THE FAILURE OF EVANGELICAL ELITES

by Carl R. TruemanNovember 2021

There are times in history when Christianity feels its place in ­society coming under threat. As it finds itself pushed to the margins, two temptations emerge. The first is an angry sense of entitlement, an impulse to denounce the entire world and withdraw into cultural isolation. In the early twentieth century, American Fundamentalism offered a good example of this tendency, renouncing public engagement and defining itself against alcohol, evolution, the ­movies—characteristic productions of the society by which it felt attacked. Arguably, we see something of the same thing today in evangelical support for Donald Trump, though in this case populist Protestantism is contending for ­America’s future rather than retreating from its present. I dare say readers of The Christian Century wish that truculent evangelicals would take the Benedict ­Option.

The second tendency is more subtle and more seductive. While appearing to be valiant for truth, it conforms Christianity to the spirit of the age. If fundamentalist fist-shaking is the temptation of the ragamuffin masses, accommodation appeals to those who seek a seat at the table among ­society’s elite. And these elite aspirants often blame the masses when their invitation to high table fails to materialize.

Over the last few years, America has witnessed plenty of both tendencies. We’ve seen the anger of the evangelicals who think the country is being stolen from them, and we’ve detected the condescension of those who blame their less urbane coreligionists for the woes of the Church and the nation. Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun. As often as Christianity has had its cultured despisers, it has had adherents who respond by warring against the age or by making entreaties to the despisers—often reinterpreting the anti-Christian sentiments of the moment as fulfillments of the true faith.

Today, countless apologists insist that a rejection of Christian sexual morality is actually a fulfillment of the Christian imperative of love, which they gloss as the imperative to “include.” But one of the first of these apologists, and arguably the most sophisticated, was Friedrich Schleiermacher. He is credibly called the father of modern theology, which really means modern liberal Protestant theology. Liberal Protestants pioneered the tactic of labeling critics “anti-modern” rather than engaging their arguments. Only in the last few decades, as liberal Protestantism has declined as a cultural force, have historians recognized that theologies framed to reject modern individualism, subjectivism, and historicism are themselves uniquely modern.

When Schleiermacher was a young man, an older, confessional Protestantism still had ownership of institutional culture in his native Germany. But even then society was in transition, and ­Christianity was losing ground among elites. The first generation of historical critics was shaking old Reformation certainties. Theology, once queen of the sciences and the crown of university education, was subject to fundamental challenges from Enlightenment thinking. The empiricism of thinkers such as David Hume called into question the traditional proofs for God’s existence and the credibility of miracles. Influenced by Hume, Immanuel Kant ruled out-of-bounds any possibility of knowing transcendent realities. In effect, Kantian philosophy, which rapidly came to dominate German intellectual life, made it impossible to sustain classical Christian theism. In the world of Kant and his successors, God was perhaps useful as a presupposition by which to anchor moral duty—what Kant called a “postulate” of practical reason—but theological notions served no substantive purpose. At the same time, Romanticism was placing sentiment or feeling at the heart of what it means to be human. This, too, ran counter to inherited forms of Christianity, with their dogmas and systematic theologies full of close arguments and fine ­distinctions. Christianity was being cordoned off from the influential modes of inquiry that inspired excitement and enjoyed the prestige of the new.

It was in this context that Schleiermacher produced his brilliant work On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. He did not dispute Kant’s strictures against metaphysics, which entailed that we cannot know God’s revelation and thereby denied that Christian doctrine has authority. Instead, he attacked Kant’s reliance on argument and analysis. God, Schleiermacher insisted, is not a postulate. He is rather the object of our most intense emotions. Religion is thus a matter of feelings, not of reason. The purpose of doctrine, therefore, is not to convey knowledge but to evoke intense ­feelings that move our souls. We do not “know” God; rather, we commune with God in an “­immediate feeling.”

One rightly marvels at Schleiermacher’s ability to concede all of Kant’s philosophical points while advancing a passionate case for the enduring relevance of pious emotions. At one point, ­Schleiermacher notes that Christianity is heatedly rejected by those influenced by Enlightenment thought—and the passion of unbelief indicates that religion has great power and significance. Yet it is not so much Schleiermacher’s argument as his strategy that is instructive. Rather than defend Christian orthodoxy, he concedes the ground claimed by religion’s cultured despisers. He redefines Christianity to make it accord with the assumptions of its critics. He argues that ­Christianity is not characterized by irrational credulity, because it is not concerned with beliefs at all, but rather with feelings. By Schleiermacher’s way of thinking, Christian beliefs are symbols, cherished because they evoke the “immediate feeling” that links us to the divine.

With this approach, Schleiermacher was free to partake of the rising criticism of theological systems. He need not defend the authority of doctrine or of those who believed that Christian doctrine made objective claims about reality. By turning the dogmatic faith of previous generations into a religion of feelings and intuitions, he construed Christian doctrines as expressions of religious sentiment rather than as statements of objective truth. For example, predestination was not for him a matter of divine action effecting the eternal decision or decree of God, which divided the human race into elect and reprobate. Rather, it was a conceptual-­poetic expression of the feeling of absolute dependence upon God, which Christianity evokes and Christians experience.

Schleiermacher is long dead, as is the Enlightenment audience he sought to address. But the problem of Christianity and its cultured despisers has not disappeared. It has become increasingly evident in recent decades. Powerful forces of secularism, metaphysical materialism, and scientism, among other factors, have driven religion from its former places of influence. One need only note that very nearly all private universities in the United States were founded by religious groups and were for a long time anchored in a religious tradition, only to become secular in the last two generations. In response to this pressure, Christianity has once again put forward those who seek to persuade its despisers that the faith is not inimical to polite society.

In the mid-1990s, a sustained effort was made to rehabilitate and defend the intellectual and academic integrity of orthodox Christians. The leaders of this movement, the historians Mark Noll and George Marsden, made valiant cases for the Christian mind. In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Noll argued that American evangelicalism was hamstrung by its commitment to indefensible positions that lacked intellectual credibility. It consequently attracted the scorn of educated people outside the Church. Worse still, the lack of intellectual standards made life hard for thoughtful individuals within the Church. Noll focused on dispensationalism and literal six-day creation, arguing that these commitments were not defensible by the canons of reason, nor were they necessary for a rigorously orthodox Christian faith.

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was a bestseller and named Book of the Year by Christianity Today, the flagship evangelical magazine whose purpose was, in part, to articulate a Christianity that avoided the excesses of fundamentalism while defending orthodox Christianity. Shortly afterward, Marsden argued for what he dubbed “the outrageous idea of Christian scholarship” in a monograph of the same name. The historical portion of his case was based on research he had earlier published on the Christian origins of many of America’s most significant institutions of higher education. Marsden concluded that Christianity’s cultured despisers were simply wrong when they claimed that faith set a person at odds with the life of the mind. In the constructive portion of his case, Marsden argued that Christian scholars could cultivate careful respect for the canons of academic discourse and thoughtful, honest engagement with other academics within the guild without compromising their faith.

Unlike Schleiermacher, Noll and Marsden are careful to sustain full-blooded affirmations of orthodox Christian faith. And unlike ­Schleiermacher’s, I find their arguments convincing. There is nothing about belief in the saving death and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ that undermines intellectual rigor or compromises academic standards—­unless, of course, those standards are deemed above criticism from the get-go. But there can be no doubt that the extraordinarily positive reception of Noll’s and Marsden’s ideas came about because university-­educated Evangelicals in the 1990s were anxious to be reassured. The universities they attended increasingly told them that their faith was disqualifying. Noll and ­Marsden argued otherwise, showing that a person of faith who ­engaged in self-criticism and discarded ­untenable beliefs could participate fully in modern ­intellectual life.

Though Marsden and Noll made their ­cases less than thirty years ago, I am struck by the fact that their arguments belong to an age that is long past. The idea that a commitment to honesty and integrity in scholarship might gain a person membership in today’s universities and other leading institutions was, in retrospect, ­naive. Higher education today is largely the land of the woke. One might be a brilliant biochemist or have a profound knowledge of Minoan civilization, but any ­deviation from cultural orthodoxy on race, sexuality, or even pronouns will prove more significant in hiring and tenure processes than considerations such as scholarly competence and careful research.

Noll and Marsden are committed to a thoroughgoing supernatural Christian orthodoxy. Nevertheless, a sociological comparison of their project with Schleiermacher’s is legitimate. Like the great German liberal, these American evangelicals assumed that the problem between their religion and the culture that despised it primarily concerned intellectual integrity and respectability. Schleiermacher accepted the rationality of the cultured despisers. Noll and Marsden adopted a narrower strategy, embracing the scholarly criteria of the academy and making a credible case that religious scholars, if capable, ­deserved respect from the cultural elites. It was also true that these American evangelical intellectuals, like Schleiermacher before them, largely blamed Christians themselves for the scorn heaped on them—for Christians had failed to distinguish between the essential core of faith and its accidental elaborations, which invite unnecessary conflicts with unbelievers.

What Noll and Marsden advocated in the nineties seemed, at least initially, to bear good fruit. Their doctoral students published fine monographs with respected academic presses and obtained positions at colleges and universities. And their idea—that Christians could obtain high intellectual office if they conformed to the expectations of the scholarly guild—had perhaps no better exemplar than Francis Collins.

Collins, a distinguished Evangelical scientist, was appointed by President Obama to the National Institutes of Health. His appointment was hailed in the Washington Post as a signal that evangelicalism was finally maturing—a comment cited with approval by Christianity Today. If ever the “evangelical mind” could be said to have realized its full potential, this was surely the moment. A devout evangelical Christian appointed to a prestigious position in the scientific community by a progressive Democratic president! Collins was proof positive that, yes, a careful adherence to scholarly standards combined with a gracious and thoughtful demeanor can earn a faithful Christian a place in the professional elite. Even in twenty-first-century America, when a presidential candidate can speak of bigoted people who “cling” to religion, Christians can rise to high office and make a difference in the secular world.

Yet in the years since his appointment, Collins has consistently defended the use of fetal tissue from elective abortions. Worse, in recent months details have emerged of an NIH grant supporting research on the remains of aborted babies specially curated from ethnic minorities—an atrocity that has received no comment from Christianity Today. To be sure, Collins may not have approved the grant personally. But it must be legitimate to ask what difference his Christian presence makes at the top of his organization, given that it funds research that legitimates abortion and racism simultaneously. Woke Christians, typically so sensitive to matters of systemic racism, have been rather muted on what would seem to be a clear example of just that.

The hope had been that Collins would be an instance of what James Davison Hunter called “faithful presence”: the idea that Christians should eschew worldly notions of power and influence and not seek to change the world by direct means. Instead, by being faithful disciples pursuing earthly callings in a godly and humble manner, they are to transform the world indirectly—or transform at least those people and institutions with whom they are connected. In principle, this idea is sound, and Collins could have put it into practice. But for faithful presence to be effective, the faithfulness must be at least as important as the presence. That seems not to be the case here.

The problem with Noll and Marsden’s approach, as with Hunter’s related notion of faithful presence, is that modern intellectual culture has never been engaged in a morally neutral exercise of refining the canons of ­intellectual inquiry and debate. The leading figures of the Enlightenment and their intellectual descendants were engaged, with varying degrees of conscious intention, in an attack on the moral significance of orthodox Christianity.

In Revelation and Reconciliation, Stephen ­Williams cautions us not to take modernity at its word: Though the “epistemological challenge to Christianity must be taken seriously,” we must not forget “that it is grafted onto a fundamental resistance to the message of reconciliation.” The Enlightenment did not simply rebel against old ways of thinking about knowledge; it rebelled also against the moral teachings of Christianity. The mainstream of modern thought has deemed doctrines of human sinfulness and Christ’s atonement incompatible with human autonomy and freedom. This moral and political objection to Christianity is the dominant motif of today’s cultured despisers. Unlike the canons of scholarship, the objection that Christianity promotes subservience, injustice, and hatred cannot be accommodated by Christians. Reason is compatible with faith, but the opposite of humility before God and obedience to his commandments is antithetical to it.

Last year I taught a class in historical method at Grove City College. One of our texts was ­Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. The students’ response to the book was striking. Though they saw Marsden as a thoughtful and engaging writer, they considered his argument—that ­Christians could find a place at the academy’s table by being good scholars and treating colleagues with respect—unpersuasive in the present context. No student today thinks that a professor in any discipline at a research university who is polite and respectful to a gay colleague will also be allowed to voice his objections to gay marriage. That is not how the system works anymore.

My students have an accurate view of reality. Today’s cultured despisers of Christianity do not find its teachings to be intellectually implausible; they regard them as morally reprehensible. And that was always at least partially the case. This was the point missed by Noll and Marsden—though it may not have been as obvious at Wheaton College or the University of Notre Dame in the nineties as it is almost everywhere in higher education today. Our postmodern world sees all claims to truth as bids for power, all stable categories as manipulative—and the task of the academy is to catechize students into this orthodoxy. By definition, such a world rejects any notion that scholarly canons, assumptions, and methods can be separated from moral convictions and outcomes. Failure to conform to new orthodoxies on race, morality, sexual orientation, and gender identity is the main reason orthodox Christianity is despised today. These postmodern tenets rest upon cultural theories that cannot accommodate Christianity, precisely because they underwrite today’s academic refusal to discuss and weigh alternative claims. To oppose critical race theory or gender theory is to adopt a moral position that the culture’s panjandrums regard from the outset as immoral. The slightest hint of opposition disqualifies one from admission to polite society.

Here’s the rub: Within Christian circles, particularly those of the leadership class and its associated institutions, the desire to appease religion’s cultured despisers has become a powerful force. Like Schleiermacher, those who hold to this vision think that a winning strategy involves standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the despisers. This no longer means conformity to the canons of academic discourse, the well-­considered position advanced by Noll and Marsden. It means echoing woke outrage. And, where possible, it means laying the blame for Christianity’s failure to meet elite standards on other Christians, typically on those who stand to the right of the “good ­Christians” politically and beneath them economically and socially. Sadly, the Schleiermachian ambition to appease the cultured despisers has reinforced the Menckenite tendency to sneer at the “fundamentalist” masses. The class division in American society between the educated people who count and the “low-information” people who do not appears just where it should never be found: in the body of Christian believers.

In this respect, militant rank-and-file evangelical support for the Trump phenomenon was paradoxically a gift to evangelical elites. It was only too easy for evangelical leaders to adopt the simplistic progressive narrative: Each and every Trump voter is a hardcore ignorant bigot and, if professing Christianity, also a rank hypocrite. The idea that not all who voted for Trump did so with any enthusiasm had no place in the secular elite’s interpretation of 2016; nor did it fit with the therapeutic narrative adopted by many anti-Trump Christians. To concede that Trump’s victory was not an artifact of white Christian nationalism or some similarly simplistic construct would have demanded a painful degree of heart-searching and self-criticism on the part of the officer classes of society at large and Christianity in particular. And that made the two extreme camps, Trump and anti-Trump, similar in the moral clarity with which each believed it understood its opponents. Rhetorically, the language of many of the most prominent figures on either side was nasty in the extreme and incompatible with basic Christian decency. Yet both sides hurled accusations without hesitation because of the obvious (to them) evil of their opponents. Stories of how leading #NeverTrumpers suffered like ­Shakespearean tragic heroes at the hands of Trumpite Twitter mobs merit an equally ­Shakespearean response: A plague on both your houses!

Post-Trump, the political landscape has shifted, but the game is the same. The moral preoccupations of secular progressive America now focus on two basic issues: race and LGBTQ+ rights. ­Christian leaders professing orthodoxy cannot support gay rights in the form of, say, the Equality Act. It is therefore unsurprising that we find so much vocal outrage among members of the Christian establishment on matters surrounding race. This topic provides a perfect opportunity for Christian leaders to place themselves (for once) on the “good” side of a moral debate that is generating turmoil in wider society, and thus to stand with the cultured despisers. It also allows the older generation to assure the young that the Church is not a haven of reactionary bigots, as their secular peers would have them believe. And given America’s legacy of slavery and segregation, the race issue offers ample opportunity for public displays of self-loathing and expressions of shame, the acts of atonement that progressive America encourages and enjoys.

Yet leading anti-racist Christians operate within parameters set by cultural progressives. Police actions in 2018 accounted for the deaths of fewer than three hundred African Americans, while in the same year abortions of African-American babies accounted for more than 117,000 of the same. One would think this extreme difference (390 to one) would make abortion the centerpiece of Christian critiques of racism. But abortion was remarkably unremarked upon in the myriad op-eds and blog posts about George Floyd and critical race theory that dominated establishment Christian websites in 2020. That is not surprising: ­Condemning abortion would not have been to the taste of the cultured despisers.

Let me put it bluntly: Talking in an outraged voice about racism within the boundaries set by the woke culture is an excellent way of not talking about the pressing moral issues on which ­Christianity and the culture are opposed to each other: LGBTQ+ rights and abortion. Even ­Schleiermacher would cringe. Christian elites try to persuade the secular world that they aren’t so bad—no longer in terms of Enlightenment conceptions of reason, but in terms of the disordered moral preoccupations of the day.

For all his brilliance, Schleiermacher did little to mitigate elite cultural contempt for Christianity or preserve Christian orthodoxy for future generations. He conceded too much and failed to see that Christianity is despised not ­simply because of its doctrinal content but because of its moral teachings. I suspect the same will prove true today: Those who seek selective solidarity with our cultured despisers on the woke fixations of the day will find their strategy inherently ­unstable. We cannot pick and choose moral priorities. The Christian gospel is first and foremost a judgment on this world, not a selective affirmation of it in the service of winning friends and ­influencing people.

Christians should not expect to be warmly embraced by the world, nor even to be tolerated. In John 15, Christ tells his disciples:

If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

Harkening to Jesus’s words is not an excuse for sloppy scholarship any more than it is an excuse for indifference to injustice and evil. Nor does it justify treating with contempt those with whom we disagree. Christians who act despicably should not complain when they find themselves despised. But Jesus’s warning surely reminds us that we do not need to take our cultural despisers seriously; still less ought we to side with them against those who actually share our faith. Christianity tells the world what it does not wish to hear. We should not expect to be embraced by those whose thoughts and deeds contradict the truths of our faith. Nor should we seek to make our faith more palatable, lest the salt lose its savor. Accommodating the world’s demands is a fool’s errand, as anyone who reads Schleiermacher should know.

Carl R. Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

 

Explosive Report: China Discussed Making Bioweapons to Target Certain Races

by Matt Palumbo

Explosive Report: China Discussed Making Bioweapons to Target Certain Races | Dan Bongino 

Maybe someone should ask Nike and the NBA what races the Chinese would like to eliminate?

Maybe this is what helped them decide. https://youtu.be/Few8kJ0zfnY

China helps BLM institute Marxism, then the Chinese kill BLM, it wouldn't be the first time.

Our Politics And The English Language 

What would Orwell say about our debased discourse? Andrew Sullivan 

 From time to time, I make sure to re-read George Orwell’s classic essay, “Politics And The English Language.” It remains the best guide to writing non-fiction, and it usually prompts a wave of self-loathing even more piercing than my habitual kind. What it shows so brilliantly is how language itself is central to politics, that clarity is as hard as it is vital, and that blather is as lazy as it is dangerous. It’s dangerous because the relationship between our words and our politics goes both ways: “[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” We create language and language creates us. If the language is corrupted, so are we. Near the end of the essay, Orwell lists a few rules to keep writing clear, accessible and meaningful: i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do. iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. Originality, simplicity, brevity, active verbs, everyday language, decency: as simple as it is very, very hard. It’s a relief in a way to recall that Orwell thought things were pretty damn shitty in his day as well, but the more you read broadly across most elite media platforms these days, the more similar it all sounds. To reverse Orwell’s virtues: so much of it is repetition, complexity, length, passive verbs, endless jargon, barbarism. I was just reading about the panic that occurred in the American Medical Association, when their journal’s deputy editor argued on a podcast that socio-economic factors were more significant in poor outcomes for non-whites than “structural racism.” As you might imagine, any kind of questioning of this orthodoxy required the defenestration of the deputy editor and the resignation of the editor-in-chief. The episode was withdrawn from public viewing, and the top editor replaced it with a Maoist apology/confession before he accepted his own fate. But I was most struck by the statement put out in response by a group called “The Institute for Antiracism in Medicine.” Here it is: The podcast and associated promotional message are extremely problematic for minoritized members of our medical community. Racism was created with intention and must therefore be undone with intention. Structural racism has deeply permeated the field of medicine and must be actively dissolved through proper antiracist education and purposeful equitable policy creation. The delivery of messages suggesting that racism is non-existent and therefore non-problematic within the medical field is harmful to both our underrepresented minoritized physicians and the marginalized communities served in this country. Consider the language for a moment. I don’t want to single out this group — they are merely representative of countless others, all engaged in the recitation of certain doctrines, and I just want an example. But I do want to say that this paragraph is effectively dead, drained of almost any meaning, nailed to the perch of pious pabulum. It is prose, in Orwell’s words, that “consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.” It is chock-full of long, compounded nouns and adjectives, riddled with the passive voice, lurching and leaning, like a passenger walking the aisle on a moving train, on pre-packaged phrases to keep itself going. Notice the unnecessary longevity: a tweet becomes an “associated promotional message.” Notice the deadness of the neologisms: “minoritized”, “marginalized”, “non-problematic”. As Orwell noted: “the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning.” Go back and see if you can put the words “minoritized” or “non-problematic” into everyday English. Part of the goal of this is political, of course. The more you repeat words like “proper antiracist education” or “systemic racism” or “racial inequity” or “lived experience” or “heteronormativity,” the more they become part of the landscape of words, designed to dull one’s curiosity about what on earth any of them can possible mean. A mass of ideological abstractions, in Orwell’s words, “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.” Then this: “Racism was created with intention.” Abstract noun, passive voice, vague meaning. Who “created” it? What was the intention exactly? Hasn’t racist tribalism been a feature of human society for tens of thousands of years? They never say. Or this phrase: “purposeful equitable policy creation.” Again: what are they talking about? It is as vague as “doing the work” — and as deliberate as the use of a highly contested term like “structural racism” to define objective reality. These are phrases not designed to say anything real. They are phrases designed to send a message of orthodoxy, and, as Orwell also noted, “orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.” Try reading Slate or Vox or the Huffington Post: the tedium you feel is the tedium of a language rendered lifeless by ideology. I caught a glimpse of Ibram X. Kendi’s recent appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the annual woke, oxygen-deprived hajj for the left-media elites. He was asked to define racism — something you’d think he’d have thought a bit about. This was his response: “Racism is a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas.” He does this a lot. He repeats Yoda-stye formulae: “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy … If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.” These maxims pepper his tomes like deep thoughts in a self-help book. When he proposes specific action to counter racism, for example, he suggests: “Deploy antiracist power to compel or drive from power the unsympathetic racist policymakers in order to institute the antiracist policy.” “Always vote for the leftist” is a bit blunter. Orwell had Kendi’s number: “The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.” And that conformity is proven by the gawking, moneyed, largely white, Atlantic subscribers hanging on every one of this lightweight’s meaningless words — as if they really were in church. The most dedicated abusers of the English language, of course, are the alphabet people. They have long since abandoned any pretense at speaking English and instead bombard us with new words: “cisheteropatriarchy”, “homonormativity”, “fraysexuality”, “neutrois”, “transmasculine”, “transmisogynoir”, and on and on. To give you a sense of the completely abstract bullshit involved here, take a style guide given out to journalists by trans activists, instructing them on how to cover transgender questions. (I’m wondering how Orwell would respond if given such a sheet of words he can and cannot use. Let’s just say: not like reporters for the Washington Post.) Here’s the guide’s definition of “gender nonconforming”: “[it] refers to gender presentations outside typical gendered expectations. Note that gender nonconforming is not a synonym for non-binary. While many non-binary people are gender nonconforming, many gender nonconforming people are also cisgender.” This is a kind of bewildering, private language. But the whole point of the guide is to make it our public language, to force other people to use these invented words, to make the entire society learn and repeat the equivalent of their own post-modern sanskrit. This is our contemporary version of what Orwell went on to describe as “newspeak” in Nineteen Eighty-Four: a vocabulary designed to make certain ideas literally unthinkable because woke language has banished them from use. Repeat the words “structural racism” and “white supremacy” and “cisheteropatriarchy” often enough, and people come to believe these things exist unquestioningly. Talk about the LGBTQIA2S+ community and eventually, people will believe it exists (spoiler alert: it doesn’t). And that is the only recourse an average citizen has when buried by this avalanche of abstraction: ask the language-launderers what they are really talking about. When some doofus apologizes for the “terrible pain” they have caused to the whatever community, ask them to give a specific example of that “pain.” When someone says “structural racism,” ask: what actual “structures” are you referring to? How do they actually work? Give concrete examples. When someone calls American society “white supremacy”, ask them how you could show that America is not a form of “white supremacy”. When someone uses the word “Latinx”, ask them which country does that refer to. When someone says something is “problematic”, ask them to whom? When you’re told you’re meeting with members of the BIPOC or AANHPI communities, ask them first to translate and then why this is in any way relevant, and why every single member of those communities are expected to have the same opinion. And when you’re told that today is IDAHOBIT Day, ask them if you can speak to Frodo. Yes, some humor is key to fighting back. But the core truth is: we do not have to speak this debased and decadent language. It is designed to overwhelm and confuse and smother and subdue. And the more it is used by elites, the more normal Americans, still living in the real world, feel utterly alienated by their masters, and the deeper our divide goes. Reclaiming our discourse from these ideological contraptions will make our writing better. It will help us think more clearly. And it could help re-start a genuinely national conversation. In everyday English, the language of democracy. https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/our-politics-and-the-english-language-8be

A Momentous Election

Donald Trump may be an odd ambassador of freedom. But Joe Biden is but a gibbering front for a vanguard that would destroy America as traditionally conceived.

By Roger Kimball

October 24, 2020

So here we are, 10 days out from the most momentous election of my lifetime. 

Candor requires that I admit that I have often felt that sense of existential emergency around election time. But reflection tells me that the closest thing to the 2020 election was the 2016 election, and that was not because of its wild card—Donald Trump—but because of “sure thing” Hillary Clinton, the single most corrupt serious contender for president in our history. 

That may seem melodramatic, but the truth is often melodramatic. 

I did not, until recently, suspect Joe Biden of serious corruption. The ongoing revelations from Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” have led me to reconsider that judgment, especially when combined with the ongoing bulletins from Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, who claims that Joe Biden, contrary to his repeated assertions, was involved in discussions about his son’s business dealings. 

So far, I believe, the public is not privy to any smoking-gun evidence about Joe Biden’s involvement, but the gun is warm and the optics are bad. The implicit oath of omertà followed by the media with respect to the saga of Hunter’s laptop has been truly impressive. 

Day after day, the New York Post, which first broke the story a week or so back, has been broadcasting more and more tidbits from this extraordinary trove of perversity and apparent corruption. No matter that the Post is the country’s fifth-largest paper: Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and television news have joined forces to close the public’s eyes, seal its ears, and scream there is nothing to see here, move along, and pay no attention to those muffled cries from the oubliette. It has been an extraordinary act of malignant solidarity, worthy of the Politburo in the heady days of Joe Stalin’s airbrush. 

I think this strategy is in the process of backfiring. Twitter may close down the Post’s account and forbid people to retweet its stories, but that, too, is news and the news, finally, will out. The Streisand Effect will not be denied. 

I have limited curiosity about Hunter Biden’s choice in narcotics or prostitutes. His alleged influence peddling, however, trading introductions to “the Big Guy” for wads of cash, especially if some of that cash wound up in the Biden family fisc—well that is something else entirely. The implications of this story have yet to penetrate the consciousness of the mainstream media, who are playing the three wise monkeys for Halloween, at least so far as Democrats are concerned. But it won’t matter. Curiosity is a stronger passion than politically fired discretion. We’ll find out what’s on that hard drive, and we’ll find out soon. 

Even so, it is not Biden’s alleged corruption that is the primary issue for me. If the allegations are true, they are heinous and disqualifying, indicating blatant corruption of the grossest, most damaging sort. Add China into mix—there are, after all, an awful lot of Chinese actors in this movie—and you have a thriller-level scandal waiting to happen. As Andrew McCarthy reports, 

In November 2011, Hunter Biden’s business associates arranged meetings at the Obama White House for a delegation of the China Entrepreneur Club. Established in 2006, the CEC is led by high officials of the Chinese Communist Party, some government officials (including diplomats), and billionaire business executives with close ties to the regime.

This visit to the White House is said to have included a meeting with then-Vice President Biden. In discussions among themselves, Hunter Biden’s associates reportedly made it clear that they anticipated cashing in on business prospects that were expected to arise from providing the Chinese contingent with high-level access to the Obama administration.

I think of the phrase that the travel writer Alexander Kinglake wanted inscribed upon the lintels of all churches in England: “Interesting if true.” Still, these allegations, if true, though they would be enough to dissuade me from voting for Joe Biden, are not the reason that I think this election is the most momentous of my lifetime. 

Is it because of the stark policy differences, then, between the candidates that I believe this election is so momentous? The differences are indeed stark, as a simple list of issues will demonstrate to cognizant voters: Taxes, regulation, immigration policy, environmental policy, energy policy, judges, foreign policy, affirmative action and everything that’s loaded into the charge that America is “systemically racist”—even to utter these words is to acknowledge that the differences between what Donald Trump has done and wants to do and what the Democrats promise is as night and day. President Trump is about “America First.” Team Biden is about “America Failed.” 

But even those powerful differences do not, by themselves, describe why I think this election is so important. The real gravamen is this. The battle between Donald Trump and the Biden-Harris coalition is a battle between the forces of republican democracy, on one side, and the forces of socialist oligarchy, on the other.

I understand that “democracy” is more of a eulogistic than a descriptive word, a totem under whose soothing light every sort of regime, be it ever so brutal, wishes to bask. The fact that North Korea is officially known as the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” underscores that fact. 

I understand, too, that ever since Donald Trump made his fateful descent down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president, uninformed people have been denouncing him as “authoritarian” and worse. 

Those charges have not abated. On the contrary, they have become more widespread and hysterical among a tiny, though highly visible and well-funded coterie of the nomenklatura. But evidence of his alleged authoritarianism, to say nothing of his supposed “fascistic,” Hitlerian (literally Hitlerian) inclinations is never forthcoming.

Trump has governed not as a “fascist” but as a rambunctious and sometimes impatient businessman whose top priority has been to keep his promises. I have often rehearsed the impressive litany of Trump’s kept campaign promises and I won’t repeat it here. 

But it is the other side of the divide that throws president Trump’s virtues into relief. He fights to make America great. The other side would make America prostrate. Donald Trump rode to victory on a wave composed partly of populist fury, partly of populist enthusiasm. The Biden-Harris coalition, even more than the Clinton candidacy, is a product of the swamp, the pulsing, self-engorging bureaucracy that regards itself as the only legitimate repository of political power. Although determinedly left-wing in its policy prescriptions, it is, as Joel Kotkin points out in his new book The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, essentially feudal in its deployment of power and contempt for the masses it seeks to control with the panis et circenses of technological distraction and bottomless surveillance. 

Donald Trump may be an odd ambassador of freedom. His motley may not pass muster in the salons and drawing rooms of our lords and masters. But Joe Biden is but a gibbering front for a vanguard that would destroy America as traditionally conceived—America, I mean, as a crucible of ordered liberty, limited, government, and individual freedom. 

The swamp would smother those ideals in a muck of group rights and the rule of diktat, not law. It would represent not the peaceful transfer of power but the destruction of that process by the substitution of political correctness for politics. No longer would it be a debate about policy. It would become instead a series of heresy trials, with a sort of spoils system benefitting lucky members of the new commissariat. 

A preview of this new order was recently vouchsafed by the diminutive satrap Robert Reich. “When this nightmare is over,” he tweeted, “we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe.” 

Noted. And the truly frightening thing is that it would be susceptible neither to repeal nor revision but, having cast our political life into a Manichaean struggle between heresy and the regime, would hearken only to competing entreaties from its own medium of exchange, naked power. 

The prospect of that malign dispensation is why I believe the 2020 election is the most momentous of my life.  https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/24/a-momentous-election/

 

 

The City is Killing America

America’s real problem are urban problems.

Wed Oct 21, 2020

Daniel Greenfield

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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

The coronavirus, like so many other social ills, real and metaphorical, incubated in major cities.

New York City, with the highest population density in the country, also accounted for the highest death toll. San Francisco, the second highest among large cities, was a major incubator.

Pandemic maps of the death toll show the deaths concentrating around major cities before making the slow trek from urban into suburban and eventually rural areas. The urban lockdowns didn’t stop the spread of the virus. What they really did was trap poor and middle class residents in urban areas, while the wealthy fled, and the virus spread to urbanites with the least mobility.

The people with the worst immune systems, in the densest living conditions, and the least ability to get up and leave, suffered the most, from nursing home patients to minorities with large families. The general pattern was historically familiar from the Middle Ages, and the only thing that our public health experts proved is that they weren’t any smarter than medieval peasants.

But the coronavirus is an urban problem and all the official solutions to it are urban solutions. And the urban problems and their solutions are killing us and taking down the whole country.

The Black Lives Matter race riots that followed on the heels of the lockdowns were yet another example of an urban problem exploding out of failed cities to become a national crisis. But the vast majority of our problems, social, economic, racial, and political, are the problem of the city.

Cities concentrate civilizational achievements and challenges, but it’s been a long time since cities were generating American achievements. America’s cities were once built to house industries and businesses. Their only real business anymore is the business of government.

That’s why the Democrat plan to stack the Senate depends on making D.C. into a state.

American cities aren’t hyperdense blocs because of industrial density. Even as the city went into a decline as an industrial center, municipal governments began building huge stacks of public housing meant to cram as many people as cheaply as possible into a single block.

Why did so many people need to be housed in such a small space? It wasn’t because they had jobs, but because they didn’t. And yet cities needed to keep growing, not because they had too many jobs to fill, but because their political influence depended on human capital.

The more people a city had, the more votes it commanded, and the more money it got. And the fewer jobs a city had, the more people it needed to boost its political capital and its cash flow.

Even fifty years ago, cities had stopped making jobs and focused on making people.

The cities are running out of money, but population growth made them political powerhouses. Even if that power is based on trapping the descendants of black factory workers in urban wastelands, attracting immigrants they can’t employ, and using raw numbers to seize power.

That’s what the battle over the census is about.

The South had triggered a civil war by trying to use human capital for political power, but its Northern urban counterparts used human capital to dominate regions, states, and then the country. Cities took over the country’s power politics even as they grew more broken and less useful. No one asked what cities were for anymore. The answer seemed self-evident.

Huge cities growing out of control while figuring out new ways to house new immigrants and the grandchildren of dispossessed sharecroppers was one of those things a great nation needed.

What it needed them for, beyond exotic restaurants and a few industries requiring dense office spaces that suburban employees would spend two hours a day commuting to, no one knew.

And pandemics and race riots are just part of the price we pay for having big cities.

Housing thousands of people in an area that would normally be home to one family comes with high crime, mental breakdowns, and vulnerability to disease. Stacking a vast number of poor minority groups together requires high welfare spending, heavy police investment, and tolerance for the inevitable outbreaks of violence by people living dead end lives in miserable conditions.

But cities need that human capital. And that means importing immigrants from Muslim majority countries who react to religious or political dissent with violence. It means that regular air travel and border traffic keeps bringing new exciting diseases into cities where they spread like wildfire. It means the implosion of families and the communal and social structures of civilization which unleash gang violence, feral youth, suicide, drug use, and constant political outrage.

These aren’t really new developments. Prohibition was one of the first massive responses to urban misery. But back then cities created more than they destroyed. Now all they do is destroy.

America was a rare example of a new land. The land attracted settlers, the settlers built villages, towns, cities, industries, and their own unique society and government. Millions of immigrants flocked to the frontiers to run their own farms and to the cities to build their own businesses.

By the turn of the last century, the country was a booming proposition and running out of frontier. But what it lacked in territorial frontiers, it made up for in industrialization. Immigrants came for factory jobs and large numbers of black people also moved out of the South for them.

And then the industrialization declined, but the people still kept coming. A million immigrants poured into the country every year. But America wasn’t making a million more jobs. Certainly not a million jobs that would transform the new arrivals into productive and independent citizens.

The American city has failed. The coronavirus lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter race riots haven’t revealed a new reality, but the old truths under the glossy branding and hipster cafes. The underlying failure of the city isn’t social, it’s economic. Urban areas parted ways from the basis for their existence generations ago. Cities don’t exist because we need them, or because they’re more efficient ways of bringing workers and businesses together. They’re relics of economic empires that have collapsed leaving behind beautiful architecture and urban decay.

Major cities only productively employ a fraction of their residents, and most of their better jobs in both the private and public sectors are filled by workers who don’t live there. But the limited culture, medical, financial and tech industries that do thrive there produce a lot of money and even more influence. The difference between the perception of a failed city and a successful one is bringing in a few companies with a national brand and a global footprint. A city with a few major publishing firms, financial companies, or dot coms is seen as a success even if these narrow sectors have little to do with the majority of the millions of people who actually live there.

Urbanization has become a pyramid scheme taking over entire states, while hollowing out the more conservative rural areas, turning red states blue, and leaving everyone except those at the top of the pyramid scheme poorer with each generation.

America is no longer divided between the old geographies of North and South, but the new geographies of density, between cities and their suburbs, and rural areas and small towns. The latter represent the old American communities, while the former showcase the new feudal order in which great suburban wealth and urban poverty combine into radical political alignment.

That’s the so-called “resistance”, not by the disempowered, but by the politically privileged.

The growth of urban areas benefited Democrat political machines. These machines however fell out of the hands of the old machine politicians and into the hands of a class of academic leftists who were detached from everyday life and incapable of understanding basic economic realities. They accumulated populations without having the faintest idea of how to provide for them even while imposing policies that crushed industries and shattered the economies of entire regions.

And this class insisted that it knew what it was doing because it was listening to the experts.

The bigger the urban political class grew, the more it was able to destroy industries, replacing actual productive labor with government makework in its own economic echo chambers. The deficits were plugged with unsustainable borrowing sprees against the brand of the city. Cities grew, debt rose, jobs declined, welfare increased, and the clock ticked ever closer to midnight.

The scarcity of jobs sharpened racial conflicts, between black and white workers, between citizens and new arrivals, fighting over the rotting slices of a shrinking pie. And the only solution of the political class was to promise that everyone should be able to go to college for free, as if the problem was the lack of credits in social anthropology, instead of the lack of industries.

The dot com boom made the promise of new industries seem real, but it was another facade. The biggest tech companies, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are little more than pipelines connecting Chinese businesses with American consumers. When Chinese dot coms succeed in replicating Amazon’s fulfillment model, and the freebies-for-data advertising models of Google and Facebook, then the big behemoths will fall or just be taken over by our new overlords.

Meanwhile all they’re really doing is creating new industries and manufacturing jobs in China.

Our political and social crises are rooted in the economic boom of our origins. America only ‘worked’ as a growing and expanding nation. The boom of land, liberty and production made us a superpower. But, like the European continent that birthed America, we’re running out of all three. All we have anymore is population growth and so does the entire Third World.

Cities have become cancers on the country, expanding unsustainably, sucking up resources, and eliminating productive employment. The urban model is a welfare state subsidized by a handful of wealthy industries. Those cities that can keep a Silicon Valley, a Wall Street or a Hollywood can go on faking it, while those that lose core industries become black holes, sucking up endless amounts of money, while spewing blight, crime, and violence in all directions.

Urban political models insist that we can spend our way out of these crises by putting even more money into schools, social services, public housing, and the rest of the welfare state.

That hasn’t worked in four generations. It’s not about to start working now.

Welfare states don’t create jobs. They’re what happens when there are too many people and no jobs. We might be able to build our way out of this dead end, but we have to begin by questioning the urban model which is at the root of all of our national problems.

America doesn’t need an expanding population. Urban political machines do. Nor do we need massive urban density that no longer occurs because of the density of opportunities, but just the opposite, the density of failure and the real estate bubbles that are fueled by urban crises.

There is no shortage of cheap labor in America. We don’t need more of it. Every major city is already choking on the unemployed cheap labor forces they have. And unless we have a massive manufacturing boom, the only employment opportunities for them are in the gig economy where they can deliver pad thai and give rides to environmental consultants.

The urban model hasn’t worked for America in sixty years. The pandemic has put it on the verge of collapse as the wealthy industries that made cities their base flee into virtual workspaces. It’s time to rethink and defund cities as the hubs of our economy and our nation.

The Trump administration began the move by trying to relocate federal agencies from Washington D.C. to other parts of the country. But the government has a great deal more power to defund the urban sprawl that’s choking the country’s institutions. Government funding created centralized institutions and massive urban housing complexes. It has the power to defund them.

Envisioning a less dense and more open country will heal many of our social and economic ills.

Urban areas have concentrated political radicalism and blight. Universities have become their own radical cities. Municipalities have built networks of crony companies around themselves. Density has destroyed communities and families while depriving people of a meaningful life.

America was built around communities, not cities. It can be rebuilt around communities again.

Reducing immigration can slow down population growth to sustainably match our economy and replacing cities with communities can allow our society to heal from its urban wounds.

The city is too big to fail and that means that the country is dying of its failures. We can either keep the city alive at the cost of the country, or let the city fail so that the country can live.

 https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/city-killing-america-daniel-greenfield/#.X5CSmU-KpNo.twitter

The Destruction of Men

A Fantasy for the SexesMale and female gender symbols in fire of love

    By Daphne Patai April 17, 2019


Op-Ed: In contemporary America, women and men still act out ancient roles. From the point of view of the men, the society is a matriarchy: Women have physically less demanding jobs — with the sole exception of childbirth, by now a rare event in the average woman’s life. Women sustain far fewer injuries on the job, are not required to go to war, take better care of their health, and for these reasons and many others enjoy a lifespan significantly longer than that of men.

In this society, men use their physical strength, when necessary, on women’s behalf.  Women claim to be equal partners when that suits them and claim to be entitled to special consideration when that suits them. They insist on autonomy in maintaining or aborting pregnancies, but at the same time, they determine the fathers’ duties-and rights, if any. Women claim child support. They can either demand or impede fathers’ continuing involvement with their offspring, as the women see fit. The result is that women have advantages over men in child custody suits, just as they have learned to use charges of child sexual abuse and domestic violence.

Though dozens of studies show that women, by their own account, initiate violence against their domestic partners as often as (if not more often than) men, and cause as much injury when weapons are involved, somehow the social mythologies of this country keep that fact from gaining broad public attention, let alone credence.

But worst of all, in terms of the interactions of daily life, are women’s emotional demands on men. At home, men routinely sit through harangues that demonstrate women’s greater verbal skills and emotional agility. Men, inarticulate, try to figure out what is required of them in a given situation. Not by accident, verbal therapies in this society archetypically began with men listening and women speaking. Even as little boys, males learn to be in awe of girls’ verbal fluency. The feeling of ineptness, of being no match for females at the verbal and emotional level, is the common inheritance of all but a few exceptional males.

The matriarchy here described, structured to protect women’s interests as against men’s (and, ironically, having conned men into defending such a set up) puts a premium on women’s special social and emotional skills. Everywhere, women engage men and one another in personal conversation, offering and receiving disclosures, demanding commiseration, giving advice, spreading censure. Men, trained to keep to their workhorse style, are uncomfortably cornered by women, in the workplace, and at home, demanding that they speak from the heart.  When asked “How are you?” women give a detailed and precise accounting. In offices, they spend valuable time discussing personal matters.

Studies are done on the economic costs of smoking and poor health, but not of the costs of women’s work habits.

In the private sphere, women endlessly complain that men are not on their wavelength. An observer of this society, coming into a shop toward the end of a conversation and hearing one woman say heatedly to another, “… stood there like a stone and said not a word!” knows that a man is being described. Or on the street, overhearing one woman say, in anger, to another, “It was like talking to a plot of grass!” knows that an unsatisfactory encounter with a man is being recounted.

At home and on the job, men are reminded of their emotional inferiority and verbal inadequacy. Nowhere are they as quick as women in their emotional responses, their verbalization of those responses, or their acuity in gauging the dynamics of interaction or situation. And constantly they are reminded of this disadvantage. Women berate them, browbeat them, even physically attack them out of frustration at these characteristics.

Somehow it is always men who are to blame. Even in the schoolyard, little boys suffer from puzzlement, pain, and ostracism as little girls make comments and express expectations boys cannot quite grasp or respond to. Thus, boys are trained into a lifelong awareness of inferiority.  At home, mothers demand expression of their sons’ and husbands’ feelings and berate them when they are confused and reticent.  At work, women exchange knowing smiles signifying that   men ‘Just don’t get it.”

Finally, some men are organizing around the issue of emotional harassment, the problem that hitherto has had no name. A sophisticated analysis of the matriarchal bases of this social practice springs up. Everyone denies that it has anything at all to do with biology, which allows women to be fully blamed for this domineering and demanding behavior, highlights women’s shortcomings, and pushes them into corrective political action.

And so, a men’s movement develops.
More to read at Link

Back to Blogging: War Addition

Why I do not support going to war with ISIS, ISIL or whatever. If Obama takes us to war there is no doubt that HE would make matters worse. His track record of accomplishments is dismal to say the least. I believe the best way to assure the American people that they would be safe is have Obama on their side.