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Channel: Law – The American Conservative

Progressive Politics Permeate, Poison

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What must it be like to work in such a lunatic environment? From the NYT:

“I want to apologize,” the Facebook executive wrote last Friday in a note to staff. “I recognize this moment is a deeply painful one — internally and externally.”

The apology came from Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president for global public policy. A day earlier, Mr. Kaplan had sat behind his friend, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, when the judge testified in Congress about allegations he had sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford in high school. Mr. Kaplan’s surprise appearance prompted anger and shock among many Facebook employees, some of whom said they took his action as a tacit show of support for Judge Kavanaugh — as if it were an endorsement from Facebook itself.

The unrest quickly spilled over onto Facebook’s internal message boards, where hundreds of workers have since posted about their concerns, according to current and former employees. To quell the hubbub, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, last Friday explained in a widely attended staff meeting that Mr. Kaplan was a close friend of Judge Kavanaugh’s and had broken no company rules, these people said.

Yet the disquiet within the company has not subsided. This week, Facebook employees kept flooding internal forums with comments about Mr. Kaplan’s appearance at the hearing. In a post on Wednesday, Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook executive, appeared to dismiss the concerns when he wrote to employees that “it is your responsibility to choose a path, not that of the company you work for.” Facebook plans to hold another staff meeting on Friday to contain the damage, said the current and former employees.

Read it all. It gets even more berserk. It’s a company full of SJW snowflakes, freaking out because Kaplan took a personal day to go be present when one of his closest friends, Kavanaugh, was facing one of the most difficult days of his life. And for that, he’s pilloried within the company.

Once upon a time, you left your politics out of the workplace. Now they infest the workplace — from the Left. Can anybody think of companies where conservatives demand a space safe from an opposing opinion expressed in private life? I can’t.

More left-wing fanaticism ruining everyday life: a DC woman, Jessica Raven, was so upset that a woman running for PTA president at her kid’s school tweeted out support for Kavanaugh that she (Raven) decided to run against her. Now Social Justice Warriors from all over are backing her candidacy. From the WaPo:

Jessica Raven is the executive director of Collective Action for Safe Spaces, a grass-roots organization that describes its role in one sentence on its website: “We’re working to make DC safer for everyone.” She had recently cut back her hours so she could become more involved in the life of her 4-year-old transgender daughter, Max, but she said that before the hearing, she hadn’t decided how she was going to spend that time. When she saw the other woman’s tweets, she said, they struck her because they “seemed defensive of Brett Kavanaugh.”

Knowing the other mother was running unopposed, Raven submitted her bio that night to the parents’ association and, with that, secured her place on the ballot.

“I thought no one is running, and I’m someone,” she said. “My child needs a safe community at school, and I want to be a part of creating that.”

Because having a PTA president who expressed sympathy for Brett Kavanaugh on social media makes a school unsafe.

These people. They have to be stopped. They’re ruining life. Who wants to work for a company where you can become an internal pariah for standing by your old friend? Who wants to work in a neurosis-ridden hamster cage where you have to be afraid that the internal mob will turn on you for having the “wrong” opinion? Who wants to get involved in helping out at your local school when ideologically-charged activists rush in to politicize everything?

A Missouri reader writes, asking me to leave his name out of it:

I just wanted to drop a note regarding your recent piece on polls. I was a life-long Democrat who felt like the party abandoned me after Ferguson. I felt it was unjust that a cop couldn’t be considered innocent until proven guilty, and I was deeply uncomfortable with the way my party was heading. However, even though I detested Hillary Clinton because of her riding her husband’s coattails, I preferred her to Trump’s boorish lack of values, and his nationalist rhetoric. Politically, I couldn’t even join a new party, because it had been co-opted by this lout. This was difficult, because the Democratic Party’s near obsession with abortion was especially disconcerting to me. For me over the years, it became an environmental issue, because you’d be ending an utterly unique life. It seemed hypocritical that we’d rightly bend over backwards to save an endangered species, yet dispose of a baby in the womb.

Clinton’s loss gave the Democrats time to reflect, but they seem to have doubled down on everything. I’ve had friendships altered. Co-workers who used to go to lunch with me have ostracized me, simply for not being fully on board with the various causes that pass for the Left, today. There can be no engagement and no persuasion. In the Kavanaugh matter, I would say that regardless of how I feel he may rule, I’m concerned about going after anyone no evidence. The political timing makes Dr. Ford at best a pawn, or worse; a co-conspirator bringing down an innocent man.

So…what do I do for the Senate race in Missouri? Option A would be to follow my history and vote Democratic. McCaskill has been one of the more moderate voices in the party. She opposes Kavanaugh, but seems to have removed the dubious allegations against him from the equation. I applaud her for at least that. She didn’t show that restraint towards Darren Wilson. Option B would be to vote for the Independent. Or Option C would be give it to the Republican who doesn’t seem particularly interested in the job, and who decried those who uses offices for stepping stones. The correct answer now is C. Democrats can’t be trusted to handle an investigation properly, and they will play this game for any subsequent nominees. If it won’t be some neo-Puritanical test, it will be a religious test disguised as making sure someone isn’t prejudiced. I can’t share my thoughts with many, but I’m reminded of Claudius’ line from Hamlet.

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

My only haven will be the ballot box. Anything else would be a tip-off risking more alienation from many peers. The party needs to suffer more, before they can grow. Tactics like this are shameful. The question is…will they do it by 2020? Will we even last that long? I suspect there are thousands of people like me who are disgusted with the way they are heading. I loathe Trump, and would never vote for him; but the Democrats had one job…and they can’t manage even a partial turn to the center. That’s why I’m calling it now: Democrats won’t claim the Senate. If the Democrats can return to valuing the blue collar workers, and not just the minimum wage crowd, find room in their tent for those who find abortion wrong, and reclaim themselves as defenders of free speech; they might have a future. However, identity politics and all the myriad other ills seem too entrenched. So do the politics of destroying people, rather than honestly and ardently debating the flaws of their ideas.

UPDATE: A reader who grew up in communist Czechoslovakia writes:

It may look like Communism but it isn’t.  It’s worse. Nobody, and I mean nobody (perhaps with one notable exception of a very decent guy, actually), believed the communist propaganda drivel. I don’t recall anybody fainting at the thought of imperialist ‘diversants’ sneaking across the border, revanchists hiding in their closets. It was a mechanism to control, brutalize and destroy and both the brutes and the brutalized understood it as such. Our current situation is somewhat unique. We actually have a large class of people who take this garbage at face value. That’s scary.


After Kavanaugh’s Destruction, Who Is Safe?

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David Brooks is back from book leave today, and he’s disgusted by the Kavanaugh debacle, which he calls “a complete national disgrace.”  Excerpts:

What we saw in these hearings was the unvarnished tribalization of national life. At the heart of the hearings were two dueling narratives, one from Christine Blasey Ford and one from Brett Kavanaugh. These narratives were about what did or did not happen at a party 36 years ago. There was nothing particularly ideological about the narratives, nothing that touched on capitalism, immigration or any of the other great disputes of national life.

More:

These hearings were also a devastating blow to intellectual humility. At the heart of this case is a mystery: What happened at that party 36 years ago? There is no corroborating evidence either way. So the crucial questions are: How do we sit with this uncertainty? How do we weigh the two contradictory testimonies? How do we measure these testimonies when all of cognitive science tells us that human beings are really bad at spotting falsehood? Should a person’s adult life be defined by something he did in high school?

Commentators and others may have acknowledged uncertainty on these questions for about 2.5 seconds, but then they took sides. If they couldn’t take sides based on the original evidence, they found new reasons to confirm their previous positions. Kavanaugh is too angry and dishonest. He drank beer and threw ice while in college. With tribal warfare all around, uncertainty is the one state you are not permitted to be in.

This is where I think the fault is entirely with the activist Left. Heaven knows the partisan Right is capable of same, and often guilty, but in the Kavanaugh case — as Brooks’s examples show — the recklessness was almost entirely on the part of the Left. In my own case, this is what made me come down hard for Kavanaugh (absent any credible discovery of serious sexual misconduct): that he was clearly being railroaded by liberal politicians and media, in a way that is frankly McCarthyite. Except this time, instead of Reds, we have White Male Conservatives. People like me, and my friends and family. The last two weeks have brought forth from the Left a concerted attempt not to get to the truth about what happened 36 years ago, and how to deliberate responsibly in the face of uncertainty, but rather to brutalize and destroy a man and all those of his despised cultural and ideological class.

Brooks writes, trying to be even-handed:

This past month we’ve seen thousands of people convinced that they know how Kavanaugh behaved because they know how “privileged” people behave. We’ve seen thousands of people lining up behind Kavanaugh because they know that there’s this vicious thing called “the Left,” which hates them.

But — and I ask this honestly — what other conclusion is there to be drawn when so much of the opposition to Kavanaugh has been stated in explicitly racist, sexist terms? The “privilege” that the Left uses to abominate Kavanaugh is, in their worldview, a function of his race and his sex. I don’t know Brett Kavanaugh and I had no interest in his nomination, but watching what progressive leaders in politics, law, and media have done to him, in terms of turning him into a demon and denying him the presumption of innocence, has been a constant drumbeat of: if they’ll do it to him, they’ll do it to you and your sons, because you are members of the hated class. 

If my sons or my daughter are ever the victim of sexual assault, or are ever accused of sexual assault, I want them, their alleged assailant, or their accuser, to have due process. This is one of the most precious aspects of our system of law. Human perception and memory is faulty, and under certain conditions, even innocent people will formally admit their guilt. (The Innocence Project has documented many false confessions.) Our system is not perfect, but it’s the best we have, and we’re fools if we throw it away.

I can’t tell this story often enough: In my rural Southern town, back in the 1940s, a black man and a white woman were discovered in sexual congress. The woman accused him of rape. The sheriff and two deputies hunted the black man down through the woods, captured him, dragged him back to the jailhouse, and lynched him. Days later, the white accuser broke down under the weight of her conscience. She confessed that the black man had been her lover. She had accused him of rape to save her own reputation in that white supremacist culture.

There was never any chance that that black man would have had the opportunity to defend himself in court. There was never any chance that he would be considered innocent until proven guilty. Everybody (that is, all whites, who held all the power) knew that black men seethed with lust for white women. Everybody knew that no white woman could possibly find black men sexually desirable. In a case like this one, there’s no need for a fair trial; you believe the woman. If you don’t believe the woman, and exact swift and sure punishment for her assailant, then it will be open season for black men to rape white women. That was what the power-holders in that time and place believed.

When the woman finally told the truth, no one had to answer for that murder. She and her family quietly moved away from the town, and were never heard from again. Everything returned to normal. An innocent black man was killed by the sheriff and two deputies, solely on the word of a white woman who told a lie that confirmed all the white supremacist society’s own prejudices. But to have attempted to hold those white murderers accountable for their deed would have brought the entire cultural and legal system of white supremacy into question. It was thought better than an innocent man should die than that the entire system should be revealed as corrupt. Protecting the system was more important than justice.

The only reason I know about this is that back in the 1990s, one of the deputies who was there that night confessed to his son what he had done. The old man had carried the weight of his guilt for 50 years. The son was a friend of mine, and shared the confession with me because he was deeply disturbed by this knowledge. He had not thought his father capable of such a deed. It stunned me too. I knew that old man as a kindly pillar of the community. Which he was. But he was also a murderer, and he was a murderer because the ideology of his community told him that the black man could not possibly be innocent, and the white woman could not possibly be lying.

Brett Kavanaugh is not being lynched, of course. But his character is being assassinated, and his Supreme Court nomination may be destroyed on the basis of a 36-year-old accusation that cannot be reasonably established as true. And this is considered necessary by an activist Left that believes the ends justifies any means necessary to achieve them.

Take a look at the opening of this Slate column by Mark Joseph Stern:

By all indications, Brett Kavanaugh is about to be confirmed to the Supreme Court, where he will become part of a five-justice conservative bloc that will swiftly roll back decades of progressive jurisprudence. His confirmation will be a major victory for the Republican Party and its leader, Donald Trump, who will soon succeed in entrenching GOP control over the court for at least a generation. But as soon as Kavanaugh takes the oath, he will plunge the Supreme Court into a legitimacy crisis that could weaken its power over the long term. This crisis will become particularly acute if Democrats retake Congress and the presidency but find their reforms stymied by a reactionary judiciary. The broad consensus over the court’s authority to interpret the Constitution will crumble. If that all comes to pass, Kavanaugh’s appointment may come to be seen as a Pyrrhic victory not just for Trump but for the entire conservative movement.

The reader who sent me that adds:

Think about that. Until now there was “broad consensus over the court’s authority.” He said that. I didn’t. And this existed despite “decades of progressive jurisprudence.” So for decades, conservatives lost and lost and lost and lost, but still confirmed the legitimacy of the system. But as soon as those losses BEGIN to be rolled back, it’s time for a war on the judiciary.

This is who we are playing against here, Rod . Being professional and winsome and all the rest was a fool’s game.

Ermagerd! The court is ditching laws enacted by Congress!

Yeah. No sh*t. Tell it to gay marriage.

Conservative writer and broadcaster Erick Erickson was one of the original Never Trumpers. When he came out against Trump in 2016, he lost two-thirds of his income. He sacrificed for his principles. But events of the past two weeks have pushed him to declare that he will vote for Trump’s re-election in 2020. Here’s why:

Frankly, Trump does not have the character or strong Christian faith I prefer in a President. But he is positively angelic compared to his political opponents and the press. Between Trump and his opposition, I would rather vote for him, despite his flaws, than his opponents who want a flawless progressive utopia. Trump is neither an ambassador for my values nor the articulate champion of my principles I would prefer. But he is a safe harbor in a progressive storm that seeks to both destroy my values and upend our constitutional republic.

Progressives believe Trump is an authoritarian tyranny barely constrained by the rule of law. With a straight face, these same progressives argue the accusations against Kavanaugh are proof of his guilt, he should not be presumed innocent, a lack of witnesses is confirmation he did what they claim, all women must be believed except the ones who defend Kavanaugh, and any dissent is just white male privilege. Progressives may claim President Trump is Caesar at the edge of the Rubicon, but they have embraced the bastard love child of Joseph Stalin and Franz Kafka and enlisted the American political press to smear, defame, and attack anyone who stands in their way.

And:

There is much in this present political age about which I am uncertain. But there is one thing about which I am absolutely certain. President Trump is not my enemy and too many progressives view me as theirs.

A senior Facebook executive, its chief Washington lobbyist, has been close friends with Brett Kavanaugh for over 20 years. He was present at Kavanaugh’s hearing in a personal capacity, to show support by his presence for his old friend. He said not one word about the nomination, only sat with Kavanaugh’s friends and family in the audience. Now he is being excoriated from within Facebook for that, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has said publicly that it was a “mistake” for him to be there. I understand this morning that Kaplan may be fired over the incident.

Fired for holding an opinion different from the opinion of many employees. Fired for sitting behind his old friend in a Senate hearing. “Are you now, or have you ever been, a friend of Brett Kavanaugh?” Then let’s blacklist you, and make sure you can’t work.

Facebook is not a dinky-butt muffin shop in Portlandia. It’s one of the most powerful global corporations. Today Facebook is having a town hall meeting where Mark Zuckerberg will address this issue. Watch what he does. If the Social Justice Warrior mob gets away with this at Facebook, it will set a terrible precedent.

Whatever happens, be aware: this is what woke progressives want for our country and its institutions. I hate the idea of tribalism too, but at what point does one have to fall in with the tribe, out of sheer self-protection? Brett Kavanaugh, from what I can tell, is a by-the-book pinstriped Washington Republican. If the liberal mob can turn him into History’s Greatest Monster on the basis of unsupported allegations from his teenage years, and on the basis of his race and gender, then who is safe?

 

Susan Collins’s Strong Speech

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Sen. Susan Collins, the pro-choice moderate Republican from Maine, gave a great speech on the Senate floor, explaining at length why she intends to vote for Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation. In it, she does a terrific job of explaining her reasoning, demonstrating how much thought she has put into her vote.

As a pro-life conservative, I should note that I was discouraged by her lines saying why she has confidence that a Justice Kavanaugh would vote to uphold Roe v. Wade — discouraged, because I suspect that she’s correct. I can understand why liberals would not want to take that chance with him, but given a Republican president and a Republican Senate, I think somebody like Kavanaugh is the best they can hope for. I hope Sen. Collins’s faith in him on the abortion issue is misplaced, but I don’t think it will have been, in the end.

Most importantly, she showed why it is important that Kavanaugh’s nomination not go down under the weight of these spurious accusations. Here is the full text of the Collins speech. Excerpts:

Mr. President, I listened carefully to Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee. I found her testimony to be sincere, painful and compelling. I believe that she is a survivor of a sexual assault and that this trauma has upended her life. Nevertheless, the four witnesses she named could not corroborate any of the events of that evening gathering where she says the assault occurred. None of the individuals Professor Ford says were at the party has any recollection at all of that night. Judge Kavanaugh forcefully denied the allegations under penalty of perjury. Mark Judge denied under penalty of felony that he had witnessed an assault. PJ Smyth, another person allegedly at the party, denied that he was there under penalty of felony. Professor Ford’s lifelong friend, Leland Keyser, indicated that under penalty of felony she does not remember that party. And Ms. Keyser went further. She indicated that not only does she not remember a night like that, but also that she does not even know Brett Kavanaugh.

In addition to the lack of corroborating evidence, we also learned some facts that raised more questions. For instance, since these allegations have become public, Professor Ford testified that not a single person has contacted her to say I was at the party that night. Furthermore, the professor testified that although she does not remember how she got home that evening, she knew that because of the distance she would have needed a ride, yet not a single person has come forward to say that they were the one who drove her home or were in the car with her that night. And Professor Ford also indicated that, even though she left that small gathering of six or so people abruptly and without saying good-bye, and distraught, none of them called her the next day or ever to ask why she left, is she okay, not even her closest friend Ms. Keyser. Mr. President, the Constitution does not provide guidance on how we are supposed to evaluate these competing claims. It leaves that decision up to each senator. This is not a criminal trial, and I do not believe that the claims such as these need to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, fairness would dictate that the claims at least should meet a threshold of more likely than not as our standard. The facts presented do not mean that Professor Ford was not sexually assaulted that night or at some other time, but they do lead me to conclude that the allegations fail to meet the more likely than not standard. Therefore, I do not believe that these charges can fairly prevent Judge Kavanaugh from serving on the court.

More:

Since the hearing I have listened to many survivors of sexual assault. Many were total strangers who told me their heart-wrenching stories for the first time in their lives. Some were friends that I had known for decades, yet with the exception of one woman who had confided in me years ago, I had no idea that they had been the victims of sexual attacks. I am grateful for their courage and their willingness to come forward, and I hope that in heightening public awareness, they have also lightened the burden that they have been quietly bearing for so many years. To them I pledge to do all that I can to ensure that their daughters and granddaughters never share their experiences. Over the past few weeks I have been emphatic that the Senate has an obligation to investigate and evaluate the serious allegations of sexual assault. I called for and supported the additional hearing to hear from both Professor Ford and Judge Kavanaugh. I also pushed for and supported the FBI’s supplemental background investigation. This was the right thing to do.

Christine Ford never sought the spotlight. She indicated that she was terrified to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and she has shunned attention since then. She seemed completely unaware of Chairman Grassley’s offer to allow her to testify confidentially in California. Watching her, Mr. President, I could not help but feel that some people who wanted to engineer the defeat of this nomination cared little, if at all, for her well-being. Professor Ford testified that a very limited number of people had access to her letter, yet that letter found its way into the public domain. She testified that she never gave permission for that very private letter to be released and yet here we are. We are in the middle of a fight that she never sought, arguing about claims that she wanted to raise confidentially.

After this speech, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin signaled his intention to vote for Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Barring something unforeseen, Judge Kavanaugh will be confirmed tomorrow.

Of course I am relieved by this outcome — not so much that Brett Kavanaugh is going to the Supreme Court, but that a nominee was not brought down by unsubstantiated, last-minute accusations, and media bullying, and that logic, evidence, and due process won the day. Even so, I don’t feel triumphalistic. I hope fellow conservatives like me who do not like President Trump and the way he conducts himself, and who have not been eager to vote Republican, or to vote at all, will remember on Election Day next month this vile liturgy orchestrated by the Democrats and their media allies. It demonstrated what we can expect from identity-politics liberalism in power.

I don’t think our country is going to be better off because of any of this, though. We will only be less worse off than we would have been had the Left won this clash by using these malicious tactics.

Kavanaugh 4-Ever

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Even if he’s confirmed today, that’s not going to be the end of it, according to a top House Democrat:

House Democrats will open an investigation into accusations of sexual misconduct and perjury against Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh if they win control of the House in November, Representative Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat in line to be the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said on Friday.

Speaking on the eve of Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote this weekend, Mr. Nadler said that there was evidence that Senate Republicans and the F.B.I. had overseen a “whitewash” investigation of the allegations and that the legitimacy of the Supreme Court was at stake. He sidestepped the issue of impeachment.

“It is not something we are eager to do,” Mr. Nadler said in an interview. “But the Senate having failed to do its proper constitutionally mandated job of advise and consent, we are going to have to do something to provide a check and balance, to protect the rule of law and to protect the legitimacy of one of our most important institutions.”

Good grief. If I’m the Republican National Committee, I’m going to take Nadler’s comments and remind people every day from now till Election Day what the Democrats intend to do if they win power. Having failed to crush this Privileged White Male’s nomination with unsupported allegations of sexual assault, and worse, Democrats will try to come pry him off the Supreme Court with the same allegations.

Yesterday, after Sen. Collins’s speech all but guaranteed that Kavanaugh would win confirmation today, I heard a couple of Democratic strategists saying that they hope passion among Republican voters over this thing will fade before election day. They were referring to the NPR poll this week showing that the Kavanaugh controversy had wiped out the big advantage Democrats had in voter enthusiasm headed into the fall election. Well, Jerrold Nadler has probably just guaranteed that that’s not going to happen. He’s laid it out clearly: if Republicans don’t show up to vote, and vote Republican, they’re leaving Kavanaugh at the mercy of a party that will try to remove him from the Supreme Court.

In other words, the Kavanaugh fight doesn’t end with the Senate’s vote today. It goes on until Election Day. Jerry Nadler told us so.

Lindsey Graham FTW

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John Podhoretz has a very good column about how Brett Kavanaugh turned his battered nomination around. Excerpt:

At 12:30 in the afternoon on September 27, I don’t think there were many serious political thinkers or activists on the Right who thought Brett Kavanaugh would survive that morning’s testimony by his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford.

Eight days later—today—Kavanaugh all but secured his appointment. The question is, how did this happen? The answer is: Kavanaugh happened.

In his unprecedented speech following Ford’s testimony, Kavanaugh not only blasted the process but made no pretense when it came to those who had manipulated it—liberal groups, people angry with Donald Trump, people wanting to take revenge for the Clintons. The speech electrified the right. There is no other word for it.

It was this very speech that caused so much tut-tutting and concern about Kavanaugh’s judicial temperament among the very people who were already opposing him for any and every reason—and among those who instinctively feel the need to beg for mercy and seek absolution any time anything a conservative says or does puts liberals in high dudgeon. But everything that triggered those people turned Kavanaugh into what he had not been before—a cause.

He’s right about that. But you know what else is true? Sen. Lindsey Graham also turned this thing around, by shooting straight fire at Judiciary Committee Democrats:

I remember exactly where I was when I saw that speech: sitting in a hotel room in Yonkers. But I thought I was on top of the world. I wanted to stand up and yell!

Yes, Kavanaugh turned this around with his impassioned self-defense. But Sen. Graham boosted that self-defense into orbit by saying exactly what a lot of conservatives were thinking as they watched the hysterical campaign waged by the New Yorker and others in the left-wing media, who threw standards overboard in a desperate effort to sabotage Kavanaugh. Lindsey Graham — of all people! — gave voice to millions of us.

Cocaine Mitch nailed it in an interview with the Washington Post today, prior to Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote:

“It’s been a great political gift for us. The tactics have energized our base,” he said, adding: “I want to thank the mob, because they’ve done the one thing we were having trouble doing, which was energizing our base.”

A reader writes:

This is just amazing: Joe Manchin was shouted down by protesters as he tried to explain his vote for Kavanaugh.
So, at this point, Democrats have spent three weeks viciously attacking and alienating a moderate conservative all but certain to reach the bench (both at the time and now). What kind of thinking is that? Conservative justices tend to become more liberal on the bench, so Dianne Feinstein decided it was smart to force Kavanaugh to take his red pills during the confirmation? Insane!

Now, Democrats are turning on their own Senator in a Red State and making him take his pills. Is their goal for Manchin to switch parties and leave them further in the hole?!? Are they going to find a socialist trans activist to run against Manchin in the West Virginia primaries?

Trump was in one of his unpopular phases at the end of the summer and Dems had the momentum for November. Now, after red-pilling the entire country with their disgraceful conduct both in the confirmation hearings themselves and these absurd protester, Trump is at 51%.

I’d say September was the point at which the liberal media–CNN, CBS, etc–was completely exposed. The academy also. No one can ever respect mainstream news media as objective again. It is not even close. I think Republicans may be about to make some serious gains. White males who might otherwise be liberals are learning the truth that they are public enemy #1 and that their professors and the news media will do anything to destroy them.

The reader added news from Axios showing big gains for GOP Senate candidates in the last week.

Brett Kavanaugh is an October Surprise the GOP never imagined coming.

Progressive Tribalism Beats The War Drums

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I would like fair-minded liberal readers to take a look at this op-ed from The New York Times, and consider that this is exactly the kind of left-wing racist rant that drives many of us white people into the arms of the Republican Party — not out of any particular love for the GOP, but out of fear of what this progressive racism would do in power. Alexis Grenell, the author, is a white woman and a Democratic strategist. Here’s the headline on her article. Note well that authors do not choose their headlines. This was written by someone at the Times:

So, that starts well. More:

After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol,

“Slit their wrists” … “rivers of blood through the Capitol”. Un-freaking-hinged. These people are working themselves up to doing something violent.

the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. With the exception of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all the women in the Republican conference caved, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who held out until the bitter end.

These women are gender traitors, to borrow a term from the dystopian TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” They’ve made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job. The women who support them show up at the Capitol wearing “Women for Kavanaugh” T-shirts, but also probably tell their daughters to put on less revealing clothes when they go out.

Here, she tears into women who express concern about men being falsely accused of sexual assault:

But the people who scare me the most are the mothers, sisters and wives of those young men, because my stupid uterus still holds out some insane hope of solidarity.

Think about that: Alexis Grenell believes that having a uterus means that women should not be concerned that their sons, brothers, and husbands might be falsely accused of raping a woman, and suffer from the lack of due process.

Think about that.

And here, we get to the heart of the matter:

We’re talking about white women. The same 53 percent who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, just as they have for decades. White women have broken for Democratic presidential candidates only twice: in the 1964 and 1996 elections, according to an analysis by Jane Junn, a political scientist at the University of Southern California.

Women of color, and specifically black women, make the margin of difference for Democrats. The voting patterns of white women and white men mirror each other much more closely, and they tend to cast their ballots for Republicans. The gender gap in politics is really a color line.

That’s because white women benefit from patriarchy by trading on their whiteness to monopolize resources for mutual gain. In return they’re placed on a pedestal to be “cherished and revered,” as Speaker Paul D. Ryan has said about women, but all the while denied basic rights.

“Patriarchy,” “whiteness” — she’s using these Grievance Studies buzzwords in response to women worried about their flesh-and-blood male relatives being falsely accused. That’s because these men are nothing but abstractions to Grenell.

Again, she returns to hysterically violent language — a language of tribalism:

This blood pact between white men and white women is at issue in the November midterms. President Trump knows it, and at that Tuesday news conference, he signaled to white women to hold the line: “The people that have complained to me about it the most about what’s happening are women. Women are very angry,” he said. “I have men that don’t like it, but I have women that are incensed at what’s going on.”

I’m sure he does “have” them; game girls will defend their privilege to the death.

“To the death”? What does that mean? What could that possibly mean, other than to signal that Alexis Grenell and her people are preparing to do violence to them, and that Alexis Grenell believes that they cannot be persuaded, only defeated, no matter what it takes.

Again: Alexis Grenell is a Democratic Party strategist. The New York Times, the most important newspaper in the world, and the voice of the liberal Establishment, saw fit to publish this racist, sexist call to arms. This is what elite liberalism in America has become.

If I were a person of color, and, following a major conservative political defeat, read an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal headlined “African-Americans, Come Get Your People/They will defend their privilege to the death;”

… and that headline topped an opinion piece calling black people who voted in a way the author didn’t like as “traitors” who profaned a blood sacrifice by the righteous;

… and that op-ed claimed that black people like this cannot be reasoned with, only destroyed, because they will defend their bigoted beliefs “to the death”;

… I would be terrified about what the leaders of the Right had in mind for me and people like me. I don’t care how bad the Democrats might be, I would vote for them without even thinking about it, just to prevent blood-lusting Republicans like the author and the editors who published her from coming anywhere near power.

Wouldn’t you?

Alexis Grenell — who earned her master’s degree in 2015 from an Ivy League school (Columbia) — is the face and the voice of elite liberalism. The Times editors read her savage essay and considered it within the mainstream of commentary, whereas no responsible editor of any serious publication would have published the same kind of rhetoric wielded against people of color.

Rivers of blood … blood pact … gender traitors … defend their privilege to the death. 

This is the language of tribalism. This is blessed by elite liberal gatekeepers, as long as it is wielded by the Righteous Tribe, against the Deplorable Tribe.

Members of the Deplorable Tribe are fools if they fail to notice this, and to respond to it. And you’re a fool if you don’t recognize that you are part of the Deplorable Tribe whether you want to be or not.

I prefer not to be. I prefer to be part of the American tribe, judging people not on the basis of their reproductive organs or the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. That’s the America I want to live in. It’s the America that people like Alexis Grenell and the editors of The New York Times want to end.

Useful to get that learned. These people are Jacobins.

UPDATE: I know what you’re going to say. Yes, of course, you can find left-wing crazies everywhere, and right-wing crazies too. What sets this Grenell column apart is that it appeared in The New York Times, the flagship publication of elite liberalism. It has the imprimatur of its editors. That is significant.

UPDATE.2: Good grief. Only Dostoevsky could do justice to these berserkers.

UPDATE.3: A French reader writes:

I know you are fond of Revolutionary analogies, but I think these people are best described as Stalinists – replace “gender” with “class” and Grenell’s is straight from Uncle Joe’s textbook. Modern feminism is very much like communism. Both ideologies have a lot in common. They rely on a similar black-and-white worldview that shuns reform and mandates instead a brutal reversal of existing social hierarchies in favour of the “oppressed” (the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” in one case, and the matriarchy in the other) They’re also all-encompassing systems that inform their followers’s “thinking” not just in the political area but the intellectual, artistic and even personal ones and no deviance can be tolerated. Being a communist or a feminist is being that all the way, just like being a Jet. As a result, both communists and feminists often sound like robots toeing the party line and whose opinions and reactions can be predicted with a high level of accuracy.

How comes this totalitarian mindset resurfaces now in an Anglosphere that so prided itself with being immune to it? Well, it’s all McCarthy’s fault – let me explain. McCarthyism crushed communist subversion in the States (and destroyed lots of innocent lives in the process) but it also made communists martyrs in the eyes of the American Left which thus kept regarding them as “members of the family”. That’s why even today Hollywood keeps lionizing the Ten and stubbornly refuses to make movies that deal with the horrors that happened in communist-led countries (their craving for China’s market doesn’t help either) The result of all that is that the Left hasn’t grown the antibodies that its Western counterparts did with more or less success. Also millenials (sorry to bash them again but they are the driving force behind this) are awfully ignorant of history except as a narrative of oppression. Their embrace of old-school socialism is a case in point: they honestly have no idea that Bernie and Corbyn’s ideas have been tested and have failed repeatedly in the last century and this. Since both movements seem to be converging I worry that Marx’s time may have come — alas — and that the Fall of the Berlin Wall was but an interlude.

So what are we to do? Honestly I don’t know and I’m glad to not be concerned yet. What you Americans would need is a third party that would give a home to moderate conservatives and moderate liberals that want nothing to do with either Trump or Grenell. The problem is, your stupid system doesn’t allow for that. I used to admire it but the recent events have demonstrated that it no longer works, that your institutions are useless at best and toxic at worst, and that your Constitution needs a thorough revision — that won’t happen since the Founders made it almost impossible.

God bless America. She will need it.

Catholic Thoughtcriminal Forced Out At OU Law

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A reader writes:

Just wanted to put this story on your radar, which, surprisingly to me at least, hasn’t blown up beyond local and a few Catholic outlets. Brian McCall, a professor and dean at the University of Oklahoma’s law school, was forced to step down from his administrative position essentially because he’s an orthodox Catholic. In the course of the controversy, the law school’s dean sent out a specious letter about inclusivity and harassment.

What’s the controversy about? According to KFOR, a local TV station (link in previous graf):

OU’s Equal Opportunity Office conducted an independent review of McCall and found no evidence of workplace harassment or discrimination, but McCall decided to resign because of the backlash from his statements in his book, To Build the City of God: Living as Catholics in a Secular Age.

“Women must veil their form to obscure its contours out of charity towards men,” McCall wrote in the chapter Modest Contact With the World: Women In Pants and Similar Frauds. “To know that women in pants have this effect on men and to wear them is thus a sin against charity as well as modesty.”

That’s a super-antiquated view, for sure, and not one I share at all. But so what? The man has never harassed or discriminated against a woman in the office. But that doesn’t matter. He committed a thoughtcrime related to his religion.

More from the reader’s letter:

Of course, McCall had an impeccable record, per this testimony from a former student of his who identifies as a feminist and a Democrat. He sounds like an very decent man.

Like that student, I’m also a Democrat, I work in politics, and I’ve never hated my line of work more than I do right now because this nonsense infects everything.

Here’s the feminist Democrat’s testimony about McCall:

Bre Little, an Oklahoma City paralegal, said McCall was the dean over the paralegal program during her time at OU and also was her professor.

Little, who described herself as a Democrat and a feminist, said she disagrees with McCall’s sociological, theological and political views, but defends his professionalism.

“He was never anything but kind, fair and extraordinarily helpful to me as a student. I never felt discriminated in any way, for any reason in his classes, or in my encounters with him as an administrator,” Little said.

“I can first-handedly speak to how this man treated me as a woman, as a student, and as a human being,” she said. “And I believe that stories like mine have a place in the dialogue before everyone casts stones.”

McCall said some of the claims made about what he believes are not accurate.

“I believe it an injustice and a sin to treat someone not on the merits of what they do simply because they do not agree with me,” he said.

The Dean’s October 2 statement said, in part:

The OU College of Law is a place of inclusion. Beyond ensuring the college is free from illegal harassment or discrimination, the college must prepare tomorrow’s leaders – our students – for the world in which they will serve. It would be a disservice to them if we did not provide an educational experience that presents diverse subject matter, encourages thoughtful conversation and debate, and prepares them to practice in an increasingly diverse world. This commitment is reflected in our first-year class, which is the second class in the history of the OU College of Law to have more women than men, and which has the highest percentage of minority students of any class in the history of the college. Attracting students from diverse backgrounds ensures that all points of view will be heard in our classrooms and, ultimately, in our society.

At all levels of the college, we promote the importance of diversity, multiculturalism, inclusion, and equality for all students, faculty, and staff. Our educational efforts and programs in these areas continue to grow. Last year, we created a standing Dean’s Committee on Diversity and Inclusion with our student leaders.

Blah blah blah inclusion diversity multiculturalism equality diversity inclusion minority diverse … it’s all a load of ideological bulls–t. Dean Joseph Harroz is being dishonest when he says that “all points of view will be heard” at OU Law school. Brian McCall is a traditionalist Catholic, but he felt obliged to resign.

Guess who also believes what Brian McCall does about female dress codes and modesty? Many practicing Muslims.  The Quran instructs women to dress modestly. If a Muslim law professor wrote a book saying that women should wear hijab (which takes many culturally specific forms), would he or she feel pressured to resign their job at OU Law School? Would Dean Harroz feel obliged to generate several paragraphs of self-abasing jargon about how OU Law has never deviated from the party line?

Note well that OU Law did not fire Brian McCall. He resigned to end the controversy. But reading Dean Harroz’s full statement indicates the kind of pressure the man must have been under, simply for holding old-fashioned views about modest dress.

Look at how the OU Daily campus newspaper characterized McCall’s views in a September 30 news report. Note: not an op-ed, but a news report:

An OU law professor and associate dean wrote in a 2014 book that women should not wear pants and gay marriage is “insanity,” among other controversial views. Though his faculty member status is protected under academic freedom, an expert said his administrative position may not be.

Brian McCall, an OU law professor, associate dean for academic affairs and associate director of the OU Law Center, is editor of Catholic Family News and has also contributed to The Remnant newspaper and the International Fatima Rosary Crusade. The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified these organizations as anti-Semitic hate groups.

Well, there you go. If the SPLC says it, it must be true. The OU Daily‘s coverage of the McCall situation relied heavily on the SPLC.

The Daily Oklahoman — the local newspaper, not the student paper — editorialized in favor of McCall, writing in part:

While not a deliberate parody, a published academic article by an OU professor examined how literature by Chicana lesbians “not only invites scholars to question heteronormative assumptions about food, gender, and identity, but also demonstrates the potential of queer studies to enrich a variety of topics in food scholarship.” 

This month, Georgetown University professor Christine Fair wrote that Senate Republicans “deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine?” It elicited nary a peep.

There’s no shortage of bizarre and laughable views in academia. McCall’s comments pale when compared with many of his peers. Demands that he resign his administrative job, therefore, had nothing to do with “extreme” views. Instead, McCall was targeted for being conservative and religiously devout.

Exactly right. Traditionalist Catholics are a tiny minority, even within Catholicism. Now we know what kind of bigotry Dean Joseph Harroz and his institution support. I warn in The Benedict Option that this is the kind of thing that conservative Christians should prepare themselves for in the workplace. Most conservative Catholics aren’t traditionalists (who are on the margins of the Catholic world, and even disdained by Pope Francis), but if they think this bigotry isn’t coming for them, they’re deluded.

I repeat: Brian McCall was investigated by the university, and found never to have discriminated against or harassed women in his position as an administrator. But he is guilty of thoughtcrime. Should any Muslim or Orthodox Jewish law professor seek to work at OU Law, they had better keep their opinions about modest religious dress to themselves. Right?

Right?

Don’t forget these lines from the reader who sent me this story:

Like that student, I’m also a Democrat, I work in politics, and I’ve never hated my line of work more than I do right now because this nonsense infects everything.

These people, these haters, have no idea that McCall’s Catholic traditionalism led him to write this legal paper taking on Republican free-market dogma, arguing instead that corporations ought not to focus on maximizing shareholder value, but have a social responsibility to the common good. He didn’t write that in spite of being a Catholic traditionalist (as distinct from a Catholic conservative); he wrote that because that’s what Catholic traditionalists believe. 

None of that matters. The SPLC said he’s probably an anti-Semite, and he believes that women shouldn’t wear pants. But hey, Dean Joseph Harroz wants you to know that OU Law acts to assure that “all points of view will be heard in our classrooms and, ultimately, in our society.” The pathetic thing is that Dean Harroz probably believes that about himself and the institution he leads.

UPDATE: A Catholic reader points out in an e-mail that the publication McCall edits, Catholic Family News, has attacked me recently.

Doesn’t bother me. I can live with the fact that they are weirdos. Trad World is full of weirdos. It shouldn’t be a crime to think like a weirdo, as long as you treat everyone under your authority in the office with respect. McCall did that.

The Media & The Mob

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There ought to be a word for this phenomenon. Earlier today, I blogged about a progressive Catholic who is appalled that conservative Catholics cite homosexual priests as a cause of the abuse scandal. What’s telling about the way she frames her complaint is her assumption that these conservatives are acting in bad faith, because obviously their claim cannot be true. It is certainly possible that homosexuality among priests is correlative with the abuse scandal, and not causative, but it is irrefutably the case that there is correlation. One hundred percent of clerical abusers are male, and 81 percent of abuse victims (1950-2002) were male, according to the John Jay Report. The recent report from German bishops offer similar figures.

But many on the Catholic Left assume this cannot be relevant, because this fact undercuts what they wish to believe about homosexuality and the priesthood. The conclusion can’t be true, because that would mean that the Bad People have a point, and us Good People are mistaken.

I sense a similar epistemological fallacy at work in this Washington Post story about GOP election strategery, post-Kavanaugh. Excerpt:

Weeks ahead of the midterm elections, Republicans have cast the Trump resistance movement as “an angry mob,” a term used by many of them to describe a faceless amalgamation of forces that they say threaten the country’s order and, they hope, energize their voters.

President Trump and the GOP firmly control Congress and the White House and have massive financial and media infrastructure behind them. But in an effort to flip the midterm elections from a referendum on the unpopular president, they are casting themselves as defenders at the barricades.

In Virginia, Rep. David Brat (R) is running against the “liberal mob,” and GOP Senate candidate Corey Stewart has decried the “mob tactics” that “tried to destroy” Kavanaugh.

“When we’re out at grocery stores or at events, we’re finding swing voters are turned off by how Kavanaugh was treated,” Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) said. “Chasing senators down the hall, running up the stairs at the Capitol — we’ve been taken aback by how people have reacted to it. And we’re responding.”

The characterization evokes fear of an unknown and out-of-control mass of people, and it taps into grievances about the nation’s fast-moving cultural and demographic shifts that Republicans say are working against them. With its emphasis on the impact on traditional values and white voters, particularly men, it strikes the same notes as earlier Trump-fanned attention to immigrants, MS-13 gang members and African American football players protesting police treatment of young black men.

This is a straight news story, not an op-ed.

Here’s the thing: though there is no question that the GOP, like Democrats, play to the anxieties of its base — this is normal politics — there really were, and are, mobs out to get conservatives. 

Conservatives didn’t just imagine the anti-Kavanaugh protesters filling the halls of Congress, harassing GOP senators. Conservatives aren’t imagining campus mobs shouting down conservatives. Republican political consultants didn’t invent the mob at Middlebury College last year that chased Charles Murray off of campus, and physically injured a (liberal) professor who was his host. Nor did the GOP conjure the Yale mob that abused the Christakises over Halloween costumes in 2016.

And on and on. More to the point, Republicans did not invent the mob-like behavior of the news media in the Kavanaugh affair. In the last 24 hours, I’ve heard from three friends — two Democrats, and one anti-Republican independent — who have written to express profound concern about this political moment, and the behavior of the liberal mob. One of the Democrats — no fan of Trump or Kavanaugh — told me that her party has lost her over all this. The independent told me he hasn’t voted GOP in 30 years, but that may change this November, because of the “malice” (his word) on the left. And the third remains a devoted Democrat, but he is agonizing over the demons now taking over his political side, and worries if they can ever be reined in.

Look, Republicans do not have clean hands here. But it is breathtaking to observe how so many in the news media appear to assume that Republicans who are looking at the world as it actually is, and drawing conclusions from it, are acting in bad faith. More from the Post story:

When Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and his wife, Heidi, were confronted by protesters at an Italian restaurant in Washington last month — as Kavanaugh’s nomination was teetering amid sexual assault allegations — the grim-faced couple quickly ducked out as activists chanted, “We believe survivors!”

But when video of the episode was uploaded and went viral, it boosted Cruz, rather than his critics.

Republican strategist Jeff Roe, who is advising Cruz’s hotly contested reelection bid, said that September day was the campaign’s biggest fundraising day of the year — and noted that the influx was unsolicited and a visceral response to the way Cruz was treated.

“Their tactics are too hot. They insult Republicans and turn off independents even more than the prospect of impeachment does,” Roe said, adding that other GOP candidates he’s advising are also taking aim at Democrats as a mob-like party.

“We’ve used it everywhere because it’s effective,” Roe said.

I don’t want to overinterpret the Post story. It really does report straight news, about how Democrat protests are being used by Republicans to appeal to their own voters. What gets to me is the sense in the framing that this is somehow dirty pool. The Kavanaugh drama made it crystal clear to many of us conservatives — including people like me, who are no fans of Donald Trump — that the mob exists, and that the media are part of it.

Michael Gerson, who is the embodiment of Never Trump conservatism, writes about how the media seriously undermined its own credibility in the Kavanaugh affair. Gerson points out that the New York Times published a massive, deeply reported investigation of Donald Trump’s financial history … and it also published an “exposé” of Brett Kavanaugh’s participation in a bar fight in college. Writes Gerson:

Let me state this as clearly as I can. It is President Trump’s fondest goal to make his supporters conflate the first sort of story with the second sort of story. And he hopes this for a specific reason: to discredit special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report when it is eventually covered in the media. Trump not only wants to argue for his version of the truth; he also wants to undermine alternative sources of truth. And this requires him to maintain that the press is “the enemy of the people.”

Trump’s claim of a partisan press was strengthened when the New Yorker published an accusation of first-degree penis exposure by Kavanaugh that no one else cited in the article could directly confirm. The New York Times, to its credit, had initially held off on publishing this unsupported allegation. Meanwhile, the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow concluded of the accuser, “This is not the behavior of someone who is fabricating something.” This judgment substituted for journalistic principles such as the need for multiple sources and corroborating evidence.

 

Honestly, I doubt most in the media are capable of perceiving themselves as dishonest brokers. One of the most important studies I ever read was an analysis from nearly two decades ago, from two political scientists at Baruch College, if memory serves. I can’t find a link for it, but I’ll eagerly post one if somebody can find it. The professors found that the major US media had done a very good job of cataloguing and explaining the rise of religious conservatism within the Republican Party. But they found that the media had done a terrible job of reporting on the simultaneous rise of secular liberalism in the Democratic Party. 

What accounted for the disparity? The political scientists theorize that because the elite news media are overwhelmingly liberal, those journalists (reporters, editors, producers) were unaware of their own biases. They missed the steady transformation of the Democratic Party into one where secular liberalism dominated because for them, secular liberalism was normal. Because Democrats were becoming more like journalists, journalists failed to see what was happening right in front of their eyes.

The same dynamic was at work in the Kavanaugh mess. Relatedly, I believe that the mainstream media genuinely does not understand how unnerving it is to many normal people — not just partisan Republicans, but to a wide range of people — to see these deranged mobs in action, and to observe how far they are willing to go to achieve their goals.

Yes, for sure, it suits the partisan goals of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and the GOP leadership to point to the left-wing mobs and say, “They exist, and they’re coming for you.”

But in point of fact, they do, and they are. They may not come banging on your door, screeching like the nuts outside the Supreme Court when Kavanaugh was being sworn in (see above), but they’re going to come.

It could be something like Robby Soave’s terrifying account of a college student who faced a Title IX inquiry after a light make-out session — no sex, just making out — turned into a nightmare of false accusations, which he only overcame after a harrowing investigation and $12,000 in legal fees. Or it could be some other accusation. That’s all it takes — an accusation.

Longtime readers will remember that three years ago, a reader told me his elderly mother, who spent years in a communist prison as a dissident, told him that the spirit overtaking our culture today reminds her of the years when communism came to her country.

Thinking that must be an exaggeration, I relayed that observation to a friend in the UK who defected with his wife in the 1960s from a communist country. He said that it was absolutely true. I asked him to explain that conclusion, because it made no sense to me. He said that it has to do with the willingness of people to try to destroy their opponents. With righteous mobs, aided and abetted by the media. Ideological hysteria. This was how the communist behaved. And these aging former dissidents, who don’t know each other, see the same thing happening in the liberal West.

When the Social Justice Warriors are banging on doors braying for Social Justice by any means necessary, don’t be surprised when people notice, and act on what they see and hear.

UPDATE: Look, stop it with the whataboutism. I’ve had a couple of you say, “But whatabout the right-wing mobs in 2010?!” etc. I hate mobs. All mobs. If you want to criticize this post from the left, I welcome that — but I’m not going to publish whataboutism. One of you tried to make a comment accusing me of not caring about a particular mob years ago — when in fact I spoke out against it. No whatabout comments will be published on this thread. Stifle it, Edith.


A Deal For Social Conservatives?

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Elizabeth Dias of the NYT writes today about the political future of social and religious conservatives, after the recent elections. This part jumped out at me:

In a divided Congress, social conservatives have little hope of advancing their legislative priorities, like ending Planned Parenthood funding or banning abortion after 20 weeks. But many are instead emphasizing their success at the judicial level and seem only minimally interested in adjusting their focus.

“If you ask social conservative voters, would you be willing to accept Nancy Pelosi as speaker for two more Supreme Court justices, I suspect they would make that trade,” said Dan Schnur, a former longtime Republican strategist who is now an Independent. “A short-term congressional loss for social conservatives is almost certainly offset by a long-term judicial gain.”

Fellow religious and social conservatives, what do you think about that? It makes sense to me. This country is becoming more secular, and more socially liberal. As you know — see The Benedict Option —  I don’t believe that it is possible to turn the country around (in a direction we think is good) via politics. At best we can hold the line on religious liberty, to give us and our institutions the space within which to work.

Protecting religious liberty is the most important political goal for us, in large part because it is so threatened. Unfairly, the media and the political left have associated “religious liberty” with hatred of gays and lesbians. The truth is, religious liberty, rightly understood, would give progressive religious congregations maximal (though not absolute) rights to observe their religious beliefs, even if the cultural and political consensus were to be against them. That’s what 1993’s bipartisan Religious Freedom Restoration Act was all about: protecting religious minorities from the majority.

The First Amendment guarantees of free speech, assembly, and religious liberty don’t mean anything when their exercise is not challenged by the majority. They only really matter when they protect unpopular minorities. I deeply wish that the left understood this, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen within our emotivist popular culture, where crushing “hate” is considered to be self-justifying. To them, Baronnelle Stutzman, a gentle little old Baptist lady florist, is Triple Hitler. I don’t see that changing soon.

That said, the best shot we have at preserving our constitutional rights over the coming decades will be through the courts, especially the Supreme Court. I would take Dan Schnur’s deal. Would you?

I have a lot of problems with the Republican Party, on a number of fronts. On one of them, I wish it were more aggressive on advancing and protecting religious liberty. In a secularizing country, it’s going to be even harder to expect this out of them. (I would love to be surprised!) We can say this much: at least the GOP’s Congressional representatives don’t despise people who believe as I do, and seek to harm us legislatively. If the day should come when there is little meaningful difference on religious liberty between Republicans and Democrats, then I will probably vote Democratic more often, because my economic and foreign policy views tend to align more with the Democrats than the Republicans.

Anyway, if you are a social and/or religious conservative, would you take Dan Schnur’s deal? Explain your reasoning. By the way, I’m going to police this thread to keep liberal potshots from crowding out meaningful conservative conversation.

Drowning Cultural Conservatism

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From time to time in this space, a fellow religious conservative will attempt to cheer us all up by claiming that our tribe is more fecund, and will outbreed secular liberals. It’s a nice thought, but there’s no reason to believe that it’s true. In Italy, in 2016, a sociologist released a study showing that of the (small number) of Italian Catholics who considered themselves to be “convinced and active believers,” only 22 percent of those families reported having children who were also convinced and active believers.” As other studies of religious practice have found, having parents who are convinced and active believers is one key factor in whether or not young people practice the faith into their own adulthood, but it is no guarantee.

Daniel McCarthy writes about the total domination of left-liberals in cultural and culture-forming institutions, and what this means for the future of conservatives. Examining the dynamics of US culture and politics, McCarthy says that political victories for a Trumpist GOP masks the collapse of social and cultural conservatism. Excerpt:

The trouble with this, for Republicans and cultural conservatives both, is that even success at the ballot box will not check the consolidation of left-wing social power. The opinion elite, educators and the media, shape the environment in which business takes place, and in which business people themselves are formed. Cultural conservatives can home school, they can send their children to Hillsdale or Christendom or Grove City College — but where will they work when they graduate? Even pizza companies must follow the unwritten laws laid down by the opinion police. The insider left, in its new form, has strategies to win at the cultural, economic, and political levels, each of which reinforces the others. The right can barely hold its own in politics and is without any cultural leverage over economics. The Tea Party and Trump succeeded at least in channeling the great popular anger at the new insider left, but the deplorable Americans on whom they’ve relied are scheduled for extinction by opioids and economic euthanasia.

Conservatives can’t wish their plight away — they can only take a stand on the ground they already occupy in politics, while they turn their minds to nexus of cultural and economic power that is their greatest challenge today.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough to my conservative readers: read the whole thing. 

The Benedict Option has now been translated and published in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Portuguese. It will soon be published in Croatian and Korean. The book has sold fewer raw copies in Europe than in the US, where it was a bestseller, but from my calculations, has done much better proportionally with European Christians than it has with American Christians. Why is that?

McCarthy’s column explains it, pretty much. So many conservative American Christians have not yet come to terms with demographic reality. They still believe that because Donald Trump is president and the Republican Party is doing well politically, that they (we) have meaningful cultural power. European Christians don’t have the luxury of this illusion, and haven’t had for some time. They understand clearly that the future of the Christian faith depends on recognizing reality and acting on facts, not sentimentality.

(In Italy this past September, I had a Baby Boomer approach me on my book tour and say that he counts himself as a liberal Catholic. But as a high school religion teacher, he knows how desperate the situation is regarding passing the faith down to the young, and he’s therefore happy to see The Benedict Option in Italian. “Something has to change,” he told me.)

It has to. It really does. We are facing a secular liberal culture that is overwhelming in its power. When I say “overwhelming,” I don’t mean that it will intentionally try to steamroll over conservative church people. It doesn’t have to; it is eroding us from within.

In The Benedict Option, I talk about how conservative Christians have to stay involved at some level in conventional partisan politics, if only to fight for religious liberty. Taking the long view, our best hope politically lies with a judiciary that has a strong view of the First Amendment. That would only guarantee us relative freedom within which to work; it guarantees nothing about transmitting the faith on to the next generation.

St. John’s law professor Mark Movsesian, whose scholarship focuses on religious liberty, has a forthcoming paper in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, examining how the nation’s cultural and political polarization is likely to affect religious liberty jurisprudence in years to come. You can read the entire paper here. 

Excerpts:

Masterpiece Cakeshop is nonetheless important for what it reveals about deeper cultural and political trends, all related, that will affect the future course of the law. Two cultural trends are important: religious polarization and an expanding concept of equality.

Over the past two decades, American religion has become polarized between two groups, the Nones, who reject organized religion as authoritarian and hypocritical, especially with respect to sexuality, and the Traditionally Religious, who continue to adhere to organized religion and to traditional religious teachings, especially with respect to sexuality. Each group views the other’s values as threatening and incomprehensible. Neither is going away, and neither seems in a mind to compromise—including in commercial life.

This religious polarization has figured very prominently in the public’s response to Masterpiece Cakeshop and controversies like it.

Masterpiece Cakeshop also reflects a second cultural trend, one that Alexis de Tocqueville—whose work runs like a red thread through our story—saw long ago: an expanding notion of equality. Increasing numbers of Americans endorse a capacious concept of equality—“equality as sameness”—that treats social distinctions, especially religious distinctions, as arbitrary and unimportant.

Asserting the importance of religious boundaries, as [Christian baker] Jack Phillips did, seems unreasonable to increasing numbers of our fellow citizens. Asserting such boundaries strikes them—as it did Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins, and at least some of the Colorado commissioners—as deeply insulting, an affront to human dignity. The fact that so many of the actors in Masterpiece Cakeshop could not credit Jack Phillips’s assertions of good faith explains much of what happened in the case, and much of what is likely to happen in future cases.

Finally, Masterpiece Cakeshop reflects an important political trend: the steady growth of an activist state committed to the idea of equality as sameness. At both the federal and state level, administrative agencies work to promote equality in all areas of life. Their actions increasingly impinge on the Traditionally Religious, who face an expanding set of rules and policies, backed by serious sanctions, which promote new understandings of equality, particularly with respect to sex and gender. The actions of the Colorado Civil

Movsesian stresses that his paper is analytical; that he is not taking a position on which side should prevail in future disputes. Nevertheless, he predicts that it will become more and more difficult to settle these cases, and as a result, judicial confirmation battles will grow ever nastier.

Movsesian says the rise of the Nones, who reject institutional religion (though not necessarily spirituality) is key to this conflict. Why? Several reasons. Among them:

Second, the Rise of the Nones seems to be associated with the Sexual Revolution, especially with changing views on homosexuality. According to the 2014 Pew report, a solid majority of Americans, about 62%, now say that society should accept homosexuality.

Among Nones, however, the percentage is strikingly high—83%. Here again, Millennials are key. Young adults are driving the changing social consensus on homosexuality, including among Nones. Millennials generally have more positive views of homosexuality than older Americans, and nearly 90% of Millennial Nones say that society should accept homosexuality. The Pew report thus offers support for what sociologists have been saying for years: young Nones dislike organized religion because they associate it with traditional, negative views about homosexuality, and because they believe organized religion’s rejection of homosexuality masks hypocrisy about sexual sins generally.

Note well: normalizing homosexuality is not causing this, exactly, but normalizing homosexuality does require institutionalizing the Sexual Revolution, which negates what traditional Christianity teaches about sexual morality. People who think they can have Christianity and the Sexual Revolution are surrendering Christianity, whether they realize it or not.

And this:

Finally, the Rise of the Nones in the twenty-first century may reflect the gradual, but inevitable, working-out of the inner logic of liberalism, America’s dominant political ideology. In the nineteenth century, Tocqueville wrote that escaping the hold of habit, family, and tradition were among the principal features of the American mindset. More recently, Patrick Deneen has observed that liberalism has always opposed received
authority, which it views as arbitrary and accidental, in favor of individual autonomy and choice. Loosening the bonds of family, community, and religion is necessary, liberalism teaches, in order to release the full potential of human beings. Liberalism encourages the person to think of himself “primarily a free chooser” with respect to “all relationships, institutions, and beliefs.” Over time, the ethos of choice extends to more and more subjects. It is no surprise, then, in a society where liberalism dominates, that many people eventually come to see choice as extending to religious institutions and beliefs, along with all the others.

This is America today. Expanding social and cultural egalitarianism is our future. Movsesian says that the Traditionally Religious aren’t going away, but they will also not be able to count on what has been a constant in American culture: a general sympathy for traditional religion, even among people who don’t practice it. For their part (says the professor), Trads aren’t going to be able to compromise their beliefs on sexuality, because they understand them to be “necessary for human dignity.”

Movsesian makes the Tocquevillian point that for Americans, equality is the core commitment. They may say them believe in diversity, but ultimately, for Americans, equality equals sameness. He gives this striking example from his own teaching:

If I may offer a personal anecdote, I recently posed a hypothetical case in my law-and-religion class. Suppose, I asked the students, an observant Jew has a florist shop. One day, a customer, who is also Jewish, comes to the shop to say she’s getting married and would like the florist to do the wedding. “That’s wonderful,” the florist says. “Where will you get married?” The customer replies that the wedding will be at a local nondenominational church, because her fiancé is Christian, and she, the customer, isn’t very observant. The florist thinks about it and says, “I’m so sorry, but I can’t do your wedding. It’s nothing personal; I’m sure your fiancé is a fine person, as are you. It’s just that as an observant Jew, I don’t approve of interfaith weddings. For our community to survive, we must avoid intermarriage and assimilation. Please understand. There are many other florists who can do your wedding. I’ll even suggest some. But I can’t, in good conscience, participate.”

In posing this hypothetical, I was trying to show the students these are complicated questions and that they need to consider both sides. Much to my surprise, the students were uniformly unsympathetic to the florist. There should be no legal right to decline services in this situation, they told me: the florist was not acting reasonably and in good faith. I pressed them. Didn’t they see that genuine religious diversity requires respect for difference, that difference implies boundaries, and that boundaries necessarily exclude? Couldn’t a member of a minority religion believe, in good faith, that her community faced assimilation and decline to run her business in a way that promoted it? Wasn’t that a concern worthy of respect? No, they told me. The florist in my hypothetical case should have no right to turn away the interfaith couple.

I have thought about the students’ reaction, and it seems to me that it results from the students’ sense that it is wrong to draw religious distinctions that exclude others and injure their dignity, no matter what the justification. That’s what the florist did in my hypothetical case—and that, I think, was what bothered the students. The florist was violating the equality-as-sameness principle, and my students simply did not think her concerns justified her in doing so.

As a Traditional Religious person, that is frightening to me. These egalitarians could not grasp the point of view of the Orthodox Jew, much less make room for it.

There’s so much interesting stuff in the Movsesian paper, and it’s written in clear prose, unlike so much legal writing. Please read the whole thing. Note especially the section about how the expanded role of the administrative state works against cultural and religious conservatives. Movsesian concludes by talking about how the law really doesn’t provide a clear way forward through the coming conflicts. The “compelling interest” test — in which the government must have a “compelling interest” in violating religious liberty — is not much of a guidepost, because it depends on a particular understanding of the Good. The professor writes:

In a society in which we cannot agree on what is good, how can we agree on what is a compelling interest?

As MacIntyre might have said, “We will not have Aristotle; we will therefore get Nietzsche.”

So, to return to the point of this post: not only are we Trads losing ground, the culture in which we are embedded both actively and passively trains young people to reject their religion.

What are you doing to build resistance to secular liberal hegemony within your children, your family, your congregation? If you don’t think The Benedict Option is the best plan, then please, let’s hear your strategy. I’m serious. I’ve got skin in this game. I’ve got kids. Read the book, take what’s good in it, and improve on it. Let the rest of us know what you think. The one thing that cultural and religious conservatives absolutely cannot do is continue to drift. That drift is only in one direction in this culture: towards de facto atheism.

European Christians understand this. American Christians will too — but only after massive losses, I fear.

UPDATE: You know what’s a great way to get me to send your comment to the trash bin? Be one of the liberal commenters here who responds with some restatement of “The conservatives brought this on themselves” or “The conservatives are hypocrites because of blabbity blah blah gays blah blah blah Islam.” Some of you, that’s all you ever say when a post like this goes up. Look, I welcome critical engagement, but if all you can do is jerk your knee in the way we have read a thousand million times here, save yourself the trouble or, even better, actually think for a minute or two, and say something fresh and interesting.

 

Cultural Socialism In The Law

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You want to talk about “social justice”? Here’s what the identity politics mentality is doing to the law in Canada. Take a look at this Quillette essay by Murray Klippenstein, a progressive Toronto lawyer who started his own firm years ago to serve disadvantaged and minority clients. He writes:

For all of my adult life, I have worked to advance social justice. Now I am horrified by what my own professional regulator is doing in the name of that same cause.

In Canada, the legal profession is regulated provincially. Seven years ago, the Law Society of Ontario (which then was still called the Law Society of Upper Canada) created a working group to address “challenges faced by racialized licensees” in Ontario’s legal profession. The working group reported in 2016 that it had discovered “systemic racism” in the profession. While no one will dispute that elements of racism can be found in parts of Canadian society, the collected survey data did not support the conclusion that racism in my profession is widespread and serious. Nevertheless, in December, 2016, Convocation (the legislative body that governs the Law Society) adopted a set of 13 recommendations on the topic. Times being what they are, no one felt comfortable putting the brakes on this process, despite misgivings. The idea that racism was rampant, and that heavy-handed measures were required to address it, took on a life of its own.

One of the listed recommendations was that the Law Society should “require every licensee to adopt and to abide by a statement of principles acknowledging their obligation to promote equality, diversity and inclusion generally, and in their behaviour towards colleagues, employees, clients and the public.” When the Law Society announced this new requirement the following September, its advisory also stated that we Ontario lawyers should “demonstrate a personal valuing” of these principles.

Despite the fact that I always have been a strong advocate for “equality,” this development left me flabbergasted: Our regulator was demanding that lawyers and paralegals draft and then obey a set of specific political ideas—both in their personal and professional lives—as a condition of their license.

Though he is himself a self-described progressive who has spent the last 20 years suing governments and corporations on behalf of indigenous peoples and other minorities, Klippenstein refused on principle to cooperate with this regulation. In his essay, Klippenstein explains why he felt he had no choice but to close his firm’s doors, because it’s impossible to work in this climate. He goes on:

Unlike me, unfortunately, most younger lawyers and paralegals have no realistic option for resisting the Law Society’s authoritarianism. As the new rules make plain, they will increasingly be judged more on the basis of ideology, skin colour and sex chromosomes than by their competence, skills, effort and professional contributions. That is not a career that I would wish upon anyone—including those individuals who are nominally considered as potential beneficiaries of these new rules.

I strongly urge you to read the whole thing. Note well that this is not the Ontario government imposing this on lawyers; this is the profession imposing it on its practitioners. If you cannot practice law unless you agree with the regulatory regime’s politics, does it really matter if it’s the state doing it, or the profession’s guardians?

I have heard American lawyers tell me privately that this kind of thing is coming to America. This is what cultural socialism is. 

Republicans in Congress should bring forth legislation banning licensing associations and private regulators from imposing what amount to political litmus tests on doctors, lawyers, and other professionals.

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Inside The Poverty Palace

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A lot of people on the right have known for a while that the Southern Poverty Law Center is an extremely effective grifting operation. You might have even called it “a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals.” That succinct description is made not by an enemy of the SPLC, but one of its former employees, Bob Moser, writing in the New Yorker in the wake of the wealthy “poverty” organization’s firing of its founder under an ethical cloud. Excerpts:

In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used to tell to keep ourselves sane. Walking to lunch past the center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs, we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble—“Until justice rolls down like waters”—and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice rolls down like dollars.” The Law Center had a way of turning idealists into cynics; like most liberals, our view of the S.P.L.C. before we arrived had been shaped by its oft-cited listings of U.S. hate groups, its reputation for winning cases against the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations, and its stream of direct-mail pleas for money to keep the good work going. The mailers, in particular, painted a vivid picture of a scrappy band of intrepid attorneys and hate-group monitors, working under constant threat of death to fight hatred and injustice in the deepest heart of Dixie. When the S.P.L.C. hired me as a writer, in 2001, I figured I knew what to expect: long hours working with humble resources and a highly diverse bunch of super-dedicated colleagues. I felt self-righteous about the work before I’d even begun it.

I knew they were rich, these do-gooders, but I had no idea they were this rich. More:

The controversy erupted at a moment when the S.P.L.C. had never been more prominent, or more profitable. Donald Trump’s Presidency opened up a gusher of donations; after raising fifty million dollars in 2016, the center took in a hundred and thirty-two million dollars in 2017, much of it coming after the violent spectacle that unfolded at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that August. George and Amal Clooney’s justice foundation donated a million, as did Apple, which also added a donation button for the S.P.L.C. to its iTunes store. JPMorgan chipped in five hundred thousand dollars. The new money pushed the center’s endowment past four hundred and fifty million dollars, which is more than the total assets of the American Civil Liberties Union, and it now employs an all-time high of around three hundred and fifty staffers. But none of that has slackened its constant drive for more money. “If you’re outraged about the path President Trump is taking, I urge you to join us in the fight against the mainstreaming of hate,” a direct-mail appeal signed by Dees last year read. “Please join our fight today with a gift of $25, $35, or $100 to help us. Working together, we can push back against these bigots.”

Moser goes on to say that the organization exists mostly to raise money from, well, gullible Northern liberals. But he also points out that journalists depend on its annual list of “hate organizations” — this, without ever questioning the fact that the SPLC’s designation of even ordinary conservative organizations (like Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom) as hate groups serves to tarnish their reputations and keep the dirty money rolling in from liberals easily separated from their money.

People inside the organization aren’t surprised by any of this. As Moser writes:

For those of us who’ve worked in the Poverty Palace, putting it all into perspective isn’t easy, even to ourselves. We were working with a group of dedicated and talented people, fighting all kinds of good fights, making life miserable for the bad guys. And yet, all the time, dark shadows hung over everything: the racial and gender disparities, the whispers about sexual harassment, the abuses that stemmed from the top-down management, and the guilt you couldn’t help feeling about the legions of donors who believed that their money was being used, faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dixie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.

Read the whole thing. 

 

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BC Judge Gags Thought Criminal Dad

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In an interview with me published yesterday, Polish academic and European parliamentarian Ryszard Legutko compared Communist era to today’s atmosphere on many college campuses:

Each time the results are the same: certain authors are stigmatized, certain arguments cannot be raised, and certain questions must not be asked. Both then and now the ideological hooligans live in the illusion that they open new perspectives and tear down the existing barricades. In fact, they are doing the opposite: they help to legitimize intellectual vulgarity and intimidate all courageous and independent thinking. They reinforce this feature of all ideological regimes, which George Orwell called “thought crimes.”

The paradox is that in today’s liberal democracy there are more thought crimes than in communism: racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, ageism, binarism, Eurocentrism, white supremacy, and many others which a person like myself long ceased to keep up with. They give the latter-day Bolsheviks enormous power and countless instruments to silence all opponents. The only way to avoid any of these accusations is to capitulate, body and soul, to the prevailing ideologies and to participate in all ritualistic dances that express either absolute approval of the ideological gods or absolute condemnation of the enemies.

I thought of that when reading that a British Columbia judge has forcibly silenced the father of a biological female who identifies as male. This is horrifying (“Clark” and “Maxine” are pseudonyms):

Last week, Justice Francesca Marzari of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada, declared a father guilty of “family violence” against his 14-year-old daughter on the sole basis that he had engaged in “expressions of rejection of [her] gender identity.” These “expressions” revolved entirely around his polite refusal to refer to his daughter as a boy in private, and his steady choice to affirm that she is a girl in public.

As previously reported, the BC Supreme Court ordered in February that 14-year-old Maxine receive testosterone injections without parental consent. Accordingly, Maxine began regular injections at British Columbia (BC) Children’s Hospital over the course of the last two months.

Her father, Clark, strongly objects to this treatment and immediately sought to reverse the decision in the BC Court of Appeal. Hoping to raise awareness of his case, Clark gave a number of interviews to media outlets, including The Federalist. In these interviews, he repeatedly referred to his daughter as a girl, stating to The Federalist that “she is a girl.  Her DNA will not change through all these experiments that they do.”

While many might take this to be an honest statement of biological fact, Marzari quoted it as a prime example of Clark’s “family violence of a public denial of [Maxine’s] gender identity.” Marzari convicted Clark of this violence, and issued a “protection order” preventing him from speaking to journalists or the public about his case.

Unbelievable. A Canadian judge has forbidden a man to say aloud what is a scientific fact, on grounds that it hurts his daughter’s feelings. Note well that this is not about the father revealing the name of his daughter; he has not done that. This is entirely about the court forcing him to remain silent about the fact that his daughter is biologically female.

This is Canada, but if you think this isn’t ultimately going to be tried in the US, you’re dreaming. This is why it is vitally important to get sensible, non-SJW judges onto as many federal courts as possible.

On the other hand, next year the Supreme Court will make a monumental decision about SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) laws and civil rights. Whatever SCOTUS decides — and if I were betting, I would lay money that the Chief Justice is going to go left on this, and not be a traitor to his class — it is unlikely that the First Amendment would permit a judge to silence someone as the BC judge has silenced the trans kid’s father. But if the Court does rule that SOGI are protected classes under federal civil rights law, we really will be in a new world — in public schools, for example. Gender ideology will be mandatory. “Misgendering” someone will be the legal equivalent of saying the n-word.

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Kansas: Now The Abortion State

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The Kansas Supreme Court issued a stunning 6-1 decision today that guarantees expansive abortion rights in the state, no matter what happens at the federal level. To make this clear: even if Roe v. Wade is overturned, abortions will be legal in Kansas, because the state Supremes say abortion is guaranteed in the state constitution.

What makes today’s ruling so extreme is that, as a pro-life Kansas lawyer friend explained to me:

The U.S. Supreme Court uses an “undue burden” test to evaluate pro-life laws under the U.S. Constitution, which while bad at least gives us a fighting chance to see some restrictions upheld. The Kansas Supreme Court has adopted a “strict scrutiny test” – the most difficult legal standard for a challenged law to withstand. As even the one concurring justice notes it’s a standard “very rarely used in Kansas.”

In the New York Times, an abortion rights law expert with Planned Parenthood’s research arm said:

“This is the first time that the Kansas Supreme Court has ruled that abortion rights are protected under the state Constitution,” Ms. Nash said. “Nearly all of the abortion restrictions in the state, they could be challenged and struck down, with this ruling.”

“It opens the door for abortion rights,” she added.

Kansas is a strongly pro-life state. The only way this decision can be overturned is through an amendment to the state constitution. Today’s ruling goes beyond what abortion rights advocates had hoped for. Now the state’s pro-life community is gearing up to pass a constitutional amendment.

Here is a link to the ruling, including a separate concurring opinion, and the lone dissent, which was by Justice Caleb Stegall. If the name is familiar to you, that’s because Caleb is a longtime friend of mine, and one of the founders of Front Porch Republic. His is no doubt the first judicial opinion in US history that quotes Karl Polanyi, Eric Voegelin, and Patrick Deneen.

I’ll get to the dissent in a moment. First, here’s the core of the majority’s opinion:

At the heart of a natural rights philosophy is the principle that individuals should be free to make choices about how to conduct their own lives, or, in other words, to exercise personal autonomy. Few decisions impact our lives more than those about issues that affect one’s physical health, family formation, and family life. We conclude that this right to personal autonomy is firmly embedded within section 1’s natural rights guarantee and its included concepts of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

In this passage, they object to parts of Justice Stegall’s dissent:

Consistent with these and other states, today we hold our Kansas Constitution’s drafters’ and ratifiers’ proclamation of natural rights applies to pregnant women. This proclamation protects the right to decide whether to continue a pregnancy.
We are struck by the ease with which the dissent ignores the importance of this natural right and the consequences women would face if we did not recognize the founders’ intent to protect it from an overreaching government. The dissent mentions
pregnant women only when discussing the graphic details of the D & E and other medical procedures. By avoiding any other aspect of the lives of pregnant women, the dissent appears to maintain that upon becoming pregnant, women relinquish virtually all rights of personal sovereignty in favor of the Legislature’s determination of what is in the common
good. Essentially, the dissent exploits the vivid medical details of abortion procedures by turning them into a constitutional prerogative to invade the autonomy of pregnant women
and exclude them from our state Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

Stegall’s dissent is quite long — it starts at page 115 — but as anyone who has read his essays knows, he’s a fantastic writer. In terms of judicial prose, this dissent is worthy of Scalia. This line characterizing the worldview of the judicial majority is utterly devastating: “In this imagined world, the Liberty Bell rings every time a baby in utero loses her arm.”

Let’s read more of the Stegall dissent at length. Keep in mind that his dissent is not based on whether abortion is morally right or morally wrong, but on the right of the people to govern themselves on the matter. Excerpts:

 This case is not only about abortion policy—the most divisive social issue of our day—it is more elementally about the structure of our republican form of government. Which is to say, this case is about the proper conditions for just rule. At bottom, this case is about finding and drawing the sometimes elusive line between law and arbitrary exercises of power. Here we venture onto a battlefield as old as politics itself. And as we argue about the structure of government—and ultimately delineate the proper conditions for just rule—we must never forget that we are also actively engaged in ruling.

 

The structural idea that gave birth to Kansas as a political community, which has achieved consensus support across most of our history, is that the proper conditions for just rule are met via participatory consent to secure and promote the common welfare. Today, a majority of this court dramatically departs from this consensus. Today, we hoist our sail and navigate the ship-of-state out of its firm anchorage in the harbor of common good and onto the uncertain waters of the sea of fundamental values. Today we issue the most significant and far-reaching decision this court has ever made.

The majority’s decision is so consequential because it fundamentally alters the structure of our government to magnify the power of the state—all while using that
power to arbitrarily grant a regulatory reprieve to the judicially privileged act of abortion. In the process, the majority abandons the original public meaning of section 1 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights and paints the interest in unborn life championed by millions of Kansans as rooted in an ugly prejudice. For these reasons, I dissent.

Reading today’s majority opinion is a follow-the-white-rabbit experience. One is left feeling like Alice, invited by the Queen to believe “‘as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'” Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass 100 (1899). Indeed, the story told by the majority is a strange one. In it, all the luminaries of the western legal tradition— from Sir Edward Coke and William Blackstone to Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson—would celebrate and enshrine a right to nearly unfettered abortion access. In this imagined world, the Liberty Bell rings every time a baby in utero loses her arm.

More:

The very language chosen by the majority to describe the act prohibited by S.B. 95—”‘instrumental disarticulation,'” “‘collapse of fetal parts,'” “fetal demise,” etc. (slip op. at 8-9)—is designed to “name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”
Orwell, Politics and the English Language, in 4 The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell 127, 136 (Orwell & Angus eds., 1968). In the majority’s narrative, even the word abortion is set aside in favor of the anodyne decision to
“continue a pregnancy”—a phrase occurring more times in the majority opinion than I can cite. Perhaps the majority finds the unsanitized facts “too brutal for most people to face.” Orwell, at 136. The majority doesn’t recite the portion of S.B. 95 defining “dismemberment abortion” as:

“[W]ith the purpose of causing the death of an unborn child, knowingly dismembering a living unborn child and extracting such unborn child one piece at a time from the uterus through the use of clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors or similar instruments that, through the convergence of two rigid levers, slice, crush or grasp a portion of the unborn child’s body in order to cut or rip it off.” K.S.A. 65-6742(b)(1); L. 2015, ch. 22, § 2.

As Justice Kennedy wrote in Stenberg, 530 U.S. at 957 (Kennedy, J., dissenting), the “majority views the procedures from the perspective of the abortionist, rather than from the perspective of a society shocked when confronted with a new method of ending human life.” Justice Kennedy went on to describe what actually happens during a D & E procedure—the very procedure at issue here. He did so “for the citizens who seek to know why laws on this subject have been enacted across the Nation.” 530 U.S. at 957 (Kennedy, J., dissenting).

The procedure “requires the abortionist to use instruments to grasp a portion (such as a foot or hand) of a developed and living fetus and drag the grasped portion out of the uterus into the vagina.” 530 U.S. at 958 (Kennedy, J., dissenting). Using the resistance “created by the opening between the uterus and vagina” the “grasped portion” is torn “away from the remainder of the body.” 530 U.S. at 958 (Kennedy, J., dissenting). “For
example, a leg might be ripped off the fetus as it is pulled through the cervix and out of the woman.” Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124, 135, 127 S. Ct. 1610, 167 L. Ed. 2d 480 (2007). The baby then “bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb.” Stenberg, 530 U.S. at 958-59 (Kennedy, J., dissenting). The child “can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.” 530 U.S. at 959 (Kennedy, J., dissenting). The heartbeat can continue
even “with ‘extensive parts of the fetus removed.'” 530 U.S. at 959 (Kennedy, J., dissenting). “At the conclusion of a D&E abortion . . . the abortionist is left with ‘a tray full of pieces.'” 530 U.S. at 959 (Kennedy, J., dissenting).

The Kansas Supreme Court majority indicates that Justice Stegall was a bad sport for detailing what they are actually defending.

After a rich history lesson on the idea of individual liberty and political community in the American tradition, Stegall gets to the core of his objection to the majority ruling:

Either section 1 is a fount of judicially discovered and preferred “fundamental” rights or it is a blanket guarantee to all Kansans of the first rights of republican self-government: the right to participatory consent to government for the benefit of the
common welfare, on the one hand, and the right to otherwise be free from arbitrary, irrational, or discriminatory regulation that bears no reasonable relationship to the common welfare, on the other. Section 1 cannot be both. The former road alienates the people from the exercise of power and disembeds them from the political community. But this is the way the majority has decided to go.

In other words, the state Supreme Court has said that the people of Kansas do not possess the right to rule themselves when it comes to matters governing abortion. And it claims that this right was embedded in the state’s 1859 constitution all along.

Stegall is not having his colleagues’ condemnation of his point of view:

I am agog. I must know—what have my colleagues been reading? It cannot be anything I have written. In any case, I assure the reader this description of my view is a fabrication so flimsy it makes run-of-the-mill straw men appear as fairy tale knights by comparison.

The ghost of Nino slaps his spectral thigh in delight!

A couple more passages of note:

Many Kansans—a significant majority of them if one extrapolates from the votes of their political representatives—will feel aggrieved by the decision this court renders
today. They will not be pacified by claims that the result was achieved by a fair, impartial, and “democratic vote by [seven] lawyers.” Stenberg, 530 U.S. at 955 (Scalia, J., dissenting). It’s important to ask, why? Is it because, as the majority suggests, a
significant majority of Kansans continue to be informed by centuries-old prejudices? Given the flourishing and broadly equal society Kansans have fashioned, this explanation
seems unlikely at best. Or is it because Kansans will feel, even if only intuitively, that an important right of self-government has been stolen away from them under a cloud of impenetrable legal jargon?

And:

At the outset, I noted that this case isn’t just about the policy of abortion, it is more basically about the structure of our government. While true, this description fails to account for a strange but persistent symbiosis between the two. Abortion has become the judicially preferred policy tail wagging the structure of government dog. For the majority, the settled and carefully calibrated republican structure of our government must give way, at every turn, to the favored policy. But in my considered judgment, constitutional structure is the very thing securing and guaranteeing the full range of human liberty. History and reason suggest that those who, in the name of liberty, tear down that edifice will wind up out in the political elements, unsheltered and exposed to the cold wind of every arbitrary power.

I dissent.

Read the whole thing.

It is worth going back to the controversial essays in the 1996 First Things symposium on “the judicial usurpation of politics,”  which was convened around the question of abortion jurisprudence. Almost a quarter century ago, the First Things editors wrote in their introduction to the symposium:

What is happening now is a growing alienation of millions of Americans from a government they do not recognize as theirs; what is happening now is an erosion of moral adherence to this political system.

What are the consequences when many millions of children are told and come to believe that the government that rules them is morally illegitimate? Many of us have not been listening to what is more and more frequently being said by persons of influence and moral authority. Many examples might be cited. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in a recent lecture: “A Christian should not support a government that suppresses the faith or one that sanctions the taking of an innocent human life.” The Archbishop of Denver [at that time, Charles Chaput — RD] in a pastoral letter on recent court rulings: “The direction of the modern state is against the dignity of human life. These decisions harbinger a dramatic intensifying of the conflict between the Catholic Church and governing civil authorities.”

Professor Hittinger observes that the present system “has made what used to be the most loyal citizens—religious believers—enemies of the common good whenever their convictions touch upon public things.” The American people are incorrigibly, however confusedly, religious. Tocqueville said religion is “the first political institution” of American democracy because it was through religion that Americans are schooled in morality, the rule of law, and the habits of public duty. What happens to the rule of law when law is divorced from, indeed pitted against, the first political institution?

“God and country” is a motto that has in the past come easily, some would say too easily, to almost all Americans. What are the cultural and political consequences when many more Americans, perhaps even a majority, come to the conclusion that the question is “God or country”? What happens not in “normal” times, when maybe America can muddle along, but in a time of great economic crisis, or in a time of war when the youth of another generation are asked to risk their lives for their country? We do not know what would happen then, and we hope never to find out.

Americans are measurably less religious today than they were in 1996. But those Americans who are still traditionally religious have much more reason in 2019 to think hard about this FT passage than we did back then. It’s not Bible-thumpers forcing the issue; it’s judicial elites who are so determined to achieve a progressive result that they detect in an 1859 document the constitutional right for a mother to dissect her unborn child.

History will record that Justice Caleb Stegall was the only one to object to this barbarity. I am proud to call him my friend.

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Knifing Liberalism At Harvard

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This is a big deal:

Harvard said on Saturday that a law professor who is representing Harvey Weinstein would not continue as faculty dean of an undergraduate house after his term ends on June 30, bowing to months of pressure from students.

The professor, Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., and his wife, Stephanie Robinson, who is a lecturer at the law school, have been the faculty deans of Winthrop House, one of Harvard’s residential houses for undergraduate students, since 2009. They were the first African-American faculty deans in Harvard’s history.

But when Mr. Sullivan joined the defense team of Mr. Weinstein, the Hollywood producer, in January, many students expressed dismay, saying that his decision to represent a person accused of abusing women disqualified Mr. Sullivan from serving in a role of support and mentorship to students. Mr. Weinstein is scheduled to go to trial in June in Manhattan on rape and related charges.

As the protests continued, with graffiti aimed at Mr. Sullivan appearing on a university building, Harvard administrators said they would conduct what they called a climate review of Winthrop House. In recent weeks, tensions have escalated, with a student sit-in and a lawsuit sparked by a clash between one of the protest leaders and two Winthrop House staff members who were seen as supporting Mr. Sullivan.

On Saturday, the dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, sent an email to students and staff members at Winthrop House, informing them that he would not renew the appointments of Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Robinson as faculty deans after their terms end on June 30. Mr. Khurana said in his email that the decision was informed “by a number of considerations.”

This May 10 story in the Harvard Crimson reports what those other “considerations” are.  They are non-trivial.

This is a big deal because we should not want a society in which lawyers are punished by loss of position for defending unpopular clients. It is a fundamental principle of liberal democracy that legal defendants have a right to counsel. If the charges are true, then Harvey Weinstein behaved like a pig — but he absolutely has the right to a good defense. It would be shocking and wrong for Harvard to give in to the mob on this one, and it is certainly worrying that students at one of America’s elite-manufacturing universities believe a lawyer who represents an unpopular client is not fit to be part of their community. What happens at Harvard doesn’t stay at Harvard.

On the other hand, if the Crimson report is accurate, it sounds like Profs. Sullivan and Robinson were seriously problematic, and the university had ignored or downplayed problems with the way they ran the house. Maybe they really did deserve to be replaced, for reasons that had nothing to do with Harvey Weinstein. If so, it is nevertheless awful for Harvard to give the impression that students who spited Sullivan for being Weinstein’s lawyer succeeded in driving him out of Winthrop House over that issue. If not for the allegations of Winthrop House problems with the couple since 2016, this would be a genuinely outrageous turn of events.

UPDATE: Reader Ctbrgn writes:

The removal of Sullivan and Robinson has little to do with Harvey Weinstein. They were clearly disastrous as House Masters (oops, I mean “Faculty Dean,” the new, sanitized term for House Master). The fact that they had a turnover rate in House administrators that was at least four times the average tells you something. The fact that Winthrop House ranked dead last amog undergraduates as a place to live tells you the same. Winthrop House, as one of the so-called “River Houses” standing near the Cambridge River, has always been a prized residence due to its location and its beautiful architecture.

The dysfunction at Winthrop House was beginning to spill over into other parts of the university. Look into the spat between the Millers of Winthrop House and O’Keefe at Eliot House. What a mess!

The real scandal is why Harvard waited so long to act against Sullivan and Robinson, and why it is acting now and daring to act only under such a reprehensible guise. Weinstein is a pig, but serving as his defense lawyer should be no cause for losing a position. This is a very bad precedent. But we have been seeing many such precedents with the unraveling of America’s traditional liberal order.

The real problem here is cowardice. The Harvard Administration is guilty of cowardice for its failure to act earlier. And so are the Winthrop House tutors who publicly and boldly vowed to resign from their positions but then meekly remained.

Intersectional inanity and cravenness. That is 95% of American academia. And it is leading all of us to nowhere good.

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