The Torn-Apart Land

Going to CPAC Dallas this week was a great experience. I found a lot of things to reflect on, but not much that was encouraging. It’s still a challenge to put together all of the conversations. CPAC is expected to have many people on both extremes of American conservatism. That’s exactly what I saw. But, honestly, it wasn’t all that troubling. In fact, some of the speakers from Latino countries actually encouraged me. Even though their conservatism is not entirely my style, most people I met there were genuine earnest and friendly.

I was so confused by the conversations that I had while attending the CPAC event with my journalist friends (not registered CPAC attendees unless they were media registered).

It was great to meet people with whom I hadn’t seen for a while — old friends or acquaintances who had lived in the same cities as me over many decades but have lost touch. It was fun to talk about the people that we share in common and get caught up with what happened since our last meeting. It was all the same stuff that middle-aged people deal with, including many divorces. Every single one was initiated by my wife. Surprising stories were told about transgender grandchildren and children. This was surprising because I didn’t think people in my Christian and conservative circles would need to handle this kind of stuff. But that is where we are now as a nation. You don’t have to deal with it if you believe you can.

But the thing that struck me most was how many people had turned out to be so radical. Stories about young adults who were awakened by politics and the damage it had done to their relationship with their parents showed me how difficult parents worked. One story I heard was about a father who disinherited his son after his son declared he would vote for Bernie Sanders. The person that told me this story was familiar with the individuals involved. I told my interlocutor, “My older son is 22, and is a Bernie Bro. Although we argue about politics occasionally, I can’t imagine him turning his back, or writing him out my will because of his political views. Is there anything wrong with people? “

There’s so much wrong with the world these days. All the people I spoke to were conservatives and they weren’t Never Trump-types. Based on the experiences of the people I had with, however, I felt a deep sense of unease about where our country was heading.

He was a Christian acquaintance who left his wife for another woman and is now blaming their child with trans-sex hormones. Since then, nobody has heard or seen him. He has just left church.

There is a lot of normie conservatives, normies from my time with them years ago. They have become radicalized to extreme right. Moreover, they are not involved in politics. These impromptu conversations were too short for me to get more information about the events. I am just reporting that they happened. When I say “radicalized to the far right,” I don’t mean that they are CPAC types (to be perfectly clear: none of these people I’m talking about were CPAC attendees!). According to what I have heard, they would not waste their time at CPAC. These people are willing to try new things. These jaw-dropping stories are so shocking that I would be worried if they had been about college students or teenagers. These stories are about white-collar radicals in middle age who now believe conspiracy theories. You would think that the people who I spoke to were familiar with Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism if they had seen me over the last few days.

In Live Not By Lies, I drew from Arendt to identify how the Left in America is showing the hallmarks of a pre-totalitarian society. The same thing is happening to me after listening to conversations in Dallas about people I knew. Disdain for truth-seeking and the simultaneous eagerness to believe any thing that is internally consistent with and confirms what the individual already believes. Radical atomization. Total distrust of institutional authority So on.

I have always focused my professional attention on the Left that is running amok and waking up, as the Left has all of the power institutions in the country. IbramX. Kendi seems as insane as an ex-far-right racist academic I once heard talk about as having had an influence on a friend. But that far-right academic’s power is elusive and ineffective. Kendi is on national TV all the time, writes for The Atlantic, and runs a Boston academic center funded in part by generous corporate donations. Elites are proud of Kendi’s anti-white racism and mainstream acceptance. For now, the far-right man’s anti-Jewish racism is completely ignored. It is shocking to me that an executive of middle class normie corporations has relocated to suburbs with his friend, and now reads and absorbs the writings of radical racist writers.

In another conversation, I learned about Bob (as I will call him). Bob and I used to go out together for beer. Bob had an excellent career path and worked in a challenging job at a respectable company when I was part his life. Although he wasn’t a journalist, he was part of the group. He was a smart, sensible guy and is often the first to point out any b.s. The theory was that one of us had floated it. Bob has become radicalized and is raging with anger. My source says that Bob believes the Left is evil and wants to have nothing to do with the cultural or political Left. Bob, what happened?

In other words, his economic security was eroded by a string of corporate restructurings which left him unemployed for long periods. He worked at a company that was all about waking up. Bob was a white man who had to go when it was time for downsizing. However, the company kept younger workers with less skills because they were open to diversity. Bob had to work hard to prevent his family going hungry because he was fired (or not retained) as a white man. Bob, his family and children have struggled for many years according to me. Back in those days, I thought that journalists faced rocky times back then (this was before the Internet made it difficult for print media), but Bob, smart, steady and reliable, would always be safe. Nope.

This was a casual conversation about “whatever happened?”

This was a casual “whatever happened to?” conversation. I do not know how radical Bob is, and I am therefore unsure if Bob is a conspiracy theorist or otherwise. It would be hard to believe, but Bob strikes me as the embodiment of common-sense skepticism. According to a mutual friend, he sees the Left in a negative light.

I thought of Bob when I saw this tweet:

Thread: Universities increasingly require DEI statements for not only hiring but also promotion and tenure (see below).

In many cases, rubrics used to evaluate statements are designed to determine whether the candidates have the correct “values”.

For example, UC Berkeley’s rubric. pic.twitter.com/SWFWkMBZ94

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) August 5, 2022

You have to understand the fine print. This is not an examination of political loyalty.

John Sailer in this thread points out that other colleges have adopted the same idea. It is precisely this mindset that cost Bob and his family their financial security. This had nothing to do Bob’s ability to perform his job. It was 100 percent about ideology, and racial identity. This is the statement of a large university that discriminates against candidates who do not share an ideology that is only peripheral to their work. It is considered a virtue by America’s ruling class.

Hell, yes. I’d be too radicalized if such a thing happened to me. My Bernie Bro son keeps telling me that if you’re denied employment or promotion because of your skin color or sex you’ll put aside your leftist passions. A commenter left this under Heather Mac Donald’s stunning recent piece about how racial wokeness is destroying medicine:

Public Health has been gone for at least the last 10 years. After I retired from clinical practice I spent the last 25 years of my career in public health. We started holding seminars on “Woke public health” about a dozen years back. This terminology was long before the term “woke” became common. At my Big State R01 Flagship uni, the leadership at my school of public health starting purging white males from the administration about 10 years ago and the faculty soon followed. The administration and research staff are now all made up of white men. Faculty members who remain white have been forced to retire. The truth is that faculty posts are open to all “white men”. Literally, every department has a chairwoman, many of which are white women but some that are minorities. Of course, our dean is black.

Although the notion of “replacement theories” is often dismissed by the left, academics see it every day.

It’s happening across many fields. Of course, the Left ignores it. Long-time readers will know I’ve said for many years in this space, that Leftist identity politics always call up white identity politics and justifies it. This is something I’ve never understood. They might think all white people are as self-centered and compliant as those in journalism and academia. The white radicals are like those fringe Charlottesville people. It’s becoming much more broad after these weekend conversations. It’s unlikely that any of these radicals would go out on the streets to make a difference. They will still vote. They won’t mind if the Left is being fought with authoritarian measures.

I didn’t realize this was happening because of all the moving that had taken place. My old social networks in New York and Philadelphia as well as my old ones in Dallas and Washington DC were lost. You, the reader, would not hear this stuff if you weren’t close to such people. All of these people are middle-class professionals who know more than anyone outside their circle.

I was discussing with a conservative friend how stunned I was at the extent of radicalism among middle-class and middle-aged people that I knew. I was told by him that the same phenomenon has been seen in his large circles. The Summer of Floyd, and Covid had a profound effect on many people. They understood the priorities of the ruling class and what privilege looks like in this country. They were afraid and began to distrust authorities and Authority. So it went on. Many of them believe everything.

Away at CPAC, I met with a friend who said that anxiety disorders in children today are out of control. This is something I have heard many times. They were terrible before Covid. But now? He threw up his hands and said: “They were bad before Covid, but now?”

Well, these same radicalized conservatives are now watching the spread of a horrible disease called monkeypox, which for now is almost 100 percent spread among gay and bisexual men. The public health officials — who also shut down churches and schools for Covid — can’t bring themselves to suggest that gay men stop having orgies and that all gay sex festivals need to be stopped for health reasons. They are, according to the Washington Post, “wary of further stigmatizing same-sex intimacy.”

Further stigmatizing?! This is not stigmatized! People fear they will be fired if they do not celebrate the same-sex intimacy. We’ve set aside an entire month to do this! It’s not about stigma; this is about gay men believing, together with their friends, that homosexual men should have unlimited sex and be free from any consequences. The common good is dead. This is what ordinary people can see. They remember when medical officials suspended rules for public health in order to allow George Floyd’s protests. The same thing is occurring here. Now it’s passing to children, somehow, but heaven forbid we tell gay men to stop rutting like animals.

Last week came the report that Justin Trudeau’s government instituted a travel ban on Canadians due to Covid, even though there was no scientific base for it. This is based on documents that were gathered in a case against the government. Excerpt:

The whole point of the case was to lift that shroud and cast a spotlight on the unscientific basis of the mandate.

The court papers indicate that

+ Jennifer Little (director-general) had no formal education in public health, epidemiology or medicine.

+ Little, who has an undergraduate degree in literature from the University of Toronto, testified that there were 20 people in the unit. Presvelos asked Monique St.-Laurent if anyone had experience working in public health. St.-Laurent appears to have been a short time a Civil Service employee for the Public Health Agency of Canada. Little stated that St.-Laurent was not a doctor. (Reachable by phone, St.Laurent confirmed she is a COVID Recovery member. All other questions were referred to the government spokesperson.

+Little speculated that COVID Recovery had been ordered to enforce the travel ban by a top official of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet, or perhaps the prime minister. (While being cross-examined, Little repeatedly stated to Presvelos that discussions about the mandate took place at both senior and very high levels. She refused to reveal the identity of the person who gave her team permission to impose this travel ban. She said, “I am not allowed to divulge anything that is subject in cabinet confidence.”

+ “Cabinet confidence” refers to Cabinet members of the Prime Minister. Because of this, Little was unable to discuss who directed COVID Recovery unit’s imposition of the travel mandate. It is believed that someone in the highest ranks of government did.

Transportation officials searched tirelessly for an explanation for the mandate in the days before it was implemented. But they failed to find a reason.

That was made clear by an email exchange in the latter half of October 2021 between Aaron McCrorie and Dawn Lumley-Myllari. McCrorie, who is also the deputy assistant minister for safety in Transport Canada (the department responsible for COVID Recovery), is McCrorie. Lumley-Myllari works for the Public Health Agency of Canada. McCrorie appeared to be looking for an acceptable reason for the travel mandate in the email exchange. It was just two weeks until the mandate went into effect. McCrorie sent another email to Lumley-Myllari on October : “Our requirements come in on October “), and she said that they needed something very soon.

Four days later, on October 22, McCrorie emailed Lumley-Myllari again: “Our requirements come in on October 30”–in just over a week–“so need something fairly soon.”

On October 28, Lumley-Myllari replied to McCrorie with a series of bullet points outlining the benefits, generally speaking, of the Covid vaccine. McCrorie was not addressed by her, but she did note that the Public Health Agency of Canada had updated its “Public Health Considerations” regarding vaccine mandates.

Two days later, on October 30, the travel mandate took effect.

This dreadful act has ruined lives and businesses all over the world! These are the kinds of things that make norms radical. It scares the hell out of me when I hear about people who, despite being good friends, have turned to conspiracy theories to explain the fall of the world and their own worlds. Although I do not know if the above-mentioned doctor is among these individuals (he has just left that circle), what would you do if he were? How would you react if you lost your wife for another woman and you were responsible for the transition of your child to someone else’s sex? This was legal and celebrated in this country. What would I do? It would make me mad, I’d be filled with grief and want to see the system destroyed. I wouldn’t mind if it cost anything.

I’m not saying that this is correct! This is just my opinion. Again, read your Arendt. The world is on the cusp of becoming a post-totalitarian society. I believe the State will work with Corporations to establish a social credit system for keeping the proles happy. There won’t be a General Franco type to emerge — that’s not really possible in 21st century America — but if there were widespread guerrilla campaigns of sabotage, there aren’t enough police and soldiers to stop them. This isn’t the world we want. What could possibly stop this from happening at this stage? When you have columnists in the Washington Post calling Viktor Orban — the four-times-elected Prime Minister of Hungary, a man whose country feels like 1990s America — the harbinger of the “New Fascism” because of his views on mass migration and national sovereignty … well, the ruling class is gearing itself up for further repression in the name of Wokeness. They’re not going to stop there. It was recruiting trans children, which I thought, but now they want to create a state between parents and children in order to seize the children. It is not, I think. But not yet.

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I challenge you to watch this first episode of a six-part 1980s documentary from British television, about the Spanish Civil War. This is the episode about the prelude of the war. When I first watched it in early 2019, it sent chills up my spine, recognizing what’s going on in America. What now, Floyd and Covid? It is likely that I will see some very terrible things in America. And by the way, if you have a substantive comment you’d like me to consider for publication, and you don’t subscribe to TAC (and therefore can’t use our stupid new and worse-than-Disqus system), email it to me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, with the word “COMMENT” in the subject line.