Dear Pro-Gun Activists: Nobody is Listening to You Anymore

An article published Wednesday in American Thinker, “Cries to ‘Ban the AR-15’ Based on Ignorance and Hysteria” by Michael Filozof, is representative of what is sadly the best of pro-gun activism in the wake of the Parkland, Florida massacre. Filozof may know quite a bit about hunting and semiautomatic rifles, but he doesn’t get the opposition. In fact, by the end of the third paragraph, you realize he’s not really talking about the opposition — he’s retailing long-standing right-wing stereotypes about gun-grabbing, Godless libruls. I say he represents the best because at least he had the good taste not to claim David Hogg is a “crisis actor” or to tweet that the deaths were the “worst news [for the survivors] since their parents told them to get summer jobs.”

Really? I remember a time, not so long ago, when conservative commentators were thoughtful, nuanced, and respectful of the opposition. Is this what American conservatism has been reduced to — conspiracy theories and social-media asshattery? At long last, has conservatism lost all sense of decency?

The New Pro-Life Movement and Its Critics

Since its inception in 2016, the New Pro-Life Movement has drawn criticism from conservative Catholic writers, not least because the NPLM began with the rejection of the old guard’s unhealthy attachment to conservative/Republican politics. The most recent attack, coming from the Charismatic Episcopal Church’s CEC for Life blog, had some me-too reprinting from Life Site News and Church Militant just as Crux Now published an interview with M.T. Dávila, an NPLM member and associate professor of Christian ethics at Andover Newton Theological Seminary. While some of CEC for Life’s criticisms are worth considering, more of them show why the old movement needs in-house censure.

Semantics Matter

Let’s begin with what the CEC for Life article gets right:

Under the NPLM’s “Women’s Rights and Justice” section of its 11 Pillars, the first paragraph begins, “Since women are the central figures in the abortion debate ….” Women are at the center, sure; they’re certainly not irrelevant to the debate. But neither are the unborn, who are also at the center of the debate. This particular phrasing simply begs to be misunderstood as saying the unborn and their right to life are of secondary consideration. The effect of legal abortion rights on fathers also gets no attention, enhancing this error.

Semantics matter. Murphy’s Law for Writers holds that “whatever can be misunderstood will be misunderstood, usually in the worst way possible.” Granting that opponents will deliberately misrepresent your position, you still write to be understood by those who rely on your words as you state them. Unlike a person in a casual conversation, the writer can’t afford to metaphorically let words just fall out of their mouths under the assumption, “Oh, they’ll know what I mean.” A political manifesto is the last place to be careless in your phrasing.

I’m well aware that no one in the NPLM sets a lower value on the unborn’s life than they do on the mother’s. But I’m not the one that has to be convinced.

Also, CEC for Life points out that, whatever the national leaders of the old movement do, there are more and more localized efforts to address the “demand” side of the abortion equation. “Ultimately, ... [the NPLM] fails to acknowledge a long-standing history of compassion and hard labor made evident through the hundreds and thousands of resources now available for mothers and fathers and their preborn child. Not to mention counseling and services available to abortion workers looking for healing and a new life.” The NPLM would do well to acknowledge these contributions and limit its criticism to the national leadership.

The Triumph of the Idiot

Thomas Hobbes. (Image source: totallyhistory.com)

The word idiot, I am reliably informed, comes from the ancient Greek ἰδιώτης idiōtēs, via the Latin transliteration idiota. On the face of it, an idiōtēs was merely a private individual, as opposed to a government minister or military officer. However, among the Athenians, it was a derisive term applied to anyone who declined to take an active role in civic affairs, or who cut themselves off from the community in pursuit of their own interests. This pejorative application became associated with a person of low intelligence or skill, who could contribute little to the polis.

Res Idiotica

America is becoming (or has become) a nation of idiots, according to writers and thinkers who deliberately reference this half-forgotten sense of idiōtēs. That’s to say, we are becoming increasingly self-absorbed and disconnected, isolated not only from each other but from any sense of community or history. Their critique of millennials has gone beyond sneering at “snowflakes” and hooting over participation trophies. Instead, their concern is for the disturbing number of twenty-somethings checking out of adult social interaction and the burgeoning industry of “self-care” products.

Writes philosopher Michael Liccione, “It’s as if real relationships and real community engagement are all just too much for many people, who prefer to define and live in their own little worlds, insulated as much as possible from the pain and inconvenience of regular involvement with the big bad world.” Another philosopher, Reilly Smethurst, reminds us that St. Augustine “famously associated idiocy with ostentatious self-authorization. In his Confessions, Augustine referred critically to his younger self as ‘a prisoner, trying to simulate a crippled sort of freedom.’ The specter comforting America is that of the juvenile Augustine — free to enjoy its own vacuity, empowered ironically by crippledom.”

The best use of this equation between self-absorption and idiocy came from Notre Dame professor Patrick J. Deneen’s critique of the education system:

Above all, the one overarching lesson that students receive is to understand themselves to be radically autonomous selves within a comprehensive global system with a common commitment to mutual indifference. Our commitment to mutual indifference is what binds us together as a global people. ... Ancient philosophy and practice heaped praise upon res publica — a devotion to public things, things we share together. We have instead created the world’s first res idiotica .... Our education system excels at producing solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history.

Uncivil Discourse 2: Kathy Griffin and the “New Normal” of Obscenity

Kathy Griffin, desperate attention-seeker.
(Photo: Getty Images.)

I absolutely cannot stand Scotch whiskey. People tell me that Scotch is an “acquired taste.” To which I always respond with some bewilderment, “Why would anyone want to acquire a taste for it?” Why would anyone, having found something vile and disgusting, deliberately take in more and more of it until it becomes their go-to consumable? This is just one of many questions we should ask ourselves while we’re all in a flutter over the picture of “comedian” Kathy Griffin holding up a bloodied mock-up of Donald Trump’s head.

The Massacre in Arizona

Before we go further, I’d like to cast your memories back to January 2011, to the mass shooting in Tucson in which six people died and thirteen others were wounded. As I wrote at the time, “The smoke from Jared Lee Loughner’s weapon had hardly a chance to dissipate when liberal hate-mongers in the MSM started to accuse Sarah Palin and the Tea Party as accessories before the fact to mass murder. The grounds? One of the victims, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, is a Democrat ‘targeted’ by the Tea Party for unseating in her next re-election bid.” And among the accusers was Kathy Griffin.

Palin had posted an online map that had Giffords’ and other Democrat incumbents’ pictures with cross-hairs drawn on them. Had Loughner never fired his weapon, no one would ever have thought it unusual; it would have been like the Sunday-morning mailman in Chesterton’s Father Brown mystery. False cause fallacy, folks; nothing to see here. The accusation was baseless and stupid, and the conservative chatterati tore the most visible offenders, Keith Olbermann and Paul Krugman, to tiny little shreds. Even some liberals participated in the beatdown.

Other conservatives, however, went the tu quoque route, serving up some violent talk from liberal thought leaders from then-Pres. Barack Obama to also-unfunny comedian Sandra Bernhardt and queen emeritus of pop Madonna. At the time, Michelle Malkin had been collecting such examples for ten years; she posted them with the admonition, “... [Don’t] let the media whitewash the sins of the hypocritical Left in their naked attempt to suppress the law-abiding, constitutionally-protected, peaceful, vigorous political speech of the Right.” Peaceful and vigorous, I assume, includes the various lynchings and burnings of Obama, as well as rocker Ted Nugent’s later invitation to the president to “suck on my machine gun.”

Scarcity No Excuse For Avoiding Health Care Reform

Image Source: Center for American Progress.

Plenty of people have written ad nauseam about liberal smugness. Heck, even liberals have written about liberal smugness. I’ve already pointed out that liberals’ supposed intellectual superiority is oversold. But for sheer condescension, try reading a conservative on economic issues. It’s hard to find a conservative talking head who doesn’t assume liberals know nothing about economics, who doesn’t treat liberals like third-graders in need of a stern talking-to about grown-up stuff. Case in point: Kevin D. Williamson, whose National Review piece, “Health Care, from the Top”, can serve as a model for How to Write Like a Patronizing Ass.

“Those Poor, Simple Liberals”

“Our ongoing troubles with health care,” Williamson begins, “stem from an unwillingness to deal with certain facts. One of those facts is scarcity.” Just from the way Williamson tees up the ball you can see where he’s aiming: “Those poor, simple liberals think everything is available in mind-dazzling abundance and shouldn’t have to be paid for (except by other people).” Apparently, to Williamson liberals are all college-age kids going to school on Mommy and Daddy’s nickel, who don’t have to pay for anything except Jell-O shots and the occasional reefer (thanks to Obamacare, the Trojans are covered).

To give Williamson his due, his attitude never verges into a Scroogean desire for the unfortunate to die and decrease the surplus population. “There is a certain libertarian tendency,” he writes,  “to … throw up one’s hands, exclaiming: ‘Just let markets work!’ We should certainly let markets work, but not ‘just.’ We aren’t going to let children with congenital birth defects suffer just because they might have stupid and irresponsible parents [people are poor because they’re stupid and irresponsible, don’cha know], and we are not going to let old people who have outlived their retirement savings die of pneumonia because we don’t want to spend a couple of thousand bucks treating them.” He even writes approvingly of “giving poor people money and money analogues (such as food stamps) to pay for food,” which makes him a rarity among conservatives.

However, these heartwarming glimpses of Williamson’s humanity aren’t enough to dispel the irritation produced by his ham-handed belaboring of the obvious. It might distress him to learn that not all liberals are spoiled-brat millennials mindlessly parroting Bernie Sanders’ Facebook memes. Indeed, it might cause him consternation to know that liberals are fairly evenly distributed among income strata and that college graduates are a bit more likely to lean left than right. I can’t imagine what would happen to Williamson if it were revealed to him that there are even a few liberal economists still around.

The Day Melania Trump Became a Real Person

First Lady Melania Trump, just before meeting Pope Francis.
(Photo credit: Gregorio Borgia, AP)

I’ve felt some pity for Melania Trump for some time now. It’s hard not to.

In the Shadow

For one thing, for all the money they make — and it’s not necessarily as much as you’d think — supermodels don’t get much more respect than ordinary models, who rate more respect than fast-food workers but less than nursing assistants. To the average person, being a model requires only three attributes: height, skinniness, and photogenic looks. No one expects you to have a brain, let alone opinions worth listening to; after all, if you had a brain, you’d have pursued some socially useful career, like (fill in the blank), instead of trading on such an ephemeral quality as beauty.

For another thing, Melania’s married to the shamelessly self-promoting Donald Trump. As such, to the public eye, she’s been little more than an accessory to The Donald, a gold-electroplated accouterment. Nobody actually knows the dynamic of their relationship, which has never stopped anyone from treating speculation as fact (“trophy wife!”). Being Trump’s wife has made her a target of spite. Melania recently settled a libel lawsuit with the British tabloid the Daily Mail, who had asserted that at one point she supplemented her modeling income with prostitution. And her delivery of the Lord’s Prayer at a rally in Melbourne, Florida garnered both howls of outrage from secularists and sneers from bigots who made fun of her accented English.

All told, however, most of Melania’s time is spent in the shadow of the lurching, bellowing PR ogre that is Pres. Donald Trump. For the press and for a large proportion of the Trump-hating public, she is little more than a cardboard cutout, or a pretty face posted on a punching bag — the First Bimbo. Even her son Barron gets more positive attention than she does.

Dreher’s “Benedict Option” Not THAT Hard to Understand

Monday, while perusing Big Pulpit, I came across a link to Deirdre Mundy’s Aleteia post, “Where [Rod] Dreher lost me on the ‘Benedict Option’”. I recently bought the book The Benedict Option: A Strategy For Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Sentinel Books) but hadn’t got around to reading it yet. I’d read a couple of his columns on the concept two years ago (and wrote a post about them); the basic idea seemed pretty clear to me at the time. However, intelligent people like Dr. John Zmirak and Austin Ruse showed quite clearly that they didn’t get it. Nevertheless, I read the book before reading Mundy’s piece.

Build an Ark? Right!

Reading the book was kind of a let-down. I agreed with everything Dreher wrote. In fact, I had written about many of the things he discusses and drawn pretty much the same conclusions. It was like I had paid $16.00 for the privilege of reading my opinions in someone else’s book. (Mind you, I’m not accusing Dreher of plagiarism!) The difference is, Dreher is a more experienced writer who uses fewer twenty-dollar words than I do, so his style is more accessible to the average reader. So it was like reading my opinions the way I should have written them. The Benedict Option concept is just not that hard to understand; it’s not Plato’s Republic or Cicero’s On Public Duties.

Having forearmed myself with the assurance that I indeed knew what Dreher was talking about, I then plunged into Mundy’s article to see where Dreher lost her. It turns out that her problem is with a simile Dreher conjured up in passing: “I believe that Christians now have got to realize that we’re living in a post-Christian civilization and take measures to build a kind of ark for ourselves with which to ride out the dark ages, to hold onto our faith, and tender the faith for such a time as light returns and civilization wants to hear the gospel again.”

Rebuts Mundy: “Here’s the problem: from a Catholic point of view, we already have a metaphorical Ark: The Church. We don’t need to build a new, more isolated ark to ride out what Dreher sees as a coming dark age. We can continue to live in the Ark we already have, as members of the body of Christ.” The rest of the article discusses ideas that Dreher covers in his book, but they’re written as if she’s contradicting him instead of agreeing with him. Sigh; some more hay litters the pavement of the public square as another straw man has the stuffing beaten out of it.

NYT: Trump Stole the Left’s License to BS

I must apologize — I thought I’d written my last political commentary. But when I read Casey William’s April 17 New York Times think piece, “Has Trump Stolen Philosophy’s Critical Tools?”, my first impression was, “This is either very subtle satire or the most blatant exposition of cognitive dissonance ever.” The problem: Williams desperately wants to call Pres. Donald Trump a liar.

We’re used to this pattern by now: The president dresses up useful lies as “alternative facts” and decries uncomfortable realities as “fake news.” Stoking conservative passion and liberal fury, Trump stirs up confusion about the veracity of settled knowledge and, through sheer assertion, elevates belief to the status of truth.

Trump’s playbook should be familiar to any student of critical theory and philosophy. It often feels like Trump has stolen our ideas and weaponized them.

However, the very critical tools upon which the academic left has become dependent for intellectual life-support forbids appealing to objective reality to back the claim that Trump lies. After all, if there is such a thing as an objective reality, we can’t know it for certain. The left has their facts, and Trump has his. Under postmodern critique, pace Daniel P. Moynihan,[*] the right to one’s own opinion is the right to one’s own facts.

La Civiltà Cattolica and the “Spirit of the Age”

Rev. Antonio Spadaro, SJ. (Photo: Magyar Kurír.)

Brace yourselves. Once again, someone in the Vatican has challenged Church doctrine in a way that implicates Pope Francis, on an issue about which he has already spoken — women’s ordination to the priesthood. (Surprise, surprise, the culprit is a Jesuit.) Arguably, the last pope to have total control over his staff was St. Gregory the Great. Certainly, it’s dubious whether any pope since Pius XII has had a curia and bureaucracy that were all striving to the same end. But even the most doughty of papal defenders must occasionally find himself irritated by Francis’ seeming unwillingness to ride herd on the Vatican administration.

This is Where We Came In …

On Tuesday, February 7, Sandro Magister reported on an article published in the Italian Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica, written by Fr. Giancarlo Pani, SJ. Titled “La Donna e il Diacono,” Magister claims that in the article, “Fr. Pani calmly rips to shreds the ‘last clear word’ — meaning the flat no — that John Paul II spoke against women’s priesthood.”

Yawn, you say; haven’t we seen this movie before, during the reigns of Benedict XVI and St. John Paul himself? Ah, says Magister, but this is different! You see, the Holy See inspects and authorizes every line it publishes! Plus, the editor is none other than papal confidant Fr. Antonio Spadaro, and Fr. Pani is not only a deputy editor but his closest colleague!

And Francis is the first “not to limit himself to what is already known, but wants to delve into a complex and relevant field, so that it may be the Spirit who guides the Church,” concludes La Civiltà Cattolica, evidently with the pope’s imprimatur.

The first rule in dealing with news from the Vatican: Not everybody in the Vatican is on the same page. In fact, going off-script is almost an intramural sport. Most bureaucracies have functionaries whose agendas differ from the person supposedly in charge of the mess. The Vatican differs only in that the subversion is more rampant and sometimes more blatant. Since Pius XII, the popes have as often had to work against the bureaucracy as with it. Nobody should assume that anybody in the Holy See does anything unusual with the full knowledge of the Pope, or even with the minimum knowledge of the next person up the food chain.

The Chittister Challenge 2: Supply, Demand, and the “Culture of Life”

On Saturday, January 28, Joe Heschmeyer published an essay, “Seven Answers to the ‘Pro-Lifers are just Pro-Birth’ Argument,” in his blog Shameless Popery. The essay offers rebuttals to a meme featuring the quote from Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB, that I wrote of a couple of years ago. I have a lot of respect and admiration for Joe, who is a student at the Pontifical American College in Vatican City (and, I believe, should be coming up on his transitional diaconate this year). I earnestly commend the essay to your attention; it’s very well balanced in its treatment of the argument.

Supply and Demand

However, Joe’s essay did prompt me to do a little more drilling on the subject, to embrace a little more of the political context in which the argument arises. The recent elections brought to the surface a long-standing tension between two different camps within the pro-life movement, camps which I will for brevity’s sake call the supply-side and demand-side branches. While the meme Joe dissects arose in a pro-abortion context, the quote has also had currency among demand-side pro-lifers.

The supply-side pro-life camp, which we could also call the first-wave movement, is mostly concerned with the legality of abortion and euthanasia, along with some related issues such as assisted suicide, cloning, IVF, and contraception. Politically, they tend to be older and more conservative or right-wing libertarian. As Joe rightly points out, conservatives are more likely to donate time and money to support charitable causes than are liberals, so it’s not like they’re stingy. However, precisely because their politics are more conservative, their view of the scope of “pro-life” is, for want of a more charitable word, narrower. They highly resist the importation of other issues, such as Syrian refugees or undocumented immigrants, into the pro-life purview and refuse the creation of government intervention programs. Because their concern is mostly with the legal and political mechanisms permitting the “death industry” to exist, one can say they seek to shut off the supply.

By contrast, the demand-side camp or second-wave movement tends to be younger, as well as more moderate to liberal in their politics though less willing to affiliate with either party or identify with either ideology. The demand-siders recognize that economic and social issues often drive the choice for death; by addressing those issues, they seek to reduce the demand. For this reason, they’re more likely to support government intervention and more willing to pay the taxes required to support the efforts. The pro-life movement as a whole is concerned with what Vice-President Mike Pence called “[society’s] most vulnerable, the aged, the infirm, the disabled, and the unborn.” The second-wave movement, influenced by the consistent life ethic articulated most notably by Cdl. Joseph Bernardin and in St. John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae, extends its recognition of vulnerability to immigrants, refugees, the homeless, and other socially marginalized people.[*]

The Absurdity of “Values-Free” Economics

Image source: marketoracle.co.uk.

While reading John C. Médaille’s Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Healthcare, Deficits, and More (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2010), I couldn’t help thinking of Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s admission three years ago that “economists actually know very, very little, and that a lot of what we thought we knew [prior to the last recession] turned out to be wrong.” Yet the defenders of what Gobry calls “the Washington consensus” still talk and think as though their economic dicta were enshrouded in papal infallibility. Toward a Truly Free Market helped me to realize that the economists were wrong because the entire discipline is not (and never could be) “values-free”; the very notion is inherently absurd. And the values enshrined in modern economic theory not only blind economists to impending market failures but make them inevitable.

What is Distributism?

Distributism holds that a community’s economic health is better secured when the ownership of capital — the means of production, including everything from office ball-point pens to factories, especially land — is spread out (distributed) widely among the population. It champions smaller, more localized businesses, especially cooperatives and employee-owned corporations, and considers globalism and the huge multinational conglomerates positive evils.

Distributism is not, however, a form of socialism. It rejects state ownership of property and demands a reordering of government power to prioritize the community over the nation. Nor does distributism necessarily require a forced redistribution of capital by the government, though Médaille doesn’t rule it out (see pp. 243-245).

About Those Participation Trophies …

Dear Cody,

I’ve seen the message you left for “People Older Than Me” on behalf of “People Younger Than Me”, which has had over 331,000 views at this writing [11/19/16]. For the benefit of everyone else, let me repeat it:

Dear People Older Than Me:

Shut up about the f**king participation trophies. We didn’t ask for them. We didn’t want them. We didn’t cherish them and polish them while thinking about what special, gifted children we are. They were annoying clutter on our shelves that we had to throw out in secret so we wouldn’t hurt YOUR feelings. And if we knew back then that you were gonna bring it up every time you disagreed with someone under 40 for the rest of f**king time, we would have told you where to shove that cheap plastic statue.

Sincerely,
People Younger Than Me

Mass Immaturity

Cody, I’m sure you’re sick of the references to the participation trophies. As a friend of mine pointed out, only the really little kids just starting Little League got participation trophies. Eventually, they went out with the ball tee, and you had to learn to play to win just as you had to learn how to hit a pitch. Which is to say, you had to learn to risk losing just as you learned to risk getting hit by a pitch. Participating is a minimum requirement; getting a trophy for it is like receiving an award for putting on your pants.

Just to show I get the larger point, I’m sure you’re also tired of the sneering references to “safe spaces” and trigger warnings and being called “delicate snowflakes”. I suppose it’s also our fault that many people of your generation come to adulthood ill-equipped, lacking confidence, self-esteem, and the normal skills to cope with adversity, unprepared to accept the risks that are part of life in an unsafe world. And if your cohort has shown some rotten behavior as a result of the recent election, I must admit many adults haven’t shown mature behavior either before or after the election.

But in case you missed it, Cody, that was the real point of the “participation trophy” reference — not that your cohort thinks of themselves as special, gifted people, but rather that they throw temper tantrums or break out in noisy tears like spoiled, entitled brats at the least sign of opposition. You’re angry, sad, or afraid? So what; it’s still unacceptable. When you have these episodes of mass immaturity, that’s when we start talking about participation trophies. We don’t simply disagree with you; we find your manner of disagreement absurd and contemptible. No one has to take you seriously just because you do.

Trump’s Plan: “Make America an Oligarchy”

I published Friday’s post a couple days later than I wanted to because my home Internet connection was down. In that post, I reflected on the degree to which elite arrogance had led to Donald Trump’s astonishing victory. But for anyone who thought voting for Trump was a vote for reform, I have news for you: We’re about to enshrine an oligarchy in power, where they can finish the wrecking of the American economic base. And We the People made it happen.

The Triumph of Neoliberalism

While liberals were wrecking windows and cars in a heartwarming display of love and inclusiveness, wearing safety pins for solidarity (because they don’t need them to hold their diapers together), and boomers and Gen-Xers were displaying their contrasting maturity and level-headedness by abusing Hispanics and committing hate crimes, the President-elect was putting a team together of the very people he promised to kick out of Washington to help him plan out the pillaging of the American economy and environment on behalf of the 1%. Speaking of promises, Trump is thinking of keeping some of Obamacare in place — most likely, the parts that keep your rates jacked up, while disposing of those parts that impose costs on the rich.

While you all were fretting over whether Trump would turn SCOTUS to the far right or Hillary would turn it to the far left, whether Christians would be herded into re-education camps or undocumenteds into deportation camps, whether we’d build a wall between us and Mexico or tear down the walls between “gendered” bathrooms, you missed the elements of Trump’s platform which signaled that he really is as much a member of the Establishment as Clinton … and that he really doesn’t empathize with the lower classes. All Trump’s race-baiting, rabble-rousing rhetoric was to distract you from the least appealing feature of his platform — his tax plan.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, it’s by no means unfair or unreasonable for those who own 89% of the nation’s assets and 95% of our financial wealth to pay 2/3rds or more of the government’s expenses. Those who rape — er, reap — more of the benefit of the laws should pay more for the establishment which guarantees those benefits. But Trump’s tax plan ignores all that. As Paul Waldman explains, “Trump’s tax plan would give 47 percent of its benefits to the richest one percent of taxpayers. Paul Ryan’s tax plan is even purer — it gives 76 percent of its cuts to the richest one percent in its first year, and by 2025 would feed 99.6 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent.” Dodd-Frank is slated to be axed, freeing the financial industry to make risky gambles with other people’s money once more. And while there won’t exactly be an “energy-regulation bonfire”, expect clean-energy initiatives to be cut.

Message to the Elite: “You’re Running the Country Wrong”

© 2016 A. F. Branco, Liberty Alliance.

As I watched ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and his crew of talking heads begin the autopsy on the election late Tuesday night, I felt some dark satisfaction. I hadn’t been the only self-appointed expert caught flat-footed by Donald Trump’s and the Republicans’ victory. Most of the elite, the Only People Whose Opinions Count, were humiliated by an over-glorified carnival huckster who (in our wise estimation) did just about everything wrong that could be done wrong and still pulled the upset of the century.

Andrew Sullivan Throws a Nutty

And the funny thing is, having been so spectacularly wrong about this election, we, the chatterati of America who have been polluting your television screens and social media feeds for months with our hive-mind wisdom, still think you should take our social forecasts seriously. Case in point: Andrew Sullivan, who threw a classic spittle-flecked nutty on the Daily Intelligencer.

This is now Trump’s America. He controls everything from here on forward. He has won this campaign in such a decisive fashion that he owes no one anything. He has destroyed the GOP and remade it in his image. He has humiliated the elites and the elite media. He has embarrassed every pollster and naysayer. He has avenged Obama. And in the coming weeks, Trump will not likely be content to bask in vindication. He will seek unforgiving revenge on those who dared to oppose him. The party apparatus will be remade in his image. The House and Senate will fail to resist anything he proposes — and those who speak up will be primaried into oblivion. The Supreme Court may well be shifted to the far right for more than a generation to come — with this massive victory, he can pick a new Supreme Court justice who will make Antonin Scalia seem like a milquetoast. He will have a docile, fawning Congress for at least four years. We will not have an administration so much as a court.

You should read it. Sullivan is so hysterical over Trump’s forthcoming fascist state that he didn’t pay attention to what he himself wrote: Trump can’t keep all his promises. In fact, we ought to be wondering which promises, if any, he really meant. For instance, his website’s policies page doesn’t have a link to pro-life policies. Various press releases had mentioned his pro-life position; but hey! those press releases are gone now. And frankly, I don’t trust the GOP to hold his feet to the fire on the matter.

Doing Wrong By the Country: The “Lesser Evil” Vote

I’m sick to death of this election. The most distressing aspect of this election cycle is that it’s revealed the extent to which American Catholics, particularly those of a conservative bent, have embraced utilitarianism. For some, it’s a half-hearted utilitarianism — “Oh, we have a lot of qualms about our candidate, but we’ll manfully swallow them to prevent The Evil Candidate from being elected” — but it’s utilitarianism nonetheless.

A Priest Endorses Utilitarianism

Nothing so forcefully illustrates this as the final paragraph of this op-ed from the Wall Street Journal by James Freeman, “Doesn’t Clinton Embarrass the Democrats?”:

Voters who wish to reject the Clintonization of America’s governing institutions have a choice on Nov. 8. They can feel good about themselves by writing in the name of a third-party candidate. Or they can do right by the country by selecting the only person who can stop the Clintons: a very flawed candidate named Donald Trump.

Not only is the argument utilitarian, it sneers at third-party/write-in voters as vain fools voting their self-images. Ad hominem much? The kicker: the paragraph had been posted on Facebook by a priest whose name I shall not mention … and who ought to know better than that.

That Freeman and the WSJ would be for Trump is no surprise. Remarking on the last debate, Freeman comments, “Mr. Trump, for his part, deviates from many Republicans on trade and immigration but has otherwise embraced a growth agenda of lower taxes and regulatory relief for an economy that sorely needs it.” In other words, Freeman and (by extension) the Journal believe the only cure for our current economic doldrums is a hair of the dog that bit us in 2007.

Christian and Pro-Life Leaders: DUMP TRUMP! (UPDATED)

Paul Combs, Tribune.org

[ADDED NOV. 9, 2016: Obviously, my crystal ball is working as well as it usually does come election time. I deserve to have the lede carved on my headstone to shame me even after death. Nevertheless, I’m still convinced Pres. Trump will eventually jilt the pro-life movement, and that the leaders of the “official” movement — especially Fr. Frank Pavone — did us no favors by hitching us onto the Trump train.]

I am no longer concerned about the prospect of Donald Trump as President of the United States. It was never a strong likelihood, despite his sense-defying victory in the Republican primaries. In fact, over the last year, The Donald has done just about everything in his power to ensure Hillary Clinton’s election save drop-kick a beagle puppy from the 58th floor of the Manhattan Trump Tower. The revelation of his “grab them by the p***y” remark simply put the final nail in the coffin. What does concern me is the failure of some visible Christian leaders, especially in the pro-life camp, to admit their error in supporting Trump.

Assessing the Damage

As of this writing [4:00pm CDT, Oct. 8], the most recent political post on the Priests for Life site is an action alert item: “Help Us Tell Tim Kaine to Stop Insulting Catholicism!” The latest news from Susan B. Anthony List is Oct. 5’s “Pence Goes on Offense to Expose Clinton-Kaine Abortion Extremism”. Ralph Reed of the Faith & Freedom Coalition thinks that “A ten-year-old tape of a private conversation with a talk show host ranks low on [people of faith’s] hierarchy of concerns.” And Gary Bauer of the Campaign for Working Families stated, “The ten-year-old tape of a private conversation in which Donald Trump uses grossly inappropriate language does not change the reality of the choice facing this country.”

In a sense, Bauer does hit the right nail: in reality, Trump is no worse a candidate than he was a week ago. The only difference is, Republican leaders are finally waking up to the full shambling horror, albeit too late to do anything meaningful about it. And neither Gary Johnson nor Jill Stein presents a better choice on religious and pro-life issues. Johnson has called religious freedom a “black hole”, while Stein has called it a code for “patriarchal domination”. If you eliminate fringe candidacies, such as the American Solidarity Party’s Michael Maturen and (sadly) the independent Joe Schriner, that leaves Christian and pro-life leaders with a Hobson’s choice: either Trump or nobody.

The choice should have been nobody.

The smart Republicans started to abandon ship even before Trump’s nomination was a done deal. Republican strategist Doug Heye called the decision to nominate Trump “a stain on the GOP’s soul,” nor is he the first. Back in August, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson asked Republicans, “If you tell us such a man should be president, why should the nation ever believe anything else you say?” Just a few days earlier, Kathleen Parker of MySanAntonio.com noted, “For many Republicans, the question is: ‘Who’d want to be a member of a party that would have Donald Trump as its leader?’” As for those who are only now trying to distance themselves from this dumpster fire, the cliché “a day late and a dollar short” doesn’t begin to describe their failure of foresight.

Book Review: Particles of Faith, by Stacy A. Trasancos

One challenge Christians face, particularly millennials, is the apparent challenge Science poses to articles of faith. To be brutally blunt, most of this appearance of challenge stems from the inability of believers and nonbelievers alike to respect the limits of both Science and Religion. An impoverished “progressive” education, neglecting even the most rudimentary instruction in philosophy and leading to rampant neo-philistinism, contributes heavily to the confusion. Many Catholics can benefit from a guide that clarifies those limits and defangs the “hermeneutic of conflict” which decrees the challenge. This is what Stacy A. Trasancos, Ph.D., M.A., offers us in Particles of Faith: A Catholic Guide to Navigating Science (Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria Press, 2016; $15.95).

Walking in “No-Man’s Land”

Particles of Faith is not an apologetical work. That’s to say, Dr. Trasancos doesn’t explicitly seek to make converts of atheists, but rather to steer Catholics along a path that will help them comprehend the current state of the sciences that form the “no-man’s land” between belief and unbelief. To this task, she brings an impressive array of education and experience — industrial chemist, theologian, teacher, and mother of seven.

One small complaint: every once in a while, the chemistry talk goes beyond the average layman’s comprehension despite Dr. Trasancos’ obvious attempt to simplify it. I say this as one whose last physical-science course was twenty-three years ago (for what it’s worth, it was organic chemistry, and I got a 4.0). But that’s what Google’s for, right? [Full disclosure: Stacy is not only a friend but the co-publisher and editor emeritus at Catholic Stand; she and Tito Edwards brought me on board there.]

The book is set up in three parts. Part I, “Science in the Light of Faith”, discusses the limitations of science and its necessarily transient state. Part II, “Questions in the Physical Sciences”, delves into the “Big Bang” theory, the relationship of atoms to reality, and the question of whether quantum mechanics explains free will. Part III, “Questions in the Biological Sciences”, discusses evolution from three different angles; particularly useful is the discussion of polygenism versus monogenism (that is, whether humans evolved from a single Adam-and-Eve pair or from a group of independently-evolved individuals).

The Twin Towers of Siloam

The one memory that will stay with me, when all other memories of September 11, 2001 have faded, is how obscenely beautiful the weather was. There really should have been more portents. Fierce, fiery warriors battling in the clouds. Graves yawning and yielding up their dead. At least a two-headed cow, or the ghost of William McKinley.

But no, the New York sky was barely touched with clouds when the Twin Towers  crumbled to the ground. Just as clear was the Arlington, Virginia sky as American Airlines flight 77 slammed into the western side of the Pentagon, and over Stoney Creek Township, Pennsylvania, as the hijackers of United 93 plowed their Boeing 757 into the ground to prevent the passengers from taking over. And it was just as beautiful in Omaha, Nebraska, where I listened to my cab’s FM radio in horror, knowing exactly why Peter Jennings quietly said, “Oh, my God,” as soon as he said it. Satan had apparently decided not to overdo it.

The Loss of Faith

Inevitably, anniversaries such as this will produce analyses in gross lots, rewriting as growing out of the evil stem of the 9/11 attacks trends that were already in place the day before. We need no “truther” conspiracy theories to explain the nadir of our trust in our government; it had been declining for three decades and more. Anti-Moslem sentiment didn’t begin with the collapse of the World Trade Center; it was present during the OPEC oil crisis in the late 1970s, a natural outgrowth of American nativism. We don’t need al-Qaida to explain our interventionism; it was already implicit in complaints that Operation Desert Storm didn’t “finish the job” by going to Baghdad and ousting Saddam Hussein.

Of course we became more afraid. For the sake of security, we permitted the federal government unprecedented powers of investigation and almost casually dispensed with habeas corpus rights for suspected terrorists. In the meantime, we created a new Cabinet-level department whose name carries perhaps-unintended echoes of totalitarian police states. And we also built a cheap, absurd wall along our border with Mexico, as we flailed around to find solutions that would keep terrorists out without going so far as to completely imprison ourselves or stop tourists and imports from coming.

I can’t help but think, though, that in the last fifteen years we became more aware of the fact that America is rotting from within, that both the dream and the reality of America have been corrupted. That’s a broad and vague charge, one not easily specified or documented. However, as much as has been written about the loss of faith in God, I believe that we’ve lost faith in everything — faith in ourselves, in each other, in our social institutions, in our government, in our founding principles.

Libsplaining “The Star-Spangled Banner”

Colin Kaepernick. (Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images.)

“Mansplaining”, originally defined as the tendency of men to explain the frickin’ obvious to women in a patronizing tone, lost its unique vitality and appropriateness by being applied to any situation where men dared contradict feminist dogma. Eventually it met its conservative matches in “femsplaining” and “libsplaining”. Any portmanteau word which includes -splaining can pretty much be taken to mean “ideologically-motivated bulls**t”. While libsplaining is often employed to defend visible-from-space liberal hypocrisies, like George Takei’s labeling Clarence Thomas “a clown in blackface”, it has a more subtle use: rewriting history.

Kaepernick Sits It Out

On Saturday, August 27, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the National Anthem at the beginning of an exhibition game against the Green Bay Packers. Explaining his refusal, the biracial Kaepernick, who is a supporter of #BlackLivesMatter, said, “There is police brutality. People of color have been targeted by police. So that’s a large part, and they’re government officials. They’re put in place by the government. That’s something this country has to change. There are things that we can do to hold them more accountable, make those standards higher.”

Predictably, there was outrage, and it wasn’t confined to white conservatives. Many NFL players admitted Kaepernick’s right to not stand, but felt his decision was wrong. Said New York Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz, “Regardless of how you feel about the things that are going on in America today and the things that are going on across the world with gun violence and things of that nature, you’ve got to respect the flag.” Retired Army lieutenant colonel and former Florida congressman Allen B. West chided Kaepernick:

Mr. Kaepernick, a biracial young man adopted and raised by white parents, claims America is oppressing blacks at a time when we have a black, biracial president who was twice elected. We’ve had two black attorneys general and currently have a black secretary of homeland security, along with a black national security advisor. Here in Dallas our police chief, whom I know, is an outstanding black leader. The officer in Milwaukee who shot the armed assailant after issuing an order to drop his weapon was black. Is Mr. Kaepernick following suit and cherry-picking what he terms “oppression?”

The Liberal Intelligence Premium is Oversold

Image Source: Institute for Competitive Intelligence.

Over the last few years, liberals have had their egos stroked by studies which report that they are smarter than conservatives. For instance, a few months ago the Pew Center reported that people who had attended graduate school had more consistently liberal positions. These reports have fostered a “smart urban sophisticates vs. dumb rural hicks” mindset among liberals that, if you listen to some people, feeding and encouraging was the sole raison d’être for The Daily Show during Jon Stewart’s tenure. Finally, it got so egregious that even some liberals became uncomfortable with it.

Contemporary Liberalism “Lacks Humility”

Back in April 2016, Vox.com launched a 7,000-plus word essay by deputy First Person editor Emmett Rensin, titled “The smug style in American liberalism”. That liberals have tended to smug condescension has been a complaint of conservatives for some time now. Rensin’s article, however, drew a bigger impact because it came from a liberal writing on a liberal platform, one Kyle Smith of the New York Post described as “typically [combining] childlike oversimplification …, high-school-student-government-nerd idealism, just-arrived-on-campus humorcidal earnestness and the millennial generation’s pretend fealty to big data.” For conservatives like Smith, this was a liberal safety or an own-goal: a member of the opposition had finally scored their point for them.

Oddly enough — odd, because conservatives tend to take it for granted that postmodern liberals are incapable of substantive self-criticism — Rensin’s screed did provoke some internal agreement. Kevin Drum of MotherJones.com (mirabile dictu) commented, “We’re convinced that conservatives, especially working class conservatives, are just dumb. Smug suggests only a supreme confidence that we’re right — but conservative elites also believe they’re right, and they believe it as much as we do. The difference is that, generally speaking, they’re less condescending about it.” “The great virtue that contemporary liberalism lacks and needs,” lamented Ramesh Ponnuru in Bloomberg.com, “is neither civility nor solidarity. It’s humility — and sadly, even some of liberalism’s most thoughtful internal critics can’t see it.”

Even more recently, lawyer-activist Nikki Johnson-Huston took a swipe at “... the cocktail party liberals, the elites, who wear the cloak of liberalism to protect themselves from criticism and so they can keep a clear conscious [sic]” … in Huffington Post, no less. Johnson-Huston’s criticism, however, was aimed at white liberals who used their leftist concern more to assert their moral superiority over conservatives than to actually get involved in problems like racism.