Do it right

David French deals too gently, for my tastes, with the absurd histrionics of the New York Times and now the Washington Post on the meaning of “sex” in Title IX. (It’s apparent to me now that our elites distinguish wicked, troglodyte Republican science denial from shiny, trendy, bien pensant Democrat/progressive science denial.)

But I’m taking a second look at what the Administration is doing.

Here’s the very legitimate beef with the 1/19/17 status quo:

In April 2014, the Obama administration quietly expanded the definition — without an act of Congress or even a regulatory rulemaking process. In a document called “Questions and Answers on Title IX and Sexual Violence” it stated that “Title IX’s sex discrimination prohibition extends to claims of discrimination based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity.”

Empowered by this new definition, the Obama administration issued extraordinarily aggressive mandates to schools across the nation, requiring that schools use a transgender student’s chosen pronouns and that they open bathrooms, locker rooms, overnight accommodations, and even some sports teams to students based not on their biological sex but their chosen gender identity.

Again, this was done without an act of Congress and without even a regulatory rulemaking process ….

My question: How, precisely, does that differ procedurally from the Trump administration’s “formal guidance”?

The administration may issue formal guidance establishing a biological definition of sex. Specifically, the administration may define sex to mean “a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.”

(David French)

This isn’t an accusation of equivalence. Perhaps there is a principled difference between “formal guidance” (whatever that means) and Obama’s “quietly expanded”? The New York Times, when it was finished with sobs of anguish, made it sound as if this is a definition the Administration wants to see in new regulations, which would be a permissible approach.

I’m 100% in favor of undoing Obama’s lawless affrontery. I’m 99.9% in favor of Executive branch departments narrowly construing “sex” for purposes of Title IX enforcement policy until Congress or the courts expand the definition. I’m 99.9% certain that’s what Congress meant in enacting Title IX.

But let’s stop abusing Executive power.

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American culture is probably the least Christian culture that we’ve ever had, because it’s so materialistic and it’s so full of lies. The whole advertising world is just intertwined with lies, appealing to the worst instincts we have. The problem is, people have been treated as consumers for so long they don’t know any other way to live.

The late Eugene Peterson on PBS, via his New York Times obituary

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Merrick Garland died for Harry Reid’s sins

I mentally checked out of the GOP in 2005, which was the best I could do since Indiana doesn’t register voters by party. So I feel no keen interest in defending its wiles and works.

On the other hand, I’m not blind, and I care about the judiciary, not least the Supreme Court of the United States. And when some people suggested that Brett Kavanaugh suffered for Mitch McConnell’s sins toward Merrick Garland, I was pretty much dumbstruck, lacking any justifying argument (other than “we had the power,” which isn’t an argument at all) for not bringing Garland to a vote.

“Was” dumbstruck is now past tense. I stumbled onto a pretty good rationale today:

In 2013, Democrats had invoked the “nuclear option,” eliminating the filibuster for all federal judicial appointments except the Supreme Court — allowing them to pack the federal circuit courts with left-wing Obama appointees by simple majority. After Republicans won back control of the Senate in the 2014 midterms, McConnell put the brakes on the Democratic confirmation juggernaut — and then blocked President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who had died during Obama’s final year in office. Result? On Inauguration Day, Trump was presented with a slate of more than 100 judicial vacancies to fill, including a seat on the Supreme Court.

Democrats were so blinded by their anger over McConnell’s tactics that they made an unforced error: When Trump nominated Neil M. Gorsuch — a judge of unquestioned qualification and temperament — to fill Scalia’s seat, they decided to filibuster him. McConnell could not believe his luck. Some of his Republican colleagues had argued that, once in the majority, they should restore the judicial filibuster Democrats had eliminated — not extend it to Supreme Court nominations. But the Gorsuch filibuster changed their minds. “I argued to my people if this guy can’t get 60 votes then nobody a Republican president nominates is going to get 60 votes,” McConnell says. “That’s what allowed me to get people who were reluctant and complaining about using the nuclear option four years earlier to do it.”

Mark Thiessen, The tea party owes Mitch McConnell an apology. (Love that title!)

So Merrick Garland suffered for the Democrats’ packing of lower courts, led, as I recall, by Harry Reid.

You may now begin the Hatfield versus McCoy Infinite Resentment Regression if you like. It will cause me no more distress than I felt this morning before reading Thiessen’s column.

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Ain’t that just like life for ya?

Concrete instance:

So over the weekend President Trump made liberal heads explode by…proposing to return Title IX rules to the way they were before President Obama changed them …

The truth is that this sort of confrontation was bound to happen, because there are roughly two ways of viewing transgenderism. A quick summary of those views follows:

View Number One: Transgenderism is the popular term for persistent gender dysphoria, a condition in which people who are clearly of one biological sex insist for a prolonged time period that they really are the opposite of their birth sex. Eventually they begin to dress, act, and live as though they are of the opposite sex because this brings some of them some psychological relief from the pain of their condition. Some may progress as far as lifelong medical treatments including surgeries that remove healthy body parts and organs. Many of them have other psychological comorbidities which can make the effective diagnosis and treatment plan for their gender dysphoria even more complicated. The general public should be sympathetic to their real sufferings and should be kind. However, it is not necessary for society to order itself in such a way that biological males living as females, or biological females living as males, must be given complete access to every space and situation which has been carved out for people whose actual biological sex matches their own rational perception of themselves–which is well over 99% of all human beings.

View Number Two: Transgenderism is the popular way to describe people who were really, actually born into the wrong bodies. At birth they were randomly assigned a sex based on a doctor’s observation of their exterior genitalia, but this is a barbaric practice that should be stopped, as a not-insignificant number of people who appear to be biologically male or biologically female are not the sex they appear to be. Superficial examination of body parts, internal observation of organs such as the reproductive system, and even DNA testing cannot reveal whether a person is a boy or a girl. It is, in fact, scientifically impossible to tell whether someone is male or female at birth. There is really no way at all to tell until the child, who should be raised with no gender symbolism whatsoever, is old enough to articulate his/her/their/zir/xyr preferred sex identity, at which point his/her (etc.) preference should be embraced, applauded, and supported whatever that requires. For the child whose internal sex identity actually matches his/her (etc.) body parts, there is a certain degree of unearned privilege which, though not the child’s fault, must be deplored. Other children are not so lucky and will require hormone injections, daily medications, surgeries to alter their genitals, and similar measures if they have any hope of living as a member of their true sex. Society must be radically restructured until there is no difference whatsoever between those whose apparent bodily sex matches their internal sex identity and those whose apparent bodily sex does not match their internal sex identity. This means that people who were formerly misgendered as “biologically male” must have full access to everything people born with vaginas have access to, and people formerly misgendered as “biologically female” must have full access to everything people born with penises have access to, whatever the social cost.

Erin Manning. I award this my Sanest Small Blog of the Day award.

Note that Barack Obama’s party unmistakably is the party of “View Number 2.” That is no small thing.

Generalization:

We’ve learned a few things about the Democratic Party. First, it’s still fundamentally a materialist party. The Trumpian challenge is primarily a moral and cultural challenge. But the Democrats are mostly comfortable talking about how to use federal spending to extend benefits …

Second, we’ve learned that when Democrats do raise a moral argument, it tends to be of the social justice warrior variety …

It has now become evident that Republicans are better at politicizing cultural issues and Democrats are better at offering economic benefits to those who are struggling. If you think voting behavior is primarily motivated by material appeals, the Democratic strategy is fine. But if you think it’s motivated by cultural identity, a desire for respect, a sense of what’s right, loyalty to a common story, the Democratic strategy leaves a lot to be desired.

These days, culture is more important than economics.

David Brooks. Do read it all; it’s richer than a few quotes can capture.

Yes, I think the Democrats do tend to go the Social Justice Warrior route on “moral” issues.

What does this portend for the election in two weeks? What should it portend for my absentee ballot, which I shall complete and mail Saturday or Sunday? Should I stick with doing my part to deliver the House to the Democrats, as both a rebuke to the Trumpistas and as a way prospectively to thwart Trump’s worst impulses?

It’s just like life to hand you a win in the culture wars (I have little doubt that View Number One is held by 75%+ of America, though they might lie to pollsters about it) accompanied by unpalatable truce terms.

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A modest way of being Christian

Under the Midgleys, I came to see that explanation is not always like the foundations of a building, keeping it up – as if, without a proper explanation, the building falls. On the contrary, an explanation is a way of making sense of what is already there, not a way of re-arranging it. Understanding is after the fact. So St Anselm’s ‘Faith seeking understanding’ – i.e. faith is not built on understanding but goes looking for it – opened up, for me, a way of being a Christian, without having resolved any of the underlying contradictions. And that hasn’t stopped being true. For me, believing in God names a certain sort of commitment, not the conclusion of an argument.

Giles Fraser, eulogizing philosopher Mary Midgley, very recently reposed.

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Peter Principle update

Do you know the Peter Principle?

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Image Journal has a new editorial team, with James K. A. Smith taking the helm as the new editor in chief. That’s a bit of head-scratcher to be honest. Everything I’ve read by him on poetry and fiction is pretty much what you’d expect from a well-read theologian writing on poetry and fiction. That’s not a slight. Theologians and critics tend to approach texts in different ways, even if they might arrive at some of the same conclusions. For the critic, style is argument. For the Protestant theologian—and I’m generalizing here, so forgive me—style mostly contains argument. I can’t say this is always the case with Smith. He certainly has something like this view regarding form when it comes to liturgy, but I have never thought of him as being particularly interested in style in writing or in the forms of poetry or the novel. Anyway, he has a strong team under him, it seems, and I am sure he will bring in new readers. Good luck to the whole crew!

Micah Mattix’s Prufrock newsletter for October 18.

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This item aggregates downers — I guess they’re “uppers” if you exult in Trump hatred instead of just shaking your head and saying “heaven help us.”

It is a sign of the times — the kind involving the seven-horned beast, and the rain of fire, and the end of days — that recent news has been dominated by Kanye, Stormy and the misogynist boor who is president of the United States. It would be a circus if it were not a crime scene, complete with credible accusations of financial corruption, obstruction of justice and campaign collusion with a hostile foreign power.

… I do think [the charge of fascism is] basically mere alarmism, yes. We have a president whose shallow malevolence is matched only by his bottomless incompetence. But that’s not fascism. It’s more weakness than strength.

…

And yet, it is impossible to listen closely to Trump without hearing echoes of fascist language and arguments. He describes a form of national unity based on deference to a single leader. He claims to lead a movement that speaks exclusively for American values. He defines this movement primarily through exclusion, by directing bigotry and contempt toward outsiders. He paints the picture of an idealized past, involving pride, ethnic solidarity and national greatness.

Fascism may not describe what Trump has done, as opposed to what he says. But what he says matters and can create its own dangerous dynamic. It is possible for a leader to be incompetent and still profoundly corrupt the people who follow him, undermining the virtues — tolerance, civility and compromise — that make democratic self-government work. It is possible for a foolish leader to leave the imprint of fascism on a portion of his followers ….

Michael Gerson (in part quoting an unnamed “conservative leader”).

Michael V. Hayden, a former C.I.A. director who served under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said that Mr. Trump could be coaxed into believing objective reality, but that it “is not the instinctive departure point for what Donald Trump does.”

“It’s something else — it’s feeling, emotion, preference, loyalty, convenience of the moment,” Mr. Hayden said. He quoted a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush, Michael Gerson, about Mr. Trump: “He lives in the eternal now — no history, no consequences.”

Maggie Haberman. I didn’t used to think of left liberals as defenders of objective truth, nor of Evangelicals as indifferent toward it, but times change.

In the first 18 months of his administration, those who pointed out that he’d made a good decision, or failed to castigate him enough, were sometimes accused of “normalizing” Mr. Trump. But normalizing him wasn’t within their power. Only Mr. Trump could normalize Mr. Trump, by enacting normality and self-possession. He could have opted for a certain stature—the presidential stage, with its flags and salutes, almost leads you by the hand to stature. But he hasn’t.

Peggy Noonan.

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Our clamoring after Christian “rock stars” — paired with the sheer volume of content those in the spotlight are expected to produce — has created the perfect environment for slipshod attribution and theft of content from lesser-known authors.

Mary DeMuth at Religion News Service.

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Picohontas, Paul Allen and more

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I’ve been watching “alternate” and “independent” news sites, left and right, for a week or two. From a “right-wing” site (that seems to have gotten what I consider an unduly bad rap) comes the term Picohontas, with a reminder that “pico” is a prefix denoting 10^-12, or one-trillionth.

Let him who has lungs to giggle, giggle.

And be assured that I’m taking these “alternate” and “independent” news sites with a whole shaker of salt. So far, they seem disappointingly tendentious. For instance, in this story (about a 70-year-old weed enthusiast who just got what amounts to a life sentence) the line that “unfortunately, he couldn’t find a lawyer that wasn’t intimidated by Bass’s trumped up charges and that was willing to fight for him” is almost certainly sewage, and a spoonful of sewage in a barrel of wine creates a barrel of sewage.

Maybe he was too poor — court-appointed public defenders often are overworked and under-funded relative to prosecutors, and might reasonably be thought too passive.

Or maybe he was too cheap to hire a lawyer and thought someone should represent him for free.

One thing I know: criminal defense attorneys are not “intimidated by … trumped up charges.” Their mouths water at such things. But they do need to make a living.

And if that site compares one more long sentence to notorious perv Anthony Weiner’s relatively short sentence, I’m deleting them from my RSS feed tracker.

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The Atlantic notes, in an item that seems not quite up to Atlantic standards, that Paul Allen “signed the Giving Pledge in 2010, becoming one of 40 people to agree to give at least half their fortune to philanthropy,” did in fact give away hundreds of millions of dollars per year, but died 8 years later, worth 50% more than when he made the pledge. This, to the Atlantic, is “a sign of just how broken the American system of wealth is.”

In my opinion, all the author proved is that it’s deucedly hard to give away hundreds of millions of dollars without doing much collateral harm, or even more harm than good. Let interventionist government take note.

(Meanwhile, I have little doubt that prosperity gospel preachers are going to turn Paul Allen’s last eight years into a parable, the better to fleece their flocks.)

3

Both “political correctness” and “civility” have become inflammatory notions in the post-2016 world. But what are they? Essentially, they’re both modes of speech and public conduct that aim to address the largest possible number of listeners without offense. In a liberal democracy, where citizens deliberate in public about political choices, it’s critical to have a widely inclusive, intelligible manner of speaking. The great liberal theorist John Rawls called this maximally inclusive way of communicating about politics “public reason,” and he considered it essential to maintaining a functional liberal democracy.

Elizabeth Bruenig (emphasis added).

Bruenig broached this topic differently differently a few weeks ago. I find this version better, but I’m still bothered if people really consider it “lying” to use (what Rawls calls) “public reason.”

My brain must work, my convictions form, very idiosyncratically.

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One final thought.

I didn’t get on my bicycle much this summer, partly due to injuries sustained other than by biking. But I love riding “rails-to-trails” and other paved trails, where one can bike with minimal worries about traffic (i.e., only when you cross a road or perhaps a farm lane crosses the trail). Biking on the road is relatively worrisome, and it’s where I’ve had all my biking mishaps.

But I have stopped supporting the rails-to-trails advocacy groups because I’ve become aware that they’re carrying water mostly for wealthy, white, leisured people like me, and presumably someone else is paying the price. I am giving to support maintenance and extension of my favorite trails up in Michigan, but I’d feel really debased were I to respond to letters about some abandoned rail corridor somewhere in Indiana that isn’t paved yet, with some sentiment to put it to some other use.

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Assorted thoughts on Picohontas — a topic in which I’m mildly embarrassed at indulging. In my defense, I skipped a lot of them. Those DNA hijinks seemed to be real pundit bait.

Since I collected ’em already, I might as well share:

According to my 23 And Me profile, I am as black as Elizabeth Warren is Native American, and as Native American as Elizabeth Warren is Native American. To put it another way, the 0.6 percent of my genes that derive from West Africa entered into my genetic line five or more generations ago; the 0.1 percent of Native American ancestry in my genetic line entered six or more generations ago.

I am 99.3 percent European, according to the same test. And of that number, all but 0.4 percent is northwestern European.

I’m fine with having non-European blood in my lineage, but guess what? I’m not Sitting Bull. I’m not Kunta Kinte. Genetics says nothing about the content of my character or yours. Elizabeth Warren is a moron to have brought this up again, and deserves the mockery she’s getting. So does the Left in general, given its obsession with racial identity.

Rod Dreher

I also have a family legend that there is Native American ancestry way back. That doesn’t mean that I publicly list my ancestry as Native American so that my employer can promote me as a diversity hire. I also don’t plagiarize French recipes and submit them to Pow Wow Chow with the claim that I am Cherokee.

Read David French’s article from last year if you want to see the full depth of her fraud: https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/11/elizabeth-warren-native-american-heritage-harvard-fraud/

Ryan Booth

As they say, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does indeed rhyme. And so “Elizabeth Warren” rhymes with “Hillary Clinton” ….

James Pinkerton.

Finally, the best:

Warren should not have taken the test; having taken it, she should not have publicized it; having publicized it, she should quietly fire anyone who urged this gambit and move on. And liberals generally should regard this whole thing as a cautionary tale. There is an obvious appetite on the activist left for a candidate or candidates willing to take on Trump on his own brawler’s terms. But if you come at him that way, you best not miss — as Michael Avenatti, the would-be Trump of the Resistance, has been missing repeatedly of late, with a Kavanaugh intervention that helped get the judge confirmed and a libel lawsuit that just got his own client ordered to pay Trump’s legal fees.

Ross Douthat

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Counter-hegemony

A fine Saturday WSJ profile of Heather MacDonald, who was only halfway onto my radar previously. She has some very plausible explanations of phenomena that swim against both progressive and conservative streams on snowflakes, Title IX Due Process, patriarchy and more.

Emphasis added.

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Heather Mac Donald may be best known for braving angry collegiate mobs, determined to prevent her from speaking last year in defense of law enforcement. But she finds herself oddly in agreement with her would-be suppressors: “To be honest,” she tells me, “I would not even invite me to a college campus.”

No, she doesn’t yearn for a safe space from her own triggering views. “My ideal of the university is a pure ivory tower,” she says. “I think that these are four precious years to encounter human creations that you’re otherwise—unless you’re very diligent and insightful—really never going to encounter again. There is time enough for things of the moment once you graduate.”

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Her views are heterodox. She would seem a natural ally of Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, authors of “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.” They argue that college “snowflakes” are the products of overprotective childrearing, which creates oversensitive young adults.

Ms. Mac Donald doesn’t buy it. Minority students disproportionately come from single-parent homes, so “it’s not clear to me that those students are being helicopter-parented.” To the contrary, “they are not getting, arguably, as much parenting as they need.” If anyone is coddled, it’s upper-middle- class whites, but “I don’t know yet of a movement to create safe spaces for white males.”

The snowflake argument, Ms. Mac Donald says, “misses the ideological component of this.” The dominant victim narrative teaches students that “to be female, black, Hispanic, trans, gay on a college campus is to be the target of unrelenting bigotry.” Students increasingly believe that studying the Western canon puts “their health, mental safety, and security at risk” and can be “a source of—literally—life threat.”

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She similarly thinks conservatives miss the point when they focus on the due-process infirmities of campus sexual- misconduct tribunals. She doesn’t believe there’s a campus “rape epidemic,” only a lot of messy, regrettable and mutually degrading hookups. “To say the solution to all of this is simply more lawyering up is ridiculous because this is really, fundamentally, about sexual norms.”

Society once assumed “no” was women’s default response to sexual propositions. “That put power in the hands of females,” …

Young women … are learning “to redefine their experience as a result of the patriarchy, whereas, in fact, it’s a result of sexual liberation.”

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What about the idea of actively enforcing viewpoint diversity? “I’m reluctant to have affirmative action for conservatives, just because it always ends up stigmatizing its beneficiaries,” Ms. Mac Donald says. Still, she’s concerned that as campuses grow increasingly hostile to conservatives, some of the best candidates may decide, as she did, that there’s no space left for them.

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What worries Ms. Mac Donald more than the mob is the destructive power of its animating ideas. If the university continues its decline, how will knowledge be passed on to the next generation, or new knowledge created? Ms. Mac Donald also warns of a rising white identity politics—“an absolutely logical next step in the metastasizing of identity politics.”

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I turn now to Andrew Sullivan, as I often do on Friday or Saturday.

His Friday column, The Danger of Trump’s Accomplishments, is almost perfect, but “Put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel of wine and you get sewage”:

The Republican senators likely to be elected this fall will, if anything, be even more pro-Trump than their predecessors. Corker, Flake, McCain: all gone. The House GOP will have been transformed more thoroughly into Trump’s own personal party, as the primary campaigns revealed only too brutally. And if by some twist of fate, a constitutional battle between Congress and president breaks out over impeachment proceedings, Justice Kavanaugh will be there to make sure the president gets his way.

(Emphasis added)

That ipse dixit about Brett Kavanaugh defending Trump from impeachment is vile, far beneath Sully’s usual level and, I’d wager, wrong. Moreover, it undermines the judiciary and, thus, the rule of law as surely as Democrats do when they talk as if Kavanaugh is some kind of Manchurian Associate Justice.

And — set me straight if I’m missing something — I think it’s stupid. The House impeaches; the Senate tries the impeachment. An Associate Justice of the Supreme Court has nothing to do with this process which, as we’ve been reminded much of late, is political despite the allusion to “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

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Audiotape of an exorcism

More cause for rejoicing: Peggy Noonan, like David Brooks, appears to have ended some sort of sabbatical and returned to writing a Friday column in the Wall Street Journal.

Her re-inaugural column, on the Kavanaugh nomination proceedings, departs powerfully from her usual irenic voice:

[T]he Kavanaugh hearings had some new elements. There were no boundaries on inquiry, no bowing to the idea of a private self. Accusations were made about the wording of captions under yearbook photos. The Senate showed a decline in public standards of decorum. A significant number of senators no longer even pretend to have class or imitate fairness. The screaming from the first seconds of the first hearings, the coordinated interruptions, the insistent rudeness and accusatory tones—none of it looked like the workings of the ordered democracy that has been the envy of the world.

…

It was a woman who redeemed the situation, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. In her remarks announcing her vote, she showed a wholly unusual respect for the American people, and for the Senate itself, by actually explaining her thinking. Under intense pressure, her remarks were not about her emotions. She weighed the evidence, in contrast, say, to Sen. Cory Booker, who attempted to derail the hearings from the start and along the way compared himself to Spartacus. Though Spartacus was a hero, not a malignant buffoon.

…

A word on the destructive theatrics we now see gripping parts of the Democratic Party. The howling and screeching that interrupted the hearings and the voting, the people who clawed on the door of the court, the ones who chased senators through the halls and screamed at them in elevators, who surrounded and harassed one at dinner with his wife, who disrupted and brought an air of chaos, who attempted to thwart democratic processes so that the people could not listen and make their judgments:

Do you know how that sounded to normal people, Republican and Democratic and unaffiliated? It sounded demonic. It didn’t sound like “the resistance” or #MeToo. It sounded like the shrieking in the background of an old audiotape of an exorcism.

Democratic leaders should stand up to the screamers. They haven’t, because they’re afraid of them. But things like this spread and deepen.

Stand up to your base. It’s leading you nowhere good. And you know it.

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Alan Jacobs on Evangelicalism

Some very sharp observations by Alan Jacobs in a Los Angeles Review of Books interview. I’ll not highlight as you should read it all (if at all) and let Jacobs himself guide you:

I felt that [Marilynne] Robinson was, in many cases, using her entry to the liberal intelligentsia — she can always be published in the NYRB or wherever else — to be very critical of her fellow Christians, and I just wished that went the other way around. I wished she would use her opening with the liberal intelligentsia to be more critical of them.

But, I’ve got to say, there’s been a bit of a change in my thinking that can be deeply identified with the 80 percent rate at which white evangelicals — or people who call themselves evangelicals — voted for Trump. When that happened, I thought, maybe Marilynne Robinson is more right about my fellow evangelicals than I was, you know? At that point, I thought maybe I should just drop my criticism of her, she may have been right after all.

That was a very distressing moment for me. I knew there would be a lot of support for Trump simply because he was the Republican candidate. I didn’t expect it to be that high. What I expected was more of a nose-holding posture — like, I don’t like this guy, I don’t approve of his personal life, I don’t approve of many things about him, but he’s the lesser of two evils. What we got instead was a great many Christians refusing to acknowledge that there’s anything evil here at all — he’s great, he’s wonderful, he speaks for us. And I will have to admit that I was taken aback, not so much by the willingness of evangelicals to vote for him, but by the enthusiasm with which they voted for him.

And then I started looking into things a little more, because I was curious about this phenomenon. And I came to realize that a lot of people who are willing to claim the name “evangelical” are actually people who don’t go to church and couldn’t sum up what evangelical belief is. They just don’t know.

And while some see that as good news, that the people who voted for Trump aren’t really evangelicals, that’s not the lesson I took from it. The lesson I took from it is: How many of us are there? We used to think there are a lot of evangelicals in America. Maybe there aren’t very many people who are sufficiently formed in the Christian faith to be able to say what it is.

So, what does “evangelical” mean?

Right now, I have no freaking idea. [Laughs.] I couldn’t begin to tell you.

What is it supposed to mean?

So, the most classic definition is one that was coined by Scottish historian David Bebbington (you can Google the term “Bebbington quadrilateral”), and it consists of these four things: evangelicals are people who believe in a conversion experience; they believe in the authority of scripture; they have a theology centered on the cross, and Jesus’s atoning work on the cross; and, as Bebbington puts it, they engage in a theologically informed activism, they get out there and preach the gospel and try to win people over. Some have suggested revisions to that, but that’s the general thing.

And what we’re looking at now is that many of the people who call themselves “evangelical” in polls are people who actually could not in any meaningful way affirm any of those four things. But that’s not encouraging to me, because what that suggests is that there are all these people who have some kind of tribal association with the word “evangelical.” And that means that evangelical churches have allowed themselves to degenerate into a kind of tribalism, rather than theologically informed, compassionate activism.

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Friday 10/12/18

1

There is nothing new about disinformation. Unlike ordinary lies and propaganda, which try to make you believe something, disinformation tries to make you disbelieve everything. It scatters so much bad information, and casts so many aspersions on so many sources of information, that people throw up their hands and say, “They’re all a pack of liars.” As Steve Bannon, a former Trump aide and former leader of Breitbart News, succinctly put it in an interview with Bloomberg, “[T]he way to deal with [the media] is to flood the zone with shit.”

Although disinformation is old, it has recently cross-pollinated with the internet to produce something new: the decentralized, swarm-based version of disinformation that has come to be known as trolling. Trolls attack real news; they attack the sources of real news; they disseminate fake news; and they create artificial copies of themselves to disseminate even more fake news. By unleashing great quantities of lies and half-truths, and then piling on and swarming, they achieve hive-mind coordination. Because trolling need not bother with persuasion or anything more than very superficial plausibility, it can concern itself with being addictively outrageous. Epistemically, it is anarchistic, giving no valence to truth at all; like a virus, all it cares about is replicating and spreading.

… By being willing to say anything, they exploit shock and outrage to seize attention and hijack the public conversation.

That last tactic is especially insidious. The constitution of knowledge is organized around an epistemic honor code: Objective truth exists; efforts to find it should be impersonal; credentials matter; what hasn’t been tested isn’t knowledge; and so on. Trolls violate all those norms: They mock truth, sling mud, trash credentials, ridicule testing, and all the rest.

Jonathan Rausch. Donald Trump is our Troll-In-Chief.

How do you balance:

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and slowing of regulatory assaults on orthodox Christians; against
The daily tacit denial from Trump and Sarah Sanders that there exists any such thing as objective truth and reality — “flooding the zone with shit”?

Something tells me that the long-term costs of #2 — and not just in terms of damaging the credibility of Christianity (of which Evangelicals have dubiously made themselves avatars) — outweigh and perhaps vastly outweigh the benefits of #1. I can’t yet put my finger on it; maybe it’s ineffable or self-evident.

We’ve gone from agreeing that there is “Truth” (even if we disagreed about its content), to referring to “your truth” versus “my truth,” and now we hover on the edge of the Emperor’s truth being the only truth, with the Emperor smirking as he mocks us by changing that “truth” at will.

2

Purdue University,”mother” to an astonishing proportion of early astronauts and now sporting a rather new, large and prominent Neil Armstrong engineering building and archive, is atwitter over the release of “First Man” and should be (pardon the expression) over the moon at Joe Morgenstern’s Wall Street Journal review.

Speaking of which, our local TV news, which regularly interjects inadvertent comic relief into the news, covered the Armstrong archive last night with a comment about it housing “N pieces of his life,” reminding me of Mitt Romney’s “binders of women.”

3

Pushing back against talk about Texas Evangelical women pushing Beto O’Rourke past Ted Cruz in the Senate race:

“I can’t support Beto because he’s pro-choice, and I just think Cruz is a liar,” my sister said in a text message.

Bobby Ross, Jr.

It’s good that this is in print, because one can read it categorically or presumptively (had it been spoken, the inflection likely would have disambiguated it):

I can’t support Beto — because he’s pro-choice ….
I can’t support Beto because he’s pro-choice ….

I believe the moral law would permit Ross’s sister, for sufficient cause, to vote for Beto despite his being pro-choice, but never because he’s pro-choice.

The decisive question is the sufficiency of Cruz’s cynicism and lying. His cynicism stinks to the heavens, but I haven’t kept a scorecard on his lying. Texans probably have a better reading on that.

4

Be it remembered that Jeff Sessions was one of Donald Trump’s earliest supporters for the Presidency but Trump is getting ready to replace him because he won’t corrupt the Justice Department by conducting show trials against Trump’s enemies or by firing Robert Mueller.

This is the treatment Evangelicals can expect if they ever reach a “we must obey God, not Caesar” moment. Whether they have the integrity to reach that moment is an open question.

Add this to item #1 as a reason why Trump should be voted out either in the 2020 Republican primaries or against many potential Democrat nominees in the General Election.

Since we’re apparently slow learners, though, God may ordain that 2020 be a repeat of Trump versus Hillary or maybe even Trump versus Beelzebub.

5

Be it noted, too, that Atifa, at least in Portland, has itself become a fascistic mob, just as I figured would happen in this world where every evil has a euphemistic name.

At the beginning, they came out only when conservatives, including trolls like Milo or Ann Coulter, came to town. Now they call protests, take over the streets, redirect traffic, and threaten anyone who doesn’t comply.

That’s why I say “fascistic.”

6

Consider two recent surveys released before the Senate voted Saturday to confirm Justice Kavanaugh. After the riveting Judiciary Committee hearing on Sept. 27, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll asked: “If there is still a doubt about whether the charges are true, do you think Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed?” Respondents said no by 52% to 40%.

A Harvard-Harris poll released Oct. 1 asked: “If the FBI review of these allegations finds no corroboration of the accusation of sexual assault, should Brett Kavanaugh be confirmed?” Sixty percent said yes and 40% no, with 86% of Republicans, 58% of independents and even 40% of Democrats supporting confirmation.

The 20-point swing between these two survey questions shows public opinion is malleable ….

Karl Rove.

I doubt that we’ll really know until November 7, if then, which way the Kavanaugh hearings cut politically.

7

I’ve periodically mentioned and lamented that “Christianity” in the U.S. Seems to have just two avatars, Roman Catholicism and Evangelicalism.

Roman Catholicism got that status by being huge and by claiming that it is The Church uniquely (a claim attenuated since Vitican II). Its claim had purchase in the West, which knew little of the four patriarchs from whom the proto-Popes went into schism (and which now are known as “Eastern Orthodox”). You were either Catholic or ex-Catholic via the Reformation. Those were the mental options.

I just realized, though, that I had that bit of history or Evangelicalism stored away that perhaps not everyone is aware of it.

Evangelicals got their status differently. I don’t discount the Great Black Swan, Billy Graham, and the boost William Randolph Hearst decided to give him, nor the sizzle of the Moral Majority and the rest of the Religious Right (which finally brought Evangelicalism into what the press thinks of as “reality”: contentious politics).

But it started earlier. Some evangelical visionaries early on saw the evangelistic potential of radio and, later, television. They scarfed up hundreds or thousands of FCC broadcast licenses in order to preach their version of the Gospel. Try to find a “Christian” radio station that isn’t Evangelical.

Go ahead. I’ll wait. (Crickets)

Domination of the airwaves had a big influence on perceptions of non-Catholic Christianity.

I don’t think Evangelicals set out to eliminate other voices from the airwaves, or otherwise to delegitimize those voices. It was more positive than that: spread the Gospel. The rest is epiphenomenal.

And the chaotic internet, where licenses aren’t yet required (but see next item) will perhaps diminish Evangelicalism’s place aside Rome in the Western Christian oligarchy.

8

Those who demanded Facebook & other Silicon Valley giants censor political content – something they didn’t actually want to do – are finding that content that they themselves support & like end up being repressed. That’s what has happened to every censorship advocate in history: https://t.co/IZHF8GVkgC

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 12, 2018

Late Thursday, Facebook and Twitter began what appears to be a coordinated purge of accounts trafficking in real news our masters would prefer we not know and opinions that no bien pensant should entertain. Caitlin Johnstone, aware that “censorship” proper is a government act, thinks nonetheless that the rise of corporate power and the thin line between corporate and government power make this effectively censorship in our new media age.

I’m likely to have more to say about this, but for now, Glenn Greenwald and Caitlin will suffice.

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