aspect of this revolution is that it began in poetry and has now achieved its most complete expression in a monumental two-volume work, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, just published, that ends in a form of undogmatic and heterodox theology.

I’m not sure how heterodox the theology is, but no matter. Sharkey is right: this is a BIG book, in every sense of the word. As I reached its final pages, I read this passage. I had to screenshot them from the Kindle version, so you’ll need to read them in slightly unusual order:

Let’s repeat the key line:

Indeed, if you had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would have been hard to improve on our current formula: remove yourself as far as possible from the natural world; repudiate the continuity of your culture; believe you are wise enough to do whatever you happen to want and not only get aways with it, but have a right to it — and a right to silence those who disagree; minimise the role played by a common body of belief; actively attack and dismantle every social structure as a potential source of oppression; and reject the idea of a transcendent set of values.

About the “current formula” in that last, long sentence, I thought about Uvalde. And I thought about this great Bethel McGrew essay from her Substack, titled “There Are No Solutions”. Excerpt:

“We have to do something.”

“WE have to do something.”

“We have to do SOMETHING.”

Every single time.

And every single time, I ask, “Okay. Who is ‘we’? And what is ‘something’? And what exactly do you mean by ‘have to’?”

Less than two weeks ago, “we” were white Americans. Or white evangelical Americans, to be more specific, depending on which channels you were tuned into. And “something” was recognizing that we are all complicit in white supremacy. Or something.

This week, the Discourse shifted (because the latest evil psychopath to hijack the news cycle happened to be not-white), so now “we” are just Americans, and “something” is just agreeing with everyone’s half-baked hot takes on gun control. To prove that we care. Or something.

Of course, I could play this game too. I could say that if we’re going to talk about this sort of thing in terms of Grand Unifying Narratives, we could at least take the “How COVID-19 restrictions ruined at least as many lives as they might have saved” narrative for a test-drive. We know the Buffalo shooter first fell down the rabbit-hole of propaganda while trawling forums like 4chan in “extreme boredom” during lockdown. We know the Uvalde killer had become estranged from his father because the father spent the year prior minimizing contact to protect his elderly mother, who had cancer. So, this wouldn’t be hard. The problem is that like all Grand Unifying Narratives, it would be too easy, and so I’m not going there, because I’m not a hack.

Meanwhile, a few salient facts: In this country, we already have mandatory background checks. In this country, we already have bans on firearm ownership for felons, domestic abusers, and persons with specific mental health issues. In this country, we already have states (like California) that will not even allow you to transport a gun with ammunition in it. In this country, we already have cities (like New York) with restrictions so severe that the only people freely carrying and using guns are people willing to break the laws we already have.

We have laws. We have laws on laws on laws.

Now, it’s easy to go after the left in these moments, but this week has also provided opportunities for right-of-center disillusionment, as appalling details continue to emerge about the on-duty cops who stood down for nearly an hour while the massacre was ongoing. There’s no polite way to say this: While little children played dead, called 911 and begged for help, the good guys with guns did not do what the good guys with guns are supposed to do. They will have the rest of their lives to think about that, unless they despair and kill themselves sooner (which I’ve seen some people unironically suggest—as a periodic reminder, don’t do this, it’s bad for your soul).

Of course, in the end it was still a good guy with a gun who actually did his job and ended it all. So no, this case does not shatter the “good guy with a gun narrative,” as some have suggested. It simply means there are fewer good guys willing to bring their guns to a real gunfight than we all want to believe.

So, here we all are all over again, having to admit all over again what nobody wants to admit: There is no magical cure for the scourge of school shooting. There is no SOMETHING that WE can all be forced, collectively, to do. There are no solutions.

She is certainly not saying that we should throw up our hands and do nothing! What she is saying is that we are lying to ourselves when we comfort ourselves with the thought that if we just passed this law or implemented that policy fix or funded this government program, then these things wouldn’t happen.

It seems to me that she is making a point complementary to Dr. McGilchrist’s: that we have created a culture and indeed a civilization that produces unhappy, unstable people, and provides them with the means to stay hidden from the rest of us, and to inflict mass murder.

Before I left the US, I spoke at length to a conservative friend who lives in Northern Virginia and works at a senior level of the bureaucracy emanating from the Imperial City. He was telling me about how much worse the rot is at the elite level of US culture than normal people realize. I can’t give details without risking revealing too much about his work, but he was talking about seriously Orwellian levels of totalitarian dismantling of our sense of reality, imposed on the rest of us by elites, such as those in his workplace. Live Not By Lies tells the truth about what’s going on, he said — and this is a man who is in a position to know a lot more than most. In fact, he despairs that so many normie conservatives in America are so bound and determined to console themselves that it’s not all that bad, that we are still in some sense in normal times, that they won’t stand up and defend themselves, their culture, and their children. They are so terrified of facing reality, and so afraid of being thought ill of by others, that they are standing in the hallway, so to speak, allowing their children’s future to be murdered.

Iain McGilchrist’s book is not remotely a book about policy or politics, and it’s only about religion in a phenomenological sense (that is, “what is religion, and what does it have to contribute to our knowledge of reality and how to live in it?”. But the things that book talks about are things that we are going to have to recover if we want to survive as a people. This is also what my next book is about — and you had better believe that I will be drawing heavily on this miraculous McGilchrist book. For those who prefer to watch or listen on podcast, here is a 90-minute interview with Iain about the book:

The post Iain McGilchrist And Uvalde appeared first on The American Conservative.

Pope Francis this morning announced the creation of 21 new cardinals, most of whom will be eligible to vote in the next papal conclave. One of them is Robert McElroy, the ultra-progressive bishop of San Diego. For Catholics who actually believe what the Catholic Church teaches, this is terrible news.

And for Catholics who would like their Church to be run by men who can be trusted to do the right thing on sex abuse — well, Francis long ago showed (e.g., the Zanchetta affair) that he cannot be trusted. And here he goes again. Here’s a link to a 2016 letter that Richard Sipe, the (now-deceased) psychotherapist and foremost expert on the sexual habits of the Catholic clergy, sent to McElroy back in 2016. Excerpts:

It was clear to me during our last meeting in your office, although cordial, that you had no interest in any further personal contact. It was only after that I sent you a letter copied to my contacts in DC and Rome.

The new Nuncio, Archbishop Pierre, told my colleague he is interested in the care of and reaction to victims of clergy assault: and I am assured that the Papal Commission for the Prevention of Abuse is also dedicated to this aspect of the crisis.

I will as I was asked, put my observations in the form of a report. Your office made it clear that you have no time in your schedule either now or “in the foreseeable future” to have the meeting that they suggested. Bishop, I have been at the study and research of the problem of clergy abuse since 1960. In 1986 I wrote to Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk, president of the USCCB at the time, with my preliminary conclusions. His response was negligible, although he passed the substance onto the USCCB office who gave my figures to a NEWSWEEK reporter.

More:

Sooner or later it will become broadly obvious that there is a systemic connection between the sexual activity by, among and between clerics in positions of authority and control, and the abuse of children.

When men in authority—cardinals, bishops, rectors, abbots, confessors, professors—are having or have had an unacknowledged-secret-active-sex life under the guise of celibacy an atmosphere of tolerance of behaviors within the system is made operative.

Many of the sexual patterns are set up during seminary years or in early years after ordination when sexual experimentation is initiated or sustained.

The 2009 Vatican Report (in English) on American seminaries invented a new term—transitional homosexuality. I believe this is due to the awareness of the frequent activity in the homosocial structure of seminary and religious life.

I was on the staff of three major seminaries, one Pontifical, from 1967 to 1984. I served as a consultant for seminaries from 1966 to 1996. That gave me a broad contact with several other seminaries, their Rectors and staffs.

I was aware, from information shared by their partners, that a number of rectors (at least three) and also some staff members, were having periodic sex with students.

At one seminary fully one-fourth of the professors had ongoing sexual contacts with men or women in more or less consensual arrangements.

It is credibly established that thirty percent (30%) of U.S. bishops have a homosexual orientation. This is not a condemnation nor an allegation of malfeasance. The list of homosexual Popes and saints is long and illustrious.

A serious conflict arises when bishops who have had or are having sexually active lives with men or women defend their behavior with denial, cover up, and public pronouncements against those same behaviors in others.

Their own behavior threatens scandal of exposure when they try to curtail or discipline other clerics about their behavior even when it is criminal as in the case with rape and abuse of minors, rape, or power plays against the vulnerable. (Archbishops Harry Flynn, Eugene Marino, Robert Sanchez, Manuel Moreno, Francis Green, etc.)

Here’s a passage about McElroy’s immediate predecessor:

Bishop Robert H. Brom: I have talked with the man who made allegations of misconduct against Brom and with whom he made a $120,000 settlement. The history is well recorded by several responsible reporters.
(http://www.awrsipe.com/brom/bishop_br...) Significant here is the operation of the National Conference of Bishops who in their 2002 Dallas Charter made provision for “zero tolerance” of clergy abusing minors but neglected to address violations by bishops. Instead they appointed Brom, when allegations were known, to make “Fraternal Correction” to other bishops accused.

This type of operation is typical of the pattern of cover up from the top of the institution. (Reflected in the destruction of documents by the Papal Nuncio in the Neinstedt case. Cf. Documentation provided by the Ramsey County District Attorney)

And here, crucially, is a passage in which Sipe told the bishop about the abuse of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, two years before it was exposed in The New York Times:

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been reported by numerous seminarians and priests of sexual advances and activity. A settlement with one priest was effected by Stephen Rubino, Esq. In that record the operation of McCarrick in sexual activity with three priests is described. Correspondence from “Uncle Ted” as he asked to be called, is included. One of the principals is now a lawyer who left the priesthood, two men remain in the priesthood, but refuse to speak publicly despite the fact that the settlement document is open. One priest was told by the chancery office, “if you speak with the press we will crush you”. Priests or seminarians who speak up about a sexually active superior are threatened with the loss of everything—employment, status, etc.

Those 8 who report are greeted with disbelief or even derision if they know but were not personally involved. If they were a partner in the sexual activity and “come out” they become a pariah and labeled a traitor. I have interviewed twelve seminarians and priests who attest to propositions, harassment, or sex with McCarrick, who has stated, “I do not like to sleep alone”.

One priest incardinated in McCarrick’s Archdiocese of Newark was taken to bed for sex and was told, “this is how priests do it in the U.S.”. None so far has found the ability to speak openly at the risk of reputation and retaliation. The system protects its impenetrability with intimidation, secrecy and threat. Clergy and laity are complicit.

I remind you that many, many people inside the Church knew about McCarrick, many years ago. Some would call me in 2002, as a writer at National Review, telling me that I have to “do something about this.” I would tell them that I can’t do a damn thing about it unless they are willing to make on the record accusations, or provide documents. Otherwise it’s just gossip, and potential libel. Nobody ever came forward — not a cleric, not a layman, though I spoke to both kinds of sources. Sipe was almost certainly not telling McElroy anything he didn’t already know, but at least we have on record that the man who knew more about the sex lives of US Catholic clergy than anyone else alive informed the new San Diego cardinal-designate about Uncle Ted — and the bishop did nothing.

The letter is long and detailed, with exactly the kind of information a Christian bishop, if he were any kind of man, would want to know. Sipe ends:

These and myriad other stories are to be told from documents and records. These records show [Los Angeles Cardinal Roger] Mahony’s, and other bishops pattern and practice that reflect institutional defenses of its ministers’ sexual behaviors.

I will not belabor the more than 250 abuse cases of clergy abuse I have served on as an expert witness or consultant.

I served the Attorney General of Massachusetts in the formation of their Grand Jury investigation of clergy abuse in that State (2002). And I was an expert witness to the first of three Grand Juries empaneled in Philadelphia and I reviewed 135 clergy abuse files then. Since that time I have been able to follow the working and operation of the Archdiocesan offices dealing with victims of clergy abuse. That is a paradigm of the malfunction of the American church in response to clergy.

You are well aware that your diocese has settled with many victims (144 in 2007 alone).

I have tried to help the Church understand and heal the wounds of sexual abuse by clergy. My services have not been welcomed.

My appeal to you has been for pastoral attention to victims of abuse and the long term consequences of that violation. This includes the effects of suicidal attempts.

Only a bishop can minister to these wounds.

Enclosed you will find a list of bishops who have been found wanting in their duties to the people of God.

(Interestingly, Sipe mentions the case of Father Paul Lavin, who in the 1990s was pastor of St. Joseph’s, a prominent parish on Capitol Hill. He was my parish priest when I first became a Catholic. I quit going to confession to him early on, though, because he didn’t seem interested at all in helping me struggle to learn how to be chaste in obedience to Catholic teaching. Now we know that Father Lavin was a child rapist.)

Read the whole letter. No wonder Bishop McElroy didn’t want to meet with Sipe. Sipe had his number. Sipe had the number of the entire lot of them.

So, Pope Francis named to the College of Cardinals a pro-gay ultra-progressive who turned a blind eye to sex abuse, but he also named today a longtime curial official — he runs the Vatican city-state — and senior member of the disgraced ultraconservative Legion of Christ.

You will recall that the LC was founded by the late Father Marcial Maciel, a grotesque pedophile who had a secret family, among many other horrendous sins, and who ran the wealthy, militantly conservative religious order like a cult. There are a number of conservative, orthodox Catholics who cannot understand why the Vatican did not dissolve the Legion after Maciel’s evil was exposed. And now Pope Francis, the progressive pope, has elevated one of their own to the ranks of Cardinal.

McCarrick and Maciel: the indifference of this Pope to the reality of what abusive priests, including senior clerics like McCarrick and Maciel, did to victims is beyond my ability to explain, other than utter vanity and vainglory.

Can the Catholic Church really be reformed? Or is it the case that its leadership class is too fatally compromised? I ask this as an ex-Catholic, but also as a friend of the Catholic Church, which is the institution on which the fate of Western civilization — my civilization — rests. I no longer believe what the Catholic Church teaches is entirely true, but I recognize its incomparable importance for the civilization of which I am a member. These are apocalyptic times.

(And lest you think I am indifferent to the mess in the broader Orthodox communion, Vladimir Putin and his ally Kirill, the Patriarch of Moscow, have now forced a total schism with the Church in Ukraine; even the faction that stayed loyal to Moscow has just now broken with the Russian Church, in a world-historical blow to Russian Orthodoxy. With this war, Putin and Kyrill lost Ukraine to Russian Orthodoxy. It is hard to overstate the significance of this within world Orthodoxy, and Russian history.)

Read this chapter from historian Barbara Tuchman’s The March Of Folly, in which she talks about how six Renaissance popes provoked the Protestant Reformation by their poor government. Tuchman wrote:

Their three outstanding attitudes — obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constitutents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status — are persistent aspects of folly. While in the case of the Renaissance popes, these were bred in and exaggerated by the surrounding culture, all are independent of time and recurrent in governorship.

Nobody is saying that either McElroy or Fernando Vergez Alzaga, the LC cardinal-designate, are or ever have been sex abusers. But they are both tainted by the scandal, to an extent that it is hard to comprehend why the Pope would elevate them, except that protecting the good ol’ boys network is the most important thing. I’m beginning to think that the Uvalde cops are a metaphor for a number of our elites, across institutions, including (but by no means limited to) the Catholic Church: standing around with the authority to respond effectively to crisis, but too afraid and bound by bureaucratic procedure to do a damn thing.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that this is Pope Francis stacking the College of Cardinals in advance of the conclave to choose his successor. I spoke recently to a Vatican insider who said that neither conservatives nor liberals had a clear majority, so the successor to Francis is likely to be a compromise candidate. Unless the conclave happens before these new cardinals are installed in August, Francis has tipped things in his favor.

UPDATE.2: James C., one of my dearest friends and one of the most faithful Catholics I know, comments:

Bergoglio is a mafia boss, not a pope. He rewards his friends and punishes his enemies. Remember when we saw ultra-progressive Cardinal Danneels on the loggia by him the night he was elected? The same Cardinal who had been put out to pasture after he was caught on tape bullying a man into silence after the man told him of being abused as a boy by the bishop of Bruges, one of the Cardinal’s friends? https://uploads.disquscdn.c…

Remember how he appointed Cardinal Maradiaga as his right hand man in the curia, the same Maradiaga who blamed the Catholic sex abuse scandal on Jews in the media?

Remember how he rehabilitated Ted McCarrick, and how he has been filling the College of Cardinals with members of McCarrick’s lavender mafia (Farrell, ‘Nighty-night Baby’ Tobin, Cupich, now McElroy)?

The fix is in. These are enemies of Christ and his Church. And I despair, save for radical divine intervention or near-total institutional collapse.

The post Pope Francis, McCarrick, Maciel appeared first on The American Conservative.

I don’t wish to sound apocalyptic about this, but one has the sense that at present our society is simultaneously characterized by wildly disproportionate accountability for trivial transgressions and zero accountability for profound institutional failure.

— David Polansky (@polanskydj) May 27, 2022

I can’t improve on this.

Here is more of the horror from Uvalde. I cannot comprehend the mentality that led to this. The killer was evil and perhaps deranged. But how do you explain these damn cops?! From the NYT:

In Uvalde, Texas, some of the worst fears about the police response to the school shooting rampage were confirmed on Friday when state law enforcement officials acknowledged that more than an hour lapsed after the shooting began, as the police waited to enter the classroom where students were trapped inside.

In an emotional and at times tense news conference, Steven C. McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, gave the most detailed accounting of the shooting yet, diverging in substantial points from the original timeline given by officials.

Most of the time the gunman was at the school, Mr. McCraw explained, he was inside the classrooms where nearly all of the killing took place, while as many as 19 police officers waited outside in the school hallway. Multiple people in the classrooms, including at least two students, called 911 over that horrifying stretch, begging for police. But apparently believing that the suspect had barricaded himself in the classroom and that “there were no kids at risk,” the police did not enter the classroom until 12:50 p.m., 78 minutes after the shooter walked inside.

No words.

More:

By 12:15 p.m., agents from Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrived with tactical shields, he said, far earlier than previously known. But local police at the scene would not allow them to go after the gunman who had opened fire on students inside the school.

In a news conference in Uvalde several hours after Mr. McCraw spoke, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas said he had been “misled” early on about what happened during the shooting before his comments praising the response earlier in the week. “As everybody has learned, the information that I was given turned out in part to be inaccurate and I am absolutely livid about that,” he said, adding that he expected law enforcement leaders investigating the sequence of events “to get to the bottom of every fact with absolute certainty.”

Again: why? I cannot understand it. How can you stand there, armed, in a hallway, as a law enforcement officer, and … stand there? Children were on the phone begging to be rescued. But those men stood there.

Who did this? Who gave that order? Why did those cops obey it?

The post Failure In Uvalde appeared first on The American Conservative.

I have been wondering what to say about the catastrophe that has overtaken the Southern Baptist Convention, regarding the tolerance of key leaders of a culture of sexual abuse, and cover up. I understand it less than I did the same thing in the Catholic Church, in part because I was once Catholic, and grasped how the system worked within Catholic ecclesiology. I don’t know nearly as much about the Southern Baptists, aside from the fact that it is far less systematically organized than Catholicism. Each congregation has far more autonomy than Catholic congregations. I don’t understand the degree of responsibility that the SBC’s leaders have, compared to the Catholic system. It is hard for me as an outsider to get a handle on who, precisely, is to blame for what. This is important, because I remember as a Catholic going through the first years of the outbreak of the Catholic scandal, which exploded in early 2002, in the wake of the Geoghan trial in Boston, how the justified rage of all people came down unfairly on many priests who had nothing to do with it. The priest at the parish down the street might have known as little about what was going on as his non-Catholic neighbors, and just as little power to do anything about it. On the other hand, the Catholic Church was full of people who may not have had direct responsibility for protecting abusers, but who had a pretty good idea of what was happening anyway, but said nothing.

If you haven’t been following this story, this CNN report will bring you up to speed:

I just returned from getting together with a friend who is one of the finest men I know. He is a Southern Baptist pastor who moved out of town a couple of years ago, and happened to be back visiting family. We were together for two hours, and though I intended to ask him what he thought of this scandal, it never came up. We spent a long time talking about my ongoing divorce, and about what his life was like in his new city, and about miracles, and all kinds of things. I only remembered that I had wanted his take on the scandal after I got home and read the new David Brooks column, more on which in a moment.

I am sure that this man, my pastor friend, would have expressed disgust with it all. But then, he had left the pastorate suffering from burnout. I know he’s still involved in ministry, but I seem to recall that it’s not in a Southern Baptist context. I could be wrong; I honestly can’t remember. I do remember that when he left town, he was worn out with congregational ministry. Trying to help lead a congregation through the Covid crisis tore him up, plus he was ground down by the politicization of Southern Baptist life. He was, and is, a conservative, both theologically and politically. But he hated what politics had done to the people in his church. The seething hatred folks had for each other, and the expectation that the clergy would take a side. I had two Southern Baptist pastor friends — both conservatives — who quit their congregations because they couldn’t take it anymore. One of them left church work entirely; the other is this man.

I bring him up because he is the face of the Southern Baptist faith too. He is not Paige Patterson, or Johnny Hunt, or any of the other villains whose names have come out in the new independent report about sex abuse and cover up in the denomination. And yet, those men were, and are, part of his denomination. I remember what it was like in the first few years of this decade, when I was writing as a Catholic about the scandal, and struggling intensely with the anger I felt not only at the bishops who had overseen this moral meltdown, and the priests who had participated in it, but also with the priests and ordinary parishioners who compartmentalized it away, and who didn’t want to think about it at all, because it disturbed their peace. As I write this, I’m thinking about how in 2004, I would be standing at mass unable to focus on anything but the rape of children, the crushing of their families, and the systematic cover-up of the abuse — and wondering how in the hell so many people around me at mass could be at peace with it all, in the sense of carrying on as if this had nothing to do with them. They had not molested any children. As far as they knew, their priest was a decent man. If it weren’t for what was being reported in the papers, they wouldn’t know a thing about it. And that’s how they wanted it to be.

As my regular readers know, the anger over the injustice, and the impossibility of justice ever being done, because bishops lie, and most Catholics wanted to be lied to for the sake of protecting their personal peace, finally broke me. I lost my ability to believe in Catholic Christianity. Here was the breaking point: when I discovered that a conservative priest I had come to know and trusted was in fact a liar, and an accused molester. When I broke the news, some of the people at the parish where he ministered, and where my family and I had sought refuge (still believing, naively, that conservatives like us were safe), were furious at me for telling the truth. Eventually we ended up in the Orthodox Church, but I have never regained my trust in clerical authority. It’s not that I expect every priest or bishop I meet to be a bad guy. I certainly don’t. But I have no more ability to trust them naturally than a man whose legs were once mangled in a car crash has the ability to run a mile.

Over the years since, though, I have matured somewhat, and I have learned that the problem that manifested in the Catholic Church is not specific to Catholicism. It is human. One of the reasons my attempt to return to Louisiana and be with my family down here failed is because I warned people I loved about a villain who was trying to take advantage of them, and they refused to believe me, considering me to be a cynical big-city type. Everything I told them was about to happen in fact happened — and the fallout was catastrophic. I haven’t written about this to protect the innocent, but it damn sure happened, and of course there were no apologies forthcoming. It was more important to protect the System — not a church, but a family system — than to acknowledge responsibility for allowing an evildoer to take advantage of the weak. (This does not involve sexual abuse, I hasten to say.)

This plays indirectly into the crisis of divorce that has overtaken me and my wife and children. It would be morally wrong to talk about this in detail; it is not my story to tell. It is important to say, though, that the pride and the arrogance of people who will sacrifice the innocent to protect their own peace of mind, and the system that gives them peace of mind, is a recurrent human trait. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my friend “Alison,” who was molested by family members as a child. She comes from a conservative Christian family. Her folks ought to have known what was going on. The signs were all there. But molesters are dirty people who are Not Like Us. Confronting what those kinfolks were doing to that defenseless little girl would have required challenging the System, and that was not something they were going to do. They sacrificed their child, in a sense, to protect the image of themselves as a Good Christian Family.

Alison ended up becoming an alcoholic in her desperate attempt to deal with the impact of her abuse. She finally hit bottom, and with the love and support of her husband, went to rehab and has been rebuilding her life. Part of the rebuilding has been committing herself to helping, through a charitable organization, other families with children in crisis. It wouldn’t be right to say her story has a happy ending, exactly, but it is a hopeful one, and a beautiful one.

But these crimes have consequences. I have a friend who works for the Catholic institution, for a diocese. He told me the last time we saw each other that his son had been in seminary, but dropped out, discerning that he didn’t really have a vocation. The man, a devout Catholic who had given his life to serving the church in administration, told me that he was secretly relieved. He knew how rotten the system was from the inside, and did not want his idealistic and faithful son to suffer. At the same time, he did not tell his son what he really thought, because he wanted to be a supportive father. Besides, the Church needs good priests. He believed that too — he believes it — with all his divided and broken heart.

What I learned from my own experience of having my heart shattered by the Catholic institution was not to place my faith in religious institutions. Some people quit believing in God. Not me. I came to believe that the same people who proclaim God, and who believe themselves to be His representatives on earth, would crucify His son all over again if it was what they needed to do to protect the System. Caiaphas, the high priest of the Sanhedrin, said of Jesus of Nazareth, “It is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” By this reasoning, it is better that all those abuse victims — Catholic, Southern Baptist, all of them — be crushed than that the whole System come tumbling down.

This is not just a Catholic thing. This is not just a Southern Baptist thing. This is human, all too human. I say this not to excuse any of these evildoers and the systems that upheld them, but only to say that it could happen to anybody. I remember hearing some Protestants — not all, but some — snorting when the Catholics were being torn to bits by the exposure of their own sins, acting as if this was a Roman problem. Well, guess what?

Right now, the spotlight is on the Southern Baptists, as it should be. David Brooks has written a damning column about what the SBC allowed to happen in its midst. Excerpts:

They dedicated their lives to a gospel that says that every human being is made in the image of God. They dedicated their lives to a creed that commands one to look out for the marginalized, the vulnerable. The last shall be first. The meek shall inherit the earth.

And yet when allegations of sexual abuse came, the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention betrayed it all. Those men — and they seem to have all been men — must have listened to hundreds of hours of pious sermons, read hundreds of high-minded theological books, recited thousands of hours of prayer, and yet all those true teachings and good beliefs had no effect on their actual behavior.

Instead, according to an independently produced report released by the convention this week, those leaders covered up widespread abuse in their denomination and often intimidated and belittled victims. More than 400 people believed to be affiliated with the church, including some church leaders, have been accused of committing abuse.

Preach! More:

How can there be such a chasm between what people “believe” and what they do? Don’t our beliefs matter?

The fact is, moral behavior doesn’t start with having the right beliefs. Moral behavior starts with an act — the act of seeing the full humanity of other people. Moral behavior is not about having the right intellectual concepts in your head. It’s about seeing other people with the eyes of the heart, seeing them in their full experience, suffering with their full suffering, walking with them on their path. Morality starts with the quality of attention we cast upon another.

If you look at people with a detached, emotionless gaze, it doesn’t really matter what your beliefs are, because you have morally disengaged. You have perceived a person not as a full human but as a thing, as a vague entity toward which the rules of morality do not apply.

In 2007 a woman named Christa Brown had the courage to testify before Southern Baptist officials that her youth pastor had repeatedly sexually assaulted her when she was 16. She reported that one official turned his back, literally refusing to look at her, refusing to see her. That is the sort of dehumanization that creates indifference that enables rape, abuse and all the other horrific dehumanizing acts down the road.

Character is not measured by a person’s beliefs but by the ability to see the full humanity of others. It is not automatic. It’s a skill acquired slowly. It’s about being able to focus on what’s going on in your own mind and simultaneously focus on what’s going on in another mind. It’s about learning how to minutely observe, absorb and resonate with other people’s emotions.

How do these leaders get away with it? Cardinal Bernard Law railed publicly against the Boston Globe, saying that they were out to persecute the Church. And you know, there was something to that, regarding the Globe‘s spitefulness towards Catholicism. But the cardinal used that bit of truth to confect a false defense of the indefensible. Brooks writes:

You tell a victimization story: We are under attack. They’re out to get us. They’re monsters. They deserve what they get. You tell a righteousness story: We do the Lord’s work. Our mission is vital. Anybody who interferes is a beast.

Yep. This is what the Black Lives Matter leadership, which is trying to get people to ignore how they spent the white guilt money people showered on them after the George Floyd murder, is doing. Like I said, a human thing. It’s in our character.

Anyway, read it all. 

David ends the column with this punch in the gut: “Where will the forces of re-humanization come from? Apparently not from our religious elites.”

I get that. It’s hard for me to see much hope in any elites, to be honest. Maybe I’m too cynical, but this Twitter exchange captures my mood these days:

And this response from a New Orleanian:

FEMA did the same in New Orleans after Katrina. We are on our own.

— Dewey (@scandurro) May 27, 2022

The “rehumanization” will come from people like the pastor I met with tonight. He told me about some people he is helping in counseling — people who are truly in crisis. He couldn’t give me details, for obvious reasons, but was just sharing with me very generally about the kind of brokenness he’s trying to heal. I’m realizing now that if I had asked him about Paige Patterson, and the other Southern Baptist bigs who are now in disgrace, he would have burned up my ears with his harsh opinions of them. That’s my guess, based on what I know of his character. But we never got around to talking about them because he busied himself trying to give me constructive advice on how my wife and I can treat each other going forward through this divorce in ways that can hold our children together, and talking about how he’s helping others deal with brokenness in their lives. It’s funny, but years ago, when I was a grieving and aggrieved Catholic, had I been sitting with a Catholic priest, I would have been able to talk about nothing else other than those good-for-nothing bishops, and did you see that report in the paper today about that pastor, and so forth. Tonight, with this Southern Baptist pastor, there was none of that.

Some of it is because I just don’t know the Southern Baptist world well enough to have informed opinions. But I think most of it is because over the years, I’ve given up on expecting anything from representatives of institutional religion. I have never felt more secure in my Orthodox Christian faith, but that’s probably because I spend almost no time at all thinking of the failures of the bishops and clergy. If I meet a good priest — like those amazing monks I met in Romania last month — I give thanks to God. But I don’t expect it anymore, and that is good for my faith, I think. But that’s me — I’m weak, and find it hard to trust. I mean, look, I trusted in the goodness of Family ten years ago, and moved down to Louisiana with my wife and kids to be a good boy to my folks and my sister’s kids. Now all that is gone, and I’m living through the dismantling of my own marriage, pretty much the direct result of my stupid, naive trust.

If you are struggling to hold on to your faith because of the failures of the clergy or the church, come sit by me. If you are struggling to hold on to your faith in marriage or family because of failures in same, hey, I’m your man. It hurts like hell. But the wise poet tells us to “stagger onward rejoicing” towards the Promised Land, and he is right. It’s not here on this earth, though we can catch glimpses of it that signal to us that it is real, and our ultimate destination. Remember, though, that on this earth, the religious authorities murdered an innocent man, a man who was God himself — and the crowd (people like you and me) clamored for it, as surely as any one of us sat there, or would have sat there, in the pews, protecting our innocence through pious pretense.

Where will the forces of re-humanization come from? Let’s start with our own repentant hearts. Back in 2014, when I was blogging a lot about Dante, I wrote:

Longtime commenter Matt in VA, who is gay and married, put a fascinating comment on the conscience thread:

“…none of it excuses us from individual responsibility. If you go down that path, you will end up in hell, and make life hell for those around you.”

I think straight people generally cannot appreciate how completely devoid of a concept of individual responsibility gay male culture in particular is. Sure, a big part of it is “structural”: no kids and no real obstacles to sex except whatever you carry within you/bring with you from your upbringing or religion or culture or whatever else outside of the gay ghetto. The total disaster that is gay and bi men’s sexual health outcomes (and don’t be fooled by the existence of medicines to mitigate the worst effects of that culture; it remains a disaster) is just one symptom of the overall really fundamental moral vacuum/pit.

It is a rotten deal: you listen to “fag” and “queer” being thrown around all the time as a kid, either at you if you’re effeminate or at other nongenderconforming kids if you can pass for straight…and then you grow up and hope to find acceptance and a place for yourself and get sucked instead into a culture in which you’re encouraged to view yourself as a piece of meat, in which you are socialized to treat your own body and the bodies of others as trash receptacles for incurable viruses, in which drug use and trolling for sex partners night after night on the basis of proximity are normalized, and you end up spit out at some point when your looks fade, fundamentally changed as person, often infected, and no closer to (probably much farther from) finding meaningful love than you were before you came out. And the whole time the culture keeps telling you to keep your ire focused on conservative Christians, they’re the real problem, they’re the ones to blame if you experience any unhappiness.

Gay people who refuse to be the victims of this communal-sewer culture are the ones who retain that concept of individual responsibility from wherever they got it in the first place — their families, their religions, their upbringing, maybe even just from books (I think for me, it’s been books that have helped the most, though I was involved in, and implicated in, that sewer culture for a while). My point is, that idea — of individual responsibility, the Solzhenitsyn bit about the line between good and evil being not between you and some horrible Other but being inside your own heart — that idea, that saving idea is often within individual gay people, but it is not anywhere within Gay Inc. It does not exist there. I am gay-married, but I don’t think that perennial Big Issue, gay marriage, will make much of a difference in the lives of most gay men so long as gay culture remains continues to so completely exclude the truth that *we* are (and all human beings are) our own worst enemies, we are what’s wrong with the world.

That’s powerful.

On the conscience front, as you know, I was bullied in high school, but I can remember plenty of times afterward that I was a bully, in my own way, taking pleasure in coming up with cutting phrases and critiques that tore others down for the sake of appearing clever. For this reason, I think it would be difficult for me to read some of the writing I produced in my twenties, in particular.

Every single one of us, unless we’re a saint (and very few of us are), has the potential to misuse power to serve ourselves — even if we think we are serving a Good Cause. In fact, it’s when we think we’re serving a good cause that the temptation to bully is the worst. Some of the worst bullies of our time were Catholic bishops who covered up for abusive priests. Do I think those bishops enjoyed their de facto bullying of the powerless? Of course not. I think most of them meant well. As one of them of my acquaintance told an abuse victim he threatened with personal ruin if she went public with what she had suffered, “I have to protect the people of God.” I think the bishop really believed that.

But you know what? Those who attack Catholic bishops can be bullies too, precisely because the cause of defending victims is so righteous. I am all too aware of how my righteous anger on this topic got the best of me at times. If you read Dante’s Purgatorio with us, you’ll remember that on the terrace of Wrath, Dante could barely see in front of his face for all the smoke. This is what Wrath does to us: it makes us blind. When I was in a state of wrath at the bishops, nothing mattered more to me than making them pay for the injustices they wrought. I could not see my own capacity for inflicting injustice, which was absolutely there.

This is a hard thing to deal with, in part because it blunts the satisfaction we may feel for being on the Right Side. To be sure, I’m not drawing a moral equivalence between the sides in the abuse scandal, or in the history of anti-gay bullying, or racist bullying, or any of that. My point is simply that having been victimized does not obviate your capacity to become a victimizer if you are given the chance. It’s human nature.

The Southern Baptist evildoers, and those who looked the other way and allowed them to get away with it, all face their comeuppance now. This is just. This is right. But be careful. Matt in VA was right to quote Solzhenitsyn: the line between good and evil runs down the middle of every human heart. Bear in mind that every one of us are right this very second probably turning a blind eye to something wicked that we have it in our power to stop, to expose, or to in some way resist, but we are failing to do so because it would cost us too much — even if the price we have to pay is as little as comfort and peace of mind.

The post Southern Baptist Crash appeared first on The American Conservative.

Another day of the Internet — well, the part of it I look at anyway — filled with exhortations to ban all guns, or something like it, to stop things like the Uvalde shooting. I’m not a Second Amendment absolutist, and I probably support more gun sales restrictions than most of my conservative friends do. But I think that most of this talk is people demanding Advil to deal with a headache caused by a brain tumor. I know somebody who is suffering real pain right now, with an obvious medical condition that is treatable, but this poor person refuses to see a doctor out of fear of what the doctor will say. My mom has been like that too, for all her life.

If every gun in America not in the hands of law enforcement were to disappear magically tomorrow, we would still be a country that was disintegrating. I’m going to tell once again a story that is familiar to you longtime readers, but which has been on my mind since yesterday. You who are familiar with this story can skip the next few paragraphs. I’ll put it inside a quote, so you can easily pass over:

Back in 2002, on the first anniversary of 9/11, I woke up early in Brooklyn to walk behind the bagpiper band (NYPD, I think) marching to Ground Zero. It had been arranged that a piper band would leave each of the five boroughs and march to Ground Zero, converging just before the ceremony on the grounds started, reading the names of the dead. It was to start at precisely the moment the first plane hit.

I was walking there with a journalist friend (with whom I lost touch ages ago). When we got to Ground Zero, we split up. At exactly the moment the first plane hit, a fierce wind came up, from exactly the direction that that first plane flew. There was a hurricane far offshore, not threatening land, but this was the first (and only) effect New York City got from it. The timing was bizarre; I looked at my watch to make sure it was for real.

That wind blew in gale force. My wife was back home watching from Brooklyn, and said that one of the TV commentators from a network said it was “Biblical”. It kept going the whole morning, while the event was happening at Ground Zero. After  a while I made my way to Trinity Church Wall Street, where the Archbishop of Canterbury was to lead a memorial service. The wind was howling outside when I went in.

During the service, we heard the bells tolling from Ground Zero next door, indicating that the reading of the names had ended. The church service concluded shortly thereafter. I exited, and there was no wind. I can’t say when the wind stopped, but I would bet money that it ended exactly as the reading of the names ended.

I walked back home to Brooklyn. In an hour or so, my journalist friend called, and urgently asked me to come over. I walked up to her place, and she took me into her home office. She showed me a small antique American flag that was framed under glass, hanging on her wall. It was split down the middle. I asked her what I was looking at. It just appeared to me to be a damaged antique.

She said, “I’ve had that for years. When I got home today from Ground Zero, it had torn down the middle.”

Nobody had been in her house that day. The flag remained behind glass, sealed within a frame that had not been tampered with.

As Christians, the symbolism of this was staggering to us both: in the Gospels, when Jesus died, the veil in the Temple separating the Holy of Holies from the people, spontaneously tore in half — a sign that the covenant between God and His people had been broken, but also that, from a Christian point of view, the true veil, the God-man, had been murdered, but this act symbolized a new relationship between God and humankind.

Anyway, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in a single generation after that. I think that I wrote about it at the time in National Review, though I can’t find the archive. Looking back now, 20 years later, I think I saw a sign, a prophecy. What brought it to mind was yesterday, having lunch with one of my old teachers, who said that the things that have come over this country over the last twenty years have been hard to make sense of.

Now, read this interview by Jonathon van Maren with the pseudonymous writer N.S. Lyons, published in The European Conservative. Lyons writes a must-read, subscriber-only Substack newsletter of geopolitical analysis, titled, The Upheaval. I’ve corresponded with him (I guess it’s a male), but all I know about his identity is that he works in the foreign policy sphere in Washington. Van Maren speaks with Lyons about the condition of the world today. Lyons explains that Russia’s disastrous Ukraine invasion has caused the acceleration of a new order within the West. Lyons says:

This new order is also likely to be fundamentally technocratic, power centralizing, and anti-federal. There can be no dissention in the bloc, or it risks falling apart; if EU-U.S. unity breaks or Europe fragments then this whole order would collapse, and we’d move back to a more equal U.S.-China rivalry. So, to cut to the chase, internal dissent from official values is going to be tolerated less and less. As part of that, I expect this order to be vertically integrated, with a focus on digital control, and make public-private partnership a core part of its operating system. In other words, I’d expect far more movement toward ‘harmonizing’ digital regulations (i.e. on censorship), ESG standards, formal and informal sanctions, and digital currency systems across the Atlantic.

More:

How likely is it that we will see centralized digital currency and ID and the corresponding threat to the rights of those who oppose fundamental tenets of progressive thought arrive in the next few years?

I think very likely. Both the Biden administration and the EU have described digital currencies as an urgent priority. In part, I think they fear the massive sanctions levied against Russia will encourage other countries to try to begin using digital currencies (and in particular the digital yuan, which is currently the most advanced) to start circumventing dollar/euro supremacy. To make sure this doesn’t happen, multiple central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank (ECB), the Bank of England, and the Bank of Japan, have begun cooperating to ensure their new central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) can be easily convertible. This would make staying within that currency system very convenient and unavoidably attractive for global capital.

It just so happens that CBDCs would provide governments with totally unprecedented surveillance and control over all transactions, wherever in the world they occur, in real time. It would make fine-grained control of economic incentives—say setting limits over how much anyone can spend on fossil fuels each week before their money stops working or begins to have less purchasing power—much simpler, along with making tax evasion and any other illicit financial activity impossible. We’ve already seen a recent example in Canada of how useful this kind of control over financial activity could be to enforce ideological political control.

But to make a harmonized digital currency system work, a harmonized digital ID would be a requirement, so I’d expect that to come sooner rather than later. Then cash would have to be phased out. The ECB’s report on CBDCs is quite explicit about this.

Then there is this:

With so much of the discussion around “the Great Reset,” digital currencies, the World Economic Forum, and other globalist institutions descending almost immediately into the realm of conspiracy theory, how can we initiate credible conversations on essential issues?

I think conspiracy theories are proliferating because we can all feel now the ground shifting under our feet but have no easy way to understand and make sense of that feeling of chaos. Conspiracy theories provide a simplified way of trying to make sense of what is happening. If, for example, a small cabal of rich global elites is controlling world events (as in the theory of the “Great Reset”), this makes the situation seem easier to understand. But, in fact, this is not very helpful, since things are actually even crazier than that! Many systemic forces and factors and ideas are at work changing the world right now, over and above many different people and groups with different interests. Depersonalizing this and trying to disentangle different causes and effects and how all these things fit together is no easy task. But I think it is important to try, and that’s essentially what I’m aiming to do at my Substack, The Upheaval.

Read the whole thing. And do subscribe to The Upheaval. Lyons’s most recent essay there, “The World Order Reset,” is worth the price of subscription alone. It’s long, pungent, and clarifying. The thing that jumps out at me the most is his explanation for why the West is going to push for Central Bank Digital Currencies, which would give the state total control over all financial transactions. If you are, like me, a reader of the Book of Revelation, this is the long-prophesied moment in which refusing to take the “mark of the beast” means you can no longer buy and sell. Lyons, of course, doesn’t mention Biblical prophecy, but it is impossible for a Christian who takes prophecy seriously not to read this Lyons passage in light of it:

Were Trans-Atlantis, with its preponderant share of the global economy, to establish a system that allowed for instant conversion, transfer, and data sharing between their various digital currencies and central banks, this could form the keystone of a new era of centralized power. Not only would it allow for new, unpresented methods of direct, granular financial control, but it would help to head off any long-term decline in the use of the dollar and the euro by ensuring there could be no alternative that was remotely as valuable for global commerce. It would, in effect, represent another re-founding of the global monetary and financial system equivalent to the establishment of the Bretton Woods system that cemented the first century of American power.

And, with a CBDC system in place, a market-dominant, vertically integrated Trans-Atlantis seems like it would be in a strong position to demand much of the world play by its standards and conform to its values. But what would those values be?

The Binary is Real

Are you a small nation yearning to live free? Or a regular Joe from small-town Lubelskie/Midlands/Maharashtra/Oklahoma who just wants to be left alone to grill and raise a family with the same values as your father and his father before him? Well I have some bad news for you: Trans-Atlantis is not going to leave you alone until you’ve been thoroughly enlightened. Pluralism might in principle be an old liberal value, but today there is no liberal West anymore. We are moving beyond the liberal international order, and the successor order has a successor ideology all lined up – one that it is going to be very insistent that you follow.

The U.S. State Department, for example, has already proudly informed us that it is now engaged in a “historic shift” that “requires advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities across all dimensions of U.S. foreign policy and the broader foreign affairs mission”; that it is consequently adopting an “analytical framework” that will “will underscore embedding equity into the State Department’s foreign affairs work as a strategic National Security imperative”; that this framework will be integrated into determining how all money is spent on all “U.S. foreign policy and assistance, public engagements and exchanges, grants, procurement, contracts, and consular services”; that it “will engage high-level diplomatic partners and individuals worldwide” in order to “build global support for the advancement of racial equity”; that the United States will “embed intersectional equity principles” into all its diplomatic messaging and efforts to use “inclusive, equitable messaging to combat disinformation”; that it “will foster strong partnerships among individuals of underserved communities and their allies in their advocacy for social and policy change” worldwide; and will “work closely” with “LGBTQI+” organizations to “catalyze progress” worldwide; and so on.

And I’m afraid this small sampling of ideological exuberance is but one small part of a U.S. government that is eagerly looking forward “using American leadership abroad” to begin “strengthening inclusive democracies worldwide.” The Department of Defense has a new plan too. So do more than 90 agencies of the U.S. federal government. And at this point I needn’t even mention the EU’s position on this kind of thing.

But then Joe from Oklahoma could have already pointed out from experience the likelihood of Washington ever leaving you and your local culture alone. And really, when could the United States ever really refrain from being an ideologically missionary nation abroad? Never.

There are, however, some additional factors now at work beyond America’s ingrained habit of trying to remake the world in its image. The structural setup of the new order is itself likely to help push much greater ideological zeal by both Washington and Brussels.

If the dominance of Trans-Atlantic power relies on the unity of that bloc – on being able to bring to bear the full weight of the whole bloc against competitors – then any disunity or fracture within the bloc is a danger to the entire world order the bloc seeks to maintain. It could even lead to the dissolution of the bloc. Any internal disharmony is therefore simply too dangerous to be tolerated (even if the official motto of the EU still happens to literally be “unity in diversity”).

Meanwhile, there must be some clear guidelines for those who want to join this exclusive bloc and need a way to signal their loyalty. Similarly, if banishment from the club is to be wielded as an effective threat, then it will help to have bright lines to separate the inner from the outer, the acceptable from unacceptable. Maintaining an official ideological alignment will be a tempting way to try to address all of these needs.

Finally, though, we of course simply can’t discount the personal motivations of a policy elite in Washington and Brussels that are now overwhelmingly progressive in their own ideological outlook. They will inevitably reflect that ideology in their view of the world and approach towards it.

In any case, we already know how this ideological divide will be characterized: it is the dualistic “battle between autocracy and democracy” that Biden has repeatedly described (or alternatively the battle between authoritarian and “European” values, as Brussels tends to describe it, which is the same thing). This rhetorical division is now exceptionally powerful because, as Russia has now demonstrated for everyone, there really is an authoritarian threat out there. But the democracy-autocracy dichotomy will hardly be restricted to threats from the outside – it will be (and already is) the go-to way to characterize any ideological disharmony within the system as well. Or as I warned in “Intersectional Imperialism and the Woke Cold War”:

In this worldview, in order for a democratic state to be a legitimate [capital D] “Democracy,” it is not enough for it to have a popularly elected government chosen through free and fair elections – it also has to hold the correct progressive values. That is, it has to be Woke. Otherwise it is not a real Democracy, but something else. Here the term “populism” has become a useful one: even if a state is not yet authoritarian or “autocratic” in a traditional sense, it may be in the grip of “Populism,” an ill-defined concept vague enough to encompass the wide range of reactionary sentiments and tendencies that can characterize “resistance” to progress, as based on “traditional values,” etc. And ultimately, we are told, “Populism” is liable to lead to Autocracy – because if you aren’t progressing forward in sync with Democracy, you are sliding backwards along the binary spectrum toward Autocracy.

Moreover, as in the case of the struggle between Capitalist-Liberalism and Communist-Authoritarianism during the original Cold War, the insidious “forces” of Populism-Autocracy are present not only out in the undecided “Third World,” but even lurking inside Democracies in good standing – constantly threatening to tip them, like dominoes, into the opposite camp. Hence why Biden issues warnings like the one claiming that, “in so many places, including in Europe and the United States, democratic progress is under assault.” The fight against the perceived forces of Populism-Autocracy within the United States, or within the European Union, is not in this conception at all separate from the fight against the likes of China and Russia on the world stage; they are the same fight.

This cold war-inflected dichotomy between the forces of Good and Evil empire will go on to shape official policy, on everything from internet censorship and education policy, to ESG standards, to national security policies and assessments of what constitutes foreign threats. And it is certain to prompt all manner of enthusiastic interventions, at home and abroad.

So if you are country interested in neither being assimilated into Trans-Atlantis’ Progressive Utopia nor being forced out into the marginalized sphere of Putin and the Chinese Empire, you may find yourself in a rough spot for a while.

Poor Hungary. And poor the rest of us: conservatives, old-fashioned liberals, religious believers, and all other non-woke persons. Anyway, The Upheaval is really one of the best Substacks out there, and I hope you will subscribe.

Let me tell you once again: Live Not By Lies describes how to prepare yourself spiritually and communally for the future that is coming into being right now. This is going to be the rest of our lives. We have the gift, now, of time and foresight. Those who lived with totalitarianism are shouting their warnings. We are in a Kolakovic Moment at this very second. Get ready!

Now, the other must-read Substack of the moment is English novelist, essayist, and recent Orthodox Christian convert Paul Kingsnorth’s Abbey of Misrule. His most recent essay, “What Progress Wants,” is, well, worth the price of at least a one-month subscription, but I promise most of you will become hooked on it. On that Substack, Kingsnorth is doing some of the most urgent, insightful, and prophetic cultural analysis in the English language today.

It begins like this:

I was sitting around a fire recently under the trees, with a new friend. Night was coming in. The moon was nearly full as it climbed above the willows, and the bats were beginning their nightly circuit. We were drinking beer and talking about the state of the world, which can be a dangerous combination.

We got to talking about the last two momentous years: what had changed and how it had changed us. Something big, we both agreed, had shifted, but neither of us could quite pin it down. On the surface, of course, we could point to the obvious changes. The unprecedented biosecurity state which governments had imposed in response to covid. The accompanying media censorship operation. The vaccine passports and normalisation of mass surveillance. The digital attempts to enforce uniformity of opinion on key issues. Deepening political divisions. Crumbling public trust in institutions. Supply chain collapses. Coming food shortages. European war.

These are the symptoms of the times, but there was a shared sense that something else was going on behind them, and it wasn’t just the beer talking. We both seemed to feel as though something huge was moving beneath a deep ocean and we could only see the ripples on the surface. Whatever was happening, it somehow didn’t feel rational, or even really explicable. It felt like some psychic force was at work; as if some eruption from the underworld was playing out around us.

‘Sometimes’, my friend said, staring into the flames, ‘I feel like I’m living in 1913. Like we’re on the brink of something, but it hasn’t quite arrived yet.’

Yes, absolutely true. Kingsnorth devotes the rest of his essay to trying to describe what rough beast is around the corner. Referencing thinkers and artists as disparate as Rene Guenon, Augusto Del Noce, Ivan Illich and Allen Ginsberg, he calls it “Progress”. Why? Read on:

Humour me. Imagine for a moment that some force is active in the world which is beyond us. Perhaps we have created it. Perhaps it is independent of us. Perhaps it created itself and uses us for its ends. Either way, in recent years that force seems to have become manifest in some way we can’t quite put our finger on, and has stimulated the craziness of the times. Perhaps it has become self-aware, like Skynet; perhaps it is approaching its Singularity. Perhaps it has always been there, watching, and is now seizing its moment. Or perhaps it is simply beginning to spin out of control, as our systems and technologies become so complex that we can no longer steer them in our chosen direction. Either way, this force seems to be, in some inexplicable way, independent of us, and yet acting within us too.

Let’s give this force a name: a less provocative name, for now, than Moloch or Anti-Christ. Let’s keep it simple. Let’s just call this force Progress. Then, a la Kevin Kelly, let’s ask ourselves a simple question:

What does Progress want?

The rest of his essay is an answer to that question. Here is a short passage relevant to the work I’m doing on my new book:

Del Noce seems to be having something of a moment at present, provoked by a recent collection of his essays and lectures, translated into English as The Crisis of Modernity. This crisis, in Del Noce’s seeing, is one of exclusion: it is what the modern way of seeing leaves out that matters. What is it, asks Del Noce that ‘is no longer possible’?

The answer … is simple: what is excluded is the “supernatural,” religious transcendence … For rationalists, certainty about an irreversible historical process towards radical immanentism has replaced what for medieval thinkers was faith in revelation.

Del Noce’s ideas are complex, but this claim gets to the heart of the matter. The modern epoch, guided by science, reason and the self, rejects the notion of anything ‘unseen’ or ‘beyond’. From the eighteenth century onwards, philosophy sweeps away religion: the world is now understood in purely human terms, and managed with purely human notions. Everything becomes immanent: literally down-to-Earth. There are no principalities or powers, and so everything is potentially transformable and explicable through human might. This is another way of framing Guénon’s ‘Western deviation’: a ‘progressive materialisation’ that leads us into a ‘reign of quantity,’ in which we take on the role of the Creator for ourselves.

What Progress wants is the end of transcendence.

All of this, said Del Noce, marks a radical transformation in human seeing. It is, for example, a ‘sharp break with respect to the Greek and medieval periods.’ Both the followers of Plato and the followers of Christ (not to mention every other old culture on Earth, in their own particular way) believed that truth was transcendent, eternal and uncreated, and could be known through some combination of faith, practice and reason. No longer, said Del Noce: the only ‘transcendence’ that our age will permit is that which we create ourselves :

Modernity marks a major break by fully developing the anthropological theme, so that transcendence pictured as ‘beyond’ is replaced by transcendence within the world.

‘Transcendence within the world’ can also be translated as ‘Progress’. With no ultimate truth or higher story, there is nothing to stop us bending the universe to our desires: indeed, to do so is our duty. This, in Del Noce’s telling, explained twentieth century history. Having replaced religion with philosophy, we then tried putting philosophy into practice on a grand scale, with terrible results.

How do we shape the universe in the age of immanence? ‘The spiritual power that in the Middle Ages had been exercised by the Church … today can be exercised only by science’, writes Del Noce. A ‘totalitarian conception of science’ sees

… science regarded as the only true form of knowledge. According to this view, every other type of knowledge – metaphysical or religious – expresses only ‘subjective reactions’, which we are able, or will be able, to explain by extending science to the human sphere through psychological and sociological research.

But the rise of science did not lead to the end of religion, however much Richard Dawkins might like it to be so. Instead – as noted by Illich – religion responded to the challenge by becoming immanent itself. Western Christianity progressively abandoned its commitment to transcendence and was ‘resolved into philosophy’, allowing itself to be brought down to Earth, into the realm of social activism, politics and ideas. ‘The conversion of a large part of the religious world to the idea of modernity’, said Del Noce, ‘accelerated the process of disintegration’ that the modern revolution had unleashed.

What Progress wants is the death of God.

One more passage:

Modernity, in the final accounting, took aim at all authority, all tradition, everything rooted and everything past. Del Noce’s prediction, made decades ago, was that the end result of modernity’s revolutions would be the rise of a ‘new totalitarianism’. This time around it would not involve jackboots and uniforms. Instead, it would be a technocracy built on scientism and implemented by managerial elites, designed to ensure that order could continue after modernity had ripped up all former sources of authority and truth:

The age of the revolution gave up on searching for unity, and accepted a sharp opposition. The ideal endpoint is identified with liberation from authority, from the reign of force and necessity. However, what has happened so far suggests, rather, that the rejection of authority, understood in its metaphysical-religious foundation, leads instead to the fullness of ‘power.’

Create a void, in other words, and into it will rush monsters.

The new totalitarianism, suggested Del Noce, would ‘absolutely deny traditional morality and religion’, basing its worldview instead on ‘scientistic dogmatism.’ It would negate all ‘spiritual forces’, including those which, in the 1930s, had been used to resist the totalitarianisms of Hitler and Stalin: ‘the Christian tradition, liberalism, and humanitarian socialism.’ It would be a ‘totalitarianism of disintegration’, even more so than Russian communism, which had presented itself to some degree as a continuation of national tradition. This time around though, ‘the complete negation of all tradition’, including that of ‘fatherlands’ – nations – would lead to rule by the only large institutions still standing: global corporations.

Read it all.Read it like your freedom and the freedom of your children depended on it.

Reading both Kingsnorth and Lyons, I understand that without meaning to, I am completing a trilogy on how to survive the “totalitarianism of disintegration.” The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies will be followed by this third book, which doesn’t have a firm title yet, but which will deal with the heart of the matter: reversing the “radical transformation in human seeing” (Kingsnorth’s phrase) by recovering the old way of seeing, and making it live again.

This is the way. This is the only way. When they institute Central Bank Digital Currencies, the social credit system will be in place. It will be far, far more difficult for us to say or do anything that dissents from wokeness then. The time to fight it is now, and while we fight with our right hands, let us also prepare ourselves with our left hands for the resistance years ahead.

The post ‘The World Shifting Beneath Our Feet’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

OMG:

This video make so much more sense now. The cops literally stopped parents from helping their kids. pic.twitter.com/zhQfUjlpjd https://t.co/DqgZUH3uCC

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture) May 26, 2022

The Associated Press reports:

Frustrated onlookers urged police officers to charge into the Texas elementary school where a gunman’s rampage killed 19 children and two teachers, witnesses said Wednesday, as investigators worked to track the massacre that lasted upwards of 40 minutes and ended when the 18-year-old shooter was killed by a Border Patrol team.

“Go in there! Go in there!” nearby women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the scene from outside his house, across the street from Robb Elementary School in the close-knit town of Uvalde. Carranza said the officers did not go in.

Javier Cazares, whose fourth grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, said he raced to the school when he heard about the shooting, arriving while police were still gathered outside the building.

Upset that police were not moving in, he raised the idea of charging into the school with several other bystanders.

“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” he said. “More could have been done.”

“They were unprepared,” he added.

I don’t get it. Look at the video. The police were armed, and wearing body armor! And that Ramos was in the school shooting little children!

I hope there is a good explanation for this. Because if not … how could you live with yourself as a cop, knowing that you just stood there?

The post What Are Police For?! appeared first on The American Conservative.

The bureaucracy that runs the US federal court system sent out to every federal judge and federal judicial official a list of books and resources to “educate, enlighten, and entertain” them during the High Holy Month of Pride. Here are some of the titles that the bureaucrats — specifically, Tiffany D. Blakey, Fair Employment Practices Officer of the Administrative Office of the US Courts — think are important for federal judges to read:

Blow Me Away is a bisexual awakening romance in which Rebecca convinces Nick, her brother and a 22-year-old straight jock, to go to a Hawaiian wedding pretending to be the boyfriend of a gay male friend. Nick finds that he enjoys experimenting sexually with a dude. Here are some passages from this fine work of literature that the federal judiciary bureaucrats think judges and others ought to be reading. Sorry for the profanity, but you need to know this:

More:

Literature! One more:

Why wouldn’t federal judges be educated, enlightened, and entertained by literary explorations about bisexual blow jobs? Can’t for the life of me figure it out. Billie Bloom says on its website that it writes “swoony high steam romance.”

Let’s move on to another title Tiffany D. Blakey recommends to federal judges and other employees of the US courts system:

Here’s the opening line:

Gosh, sounds promising. Almost as good as Jane Austen! Here’s what happens when Yami, the protagonist, stands up to do a report on her first day of  Catholic school:

Here’s another one, that involves, according to the title description, “light daddy kink, no age play and lots of chemistry.”

What is “daddy kink”? I searched the text on Amazon with the word “daddy.” Most of it I can’t publish here; it’s too pornographic. From this book that the federal judicial bureaucracy recommends for judges and others:

You know what’s not on that list? Any serious title about LGBT history or life — such as James Kirchick’s recently published (and well reviewed) Secret History, about closeted gay life in Washington. It’s all trashy softcore and romance novels.

I just wanted you to get a sense of what the federal diversity bureaucracy wants jurists and others to read — no doubt liturgically — to celebrate Pride Month. Tiffany D. Blakey tells her readers, “I hope these materials are useful and believe they can also be used as part of a larger fairness in employment program.”

Sure, if you want to employ mouthy lesbians who hate pro-lifers and the Catholic Church, gay guys who seduce straight ones, and men who want to be sexed by other men they call “Daddy”.

Thank you, Tiffany D. Blakey, for educating, enlightening, and entertaining our federal judges. It is good for the rest of the country to know who, exactly, has marched through our most elite institutions, and what they are doing with their power to queer America.

Which Republican president will fire the Tiffany D. Blakeys of the swamp, close down their diversity departments, and salt the earth where their desks were? That’s the one I’ll vote for.

The post Queering The Federal Judiciary From Within appeared first on The American Conservative.

First thing I do in the morning when I wake up is check The New York Times to see what happened overnight. Naturally the website today is filled with commentary about how the Uvalde massacre is the fault of gun rights. It turns my stomach reading this stuff — and not because I’m some big Second Amendment guy. What I hate is how easily we slot these horrific acts into a politically affirmative narrative. The Buffalo mass shooter — it’s white supremacy, it’s Tucker Carlson, they said, even though anybody who read that freak’s long manifesto could see that white supremacy was just the latest thing the kid’s deranged mine latched onto. A few years earlier, he was calling himself a Communist.

The killer in Uvalde was Hispanic, so he didn’t fit the white supremacist narrative so beloved of the Left. So they default to guns. To be clear, I believe in gun rights, but I also don’t believe gun rights should be absolute. Nevertheless, based on what we know now (meaning: this could change), that young man bought his guns legally. Should it not be possible for adults to buy guns legally now? I know there are a lot of people who want that to be the case, but it’s not going to happen, and it shouldn’t happen. So how would we have stopped Salvador Ramos?

This Washington Post story about him has rich detail about his sad life. Excerpts:

The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently and over the years, friends and relatives said.

Using weapons purchased this month, days after his 18th birthday, authorities said, Salvador Rolando Ramos shot and critically wounded his grandmother. He then went on a shooting rampage at Robb Elementary School near his home in Uvalde, Tex., killing at least 19 children and two adults and injuring others.

Ramos also was fatally shot, apparently by police. The Texas Department of Public Safety said he was wearing body armor and armed with a rifle.

More:

Santos Valdez Jr., 18, said he has known Ramos since early elementary school. They were friends, he said, until Ramos’s behavior started to deteriorate.

They used to play video games such as Fortnite and Call of Duty. But then Ramos changed. Once, Valdez said, Ramos pulled up to a park where they often played basketball and had cuts all over his face. He first said a cat had scratched his face.

“Then he told me the truth, that he’d cut up his face with knives over and over and over,” Valdez said. “I was like, ‘You’re crazy, bro, why would you do that?’”

Ramos said he did it for fun, Valdez recalled.

In middle school and junior high, Ramos was bullied for having a stutter and a strong lisp, friends and family said.

Stephen Garcia, who considered himself Ramos’s best friend in eighth grade, said Ramos didn’t have it easy in school. “He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people,” Garcia said. “Over social media, over gaming, over everything.”

Bullying. One of my kids used to have a strong stutter. He wasn’t really bullied over it, but he was so, so sensitive to it. He has conquered it by now, but a few years ago, when he was in middle school, we watched together The King’s Speech movie. He wept copiously during that movie. I held him in my arms, and he said, “Dad, that’s what it’s like.”

Understand me clear: nothing justifies what Ramos did. Nothing. But damn these bullies! Still, lots of people are bullied, and they don’t go into elementary schools and kill little children.

One more from the Post:

Multiple people familiar with the family, including Flores, said Ramos’s mother used drugs, which contributed to the upheaval in the home. Ramos’s mother could not be reached for comment.

Ramos moved from the Hood Street home to his grandmother’s home across town a few months ago, Flores said. He said he last saw the grandmother on Sunday, when she stopped by the Hood Street property, which she also owned. The grandmother told him she was in the process of evicting Ramos’s mother because of her drug problems, Flores said.

That kid, Ramos, was lost. No wonder he was a nihilist. And yet — and yet! — lots of people have terrible family situations, and they don’t go shoot up elementary schools.

It is only natural that we seek to come up with a reason for this violence. But what makes me sick is how so many of us are quick to assign blame because it makes us think that the world is controllable — that if only we pass the right laws, or implement the correct procedure, or marginalize the Bad People, that these things wouldn’t happen.

The truth is that the veneer of our civilization — of life in America — is thinning. Bari Weiss writes:

You don’t need another writer telling you what you already know: that mentally ill people getting their hands on guns to commit mass murder this easily is deranged and wrong. Accepting this as normal has nothing to do with respecting the Second Amendment. You don’t need another writer pointing out that this doesn’t really happen in other places and maybe the fact that America has more guns than any other nation on Earth has something to do with it. There’s nothing well-regulated about Salvador Ramos, though it appears he bought those assault rifles legally on his 18th birthday. There’s simply no world in which our founders would look at inner-city gun violence and these sick teenagers in suburban schools and say this was their intention.

Gun rights activists will argue that other countries have guns and that murderers don’t need guns to kill and that some of the cities and states with the strictest gun laws in the country have the highest rates of violent crime and that people kill people guns don’t kill people and that anyway good guys with guns kill bad guys with guns. (Uvalde police officers and a school resource officer reportedly fired at the shooter. They couldn’t stop him.)

Here’s where I think they are right, if inadvertently: The social rot that’s come over America, the nihilism and hatred of each other, is part of the cause here. The dissolution of our social ties—and with them the accountability and responsibility that an actual community demands—has allowed insanity to fester unnoticed. Lockdowns accelerated the isolation, the purposelessness, the lack of meaning that was already overcoming us.

If we insist on viewing this shooting as part of some isolated issue or species of violence, then we miss the point. The point is the country is being consumed by what Philip Roth famously called “the indigenous American berserk.” It stretches back many decades, or longer, and for ages, it was possible to ignore or compartmentalize. Now the brokenness is everywhere we look and it is impossible to unsee it.

This morning a Hungarian friend texted to say

People can call Hungary autocratic, a dictatorship etc, but whatever it is, it’s a place where mass shootings don’t occur.

That made me reflect on how stable Hungarian society seems compared to our own. Hungary is much less wealthy than America is, and it has its own social problems. But you feel so safe there. When my American friend and his young son came to visit, I was struck by his initial anxiety over being in Budapest. He naturally assumed it was as unsafe as most American cities. It took a couple of days for him to realize that no, this city is safe. Nobody is going to harm you as you go about your business. This is not America, where you cannot make that assumption.

We tell ourselves so many stories to make the nihilism of American life today bearable. For me, it was good to spend three months abroad this spring, to gain a certain perspective on life back home. To find yourself trying to explain to foreigners why the US has become a culture in which we are all being forced to believe men can be women and women can be men because of desire, law, and, when applicable, chemicals and surgery — you realize that we have lost our f*cking minds in this country. When you try to explain to foreigners how it is that the US has become a place where privileging certain races because of the color of their skin is a virtue to progressives, you realize that we have lost … you know. They look at you and wonder how we Americans think we’re going to hold our society together if that’s how we choose to live. And they’re right.

Here’s a really superb essay by Mark Bauerlein on the Joshua Katz affair at Princeton. As you will have heard, Princeton fired Katz on dubious charges. What Katz had really done was to challenge the progressive racism of the school. Katz spoke out against an outrageous set of demands black faculty and allies had posted, and he criticized as “terrorists” a black student faction that had previously bullied people on campus — including other black students — into compliance. Here’s Bauerlein:

The reason is simple. In higher education in America in the 2020s, if you have tenure and a decent record of publication and teaching, you can argue over many things, raise doubts about this or that leftist dogma, pose worries about identity politics, challenge the secular religion that rules the departments, and only suffer a little ostracism here and some discrimination there. If you do it with a smile, firmly but collegially, some will surely despise you, but others will stay polite and even pleasant. Everyone knows you are no threat to the prevailing order, and life goes on.

But—you must never, ever criticize students of color, especially the black students. At elite universities, those individuals are sacred. Really, they are. They possess a moral authority that surpasses that of everybody else. Those 19-year-olds scare the presidents and provosts and deans to death. If you ever want to see a $500,000-per-year college leader, usually so composed and involved, turn to stone—no confidence on his face anymore, the firmness gone from his posture—just get eight black students to march down the corridor to his office with menacing scowls on their countenances.

Our president knows what it means: nothing but pain. Remember, those kids were recruited to Ivy U with prophecies of success and joy and welcome. “You will prosper and thrill at our most inclusive and inspiring haven,” they were told. Promises were made, and if those students one year in weren’t happy, if their lesser grades knocked them out of pre-med, if they didn’t find the school’s traditions to their liking, well, that’s the school’s fault. Administrators and professors told them so every time they raised the question of systemic racism and noted the rarity of black professors in their own departments.

Katz wouldn’t play this dishonest game. He blurted a discomfiting truth about those sacred ones. When he called this one activist group “terrorists,” the charge could not stay put as a narrow description of the nasty acts of specific persons, which, we may add, Katz stated were perpetrated against other black students as well as whites. No, a taboo had been broken; no qualifying distinctions could be admitted. Katz had chided a black group, period. He was guilty, the verdict was instantaneous, and termination was inevitable. All that remained to do was to find a pretext for the execution, one that went beyond words (and thereby didn’t deny Katz’s academic free speech). The old case of a student relationship was revived, the patent farce of it being the time of the involvement: 2006.

The whole sorry affair reveals a sickness in elite academia that goes much deeper than political bias. It’s not an ideology—it’s an anthropology. Our leading intellectuals have made skin color into a focus of taboos, prohibitions, shame, crime, and punishment. In the name of antiracism, they have countenanced overt wrongs against conscience. They have elevated racial difference into a treacherous and imposing reality. How one behaves relative to it is closely watched. The ones who operate cannily within it, who know how to exploit its codes—not just obey them—and who cleverly direct its policing toward inconvenient personages—they prosper. You don’t get to be president of such institutions unless you are an unprincipled, scheming, finger-always-in-the-wind, ever so flexible, superficially conscientious and deeply calculating bureaucrat, as is the current holder of that post at Princeton.

Katz couldn’t take it anymore. He had to speak up and speak out. His blunt Thoreauvian dissent did, indeed, offend his colleagues and supervisors. The identity politicians knew immediately that this brand of refusal had to be shut down. They didn’t want him to inspire any imitators.

As for the more or less moderate liberals on campus, those utterly bourgeois figures who flirt with radicalism in a nice, safe way, they had a different response, though still a reactive one. Katz made them uncomfortable, especially where they agreed with him. He put them on the spot: “You know how illiberal this letter is—I have protested—you should, too.” In other words, he pressured them to live up to their own pretensions, and they didn’t like that. No way would they swim against the woke tide. His action forced them to acknowledge their own weasel character. To have done that to a group of people who regard themselves as superior beings was unforgivable.

What a great essay — read it all. 

I bring it up here to ask you this: would you defend a system that treats its Joshua Katzes this way? I wouldn’t. I’ve mentioned before in this space how almost 20 years ago, in a newsroom, a black co-worker leveled an utterly absurd charge against me of creating a “hostile work environment” because of a line I had written about terrorists. The allegation was beyond crazy — but I knew that the Human Resources department at the paper, and the liberal gatekeepers in management, were terrified of being called bigots, and would not have defended me had this co-worker gone to them with a complaint. I backed down because I couldn’t afford to lose my job, but from that point on, lost all confidence in the paper. I knew that this was a place — a newspaper! — where it was taboo to say anything that a black employee might find offensive, no matter how trivial and groundless the claim.

My point in bringing that up again is that more and more, our system — the one created and administered by elites — is increasingly not one that deserves our respect or loyalty. A friend of mine who is a military veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan is so disgusted by the way our civilian and military leadership handled all that that he has lost faith in them. I feel the same way — it’s why I talked my 18 year old son out of joining the military (that, and the fact that I told him as an Orthodox Christian in the woke military, I wouldn’t want him to have to choose between obeying his superiors or obeying his conscience).

In fact, it’s hard for me to think of a single institution in this country in which I have confidence. I don’t know whether I am being unduly pessimistic, or realistic. I could list a whole bunch of things here, and I bet you have your own list. The thing is, even though I have zero confidence in our elites — in just about any institution — I don’t think this is simply a matter of changing out elites. Every society has elites; hierarchy is natural to the human condition. What is it about American culture today that cultivates the virtues needed to build a strong, resilient, morally worthy society?

“America is lost,” an elite conservative told me abroad not long ago. This man had served in the upper echelons of power, so he wasn’t just talking. Other elite conservatives who work within institutions testify similarly to the rot they see all around them. They aren’t abandoning their posts; they’re just trying to be realistic about what they see around them, and the future. These people all have kids, too.

I meet people — conservative people, sometimes religious conservatives — who are dealing with teenage children who now claim to be transgender, and who refuse to argue about it. As the brave detransitioner Helena Kerschner keeps saying, institutional culture in the US has aligned with popular culture to press, and press hard, the narrative that if you think you are trans, then you are trans, and anybody who challenges that narrative is Evil. Almost a decade ago, I met a reader of this blog in my travels. She was telling me how worried she was that her daughter, who was slightly on the spectrum, was going to embrace a trans identity, because it had become a huge fad at her suburban East Coast high school. The woman told me that this was not only big among the kids, it was pushed by the guidance counselors, and the culture of parents whose kids had transitioned aggressively pushed the Narrative, making any parent who questioned it feel isolated and despised.

When her daughter turned 18 and went off to college, she visited the university health center, got testosterone, and now sports a beard to complement her vagina.

Insane. What sane person can possibly support this social and cultural order? Who can trust those who administer it?

And now look: Washington is maneuvering us further towards war with Russia. I don’t know if you can read Niccolo Soldo’s latest Substack essay (I’m a subscriber), but he cannot believe the hubristic insanity of the US right now:

Hubris is the present condition of the USA on the global stage. This is best exemplified by two current facts:

the USA seeks to confront and reduce the power of both Russia and China simultaneously to preserve its own hegemonythe USA is doing absolutely nothing to pit these two targets against one another in order to engage in the tried and tested strategy of divide et impera (divide and conquer)

This unwillingness to turn China against Russia and vice versa and instead pushing the two together in an anti-American alliance shows us that the USA is so utterly confident in its own ability to shape the world in its desired image that such logical and historically successful strategies as divide and conquer don’t even enter into their own calculations. They will take on both, and even incentive both of them to work together to try and stop them in their ambitions.

We’re going to fight in Ukraine, and we’re going to fight in Taiwan, according to our senile president. Great, just great. Our own country is rotting from within, but we’re so damned confident in our Way Of Life that we’re going to court these disasters. Oh, and look at what our State Department elites are doing in one of the most radical Islamic countries on the planet:

Hubris. They think we can impose our will on the world. This, I hardly need to say, did not go unnoticed and uncommented on in Pakistan.

Do you have any confidence in corporate America? I don’t. It started with the 2008 stock market crash, and reached terminal status with the advent of Woke Capitalism. I now see Big Business as an Enemy almost as much as any socialist does, though for a different reason. Take the insurance company State Farm:

State Farm, the household name insurance company, has launched a program that would enlist hundreds of staff volunteers across the country to distribute LGBTQ-themed books to teachers, community centers, and libraries, explicitly targeting children as young as kindergartners.

In collaboration with the GenderCool Project, State Farm aims to “help diversify classroom, community center and library bookshelves with a collection of books to help bring clarity and understanding to the national conversation about Being Transgender, Inclusive and Non-Binary,” an employee whistleblower email obtained by Consumers’ Research, dated January 18, 2022, reveals.

“The project’s goal is to increase representation of LGBTQ+ books and support out communities in having challenging, important and empowering conversations with children Age 5+,” the email from Jose Soto, State Farm’s Corporate Responsibility Analyst, to all Florida agents reads.

After this became public, State Farm reversed course. Like a good neighbor, State Farm wants to groom your children. We can win some of these fights (I’ll say it again: the fearless Christopher Rufo is more valuable than any number of grifter Conservatism Inc. organizations; redirect your political tithes to him).

The thing is, all of these big corporations are woke. They all want to groom your kids for life as sexually and genderfluid, deny your kids employment or employment advancement (if they are the wrong race), and fragilize them to make them dependent. Does your church stand up to this stuff? Some churches are woke, some have lost their minds in right-wing conspiracy theory, and many others just don’t want to get involved.

I could rant about the broken family, but nobody wants to hear it from a right-wing Christian whose wife is divorcing him. Though obviously I can’t talk about the divorce in detail, for the sake of privacy, I can tell you that our divorce has nothing at all to do with general social breakdown. It wasn’t infidelity, it wasn’t feminism, it wasn’t toxic masculinity, or any of the other things that people blame. What the divorce does reveal how even strong conservative religious and social conviction cannot shield a marriage and a family from this chaos and disintegration. It has been humbling, let me tell you.

What’s the point of this rant? Only this: Salvador Ramos doesn’t come from nowhere … but he comes from anywhere. That is, lots of young men are just as lost as that kid was, but they don’t do what he did. Yet somehow, it is easier to contemplate doing that kind of thing today. When I despair for my country, I think about the patriotism of the father of the actor Wendell Pierce. Amos Pierce, who is still alive in his nineties, was drafted into a segregated US Army, out of a segregated New Orleans, and sent to the war in the South Pacific. When he returned home, a racist Army clerk denied him the medals he had been awarded. He never told anybody, and raised his boys to be patriotic. His son Wendell, upon learning a few years back about the injustice that had been done to his father, worked with then Sen. Mary Landrieu to right that wrong.

My point is this: how did Amos Pierce maintain his faith in an America that did him and black people so wrong? The answer is because he believed that America’s better days were ahead. He had hope that America would change, would become more just for all. And he was right: it did!

Do you believe that now? If so, why? I’m not asking rhetorically. I don’t believe it, and I don’t know what to do with that lack of faith.

One more thing: in Wendell’s memoir, The Wind In The Reeds, he tells the inspiring story of his grandparents, living in rural St. James Parish under segregation. These were poor black country people living in KKK times. And yet, they held everything together, educated their kids, and prepared them for a better life. It’s an all-American story. It’s a version of the story that my own father grew up on, in rural Great Depression poverty. They were all taught to believe that America was a country where a man who worked hard and lived a life of self-discipline could advance. It was certainly more true for someone of my dad’s race than for Wendell’s dad’s race, but the point is, this was the Narrative that held America together, and gave people the faith to endure and to sacrifice.

I would like to say that Christianity was a part of that too: that people believed suffering meant something in God’s mysterious plan. That suffering could be borne with God’s help. I don’t really know to what extent that kind of Christianity was taught in the churches of my father’s day, and Wendell’s father’s day, but my sense is that it somehow permeated the local culture.

The point is not that America was ever a paradise. But it was a place people believed in. My father was a lifelong conservative, but he loved Huey P. Long and Franklin D. Roosevelt, because as he once told me, you felt like people in power were looking out for little people like us, and trying to help us.

Do people feel that way now, about any of them, R or D? The question itself makes me smile wistfully.

We used to not be a country where people sent their little kids off to elementary school in the morning, and went to identify their bodies shot to pieces in the afternoon. But now we are. What happened to us? What if the risk of a Ramos is the price we pay for our American idea of freedom?

One more time: Do you have faith that America can pull out of this downward spiral? If yes, why? If not, why not? And in either case, what do you propose to do about it?

I hope that we can have a meaningful discussion about this in the comments section. I’m really not interested in the usual suspects blaming the usual other suspects. The sickness overtaking our country today is beyond political categories. Given my own core beliefs, I plainly think it is a problem primarily of the cultural left. But that is not even close to a sufficient explanation, and that must be admitted. I’m just so damned sick of the people who have the hot takes and ready-made narratives whenever things like this happen. We’d all understand it better by reading Dostoevsky than The New York Times. The respectable nihilism of those who have marched through institutions and formed elite networks results in the hard nihilism of a demon like Ramos, who has nothing to live for, and only wants to kill innocent children because he can.

Now the brokenness is everywhere we look and it is impossible to unsee it.

Oh, but we can unsee it. Offloading all the blame onto the Other is a way of unseeing that tempts us all.

And yet, what if the answer is that there is no answer? That Ramos’s evil deed was just one of those things? What if evil ultimately cannot be understood, but is, at bottom, a mystery? At some point, we have to recognize that there is something about the nature of human evil that defies our ability to encompass with reason. To encompass something wild with reason is to attempt tame it, to bring it under our control. Tell me, what form of reason could tame the demon that possessed Salvador Ramos?

The post American Nihilism appeared first on The American Conservative.

When I was at LSU as an undergraduate in the 1980s, a high school friend who attended an Ivy League school took a semester of classes at LSU so he could go on the year abroad program that LSU and his Ivy school were part of, without having to pay Ivy tuition. He told me once that it was such a relief to be at a campus where everything wasn’t politicized. This surprised me, because my friend was quite lefty, and LSU in the 1980s was … not. He explained that you couldn’t do a damn thing at his school without people imputing political motive to it.

“If I take the stairs instead of the elevator, somebody is going to congratulate me on making an environmentalist statement,” he said. That kind of thing. It was exhausting, all the drama.

We lost touch over the years. I just looked him up. He has become an astonishingly accomplished scholar in his (non-political!) field, but now teaches at a super-woke university. I wonder what he thinks of it all. I remember him as a very gentle soul. He probably lets it all roll off his back as best he can, and gets on with his work. I looked at his publication record, and it’s very impressive. Fortunately he works in a field that hasn’t yet been woke-ified. The totalitarians will eventually get there.

During my undergraduate years, I was really interested in ideas, but I didn’t have a scholarly temperament. Fortunately I discovered journalism back then, and realized I would be happier writing about ideas as a journalist than as an academic. Thank God for that. I mean that literally: I thank Him for delivering me from the fate of a conservative, or even independent-minded, academic. If I were stuck in the academy now, given what it has become, and had no way to exit it, I would probably be crushingly depressed.

I was in New Orleans to be filmed for a documentary on American decline. It was a long interview, and at one point I began to talk about the difference between campus life when I was an undergraduate, and campus life today. I hope I’m not seeing it through the lenses of poetic memory, but I recall that we were all so happy to be away from our parents’ home, trying out adulthood. We made stupid mistakes — I got popped for drunk driving the first semester of my freshman year, and got to spend the night in the downtown jail; the booze culture at LSU in my day was really destructive — but this was all part of learning what it meant to be an adult. Back then, it was possible to have conversations with people who disagreed with you politically. They weren’t easy conversations, but there was a generally shared understanding that being at college was where you learned how to deal with people unlike yourself, in a constructive way.

Those were the days! Today in Bari Weiss’s invaluable Substack, the essayist William Deresiewicz, who taught English at Yale for a decade, reflects on how today’s students, at least the ones at elite colleges, are a flock of sheep who don’t know how to think independently, but rather know how to hack the American meritocracy, which is really a “baizuocracy” — a terms I invented using the Chinese insult for doe-eyed Western leftists. Excerpt:

I was involved in the anti-apartheid protests at Columbia in 1985. Already, by then, the actions had an edge of unreality, of play, as if the situation were surrounded by quotation marks. It was, in other words, a kind of reenactment. Student protest had achieved the status of convention, something that you understood you were supposed to do, on your way to the things that you’d already planned to do, like going to Wall Street. It was clear that no adverse consequences would be suffered for defying the administration, nor were any genuinely risked. Instead of occupying Hamilton Hall, the main college classroom building, as students had in 1968, we blocked the front door. Students were able to get to their classes the back way, and most of them did (including me and, I would venture to say, most of those who joined the protests). “We’ll get B’s!” our charismatic leader reassured us, and himself—meaning, don’t worry, we’ll wrap this up in time for finals (which is exactly what happened). The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

And so it’s been since then: the third, fourth, tenth, fiftieth time. In a recent column, Freddie deBoer remarked, in a different context, that for the young progressive elite, “raised in comfortable and affluent homes by helicopter parents,” “[t]here was always some authority they could demand justice from.” That is the precise form that campus protests have taken in the age of woke: appeals to authority, not defiance of it. Today’s elite college students still regard themselves as children, and are still treated as such. The most infamous moment to emerge from the Christakis incident, captured on a video the world would later see, exemplifies this perfectly. Christakis’s job as the head of a residential college, a young woman (one could more justly say, a girl) shriek-cried at him, “is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home!”

We are back to in loco parentis, in fact if not in law. College is now regarded as the last stage of childhood, not the first of adulthood. But one of the pitfalls of regarding college as the last stage of childhood is that if you do so then it very well might not be. The nature of woke protests, the absence of Covid and other protests, the whole phenomenon of excellent sheephood: all of them speak to the central dilemma of contemporary youth, which is that society has not given them any way to grow up—not financially, not psychologically, not morally.

The problem, at least with respect to the last two, stems from the nature of the authority, parental as well as institutional, that the young are now facing. It is an authority that does not believe in authority, that does not believe in itself. That wants to be liked, that wants to be your friend, that wants to be thought of as cool. That will never draw a line, that will always ultimately yield.

Children can’t be children if adults are not adults, but children also can’t become adults. They need something solid: to lean on when they’re young, to define themselves against as they grow older. Children become adults—autonomous individuals—by separating from their parents: by rebelling, by rejecting, by, at the very least, asserting. But how do you rebel against parents who regard themselves as rebels? How do you reject them when they accept your rejection, understand it, sympathize with it, join it?

The 1960s broke authority, and it has never been repaired. It discredited adulthood, and adulthood has never recovered. The attributes of adulthood—responsibility, maturity, self-sacrifice, self-control—are no longer valued, and frequently no longer modeled. So children are stuck: they want to be adults, but they don’t know how. They want to be adults, but it’s easier to remain children. Like children, they can only play at being adults.

Read it all. 

You might recall a story I like to tell about a European friend who spent a year recently at Harvard, doing graduate study as part of a program. He told me the thing that stood out the most for him about that year was how “fragile” (his word) elite American students are. He spoke about how professors would modify their classroom presentations to accommodate the fragility of students, who would ask him not to talk about this or that idea, because it would trigger their anxieties.

My friend went on to say that these students all believed fully that they had a destiny to rule the world. They had an unshakable belief in the justice of their own privilege. But they also crumpled before ideas that challenged them.

These people are protected by real institutional power. But they are soft, and as they move into leadership positions, they will not be able to hold their ground in the face of a determined and intelligent opposition. Now is the time to create that opposition, and to network it. This is the fight of our present, and our future. These people are Creampuff Stalins. They think like totalitarians, but they are too anxious to sustain a prolonged and intelligent assault. They hold institutional power and resources, but they lack true grit. Over the weekend I talked to a Ukrainian immigrant friend, who told me about how just about everybody he knows back home is in the fight against the Russians. Even his 61-year-old brother-in-law returned to Ukraine from his safe job in Poland, to fight the invaders. Listening to him, I realized the same lesson that the US ought to have learned in Vietnam and Afghanistan: you can throw immense material resources at a people you intend to conquer, but if they are fighting for their homeland, they are hard to defeat.

Admittedly this is only of limited application to the kind of culture war fight I’m talking about here. In what sense are elite institutions our “homeland”? It’s hard to see. Nothing will change until ordinary people come to understand that the insane ideas and policies inculcated into elite students at these universities will ultimately affect them, as the ideas and practices trickle down through the institutions that they deal with daily. It’s instructive to consider that the fights against wokeness finally gained traction when people came to understand that these activists were trying to poison the minds of their children — and they took political action. What the movement against CRT in schools in northern Virginia did — that’s the way. Ron DeSantis — he’s the way. One of the reasons I tout Viktor Orban is that, for example, he used political power to defund and disaccredit the bullsh*t academic field of “gender studies” in state-funded Hungarian universities. He didn’t apologize for it, and didn’t give a rat’s rear end what the bien-pensants of the Left had to say about it. He doesn’t want this garbage taking root in his country, if he can help it, and convincing Hungarian adolescents to cut off their balls and breasts.

Are we serious about fighting the culture war? If so, it’s going to require developing contempt for these elite institutions that already hold contempt for us — and making them pay real prices. They are going to hoot and holler about our “illiberalism” — while remaining perfectly blind to their own left-wing illiberalism, and completely sanguine about the justice of their own privilege. Deresewiecz writes:

But wokeness also serves a deeper psychic purpose. Excellent sheephood is inherently competitive. Its purpose is to vault you into the ranks of society’s winners, to make sure that you end up with more stuff—more wealth, status, power, access, comfort, freedom—than most other people. This is not a pretty project, when you look it in the face. Wokeness functions as an alibi, a moral fig leaf. If you can tell yourself that you are really doing it to “make the world a better place” (the ubiquitous campus cliché), then the whole thing goes down a lot easier.

All this helps explain the conspicuous absence of protest against what seem like obviously outrageous facts of life on campus these days: the continuing increases to already stratospheric tuition, the insulting wages paid to adjunct professors, universities’ investment in China (possibly the most problematic country on earth), the draconian restrictions implemented during the pandemic.

Wendell Berry, a man of the ornery and anti-woke Left, once sarcastically wrote:

Quit talking bad about women, homosexuals, and preferred social minorities, and you can say anything you want about people who haven’t been to college, manual workers, country people, peasants, religious people, unmodern people, old people, and so on.

That’s taken from his great essay “The Joy Of Sales Resistance”. He goes on — again, in a sarcastic vein:

The first duty of writers who wish to be of any use even to themselves is to resist the language, the ideas, and the categories of this ubiquitous sales talk, no matter from whose mouth it issues. But, then, this is also the first duty of everybody else. Nobody who is awake accepts the favors of these hawkers of guaranteed satisfactions, these escape artists, these institutional and commercial fanatics, whether politically correct or politically incorrect. Nobody who understands the history of justice or of the imagination (largely the same history) wants to be treated as a member of a category.

I am more and more impressed by the generality of the assumption that human lives are properly to be invented by an academic-corporate-governmental elite and then either sold to their passive and choiceless recipients or doled out to them in the manner of welfare payments. Any necessary thinking—so the assumption goes—will be done by certified smart people in offices, laboratories, boardrooms, and other high places and then will be handed down to supposedly unsmart people in low places—who will also be expected to do whatever actual work cannot be done cheaper by machines.

Such a society, whose members are expected to think and do and provide nothing for themselves, will necessarily give a high place to salesmanship. For such a society cannot help but encourage the growth of a kind of priesthood of men and women who know exactly what you need and who just happen to have it for you, attractively packaged and at a price no competitor can beat. If you wish to be among the beautiful, then you must buy the right fashions (there are no cheap fashions) and the right automobile (not cheap either). If you want to be counted as one of the intelligent, then you must shop for the right education (not cheap but also not difficult).

Actually, as we know, the new commercial education is fun for everybody. All you have to do in order to have or to provide such an education is to pay your money (in advance) and master a few simple truths:

Educated people are more valuable than other people because education is a value-adding industry.Educated people are better than other people because education improves people and makes them good.The purpose of education is to make people able to earn more and more money.The place where education is to be used is called “your career.”Anything that cannot be weighed, measured, or counted does not exist.The so-called humanities probably do not exist. But if they do, they are useless. But whether they exist or not or are useful or not, they can sometimes be made to support a career.Literacy does not involve knowing the meanings of words, or learning grammar, or reading books.The sign of exceptionally smart people is that they speak a language that is intelligible only to other people in their “field” or only to themselves. This is very impressive and is known as “professionalism.”The smartest and most educated people are the scientists, for they have already found solutions to all our problems and will soon find solutions to all the problems resulting from their solutions to all the problems we used to have.The mark of a good teacher is that he or she spends most of his or her time doing research and writes many books and articles.The mark of a good researcher is the same as that of a good teacher.A great university has many computers, a lot of government and corporation research contracts, a winning team, and more administrators than teachers.Computers make people even better and smarter than they were made by previous thingamabobs Or if some people prove incorrigibly wicked or stupid or both, computers will at least speed them up.The main thing is, don’t let education get in the way of being nice to children. Children are our Future. Spend plenty of money on them but don’t stay home with them and get in their way. Don’t give them work to do; they are smart and can think up things to do on their own. Don’t teach them any of that awful, stultifying, repressive, old-fashioned morality. Provide plenty of TV, microwave dinners, day care, computers, computer games, cars. For all this, they will love and respect us and be glad to grow up and pay our debts.A good school is a big school.Disarm the children before you let them in.

Of course, education is for the Future, and the Future is one of our better-packaged items and attracts many buyers. (The past, on the other hand, is hard to sell; it is, after all, past.) The Future is where we’ll all be fulfilled, happy, healthy, and perhaps will live and consume forever. It may have some bad things in it, like storms or floods or earthquakes or plagues or volcanic eruptions or stray meteors, but soon we will learn to predict and prevent such things before they happen. In the Future, many scientists will be employed in figuring out how to prevent the unpredictable consequences of the remaining unpreventable bad things. There will always be work for scientists.

We need to learn the joy of resisting Princeton, and Yale, and Harvard, and McKinsey, and Netflix, and Disney, and The New York Times, and NPR, and the Pentagon, and the Human Resources Department, and the public school that has reinvented itself as a woke madrassah. And that resistance has to be more than just a matter of arranging our thoughts and emotions. These conformists are going to use whatever institutional power they have against people like us — unless we make them pay serious prices.

What kind of prices? Let us ponder. We are in a culture war whether we want to be or not. The fight that matters is not going to be led by right-wing grifters who simply profit off of stoking angry emotions. The fight that matters is the one led by serious thinkers and politicians who want to see change in the world, not change in their pockets.

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