My buddy Ed picked me up at the Birmingham airport yesterday. After we loaded my ten bags into the back of his Canyonero, he greeted me with a giant Coke Zero from Sonic, king of the drive-in, and a “bouquet” of collard greens, one of my favorite Southern foods. Yeah, y’all, I’m back in the South!

I love all greens — collard, mustard, and turnip — and it’s been too long since I’ve had them. Kale isn’t really known in the South. I discovered it when I moved to Philadelphia, and fell in love with it. But my favorite way to eat kale is to cut in super-thin, almost in shreds, mix in some fresh-squeezed Meyer lemon juice (has to be Meyer lemon, which is not as tart), and let it sit for a while, so the acid in the lemon juice breaks down some of the fiber in the kale. Then I put sea salt and black pepper in it, and mix it up with my hands. Let it sit for a few more minutes, and you’ve got a great salad.

Re: the collards, gotta get some fatback today and cook up a mess of ’em tonight. That, by the way, is the Southern collective noun for greens: a “mess”.

Funny story, one I’ve told here before. Back in the day, when I worked at the Dallas Morning News, I was in the break room microwaving a bowl of mustard greens for my lunch. I had cooked up a mess over the weekend, and enjoyed them with my wife’s peerless cornbread. One of my black co-workers, smelling the distinct aroma of the greens, dashed in wanting to know what on earth I was doing. “Warming up my greens,” I said, puzzled.

“That’s black people food!” she said, astonished.

“No, that’s Southern country people food,” I replied.

Turns out she was from Indiana. The only people who ate stewed greens there were black folks who had migrated out of the South in the diaspora. She had never seen a white man eat greens. We had a good laugh.

The Trumpening Of Texas

I guess you saw that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton whomped incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in that state’s GOP primary runoff yesterday. It wasn’t even close: 64% Paxton, 36% Cornyn). Now Paxton will face Democrat James Talarico in the fall election.

This was a gift to the Democrats. Paxton is a much harder pill for the general election voters to swallow in Texas than was Cornyn, an affable, normie Republican. Paxton is vividly corrupt. I have Texas Republican friends who support Trump, but tell me they will not vote for Paxton, who is a hot mess. (One of them, mentioning Paxton’s adultery, told me that if Paxton wouldn’t make a big deal about his Christian faith, it wouldn’t be quite so bad … but Paxton loves talking about Jesus.)

But even though Cornyn almost always votes Trump’s way, he carries himself like a dignified US Senator. Paxton is way Trumpier in his personal and rhetorical style, and got Trump’s endorsement — and that made a big difference. Time magazine writes:

Trump’s latest intra-party purge may end up being a bigger deal than some of his others of late. Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in almost 40 years. If Republicans end up investing a small fortune to help Paxton defeat Democrat James Talarico and still come up short, it would be a stunning end to the longest Democratic dry spell in the nation, and Trump would take a good share of the blame.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Establishment Republicans are steamed that Trump’s pettiness is going to take as much as a quarter-billion dollars off the map simply because the President didn’t think Cornyn was MAGA enough, voting record be damned. Cornyn handled the nose-count for Trump’s first term, helped him confirm both Cabinets and all three Supreme Court nominees—all while voting with Trump 99.2% of the time, a number that makes him more loyal than Texas’ other Senator, Ted Cruz.

Talarico is really liberal, and in a way that doesn’t fit Texas (e.g., he loves him some trans rights). Ramesh Ponnuru notes:

Christian preachers — at least ones who are, like Talarico, White — have for some time been associated with conservatism. The problem is that many moderate or conservative voters are looking for candidates who share their views on moral and cultural issues, not merely some of their traits.

These voters will discover that Talarico believes there are six sexes, not two, basing his view on rare chromosomal abnormalities. This is both dubious science and irrelevant to the political debate that led him to bring it up — one that mostly concerned whether some people with the standard male chromosomes should be able to compete in women’s sports.

Talarico’s main tack is to argue that voters who disagree with him are wrong to care about what they care about. He notes that the Bible doesn’t mention abortion but does insist on “feeding the hungry and healing the sick.” (One could as accurately note that the Bible dwells on the sanctity of life but doesn’t mention Medicaid.) More provocatively, he says that just as the Gospels say that Mary consented to being the mother of Jesus, women should have abortion as a choice. Are conservative Christians, whom Talarico typically calls “Christian nationalists,” eager to be told that they have misunderstood their own faith?

There’s more. But in a poll released May 18 (scroll down at the link), the Democrat was running neck-and-neck with both Cornyn and Paxton. This is shocking in a state as red as Texas, especially with a Democrat as liberal as Talarico is. Paxton moves on to the fall campaign carrying a ton of baggage, and is going to be a much harder sell outside of the GOP primary. As Time says, now the national GOP is going to have to spend a fortune to hold on to Texas — and Trump has a lot to do with that. He has always had a habit of endorsing primary candidates who fire up the MAGA base, but who are too far out to win the general. If that Texas Senate seat goes to a very liberal Democrat — which could easily happen — it will be a massive, unnecessary blow.

The Free Press writes today that the Paxton endorsement is a classic example of Trump caring more about what matters to him personally than the good of his party. To me, John Cornyn might not have been the most exciting Senate Republican, but he was a safe, reliable conservative vote, and probably could have beaten Talarico. Now, who knows? I’d rather have the Senate stay Republican than Trump’s ego be satisfied. I guess that makes me a RINO, or something.

I mentioned in this space the other day that Trump ought to look to the fate of Viktor Orban for an example of what being indifferent to corruption in your party ranks in a time when voters are hard-pressed economically can do to you. My Budapest friend Mark Bollobas, who is generally conservative but also clear-eyed about politics, has a daily short videocast on X, in which he sums up the previous day’s news in Hungarian politics. Today he discusses action in parliament yesterday, in which it was revealed that a couple of Orban insiders had parlayed their government jobs into becoming property tycoons. Even Bollobas, who is not prissy about politics, was shocked and angered by this.

In his Free Press commentary on Trump and Texas, politics editor Mene Ukueberuwa writes:

Both the ballroom and fund slotted neatly into the midterm campaign narrative that Democrats were already pitching to voters: While you suffer high prices because of the president’s disastrous war in Iran, Trump is enriching himself and his friends, and the entire GOP is aiding him.

The polls suggest that message is sinking in—Trump’s approval rating has plummeted below 40 percent in the polling average, and Democrats lead Republicans by 7.6 percent in the generic congressional vote.

Driving me to his place from the Birmingham airport yesterday, Ed said, “It’s going to shock you how expensive life in the US is right now. I don’t know how people are making it. I had to fill up my truck the other day, and spent over $100.” Hmm.

MAGA is very good at tearing things down. Hey, a lot of things NEED tearing down. But it can’t build. Similarly in Hungary, the only thing holding the new governing Tisza party together is collective hatred of Viktor Orban. As Mark Bollobas’s X report today says, there really are things to despise about the Orban system. But that’s not the same thing as offering a vision of governing.

Gurri, Nihilism, & The Desperation Of Western Elites

For my Weimar reading for the second draft of my book, I finished on the plane yesterday Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority In The New Millennium, the 2018 updated version. Gurri is a former CIA analyst who writes about the political turmoil in our current age, throughout the world, under the new information environment (the digital sphere).

He is not a fan of Donald Trump, but he really isn’t a fan of the establishment that holds Trump responsible for ruining everything. Per Gurri, Trump is not the cause of anything, but a symptom of a broader and deeper crisis of the System, which started long before Trump descended the golden escalator to declare his candidacy:

He was the chosen instrument of an insurgent public, and no established centers of power stood in his way. The somewhat different question of how this transpired now needs to be posed. In 1980, 1990, even 2000, Trump’s bizarre trajectory would have been not just impossible but politically suicidal. What has changed? The information balance of power has changed, of course. A generation ago, the public could exist only as a passive audience. Information was dispensed on the industrial model: top down and one to many. That was the great age of the daily newspaper and famous anchormen on the model of Walter Cronkite. The advent of digital platforms, in a sense, created the public. People from nowhere, free of institutional entanglements, pushed the elites out of the strategic heights of the information sphere. Almost immediately, great institutions in every domain of human activity began to bleed authority—a process that, as we have seen, in now approaching the terminal stage for many of them.

Gurri goes on:

The peril to democracy under present conditions of information isn’t any of these things: it’s the spread of nihilism in the public and the demoralization of an elite class that has lost any claim to authority.

That nihilism has accelerated, on both the Left and the Right, since Gurri wrote those words. About Trump:

Such rhetorical onslaughts would have destroyed political careers just a short time ago. They can succeed today only in the context of the great struggle that is my theme. The public, recall, has mobilized in a spirit of negation and repudiation of the status quo. It isn’t interested in a positive program of reform. Because the impetus for revolt was born in the digital universe, it has inherited the style peculiar to the web—a place where every political dispute ends in obscenities, and, not infrequently, death threats. The public has absorbed this language of outrage. It too speaks in rant.

This is the symbolic meaning of White House communications director Stephen Cheung’s rude tweet telling Mike Pompeo to “shut the f—k up” in criticizing Trump’s Iran negotiations.

And speaking of the demoralization of the elite, look at what the fraudulent establishment in Belgium is doing. Belgian nationalist Dries van Langenhove has been convicted of hate speech for a 2024 lecture in which he connected the decline of the quality of life in his country to mass migration. Van Langenhove writes:

Every single point I made was 100% the truth and based on scientific evidence.

Cynically, even the judge that convicted me admits as much by writing in his verdict: “Even if all of the statements made by Van Langenhove are based on scientific evidence and statistics, it makes no difference to the criminal intent. Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law.”

That's a lot of words just to say he wants to send me to prison for speaking the truth.

Even the regime media write: "It did not matter to the court that Van Langenhove was quoting scientific sources. The judge argued that Van Langenhove's main message was that a big part of the societal problems like insecurity, housing shortages and lowering educational standards are due to mass migration."

You may think the regime media are being sympathetic to me in the first sentence, but in reality they are warning people: even if you speak the truth, if you go against our narrative, we will crush you in every way possible.

Gotta be honest, one reason I’ve re-patriated to America (though only a minor reason, at this point) is my fear that with the mounting atmosphere of soft totalitarianism coming from the EU and some member states, I might run afoul of some law based on my writing. In Belgium, if even truth is no defense against prosecution, how is that not tyranny? If you want to donate to Dries to help him pay his legal bills, go here.

Meanwhile, in Germany, the state really thinks it can manage information:

Germany’s network of state media regulators — the Landesmedienanstalten — is assembling a regulatory framework that would compel social media platforms to algorithmically privilege government-sanctioned news sources. Under the proposed rules, platforms including X, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram could be legally required to elevate “reliable” media outlets in their feeds, recommendations, and search rankings, with everything outside those categories correspondingly buried.

This is a legally-mandated version of the practice tech companies frequently engaged in at the height of censorship in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when platforms such as YouTube were found to have manually adjusted search results to favor establishment news sources in keyword searches for politically sensitive topics.

The regulators are marketing the proposal in the now-familiar vocabulary of the censorship industry: “protecting media plurality” and combating “disinformation.” But the mechanics of the policy invert the very plurality it claims to defend. A government-blessed list of “trusted” sources is, by definition, a government-blacklisted list of everyone else. Independent outlets, citizen journalists, and politically inconvenient publications would not need to be removed from the platforms; they would simply be made invisible.

The EU establishment is under the impression that it can avoid trouble by punishing Europeans who notice how badly they have been governed. They are only going to end up radicalizing people. We Americans ought to thank God and the Founding Fathers every single day for the First Amendment. One of the first things you learn in media law class in journalism school is that truth is an absolute defense against libel.

The desperation of the European ruling class to hold on to its increasingly discredited ideology is going to crack at some point. Here in the US, our media (like their European counterparts) are messing their britches with fear that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party — a “far right” party — is gaining in strength. Why is that happening? Because the mainstream parties keep refusing to deal with Germany as it is, and acting to fix its deep problems. Similarly in Britain, with Reform UK. Headline from the NYT today:

You’d think that Farage was the second coming of Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists. Whatever you think of Farage and his limitations, he speaks the language of common sense. That’s “far right” to the media. Same with Alice Weidel of the AfD. Same with Viktor Orban. These categories are simply meaningless now. You don’t have to agree with any of these politicians to recognize that calling them “far right” is ridiculous. They are, increasingly, simply “the Right”.

AI Is Going To Be Their Mamas and Daddies

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is sounding the alarm:

Social media already hacked our attention. Now AI is coming for our attachments — the deep emotional bonds that shape how we relate to other humans.

He warns that AI companions (chatbots, holographic “friends,” digital teddy bears) will be far more responsive than any parent. Kids will form their primary attachments to AI instead of people. And because these companies have raised billions, they’ll eventually “enshittify” them, turning your child’s best friend/therapist/lover into a predatory monetization machine.

I haven’t yet read Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI, but I have a feeling that the Catholic writer Matthew Walther is right. Excerpts:

Even by the standards of modern papal encyclicals, with their uninspired phrasing, frequent auto-plagiarism and stultifying length, “Magnifica Humanitas” is disappointingly measured and cautious. (The least guarded language in the document — Leo’s dismissal of just war theory as “outdated” — has nothing to do with A.I.) Despite voicing concerns about the dangers that A.I. poses to humanity, the encyclical nonetheless seems to envision a world in which it is simply a tool, rather than an evil that all people should reject.

… For those of us who see the rise of A.I. as unambiguously evil, Leo’s emphasis on its ethical use is a nonstarter. He seems to underestimate A.I.’s ability to exacerbate existing crises and to accelerate processes of cheapening and redefinition.

How We Should Prepare For Disclosure

Nick Cook, who used to write for the gold standard Jane’s Defence Weekly, has some fascinating thoughts about how we should be thinking about UAPs and disclosure. I can’t do this piece justice by quoting it; do read the whole thing.

His basic argument begins with the claim that we can no longer plausibly deny that Something Real Is Happening. When the US Government admits openly that UAPs are real, and provides lots of videos, and formerly classified reports and testimonies, hardcore skeptics have their backs against the wall. I’m really astonished by the epistemic closure demonstrated by the mainstream media, which is not covering the latest UAP disclosures by the Pentagon. I think this is the media doubling down on their antiquated hard materialist worldview.

The problem, Cook says, is that we all rush to insist that We Know What It Is. More:

Because when civilisations encounter periods of rapid ontological instability – moments when their deepest assumptions about reality begin to fracture – the danger is not merely confusion, but overcorrection – the human tendency to rush from anomaly to absolute explanation.

This, historically, is where things become dangerous.

We are now entering what many are beginning to call the ‘Age of Disclosure’. But the phrase itself may already contain a hidden assumption: that what is being disclosed is singular, stable, and ultimately understandable within our existing conceptual frameworks.

That may not be true at all.

The modern UAP archive is not simply a collection of unidentified flying objects. It is a sprawling, contradictory, psychologically charged body of material that appears to intersect with consciousness, perception, symbolism, trauma, physics, information theory, folklore, religion, and human expectation itself.

The phenomenon – whatever it ultimately turns out to be – does not behave cleanly.

And that should give us pause.

Because the temptation, particularly in periods of uncertainty, is to impose coherence too quickly. To move from:

• ‘something strange is happening’
  
  to:

• ‘therefore I now know what’s causing it.’

History is littered with examples of intelligent people making exactly this mistake. The problem is not that they observed anomalies. Often, the anomalies were real, or at least sincerely experienced. The problem is that observation became ontology – the question of what kind of thing something actually is – and ontology became metaphysics, with extraordinary speed.

In other words: certainty arrived before understanding.

The rapidly emerging situation goes beyond UAPs, taking in AI and other phenomena that destabilize our collective and individual models of reality. It is producing what Cook calls “ontological overload”:

For most of modern history, reality itself functioned as a relatively stable social consensus. Whatever people privately believed, institutions broadly maintained a coherent model of the world:

• material reality was objective,

• consciousness was local,

• human perception was broadly reliable,

• and anomalous experiences existed at the margins.

Today, nearly every one of those assumptions is under pressure.

AI is challenging the uniqueness of human cognition.

Quantum information theory is reshaping parts of physics.

Neuroscience increasingly suggests perception is actively constructed rather than simply passively received.

Simulation theory has migrated from philosophy seminars into mainstream technological culture.

And the UAP discussion has opened the door – however cautiously – to the possibility that reality may contain intelligences, behaviours, or dynamics that do not fit conventional models.

Cook says we need to learn to apply rigorous discipline as we approach this stuff. He believes we ought to adopt a strategy of “layered uncertainty”:

Anomaly first.
Ontology second.
Metaphysics last.

As you regular readers know, I am confident that the UAP/aliens phenomenon is demonic at base. I’m not going to be shaken from that. But I am much less sure of the details. For example, the standard Christian cosmology holds that demons are fallen angels. It does not clearly state (though the Old Testament alludes to it) that there can be other categories of created beings. I love to joke about my childhood fear of Bigfoot … but what if there is more to it than we think? I think we have to take seriously that possibility. If they exist, then I believe they are not aligned with the Good. Jacques Vallée, praised by Cook for his own layered-uncertainty approach, is not a Christian, but he has written that based on his observation, whatever this thing is, it does not seem to be good or even neutral.

I believe we are being set up for the Great Deception spoken of by St. Paul. This will accompany the emergence of the Antichrist:

The coming of the lawless one by the activity of Satan will be with all power and with pretended signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are to perish, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false, so that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness (2 Thess. 2:9-12).

When it is no longer possible to know what is true and false, between what is real and fake, and that condition becomes globalized (as it is in the age of the Internet), we are in unprecedented times. I wrote about this, in a mostly non-Apocalyptic way, in Living In Wonder, in which my focus is not really on the End Times, but on how reality is much stranger than the story we tell ourselves — and even that we Christians in the modern West tell ourselves.

An Evangelical friend who went through an exorcism, or deliverance, last year with a priest told me that his church is full of righteous, faithful people, but that his tradition is “totally incapable” of understanding this aspect of reality. He told me that when he shared with friends in his church what had happened to him, some of them got angry. Rather than rejoice that he had been set free of a demon (there were extraordinary, totally inexplicable things that happened around his exorcism; I know the exorcist who helped him, who confirmed what the friend told me) by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the name of Christ, these believers were put out and mad at him. Why? Because That’s Not The Way The World Is Supposed To Work! This is just like the Gerasenes who ordered Jesus to get out of town after he delivered the local demoniac from his oppression. Jesus upset their settled metaphysical order.

When we talked about this not long ago, I mentioned that missionaries, Protestant and otherwise, who go to the Third World, encounter these things all the time. He told me a story a Pentecostal missionary friend relayed to him about events in an Amazon village that simply do not fit into the modern Western Christian mindset.

This is why I fear that a lot of contemporary Protestants (not Pentecostals!), as well as nominal Catholics and Orthodox, are sitting ducks for manipulation around “alien disclosure”. My Evangelical friend told me that his pastor is a good and godly man, but that he (the pastor) was completely unprepared to help him with his demonic crisis, because the demonic realm is at best theoretical to him. Christians like that will be very hard hit by disclosure. At some point, their resistance is going to crack in the face of overwhelming evidence, or some undeniable manifestations. How will they explain it? Might they even lose their faith?

Secular people who have no meaningful concept of the non-material realm are going to find themselves similarly disoriented, but even worse. Modern ways of thinking (that is, ways of thinking that have formed over the last 500 years, including most magisterial Protestantism, and Enlightenment modes of thought) simply cannot handle this stuff, except through ignoring it or making fun of it. As I write in Living In Wonder, we in the modern West are far outliers on the sum total of human experience, and even in the world today — but we think we sit atop the epistemic pyramid because our science and technology, which has given us immense mastery of the material world.

Mark my words, this is a vanity that is going to lead to the spiritual destruction of many, and maybe worse.

OK, enough from me today. Gotta take a shower and get ready to go out and get a car. I have the cash saved up to buy a Honda outright — I’m very loyal to Honda, which makes a great, fuel-efficient, reliable car — but I don’t know if it makes sense to buy or lease. Not sure what my plans are going to be in the next three years. I’d like to go back to Europe if that’s possible, but I have a sense, somehow, that this is not likely to happen. I don’t know why, it’s just there — as if events are going to accelerate, somehow, and make it smarter to stay in America.

In any case, I’m very happy to be back in the South. As much as I loved living in Europe, and would love to live there again, I’m pretty burned out from all the drama of the past few years in my personal life. There’s something to be said for living in a place where you speak the language, you know how people think, and you know how things work. That removes some stressors from one’s daily life, you know?

Southern soul food, the Trumpening, nihilism and politics, alien disclosure — just another day around this newsletter. Thank you for subscribing. Let’s keep having some fun, and learning about this wide, weird, wonderful world along the way.

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Good … afternoon, or whatever it is where you are reading this. I’m somewhere over the North Atlantic, enjoying the free wi-fi American Airlines offers its frequent flyers. I’m going to write a longer essay for The Free Press later about what I learned these past four or five years living in Europe but for now, here …

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When you walk into the train station in Prague, this is what you see. That reads, in Latin, “Prague, Mother of Cities”. I tell you, I get my back up when I hear Americans dismissing Europe as a “museum”. I get it, and they’re not entirely wrong. Europe, once the master of the world, has badly receded as a power. But it’s too easy for us in the real worl…

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I have a new piece in The Free Press, based on my reading the 75-page mosque shooters’ manifesto. Cain Clark and Caleb Vazquez were alienated teenage loners who met in Internet radical forums, and died in a murder-suicide after shooting up the Islamic Center of San Diego. Their manifesto proclaims savage hatred for many groups. Some of this I said here yesterday, not knowing for sure if TFP was going to publish it. Excerpts:

But above all the enemies hated by the duo sit the Jews, the summum malum of all the world’s wickedness. In fact, Vazquez calls racial minorities and Muslims “Bioweapons of the Kikes,” who control everything in the world. Wrote Clark, “Every problem in the modern world can be connected to the Jews.”

This is all grotesquely familiar. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt distinguished modern antisemitism from its old Christian origins, explaining that Jews had become the omni-explanation for all the world’s problems.

Why Jews? Because of their historical position in modern Europe: as outsiders who served as a way for totalitarians to focus the hatred of the deracinated masses, and mobilize them. Reading the Vazquez-Clark manifesto is like revisiting Weimar Germany a century later. It is a world I have been immersed in for a book I am writing about that time and its lessons for our own. I cannot help hearing, in their hate-filled, disjointed formulations, echoes of the inchoate rage of the dispossessed young, the same passion to scapegoat others for their own anxieties, inadequacies, and failures, the same bottled-up frustrations exploding into murderous deeds, by which the powerless imagine they are finally asserting agency.

The Nazis taught their followers that war and violence were sacred, purifying acts. “All violence is good violence,” said Vazquez. Clark believed this too, writing that the “upcoming Race War will be another type of war, it will be the most beautiful one yet, cleansing this earth of the disgusting filth walking all over it.”

Yes, they were white supremacists (even though Vazquez was Latino; it’s part of the insanity). But:

If these are supremacists, they have absorbed a large dose of victim culture to go with it, which is why they see themselves neither on the right nor the left, and sound like both and neither. That’s the heart of it, for both killers. The racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and all the rest is a construct built on a nihilistic, radically atomized base. And this is why we would be fools either to brush this off as the one-off deeds of radical racists, or attempt to make sense of their killings by slotting them into familiar categories.

More:

Clark and Vazquez grew up in a society in which many sources of transcendent and personal meaning had grown feeble, or vanished. It valorized racial identity, except for whites, belittled masculinity, and was formed by digital culture—which emphasizes physical perfection while discouraging personal and communal bonds. Arendt said that by far the most important factor leading to totalitarianism is social atomization. If that’s true, then America today has recreated the psychosocial conditions of Weimar Germany, without the traumas of war and economic collapse.

It is early yet in the investigation, but what struck me reading the manifesto is that these hate-filled young California men, who did not appear to suffer from material want, ached to free themselves from their own impotence and self-hatred. I am not suggesting they lack agency or responsibility for their terrible crimes, only that I cannot help seeing in their murderous words and deeds the consequences of ideas that serve as common currency in online culture, taken to their logical ends.

One more:

“I want to burn this earth down and rebuild it into a new and better society,” wrote Clark. When I read that, I recalled with a shiver the answer a Zoomer conservative on Capitol Hill gave me when I asked him what the large tribe of Gen Z Groypers working in right-wing politics want.

“They don’t want anything,” he said. “They want to tear it all down.”

That was the very moment I started to think seriously, “Are we Weimar?” I had been thinking about it for a while, as you readers know, but that line from the Zoomer made me realize I had to write a book about this. Anyway, please read the whole TFP piece, and share it. We need to face this.

We will not be able to deal with the racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and violence from these cracked young people until and unless we deal with the sources of it: the meaning crisis, and social atomization.

I believe serious Christianity is the solution — and not the angry, hypertrad version among the Orthobros, Latin mass traditionalists, and Reformed militants. Here is a terrific video from a young male South African convert to Orthodoxy, who talks in non-traditional terms about the noise and alienation of the modern world, and why, in his view, Orthodoxy offers practical deliverance from it:

Postcard From Villa Petschek

This is a view of Villa Petschek, the US Ambassador’s residence in Prague, taken from the back garden. My bedroom is the one on the third floor, far right of frame. It turns out that the new ambassador, Nicholas Merrick, and his wife Leslie are old friends from my Dallas days. They invited me up to visit before I head back to the US next week. This afternoon, we are having tea here with Kamila Bendova and Ludek Bednar, whom you’ll recall from the Live Not By Lives documentary. Leslie is a big fan of the LNBL book, in which Kamila features prominently. I didn’t know Ludek when I was writing it, but I was pleased to meet him afterward.

He too was part of that brave, brave circle of heroes, the fellowship that met in the flat of Kamila and her late husband Vaclav, who stood up to Communism back when doing so earned some of them prison sentences. What a privilege and a blessing it is to meet them with the ambassador of my country, and his wife, so that they too can learn from Kamila and Ludek. That generation is disappearing, and I told Leslie that I have to face the fact that this meeting coming up today is likely to be the last time I see either of these heroes in this life. I’ll write about the meeting in Monday’s newsletter. In the LNBL movie, there’s a scene in which Kamila says that she and the rest of the fellowship that stood up to the totalitarian state used to read their Tolkien, and wonder, with the hobbits at the end of Lord of the Rings, if anyone would sing songs of them one day. She drops her chin and seems to tear up.

Thank you, Lord, that I was able to do something to make sure they — we — sing songs of those heroes. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.

This villa was built by Otto Petschek, a Jewish owner of coal mines, in the late 1920s. Later, it was the residence of a Nazi general who, thank God, did not steal or destroy Otto’s books or the china, which is still here (Leslie explained that they thought they would be ruling a thousand-year Reich, and Herr Petschek had such nice things in his house). It is really something to walk the corridors here, thinking about the family Petschek, and what they endured, as well as the evil man who lived in the house the Petscheks (who escaped to the US before the Holocaust) had to surrender to save their own lives. The thing I will miss most about Europe is living amid all this history. It’s why I plan to come back one day. History is my favorite thing to read about, and here, it’s, well, everywhere.

Meta Layoffs: Revolution Bait

Link to this tweet is here. This kind of thing is going to cause a revolution one day. Historian Peter Turchin says that most revolutions are caused primarily (though not exclusively) by “elite overproduction” — his term for too many educated people and not enough jobs. Contrary to what many believe, the poor and working class are not the primary drivers of revolution. It’s the educated middle classes who have been frustrated, and who have the knowledge and motivation to organize.

The loss of blue collar jobs to outsourcing in the 1980s and 1990s did not cause much of a stir. But the loss of white collar jobs to AI is not likely to be the same. That’s why I end Weimar America with speculation that the psychosocial instability and economic precarity already well established in America might not be able to absorb and contain what AI does to the prospects of the aspirational elites. We need to be ready for whatever is coming — a right-wing dictatorship, a left-wing one, or (as I suspect is most likely), some sort of managerial authoritarianism powered by AI, and eventually assented to by those whose desires have been manipulated by the algorithm. To that end, let’s talk about a fantastic new book about to be published…

The One And The Ninety-Nine

Next month, Luke Burgis will publish his new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, a book about learning how to form a stable self in the digital world (pre-order through his website). I started reading it as I was finishing the Weimar manuscript, and realized straight away that what he was writing about is vital to my own work. I’m going to incorporate it in the second draft. I’m just over halfway through it, and I realize that Luke has written a book about how to create a resilient self capable of resisting totalitarianism. He begins by writing about August Landmesser, the German man in this 1936 photo — the only one in the crowd who refused the Nazi salute:

Luke is trying to help us become August Landmessers. Again, I’ve not yet finished the book, but I’m so excited about it that I want to start writing about it now.

But this is not really a political book. It’s about individual and social psychology. Look at this:

Bowen thought society behaves like a family under stress. When anxiety runs high—as it does in our fast, overloaded world—people lose their sense of self. They fall back on pseudo-selves to cope, becoming more reactive and polarized. Society becomes like a family in which no one can be in the same room without blowing up. Extreme political polarization, viral outrage on social networks, and the inability to tolerate differences can all be interpreted as signs that many people have low differentiation of self—which sounds like America today.

Younger generations are struggling to cope. Gen Z reports record levels of anxiety, depression, and stress. A 2025 Rasmussen study found that 37 percent of single people under the age of thirty are “not interested” in dating at all. In other polls, many say they want partners who share not only their politics but their tastes in music, food, hobbies, fitness—virtually everything. Dating apps now make it easy to filter for these preferences. The result is a growing desire for partners who match on almost every dimension.

Luke gives me an understanding about why the Benedict Option is more important than I thought:

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s research on social bonding shows that humans organize their relationships in concentric layers, with the innermost circle made up of about five people. Many know his famous “Dunbar’s number”—which refers to the roughly 150 meaningful social ties that humans can maintain—but fewer realize his work also reveals that true psychological security depends on far smaller groups. Microcommunities of four to seven people, usually immediate family and closest friends, act as the strongest buffers against the fragmentation of modern life—places where identity is clarified, responsibility is mutual, and trust is the norm.

More:

Identity forms most deeply within small, stable groups. While there are certainly situations where digital life can bolster those tight-knit relationships (I have been on a text thread with several old friends for years, and it keeps us bonded and close despite living in different cities today), digital life tends to pull us out into vast, shallow networks if we’re not careful. When relationship networks grow far beyond our natural capacity to handle them, we start negotiating our sense of self in response to overwhelming feedback—this is especially dangerous if a solid self is not well formed. The solution is not total withdrawal from society, but choosing communities with real gravity—communities that forge identity rather than weaken it.

… The internet has imposed this counterfeit rite of passage that no child has asked for, yet nearly all are dragged through. It is counterfeit because it’s a rite of passage away from the real, toward the fake— and because it feeds the illusions of the pseudo-self, not the solid self. A generation ago, the transition into adulthood was marked by the natural tension of meaningful passageways: a nerve-wracking call to ask someone out, the shock of leaving home with no digital tether, the silence of a first job interview waiting room (not Zoom), navigating a long-distance trip without GPS. These rites created friction—forcing people to think seriously about who they were and who they were becoming. Today, that friction has been largely erased. We drift through key life transitions without ever fully realizing we’ve crossed them—or that we haven’t. The result is confusion about how to engage with the world, and more profoundly about who we are. The primary driver of this shift is not war or politics, but technology.

We are all compromised by digital life. (Watching that South African video I embedded above made me realize how much I need to be back into Orthodox church life in parish community; this is the thing I’m looking forward to the most of being back in the US). Anyway, I’m learning from Luke’s book the details of how digital life forms and malforms us, mostly by wrecking our ability to pay attention, and to know what is worthy of attention. Even people like me, who know this stuff, still allow ourselves to be compromised by it, because it’s so hard to avoid.

In LNBL, I write about how “soft totalitarianism” conquers us because in today’s world, people — especially young people — cannot deal with friction. We are formed by psychological and social environments that teach us that any friction we encounter is bad, and maybe even the result of some wicked Other seeking to harm us. We will do anything to seek release from the overwhelming anxiety. If you know anything about Cluster B personality disorders, this is what I’m talking about. We are living in a Cluster B society (Chris Rufo explains in this short video). Watching Rufo’s argument, I wished I had thought about all this when I was writing LNBL. It really does explain a lot.

An older friend of mine, a woman, has borderline personality disorder. I haven’t seen her in a while, but my understanding is that she has driven away most of her friends, in part because she is so overwhelmed by anxiety that without knowing what she’s doing, she construes “reality” as whatever promises to deliver her from this horrible anxiety. Anybody who challenges her — and that person has been me, on occasion — she treats as the Enemy. At first I thought it was about narcissism, but in talking with her long-suffering husband (who died a few years ago) I realized that it’s not really that. It’s that she cannot bear the weight of the world.

Here’s the thing: digital culture forms us in Cluster B ways. It turns us into the kind of sheep who will follow anybody and anything that promises to deliver us from this burden. In Weimar Germany, people were reduced to this psychological state by overwhelming real-world trauma (war, hyperinflation, etc). In Weimar America, we have achieved something similar through prosperity and technology. This is why I argue in my book that to look too closely for a one-to-one comparison between material conditions in 1920s Germany and the same in rich, peaceful America is to miss the bigger picture.

I’ll finish Luke’s book on the train back to Budapest tomorrow. I can’t recommend it strongly enough. I think it is one of the most important books of the year, no question. And I hope my new book too will do its part in helping Americans become Landmessers. We might not be able to escape this awful political fate — though nothing is fated! — but we can at least prepare ourselves for resistance.

Warren Farha: A Hidden Life

I’m still coming to terms with the sudden death of Warren Farha, the quiet genius behind Eighth Day Books, probably the greatest Christian bookstore in the world. I’ve been hearing from people who knew him and his work, and all testify to the gift that this Kansas man’s life was to the church. The thing about his bookstore was that its wide selection was personally curated by Warren. I have bought many books over the years from Eighth Day, and all of them meant something. You can be confident that whatever you buy from that store will be something worth reading. Warren chose it, I believe it, and that settles it.

Here’s an older podcast interview with Warren about his bookstore and how he went about curating its collection. And here is an interview he did almost a decade ago with an online Orthodox publication, about the same thing. Excerpt:

OYM: Based on your experiences, what advice or guidance would you give to a young Orthodox Christian who wants to start a ministry or a store project—something rooted in the Orthodox faith?

Warren: I would begin by saying: pay attention. Pay attention to your loves. Pay attention to your passions—not in the bad sense of sinful obsessions, but the activities and subjects that completely absorb you.

In my case, it began with a love for reading. A love for ideas. A love for influences. And however imperfectly, a love for Christ and the Church.

It’s also important to realize that all kinds of occupations can be a means of mission—a means of service to Christ. Every single person, whatever their work is, needs to submit it and bring it under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

So that means: if you’re a great basketball player and you intend to make basketball your vocation—glorify Christ in it. If you’re a great baker—glorify God in it. The list is endless. It doesn’t have to be a specifically religious vocation.

Now, God knows we need people who have that calling. But as C.S. Lewis put it so brilliantly in one of his essays, what we need are not just more evangelists, but rather writers who are Christians and can express, in their writing, a vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful. We need scientists who believe and who express, in the integrity of their work, a vision of God and His relation to the universe. That’s what we need—people who bring into their vocation a love for Christ.

So, pay attention to the things that drive you—the good things that drive you—because those loves and drives are expressions of the image of God in you. And those expressions are infinitely varied.

Pay deep attention to those, because through them, you will discover who you are as a human being—as a beloved creation of God. And that will help unlock the question of vocation.

This is the kind of man we have lost. This is a great soul. The thing is, Warren was an introvert, and extremely humble. As I was preparing to write this item, I thought of the title Terrence Malick gave to his biopic of Franz Jägerstätter, the simple Austrian Catholic farmer who was the only one in his village (other than his wife) to resist the Nazis. He paid for it with his life, and is now on the road to canonization. Malick focuses on the depths of that farmer’s faith life, and how though he was a simple man, he was deep. Nobody would have known it just to see him, but it was true.

Similarly with Warren. I don’t think anybody could have called a man as intelligent as Warren “simple”; “plain” might be the better word. Over and over again, the word his friends and acquaintances are using to describe him is “humble.” You would walk in the bookstore, and there he stood behind the counter, quietly glowing with charity and wisdom — and, I believe, holiness. There was something monastic about Warren. Please, if you ever pass through or near Wichita, stop at Eighth Day Books. It is one of the happiest places on this earth. And it became so because of the vision and faith of one man, Warren Farha, and the team he built at the store. It’s not just a store. It is a way of life.

As soon as I am able once I’m back in the States, I’m going to make a pilgrimage there (funny, but we fanatics of Eighth Day are used to calling visits to the store “pilgrimages”), though this time it will be not just to buy books, but to pay respect to the life and legacy of my friend, and to offer comfort to his good wife Chris, and to the kind workers there, all trained by Warren, as an abbot trains monks. Note that it’s not an “Orthodox Christian bookstore,” but a Christian bookstore, in which Warren stocked the best of the three great Christian traditions. He told that Orthodox paper:

People often ask whether Eighth Day Books is an Orthodox missionary activity. The answer is no—or at least, not originally. My goal was to create a vocation I could dedicate my life to, and that happened to be a bookstore rooted in the classics. But because Orthodoxy is an essential part of who I am, it naturally became an essential part of the store.

I see my work as an extension of my baptism. As an Orthodox Christian, my faith is at the core of who I am, and my work reflects that—hopefully in a meaningful way.

It did, brother, it did. And it does. And it will for as long as there are men and women who share your vision. Eighth Day Books is a place of hope for the life of the mind and the life of the soul. We need places like that now more than ever. I wrote this about Eighth Day back in 2015: “The Joy of Wichita”. Excerpt:

[W]hat Warren Farha has created here is a great American institution. I’m serious about that. This is what book lovers hope that all bookstores will be like: eclectic, idiosyncratic, and radiant with the conviction that the people who own this thing have a vision that was not decided by algorithms from corporate headquarters.

I appended this comment to the essay, sent in at the time by a reader:

It’s difficult to exaggerate the genius and love these two, Warren and Chris, have imparted through their work and sacrifices at Eighth Day Books, St. George Orthodox Cathedral, and Wichita at large. Perhaps the following account, among many untold ones, can convey the unique character of their decades-long project.

There’s tons of ink spilled and synods and conferences had about uplifting the family but the overall rhythm of typical American life marches on assuming otherwise. My young wife had worked for Warren at EDB since 2007 up until late last year when she was 8 months pregnant with our fourth child. Being a young family, we needed that extra income. Warren, with his characteristic grace, hesitated none at all at allowing my wife to bring and care for each of our three other children (ages 4, 3, 1.5) while they were in infancy. So while the toddlers were being cared for by grandparents during the day, my intrepid wife would bring whoever was the baby at the time to work, fielding customer transactions, fixing network issues, shipping orders, and shelving books all with baby in tow. And so for the last 5 years, EDB had baby paraphernalia scattered about behind their back counter, and at times inconsolable cries–from the baby– would interrupt the generally calm and quiet bookstore atmosphere. We know that it was taxing at times for the staff and customers during those outbursts of infant dependency and with the need to navigate gingerly at times around a sleeping child. And yet through it all, Warren, the staff, and many of the customers warmly welcomed each baby. Each day, they bestowed a Christian patience and acceptance around the little one. Truth be told, babies are bad for the bustle of retail business, but Warren thrives on the relationships he daily cultivates, not on the end dollar. So along with the beer, books, and “hearthiness,” this wonderful enterprise we call Eighth Day Books truly is an oasis of civility and as my family has witnessed, Christian love.

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It should tell you how incredibly busy I am in trying to get things sorted for my move next week back to the US that I didn’t have time to finish this newsletter yesterday. You know how hard it is for me to fail y’all by not giving you what you pay for. I’m sorry about that, but I trust that you will understand. I’m almost fully packed, and will be traveling back with about ten suitcases. I will probably spontaneously combust once the attendant at the American Airlines check-in desk tells me how much this is going to cost.

I looked into shipping books back, but it turns out that the US Government changed the law that allows you to ship items worth less than $800 back without paying duty.

Now, on to the news. In the many conversations I’ve had with Hungarians since Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party lost in a blowout election, the one thing all my Hungarian interlocutors (all of whom voted Fidesz) agree on is that the party made a massive mistake by not taking corruption seriously. As every single one of these Orban voters has pointed out to me, in good times, people don’t really care about the corruption, as long as they see money in their own bank accounts. But times have not been good for the past four years, so the corruption really infuriated them.

Which brings us to Donald Trump, and this week’s announcement about his agreement with the IRS, an agency of the executive branch, whose controller is … Donald Trump:

The Justice Department on Tuesday expanded the agreement it reached this week with President Trump to resolve his extraordinary lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service to include a provision that would bar the agency from pursuing tax claims against the president, his family or his businesses.

In a one-page document signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and quietly posted on the department’s website, officials vowed not to pursue any matters, including those involving Mr. Trump’s tax returns, that are currently pending.

More:

Federal law prohibits the president, vice president and other executive officers from instructing the I.R.S. to start or stop specific audits. But that broad prohibition does appear to include a carve out for the attorney general.

So, the man who answers to Donald Trump, who appointed him to the job, has now taken the extraordinary step of agreeing that the Trumps can never be held accountable for any criminal tax acts that may have been committed prior to the issuing of the memo. Here’s the one-page statement announcing it. The top lawyer at the Treasury Department resigned in the wake of this extraordinary agreement.

Note that this does not protect Trump and his family from tax investigations in the future, if — it’s a big if — the allegedly criminal acts took place after the memo came out. Jeffrey Toobin interprets it like this:

The document places off limits the investigation of any tax disputes (or tax crimes) regarding returns that were filed before this week.

If something comes to light in the future about misconduct or malfeasance relating to the Trump family’s tax filings, as long as it took place before the agreement took effect, it cannot be the basis for a prosecution. Reinforcing the same point, the agreement states that the government is barred from pursuing “any matters that were raised or could have been raised” in the Trumps’ dispute with the I.R.S.

There will be no cases against the Trumps before the I.R.S. “or other agencies or departments.” Could Mr. Trump’s immunity extend beyond taxes? The Justice Department, which brings federal criminal cases, may, as I interpret it, also be barred from charging the Trumps with other crimes.

By issuing a prohibition on federal investigations that might threaten Mr. Trump’s finances, the department has placed the president and his family in a new category of citizenship, where the tax rules that apply to every other American do not apply to him or his family. By my reading, the document explicitly forbids the government from challenging the legality of any trusts, which can survive in perpetuity. In this way, Mr. Blanche’s memo is a gift to subsequent generations of the Trump family.

The big win for Trump this week is the end of the long-running IRS audit of his claim of about a $100 million tax refund based on losses on his Chicago Trump tower. Here is an unlocked link to a NYT story explaining the grounds for the IRS audit, explaining why the president might be guilty of double dipping.

In sum, the IRS challenged a “dubious accounting maneuver” where Trump allegedly claimed the same massive losses twice on the underperforming Chicago property (initially deeming it “worthless” in 2008, then transferring it to another entity he controlled in 2010 and claiming an additional ~$168 million in losses over the following decade).

A loss for Trump could have meant a tax bill exceeding $100 million (plus interest and penalties), per analyses of his returns.

So, did he double-dip here? Did he claim the same losses twice? We will never know; Todd Blanche closed the door on that. This is appalling!

And here’s why it sticks in my craw. I have already spent at least $18,000 on tax lawyers to fight a groundless claim by the IRS against my ex-wife and me, claiming that we didn’t pay our 2021 taxes. But we did! We have the proof. Not good enough fro the IRS, which is demanding a HUGE six-figure payment (including penalties). I repeat: we paid our taxes that year, and can prove it! We will almost certainly prevail in court. But I’ve heard from other people who have been accused of the same thing, and have been dragged through hell by the IRS, even though (in one case) the taxpayer was able to produce canceled checks written to the IRS to cover the tax bill the IRS accuses him of not paying!

My ex-wife and I did no wrong here, and we can easily prove that, but we are still being put through the wringer, at considerable cost, because of the IRS’s mistake. Trump, though, gets a pass on a tax situation in which it is not at all clear that he did nothing wrong, and might have had to pay $100 million if wrongdoing was proved.

Must be nice when you are the AG’s boss. But it stinks to high hell of corruption. Oh, there’s more. I am not accustomed to quoting The New York Times editorial board, but when they’re right, they’re right. Here’s the other part of Todd Blanche’s gift to Trump:

The department has allocated $1.8 billion for what it calls, in an Orwellian flourish, an Anti-Weaponization Fund and invited applications from people who have been targeted for “political, personal or ideological reasons.” Mr. Blanche — who holds his position as acting attorney general largely because of his willingness to use federal power in service of Mr. Trump’s personal whims — will appoint a five-member board, with congressional leaders given input on one of the five. Mr. Trump can fire any of the members at any time.

To understand who is likely to receive payments, look at who has previously received settlements from the Justice Department. Michael Flynn, who was briefly Mr. Trump’s national security adviser in 2017, received $1.25 million, even though he pleaded guilty to lying to F.B.I. agents. The family of Ashli Babbitt, who participated in the Jan. 6 riot, and whom federal agents shot as she and others approached the House floor, received nearly $5 million, even though investigators cleared the shooters of wrongdoing. The Trump administration is paying off people who committed violence and crimes, as long as they are Trump allies.

The fund’s timeline is the giveaway of how Mr. Trump plans to use it. The Justice Department said the fund would stop processing claims on Dec. 15, 2028, weeks before the president is to leave office, ensuring the money is distributed while he still holds the power to fire anyone who objects. The window is precisely the window of Mr. Trump’s authority.

I think people who have been abused by federal prosecutors in “lawfare” cases should be compensated. But that’s not what’s going on here. Law professor Jed Rubenfeld breaks down why this is so bad. Excerpt:

Still, if some victims of Biden-era abuses deserve compensation, the Anti-Weaponization Fund is not the way to do it, for two reasons.

First, without transparency or independent decision-makers, the fund will be awash in the appearance—if not the reality—of corrupt self-dealing. Five people, all of whom Trump can fire at will, will be in charge of doling out $1.8 billion of taxpayer money without the public knowing who’s getting the money, how much they’re getting, or on what basis. In theory, the people handing out money from the fund could agree to give millions of dollars to themselves.

Second, the Trump administration’s hands aren’t exactly clean when it comes to lawfare and weaponization. Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms are a good example. Several of these orders were blatantly unconstitutional and directed at the president’s perceived enemies. Trump did serious damage to some of these firms, but I think we all know they won’t be collecting payments from the Anti-Weaponization Fund. That will be a very bad look for the administration. It might also be illegal.

An even-tempered lawyer friend who is a political and religious conservative texted me yesterday, enraged by all this. I’ve known this man for over half my life, and I’ve never seen him so angry — and he’s not a Never Trumper. Well, he is now. The corruption here is just so blatant.

If you think this kind of thing doesn’t stand to hurt Trump and Republican candidates in the 2026 and 2028 elections, then you need to consider what happened to Viktor Orban and his party. Again: if times were good, most voters would frown at this deal, and move on. But times are not great now, and depending on how the coming oil shock affects the US and global economy, they could get considerably worse. The president getting a sweetheart deal from his own employee (the acting AG, who was once Trump’s personal lawyer) to get him out of a highly dubious real estate tax situation, while the masses are struggling to pay bills — that could have immense emotional salience.

Right here, right now, in Hungary, the new government is taking advantage of the widespread public anger over Fidesz’s corruption to make sweeping, destructive changes. That is, they are doing radical things that have nothing at all to do with rolling back corruption and holding corrupt politicians and business figures responsible, or anything to do with reasonable reforms. But they are able to do this because people are still mad about the corruption.

Watching all this ideologically-driven vengeance wreak havoc in Hungary now, I feel like I’m seeing a preview of what the Democrats are going to do to our side should they come back to power.

Along those lines, I agree with Bonchie, the RedState.com writer:

One more thing: Trump this week endorsed Ken Paxton, the deeply compromised Texas Republican (for example, and also this) who is running for US Senate, over his GOP opponent, incumbent GOP Sen. John Cornyn.

According to a new Texas poll, both Cornyn and Paxton are viewed unfavorably by a plurality of Texas voters — and both men are essentially tied in a match with James Talarico, the Democratic candidate. This is a five-alarm fire for Texas Republicans. Paxton is slightly ahead of Cornyn in their runoff. Either man will have a tough time defeating Talarico, but Paxton carries a lot more ethical baggage. He might be the preferred choice of Texas GOP primary voters, but if they pick him, they’re going to go with a standard-bearer who is less appealing in the general election.

Adventures In DEI Hiring, Italian Edition

From Visegrad 24:

Salim El Koudri, the terrorist who committed an atrocity in Modena had sent a job application in 2021 to the university he had graduated in Business Economics from:

"You have to hire me as an employee. Fucking Christian bastards.

You and your Jesus Christ on the cross, I'll burn it"

Meanwhile, a Brussels court has approved prison leave for one of the masterminds behind the Bataclan massacre. Incomprehensible, except as suicidal empathy.

Hating Muslims — And Everybody Else

Here we must notice with alarm and disgust that two teenage California lunatics killed several Muslims in a mass shooting at a mosque, before killing themselves in a murder-suicide. This shooting defies categories. In a 75-page manifesto the neo-Nazi killers left behind, they blamed … Jews! (I’ve read the entire manifesto, but am not going to link to it here.)

They hated blacks, Chinese, immigrants (both legal and illegal), Latinos (though one of them was Latino), and while claiming not to hate Muslims, they hated Islam. They referred to blacks, Muslims, and Latinos as “the bioweapons of the kikes.” Yes, Jews get blamed by these cretins for the sins and failings of these other groups they despised. They hated liberals and conservatives both. They even urged leftists to kill Trump and Vance.

They hated women, and were incels. One of them, Caleb Vazquez, wrote:

After the Jew the most evil creature in this world is the woman. This is because after Jews women tend to cause all the problems in the world…

“Height difference I deserve! Height difference I deserve! Height difference I deserve!” You deserve nothing. Being short, especially now more than ever is nothing short but a torturous humiliation ritual. As someone who’s been short my whole life trust me I know from experience and they’ve never let me forget it. If you’re a man and you are below that magic six foot height you’ll be treated as a lesser, if they even acknowledge you at all that is. You’ll be made a laughing stock who is treated like as if you were a child or a pet with the way they talk down to you. If you’re confident and tall you’re just confident, if you’re the exact same but short, then you have that “short guy ego”, one of many terms they’ve bestowed upon us to further ridicule us just for our height. If you’re short like me they’ll never see you as human, plain and simple.

“So give them what they want show them that incel hatred they won’t shut up about,” Vazquez continued. “The revolution awaits.”

And this, from Cain Clark (who names their child “Cain”?!):

For his part, Vazquez said that his religion is “the white race.” Once again, I point out that he was Latino, and wrote that he knows people will accuse him of “larping” as a white, but said he didn’t care.

So, good luck trying to put these monsters into a neat little ideological box so you can blame your enemies. These people were, apparently, nihilists. They hated everybody, and wanted to Blow It All Up.

Now, these idiots are useful to those who want to blame “Islamophobia,” or some other criticism of the groups that these men hated, for their actions. See, if you people would just stop saying mean things about Islam [or feminists, or Jews, or ____], these things wouldn’t happen! Not true. If only it were that easy. To be crystal-clear: I think that we have to be willing to criticize Islam, Judaism, Christianity, men, women, migrants, white people, non-white people, gays, straights, trans — everybody, basically. That’s what it means to live in a free society.

But we have a duty to do so carefully, and not with bigotry, which is irrational hatred. The idea that to object to something that members of a favored minority believe and do is evidence of phobia (irrational fear) is a cheap rhetorical trick. It’s to dismiss what could be valid and necessary critique by pathologizing it.

Actually, these two killers are scarier than conventional haters, because their hatred was so all-consuming, and covered almost everybody except people exactly like themselves. They hated themselves too, it seems: they both talked in the manifesto that they wanted to die. We will find out later, I suppose, how they were radicalized, but it doesn’t take Nostradamus to predict that they got to this point through material they saw on the Internet. (Though in an interview last year, Clark’s mother said that her son was forced to take an Ethnic Studies course to graduate, and hated it because he felt that he was being forced to hate himself for being white.)

Mind you, bomb-throwing Russian nihilists got to the same place in the 19th century without the Internet. But the Internet makes it easy to learn very refined hatred for anybody and everybody, take your pick. I don’t know how we deal with this, as a society, or as a civilization. It’s like porn: in the pre-Internet era, you had to work hard to find porn, especially more extreme forms. Now, anything, no matter how vile, is just a click away. Similarly with violent hatred and political extremism.

I can foresee the coming of an AI-powered surveillance state that offers people safety from hideous attacks like the San Diego mosque shooting in exchange for being surveilled constantly, even in their private communications. If an AI model were constantly monitoring traffic to hate sites, and could alert authorities when teenage boys were visiting and perseverating on websites preaching hatred and political or religious extremism, such that police could intervene in a “pre-crime” mode to stop them, would you agree to it? Probably not — that would be an outrageous violation of liberty.

But what if this kind of terrorism kept happening? Would you then?

We live in a rootless society that is bound to produce at least some monsters like those teenagers. I don’t see any way around that, absent creating a police state. I know people who are grieved that their children, who were raised in stable homes, have lost themselves through online insanity, and followed an Internet trail into the abyss of transgenderism, Groyperism, anti-Semitism, and so forth. Parents ask themselves, “What did I do wrong?” Maybe some of them shouldn’t have given their little children access to the Internet. But I know people who really did try to be responsible with managing their kids’ online activities, and still… .

I don’t have any answers. The frightening thing is that maybe there are none.

Same Song, Seven Hundredth Verse

You know, at some point, you wonder why the hell bishops think they can get away with non-performance of basic duties. From The Pillar, this update on the case of Father Charbel Jamhoury , a Baton Rouge Catholic priest who was formally accused of sexual misconduct, and the local bishop, Michael Duca, who is doing the same old song-and-dance. Excerpt:

And while Duca told priests that the news report on the subject contained only “one point of view,” the diocese did not respond to emails with follow-up questions ahead of The Pillar’s reporting, providing a brief statement to The Pillar, and despite a spokesman requesting that The Pillar provide follow-up questions “in writing,” for the “consideration” of Duca and diocesan vicar general Fr. Jamin David.

The letter also pushed back on a claim from the whistleblower in the case, who told The Pillar that Duca said Jamhoury had admitted to misconduct with a second adult male, in addition to his parishioner. Duca’s letter would seem aimed at disputing that claim, by telling priests that “no further accusation has been made against Fr. Charbel.”

From what has been reported so far, it appears that the diocese did not act in accordance with official church policy regarding accusations against Father Charbel, which are non-trivial. It looks like the local bishop is trying to cover his backside. This reminds of me of the time in 2002 that a Dallas Morning News reporter reached out to me in New York, asking if I had any way for him to contact Father Benedict Groeschel. The reporter was seeking comment on certain accusations against the psychological center Groeschel, a popular EWTN priest, ran that served abusive priests. The reporter told me he had been trying for a while to get a comment on the accusations from Fr. Groeschel, who had been blowing him off.

When the reporter finally published his story, Fr. Groeschel released a statement saying that the reporter had not reached out for a comment, and was smearing him. It was a lie. A straight-up lie. This, from a priest I really respected. I learned something then. It was not the first lesson I would learn.

Katherine’s Response

Here is the response that Katherine, the Orthodox woman digitally stoned by the Orthobro mob, made to her attackers. I don’t know how she was able to be so graceful. I certainly could not have managed it.

Warren Farha, RIP

Woke up this morning to devastating news: the great Warren Farha has died of pancreatic cancer. Warren was the owner of Eighth Day Books, probably the greatest Christian bookstore in the English-speaking world. If you’ve been, you know I’m telling the truth. He was not only an unparalleled genius at curating books, he was also one of the most humble human beings in the world. Everybody who knew Warren loved him. Here’s a link to a 2015 NYT piece about this special man and his bookstore, which he founded with money paid out after he lost his wife to a drunk driver.

Warren leaves behind three kids, a widow (his wonderful second wife, Chris), countless friends and admirers, and a legacy that will never be matched. Of course I’ll pray for his soul, because that’s what we do, but I am confident that all of us have gained a great intercessor in heaven. I hope Eighth Day Books will survive. If there’s any doubt about that, I will do everything in my power to make it happen, and I know that I am not alone in that.

God, what a fine man Warren Farha was. The best of us.

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We have a festering problem in the Orthodox Christian world in the US. I don’t know how big it is, but the anecdotal evidence indicates that it’s not minor. Here, from Lauren Southern, is a shocking, disgusting account of young Orthodox men — “Orthobros” — engaging in online revenge porn against an Orthodox woman who had the temerity to complain about the culture of dating within US Orthodoxy.

It began on May 13, with this article posted by an Orthodox woman named Katherine, complaining about how difficult it is to date men within the Orthodox world. Katherine wrote, in part:

A portion of male converts appear to operate with very high expectations shaped by online “trad” or “orthobro” communities, where a wife must demonstrate deep theological knowledge, have extensive domestic skills, an idealized traditional appearance and demeanor, the desire to forgo modern medicine and convenience, and have a completely pure past. One woman in the survey reported that after just a few dates, a man informed her he expected her to give birth at home with zero pain medication. She was completely put off by the conversation coming so early in courtship, where no further discussion could be had.

There’s the rigid “trad” camp online that seems to be made up not only of traditional Catholics but Orthodox as well. Much of the conversation online seems to echo the “red-pill” and Manosphere talking-points about all women as “ran through” and that there are no pious Christian women anymore, which, in my opinion, is both not true of all women and not a compatible outlook for Orthodox courtship and marriage, especially toward our Orthodox brothers and sisters. I can speak for my many lovely Orthodox friends, both at my church and others I visit, both cradle and convert, who are normal girls who love Christ and His Church.

Katherine polled 41 Orthodox women she knew to ask about their dating situation in church. More:

Only sixty-three percent said they had been approached at church, and my follow-up question was, “Why did things not work out”?

The top reasons were:

• Lack of physical attraction

• Poor hygiene

• Age/life stage differences

• Lack of social skills

• Made her feel uncomfortable

• Personality mismatch

• Too “orthobro” and extreme

I have been hearing similar things anecdotally in recent years from friends in various Orthodox parishes around the US: that a cohort of the young men coming into the Church are radical and incredibly immature, especially regarding women.

The reaction Katherine got online to this only confirmed her findings. According to Lauren Southern, Katherine was set upon by the online Orthobro mob — boogereaters, neckbeards, and such brave young warriors for the faith that they hide behind Twitter anonymous handles — who ripped her guts out. Southern writes:

The collective response can largely be summarized as a complete inability to tolerate even mild criticism or self-reflection.

Not that Katherine’s piece was beyond critique. Any article built around one-sided anecdotes about gender dynamics will naturally contain some bias. But I suspect I would feel similarly watching women react to a fairly friendly article offering relationship advice by immediately declaring all men narcissistic demons incapable of love.

The dominant conclusion across Orthodox X quickly became that feminism had irreparably ruined women, and that modern dating dysfunction was entirely the fault of female degeneracy.

And then the revenge porn started. Someone in the online Orthosphere leaked photos of Katherine in her underwear. Southern again:

The initial leaker was an account called @JohnSmithdzz7, who later claimed he was essentially forced to leak the images because Katherine would not respond to his messages.

Which is, of course, an extremely normal and emotionally healthy reaction to being ignored by a woman online. And certainly not the exact kind of antisocial, manipulative, deeply unwell behavior Katherine had been criticizing in her article to begin with.

Though honestly, if anything, her original piece may have been too charitable. Being awkward, rigid, or overly ideological is one thing. Publicly humiliating a woman because she ignored your DMs is behavior so deranged that even I would’ve accused her of exaggerating for dramatic effect had she included it in the original article.

The online Orthodox male mob stoned the woman, Katherine:

But the story continued escalating until the source of the leaked image itself was uncovered.

An ex-boyfriend of Katherine’s, known online as @wrightwingman, had allegedly shared the image privately with a friend, who then leaked it publicly onto X. As the controversy grew, he inserted himself directly into the discourse with a lengthy statement attempting to justify the situation.

In it, he framed the public humiliation of his ex-girlfriend not as gossip or cruelty, but as a kind of moral warning for the Orthodox community.

Southern posts screenshots of the ex-boyfriend’s posts, then comments:

The poor man, you see, bravely attempted to “pump the brakes” before tragically succumbing to the devastating temptation of an attractive woman sending him revealing photos during a flirtatious relationship.

Naturally, the only moral solution afterwards was to help leak those images online and publicly humiliate her for the protection of Christian society.

Truly heroic stuff.

You need to read the whole thing. Katherine has deleted her accounts, and has apparently gone into online hiding. It’s horrible, but it’s real, and it’s something we Orthodox have to deal with. Now.

A year ago, an English Orthodox bishop, Irenei, released a powerful statement against young men who come into Orthodoxy expecting it to be the Manosphere at prayer, and so forth. So it’s apparently happening in the UK too. Excerpt:

We live in a culture where too many people, including people in our own Church, turn to the media, whether it be traditional or social media, or other things, and think that they will find there some accurate echo of the Church’s teaching. This almost never happens. Almost always, what is presented in the media — especially in social, but even in traditional media — is a distortion, a mischaracterisation, intentional or otherwise, and not a safe place to gain an understanding of the Church’s teaching.

So there have been a few reports of late, including this most recent one currently making the rounds, about a number of young people converting to Orthodoxy, particularly young men, converting because they find in the Orthodox Church, according to these reports, an environment that preaches ‘masculinity’ and real ‘manhood’. And I want to say that if you’re here because you think that that’s what we are here to do, then you are a fool. This is stupidity. ‘Masculinity’, so far as I am aware, is not an Orthodox term. It is not a term that has any traditional place in Christianity. It is a term embraced by the secular world because this world has rejected normal concepts of humanity, in which of course there is male and there is female, there is child, there is adult. These are simply human beings. But because the world has lost sight of the basics of what it means to be human, it is forced to respond to the lack of clarity it has pushed on itself by fostering these concepts of ‘femininity’, ‘masculinity’, and so on.

None of this has anything to do with the teaching of Jesus Christ. This Church proclaims a simple reality that in Jesus Christ our Saviour, all of us discover what it means to be a human being, what it means to become a human person. And this is to live according to the Gospel after the image of Christ. If you have lost sight of what it means to be a man in this strange world, or if you have lost sight of what it means to be a woman in this strange world, this is hardly surprising. This world is more confused about these simple concepts than about almost anything else. So if you are here because you are confused and you wish to find sanity and normality in the teaching of Christ: God bless you, and may we by God’s mercy be of some help.

But if you are here because you think this is a place where you can reinforce some cultural masculinity, if you’re here because you think this is the place to rebel against what you see going on politically around you or socially around you, please keep on going — go somewhere else. We are not here for this reason. …

Amen! We Orthodox are very happy that so many young people are finding their way into the Church. The Church is a hospital for sinners. Every one of us comes to it broken, seeking healing. Based on what I’ve been hearing for some time now, some of the Orthobros show up carrying white nationalism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny, and try to find theological backing for their bigotries. I have been living overseas for the past four or five years, and have been off the US Orthodox scene. From what I can tell from the stories I’ve heard from Orthodox folks around the country, though, these disturbed young men, though by no means a majority of the converts, are not rare.

This is a problem that all of us in the Church have to deal with. Yes, bishops and priests must speak out clearly against it, to stop this poison from spreading, and to save those young Christian men from their worst passions. If the Orthodox churches in America (and elsewhere in the West) become known as havens for vicious and abusive malcontents, they will become radioactive.

I always tell new converts to stay off the online Orthosphere. There are some good sites, but a lot of it, especially on social media, is filled with rage and dysfunction, as the situation with Katherine reveals. I’m not at all saying that Katherine did not deserve to be challenged in her conclusions. Even Lauren Southern concedes that. But Katherine’s post was an invitation to open an important conversation. Now these so-called Christian men have driven her offline, and God only knows what else they’ve done to her. How would you feel if your brothers in Christ were sharing nude photos of you online? She might not even want to go to church anymore.

Whoever these people are, I hope they are excommunicated until and unless they repent. And I hope Katherine files criminal charges against the leaker.

Every Orthodox bishop and every Orthodox priest needs to confront this cancer head on. But we Orthodox laymen cannot leave this entirely to the clergy. We need to step up and do our parts to put a stop to this, and to actively mentor these young men, who need help, whether they realize it or not. After this Katherine episode, I wonder how safe young women might feel in parishes with a sizable Orthobro contingent.

I’m told by an Orthodox friend who has clashed with these creeps online that the insult they use for men like him is “Girldad” — as if there were something wrong with trying to protect one’s daughters from exploitative creeps! Well, I’m a girldad too, and also a dad to sons. My kids are all grown now, but I damn sure would go to any lengths to protect them from this. It is not Christian. It is anti-Christ.

What a tragedy all this is. So many of us have found a home, and help with our own struggles, within the Orthodox church. Like Bishop Irenei said, young men and young women in our society today have been dealt a terrible hand. The Church is there to help them see what is real, and true, and beautiful, and to find their way to it. This is not a crisis that we can ignore, and hope it takes care of itself. I remember some years ago talking to a parish priest about a certain urgent cultural matter, and him brushing me off, saying he thought it would work itself out if people just keep coming to church. I knew perfectly well that he simply did not want to confront the problem, that he wanted to avoid conflict.

Hey, I get it; I hate face to face conflict too. But this is a real and pressing and urgent matter for the life of the Church, right here and right now. I bet the Orthodox churches aren’t the only ones dealing with this. A year or so ago, I had coffee with a lovely, intelligent, faithful traditionalist Catholic young woman. Just good as gold. She said the dating scene in her city was a nightmare for women like her. She said they couldn’t find men who both took the faith seriously, and were normal.

She had even been onto a Catholic dating site, and gone on a few dates with matches there, but gave up because the men, without fail, had no idea how to have a conversation with a woman. It was beyond ordinary awkwardness, she said. She was pretty down about it. I sensed that she was coming around to the conclusion that if she wanted to marry a man who was capable of being a good husband, and a normal companion, she was probably going to have to marry an unbeliever.

Look, I recognize that a divorced Orthodox man is not the most credible source for saying these things. But I can tell you from within my own failed marriage experience (which, I underscore, did not involve infidelity on either of our parts) that the cultural forces working against men and women getting married and staying married are immense. I’ve heard it often from single Christians that they feel ignored by their church communities, because everything seems geared towards families. It’s right that churches should care about families, and strengthening them — but that concern should also extend to helping young men and women form families! We live in such a screwed-up and broken time that we in the Body of Christ are going to have to help young people do what was natural a generation ago: figure out how to meet each other and date.

I have heard from young Christian men that they are afraid to approach women, because women can be very judgmental, unrealistically so. These men are afraid that if they make themselves vulnerable, they will be mocked, even on social media, by women who take pleasure in sharing with their girlfriends how lame men are. I’ve heard this too often to dismiss it as paranoia. It is one way that digital culture is ruining normal human relations.

But it is also the case, as we see in the repulsive treatment of Katherine, that the online culture of men has its own pathologies.

What do young adults who have only ever known a world formed by the digital imaginary do to escape it? This is obviously a pressing pastoral problem. And again: this is a pastoral problem in which our pastors need the help of all older Christian in the church, both men and women. When I get settled in Birmingham, and find a parish, I’m going to offer to do whatever I can to get a ministry of lay mentorship for the young men (and young people in general) going in our parish. Even a middle-aged man who has gone through a painful divorce has wisdom to offer to his younger brothers and sisters in Christ. All of us do. There is not a single soul in church on Sunday who is not broken in some way, and who is not fighting a great battle, probably hidden from everybody else. You live long enough, and talk to enough people, you know it.

What’s more, we Olds who grew up pre-digitally simply don’t grasp the fullness of what the Youngs are going through. Over a decade ago, when a well-known white nationalist became Orthodox, and started preaching race hatred as consonant with Orthodoxy, it took a young priest who understood what was happening (because he had been exposed to it prior to seminary) to convince the white nationalist’s bishop what was happening, and why he needed to act. The bishop did then act, but I recall that the old bishop was completely blindsided by the realities that exist within digital culture today, and how they malform those who give themselves over to it.

You know, if these tough guys who engage in revenge porn and other forms of digital stoning of women were to reveal their names in front of actual fathers of girls in their parish, they would be dealt with in a manly, physical way that would probably teach them something about the difference between masculinity, and its fake online version.

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It was a solemn, rainy Saturday for me here in Budapest. I spent the late afternoon with a friend I’ll call Eva, which is not her real name. I have a handful of faithful Catholic friends here in Budapest. Eva is one of them.

Eva is not terribly political, but has voted Fidesz all these years, because she is a Christian and a patriot, and does not want Hungary to go the way of the European Union. She is today very worried about the future of her country.

“We are going to have same-sex marriage here within a year, maybe two,” she said. “And nobody will care. It will now be obvious to everybody that this isn’t really a Christian country anymore. Cultural Christianity is not enough.”

I brought up something a Catholic sociologist here told me a few years ago: that the Catholic and Reformed churches are moribund, and that the only religious communities with any spirit left are the Orthodox Jews (Chabad) and the large community around Faith Church, an Evangelical/Pentecostal megachurch.

Eva is in no position to know what’s going on with the Reformed, but she pretty much agreed with that verdict on the Catholic Church.

I told her that from my perspective, Viktor Orban did the best that can be expected of any politician to help the churches thrive, but in the end, you cannot solve a spiritual problem with politics. I brought up once again the thing Orban once said: that politics cannot provide meaning, but it can open a space in which meaning-giving institutions — families and churches above all — can fulfill their vocations. If they fail to act within that space, then nothing politics achieves can last.

Now I think Hungary is about to live that out. After our dinner, I went back to look at the transcript of Viktor Orban’s closing address last summer at the annual Fidesz summer camp meeting in Transylvania. Here’s how he closed his talk:

To expand on Orban’s point about same-sex marriage, I think what’s behind it is the same point of my viral 2013 essay, “Sex After Christianity”. Its basic point is the same one sociologist Philip Rieff made in his 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic: that the Christian sexual model is at the heart of Christianity’s social imaginary, and that very thing is what was, at the time of his writing (the beginning of the Sexual Revoultion), being rejected wholesale by the West. The Sexual Revolution was not just a revolution in ethics, but a cosmological one. It’s important to understand what Rieff was saying: that rejecting Christian sexual ethics amounts to rejecting the authority of the Christian faith. As an atheist and a Jew, Rieff had no horse in the race in terms of defending Christianity or its sexual ethics. He was making a sociological judgment on the collapse of the Bible’s binding authority to set the moral framework.

Rieff was right, as the decades since he first wrote have shown. MacIntyre’s 1982 corollary about how emotivism is at the core of our moral reasoning today, is something we are living out now as well. That poor woman Celeste, the 66-year-old woman who defends her romantic relationship with an AI lover on the basis of how the machine makes her feel, is typical of our time. (Watch the video here.)

I agree with Orban about the tipping point. Same-sex marriage did not emerge in a vacuum. It was simply the rational next step of the Sexual Revolution. Heterosexual society had already hollowed out marriage, making it into nothing more than a contract between two people who feel themselves to be in love. The contractual model, based on expressive individualism, had become the baseline long before same-sex marriage was a realistic possibility.

Once a majority comes to believe that this is what marriage is, then it’s hard to justify denying it to same-sex couples. Orban once said that the main social difference between Hungary and the EU is that the EU countries see the individual as the basis for society, while Hungary sees the family as such. This is what Orban meant by saying he wants to build an “illiberal democracy”: on that prioritizes the family as the basis of society, and recognizes the Christian faith as the source of law.

That’s gone now. I don’t think people voted consciously to reject that. They voted against Orban because they are suffering economically, and because they were fed up with a system they perceived as corrupt. Still, it’s becoming clear that PM Peter Magyar, despite having campaigned as “Orban, but without the corruption,” is going to be a hell of a lot more “European” than Hungarian. Eva’s fear is that there won’t be enough resistance to any of this left among Hungarians to stop it.

Eva told me that she believes the only way Catholic life will survive in the long term here is “through small groups of Catholics really devoted to prayer.”

“The Benedict Option?” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed.

Now, let’s turn to America. Church attendance is a much better measure of devotion than mere identification with a particular church or tradition. Take a look at this chart from the political scientist Ryan Burge, who studies American religion:

Here’s a link to that post. What I found most interesting about it was how the Catholic decline has been straight downhill. Not even the world-changing pontificate of St. John Paul II, or the sex abuse scandal, affected the decline. I’ve been texting with American Catholic friends about it since this chart appeared. One of them responded:

Another factor on US Catholic decline, going back to terrible catechesis and faith formation is that by the 1970s, Catholics at the parish level were functionally indistinguishable from mainline Protestant sects. It is completely unsurprising that they would experience a similar decline.

It isn’t that JP2 didn’t affect the situation, which could have been much worse, but I would keep in mind that we are only now starting to see momentum where priests who actually care about the Church are only even starting to reach a critical mass and even then they aren’t in the leadership.

Douthat made this point in one of his columns a month ago or so where he stated that even where the Church leaders are orthodox, they are still ur-Boomers who are clearly profoundly uncomfortable and in many cases ashamed of their own faithful. You had JP2 as a widely respected leader but the wide gap between him and his employees was a meme. While I don’t relish the public feud between Trump and the Pope, the fact is that it hasn’t cost Trump meaningful support because the Pope stopped being a leader anyone took seriously even among his own flock since JP2 died.

Again, if the duty of the Church is not to proclaim the witness of Christ but to serve as yet another EU-adjacent NGO, that will regurgitate all the standard positions and talking points, then it is going to be dismissed accordingly.

Per Burge’s chart, the news is great for Evangelicals, but it has to be qualified. In the United States since the 1970s, all religious observance has been declining. So, Evangelicals have held on, and even increased, their numbers of Christians who actually go to church. The problem is, there are fewer and fewer of those. Only about half as many American Christians attend church regularly today as in 1970s.

I would guess that the theological conservatism of Evangelicals accounts for much of their strength. As you know, I’ve been an Orthodox Christian for twenty years, but there are too few Orthodox in the US to make even a blip on big studies. But from 13 years in Catholicism (1993-2006), I can tell you that actual, existing Catholicism in America is theologically diverse. This was the biggest shock to me, as one who was converted by reading myself into the Catholic Church, and by following with love and admiration Pope John Paul II. I had not reckoned with how much heterodoxy (from the point of view of fidelity to the Catholic Magisterium, or teaching authority) I would find in American parishes.

I do believe, with my Catholic friend quoted above, that the change is making its way through the system, as many liberal Catholics have left the Church, or at least aren’t winning over the young. You’ve seen studies, I guess, saying that there are virtually no theological liberals studying for the priesthood today. According to a study last year, “priests ordained before 1975, more than 70% described themselves as theologically progressive, while in the 2010-or-later cohort only 8% did so.”

The problem for those young priests, and priests-in-training, is the US Catholic laity are much more liberal. Then again, that only means that the laity is a mission field. I’ve written here before how the Millennial-generation priest at the Catholic parish in my Louisiana hometown has become quite popular. He’s orthodox, and ministers with real spirit. Maybe a lot of laity might never have experienced what it’s like to be led by a pastor who is on fire for God. So, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens.

I would imagine too that the only Evangelical churches that are going to hold on to people are those that offer truly countercultural Biblical teaching. It’s certainly true that there are a sizable number of progressive Evangelicals, but it’s hard to see how they can grow, because when your church looks like the culture, and makes few demands on you, what’s the point of going? While the numbers on the chart for Evangelicals are something they can rightly take pride in, I am thinking of what an Evangelical friend, an academic, told me a while back: that Evangelicalism’s strength and its weakness is that it always tracks closely with the culture’s trajectories.

Please forgive me for not knowing more about Evangelicalism — and I’m happy to be corrected — but I understood him to be saying that the structural flexibility of Evangelicalism allows it to be more responsive to changes in the culture. That’s both good and bad, in his view. I wonder if that explains this recent graph by Ryan Burge:

Non-denominational churches are those without fixed creeds — or rather, they likely have a “Statement of Faith,” but they aren’t fixed within a particular tradition, like Baptists are. So they can be flexible. I don’t say that as a criticism, but looking back on how much American Evangelicalism changed in the 20th century, I’m not sure what to expect in this century. Protestantism has historically depended on print culture; I don’t know what happens to it in a culture where younger people simply do not read.

The bottom line is that we are in a period of intense religious fragmentation and churn, such that it is difficult to make predictions. Matthew Schmitz, who is Catholic, had an interesting piece the other day in First Things, in which he noted that the Catholic Church in the US is “in steep decline,” citing harsh statistics revealing that whatever the good news about converts entering the Catholic Church right now, its not nearly enough to counter the broader decline. “And yet,” he writes

…something is stirring in the Catholic Church. It is evident not only in the number of adults seeking confirmation, but in the way Catholic concepts and figures have moved to the center of public debate. Rather than simple Catholic decline or Catholic revival, we appear to have entered a period of Catholic ferment, in which a process of breakdown is accompanied by the emergence of something new.

He talks about how Catholic ideas are finding new salience in the public square. No space here to quote him, but do read the piece. The professor with whom I dined last night asked me about Orthodox conversions in the US. I told him that I hear anecdotally all the time that churches in the US are filling with converts, but that it is also true that Orthodoxy is such a tiny presence in the US that it’s hard to say what kind of influence that may have on American life in the long term.

Whatever one’s faith tradition, chosen or inherited, all of us Christians are going to face the same problem: holding fast to the faith in the present and coming storm, which will present challenges like nothing the church has ever seen. I think of the coming of AI in the way Jaguar Paw and his pursuers in Mel Gibson’s brilliant Apocalpyto reached the end of the chase (it’s here, but the ending will be spoiled).

The key battle we will be fighting is to know what is real. Yesterday I got lost for a while plotting out an apocalyptic novel, which I might take a shot at writing once I get settled in the US this summer. I was thinking about how forms of Christianity that require embodiment — sacramental forms — have an advantage in the age of AI. If the sermon is the center of one’s worship service, then AI can produce a sermon more learned and masterful than nearly every preacher. As people begin to merge themselves more fully with the Machine, I wonder how Protestant pastors are going to stay relevant. No machine can ever confect the Eucharist out of bread and wine … but if a people does not believe that is a necessary, irreducible aspect of Christian life and worship, it won’t matter. And even then, if priests do not actually preach, teach, and disciple their congregations in being countercultural in an AI-dominated culture, then simply having the Eucharist is not going to be sufficient to make disciples.

However, I recall from my Catholic years coming to understand, towards the end, why some disaffected Catholics left for Evangelicalism. In my triumphant early years as a Catholic convert, I couldn’t grasp this at all. But as the years went by, and especially in the sex abuse crisis, the fact that in parish after parish, the sermons rarely taught or proclaimed anything substantive really taught me why Catholics starved for real leadership defected to Evangelical churches whose pastors went deep into the Bible. I have had too little experience in American Orthodox churches to make a judgment about the quality of preaching, and having been out of Catholicism for two decades now, I’ve missed any improvements in preaching that might have come from younger, Millennial priests. Still, we Christians of the older, liturgical and sacramental traditions, are going to need to look to our Evangelical brethren for examples on how to preach and teach effectively. The times are incredibly disorienting.

No matter what kind of Christian you are, you need a Benedict Option community: a thick group of prayerful disciples who understand themselves to be in opposition to the broader culture, and who consider all of life to be training in discipleship. There’s just no substitute for being part of a worshiping community, one that forms the whole self. Viktor Orban is right about our duty: “That duty is to preserve what we have, to acquire what we do not have but need, and to reject what we do not need.”

Being outside of a serious community of worship and discipleship has made it harder for me to fulfill my duty. I will miss Europe, but need to get my spiritual life in order.

The Sunday Of The Blind Man

Yesterday in the Orthodox Church was what we call the Sunday of the Blind Man. The Gospel reading is the story from the Gospel of John, Chapter 9, in which Jesus restores sight to a blind man. The Pharisees get angry over this. They reject the idea that God could have worked through Jesus to do this miracle. For one, they don’t want to hear the testimony of the formerly blind man, because he is not learned. For another, Jesus did this work of healing on the Sabbath, breaking religious law.

The chapter ends like this:

Then Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind.”

Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not also blind, are we?”

Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you are saying, ‘We see,’ so your sin remains.”

How mysterious this whole story is! As in the story of the Gerasene demoniac liberated by Jesus, who was then driven out of town by the people, who preferred the world they could predict to the possibility of liberation, we see here people (the Pharisees) who have a great miracle performed in their midst, but who refuse to see what is right in front of them because it doesn’t conform to their expectations. Jesus’s final line to them is a real challenge to us all, isn’t it? It’s a challenge to their pride and arrogance. He’s saying, “You think you know everything, but you can’t even see what’s happening in front of you.”

I don’t think Jesus was denying the possibility of knowing truth, not at all. What he’s saying is that we can become so trapped in our own ways of knowing that we blind ourselves to mysteries unfolding all around us. Religious people do this (“God can’t be working within that church, because they are Not Like Us”) and non-religious people do, going out of their way to come up with materialist explanations for seemingly miraculous events, or at least to dismiss the possibility that something has truly happened here that violates their model of reality.

This Gospel passage always makes me interrogate myself, to ask what movements of the Holy Spirit am I missing in my own life, and as I survey the world, because they don’t fit into my way of framing reality?

I really love the new piece by Josh Robinson, in which he talks about evangelizing the “naturalist” — that is, the kind of person who thinks the world can be entirely explained by materialism. (The Pharisees were religious men, of course, but their understanding of religion was highly legalistic, so they, in a sense, were like Robinson’s “naturalist”). Robinson writes:

What is an enchanted apologetic? First, I will say what it’s not. It’s not an evidential apologetic that leads you to the belief that a god exists. It’s also not a presuppositional apologetic that spends time examining underlying presuppositions, though I think that is helpful at times, depending on the conversation.

It’s mainly an argument for meaning. Here I was talking to the guy, and even though he was skeptical about his entire upbringing and what anyone could know apart from the scientific method, yet, he had no way to account for meaning.

He couldn’t explain to me what it meant that he loved his wife and children, yet he did. He couldn’t explain to me what justice was, though he believed it to be important. And he couldn’t explain to me why his experience participating in confession at a catholic church was somehow burden-lifting.

That’s because naturalism, naturally, leads you straight to a meaning crisis. It causes you to begin to look at yourself in the third person instead of the first person. When asked about love, you step out of yourself and begin to describe the release of chemicals in the brain. You step outside of yourself and begin to talk about social conventions, competition, evolution, and the preservation of the species. And, you begin to step outside of yourself like a doctor inspecting a patient on a couch and begin to talk about therapy.

Naturalism removes you as a participant in the world and makes you a spectator. That’s because naturalism reduces everything down to its material cause, which is what it can examine and quantify. It cannot account for meaning because it rejects all the other causes. And the problem with this is that no one lives life this way. No one goes home and tells their wife, “Hey, my brain is producing feel-good chemicals when I look at you and the kids.” Or at least, I hope they don’t. And what about justice? If we’re just matter in motion, then what the hell does justice matter? And what are you confessing? Is there sin or is there not?

Robinson goes on to talk about how the naturalist, though he claims to be a man of science, is actually a man of false enchantment:

Naturalism reduces the world to its material parts and reduces the person to a spectator operating on those parts. Everything becomes technique or techné. The right inputs produce the right outputs. The body is managed. The mind is hacked. The emotions are regulated. The relationships are optimized. This is what magic always wanted to be. The old magician muttering over his herbs and the modern naturalist adjusting his serotonin are doing the same thing in different costumes. Both of them have replaced participation with manipulation. Both of them have decided the world is a mechanism, and they are the operator.

The enchanted man does the opposite. He receives the world as it is. As a gift from God. And offers it back up to Him in thanksgiving. He opens his hands. He lets the bread be placed in them. He does not operate the world. He lives in it.

This is where the naturalist gets confused, because he has been told that he is the opposite of the magician. He has been told that he stands at the end of a long progress out of superstition and into reason. The old world was full of witches and charms and incantations, and the modern world has cleared all of that away with the clean light of science. He believes this. He has been catechized into it. He thinks of himself as the disenchanter, the one who pulled the curtain back and revealed that the wizard was just an old man with a microphone.

But he actually has the story exactly backward. The naturalist is not the opposite of the magician. He is the magician’s grandson. They are after the same thing by different means.

Robinson explains that both magic and science emerged in the early modern world, as attempts to bend the world to the will of the magician/scientist. Science is magic that works. But the goal is the same: to make the world malleable, useful. This is what Yuval Noah Harari, a naturalist, meant when he said that modern man made a fateful bargain at the start of the modern age 500 years ago: he exchanged meaning for power. If there is no intrinsic meaning to the material world, then we can do anything we want with it, and to it. We have become very powerful living by this philosophy, in that “power” means agency over matter. But what’s it all for?

I love this from Robinson:

The enchanted man stands somewhere else entirely. He does not want what the magician wanted. He does not want what the scientist wants when the scientist is being a magician. He does not want to dominate the world. He wants to live in it. He wants to know it the way you know a person, by patient love and long attention, not by dissection. He wants the apple to fall from the tree and find it astonishing, the way Chesterton found it astonishing. He wants to walk through the woods without taking inventory. He wants to receive the bread without analyzing the molecules.

He does not want to dominate the world. He wants to live in it. I want to live in a world in which I can see things like a blind man receiving sight, and not immediately try to explain it away, but simply say, “Glory to God!” To become the kind of man who can do that requires training, though. It is not the way of our world.

Escaping The Academic Echo Chamber

The academic with whom I dined last evening earned all of his degrees — undergraduate, graduate, and doctorate — from Ivy League colleges. Yet he bailed on an academic career because he saw that there were few jobs at all in his field, and none for straight white males interested in subject areas that did not include queer studies, gender studies, decolonial studies, and the usual. He’s a trained scholar of what until yesterday was a major field, one with real-world applications. I have no idea what his politics are, but he told me that the world of American academia is irreversibly sick, and he knew he had to find something else to do with his knowledge.

Thought of him when I saw this chart, via Steve Stewart-Williams:

Sen. Cassidy Loses

I was sad and discouraged to see that my friend Sen. Bill Cassidy lost his primary bid for re-election as one of Louisiana’s US senators. He lost because of a single vote he made in 2021: to impeach Donald Trump over Trump’s disgraceful behavior around the January 6 debacle. Cassidy didn’t have to vote that way. Most GOP senators refused to uphold Trump’s impeachment, and besides, it didn’t really matter, because Trump was about to leave office anyway. At the time, the Senator explained here why he voted as he did. He was right.

Trump vowed revenge on him for this act of personal disloyalty, and, with the Trump-endorsed candidate Julia Letlow dominating the field at this past weekend’s vote, Trump prevailed. Too bad. Louisiana loses a strongly conservative senator, a devout Evangelical Christian of real integrity, who worked with Trump when he agreed with him (which was often, but only slavish loyalty suffices). Sen. Cassidy returns to private life with his head held high. I’m proud of him, and glad he was my senator.

I can and do support Trump when I think he is right, and oppose him when I think he is wrong. No politician will ever have my unquestionable loyalty. I am quite sure that my loyalty will be misplaced from time to time — same goes for all of us; we are only human — but I don’t care for personality cult politics. You can reasonably ask: how could you, Rod, have supported Trump’s 2021 impeachment, but also backed his 2024 presidential run? The answer is not because I found Trump to be suddenly fit for office. The answer is because the alternative was worse. Remember, I once voted for Edwin W. Edwards for Louisiana governor in 1991, versus David Duke, and had this bumper sticker on my car:

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The great Mary Harrington has a terrific piece about St. Thomas Aquinas. I cannot do its complexity justice by quoting it; you really do have to read the whole thing. It’s about how she found herself frustrated by the lack of words for concepts she knew, intuitively, were there … until she read an introduction to Scholastic thought. The more she thought…

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The defining event of Soren Kierkegaard’s life was his breaking his engagement to marry Regine Olsen. She was the daughter of a government official. SK was smitten when he first saw her. He proposed marriage in 1840, and they seemed blissfully happy. But a year later, troubled by doubts, SK ended the engagement. He late…

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So I did it. One of those bucket list things I’ve wanted to do for all of my adult life: visit the grave of Soren Kierkegaard, and pray. I thanked God for the life of this man, and for sending him into my life. You all know how formative the Chartres experience was to me in setting me on the road to Christ. But as I’ve alwa…

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You’re going to need to sit down for this one. It’s a short essay by Robert Kagan, an uberhawk and one of the most elite of the neoconservative elites. As Arnaud Bertrand wrote in introducing the essay on his X account:

Are you ready? Let’s go. Here’s Kagan:

It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored. The calamitous losses suffered at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and throughout the Western Pacific in the first months of World War II were eventually reversed. The defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America’s overall position in the world, because they were far from the main theaters of global competition. The initial failure in Iraq was mitigated by a shift in strategy that ultimately left Iraq relatively stable and unthreatening to its neighbors and kept the United States dominant in the region.

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

Bob Kagan wrote that. Bob Kagan! Let me give you a sample from his piece about why he has reached that Götterdammerungy conclusion. Kagan talks about how he has no idea why a regime (Iran’s) that survived 37 days of pounding, including the elimination of its senior officials, and still hasn’t conceded an inch, would do so with anything else the US has to throw at it. Kagan:

The risk calculus that forced Trump to back down a month ago still holds. Even if Trump were to carry out his threat to destroy Iran’s “civilization” through more bombing, Iran would still be able to launch many missiles and drones before its regime went down—assuming it did go down. Just a few successful strikes could cripple the region’s oil and gas infrastructure for years if not decades, throwing the world, and the United States, into a prolonged economic crisis. Even if Trump wanted to bomb Iran as part of an exit strategy—looking tough as a way of masking his retreat—he can’t do that without risking this catastrophe.

More:

But any resolution other than America’s effective surrender holds enormous risks that Trump has not so far been willing to take. Those who glibly call on Trump to “finish the job” rarely acknowledge the costs. Unless the U.S. is prepared to engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold; unless it is prepared to risk the loss of warships convoying tankers through a contested strait; unless it is prepared to accept the devastating long-term damage to the region’s productive capacities likely to result from Iranian retaliation—walking away now could seem like the least bad option. As a political matter, Trump may well feel he has a better chance of riding out defeat than of surviving a much larger, longer, and more expensive war that could still end in failure.

Defeat for the United States, therefore, is not only possible but likely. Here is what defeat looks like.

Per Kagan’s analysis, it includes:

• Iran retaining its uranium and nuclear weapons program

• Iran maintaining control of the Strait of Hormuz, giving it a thumb on the carotid artery of the global economy. This makes Iran much stronger than it was before the US-Israeli war.

• Israel finds itself more isolated than ever, and more at Iran’s mercy than before

• “All nations that depend on energy from the Gulf will have to work out their own arrangements with Iran. What choice will they have? If the United States with its mighty Navy can’t or won’t open the strait, no coalition of forces with just a fraction of the Americans’ capability will be able to, either.”

Conclusion:

The American defeat in the Gulf will have broader global ramifications as well. The whole world can see that just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight. The questions this raises about America’s readiness for another major conflict may or may not prompt Xi Jinping to launch an attack on Taiwan, or Vladimir Putin to step up his aggression against Europe. But at the very least America’s allies in East Asia and Europe must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.

The global adjustment to a post-American world is accelerating. America’s once-dominant position in the Gulf is just the first of many casualties.

Do read the whole thing. It’s going to be a while before it sinks in. Again: Kagan is the utter opposite of a peacenik. But his hawkish ideology has come up hard against reality. Donald Trump was supposed to be the GOP’s answer to the bellicose hubris of the neoconservative-led Republican Party. And he turned out to be far more reckless and bellicose than those Republicans he condemned!

I hope Kagan’s verdict is premature, of course. Still, the first thing that comes to my mind is the shock defeat of the Imperial Russian navy by the Japanese in their 1904-05 war. Russia expected to wipe the floor with the Japanese. Russia’s loss destroyed the myth of European invincibility (Russia was considered a European power on the world stage then), and back home, forced the Tsar to grant humiliating political concessions that weakened the autocracy. The Tsarist system never recovered from that defeat. We all know what happened in 1917.

Globally, Russia’s defeat sparked a naval arms race among the Great Powers, which contributed to the coming of World War I. We all know what that did too.

Just as few of us ever imagined that Donald Trump would start an unnecessary and unprovoked Middle Eastern war, it is equally hard to imagine that the man whose slogan was “Make America Great Again” will have left the country likely permanently diminished, and will have presided over the end of America’s global hegemony. Even if you thought “MAGA” was nothing more than cheap nostalgic sloganeering, few such critics could have predicted this.

Yet here we are. This could actually be a point of extreme danger, given Trump’s ego. Wolfgang Munchau, a smart German observer of geopolitics, says that the logic of war dictates that Trump should commit to a ground invasion. Munchau is pointedly not saying this should happen, only that it makes a certain sense. He writes that if Trump were to agree to any conceivable peace arrangement with Iran:

Even the best possible deal, from a US perspective, is inferior to anything they could have had — had they not gone to war.

Munchau’s basic argument is that the political costs to Trump for cutting and running would be worse than ramping up with a ground invasion:

The decisive argument that persuaded Trump was the idea that the costs of not acting would outweigh the costs of fighting. What has changed since is that the cost of the war is higher than Trump anticipated. But as I’ve explained, the cost of chickening out are higher still. Since the US is unlikely to achieve a military victory over Iran before November anyway, the President has only a few imperfect options left. A longer-term triumph over the Islamic Republic would destroy one of the most horrendous regimes on earth, a regime which imposes tolls on global shipping in defiance of international law, and which may one day develop nuclear weapons. A skillful communicator, which at his best Trump is, should not struggle to explain this.

I don’t have the slightest confidence that at this point, Trump could sell the American people on the wisdom of a ground invasion of Iran. This doesn’t at all mean that Trump won’t make that very move! Would he really be willing to allow himself to go down as the last president of the American Century (the term of art for the post-WW2 era dominated by the United States).

(N.B., Robert Kagan’s hawkish think tank, the Project for a New American Century, has as its goal creating the conditions to extend American hegemony into the post-Cold War era. The three events that, in my view, destroyed the idea of a New American Century are 1) the US, via economic globalism, setting China up to become the dominant global economic power; 2) the failed Iraq War; and 3) the failed Iran War.)

Trump never troubled himself to make a sustained case to the American people for the necessity of war on Iran. Yes, we all know why he launched the war. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about him making the effort to do as George W. Bush did before the US went into Iraq: going all-out on every front — public relations, diplomatic, all of it — to make the case for that war. This is why on the day bombs began falling over Baghdad in 2003, 72 percent of the American people backed the war.

It was a bad war, as most of us agree now, but give Bush credit for realizing that his government could not undertake such a massive operation without the political backing of the American people. Iran was always going to be a far, far more serious enemy than Saddam’s Iraq ever was. But Trump just barreled into it.

Munchau is certainly correct that if Trump cuts and runs now, it will mean the effective end of his presidency. But what if Trump does what Munchau suggests that logic indicates? Here, according to Munchau, is what we would be facing:

The scale would necessarily be enormous. Iran has 610,000 active soldiers, including the Revolutionary Guards. On top of this they have 350,000 reserves. Israel has 170,000 troops. A ground invasion would therefore necessarily involve hundreds of thousands of US soldiers, all of whom would first have to be mobilized, something that would take months.

So, we would be facing up to one million Iranians, fighting on their own land. Not great. Here is Nate Silver’s chart aggregating opinion polling on the war:

Does Munchau really believe that a politician as polarizing as Donald Trump really has it within him to sell a population that has never been close to approving of this war, even at the beginning, on a ground invasion? I can’t see it. What’s more, the only Americans who support the war today are Republicans, and some independents. Can you imagine being a Republican senator or Congressman up for re-election, having to campaign during a time of economic pain, because of the oil shock, and as US troops are mobilizing for a ground invasion? It would be a political suicide mission.

It would be hard even if US victory were assured. But US victory is by no means assured. What’s more, before going down, the Iranian regime would destroy everything it possibly could in terms of the Mideast’s petroleum infrastructure, plunging the world into an economic depression.

I could be wrong, but I see Trump chickening out in the face of those odds. If he doesn’t TACO, then God help us all. One way or the other, I can’t see any good way out of this for the United States.

I’m listening now to the audiobook version of Joseph Roth’s 1932 novel The Radetzky March, which I first read a decade or so ago. It’s a terrific book, one of the best novels I’ve ever read. It is a saga about the decline and fall of the Habsburg Empire, as told through the lives of three generations of the von Trottas, a Slovenian family. One of the book’s deepest lessons is that a political order cannot outlive the inability of the people who live within it to believe in the myth, or myths, that support it.

In the Roth novel, by the third generation — Carl Joseph, the von Trotta son who serves in the Austrian military in the years leading up to World War I — fewer and fewer Austrians believe in the imperial myth. There’s a haunting, lengthy passage about a pistol duel of honor. The duel is so stupid: nobody really believes that “honor” requires men to risk their lives in that way, but the officers are so trapped in the ritual formalities of a decaying system that they see no way out. What one sees as the novel plays out — and by the way, Roth was nostalgic for the Habsburgs, but did not let that fond feeling get in the way of his clear-eyed observations — is an entire social, cultural, and political order dying from lack of interest.

It looks great from the outside, but inside, it’s rotten. You also see this in Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday, though not told as elegiacally. As you may or may not know, the Austrian army performed badly in World War I, and often had to be bailed out by the Germans. Over one million Austrians died in the war, with total casualties more than twice that. It’s hard to say how much of this was down to sheer incompetence, or was the result of a loss of vigor and vitality, as illustrated by Roth’s novel (Roth served in the Austro-Hungarian army, but never saw combat). Roth dramatizes how as Kaiser Franz Joseph aged into decrepitude, so did his imperial system.

What does any of this say about America? Nobody can deny that the United States remains the most powerful military force on the earth, and with the possible exception of China, has the most powerful economy. We are not Austria-Hungary. I’m more interested in the role of myth in undergirding the nation.

I’m old enough to remember our Bicentennial celebrations in 1976. The US was going through a hard decade then. We had withdrawn humiliatingly from Vietnam, and the year before, Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace. Nevertheless, there was so much pride back then in America, and it really came out in the Bicentennial year. Every night on TV, there was the “Bicentennial Minute,” in which some famous person recounted historical events on that very day 200 years earlier. They began on July 4, 1974, and ran through December 31, 1976, with President Ford delivering the final one. Even as dismal as the economy was, there was such a sense of pride in the nation’s achievements.

This year, our 250th, there is nothing like that. You’d hardly know the year had any real importance. Even though we are in far better shape economically than we were in 1976, something has died, don’t you think? You could blame woke teachers for poorly educating younger generations, teaching them to doubt America, or whatever, but I don’t think that gets you very far. I think this decay has many fathers, but it’s definitely there, and I’m not sure how we turn it around.

In 1976, the country elected Jimmy Carter, who failed as president. Then, after the Iran crisis, Ronald Reagan came to power — the cruel Iranians released the hostages minutes after Carter left office — and revived the American spirit ground down by the grim economy and the national humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis. I hope I’m wrong, but I just don’t see that we have it within us, as a people, to come back like that again. Most Americans have lost a lot of faith in institutions over the past fifty years, and you can’t command people to believe.

We all know a core myth of America, called “the American Dream”. It’s the belief that in America, you can go as far as your talents and your willingness to work hard will take you. That, and the sure confidence that your children will live better than you do. There was reason to believe that, too, especially in the post-WW2 period. But, as historian Peter Turchin has pointed out, that period of great social mobility, relatively low inequality, social stability, and broad prosperity came to an end sometime around the late 1970s.

Yes, America grew a lot richer from 1980s till today but those gains were concentrated in the upper tier. The American college lecturer (a conservative!) with whom I dined on Sunday lamented that people who take the booming stock market as the only meaningful sign of America’s economic health are completely ignoring how fragile and unstable daily life feels for more and more Americans. She talked about how her dad, who is not much older than I am (meaning, he’s in his 60s), was able to pay his way through college with summer jobs. That’s unthinkable today. She says that she sees so many young people expensively educated for jobs that aren’t there, or aren’t likely to remain for long.

It was at that point I told her about Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction” as the main catalyst for revolutionary upheaval. This figures prominently in the final chapter of my Weimar America book. Basically, Turchin’s analysis of history finds that the main driver (though not the only one) of revolutionary upheavals throughout history has been the inability of a system to meet middle-class aspirations. In Weimar Germany’s case, as I’ve been writing in this space, the collapse of faith of young, educated, middle-class men in democracy caused them to rush into the arms of Hitler. They had grown up in a highly unstable decade, and did not have the kinds of roots and faith in institutions that might have given them the ballast to hold on through hard times.

Fortunately, the US has over 200 years of democratic tradition to rely on, but how much is that likely to keep our collective ship steady through the very rough waters ahead? We will see. It is not a good sign that here, in the 250th year since the birth of our nation, very few people seem to care about that noble and glorious history. Think of it: we roughly as close in time today to Obama’s second inaugural as Americans in 1976 were to the JFK assassination … not to mention the killings of MLK and RFK, the Vietnam War spasms, and Watergate. And still, Americans found reason to celebrate the nation’s milestone birthday! The Spirit of ‘76 just ain’t with us, even though we have done pretty well overall since 1976.

Maybe it has to do with the dying of collective memory of the great victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Maybe it has to do with the story educators have chosen to tell to American students since around 1976. According to a 2008 study (the link takes you to a Smithsonian magazine article by one of the professors who conducted it):

For today’s teens, the most famous American in history is...the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., appearing on 67 percent of all lists. Rosa Parks was close behind, at 60 percent, and third was Harriet Tubman, at 44 percent. Rounding out the top ten were Susan B. Anthony (34 percent), Benjamin Franklin (29 percent), Amelia Earhart (23 percent), Oprah Winfrey (22 percent), Marilyn Monroe (19 percent), Thomas Edison (18 percent) and Albert Einstein (16 percent). For the record, our sample matched within a few percentage points the demographics of the 2000 U.S. Census: about 70 percent of our respondents were white, 13 percent African-American, 9 percent Hispanic, 7 percent Asian-American, 1 percent Native American.

For comparison, the researchers gave the same exercise (asking them to list the ten most famous Americans in the nation’s history, excluding presidents and their wives) to 2,000 adults aged 45 and over:

What about the gap between our supposedly unmoored youth and their historically rooted elders? There was not much of one. Eight of the top ten names were identical. (Instead of Monroe and Einstein, adults listed Betsy Ross and Henry Ford.) Among both kids and adults, neither region nor gender made much difference. Indeed, the only consistent difference was between races, and even there it was only between African-Americans and whites. Whites’ lists comprised four African-Americans and six whites; African-Americans listed nine African-American figures and one white. (The African-American students put down Susan B. Anthony, the adults Benjamin Franklin.)

Trying to take the national pulse by counting names is fraught with problems. To start, we know little about our respondents beyond a few characteristics (gender, race/ethnicity and region, plus year and place of birth for adults). When we tested our questionnaire on kids, we found that replacing “important” with “famous” made little difference, but we used “famous” with adults for the sake of consistency. Prompting for women’s names obviously inflated their total, though we are at a loss to say by how many.

But still: such qualifications cannot mist the clarity of consensus we found among Americans of different ages, regions and races. Eighty-two years after Carter G. Woodson founded Negro History Week, Martin Luther King Jr. has emerged as the most famous American in history. This may come as no surprise—after all, King is the only American whose birthday is celebrated by name as a national holiday. But who would have predicted that Rosa Parks would be the second most named figure? Or that Harriet Tubman would be third for students and ninth for adults? Or that 45 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, the three most common names appearing on surveys in an all-white classroom in, say, Columbia Falls, Montana, would belong to African-Americans? For many of those students’ grandparents, this moment would have been unimaginable.

I found out about the existence of this 2008 survey when I watched this clip from a new two-part Matt Walsh special on the Civil Rights movement; it popped up on my X feed. It purports to tell the hidden truth of the movement. I had not realized until I saw that five-minute clip that the MLK family keeps incredibly strict controls on how his image is discussed. You can’t even use clips of the “I Have A Dream” speech without the family’s consent! I figured that when Civil Rights Movement historian and prize-winning MLK biographer David J. Garrow had to turn to a British magazine to publish his excruciating historical essay on King’s disgusting behavior with women, based on FBI surveillance records, it was because no US publication would touch it for political reasons. That may be, but it could also be that publications feared a lawsuit from the King family.

Anyway, the author of that piece about the 2008 survey points out that it cannot be that only educators from the 1970s onward contributed to the revolutionary change of names on that kind of list. He acknowledges that the entire culture shifted towards a more black-centric, female-centric view of American history. He’s right about that, and this is in some ways a good thing, given how past generations erased them. But when you have generations who have forgotten about the importance of the Founders, of Lincoln and the Civil War generals, and Dead White Men like that … well, is there any surprise that Americans don’t have a lot of interest in their country’s 250th birthday?

So, the myth of the Founding — and I use “myth” not to mean “a false story,” but rather, a story that gives a semi-sacred meaning to a historical narrative, one that, in the case of a people, tells them who they are — has largely been eclipsed by progressive narratives. It’s not really controversial to claim that the Civil Rights Movement is the more powerful myth in the minds of Americans today — even if they didn’t get a lot of teaching on it in school.

But no myth is forever. The fact that Matt Walsh has made a two-part documentary questioning that myth is a sign that even that myth is beginning to die. (Here’s a link to a YouTube video in which he talks about the documentary.) As recently as a decade ago, this would have been taboo. We are now over sixty years past the Civil Rights Act. The passions from that era are passing into memory, for better and for worse. Similarly, as the Second World War — the greatest of modern myths — fades into the past, what historian Alec Ryrie calls “the Age of Hitler” is going with it. Ryrie’s point is that the evil of the Nazi dictator was so overwhelming that his life and example became the founding myth, or anti-myth, of the postwar Western order. Put simply, if people post-1945 wanted to know what the Right Thing To Do was, they would ask themselves, “What would Hitler do?” — then do the opposite.

Ryrie — who describes himself as a liberal — acknowledges in his book that the era defined by the memory of Hitler is ending, and we had better all acknowledge that and think about what this means for our future. (I wrote about Ryrie’s book here.) As you regular readers know, I am extremely worried about the resurgence of racism and anti-Semitism within Generation Z. Nevertheless, we can understand this phenomenon from a neutral position: as the effect of the waning of the power of particular myths over the minds of people.

Myths don’t die easily. If it’s true that the myth of the American Century is finally having a stake put through its heart by the US’s failure to defeat Iran, then that is going to be convulsive as it makes its way through American society in the years to come. As Kagan points out in his Atlantic article, America’s defeat by Iran — and don’t lie to yourself, Iran has jiu-jitsu’d America good and hard — is so tectonic that “there will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done.”

We will still have our freedom, of course. We will still be rich and powerful. But Trump’s folly will have demonstrated that the US is not what it once was, and what many, no doubt most, Americans still think it is. Though I believe my country’s government has done some foolish things over the course of my lifetime, I am certain that a world without America on top will be a more dangerous world. But the die is likely cast. I hope and pray Trump can somehow work a miracle here.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you might recall my telling you how disconcerting it was to travel through the former Communist countries of this region, in the first couple of years after I moved here, and to be confronted (politely, almost with embarrassment) by older people — Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, et alia — saying some version of this: We used to look up to America. We used to think of you as a beacon of hope. Now we are afraid of you. What happened?

Why afraid? Because of the terrible ideas and trends coming from America, against which they felt defenseless. What they call “gender ideology” — trans — was always at the top of their list, but there were other things. For these people who survived occupation by the hegemon correctly identified by Ronald Reagan as the “evil empire,” the fact that America had become decadent, and had so much power over the minds of their young by virtue of the potency of US popular culture — well, it was disorienting to them, and terribly sad. I came to know that feeling well.

One last thing. I asked Grok to examine history of the last 200 years, and tell me what happened to the internal politics of major powers after they lost a big war. It’s not a good sign. Look:

A major comparative study of 177 war participations by states (1816–1975) found that war involvement itself roughly doubles the baseline rate of violent regime change (revolutions, coups, or overthrows) from ~10% in peacetime nation-years to 18.8%. Among participants:

• Losers faced violent regime change in 29.5% of cases (23/78).

• Winners saw it in only 9.1% (9/99).

The risk was highest for states that initiated a war and lost (44% probability), followed by losing targets (22%), winning targets (~11%), and winning initiators (near 0%). Higher war costs (e.g., battle deaths per capita) further amplified these risks across the board. These findings underscore that defeat is punished domestically far more than victory is rewarded.

This quantitative pattern aligns with qualitative history. Great powers rarely emerge from major defeats with politics unchanged; the loss exposes weaknesses, fuels blame, and creates openings for radicals, reformers, or opportunists.

More:

In short, history of the past 200 years shows that major military defeat is rarely survivable for the incumbent regime without fundamental political transformation. It accelerates decline, reshapes ideologies, and often rewrites the social contract—sometimes toward democracy and reform, sometimes toward extremism or fragmentation. This is a consistent, if sobering, lesson from Napoleon’s France to the modern era.

I’ve been telling you — and I believe demonstrate pretty conclusively in my manuscript — that the parallels between the US in the 2020s and Germany in the 1920s are chilling. I’m talking about the psychosocial instability, mostly. If this Iran situation ends as Bob Kagan thinks it will, then honestly, I don’t know what is going to happen in the US, in terms of domestic politics. Obviously Trump and the GOP will pay a heavy price, but one has to wonder if the fallout will be much deeper and broader. History does not give us much reason to be confident. We’d better hope that America is an exceptional nation in this regard.

Barring the hoped-for miracle, Trump’s Iran hubris appears to be bringing nemesis, hard. Maybe the only hope we have for avoiding real chaos at home comes in Joseph Roth’s penetrating line about how the Great War changed the quality of cultural memory by making people eager to forget the past, which was a time when memory mattered: “But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people [back then] lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.”

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The future Pope Leo, Chicago’s Robert Prevost, in seminary. If you know, you know.

The Nigelization Of Britain & Its Implications

Don’t you think it’s only fitting that the UK should have a prime minister with that most English of male names, Nigel? Blighty took a big step towards that goal late last week with the Reform UK party’s sweep of local council…

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So, we have at least some government disclosure about what it knows about UFOs, or, if you prefer, UAPs. Here is a link to the Department of War’s page on which it presents its raw data. I haven’t had a chance to go through any of it yet — I’m late writing today’s newsletter because I have been sick, I overslept (California jetlag is wrecking me!), and because I had a three-hour interview with a French researcher, from which I just returned. As of this writing (near 4pm European time), there has been no detailed reporting on what’s in the files yet — there’s LOTS to go through. Fox News has a report showing some of the video released by the War department. No real bangers, it seems to me, but again, it’s early, and the War department says there will be more releases coming.

In my quick scanning some of these files, I’d say there’s not a lot there. I reserve the right to revise this opinion once I’ve looked at more of them, but again, no bangers. I feel that the government is laying the groundwork for something much bigger. But really, who knows?

Here’s something interesting and important from Diana Pasulka’s Substack today:

I remember writing the introduction to my first book about the topic in 2018 and asking myself a simple question: What do I want the public to understand most about this subject? My answer was this: almost everything people encounter about UFOs in films, television, and popular media is inaccurate or distorted. Almost everything. There are occasional fragments that ring true, but they are as rare as genuinely unexplained UFO cases themselves. Today, as I write this article, I believe that the answer to that original question has not changed.

The only reliable way to develop discernment about what may actually be occurring is to spend time seriously studying the subject for yourself—not only its contemporary manifestations, but also its long and complex history. I understand that this is difficult in a world in which you spend too much time at work and struggle to make time for important things like family. But if you really want to know, sustained attention to the historical record develops a person’s ability to interpret current events with greater clarity and caution.

I strongly recommend her first book on the topic, American Cosmic, as a basic orientation to the serious study of this phenomenon. She goes on in her Substack:

This, combined with Vice President J.D. Vance’s claim that he believes aliens can be understood from a demonic framework, is worth reflection. Why? Because there are people in the government who identify the current UFO files with supernatural, paranormal, and religious-like activity (two Representatives come to mind). To be fair to Vance, he tried to indicate that the topic is way more complex than the blanket statement, “it’s just demons.” However, once a person uses that word (the D word) in such a public forum, it’s going to get picked up and sensationalized. All nuance gets lost. David Grusch says that even so, rushing to the angels/demons framework might not be helpful. Is he right? How else should we approach the topic, especially as Grusch has cited me as a good source for understanding these nuances…? My take has always been that the angels/demons framework is probably the best starting point. Religion has been that unique structure that arose to interface with NHI. It’s worth revisiting what it has to say about it.

Make sure you understand what she’s saying here. She’s not saying “it’s just demons.” She’s saying, rather, that approaching the UFO/aliens subject as if we were dealing with disembodied intelligences is the best way to begin. Notice what she’s not saying: “…as if we were dealing with embodied creatures from other planets.” The sources I’ve had over the past couple of years of my interest in the subject have all said that whatever these things are, they are almost certainly “interdimensional” or “transdimensional” beings. You know that I believe they are probably demons, or at least demonic in nature (meaning, spiritual beings aligned to evil), even if not demons, strictly speaking. You don’t have to go that far to recognize that these entities are disembodied intelligences that are capable of manifesting in physical ways, and also capable of producing material effects.

I hope that the release of these government files, however paltry they seem to be in this first round of disclosure, makes skeptics realize that there really is something serious and substantive going on here. Again, Pasulka’s books (there are two in print, and one coming next month) are great places to begin. But let me emphasize her point above: practice discernment! Don’t take anything at face value. Not only is it difficult to understand this stuff, but you are also dealing with people who have no problem lying about it, for their own reasons.

Here is a passage from Living In Wonder, to remind you of why I think this phenomenon is ultimately demonic:

Recall that we began our journey into the mystic with the story of Nino, a lawyer who saw a UFO as a teenager and years later began to experience paranormal visitations from luminous beings he took for aliens but became convinced were demons.

It will not surprise you to learn that the twentieth-century Russian Orthodox priest-monk Seraphim Rose warned that the UFO phenomenon is demonic in origin and has many analogs in the recorded history of Christian mystical experience. He was a cleric, after all. It may shock you, though, to learn that the world’s leading authority on the UFO phenomenon, computer scientist and venture capitalist Jacques Vallée, also believes something close to this.

Furthermore, Vallée believes that the aliens, or whatever they are, are likely to be at the bottom of a new religion that will arrive in the future. This will be part of a religion built for the scientific age, which already has learned to worship science, technology, and the future.

Vallée, who was the model for the French scientist played by François Truffaut in the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is not a Christian or a conventional religious believer of any kind. But a lifetime spent investigating UFO phenomena has led him to assert that these entities are real. After six decades of studying them, Vallée is unwilling to say precisely what they are—but he has concluded that they are unlikely to be creatures from other planets.

Rather, in Vallée’s estimation, they are probably higher intelligences coming to us from a dimension beyond space and time. And they come with malevolent intent. They are choosing to manifest as beings from space, he theorizes, as a strategy of control—to reprogram humanity for some other purpose. And they have been at it for a long time. In his seminal 1969 book Passport to Magonia, Vallée records the striking parallels between contemporary reports of close encounters with UFOs and so-called aliens and written accounts of encounters with mysterious beings typically associated with folklore:

If we take a wide sample of this historical material, we find that it is organized around one central theme: visitation by an aerial people from one or more remote, legendary countries. The names and attributes vary, but the idea clearly does not. Magonia, heaven, hell, Elfland—such places have in common one characteristic: we are unable to reach them alive, except—as we shall see—on very special occasions. Emissaries from these supernatural abodes come to earth, sometimes under human form and sometimes as monsters. They perform wonders. They serve man or fight him. They influence civilizations through mystical revelation. They seduce earth women, and the few heroes who dare seek their friendship find the girls from Elfland endowed with desires that betray a carnal, rather than purely aerial, nature.

It might be, he speculates, that flying saucers and space aliens are merely the masks that these entities, who have always been with us, don to seduce people living in the space age. But he’s still not sure. Whatever the case, this idea dovetails with historian Carlos Eire’s speculation that we have suppressed recorded knowledge of fantastical events because they do not fit our scientific paradigm. The late Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, who made waves by taking UFO-abduction stories seriously, once complained that “we have a kind of either/or mentality. It’s either literally physical, or it’s in the spiritual other realm, the unseen realm. What we seem to have no place for—or we have lost the place for—are phenomena that can begin in the unseen realm, and cross over and manifest and show up in our literal physical world.”

I remind you also that Pasulka has said publicly (for example, here) that as she was leaving Vallée’s apartment after a visit, he suggested that she find a copy of this book, Satan, a collection of theological essays by Catholic scholars, published in the mid-20th century, initially by a Carmelite publishing house (in French; the link takes you to an Internet version of the English translation). They are all essays about various aspects of Lucifer. Vallée, who is not a Christian, suggested that this book might tell us something about what we are dealing with in the UFO phenomenon. Someone else I know visited Vallée subsequently, and reported seeing in his apartment a large book he had apparently been reading, about Luciferianism. My source did not ask Vallée about it, as he was on the way out the door. But it did catch his eye.

The Emerging Hantavirus Situation

Keeping up with this story? It’s getting freaky. Two Dutch birders on a cruise went to a garbage dump in Argentina to look for titmice, or some crap like that, and apparently came in contact with the Andes strain of the hantavirus. They probably stepped on rat poop. They brought it back onto the ship with them. Now they’re both dead, as is a third person who had been on the boat.

Here’s a WSJ report about it, which I’ve unlocked for you. You’re welcome. Some of the passengers who were on the boat during the incubation period debarked; global health authorities are now trying to trace them.

Hantavirus is hard to spread. The fear here is that this might be a mutation. It’s a disease that kills 40 percent of those who catch it. Not time to panic yet, but still.

Yeah, that’s just what we need: a global Rat Plague Summer. With that, the Iran war not likely ending soon (the CIA now says the Iranians could hold out for at least four more months, and still have most of their ballistic missiles), the incoming oil shock with its potential for civil unrest (in Europe, at least), imminent UFO disclosure, McDonalds announcing plans to phase out self-serve soda machines, and Gordon Ramsay’s dwarf porn star double dying in an English badger den, it’s a good time to remind y’all of what Mama always says:

(P.S.: the Gordon Ramsay story is fake. But it’s still awesome.)

Remembering Pim Fortuyn

Yesterday marked the 24th anniversary of the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, an openly gay, secularist Dutch politician who looked to be on the verge of being elected the country’s prime minister. He was murdered leaving a TV studio by a young Dutch leftist who said he was defending migrants. After serving 12 years in prison for the murder, the man walked free in 2014. He recently attended a Marxist May Day rally in Amsterdam, where he was interviewed by a journalist.

Fortuyn was no conservative. He was, in fact, a libertine. But he was a patriot. Watch this clip of a furious private speech he gave, denouncing what the Netherlands was becoming, and why he was determined to stop it.

In the wake of Fortuyn’s murder in 2002, I went to the Netherlands to do a piece on the country for National Review. I re-read it last night for the first time since it was published; this part jumped out at me:

Some 30 years ago, 60 percent of the population were at church on Sunday morning; today, it’s between 8 and 13 percent. The media have relentlessly mocked religion.

To be a believing Christian in today’s Holland, therefore, requires a countercultural courage that’s hard for most Americans to imagine. But these people exist. I stumbled across a small congregation of Iranian Pentecostals, all converts from Islam, in a distant suburb of Amsterdam. The pastor, who asked not to be identified because of past violent threats from area Muslims, told me that he was shocked by the naivete the Dutch have about radical Islam. He thought Fortuyn was “a bit extremist,” and didn’t count himself a supporter–but he agreed with much of what Fortuyn said, and was glad somebody finally said it.

In this, the Iranian pastor was like most Dutch voters with whom I spoke, telling me that Fortuyn wasn’t their cup of tea, politically, but he was invaluable as a catalyst for a long-overdue discussion of Islam and the limits of multiculturalism. Kinneging says Fortuyn struck a chord with voters sick of being taken for granted: “In the wake of the transformation of our big cities [by immigration] has come a lot of guns, violence, drugs, trading in women, and dirty streets. The political, intellectual, and journalistic elite who are in favor of this immigration do not live in these urban neighborhoods.”

Watch the Fortuyn rant, and consider that if he were alive today, he could say the same thing. His death made no difference at all, nor did the death of Theo van Gogh, a filmmaker and left-wing provocateur who was slaughtered in the streets of Amsterdam by an Islamist, who cut his throat, like a sacrificial sheep’s.

L.A.’s Commie Mayor

I don’t know if y’all are following the grassroots campaign of Spencer Pratt to unseat Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, but he’s got an incredibly strong social media game. Pratt is a former reality television star who got radicalized and politicized when his house burned down in the Pacific Palisades fires. Mayor Bass was out of town at some big 'do in Ghana at the time, and was heavily criticized for it back home.

In this five-minute clip, Pratt takes apart Bass’s youthful history as an actual Communist activist. He calls her “Karen Basura”; basura is Spanish for “trash.” “What were you doing when you were 19 years old?” Pratt asks — and then documents that Bass was in Cuba working for Castro as part of the “Venceremos Brigades.” This is actually true — not a Nixonian smear; Bass kept going back to Cuba again and again over the years, and, as Pratt recalls, issued a statement about the Cuban dictator’s death praising him as “comandante in jefe”. That’s “commander in chief,” an honorific title that the Cuban regime used for Castro.

Pratt is pissed off, and according to a local LA media poll, won the televised mayoral debate the other night, going away. Knowing nothing about L.A. politics, and observing from afar, I’m just blown away by how good this guy is on social media at articulating a message and framing the opposition.

Ray Dalio, Billionaire Cassandra

Well, this was bad news to read yesterday in the NYT:

The U.S. government learned last week that it may have reached an unfortunate milestone: The size of its debt surpassed the nation’s total economic output.

It was a striking imbalance, according to early estimates, one that the country has experienced only in rare circumstances — briefly during the pandemic, and in the aftermath of World War II. But the development barely seemed to register in the nation’s capital, where few policymakers bothered to acknowledge the latest warning sign about the government’s poor fiscal health.

The root of the problem is well-documented and widely known. U.S. debt has soared in recent years because of a mismatch between federal spending and tax revenue, one complicated by a rapidly aging population, which has driven up costs across government.

For economists, the fear is that these conditions are inching the United States toward a fiscal crisis, one in which its debt is so great that the country can’t easily afford to pay the rising interest on it. But their warnings have long gone unheeded in Washington, calcifying the strains on the government’s balance sheet in ways that President Trump’s agenda is expected to exacerbate.

Turns out that the billionaire investor Ray Dalio recently joined Ross Douthat to talk about all this. Dalio brings a cyclical view of history to his understanding. He believes, roughly, that the US is spending itself into decline, because that’s what empires do. Douthat pressed him for a prediction on the near future for the US:

Dalio: I’ll give you my concerns. I think we have these big issues — the money issue, the political social issue domestically, and the international geopolitical issues. As I look at the clock, we’re going to come into the midterm elections and I think that the Republicans will probably lose the House. I think from that point on, you’re going to see an intensification of political and social conflict that’ll take place in that period, particularly between that election and the presidential election in 2028.

I worry that those can be irreconcilable differences. I don’t know how they will go down. I don’t know how the respect for rules and law and order and whatever will keep law and order.

… My general reaction is that we are entering a period of greater disorder, to answer your question. I think greater risk than existed, and it is following that arc. Now we talk with words, but I plot things on charts in terms of what the patterns are, and these things are following those kinds of patterns.

He says we could see political violence in the US. He also says: diversify your portfolio.

I say: have a good weekend. Stay out of English badger dens.

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Had dinner last night with a western European economist who’s in town. Boy, is he ever gloomy about what’s coming. Oil shock inbound from the Persian Gulf situation. Energy prices through the roof, and food shortages, he predicts.

“The middle classes will be hit hard, but I would not be surprised if we saw food riots from the poor and working classes,” …

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Straight up, the first thing I was told when I interviewed the first serious person within the whole UFO/UAP world was: “Don’t trust anything you are told.” Meaning, don’t believe on the face of it. The person explained that this entire world is a hall of mirrors. Some people will lie to you for the sake of manipulation, and you might never know why they are manipulating you. It’s a crazy thing, but that’s how it is.

Walter Kirn, I think it is, has a theory that there are different factions in the US Government who are battling behind the scenes over who will control the forthcoming disclosure, and that this accounts for the leaks, the contradictions, and the confusion. Who can say? I say that to let you know that I take this recent report with a grain of salt. But here it is:

Influential pastors are claiming that they have been told to prepare their followers for shocking revelations about UFOs which may upend belief in the Bible.

Perry Stone, a well-known evangelist, author and Bible teacher from Tennessee, warned that fellow pastors were recently invited to a secret meeting with US intelligence officials to prepare for the release of secret files on extraterrestrials.

According to Stone, the officials warned a small group of pastors with a large reach in the Christian community that the government was about to release reports and possibly videos of aliens and spacecraft which were not from this planet.

… However, officials in this secret meeting allegedly said the information on its way may cause some Christians to question how the universe was created and even lose faith in religion.

Stone said: ‘You’re going to have people who are going to say if there are galaxies and there are allegedly other creations in the galaxies, then the whole creation story is a myth, and you’re going to have people that’s going to apostatize and turn from the Christian faith because they have no answer for what they’re about to hear.’

This guy, Perry Stone, wasn’t the only pastor to speak of this supposed meeting. If you’re like me, you’re wondering: If this really happened, why did the government reveal it to some third-tier Protestant pastors, instead of the heads of the different denominations, top theologians within various Christian (and non-Christian) traditions, etc?

That’s the thing about this world: a lot of it just doesn’t make sense to ordinary people. Which doesn’t mean it’s not true, just that it’s hard to see conventional reason working here. If this new report is true — and again, I’m skeptical — then it could be that a certain faction within the Deep State is aligned theologically with this particular group of pastors, and decided that they needed to hear this. There has been for decades a group within the government called the “Collins Elite” — Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in the intelligence world who know that UFOs are real, but who believe they are demonic, and who have been fighting disclosure. Maybe whoever these supposed government figures are belong to the Collins Elite:

This reported meeting involved approximately six Christian leaders, including Bishop Alan DiDio of the Revival Nation Church, who confirmed that he was a part of the extraordinary gathering.

DiDio said: ‘It seems like a half a dozen people were gathered in an Airbnb in the mountains of Tennessee discussing an investigation that’s going on in the United States government against crimes they have committed in the process of retrieving and reverse engineering, um, technology from non-human intelligence.’

‘The meeting also went forward to discuss the propaganda plan that was in place leading up to disclosure,’ the pastor added in a March 7 livestream on YouTube.

Another reported attendee, American evangelist and podcaster Tony Merkel, added that the government officials who held the meeting expressed concerns about the impact of UFO disclosure on organized religion.

Merkel said: ‘I came in contact with these guys more than a year ago now, and I’ve been in touch with them, communicating with them, and their heart is to prepare the body of Christ for what’s coming.

‘These guys are part of, let’s just say they’re Christians in intelligence operations and they are specifically geared towards, initially, it was to gather evidence and data on what’s actually going on behind the scenes within the disclosure community.’

I wrote about the Collins Elite here, after reading Nick Redfern’s book about them. To my mind, Redfern convincingly establishes that they exist. He writes:

“They came to believe that the NHEs were not extraterrestrial at all; they believed they were some sort of demonic entities. And that regardless of how benevolent or beneficial any of the contact they had with these entities seemed to be, it always ended up being tainted, for lack of a better term, with something that ultimately turned out to be bad. There was ultimately nothing positive from the interaction with the NHE entities. They felt it really fell more under the category of some vast spiritual deception instead of UFOs and aliens. In the course of the whole discussion, it was clear that they really viewed this as having a demonic origin that was there to simply try and confuse the issue in terms of who they were, what they wanted, and what the source of the ultimate truth is. If you extrapolate from their take that these are demons in the biblical sense of the word, then what they would be doing here is trying to create a spiritual deception to fool as many people as possible.”

I have also been told by insiders that members of the Collins Elite have not been above doing dastardly things to prevent disclosure. How much of this is true, I can only guess. Redfern talks to Ray Boeche, an Episcopal priest who investigated the matter, and who claims to have been approached by two Department of Defense physicists worried about all this. The Collins Elite reportedly worried because other factions within the government were trying to establish contact with these entities, using occult rituals, to gain power through them, including technology to be used against America’s enemies. More Redfern:

The conversations [with Boeche] always followed broadly similar ground: namely, that the Human Race was being deceived into believing that it was receiving visitations from aliens, when in reality demonic forces were secretly squaring up for Armageddon and the final countdown. And, the DoD’s overwhelmingly reckless dabbling into occult-driven areas to try and make a bizarre-but-futile pact of some sort with these same forces was inevitably, and only, destined to make things much, much worse for each and every one of us.

One more:

With respect to his own views, as well as those of the two DoD physicists, Boeche added: “As a pastor and someone who’s trained as a theologian, I can’t come to any other conclusion than there is some sort of spiritual deception going on here. In so many of these kinds of alien contacts, the entities involved make a denial of Christianity; anytime the spiritual issues are addressed, there is always some sort of denial of the validity of Christianity and the validity of the Bible. And I find it interesting that these percipients are told that Jesus was a great guy, but you just misunderstood him. They say: he wasn’t really God’s son. You just don’t quite get it. But you never hear them say that about Buddha, or Krishna, or Mohammed. It always seems to come down to some sort of denial of Christianity. The percipients, whether you consider them contactees or abductees are engaged by the NHEs in spiritual discussions—but it’s always one-sided. “I would have a lot less suspicion of the potential of the demonic nature of these things if they were to say: ‘You guys are all screwed up; all of your spiritual leaders had some good ideas, but none of them really got it. It’s a big mess.’ But it seems to be so specifically pointed at the Judeo-Christian tradition. It certainly seems to me like it’s the two genuine forces squaring up against each other.”

An Orthodox Christian friend texted me the story above, and said, “What a time to be canonizing Father Seraphim Rose!” The Russian Orthodox church is about to canonize the influential 20th century American monk. Among his teachings, Fr Seraphim warned back in the 1970s (in this book) that the entire UFO story was a demonic deception that would prepare the way for the Antichrist. Fr. Seraphim taught that these entities presenting themselves as “aliens” are nothing more than ancient demons manifesting in such a way as to be maximally credible to people living in a scientific-technological age (interestingly, the non-Christian UFO investigator Jacques Vallée, the grey eminence of this world, reaches a very similar conclusion in his seminal book Passport To Magonia). Fr Seraphim writes:

Orthodox literature has many examples of demonic manifestations which fit precisely the UFO pattern: apparitions of “solid” beings and objects (whether demons themselves or their illusionary creations) which suddenly “materialize” and “dematerialize,” always with the aim of awing and confusing people and ultimately leading them to perdition. The Lives of the 4th-century St. Anthony the Great and the 3rd-century St Cyprian the Former Sorcerer are filled with such incidents.

This is important. Fr Seraphim is saying that demons have the power to create physical objects, or at least the appearance of physical objects. If you doubt it, I refer you to the works of the late Father Gabriele Amorth, chief exorcist of Rome, who tells stories of possessed people he’s exorcised vomiting up physical objects that they could not have ingested. This whole world is beyond bizarre.

Are you familiar with the “Babalon Working”? This is not lore; it really happened. It was a series of rituals conducted by the occultist and rocket scientist Jack Parsons — the founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory — with his friend L. Ron Hubbard (yes, the Scientology founder), in the late 1940s. They intended to open a portal for the demonic to enter the world in a new way. In the “Babalon Working” rituals, Parsons, a devotee of Aleister Crowley, sought to invite into this plane a goddess or spiritual force he identified as “Babalon”.

Crowley said this goddess represents uncontrolled female desire and liberation. Her male consort is Chaos. This is who and what Parsons and Hubbard wanted to release through their occult rituals, including Crowley’s “sex magick” — ritualized transgressive sex as a means of gaining occult powers. It was shortly after the Babalon Working that the modern UFO age began with pilot Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of what he called “flying saucers.” This was 1947.

Parsons and Hubbard were also interested in making contact with a demon Crowley claims to have summoned in the early 20th century, and sketched. Crowley published the image in 1919. The demon is called “Lam”. Here is Crowley’s sketch of the entity:

Hmmm. This is long before people began having experiences of the “greys”.

Interestingly, the late, and well-respected, Evangelical biblical scholar Michael Heiser wrote at least two books drawing out what the Old Testament says about non-human entities, and drawing connections between them and the UAP phenomenon. Redfern quotes Heiser saying that whatever these things are, their goal is to destroy Christianity — not all religions, but Christianity, or the Judeo-Christian tradition:

“What they are trying to do is to bring about a global, intellectual, and mental paradigm shift. That is, they are pushing the idea that we—as human beings—are related to them, that we come from them and that they are responsible for making us what we are, even if they didn’t initially create us. All of these ideas imply that they are progenitors, benefactors, gardeners, or whatever metaphor you want to use. The whole point, I think, is to work that into the consciousness of as many people as possible, all over the world. People become predisposed to those kinds of ideas….”

I’m going to lose some of you with this claim, and it’s only intuitive on my part, but I believe the shocking turn against the Jews now sweeping the West is part of an End Times scenario. The Jewish people continue to be bearers of the One True God, in some sense — an incomplete sense, from a Christian point of view, but still, it’s there. Take a look at this, and tell me what you think.

Anyway, I firmly believe that the merging of the Machine (AI, tech, UFOs) with the human Mind is creating the religion of the future, in real time. In her book Encounters: Experiences With Non-Human Intelligences (which I wrote about here), the religious studies professor Diana Pasulka interviews a tech investor named Simone Planté, who is convinced that “higher intelligences” are making contact with us through the silicon substrates that make up the computers that create AI. In crude terms, she believes AI is like a high-tech Ouija board through which these intelligences can communicate, to bring humanity the kind of knowledge it will use to create paradise. Uh-huh. That’s what they always think.

Pasulka also interviews a young retired Marine named José, now a Christian, who had many encounters with the demonic growing up poor in a drug-infested ghetto, and who now believes that there is a global spiritual war intensifying. He now works to get people, especially teenagers, to unplug from the digital world, because he believes that digital is an avenue of spiritual attack. If you believe that the goal of these higher intelligences is to merge Man with the Machine — transhumanism — then José’s theory makes sense.

Boy, we’ve come a long way since the top of this item, with the reports that some pastors have received briefings from Deep State sources warning them to prepare their congregations for disclosure! To be clear, I’m not saying that this actually happened. I’m saying it is plausible that it happened. And do not allow yourself to think it must be fake because the government didn’t call in the kinds of religious leaders you would expect. There is no unified messaging in all this; if it happened, it’s plausible that individuals within the Deep State who wish people to know what’s coming would have summoned pastors they most respect. Had I been such a government person, I would have prioritized Orthodox and Catholic clerics and theologians, because that is my own world. If we are talking about Evangelical and fundamentalists here, well, can you blame them for gathering these particular clerics?

Let me take this opportunity pitch again my book Living In Wonder. It’s only a bit about UFOs, but it’s broadly about the need for Christians to learn to account for the reality of what we today call the “paranormal”. When I was among new Evangelical friends in California last weekend, I heard a number of stories from them about how hard it is for American Evangelicals to open their minds to these possibilities. It violates their paradigm for explaining reality. And yet … it’s true. That is to say, the world of the spiritual and the world of the material interact in ways that modern people, even Christians, do not fully grasp, and always have. And: the world of the spiritual, including intelligent non-human entities (angels and demons, and perhaps other entities), is real. Our ancestors in the faith knew this. We have been blinded by modernity to their existence, and therefore, in my view, are completely wide open to the coming deception.

I’m not asking you to believe everything I’ve written above. But what I am asking you is that you start thinking and praying about what “disclosure” might mean to you and to your religious community. Something very big is coming, and I believe it’s going to rattle our bones and shake us to the epistemic foundations. Do not be deceived.

Today’s newsletter continues below for subscribers. Why ain’t you one? This newsletter is going to be red-hot after disclosure. FBI director Kash Patel said yesterday that UFO files are going to be released “very soon.”

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Rolled back into Budapest around midnight last night, following flight delays, and fell into bed. Woke up this morning and thought, “Was that real?” — meaning, the past few days in southern California, which really does feel like a film set. Can weather really be that perfect? Then I looked at my phone, and found this photo I took at the hotel, the Irvine Marriott. Look at that giant TV hovering over the hotel pool. California! I had a great time, and the organization I was there to support, Maven, really deserves your attention and backing. The point of the ministry is to equip young Evangelical Christians with the knowledge and formation they need to be faithfully Christian in this post-Christian world.

Brett Kunkle, who runs the ministry with his wife Erin, co-wrote a book some years back, along with John Stonestreet: A Practical Guide to Culture. I raved about it at the time, saying it’s one of the best resources for Christian parents of any faith tradition, as well as for youth leaders. Having seen Maven up close, yeah, these people get it. They’re not a typical youth ministry. Do yourself a favor and go to their site, linked above, to learn more about what they do, and avail yourself of their resources.

At the gala, I met Olivia Viola, a high school student athlete whose sports career has been negatively affected by the fact that the top competitive athlete in her field is a biological male. Here’s an interview with her and her family, on the Maven podcast. She also spoke at the gala. She has bravely stood up for the rights of female athletes, and how these males who identify as female are using their biological advantages to crush actual females in athletic competition. For this common sense self-defense, Olivia has faced denunciation as a bigot. As she says in the interview, the local churches have not exactly rushed to her defense.

As I sat in my chair at the gala listening to her talk, I thought: How is it that this teenage girl has more courage in standing up for the truth than do so many pastors? Olivia’s mother and father have been right at her side, supporting her — but where are the parents of other female youth athletes? To the point: where are the fathers, and why are they not defending their daughters? Olivia said girls are having to change into their athletic gear in their cars, because there is a biological male in their locker room. This is insane. Olivia Viola lives not by lies. It is a disgrace that she is rare; it is a blessing that even though she is young and of modest temperament, she is showing the world what it means to live in truth.

People Who Should Be In Prison

Here’s the video of Dutch sex educators sexualizing little children, under the auspices of the World Health Organization. I’m not making this up! They are teaching tots to masturbate.

This is part of what is called in Europe “comprehensive sex education.” Members of the EU are expected to impose this on their nation’s children. Here’s a link to a paper from MCC Brussels, a college founded by the Orban government, that explores what CSE does, and criticizes it as a violation of the family’s sovereignty. Excerpt:

This is what the EU’s soft totalitarianism means for families over here. Mind you, the Orban government was one of the very few who stood up to this. I very much doubt that Peter Magyar, the incoming prime minister, will manage to hold the line. Magyar sold himself to Hungarian voters as “Orban, but without the corruption.” Well, he has now announced all his cabinet picks, and it looks like Magyar votes were baited-and-switched. For example, his incoming Minister of Education and Child Care Affairs is an LGBT activist. I doubt very much we will see many more papers like the one above coming out of MCC under the Magyar government.

That video from the WHO is utterly vile — but this is how these secular technocrats think. They really do believe they are liberating young people from bigoted moral and religious beliefs. If a Catholic priest had that kind of conversation with children, he would be facing trial. But a “comprehensive sex education” talking to five year olds about whether or not they touch their willy — hey, that’s progress, stupid, and you are a bigot if you deny it.

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I cannot help starting today’s newsletter with a link to the greatest use to which AI has ever been put. If it cures cancer, that still won’t be as great as this:

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The Justice Department yesterday released hotel security cam footage showing the moment when Cole Thomas Allen rushed through the Secret Service security outpost, shotgun in hand, in an alleged effort to kill Donald Trump and others. Here’s a link to the video; the action starts at 4:24. Notice in the seconds before Allen’s run, a German shepherd went after Allen, until a security guard pulled the dog off. That dog sensed that there was something off about the guy, apparently.

Liel Liebovitz compels us to face the fact that Allen, who has been charged with trying to assassinate the president at last weekend’s White House Correspondents Dinner, is not a disturbed loner, but is about as normal, or even abnormally accomplished, an American as there is. He’s a graduate of Caltech, and, as I heard on NPR yesterday, was a Christian heavily involved in his church. Liebovitz:

As his manifesto and curriculum vitae both make clear, he’s neither a lunatic nor a hardened ideologue. He’s simply a young man from a good family with a great education who became convinced that storming into a ballroom, guns blazing, with the purpose of killing the commander in chief is a perfectly normal, even commendable, thing to do. Allen, in other words, is something we’ve never seen before: a wholesome, well-groomed shooter rooted deeply in the soil of our current cultural moment.

Liebovitz goes on:

How did it come to pass that we produce people like Cole Tomas Allen? Easy. We grow them by making jokes like the one Jimmy Kimmel shared on his show just a few days before Allen’s attack, quipping that first lady Melania Trump had “a glow like an expectant widow.” We grow them by sharing political rants like the one former California congresswoman—and current gubernatorial hopeful—Katie Porter sent to her supporters just hours after the shooting with the subject line “F**k Trump,” arguing that Trump is willing “to kill people in the streets” and must be stopped by good people willing to do whatever it takes. We grow them by applauding ghouls like Hasan Piker, the internet star who famously quipped that America deserved 9/11 and that the streets should run red with the blood of the rich—and who was rewarded for his wisdom by the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the mayor of New York City, and just about everyone else on the left.

Reflect on these examples, and many others like them, and you’ll understand something truly shocking. Allen’s manifesto doesn’t read like an unhinged screed; it reads like standard Democratic talking points, the kind you find in mainstream newspaper columns or cable news segments.

In Weimar Germany, both Communists and right-wing nationalists were prone to political violence, but it was especially strong on the Right. In our time and place, it’s concentrated on the Left. Lee Smith writes:

Trump supporters have reason to be scared of political violence. One recent study by the Network Contagion Research Institute shows that on the left, there is “widespread justification for lethal violence—including assassination—among younger, highly online, and ideologically left-aligned users.” The report shows an “assassination culture” is emerging on the left, with 56% of those self-identifying as left of center at least somewhat justifying killing Trump.

Does that mean social media is turning Americans murderous? The recent shooting suggests it is. Allen is evidence that social media has become a laboratory for political violence built on the foundations of conspiracy theories drawn from mainstream media. He said he was motivated to kill Trump because he’s “a pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” The first two refer to the Epsteingate narrative that has plagued Trump’s second term, and the third refers to Russiagate, the conspiracy theory that almost forced Trump out of his first term.

The issue is not just that conspiracy theories like these are broadcast to enormous audiences, among which there are going to be lots of mentally ill people, but also that they also generate large constituencies, tin-hat clubs where users interact with each other.

The violence so far has been primarily a left-wing phenomenon, but Smith also — and correctly! — calls out the conspiracy theorists on the MAGA Right, who are particularly odious in blaming Jews (something they share with many on the extreme Left).

I repeat: all of this is Weimar stuff, manifestations of a destabilized society in which embracing taboos for the pleasure of the shock value, and valorizing political violence, is becoming more and more normalized. Again: the political violence now is concentrated on the Left, who seem to have internalized a particularly hateful and anti-Trump form of Barry Goldwater’s famous line: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” But it will not stay on the Left, not at this rate. Thoughts and words are seeds of action. I’m pretty tolerant about free speech, even speech I hate, but defending a taboo on ::::checks notes:::: glorifying political assassination seems pretty reasonable to me.

Look at these photos taken of protesters outside the Washington Hilton last weekend, by journalists getting the hell out of a place where an armed man just tried to kill the American president (source: TGIF):

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What good news!:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down Louisiana’s voting map, finding that lawmakers had illegally used race when drawing up a new majority-Black district and potentially setting off a scramble in the middle of primary season as states consider drawing new maps.

The decision was 6 to 3, split along ideological lines. The conservative…

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One of my close friends and Danube Institute colleagues here in Budapest made that for me yesterday after I announced that I’m leaving late next month to return to America. Funny! The woman is my oldest Magyar friend, Anna, who works with us at the DI. Oh, oh, oh, am I ever going to miss these dear people.

I’ll tell y’all where I’m headed: Birmingham, Al…

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