Public Life, Private Life

And: Open Borders & Terrorism; Liberals & Migration; Ignatian Customer Service

Justice Samuel Alito (left) and Chief Justice John Roberts

Not long ago, I mentioned in this space that some of my conservative friends who have a public profile will not go to a dinner party or social event where liberals are present, if they can help it. This is not because they don’t want to socialize with liberals. It’s because they are afraid someone on the Left will record their conversation and distribute them on social media in an effort to embarrass them. Who wants to have to go to a party where you have to weigh your every word? Who wants to live in a world where even parties are weaponized to serve The Cause?

It just happened to Supreme Court justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Excerpts:

A left-wing activist on Monday released secret recordings of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts, discussing a range of politically sensitive topics.

In conversation with the activist, who represented herself as a religious conservative and did not disclose in the recordings she released that she was producing them and would make them public, Justice Alito endorses her suggestion that “people in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that – to return our country to a place of Godliness.” “Well, I agree with you, I agree with you,” Alito says.

At another point, the activist represents herself as a devout Catholic, telling the justice, “I don’t know that we can negotiate with the left in the way that, like, needs to happen for the polarization to end. I think that it’s a matter of, like, winning.”

“I think you’re probably right,” Alito responds. “On one side or the other — one side or the other is going to win. I don’t know. I mean, there can be a way of working,  a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So, it’s not like you are going to split the difference.” 

The recordings were made by Lauren Windsor, a self-described documentary filmmaker who said she made the recordings during a dinner hosted by the Supreme Court Historical Society last week. The subjects appear to be unaware that they were being recorded by Windsor, who called the clips “undercover audio” on X.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong at all with what Alito said, though many on the Left are flipping out. In fact, he’s telling the truth. This, for example, is why so many churches are splitting over homosexuality. If homosexuality is morally neutral or morally good, then it is unjust for a church to regard the condition of being homosexual as sinful. If Scripture is correct and it is sinful, then it cannot be normalized. There is no halfway point on the question. Both pro-LGBT activists and defenders of tradition within the churches are correct.

So Alito wasn’t wrong. What’s wrong is what this Windsor woman did: misrepresented herself in an attempt to bait these Justices into saying something she could weaponize on social media.

To be fair, the right-wing activists of Project Veritas have famously done the same kind of thing. I’ve praised it before, but on reflection, I regret that. It is a bad thing to turn even private life into an ideological battleground. When activists of either Left or Right go picket outside a public figure’s house, they claim that their cause (pro-life, gay rights, whatever) is so morally urgent that it justifies violating the unwritten taboo that separates public from private. Both sides do it, and it’s wrong. They’re making life together impossible.

Project Veritas has landed some excellent scoops with its undercover activism, and has exposed some bad actors, for sure. Yet I have come to believe the price for doing so is too high. If we lose the ability to socialize with each other out of fear that the stranger we have just met might not be who he or she claims to be, and that they might be leading us into a trap, then we have lost something fundamental to civilized life, haven’t we?

Related: as many of you know, back in 2002, I knew for a fact that Cardinal Ted McCarrick was a serial molester of seminarians (at least). Yet I could not report that, because the people who told me did so in confidence. Believe me, as a furious Catholic at the time, I wanted to blow the lid off of that pervert’s case. But there is a reason it’s important to observe professional ethics. For one, you might get sued, though I didn’t fear that in this case.

Relatedly, there was always the chance, however small, that the whistleblowers were either trying to destroy McCarrick’s reputation, or had the facts wrong. I didn’t think so in this specific case, because a McCarrick ally had more or less admitted the cardinal’s deeds in a phone call trying to get me off the story. But as a matter of prudence, you have to be aware of this. I was recently involved in a situation in which a source believed he was telling me the truth, but he innocently omitted facts that substantially changed the story.

Finally, there is the matter of one’s professional credibility. Journalists have to depend on people telling them things in confidence. If you get the reputation of burning confidential sources, your career is over, and it should be over. There are lots of things I believe are true, but that I’ve never been able to report, because I can’t burn a source. Unless it’s a matter of, I dunno, stopping a violent crime before it happens, you have to maintain confidentiality. It is sometimes the case that a journalist can convince a skittish source to go public.

Back in the early 2000s, I tried unsuccessfully to get those clerics and laymen who knew the truth about McCarrick either to go on the record with their accusations, and/or to provide me with documents. If you’re going to make those kind of accusations against anybody, especially a Catholic cardinal, you’d better be prepared to back them up — either with your reputation, or with documents. There is always the possibility that the accused is innocent, and that the journalist is being used in a plot to destroy the reputation of a public person. Again, I was morally certain that this was not the case in the McCarrick affair … but then, we journalists are also subject to confirmation bias.

Consider: in March 2002, Father Richard John Neuhaus deployed his considerable rhetorical skills in the defense of Father Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ religious order. In First Things that month, Neuhaus thundered against those who accused Maciel of sexual molestation, and wrote:

I am not neutral about the Legionaries. I have spent time with Fr. Maciel, and he impresses me as a man who combines uncomplicated faith, gentle kindness, military self–discipline, and a relentless determination to do what he believes God has called him to do. They are the qualities one would expect of someone who at age twenty–one in Mexico vowed to do something great for Christ and his Church, and has been allowed to do it. In the language of the tradition, they are qualities associated with holiness; in his case a virile holiness of tenacious resolve that has been refined in the fires of frequent opposition and misunderstanding.

… I can only say why, after a scrupulous examination of the claims and counterclaims, I have arrived at moral certainty that the charges are false and malicious.

But they were true. They were spectacularly true. Things with Maciel were even worse than people suspected; he had a secret family with a woman, and sexually abused his own children. Just a few years later, Maciel was defrocked, and died in disgrace. He reportedly refused to confess his sins at the very end of his life, when he was confronted by other priests of the order. He was an almost demonically corrupt man, and, as it turned out, the Vatican had known for sixty years that he was a problem.

Father Neuhaus was a brilliant man, and one of the brightest conservative lights in the US Catholic Church. The fact that he declared his “moral certainty” that Maciel was not guilty of the charges carried a lot of weight. At the same time Neuhaus was making that declaration, agents of the Legionaries were pressing me to write something similar in National Review, where I worked at the time. I resisted, not only because I trusted the journalist Jason Berry, who was doing the best critical reporting on Maciel, but also because I had been shocked into not trusting Catholic authorities, or at least not in giving them the benefit of the doubt on sex abuse matters.

In this period — Spring 2002 — Neuhaus was extremely ticked off at me for this. He phoned me at least twice to admonish me for my critical reporting. In one instance, having to do with the Society of St. John, a small neo-traditionalist order that turned out to be something like a gay cult, I wrote a piece for National Review Online detailing the formal allegations of sex abuse made against the order, which was in the Diocese of Scranton. I included the local bishop’s defense of the order in a telephone interview with me.

On the day the story appeared, Neuhaus called me enraged that I had written it. I told him that I had quoted both sides — meaning, I had given Bishop Timlin a chance to defend himself and the order. That wasn’t enough for Neuhaus. He told me that after Timlin told me there was nothing to the story, that should have settled the matter.

"Father Neuhaus," I said. "Why should I believe Bishop Timlin?" Mind you, this was well after all the episcopal lies in Boston had been revealed, and not only in Boston.

Neuhaus literally yelled at me: "Because he's a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church!"

Several years later, the sex abuse lawsuit against the Society and the Diocese of Scranton was settled and the new bishop suppressed the Society. Timlin was shown to have been not credible, to put it with undue charity.

I bring this up not to embarrass the late Father Neuhaus, who was a great man. I bring it up to show how even the best of us can be fooled by our biases. Nobody is immune. Professional journalistic standards exist to guard against this kind of thing. They do not guarantee that journalists will never make a mistake. But they do make it harder for mistakes to happen. One can be an intelligent, morally serious person, and still commit a grave error in judgment, as Neuhaus did. Again: none of us are immune. What if, by some chance, McCarrick had been the victim of a smear campaign by his enemies within the Church? If I had gone public accusing him of being a sexual assaulter, and it had been false, not only would I have set myself and National Review up for a massive libel suit, but even worse, I would have been guilty of wrecking the reputation of an innocent man. Believe me, it made me sick that I was certain of McCarrick’s guilt, but had to stay publicly silent about it. This is one of the things that destroyed my capacity to believe in Catholicism: knowing that the Vatican knew perfectly well what McCarrick had done, but turned a blind eye to it.

Nevertheless, it is better that professional ethics required me to remain silent than that an innocent man would have had to bear the indelible stain of a sexual molestation accusation. I was just as morally certain about McCarrick’s guilt as Neuhaus was about Maciel’s innocence. One of us was right, the other wrong. Neither of us could prove our case, but then, there is no potential civil offense or moral crime in saying that a man is innocent of sexual molestation. To say a man is guilty of it without rock-solid evidence, though — that is a terribly risky thing. It is better that a guilty man, such as McCarrick was, can thrive under the presumption of innocence absent on-the-record accusations from credible people, and/or documents proving guilt, than that an innocent man be susceptible to slander and libel.

Similarly, as much as I have enjoyed some of the revelations of left-wing wrongdoing that Project Veritas has sussed out, I think we are better off in general drawing strong lines between public and private life. I don’t believe undercover journalism is never justified. Sometimes it is. But an activist of either side going on a fishing expedition to draw Supreme Court justices into saying something embarrassing? No, never.

Peak Guardian Alert!

From today’s Guardian. The pitiableness, it burns:

Joe Biden’s Open Border

Oh:

Eight suspects from Tajikistan with suspected ties to ISIS, who crossed into the United States from the southern border last year and this year, have been arrested in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York City, according to a source familiar with the investigation.

The suspects were initially allowed to enter the U.S. after being vetted and no national security issues were uncovered, the source said.

Why were these illegals from Central Asia allowed to come into America at all?!

If there is a single act of terrorism between now and November involving men who came across the southern border, even if it’s only setting a trash can on fire outside a Kwikee-Mart, you can kiss the Biden presidency goodbye.

Elites Are Stonkingly Dense On Migration Issue

A liberal journalist tweeted this week:

To which Ben Sixsmith responded:

I dunno — have you considered reducing immigration? 

Unprecedented demographic changes, after all, are the common threads linking Western European nations that are now experiencing a “far right surge”, and voters have made it very clear that they are unhappy. Have previously liberal voters suddenly become xenophobes and reactionaries or do they have substantive problems with the scale and effects of these changes? No one is obliged to agree with them but you can’t ignore, demonise or trivialise their perspective and then be shocked when it becomes more urgent and bad-tempered. 

“At a certain point I’m afraid we’re just going to have to admit it,” sighs Ben Coates, the author of The Rhine and Why the Dutch Are Different, “A surprisingly large proportion of Europeans are actually quite racist.” This kind of sentiment tends to blithely overlook the rest of the world — Pakistan, for example, where Afghan refugees are being forced out in their hundreds of thousands. 

It’s hard to overemphasize how important out-of-control migration is as a political issue in Europe. It’s a big deal in the US too — two-thirds of all voters, including one-third of Democrats, in a new CBS poll want to deport all illegals — but it’s much more potent in Europe, because its costs are far clearer to most voters. It’s primarily a matter of crime, but not only that.

In his latest Substack newsletter (which might be paywalled, I dunno), Ed West writes about Germany’s failed experiment with migration:

After the October 7 attacks unleashed protests across Europe, [US journalist Christopher] Caldwell wrote in The New Criterion that: ‘Well before the events in Gaza, Germany was nervous over migration. Today, 24 million of Germany’s roughly 80 million people — almost 30% — are of “migrant background,” and 2.7 million migrants settled in the country in 2022 alone. The demographic transformation of the West that began slowly with European decolonization and American civil rights has accelerated over the past decade and a half.’

He warned that that ‘there are signs that Germany is about to grow considerably less stable’.

More, about Germany:

Newly released statistics shows that over half of these recent migrants are currently unemployed and 60% of Syrians receive state benefits. compared to under 6% of the population. The data shows that ‘nearly 900,000 migrants, around half of those who arrived in Germany during the migrant crisis of 2015-2016, still live on social welfare benefits.’

Of the estimated ‘1.6-1.8 million asylum seekers who arrived during the two-year crisis—most of whom originated from Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Eritrea, Pakistan, and Nigeria—only 460,00 are employed,’ and half of those working are in the unskilled sector, many still receiving benefits to supplement their low income. Payments to Hartz IV social benefit recipients without a German passport ‘have doubled since 2007, climbing to nearly 13 billion euros as of 2020.’

Two-thirds of Syrians are still unable to support themselves, compared to 37% of Somalian migrants and 44% of Afghans.

It has been a disaster. Liberal migration policies have been a disaster everywhere in Europe, from the point of view of many of the people who live in those countries. These are typically not the kind of people who govern a country and its institutions. They are able to exercise their liberal consciences without paying a significant price.

The price is paid disproportionately by people like Jordan Bardella, whose Americanized first name is a signal in France of working-class roots. Bardella, now the leader of the National Rally, was raised by a single mother in the projects of suburban Seine-Saint-Denis. Half that suburb is Muslim; it is considered a stronghold of Islamism, with much of it being a no-go zone for French police (see here). Bardella has lived on the front lines of the demographic and cultural transformation of France. He gets it.

The French elites do not. Eric Ciotti, the head of the failing Républicains, what’s left of the old center-right Gaullists, said yesterday that after the party’s dismal performance in the weekend’s election (they polled only seven percent), he seeks an alliance with the National Rally. Other party grandees were outraged that he broke the cordon sanitaire forbidding respectable French politicians from working with the so-called “far right” (which on Sunday gained more than four times the number of votes as the establishment Right). Ciotti responded (from the NYT):

“We need an alliance, while remaining ourselves,” Mr. Ciotti said. Later, asked by reporters at the party’s headquarters what had happened to the barrier that traditional parties in France usually erected around the far right, he demurred, saying the question was “totally out of step with the situation in France.”

“The French don’t see the cordon sanitaire,” he said, referring to what was sometimes called a “dam” against the extreme right. “They see diminished purchasing power, they see insecurity, they see the flood of migrants, and they want answers.”

As I wrote in The European Conservative yesterday, if you look at the actual platform of Marine Le Pen’s and Jordan Bardella’s National Rally, you will find very little that says “extreme right” in it. Ciotti is right: French elites, including conservative elites, are completely out of step with their country. Look at this map: the only district not in blue (meaning, the only one where a majority of voters did not vote for the National Rally on Sunday) is Paris, which split between the Macronists and the Socialists:

One can hear the old-line conservatives griping over their pastis at a Saint-Germain cafe: “I don’t know how the far right won. I don’t know a soul who voted for the National Rally.”

Once again I call your attention to this article from a couple of years ago by the Hungarian historian Laszlo Bernat Veszpremy, who pointed out that migration from Africa and the Middle East into Europe is bound to increase — and that this will cause major political upheavals. Excerpts:

Why are the liberal Brusselites interested in fostering mass migration to Europe? How can they not see the social unrest and dangerous developments their actions ferment? The answer is most likely that they can see it, but they do not care. The European liberal elite has decided that the merits of turning the Old Continent into “Terra Nova”, the New Land for the New Europeans outweighs the downsides. Most of all they want to stay in power, a feat that is becoming increasingly difficult for left-wing and liberal parties in Western Europe, at least without the Muslim vote.

As the European right turns its attention more and more to the woes of the classical working class, so does the left concentrate more and more on the social situation and rights of the migrant masses. And the migrant masses do know how to say thank you.

He’s talking in that last line about Muslim migrants voting Left. More:

T.S. Eliot rightly pointed out that the main problem with liberalism is that it contributes to the dismantling of the very liberties that had helped bring it about in the first place. Brussels is making the same mistake today: It is persecuting the Hungarian right and its migration policy by referring to it as “far right,” and not seeing the reality that if Europe does not catch up with Hungary’s position soon by 2050 the continent will face a real far right. The day will come when we will think of Viktor Orbán as a moderate, liberal politician, and perhaps even in Brussels they will feel nostalgic for the good old days when all they had to do was write angry communiqués against Hungary.

In 2019, the neocon writer David Frum penned a piece in The Atlantic that made the provocative point: “If liberals won’t enforce borders, fascists will.” He was trying to wake up classical liberals of the Left and the Right to the salience of the migration issue. Obviously it didn’t work. There is something about the paralysis of ruling-class elites on both sides that renders them incapable of carrying out the clear will of voters on this matter. Eric Ciotti understands that, even if his comrades in the establishment Right do not. As others have pointed out, Denmark doesn’t have a “far right problem” precisely because its center-left governing party got the message about mass migration, and voted in strong anti-migration policies. Liberal journalists and activists fret (“racist, duplicitous and hypocritical”), but this is what Danish voters want. More and more European voters are more worried about what’s happening to their countries than they are about being thought bigoted by ruling elites.

Ignatian Customer Service

I’ll leave you on a much lighter note today. Did you know that in Spain, in 2015, they had a day celebrating Our Working Boy?:

I had the opportunity this morning to introduce a young fellow to the glories of Ignatius J. Reilly, the antihero of A Confederacy of Dunces, which you know I regard as the Fifth Gospel. Here is an example of Ignatian Customer Service. Ignatius works briefly for Levy Pants, and takes it upon himself to respond via letter to a retail customer’s complaint like so, in the name of the trouser manufacturer himself:

Abelman’s Dry Goods

Kansas City, Missouri

USA

Mr. I. Abelman, Mongoloid, Esq.:

We have received via post your absurd comments about our trousers, the comments revealing, as they did, your total lack of contact with reality. Were you more aware, you would know or realize by now that the offending trousers were dispatched to you with our full knowledge that they were inadequate so far as length was concerned.

“Why? Why?” you are in your incomprehensible babble, unable to assimilate stimulating concepts of commerce into your retarded and blighted worldview.

The trousers were sent to you (1) as a means of testing your initiative (A clever, wide-awake business concern should be able to make three-quarter length trousers a by-word of masculine fashion. Your advertising and merchandising programs are obviously faulty.) and (2) as a means of testing your ability to meet the standards requisite in a distributor of our quality product. (Our loyal and dependable outlets can vend any trouser bearing the Levy label no matter how abominable their design and construction. You are apparently a faithless people.)

We do not wish to be bothered in the future by such tedious complaints. Please confine your correspondence to orders only. We are a busy and dynamic organization whose mission needless effrontery and harassment can only hinder. If you molest us again, sir, you may feel the sting of the lash across your pitiful shoulders.

Yours in anger,

Gus Levy, Pres.