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How to drive back doubt and dark
Rod Dreher Diary
September 09, 2024
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How To Drive Back Doubt And Darkness

Thoughts For Christians Who Are Struggling With Scandal And Defeat

Sep 8
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Me in Jerusalem, at the Holy Fire ceremony in 2022, one week after learning that my marriage was over. Why am I so joyful? Read on…

Another weekend post from me! I have some things I want to say that I don’t want to get lost in the more news-oriented posts I make during the week. Thanks for your indulgence.

I just returned from church, where I spent some time praying for friends and others who are scandalized by the failure of churches and Christian institutions. The big news in Hungary this weekend is that a 38-year-old Catholic priest who made a name for himself as a right-wing culture warrior, and who had even been invited to bless Prime Minister Orban’s office, was suspended by his bishop. Why? It is reported that he had multiple gay lovers, and even that gay porn videos featuring him performing are available online. This priest had even in the past denounced homosexuality and liberalism. If the charges are true, then it’s hard to imagine a more thorough hypocrite.

Naturally Orban’s political enemies are seizing on this to attack him, but it’s hard to see how the government should have known this about the priest, when his own bishop apparently did not. But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is that at a time when Christianity is fast-shrinking in Hungary, the churches are often their own enemy. The country’s president, a Calvinist, was forced to resign earlier this year because she pardoned a well-connected Calvinist imprisoned for aiding and abetting a pedophile. She pardoned him at the request of the country’s Reformed bishop, who also suffered disgrace from it. And now this big Catholic scandal.

From America magazine:

Hungary is a Catholic country with a strong Protestant presence, but in its latest census, published late last year, a majority of Hungarians, 57 percent, failed to declare an affiliation in any faith tradition: Forty percent did not answer the question about affiliation at all, and 17 percent declared “no religion” after being asked which church they belonged to. The census outcome marks the first time that religious identity has fallen below 50 percent in Hungary.

The Catholic Church in Hungary saw the steepest loss of membership, dropping 30 percent since the last census in 2011. Now 1.1 million fewer Hungarians identify as Catholics than 10 years ago. The contemporary decline reflects a long-term trend. Two decades ago, over half of Hungarians identified as Catholic; today only 28 percent do.

I passed on the gay porn priest news to a devoutly Catholic friend here yesterday. Her response: “Our church is a corpse.” She explained that she meant in Hungary, and in much of Europe.

I prayed for her this morning at liturgy, and for brothers and sisters in Christ like her. And I prayed for a close Orthodox friend who has ceased attending the liturgy out of anger at certain gross and undeniable failures of the Orthodox clergy in his life. When this guy told me that this summer, he found he couldn’t bring himself to go to liturgy anymore, I responded with the usual arguments about how the sins of the priests do not negate the truths proclaimed by the Church. And then I realized that these were exactly the same things that Catholics trying to keep me from leaving the Catholic Church said in my great crisis almost twenty years ago.

I realized in that moment that these logical arguments are as useless to my Orthodox friend in his suffering as they had been to me as a Catholic in crisis. This is a matter of the heart, not the head. The rage and the pain I suffered those many years ago from the corruption in the Catholic institution made it emotionally and psychologically impossible even to deal with those arguments.

Though the failures of the priests in my friend’s case are objectively speaking not nearly as serious as the sins of the Catholic hierarchy and clergy that drove me from Catholicism, that’s not how it feels to him. I know a lot about what he’s been through in recent years, and the idea of saying, “Cheer up! At least our priests aren’t molesting kids!” is insulting. My friend really was failed in a very, very painful way, and tells me that he simply can’t bear standing in church on Sunday with all this weighing on him.

So I pray, and listen, and help as much as he will let me. What else can I do, or any of us do? I did tell him that I came out of the crisis of faith that cost me my Catholicism with the conviction that I should never, ever put the institutional Church and its clergy on a pedestal. What that has meant in practice is that I have learned not to expect anything from the Orthodox clergy, or any clergy. I hate it. It should not be that way. But having been severely burned once by my trust, I can’t let that happen again. So when I hear of corruption in the Orthodox Church — in the news, or in the lives of individual believers — of course I hate it, but it does not shake my faith. I learned that the sins of the priests don’t negate the truths of the faith, just like my Catholic friends back in the day said.

What changed in me? Aside from having thrown down the idolization of the institutional church, that is? Simply this: I had to learn to be enchanted as a Christian. I wouldn’t have put it that way before this morning, but that is the secret to keeping the faith in a time of radical disillusionment with our religious institutions. (I bold printed it)

I don’t bring that angle into my forthcoming book Living In Wonder, because frankly, it hadn’t really occurred to me. But boy, did it make itself clear today in prayer.

I had been thinking this morning, as I stood in church praying, that the Benedict Option is looking better and better as a strategy for coping amid the collapse of church authority. That is, if we Christians, whatever our confession, are going to keep the faith through this long dark winter, we are going to have to take more responsibility in our personal lives, our family lives, and in our local church community. When church leaders fail, we have to disciple ourselves. For that matter, when they succeed, we still have to disciple ourselves, because the pressures from post-Christian, even anti-Christian, culture are immense. If you read The Benedict Option, you will see that it’s about building resilience where you are, not escaping; I say in the opening chapter that there is no escape anymore. We are simply going to have to get through this. We cannot wait to be rescued. We have to build the arks, and start rowing.

Standing in church this morning in prayer, I reflected on how much I had learned over the years of living as an Orthodox Christian, about enchantment. By “enchantment,” I mean becoming aware, not just as a matter of an idea in your head, but in your heart and in your bones, that God is, as we Orthodox pray, “everywhere present, and filling all things.” Here we are all standing around in this hot, humid church this morning in prayer, while all around us, angels have gathered — really and truly gathered. That awareness changes everything.

It’s not just an Orthodox thing. You longtime readers might recall my story about going to Catholic mass in Dallas when my son Lucas was a young toddler. He hadn’t yet learned how to talk. He was being squirmy, so I took him into the church foyer, separated from the nave by large panes of glass. I held Lucas while mass was going on. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in my arms, pointed his right finger at a space to the side of the altar, and said, “Angel!” His finger tracked whatever he was seeing, and he kept saying, “Angel! Angel!” Then he put his head back on my shoulder, and tried to sleep.

I believe that little boy saw an angel.

I also believe now that if I had spent more time cultivating my awareness of angels (which I used as a symbol for the general mystical awareness of the presence of God), my faith would have been stronger as a Catholic. But I didn’t: I thought it was sufficient to have mastered the propositional arguments for the faith. I’m not sure why my Orthodox friend is having the crisis that he is, given how much Orthodoxy stresses conversion of the heart, and mystical awareness, but I suspect it’s because his faith is mostly a cerebral thing for him (he is very intellectual, and has more of an engineer’s mindset than an artist’s). As I try to bring him back to liturgical worship, I’m going to need to think and pray hard about how to reach him where he is.

After church, I met a new friend, an American who just moved to Budapest with her family for a temporary job assignment. She is a churchgoing Catholic and a conservative, younger than I am (but aren’t they all these days?), and we got to talking about the situation in our home country, and in the world. As we traded stories about our lives, and shared our deep concerns about the civilizational crisis of the West — it always does me good to meet new people and to be able to say, “You see it too, huh?” — I told her about The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies. She hadn’t heard about the books or their arguments, but as I laid them out briefly, she nodded along, and added occasions when she had seen the same things I talk about in the books.

She also said that she is only a Catholic now by the grace of God, because her parents had been so demoralized by church scandals that they didn’t raise her in the Church. She had a strong re-conversion in adulthood. We talked about the complacency among American Christians. She said, “I think a lot of us don’t understand how fast everything can change.”

I told her the story of Father Kolakovic, and how he had to battle the same thing among Slovak Catholics in the 1940s. So many of the older ones did not want to see what was coming, and were not prepared for the advent of Communism, and its persecution of the Church.

Walking home a few minutes ago from our conversation, thinking about it and about my experience in church this morning, I felt more convinced than ever that Living In Wonder, though I didn’t intend it as the final part of a trilogy on how to be faithfully Christian in this post-Christian world, that’s exactly what it is. In the end, re-enchanting ourselves as Christians — that is, adopting the mindset and the practices that help us to see and feel the presence of God, his saints, and his angels — is the bottom line of holding on through hard times. Even when the clergy and the institutions fail, and fail badly, if we not only know in our heads, but feel in our bones, the truths of our faith, we can hold on. But if not, well, it’s going to be very hard. In my own life, I have lived this out, and I hope that I can convey that in the book to readers.

Yesterday I listened to an episode of The Exorcist Files, the excellent podcast featuring Father Carlos Martins, an American Catholic exorcist. It’s pretty scary, but what I like about it is that Father Carlos uses these real-life stories from his experiences to educate listeners about the realities of spiritual warfare. One thing he talked about in the episode I listened to is why the demons have special hatred for the Virgin Mary. This is something my own confessor, Father Nectarios, an Orthodox exorcist, has discussed with me as well. There is something about Mary (sorry) that riles the demons up. It seems clear that because she, in her humility and purity, is the absolute opposite of the demons, in their filth and their pride. Plus, she is not a goddess, but was and is one of us: a non-divine human being who epitomizes the pinnacle of what human beings who surrender radically to God can become. Listening to these stories, in both the podcast and in conversations with my confessor, teaches me something about the realities of the world of the spirit. I gained some new insights into why Catholics and Orthodox regard Mary with such honor. Even the demons, who hate God, know that she is special among God’s creatures.

See, this is the kind of everyday knowledge that we Christians, whatever our confession, need to be building into our faith. You might not be able, because of your Protestant convictions, to regard Mary as we from the older traditions do, but it is still valuable to ponder why exorcists report that demons despise her with special hatred. What does that tell us about the role of humility and purity in the Christian life? We have so much to learn, and so many opportunities to learn. But we cannot be deceived by thinking that this is a matter of mastering our catechism. We have to open ourselves up to the power of God in everyday life.

In Living In Wonder, I end by talking about how, the day before Palm Sunday in 2022, on the eve of traveling from Budapest to Jerusalem for Orthodox Holy Week, I learned via an email from my wife that she had filed for divorce, bringing the ten-year painful struggle to keep our marriage together to an end. We had never spoken of divorce before. I got on the plane for Jerusalem the next morning a total wreck. Arriving in the Old City, I dropped my bags in my hotel, made my way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and up the stairs into the chapel built over Golgotha (really), fell on my face, and begged Jesus for His mercy. That’s how the most extraordinary week of my life began — a week full of signs and wonders.

That photo up above was taken at the ceremony of the miracle of the Holy Fire, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Holy Saturday afternoon. I went to it skeptical that the miracle was real. I found out it was! That joy you see on my face is the joy of a man who only one week earlier had learned that life as he knew it had been destroyed — but he had literally just put his hand through the fire, over and over, and had not been burned. Our God is an awesome God! He would take care of me, and see me through this. I returned to Budapest so filled with joy, even though the worst was yet to come.

Here’s where the Living In Wonder narrative picks up from that point:

After that Easter journey, I began to look even more intently for signs of God’s presence and love everywhere. When I would experience hardship—something serious or something trivial—I now framed it as an opportunity to grow closer to him. And I practiced the presence of God by talking to him throughout the day more often than before.

I noticed, too, that the things I had learned about focused attention, particularly the strategies from Orthodox priests about refusing logismoi, any bad or distracting thoughts, helped me avoid being drawn again into the trap of nostalgia for a lost golden past. Whenever I was tempted to feel anger or self-pity, I thought about Saint Galgano in Luca Daum’s drawing and compelled myself to stay focused on Christ. God has not abandoned me, I would tell myself. This is all happening as a test of faith.

There are people who would say, “If God is real, why didn’t he save your marriage? Why does he let children die? Why do the wicked prosper and the just suffer?” This is the wrong approach. My friend Marco Sermarini, whose bereavement of his wife did nothing to dim his bright shining joy, says that the existence of suffering in the world calls us to perform “the spiritual exercise of wonder.”

“If you read the book of Job, there is a question recurring, ‘Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?’ and so forth,” says Marco. “I think this is a program, not just something random.”

This is an important point. It is true that we can’t force the awesome and wonderful to manifest themselves to us; the best we can do is to keep ourselves in a state of watchful waiting. But it is also true that we can practice wonder, in the sense that we can meet our doubts with an exercise of faith in the unfathomable mysteries of God, who is all good. When the tide of the Holy Spirit seems to have gone out, we have a responsibility to trust that it will return in time. Having seen the wonder of God once, we practice it in our prayers, our prostrations, and our liturgies of the everyday. That’s how we make it real and ever present.

How do we begin to live out Christian enchantment? If you are not a believer, or if you are a weak one, start by accepting that the contemporary story about how Christianity is a thing of the past, whose claims cannot be believed by modern people, is just one take among many. If you believe the secular materialist narrative, you are saying that the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived, and the majority of people alive today, are wrong. It is possible that you are right—but the odds are not in your favor. Shouldn’t you at least consider that you are wrong?

Then you can face seriously the task of changing your mind to become more open to the reality of God and the presence of mystery, meaning, and miracle in this world. True, God cannot be commanded to show himself, but that does not relieve us from the responsibility to open ourselves to him. After all, you will never find if you don’t first seek. You will never experience re-enchantment without metanoia—a radical change of mind. Iain McGilchrist explains how and why the left-brain vision that made the modern world is a distortion of the truth—and why those who seek the truth must not abandon it but rather should balance it with the intuitive way of knowing from the brain’s right hemisphere.

This is not a matter of accepting an illusion because it might make you feel better. This is about learning to see the truth, to access the really real, which has been denied to you by the flawed way of perception the modern world has falsely claimed is the whole truth. The harder we cling to the modern idea that the material world is nothing more than stuff that we are free to manipulate, the more difficult it will be to experience a resonant sense of connection with it.

Because the way we pay attention to the world has a lot to do with what we perceive, you can endeavor to shed distractions in life that get in the way of focus. And you can take on prayer disciplines that help still the mind, cleanse the nous, and repair the fragmented attention that makes it hard to relate to God.

Then lean, and lean hard, into beauty. Beauty—the moral beauty of good and holy people and the aesthetic beauty of art, music, and architecture, as well as the natural world—is a portal through which enchantment passes to us. Stop thinking of it as merely something admirable or decorative. True beauty reveals to us something of God’s nature, and truth. It shows us that the world has meaning and that we are part of that world. Beauty offers us those moments of epiphany in which the fundamental unity and purpose of the world appear to us. It is also a bridge to the world of the transcendent and ultimately to God.

Cultivate a real appreciation for beauty by reading, listening to, and looking at works of art, music, and architecture that have stood the test of time. Go out into nature and see and feel it for meaning. Read the lives of the saints and meditate on the lives of holy people in our world today. The beauty present in all of these people, places, and things is a sign telling us all where we need to go if we want to live.

Take stories of miracles and encounters with the numinous seriously. Don’t be credulous; not every miracle story is true. But many of them are. You might not experience one, and if not, that doesn’t mean you are unworthy. Still, they really do happen to people, even today. This fact should humble us all and remind us that anything is possible. None of us knows if a miracle awaits us, but we have the responsibility to prepare ourselves for that possibility. We don’t want to be the kind of people who, when confronted by a miracle, react with fear or reflexive disbelief because we don’t want to change our lives.

You can also educate yourself about the realities of the dark side—of black magic and the occult. Modern secularists and rationalist Christians laugh, but demonic possession is real. If you’ve seen it, you don’t need convincing. Demons can work apparent miracles, too, for the sake of deceiving us. Remember that occultists want false enchantment—that is, to experience and access the power of the spirit world—but only for the sake of learning to control it, to compel demons to do things for them. This is the way of destruction. More and more people are choosing it. You must learn why it is evil and turn away from it in all its forms—psychedelics, occult practices, all of it.

It is frankly depressing to look at the state of the churches today and to take stock of the overall quality of leadership, both clerical and lay. Don’t despair! God is raising up new voices to show his people the way forward. It will not do to complain about the very real failures of religious leaders and claim that as an excuse to abandon the faith. This is cowardice. How can you be sure that God won’t use you to rally believers to repentance and return to a true and living faith, as he has done so often in ages past with other ordinary men and women?

To summarize: We Christians have a mission to focus our attention on Christ and to create the conditions for the flow of divine energy—of grace—to purify the eyes of our hearts so that we can see the holiness all around us and share in the life of God. To accomplish this, we have to learn how to sacrifice, die to ourselves, and fix our personal swords, as symbols of our will, into the stone of God as an act of faithful obedience.

We have to learn how to direct our attention rightly, pray more effectively, and reestablish resonance with the world beyond our heads. We have to discover how to open our eyes to beauty and allow it to work its magic on us, drawing us into a deeper relationship with reality.

We have to learn about the frightening facts of spiritual warfare and dark enchantment and turn from its enticements. And we have to seek out the community of wise and faithful men and women with whom to share the pilgrim’s journey.

We can’t force enchantment to happen, but we can certainly do all of these things to prepare ourselves for it—even in the face of a world that says they are impossible and that offers us instead the false enchantments of sex, money, fame, technology, and even the occult. The means to do this are part of our past and part of our present. They can be part of our future, if we want them enough to make life-changing sacrifices. There is no other way. The more control you want to have over your life, the less enchantment you will experience. As Jesus said, “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matt. 16:25).

That is a summary of Living In Wonder, but the whole book is full of stories and details and practical advice for how to do this. I needed today — praying for my scandalized friends in church, and that conversation over coffee — to get myself into the headspace of talking about Christian re-enchantment as a survival skill for believers trying to hold on through this civilizational crisis. I’m going to be giving a speech on this topic at the upcoming Touchstone conference in Chicago later this month. But you’d better believe that when the book comes out on October 22, I’m going to be preaching this gospel of joy.

I told my coffee conversation partner this morning the amazing story of how the Lord sent angels to revive the flagging faith of prisoner Alexander Ogorodnikov. God is doing things like this for us all the time, but often we don’t have eyes to see it. I look at that image of my face above, filled with grace and awe at the goodness of the Lord, and I realize that the darkness of the loss of my marriage could not extinguish the holy fire in my hand, and the light that Holy Week had rekindled in my heart. The miserable failures of the clergy cannot touch you if you are enchanted, in a Christian way. Let’s go! Christ has overcome the world!

I’m making this post free to the whole list today. Please share it with anyone you know who is struggling in the faith, and who needs encouragement. I can barely wait for the book to come out, so we can talk more in depth in this space about signs, wonders, miracles, and the light that cannot be comprehended or snuffed out by the darkness visible. In the book, I tell a story about a New York Catholic businessman whose wife was possessed; an ancestor had made a pact with the devil, which brought the evil onto her. She was eventually delivered after much prayer, thanks to the help of an exorcist. The struggle brought both of them much closer to God. The businessman told me that he and his wife had been ordinary mass-going conservative Catholics prior to this horrific experience, but this taught them both that there is another dimension of reality. He said that now when he walks down the streets of Manhattan, he realizes that there are intense spiritual battles going on unseen all around him.

But he also knows how to achieve victory. That’s what I want to share with readers in this new book. We are like the great French general Marshal Foch in World War I. He sent this message back to headquarters: “My center is giving way, my right flank is retreating, situation excellent, I attack!”

  

Don’t forget to pre-order the book; the new Living In Wonder website Zondervan has created for the book has lots of links to book dealers. If you would like to pre-order a copy signed by me, you can do so exclusively through Eighth Day Books.

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America is currently sick.

The young conservative organizer and media personality Charlie Kirk was just murdered in a political assassination by a 22-year-old ‘anti-fascist’ and trans advocate, Tyler Robinson. As planned, he eliminated the most astute and successful political activist in a generation. Indeed, Kirk may well have ensured that Donald Trump won the 2024 election by not just increasing his youth vote by 6 percent since 2020 but, more importantly, by margins in the swing states of 15-24 percent, ensuring Trump’s victory.

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Such utter moral bankruptcy was on display as well by the social media praise of Palestinian activist Elias Rodriguez (“Free Palestine”), after he brutally murdered a young Jewish couple at the Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. Rodriguez supposedly showed the world how to deal with Zionists—reifying the hateful rhetoric that pervades the modern campus.

Was that ghoulishness confined to such anonymous left-wing nuts and fringe trolls?

Not really.

MSNBC’s guest “analyst,” Matthew Dowd, casually raised an asinine suggestion that the lethal shot came from a Kirk supporter firing off a round. And then, in Pavlovian fashion, he blamed the assassination of Kirk—on Kirk himself—for being an unapologetic “divisive” activist.

Dowd, who was subsequently fired by an embarrassed MSNBC president, only took his cue from anchorwoman, the untouchable Katy Tur, who first editorialized Kirk as a “divisive” figure. By her logic, would that mean that, say, a Bernie Sanders or Zohran Mamdani would also be divisive? What does Joe Biden, by Tur’s logic, deserve after labeling half the country as “semi-fascists” or reducing them to “garbage,” “chumps,” and “dregs”—or boasting he’d like to take Trump behind the gym and beat him up?

Does Tur mean that anyone deemed “divisive” then should naturally expect what befell Charlie Kirk?

Yet, in truth, Charlie Kirk was an upbeat, happy warrior not unlike William F. Buckley in his youth, willing to politely debate political opponents without anger and bias.

The multimillionaire socialist Rep. Ilhan Omar, who once claimed that the Trump “dictatorship” was worse than what she had fled from in her native Somalia, claimed the slain Kirk mourners were “full of sh-t” in a long, incoherent rant. Such creepy examples could be easily multiplied, such as the accustomed lunacy of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She now claimed that those who block gun control legislation could not blame others for inciting the violence: i.e., Charlie Kirk should have expected to reap what he sowed.

A dense AOC seems clueless that not even her fellow leftists seriously advocate confiscating bolt-action .30-06 hunting rifles of the sort that the assassin used to kill Kirk. Perhaps it might be wiser not to try to hunt down and round up 500 million guns in America, but rather to enforce existing unenforced gun laws that prohibit felons, the mentally ill, and domestic terrorists (“anti-fascists”) from possessing them.

Just prior to the murder of Charlie Kirk, a video had been issued of a 23-year-old Ukrainian immigrant, Iryna Zarutska, brutally murdered on public transit in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her throat was slashed by one Decarlos Brown, an African-American, 14-time felon, recently and prematurely released from custody.

The horror followed the now familiar left-wing script. The left-wing mayor, Vi Lyles, immediately tried to stop the release of the transit video, lest it cause anyone or anything to be blamed. Then she followed with the usual DEI boilerplate that excuses evil: do not judge the homeless, arresting people solves nothing, and the murder was merely “tragic,” as if there is no culpability, just bad luck or fate.

As expected, most of the media suffocated the murder story. After all, it upset the dominant racial narrative that must remain unquestioned. We have been told for decades that systemically racist Americans prey on victimized blacks, and thus, Ibram X. Kendi-style antiracism—de facto stigmatizing and demonizing whites—is needed to stop racism.

The left knows that black males, age 15-40, commit well over 50 percent of the most violent crimes in America, while comprising about 3 percent of the population. They know it and privately navigate accordingly, but few speak of it, and none seem to have answers to it. So the topic remains taboo.

Any “tragedy” that highlights that fact—such as the murder of Ms. Zarutska or the recent brutal strangling of Auburn retired professor Julie Schnuelle by a young black man with a felony record who was released back into the public—must be suppressed. So too we rarely hear of the recent murder of the elderly Queens couple by the alleged career felon and released criminal Jamel McGriff. He robbed them, he tied them up, he murdered them, and then he torched their home. And on and on the crime continues, the narrative continues, and we dare not say a word.

In our post-Daniel Penny world, three young black people, sitting just feet away from Zarutska, witnessed Decarlos Brown slit her throat—and did nothing. Perhaps they were afraid, we were told. Perhaps, we were advised, no first aid could have staunched such horrific wounds. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…

Nonetheless, when Zarutska was staring out at eternity in her death throes, bewildered that someone or something had just ended her life, none of the three lifted a finger to help her—or even console her in her final moments. Instead, the killer, blood dripping from his person, calmly walked off the train unmolested. And even then, in his absence, there was no effort of any of the nearby witnesses to tend to the dying Zarutska. Instead, they sidestepped her and left her behind on the train as she lay gasping her last breaths.

The killer, Decarlos Brown? He can be heard on the video mumbling twice, “I got that white girl.” Yet we were told either that the video was doctored, or too unclear, or irrelevant. If accurate, it demolished the media elite’s insistence that Decarlos Brown had not a racial thought in his mind.

Instead, we were to listen to media analyst Van Jones pontificate that the late Charlie Kirk should have been ashamed for connecting Decarlos Brown to racist hatred. Perhaps Van Jones should reconsider. He should review the entire narrative of how Zarutska found herself a target of a killer. Brown was a 14-time felon. He was out on cashless bail. The magistrate Teresa Stokes, who freed him, had no law degree. Such a “judge” had never taken, much less passed, a bar exam.

She owned an out-of-state alternative treatment center and was involved in another local one. In a prior sane world, magistrates had law degrees. They had been certified as competent by the bar exams. They followed conflict-of-interest protocols that prohibited them from even indirectly profiting from their judicial decisions.

But again, that narrative too is passé, given the power of diversity, equity, and inclusion to exempt norms and protocols for the supposed greater collective good.

From where does all this hatred, violence, and moral vacuity arise? Why did the shooter inscribe his bullets with “anti-fascist” messaging, cruel taunts, and trans jargon?

Is the hatred caused by the media, who talk about toxic “whiteness” nonstop? Is it the collateral damage from the racial obsessions of a Jasmine Crockett, Joy Reid, and septuagenarian Al Sharpton, now ending his racialist career where he started it?

Or is the promulgator the Democratic Party and the Left, out of power, impotent, and angry that their superior intelligence and morality are not properly appreciated by 51 percent of the people? Who put a photoshopped Trump on a New Republic cover as Hitler?

If a General Milley (“now I realize he’s a total fascist”) or a General Kelly (“certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure”) calls a current or ex-president a fascist, and presidential candidate Kamala Harris agrees (“a president…who admires dictators and is a fascist”), then does an unhinged 22-year-old “anti-fascist” college student feel the popular culture might approve of his own efforts in dealing with “fascist” Trump supporters?

Milley, Kelly, Harris, and the rest can call anyone a fascist but without ever defining the term. Did Trump suspend immigration law to let in 12 million illegals? Did he invite into the DOJ or White House the prosecutors Nathan Wade, Jack Smith, and the revolving door Michael Colangelo to coordinate lawfare against an ex-president?

Is Trump ignoring the improper usurpation of executive power by left-wing lower-court judges or instead appealing their decisions through lawful channels?

Did he hire a foreign national to undermine his presidential rival with a fake dossier?

Did he round up “51 former intelligence officials” to lie to the American people to warp the election?

Did he pardon his entire criminally minded family and then cover it up by in absentia outsourcing to his aides the pardoning of hundreds of criminals through an autopen? So please define fascism before smearing a president and lowering the bar of the acceptable.

What is the point of the past violent braggadocio of Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, posing with a baseball bat, or huffing that he will take the “fight” against the Trump agenda “to the streets?” Was he merely following on the earlier example of Rep. Maxine Waters, who urged supporters to whip up a crowd and physically confront Trump officials in stores and restaurants?

Why are congresswomen kickboxing and punching the screen as they video their seriousness to assault Trump?

What does now-campaigning California Governor Gavin Newsom mean when he promises, “It’s not about whether we play hardball anymore—it’s about how we play hardball. We are going to fight back, and we’re going to punch this bully in the mouth.” What would a potential third assassin think of that promise?

If the governor of the largest state in the union wants to bloody the face of the President of the United States or physically attack his opponents (“We’re gonna punch these sons of b‑‑‑‑es in the mouth”), then might lesser underlings and sympathizers try to outdo that?

Or, finally, is the culprit for the madness found ultimately in the elite university? Who, after all, mainstreamed the idea of racial re-segregation in dorms and graduation ceremonies and taught America that racial essentialism is part of the new tribal America?

Who ignored court rulings and civil rights legislation in their arrogance to recalibrate admissions by race? Who taught the anti-Jewish assassin Elias Rodriguez his hatred of Israel and his pro-Hamas zealotry, and who influenced Luigi Mangione, an honors graduate, to despise “capitalist” CEOs?

Where did the practice of identifying one’s pronouns at the end of memos start, or demanding that biological males could compete in women’s sports, and demonizing anyone who objected that there were still two, not three, biological sexes?

Where did the critical race theory and critical legal theory that empowered Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, Cashless Bail, and all the laws that assured the public that thefts less than $950 were not really thefts?

From where did the new anti-Semitism come, and so strangely after the slaughter of October 7—if not from the campus?

Where else in America were young Jews fleeing to a library with the mob pounding on the windows? Where else are Jews roughed up by a thug who is subsequently given an award by their university? Where did demonstrations arise on behalf of those who murdered 1,200 on October 7?

Why, in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, are so many teachers, professors, and college-graduate bureaucrats so eager to gloat over and cheer his death? Who taught them that?

Are universities critical to America’s prosperity and security now only in terms of the sciences, math, engineering, and medical schools?

As for the humanities? They scarcely exist at the elite universities as we once knew them. Either de facto or literally, they have been overwhelmed and distorted by endless studies-courses, DEI radicalism, 90 percent leftist faculties, and suppression of free thought and free expression.

Where did the envisioning of violent crime as the fault of a flawed society, the institutionalization of modern racialism, chauvinism, and essentialism, and the empowerment of militant transgenderism that in so many insidious ways has filtered throughout society—if not originally birthed in the university—come from?

Those sins of commission are force-multiplied by those of omission. Hundreds of thousands of students emerge from campuses not just indoctrinated with contempt for the Western tradition and American exceptionalism, and not just often thousands of dollars in debt from inflated tuition, but also poorly educated by the standards that once defined education.

The working classes and high school graduates, supposedly the losers of our society, are not those who are dividing the country. They are not often advocating violence or trying to use any means necessary to overturn the established order. But so often the products of the modern university are doing just that.

Sadly, in all these recent horrors, the ideology behind them—the premise that either birthed or appeased them—was birthed in modern higher education.

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September 15, 2025
Rod Dreher's Diary
The times they are a changing
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The Times, They Are A-Changin'

How Charlie Kirk's Murder -- And Two Other Deaths -- Should Radicalize Us

Sep 15
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Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk: one week, two murders, a changed world

Yes, this is going to be another Charlie Kirk post, because I am convinced that a moment of reckoning has suddenly arrived, in many ways.

I woke up Sunday to learn that Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s assassin, was living in romantic partnership with a man, Lance Twiggs, who was transitioning to female, and who was also, it appears, a furry (a weird subculture of people who costume as animals, and often sexualize their costumed selves). (Read Andy Ngo’s excellent online sleuthing.) It could be that Charlie Kirk died so Tyler Robinson could defend the honor of his troon (tranny) lover. Of course we knew already that Robinson was steeped in radical Left/Antifa politics.

Robinson and Twiggs were ex-Mormons raised in conservative families, who were radicalized by going deep online and living there as if it were reality.

Let me offer you this full post by Robert M. Sterling, which he uploaded to Twitter. It’s long, but I think it’s very true. If you’re on X, follow Sterling:

My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue.

I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues.

Millions of them. Tens of millions. They’re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious.

And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left. Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly.

I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and—absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine—you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own.

Here are the facts:

Fact 1. Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman—a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter—stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over.

Fact 2. Two days later, tens of millions of Americans watched a video of Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family. Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept.

Fact 3. Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man get shot in the neck, these same people logged onto Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, school teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it, but cheering it.

These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are nevertheless factual statements.

Here’s what it means for you, the Democrats reading this: These normal, middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics. After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not.

These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened.

When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice. They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends—their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges—and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter bullshit.

And they blame you. Because, even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their family’s safety.

When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who (1) calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and (2) constantly jokes—“jokes”—about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.” They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin. They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep.

And they blame you. Because, even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social-media struggle sessions has now turned to 30-06 bullet holes. When these Americans log onto social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst.

These people—whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve—start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person. And they blame you.

Because, even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them.

For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but bullshit. In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post bullshit statistics about reductions in reported crime, when everyone who’s ever been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, only for victims not to waste their time reporting it to cops that don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors that seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanor citations.

In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but bullshit whataboutism.

> “What about January 6th?” (Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares anymore.)

> “What about Mike Lee making a dumb joke on Twitter about some guy in a mask in Minnesota?” (No one outside of Utah, DC, or Twitter knows who Mike Lee even is.)

> “What about Paul Pelosi?” (That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. And, again, Paul who?)

> “What about regulations on assault rifles?” (That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.)

In response to teachers, healthcare workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more bullshit and misdirection.

> “It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” (Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.)

> “I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” (We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs—especially their taxpayer-funded jobs—for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.)

All bullshit. Not even smart bullshit, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ bullshit. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells.

You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it. Because I’m right, and, as you reflect on this, you know I’m right. The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members this week. We have a mandate to ensure these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do. If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.

A friend back in the US texted me this overnight:

FB blew up in my face. Family and friends celebrating Kirk’s death. The best man at my wedding that I’ve known for 35 years blocked me becuase I called him out for cheering on his death. I deactivated Facebook. I don’t need to see this. It genuinely hurts to know so many people in my life have such bloodthirsty and are so callous.

My friend has a heart condition. This experience caused him chest pain, which he had to medicate to keep it from turning into cardiac arrest. Yep: his heart literally strained to the breaking point from shock and anger at seeing people he cared about to have a relationship with him cheering the slaughter of a man who held the same opinions, pretty much, as he did.

I agree. Prior to last week, the only thing I knew about Charlie Kirk was that he was some kind of successful MAGA influencer. That’s not my world, so I didn’t investigate further. Now I know there was so much more to him than that, but even if all he was was a MAGA influencer, I would feel the same way. If I find that anybody in my life cheered on, or is cheering on, Kirk’s murder, they’re now out of my life. I have nothing in common with people who celebrate political assassination of a man simply for holding and stating opinions contrary to their own.

Killing Osama bin Laden? Fine. He was a terrorist and a mass murderer. But Charlie Kirk was about as average-American as you can get. He used words of persuasion, not weapons. One of the most extraordinary things about him, something that lifted him above average, was that he was willing constantly to engage his opponents in civil debate. This is what made him so popular and influential. At his campus appearances, he made a point of giving people who disagreed with him the privilege of moving to the front of the question line. He welcomed disagreement! In today’s NYT, there’s an account by a conservative college student that shows you the kind of movement Kirk started. This is from Jeb Allen, a conservative at Amherst College, a liberal bastion:

Last spring, I received a death threat in response to an article I wrote. My friends at Turning Point USA encouraged me to request the Amherst administration drop all disciplinary action in exchange for a one-on-one dialogue with the student. That request was granted, and I found our conversation informative.

Today, I believe that among the things the state should do is to ban all gender transition. Close the clinics. Forbid cross-sex hormones, and prosecute doctors who persist. If that is politically untenable, then strictly forbid it to anyone under the age of 30. Outlaw any policies that in any way grant privileges (e.g., bathroom and locker room access) to transgenders. Agreed, the great majority of transgenders are not murderers, and deserve to be treated with ordinary human decency. But we must abnormalize this condition again.

There’s not a lot the government can do about computers and youth, but there is a hell of a lot parents can do. This image, from Tyler Robinson’s mother in 2013, ought to be on the minds of every mother and father in America:

  

Note this commentary on it:

  

We need to once again abnormalize letting kids get computers and smartphones. It used to frustrate me to see the Christian school my kids attended forbid students to have phones during school, but parents — conservative Christian parents — permitting it out of school hours. It was like all the good the school tried to do was totally undermined by the kids’ parents.

It has been very heartening to see clips all weekend on X of people saying they are going back to church for the first time in ages, or going for the first time ever, because of this (watch this incredible short clip). Or picking up a Bible. Or leaving the Left. As the WSJ reports, the Charlie phenomenon is going global. You should also know that in the European media, Charlie is being described as a right-wing extremist and freak (strong implication: who had it coming). Here’s a report from German media about how a professional soccer team is coming down on a Christian player, Felix Nmecha, of African background, who is in trouble for posting mild, apolitical support for Kirk. The clip I post is from the translation:

  

This outraged some fans, and has prompted the team to say they are going to be having a talk with Nmecha. And you wonder why Europe is in so much trouble!

Here’s a fascinating take on the meaning, especially historically, of Charlie Kirk by T. Greer on his excellent Substack, The Scholar’s Stage. Excerpt:

To understand these emotions, you must first understand what the young Republican on campus was feeling at the height of the Great Awokening.

The young Republican felt afraid.

The young man who believed that a transgender woman is not a woman, or that white privilege is not a national crisis, or that Donald Trump should be president, was a young man who lived in fear. He feared what would happen if he expressed his beliefs. He feared humiliation. He feared that his classmates would blackball, bully, or haze him. He feared becoming the subject of a viral wave of hate. He feared having advisors and professors turn on him, damaging his grades or sabotaging his future career. (While I have used “he” here, all of this was even more true for the conservative young woman, who faced even greater social pressures to conform and more vicious tactics when she did not.)

These young conservatives feared because they took the rhetoric of their professors and classmates seriously. They expected to be treated with the same grace, respect, and friendship that the median progressive reserved for the Ku Klux Klan. Time and again they were told that their beliefs were the functional equivalent of a Klansman’s. In this environment, only the most disagreeable or the most courageous were willing to stand up for their beliefs.

It was in this air of fear that Turning Point USA began to rise. For years progressives have looked at Charlie Kirk’s campus events and lampooned him for spending so much time debating 18-year-olds. They missed the point of these events. By walking onto hostile campuses and planting TPUSA chapters, Kirk showed young conservatives that they were not alone. By arguing with anyone willing to stand in line—professor or protester, heckler or hanger-on—Kirk was demonstrating that conservative beliefs could withstand the scrutiny and social pressure of the college environment. Their creed could take the blows and keep its shape. Every clip he uploaded was evidence that a man who openly championed this creed could walk away looking better and wiser than the progressives who attacked him—no matter how many of these attackers there were. Kirk cut against the spirit of the age. He was no anon. He did not hide behind a handle or bury his convictions in the darker corners of Discord. Every time Kirk or his proxies praised Trump or made some inflammatory declaration, they were showing young conservatives that they could not be silenced.

Behind all of this was one overarching message: Do not fear. You have truth behind you. An entire fellowship of young conservatives stands behind you too. Charlie is here today to show you that conservatives like you can stand tall in hostile spaces. You can also do this. You should also do this. They do not own the public square. You do not need to be afraid.

That was the message of the man who was murdered this week.

You know, this is a variation on the message of both Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel. They both said that people who are willing to live not by lies, and willing to suffer for their convictions, will attract more and more people to their cause by their courage, such that eventually a system built on lies will collapse.

Charlie Kirk embodied that. He was willing to suffer the scorn of campus haters for the sake of engaging them in public debate. Indeed, he said many times that the alternative to discussion and debate is violence. He paid for that conviction with his life. I don’t feel comfortable calling him a Christian martyr, because he was not murdered for his faith per se. But he was absolutely a martyr for free speech, like Socrates.

And now we see so very many people who were afraid no longer willing to be silent.

I’m also seeing on X a lot of people complaining that their churches were packed over the weekend, but their pastors said nothing at all about Kirk’s murder. To be fair, I don’t believe clergy are obligated to preach on current events. But this one — my God, it was news around the world, and had so very much to do with faith and courage and the wages of sin! And so many pastors, it appears, blew it. How out of touch with the needs of your flock can you be? I am reminded once again of the Orthodox priest I once met who refused to talk about gender ideology to his congregation, even though parents in it were confused, because he didn’t want to be “political.” Men of God, sack up! People need to know that the church is a place they can go for wisdom and leadership on how to live godly lives in a world that has turned its back on Him. If all you can provide are canned sermons that have little or nothing to do with the actual lives people live, then you are failing.

The American pope had nothing to say about it, aside from expressing condolences to the new US ambassador to the Vatican. Our Catholic reader Anne Heath sent this commentary, written by an angry Catholic, with a broken heart. Excerpt:

  

And Leo? On the very day of the assassination he tweeted not about Kirk, not about truth, not about martyrdom, but about migrants at Lampedusa. His only mention of Kirk came two days later in a private conversation with the U.S. ambassador, where he warned that “political differences must never be resolved with violence.” A diplomatic platitude, whispered in private, while the nations chanted in the streets.

Leo indicated that his first foreign trip will be to the island of Lampedusa, same as his predecessor’s first foreign trip, to highlight the plight of refugees. If so, then that is a signal that nothing much is going to change in this pontificate. Would that Leo go to Lyon to comfort the family of this wheelchair-bound Chaldean Catholic, who fled his native Iraq to escape ISIS persecution, slaughtered on a livestream by a machete-wielding Islamist for preaching the Gospel:

  

Say his name: Ashur Sarnaya. He was martyred by the same sort of person Pope Leo is urging Europe to keep letting in, and whose violent presence is driving Europe to the brink of civil war. Such is the pastoral wisdom of so many Christian leaders. Europe, and all the West, ought to be a haven for Christians fleeing Islamist persecution. But the Leos of the world want to keep letting Muslims in. No wonder Christians are losing faith in their institutional leadership — but not, let us hope, in Jesus Christ! (BTW, that same report Anne sent features a report of a German Catholic bishop going on TV to say that the Bible is wrong about homosexuality.)

Yes indeed, Charlie’s assassination has been an apocalypse. We are seeing who people are — and who they are not. We are seeing Good, and we are seeing Evil. We are seeing ourselves too. The words, or lack of words, from religious leaders say nothing to us, or are even counsels of despair. But the blood of Charlie Kirk, the blood of Iryna Zarutska, and the blood of Ashur Sarnaya shouts to us: You must change your life!

Tertullian: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Strictly speaking, Sarnaya is the only true Christian martyr of these three. But there is not a Christian alive — indeed, not a person of conscience anywhere — who cannot read these signs, and choose to live in a different way. A better way. A braver way. A holier way. Me too.

Bob Dylan said it well two generations ago:

For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled

The battle outside ragin’

Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls

For the times, they are a-changin’

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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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