Everyone sucks, and that is why you should make extra sure to have a very happy Thanksgiving this year.
No, seriously. The most needful reminder of all this year is that everyone is — categorically, scripturally, and historically — the worst. The tale of humanity is a tale of murder, war, rape, disease, and other assorted catastrophes. I do not mean to be flippant about such things. They are agony, but they are the norm.
And so in order to grasp the true character of any event in any human society, one must understand that a large amount of human history is quite painful and terrible. There is no pure and unblemished culture against which we can measure the atrocities of those big bad Europeans who came to settle the New World centuries ago. Maya, Aztecs, Incas, Toltecs, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Egyptians alike: at one point or another they have <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-native-american-slaveholders-complicate-trail-tears-narrative-180968339/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-native-american-slaveholders-complicate-trail-tears-narrative-180968339/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1EIM7kT0xqotO3XCFSQ3jn">all</a> gotten <a href="https://www.history.com/news/aztec-human-sacrifice-religion" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.history.com/news/aztec-human-sacrifice-religion&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0zgOke15ELdz0eZ9GHMIzN">eagerly</a> about the <a href="https://newafricanmagazine.com/16616/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://newafricanmagazine.com/16616/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3ppRZ1BeSRMRTTztXVE-qH">business</a> of <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/discovering-columbus/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/discovering-columbus/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1XXY7fpcbkdSNixczUObAj">enslaving</a> each other, sacrificing one another to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/10/skeletal-remains-confirm-ancient-greeks-engaged-in-human-sacrifice" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/10/skeletal-remains-confirm-ancient-greeks-engaged-in-human-sacrifice&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1qw8GHop2RwY23SIjVFdc1">false gods</a>, or otherwise <a href="https://www.livescience.com/65283-crucifixion-history.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.livescience.com/65283-crucifixion-history.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1WxeGCC2dyAYX-HJGxrPJB">mistreating one another</a> quite dreadfully. You don’t need religion to tell you this: you just need a few history books and a pair of eyes.
Against this rather grim backdrop there occasionally emerge, by the grace of God, a few spots of light. The story of Thanksgiving is one such spot. The Puritan Pilgrims were what is called “Separatists” from the Church of England because of their refusal to participate in rituals they deemed unbiblical. They had been “harried” (to use the language King James employed at the time) out of their native land. Though they found sanctuary for a while in the Dutch town of Leiden, they so yearned to raise their children apart from the seductions of the world that they felt called to set out for distant shores.
On the way, they were given the runaround by some thoroughly opportunistic businessmen called “The Adventurers,” kept from departure until the worst possible time, and shunted into a 75-foot-long cavern in the belly of a ship, the Mayflower, which would suffer hair-raising damage on the 65-day journey to the New World.
They arrived to find the native Wampanoags either thoroughly wiped out by disease, or else humiliated by forced capitulation to sworn enemies such as the Narragansett. Of those who had occupied the area of Patuxet, now called Plymouth, only one, Squanto, remained alive — and that was because he had been enslaved, carried to Europe, and forced to find his way home after regaining freedom.
Half the Pilgrims died during their first brutal winter in Plymouth. Their meeting with Squanto and the regional chief, Massasoit, likely saved them from ruin. And so it was that, 399 years ago, in 1621, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag made a pact that would last for decades of peace.
It can only be understood as a miracle: these two battered, beleaguered people, rendered desperate and needy by the cruel violence of this fallen world, came together in the midst of it all — all the disease, all the heartache, all the fear — and they broke bread. Like all miracles, it was a moment in which the warmth of fellowship glowed defiantly in spite of all else — a moment puncturing through the darkness, providing some hint that we are more than this world makes us out to be.
And indeed we are, though disease and fear threaten us still. We are told this year that we must not gather, because it is not safe to do so. But just like the accusation that the European settlers of America were uniquely evil, this warning against the plague of coronavirus is based on a deep misunderstanding about what kind of world it is we live in.
It is never simple, never clean, never easy, to do the things we humans are called by God himself to do. Eating together, building families, building nations: these things are not safe. Never have been, never will be. We do them anyway, not because we can be assured of their success or their security, but because our gift and our duty is to rejoice together in the midst of all this mess. Now we are told to wait until the mess is cleaned up. That is nonsense. We will die before that happens, and we will never have lived.
The Pilgrims’ eventual governor, William Bradford, <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24950/24950-h/24950-h.htm" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24950/24950-h/24950-h.htm&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw39QeoD8zTcdsAwX8CKJjU7">wrote</a> in his record of the journey that when the group left Holland, they were deathly afraid and bitterly sad. But “they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift[ed] up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.” So are we pilgrims, all of us, on this earth — here to find what joy in it we can. May your own Thanksgiving, and every Thanksgiving, be one moment of such joy. Do not wait until it is safe to make it so.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://youngheretics.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0GMUxg7VdCwuD3R6L_d0Ck">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2pFKJrpynA6Tw5SEUoWO-Q">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0qDA523zYhtONSXhHcG_1m">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/spencerklavan&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0Ut9TSIMBUWEolj8C35yBk">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Thanksgiving

Why You Should Celebrate Thanksgiving

Coronavirus

Readers Pass

By now if you are very online, you will have heard that Megan Rapinoe, professionally arrogant woke chucklehead (I mean, um, inspiring women’s soccer star and empowering feminist icon) will be representing the famous lingerie company, Victoria’s Secret. So will plus-sized model Paloma Elesser and various other “women inspiring change and positivity.” I hear there will be a podcast involved, but to be honest I don’t know much else about it because I physically felt my testosterone levels dropping as I read the story. I didn’t get far past “inspiring change.”
If you are not very online, God bless you. No, really, you are to be congratulated on your positive life choices and I am sorry to burden you with this cursed news. I apologize, also, for sharing with you the following quote from a video on the Chinese intelligence asset (I mean, um, totally legit social media app), TikTok: “Actively not wanting to be fat is fatphobia.” Okay, that’s the worst of it, I promise. Just be glad I didn’t make you look at the smug face of the little dweeb who said it.
Anyway, I do actually have a good reason for inflicting this stultifying content upon you. It is part of a new leftist effort to demoralize and undermine the American people, and I would like to suggest some things you can do about that. First: what is going on here? Well, with summer coming and the country opening back up (despite the Left’s best efforts and thanks to the Trump VaccineTM), the cultural Marxists who run our dying institutions want to make sure that the natural exuberance of the season doesn’t give us any ideas. If left to our own devices, we might go out, get some sun, maybe run around a little, and try to get in shape.
One thing could then lead to another, and we might even enjoy the health of our bodies, encouraging each other to do likewise. Perhaps, if we start dealing with our national <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1624569337778000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHl2p5S97bs3vhHg5nEsevcaRgZSw">obesity epidemic</a> on the personal level, we might learn a thing or two about personal accountability and self-reliance. Most troublesome of all, men and women might find one another attractive according to “traditional beauty standards,” and they might shack up, get married, and make babies.
All of this is very bad for the Left, because it is very good for the country. Perhaps it sounds frivolous, but it is not: it is actually the foundation stone of all Western political philosophy. It was Aristotle who observed that politics is essentially about partnerships between people, and “necessity dictates first and foremost that partnership without which we cannot continue to be: the one between male and female.” In other words: finding each other sexy, getting together, and making families is the fundamental basis for people to govern themselves. Everything else arises naturally from that.
Aristotle also knew that education in the deepest sense was indispensable for any political regime. “Education ought to be tailored to the particular kind of government,” he wrote. If you want people to be free, you have to train them appropriately.
In this Aristotle was recalling his teacher, Plato, and he wasn’t talking just about learning your multiplication tables. Education for the Greeks meant molding the entire person, shaping children into the kind of men and women who could live together justly. This meant “physical training for the body, and literary training for the soul.”
What I’m getting at here is this: the Left doesn’t just want you fat, lazy, and infertile because that seems like fun to them. They want it because it suits their political project. Train people from youth that <a href="https://www.boredpanda.com/plus-size-women-cosmopolitan-cover-obesity-negative-people-reactions/?utm_source=google&amp;utm_medium=organic&amp;utm_campaign=organic" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.boredpanda.com/plus-size-women-cosmopolitan-cover-obesity-negative-people-reactions/?utm_source%3Dgoogle%26utm_medium%3Dorganic%26utm_campaign%3Dorganic&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1624569337778000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGjZiTJEAEO5dJju4Dnu7vjGWMhzg">fat is healthy</a>, berate them about their natural attraction to conventional Victoria’s Secret models, and mollify them with assurances that <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjR5Ozh-Z7xAhXQVs0KHYzDBuQQFjABegQIAxAE&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.insider.com%2Fweight-gain-during-coronavirus-pandemic-2021-1&amp;usg=AOvVaw1xOgi7ZUr-GDhLCI-yhtcg" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.google.com/url?sa%3Dt%26rct%3Dj%26q%3D%26esrc%3Ds%26source%3Dweb%26cd%3D%26cad%3Drja%26uact%3D8%26ved%3D2ahUKEwjR5Ozh-Z7xAhXQVs0KHYzDBuQQFjABegQIAxAE%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.insider.com%252Fweight-gain-during-coronavirus-pandemic-2021-1%26usg%3DAOvVaw1xOgi7ZUr-GDhLCI-yhtcg&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1624569337778000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH9k1JDP8yBNEfh0AiDAbpzL2lrqA">weight gain during lockdown</a> is fine, and you will end up with a citizenry that is totally unfit to govern itself: docile, unattractive to one another, and easy to control.
This means that one of the most consequential and effective things you can do for the country right now is get yourself and your family in shape. Yes, really. You don’t have to look like a ’roid-head or a runway model — that’s not actually all that healthy anyway. But take up boxing. Get your kids on a sports team. Start a weightlifting program, and stick to it. It’s genuinely an act of political rebellion and, unlike so many other things right now, it’s within your control.
“In everything that men do, the body is useful,” said Socrates in the historian Xenophon’s account of him — and he was talking about politics just as much as about philosophy. On the field, at the track, in the ring, you will instill values and form relationships that can withstand an awful lot of assault from scoundrels and fools. And since scoundrels and fools currently run our country, the gym is a pretty good place to start fighting back.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Profile of obese man

Fight The Left: Get In Shape

Fat Acceptance

Woke Culture

Of all the bad-faith, smooth-brain takes out there, surely the worst-faith, smoothest-brain one currently trending is: “but I thought cancel culture was bad?” This is what you are likely to hear if, as a conservative, you fight leftist boycotts by responding with boycotts of your own.
As I have argued before <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/dr-seuss-and-the-culture-of-fear" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dailywire.com/news/dr-seuss-and-the-culture-of-fear&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140666000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEa-HS58wbV9QucffhNmHnI1-Z3HA">on this website</a>, cancel culture is called a “culture” because it does not function primarily by force of law. It is a system of assumptions and practices, a set of ways that people treat one another and do business. The network of social trends and public examples that makes people think twice before voicing their honestly-held conservative beliefs in a board room or a college lecture hall: that’s cancel culture.
Cancel culture is a beloved football coach having to recite a <a href="https://www.si.com/college/2020/06/16/mike-gundy-apology-oan-t-shirt" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.si.com/college/2020/06/16/mike-gundy-apology-oan-t-shirt&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140666000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHsLP55B8_U80WjK_sC2CsVF1l_pw">ritual confession</a> because he was caught wearing a conservative t-shirt, or a teacher at a Catholic high school <a href="https://stream.org/this-catholic-school-teacher-was-fired-for-criticizing-black-lives-matter/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://stream.org/this-catholic-school-teacher-was-fired-for-criticizing-black-lives-matter/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140666000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFt8B72HLMiTl-GoVbf9fnnjHU7-A">getting fired</a> for criticizing BLM in public. It’s Disney <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-abortion-walt-disney-exclusive/exclusive-disney-ceo-says-it-will-be-difficult-to-film-in-georgia-if-abortion-law-takes-effect-idUSKCN1T003X" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-abortion-walt-disney-exclusive/exclusive-disney-ceo-says-it-will-be-difficult-to-film-in-georgia-if-abortion-law-takes-effect-idUSKCN1T003X&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140667000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGEw_PdYYNra_QIGhZ7pnou4YGkyQ">threatening to boycott</a> the entire freaking state of Georgia over moral objections about Georgia’s abortion law (no killing a baby once its heart is beating, for those keeping score at home). It’s Disney having no qualms about attempting to hamstring and blackmail an American state while happily pandering to the murderous Chinese Communist regime. That’s cancel culture: the use of money and power to punish Americans for views that millions of people hold, but the ruling classes despise.
As the gatekeepers of Principled Conservatism™ are tiresomely fond of <a href="https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench/status/1363729118307774464?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench/status/1363729118307774464?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140667000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFtUgjXMht5MHLHf4D12qR1MtOyzQ">reminding us all</a>, private companies and individuals are free to associate as they choose with one another. There is nothing illegal or unconstitutional about most of the actions which make up cancel culture. This is the same logic that allows some of the Left’s most <a href="https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1281392795748569089?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1281392795748569089?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140667000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHBL_0K-RQT5kUjuAqGX0i25-f84w">supremely disingenuous hacks</a> to claim that cancel culture is just people being “held accountable.” If people want to enforce social and moral standards of their choosing within their own communities, you should be okay with that as a conservative because #freedom. It’s their standards, after all.
Yeah, except they’re crap standards. That is our objection to cancel culture: not that it should be outlawed, but that it should be scorned and rejected as the bad behavior of a few unhinged weaklings. Because that is what it is. The conservative argument against cancel culture isn’t that you’re a criminal if you participate in it. It’s that you’re an anti-American prick.
Fighting Fire With Fire
It has taken us far too long, but conservatives are finally realizing that they need to get as serious as the Left is about enforcing our values with our economic leverage. So we <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/10/24/netflix-subscription-cancellations-skyrocket-after-cuties-backlash/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://nypost.com/2020/10/24/netflix-subscription-cancellations-skyrocket-after-cuties-backlash/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140667000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHZmDvB0l-IyJwXU9sY-mvG4cX4jw">boycotted Netflix</a> over the kiddie-twerkfest Cuties and cancelled our <a href="https://www.screengeek.net/2021/02/12/cancel-disney-plus-gina-carano/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.screengeek.net/2021/02/12/cancel-disney-plus-gina-carano/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140667000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFCBbrGnoIxfixU7rn4kqy5U1golQ">Disney Plus subscriptions</a> when ex-Star-Wars-now-Daily-Wire star Gina Carano got fired.
In the latest installment of this ongoing saga, the disposable razor company Harry’s stopped sponsoring the Daily Wire because one anonymous account with a total of fifteen followers <a href="https://twitter.com/flyingsodacan1/status/1368537912606740481?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/flyingsodacan1/status/1368537912606740481?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140667000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFlVwjna-RRkiFv4ftrsaxdJibD9g">complained</a> that Michael Knowles says “homophobic and transphobic” things. The Daily Wire community struck back by cancelling their Harry’s subscriptions and switching to other razor companies.
Now, I’ve known Knowles for years. He’s one of my dearest friends. I also happen, for those who don’t know, to be gay. I recognize there is a wide range of opinions among Daily Wire fans about the moral status of homosexuality, and it’s not my intention to litigate that issue here. But that’s kind of my point: the Daily Wire guys, Knowles included, have always been the most sterling of pals of mine, despite whatever disagreements we may have. My boyfriend works at the Daily Wire, for mercy’s sake.
The suggestion that Knowles hates anyone, just because he isn’t falling over himself to celebrate homosexuality, is absurd on its face. I pointed this out to Harry’s in a <a href="https://twitter.com/SpencerKlavan/status/1374358333377945600?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/SpencerKlavan/status/1374358333377945600?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140667000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF5DUOHpCQ_aV4CtIYLINzQc-2O_Q">tweet</a> that, to put it mildly, was somewhat more popular than the original complaint against Knowles. I also <a href="https://twitter.com/SpencerKlavan/status/1374358334690693129?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/SpencerKlavan/status/1374358334690693129?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140667000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF1VgodDBfC9E_Voed9FjZefeF4AQ">noted</a> that I’ll be putting a stop to all my business with Harry’s going forward.
Readers will be shocked to know that Harry’s, lightning-fast as it was to answer @flyingsodacan1’s concerns about Knowelsian homophobia, has not yet responded to me as of this writing. Apparently some customer complaints are more pressing, shall we say, than others. So the sponsorship remains cancelled. But it does seem that customers really are <a href="https://twitter.com/TheYankoShow/status/1374370368819957761?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/TheYankoShow/status/1374370368819957761?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140667000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEwdxPeIbmb8L0kWEhI0HJqdduQnQ">flocking away</a> from Harry’s as I and others invited them to do. Get woke, go broke.
The &#8220;Actually&#8221; Guys
Almost immediately, however, the <a href="https://twitter.com/deku3154/status/1374368707120566280?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/deku3154/status/1374368707120566280?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140667000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHsaFZqapB7wgLR5AH8aFlpuQZmEg">predictable responses</a> ensued: “I thought cancel culture was bad though.” Another poster <a href="https://twitter.com/deku3154/status/1374368707120566280?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/deku3154/status/1374368707120566280?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140667000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHsaFZqapB7wgLR5AH8aFlpuQZmEg">told me</a>, “So what you’re saying is you will no longer have a business relationship (as a consumer) with a brand that has a different view than you.” The implication being, of course, that I was participating in my own kind of conservative cancel culture.
Real galaxy brain takes here. I will go with them this far: it is true that absolutely everybody, conservative and liberal, shapes the culture in ways large and small by exercising his first amendment right of free association. So in those terms, yes: the Daily Wire guys and I aren’t doing much that is different on a structural level from Harry’s itself. We are disassociating ourselves from those whose attitudes and practices we find reprehensible, and asking others to do the same. We are doing this in the hopes of changing the conversation and establishing consequences for bad behavior.
But since in a free society people will always exert this kind of social and economic influence—since we will always work to sway one another by the ways we choose to make friends and do business — it matters profoundly what kind of climate we are trying to create by swinging our cultural weight around. Not all kinds of culture are equal: some are worse than others. So trying to bring about a worse culture is, you know, worse than trying to bring about a better one.
Again, I will grant it to the Left that economic decisions are not just economic decisions, and friendships are not wholly apolitical: everything we do also has ethical consequences, and so we make business choices and form personal relationships based in part on what kind of society we want to live in. If wearing coronavirus masks outdoors is considered generally acceptable, and refusing to do so makes you a pariah, then more people will wear them out of a simple desire to be accepted. If accusing people of “whiteness” as a slur is likely to lose you friends, you’ll be more likely to refrain from doing it.
But this is precisely the point: attacking people because of their skin color is a spiteful thing to do, so exerting social pressure to discourage it is a good thing. Wearing coronavirus masks outdoors is a useless and ridiculous thing to do, so exerting social pressure to demand it is a bad thing. Social pressure in itself is a tool; everyone uses it. But how, and to what ends? That’s the question that changes things.
I and the guys at the Daily Wire want people to tolerate a wide range of viewpoints in American society, and to feel comfortable doing business with folks across the political spectrum. Harry’s and the cancel culture crew want people to purge their minds of bad opinions for fear that one dweeb with too much time on his hands will call you nasty names on social media. We. Are. Not. The. Same.
Getting Real
We on the Right need to get it into our heads that we are up against an extremely powerful minority contingent in American politics which expressly intends to shut down conservative ideas not primarily by outlawing them, but by making them shameful to express.
In an <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/03/22/trump-era-hate-crime-spike-due-to-shameless-public-racism-column/4771805001/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/03/22/trump-era-hate-crime-spike-due-to-shameless-public-racism-column/4771805001/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140667000&amp;usg=AFQjCNE68wte9ucjlYIRChQj7eQqh9INSw">article</a> this week for USA today, Florida Democratic Representative Val Demings outright stated that we should “bring back public shame about racism and prejudice.” Demings was horrified that some Republican leaders feel comfortable airing their retrograde social attitudes out there in public for everyone to see and hear. “They call Black Lives Matter activists ‘<a href="https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2020/07/trump-says-oregon-leaders-must-clean-out-beehive-of-terrorists-threatens-to-send-in-national-guard.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2020/07/trump-says-oregon-leaders-must-clean-out-beehive-of-terrorists-threatens-to-send-in-national-guard.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616679140667000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHXk29KmixHGAlztmYwFG_Y2i3nhw">terrorists</a>’ while ignoring social ills in Black communities. They proudly use racial slurs like ‘kung flu’ and use demeaning language against LGBTQ Americans.”
Leave aside for a moment the fact that BLM activists did in fact terrorize city streets last summer, the fact that practically every major outbreak of illness except coronavirus is named after where it originated, and the fact that Demings gives absolutely no evidence of this supposedly “demeaning language” about gay people. Put aside all that and merely note her technique: Demings wants people who think differently than her not to be refuted on the merits of their arguments, but to be publicly shamed for talking in a manner she finds distasteful.
This is a slimy, small-minded attitude, the kind that intellectual failures adopt when they have not a single thing to say in defense of their useless ideas. But conservatives will be mistaken — and self-defeatingn— if they infer from this that all use of social pressure is evil and wrong. Social pressure of some kind is inevitable. The only question is where that social pressure pushes us.
We already have a culture in America, and it is not one of self-censorship and fear. It is one inspired by the First Amendment, by John Milton and John Stuart Mill, in which privately-held views are neither outlawed nor otherwise persecuted. We value the free exchange of ideas, and we consider that exchange not only salutary as a practical matter for the discovery of truth, but blessed as a matter of justice by the Creator who endows us with our freedoms.
When conservatives exert their own social pressure, their own economic power, and their own collective action to bring back that culture of open ideas, we are doing a good thing because the culture we are trying to create is good. Conservative boycotts are better than leftist boycotts because conservative ideas about speech are excellent, and leftist ones are poison.
It is utterly farcical to object that conservatives should not encourage companies and individuals to tolerate dissent and disagreement because doing so entails using our credit cards and our personal choices to bring about the social situation we think best. So what? That’s the world we live in, and we are getting wise to it not a minute too soon. If anyone tries to talk you out of this by suggesting that you are being just as bad as the cancellers you oppose, the appropriate response is a hearty laugh and a “Sayonara, sucker.” That’s voting with your feet, after all.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://youngheretics.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606431224802000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF83sqnbRSoskQQ6sEAo_cYVTeiMg">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606431224802000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGTcuBM7QTUoG0IILQKEiWbSzKnoQ">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606431224802000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGMUl1NuGq0C5ObYzxcMCv-7q9PNA">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/spencerklavan&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606431224802000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGHBgoLcqZAhuVqJiN9d0bQFEIbog">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

GERMANY-AVIATION-STRIKE

There is No Such Thing as Reverse Cancel Culture

Cancel Culture

As bad idea after bad idea issues from the Biden White House and the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, one feels the decidedly adolescent impulse to roll one’s eyes and go “ugh. We’ve TALKED about this.”
<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/04/09/president-biden-to-sign-executive-order-creating-the-presidential-commission-on-the-supreme-court-of-the-united-states/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/04/09/president-biden-to-sign-executive-order-creating-the-presidential-commission-on-the-supreme-court-of-the-united-states/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1619730337728000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEJdcNQN9Knwvo2RU9tkCVTEm4xog">Packing the courts</a>? We’ve <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-history-and-meaning-of-court-packing" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-history-and-meaning-of-court-packing&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1619730337729000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGwZ3qLJnlh505eojqoAjx2GzRIiQ">talked</a>  about this. Abolishing the Electoral College? We’ve <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-the-electoral-college-was-created" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-the-electoral-college-was-created&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1619730337729000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGNoe7AlUqfwgIsd7RjvUnU5dApng">talked</a> about that, too. And making D.C. a State? Gahh, we have definitely already talked about this one, MOM.
All of these dreadful suggestions have been floated again and again throughout our history, then crushed under the weight of their manifold logical and constitutional flaws. More often than not their own supporters have come to realize that <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-electoral-college-by-dawns-early-light/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-electoral-college-by-dawns-early-light/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1619730337729000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHF-w6r8hxu1cwzRv_S-0Uvw_5Xkw">whoops</a>, this was actually not such a great idea after all, and their brilliant new idea was actually just the same old bad idea. We have, I say once again, talked about this.
In the case of DC statehood — now a favorite pet project of our leftist ruling class — the answer should be obvious. It’s flatly unconstitutional. But apparently that’s not obvious, so (*sigh*) here we go.
D.C. Statehood
The basic argument in favor of statehood, articulated in rather inelegant prose on the government <a href="https://statehood.dc.gov/page/why-statehood-dc" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://statehood.dc.gov/page/why-statehood-dc&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1619730337729000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGP0Esx0-I7YWqNgfAEo-Vouf140w">website</a> of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, is that D.C.’s current status — as a federal district with no congressional representatives — constitutes an instance of taxation without representation. D.C. residents “bear the responsibilities of citizenship, including taxation and Selective Service registration [the draft], without sharing in the full rights and privileges of citizenship [like the right to vote for Senators and Representatives].”
And of course this has been very effectively folded into the obsessively racialized rhetoric which now characterizes the Democrat Party line. So Bowser makes all the obligatory mentions of the “systemic inequality” to which “residents of Washington, D.C. have been subjected.” This is a “great historic wrong” because “Washington, D.C. is a historically Black city and Black people still make 47% of the population.”
From a constitutional standpoint, of course, that’s a complete irrelevancy: it has absolutely nothing to do with why the Constitution says D.C. can’t be a state, why history has validated the wisdom of the Founders on this point, or why Republicans and people with brains are agreed that making D.C. a state is a nakedly partisan ploy. But pretending that everything is about race has proven successful as a tactic for the Dems so far — can’t blame them for sticking with what works.
In actual fact, however (for those of us still interested in such arcane things as facts), here is what the Constitution says on this point (Article 1, Section 8):
<blockquote>
The Congress shall have Power&#8230;. To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings.
</blockquote>
In other words, there is to be no intermediate authority between the Federal government and the places where the power of the Federal government sits. A state is an intermediate authority, one which rules a given territory and may put checks on Federal power. So there is no state power between the Federal government and the place where it lives.
You accept this when you decide to live in D.C. It’s a necessity and it’s part of the deal. In fact, since 1961, when Congress passed the 23rd Amendment, D.C. residents have had it easier than they otherwise would: they can vote in presidential elections, for the sole purposes of which they are counted as a mock state with 3 electoral votes.
And of course D.C. citizens have always been allowed local municipal government, which is why they get to do stupid things like elect Muriel Bowser as mayor. They can run their own affairs when those affairs don’t pertain to national rule. What they’re not allowed to do is count themselves as an independent authority with national representation — they’re not allowed to be a state. The Capitol is run by Congress, and them’s the breaks. Don’t like it? Move to Maryland.
Why D.C. Makes Sense As-Is
There are excellent reasons for this. The most important of them are summarized by James Madison in a nifty paragraph from <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed43.asp" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed43.asp&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1619730337729000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGAXQncZgXP9jnEX5ct9Icu6vQrGg">Federalist #43</a>. Madison basically thought it should have been obvious why you need “complete authority at the seat of government.” That sweet summer child. But he still did us the courtesy of explaining, for which our degraded age thanks him.
Madison points out that direct authority over its local environs “is a power exercised by every legislature of the Union. I might say the world, by virtue of its general supremacy.” This is just how things work: state legislatures get to control their territory, so the federal government gets to control its territory. This is because:
<blockquote>
a dependence of the members of the general government on the State comprehending the seat of the government, for protection in the exercise of their duty, might bring on the national councils an imputation of awe or influence, equally dishonorable to the government and dissatisfactory to the other members of the Confederacy.
</blockquote>
In other words, if you create a political institution which regulates the management of territory and resources upon which the federal government depends, then you essentially give a local body control and bargaining power over the highest authority in the land. A D.C. state, despite its tiny size (a little over 700,000 people—less than live in Rhode Island) would exercise a staggering and unaccountable power. It would potentially have leverage to frustrate the daily operations of Congress itself.
What Democrats Really Want
All this gives us some clues about what the Left is really after here. D.C. is bright blue. They’d reliably elect two Democrats to the Senate, which could easily tip the balance there in partisan times like ours. But perhaps even more importantly, turning D.C. into a state immediately creates a leftist seat of power right where the federal government operates. It’s like a Democrat chokehold on an area that’s supposed to belong to the entire country.
This shows you why a supposedly nifty little Constitutional <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/23/politics/washington-dc-statehood-101/index.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/23/politics/washington-dc-statehood-101/index.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1619730337729000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEEeYfu0CxanVoi9ykClujDzu1Z8Q">loophole</a>, which House legislators think they’ve found, is pure meaningless pedantry. The bill to make D.C. a state, which has passed the House but will almost certainly founder in the Senate, maintains a nominal district over which the Federal government would still have power. It just makes that district vanishingly small: the bill would reduce federal jurisdiction to the area just around the National Mall, the White House, and Capitol hill — where, in the words of CNN’s Zachary Wolf, “pretty much nobody but the President lives.”
But Federalist #43 makes perfectly clear that merely having some tiny patch of land where the feds technically rule is not the point of what the Constitution says. For real “authority at the seat of government,” Congress needs to have control over the actual area where it’s situated — not just a few buildings in the middle of that area. This is about who gets power, simple as that. And the Democrats — surprise! — want that power for their own. The Constitution plainly says it isn’t theirs.
Calling Their Bluff
There’s another way you can tell this is a pure ploy to get more blue votes. Senator Roger Marshall, a Republican from Kansas, introduced <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/23/politics/washington-dc-statehood-101/index.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/23/politics/washington-dc-statehood-101/index.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1619730337729000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEEeYfu0CxanVoi9ykClujDzu1Z8Q">another bill</a> that would make D.C. into part of Maryland instead of a separate state unto itself. This solution — giving D.C. to Maryland rather than making it a state — is called “retrocession.”
Now, Maryland doesn’t really want D.C. — can you blame them? According to a 2016 Public Policy Polling survey, 44% of Maryland voters said they’d <a href="https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PPP_Release_MD_42216.pdf" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PPP_Release_MD_42216.pdf&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1619730337729000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGE70XRxhn_9LBHxci0v6c4k13RgQ">rather not</a> annex the nation’s capital, thank you very much, as compared with 28% who approved. But retrocession would totally eliminate the whole “taxation without representation” argument. It wouldn’t fix the Constitutional problem, and as we’ve already seen the whole representation complaint is bogus to begin with. But Marshall is basically asking Democrats a question: if taxation without representation is your problem, why doesn’t becoming part of Maryland solve it?
Because shut up, that’s why. Democrats have no answer to that question, and they don’t care. Mayor Bowser (remember her?) addressed the issue briefly in a <a href="https://mayor.dc.gov/release/mayor-bowser-delivers-georgetown-law%E2%80%99s-2019-philip-hart-memorial-lecture-opening-argument-dc" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://mayor.dc.gov/release/mayor-bowser-delivers-georgetown-law%25E2%2580%2599s-2019-philip-hart-memorial-lecture-opening-argument-dc&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1619730337729000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF1fnt_U8uJK99ke1ahoY3W5EAJDQ">2019 speech</a>. Her only argument was that “DC voters have already said loud and clear that we do not want retrocession, we want statehood.” The way she pretended this matters was by pointing out (accurately) that Article 4, Section 3 of the Constitution says the following:
<blockquote>
no new states shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other state; nor any state be formed by the junction of two or more states, or parts of states, without the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as of the Congress.
</blockquote>
But of course, D.C. as currently constituted isn’t a state, or even part of a state. That’s the whole point. D.C.’s vote on this — expressly, according to the Constitution — doesn’t count. Only Maryland’s state legislature, and Congress, count. If they voted to retrocede, that would be that.
Power, Power, Power
But let me let you in on a depressing secret: Democrats don’t care about any of this. They’re not here to have a conversation, or to make arguments in good faith, or to serve the interests of the Americans they claim to champion. They’re here to win, and winning for them means reshaping the country until they rule it unilaterally.
That’s the point. What the Left would love to do is carve up the country in such a way that they get maximal blue votes with minimal input from legitimate American voters. They’re perfectly willing to ship in illegal immigrants to do it. They’re more than happy to drive people to the polls and or fill in their mail-in ballots with them to make sure they vote the right way. And they’re just waiting for a chance to conjure congressional votes out of thin air, until those big swaths of red in the middle of the country don’t matter and the whole thing can be one-party rule, forever.
Now, we’re not there yet. The Senate (thank God) will likely smack this thing down, and despite a dedicated misinformation campaign from every legacy media outlet, not everyone is hoodwinked by Democrat race-baiting on this issue. But those are the stakes, and that’s what D.C. statehood is about: not representation, or fairness, or democracy, or whatever other meaningless shibboleth they throw at it. This is about control, and about undermining the delicate constitutional system which makes us a true republic. Anyone who loves that system, and wants to live in such a nation — fragile though it is these days — should laugh the idea of D.C. statehood to scorn.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Nancy Pelosi Holds Weekly News Conference On Capitol Hill

D.C. Statehood Is A Democrat Power Grab

Biden Administration

Democratic Party

Statehood

Well, I did it: I went to see Godzilla vs. Kong. All I can say is I’m glad I did a Ph.D. in literature so I could catch the film’s many subtle allusions to classical texts. They come pretty thick and fast. If you blink, you might miss the reference to Sartre in the third act.
Okay, not really. It’s hard to imagine a movie whose plot is more entirely contained in its title: Godzilla. Versus. Kong. There truly is not more to this than that. Big lizard. Big monkey. Big fight. Don’t overthink it.
And I loved it. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not here to look down my nose at tentpole action films. Just the opposite. I was raised on them. The showing I went to featured a trailer for the forthcoming movie adaptation of Mortal Kombat, one of my favorite video game franchises. I still remember the first time I notched up a win with Sub-Zero (the best character, duh). If I know myself, I can predict that I will probably go see Mortal Kombat, the movie.
But again, it’s hard to imagine a video game less suitable to narrative adaptation than Mortal Kombat. Yes, there’s an elaborate lore surrounding some of the later entries, but in essence the point of this game is: you pick a magic kung-fu dude. I pick a magic kung-fu dude. Our magic kung-fu dudes fight each other. There is about as much moral drama and emotional heft inherent in the premise of Mortal Kombat as in that of Tetris.
Now, on one level, I’m glad we’re returning as a society to a place of acceptance that not all action movies have to also be hyper-serious cosmic allegories. There was a while there — an era which seemed to me to ramp up with Zack Snyder’s DC universe and peak with Avengers: Endgame — when you couldn’t go watch big angry guys shooting lasers in the midst of collapsing cityscapes without also getting a weighty sociological and metaphysical parable dropped in your lap.
Some of the movies in this more ponderous mode were pretty good — I thought James Mangold’s Logan was a particularly strong meditation on the state of manhood in American culture and cinema. But more often than not, the “message” was less profound than the director seemed to think it was: “get it? Being an X-man is like being gay because societeeeee, mannnnn.” It was like a lot of them were built around concepts that someone found mind-blowing when they were smoking a blunt, and then never really got around to examining them in the harsh light of sobriety.
So, for example, I actually really enjoyed Black Panther — but I found the enraptured hand-wringing about its stunning and brave implications for social justice tedious in the extreme. Not to mention the fact that this sort of heavy-handed preaching lends itself to woke posturing, as we have seen.
So unlike a lot of people, I was kind of glad (or at least amused) when Wonder Woman 1984 turned out to be a hot mess. It felt a little like a throwback to simpler times: remember? This is how movies used to be. There were some that were thoughtful and artsy, and there were others that were just big, dumb fight-fests. And that’s fun, and fun is good.
COVID Killed the Movie Star
So all honor to Godzilla vs. Kong, and I mean that. But there’s more going on here: every work of art, however lumbering and silly, takes place in a cultural context that renders it significant. The cultural context of this spring blockbuster is: we have gutted the movie industry.
Truly, one of the most senseless casualties of COVID panic was this: in our arbitrary, flailing, manic response to this virus, we reached into the chest cavity of a long-ailing cultural institution and gratuitously ripped its innards from its body like Patrick Swayze does to the bad guys at the end of Road House.
The same day I went to see Godzilla vs. Kong, the beloved theatre chain Arclight Cinemas announced it would <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2021-04-13/arclight-cinemas-pacific-theaters-celebrity-reactions" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2021-04-13/arclight-cinemas-pacific-theaters-celebrity-reactions&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1618684681294000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEQQQrRsXmIAZo9mu3E8rPXfvOA4Q">never open</a> its doors again. I still remember what a thrill it was, as a middle school kid living in Santa Barbara, to drive up to LA for a pal’s birthday and sit in those big bucket seats at the ArcLight. It was the gold standard of the movie experience: you settled into the dark and compulsively slammed Milk Duds as the screen lit up your world.
That’s over forever now, and it feels like more is ending than just ArcLight. The enthrallment of that universal American experience, the movie culture that so many of us can look back on as a fixture of our youth, is dimming and draining from the world every day. It’s just no longer the most vital or urgent art form, the thing we all do and make small talk about. Other media are competing for that title now, and though Netflix seems to have an early lead, we can’t rule out video games or virtual reality as the national entertainment of the future.
And these are trends which long predate COVID: streaming services have had the movies on notice for years now, and the wild success of movies like <a href="https://www.ibc.org/trends/streaming-vs-cinema-what-does-the-future-hold-for-film/3517.article" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.ibc.org/trends/streaming-vs-cinema-what-does-the-future-hold-for-film/3517.article&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1618684681294000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH7Nccbl95MCFrQ2urXCsNd7QsPug">Bird Box</a> made clear that the days of Hollywood’s dominance were numbered. The pitiful grandstanding at awards shows, the desperate bids for woke relevance, the ever-plummeting numbers: all of these are obvious symptoms of an industry in decline. When COVID hit, we needlessly but decisively took the dying dog out back and shot him point-blank between the eyes.
The Bygone Days of Cinema
It’s hard for me to know how to feel about all this. Art forms do decline, especially in periods like ours when the invention of new communications technology occasions a sea-change in how we express ourselves. As the novel and the newspaper and the pamphlet rose to prominence with the advent of mass printing; as the movies and radio gradually replaced the novel when electricity took over; as painting lost its cultural magnetism with the development of photography; so movies are now slipping into obsolescence with the onset of the digital age and the rise of social media. These things happen.
When they do, partisans of the old art form inevitably feel the poignancy of the thing and become vulnerable to fits of nostalgia. I am a partisan of the movies, and so I wax elegiac as I consider their eclipse. And of course they’ll always be around, just as there are always good paintings and novels and plays being made. But what’s vanishing isn’t the existence of the art form: it’s the whole culture in which that art form has weight and ritual associated with it, a hypnotic kind of communal significance. There was a time when we all gravitated toward the movies, talked about them, shared them, were enraptured by the experience of sitting in a theatre. That time is passing away. In some sense, it’s already gone.
So though I’m furious that the movies are apparently having to go out the way they are — wantonly destroyed by wasteful and despotic lockdowns — my deeper emotional reaction to it all is a lingering sadness, that feeling of fond farewell you get when a time you knew and loved is passing away.
Movies and America in Decline
On that level maybe the state of cinema is the state of America in microcosm: we are being roiled by dramatic and seismic crises at the moment, and our natural reaction to them all is anger. When the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations stands on the world stage and flatly <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-un-ambassador-says-white-supremacy-weaved-into-americas-founding-documents">condemns</a> America from within — “white supremacy is weaved into our founding documents and principles,” she said — it’s hard to have any cogent thoughts beyond pure, seething indignation at her gall.
But the riots and the lockdowns and the critical race madness are, like the closure of the ArcLight, explosive events whose intensity can obscure the much deeper shifts in culture and politics that underlie them. Our ruling classes — the Democratic Party, the comfortably weak Republicans, and the corporate shills who <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/georgia-voting-law-response-corporate-ceos-meeting/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.cbsnews.com/news/georgia-voting-law-response-corporate-ceos-meeting/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1618684681294000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHz2omJk5GKQTtwRQp0LyQNnegm4w">do their dirty work </a>— have started flailing around and smashing things because in point of fact, their rule is unsustainable and their grip on power is very, very weak. I’m not saying they won’t do plenty of damage during their reign. But I am saying that, like the movies, they are on their way out. It’s just time.
Consider not only the staggering decrepitude of our oligarchy’s supposed leader, skeletal dementia patient that he appears to be, but also the sheer worthlessness of all their ideas. What if we teach people to hate each other according to race? What if we manipulate and distort their natural bodies? What if we abolish God?
Well, those are all things that have been tried before, and it is obvious that they lead to misery and eventual collapse. Like <a href="https://americanmind.org/salvo/be-a-man/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/salvo/be-a-man/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1618684681294000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFagmHNculQYizSSLppq_xy0_giBQ">Aristodemus of Cumae</a>, who tried to suppress manliness in his subjects; like the <a href="https://www.rejoice-evermore.com/chapter-15" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.rejoice-evermore.com/chapter-15&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1618684681294000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGSSenjQ7qdjJAgbA0yKBrjAc6HQw">ancient Assyrians</a>, who persecuted the ancient Jews and died by the same sword they lived by, our would-be tyrants are ultimately fighting against forces that are written into the structure of the world. It won’t end well for them.
What Comes Next?
America as we know it is in for a sea-change. It could be a disastrous one, or it could be the ushering in of something new, some thrilling period of adventure in space and digital renaissance. I hope it’s the latter. But even if so, I will be sad to see the nation of my youth transform, just as I am sad to see the movies lose their luster.
In the meantime — while we wait for the next great thing—the old world increasingly looks like a ghost town. That’s what I found most striking of all about my night at the movies: it’s like visiting a wasteland. There’s basically fun, empty schlock like Godzilla vs. Kong and Mortal Kombat, and there are seething woke revenge fantasies like Promising Young Woman, and that’s about it.
I feel about the same way about the news these days: it’s a wearisome litany of stupid (let’s pack the supreme court!) all of which seems like biding our time before the catastrophe or the inspiration. In the years between the world wars, as tensions simmered in Ireland and Europe, the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote in “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1618684681294000&amp;usg=AFQjCNG-DQJExmdHjZ-PeK_da_REgBxFpw">The Second Coming</a>” that “the center cannot hold.” With all that disaster in the air, he knew something had to give:
Surely some revelation is at hand; 
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 
… 
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
We are living in a time of suspended animation, of old things passing away. Such times are always eerily nerve-wracking, but they do not always end in disaster. “Forget the former things,” <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah%2043&amp;version=NIV" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search%3DIsaiah%252043%26version%3DNIV&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1618684681294000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFgXcgB5X-rhGWgcZuyTdw97VXeLA">said God</a> to the Prophet Isaiah, “do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!” Let us pray that when the next phase comes, it will be less grim than it was for Yeats. Like the prophet, we will have to wait and see.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

“MIDTOWN Meets GODZILLA” Show Opens In Tokyo

The Death of Movies Has Come

Entertainment

Hollywood

There was a time when “the conservative case for puberty blockers” would have just been a meme, an extravagant joke to parody the absurdism of weak Republican officials. But we are living in an era where reality fast outstrips satire, and so this very Tuesday we were treated to the honest-to-goodness “conservative case for minors having transgender surgery.” Asa Hutchinson, governor of Arkansas — Arkansas! — appeared on Tucker Carlson to defend his veto of a bill that would have <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/gov-asa-hutchinson-appeals-to-buckley-reagan-to-defend-conservative-veto-of-bill-banning-puberty-blockers-for-children">banned doctors from prescribing puberty blockers</a> to children.
The Arkansas legislature voted to override Hutchinson’s veto, but he stood by it. It’s worth quoting him at some length:
<blockquote>
Well, first of all, you have parents involved in very difficult decisions, you have physicians that are involved in these decisions, and — I go back to William Buckley, I go back to Ronald Reagan, the principles of our party, which believes in a limited role of government. Are we as a party abandoning limited role of government, and saying we’re going to invoke the government decision-making over and above physicians? Over and above health care? Over and above parents?
</blockquote>
I thought nothing could shock me anymore. But even my jaw dropped at that. Maybe I missed the part of William F. Buckley’s foundational <a href="https://www.yaf.org/news/the-sharon-statement/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.yaf.org/news/the-sharon-statement/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617997528343000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFqzuZAOD6kFI-coIHF-C_OY1pvUQ">Sharon Statement</a>, or Ronald Reagan’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjECSv8KFN4" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DFjECSv8KFN4&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617997528343000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHCYeZGQcRvDBPR6fr346fLU9oJoA">Farewell Address</a>, in which it turns out that the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights guarantee minors the opportunity to get on Lupron until such time as they decide to geld themselves for life.
For what it’s worth, adults who decide after decades of mature consideration that medical transition is right for them have my sincerest blessing — which, incidentally, I don’t think they should need. It’s no business of mine unless you insist on making it otherwise. Which, of course, you do when you bring children into the question.
On the face of it, it’s absurd to suggest that kids have the psychological wherewithal to decide, with or without the consent of parents and doctors, that their reproductive health and function should be irrevocably altered for any reason. What little evidence there is in these very early days <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/hormone-treatments-gender-dysphoric-children" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.city-journal.org/hormone-treatments-gender-dysphoric-children&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617997528343000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEYnUoR_vsLjqREbN2oEEZZW9uI3Q">suggests</a> that most gender dysphoria resolves itself through puberty — which is exactly what the treatments in question <a href="https://www.persuasion.community/p/keira-bell-my-story" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.persuasion.community/p/keira-bell-my-story&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617997528343000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEIcGJ0HdBYqdQ7Vtc3Roqpeuz68Q">prevent from happening</a>.
In other words, if you feel uncomfortable with your sex as a kid, you may grow up to be trans. But it’s at least as likely, if not much more so, that you’ll grow up to be just plain old gay. Arresting that process with experimental and invasive medical procedures is called child abuse, which is something even the most “limited” government in the world should outlaw and condemn.
What Limits Government?
To his enduring credit, Tucker — who is quickly emerging as a kingmaker for 2024, sifting Republican wheat from Republican chaff — pointed much of this out. “We’re talking about minors, children here, and there are all kinds of things in Arkansas kids — in every state — are not allowed to do. Get married, drink a beer, get a tattoo&#8230;. Why do you think it’s important for conservatives to make certain that children block their puberty?”
Why indeed. For ten minutes, Hutchinson continued to stumble painfully through an interview that felt more like a public flogging. All he could do was harrumph uncomfortably about “limited government” and “individual liberty” while Tucker effortlessly gutted his arguments one after another like dead fish.
It is telling that someone like Hutchinson — the governor of a whole state, remember — thinks he can wave away such an appalling political and moral misstep merely by invoking magic names like Reagan and repeating catchphrases like “limited government.” The fact that it even occurs to him to use these sorts of shibboleths — hopelessly irrelevant and catastrophically inadequate as they are — invites reflection about the state of the Republican Party and its prospects for the future.
Hutchinson got one thing right: a Republican platform that focuses on individual liberty is generally associated with the intellectual movement led by William F. Buckley, and put into practice by Ronald Reagan, from the ’60s to the ’80s. And it remains perfectly true that a government limited by the prescriptions of the Constitution is devoutly to be wished. Certainly a hallmark of this COVID-plagued year has been callous disregard for civil liberties on the part of governors, and recklessly destructive invasion of government mandates into private and economic life. In relation to that kind of arbitrary despotism, we might certainly wish to rein the government in.
But “limited” is not the only thing we want governments to be. We also want them to be just, or else they are hardly governments at all. We want our leaders restrained and humble, not neutered and incapacitated. We want our federal powers chastened, not nonexistent. Students of American history will recall that this was basically the whole point of replacing the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution in the first place. If Republicans are the defenders of personal liberty, or should be, they should also be the defenders of law and order — which means the government needs to be in the business of securing both liberty and justice.
In other words: government shouldn’t do nothing. It should do the things the Constitution says it should, and not other things. It’s not enough for it to merely be “limited,” no matter the limits. It could be limited to merely killing babies and doing nothing else — that would be a very limited government, but also, I think we can agree, a bad one.
What we mean, or used to mean, by “limited government,” is a federal power restricted to doing only those things which “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” The legitimate and illegitimate means of doing so are outlined pretty comprehensively in the nifty little document which follows those words. Our elected representatives should try reading it sometimes.
Prudence, not Hypocrisy
Anyway, here is a fact about politics that we have lost sight of: different coalitions emphasize different principles at different times to respond to the crises of the day. Crucially, this isn’t hypocrisy — that would be if we were abandoning the idea of limited government altogether. We shouldn’t do that. But we should recall that “limited” was never intended as the be-all and end-all hallmark of good government, the one thing which makes a regime legitimate or illegitimate. It is one of the things a government should be, with the qualifications and according to the principles outlined in the Constitution.
The coalition inspired by Buckley’s and Reagan’s leadership adopted limited government, along with strong defense and traditional family values, as the emphases suited to their era — the era of the Cold War abroad and the sexual revolution at home. That “three-legged stool” makes perfect sense as a response to the challenges of that era and the questions it raised. “Should we explode the nuclear family and abandon ourselves to a bacchanal of free love?” “No, because traditional family values are far more conducive to human flourishing.” “Should we go Socialist?” “No, because Socialism destroys the individual liberties granted us by God and defended by the Constitution.”
Where such questions are still raised, such answers are still applicable. But the urgent point here is that “limited government” and all such Reaganite bromides are answers to some questions, and not to others. The Republican Party seems to have forgotten this. So, faced with totally new challenges and totally new questions — should parents be allowed to have their children castrated? Should a few tech companies be allowed to moderate the digital public square based on their own political whims? — people like Asa Hutchinson can only chant the old hymns.
In other words, establishment Republicans keep applying tools and formulas that were designed decades ago, and wondering why they don’t come up with the right answers to the questions of the last five minutes. Reagan’s name and policy platform has morphed from what it was — a qualified set of answers to a particular set of questions — into a series of all-purpose bumper stickers, which Republicans feel they can slap onto any emerging crisis and call the case closed. That, as is becoming clear, ain’t gonna fly.
This is more than mere RINO-ism. The zombie Reaganites of the party aren’t just Republicans in name only — they’re a certain kind of Republican in actual fact, a kind that refuses to admit that times have changed. They stubbornly insist on trying over and over again the same things that worked when they were growing up. There’s a name for doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting different results — and it isn’t conservatism. It’s madness.
The New Platform
At the same time there actually is emerging something like a new three-legged stool, designed to meet the challenges specific to our present American catastrophes. If I had to put words on it, I’d say the new Right is building a coalition based on caring for the working class, fighting wokeness, and breaking the power of Big Tech to control speech. Politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who back these ideals and put them into actual practice, are likely to pick up buckets of as-yet untapped red votes. Important new allies, like the influential public intellectual <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6K_jzQVRys&amp;t=0s" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3Dz6K_jzQVRys%26t%3D0s&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617997528343000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFbMN_6wvAeela47NXpoxEVPgkZyg">James Lindsay</a>, broke for Trump in 2020 because they could get behind this emerging platform. So could record numbers of Hispanics, <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/gay-and-transgender-vote-for-trump-doubles-in-rejection-of-identity-politics" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/gay-and-transgender-vote-for-trump-doubles-in-rejection-of-identity-politics&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617997528343000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGUfEzv3rsZFO6ZeOtLizRjCWr0Rg">LGBT people</a>, and other typically blue <a href="https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/11/politics/election-analysis-exit-polls-2016-2020/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/11/politics/election-analysis-exit-polls-2016-2020/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617997528343000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF7CVOo0f-6gSc7i8n2qaMfdtUNOw">demographics</a>.
What we need to do now, I think, is replace the old Reaganite bumper stickers with new Trumpist ones. Not that Trump is the be-all and end-all of the conservative movement’s future. But he did usher in the era of the new Right in which we are all living, like it or not. A person like Asa Hutchinson shouldn’t feel comfortable falling back on outdated claptrap to defend indefensible decisions, and people like Tucker are to be praised for holding their feet to the fire on this.
But what if, instead of “limited government,” red-state governors reached instinctively for something like “fighting woke despotism?” That’s what we ought to be about, and it’s a bit of an embarrassment that so many of our supposed champions are still lagging so many years behind in their rhetoric. Changing your slogans and your focus to meet the needs of the day isn’t betraying your principles: it’s exercising prudence, that old virtue of statesmanship which rises to every occasion as it comes. We’re going to need more of that in the years ahead, and the sooner our politicians catch up to their constituents in that regard, the better. If they can’t, we’ll find new ones who can.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://youngheretics.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFegURPjAdNFJd0-_mKudXAgmAp5g">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEwm82CEKe6gHOjTWwdZQOTR6iQow">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHQm8tQMK1XoUSXLWkCl3KkGZJgrQ">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/spencerklavan&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHzq-src8474zs7-nMknyLYtgJwCA">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Ronald Reagan Giving Campaign Speech

Limited Government Isn’t Everything.

Ronald Reagan

Tucker Carlson

Something is going to have to give when it comes to gender in this country. We’ve lost our minds over it. There are now layers of nonsense, several precedents and many decades deep, piled over our basic constitutional framework. Congress is in danger of passing the Equality Act next, which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in employment and housing, casually dropping a nuclear bomb on religious liberty in the process. All of this is based on an unhinged philosophy with exactly zero basis in reality. It can’t be allowed to stand.
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employers from discriminating against employees “because of&#8230;sex.” In Bostock v. Clayton County last year, the Supreme Court decided that this also means no one can get fired for being gay or transgender. Justice Neil Gorsuch made a tortured argument that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against the individual based on sex.” For example: gay men do things (like sleep with and marry men) that women also do. So if you fire a man for marrying a man you have fired him when you wouldn’t have fired a woman under the same circumstances.
The sophistry of this argument reveals the limits of a purely “textualist” approach to law, if “textualism” means reducing a law to the ordinary public meaning of its various individual words. In this case, Gorsuch considered what “discriminate” and “sex” meant in 1964, then cooked up a wholly unintended “implication” of putting those two words together in a sentence. Words don’t work that way. They don’t just sit alone next to each other. They form sentences, which as a whole have a meaning greater than the sum of their parts. Everyone knows this, except apparently some lawyers, some of the time.
In this case the whole law obviously meant, and was understood to mean, that you couldn’t fire someone just for being a man or a woman — not that you couldn’t fire a man or a woman for doing something, like demanding public recognition as a member of the opposite sex. Personally, I don’t think you should fire anyone for being gay or transgender. Seems like a small-minded thing to do. But it’s obviously not illegal under the 1964 act.
Or it wasn’t, until the court declared it so. The result of Bostock has not been careful parsing of Gorsuch’s logic on the part of an informed citizenry. It has been a full-court press on the ludicrous notion that your sex just is what you decide it is. Activists took the ruling to mean that they were right all along: discrimination on the basis of being transgender just is discrimination on the basis of sex, which means your transgender identity is the same thing as your sex.
“It is not possible to know a person’s gender identity at birth, and there are no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth,” read a recent CNN <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/30/politics/south-dakota-transgender-sports-kristi-noem/index.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/30/politics/south-dakota-transgender-sports-kristi-noem/index.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617306243117000&amp;usg=AFQjCNG0gg6-fSkumNAPXS-4641oqeRWhw">report</a>. This is the language of extremists like Judith Butler and her academic progeny, of people whose theories about the world correspond to no observable reality. Only it’s no longer just the language of unhinged cranks: the official narrative of major legacy media sources like CNN is now that neither sex nor gender has anything to do with biology: if you think you’re a boy, you’re a boy.
No one believes this. A very few people, who write books for a living and never have to think about what their words actually mean in real life, imagine that they believe it. Many more people, who work for places like CNN, say they believe it to win plaudits at dinner parties and to avoid public shaming from wokescolds.
Nevertheless, radical gender theory like this is obviously garbage, and everyone with a functioning brain realizes it. Play with a boy for five seconds, then with a girl. They’re different. Heck, plenty of transgender people — some of them of my acquaintance, some of them public figures like <a href="https://twitter.com/buckangel?lang=en" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/buckangel?lang%3Den&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617306243117000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFTFYEsFqLXp_nwmvM2RUlfQz9JgQ">Buck Angel </a>— realize that men are men and women are women. That’s the whole premise of their identity as transgender, of their discomfort with their natal bodies and their pursuit of medical transition.
But our ruling classes and our politicians have wrapped us all up in an elaborate dance of the seven veils trying to pretend it’s not so. We are now all implicated in an absurdist form of public pageantry whose message is that simple wishing makes you magically transform into the sex of your choosing. This is dumb, and we should stop.
But how?
Lawfare
Red state politicians across America are trying to figure out their best strategy for dealing with this state of affairs. The major flashpoint right now is women’s sports, which are supposed — under the new regime — to admit biological males identifying as transgender females. Here is a good example of how gender dogma leads to conclusions that any sane person, Right or Left, should recognize as utterly cuckoo bananas (that is a technical legal term).
Watch male rapper and amateur weightlifter Zuby “<a href="https://twitter.com/zubymusic/status/1100348562041462784?lang=en" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/zubymusic/status/1100348562041462784?lang%3Den&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617306243117000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFM83lZm1OG5Dym1NO6-WSL7H5plQ">DESTROY</a>” the British women’s record for weightlifting and you’ll see what I mean. Or listen to the heartrending testimony of parents and girls whose remarkable athletic achievements have been <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/19/transgender-athletes-robbing-girls-chance-win-sports-column/4856486002/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/19/transgender-athletes-robbing-girls-chance-win-sports-column/4856486002/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617306243117000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFWHmARjudUrdLkP-OTeL40NSM47g">totally overshadowed</a> by bigger, faster, stronger men who say they’re women.
There are still more fearsome abuses to be mainstreamed down the line: if we don’t put our foot down now, we’ll see widespread public advocacy for <a href="https://twitter.com/caraesten/status/1376728777925873665?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/caraesten/status/1376728777925873665?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617306243117000&amp;usg=AFQjCNETp2eNQUlL-HR49LkGUs1CRtzwoQ">puberty blockers</a> and other pediatric interventions. Already, journalists and activists are developing a newspeak for <a href="https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1376649057775587332?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1376649057775587332?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617306243117000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGVEkgxzziwuj0gVbZ-EEa2TqXUjA">condemning</a> any and all resistance to peak trans as an effort to “ban health care for trans youth.” For those keeping score at home: health care = cross-sex hormones and genital surgery; trans youth = Davey, who’s ten and has a lisp. Trans sports is a first step on the road to trans everything.
There is thus <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/10/poll-letting-transgender-athletes-compete-in-womens-sports-is-an-unpopular-fringe-viewpoint/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/10/poll-letting-transgender-athletes-compete-in-womens-sports-is-an-unpopular-fringe-viewpoint/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617306243117000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHI114-S3l6xiew-NKig94zXcAHYQ">enormous public appetite</a> for keeping girls’ sports for girls, and doing it now. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, previously a darling of conservatives for bucking the national trend of inhuman and unconstitutional COVID-19 lockdowns, dodged left when she should have dodged right last week. Acting on bad advice from out-of-touch counselors, she <a href="https://apnews.com/article/legislature-south-dakota-legislation-kristi-noem-bills-59127fe856b9727300bd9264d9a38eff" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://apnews.com/article/legislature-south-dakota-legislation-kristi-noem-bills-59127fe856b9727300bd9264d9a38eff&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617306243117000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHue-b5dZmZ5suNEomaeLrqeTI-zQ">blocked</a> a bill that would have kept sports as they obviously should be — separated by gender and age to provide a level playing field for competition. Meanwhile Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi all made the right move by signing bills into law that protect women’s sports.
Noem’s stated reason for her decision was a concern that the law as written would have invited lawsuits and boycotts from the NCAA, which runs college tournaments. I sympathize with her, I have to say: in an <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tucker-kristi-noem-south-dakota-transgender-girls-sports" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tucker-kristi-noem-south-dakota-transgender-girls-sports&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617306243117000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHrO5uyutKRTxj76oHc9cLyJEAOTw">interview</a> with Tucker Carlson she explained (quite ineptly, I’m afraid), that she’s running a small state and worries that she doesn’t have the resources or the wherewithal to fight the holy hell of powerful and vindictive extremists who will surely descend on states that make a stand.
But here’s the thing: we are going to have to fight this in the courts. There’s no other way out of the madness. Bostock made sure of that: we’re not just up against national mania. We’re up against national mania codified in law, an entire legal edifice designed to tell lies practically no one believes and enforce rules practically no one wants. We are going to have to make it our mission to overturn this crap.
I don’t really care who fights that fight. If Kirsti Noem doesn’t have the stomach for it, eh, too bad. It’ll probably hurt her chances in 2024. But someone’s gotta do it. Whoever does will have the thanks and loyalty of sensible people everywhere. When laws like Tennessee’s and Arkansas’s get challenged in court — and the challenges will come, be assured — we can’t back down from them. We have to insist that our elected representatives stand up for us.
Make Your Stand
Conservative, Inc. will object that this is judicial activism. It’s not: judicial activism is a Supreme Court Justice turning one law into another by magic based on poorly applied and needlessly abstract theory. Fighting a court case over a legitimate injustice which arises from that error, with the hopes of overturning the bad precedent it set, is just&#8230;doing America. It’s one of the ways our government works.
Precedents get <a href="https://money.howstuffworks.com/10-overturned-supreme-court-cases.htm" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://money.howstuffworks.com/10-overturned-supreme-court-cases.htm&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617306243117000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGOOYsnbenpZqN8KOV0jBeD6Dqlpw">overturned</a> all the time — and thank God, or Dred Scott would still be the law of the land. Sometimes Congress passes a constitutional amendment; sometimes <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_overruled_United_States_Supreme_Court_decisions#Antitrust" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_overruled_United_States_Supreme_Court_decisions%23Antitrust&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1617306243117000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHqCwG1MZhyU144nIw3DV6X5i-44w">another Supreme Court decision</a> reverses the previous one. Conservatives should want this to happen with Bostock. The law is bad. It’s not working. It should change. That’s like, representative government 101.
There’s a good alternative to the Equality Act called the Fairness for All Act, which protects the free exercise of religion and specifies carve-outs for religious entities to govern themselves according to their beliefs. But that law doesn’t address the sports issue, and chances are good that somewhere down the line this stuff is going to end up in the courts. So let’s say the ACLU sues some state or school or other over their refusal to let men play women’s sports. Either that’s it, and the state or school caves, or someone, somewhere, says “enough is enough.” The minute they do, the fight is on. And here’s the thing about getting into a fight: you might lose. But you also might win.
I’m not here to pound my fist on the table about transgender people. I’m not here to make their lives more uncomfortable than they already are. I’m just here to tell you that absolutely no one sane — be they gay, straight, or whatever — believes in or wants the situation we have going on right now. We should be entirely unafraid to act as if that were the case, because it is. And we should accept the fact that wresting our country back from the unhinged minority that currently runs it is going to take guts, money, lawfare, and court cases.
None of those are dirty words. Conservatives who have become allergic to any and all political scraps since the Reagan years are going to have to get over their squeamishness, because I’m afraid that on this issue the future does not belong to the likes of Kristi Noem. There is nothing to be gained from backing down here except more debilitating gibberish and disgraceful state-sanctioned child abuse. There is plenty to be gained — including, I’d wager, a big old bucket of as-yet unwon presidential votes — from taking a principled, reasoned stand and seeing it through.
It shouldn’t be hard to say that men are men, and women are women, and act accordingly. It’s not hateful, and it doesn’t conflict one bit with peaceful transgender people living their lives. But in an unhinged time, speaking the truth takes courage, for which there is no substitute. We either cowboy up now, or we regret it down the line. Those are our options — I know which one I prefer.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Transgenderism

Men Are Not Women

Kristi Noem

Transgender

When Teen Vogue fired its new editor before she even started work this week, it felt a bit like Lord of the Flies: the kids are now running the show. Alexi McCammond is on the younger end of the Millennial generation — she’s 27 — being fired by a teen publication which has gone <a href="https://www.teenvogue.com/story/who-is-karl-marx" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.teenvogue.com/story/who-is-karl-marx&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNE_yjU2U3EYiV04F_T1Fl4OgyVPJQ">full Communist</a>, as a result of insensitive tweets about Asians from when she was a teenager.
There was a predictable <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/alexi-mccammonds-firing-from-teen-vogue-is-preposterous-and-illiberal/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/alexi-mccammonds-firing-from-teen-vogue-is-preposterous-and-illiberal/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFR2j1Tn3AFQBhxYECP-HhRig09Jg">hue and cry</a> from establishment conservatives, though precious little in the way of commentary on what to do about it all. The Daily Wire has made masterful inroads when it comes to fighting cancel culture: as Gina Carano’s recent triumphs demonstrate, there is now a home for victims of the mob if they can see their persecutors for the slimy would-be autocrats they are. But what about when the guillotine comes for the revolutionaries themselves, as it always does?
There is no sign at all that McCammond has taken this insane witch hunt to heart as a prompt to reconsider her own values — which are, by all accounts, hyper-woke. She almost certainly wouldn’t have been hired at Teen Vogue to begin with if she weren’t a card-carrying lefty, and indeed her major regret is that the tweets in question “overshadowed the work I’ve done to highlight the people and issues that I care about.” This is someone who really believes the problem is that she mouthed off as a teenager — not that the public eye in this country is ceaselessly engaged, Sauron-like, in hunting out and pitilessly condemning past transgressions.
In other words: this is not the woke coming for conservatives. This is the woke policing the woke. What felt most surreal about the whole thing was reading a New York Times rundown in which the linked source for the original story was an <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CMIKWZegh4n/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.instagram.com/p/CMIKWZegh4n/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFNHWVgFpNYxMou93BvSbuP6FXhhw">Instagram Post</a> by Diana Tsui, former fashion editor for New York Magazine. It’s like being in high school: catty backbiting, gossip on social media, and sudden shifts in alliance. Except it’s all happening at some of the most glamorous media institutions in the country. This is what it looks like when cancel culture cancels its own.
The Kids are All Grown Up
A couple years ago, there was this weird cultural phenomenon going on: everybody was talking about Millennials as if they were children, but they were really <a href="https://twitter.com/eshap/status/1159467300749103104?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/eshap/status/1159467300749103104?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHAX_73ZyZuwFVUWEb51IEJE0FnQQ">adults</a>. In 2018, Pew Research had to <a href="https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trend/archive/winter-2018/the-millennials-arent-kids-anymore" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trend/archive/winter-2018/the-millennials-arent-kids-anymore&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGbbMbZY3Tp7h0FpRcMlTRrIFv93g">remind us all</a> that “Millennials Aren’t Kids Anymore.” Roughly speaking they — we — were born between 1981 and 1996. We’re known for our native facility with digital technology, our <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/05/27/as-millennials-near-40-theyre-approaching-family-life-differently-than-previous-generations/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/05/27/as-millennials-near-40-theyre-approaching-family-life-differently-than-previous-generations/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHsQwW7h7UCfOjPVoB7tnW61wzAGQ">arrested development</a> when it comes to marriage and family life, and our <a href="https://www.millennialmarketing.com/2014/02/as-millennials-get-nostalgic-so-do-brands/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.millennialmarketing.com/2014/02/as-millennials-get-nostalgic-so-do-brands/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGHZKoq9x8FH7h_S0y7OSljx75h9w">nostalgia</a> for toys and shows from the ’90s. To our parents, the Boomers, this makes us look a lot like overgrown children. But at this point, the oldest of us are hitting 40.
In some sense, I suspect no parent ever gets used to thinking of their boys and girls as grown men and women. So maybe generational commentary is always subject to this kind of lag. But at this point, the childish antics of the college campus really have made their way into the halls of power. People who follow the American media will remember the watershed moment when Bari Weiss <a href="https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGfd0j4KY7FlkiusG4l9rwoy1ThTQ">announced</a> her resignation from the New York Times. “Intellectual curiosity — let alone risk-taking — is now a liability at The Times,” wrote Weiss. She described an office culture in which a few passionate true believers silenced all dissent.
All over the country, newsrooms are gradually being taken over by dynamics which we think of as the stuff of campus riots, but which are really now the stuff of young professionals like McCammond and her colleagues. They are turning not only on one another but on their slightly older bosses, who are often nice Boomer liberals. These remnants of the old Left probably felt initially sympathetic to the social justice concerns of their younger employees. They recognized in them the revolutionary spirit of their own youths. They did not realize that the new world their successors are ushering in looks more like a fervid religious dictatorship than a freewheeling summer of love.
We conservatives, though, have a few lagging cultural assumptions of our own that we have to bring up-to-date. One of them is that business is a naturally conservative institution. There’s an old narrative that the hippies of the’60s became the Reagan voters of the ’80s as they grew older and more conservative. And many former Democrats did vote for Reagan. But there’s <a href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/07/06/generations2/assets/cohort_voting_20140707.pdf" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/07/06/generations2/assets/cohort_voting_20140707.pdf&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFUEin01t49ih45dsUGiz0JciGqSw">good evidence</a> to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/08/upshot/how-the-year-you-were-born-influences-your-politics.html?abt=0002&amp;abg=1&amp;_r=0" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/08/upshot/how-the-year-you-were-born-influences-your-politics.html?abt%3D0002%26abg%3D1%26_r%3D0&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHemZo8ldiMG4sblyor0mnNBAZ_GQ">suggest</a> that this doesn’t mean they became conservatives altogether, or that all the hippies abandoned all their social attitudes. In other words, as the flower children grew up, many of them stayed flower children at heart.
So the Boomers who took over the world as they came of age didn’t magically transform into hard-nosed neocons. What they did, instead, was reshape our world entirely according to their ethos. No example of this phenomenon is more decisive than that of Apple. If any business mogul of the Boomer generation can be said to have had the greatest influence on our daily lives, it is surely Steve Jobs — the juice-cleansing, turtleneck-wearing practitioner of Zen mindfulness whose aesthetic sensibilities and business attitudes still radiate outward from Silicon Valley into every American city and suburb. Even the style in which we build buildings now — those sleek urban high-rises sheathed in reflective glass — is casually referred to as the “iPhone style.”
It should hardly surprise us that the prophet of “think different” comes from a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-your-favorite-companies-go-woke-11596664277" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-your-favorite-companies-go-woke-11596664277&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEGaltB3zHrfuj01iMm08CMqb908g">cohort</a> of business leaders who find things like tradition and patriotism hopelessly outmoded. Of course Nike and Verizon, Disney and Condé Nast are swathing themselves in rainbow colors, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-companies-ditching-nra-delta-selling-guns-2018-2" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.businessinsider.com/why-companies-ditching-nra-delta-selling-guns-2018-2&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH8035EbSlfAyVYsNUMGZwPNx_KXA">disassociating themselves</a> from the NRA, and expressing “solidarity” with the Marxian radicals of BLM. However few or many of their employees may <a href="https://americanmind.org/salvo/woke-capital-isnt-a-game/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/salvo/woke-capital-isnt-a-game/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFueZ8ZTGXVQZPF6eu_8FY84eQ9_Q">fully believe</a> or understand the doctrines of systemic racism and gender fluidity, they are at least committed to gaining approval among their peers — and among their peers, the atmosphere has become one of knee-jerk leftism.
Let the Cancelers Cancel Themselves
I suspect an up-to-date assessment of the landscape would show that big business and legacy media are becoming closed systems unto themselves within which cancel culture is, if anything, worse than it is out in the real world for us normies. Yes, we may face horrible consequences for speaking our minds or expressing our values. But there are a growing number of extremely successful institutions — the Daily Wire chief among them — which offer cancelled conservatives a home and a way to be successful without reference to the outdated world they are leaving behind.
The crumbling institutions which wokeness is now eating from the inside out still have a lot of power, don’t get me wrong. But we are building institutions and infrastructure of our own that stand a real shot of succeeding. In many ways the question will be whether conservatives can use digital technology to outpace the spread of woke culture into every area of life. In other words: we are in a race to create a free-standing, independent ecosystem of commerce and culture which is neither subject to censorship by the Left nor dependent on it for major resources.
If we can do so, then the cancellation of wokies by wokies for the benefit of other wokies will increasingly become a matter of occult concern, with little or no bearing on the lives of ordinary Americans. But in order to get to that place — and it’s a long way off — we have to really get it into our heads that the establishment is not our friend in basically any area of life. For all the railing we do against the mainstream media, against the academy, against big tech, we continue to buy from Amazon reflexively and marvel instinctively at people with degrees from Harvard. That is the sort of thing we have to wean ourselves off of, bit by slow bit.
The more viable our renegade institutions become, the more attractive they will be to the untold numbers of nice, sensible people who mostly just want to be left alone. At the moment, as a matter of cultural inertia, lots of those people have found themselves trapped in businesses or schools where woke doctrine is rigorously enforced and no dissent is tolerated. What will it take for someone like that to read an article in the Blaze and nod along, or check out that Ben Shapiro guy whom “everyone” seems to hate, or even — gasp — consider voting red?
It won’t take as much as we might think, if the California recall is any indication. Despite <a href="https://stoptherepublicanrecall.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://stoptherepublicanrecall.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFicyXba6aDZS2z5O4Bhzeh--H0XA">laughable efforts</a> on the part of Gavin Newsom to portray the recall as a nationwide Republican op, the fact is that people living under California’s horrendous progressive dictatorship have shown up against Gavin to the tune of around <a href="https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2021/03/17/california-recall-backers-confident-after-submitting-2-1m-signatures-1368714" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2021/03/17/california-recall-backers-confident-after-submitting-2-1m-signatures-1368714&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFQv71zSScoI1SwT97I4dYSPY2bjg">two million people</a>. You don’t hit those kinds of numbers without real, organic discontent among all kinds of Californians — from Trump-loving farmhands to nice granola-eating moms in Beverly Hills. The appetite is out there for something — anything — better than the modern Left.
The Real America
I’m not here to sell you false optimism. I’m just here to point out that though our enemies have attained enormous amounts of cultural and political power, they are essentially overgrown children running an enormous playground unsupervised. I hope the time will come when we can say: let ’em. If the kids want to devour one another alive, fine. We’ll build our own world for grown-ups, and anyone who loves this country is welcome.
It will take an enormous effort on the part of everybody — pundits, politicians, private citizens — to get there. But that effort is already underway. Ron DeSantis is <a href="https://nypost.com/2021/03/18/desantis-blocks-critical-race-theory-from-florida-classrooms/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://nypost.com/2021/03/18/desantis-blocks-critical-race-theory-from-florida-classrooms/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH23el0idJbDcaS0Y-LmeOYfmZr5g">protecting</a> the children of Florida from the poison of Critical Race Theory. Conservative media institutions are uncancelling stars whom the woke machine has chewed up and spat out. Platforms like Dave Rubin’s <a href="https://youngheretics.locals.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://youngheretics.locals.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFt51Ilw_B2WaSbrzsuyIE159EN1g">Locals</a> are opening a serious space where creators and consumers alike can be free to say and think as they please. And even inveterate Dems like <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/15/sarah-silverman-is-right-democrats-are-the-party-of-absolutism/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/15/sarah-silverman-is-right-democrats-are-the-party-of-absolutism/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1616269696055000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH1cJSK_-HUXEJAOaLELjtcuICYyw">Sarah Silverman</a> are showing signs of life, though it remains to be seen whether they will take the plunge of leaving the Left.
Perhaps it’s ironic that the administration of our oldest president would preside over an America overrun by children. But the senile White House and the squabbling newsrooms have one thing in common: they are weak. All the energy, all the vitality, all the best ideas, are ours. Let them have their crumbling towers and their dying world. The future belongs to us.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://youngheretics.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFegURPjAdNFJd0-_mKudXAgmAp5g">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEwm82CEKe6gHOjTWwdZQOTR6iQow">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHQm8tQMK1XoUSXLWkCl3KkGZJgrQ">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/spencerklavan&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHzq-src8474zs7-nMknyLYtgJwCA">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Cancel button

The Woke Policing the Woke

TOPSHOT-US-VOTE-BIDEN-CAMPAIGN

There Are Only Three News Stories That Matter In America Right Now

Big Tech

Censorship

Critical Race Theory

Only very advanced societies are able to live and let live. We are apparently no longer a very advanced society.
Twitter lit up this week with the news that six Dr. Seuss books had been cancelled by the man’s own estate. Dr. Seuss Enterprises was founded by Theodore Seuss Geisel’s widow in 1993. Since, it has decided that certain portions of Geisel’s own work are racist and therefore at odds with “our mission of supporting all children and families with messages of hope, inspiration, inclusion, and friendship.”
One might imagine that the business entrusted with preserving Dr. Seuss’s legacy of delighting and inspiring children would look for guidance on how to do so from&#8230; Dr. Seuss. But ours is an era in which sons stand in judgment over their fathers. It’s characteristic of late-stage cancel culture that the very people trained and empowered by the work of a genius would think they can use that training and power to condemn the man himself.
Seussgate is of a piece with last week’s Amazon blitz, in which Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally was zapped from the online retailer’s inventory. As Sohrab Ahmari <a href="https://americanmind.org/salvo/amazons-digital-bonfire/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/salvo/amazons-digital-bonfire/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614879961969000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFfoI7PVSvEQNxfm_AbbNDPe00M2Q">pointed out</a> at The American Mind, “given that Amazon controls most book sales in the United States, [this] means Anderson’s book simply doesn’t exist, as far as most book buyers are concerned.” And since Anderson’s book was not a screed but a thoughtful, well-researched argument, “if Anderson’s book is subject to cancellation by Amazon, few other books are safe.”
But there is something distinctive about cancelling Dr. Seuss. Two, things, in fact: for one, it makes the books in question not just difficult but impossible to obtain. They will simply no longer be published: the people in control of their licensing have made them contraband. Irrespective of the business the books may or may not generate, and purely on the basis of ethical purity, those books are now forbidden. Gone.
For another thing, Seuss is a children’s author. This obvious fact is of a weighty significance that is likely to be overlooked. If anything it might tempt us to treat this episode as more frivolous than the Amazon fiasco, less deserving of adult attention. But that is an error that lets progressives get away with a great deal. Conservatives commit it all the time: we sniff at low culture and childish things, as if they were beneath our attention. The Left does not. They understand an important truth: control early childhood education, and you control the country.
From Cradle to Congress
“The best means of forming a manly, virtuous and happy people, will be found in the right education of youth. Without this foundation, every other means, in my opinion, must fail.” So <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-02-02-0149" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-02-02-0149&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614879961969000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHpEpsErJzYNrgswaIxI7i1ngSC8w">wrote</a> George Washington in a letter to his friend, the educational theorist George Chapman. Washington had ancient wisdom behind him: “the beginning of everything is the most important thing,” <a href="https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0168%3Abook%3D2%3Asection%3D377a" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc%3DPerseus%253Atext%253A1999.01.0168%253Abook%253D2%253Asection%253D377a&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614879961969000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF9ll4s1dwMGC8iNFsw0XtxVQoUHg">wrote</a> the Greek philosopher Plato in his Republic, “especially for any creature that is young and tender. That is when it is most easily molded.”
Plato’s student Aristotle went on to write a <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0058%3Abook%3D8%3Asection%3D1337a" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc%3DPerseus%253Atext%253A1999.01.0058%253Abook%253D8%253Asection%253D1337a&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614879961969000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF-k4ZFsM7DaGDyIaFvgu261aJmdg">series</a> of lectures on how education shapes politics: the children who are trained in the nursery grow up to vote in the assemblies and write the laws of the state. “Legislators make their citizens good by training,” <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0054%3Abekker%20page%3D1103a" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc%3DPerseus%253Atext%253A1999.01.0054%253Abekker%2520page%253D1103a&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614879961969000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHoVlhTzMltG8XvrT4Pe0NjdKSWSA">wrote</a> Aristotle. “This is the wish of all legislators, and those who do not succeed in this miss their aim, and it is this that distinguishes a good from a bad constitution.” In a representative government like ours, or a democracy like Athens, education is never merely personal. It is also political in the deepest sense: it trains us for participation in government at every level.
Abraham Lincoln, in one of his <a href="http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614879961969000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEeh_tE8HcQ1nQ94wwOuOY0c1Xj3g">earliest speeches</a>, insisted on this point: “let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap,” he declared. “Let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.” “From out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou established strength,” says Psalm 8: from the nursery on up through the universities and into the legislature, like seeds sprouting into trees and bearing fruit, the lessons we teach our kids play out in our politics.
One lesson progressives are currently teaching our kids is this: those whose views make you uncomfortable should be barred from the public square. They are teaching that lesson very effectively, because they are paying attention to every level of society—down to the very babes and sucklings. This is a cultural lesson, deeper than this or that law: that is why we call it cancel culture.
Nothing that Amazon or Dr. Seuss Enterprises has done is currently illegal or ever was. It is not as if the laws changed, and now the censors are free at last to do their merciless work. Our expectations of one another have changed, our instinctive reactions to things and the unspoken rules of how we do business.
You can feel this at work in your own heart, even though if you’re reading this I doubt you support cancellation as an intellectual matter. Look up some of the <a href="https://indianexpress.com/article/books-and-literature/dr-seuss-books-racist-imagery-7211862/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://indianexpress.com/article/books-and-literature/dr-seuss-books-racist-imagery-7211862/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614879961969000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFYc4nuNd5IpV8quFyIm_0lsVOFmQ">supposedly racist</a> images from the Dr. Seuss books in question. They are, in my view, perfectly harmless. And yet I cringe to see them. Why? Because the atmosphere around me, the set of cultural assumptions I encounter every day, has trained me to do so at a subconscious level. We are all, even conservatives, being culturally molded by the Left.
Cultural Solutions to Cultural Problems
To be sure, there are some legal remedies that we can and must seek for this state of affairs. In particular the power that Amazon and Big Tech hold over us — over the flow of information, over our elected representatives themselves — must be broken. I don’t care if we use Section 230 reform, or anti-trust law, or some other new law to do it: this is a foundational, constitutional issue for us. The first amendment guarantees our rights of free expression. Any company which attains the power to nullify that amendment has violated our most basic social contract with one another and stolen our God-given birthright. If the laws do not allow us to defend these constitutional principles, the laws need changing. It’s a good reason to pay attention to the 2022 election.
But laws at the congressional or even the state level won’t fix everything. These cultural matters — these matters of the heart — also require cultural change. The atmosphere itself, the way we treat one another and expect to be treated, is something over which we the people have total collective control. We can, for starters, stop treating that fact as if it were small beer. The time is past to acquiesce, to shrug off petty accusations or menacing looks as inconsequential. It is time to boldly, without apology, act as if we believe what we believe.
And what we believe is: that we are endowed by our Creator with the right to speak our minds. That the endless invention of petty racism where none exists is a tool and a tactic to cow us into silence. That neither the state nor our neighbor has any right to make us feel ashamed of our country or to assassinate our character on charges that change every day and bear no relation to reality. We have to start acting like we believe that.
I am talking here about action on a very subtle level, about shifts in attitude which take place daily and in minor interactions. The great Athenian statesman Pericles, in a speech praising the glory of his native culture, <a href="https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ancient/pericles-funeralspeech.asp" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ancient/pericles-funeralspeech.asp&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614879961969000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEOoE736BduuaTXKj0f5Gl6etGMcw">noted this </a>about how neighbors in Athens regarded one another:
<blockquote>
Far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. But all this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this fear is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regard the protection of the injured, whether they are actually on the statute book, or belong to that code which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace.
</blockquote>
“Those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty”: in those looks, those sidelong glances and clucks of concern, are the roots of all cancel culture’s power. We are so easily swayed by one another, so ready to shrink back when someone looks at us askance. This has empowered the worst kinds of bullies: everyone is familiar now with the hideous scenes of grown men screaming at defenseless women in grocery stores, demanding that they put on masks.
The fact that those men feel comfortable acting that way is a matter of cultural climate: they have been encouraged to spy on and berate their neighbors, to demand compliance, to act as agents of the nanny state. We cannot stand for this any longer. We must not look away when things like this happen. There is no need for violence or even anger in any of this: we must simply stand our ground and defend one another against these crabbed and oppressive forms of social control.
We Can Win
I am going to stress one more time now that this is not a minor thing. It is everything. It is the context within which it becomes possible to be America. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614879961969000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEb-5VDEuR7FbruUvjqt0Mef-Y9lA">wrote</a> John Adams to the Massachusetts Militia. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Adams was saying that republican government is possible within a certain kind of culture, and not within others. That cultural context — the strong social and religious fabric in which the country was founded — preceded the country itself and made it possible.
We don’t automatically become virtuous and free by living in a country with a written Constitution. Our virtue, and our insistence on freedom, are what makes the Constitution more than writing. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&amp;doc=15&amp;page=transcript" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash%3Dfalse%26doc%3D15%26page%3Dtranscript&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614879961969000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEU6SPLrbk-KJWHEqOs58rF7_JvXg">said</a> George Washington upon leaving the presidency, “religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”
It starts in churches. It starts in gatherings of the like-minded. And then it grows every time you, or anyone, has the courage to do what is frowned upon in the era of cancel culture. To resist tyrannical lockdowns. To speak your mind honestly in love. To disregard the nasty looks or the social stigma that may come with those things.
And courage is what it will take. Courage is what it always takes: this country was founded at the risk of life and limb. We can summon the guts to resist this new foe, this cloud of censorship and closed-mindedness. When we do, we will find there were lots of people on our side the whole time, just waiting for permission to be brave and speak up.
We can give them that permission, each of us, if we step out in faith. “Do not be afraid,” said the <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings%206&amp;version=NIV" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search%3D2%2520Kings%25206%26version%3DNIV&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614879961969000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH_EBisg-wwm4JQq30hjRd0x2s0Ng">prophet</a> Elisha to his servant: “they that are with us are greater than those that are against us.” And the servant saw that though there was an enemy army outside their tent, horsemen and chariots of fire were waiting to charge into battle.
The cavalry is there for us — but we have to summon them. We have to summon them with daily courage, and with refusal to be intimidated. Do not back down: we can win this fight.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://youngheretics.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFegURPjAdNFJd0-_mKudXAgmAp5g">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEwm82CEKe6gHOjTWwdZQOTR6iQow">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHQm8tQMK1XoUSXLWkCl3KkGZJgrQ">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/spencerklavan&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHzq-src8474zs7-nMknyLYtgJwCA">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Dr. Seuss Receives A Star On The Hollywood Walk Of Fame

Dr. Seuss and the Culture of Fear

Dr. Seuss

I hope all my readers will join me in my exciting new quest to become less white. Previously, I had thought this would require an expensive membership at my local tanning salon. Now, thanks to a scandal surrounding the Coca-Cola Company (to which I refer at all times for guidance in ethics and personal formation) I have learned that being less white does not in fact require altering the pigmentation of my skin.
“To be less white,” according to the “Confronting Racism” online training course, “is to be less oppressive. To be less arrogant. To be less certain. To be less defensive.” Presumably it is also to be kinder, smarter, gentler, and better at baking pies.
I am moreover <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/backlash-hits-coca-cola-after-accusations-of-anti-white-agenda" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dailywire.com/news/backlash-hits-coca-cola-after-accusations-of-anti-white-agenda&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614209705302000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGW5bSBmm5GV5I8z8Zdj5e0BedrXQ">assured</a> via corporate statement that &#8220;Confronting Racism&#8221; is not part of Coca-Cola&#8217;s mandatory curriculum but merely an adjunct to their &#8220;learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace.&#8221; This plan includes — but does not mandate, thank goodness! — &#8220;access to LinkedIn Learning on a variety of topics, including on diversity, equity and inclusion.&#8221;
What a relief! For a moment I had thought that a major American corporation was inviting its employees to believe that their ethnic heritage — or, even more crudely, their phenotype — was a major determiner of their personal character and potential for such virtues as empathy. That would be racism, and racism is very wrong.
Now instead I learn — not because I have to but because I am enabled to — that “whiteness” is not a genetic category but merely a catch-all term for “everything bad.” In those terms, who wouldn&#8217;t want to be less white?!
It makes no difference whether Coca-Cola itself mandates this training or only lets its employees into the LinkedIn page where they can find it. In itself, the course represents a widespread philosophy as insipid as it is evil. This philosophy has found extremely popular spokespeople in Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, and Ibram X. Kendi, prophet of “anti-racism.” DiAngelo was featured in &#8220;Confronting Racism,&#8221; for which she undoubtedly received one of her <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-fragility-author-robin-diangelo-paid-more-for-university-speaking-gig-than-black-counterpart">staggering</a> speakers’ fees.
Kendi, in his book Stamped from the Beginning, has made his own fortune (to the tune of a $10 million <a href="https://www.bu.edu/articles/2020/jack-dorsey-bu-center-for-antiracist-research-gift/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.bu.edu/articles/2020/jack-dorsey-bu-center-for-antiracist-research-gift/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614209705302000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFlUoVQZM03kk9iB3LdR0KjyKxamQ">donation</a> from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, for starters) by teaching that “racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country and in the world at large.” No other factor than the inherent racism of whiteness, in other words, can explain anything less than complete racial equity in all areas of American life.
But Kendi and DiAngelo are neither of them bright enough to have had so much as an original thought, let alone to have invented an entire system of racial grievance in America. Their rise to fame, and the monstrous ascendancy of the Critical Race Theory which they teach in American schools and businesses, has been and continues to be ably detailed and opposed by City Journal’s <a href="https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo?ref_src%3Dtwsrc%255Egoogle%257Ctwcamp%255Eserp%257Ctwgr%255Eauthor&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614209705302000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGQqQ9LcEMeJpiZvvEbVawIpW-0tA">Christopher Rufo</a>. For my own part, I don’t propose to deal further with Kendi or DiAngelo except as sock puppets — little gajillionaire mouthpieces for satanic forces which have been at work in American culture since the Cold War, and in the human heart since the fall of man.
Cultural Marxism
First, the Commies. As I imagine Michael Knowles will discuss in detail when his new <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Speechless-Controlling-Words-Minds/dp/1684510821" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/Speechless-Controlling-Words-Minds/dp/1684510821&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614209705302000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFTkO9G2ivbybH3ZY1T0R17GjhUAg">book</a> comes out, Marxism failed as an economic proposition in America because, as an economic proposition, it sucks. We have — or had; it is dwindling — a middle class in this country. This made it difficult to foment discontent with America’s free market, because even our proletariat was having a pretty good time economically.
So, <a href="https://americanmind.org/features/the-racial-marxism-of-blm/the-plot-to-change-america/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/features/the-racial-marxism-of-blm/the-plot-to-change-america/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614209705302000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEiDnJhhMWm9pnTUiSMmgN41VmAiw">inspired</a> by sophisticates like the Italian Antonio Gramsci and agitators like the American Rudi Dutschke, Marxists pivoted. They began what Dutschke famously called the “long march through the institutions” — an effort to insinuate Communism into America’s schools and artistic venues, to teach every “lisping babe,” in <a href="http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614209705302000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGa-_bEVm5U1PgFWMJEzyGuLBbHiA">Abraham Lincoln</a>’s memorable phrasing, that the world could be boiled down to class grievance.
This is by now a well-known story; the success of cultural Marxism was in evidence last summer when a generation of miseducated American radicals poured violently onto the streets of our cities to express hatred for all white, male, cis-hetero oppressors from the Founding Fathers on down to the present day.
What fewer conservatives realize is that not just the fury of summer 2020, but the whole BLM philosophy which motivated it — the terminology, the ideology, the millenarian narrative of struggle and apocalyptic triumph — is Marxist in origin and design. BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors was justified in describing herself and her colleagues as “trained <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/06/25/blm-co-founder-describes-herself-as-trained-marxist/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://nypost.com/2020/06/25/blm-co-founder-describes-herself-as-trained-marxist/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614209705302000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH-ooDfstqE-1qVOSlwUjtieCNa0g">Marxists</a>”: the very notion of “white privilege” was itself cribbed from a 1960s Communist playbook.
It was Communist party members Noel Ignatiev and Ted Allen who came up with the idea of pitting Americans against one another with the accusation of “white-skin privilege.” If there is no economic grounds for discontent among the working poor, then certainly there is racial grounds: teach that the stain of racism persists in every white soul, and Americans will see one another not as friends and fellow citizens but as victims or villains.
Better yet, the same framework can be applied in every area of American society. “Once radicals adopt such an approach to radicalizing the white masses,” Allen <a href="https://americanmind.org/features/the-racial-marxism-of-blm/the-communist-roots-of-white-privilege/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/features/the-racial-marxism-of-blm/the-communist-roots-of-white-privilege/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614209705302000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFdwkYb8TPcX4zCNsvoo9FqND9loQ">wrote</a>, “the implications for particular areas of activity will not be hard to find.” Many Communists are shockingly bad writers. But Allen was trying to say that animating grievance based on past injustices is an idea with legs. Women, gays, blacks, trans people — anyone with any claim to victimhood could be enlisted in the revolution against America.
The key, said Allen, was “the function of the white radicals.” A significant number of sympathetic whites, in other words, must accept and teach that they and their like are foundationally evil by virtue of their race. That is the function that useful idiots like DiAngelo and her corporate backers serve today.
Why It Worked
Somewhere under all of this intellectual history, though, there’s a deeper question. Why did this work? Why was any American — let alone masses of us — persuaded that he was inherently, inescapably broken from the moment of his birth? Race is an agonizingly sore subject with Americans in particular, of course — not because we are the worst society ever to exist in terms of racism, but because we are the first society to posit radical equality before the law as a matter of national creed.
Our philosophical commitment to not being racist was so extreme that our failure to make good on that commitment — morally appalling in itself but not remarkable in the scope of human history — became intolerable. We tore the country bloodily apart over it. The memory of that trauma is still fresh and the wounds it left are still tender after all these years.
All of that stipulated, though, there is something yet more primal going on here. Every country has damnable injustices in its past. Why is it that we can’t lay ours to rest? It seems we are psychologically unable to situate our own failures in the context of human failure more generally.
That is a religious problem. It is not ultimately economic, or political, or sociological, except in the very deepest sense of all those words. Questions about where a person or a nation stands in the cosmic sweep of history are ultimately theological questions. All the major faiths — whatever their other flaws, virtues, or differences — have some way of processing how much violence there is in the world, how pitiless and tragic are the paths man charts through the valley of death.
In the second Surah (chapter) of the Qur’an, when Allah announces his intention to create humankind, the angels are appalled. “You will make creatures who will do mischief and shed blood?” they gasp. Allah’s response to them is pure, inscrutable enigma: “I know what you do not.”
That is an example of a religion coming to healthy terms with our broken world: Why was the existence of man worth the atrocities he would commit? It is a mystery. There are things even the angels do not understand.
Christian theology agrees with this approach, up to a point. But Christians go further: when God sacrificed himself on the cross, we peered into the infinite depths of that awful mystery. “He himself bore our sins, in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live in righteousness.” The world is still a vale of anguish and grief. But Christians are consoled and guided by the thought that though the source of grief is us, the remedy for it is God and his mercy, which we are to emulate.
In his Second Inaugural Address, years into the torment of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln told a weary nation that these hard Christian truths would sustain and guide them in what was to come. The bloodletting of the war might be “the woe due to those by whom the offence” of chattel slavery came. But when that judgment had passed, the score was to be settled and all resentments buried. “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds.”
The Nation’s Wounds
Critical Race Theory and Cultural Marxism have won the victories they have won because they came to America at a time of spiritual desolation. Those rich and noble certainties which gave shape to Lincoln’s speech, the theological framework within which all men must grapple with the angst of being broken, have drained out of our cultural life in the wake of the World Wars.
In place of that broad Judeo-Christian consensus, woke racism presents a dark travesty of religion which pretends to scratch the itch for worship in every human heart, the way all satanic perversions do. The woke profess their faith in a new creed with another sacrifice at its core — not Christ’s freely chosen self-abasement, but the old and primitive ritual of the scapegoat.
As a matter of religious heritage, scapegoating practices are first codified in Leviticus 16, where the Jewish people are instructed to pile the sins of all the people onto one goat and send it running, never to return. But this symbolic practice is no mere artifice: it is a stopgap measure given by God to his people, a way of transferring the rage and pain of our fallenness onto a relatively safe object.
The Jews blamed one goat a year for the sins of the world so they wouldn’t do it to a person or race, which is what we are naturally inclined to do. It turns out inability to face up to the horrors of our brokenness is not unique to Americans: it is the norm, and it has motivated people throughout history to invent accusations against one another rather than face the fact of their own shortcomings. This is, in a cruel irony, exactly how Jews have been treated throughout history: from the blood libel to the Holocaust, God’s chosen people have been blamed for any number of sociological dysfunctions and made, wrongly, to suffer punishment for them.
In the empty void left by Christian worship, we have reverted to this most juvenile and ugliest way of dealing with our sins. “Identity politics begins from an understanding of the brokenness of white, heterosexual men,” writes Joshua Mitchell in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/American-Awakening-Identity-Politics-Afflictions/dp/1641771305" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/American-Awakening-Identity-Politics-Afflictions/dp/1641771305&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1614209705302000&amp;usg=AFQjCNE8cxRIC1X7SrVZwoFEk-nCzURmyg">American Awakening</a>. “Then, without the assistance of God, [identity politics] seeks to save the planet from the transgressors who have endangered it.”
It is not my intention here to scold anyone into a faith he cannot accept. But I do believe we cannot be realists about saving America without identifying the nature of our problem. Identity politics is a religion; Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi are clerics; they triumph not because they are strong but because we are spiritually weak.
If there is to be a solution to this it is religious revival, and it starts at home. Perhaps you are a Christian, perhaps you are not — your task is the same. Cast out false gods wherever you find them, and do not be satisfied with cheap solutions to profound questions. If you cannot believe in Christian dogma, ask yourself what you can believe in, and why.
Somewhere, among your fellows and in your own heart, there is a better answer to the sins of the world than the hideous, churning, atavistic nightmare that has cast its shadow over us again in the form of identity politics. Seek that answer, and enlist others in the search. If we are to survive, the solution has to start somewhere. Let it start there.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://youngheretics.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFegURPjAdNFJd0-_mKudXAgmAp5g">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEwm82CEKe6gHOjTWwdZQOTR6iQow">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHQm8tQMK1XoUSXLWkCl3KkGZJgrQ">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/spencerklavan&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHzq-src8474zs7-nMknyLYtgJwCA">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

SPAIN-POLITICS-RACISM-POLICE-PROTEST

The Dark Religion of Identity Politics

Identity Politics

White Privilege

You have a right to educate your children. Say it with me, though it shouldn’t have to be said: you have a right to educate your children.
Last year, Harvard’s “nationally renowned child welfare expert,” Elizabeth Bartholet, <a href="https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-professor-says-there-may-be-a-dark-side-of-homeschooling/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-professor-says-there-may-be-a-dark-side-of-homeschooling/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1613600462173000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEmSofb2h1m3oBKjFGybPwR3J5jcw">published</a> a glorified hit job on homeschoolers and their parents. Fretting that those who choose to homeschool are often *gasp* Evangelical Christians, she explained that “children are simply not learning basic academic skills or learning about the most basic democratic values of our society or getting the kind of exposure to alternative views that enables them to exercise meaningful choice about their future lives.”
Heaven forfend, in other words, that kids should grow up deprived of such pedagogical essentials as the <a href="https://assets2.hrc.org/welcoming-schools/documents/WS_Lesson_Gender_Snowperson.pdf" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://assets2.hrc.org/welcoming-schools/documents/WS_Lesson_Gender_Snowperson.pdf&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1613600462173000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEg5IHqDi-jHOTimj7IIPCQNep1mg">gender snowperson</a>—without a Human Rights Campaign infographic to open up before them the infinite vista of gender fluidity, how will they ever exercise meaningful choice about their future lives?
If any form of schooling in this country is designed to screen out “the most basic&#8230;values of our society” and prevent “exposure to alternative views,” it is surely the public school system. “every CPS high school will receive 200-400 copies of The New York Times&#8216; <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1613600462173000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF5SMm8sU8m8aLeHkqlxTJ0vN7mdQ">The 1619 Project</a>,” said Dr. Janice Jackson, CEO of Chicago Public Schools, in September 2019. The Times’s “Project” (read: neo-Bolshevist screed) needs to be in schools, according to Jackson, so it can “help reframe the institution of slavery, and how we&#8217;re still influenced by it today.”
Long before President Biden took office, a partisan effort to install “<a href="https://americanmind.org/memo/action-civics-replaces-citizenship-with-partisanship/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/memo/action-civics-replaces-citizenship-with-partisanship/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1613600462174000&amp;usg=AFQjCNErr2QzyYtiWRov2ZBQ4msqos9vFQ">Action Civics</a>” in schools across the country was already replacing patriotic education with leftist activism. As a candidate, Biden partnered with <a href="https://joebiden.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/UNITY-TASK-FORCE-RECOMMENDATIONS.pdf" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://joebiden.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/UNITY-TASK-FORCE-RECOMMENDATIONS.pdf&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1613600462174000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGyBfpw07pujeoDxCXTz-mSAMMZBw">Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders</a> to declare his support for more unionization (of the kind that is now keeping schools <a href="https://americanmind.org/memo/get-your-kids-out-of-public-school/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/memo/get-your-kids-out-of-public-school/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1613600462174000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHAcTf8ekeyXsXGNfti9ldehwzHwQ">locked down</a> in the name of self-interested bickering and at the expense of children’s welfare) as well as his <a href="https://americanmind.org/features/what-comes-next/bidens-bipartisan-plan-destroy-american-education/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/features/what-comes-next/bidens-bipartisan-plan-destroy-american-education/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1613600462174000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHyJCrkpQK6Msti_EyJXhPRj4B-dQ">hostility</a> toward charter schools.
On his first day in office, Biden nuked former President Trump’s <a href="https://americanmind.org/memo/the-1776-report-an-excerpt/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/memo/the-1776-report-an-excerpt/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1613600462174000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFyEdFlAVTyfwd-qDUN9_ydtt5x2A">1776 Commission Report</a>, which outlined a traditional and patriotic path for American history and civics. The report would have been uncontroversial 20 years ago; now it is not fit for the eyes of children. The Democrat platform essentially amounts to: your children will learn the values we decide upon, at the time of our choosing, and your opinion on the matter is irrelevant (plus probably racist).
Something very calculated is going on here, and it’s worth being precise about what it is. The Left understands education as a form of state indoctrination. The problem with this view is that it’s roughly half correct. This may surprise conservatives initially, wary as we rightly are of state control. But there is more to this than just “government bad.” When Trump <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/10/trump-accuses-colleges-radical-left-indoctrination-threatens-tax-exemption/5415908002/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/10/trump-accuses-colleges-radical-left-indoctrination-threatens-tax-exemption/5415908002/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1613600462174000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEd-G6EVyIm_LJJWYzcUm7kCwuD2A">declared</a> that “our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated,” he was moving in the right direction — but something more needs saying if we’re going to get this thing right. Which we must: the soul of the country is at stake.
What is Education?
Education is a subject on which we have wandered far from our ancestral sources of wisdom. What is the point of teaching children at all? How do we pick what to teach? Do we teach values, or just facts?
There is an ancient answer that cuts through all these questions to the heart of what education is. Plato describes it in his Republic, though it was probably already conventional wisdom in his day. A rightly educated man, in Plato’s words, will
<blockquote>
praise beautiful things and delight in them. He will and take them into his soul to foster its growth and become himself beautiful and good. The ugly he would rightly reject and hate while still young and yet unable to apprehend the reason — but when reason came to him, the man thus nurtured would be the first to give her welcome, for by this affinity he would know her.
</blockquote>
To love what is good and hate what is evil: this is the mark of an educated man. Conservatives could be forgiven for recoiling at this definition: one of our strongest traditions in this country, after all, is freedom of thought and speech. How can we call our society free if we brainwash our kids to love what we love? Maybe we just ought to teach facts, and let people decide about values for themselves.
But there’s no getting away from the paradox this creates. For liberty itself — the context within which all these arguments make sense — is a value. It is not something “objective” in the sense of being merely factual. You can’t calculate our right to liberty with a mathematical equation or derive it from scientific observation. You have to believe in it, and that means knowing it as good.
Maybe the good of liberty is self-evident — Thomas Jefferson certainly thought so — but the majority of people throughout history haven’t seen it that way. Remember how the Israelites whom Moses freed <a href="https://biblehub.com/exodus/16-3.htm" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://biblehub.com/exodus/16-3.htm&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1613600462174000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHkY-Du_UsdwbnyLkqKcS5egJR8og">longed</a> at first for a return to slavery. Humanity had to be exposed over long years to the truth of things, to learn through hard experience the evils of tyranny and the blessings of liberty. In other words, we had to be taught — in this case, by history.
And even seemingly basic things, like math and science, involve basic values — values like reason, empirical observation, and experimentation. We’ve got these things so deep in our bones that we don’t realize that people aren’t born into the world knowing how to use them. But it’s true: we train kids to love these things. We teach them funny songs, or games, or show them puzzles, to get them used to the pleasure of finding facts out.
“Mankind by nature reaches out to know,” wrote Plato’s student Aristotle — and that’s true. But when we first reach out, as kids, we need someone else reaching out on the other end to guide our natural impulses: toward good and not evil, toward truth and not falsehood, as best as can be done in this broken world.
This is something which the Left deeply understands, albeit in a twisted and dangerous way. They want to seize control of early childhood education precisely because they do know that education is about values, and not just facts. The gender snowperson, the 1619 Project, the activism and the hostility toward home schooling: all of these are motivated by a desire to get kids schooled in their values. It’s why they’re so effective, even with their terrible ideas. Leftists know that if they can get at kids when they’re impressionable, they can teach whole generations to hate what they hate and love what they love.
Education is Politics
Education is thus political in the most profound sense. There’s no escaping it. Here’s Aristotle again:
<blockquote>
Nobody would dispute that the education of the young requires the special attention of the legislator. Neglect this in a state, and the constitution is destroyed—for education ought to be adapted to the particular form of government&#8230;for instance the democratic spirit promotes democracy and the oligarchic spirit oligarchy; and the best spirit always causes a better constitution.
</blockquote>
George Washington expressed much the same sentiment when he wrote in a <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-02-02-0149" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-02-02-0149&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1613600462174000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHgqDU_UzQaufIU2hDi273d0_1xSg">letter</a> to the teacher and educational philosopher George Chapman, “The best means of forming a manly, virtuous and happy people, will be found in the right education of youth. Without this foundation, every other means, in my opinion, must fail.” Then again Abraham Lincoln, near the very beginning of his political career, proclaimed, “that every man may receive at least, a moderate education, and thereby be enabled to read the histories of his own and other countries, by which he may duly appreciate the value of our free institutions, appears to be an object of vital importance.”
The question is not whether we want to instill political principles into children by educating them. The question is which political principles we want to instill. The Left has its answer: they want children primed to hate America from as young an age as possible, trained to assume as a matter of course that their country is racist and their fellow countrymen are potential oppressors. To think of their bodies as prisons and to long for liberation from the reality of gender. That is a totalizing educational project, and it guides how the Left wants everything — from history and civics to math and science — to be taught.
What is our answer? That, too, can be found in Aristotle, at the very beginning of his <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-02-02-0149" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-02-02-0149&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1613600462174000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHgqDU_UzQaufIU2hDi273d0_1xSg">Politics</a>. The form of education should mirror the form of government, and our form of government is a free one. Its most basic building block, the natural community out of which all its other structures grow, is the family. If the family is free — if it stands firm as a self-contained unit — then communities, cities, and states can build from there.
“Nothing of a public and institutional nature can supply the place of parents,” wrote Rousas John Rushdoony in The Messianic Character of American Education. “They were ordained of God; and no incubator of modern science or education should ever supplant them.” True learning doesn’t begin the first time a child walks through the classroom door: it begins the first time a mother smiles and her baby smiles back.
The lifelong process of becoming ever more deeply human — of learning to love the good and hate what is evil — begins in the home and grows organically outward from there into the highest reaches of government. School, if it happens outside the home, is still an extension of the home, and the parents’ final authority to choose the manner of their children’s education should be absolute. That is not a politically neutral or objective view. It doesn’t spring out of nowhere or endure without care and upkeep. It is an American view, following directly from the American belief in man’s inalienable rights.
The Opposite of Leftism
The Left has set itself resolutely against this American view of education. That goes way back: already in the late 1800s, Progressive reformers were arguing, again in Rushdoony’s words, that “the family is a social product and must serve therefore as a social agency.” The attacks on homeschooling and charter schools that now issue regularly from the modern Democratic Party follow directly from this Progressive project: we decide what is good, not you; therefore we and not you will decide what your children learn.
We will need, in the years to come, a strong defense of our own right to educate our kids. That doesn’t mean everyone should homeschool — it’s not right for everyone, of course, and there are other ways to watch over your child’s education. But it does mean defending homeschooling as the basic form of education, from which all other forms of education derive their character and their legitimacy. Homescholing has produced and continues to produce extremely high-functioning, well-educated <a href="https://twitter.com/Liz_Wheeler/status/1194440635664613376?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/Liz_Wheeler/status/1194440635664613376?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1613600462174000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF8ouzwTMG3Gh3_lgGkdwzBdaWEIQ">people</a> who defy the bigoted stereotypes of its detractors. It is not a marginal oddity or a deviation from the norm. It is the baseline, the heart and soul of how education should look.
The conservative position should therefore be the exact reverse of the leftist one — not because we want to take politics out of education, but because the politics of our education should be based on the politics of the American Constitution. If the Democrat view is wokeness from the top down, ours should be Americanism from the bottom up — no matter what, against every form of opposition. Take control of what your kids learn. You have the right. Say it again, once more to close: you have the right.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://youngheretics.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFegURPjAdNFJd0-_mKudXAgmAp5g">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEwm82CEKe6gHOjTWwdZQOTR6iQow">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHQm8tQMK1XoUSXLWkCl3KkGZJgrQ">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/spencerklavan&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHzq-src8474zs7-nMknyLYtgJwCA">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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