Luxury Beliefs & The Defense Of The West

'Safeguarding our diverse populations' is NATO's mission? Really?

You might remember me catching some flak last year for saying that the West was going to war with Russia to queer the Donbass. I was joking, of course. Turns out I was more right than I knew. The NATO Secretary-General had this to say on the High Holy International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia, coming just before Woke Ramadan (also known as “June”):

It’s less than two minutes, but if you don’t want to watch, this NATO tweet sums up the message:

“Diversity is our strength” — does anybody who is not part of the Human Resources clerisy really believe that? Here we have the head of NATO saying that the reason the alliance is so strong is because it embraces queerness. Has any military alliance in the history of the world ever made such an absurd claim? I mean, look, even if you think it’s a good thing that NATO armies are all in on LGBT, what kind of woke crackhead do you have to be to actually assert that this is the source of our military strength?

What Sec-Gen Jens Stoltenberg and his elite leadership class do here is say that affirming queerness is what characterizes the West. They’re not talking about religious diversity, heaven knows, or political diversity. It’s all about queerness, and secondarily, about race. The leaders of the West are doing their very best to confirm what the West’s enemies believe it to be.

Harpy Daniels, the Navy drag queen (see below), wasn’t an aberration, but the fulfillment of policy that apparently extends beyond the US armed forces.

As has been alarmingly confirmed by official sources, the US military is struggling to meet its recruitment goals. It is true that the younger generations are more socially liberal than older ones. But queering the armed forces to the extent that the NATO Secretary-General feels obliged to recite the woke shahadah on one more invented-just-yesterday sexual-minority holiday — is that really going to inspire young people to sign up?

More to the point, here we have the top civilian leader of the most militarily potent alliance in world history declaring that the point of the alliance is not just defending its territories, but “safeguarding our diverse populations”. What on earth does that mean? It’s important to tease this logic out. Defending our territory would imply defending everyone within its borders, would it not? That includes queer people. Is Stoltenberg simply clarifying what that means, or is he saying that NATO’s job is to defend sexual minorities everywhere?

It’s not a trite question. In a 2021 executive order, President Joe Biden ordered the US to make a priority of promoting LGBT rights internationally, including considering using sanctions and other means to punish nations who don’t agree with the rapidly-evolving Western elite view of sexual orientiation and gender identity (SOGI). It could not possibly be clearer that the government of the US, the leading NATO nation, believes in exercising soft power to compel the rest of the world to conform to American standards around SOGI. Is it really so hard to imagine that the US and NATO are evolving to the point of construing the deployment of hard power in the service of expanding LGBT interests?

Last year, the liberal Boston Review slammed Vladimir Putin for sexualizing the Ukraine war, writing:

As militarization unfolds, establishment, masculinist national security expertise tends to be privileged as the only rational and objective way of explaining the world; other perspectives, including feminist security analysis, are dismissed as naïve, idealistic, and out of touch with reality. As Putin’s speech hints, however, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—and its security policies more broadly—cannot be understood in isolation from the politics of gender and sexuality. The reality is that the Kremlin has constructed a pernicious ideology of homophobia as geopolitics, and in official Russian rhetoric the war in Ukraine is framed as the continuation of this politics by other means.

But NATO is doing the same thing! That is, NATO is militarizing the politics of gender and sexuality, and turning it against Russia. As usual with American-led initiatives, it’s good when we do it, but dirty pool when they do it.

(By the way, last week Stoltenberg sat down for an interview with the Washington Post’s editorial board, and said that every NATO member wanted Ukraine to join — even Hungary and Turkey? — and bizarrely insisted that NATO is not a party to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Diversity might be NATO’s strength, but truth-telling is not.)

Twenty years ago, had a radical imam in the Middle East said that the West’s core value was promoting queerness, we would have rolled our eyes and sent a drone to blow him up. But now, the NATO Secretary-General confirms it. Draw your own conclusions. What are we to make of the fact that the NATO leader here pretty much confirms the Putin regime’s anti-Western propaganda?!

It’s worth listening to this brief portion of a 2017 talk that the sexual radical Camille Paglia gave, in which she warned that transgenderism is historically a sign of a civilization’s final phase before dissolution:

And once again, let me refer you to this passage from the 1948 book Family And Civilization, by Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman, a work of historical sociology that charts the connection between changing family forms and civilizational decline. Here are the social factors that led to the fall of the Greek and Roman Empires, said Zimmerman:

The decay of the mores of the upper-class families; the rise of sexual abnormalities; the increasing refusal of women to be sedate in an unsedate world; the emergence of purely romantic conceptions of love, which finally became dominant; the decline in the seriousness with which adultery is considered; the purely formal adhesion to the moral code; the increased popularity and frequency of absolute divorce and separation; the rise of celibacy and aggravated birth control; the displacement of the older populations, at first near the cities, later in the further hinterlands; the replacement of the native populations by immigrants, slaves, and non-natives; the development of an antagonism to which the whole system of values upon which the society formerly operated; the enlargement of the class struggle; and finally, positive social antagonism to the old domestic family system and the family among the whole masses of people.

I’m reading now the manuscript of a memoir by Rob Henderson, a rising scholar, a book that will be published early next year. I know that I’m not permitted to quote it yet, but this piece Henderson did for the New York Post captures the gist of the book. Henderson, a social psychologist, is highly accomplished, but I had no idea until I picked this book up how hard his young life had been. The book is more or less a California Hillbilly Elegy. The deeper I go into Henderson’s story, the more I realize the how the deconstruction of normal society by elites has been utterly devastating to the poor. He is best known for the concept he terms “luxury beliefs”: ideals held and promoted by society’s wealthy, typically as a form of virtue signaling, which end up hurting people who have fewer resources and advantages. Here’s a link to a podcast interview he did with Bari Weiss about the concept.

Henderson explains the concept of “luxury beliefs” in this op-ed from the NYPost. Excerpts:

We feel pressure to display our status in new ways. This is why fashionable clothing always changes. But as trendy clothes and other products become more accessible and affordable, there is increasingly less status attached to luxury goods.

The upper classes have found a clever solution to this problem: luxury beliefs. These are ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.

One example of luxury belief is that all family structures are equal. This is not true. Evidence is clear that families with two married parents are the most beneficial for young children. And yet, affluent, educated people raised by two married parents are more likely than others to believe monogamy is outdated, marriage is a sham or that all families are the same.

Relaxed attitudes about marriage trickle down to the working class and the poor. In the 1960s, marriage rates between upper-class and lower-class Americans were nearly identical. But during this time, affluent Americans loosened social norms, expressing skepticism about marriage and monogamy.

This luxury belief contributed to the erosion of the family. Today, the marriage rates of affluent Americans are nearly the same as they were in the 1960s. But working-class people are far less likely to get married. Furthermore, out-of-wedlock birthrates are more than 10 times higher than they were in 1960, mostly among the poor and working class. Affluent people seldom have kids out of wedlock but are more likely than others to express the luxury belief that doing so is of no consequence.

Henderson grew up very poor, passed around in foster care in Los Angeles. The life he writes about that he and other kids in foster care had will bring you to tears. Being adopted into a family helped somewhat, but he was surrounded by kids who were being jerked up by abusive or otherwise uncaring parents. His own adopted family, working class people, split up via divorce, and his mother came out as a lesbian. Henderson writes with affection about his mother’s partner, who helped raise him. But he would be the first to say that that in no way means that the natural family is a harmful norm, one best discarded by society for the sake of justice.

I will say more about Henderson’s memoir when we get closer to publication next year. It’s not fair to talk too much about it so far out. I will say, though, that this is another blockbuster memoir by a young man who found success in life, thanks to the discipline given to him by a stint in the US armed forces, and who went on to master elite educational institutions (Yale Law for Sen. J.D. Vance; Yale and Cambridge for Henderson), and who has a strong message for those same elites.

I met Henderson last week when he was in Budapest. He told me that all, or nearly all, of the boys he grew up getting into trouble with are either dead or in prison. I told him the story related by the Rev. Chloe Breyer, a progressive Episcopal cleric, about her seminary experience in New York City. Breyer talked about leading a Bible study for inmates in the prison ward of Bellevue Hospital. I wrote about it in a 2001 review of Breyer’s memoir:

[Breyer] decides to set up a Bible study for a group of Bellevue patients who are in from Rikers Island, the notorious city prison. She plays a video segment from the Bill Moyers series Genesis. The inmates see Bible scholars agreeing that Genesis gives us plenty of questions, but few answers. Her students don’t get it.

“They’re supposed to be experts, right?” says Tyrone. “So then why are they giving us all this stuff about not having any answers? I mean, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. not to have answers! And if they don’t have any answers, then who does?”

Others chime in with contempt for the equivocating liberal scholars Breyer so admires. Finally, a Muslim convert speaks up. “See, this is what I’m telling you, man. The Koran is the place to go for answers! . . . I became a Muslim because the Koran has the most truth in it. You don’t argue about what it means. You read it, and you know what to do. The Prophet got the word directly from God.”

“Is that right?” asks Tyrone. “Is that how it is? The Koran has more answers than the Bible?” Undeterred, and unable to grasp the significance of the moment, Breyer sets out to teach these poor sinners that the Bible doesn’t have to be taken literally. There are lots of gray areas, she tells them, and they should feel empowered by the fact that they can interpret Scripture any way they like. The inmates are unmoved.

“They want answers, not questions,” Breyer writes. “[T]he more contradictions I point out in the Bible, the more the inmates decide there is no point in wasting their time with a religion that lacks answers.”

Smart cookies, those crooks, who intuitively grasp the worthlessness of Breyer’s baptized sophistries to their broken lives.

“Luxury beliefs” describes Breyer’s liberal Christianity. Another luxury belief: the NATO Secretary-General claiming that “diversity is our strength.” As a matter of fact, the political scientist Eric Kaufmann points out that despite what white liberals say about desiring diverse neighborhoods, they are more likely to flee ethnically diverse ones for homogeneity than are conservatives.

At some point, the Gods of the Copybook Headings are going to return, and the West will learn in a painful way that diversity is not our war-making strength, and that when our technological and industrial advantage runs out, the only real strength we have is what has been at the core of all martial prowess: heroic masculinity. Paglia, who is gay, warned in one of her 1990s essays that gays had better be very careful about destroying the pillars of complex culture (e.g., religion), because it is only in advanced cultures that homosexuals can thrive — not in the brutality that follows the demise of advanced civilization. In her 2017 talk, Paglia says she fears what is to come after this period of sexual and cultural decadence plays out. The “heroic masculine” backlash could easily be severe and incredibly destructive. After all, who, and what, came after Weimar Germany?

Paglia — who calls herself “transgender” — describes cultures that mainstream queerness as ones “that no longer believe in themselves.” Well, let me ask you readers: do you believe in this culture? Would you be willing to kill or die for the sake of defending sexual diversity, as the NATO Secretary-General seems to think is at the core of what it means to be Western today? That’s what it ultimately comes down to. No matter what the diversity consultants say, war-making is not an HR exercise.

Disney’s Billion-Dollar Punch In DeSantis’s Face

The Walt Disney Company just landed a roundhouse blow on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s chin by cancelling a planned $1 billion relocation of some of its business to Orlando. This is not good for Florida, of course, but it’s important to keep perspective. This is the price free peoples are going to have to pay for standing up to Woke Capitalism. If you don’t want major corporations like Walt Disney deciding social policy — in particular telling you that you have to allow your kids to learn in kindergarten that they might be genderqueer — then you have to be willing to take the economic consequences of those woke corporations punishing you. Stand firm, Florida! There’s an important principle at stake here. Show that you cannot be bought.