Patriarchy is dead

Giant media companies like Disney, Netflix, and Warner Media have threatened to cripple Georgia’s film industry if its residents don’t bend the knee and betray their pro-life convictions. And just last Monday, the New York Times ran a full-page advertisement organized by the pro-abortion lobby and signed by the CEOs of hundreds of companies saying that legal protections for unborn babies are “bad for business.” How disgusting is that? Caring for a little baby is “bad for business.”

Now, I get why outfits like Planned Parenthood or NARAL would say babies are “bad for business.” Abortion is their business, after all, and they’re just protecting their market share. But what about those other CEOs? Why do they think babies are “bad for business?”

Perhaps because they want their workers to focus single-mindedly on working—not building a family and raising children. All these politically correct CEOs want company men and women, not family men and women. They’ll support your individuality and self-expression just so long as you stay unattached and on the clock.

You couldn’t find a more perfect example of this than &Pizza, one of the companies whose CEO signed the pro-abortion ad. &Pizza doesn’t even offer paid maternity leave to all its employees ….

Tom Cotton, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital

All the Handmaiden’s Tale regalia seems curiously oblivious to our current reality, where women are not forced to conceive and bear children, but “empowered” by their self-interested corporate masters to be barren – or else.

French scores a TKO

Sohrab Amari (Trumpist) picked a stupid fight with David French (Never Trumpist).

The gist of [Sohrab] Ahmari’s argument is this: [David] French is a classical liberal, who argues in terms suited to classical liberalism. But classical liberalism is a dead end for Christians, and is nothing more than a way of negotiating our complete surrender to those who hate us and what we stand for. Better to fight with all we’ve got, with the expectation of winning and re-establishing Christian standards in the public square, than to keep ceding ground to those who have no intention at all of tolerating us.

…

The Ahmari vs. French standoff is a version of what Patrick Deneen, in a 2014 TAC article, identified as “a Catholic showdown worth watching.” Deneen identifies the antagonists not as left vs. right, but a dispute between two kinds of conservatives within US Catholicism. On one side are classical liberals — the Neuhaus/Novak/Weigel folks — who believe that Christianity can be reconciled with liberalism, and enrich it. On the other are those — Alasdair MacIntyre, David Schindler — who believe that they are fundamentally incompatible.

Though Ahmari is Catholic and French is Evangelical, this is near the core of their argument …

Rod Dreher

Dreher is correct that this is the sort of show-down Deneen predicted. Oddly, my visceral sympathies are with MacIntyre, Schindler and, yes, Patrick “Why Liberalism Failed” Deneen, but my reasoning throws me into the uncomfortable neo-conservative company of Neuhaus/Novak/Weigel.

It’s also a fight between the primacy of politics and the primacy of culture. Dreher is, correctly I think, on the primacy of culture side, pretty much because we have no realistic alternative. His full analysis, too, is worth reading, not just my excerpt.

The 2014 Deneen article is worth your reading or re-reading especially now. I clipped it at the time and have revisited it repeatedly.

The Amari/French fight has gone several rounds now, but I think French won on a technical knock-out yesterday:

[M]eet [Sohrab Ahmari’s] fictional Donald Trump. See if you recognize this person as the 45th President of the United States:

With a kind of animal instinct, Trump understood what was missing from mainstream (more or less French-ian) conservatism. His instinct has been to shift the cultural and political mix, ever so slightly, away from autonomy-above-all toward order, continuity, and social cohesion. He believes that the political community — and not just the church, family, and individual — has its own legitimate scope for action. He believes it can help protect the citizen from transnational forces beyond his control.

Donald Trump wouldn’t even fully grasp what this paragraph means, much less recognize it as a governing philosophy. He is a man of prodigious personal appetites. A man who proudly hangs a Playboy cover on the wall of his office. A man who marries and then marries again and again, yet still feels compelled to find porn stars to bed. In his essay, Ahmari condemns the man who craves autonomy above all else. He is, without knowing it, condemning Trump.

So, there you have it. To Ahmari, the alignment of forces looks like this: In one corner is the nice milquetoast libertarian, David French. In the other corner is the strong instrument of social cohesion, Donald Trump.

If this were a real binary conflict and I had to choose, I’d go with Trump, too …

I firmly believe that the defense of … political and cultural values must be conducted in accordance with scriptural admonitions to love your enemies, to bless those who persecute you, with full knowledge that the “Lord’s servant” must be “kind to everyone, able to teach, and patiently endure evil.”

I’m a deeply flawed person in daily (or even hourly) need of God’s grace, so I don’t always live up to those ideals. But I see them for what they are: commands to God’s people, not tactics to try until they fail. Ahmari does not wrestle with these dictates in his essay. He should have.

David French

Ben Domenech at The Federalist supported Amari.

Amari and Domenech are raising adolescent hell, as befits their publications, while French is soberly assessing reality, which sometimes makes him odd man out at NRO, but look at the last two paragraphs I quoted and I think you’ll see why he plays it that way.

Maybe Christians will need to make a strategic alliance with alt-right barbarians some day, but for now I think the alt-right ways are to be shunned as deathworks, while “David French-ism” is a lifework.

UPDATE: I couldn’t imagine what more remained to be said about Amari’s folly, but Bret Stephens finds something to say that isn’t just bouncing the rubble:

There’s something to the point that the bullying moral spirit of modern progressivism isn’t going to be mollified by David French’s niceness alone. More likely, it will be deflated over time (and only partially) by South Park-style mockery and a natural impatience with the moral scolds of any political persuasion.

But [Sohrab] Ahmari is after something else. What’s needed, he writes, is “to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” That’s the voice of a would-be theocrat speaking, even if he hasn’t yet mustered the courage to acknowledge the conviction.

…

I wish Ahmari were speaking for himself alone. He isn’t. He’s just the latest conservative writer I know who has found his own way to Trumpism — proving, if nothing else, that the only things intellectuals find hard to see are the facts that stare them in the face.

Here’s what stares me in the face: Ahmari’s life story — a Muslim immigrant who wound up becoming a Trumpian moralist by way of Marxism and then free-market conservatism — is a tribute to the value-neutral liberalism he now claims to despise. Whatever hopes remain of a decent conservative movement rest in rejecting the illiberalism he now embraces — the one that would close the door to some future Ahmari, embarking on an experiment in living all his own.

(emphasis added)

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Sacrificing Coventry

This story seemed to ripen while I was traveling abroad and otherwise occupied, but the new abortion bans in some states merit mention.

It has been decades since I was anywhere near the heart of pro-life litigation strategy — meaning cool heads figuring out how to chip away at the Supreme Court’s illicit abortion jurisprudence, as Thurgood Marshall once chippped away at segregation jurisprudence. That’s a caveat to all that follows.

But it also has long been clear to me that many “pro-life” politicians are more interested in grand, bold, and self-aggrandizing gestures than in finding plausible litigation paths through a legal minefield.

I’ll concede that if you see every abortion as a homicide, there’s a temptation toward reckless abandon, be it blowing up abortuaries or passing laws with negligible chance of withstanding constitutional challenge.

But my guiding light is, at least notionally, Winston Churchill, who knew that an air defense of Coventry (I believe it was Coventry, not another city) against an attack he knew was coming would clearly betray the Allies having quietly cracked German cryptography, thus compromising more strategic use of code-cracking.

He sacrificed Coventry — an incident that leaves me breathless at the burdens of power. A “long game” seldom is an unbroken string of successes, and the interim losses can be agonizing.

I don’t think that shenanigans like those in Alabama and Louisiana were conceived in high councils of cool legal heads. Banning all abortions, or disguising such a ban under the rubric of heartbeat detection, is exceedingly likely to fail in the courts and to be a public relations setback for the pro-life cause. I don’t think the Supreme Court is anything like nakedly political on this issue, nor would I want it to be.

Eventually, Roe v. Wade and its progeny will fall. But that will just send the abortion issue back to the legislatures, where for better or worse it belongs. In anticipation of that day, we must win hearts and minds if we’re someday going to make abortion not just unlawful, but unthinkable.

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Making it up on our own

Over the Christmas holiday 1969-70, I attended Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s “Urbana 70” Missionary Conference, along with, as I recall, 10,000 or so other young people.

Two episodes at the conference stood out in my memory these 50 years later. One is irrelevant for present purpose.

The other was an epiphanic episode wherein it was first announced that communion would be served to conferees at the University of Illinois Assembly Hall in a New Years Eve service. It made me feel all warm and comfy inside.

Then some spoilsport posed a question that conference organizers felt they must answer: By what authority was a parachurch organization enacting a sacrament of Christ’s Church? The question stunned this low Protestant boy, who had no answer, yet somehow felt that the proposed service was meet and right.

Organizers farmed the question out for answering to the late John R.W. Stott, low church only by the standards of high-church Anglicanism, who invented, live and in front of mostly smart and pious kids, a completely unpersuasive (and thus unmemorable) answer.

The show went on, but I was left pondering a conundrum, whenever that memory came back, until events decades later cut the Gordian knot: The questioner was right: IVCF had no authority to administer sacraments and should not have.

Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship was tacitly Inter-Varsity Low Protestant Fellowship when the rubber met the road, just as Christian Legal Society was really Low Protestant Legal Society. It’s an error it’s easy to make in America, where even the public schools in my childhood were tacitly Protestant.

That episode in my life came back to me as I read the following in a paean to the late Rachel Held Evans:

At every conference she hosted, Communion was served, and the table was always open. She knew how important its tangible reminders were, especially for those told they had no business imbibing the bread and wine.

I crave your forgiveness if it seems too proximate to her death to say anything, but I didn’t go looking for this; RHE’s own friends brought it up to eulogize her, and I’m loathe to let it pass.

I don’t doubt that this felt right to her, and that she meant as well as she knew how to mean. But at this point in my life, it shocks me, as something analogous apparently shocked someone 50 years ago at Urbana 70.

My shock today has little or nothing to do with her table being open, with all that implies in the context of her life, because surely all that was on the open table was “bread and wine,” not the body and blood of Christ. My shock has to do with the scotoma of “sacrament” without church. (Learning the meaning of “one holy catholic and apostolic Church” was part of what cut that Gordian IVCF knot for me.)

Some critical analysis in a long-form piece from 30 months ago, which I just discovered, is highly relevant: Alastair Roberts, The Social Crisis of Distrust and Untruth in America and Evangelicalism. It surprised and delighted me with its insight into how we get anti-vaxxers, President Donald Trump, autodidact super-peers — and, by implication, your Uncle Harry the climate denier (who has “done a lot of research on this hoax”) and churchless sacraments. It’s longish, but joins a very select club of clipped articles I’ve tagged as “important.”

Let he who has ears to hear, hear: This is not about Rachel Held Evans; it is about Church, about rightful authority, about the erosion of trust in rightful authority, and about the unreliability of most of those who, uncredentialed, fill the resultant void.

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“I am a man of European ancestry ….”

I wondered whether John Earnest really was a white nationalist, white supremacist or one of those weird birds, so I Duck-Duck Go’ed for his actual letter explaining his actions.

Because it has been put under the ban of respectable society, I got it from an execrable anti-semitic website. The Daily Stormer was in the search results, too.

You’re welcome.

I have now reviewed it. It is disgusting.

You’re welcome again. (If that’s all you wanted to know, you can stop now, and I’m trigger-warning you that I’ve got a few actual quotations below.)

But it’s not seductive. If I took in upon myself to watch a notorious porn flick in order to comment on it, I probably would feel at least a slight rise in my Levis at some point, but I found nothing remotely attractive about this letter except one reference to our sham currency.

With all the things wrong in this country, it’s astonishing that he picked, with that one currency exception (and to blame the Jews for sham currency seems sub-simplistic to me), nothing but straw men and delusional complaints to blame on the Jews.

Yes, he is not just an antisemite, but also a white nationalist, white supremacist or one of those weird birds. You don’t need to deconstruct it or listen for dog-whistles. It’s text, not subtext, starting off with his account of his God-blessed European bloodlines: “I am a man of European ancestry ….” (Well, la-de-freakin’-la to that.)

He claims not to be categorically opposed to groups other than Jews, though in his utopia, the races are segregated (“Do they actively hate my race? Yes, I hate them. Are they in my nation but do not hate my race? I do not hate them, but they aren’t staying. Are they out of my nation and do not hate my race? Fine by me.” Emphasis added.).

He is categorically opposed to Jews for the same paranoid, stark-raving reasons as those who rail against “white privilege.” I’m going to quote his most proximately toxic dogma here here.

Every Jew is responsible for the meticulously planned genocide of the European race. They act as a unit, and every Jew plays his part to enslave the other races around him—whether consciously or subconsciously.

(Sorry to beslime you, but I warned you.) I repeat: “the same paranoid, stark-raving reasons as those who rail against ‘white privilege.’” European genocide is a “systemic” feature/bug of Jewishness in his eyes — and I would wager a very substantial amount that he’s not alone in this core dogma — just as racism is systemic to whiteness. Q.E.D.

As he goes along in his explanatory letter, he gets progressively torqued up, scatalogical, and what passes for playful (apparently) on playgrounds like 4-Chan and 8-Chan.

Is he a Christian? Michael Brown, a messianic Jew, has a litmus test of philosemitism, so he says “No.”

I say “He’s got the Calvinist words down pretty well, but I’m not sure the music is in him.” I’ll leave it to his fellow-Calvinists to argue in excruciating detail why “I’m saved anyway, so I’m gonna kill some perfidious Jews” does not compute even within their baptized version of kismet.

But I’ve got benchmarks other than philosemitism:

Earnest complains of “race mixing” though the Apostle Paul notes the abolition of racial distinctions in Christ.
He calls the stoning of Stephen ” heart-wrenching and rage-inducing,” though Stephen forgave.
He refers darkly to obscure sins of Jews that “will never be forgiven,” though the prototype Christian prayer cautions us to forgive or else. (“I will never forgive [X]” is a terrifying self-sentencing to eternal death, it seems to me.)
His evasion on “loving my enemies” is a preposterous question-begging tap dance.

He inserts a bunch of “lightning round” question, including:

“Who inspires you?”
Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, Martin Luther, Adolf Hitler, Robert Bowers, Brenton Tarrant, Ludwig van Beethoven, Moon Man, and Pink Guy.

And he avers that he is not insane, though his testimony seems — gosh, I dunno — suspect.

Overall, I think publishing his letter would be a blow to anti-semitism (and to Calvinism), but I’m not Julian Freakin’ Assange, so if you want more than my 40,000 foot overview with very limited quotes, you’ll have to do your own search.

Κúριε δλεηθωμεν!

UPDATE: Veteran religion reporter Joe Carter identifies Earnest’s segregationism as “kinism,” a 2004 (or so) coinage:

The anti-kinist theonomist John Reasnor says:

At its core, kinism is the belief that God specially ordained “races” and that he intends for us to preserve that division to one degree or another. Kinism believes that God ethically and specially ordained the nations and “races.” In short, kinism is a doctrinal conviction of anti-miscegenation. All positions commonly held by kinists flow from this key kinist doctrine.

The term “kinism,” as a self-applied label, appears to have arisen around 2004 to be a “third way” for Christians between racism and anti-racism. Several kinist websites sprung up in the mid-2000s, and their ideas spread quite rapidly as they engaged and fought with Reformed bloggers.

The term—which comes from the word “kin,” such as “kith and kin”—may be of relatively recent vintage, but the beliefs and principles of kinism are ancient. As one kinist website claims, “The same continuum of concept has alternately been called familism, tribal theocracy, theonomic nationalism, or simply, traditional Christianity.” Kinists are obsessed with preserving the “European race” and their twisted form of Calvinism against those who would threaten it—usually African Americans or Jews.

This all comes as news to me, as I left Calvinism roughly seven before this term was coined and this debate joined. But I have no reason to doubt it.

Carter also makes an interesting observation:

Kinism in some form has been a problem within Reformed circles, particularly in Presbyterian and Reformed Baptist churches, since the Civil War. Even as our movement has denounced racism we’ve always seemed to attract racialists—from neo-Confederates to Reconstructionists**—who want to apply an intellectual veneer to their heretical views. But we’re seeing a resurgence in kinist ideology, and it’s far more prevalent than many of us want to admit.

…

** To understand the connection between kinism and theonomy, see Rushdoony on “Hybridization”: From Genetic Separation to Racial Separation.

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Evangelical and anti-semitic

I learned from George Yancey Tuesday or Wednesday that the murderer at the Chabad of Poway synagogue was the exception that tests the rule: a Church-going Evangelical who commits an ideology-driven crime.

For decades, the commentariat has blamed conservative Christians for heinous crimes, routinely getting way out over their skis on it but never paying a price when it turns out the criminals weren’t regular church-goers, whatever they might have adopted as a religious label.

Still, even a blind pig sometimes finds truffles, and a broken clock is right twice per day. 19-year-old John Earnest was a member of an Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC — not to be confused with the Orthodox Church), his father was an elder and he was well-catechized, as Julie Zaumer reports, at greater length than Yancey, in the Washington Post.

Yet Earnest picked up anti-semitic ideology that managed to co-exist with his Christian beliefs.

I’m passingly familiar with the OPC, and can vouch that anti-semitism is not inculcated there, although philo-semitism isn’t as obligatory there as in the different sort of Evangelicalism in which I sojourned from age 14 through my late 20s (through parental inadvertence — our mutual Christian boarding school choice).

Zaumer does a very good job teasing out several such doctrinal niceties within Evangelicalism, as Washington Post “God Beat” reporters so often do (its Acts of Faith is a daily web stop for me). And there are tantalizingly-unexpected data, such as Earnest’s pastor being “the only African American pastor in the entire OPC denomination,” who gets accused of “Cultural Marxism” when he preaches anything about “social justice” (latter scare-quotes for symmetry).

But here I set up my soapbox.

Evangelicalism is not doctrinally homogenous. It has Churches where love of Jews is taught for the “thanks-but-no-thanks” reason that the modern nation-state of Israel is a sina qua non to an end-times script of lurid battles, a bizarre mass body-snatching by God (“the Rapture”) and such; you also have the OPC, its amillenial position being much closer to historic Christianity. What loosely binds them together as a movement is what Mars Hill Audio Journal‘s Ken Myers calls “orthopathos” (“right feeling”) or, if you want to get geeky about it, the Bebbington Quadrilateral.

A fortiori, and setting aside endless debates about who’s right and who’s wrong (spoiler alert: the Orthodox Church is right — and homogenous in Nicene dogma), Christianity is not homogenous.

Likewise, Islam is not homogenous. There’s Sunni, Shia, Suffi, and probably as many other flavors as there are Imams in the world. It is not homogenous, I submit, for the same reason Protestantism is not homogenous: disparate good- and bad-faith interpretations of a holy text held to be foundational.

If you want to say that John Earnest wasn’t a real Christian, or that his Christianity was tragically tinctured with toxic non-Christian (if not anti-Christian) ideologies, you must be prepared to respectfully entertain the same possibility about “Islamic terrorism.”

Having done so, you may conclude that Islam is more prone to terroristic ideology than Christianity, but I doubt that you could honestly and intelligently claim that Islam is uniformly terroristic, let alone the idiotic trope that it’s “not even a religion.”

I may overhear some of the internal Evangelical discussions about this incident, and can easily imagine revisiting it (the part before the soapbox, too). Already, I’ve seen Alan Jacobs link to this article.

INSTANT UPDATE: I apparently misread Zaumer. Rev. Mika Edmondson, the African-American OPC pastor, was not Earnest’s pastor, though he had preached recently at Earnest’s Chuch. The mistake was one of primacy in the story: the first pastor quoted and referred to as “pastor” and quoted as saying “radicalized into white nationalism from within the very midst of our church,” which I took to mean congregation rather than denomination.

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Some animals are more equal than others

Legal Scholar Gerard V. Bradley thinks there’s more the just a desire defend the sexual revolution behind the sudden and dramatic American turn against religious freedom.

That “more” is identity politics:

For the first time in American history, it has become respectable to publicly oppose religious liberty and its supreme value in our polity. This unprecedented turn is ominous. It will not only diminish our constitutional law. It will remap our common life, for religious liberty has always been a linchpin of our political culture.

…

You might think that all of this is just another example of the sexual revolution threatening religious liberty, as it has for decades. Think again …

The sexual revolution may be a necessary part of the gale-force headwind buffeting religious liberty. But sexual freedom itself is not nearly sufficient to threaten it. Only identity politics could do that.

Here are three of many possible illustrations of what I mean when I say that identity politics poses an especially great threat to religious liberty. They stem from three related errors.

The first is that what believers invariably understand themselves to be doing (steering clear of immoral involvement in the bad conduct of another person) is forcibly reconceptualized as an attack the personal status or “identity” of a person self-identifying or presenting as a member of a supposedly vulnerable group …

…

Compounding this first error is the prevalent notion that where public authority recognizes the religious liberty of someone like Jack Phillips, the state puts its own “imprimatur” on Phillips’s unjust discrimination, and even on his normative premise that marriage between two men or two women is morally impossible …

…

A third error builds on the first two. Often styled as “dignitary” harm, the idea seems to be that when you are refused a service due to the provider’s moral qualms about assisting you in certain activities, your personhood or identity is “demeaned,” and your “dignity” is attacked.

… It is ever more apparent that, in this context, we are really talking about perceived insult, about a same-sex couple’s feeling that they have been humiliated or demeaned, even though no word has been spoken, no gesture made, that means anything more than “It is against my conscience to participate in this activity.”

… Before sexual identity could emerge as the colossus it is, religion had to be reduced from a set of beliefs and truth-claims about the way the cosmos really is to nothing more than one’s singular expression of ineffable spiritual experiences or of the collective identity of one’s religious tribe. Religion had to first be authoritatively re-described, against the self-understanding of many believers, as experience, or even as raw subjectivity, somehow walled off from the realms of genuine knowledge about reality ….

A key here, which I fear Prof. Bradley did not summarize very well, is that even on identity politics terms, there is at least as great a dignitary harm in telling the religious “accused” that his deepest convictions are contemptible (as a Colorado civil rights commissioner told Jack Phillips in the wedding cake case) as there is in the accused’s sober “It is against my conscience to participate in this activity.”

“That’s not religious freedom, that’s discriminaaaaaaaation!” is the hackneyed and idiotic new convention for remapping our common life, and it’s reinforced every time the New York Times and other idiots put religious freedom in scare quotes (e.g. Indiana’s controversial “religious freedom” law …).

Some identities are just more equal than others.

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Richard Lugar, R.I.P.

Mr. Lugar was elected to represent Indiana in 1976, after managing a family farm and food-machinery business and serving as the mayor of Indianapolis. He rose to become the leading Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before he was defeated in a 2012 GOP primary by a tea-party-backed insurgent who branded him as insufficiently conservative.

Wall Street Journal

There wasn’t much I could do about it, but that loss was the proof that Indiana had slipped its moorings.

My “Richard Lugar Memory” was a remarkable Lincoln Day Dinner speech in my home county in what must have been the mid-1980s. I was still (and for another 20 years or so) notionally a Republican.

Lugar had just returned from a junket in the Phillipines, was a bit jet-lagged, but spoke brilliantly, mesmerizingly, without notes, for what seemed like forever but not long enough.

Among other things, he warned the assembled Republicans not to believe the propaganda that the opponents of Ferdinand Marcos were a bunch of Communists. Rather, Marcos was supported only by plutocrats with medium and small business and all others in opposition.

The propaganda was pretty consistent with the Republican party line, but Lugar was prophetic, Marcos was ousted in the aftermath of a notoriously corrupt snap election, and the Phillipines were better for it.

I never voted for anyone but Lugar when he was on the ballot thereafter. He wasn’t just one of Indiana’s best, but one of the best, period, full stop.

We didn’t deserve him, the GOP ousted him for a fool (after I had repudiated the party but generally voted in its primaries, as Indiana doesn’t have voter registration by party), and the Republican party paid for that folly by losing the Senate seat to Joe Donnelly, duly replaced 6 years later by another Republican fool (the one of three primary candidates who most convincingly promised slavish fealty to the Überfool in the White House).

I’m glad for him that Richard Lugar did not live to see the denoument of this American tragedy.

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Surprised by food for thought

… I was continuing to make my way through Shoshana Zuboff’s great new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It’s not an easy book to read, in part because the things Zuboff, a former Harvard Business School professor, talks about can be somewhat arcane, but also because it’s damned depressing. This is a book about how a business model pioneered by Google has come in less than 20 years to dominate everything, with consequences we can scarcely comprehend. I’m not going to get into the book’s weeds here; there are lots of weeds, and I am not sure that Zuboff is going to be able to offer a plausible way out of this mess.

The gist of it is that nearly everything we do and say is monitored by multiple corporations, who are taking that data — usually without our knowledge or permission — and using it to figure out how to sell us things and, more crucially, to guide us toward behaving in particular ways without knowing that we are being manipulated. There is no real way to opt out of the system. It is overwhelming — and Zuboff shows how the tech companies have spent ungodly sums to manipulate politicians and regulators in order to maintain maximum access to the personal data of everyone. (The Obama administration was in Google’s pocket, for example.) Zuboff likens it to the Spanish conquistadores arriving in the New World.

I bring this up in light of Brooks’s column because if you want to talk about the foundations of society being attacked, believe me, we should all worry about Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Silicon Valley on the whole a lot more than we worry about our buffoonish president. What the surveillance capitalists have done, and are doing, matters far more to the future of our democracy and its legitimacy than does Trump.

…

I find Donald Trump — lying, unstable, barely competent Donald Trump — to be less of a threat than I find the kind of progressive elites who hate him. He has the presidency, which is a powerful thing to have. But they control Silicon Valley. They command the US economy. They control major American institutions, including higher education and the media. And they trust in their own goodness.

Rod Dreher (Emphasis in original)

I continued reading Dreher’s blog entry, despite my initially thinking “not one of his better ones,” because I thought I might have missed something in the David Brooks column he quotes (of which I also thought “not one of his better ones”).

I’m glad I continued because, although I cannot praise his prose or pace, there’s nevertheless some nourishing if un-tasty “food for thought” in it, including a different vantage point from which to ask — yes, even 32 scant hours after release of the Mueller Report — whether Trump might actually be the lesser evil in 2020, both as a matter of self-preservation (as one whose Social Credit Score, as viewed by those who trust in their own goodness, is pretty low) and for the interests of America more generally.

As Freddie put it:

I have had a standing rule not to read anything with the word “Trump” in the headline since mid-2017. I have not kept to it 100% of the time, but I have been pretty compliant. But here’s something I know.

The Trump-Russia collusion story became a national obsession because of two matters of psychic convenience: one, the belief that someone (even a Republican FBI agent cop like Robert Mueller) is going to ride in on a horse and save us; and two, that our problems are the problem of an outside force, some malevolent international entity working evil. Only a child could believe that either of those is true.

No one is coming to save you. This is what the world is now, and this is what the world will be long long after Trump is gone. And more: this is the world we deserve. We are not broken because of Russia, or Donald Trump. We are broken because of the evil this country has done and the evil this country is. You can work to change that. But if you try to hide from it behind the Mueller report you will only fail. Because no one is coming to save you.

The 2016 election had “God’s Judgment” written all over it. 2020 may come packaged the same way. Lesser evils rather than affirmative goods may be all we’ll get to choose. Democrats: This is mostly up to you as a practical matter: can you nominate someone less evil?)\

Anyway, I point you to Dreher’s blog on the chance that you’ll find food for thought as well.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Trump’s appeal to inner demons

Many (most?) of our deathworks bear a “progressive” imprimatur, but let’s give “conservatives” credit for besliming us on the matter of immigration.

It was never enough. Nielsen may have been willing to violate the dictates of morality, but she wasn’t willing to actually break the law. The New York Times reports that “the president called Ms. Nielsen at home early in the mornings to demand that she take action to stop migrants from entering the country, including doing things that were clearly illegal, such as blocking all migrants from seeking asylum. She repeatedly noted the limitations imposed on her department by federal laws, court settlements and international obligations.”

… [T]he points earned for gassing women and children were insufficient to save Nielsen’s job. Trump demanded more and more. In California on Friday, CNN reported via Twitter, “Trump told border agents he wanted them to stop letting people cross the border, despite the fact that Central American asylum seekers according to U.S. law can do so.”

Someone had to be blamed for Trump’s failure to control the border, and Nielsen made a convenient scapegoat …

It is time to end the charade. Trump is agitated that Nielsen was not barbarous enough for his depraved tastes. She still retained some vestigial loyalty to the Constitution and the laws of the United States. Given that we are in a time of purported emergency, we can no longer afford such sentimental attachments. Rather than appoint another outsider who will never live down to his expectations, Trump should nominate as her successor the actual mastermind of the administration’s immigration policies: White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller.

This is the 33-year-old wunderkind who orchestrated the Muslim travel ban, vast reductions in refugee admissions, efforts to build the wall, attempts to deport the “dreamers,” the deployment of troops to the southern border, and, of course, the family separations policy — along with the accompanying hysteria about crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. He even went so far as to deny that the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty — “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — represents the spirit of America. Miller has further ambitions such as ending “birthright citizenship” and slashing legal immigration. He should assume formal, legal responsibility for this un-American approach.

Max Boot, End the charade. Appoint Stephen Miller to run DHS.

Trump has taken what should be the honor of a lifetime — serving the country at the highest levels of the executive branch — and turned it into a reputational black hole.

… [T]he separation of crying migrant children from their parents as a deterrent, and the housing of children in prisonlike conditions, will be some of the most enduring political images of the Trump era. It says something about Nielsen that she took part in such practices. It says something about Trump that such actions were apparently too moderate and restrained for his taste.

…

I have no doubt that Trump is using the issue of immigration in a cynical way to solve political problems. But the implications are disturbing. The president clearly regards resentment against migrants as the common, binding purpose of the Republican Party. And, so far, he has not been wrong. The success of Trump’s cynical ploy depends on the existence of genuine enthusiasm for exclusion within his party. His play only works if the party’s nativism is broad and authentic.

… Trump’s appeal to inner demons above better angels proved easier than many of us hoped. And that makes the political and moral damage harder to repair.

Michael Gerson, Trump takes an honor of a lifetime and turns it into a black hole.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here, but a bit here as well. Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).