Vance Speech: A Rhetorical D-Day Landing

And: David Starkey, Unreformed; Letter From An Angry Soldier; Wheaton's Travails

Rod Dreher Feb 17   ∙   Paid

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The Americans have landed!

Good morning from London, and the first day of the ARC conference. Big opening dinner for speakers and donors last night; as a speaker, I got to go. Was so, so great to see many old friends there, Ran into Jonathan Pageau last night standing around talking to folks after dinner (had to filter the party pic selfie; the original was even more orange, thanks to the lighting):

Just now, after breakfast, I walked out of the hotel restaurant, and there sat two of my favorite people in all the world, James Orr and Martin Shaw, kibitizing. Oh happy day! Oh happy next three days!

Everybody from this side of the pond last night was talking about the J.D. Vance speech, I only heard one negative comment, and that was from an eminent writer and speaker who thought Vance said the right thing, but delivered it too bumptiously. (My response: “There is no way to say what needs saying to these European elites without coming upside their collective head with it.”) Everybody else — and I mean everybody — was over the moon with joy. The basic attitude from the Brits and the Europeans I talked to last night was, “Finally, someone is going to shake our ruling class out of its complacency.”

I cannot say it often enough or strongly enough: if you are depending on the mainstream media to give you an accurate impression of how the speech was received in Europe, you are deceived. They will tell you how European officials, policymakers, and talking heads received it — but that’s not at all the same thing as how ordinary Europeans do. Matt Taibbi takes apart the way American elite journalists, and some UK and European ones, characterized the speech. The NYT, in particular, glommed on to the “Vance normalizes Nazis” line. Here’s Taibbi:

I watched the damn thing. You can too, right here — and I hope you will, so you can see and hear for yourself the difference between an event that happened, and the same event as filtered through the mainstream media.

More Taibbi:

Others, like Bertelsmann foundation analyst Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, suggested Vance’s speech was not correct. “The first third of the speech was littered with conspiracy theories, misinformation, and the demand that these misrepresentations be taken seriously,” she said. You’re going to hear a lot about what the BBC called “dangerous” misinformation, specifically Vance’s suggestion that prayer in one’s own home could violate U.K. “buffer zone” laws about abortion clinics. The Beeb claims it would only impact things that that “could be seen or heard from the zone, such as displaying posters or banners, or protesting in their garden.”

I have many thoughts about Vance’s speech, which I think will be remembered as a moment of grave importance, but the most crucial immediate observation is how it was received by other formerly influential American figures. It’s never been a secret that postwar Europe has a different attitude toward speech and even democracy. But we’ve never seen institutional America so open in its backing of overruled elections, censorship, and the use of intelligence mechanisms to cut off voter decisions. It’s all out in the open now.

These people have no credibility anymore. I don’t think they are intentionally lying at all. This is truly how they see the world. This is why Europe is in the awful state that it is: its ruling class, in country after country, and across borders, lives in a bubble.

I don’t remember if I posted this the other day, but an English expatriate friend and reader of this newsletter sent me this short-ish commentary by an American man, summing up where Britain went wrong. The Englishman said this is the best single explanation for the crisis that has gripped his homeland:

In it are strong echoes of what the woke in power have done to America too, though the sickness is much further advanced in Britain. Similar stories can be told about the major countries of western Europe. The ARC conference is designed to come up with a better story, a life-giving story, to stimulate cultural and social recovery.

Listening to J.D.’s landmark speech, and assessing the hysterical negative reaction to it from the European leadership, I thought of that famous line by historian Arnold J. Toynbee: “Civilizations die by suicide, not from murder.”

This is what the prophetic French writer Renaud Camus has been trying for many years to say to his fellow Frenchmen. For his trouble, he has been roundly vilified by the ruling class, including the media. But he was right, and he is right, about the Great Replacement. It’s not even mostly about ethnic replacement. It’s about generations of postwar European political and cultural leadership wishing to erase all cultural particulars and cultural memory from the European mind, to replace it with a placeless, progressive, Houellebecqian pudding.

The distinguished German commentator Wolfgang Munchau is one of the few figures of his stature to understand what has happened. Excerpts:

Vance then repeated a threat he’d first made shortly after the American election — that any attempt to censor US-owned social media companies by the EU would lead to US disengagement from Nato. “I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people,” he said. “Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now… is one of our own making. If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.”

Europe was at a loss to respond. Its centrist governments are running out of ideas in the fight against the Right. They fear that uncontrolled free speech could turn into an existential threat to European integration. After all, the EU was never a bottom-up democratic project, and support for the euro was feeble from the outset. There was, for example, no majority in Germany in favour of the euro. This lack of popular support is what paralysed the EU during the sovereign debt crisis.

What sustains the EU is not a democratic mandate, but the mainstream media, academia, and think tanks — a blob of organisations that together exert indirect control over what gets discussed and published. You will not find editorials in German newspapers in support of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), despite the fact that this party now accounts for approximately 20% of popular support. The new Right-wing parties communicate through social media instead. This is why the EU is so focused on content moderation for social media, and it’s why we have seen a recent explosion of fact-checking units in broadcasting companies and media organisations.

But the Left is rarely subjected to such fact-checking. Quite a few members of the blob have abandoned X for the alternative Bluesky, which resembles the old Twitter. There, on a much smaller scale, the old echo chamber still works. There, users describe the Trump presidency as a coup d’état, and still think that Ukraine is winning the war. No one interrupts them — or checks any facts.

More:

The BBC described Vance’s speech “extraordinarily poorly judged”. And yet the intelligent way for the Brits and Europeans to respond to America’s new regime would be to stop hyperventilating and take matters into their own hands. …

There’s no denying that Trump is throwing Europe under the bus. Angela Merkel predicted this in 2018, when she gave an agitated speech in a Bavarian beer tent shortly after meeting with Trump. She said then that Europe needed to become less dependent on the US. But then she did nothing, as did everyone else. And so here we are, with EU leaders meeting to sit around yet another table. They are the Norma Desmonds of geopolitics — convinced that they are still the stars.

As I wrote the other day — and as many European fans of the Vance speech with whom I spoke last night agreed — the philosophical core of the vice president’s address was in these lines:

I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?

That’s exactly right! Europe doesn’t know what it’s for, only what it’s against (namely, everything that came before, everything that is not progressive, that is not an expression of managerial liberalism. Along those lines, here is an interesting Free Press essay from the retired CIA analyst Martin Gurri, writing about masculinity. Excerpts:

Since the species climbed down from the trees, ideals of manhood, always and everywhere, have been bound up with physicality and struggle. Each man has been expected to be a protector—or provider, which amounts to the same thing. He is the defender of all that is sacred and good, the bearer of virile virtues—courage, strength, loyalty. Thus, the soldier protects the nation. The husband protects the wife; the father, his children.

In the end, physicality prevails.

In modern times, the question arises: What are men supposed to protect against? …

Sure — but another way of saying this is: what are men supposed to protect?

Gurri meditates on unfiltered masculinity, and the figure of the Hero. The Hero is messy. It is he who confronts the “Man-Beast,” the nihilistic and violent figure that is masculine energy unbound. Gurri:

The hero slays the monster and so restores the moral balance of society, but he is rarely a bringer of harmony or domesticity. He smolders with an excess of the manly virtues, which he must constantly put to the test. He runs into the burning tower, not away from it. He leaps on the live grenade rather than seek cover. In him, the urge to protect is an almost pathological condition, leading in some circumstances to terrible crimes. Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter so that the Achaean fleet could sail to conquer Troy. Romulus murdered his brother to ensure the foundation of Rome. James Bond leaves behind him a trail of corpses and forsaken beauties.

But the hero is indispensable. Let there be no question about that. A society deprived of heroic energy would lack the power of redemption and would soon be overrun by the Man-Beast. But the hero, by definition, is an exceptional man. He is the refutation of the democratic principle. He might be a model of certain virtues for all men to aspire to, but he is also a warning: Even the instinct to protect, central to manhood, can be deformed by a lack of conviviality.

The Hero became domesticated into the Gentleman — and this, says Gurri, was a good thing. More:

His ideal of manhood is to reduce, by personal effort, the wretchedness and cruelty of life—to push against the weight and wildness of nature until decency appears to be the default condition of the human race. He alone, the silent protector of civilization, stands between the Man-Beast and his prey.

Yet since mid-century, the Gentleman has become an object of contempt. Our culture has lost sight of the important distinction between the Gentleman — the civilized form of the Hero — and the Man-Beast. The Gentleman stood condemned as an archaism. Daniel Penny was a New York hero and gentleman who protected fellow subway riders by restraining a violent and insane black predator. Yet the state put him on trial, and the progressive cretins of Black Lives Matter turned him into a villain.

So, the Gentleman was sent away. Then, says Gurri:

In his place stood a slippery character, the technocrat, morally and sexually neutral but ready to rebuild society on a new basis. Instead of personal decency, we would get state-ordained welfare.

If you won’t have the Gentleman, you will get eventually the Man-Beast. And in that case, only the Hero will save you.

The core problem of contemporary Europe is that it rejected both the Hero and the Gentleman, and has accommodated itself to the welfare state and managed therapeutic liberalism. Result: No young man in Europe will fight for Brussels, or for a social and political order that believes in nothing higher than shopping, screwing, and DEI. It was possible for Europeans to live in denial about this as long as the United States military was willing to play the Heroes manning the front lines against the Soviet Man-Beast. In its long descent into decadence, Europe became entirely feminized, in the sense of preferring safety, care, and its own idea of compassion over all.

And it won’t even stand up for itself against the Man-Beasts it has invited to live within its borders: Muslim male fanatics who stab people in the UK and across Europe almost every day now. Its decadent leaders — Viktor Orban an honorable exception — won’t lift a finger to stop the madness (this happened over the weekend in Austria). When figures like Giorgia Meloni in Italy try to do something meaningful, the ideologically charged courts stop them on “human rights” grounds. Pope Francis is eager for Europe to roll over and die for the sake of “compassion”. Doing something meaningful about this crisis would force Europe to reckon with the bankruptcy of its own progressivism. One gets the idea that most of its leadership class would sooner die than abandon its ideology and fight for the survival of its own civilization. The chairman of the Munich Security Conference cried like a baby over Vance’s speech!

C.S. Lewis saw it all coming many decades ago. In The Abolition Of Man, he wrote:

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Europe is now a Man Without A Chest. And the new government in Washington is telling the Continent: Man up, become the heroes of your own story. J.D. Vance’s speech was the rhetorical equivalent of the D-Day landing. Now European patriots are preparing to fight to save their civilization from the enemies within.

David Starkey, Irrepressible As Ever

David Starkey (photo quote Jeff Gilbert/Telegraph)

Here’s how Tim Stanley’s wonderful Telegraph interview with the irascible historian David Starkey begins:

“I am an impertinent old bugger,” says Dr David Starkey, “and I refuse to be shut up.” I meet him at his London flat, sit and brace myself for a delicious, dizzying chat with the historian once dubbed “the rudest man in Britain”. He speaks energetically and clearly, as if to the back of the class, in that “you need to know this” style he perfected on television.

The monarchy is “fading into irrelevance”, he discloses. The King is woke. William is “hopeless... Nature intended him to be the manager of a second-division football team.” (And he’d be “rather stretched at that”.) Much blame lies with the late Queen, who was “obsessed about the Commonwealth” and spent too much time “sucking up to African dictators”.

Between the gasps and laughs of every Starkey lecture shines a pertinent point. Britain was ruined by its elite; he thinks we need to undergo a “cultural restoration”. The theme has resonance in his own life.

“Impertinent old bugger” is funny because Starkey is gay. He is also infamously politically incorrect, which got him massively cancelled a few years ago for an unwise racist remark.

That happened in June 2020, during a silly podcast interview with pundit Darren Grimes; Starkey was asked about slavery and proactively – lazily – said that had it been as genocidal as some claim, the world wouldn’t be full of “so many damn blacks”. The slip was condemned. Organisations he’d worked with for years telephoned to give him five minutes to resign or be pushed.

He lost friends, his fellowship, his publisher, various honours and positions, and his literary agent, who, as fate would have it, was named Fairweather. The police opened an investigation, which they later dropped (Priti Patel, the home secretary at the time, advised the police to respect “freedom of speech”). It was “profoundly hurtful”, yet “mixed with the most wonderful farce. Three guesses what was happening on that day? I was having a new fridge-freezer delivered. My universe collapsed and I was surrounded by decaying piles of frozen food.”

He’d said such things before, so why on this occasion did he get the full Gulag treatment? He offers historical context: “This is 2020, the year of Covid-19, Black Lives Matter... George Floyd... The world went mad, and I was a very peripheral victim of it.” I sense we’re building up to the big question of what’s going wrong with Britain and how he proposes to fix it.

Well, it was an obnoxious remark — but then, as Stanley avers, this is how Starkey always rolled. His acidic judgments are part of what made him such a provocative and popular broadcaster and public intellectual. As I see it, this is why it was so great to see J.D. Vance push back hard at Rep. Ro Khanna a couple of weeks ago, when Khanna demanded that Vance seek the firing of a young DOGE Wunderkind who was discovered in the past to have made a racist remark about Indians (Vance’s wife Usha is Indian, and, of course, their children are half-Indian.) Vance obviously didn’t like what the kid had tweeted, but he said we have to quit driving otherwise talented people out of public life for stupid and ugly things they might have said.

What Vance did not say, but could have, is that for many years now the Left has not only tolerated figures from its side who say extremely bigoted things, but even valorized that bigotry. Seems to me Vance was simply arguing for common-sense tolerance: yes, when someone says something ugly, call them out on it — but don’t demonize them and make them unemployable. If we do that, we will deprive ourselves of the wisdom and talent of worthy people who are, like everybody else, flawed, but still worth having around.

Letter From A Fed-Up Soldier

A reader who is active duty in the US military, and who comes from a “very blue milieu,” socially and intellectually, writes to say that watching what wokeness has done to so many institutions of American life — including the armed forces — has driven him rightward.

“I am just at the absolute end of my patience with what the left has done to once-vital institutions that may or may not retain the capacity to sustain and transmit civilization,” he e-mails me. “I'm still center-left on some social issues, but my 'lived experience' has caused the scales to fall from my eyes regarding the postmodern, identitarian left.”

He gave me permission to share this with you, on the condition that I obscure certain identifying details, which I have done (I shared this with him first, to make sure it passed muster for protecting his identity. I know his name.)

Take the matter of women in combat.

Much of what I have to say here will be pretty familiar. A lot of it has simply been unsayable for the past decade or so, but that does not change the fact that it is true. Full gender integration only works if you accept the claim that men and women are completely interchangeable and that there are no fundamental differences between the sexes.

N. says that most people outside the military have no real idea of how physically intense the infantry is. The women he observes in his military life “get injured at much higher rates and are in an impossible situation because they do not want to draw attention to themselves but simply can't keep up.”

He goes on: “The cost of gender integration is not worth any benefit, and any benefit is entirely ideological.”

N. mentions that men in the military skew more conservative, the opposite is true for women, especially female officers. He mentions one unit that he knows in which a female was given the top NCO position. This person leapfrogged over more competent males, and has proven to be grossly incompetent. Her continued presence — she apparently is not being allowed to fail — is causing tremendous moral problems. “It’s terrible for morale and, frankly, the legitimacy of the command's authority,” N. says.

More broadly, says N., every time women are moved into combat infantry, “the level of drama and interpersonal conflict ramps up and creates distractions.” It is especially difficult for infantry members who are mothers.

Mothers and fathers are not interchangeable. When we are on deployment and doing lengthy field exercises, family and relationship issues back home are the single greatest drag on morale and focus. It's hard enough for guys, but it comes close to impossible for mothers with young children.

N. says you will hear from progressives that this is just the natural extension of the principle that led to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the subsequent normalization of gays in the military. N. believes that was the right thing to do.

There were all kinds of reasons why that was a bad law in terms of defense policy, but the biggest issue was that it didn't reflect reality. There were plenty of gay people already serving throughout the military without issue. To have the threat of career destruction hanging over them at all times wasn't fair or helpful. Repealing DADT did not force any kind of radical social change or reordering of things. It was a non-issue. If people have a problem with their gay colleagues, they usually just see past it and the whole thing is just a big whatever.

As N. sees it, the US armed forces have traditionally been a “true meritocracy.” In his part of the infantry, a large number of soldiers, even in leadership positions, are non-white — and are entirely deserving of their positions, because they are good at what they do. But now that the social engineers have gained control of the Pentagon, that’s all changed.

Mandating dishonesty is anathema to our culture. That was the problem with DADT. This brave new world of co-ed infantry units mandates dishonesty because we can't say what is obviously true: it doesn't work. The military has funded quite a bit of research into this, and every time the data come back to show that all-male infantry units are more effective and score better on every metric. For female inclusion, the best model would be all-female units (as the Israelis have in the IDF). Democrats will absolutely not allow that to happen. I have some thoughts on why that might be. It has something to do with the idea that anything with men alone is automatically suspect and by definition problematic. Women must be present to monitor, police, and change male culture.

This might be the most obvious, unsayable thing. Young men need challenging male environments to form them as strong, healthy men. There need to be spheres of life where women drill instructors are not yelling at young men to shape and form them. A great many young men join the Marine Corps, for example, specifically to find the one place left in society where they won't have to deal with that stuff. And there is nothing in the world wrong with that. How more obvious could it be that what American society is offering young men today simply is not working? The young men most at risk of deaths of despair need the Marine Corps a whole lot more than they need more sensitivity training or hectoring about toxic masculinity. The beauty of it is that this approach perfectly compliments war-fighting effectiveness. There's a good reason things have always been done this way and no good reason to radically change course.

What Is Wheaton College For?

Some of you will have heard of the controversy raging around Wheaton College, long the standard-bearer of Evangelical higher education. Recently the college issued an anodyne congratulation to Russ Vought, a Wheaton alumnus who just rose to a prominent position in the Trump administration. When progressive alumni screamed bloody murder, the school backed down. Daniel Davis writes in First Things:

The message to alumni in conservative politics could not have been more alienating. It also backfired. Within hours, U.S. senators and even Elon Musk were weighing in on X, expressing dismay at the school’s moral cowardice. Indeed, Wheaton’s actions revealed a moral sickness at the heart of how it makes decisions. Faced with a mob, Wheaton showed that it will quickly bow the knee and take the path of least resistance. As Mollie Hemingway aptly put it: If Wheaton folds this easily, “you have to wonder how well they’re preparing students for a hostile world that hates the Gospel.”

This lack of convictional courage explains much of Wheaton’s drift in recent years. While it is true that many faithful professors remain on campus—some of whom I cherish to this day—Wheaton as an institution has become unmoored. Its drift is twofold: The administration allows itself to be emotionally blackmailed by activists, and it refuses to explicitly orient the college against the most toxic ideologies of our time.

Davis goes on to cite several examples, concluding:

There’s much more. Yet beneath all of these trends is a sad undercurrent, described to me by one local pastor in the following way: Wheaton is not articulating the gospel. Instead, it is assuming the gospel, which always precedes losing the gospel.

When Billy Graham spoke at the dedication of Wheaton’s Billy Graham Center in 1980, he charged its leaders to maintain a zeal for the biblical gospel and a commitment to world evangelism. “If the leaders of a future generation take any other path,” he warned, “may they be, as the Apostle Paul said to the Galatians, accursed, because Ichabod [“without glory”] will be written on this place.”

Has the glory of God departed from Wheaton? Through weak and docile leadership, regrettably, it has.

Well, a group of alumni have launched For Wheaton, an initiative calling on the trustees of their alma mater to repent.

God has poured out tremendous blessings on many schools that have chosen a path of bold, broad-shouldered Christianity in this moment, regardless of where it places them on a political spectrum. In our time, the Gospel may be viewed as “conservative"; in other times, it has been “progressive.” So be it. Our world’s categories should be irrelevant to how we carry out our mission. Christian students and parents want a college that will shape them into the kinds of countercultural people who will walk boldly into the wind in the strength of Christ, wherever He leads them.

We, the undersigned, compelled by our love for Wheaton College, humbly ask that you take immediate action regarding (1) the state of the college, including the need for new leadership, (2) putting an end to the current DEI regime, (3) conducting an audit of every single faculty and staff member’s commitment to the Statement of Faith and Community Covenant, (4) evaluating the process for adjudicating claims of racism, sexism, and other forms of harassment, (5) affirming free speech and the importance of a vibrant competition of ideas on campus, and whatever else is necessary to ensure the drift toward worldliness is ended and replaced with a vigorous, fearless, joyful pursuit of the Lord.

Until such a time as significant changes have been made on these priorities, we are committed to one or more of the following actions:

• Ceasing all financial support to the college.

• Declining to recommend Wheaton to prospective students and their parents.

• Sharing examples of institutional drift with friends, fellow parishioners, online audiences, or the press to ensure students and parents who are considering Wheaton are aware of the disconnect between what is advertised in the Statement of Faith and what is really happening on campus.

If you are a Wheaton alumnus or parent of a Wheaton student, I encourage you to read and sign the open letter.