Tuesday roundup

Historian Niall Ferguson, writing at the website for the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, takes a very broad perspective on the undeniable cold war into which the US and China have entered. It's clear China's status is not just one of being a rival. In any way in which the US engages China, either governmentally or in the private-sector realm, no illusions should be harbored.

Paul R. DeHart, writing at Public Discourse, the Witherspoon Institute's online journal, looks at how basic an "ought" is to reality. It's as fundamental as an "is":

No natural lawyer in the classical natural law tradition derives an ought from an is (or from facts devoid of oughtness), because, when it comes to practical (or moral) reason, natural lawyers do not derive ought at all—at least not the most fundamental oughts. Rather, when it comes to moral reason—and especially the apprehension of our most fundamental obligations—they begin with ought. Put another way, in an important sense ought is underived. Or, if you will, it’s stipulated in the major premise. This can be seen by considering the order of natural law precepts as conceived by Thomas Aquinas in that part of the Summa Theologiae often denominated the Treatise on Law (ST I-II, Question 90-108).

This is hugely important, for it gives us the foundation on which to assert that pretty much all cultures  inherently recognize the morality laid out in the Ten Commandments:

What about this claim of radical cultural variation in moral knowledge across time and place? Well, the claim is empirical. And, as it happens, the claim is also empirically false. There is of course real and important variation across time and place (as any reader of Herodotus knows). Nevertheless, as C.S. Lewis writes in “The Poison of Subjectivism”:

[W]hat of the . . . modern objection—that the ethical standards of different cultures differ so widely that there is no good common tradition at all? The answer is that this is a lie—a good, solid, resounding lie. If a man will go into a library and spend a few days with the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics he will soon discover the massive unanimity of the practical reason in man. From the Babylonian Hymn to Samos, from the Laws of Manu, the Book of the Dead, the Analects, the Stoics, the Platonists, from the Australian aborigines . . . he will collect the same triumphantly monotonous denunciations of oppression, murder, treachery, and falsehood, the same injunctions of kindness to the aged, the young, and the weak, of almsgiving and impartiality and honesty. He may be a little surprised (I certainly was) to find that precepts of mercy are more frequent than precepts of justice; but he will no longer doubt that there is such a thing as the Law of Nature. There are, of course, differences. There are even but the blindnesses in particular cultures…But the pretence that we are presented with a mere chaos—though no outline of universally accepted value shows through—is simply false and should be contradicted in season and out of season wherever it is met. Far from finding a chaos, we find exactly what we should expect if good is indeed something objective and reason the organ whereby it is apprehended—that is, a substantial agreement with considerable local differences of emphasis and, perhaps, no one code that includes everything.

While there are significant differences across culture, other scholars provide evidence that supports Lewis’s conclusion. Thus, in “The Relations Between Religion and Morality in Primitive Culture” in the journal Primitive Man, John M. Cooper famously wrote the following:

The peoples of the world, however much they differ as to the details of morality, hold universally, or with practical universality, to at least the following basic precepts. Respect the Supreme Being or the benevolent being who takes his place. Do not “blaspheme.” Care for your children. Malicious murder or maiming, stealing, deliberate slander or “black” lying, when committed against friend or unoffending fellow clansman or tribesman, are reprehensible. Adultery proper is wrong, even though there be exceptional circumstances that permit or enjoin it and even though sexual relations among the unmarried may be viewed leniently. Incest is a heinous offense. This universal moral code agrees rather closely with our own Decalogue understood in a strictly literal sense. It inculcates worship of and reverence to the Supreme Being or to other superhuman beings. It protects the fundamental rights of life, limb, family, property and good name.

In a similar vein, ancient Greeks like Socrates in Xenophon’s Memorabilia or Aristotle in his Rhetoric spoke of the unwritten, common laws of right and wrong that have their foundation in nature. Cooper and Lewis, among others, supply evidence that supports their claim (see this piece by Richard H. Beis). 

Amanda Carpenter at The Bulwark offers a comprehensive look at the rise of Trumpist powerhouse Charlie Kirk and how he was the architect of the Right's mutation. He took a set of commonly agreed-upon conservative concerns - principally indoctrination in our schools - and used them to cultivate his own brand as a wunderkind:

Kirk, who is only 26 years old, gained a foothold in conservative media as a high school student by writing for Breitbart News about the “indoctrination children are receiving in today’s public schools, as unionized teachers push a liberal-leaning agenda.” Kirk had planned on college—Baylor had accepted him; West Point hadn’t—but a wealthy Chicagoan named Bill Montgomery, who was impressed by Kirk’s public speaking in 2012, convinced him to instead start a nonprofit organization to reach out to other young people. So he skipped the learning and went straight to indoctrinating students with his own agenda by way of TPUSA.

To get it going, he memorized the names and faces of prominent GOP donors and stalked them at the 2012 Republican National Convention. Multimillionaire investor Foster Friess, who bankrolled Rick Santorum’s losing campaign, was his first target. Kirk correctly surmised that Friess was willing to light more money on fire. “He impressed me with his capacity to lead, intelligence, and love for America,” Friess told Bloomberg News. “I instantly knew I wanted to support him.” Friess cut him a check for $10,000.

“He’s phenomenal. The most incredible young man I know,” another donor, Peter Huizenga, told the Atlantic in 2015. “At his age, he is one of the most accomplished, one of the most mature, and one of the most organized and intelligent guys that I have ever met. You just don’t meet guys like this.”

That all goes to say, the donor dudes really, really love him. And Kirk knows they are primed for his pitch. He told Politico in 2018:

You can’t watch Fox News without seeing five or six segments a day about the nuttiness on college campuses. . . . You pair that nuttiness up with people in their 60s and 70s who are beginning to map out where they want a significant portion of their wealth to go, and they’re saying, “I don’t want my money to go to my university. It’s not representing my values.” Then we come along.

This approach seems to be working out: Last year, Kirk raised $24 million in contributions.

You can't deny that things are happening for him:

To say Kirk is busy today would be an understatement. He’s running Turning Point USA, which has a political action arm called Turning Point Action. Turning Point Action acquired the fledgling Students for Trump in 2019. Kirk is chairman of that, too. Turning Point USA has a thriving Youtube channel that produces several original forms of programming. Additionally, Kirk has his own YouTube show and podcast. Since Trump was elected, Kirk has written two books, Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can Win the Battle on Campus and Why it Matters(amply padded with reprints of his tweets and retweets) and, from earlier this year, The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas That Will Win the Future. 

Yes, Kirk is living his dream of the chief operator of a “multidimensional culture war machine.” If you are looking for the reason why President Trump is talking as if he were a Zoomer on Parler, Kirk is it.

So, what is Kirk’s grand message to the young and impressionable? Summed up in three words: “They hate you.” (What were you expecting—Socrates?) Kirk’s so-called MAGA Doctrine amounts to nothing more than Washington and Democrats are bad, therefore, Trump is good. Everything is explained by that fact. It isn’t hard to see how a college graduate ended up thinking Aunt Jemima was the picture of the American Dream now, is it? 

That said, it's true that public schools are cesspools of indoctrination, as David Harsanyi makes clear at National Review:

Teachers unions spent $30 million on federal elections alone in 2016 — virtually all of it on Democrats. It’s about more than the money they give, however. Unions organize, campaign, and march for liberal causes. As a Washington Post piece (“Teachers’ unions may not raise pay — but they do bolster the Democratic Party”) aptly put it not long ago:

But teachers’ unions do accomplish something politically notable: They are a vital part of liberal coalitions and the Democratic Party. Teachers’ union organization and mobilization, like that of other government workers’ unions, have long compensated for the declining membership in traditional organized labor. What’s more, they’ve advanced the causes of women’s and LGBTQ rights — rights that are important to many or most of their members. They’ve done that by delivering money, mobilization and organization to both the Democratic Party and to feminist groups.

It’s likely that left-wing ideologues run your school district. They decide what your children learn. They are the ones who decide that your kid can protest the Second Amendment of the Constitution, but never, not in a million years, march for any cause the Founders might have championed.

Anecdotally speaking, I can confirm that the teaching of American history in at least one D.C. suburb — perhaps a better way to put it would be the un-teaching of American history — is detestable. Most events are couched in relativism; or, worse, the textbooks accentuate every sin and downplay every accomplishment. It would be one thing if this kind of ideological shading were relegated to history class, but it has infected plenty of other things.

If you have no interest in funding campaigns for “women’s and LGBTQ rights” (euphemisms for pro-abortion and anti-religious-liberty causes), well, that’s too bad. If you can’t homeschool your kid or send her to a pricey private school, you lose.

The embedded left-wing nature of big school districts is so normalized that parents rarely say a word. Mom and Dad can buy virtually anything from anywhere in the world, but they can’t use their tax dollars to buy Timmy an education that aligns with their values.

Charter schools don't necessarily provide an alternative, as Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute shows:

Last week, just before the Fourth of July, the influential KIPP charter school network announced it had decided to abandon its longtime mantra “Work Hard. Be Nice.” KIPP’s leaders explained that the affable slogan had to go because it hinders efforts to “dismantle systemic racism,” “places value on being compliant and submissive,” “supports the illusion of meritocracy,” and doesn’t “align” with KIPP’s “vision of students being free to create the future they want.”

What to make of all this? Well, KIPP has pledged its 240-odd schools to the cause of anti-racism. Generally speaking, that’s certainly admirable. But anti-racist education today can mean many things. What KIPP has embraced is a fairly radical vision that retreats from defending even time-tested, broadly supported, foundational virtues if someone hints that they’re freighted with wrongthink.

Washington state's plan for bringing kids back into public schools for the fall semester:

Seattle (of course) is at the forefront of making white municipal employees puke all over themselves to show contrition over their melanin levels de rigueur. Count on it: smaller cities in the interior will be implementing some version of this. A Twitter thread from Center on Wealth and Poverty director Christopher Rufo has the details:

Christopher F. Rufo

@realchrisrufo

The City of Seattle held a training session for white employees called “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.”

So I did a public records request to find out exactly what this means. Let's go through it together in this thread.

Christopher F. Rufo

@realchrisrufo

First, diversity trainers informed white participants that  "objectivity," "individualism," "intellectualization," and "comfort" are all vestiges of internalized racial oppression.

@realchrisrufo

Sometimes both sides of the coin are "oppression."

Are white employees speaking too much? That's probably the internalized racial superiority of "imposition" or "paternalism."

Are white employees speaking too little? That's oppression, too, because "silence" is "violence." 

What's next? 

The City of Seattle diversity trainers encourage white employees to "practice self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism" and work on "undoing your own whiteness." 

@realchrisrufo

What happens after the thought exercises? It's time to DO THE WORK.

The trainers ask white employees to "let go" of "comfort," "guaranteed physical safety," "control over the land," "social status," and "relationships with some other white people." 

@realchrisrufo

Then they go through a flow chart that outlines how white people "cause harm to POC," "show up small and inauthentic," and are unable to access their "humanity."

@realchrisrufo

As @DrKarlynB first reported, the invitation for this training was strictly segregated to "white City employees." 

The goal is to teach them how they have "complicity in the system of white supremacy" and must be held "accountable to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color." 

Christopher F. Rufo

@realchrisrufo

How do you know when you've successfully "interrupted your whiteness"? 
–When you "implicate yourself" in racism.
–When "other white people may be angry."
–When you have stopped your "white normative behavior." 

Christopher F. Rufo

@realchrisrufo

So far, the City of Seattle has refused to provide the names of the diversity trainers, the budget for the program, or the video of the session. I'm going to keep pushing—because this is exactly the kind of thought-policing they want to implement everywhere. 

The idea that where Colin Kaepernick was coming from when he started the kneeling phenomenon was just to bring attention to supposed systemic bigotry in the nation's law enforcement agencies was never more than horses---, as Quin Hillyer makes clear at the Washington Examiner:

“We reject your celebration of white supremacy and look forward to liberation for all,” tweeted Kaepernick about the Fourth of July, because, he said, “black people have been dehumanized, brutalized, criminalized and terrorized by America for centuries and are expected to join your commemoration of independence, while you enslaved our ancestors.”

This precisely echoes the original reason he gave for beginning his protests at NFL games in 2016. 

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” he said then. This was not a protest against police violence and racism that just happened to occur during the anthem; it was specifically targeted at the anthem and flag so as to blame the country as such for the ills Kaepernick was protesting.

The message was not that the nation per se had a flawed past and that vestiges remained in some people’s hearts and minds in a way that even well-intentioned laws and institutions had not yet eradicated. No, the message was that the institutions themselves were deliberately racist and oppressive and that the nation itself was unworthy of pride. 

So, yes, all of this “kneeling during the anthem” stuff was and is about “disrespecting the flag of the United States of America.” Everybody knows it. It is precisely and intentionally about that. If it were just about protesting racism and police misconduct, Kaepernick wouldn't say things like that. Also, there would be plenty of other ways to make that point without intruding on what always had been an aspirationally unifying civic ritual. As longtime sports columnist Jason Whitlock (who is black) wrote this week in disgust at Kaepernick, “It’s a divisive hot takepackaged as righteous indignation.”

Since then, Kaepernick has kept up a steady drumbeat of anti-American and even pro-communist statements and actions. He particularly likes radical-tinged clothing, such as socks depicting cops as pigs and a shirt proudly portraying Malcolm X meeting with Cuban mass murderer Fidel Castro, whom he complimented because of Cuba’s supposedly enlightened policies supporting education. He is likewise prone to sporting paraphernalia of the equally brutal and repressive Che Guevara.

 Tim Miller, writing at Rolling Stone, relays what Republican operatives and campaign consultants are telling him about the party's down ballot prospects this fall. Some alarm, some resignation, some hope, but pretty much universally an attitude of "We gotta hitch our wagon to the VSG; where else are we gonna go?"

Now that the release date for Mary Trump's book has been moved up to July 18, the excerpts are popping up all over the place. The New York Times. The Washington Post.  The Guardian. 

A few big facts emerge. Fred Sr. was a cruel and materialistic man, who conflated the value of individual human beings with their financial worth, who berated his oldest son, Fred, Jr., while the latter was with the family real estate business, once telling him in front of a roomful of employees, "Donald is worth twenty of you," who then further berated Fred Jr. when he left to become an airline pilot. Fred Sr.'s low regard for his eldest son set something of a tone for how the family saw him. Donald went to a movie the night Fred Jr. died of a heart attack. 

This tidbit is in keeping with what we know about the VSG:

In one particularly disturbing scene from a trip to Mar-a-Lago, Mary recounts how when she was 29 and wearing a bathing suit and a pair of shorts to lunch at the resort, her uncle looked up at her and remarked, “Holy shit, Mary. You’re stacked.”
“Donald!” Marla Maples said to her then-husband, slapping him on the arm.  

An inspirational website I like a lot, Raptitude ("Getting Better At Being Human") has a great piece today called "One Way To Stay Centered in a Divided World". What is it? He recommends reading an opinion piece every day that makes you uncomfortable. Seriously. Hear him out.