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More Thee, less me - Bonus post from Rod Dreher's Diary
A Lenten Series for Supporters
March 04, 2024
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In the Orthodox Church, today is the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, the annual pre-Lenten Sunday in which we reflect on the Lord’s parable (Luke 15:11-32) in which He compares the Kingdom of God to a household in which a merciful father welcomed his wastrel son back home, even as a jealous older brother, who had never left home and rejected his father, looks on with resentment. I’ve been pretty sick all week, and was too weak to go to the liturgy this morning. Instead, I prayed the Divine Liturgy at home, and then re-read Henri Nouwen’s marvelous little study The Return Of The Prodigal Son, which I haven’t read in nine years. It is a short book — you can read it in one sitting, which I just did — but one of the most profound in my entire library.

Nouwen, a Catholic priest who died in 1996, writes about becoming fascinated by Rembrandt’s famous painting from 1669, one of the last before the great man died. In 1983, Nouwen traveled to the Soviet Union to see the original in the Hermitage Museum. The painting became an invitation and a motivation to deeper conversion, which Nouwen discusses in his book. In its pages, Nouwen examines his own life in terms of the prodigal son, the resentful brother, and the merciful father.

I last read this book when I was near the end of my own struggle to reconcile myself to my father — which was also, though I only realized it late, a struggle to reconcile myself to God the Father. In my book How Dante Can Save Your Life (which will be re-issued this week in paperback), there is a passage in which I discovered that my own alienation from God the Father had to do with my internal confusion between him and my own earthly father, whom I saw as the distant taskmaster whom I had to propitiate constantly, but whom I never could satisfy.

As you will recall, I had returned to my home in Louisiana after many years away — years of great worldly success, but success that my father saw as worthless, because I had been away from family. My dad, as well as all the others (but especially him, because they all took their cues from him), rejected me and my family as unworthy, because my original sin was to have left in the first place. I had come home expecting my dad to be the merciful father of the parable, but he and all the others were the resentful brother. As my priest at the time told me, the Lord’s parable is about the kingdom of heaven, not about how we in this world live.

You all know what happened next. I did find reconciliation with my father as he lay dying, thanks mostly to the healing graces the Lord gave me through Dante (the story is in my book). But everything went very bad from there. The Louisiana family dissolved after my father’s death (dissolved in the sense that my sister’s girls scattered, and we don’t keep in touch with them anymore). And my own family painfully dissolved from cracks in my marriage that widened after I became chronically ill as a result of my Louisiana family rejecting us. After years of agony between us, my wife filed for divorce two years ago. The result has been very bad. Our older son and I live abroad; the two younger kids live in Louisiana with their mother.

It would not be right to talk in any further detail about the situation, but it is, for me, a desolation — a desolation that I am utterly powerless to end (believe me, I’ve tried). I would just urge you strongly not to assume that you know what’s going on here. One of the most important things I learned through the last decade of my marriage, culminating in the divorce, is that nobody outside a marriage really understands what goes on within that marriage. I bring this up not to invite speculation, but simply to say that I have never been more desolate than I am today — and that’s saying something.

Please don’t think I invite your pity, or that I pity myself! One of the great gifts of grace that God has given me through all this is resilience. The pain from the loss of almost everything I loved is hard to describe, but at the same time, I feel safe, because my deepening faith has given me the sure knowledge that all this has meaning, and will be redeemed in time if I stay faithful. I live with the wisdom I gained from reading Silvester Krcmery’s memoir about his decade as a prisoner of the Communists: that he characterized his sojourn in that desolate place as an opportunity to be “God’s probe” — that is, to learn what he could about himself, his fellow prisoners, and their suffering, so that he could, in whatever ways possible, reconcile all to the Father.

Why not? What else is there? There is nothing else for me. That’s how I feel about it. It’s weird to say that without sounding wounded and self-pitying, but I assure you, that’s not me. I’m trying to be honest, though. Most of the things I used to care about in life I no longer do. Is this depression? Probably, at least to some extent. But I have a deep sense that it is also purification. Re-reading Nouwen’s precious book today has bolstered that confidence.

I too have seen Rembrandt’s original in the Hermitage, and yes, it is overwhelming. One thing Nouwen doesn’t say, perhaps because the painting wasn’t displayed then where it is today, is that across the narrow corridor hangs Rembrandt’s earlier painting of Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac:

  

Rembrandt created that painting, full of energy and pathos, in 1635, when he was twenty-nine years old, in the middle of the passionate and tumultuous journey of his life. He made the Prodigal Son painting when he was 63, at the very end of that journey. Compare the energy and drama of the earlier painting with the stillness of the later one. At the risk of sounding presumptious, in 2012, when I first learned of how my father and my Louisiana family really thought of me, I was full of the earlier Rembrandt’s passion. Then I entered the dark wood spoken of by Dante. Today, in 2024, having gone through a dozen years of suffering, I hugely identify with the stillness of the later canvas. Life will just beat it out of you. This matters, for a reason I learned re-reading Nouwen’s book today.

Nouwen says his reflection on the painting is “a story of homecoming,” and how he came to understand how he himself incarnates the Prodigal Son, the Jealous Older Brother, and indeed the Merciful Father. What prompted him to write the book was a colleague telling the priest, “Whether you are the younger son or the older son, you have to realize that you are called to become the father.”

I had forgotten that! That line pierced my heart, as it did Nouwen’s. I am only six years younger than Rembrandt when he died. It is time to become the father.

The Prodigal Son

But first, Nouwen considers his own prodigal-son status. As I read my battered copy of Nouwen’s book, I saw for the first time in many years the notes I wrote in the margins, as I was receiving its lessons for the first time back in the last decade. There’s a passage in which Nouwen writes about how a family in Jesus’s time would have seen the son demanding his inheritance and setting out into the world. They would have interpreted it as his wishing the father dead. They would have seen it as a betrayal of family and its values. They would have seen it as a rejection of love.

I wrote in the margins: “How they saw it” — meaning, how my Louisiana family saw my leaving. But it was more than that: it’s how they saw my being different from them. Had I never left, I would have lived under the constant disapproval. I bring this up now in the same sense that Harrison Scott Key, in his great memoir of the near-loss of his marriage, puts himself in the mind of his adulterous wife, so that he can better understand how she came to sin against him so greatly. In my case, I believed then and believe now that my family did a terrible thing to me, my wife, and my kids. At the same time, if I am to forgive them — and I must — I need to understand why they thought and acted as they did. The Jealous Older Brother cannot understand his father’s mercy until and unless he enters into the mind of his prodigal sibling, and tries to understand why he left.

Nouwen writes that for so many years, he has fled from God the Father. There are lots of reasons for this. Among them, the fear that he has disappointed God, that he has failed to live up to the Father’s expectations. He confesses that he has gone out into the world and tried to find satisfaction away from his Father’s house, but always fails. Writes Nouwen, “I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.”

It was this realization the first time around that helped purge me of the deep but misleading connection I had made of my earthly father to God the Father. One of the most important lessons for me from Dante’s Commedia was coming to accept the truth that changing your mind is one thing, but infusing your heart (by which I mean, your will) with that change is quite another. Inferno is for convincing you to repent, to accept metanoia, the change of mind; learning how to live that repentance is the purpose of Purgatorio. It was good this morning to recognize once again my own need to return to the Father.

“It was the loss of everything that brought him to the bottom line of his identity,” writes Nouwen, of the Prodigal Son. “He hit the bedrock of his sonship. In retrospect, it seems that the prodigal had to lose everything to come into touch with the ground of his being.”

When I first read these words, I thought I had lost everything. I had no idea what was to come. So: what now? Almost two years after she filed for divorce, and Matt and I left for a kind of exile, and I’m still pondering that question. That said, the little boat in which I’m sailing across these rough waters feels more stable this time, because I have more confidence in God’s love for me. That is an extremely precious grace.

And yet, I am still guilty of this (the quote is Nouwen’s): “I still live as though the God to whom I am returning demands an explanation.” And: “Sometimes it even seems as if I want to prove to God that my darkness is too great to overcome.” What is it within us that resists grace? Maybe it’s not in you, but it sure is within me. Less than it used to be, but this temptation to believe the voice of the Accuser is something I’ll be battling for the rest of my life.

Nouwen makes a radical claim, one that we should take seriously: that Jesus himself was the Prodigal Son, in a sense. He too left his father’s house, and sojourned in a strange land. He returned to the father having been stripped of everything: all his worldly possessions, all his dignity, even his life. And yet, this return was for our salvation. He knew, as he sweated blood in Gethsemane, that there was no way back to the Father for any of us except through this fire.

The Elder Brother

The first time I read the Nouwen book, I recognized that my own dad had been not the Merciful Father, but the Father-As-Elder-Brother. That is, he received me, but with a hard heart, because I had strayed. He was determined to make me suffer distance from him because of that. The difficult truth is that my dad did not see it that way. He really did think he was welcoming us as he ought to. He wrote me to say so, even! What he did not understand about himself was that even before I grew older and left home, he had been the Elder Brother. I think that grace finally broke through in the final weeks of his life. In any case, he died with us at peace with each other.

Nouwen is very wise about the figure of the Elder Brother. Nouwen sees the figure of the Elder Brother living within himself, and observes that the hardest conversion to go through is not the humbling that caused the Prodigal to return, but the humbling of the Elder Brother’s righteous but rock-hard heart.

The lostness of the Elder Brother is harder for the Elder Brother to grasp precisely because it is tied to righteousness. He did all the right things, and yet this is his reward? For his father to slay the fatted calf for that wastrel young brother of his? Nouwen says that all of us face temptation to dwell in resentment over the things that we felt were our due, that we did not receive. The Elder Brother cannot go into the feast because his heart cannot receive the joy of his brother’s return.

This was how my dad was with me. He couldn’t allow himself to feel unbounded joy at his son’s return, because even though his son was there in the flesh (with wife and children too!), he wasn’t exactly like he, the father, wanted him to be. His prodigality was not just his moving away at a young man, but also his choosing to value different things in life, and to have different tastes, than the father had chosen for him.

As I’ve written in my earlier books (and my dad read this before I submitted it to the publisher, so he didn’t mind it being made public), Daddy had lived a life of submission to the will of his parents, and felt strongly that he had been shafted by it. He believed himself to have been righteous through and through (he even told me a few months before he died that he had never committed any sins in life — and he believed it — though thanks be to God he repented of that). I was able to observe the destruction to himself and to his family (= me and Ruthie and our kids) from his hard-heartedness, which Ruthie adopted too, and resolved not to be that way to my kids.

This is why I’m in a much better place today, dealing with the desolation, than I was when it all fell apart with my Starhill family. But I’m still in need of grace. I toss and turn and am tormented by nightmares of loss. When Harrison Scott Key writes in his marriage memoir that he has most deeply understood himself as a husband and father, and now all of that was at risk of being washed away by his wife’s adultery, I very nearly wept. Again, infidelity was not part of the breakup of my marriage, but having to unlearn the role of husband, and having my fatherhood questioned has been agonizing. There is a part of me that resents the injustice of it all. And yet, because of what I went through before, and because of what I learned from Nouwen, and of what I learned from Dante (in particular, Piccarda telling him that earthly notions of justice do not matter in the House of the Father; it is enough simply to be Home), this pain doesn’t hurt as bad as it otherwise would have. For that, I am grateful. Yet I must always be on guard against the Elder Brother rising within me, for I do have a self-righteous streak. In that way, I am my father’s son.

The Merciful Father

The most wonderful and life-giving insight I gained from reading Nouwen this morning, on this Sunday of the Prodigal Son, came from the last part of the book: the one in which he recognizes that he has to embrace the Merciful Father within.

The loving father, says Nouwen, has to allow his children to be free to leave him, to sojourn in a far country, even if it is bad for them. This is what love is: not to assert control, or to be angry and resentful when a child refuses your control. Says Nouwen of the father in the parable: “His only desire is to bless.”

Nouwen says that to become like the Merciful Father of the parable is to become the kind of man who experiences pure joy. It is to become the kind of man who rushes towards good news, to “celebrate every little hint that the Kingdom is at hand.

This is a real discipline. It requires choosing for the light even when there is much darkness to frighten me, choosing for life even when the forces of death are so visible, and choosing for the truth even when I am surrounded with lies.

“Joy never denies the sadness,” says Nouwen, “but transforms it to fertile soil for more joy.” More:

From God’s perspective, one hidden act of repentance, one little gesture of selfless love, one moment of true forgiveness is all that is needed to bring God from his throne to run to his returning son and to fill the heavens with sounds of divine joy.

Nouwen concludes:

A child does not remain a child. A child becomes an adult. An adult becomes father and mother. When the prodigal son returns home, he returns not to remain a child, but to claim his sonship and become a father himself. … The return to the Father is ultimately a challenge to become the Father.

In other words, theosis. The love and mercy that the Father has shown to us prodigals must not rest in us, but must flow through us to others.

Jesus told us, says the priest, to “be compassionate as your Father is compassionate.” Rembrandt shows us what that means. It means to offer mercy and welcome to all who repent. It means to lean into joy and light, and away from sorrow and darkness.

Nouwen writes of looking in the mirror and seeing the image of his late father in his own visage:

As I suddenly saw this man appearing in the mirror, I was overcome with the awareness that all the differences I had been aware of during my lifetime seemed so small compared with the similarities. As with a shock, I realized that I was indeed heir, successor, the one who is admired, feared, praised, and misunderstood by others, as my dad was by me.

I have had that kind of recognition when I see my fifty-seven year old face in the mirror. I was thinking the other day, watching Jonathan Pageau’s four-part Daily Wire series about the end of a world, about Pageau’s advice that we have to learn how to honor our ancestors even as we repent of their particular sins — this, as opposed to wanting to tear down their statues, as if they had nothing to teach us. This is how I relate to the memory of my own dear father. I may not ever have known a greater man in this life than him — nor a man who was more tragically flawed. In my journey, I hope to embody his strengths, and to repent of any of his weaknesses that linger within me. Because of his deathbed repentance, I have faith that one day, if I remain faithful, he will be there to welcome me into our Father’s house, with its many mansions.

Yet my repentance consists in part of refusing the despair that was the prodigal son’s until the moment of his father’s embrace, and the more subtle and complicated despair of the righteous elder son, who felt himself hard done by. For me, the elder son’s hardheartedness these days manifests, I think, in being too eager to see the darkness and disorder in the world, and its injustice.

For years now, I have focused on that darkness and disorder, partly in an effort to wake people up, so that we can resist it. But I told a friend recently that I know I’ve come to the end of that mission. There’s really not anything more I can say. This coming book, Living In Wonder, marks the end of that and the beginning of my next chapter as a writer, at least I hope. It will be a new role, one as someone who tries to show people hope, because it’s what I’m looking for myself.

Seems to me that Nouwen understands my next challenge:

As the Father, I have to dare to carry the responsibility of a spiritually adult person and dare to trust that the real joy and real fulfillment can only come from welcoming home those who have been hurt and wounded on their life’s journey, and loving them with a love that neither asks nor expects anything in return.

There is a dreadful emptiness in this spiritual fatherhood. No power, no success, no popularity, no easy satisfaction. But that same dreadful emptiness is also the place of true freedom. It is the place where there is “nothing left to lose,” where love has no strings attached, and where real spiritual strength is found.

More:

Living out this spiritual fatherhood requires the radical discipline of being home. As a self-rejecting person always in search of affirmation and affection, I find it impossible to love consistently without asking for something in return. But the discipline is precisely to give up wanting to accomplish this myself as a heroic feat. To claim for myself spiritual fatherhood and the authority of compassion that belongs to it, I have to let the rebellious younger son and the resentful elder son step up on the platform to receive the unconditional, forgiving love that the Father offers me, and to discover there the call to be home as my Father is home.

There it is. I have a lot of anger in my heart over what has happened, though it has been buried under a mound of ashes representing sheer emotional and spiritual exhaustion. Still, the embers burn, and I need to allow grace to extinguish them somehow. They somehow seem childish, in light of what I read today, both in Scripture and in Nouwen’s book, and in “reading” Rembrandt’s painting.

Dear readers, I strongly urge you to pick up a copy of Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son, which is truly a life-changing work. And if you haven’t yet read How Dante Can Save Your Life, it follows the same kind of trajectory, in that it applies the lesson of great and profound Christian art to the lives we actually live. You don’t have to have read Dante to get the message of my book. As with Nouwen’s journey through Rembrandt’s painting, my pilgrimage through Dante is one in which the reader learns that there is nothing any of us can do to be reconciled to the Father except get out of the way of God’s love.

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The first topic of coffee talk this morning
January 01, 2025
Local's Lounge - All are welcome

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tgif... needed something light & upbeat this week with so much darkness. this one has been trending for a while with young reactors on youTube and it somewhat mesmerizes me how many people have never heard "the bee gees"... it's ironic in today's superficial music how many of them immediately think the vocals are just too good to be authentic and must be autotuned, etc... i.e. the smooth high pitched falsettos and perfectly synched harmonies like that just can't be possible? can they? lol. it's surreal how the group was so very popular in my young life, i never even questioned it. i just thought that was just how some people sang... lol. just another unique feature of that time period. enjoy and have a good weekend! 😎

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Nihilism in our time (More Rod Dreher)
And: Order VS Chaos

Nihilism In Our Time

And: Order Vs Chaos

 
Aug 29, 2025
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Robert “Robin” Westman, failed man

This Minneapolis shooting turns out to be much darker than I realized yesterday, when I first wrote. The killer was quite clearly possessed, I think. I mean that literally. This story from the New York Post details some of his chaotic, anti-Semitic, hateful beliefs, which seem to have no ideological core. His transgenderism seems to have been not so much at the core of his identity, but rather one manifestation of a malignant, radically disordered mind. Here is the 11-minute video he left behind, before the shooting. It is a horrifying glimpse into the mind of a madman.

This page from his journal jumped out at me when I saw it yesterday:

 

The Russian says:

 

Again: possessed.

Let’s not forget the valorization of revenge violence among trannies. Watch this. And look at this:

 

Peter Savodnik takes the measure of this lunatic. He goes through the various “explanations” people have offered, in an attempt to make sense of Westman’s heinous act, and concludes:

All that finger-pointing obscures a deeper point: Westman seems to have been driven by an all-consuming, destructive force, a nihilism—the conviction that life is meaningless; that words like truthjustice and God are empty slogans; that everything must be razed.

Nihilism is not some obscure academic notion. It stretches back to the 19th century—early Russian radicals were called nihilists—and it has waxed and waned across the past 150 years. Today, you can feel the nihilist impulse coursing through America, which has been mostly stripped of its faith and a shared national culture and has seen once-great institutions—universities, corporations, churches, nonprofit organizations, the media, the military—become engulfed in scandal and politicization.

It is an understatement to say America is struggling to infuse young Americans with a sense of purpose.

Earlier this year, the FBI introduced a new category of criminal: the Nihilistic Violent Extremist, or NVE.

If jihadis kill for Allah, and anti-government extremists like Timothy McVeigh killed in the name of some demented notion of freedom, then NVEs kill simply because they want to kill. They don’t have much in the way of ideological commitments—as the confusing hodgepodge of aphorisms Westman scrawled into his rifle, pistol, and shotgun makes clear—beyond a commitment to chaos and evil themselves.

If we are dealing with true nihilism, then we are all in for a hell of a ride. There’s no way to counter people who want to murder and cause havoc simply for the pleasure of doing it. Last week at the Midwestuary, I heard lots of talk about the spread of nihilism among young American males. This is the far fringe of victims of the Meaning Crisis. Max Remington texted me overnight:

America's Years of Lead are going to be driven by this kind of nihilistic violence by people of all ages. America has so many lone wolves, I wouldn't rule out the possibility it could collapse the country, honestly.

I don’t know the extent of this problem in the US, nor do I know if Europe has a similar problem. But see, this is the kind of thing that David Betz is talking about when he raises the prospect of “civil war”. It will almost certainly not be anything well-organized, he says, but rather random acts of killing, violence, and sundry mayhem, committed by people with different motives, or no motive at all other than destroying a society that they believe has failed them.

The great contemporary literary critic Gary Saul Morson explains the nature of 19th century Russian nihilism, which is not the same thing as what Robin Westman might have instantiated. Excerpt:

“Nihilist” and “nihilism”—terms typically attributed to novelist Ivan Turgenev—originally referred to a group that arose in Russia around 1860. Today we often call people nihilistic if they extend no hope that conditions can improve. Unqualified pessimists, they regard all grounds for optimism as illusory. We also use the term “nihilism” to describe extreme relativism about the bases of human knowledge. Science, in this view, is just another ideology, based, like all ideologies, on the interests of a ruling class. Accepted knowledge is nothing more than power made into a philosophy justifying it. This kind of nihilism often interprets various philosophers—Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Feyerabend, and others—as justifying the claim that one can build on no certain “foundations.”

Neither understanding of nihilism applies to the original Russian nihilists. Far from despairing, they believed that they knew just how to build the perfect society, which, they also held, could be realized in a few years. Regarding “science” as a set of infallible (and mostly metaphysical) dogmas, they deemed their favored social theories scientific and therefore utterly beyond doubt. As their critics observed, these science worshippers missed the whole point of science, openness to contrary evidence.

The group’s leader, Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), exercised immense influence. His utopian fiction, What Is to Be Done? (1863)—the question was anything but rhetorical—became the most widely read book among the intelligentsia before the Revolution. Lenin credited it with making him a revolutionary, and the Soviets hailed Chernyshevsky as a thinker in the same league as Marx and Engels. Tolstoy, on the other hand, referred to him as “that gentleman who stinks of bedbugs,” a loathsome figure who has persuaded his followers that “to be outraged, bilious, and spiteful is a commendable thing.”

In his novel Demons (sometimes translated in English as The Possessed), Dostoevsky illustrates and condemns the nihilism popular among young people of his era. His character Verkhovensky is a political nihilist, aiming to disrupt society for the sake of creating a utopian future. By contrast, Stavrogin is an existential nihilist, who truly believes life has no meaning, and who lives to channel his despair into destruction.

I have this sense that we are living in a culture accelerating towards a general calamity. Recall that when an audience member in a screening of Live Not By Lies asked me earlier this year if I thought the threat of soft totalitarianism was waning because Trump is in power, and pushing back on woke, I said no. All the conditions that Arendt identified as conducive to totalitarianism are still very much with us: mass loneliness and alienation, a loss of faith in institutions and hierarchies, a love of transgression for its own sake, a willingness to believe that “truth” is whatever satisfies one’s desires, and so forth.

We know very well where wokeness take us. I am particularly aware of how wokeness validated racial identity, and privileging racial identity. The right-wing version is now emerging ferociously. The very right-wing demons I warned many years ago that wokeness was summoning are now here. God only knows how this ends. I’ve always had a superstitious belief that the Jews are a canary in the coal mine of society: that anti-Semitism is a sure sign that a society is giving itself over to radical evil. Now we see that rising on both the Left and the Right.

Last night in Rome I was at a social event with some people from all over Europe. A couple of British interlocutors expressed extreme worry for their country. There’s the migrant crisis, of course, but also the economic crisis, about which I knew little. They talked about how the cost of living is becoming unsustainable, and how the government is barreling towards a fiscal Armageddon. Last week, the Telegraph reported that the government might be forced to appeal to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. If that happens, my British interlocutors said, there’s a very good chance that the IMF simply will not have the funds to cover Britain’s debts. And if it does, the IMF will demand radical reforms, including either the slashing of pensions, the gutting of the National Health Service, or both. These are moves that the Labour government cannot politically do. So … what, then?

Britain is a post-Christian society. What holds it together, and prevents it from descending into chaos and violence should the economy collapse, particularly at a time of increasing racial and religious tension?

Notice that after Nigel Farage’s deportation speech, Reform has surged in popularity to the point that it has more support than the Tories and Labour combined! Has that kind of thing ever happened?

 

What if the same fiscal disaster happens to France, which is facing its own fast-approaching day of fiscal reckoning? Francois Bayrou, the prime minister, will have to resign in the days to come over the budget impasse. He appeared on French TV this week to say bluntly that the core problem is the Boomers’ pensions, which are politically untouchable.

I also talked to a German woman, who said that her own country is headed towards fiscal disaster. She told me that she used to fear and loathe the AfD (Alternative For Germany), but after seeing how extreme the German establishment has been in trying to crush the AfD, she now sympathizes with them. A German man earlier in the evening told me the same thing.

A German court has banned an AfD candidate for running for mayor in a German city. You’ll never guess why:

The exclusion began when incumbent Mayor Jutta Steinruck (formerly SPD) contacted the SPD-controlled Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of Interior, requesting information about AfD candidate Joachim Paul from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The SPD-led ministry had already made headlines by announcing that civil servants expressing sympathy for the AfD would be excluded from state positions.

The resulting 11-page report claimed “good reasons to doubt Paul’s loyalty to the constitution,” citing:

  • A photograph: Paul posted an Instagram photo of himself with Austrian activist Martin Sellner, who was banned from Germany for advocating the deportation of migrants, including those with citizenship who fail to “sufficiently assimilate.”

  • The concept of “remigration”: Paul gave a November 2023 lecture titled “Immigration: A Matter of Destiny—Why Remigration is Necessary and Feasible.”

  • Literary references: A 2022 article by Paul in the Austrian magazine Freilich referenced Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, stating, “Tolkien’s entire work reflects a conservative mindset of particular value to contemporary conservatism … The protagonists fight for a cause greater than themselves: their homeland, the survival of their culture, a just order, the defense against a global threat.”

  • Cultural interests: Paul’s appreciation for Wagner’s Nibelungenlied, which the report claims holds significance for him in terms of “national pride.” The report notes he offers video seminars on the medieval epic.

For Germany’s liberal and cultural left, all of this undoubtedly smacks of “Nazi.” But in a democracy, the question of what to make of Paul’s ideas and associations should have been left to the public. Paul might not have won—some polls didn’t favor him despite the AfD’s strong February performance in the region, where it came a very narrow first with 24.3%. But the establishment wanted to take no risks, knowing full well they have lost the public struggle on migration and national values.

The dude likes Tolkien and Wagner. Clearly a Nazi!

Meanwhile, the Chief Imam of Ireland would like you to know that it was sad that an asylum seeker raped a Dutch woman and later murdered a Dutch girl the other day, but society is also to blame for :::checks notes::: not telling him that rape and murder is wrong:

 

Poor marginalized asylum seeker. How was he to know it was wrong to rape women and murder them?

Somehow, I think the Irish, like many other Europeans, are in no mood to be talked to like this.

‘We Murder To Dissect’ — Wordsworth

A great visual representation of the Medieval versus the Modern:

 
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Another Day, Another Killer Tranny (From Rod Dreher's Substack)
And: Europe's Dimming Lights; 'Meno-Divorce'; Cosmopolitan Reactionaries

Another Day, Another Killer Tranny

And: Europe's Dimming Lights; 'Meno-Divorce'; Cosmopolitan Reactionaries

 
Aug 28, 2025
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In Minnesota — designated in law by Gov. Tim Walz as a “trans refuge state” — tranny berserker shot up a Catholic church full of children — children! — at mass. Does it get any more demonic than that? That photo above is from a video he posted before massacring the kids.

His mother used to work at the school. The shooter had once attended there. Earlier, Mom had signed off on her son changing his name to reflect his chosen female identity.

 

Notice the rifle superimposed on the LGBT omniflag, with the slogan “defend equality.”

I wonder how the Minnesota lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan, photographed below, feels today:

 

She probably feels no different than she feels yesterday. I woke up in Rome this morning seeing social media full of liberals and talking heads blaming Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and others for asking for prayers for the :::checks notes::: Catholic children shot and killed while at prayer! That, and urging people not to blame transgenderism, on account, I guess, of transgenderism being a religion of peace, or the usual bullshit.

I’m with Wes Yang:

 
 

You will recall that the Covenant School shooting in Nashville was also carried out by a female-to-male tranny who had once studied there. I have a friend who was part of the Covenant community. The devastation of that evil event on the lives of the parents of kids there is unspeakable.

Transgenderism is a form of mental illness. People with gender dysphoria need compassionate psychiatric help. What they don’t need is the “affirmation” that our sick culture gives them.

Note too that in the killer’s video, he wrote on one gun “Kill Donald Trump.” ABC News reported that he had “the name of President Trump written on one of the guns.” True, but misleading: HE WANTED TO MURDER THE PRESIDENT. One might suppose from the news reporter’s description that the killer was a Trump supporter.

I am beyond done with these people and their apologists, especially among media and liberal politicians. I want normality back.

Europe’s Dimming Lights

 

In other news about the cost of false compassion and sentimental humanitarianism, I was out for dinner in Rome last night. I met some old friends and new at my table, folks from all over Europe. We talked about politics for a while. All around the table, little to no confidence in their governments. Disgust with migrant and Muslim crime. Fear that civil war is ultimately coming, because people’s backs are against the wall.

A German at the table found out I live in Budapest. He had great things to say about Hungary, which he had recently visited. “Before I left, all my German friends told me to be careful in Viktor Orban’s country,” he said. “They were seriously worried. But then I got there, and it’s nothing like they think.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “we see that a lot. Older western Europeans usually end up saying that Budapest today is the Europe they remember from thirty years ago, in terms of safety and order.”

The German, who was on the younger side, said it really does make a big contrast with his country. (Remember, this is Germany we’re talking about, the land where nobody crosses the street against the light.) I told him about an American graduate student studying in Germany, whom I met last summer in Budapest. The American was shocked by how free and open nightlife is in Budapest, with the street cafes full.

I said, “He told me that back in Germany, German people are withdrawing from going out on the weekends, because they are scared of migrant violence.”

“Yes, that’s true,” said the German, sadly.

Similar stories around the table from all over Europe. How much longer can these people stand it?

In UnHerd, the distinguished German columnist Wolfgang Munchau delivers a despairing verdict on his continent. Excerpts:

If you’ve read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, you’ll immediately recognise what happened to the Europeans last month. They went into the Total Perspective Vortex. This is a torture device designed by a mad scientist which reveals your insignificance in comparison with the rest of the universe. Almost all who enter are annihilated. That understanding is just too terrible to survive.

More:

I have been a pro-European all my life. But a Europe of coordinated subservience is not one worth having. The whole idea of European integration was to address collective action problems. The EU no longer does that.

Instead, it set out on a path of no return. This has led it a place of low growth, high debt, and a lack of political majorities that support change. Large and increasing portions of European citizens live off welfare. They have no interest in reforms that will invariably lead to a cut in their income. Demography plays havoc with democracy. In Germany, for example, I cannot identify a single political party with a coherent agenda for reform. In the UK, too, there is not one political party that has given serious thought to a post-Brexit economic model. In their decline, European countries are astonishingly similar. The UK, France and Germany are all currently discussing wealth and property taxes as a last and desperate measure. If, and when, this is implemented, they will end up with even less growth. They are running out of ideas.

I hate this. As an American who loves Europe, I want Europe to succeed. It cannot and will not, not with the mindset and the leadership it has today.

‘Meno-Divorce’

 

A reader sends this infuriating story about women who hit menopause, and decide they’ve had it with their husbands. Excerpts:

Melissa McClure's husband asked if it was a midlife crisis.

No, she told him: "I’m wide awake to the possibility of what my life can be, and it doesn’t include you.”

McClure wasn’t sleeping well. She had hot flashes. Her husband’s loud chewing sent her into a rage. His negative attitude bothered her, and she no longer felt appreciated as a wife and stepmother.

They had been together for 14 years, but perimenopause made her realize she wanted a divorce.

“We spend our entire adult lives taking care of our husbands or partners and children. We give so much of ourselves to other people as nurturers that we lose ourselves in the process,” says the photographer, 44. “It wasn’t a midlife crisis but an awakening.”

Do I want a divorce or is this menopause? It’s a question resonating with women in midlife, when hormones are changing as their stress is increasing – kids moving out and parents moving in and careers often at their peak.

Though divorce rates overall are dropping, divorce among adults 50 and older is increasing. In 1990, almost 1 in 10 of all divorces in the United States were among adults 50 and older. By 2019, that percentage had grown to almost 1 in 4, according to a study by Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research. That coincides with a time most women go through perimenopause and menopause.

The "menodivorce" is on the rise.

(I feel it necessary to state here that this had nothing at all to do with my own divorce. So please do not jump to a false conclusion.)

As the reader who sent this to me commented:

The poor schmucks they were married to? Of course none of them are interviewed; they don't factor at all into this tale of women's liberation. It's all about how SHE ditched HIM to find her TRUE SELF - his feelings, the kids' feelings be damned.

While granting that there are certainly situations in which people 50+ are better off divorced, all I can say is I hope the "I gotta be ME!" ladies in this article find themselves abandoned at Thanksgiving by their children and alone at age 80, depending on some hired hand to help them out of bed in the mornings.

Into The Hawleyverse

 

A reader writes:

I don't know if you are a fan of Noah Hawley, but you might look into his shows. He's tapping into a number of the themes you write about, albeit from a secular perspective.

Hawley is the showrunner for the television series Fargo, and currently, Alien: Earth. As I have been watching new Alien:Earth episodes, I was reminded about this Reddit thread about seemingly human characters that are implied to be supernatural: about https://www.reddit.com/r/TopCharacterTropes/comments/1mxewel/comment/na5pgk2/.

The comment thread refers to Hawley's television series, Fargo, and correctly points out that there's at least one character in each season who represents some sort of supernatural (usually evil) force. The Fargo series, if you don't know, generally refers to and expands upon the Cohen brothers' body of work. It isn't trying to be a reboot of the film. Each season is its own story, with characters and themes that are in conversation with the Fargo movie, but also the entirety of the Cohens' oeuvre.

This supernatural character is a common feature in Cohen movies; many have one or more characters with otherworldly qualities, meant to embody Satan or evil (Anton Chigurh in No Country, Sheriff Cooley in O' Brother) or good (Sam Elliott in Big Lebowski).

As noted in the Reddit thread, every season of Hawley's Fargo series has at least one such supernatural character, who is heavily implied to be an angel or a demon or some kind of pagan god.

Throw in some UFOs in Season 2, and we are in Diana Pasulka territory.

We are also in C.S. Lewis's space trilogy territory, where angels and demons are extrademensional beings, and where the Greek and Roman gods are actually good or evil beings that are servants of God (Mars and Venus) or fallen angels. I assume Hawley and the Cohen brothers don't use Lewis as a source, but their work reflects his ideas.

Which brings me to Alien: Earth. This is Hawley's newest series, currently streaming. I've seen most of the earlier Alien movies, and am enjoying the series, but what struck me recently is that in almost every Alien movie, and in this series, there is also usually a character that seemingly represents otherworldly, supernatural powers of good or evil. And these characters are not the murderous alien species, the Xenomorphs. The big baddies are usually the "synths," which are man-created androids. In the movies, the synths are almost always the reason that the Aliens are able to kill the humans. Especially, there is a synth played by Michael Fassbender called David, who is the Anton Chigurh of the Alien universe - a relentless and supernatural embodiment of evil. But David is an AI robot created by humans.

Anyway, this again reminded me of your and Paul Kingsnorth's writings about AI, especially the Basilisk, and your recent newsletters about ChatGPT. This, also, echoes That Hideous Strength, where the new technology is really just a mask for the demonic (and has to be defeated by the old powers of Merlin, pressed into service by the Christian God).

Even though the Cohen brothers are not Christian, I've always found their work to be brimming with Christian themes, and to reflect the kind of sensibility that you, Lewis, and Kingsnorth write about. Perhaps some of that is owing to their Eastern European Jewish ancestry. And Noah Hawley is picking that up, and also echoing Lewis (and you), probably without trying to. What this tells me, is that these ideas are swimming around in the zeitgeist - aliens and robots and angels and demons. But really just a return of the old gods, and the battle of good versus evil in an enchanted world.

This is all news to me. Thoughts, readers?

Ed West: Cosmopolitan Reactionary

 

The excellent Substacker Ed West writes about how travel is correlated with becoming more liberal, but he, a frequent traveler, becomes more conservative the more he sees of the world. Excerpts:

There are plenty of cosmopolitan reactionaries out there: I’m probably one, maybe you are, too. For one thing, many conservatives rightly argue that visiting non-western countries brings home how unique our own society and culture is, how unlike the rest of the world. It also illustrates how fragile our own inheritance is.

Although Sri Lanka was filled with gorgeous scenery and wildlife, none of this would make for an enjoyable experience were it not for the immense kindness of the people, gentle, civilised and welcoming.

He goes on to talk about how beneath the pleasant surface, Sri Lanka is a country mired in violence, and ethnic and religious conflict.

More:

One might even say that travelling had reaffirmed my prejudices, but I do wish that policy makers, politicians and commentators alike, read more history beyond Europe in the 1930s or America in the 1960s. Many universalist beliefs rest on a strange lack of curiosity about the world, a parochial cosmopolitanism that ignores how unusual our own political stability is, and contingent.

On the other hand, travel can also open one’s eyes to how far our own country has fallen, compared to those which employ policies regarded as ‘extreme’. A visit to Japan can make us recognise that we don’t need to accept such levels of squalor or crime, even if that country is far from perfect (it’s dying, to be frank). Closer awareness of China, even further from being perfect, suggests that diversity might not be a sign of flourishing globalisation but rather the symptom of an empire in decline.

One added reason for the growing agitation over quality-of-life crimes is that more young Britons are visiting Dubai, which has recorded robbery rates about one-hundredth the level of London. After growing accustomed to not thinking about theft, or taking a metro without being harassed by drug addicts, it’s incredibly depressing and rage-inducing to have to turn on alert mode again. The spell of defeatism, that this is an inevitable part of modern living because it’s like that everywhere, comes to wear away with more foreign travel beyond the west.

I write in this space a lot about Europe’s problems with migration and crime. That said, every time I visit America — my home country, a country I love, and a country to which I plan to return one day — I am aware of how much better the quality of life is here in Europe. I’m not just talking about better food. The thing that always hits me about American life is how fast everything moves. That, and how car-centric everything is. Yeah, the car thing is not exactly news, but when you get used to living in a city where everywhere you want to go is walkable, or accessible by excellent public transportation, you come to value it.

Mind you, I’m spoiled, living in Budapest; my friends in Paris, for example, don’t like taking the metro anymore, because all that migrant diversity has made it more dangerous. In fact, importing to many non-Westerners has made European cities more cosmopolitan, in a trivial sense, but also much less livable. I was born in 1967. Over the course of my lifetime, London has gone from being around 90 percent white British to today, being 36 percent white British. It is the capital of Britain, but most people who live there today are not of British heritage. Isn’t that incredible?

Budapest has migrants, but it remains an overwhelmingly Hungarian city. When you visit Budapest, you know that you are in the capital of the Magyars. I like that. And if they ask me, an American, to depart to keep their capital more Magyar, well, good on them. Traveling within Europe, and seeing what mass migration has done to great European cities, makes me more reactionary. I don’t want Budapest to be like every other blob city in the world. What sort of person wants cities and nations to surrender their particularity for the sake of some sort of abstract ideal of “diversity”? It’s crazy.

I remind you that Renaud Camus says the ethnic dimension of the Great Replacement could only have happened because the country’s elites decided first that their native, traditional culture, with its shared history and habits, were a Bad Thing that needed to be dissolved. A people who know who they are, and who value their literature, music, art, and culture, will not surrender it. The elites had to first dislodge the culture that was there, in part by demonizing it as nothing more than racism, sexism, colonialism, homophobia, and the rest, and replace it with the soulless managerial liberalism and superficial cosmopolitanism represented by Brussels and the EU. Last time I was in Brussels, the strongest impressions I had about the city was that it was home to a bunch of Europeans who are fanatical about LGBT, and a bunch of Muslims who have no intention of integrating. The only thing really European-feeling about it was the architecture and the beer.

I’m a Cosmopolitan Reactionary precisely because I love Europe, I want it to remain Europe, and I realize how very, very hard it was for Europe to become Europe, over many centuries of suffering and struggle. And they’re throwing it all away, chasing a corrupt dream of sentimental liberalism. All those people from outside the West they’re letting in are escaping dysfunctional cultures, but many of them bring the same cultures that made their own native countries undesirable. What good does that do Europe?

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Cincinnati - Crickets in the news
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Cincinnati And Our Civilization's Future

At What Point Will We Take This Kind Of Thing Seriously? Before It's Too Late?

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Cincinnati, last weekend, knocked out by a black man’s punch

Heavy stuff today. Back in Budapest after a week in Transylvania, and I had some depressing conversations with some fellow foreigners at the end. I almost didn’t want to bring this up, because it’s just so awful to contemplate. But to turn away is morally irresponsible, and eventually we’re going to have to deal with it all anyway. These are the stories of our times. If you want to skip today, no harm, no foul. I feel like I’m being dragged to conclusions that I find hateful, but increasingly unavoidable.

I’m going to begin with a story I became aware of this weekend. But it touches exactly on the topic of an intense conversation with a young American conservative I met at the festival down there — a Christian who seemed to be as concerned about this stuff as I was, though less visibly shocked, because he’s been living in it.

The photo above is of a white woman in Cincinnati, the hometown of J.D. Vance when he’s not in Washington. On Friday night, she and a white male companion were assaulted by a mob of blacks at the Cincinnati Jazz Festival. Here is a link to a video of the assault, in which both black men and women participated in the pile-on. The white woman prone on the ground is shown on the video being punched in the face by a black man. The reason we have this video is a black onlooker (you can tell by his off-camera accent) filmed it with pleasure. He didn’t try to help. He just observed.

It went viral over the weekend online. The Cincy police chief condemned the attack on Saturday. Have you heard about this racist assault anywhere but online? Probably not.

  

The black conservative media personality Jason Whitlock linked to a video of one of the attacks, and said:

When you're at church today or in your secret place, say a prayer for this man and his wife. This behavior and lack of national outrage are unsustainable. It's unsustainable. The anti-white bigotry at the root of this behavior must be addressed. Sickening.

God bless Jason Whitlock! But of course our national media prefer us not to notice. Noticing is bad. If a white mob had done this to a black couple, it would still be making headlines, and our media would have been calling for a National Conversation. We all know this. We all know that we live under a double standard.

Speaking of, did you hear back in 2020, the Year of St. Floyd, about the black folks in Georgia who bought land to create a blacks-only enclave, to be safe from whites? CNN was among the many media orgs that covered it:

  

From the story:

The unrest that took hold of the country earlier this year after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police, and closer to home, the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery while jogging outside Brunswick, Georgia, prompted the women to search for a new community, one they could start themselves.

“Watching our people protesting in the streets, while it is important, and I want people to stay out in the streets, bringing attention to the injustices of Black people. We needed to create a space and a place where we could be a village, again, a tribe, again,” Scott said.

Personally, I don’t care if black folks want to do that. It’s a free country, and as long as people who aren’t black are not forbidden by law from settling there, I’ll defend this kind of thing in principle. People wanting to live around people like themselves is natural. It’s why political scientist Robert Putnam found, to his great distress as a liberal, that the more diverse a community is, the less social trust there is. It has to do with human nature, and, if you like, evolution. We are hard-wired to be more trusting when our neighbors are like us. It’s not just a race thing. If I were Muslim, I would be more at ease living in a Muslim neighborhood than in one in which I was a religious minority (and that’s why I am not bothered by news of Muslims in Texas doing this, as long as there is no evidence of criminal activity, e.g., terrorism, going on there). Heck, I would feel more at ease living in a middle-class neighborhood in which I, as a white man, was a minority, than I would living in an all-white neighborhood that was poor and violent. Be honest: so would you.

The point I’m making here is that when blacks sought to build a racially exclusive enclave, it was a cause of celebration in the media.

Now, though, a group of whites who have established a whites-only community in Arkansas have become the target of a state AG investigation. Story here, from MSNBC. Quote:

Group co-founder Eric Orwoll recently garnered national attention for the segregated community he helped launch on roughly 150 acres in northeast Arkansas. And he garnered more attention this week after revealing that his group might launch a community in Springfield, Missouri, with his self-expressed motive basically amounting to racist, anti-diversity hysteria.

“Whites should have the ability to live among their own people if that’s what they want to do, and mass immigration is quickly making that nearly impossible in many Western nations,” Orwoll told KOLR-TV, the CBS affiliate in Springfield. “If individuals decide to live in multiracial communities, then they should be allowed to do so, but we don’t want racial forced on us in every aspect of life.”

Now, if these people are white supremacists, then I think they are wicked, and should repent of their race hatred. And if there is any potential criminal activity going on there, hell yeah the state should investigate. These do not sound like the kind of people I would want to live around.

But tell me, what is the philosophical difference between black folks wanting to build a private community to live around other black folks, for the sake of their own safety and comfort, and whites doing the same? This tweet:

  

I don’t know how much you American readers see of what’s going on in the UK (probably not much, unless you read X), but British authorities are actually harassing white English people for expressing pride in being English, no matter how innocent (e.g., flying the St. George’s flag, the standard of the English nation). Here’s a tweet from a patriotic British Sikh who holds the St. George flag high outside a migrant hotel, to stand up for England, which he believes is being betrayed by UK authorities letting in so many migrants. Britain is a sick, sick society, led by elites who hate it.

Why do I bring all this up today? Because at the festival, I found myself in conversation with a fellow American visitor, a conservative in his early thirties. I asked him if he followed the work of David Betz, the UK war studies professor who has been sounding the alarm all year over the mounting prospects for civil war in the West. I asked him if he had seen the latest interview Betz did with Harrison Pitt of the European ConservativeHe had not, but he said he agrees with the things I quoted Betz as saying. In this segment of the interview, Betz points out that the older elites — even Nigel Farage who (falsely, in Betz’s view) appears to be a counter-elitist — really don’t understand what’s going on at “the thwarted younger elite level, who have become effectively anti-status quo.”

Betz explains that the young feel that the things they have a right to expect from society are being denied to them. This is called the “expectation gap,” and the literature of civil war and unrest identifies this as key to revolutions and suchlike. (This is true; revolutionaries tend not to come from the poor, but from elites who are sick of the expectation gap. For example, the Bolshevik revolutionary leaders were not from the poor, but from educated classes. The poor were passive supporters.)

And in this clip, Betz observes that the mainstream conservative political and media figures find themselves tongue-tied when it comes to standing up for their own people. He says he doesn’t know them personally, but he suspects that this has to do with their fear of losing status within the system by appearing to be “nativist”. This, says Betz, is why the young don’t listen to them. They find them to be cowardly about facing the world as it is in Britain today, and speaking truth, and having “the conversations we need to have.”

Talking about the UK situation, Betz says that the country’s elites have created this situation over the years. Now both sides “want to fight.” Listening to this, I thought about how the Democratic Party in the US, and the liberal elites (media, academic, corporate), have for a very long time driven racial and ethnic resentment, and have depended (successfully!) on the deep reticence of whites, outside of the social fringes, to object. That has begun to change with Trump — who, let’s be clear, does not talk in parallel terms about privileging whites as the way the Left has talked about privileging non-whites, but rather speaks of a return to basic fairness. This, I think, is why he draws support from a significant number of non-whites.

(Before I get to my main point, I want to tell you that Betz says that if things kick off in the UK, the British Army is too small to quell the violence — and that the loyalty of the army to the state’s orders to suppress Britons fighting a system they find unjust is very much at issue. This is extraordinary! Betz says that the history of these conflicts show that if an army loses faith that the civilian elites are “competent” and trustworthy, then they are likely to fail to defend that elite and the order it has created.)

So, what does this have to do with the conversation I had with the young American? He told me that my generation of conservatives (Gen X), the Boomers, and many Millennials are mostly or even entirely out of touch with what’s actually happening among the young. He told me that white right-wing educated people are giving up entirely on the idea that we can rescue the old classically liberal order. What he was talking about is a recovery of the old MLK “content of your character” standard, on which I was raise, and in which I still believe. His argument — and to be clear, I don’t know to what extent this young man was describing the world, and to what extent he’s endorsing it — is that they no longer believe it works, or that it can work anymore.

I told him that in the 1970s, I was of a generation of Americans acculturated to the MLK standard — and that I celebrate that, in particular because I come from a part of America where white supremacy reigned. White supremacy is un-American, and certainly un-Christian. King’s victory was a great moral victory for the entire nation. But starting around the 1990s, the Left began to give up on King’s vision, despite lying about it. The Left, which controls and has controlled all the cultural institutions, has spent almost a generation dismantling loyalty to King’s classically liberal, deeply Christian principles, and instead embracing frankly wicked racialist rhetoric that cannot do anything but divide and create racial hatred. And the establishment Right has been largely ineffective in resisting it — probably, as Betz says of the UK Right, because they are too afraid of losing status within the establishment by opening themselves to being called bigots. (Same thing on LGBT issues, by the way.)

But here’s the painful thing for me, that I realized sharply in this discussion: I too have lost faith in the King vision — not in principle, but as an ideal that America is capable of living by. And it’s not merely a matter of elite rhetoric. It has more to do with crime and culture. Let me explain.

I told the young man that right-minded people of the Boomer generation, and mine, generally believed that the reason for black poverty and crime was chiefly racist laws. Remove those laws, and things would normalize for black Americans. We have had fifty years to test this theory. The results are mostly negative — I say “mostly” because there has developed a robust black middle class. But far too many American blacks live in a separate America — and I think at this point, it is primarily a matter of deep culture.

In the US, blacks are 13 percent of the overall population. Yet from year to year, they account for just over half of the arrests for murder; the numbers are similarly disproportionate for other violent crimes. You can find out more on the FBI’s crime data site. For example, here’s robbery for 2023:

  

Again, blacks are only 13 percent of the population, and whites almost 60 percent. Yet blacks, though almost five times fewer in number than whites, commit twice the robberies. Why?

Here are the FBI numbers for aggravated assault:

  

Again, the black 13 percent of the population commits roughly the same number of aggravated assaults as the white 60 percent. Why?

These are not new questions, obviously, though they have become a lot more “real” with the spread of smartphone cameras and the Internet. We can see every day things like blacks shoplifting; this new one shows a little black kid being caught shoplifting, and when the clerk asks the kid’s mother to bring him back to pay for the thing he’s walking out with, she gets hostile and profane. Most white people avoid confrontation. You never know when it might get violent. They just endure it.

Yeah, I know: the algorithm promotes this kind of thing. But you know, there’s a reason now you can’t go to the drugstore in many parts of the US and buy things like razors without having to ask a clerk to unlock the bin. And, as I’ve mentioned here recently, back in 2012, when naive me asked a supermarket chain executive how he could justify the “food deserts” in poor black neighborhoods, he told me that the shoplifting is so bad in those places that they can’t afford to keep supermarkets (a low-margin business) open there.

To be clear, I don’t think this is a matter of “black skin makes you a criminal”. You want to see a white Appalachian family whose familial culture is criminal and self-destructive? I present to you the fascinating documentary about the White family (seriously) of West Virginia, who are known to their county as violent white trash — and the documentary shows why.

I think this is a matter of a defective culture. But — and this is the point — I am weary of trying to figure this out. I just want to live in peace. And I’m tired of being gaslit about this stuff by our media and politicians. Well, the young conservative festivalgoer I met said that in his generation, conservatives are openly embracing racist-tribalist views. They unashamedly — at least among themselves — talk of avoiding black people, because they don’t want the hassle of risking crime and all the rest. They look at older folks like me, with our MLK ideals (as attenuated as mine may be by this point), and consider us suckers. His discourse reminded me of the conversation I had in New York City earlier this year with a young woman — I’d say late twenties — who told me she had been a super-woke activist, until she was violently assaulted by a black man who lived in the projects near her University of Chicago dorm. She said that trauma drove her briefly into the racist far right, until she recovered her moral balance.

The point she was making to me was that many in her generation have lost the willingness to defer to the kinds of ideals my generation, and the Boomers, embraced. That’s what the festivalgoer I talked with was saying too, and trying to get me to see. And you know, I think a lot of it is the “expectations gap” that David Betz is talking about. They have grown up in a culture in which they cannot expect to achieve the level of material success of their parents’ generation. This is because of a variety of reasons, including structural-economic and technological, but it is what it is. And in this era of diminished expectations, they are sick of being told that they have to accept less solely because of their race or sex, because justice requires it.

Mind you, this was a friendly conversation. My interlocutor was calmly trying to tell me why his generation of educated people on the Right — tomorrow’s elites — is a lot more radical than my generation can comprehend, and why. He told me that the “civil war” thesis is not even controversial among his generation. They expect it, in America. Later, at the airport in Tirgu Mares, I ran into a young French scholar who had also been at the festival. I asked him about whether he expected civil war, in the Betz sense, in France. He didn’t flinch: “Yes,” he said, “and it might be better to get this over with sooner rather than later.”

Waiting for the delayed flight, I reflected, as I often do, on historian Edward Watts’s great book The Final Pagan Generation. As you might recall, it’s a book about pagan elites in fourth-century Rome, and how so few of them actually understood what was happening around them, with the Christian revolution. Based on their writings, Watts demonstrates that they were aware that these people called Christians had come into existence, and were growing in numbers within the Empire, but they had no real awareness that the Empire was moving to Christianity. As elites, they lived in a social bubble. They thought that because Rome had always been pagan, it always would be. Were the temples not open? Were we not still celebrating the pagan festivals?

They did not see it coming. But, Watts points out, their young did. The children of the Roman pagan elites — a generation that came of age in the 360s and 370s — were not willing to embrace their parents’ values. And they understood — as the pagan elite faithful of their generation also understood — that the peace could not hold. There was going to be a fight. David Betz, quoting that vile NSFW Bob Vylan song that caused such a stir at Glastonbury, says that the UK today is divided between those who say “I want my country back” and those who say “shut the f—k up.” So it was, to some degree, between the younger Christians and pagans of Rome in the mid-fourth century. Watts writes:

The fourth century has come to be seen as the age when Christianity eclipsed paganism, and Christian authority structures undermined the traditional institutions of the Roman state. Modern historians have highlighted the rising influence of bishops, the emergence of Christian ascetics, the explosion of pagan-Christian conflict, and the destruction of temples. This is one fourth-century story, but it is neither the story that the final pagan generation would have told nor the one that later generations told about them. Their fourth century was the age of storehouses full of gold coins, elaborate dinner parties honoring letter carriers, public orations before emperors, and ceremonies commemorating officeholders. These things occurred in cities filled with thousands of temples, watched over by myriads of divine images, and perfumed by the smells of millions of sacrifices. This fourth century was real…

I think that the 21st century of comfortable older conservatives and liberals like me is equally real. But it is becoming less so. We are headed, to quote the title of Tom Wolfe’s final novel, “back to blood.” As is crystal-clear in the UK, France, and Germany (and no doubt elsewhere in western Europe, but I don’t know as much about those places), the elites of both Left and Right are making it worse. In that Harrison Pitt interview, Betz says the violent clashes are moving toward us at great speed. Again, I remind you that Betz is in no way saying he wants this to happen! He’s a middle-aged family man. But he’s reading the signs of the times in light of what his academic training as a specialist in civil war-type conflicts has taught him, and he’s sounding the alarm.

I haven’t lived in the US for four years, so I’m somewhat out of touch. Anecdotally, I notice that even many of my middle-class white Christian conservative friends, people who genuinely hate racism, have quietly given up. They believe, even if they can’t fully admit it to themselves, that the noble King experiment has failed. It’s not because King’s moral principles were wrong; it’s because American society, for various reasons, has failed them. And, to put a fine point on it, the culture of lower-class black Americans has failed most of all. I told my interlocutor in Romania the story about the old white Christian man I knew back in Baton Rouge, who lived all his life in a neighborhood that had once been working-class white, but switched to black after the white flight of the 1970s and 1980s. He stayed, but finally left in 2020, when it became too dangerous. He told me that his friends were other black folks of his generation (he was in his seventies), and that they were the only ones left there who had any memory of what it was like to have an intact family. That matters!

The late, great Wick Allison, founder and publisher of D Magazine, the city magazine of Dallas, once wrote an essay there (I can’t find it online), talking about how when segregation ended in the city, there was a massive flight of black people out of black neighborhoods — black people who held what we call “middle-class values,” and who wanted to get away from the dysfunctional culture of the black poor. But we don’t talk about that. It complicates the Narrative.

Sir Kenneth Clark, author of the 1970s bestseller Civilisation, once said, “It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation.” This is where we are today. Do you have confidence in our civilization today? I don’t. Here in Europe, the ruling classes are doing everything they possibly can to suppress native populations from noticing the deleterious changes mass migration are having on their countries. It’s not going to work. I have more hope for the US, because we have the space and (for now) the liberty to move, to get away from the forces of destruction. But doing so implies, inescapably, a loss of faith in the American pluralist experiment.

All I know is that I am tired of pretending that things like that white woman knocked out cold by the punch of a black man on the street of Cincinnati doesn’t really matter, that it’s something we should not notice because that might comfort white racists.

Last point. After I got back to Budapest last night, I went to dinner at a friend’s house. One of the guests was a woman from a continental European country which I won’t name, to protect her identity. She told me two weeks ago, a friend in her home country was at a party held in a restaurant held in a small city there. They pushed the tables aside, and everyone was dancing to Latin music, and having a great time. Suddenly, a Muslim man came into the restaurant, unplugged the sound system, and began ranting at the crowd. He told them they were all “pigs,” and that the day is coming when they would have their throats cut. On and on he went like this. All the white natives stood in silence, afraid of confronting him because he might have a knife, like so many Muslim migrant men do in that country. Finally, one of the white men found the courage to attack the Muslim, and throw him out. The party resumed.

“This kind of thing happens all the time in my country,” the woman said.

The party will resume. Until it doesn’t. Then, the deluge. The Boomers, my generation, and the left-wing activists won’t see it coming. History teaches us that. An older friend told me he once shared a drink in New York with Alexander Kerensky, the exiled Russian social-democratic leader whose government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. He asked Kerensky why he didn’t just shoot Lenin and that lot. Kerensky replied, “Because we didn’t take them seriously.”

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