Sound-doctrine Methodists will be the ones staying

After the recent conference on sexuality, there was some speculation as to which camp - the Traditional Plan folks or the ones who wanted to go the way of the Presbyterians and Episcopalians - would be the ones to set the terms for the other side in the event of a split.

Now we know:

On Friday, the Judicial Council of the United Methodist Church (UMC) — the denomination's highest court — upheld the key provisions of the Traditional Plan, the conservative policy upholding traditional Christian teaching on sexuality, and upheld the "Gracious Exit" policy, enabling dissenting liberal churches to leave while still holding on to their property.

These decisions finalize an unprecedented move in increasingly liberal mainline Protestant denominations. The Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA) have rejected the traditional Christian teaching that marriage is between one man and one woman and that homosexual activity is sinful. Liberals in the UMC wanted that denomination to move in that direction, as well.

Yet in February, in a special meeting of the UMC General Conference, the denomination passed the conservative alternative. White liberals accused black Africans of using bribery to uphold the traditional Christian teachings, but no evidence of any such activity came to light. No, the conservative position prevailed, fair and square.

I'm not a Methodist on paper, but I've been attending a small country UMC church for about four years. The congregation put me on the search committee, as our current pastor is leaving in early June. We're interviewing a candidate Thursday evening. I'll be keenly attuned to any clues as to how this person comes down on this matter.

A lefty piece of legislation that should get a House-floor vote

Why would Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute want to see this bill get voted on? After all, it would return post-America to a footing of being on board with the Paris climate accord.

A sizable contingent of congressmen now have introduced H.R. 9 “to direct the President to develop a plan for the United States to meet its nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement, and for other purposes.”

For one thing, so we can have this discussion:

There is little trend in the number of “hot” days for the period 1895–2017; 11 of the 12 hottest years occurred before 1960. Global mean sea level has been increasing for thousands of years; it may or may not be accelerating. The Northern and Southern Hemisphere sea ice changes tell very different stories. US tornado activity shows either no trend or a downward trend since 1954. Tropical storms, hurricanes, and accumulated cyclone energy show little trend since satellite measurements began in the early 1970s. The number of US wildfires shows no trend since 1985. The Palmer Drought Severity Index shows no trend since 1895. US flooding over the past century is uncorrelated with increasing GHG concentrations. The available data do not support the ubiquitous assertions about the dire impacts of declining pH levels in the oceans.

And this discussion:

Note that the Paris agreement “requires” (again, there is no enforcement mechanism) each signatory to “update” its NDC every five years. This is an obvious acknowledgment that any given NDC might not be met; accordingly, the reasons to believe the updated promises, and the ones five years later, ad infinitum, are far from clear. What is clear is that this international UNFCCC/NDC game has little to do with GHG emissions or climate phenomena or environmental quality at all. It is instead a long-term full-employment program for the international climate bureaucracy, with endless COPs, meetings, financial support from governments and foundations, and conferences in upscale resorts and banquets at pricey restaurants. A solution to the purported problem of anthropogenic climate change is the last outcome actually preferred by this industry; only a permanent crisis can justify its existence.

It's a bit like letting Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All get a full hearing, so people can understand that it amounts to the government putting the health insurance industry out of business and that it's going to involve tax hikes like we've never seen.

Let's make the lefties talk consequences.

 

 

The fallout from the NYT's Netanyahu cartoon

Looks like Israel has made an official pronouncement on it:

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, has called The New York Times “a cesspool of hostility towards Israel.”

In remarks posted to his official Facebook page and prepared for delivery at a Holocaust memorial event at the US Capitol, Dermer spoke of what he called “the Jew-hatred of growing parts of the intellectual class.”

“The same New York Times that a century ago mostly hid from their readers the Holocaust of the Jewish people has today made its pages a safe-space for those who hate the Jewish state,” Dermer said. “Through biased coverage, slanderous columns and antisemitic cartoons, its editors shamefully choose week after week to cast the Jewish state as a force for evil.”

In describing the Times as a “cesspool,” Dermer said that the newspaper’s treatment of Israel “goes well beyond any legitimate criticism of a fellow, imperfect democracy.”

There's quite a bit of unofficial backlash as well:

In other developments in the fast-moving, escalating scandal over the cartoon:

• The curator of Harvard University’s Neiman Foundation for Journalism, Ann Marie Lipinski, seized on the situation to call on the Times to restore its “public editor,” a position the newspaper abruptly eliminated in May 2017. “I wish they’d reconsider,” Lipinski wrote, linking to the Stephens column about the cartoon controversy.
• Critics of the Times scheduled an in-person protest for Monday outside the newspaper’s 620 Eighth Avenue headquarters. Those scheduled to attend included a former New York state assemblyman, Dov Hikind. An advisory press release for the event said those gathered would call for the firing of those responsible for the cartoon’s publication. They also said they would hold signs saying “Shame On The New York Times,” “NYT Has Jewish Blood On Their Hands,” and “Fire the Anti-Semites.”
• An author and former US government official, Dan Senor, noted that the Timesinternational edition also published a second cartoon featuring a “blind” Netanyahu. “Is the Times obsessed with Israel’s prime minister?” Senor asked. A former Timeseditor, Mark Horowitz, tweeted, “Please tell me the Times didn’t run a SECOND Netanyahu cartoon in the International Friday- Saturday edition, one day later! It can’t be, right?”

Some NYT staffers are saying the reaction is overblown, but is it?

Among the developments that argue in favor of seeing the cartoon as part of a pattern rather than as a single mistake were a 2015 Times graphic that used a yellow color to identify Jewish members of Congress opposed to the Iran nuclear deal. A subsequent Times editor’s note said, “Many readers and commenters on social media found that aspect of the chart insensitive. Times editors agreed and decided to revise it to remove the column specifying which opponents were Jewish.”

The Times has used octopus imagery to describe Jewish settlers in the West Bank that the newspaper itself called “an Anti-Semitic symbol” when it was used by the National Rifle Association to depict Michael Bloomberg.

The Times has blamed measles in New York on “powerful” Jews spreading a “highly contagious” disease. That echoed what the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum said was a “recurrent theme in Nazi antisemitic propaganda … that Jews spread diseases.” Meanwhile, the newspaper has ignored recent mumps outbreaks with no apparent connection to Jews.

The last two groups in post-America against which there is substantial bigotry: Christians and Jews.

 

Joe Biden must explain what he told Arlen Specter in 1998

Well, well:

. . . in 1998, Biden admitted to [Senate Judiciary Committee member] Specter that “It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, [Hill] was lying” about a key part of her testimony. The exchange was published in Specter’s 2000 memoir, “Passion for Truth: From Finding JFK’s Single Bullet to Questioning Anita Hill to Impeaching Clinton.”

The issue is important, as the media and other partisans rewrite the historical record about Hill and her accusations. The widely watched hearings revealed inaccuracies in Hill’s various versions of events and ended with 58 percent of Americans believing Thomas and only 24 percent believing Hill. There was no gap between the sexes in the results. In the intervening years, activists have relentlessly attempted to change the narrative, writing fan fiction about Hill, bestowing honors on her, and asserting that her disputed allegations were credible.

Think about the way he operates. He really did try to help Anita Hill at her hearing, but privately, he wasn't;t buying her narrative:

On “The View,” one interlocutor told Biden that people were upset he hadn’t allowed other women to testify against Thomas. He explained that he tried to get them to testify, but there were problems and that forcing them to testify may have been worse for Hill. He was understating wildly, referring to the last woman mentioned in this summary of problems with Hill’s alleged witnesses:

Hill’s four alleged corroborating witnesses provided very weak testimony. One witness told Committee staff that the alleged harassment happened before Hill ever worked for Thomas. Another witness claimed that Hill had no political motives to oppose Thomas because she was a conservative who fully supported the Reagan Administration’s civil rights policies. This representation was false. Angela Wright, who many claimed would provide similar testimony as Hill, declined to testify because of serious credibility issues related to her motives and her previous efforts to falsely accuse a supervisor of racism.

Much revisionist history has been drafted by partisans who oppose Thomas’s judicial philosophy. It’s true that Biden did his best to help Hill, including concealing witnesses who would have been a disaster under examination. But even he admitted to his colleague Specter that Hill was lying.

Not exactly the way to check off the "character" box.

 

One of the bigwigs in the diversity-consultung field has a frightening view of Christianity

I'd never heard of this guy, but Neo-neocon summarizes what he's about - with a link to his Wikipedia bio - quote thoroughly, including a quite telling 2015 Facebook post:

 Tim Wise has (please see *NOTE below) has the following resume as an anti-racism (that is, pro-diversity) educator, activist, and speaker:

Since 1995, he has given speeches at over 600 college campuses across the U.S. He has trained teachers, corporate employees, non-profit organizations and law enforcement officers in methods for addressing and dismantling racism in their institutions.

So Wise has been instrumental in shaping—or trying to shape—the minds of both students and adults, in a diverse (to coin a phrase) group of settings. These sorts of trainings are very popular and have been for quite some time, with the alleged goal of fostering tolerance and understanding and acceptance of diverse opinions, races, colors, lifestyles, sexes/genders, and creeds.

But Wise draws the limits at Christians and white people, for whom he has the harshest of words.  Here’s a Facebook post of his from September of 2015, which I will now proceed to render in full:

This is America…people basing their beliefs on the fable of Noah and Ark, or their interpretation of Sodom and Gomorrah…rather than science or logic…If you are basing your morality on a fairy tale written thousands of years ago, you deserve to be locked up…detained for your utter inability to deal with reality…NO, we are not obligated to indulge your irrationality in the name of your religious freedom…but we will provide you a very comfortable room, against which walls you may hurl yourself hourly if your choose. Knock yourself out….seriously, knock yourself out, completely, for weeks at a time…I’m sorta kidding but not by much…I don’t believe lunatics like this should be locked up, but I do think they have to be politically destroyed, utterly rendered helpless to the cause of pluralism and democracy …the world is not theirs. They have no right to impose their bullshit on others. They can either change, or shut the hell up, or practice their special brand of crazy in their homes…or go away. Their choice. And this argument applies to any fundamentalist religionist of any faith who thinks they have a right to impose their beliefs on a secular, pluralistic society. Go away.

Now, I’m all for the separation of church and state, as are the vast vast majority of Christians in the US, as well as Jews and even ultra-Orthodox Jews. In fact, as far as I know, most of the countries these days that are theocracies are Muslim ones (although just now I did a quick search of Wise’s work, so far I haven’t found mention of that, although I suppose I might have missed something). 

Wise recently was the keynote speaker at Harvard’s annual diversity conference. He apparently kept his anti-Christian views quiet during his speech, but aired some of his other views [emphasis mine]:

President Donald Trump is and “always was” racist, Wise said. His election shows that “this country is more sexist and more racist than I realized.”…

Wise sought to clear up purported misconceptions about educating people on equity, inclusion and solidarity. It is “not about shaming people, it’s asking [them] to be responsible, responsive and accountable” for their advantages, Wise said…

Higher education has actually been too successful in this regard, prompting white people to “hoard” their privileges upon realizing they exist, Wise said. In other words, white people are inclined to “internalize superiority.”

Academic institutions have an obligation to embrace the struggle for social justice and solidarity, “not just at the level of rhetoric but policy” as well, Wise said.

“Schools must make mission statements up to date,” and be “willing to say what it means to operationalize” the implementation of inclusive ideals.

He set out vague admission and graduation requirements in order to achieve this mission. Admissions offices must consider applicants under the mind-set that “if you’re not down with this mission, then you don’t actually fit in with us as an institution.”

Current students should pay their dues by proving that they’re committed to “this mission” by way of “community service requirements … relevant to solidarity.” If they don’t meet this standard, “then you don’t graduate,” he advocated.

There’s plenty more at the article if you follow the link, but I think you get the idea.

It’s an old idea. Leftism has long had two major characteristics (among others): leftist movements tend to be rabidly anti-religion as well as deeply desirous of total control over people’s lives and thoughts. These two things are not unrelated, because in a sense the left wants to replace religiousness with its own brand of fundamentalism. 

Whether these twin elements combine to lead to actual mass imprisonment and murder when leftists come to power or whether their emphasis is on “re-education” and discrimination without so much actual murder, or whether both are equally favored, leftists want to get the job done. And freedom of speech, thought, and religion are just small casualties along the path to the Utopia they plan (with themselves in charge, of course).

The fact that this man was the keynote speaker at a Harvard conference supposedly on tolerance and understanding is both ironic and completely unsurprising, as Orwell could have told you. The left is very very dangerous, and the Gramscian marchers are entering the stadium for what they believe will be the final push. 

*NOTE: On the Spectator thread, there was a commenter pointing out that Wise is Jewish. First of all, even if he were Jewish, that says nothing about the fact that his views are not at all common among Jews and are absolutely not sanctioned by Judaism in any way shape or form.

But Wise is not Jewish in any sense of the word as I understand it. If you look at his heritage, he has three non-Jewish grandparents and one Jewish one. The Jewish one was his paternal grandparent, and Judaism is not transferred through the paternal line.

"Go away."

That's the plan for those who understand that Lord Jesus is the author of the entire universe and the savior of all and any human souls.

Folks, these people are deadly serious. There will be no room for normalcy, let alone devotion to the Most High,  in their grim post-America.

David French at National Review is right and Wrongthink Radio at RedState is wrong

I read the RedState piece first.

Lately when I stop by RedState, I think back to the purge of its writers that happened when Salem Communications took it over. I did notice the shift in editorial tone that was all the inside-baseball talk of the punditsphere, but I felt that talk was a bit overblown. There were still a number of writers who insisted that the full picture regarding Donald Trump must be presented, and that that included his problematic traits.

But at this point, I think that shift has become as marked as the original assessments. It went from being a Trump-skeptical conservative outlet to a shill rag.

The piece that is the subject here is entitled "Where is David French's Article on Pete Buttigieg?" and its point is to take French to task for pointing out Franklin Graham's hypocrisy - castigating Bill Clinton in the 90s but giving unwavering support to the Very Stable Genius in our own time.

The byline is Wrongthink Radio. I guess that's a person. RedState has an increasing number of writers who go in for odd nom de plumes. There's someone called "Bonchie" whose stuff appears a lot lately. Streiff, who has been there a while, seems to be the editorial gatekeeper.

WR's rhetorical angle is lame indeed. His basic thrust is that French is presumptuous trying to be the arbiter off Christian morality for everyone (which French is not doing; he's deferring to the authority of doctrine to discuss morality) and convince his readers that French has some kind of moral obligation to write pieces about all the clearly flawed Democrat presidential candidates:

French’s consternation with Evangelicals was that they would dismiss sinful behavior, and he championed himself to be the judge of what behavior is acceptable for a Christian voter in the United States, so naturally, I wonder where French’s article is regarding Pete Buttigieg, a homosexual candidate running for President, or his vociferous condemnation of Kamala Harris for having an open affair with her former boss?

I bring these examples up because French felt he was qualified to impose judgement on American Christians, but suddenly seems to have lost his voice when that opinion would be deemed unpopular by the Liberal press. French only chastised Evangelicals because he knew he could take a moral position that the Left would celebrate, and he could condemn his detractors as members of the “Trump cult”. This all came into perspective this week following Franklin Graham’s criticism of Pete Buttigieg and his call for Mayor Pete to repent for his sins, and French responded with his ever popular “but Trump though” style. 

French makes the statement that marriage is “between a man and a woman” but can’t seem to bring himself to state that Franklin Graham is correct that homosexuality is indeed a sin according to Christian doctrine. French can call Graham a hypocrite all he wants, but since French appointed himself as the expert on Evangelical voting, does he not have an obligation to speak out against the moral behaviors of Democrats with the same ferocity with which he attacked Trump?

French of course is rudderless when it comes to morality, his morality is as subjective as anyone else in the media. French merely used Evangelicals as the straw man to attack Trump. His thinly veiled criticisms were nothing more than a coping mechanism to convince himself that not supporting Trump was a good decision and that his requirement to double down is also a good decision. French doesn’t actually care about whether Christian morals are reflected in national leadership, he merely cares that he will be able to tell everyone how morally sound he feels about his decisions, no matter what true societal effect they have on our country. 

Now, for the piece that launched WR's "refutation.  You tell me if this sounds morally "rudderless" and "subjective":

It’s hard to think of a single prominent American Christian who better illustrates the collapsing Evangelical public witness than Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son. His commitment to the Christian character of American public officials seems to depend largely on their partisan political identity.

Let’s look at the record. In 1998, at the height of Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, the younger Graham wrote a powerful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal combating Clinton’s assertion that his affair was a “private” matter. Clinton argued that his misdeeds were “between me, the two people I love the most — my wife and our daughter — and our God.” Graham noted that even the most private of sins can have very public, devastating consequences, and he asked a simple question: “If [Clinton] will lie to or mislead his wife and daughter, those with whom he is most intimate, what will prevent him from doing the same to the American public?”

Graham was right: Clinton, it turned out, wouldn’t just lie to mislead his family. He’d lie to influence courts, Congress, and the American people.

Fast-forward 20 years. By 2018, Donald Trump was president — and helping to win important policy victories for religious conservatives — and Graham’s tune had changed dramatically. He actively repudiated his condemnations of Clinton, calling the Republican pursuit of the then-president “a great mistake that should never have happened,” and argued that “this thing with Stormy Daniels and so forth is nobody’s business.”

Graham was wrong: Trump, it turns out, doesn’t just lie to mislead his family. He lies all the time to influence courts, Congress, and the American people.

So is this the “new normal” for Evangelicals? Is politics entirely transactional now? Do we evaluate politicians only on their policies and leave the sex discussions to the privacy of their own bedrooms? 

Apparently not, according to . . . Franklin Graham. Now that the Democratic primary is gaining steam and a gay candidate is surging forward, Graham has rediscovered his moral voice. Yesterday he tweeted this:

Franklin Graham‏Verified account @Franklin_Graham

Mayor Buttigieg says he’s a gay Christian. As a Christian I believe the Bible which defines homosexuality as sin, something to be repentant of, not something to be flaunted, praised or politicized. The Bible says marriage is between a man & a woman—not two men, not two women. 2/3

Yes, marriage is the union between a man and a woman, but Trump married a woman, then married his mistress, then married a third woman, then had an affair with a porn star while that third wife was pregnant with his child. Yet Graham says, “God put him” in the presidency and we need to “get behind him and support him.”

The proper Evangelical position toward any president is not hard to articulate, though it is exceedingly difficult to hold to, especially in polarized times when one party seems set on limiting religious liberty and zealously defending abortion: We should pray for presidents, critique them when they’re wrong, praise them when they’re right, and never, ever impose partisan double standards. We can’t ever forget the importance of character, the necessity of our own integrity, and the power of the prophetic witness.

In other words, Evangelicals can never take a purely transactional approach to politics. We are never divorced from our transcendent purpose, which always trumps political expediency. In scripture, prophets confronted leaders about their sin. They understood a core truth, one clearly articulated in the Southern Baptist Convention’s 1998 Resolution on Moral Character of Public Officials: “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.” 

Wrongthink Radio is on seriously flimsy ground with that "rudderless" and "subjective" stuff as you can see.

If asked about it, I'm sure French would say that, of course Pete Buttigieg is wearing his sin like a badge of honor. But that's not the topic here.

I see this tactic employed a lot in my own polemical tussles. "If you're going to write about such-and-such problem with such-and-such figure, you have to write about these other people with the same, or similar, problems."

No, opinion writers get to select their subjects for given columns and narrow or widen the scope as they see fit. It may well be that David French will have something to say about Buttigieg at some point. But the topic here was Franklin Graham's cringeworthy turnabout and its harmful effects on evangelism's ability to participate in the public square. And he did a fine job of covering it.

 

 

California comes up with another economically idiotic idea

From the state that brought you the $15 minimum wage, the mandate that all corporate boards have at least one woman, and the still-thankfully-unbuilt light rail comes this humdinger:

Changes could be coming to your favorite restaurant thanks to a statewide initiative just being announced Wednesday, called Restore California Renewable Restaurants.

Restaurant owners have the option of charging customers an additional 1% on their bills that would go to help stop climate change. Payments will be gathered by the California Air Resources Board and spent on implementing carbon plans on farms and ranches across California, boosting healthy soil, according to the Perrenial Farming Initiative.

“There’s always going to be the people who say, why is this on the bill? I don’t want to pay it. I don’t care what it’s for. I don’t want to pay it,” Christopher Barnum-Dann, the owner of Localis, said.
Talking to people in Sacramento Tuesay, they are split on the idea.
“I wouldn’t be interested in doing that. Leave the climate alone,” one resident said.

“We’re not asking our fixed-income people to pay that on their property tax. We’re asking that of someone who had made a choice to go out and spend money,” another resident, John Peters, said.
If the restaurant you’re eating at is a part of the program, you don’t have to pay the 1% if you don’t want to. You can just ask your server to take it off your bill.
“Well I live in California and I don’t know if you know this or not it’s pretty freaking expensive here. One percent to somebody who doesn’t make that much money ain’t a lot but it’s a lot more than they have,” resident Mike Mattingly said.

It's going to be interesting to see how the size of each of the four groups of restaurant patrons shapes up as this gets going (organizers hope to have 200 eateries signed up by the end of the year):

• The eager virtue-signalers who are quite proud to part with the extra money, because they really swallow the hooey about the climate being in a state of crisis
• Those who will reluctantly cough it up rather than endure the shaming facial expression of their woke server 
• Those who will say, "No, please take that off my bill."
• Those who quit eating out. 

 

 

I truly do not understand these attempts - from various angles - to make basic conservatism "relevant to our times"

I'll give you two examples. They are, in fact, pretty close to diametrically opposite each other, but both claim the conservative mantle and draw the reader in with an appeal to anybody with the brains to see that leftism is unacceptable. Within a few paragraphs in each case, however, things quickly go south.

Exhibit A is an essay by Richard North Patterson at The Bulwark entitled "Taking Reparations Seriously."

Seriously.

And let's for a moment leave aside what Patterson's curriculum vitae tells us about where he's coming from: former chair of Common Cause, ahem, and board member for Renew Democracy Initiative, which, while boasting the involvement of some figures I greatly respect, is presided over by the utterly goofy Max Boot. Let's also leave aside the drift exhibited by The Bulwark in its brief existence so far. The top story there is by Bill Weld, ahem, and is entitled "It's Time For Trump To Resign."

Anyway, back to Patterson's piece. He starts out using an observation by Charles Krauthammer to attempt to confer legitimacy on Ta-Nehisi Coates's entire thrust as a social critic - namely, that America's historical treatment of blacks, from slavery up through segregation of the military, to mid-century banking-industry lending practices to infant mortality rates, is unique among America's legacy problems. He even devotes a bit of verbiage to the decidedly non-conservative position that gentrification - white gentrification, doncha know - is harming deteriorating neighborhoods. Even says it's due to unequal lending practices. Excuse me, but banks are going to loan to developers who can prove they're good for the money.

He even attempts - in a "conservative" publication - to defend affirmative action. Would I ever love to see him debate Heather MacDonald. He'd get his tail end handed to him.

He has a lot more statistics and examples of disparity - household income, education, "access to jobs," as he puts it.

Then he sums up with this:

In short, black poverty is not white poverty’s cousin. And because it is so highly concentrated, to many whites it becomes virtually invisible. All too often black America is a place white America zips past on the highway. It becomes too easy to talk about black “pathology” while ignoring the racial pathology which is embedded in American life.

Notice the quotation marks around the word "pathology."

Two items for consideration:

1.) A whole lot of black conservatives - Larry Elder, Thomas Sowell, Star Parker, Candace Owens (to name the ones who come to mind immediately) - would take issue with the quotation marks.  Elder in particular is on record over and over again saying that fatherless black families are an overwhelmingly greater problem than any residual "systemic bigotry" or racism.

2.) Patterson nowhere offers a clear correlation between his exhaustive citation of disparities and some kind of ongoing "racial disadvantage." We're supposed to take it as a given because he says so.

So, no, a publication posting this kind of stuff is not conservative.

Now for Exhibit B. The Claremont Institute is embarking on a new project:

This essay is the launching document in a Claremont Institute intellectual and political campaign in defense of America against the threat of multiculturalism. Phase one of the campaign will run up until the 2020 American presidential election; phase two will in part depend on the outcome of that election.

Sounds great so far to this conservative. And the first seven paragraphs nearly had me fist-pumping, so resonant was I with its assertions:

Today, multiculturalism and its politics of identity pose an existential threat to the American political order comparable to slavery in the 1850s or communism during the Cold War. Once confined to graduate seminars and the ethnic “studies” departments at our nation’s colleges and universities, multiculturalism is now the authoritative ideology reigning over higher education, our media and political establishments, legal system, and corporate boardrooms.

If we do not reverse multiculturalism’s advance, it will continue to undermine our country and constitutionalism, destroying the possibility of a common good and a life of civic peace. Indeed, multiculturalism threatens to take down western civilization as whole.

By multiculturalism, we do not mean the mere presence of many cultures, races, or ethnic traditions, which are a fixture of modern American life and can be found across our states, communities, institutions, and private associations. One of America’s—and Americanism’s—great virtues has always been the maintenance of a wide realm of liberty and civic society in which a vibrant mix of cultural heritages and individual excellence could flourish.

America’s most important politico-cultural virtue, though, has been the insistence to its current—and especially potential—citizens that they assimilate to a certain view of justice embodied in the Declaration of Independence and safeguarded by our state and national political institutions, first and foremost the U.S. Constitution. E pluribus unum (“out of many, one”), America’s motto, means that assimilation has always been in our national DNA.

Multiculturalism, on the other hand, is not this benign tolerance of diverse traditions. Multiculturalism is a comprehensive ideology, demanding obeisance to a rigid system of justice, vices, and virtues. It boasts an intellectual tradition that guides its leadership and adherents in the policing of its boundaries and the maintenance of its categories. It keeps a running list of friends and enemies, a roster of praise, shame, and blame.

In short, multiculturalism is a worldview—a regime­, in the classical sense; a political and cultural way of life all wrapped up in one. As an ideology, it stands for nearly the opposite of America’s national motto. It seeks to divide and conquer Americans, making many groups out of one citizenry. The modern Left, accustomed to running the campuses according to the new social justice diktats of multiculturalism, now wants to run the world that way.

The threat multiculturalism presents to the American regime and our way of life is now urgent.

Yup, yup, yup, and yup.

But a few paragraphs later the piece goes all American Greatness on us:

The failure to apprehend fully and take seriously multiculturalism has also led many on the Right to misinterpret and underappreciate President Trump’s virtues and his significance as a political phenomenon. Trump understands instinctually that multiculturalism (and its politics of identity and political correctness) is anti-American. He understands that the unity found in patriotism is the antidote to a politics of group identity that if left unchallenged will irreparably divide and balkanize the American citizenry and lead to disunion.

The American Right’s failure to evaluate correctly President Trump, his political movement, and the nature of his opposition stems from a much deeper error. They cannot think prudentially.

Again, as in the very differently positioned Patterson piece, there's no real subtantiation of the correlation being asserted. The closest the Claremont essay gets is this vacuous utterance:

Trumpism shows us that we must position our movement as a defense of a traditional and confident America that rejects the politically correct cosmopolitanism of our elite. In other words, it offers the opportunity to fuse civic nationalism with the popular, cultural, and historical touchstones of American greatness. America is more than an idea—it is a people and a country.

Excuse me, but I always thought that conservatism was about immutable principles, not tailoring it to the peculiarities of a given age. "Stand athwart history yelling 'stop'" and all that.

All this gets back to the point of the post right under this. Trump is almost certain to be the 2020 GOP presidential candidate, and, barring a marked economic downturn in the next year and a half, almost certain to be the victor in the next election.

That's lamentable, in fact just plain awful, but squarely facing what is is another core facet of conservatism.

Why some "conservatives" think they have to go flirting with leftist viewpoints to brightly lay down their lines of demarcation separating them from Trumpism, or, on the other hand, claim, without substantiation, that Trump somehow has the key to defeating identity politics, is baffling to LITD.

The three pillars:

1.) Free market economics: A good or a service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth.  Period.  No other entity - certainly not government - has any business being involved in reaching that agreement.  Therefore, public-policy inquiries that concern themselves with macro-level phenomenon such as wealth inequality or “fair” wages are not only pointless but tyrannical by definition.

2.) The understanding that Western civilization is a unique blessing to the world: Both the Greco-Roman tradition from which the West has distilled the political structure of a representative democracy and the above-mentioned free-market economy, and the Judeo-Christian tradition from which it acquired an accurate understanding of the Creator’s nature and humankind’s proper relationship to the creator are the two most significant avenues of advancement our species has ever discovered.  (And much falls under this point that needs serious discussion at this time, such as the fact that there are only two genders, male and female, and that their is no fluidity between them, and that the family structure of a husband, wife and children thereof is the overwhelmingly normal one and the one most conducive to a happy and prosperous society.)

3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature:  Evil is real and always with us.  A nation-state seeking a righteous world(such as the United States of America) should only form close alliances with other nations that have demonstrated a track record of common values.  Regimes that are clearly tyrannical and / or expansionist should never be appeased.  Indeed, foreign policy should be guided by thinking on how to at least eventually remove such regimes as problems on the world stage.

and the attendant virtues that conservatism insists on - dignity, decency, decorum, an inclination to make family foremost in one's life, and willingness to assume responsibility for one's own life - were right, true and good in Edmund Burke's day, in William Buckley's day, and at the dawn of the current century. 

Quit trying to add an "and" to it. Just let it guide your battles against leftism in its unadorned form.

You're not doing squat when you try to doll it up with some "angle" you think is going to be compellingly exotic.

Even giving a Democrat a cursory once-over is no longer an option for civilized people

Occasionally it behooves us to take stock of recent leftist pronouncements and actions, so as to compare them to some point in the not-so-distant past, just to gauge the momentum with which the Left's lunacy has proceeded.

In recent days,

• Bernie Sanders has called for criminals, including jihadists, who are still serving their sentences to be able to vote.
• Elizabeth Warren has called for student loans to be forgiven, college to be "free" and for federal-government jobs to be available to all.
• AOC has said about the VA, a health system so bad that patients commit suicide in its facilities, "If it ain't broke don't fix it."
• No major Democrat has mentioned that the Sri Lanka massacre victims were Christians and the entire subject never came up at the town hall for Dem 2020 presidential candidates. 
• Pete Buttigieg has joined the ranks of those who say that late-term abortion is something that is up to the woman carrying a child.

Hey, we're old enough to remember when the big items on the Dem radar screen were eliminating the Electoral College and airplanes, aren't we?

I've been having another round of bracing exchanges with friends of mine - real friends, and people whose conservative bona fides are in order - because I still reserve the right to point out Donald Trump's objectionable traits when they become a factor in a given development. I think they find it unseemly that anyone would air right-of-center dirty laundry in public, as it might give succor to the enemy.

I politely but firmly insist that Trump's problematic ways must be part of the mix, that overlooking them just to drag him over the political finish line does not get us closer to the kind of country we envision.

Still, I hope they understand that my misgivings do not rise to some kind of conversion experience. I'm not going to be going all Jennifer Rubin - Max Boot any time soon.

The term "binary choice" has become so fraught with layers of tribal interpretation that I hesitate to even mention it, but realities must be faced. Bill Weld is not going to be the Republican 2020 nominee. Not that I'd harbor the first subatomic particle of enthusiasm for him if he were. Let me put the matter a little differently: Ben Sasse, Ted Cruz and Dan Crenshaw are not going to be running for president in 2020.

And the Democrat party's self-positioning as an enemy of the country in which it exists, as well as the larger Western civilization which makes our entire political process possible, has now reached a point at which it must be the foremost consideration in the mind of any non-Democrat.

Donald Trump has a behavior-and-expression problem. The Democrats have an idea problem. Specifically, their "ideas" are borne of a dark nihilism that no longer even takes any heed of reality.

Each of us will have to come to that moment in November 2020, as we did in 2016, when we check our heart of hearts and ponder the eternal implications of the choice of button to push. However, if one is a moral being with any understanding of the importance of ordered liberty, the array of choices will not be wide open. It will be missing a left side.

It will be as if the voting machine were not even offering a Democrat option.

They've taken themselves out of the game for anyone who retains a shred of humanity.

Tuesday roundup

You have to hand it to Kim Jong-un. He's made impressive strides getting the world to confer legitimacy on his evil regime, a process that will accelerate with his upcoming summit with Putin.

Fauxcahontas proposes forgiving all student debt and making college "free" from now on. 

What happens when we expect government to address the two inescapable conditions of human life: getting sick and getting old:

Medicare's trust fund will run out in 2026 and the combined trust funds of Social Security will run out in 2034, the trustees for the government programs projected Tuesday. 

The projected exhaustion of Social Security's trust fund is unchanged from last year. For Medicare's hospital insurance trust fund, the date has been moved up three years. 

If the Social Security trust funds do expire as projected, beneficiaries would face an immediate cut of about a fifth of their benefits.

Tuesday's report also indicated that Social Security’s costs are expected to exceed revenues this year for the first time since 1982.

Heather MacDonald, writing at City Journal, offers a glimmer of encouragement regarding university administrators growing a spine and standing up to campus jackboots. She cites recent examples at the University of Arizona and the University of the Arts, but, as has been said of the happy endings of Frank Capra movies, she makes you pay for it. You have to revisit a litany of instances of administrators wimping out at Claremont McKenna College, Yale, Emory, the University of Michigan, UC Berkeley, Evergreen State College, Texas Southern University, and Middlebury College. You'll get mad all over again.

Hugely important essay by Auguste Meyrat at The Federalist entitled "Niched Pop Culture Could Lead to Either a Renaissance or a Dark Age." A taste:

With no popular standard to serve as a point of reference, audiences in search of quality entertainment will need the help of critics—people who do the job of sifting, cutting through marketing propaganda, and applying objective standards of appraisal. Otherwise, these audiences will waste their time on so much dreck and be fooled by a compromised algorithm or clever advertisements.

This new deference and attention to critics will also require a general education in the arts. People do not need to become experts, but they should be able to understand the experts and the rules they apply to whatever medium. This means appreciating art and entertainment as disciplines and modes of knowledge, not just forms of pleasure. If people approach entertainment without any knowledge of objective aesthetic values—as many do now—they will select the ones that offer the greatest dopamine rush, setting aside so many works of beauty and brilliance for binge sessions of “Fortnite” and pornography.

Before the cynic tosses aside this whole discussion of art and entertainment as a “first world problem”—which, to some degree, it is—it should be stressed just how much art influences culture. Art informs the imagination, which in turn informs opinions and perceptions, which informs actions and behavior.

It is not unreasonable to judge a culture by its art or a person by her artistic preferences. Art often says much more about a place or a population than economic or scientific statistics do. Consequently, a culture that ceases to treat its art seriously and subordinates it to lower things like politics, pleasure, or commerce will lose its integrity, along with its identity.

With this in mind, there is reason to hope that this new phase in entertainment will be positive. If Americans resist the urge to huddle in niches and use entertainment for validation and pleasure (instead of the better purpose of edification and discovering beauty), then they will continue progressing towards a brighter future with stronger communities.

Just when you think Ilhan Omar can't get any more obscene, she does. 

 

The "Easter worshippers" dustup: a mere quibble over semantics or a cultural harbinger?

It does seem like a deliberately distributed talking point, doesn't it? Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, along with others known to be lefties, used that term instead of Christians in their tweets about he Sri Lanka massacre, to the point that it hardly seems to fit the hundred-monkeys-with-typewriters-coming-up-with-Shakespeare model.

I'm sympathetic to Erick Erickson's two main points, that had the lefties been silent, Christians, especially the subset known as Trumpists with chips on their shoulders, who rarely have more to contribute to society's polemical discourse than pointing up leftist folly, would have expressed an even greater degree of outrage, and that this whole thing is pretty minor compared to the actual horror that is at the core of what's being discussed.

Still, "Easter worshippers" does seem pretty weak. Christians were targeted in Sri Lanka with the same specificity as Muslims in New Zealand recently, and all the lefties were puking all over themselves to "stand in solidarity" in that matter.

Real Christianity - as expressed in the Apostles' Creed - is under attack by entities ranging from radical Muslims to the Chinese government to mainstream Protestantism to the San Antonio City Council.

Christians make an easier target for the Western civilization-destroyers than they used to, since dwindling numbers of people attend church or ever crack a Bible.

So some context is important to bring to the conversation. It's almost as if the "Easter worshippers" bunch is saying, "Don't get me wrong. I personally don't go in for that quaint, antiquated stuff, but it seems to have some kind of community-building effect, and they're generally nice people - that is, until you get them going on that 'sin' stuff."

For leftists to call them Christians comes just a little too close to acknowledging Christians' certainty that their doctrine is the truth.

That's just way too absolutist for those who have a vested interest in keeping everything relative, so no one has a solid answer to the question, "What's wrong with the government having all the power?"

Why human death has a significance animal and plant death don't have

I often start religious reflections with mention of one or another of my last few sticking points while still a secular agnostic, as you may have noticed.

One of them was that Christians would speak of Christ conquering death.

Well, I'd think, it's not just humans that die. Dogs and cats die. Gazelles and whales and iguanas. Even oak trees and algae. And none of those organisms sin. So what's with this connection between human sin and human death?

It wasn't until I let the business about humans having been created in God's image and likeness in on a deeper level that I began to see how that might be. We were created in his image and likeness; Fido and Tabby weren't. In fact, we were granted dominion over them.

In a sense, a lower animal doesn't need a soul due to its complete innocence. It nurtures its young when that's called for and it reacts fiercely to threats when that's called for. But it can't create anything. That is reserved for the one creature made in His image and likeness.

It also has no sense of anything it does being right or wrong.

Actually, neither did humans, until they violated the hard and fast rule not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

That was kind of a two-edged sword. Our inventiveness - our power of creation - was unleashed, in large part, in order to find more efficient and traction-gaining ways to complete tasks, now that we had to live by the sweat of our brows.

We'd be overlaying our own creations upon God's. It would show up in ways that continued to demonstrate that we were His image and likeness. Life-saving technologies, transportation allowing us to span continents and oceans in mere hours, and such. But it also showed up in ways that laid waste to ever-greater numbers of us.

And we knew good and well when we were engaged in the latter.

No other organism - at least on Earth - needs grace.

But clearly we did.

And God, because he couldn't bear the thought of eternity without us, delivered.

The Barney & Clyde podcast - episode four

Welcome back to the bar! Pull up a chair and get in on the fortnightly exchange of libertarian and conservative perspectives on the weighty matters of the day. In this installment of Barney and Clyde, we group the content before us into three categories: 

Tribalism, tribalism everywhere!,

Why a true free market still seems like a distant dream, and

The death rattle of education and journalism

Over ginger beers, we look at the utterly predictable responses to the Mueller investigation, Mayor Pete (making his differences with Mike Pence personal, and also his flimsy understanding of economic liberty), the utter absence of anybody in Washington who can work up any alarm about the debt and deficit, the orchestrated attempt by the media to make the public disparage tax cuts, and the further descent of the American campus into toxic wokeness.

B&C: fortnightly and forthrightly!

Two overarchingly important points about the Mueller report: the meddling started on the Most Equal Comrade's watch, and, while the Very Stable Genius isn't guilty of crimes, he's shown to be weak and of low character

Scott Jennings, former advisor to George W. Bush and Mitch McConnell, has a piece at CNN today that lays out point number one:

The Mueller report flatly states that Russia began interfering in American democracy in 2014. Over the next couple of years, the effort blossomed into a robust attempt to interfere in our 2016 presidential election. The Obama administration knew this was going on and yet did nothing. In 2016, Obama's National Security Adviser Susan Rice told her staff to "stand down" and "knock it off" as they drew up plans to "strike back" against the Russians, according to an account from Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their book "Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump". 

Why did Obama go soft on Russia? My opinion is that it was because he was singularly focused on the nuclear deal with Iran. Obama wanted Putin in the deal, and to stand up to him on election interference would have, in Obama's estimation, upset that negotiation. This turned out to be a disastrous policy decision.

Obama's supporters claim he did stand up to Russia by deploying sanctions after the election to punish them for their actions. But, Obama, according to the Washington Post, "approved a modest package... with economic sanctions so narrowly targeted that even those who helped design them describe their impact as largely symbolic." In other words, a toothless response to a serious incursion.

But don't just take my word for it that Obama failed. Congressman Adam Schiff, who disgraced himself in this process by claiming collusion when Mueller found that none exists, once said that "the Obama administration should have done a lot more." The Washington Post reported that a senior Obama administration official said they "sort of choked" in failing to stop the Russian government's brazen activities. And Obama's ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, said, "The punishment did not fit the crime" about the weak sanctions rolled out after the 2016 election.

Okay, so we know that the MEC was at least asleep at the switch, and may have been calculating that it was not the time to bring the meddling up, because he was so intent on appeasing a rogue state, because he thought history would therefore portray him as a visionary peacemaker.

But after him we got another president whose flimsy character ought to give us pause, as David French, writing at Time, makes clear:

We now know for sure what kind of man Donald Trump is. Beyond the tweets, the rallies, the interviews, the debates, the press conferences, the scandals, the best-selling yet unclearly sourced insider books and the unrelenting braggadocio and aggrandizement, a comprehensive read of the Mueller report brings to life the portrait of the man Donald Trump more than anything before it.

It takes the traits we already knew he exhibited — his mendacity, his propensity to surround himself with crooks and grifters, and his single-minded self-focus — and places them in the context of a sweeping narrative about a presidential campaign and presidency devoid of ethics, honor or even strength. The stories paint a picture of a president who is both petty and small, so very small.

One of the most telling moments occurs on page 102 in the obstruction of justice section of the Special Counsel’s analysis. It tells a short version of a story we largely already knew. When Donald Trump’s son, Donald Junior, learned that the New York Times was about to break the news of his now-infamous June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower with Russian lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya, his first instinct was to come clean.

He drafted a statement that began, “I was asked to have a meeting by an acquaintance I knew … with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign.” But his father said no. His father demanded that the statement be revised to omit the motivation for the meeting. Donald Jr. complied and misled America. 

Think for a moment about that story. With his campaign in the media crosshairs, President Trump threw his son under the bus. He made his son transmit his own deceptions. He exposed his son to the scorn and ridicule he so richly deserved.

There are other important moments in the report. Here’s one we didn’t know before. According to the report, in June 2017, President Trump dictated a message for his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski — who had been fired in June 2016, a few months after a misdemeanor battery charge against him had been brought and then dropped — to dictate to then Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Trump was directing Sessions to essentially reverse his recusal from the Russian investigation to narrow the scope of the Special Counsel’s investigation. Trump wanted Mueller to merely investigate “election meddling for future elections.” 

Lewandowski never delivered Trump’s message. He scheduled a meeting with Sessions, but when Sessions canceled, Lewandowski never followed through. A disgraced former campaign manager felt free to disregard a directive from the President of the United States.

It’s difficult to overestimate the extent to which Trump’s appeal to his core supporters is built around the notion that — regardless of his other flaws — he possesses a core strength, a willingness to “fight” and an ability to strike a degree of fear in the hearts of his opponents. I live in the heart of Trump country in Tennessee, and I have consistently heard the same refrain from his most loyal supporters. Trump, as they say, “kicks ass.” He was the ultimate alpha male, a political version of Tony Soprano, a formidable boss who commands an army of loyal consiglieri. Cross him at your peril.
But now, thanks to the Mueller report, his “fights” look more like temper tantrums, and those closest to him — including low men like Lewandowski and far-more-noble men like former White House counsel Donald McGahn — understand that his fury is passing and his directives are unreliable, seemingly transitory and easily forgotten or disregarded.

Moreover, his vaunted personal judgment — an image cultivated through years of careful television production on The Apprentice — has been exposed as well. When one reads Robert Mueller’s account of Trump’s own campaign chair’s extraordinary efforts to maintain an encrypted connection to Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs, it’s plain that Trump was played. Paul Manafort used Trump’s gullibility as a business opportunity.

Folks, this is why I call the country we live in post-America. The last two presidents we elected have been reckless, shallow men. And three of the four most recent (W is the exception for those who need it spelled out) have been flaming narcissists.

The United States of America used to elect presidents that, even if they were shaky from a character standpoint, grasped the magnitude and gravity of their responsibilities and tried to prevent making destructive messes. They often didn't succeed, but I don't think that since the 1930s, when FDR pursued economic policies he knew damn well were going to prolong the Depression, we've seen such executive-branch deliberate harmfulness.