The American Conservative Is Increasingly Insane

[LFC]

TAC has a new boogeyman! His name is Bishop Garrison and he is a senior adviser on the task force to rid the military of Nazis and fascist i.e. people who swore to uphold the Constitution but lied. Here's a refresher on the author, hatchet man Douglas MacGregor. His comments about shooting immigrants and Serbia are the stuff of utter nutters.

Transforming the Military to Transform the Country
If the U.S. Armed Forces are compelled to internalize the Biden administration’s ideology, they will cease to be a national military establishment.

May 26, 2021 | 12:01 am
Douglas Macgregor

The Biden administration took Americans on the right by surprise. In the opening weeks of the new administration, very few expected to see the sudden, massive influx of illegal migrants and drugs through open and unsecured borders, the deliberate suspension of the rule of law in the nation’s largest cities, the demonization of the police, and the official tolerance for racially motivated violence.

Americans on the right are no longer surprised. In the minds of conservative Americans there is now real evidence for a political regime in Washington that defines itself in opposition to just about everything the United States stands for.

The White House should feel reassured, however, since very few Americans have challenged the Biden administration’s monopoly of control over the machinery of government in any meaningful way. But doubts clearly linger. The National Guard presence and the barriers of concrete, steel and barbed wire that surround the Capitol building are still a metaphor for an administration that lives in a psychological state of siege, anger, and unease.

In April of this year, the Biden administration appointed Bishop Garrison to be the senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense for diversity and inclusion. In this role, Garrison, a 2002 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, heads the Defense Department’s new “Countering Extremism” working group. Other than his virulent hatred for anyone who supported President Donald Trump, and his advocacy for Critical Race Theory, not much is known about him.

Whether Garrison’s arrival signals the implementation of a new system inside the U.S. Armed Forces tasked with the responsibility to identify alleged extremists for removal is unclear. Much depends on how the Biden administration and officials like Garrison define their missions, but it would not be a stretch to imagine such a development. It has happened before.

In the aftermath of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, Communist Party officials called commissars were installed throughout the military to ensure the loyalty and obedience of the officer corps to the orders and directives of Lenin and the new Bolshevik state. The commissar’s duty as explained by Leon Trotsky, the chairman of the Revolutionary Committee, was to “prevent army institutions from becoming nests of conspiracy.” If Russian officers failed to obey orders, the commissars could execute the offending officers and ensure their families would also be executed—a policy Stalin used during the Second World War to compel both officers and soldiers to fight the Germans.

At first glance, concerns that a system on the Soviet model would embed itself in the armed forces seem overwrought. For instance, the notion that anyone could treat tattoos as evidence for extremism is absurd. Thirty-six percent of the U.S. Armed Forces have tattoos. But perhaps the Biden administration thinks tattoos are significant given that the majority of those in uniform with tattoos are white men and women?

The point is, a woke witch hunt will have an impact. It will implant the fear in service members that they could easily lose a career or a pension for expressing an opinion that diverges from the Biden administration’s ideology. As one serving officer quietly put it, “the fear of being censored for simply loving your country is one thing. Wondering when the knock on the door is coming or to what extent officers and soldiers are being monitored is another.”

As always on TAC the comments are the best part.

Tom Riddle muzan-e • 11 hours ago • edited

according to the link you provide

Looking at the links are a real journey. Along with the tattoo one, the link about how Biden should consider how "Americans feel" is actually a book review about how Democrats do emotional appeals poorly, and the "materialism" link was a just how religious conservatives don't like Biden. Other links are a goodreads page, the mark levin show, and Ammoland.com.

I'm starting to see why Trump hired the author to "reform" the military in the week after Trump lost the election.

This was a good review of how bad this piece is.

Flying Spaghetti Monster • 7 hours ago • edited

Projection, as we know, is the art of ascribing to others at least some of the characteristics which you yourself possess. And the author has produced one of the all-time projection screeds.
Where to start in rebuttal?

***Decrying the suspension of rule of law from a president who was elected partly because the previous president engaged in it himself?
***Objecting to the presence of the National Guard around the Capitol in response to a mob which was trying to overturn a clean election? The same National Guard which the previous president wanted in the streets when protesters objected to him?
***The absurd comparison of the US military to Stalin's murder of Soviet military leaders? Good grief.
***The demand that America remain an "English-speaking culture?"
-
In the last paragraph the writer calls for the Biden Administration to consider how Americans feel about things going on. Well, according to polls and the last election they feel very good about Joe Biden, and very poorly about the racist he replaced. Conservatives seem to have lost their minds, and no longer even pretend to want to talk about issues, preferring the nonsense that the writer of this AC story spews.

But let's hear comments from the other side, shall we?

kirthigdon • 5 hours ago

Anyone who serves is the armed forces is involved in imposing the porno sodomite woke culture on the rest of the world and on the USA at gunpoint. This has been the case more or less covertly for some time, but is now open and obvious. No Christian or white person should aspire to "serve" in such an institution which is deadly to body and soul. In a related article, Dreher predicts that millions will refuse to "serve". Let's hope he's right and let's hope it's tens and hundreds of millions who become "refuseniks". The sooner the evil empire is no more, the better.

Oh, my. Well maybe this one is better? Uuuuhhhh, nope.

Rossbach • 2 hours ago

The Democratic Party is now basically a coalition of fringe groups that has as its main mission the marginalization and demonization of the historic American nation. If the US military establishment is to be a part of that mission, it is imperative that it look more like the Democratic Party and less like the historic American nation. Purging traditional Americans from the ranks of the Armed Services and discouraging their enlistment or commissioning will give the Democratic Party the tool it needs to move on to the next - and more coercive - phase of its program to “fundamentally change America”.

[goldenvalley]

That last block quote from Rossbach...screwed up a bit there. Said "Democratic Party" instead of Democrat Party.

[LFC]

Dreher is on the Bishop Garrison train as well. He tries to sound reasonable every now and then but always slips back into excusing the racists, extremists, misogynists, fascists, who are on his side. He is, at heart, an authoritarian as long as the demagogues who take over use his religion as a weapon, keeping it in a position of power where he and his ilk can impose their will on others.

Well, well, well:

The Pentagon official tasked with leading efforts to crack down on extremist views among military servicemembers once asserted that backers of former President Donald Trump were also supporters of racism, misogyny and extremism.

The official, Bishop Garrison, is a senior adviser to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and head of the Pentagon’s Countering Extremism Working Group. Garrison expressed his view in a series of tweets on July 27, 2019.

“Silence from our Congressional leaders is complicity,” Garrison tweeted. “He is only going to get worse from here, & his party and its leadership are watching it happen while doing nothing to stop it. Support for him, a racist, is support for ALL his beliefs.”

“He’s dragging a lot of bad actors (misogynist, extremists, other racists) out into the light, normalizing their actions,” he added. “If you support the President, you support that. There is no room for nuance with this. There is no more “but I’m not like that” talk.”

It is important to note that Garrison tweeted this in 2019, not recently. Nevertheless, it is clear that he believes anyone who supported President Trump — who was at the time Commander In Chief — is a racist. The man who believed that is now the Grand Inquisitor tasked with purging the US armed forces of wrongthinkers.

This is deeply shocking. Garrison must be removed. It is impossible to have confidence in this man to do anything other than lead a purge of Trump supporters. If this is where the woke US military is headed, our country is in deep trouble. There will be millions who will not serve in a politicized military. They shouldn’t. I say that as someone who was for the most part not a Trump supporter.

This is not something happening in isolation, I believe. There is going to be a broader purging of wrongthinkers, even in private life. Woke capitalists will keep it quiet, but they will use the information they gather from mining legally available data to carry out the purge.

UPDATE: I understand that Revolver News broke the story. Here’s a link to their piece. Credit where credit is due.

[LFC]

Did you know that there's a vast effort by Democratic supporters abusing 501(c)(3) organizations disguised as voter engagement and the Republicans have nothing like that yet? TAC really does manage to dredge up the utterest of nutters.

According to the IRS, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organizations are prohibited from engaging in “voter education or registration activities with evidence of bias that … have the effect of favoring a candidate or group of candidates.” But for many years 501(c)(3) voter engagement programs have been violating the spirit of this law (if not also the letter) by running programs clearly favoring Democratic politicians.

The evidence is often in plain sight. But more in the shadows is a detailed plan to bankroll these programs during the 2012 election, revealed because of a 2016 data hack of the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations. The Soros memo from nine years ago may have also revealed the embryonic stages of this year’s effort by congressional Democrats to take over federal election laws: the so-called For the People Act (H.R. 1).

Political journalists frequently fail to find and expose the evidence that is right in front of them. Consider recent coverage of the Voter Participation Center, one of these 501(c)(3) organizations. A Time profile from February 2021 teased that it would reveal “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Time’s secret-seekers credited Voter Participation Center with sending “ballot applications to 15 million people in key states” and getting 4.6 million people to return them.

“All the work we have done for 17 years was built for this moment of bringing democracy to people’s doorsteps,” said the organization’s CEO Tom Lopach, according to the magazine.

Unreported by Time is that the Voter Participation Center’s democracy delivery wasn’t for all the “people’s doorsteps.” The Voter Participation Center website proclaims that “We’re the New American Majority” and carefully defines this as “young people, people of color and unmarried women.”

Obviously, this leaves out some folks. In a suspiciously convenient coincidence, exit polling from the 2020 election shows their so-called “New American Majority” gave 60 percent or more of their votes to Joe Biden.

[goldenvalley]

May 26, 2021 17:26:35 GMT LFC said:

Did you know that there's a vast effort by Democratic supporters abusing 501(c)(3) organizations disguised as voter engagement and the Republicans have nothing like that yet? TAC really does manage to dredge up the utterest of nutters.

According to the IRS, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organizations are prohibited from engaging in “voter education or registration activities with evidence of bias that … have the effect of favoring a candidate or group of candidates.” But for many years 501(c)(3) voter engagement programs have been violating the spirit of this law (if not also the letter) by running programs clearly favoring Democratic politicians.

The evidence is often in plain sight. But more in the shadows is a detailed plan to bankroll these programs during the 2012 election, revealed because of a 2016 data hack of the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations. The Soros memo from nine years ago may have also revealed the embryonic stages of this year’s effort by congressional Democrats to take over federal election laws: the so-called For the People Act (H.R. 1).

Political journalists frequently fail to find and expose the evidence that is right in front of them. Consider recent coverage of the Voter Participation Center, one of these 501(c)(3) organizations. A Time profile from February 2021 teased that it would reveal “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Time’s secret-seekers credited Voter Participation Center with sending “ballot applications to 15 million people in key states” and getting 4.6 million people to return them.

“All the work we have done for 17 years was built for this moment of bringing democracy to people’s doorsteps,” said the organization’s CEO Tom Lopach, according to the magazine.

Unreported by Time is that the Voter Participation Center’s democracy delivery wasn’t for all the “people’s doorsteps.” The Voter Participation Center website proclaims that “We’re the New American Majority” and carefully defines this as “young people, people of color and unmarried women.”

Obviously, this leaves out some folks. In a suspiciously convenient coincidence, exit polling from the 2020 election shows their so-called “New American Majority” gave 60 percent or more of their votes to Joe Biden.

Simply registering voters or encouraging them to register is deemed a partisan act.  Watch out League of Women Voters!  They were real radicals getting women registered to vote after the 19th Amendment passed.

[pnwguy]

May 26, 2021 17:44:37 GMT goldenvalley said:

Simply registering voters or encouraging them to register is deemed a partisan act.  Watch out League of Women Voters!  They were real radicals getting women registered to vote after the 19th Amendment passed.

Women are property of their husbands, so only he should be able to vote.  Woman suffrage goes against God's holy order, don't you know?

[LFC]

May 26, 2021 21:03:35 GMT pnwguy said:

Women are property of their husbands, so only he should be able to vote.  Woman suffrage goes against God's holy order, don't you know?

Not so fast. First Republicans will want to see if there's a significant electoral advantage to giving the husband his wife's vote as well. (Gays shouldn't vote at all.)

[LFC]

TAC puts out a piece that is a full throated defense against charges of the blatantly obvious i.e. Trump, the MAGAts, and the Republican Party has a whole has become incredibly cruel and it's entirely intentional. The piece is unoriginally called The Cruelty Was Never the Point.

Adam Serwer’s “The Cruelty Is the Point” is the most toxic piece of journalism of the Trump era. After the shocking election of 2016, the liberal establishment showed glimmers of willingness to ask hard questions about how it had happened. If millions of Obama voters were now switching their allegiance to a reality show billionaire, perhaps the Democratic party had done something to ill-serve these people? Then along came Serwer in the Atlantic to tell them that, no, Trump voters did not have any legitimate grievances. They were evil racists, simple as that.

The phrase took on a life of its own. Politicians from presidential candidate Julian Castro to “Squad” member Rep. Ayanna Pressley started using it. “Do these five words define the Trump years?” asked Brian Stelter on CNN. It became ubiquitous on cable news and Twitter.

Now Serwer has published a book under the same title. You might think the 2020 election, which saw Trump gain among black and Hispanic voters, would have caused him to reconsider his thesis that the source of Trump’s appeal is racist hate. Not a bit. Each essay in this collection comes with a short introductory essay describing how Serwer came to write the piece and how he thinks it has held up in retrospect. He makes very clear that, with the benefit of hindsight, he has no regrets.

Looking at the title essay fresh, two and a half years after it was first published, one is struck by how offensive it is, and with how little justification. It opens with a lynch mob. “Grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street,” writes Serwer, describing an old photograph. He leaps from this haunting image to a Trump rally, where he detects the same “rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them.”

His evidence for this incendiary claim is a rather hasty list of talking points, very few of which live up to his tendentious billing. He accuses Trump of “seeking to ethnically cleanse 193,000 American children,” which refers to his not renewing temporary protected status for certain Salvadoran refugees. “Mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria” refers to this clip, which you can watch for yourself to see how innocuous it is.

Bad example, Helen. Also to believe he provided a "rather hasty list of talking points, very few of which live up to his tendentious billing" requires several things. First you have to fail to follow the links in the original essay. Second you have to ignore delivery. Third you have to ignore the playing to the crowd. You also get to ignore the chanting MAGAts demanding their political foes be locked up, that members of the media be attacked, that protesters be roughed up, and on and on. And I guess this was all innocent as well.

[LFC]

Rod Dreher continues to circle the drain. As I've mentioned before I believe that he is literally, not figuratively, insane as his paranoia and persecution complex overwhelm any shred of an analytical mind he might have once had. Among the things causing his latest freakout? The NFL said they stand with gays that they should be treated just like any other humans. To Rod that's part of the hardening of soft totalitarianism.

It. Never. Stops.

NFL
@nfl

If you love this game, you are welcome here. Football is for all. Football is for everyone.

The NFL stands by the LGBTQ+ community today and every day.

For more information on how you can help the @trevorproject, visit thetrevorproject.org

I don’t care if football is gay. I don’t care if football is anti-gay. I don’t want football to be either. I want football to be football. I know I sound like a broken record, y’all, but this kind of crap advances the totalitarianization of our society. From Live Not By Lies:

One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is political—captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left pushes its ideology ever deeper into the personal realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.

This from a book he wrote called Live Not By Lies. He's so blind that he can't see that this is EXACTLY the formula the religious have been using all along. They're the ones who pushed to make gender political. Who made sex political. Who made same-sex marriage political. Heck, ditto interracial marriage. Birth control. Marijuana use. Remember blue laws? There are few things that the religious wouldn't jump at the chance to control in our lives if given half a chance. How do I know this? Centuries and centuries of history. It's a classic case of accusing the other side of doing exactly what your side is guilty of.

Then there's this:

Another sign of the totalitarianization of US society:

California added five more states, including Florida, to the list of places where state-funded travel is banned because of laws that discriminate against members of the LGBTQ community, the state attorney general announced Monday.

Got that? It's OK to single people out for persecution to protect religion but it's totalitarian to defend people's rights against religion. If my choices are to accept the so-called "totalitarianism" of the left or the clear fascist theocracy of the right well the decision is f***ing simple. You can keep Hungarian style "democracy", Rod.

The fact is that all of his bed wetting screeds come down to one thing and that's the fact that the nation is rejecting his "morals" as they find them to be mean, cruel, shameful, and downright silly. Once again in his life he's quickly becoming the awkward, unpopular kid. He can't tell the difference between widespread disagreement with his beliefs and actual persecution, like the kind his ilk have been defending and practicing for ages.

EDIT: Just as a reminder of what the Trevor Project, that awful, oppressive, left-wing totalitarian organization of anti-American / anti-God(tm) storm-troopers, really does.

The Trevor Project is the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer & questioning (LGBTQ) young people under 25.

How sick! Better to call your pastor or priest and learn to pray the gay away.

[LFC]

TAC continues its descent into MAGAt World (tm). Here's a piece once again calling for herd immunity and saying those who called for it before were proven correct. It uses real data and comes to a conclusion that's insane. There's literally no mention of over 600,000 dead (probably much closer to 1,000,000). The mortality rates by age group is quoted pre-Delta, something that's outright journalistic malpractice. There's no mention of long COVID. There's no mention of people dying when ICUs are full. Idaho has just 4 adult ICU beds open for the entire state. There's no mention of the hospitalization rates for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated people. It's an incredibly inane grab-bag of conclusions based solely on the study out of Israel showing immunity from getting COVID is greater than from the vaccine. TAC has gone both blind and stupid. Oh, yeah. And paranoid (bold mine).

Au Naturel: Israel’s Immunity Study

If you were a real rebel in June 2020, you may have said the words “herd immunity” above a whisper. The idea that it could actually be good for individuals to be exposed to Covid-19 so they could produce antibodies naturally, as the human body does for a host of common viruses, was anathema in the early stages of the pandemic. Proponents of natural immunity at the level of the general populace were derided as having a death-wish for their neighbors.

Time, however, often vindicates the truth. The results of the Israel study, though not yet peer reviewed, reveal a devastating trend in our own government’s response to this virus: assume guilt until innocence is proven. Or rather, assume the offbeats are off their nut, until the experts discover—months of damage later, of course—those nuts were on to something. Hoping they’d admit this folly is a chimera, however, and beside the point. The point, as usual, is power.

[LFC]

Shorter other TAC COVID piece: "FREEDUMB!"

[LFC]

TAC published a religious freak on the Texas law. Still nothing I've seen on the abuse of the civil court system and the protection of people who file baseless lawsuits (Hmmmm. Just like 80+ voter fraud lawsuits.) that is the core of the new vigilante law.

Behold, as I looked on social media, those places of inner darkness, there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth, and I rejoiced and I asked, where are your gods now?

As Texas’s heartbeat abortion law went into effect this week, the servants of Moloch furiously raged. Women and their male “allies” (not men, exactly—many acolytes in the mystery religions of the ancient world castrated themselves) wailed their tired lamentations, about sharia law, about Christian fascism, about the self-hatred that must drive other women to defend the unborn. Some 60 million human babies have been offered up since Roe confirmed our Punic piety in 1973, passed through the acid fires of syringe and scissors and forceps. One would think that was enough to slake any amount of blood thirst, but the Lone Star State’s effective ban of sacrifices after the sixth week of pregnancy elicited the fury and despair of the passionate religious beholding an obscenity.

It was, for abortion activists, a violation of the sacred, a defilement of their high places and casting down of altars. By now you know the thrust of the Texas law, but let me summarize it once again. It bans abortions after the point that an ultrasound can detect the unborn baby’s heartbeat, which can come as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, rather than tying protection to some sort of definition of “viability” for the infant. “Our creator endowed us with the right to life and yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion,” Governor Greg Abbott said as he signed the bill this past Wednesday.

Perhaps it is unfair to associate America’s cult of “reproductive rights” with a minor deity of Canaan when an older, greater god would do. Mammon rules the land, and it is in his service that women so eagerly unsex themselves, and turn the safety of the womb into a grave. A woman must, so the argument goes, be able to choose whether her child will live or die because there should be no difference between a man’s and a woman’s experience or opportunities in the market. If he will, by nature, not be burdened with a pregnancy nor by the most intimate nurture of a newborn life, then she must, by law and technology, be made able to slough off the necessities of biology, the better for both to give themselves to economic production, living sacrifices to Mammon.

From the perspective of the whole war against abortion in America, the victory in this Texas battle is primarily significant for the introduction of an innovative tactic, a tactic essentially having to do with law but misperceived as being of a piece with Mammon—the liberal sees his gods everywhere. The legislation permits private parties to file civil lawsuits against people who either intend to or do perform or aid an abortion after a heartbeat has been detected, and success in court entitles the plaintiff to at least $10,000 in damages. While Mammon’s servants typically sue the enforcing government officials before restrictions on abortions go into effect, tying the initiatives up in interminable and punishingly expensive legal battles, those officials are not the enforcing parties here, and so a court cannot enjoin their enforcement of the law.

So who is this freak they dug up? Oh. He's the managing editor at TAC.

Micah Meadowcroft is managing editor of The American Conservative. Before joining TAC he served as White House Liaison at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and assisted in speechwriting there. He holds an MA in social science from the University of Chicago, where he wrote on political theory. Previously, he worked as associate editor of the Washington Free Beacon. This is his second stint at TAC, as not so long ago he was an editorial assistant for the magazine. His BA is in history from Hillsdale College, where he also minored in journalism. Micah hails from the Pacific Northwest, and like Odysseus hopes to return home someday after long exile in the East.

[LFC]

This was published at TAC. It's so awful I don't even know how to criticize it.

Prophets of American Decline
Kanye West is Donald Trump set to music—and every bit as bleak.

The mix of Trump and West adoration falling into an absolutely pompous review of West's last two albums is simultaneously horrifying (at its ridiculousness) and hilarious (also at its ridiculousness). I guess this is what you get when you pull inexperienced but I'm sure inexpensive children in as "associate editors."

[goldenvalley]

Sept 7, 2021 19:14:13 GMT LFC said:

TAC published a religious freak on the Texas law. Still nothing I've seen on the abuse of the civil court system and the protection of people who file baseless lawsuits (Hmmmm. Just like 80+ voter fraud lawsuits.) that is the core of the new vigilante law.

Behold, as I looked on social media, those places of inner darkness, there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth, and I rejoiced and I asked, where are your gods now?

As Texas’s heartbeat abortion law went into effect this week, the servants of Moloch furiously raged. Women and their male “allies” (not men, exactly—many acolytes in the mystery religions of the ancient world castrated themselves) wailed their tired lamentations, about sharia law, about Christian fascism, about the self-hatred that must drive other women to defend the unborn. Some 60 million human babies have been offered up since Roe confirmed our Punic piety in 1973, passed through the acid fires of syringe and scissors and forceps. One would think that was enough to slake any amount of blood thirst, but the Lone Star State’s effective ban of sacrifices after the sixth week of pregnancy elicited the fury and despair of the passionate religious beholding an obscenity.

It was, for abortion activists, a violation of the sacred, a defilement of their high places and casting down of altars. By now you know the thrust of the Texas law, but let me summarize it once again. It bans abortions after the point that an ultrasound can detect the unborn baby’s heartbeat, which can come as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, rather than tying protection to some sort of definition of “viability” for the infant. “Our creator endowed us with the right to life and yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion,” Governor Greg Abbott said as he signed the bill this past Wednesday.

Perhaps it is unfair to associate America’s cult of “reproductive rights” with a minor deity of Canaan when an older, greater god would do. Mammon rules the land, and it is in his service that women so eagerly unsex themselves, and turn the safety of the womb into a grave. A woman must, so the argument goes, be able to choose whether her child will live or die because there should be no difference between a man’s and a woman’s experience or opportunities in the market. If he will, by nature, not be burdened with a pregnancy nor by the most intimate nurture of a newborn life, then she must, by law and technology, be made able to slough off the necessities of biology, the better for both to give themselves to economic production, living sacrifices to Mammon.

From the perspective of the whole war against abortion in America, the victory in this Texas battle is primarily significant for the introduction of an innovative tactic, a tactic essentially having to do with law but misperceived as being of a piece with Mammon—the liberal sees his gods everywhere. The legislation permits private parties to file civil lawsuits against people who either intend to or do perform or aid an abortion after a heartbeat has been detected, and success in court entitles the plaintiff to at least $10,000 in damages. While Mammon’s servants typically sue the enforcing government officials before restrictions on abortions go into effect, tying the initiatives up in interminable and punishingly expensive legal battles, those officials are not the enforcing parties here, and so a court cannot enjoin their enforcement of the law.

So who is this freak they dug up? Oh. He's the managing editor at TAC.

Micah Meadowcroft is managing editor of The American Conservative. Before joining TAC he served as White House Liaison at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and assisted in speechwriting there. He holds an MA in social science from the University of Chicago, where he wrote on political theory. Previously, he worked as associate editor of the Washington Free Beacon. This is his second stint at TAC, as not so long ago he was an editorial assistant for the magazine. His BA is in history from Hillsdale College, where he also minored in journalism. Micah hails from the Pacific Northwest, and like Odysseus hopes to return home someday after long exile in the East.

Oh yeah this dude is one step away from the Gilead of The Handmaid's Tale.  Women can bear children and so they must.  He sort of knows that economic interests might have impact on the decision to reproduce but it doesn't matter to him.  It's all the Mammon's fault. 

[LFC]

It's been over a month since I've been over at TAC and in that time they seem to be circling the drain even faster. I'm going to post up examples from just what I saw up there today. It's a cornucopia of crazy with a dash of fascism, or at least fasc-curiousness, tossed in. First up we actually have an associate editor at TAC approving of the case for serfdom and the happiness of the people during Medieval times.

The argument at the center of the book is that life was just better eight centuries ago; the medieval serf, for all his technological primitiveness, at least had the advantages of an integral social order and an integral worldview. “The major catastrophes in Western history…the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution,” dissolved both and gave us the iPhone as consolation.

Another of the founding texts of the contemporary “conservative” movement warns that governments might set us on a road to serfdom, reimposing the premodern conditions of the medieval serf on his 20th-generation descendants. Davis is ready to hit the road, to ride back past modern catastrophe to the happy life of our faithful forebears.

He makes his case with a startling simplicity, recasting modern humanism as anti-humanism, and holding up the modern state in contrast to medieval government—a comparison that reflects none too kindly on our own temporal rulers. What good have these centuries of revolution done, besides strip men of their religion and their land and substitute the iron fist of the liberal state for a free life under a Christian king?

Though I must admit I am predisposed to agreement, it is hard not to be struck by just how obvious the book’s lines of reasoning appear.

Of course the reorganization of society around the individual at the expense of mediating institutions necessarily leads to increased state responsibility, and thus increased state authority. Of course social contract theory legitimizes the expansion of governmental power in a way medieval theory never could. Of course a modern bureaucratic leviathan is both more vulnerable and better suited to the development of tyranny than any old feudal system. Of course the transformation of the taxpaying small farmer into a deracinated wage slave made him less free, not more. Of course the abolition of public religion has done exactly what any sensible person before about a century ago could have warned you it would do.

The reactionary knows all these things, and yet the question remains: How do we go back? This is the question guiding the book’s second part, “a handbook for would-be reactionaries…in open revolt against the modern world.”

And talk about being clueless of history...

Near the end of The Reactionary Mind, Davis predicts:

Christendom—a Christian society and culture, reflected in life and law—may be dead beyond any hope of resurrection. The American republic may fall. It may be succeeded by some techno-oligarchic tyranny, or it may be swept into the sea by a Chinese invasion. The whole industrial capitalist system may collapse and plunge our nation into anarchy, hunger, and war. Christians may once again become an openly persecuted sect. We may very well be headed for a new Dark Age.

This seems, at first glance, bleak. But we ought to remember that the last Dark Age birthed the thousand years of Christendom on whose goodness this book meditates. Nothing is permanent except for the things that are.

Yes, by all means to avoid "a new Dark Age" what we need to do is run to the American version of Christianity. THAT's a real fountain of intellectualism and creativity. And those 1,000 years of Christendom Christianism? Remind me again the period of time that encompassed The Crusades, the torture and execution of heretics, witch trials and burning, and The Inquisition. Yep, these are the "good old days" that the author of the piece and the author of the book he's writing about seem to yearn for.

[LFC]

Next up we have a contributing editor openly fellating Ron DeSatanist. I wonder if he even bothered wiping his chin before sitting down to type out this ode to sycophancy. I'm pretty sure I know why he calls him "Big Ron."

Ronald Dion DeSantis—“Big Ron,” as I’m going to call him, for the gall of his Florida Covid program and the heft of his no-apologies demeanor, and despite his quest to become the first president under a solid six feet in quite some time—slipped into the scene here on Saturday at the Claremont Institute’s annual gala. In some ways, it’s a pitch perfect pairing: both entities are nationally ambitious and on their way up but also nationally under siege. Well, whatever… No one’s really that happy in 2021.

DeSantis is at my table, and he reports, in exact language overheard later at the diner, that he’s come from San Francisco and man, “what a dump.” It might be the only time the man from Tallahassee cracks a legitimate smile. DeSantis is plainly an introvert in something of an extrovert’s game, but what he lacks in cheshire charm he makes up with a record of making decisions, if only from an impatient temperament in a country that’s grown gnawingly accustomed to not getting things done.

DeSantis will always be an alumnus of George W. Bush’s fraternity at Yale College, but at the bare minimum, he seems to “know what time it is”—as seems to be the common refrain of the crowd on this night. Things. Are. Bad. Or as translated into politician speak, “We cannot go back to the failed Republican establishment of yesteryear,” the rising star intones. And in Thielian language, he reminds, “There is no substitute for courage.”

Charmingly, DeSantis talked little of his state’s most famous resident. “Donald Trump used online very well,” the governor concluded to the crowd. Clooney-cold takes like this—the world-famous actor concluded recently that the 45th president was a “knucklehead”—are why they pay Big Ron the big bucks.

In all seriousness, DeSantis on the national stage means a man who means business and knows some insider history not yet brought to light. He tells the table the much-maligned “15 days to slow the spread” swiftly became 15 days to distrust Anthony Fauci by late March 2020. He hints, but does not declare, that a President DeSantis might have taken a different tact. Well, we know a Governor DeSantis did just that.

The Claremont Institute? Hmmm. Where did I hear that name. Oh, that's right. They employ and defended fascist lawyer John Eastman who wrote the justification for stealing the election. (Suck on that, John Yoo. You only wrote the torture memo that hurt and killed some brown people.) And of course citing DeSatanist's record on COVID is like citing Trump's, McConnell's, Ryan's, and the rest of the GOP on the deficits.

[LFC]

This one is about German ownership of news outlets. (Never mind that the company that he's ranting about is actually owned by an American investment firm.) But this setup is worthy of The Onion.

What if I told you that some of the most prominent American political and business news outlets aren’t owned by Americans, but Germans. Sounds like something out of the middle of last century, but it’s true.

I got interested in the subject after the New York Times reported some of the findings of an investigation into allegations that the German tabloid Bild and its then-Editor in Chief Julian Reichelt created a toxic working environment for women. Reichelt allegedly had intimate relationships with several female subordinates, one of whom was a trainee eleven years his junior starting in 2016.

What if I told you that maybe you should read up on the history of Faux News, which BTW is owned by an Australian? What if I told you that this same Australian also owns the WSJ, NY Post, and Harper Collins as well as multiple outlets all over the globe? Would you soil your Underoos then too?

As always the comments are the best part of TAC though they seem to be killing off some of them too. Anyway the first comment destroyed the entire premise of the article. So TAC is not only getting frothier and more insane but they also can't even bother with the even a first level of fact checking. Sounds like they're sliding into the right-wing media mainstream pretty well.

Carpenter E • 2 days ago
"What if I told you that some of the most prominent American political and business news outlets aren’t owned by Americans, but"

But?

"German."

Ah. Sure. THAT is all right to mention.

Except, "German" company Axel Springer is owned by the U.S. investment company KKR, which is run by *Henry Kravis.

But sure, let's say "Germans" dominate too much of the media.

FYI Henry Kravis is an American who gave $1M to Trump's inauguration. So the author effectively melted down over media that is owned by a wealthy, powerful, American Republican. (To be fair that's actually something to melt down about.)

[LFC]

Next up we have an unthinking defense of globalization by some asshat and is daughter. (He wrote this beautiful intro elsewhere: "I am Dr. Alex Tokarev, economics professor at Northwood, America's free enterprise university.") Apparently everything that goes wrong with globalized business is the fault of government regulation and it would work soooooo well if we just let companies to whatever they wished. Read on and you'll see that when I say "everything" it's literally what he states. The title and subtitle are:

The Global Economy Works When We Get Out of the Way

The current supply chain crunch is not an indictment of globalization, but of government interventions.

Here's a sample.

The global economy depends on billions upon billions of individual decisions driven by nothing more than personal self-interest and coordinated solely by free-market price signals. Any part of that giant market ecosystem can experience problems due to managerial mistakes, labor strikes, bad weather, or communication disruptions that cause ripple effects. Most of the time the wounds along the supply chains heal as quickly as minor scratches on a healthy child’s skin, whether the source of trouble is hacking or solar flares causing internet failures, hurricanes or terror threats shutting down ports and oil refineries, and flooding or civil unrest disrupting mining for rare minerals in a given region

Occasionally, we get systemic failures in the global economy. Those can only come from large-scale natural or man-made disasters. Shall we blame Covid-19 or businesses for the current mess? Neither of those. Consider the impact of the novel coronavirus. In two years, less than 1 in 1,000 people on our planet has died after contracting the disease. The vast majority of those victims were not part of the supply chains. Like Colin Powell, they were overwhelmingly retirees, very old and suffering one or more terminal conditions like cancer.

Obviously, we have a global man-made commercial gridlock, so let’s move on to the next available suspect. Profit-seeking under competition for customers forces companies to cut costs by outsourcing while keeping low inventories requiring production and transport on very tight schedules. Shall we blame the bottlenecks on the greedy entrepreneurs who outsourced so many jobs in the past several decades? No. This is not a market failure. And neither were the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Great Stagflation of the 1970s, nor the Great Meltdown of 2008. Every national, regional, and global economic crisis of the past century has been a direct result of bad policies: wars, debts, inflation, and restrictions.

Wait, the broad use of "just in time" supply isn't a market failure,it's the gubmints' faults? I sure hope this so-called professor doesn't attempt teaching critical thinking.

Here's the finish but the whole thing is worth a read. It's a globalist's defensive screed of the dumbest order which literally ignores the drag that unbridled capitalism, and the near guarantee of monopolies, has on innovation and competition. It's full throated Ayn Rand.

All credit for the current bottlenecks goes to the world political elites who adopted the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party Covid measures. Simultaneously with this economic hara-kiri, Congress indiscriminately sends all Americans money for nothing. On top of that, the Fed shows no signs of reversing its unprecedented cheap money policies that started almost 14 years ago. Meanwhile, California had already made plans to sabotage the supply chains by demonizing the most reliable energy sources, banning older trucks, and kicking out all independent truckers.

Capitalism is very resilient and human ingenuity always delivers the goods when men are free to act. To help the supply chains heal faster, we should: (1) stop governors from deciding which jobs are essential, (2) stop Congress from incentivizing people not to produce, (3) stop the president from harassing producers who choose not to vaccinate and wear masks, (4) stop intimidating sellers who charge more during temporary supply disruptions and spikes in demand, and (5) stop the Fed from assisting the spending madness in our federal government.

[LFC]

And what would a list of articles illustrating the insanity at TAC be without my favorite Christian theocratic authoritarian, Rod Dreher! In a bed wetting piece called The Age of Antichrist Is Here he and some other clown he quotes have now defined the Antichrist in a vastly more convenient and nebulous manner. Actual words in the Bible? Easily and effortlessly tossed aside when they don't fit your narrative. You see the Bible literally tells us to bash gays but when it comes to the Antichrist you have to understand the metaphor of what God(tm) was trying to tell us ... or something like that.

The thing is, the Christian tradition really does say that before the Second Coming of Christ, there will arise a messianic world leader called by Scripture the “Beast,” who is the “Antichrist.” He will lead a mass persecution of the Church, and will oversee a global dictatorship that controls people’s lives so thoroughly that, according to Revelation 13:

¹⁶Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, ¹⁷so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. ¹⁸This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.

I hardly need to point out that there is a massive literature of speculation about the identity of the Antichrist, and how it is connected to the number 666. I find the theory of the Orthodox Christian thinker Jonathan Pageau persuasive: that the Antichrist 666 is not necessarily a single man (though it might be), but the number refers to a total godless system. He writes, in part:

So, we have to be very attentive as these patterns play themselves out. As these patterns start to appear to us in the world, we have to not look for the Ozzy Osbourne, dark Satanist who is going to be wearing all black and looking like a ghoul coming out of the Earth. That is not what 666 looks like. 666 looks like a luminous system that seems like it contains everything and can control everything. And that is why it is so seductive. That is why it can delude us if we’re not careful, because to not participate or to not, let’s say, worship this system can exclude you from the discourse. It makes it very easy to compromise in that sense.

Not long ago, I read that the Romans tattooed slaves on their hands or foreheads, so they would never be able to escape. It hit me, then, that the “mark of the Beast” seen by St. John was not necessarily a literal mark on the forehead or hand (though it might be), but that symbolically it meant that you had to be a slave to the system in order to participate economically — that is, to earn a living.

As a Christian, I certainly believe this dark, totalitarian world will one day come into being. It’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole of guessing when that might be, and that’s something I never do. But I gotta say, the shape of the thing really does seem to be coming into being. In 2019, I wrote this piece after two prominent Catholic cardinals warned that the age of Antichrist might be upon us — both of them referencing the confused teaching coming from Pope Francis as a dangerous sign of the times. The intellectual giant René Girard, a Catholic, wrote around the turn of the century that we were in perilous times:

The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition. … We are living through a caricatural “ultra-Christianity” that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by “radicalizing” the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner. … The intellectuals and other cultural elites have promoted Christianity to the role of number one scapegoat.

Girard says we are at the advent of what he calls “the other totalitarianism,” saying that it is

the most cunning and malicious of the two, the one with the greatest future, by all evidence. At present it does not oppose Judeo-Christian aspirations but claims them as its own and questions the concern for victims on the part of Christians (not without a certain semblance of reason at the level of concrete action, given the deficiencies of historical Christianity). The other totalitarianism does not openly oppose Christianity but outflanks it on its left wing.

As I wrote the last time I brought this up, this is the force of what in the Christian tradition is called Antichrist. You don’t have to believe in a literal Antichrist figure to grasp what Girard is saying here. Girard points out that in the symbolic language of the New Testament, Antichrist opposes Christ by imitating him and seeking to be better than him. More:

The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc.

Girard wrote that in his 2001 book I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning. He died in 2015, just as the trans craze was getting started. I don’t think he would have been surprised by any of it.

Got that? A society that wants to make abortion legal but rare and accepts the rights of gay and trans people is the REAL Antichrist! None of the evils we're seeing all around us from one Christian church after another like burying cases of rape (both children and adults), bearing false witness to protect an institution rather than the truth, racism, political lies, sinners casting the first stone (buckets and buckets of stones, actually), endless amounts of rank hypocrisy, and on and on and on have anything to do with it. It's all them damned libruls!

Man, I've certainly seen some twisted biblical interpretations before but this one is a humdinger.

[goldenvalley]

New book coming out from Rod Dreher? Seems like he's got a first draft in the above quoted stuff.

[LFC]

With ever mounting evidence that John Eastman was Trump's point man in a coordinated coup attempt I did a quick search at TAC. Not a word. Not one.

Just for fun I searched for Florida University as they are trampling the rights of 3 professors to speak up against Ron DeSantanist's fascist attack voter rights. Again, no mention even though Rod Dreher has made a career out of screeching about university's attacking free speech. No shock here. Right-wingers spewing lies are the only ones who have the right to speak.

[LFC]

It's been a while since I checked in. They are still brimming with utter nuttery. Faux News comparing Dr. Fauci to Josef Mengele couldn't go unmatched. Now that Germany is clamping down on the unvaccinated, the people responsible for many of the COVID problems, they dropped a piece called Covid Uber Alles. They've fully embraced going full metal Godwin at the drop of a tin foil hat.

[LFC]

The right is still desperate to not just exonerate Nixon but to demonize the Democrats who busted him for attempting to overthrow an election. Comparisons are made to Trump. At least they got the comparison correct even though clearly failing to acknowledge just why they are comparable. So what's their excuse? (Bold mine.)

There’s an old saying in legal circles: “A prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.” That is, a determined prosecutor can allege a crime, somewhere, thereby securing an indictment against a hapless defendant. And if that’s true, then what can 150 prosecutors do?

That’s the question posed by veteran lawyer Geoff Shepard in his new book, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President. The conspiracy Shepard limns isn’t by Richard Nixon, it’s against Nixon. A conspiracy waged by some 150 Democratic prosecutors and investigators, scattered across the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government, all aiming to bring down the 37th president—who was, of course, a Republican.

To be sure, Nixon wasn’t just any Republican. During his political career, many Democrats regarded him the way they regard, today, Donald Trump. Yes, they hated Nixon that much. As a result, for all their differences, Nixon and Trump shared a common fate—they were the objects of a remarkable, and very much targeted, legal assault. Democrats switched their prosecutorial phasers to kill in their effort to zap both presidents, the 37th and the 45th.

Shepard is fully mindful of the parallels. As he writes, “If Donald Trump hoped to understand what he would face upon moving into the White House in 2017, he would have done well to study what happened to Richard Nixon nearly fifty years prior.” In fact, all the parallels fall into place: zealous prosecutors, a leaky bureaucracy, an avidly supportive media, and pre-primed Democrats in Congress, eager to impeach the miscreant chief executive. (In fact, there’s a third Republican president who found himself in these same crosshairs, and we’ll get to him later.)

During the Watergate investigation, beginning in 1972, Democrats succeeded in doing something seemingly impossible: They overturned one of the most decisive electoral mandates in U.S. presidential history. First elected in 1968, Nixon had been reelected four years later with a massive 60.7 percent of the vote, winning 49 of the 50 states. And yet less than two years later, in August 1974, he was forced to resign.

So how did Democrats accomplish that feat? That’s the subject of Shepard’s book. Let him set the stage: “By the time Nixon took power in 1969, the ‘Deep State’ had held the reins of power for 40 years and wasn’t about to give it up. President Eisenhower had famously warned against the ‘military-industrial complex,’ but the Deep State’s tentacles reached much deeper than just the military and allied industries.”

As for Shepard himself, he worked in the Nixon White House for more than five years, first on domestic policy, and then as part of the Nixon legal defense team. The author doesn’t dispute that crimes were committed in Nixon’s name—most notoriously, the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on June 17, 1972. And so he makes no attempt to dismiss or minimize the guilt of such figures as E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. Indeed, Shepard paints Liddy, who worked for a time at the White House, as a nut, even a psychopath.

We can immediately observe that someone such as Liddy slipping into the White House is not a good sign. And yet the overall Executive Office of the President is a big place, employing thousands of people, and so it’s inevitable that a crazy or two can get past the gatekeepers.

Congratulations on pulling the Sgt. Schultz defense.

This comment summed it up.

I think it will be another six months before AmCon has the guts to say that Nixon was a criminal and being a criminal is good if it owns the libs! This is just an awkward stage

[LFC]

I hadn't checked into TAC in a while but, as expected, it's still swimming around in the fever swamps as its authors try to masquerade as deep thinkers. Here we have a piece calling for the right, which as we can clearly see is already embracing fascism, to embrace personal, armed violence as part of our history and vital to retaining rights. It's been noted on TRS for years (going back to the old site) that the normalization of the previously unacceptable was key to a fascist takeover and violence is one of things that was previously unacceptable.

ne of my neighbors has a bumper sticker: “The 2nd Amendment isn’t for hunting.” He’s correct as a matter of constitutional law—the Bill of Rights affirms the right to private gun ownership and, in effect, creates a form of distributed sovereignty that prevents the state from having a monopoly on force. In case after case, the Supreme Court has struck down attempts to limit this right, and seems poised to further expand gun rights next year. But pretending gun ownership is a privilege granted by government cedes too much ground. The right must unapologetically embrace the substance of the left’s complaint that the 2nd Amendment endorses violence as pillar of American politics.

In the Politics, Aristotle explains how “heavily armed men” (hoplites) form the foundation of political order. Their violent coercion, even in the form of bloodless potency, overrides both the wealth of shiftless plutocrats and the inheritance claims of the gentry. Americans will recognize the colonial minutemen as our hoplites—not an inconvenient anomaly from America’s past, but the politically necessary foundation for America’s present and future. Aristotle is being descriptive, not prescriptive: he observes that while the liberties of landowners and craftsmen should be protected, the liberties of the hoplite are protected by definition. While reason must precede law, violence always precedes order.

The American right must acknowledge the association of guns with violence, while rejecting the fallacy that all violence is evil. Like the hoplite with his shield and spear, gun owners who take their duty seriously become bulwarks against both tyranny and anarchy. Instead of pretending our guns are only for outdoor sportsmanship, a luxury graciously allowed us by a piece of paper in the National Archives, we should acknowledge what they represent and accept the violent responsibility they entail.

Heavily armed men are a necessary but insufficient condition for the rule of law. The U.S. Constitution—a mere document subject to revision and manipulation—cannot alone protect the right to keep and bear arms. Rather, the inverse is true: keeping and bearing arms, as an act of political violence, is all that protects the Constitution.

If a line in the Constitution were enough to protect the Founders’ values, we wouldn’t be facing our current predicament of surveillance and censorship—or pay income tax, for that matter. The Bill of Rights doesn’t keep gun ownership legal; the implicit violence of 400 million privately owned guns does. That’s why this fight is one of the only ones the right is currently winning. It’s not as though the left has carelessly forgotten about guns while attacking other American liberties. In fact, just this year, President Biden himself tried to argue for a novel interpretation of the 2nd Amendment—”you couldn’t own a cannon”—to signal his party’s renewed push against gun ownership. Multi-billionaires like Michael Bloomberg spend tens of millions lobbying for gun control each year. Nevertheless, laws favoring gun ownership continue to expand.

These victories don’t happen because the NRA and other pro-gun groups have some secret strategy that, say, pro-family or pro-borders groups can’t grasp. Rather, the 2nd Amendment’s advantage is its uniquely self-ratifying history. America has never imposed a new right to keep and bear arms. The keepers and bearers of arms imposed everything else.

You can practically see the Nazi salutes as you read this. You can read it in the attitudes of the commenters as well. Here's a real beaut on yet another unhinged Dreher piece. I think this person has exactly the same attitude as Dreher. He's just a lot more honest about putting it in writing.

HeadspacenTiming • 4 hours ago
It's precisely this sort of thing that'd make me stand aside if a right-wing dictatorship on the level of Francisco Franco ever came to the U.S.

No quarter for insurrectionists and groomer teachers. None.

[LFC]

Here's another wild piece at TAC on the use of plastic barriers to prevent COVID spread. I hate to overuse the word "unhinged" but it's just so perfect for so much of the American right. They have cut loose any tether to reality and, in this case, can go on and on eloquently spewing utter nonsense. The line on contraceptives (bold mine) jumped out like a wingnut flare to me.

What reports like this miss are that it’s not just seeing loved ones, but touching them—knowing them, in short—that has robbed these elderly folks’ lives of the joy that this season promises. A “touch” through plastic is not enough. How many more grandparents must be made miserable before we admit this?

In some sense, all of this estrangement is not entirely new. Plastic has been used as a barrier in human relationships ever since modern contraceptives were invented. But in the last year and a half it has ratcheted up to a fever pitch. Plastic walls between you and the checkout lady, plastic shields over your face, bread in plastic takeout containers rather than broken together by human hands. Forget for a minute about the immense waste, and failed stewardship, of this obsessive-compulsive tendency, and think about how inhuman it is to touch only one another through an impenetrable substance. At that point, don’t even bother embracing. Accept your dualistic fate.

Because in trying desperately to rewire the human being to commune in spirit but not in the flesh, we are engaging in that same old ghost dualism, which changes the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak to the spirit can only live when the flesh is slain. The fresh perfume of the biomedical security state (formaldehyde) can’t hide the reek of death.