The Fight Is Only Just Beginning

And: Jeff Shafer's Prophetic Warning; Renaud Camus & Humanity; More

I’m not the kind of conservative who pays a lot of attention to Charlie Kirk, but this time, I do, and you should too. Watch:

Kirk is talking about a report that the Pentagon is having informal meetings about how to resist Trump. Specifically, per CNN:

Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Department of Defense would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically and fire large swaths of apolitical staffers, defense officials told CNN.

Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to stack the federal government with loyalists and “clean out corrupt actors” in the US national security establishment.

… Defense officials are also scrambling to identify civilian employees who might be impacted if Trump reinstates Schedule F, an executive order he first issued in 2020 that, if enacted, would have reclassified huge swaths of nonpolitical, career federal employees across the US government to make them more easily fireable.

Of course if Trump or any president wanted to use the military to carry out an unlawful order, then they should resist. I think this is much more about the Deep State planning resistance to its hegemony. As Kirk says in the clip above, this is ultimately about the way the US is governed. On paper, the elected American president has the authority to run the government. But does that exist in reality? I’m generally very much in favor of a non-political civil service. But what happens when that civil service, or at least parts of it, become so ideologically captured that they do not wish to obey legitimate directives from the elected representatives of the people? I’m not talking about illegal orders, but legal ones that the bureaucracy does not wish to obey?

When I was at the ISI conference last weekend, I had an in-depth conversation with a young-ish former Army officer who said he was forced into retirement simply because he asked his superior officer what his religious liberty rights were to object to the military’s new pro-transgender policy. He gave me chapter-and-verse about how ideology has thoroughly corrupted the armed forces’ leadership, and how it is harming the ability of the military to do its job defending the country. As you longtime readers will know, I’ve been hearing this for years. This man I spoke to last weekend said that unless Trump fires “every general three-star and above,” nothing will change.

Well, well, well, here is Pete Hegseth, just announced by Trump as his Secretary of Defense, explaining to Ben Shapiro how the military became woke. Watch it by clicking here. Next, listen to this short clip by Hegseth. Revolution coming to the Pentagon, y’all!

Very big and consequential struggles ahead. The battle is joined. Watch. Pray.

Jeff Shafer’s Prophetic Warning

Jeff Shafer

When I was working on The Benedict Option, a young lawyer named Jeff Shafer gave me a book called How Societies Remember, by Paul Connerton, saying it would be helpful to me. It was. Indeed, it was one of the most important texts I read to formulate the idea, and it’s one that you all know I continue to quote. Well, Jeff Shafer gave a talk at a recent conference in upstate New York that shook the people who heard it. One of those people was my friend N.S. Lyons, who reproduced it on his Substack. I saw N.S. last weekend at the ISI thing, and he was still shaken by it.

The talk was about the long-term implications for humanity of reproductive technology. I cannot urge you strongly enough to read the whole thing; I can only summarize it here.

Shafer’s main point is that Artificial Reproductive Technology (ART) stands to abolish man and merge humanity with the Machine. The transgender revolution has gone far down this path in redefining humanity as having nothing to do with our biological givenness. ART advances the revolution. He writes:

The “global baby” (so called) represents the paradigm and the central case of the industry precisely because it best symbolizes the disintegration of nature and organism accomplished by the ART project. This infant manufacture regimen represents and enables the abolition of relationality in reproduction and custody, and with that it establishes the irrelevance of the location of gametic, gestational, technical, and financial participants. The so-called sperm donor may live in Israel, the ovum contributor in Mississippi, the gestator in New Delhi; none speaking the same language, and the only one to lay eyes on the child is the customer in Denver who placed the order and flew in to pick it up. Classifying all aspects of reproduction in mere functional terms enables their commercialization, thereby qualifying them for offshoring and otherwise participating in the efficiencies and larger genetic and physiological resources of global markets. Liquid nitrogen freezers, air transportation, and information technology make geographic divides of no production consequence.

And because the ART baby is a project of making, it veritably demands the law apply a consumer paradigm in the later custody determination: The person hiring and directing the technicians to manipulate the biological material should receive the tailored product of his commissioning.

By permitting this technician-engineered form of reproduction, the law’s own description of human meaning is on track to correspond to the mechanical features of this system. Once the law permits the will-based biotechnical making of children from the parts and efforts of disbursed participants, the law already takes for granted and validates that the child (despite the visible realities of genealogy and filial origination), in fact belongs to no one in particular. Moreover, the law thereby abandons the grounding for its historic authority and practice to enforce maternal and paternal duties and claims grounded in the ontology, authority, and moral commands of those embodied offices.

The ART industry’s coup, then, is not merely in the mechanical accomplishment of human reproduction, but in capturing the standards of the law itself. The law’s failure to forbid at the front end the industrializing of human reproduction ensures the law’s submission thereafter to the mechanistic premises of that project. For the ART regime is not just advocating for an unnatural anthropology; it produces vulnerable infants requiring resolution of their custodial placement—which demands the law’s participation. And with that participation, alas, comes the law’s validation of the deeds it inspects and then honors with rules fitted to their character. By pressure of the novel circumstance now before them, judges or other state officers are essentially compelled to stipulate a legal principle elevating something other than the natural, integrated whole of maternity and paternity as the ground for the law’s determination of an adult’s custodial claim and duty to a child. Whatever the contrived resolution, the adjudicative task has been subordinated to the circumstance of industrial reproduction that the law has permitted, and whose human products the law now confronts and must situate.

The ultimate question is this: To whom does a child belong? The answer the emerging system gives us is: to no one. Shafer:

We might say that what this means is that the initiating condition of human arrival in the world is as orphans. But that would be wrong. It’s much worse than that. An orphan, by that very classification, is reminded that he lost something vital, and he (and we) are allowed to lament that loss. But in terms of the new techno-anthropology, there is no recognition that the child ever had anything to lose, and so there is no reason or permission for lament—or even for the category of “orphan.”

This is the point to which advanced liberalism has brought us. I’m not talking about “liberalism” in the narrow sense of the philosophy of the Democratic Party. I’m talking about the end point of the philosophy that has governed the West since the Enlightenment, one that Patrick Deneen writes about in Why Liberalism Failed: a regime centered around the progressive emancipation of the choosing individual from any and all constraints binding choice. It has now produced a world in which not even biology limits choice (e.g., transgenderism, which is a precursor to transhumanism). And it is in process of creating a world in which human beings are nothing more than products of the consumer choices of others. Humans reduced to mere material. This is happening right now.

You know how this monstrous totalitarianism advances? Through sentimentality, through compassion untethered to any other principle. Many, perhaps most, people cannot bring themselves to say no to this, because they don’t want to deny people who desire a baby the possibility to have that experience by any means necessary. “Tenderness leads to the gas chamber,” said Flannery O’Connor. This is what she meant!

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