Nei til islam: FIFA, islam, følelsene og de servilt betingede korrekte emosjoner

Som en liten “ikkeobligatorisk” påminnelse;

Siden Kohlberg nevnes flere ganger i artikkelsamlingen under, må vi vise til vår egen:

http://neitilislam.blogspot.com/2022/09/religion-og-psykologi-definisjoner.html

Kohlberg var en fan av Sokrates, se derfor vår egen om Sokrates, med mange relevante linker:

https://neitilislam.blogspot.com/2021/07/anders-b-b-og-var-emosjonelle-dissonans.html

https://neitilislam.blogspot.com/2018/12/ytterligere-klargjring-av-hypermagi-og.html

Mer om Sokrates, Aristoteles og essens:

http://neitilislam.blogspot.com/2015/11/islam-uten-essens-tolkere-uten-essens.html

http://neitilislam.blogspot.com/2021/03/det-moderne-mennesket-samvittigheten-og.html

https://neitilislam.blogspot.com/2019/04/forsker-elgvin-den-ene-eller-den-ene-av.html

https://neitilislam.blogspot.com/2021/06/det-nye-store-emosjonelt-korrekte-credo.html

Best å bli synkretistisk eller «unitarian»?

https://neitilislam.blogspot.com/2016/03/favntak-og-anfindsens-forsk-pa.html

Om «the rise and triumph of the modern Self”:

https://neitilislam.blogspot.com/2022/04/ukraina-og-den-kristne-avisen-dagen-i.html

Om Critical Theory, Pluckrose pluss:

http://neitilislam.blogspot.com/2022/10/et-flaneri-om-konvertering-og-forbud.html

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/19/fifa-gianni-infantino-world-cup-qatar:

‘I feel gay, disabled … like a woman too!’: Infantino makes bizarre attack on critics

‘Don’t criticise Qatar,’ Infantino tells press conference in Doha
Fifa president accuses western critics of hypocrisy and racism

The Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, has accused critics of Qatar’s human rights record of staggering hypocrisy and racism in a bizarre and incendiary attack on the eve of the 2022 World Cup finals.

In an 57-minute diatribe which frequently drew gasps of astonishment, Infantino claimed that western nations were in no position to give morality lessons to Qatar given their past and current behaviour.

“We have been told many, many lessons from some Europeans, from the western world,” he said. “I think for what we Europeans have been doing the last 3,000 years we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people.” …

Today I feel Qatari,” he said. “Today I feel Arabic. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel [like] a migrant worker.”

He added: “Of course I am not Qatari, I am not an Arab, I am not African, I am not gay, I am not disabled. But I feel like it, because I know what it means to be discriminated [against], to be bullied, as a foreigner in a foreign country. As a child I was bullied – because I had red hair and freckles, plus I was Italian, so imagine.”

Kommentar: Fifa-presidenten får selvsagt my tyn for disse uttalelsene. Han krenker selvsagt noens følelser, fordi noen ikke bare har krenket hans egne følelser, men fordi disse noen har blitt krenket først. Han utroper dermed Qatar som et uskyldig offer, rent empirisk, og for anledningen, samtidig som han presterer å få frem at det riktig nok finnes visse ting å kritisere Qatar for, og at man bør arbeide for at Qatar retter opp «feilene» - det eneste som «virker», i nåværende situasjon, er å gripe til fotballen. Det er fotballen – spillet og spillerne - som skal redde både oss og Qatar. Får man bare spilt fotball, vil forholdene i Qatar så å si ordne seg av seg selv.

Han nevner ikke Qatar faktisk er muslimsk og at Qatar holder seg til islam, Allah, Koranen og profeten (om enn i noen tillempet grad).

Presidentens uttalelser er tvetydige. Han kan ha ment noe slikt som: Skal vi ikke kunne nyte kunsten for kunstens skyld? Skal vi ikke tilstå oss stakkars mennesker et frirom for lek og lyst langt borte fra alle religiøse, ideologiske og politiske krav og bekymringer?

Han kan tolkes som om det er nettopp det han mener. Men hva da med olympiaden under Hitler i Berlin? Hadde vi ikke kunnet spare enorme lidelser, hvis vi hadde protestert og boikottet?

Han kan også mene at det er viktig ikke å bli så opptatt av de homofiles sak at man så å si gjør seg selv til homofil, uten egentlig å være det, bare fordi man vil beskytte de homofiles rett til et verdig og rettferdig liv? Han kan ha tenkt at det ikke er sunt å føle med noen så sterkt at det blir kvalmt og uekte, - servilt betinget emosjonelt korrekt, en tilstand som langt fra fremmer ærlig redelighet, men snarere oppfordrer til ryggslikkeri og selvforherligelse. Meningen hans kan da ha vært å oppfordre de som ikke er homofile for en gang skyld til å ta hensyn mer til seg selv og den de er, i stedet for å la de mer eller mindre fremkonstruerte positive følelsene for noe og noen , noen og noe som er helt annerledes, innta alt fokus og dominere ethvert engasjement og enhver personlighet, inn til margen? Er presidentens beskrivelser en oppfordring til mer autentisk livsfølelse og identitet? Skal varme følelser og vemmelse ved Qatars behandling av homofile få dominere – og undertrykke - i forhold til «kunsten for kunstens skyld»?

Samtidig hevder presidenten at vi bør føle skyld for all den urett som er begått opp gjennom tidene for Europa – de siste 3000 år og samtidig mer skyld for de de neste 300 årene. Vi har sannelig ikke noe å kritisere Qatar for, altså! Hvis vi gjør det, imidlertid, så har vi feil moral og føler feil … Slå den! Her viser presidenten hvor forvirret han er i tenkningen. Skal vi le eller gråte? Se her om hva norske Bangstad og franske Pascal Brückner mener om skyldfølelse og hvor den en mener vi bør ha mer av den og den andre mener at vi bør kvitte oss med den:

https://neitilislam.blogspot.com/2017/11/terrorangrep-pa-muslimer-av-muslimer-i.html

Presidenten appellerer i sitt selvskryt og sin elegi på typisk vestlig vis til de gode emosjoner og «feel-good», til det antatt universelle menneskets iboende og sanne godhet, fordi mennesker jo har ett felles, går han ut fra, og det er følelsene og emosjonene, både som eviggyldig «konstitusjon» og øverste, ikke foranderlige rettskilde. Han ser med andre ord helt bort fra islam. Spørsmålet er om han gjør islam og muslimene ww en tjeneste ved å foreta denne manøveren. Vil det lønne seg på lang sikt å gjøre islam til en stråmann – en illusjon - av pur godhet og velvilje?

Han forstår ikke at for å være god, bør mennesket følge islams deen, selve livets naturlov, slik de ser den idet de hvder at den er det eneste objektive, eller den islamske «eksistensloven», vil jeg si, og at denne står over alle forestillinger om «personlig godhet». Som alle vet: Allah er ikke kjærlighet.

Han gjør akkurat det hans kritikere nå gjør, for også de appellerer til de gode emosjoner, til «feel-good» og det jeg kaller de servilt betinget korrekte emosjoner.

Presidentens forsøk på å roe ned kritikere av Qatar motiveres av ikke stort annet enn ett forsøk på rasjonalisering. dvs «falsk, selvmedlidende forklaring». I stedet for å kritisere Qatar, bør kritikerne av Qatar unnskylde seg for hva europeerne har gjort de siste 3000 årene, og dessuten angre i de kommende 3000 årene, for alle moralske feilsteg europeerne kommer til å gjøre.

Presidenten moralpreken er ikke stort annet enn forsøk på selvforherligende følelsesmessig utpressing, forsøk på å manipulere emosjoner, for slik å bortforklare at han faktisk går inn for å beskytte Qatar mot all vesentlig vestlig kritikk. Og, surprise, surprise, dette får han liksom til, tror han, ved å gjøre Qatar til et offer, ikke til en overgriper. Vi skal føle synd på Qatar og rose Qatar for det gode Qatar tross alt klarer å servere verden og menneskeheten den frelse det måtte være å avstå fra kritikk. Vi skal være takknemlige for overgrepene. Vi skal føle at det eneste moralsk riktige er å spille fotball, fordi dette jo føles så mye bedre, enn dette å påta seg rollen som en kritiker, som ikke har de korrkete emosjoner og følelser.

Verdensscenen er satt: Alt dreier seg nå om følelser, de mest korrekte emosjoner. For alle underlegger seg følelsene diktatur, ikledd «intellektualitet», det man oppfatter som rasjonelt. For hvem kan skjelne og skille mellom emosjoner og rasjonalitet i dag?

De servilt betinget korrekte emosjonelle er nå blitt de eneste sanne og virkelig rasjonelt betinget rasjonelt korrekte emosjoner og følelser. Og emosjoner er i dag blitt øverste rettskilde og selve fundamentet for selve troen, selv om denne skulle ha et naturalistisk fundament. Qatar har klart mesterstykket: Gi fifa og fifas president og alle kritisk innstilte fotballspiller og potensielt kritiske fotballfan verden over skylden for egen etiske utilstrekkelighet. I tillegg skal altså Vesten i seg selv fortsette å piske seg selv for de kommende 3 tusen årenes manglende skyldfølelse (forutsetter han – se hvor iboende ondt Vesten er … ).

I dag går alt ut på ett: Bare du har de korrekte emosjoner og «utøver dem» på den korrekte måten i «det korrekte miljøet» eller «den korrekte konteksten» - er du frelst for evigheten og ingen eller intet kan rokke ved deg: Du kan forvente kjærlig oppmerksomhet og støtte, fra dine trosbrødre eller dine pub-kamerater. Ja, du kan forvente deg støtte fra høyeste myndighet – emosjonelt korrekte myndigheter –i landet du bor i. Du kan være sikker på at du har loven på din side hvis du hevder at du er blitt eller har følt deg krenket eller fornærmet. Da har du statsmakten, til og med, og det høyeste sekulære presteskap, i ryggen og den skyldige eller de skyldige skal tas, skjelles ut, utvises, forfølges og helst straffes korporlig, fordi noen bot aldri vil stå i forhold til forbrytelsen, som er at noen har fornærmet deg, enten du har gode eller dårlige følelser rundt, uansett om du har følt deg krenket eller ikke, for du har myndighetene og klerkene med deg på at du uansett skal straffes, fordi noen har krenket eller fornærmet deg.

Du kan trygt gå til domstolen med din sak; du vet at du har vunnet allerede før saken er behandlet for domstolene. For den som har krenket eller fornærmet deg må bevise at du ikke burde ha følt deg krenket av krenkelsen og det er umulig, vil du ha god grunn til å tro og kunne rette deg etter. Fordi det er de servilt betinget korrekte emosjoner som i dag råder og igjen våger å si imot, fordi følelsene og emosjonen er blitt den enste og høyeste autoritet over ditt liv.

Det dramatiske er at du i praktiken faktisk lever i Det nye totalitære samfunn, i Det absolutte Emokrati som ikke tåler noen over seg, og ingen ved siden. Det gjør deg til undersått uten at du merker det, fordi du gjerne vil være korrekt og føler deg korrekt og god ved å føle deg korrekt, (og uten mulighet for å bli korrigert), uansett om du egentlig er servil – og dine holdninger derfor forkastelige - eller ikke. Du vil føle deg god, fordi det føles bedre og fordi serviliteten og emosjonene er blitt din nye Gud og eneste rettskilde, en kilde som skal gis den høyeste autoritet og som fra nå av er den eneste måten å legitimere noe på, (til og med dine emosjoner).

Det flaue og nærmest bevisstløse og skadelig ironiske av fifapresidenten nå er at fifapresidenten beskylder alle som vil kritisere Qatar for å være hyklere, eller til og med «hatere». Han vet at disse ikke har de korrekte følelser eller emosjoner og at de derfor hater og kan betraktes som hatere. Vi skal ikke ha følelsen av hat i forhold til Qatar. Vi skal ha de mest servilt betinget korrekte emosjoner overfor Qatar, i hans øyne. Presidenten må ha et stort og kanskje til og med det sykelig behov for å være servilt betinget emosjonelt korrekt, nærmeste etter fritt valg.

Han ser ikke at å gjøre seg «servilt betinget emosjonelt korrekt» nettopp er å hykle, gjøre seg til opportunist og manipulerende kyniker, ja, psykopatoid eller verre. Han ser ikke at han gjør seg servil overfor Qatar ved å beskytte Qatar mot kritikk, saklig kritikk. Slik faller han i sitt eget nett, i en typologi vi bare kjenner igjen bare så altfor godt også her på hjemlige trakter:

http://neitilislam.blogspot.com/2020/01/johannes-morken-og-morten-horn-revisited.html

https://neitilislam.blogspot.com/2019/07/hatprat-personangrep-horn-morken-og.html

Han ser heller ikke at han gjør seg selv til det jeg kaller hypermagiker: Ved å beskytte Qatar, stjeler han han en viss «kraft» fra Qatar, en kraft som får ham selv til å føle seg litt mer moralsk overlegen, fordi Qatar altså i hans øyne bør gjøres til et offer som han faktisk selv produserer, nettopp for å kunne tilegne seg denne moralske merverdien denne strategien gir ham. Slik mener han selv - eller hans underbevisste - at han faktisk har en «rett og plikt», - både mentalt og de jure - til å drive med følelsesmessig utpressing i stor skala, nærmest uhindret, fordi jo de færreste i dag vil makte å gjennomskue spillet, sette de rette ordene på det og ta skritt for å få slutt på makepien,, for hele verden til å se og forstå. De servilt betinget emosjonelt korrekte kan ikke beskyldes for umoral, vil de fleste tenke. Å tenke det, vil i seg selv være en form for rasisme, en form for krenkelse av personer som «gjør så godt de kan» og som strør rundt seg med «speachcodes» - som i kraft av det de er krever lystring - som nettopp skal vise og bevise at nettopp de befinner på den riktige siden og virkelig har de korrekte emosjoner.

I de to linkene over vil man kunne se et par avslørende eksempler på hvordan dette fenomenet i høy grad gjør seg gjeldende i vår mediaverden og i vår egen lille, snille snevre virkelighet av i dag, i vår egen stue, så å si, til og med blant mennesker som kaller seg kristne, eller humanetikere som vil være enda bedre og enda mer moralsk overlegne, men som viser seg å være mer hyklerske, intolerante ,«forstilte» og manipulerende og følelsesmessig mer utpressende enn de fleste vil like å tro.

Slike mennesker vil ha stor interesse av å leve i et evig simulacrum med et behov for å få flest mulig andre til å gjennomleve det samme, ved å forsøke å forevige det grandiose selvbildet de nå engang trenger, for å kunne bevare sin posisjon som spesielt gode og korrekte, som spesielt utvalgte, også i kosmisk sammenheng. Om de blir avslørt som posører, vil ikke skade dem, tror de. De eier i sitt hovmod sitt eget image og ingen vil våge å ta dette fra dem.

For å si det så fortettet som mulig: Fifapresidenten forholder seg til Qatar som den kristne redaktør Johannes Morken og legen, forskeren og humanetikeren Morten Horn gjør i forhold til Hadia Tajik, (tidl, meget oppegående nestleder i Ap): Under påskudd av å forsvare, spør de ikke om lov til å forsvare; hun skal beskyttes fordi de selv mener at hun trenger beskyttelse og noen å opptre på hennes egne vegne, selv om hun ikke har bedt dem om å gjøre dette. (Har forresten Qatar bedt presidenten om å forsvare seg – vel da blir tragedien desto større?). Man skulle nesten tro de var ute etter å forsvare henne fordi hun er muslim. I så fall ligger det jo i dette en forakt for muslimer sett som gruppe. Deres grunnholdning ville derfor og i så fall være i strid med vår lovgivning på området, som forbyr hets mot gruppe pga av tro, legning etc.

Så alvorlig er dette.

De handler på hennes vegne «by false proxy», en strategi som i seg selv ikke bare er høyst kritikkverdig, men også klart umoralsk og selvkorrumperende, og med klare skadelige ringvirkninger, kort og godt fordi en slik tilnærming jo strider mot vårt menneskeverd, vårt menneskesyn, vår virkelighetsoppfatning og våre rot- og frihetsidealer.

Som Kjell Skartveit skriver: … Dagens mobb er både etterforsker, aktor og dommer. De setter agendaen og har makt til å fryse ut den de ønsker. De dyrker hykleriet, er nådeløse i sin tiltale, og uskyldspresumsjon er bokstavelig talt et fremmedord.

Fotballfansen – på sin side - plasseres dermed på tribuner og foran tv-skjermene som moralsk sett uforskyldte helgener som kan sole seg i sine nye dygder – som er å være mest mulig servilt betinget emosjonelt korrekte - uten å måtte forholde seg til realiteter, som hvis de ikke avsløres og kritiseres for det de er, nemlig overgrep og forbrytelser mot menneskerettighetene, dvs de vestlige menneskerettighetene.

De forutsetter med andre ord en svakhet hos Qatar og Tajik, en svakhet som ikke eksister annet enn i hodene på redaktøren og legen, og i hodet på Qatar og fifapresidenten. De mener at de har en rett og en plikt til å forsvare et offer som de selv har produsert, med andre ord, fordi de føler seg moralsk overlegne. Saklig kritikk av Tajik kan derfor ikke tolereres, heller ingen saklig kritikk av Qatar. Dermed konserverer de både Tajik og Qatar i en offerrolle som de selv forsøker å lukrere på, mentalt. De fremstår blant folk og andre influensere, andre «fromme» og andre servilt betinget emosjonelt korrekte, dvs sanne hyklere, og like medskyldige som de selv er skyldige, som de bare tilsynelatende sanne og noble hjelpere de forsøker å skape inntrykk av at de er. I realiteten fungerer de med stort, krypende frimod og i hellig overbevisning i praksis som aktører som må produsere seg sine ofre, for å kunne føle seg litt bedre, og for slik selv å kunne skinne som enda mer «høyverdige». De beskytter jo bare de svake, ikke sant? Beundringsverdig, ikke sant? Vel, verden vil bedras.

Sannheten er at de er tyver, de er hypermagikere. Selv om de altså burde vite, se og forstå at Tajik jo er fullt kompetent til å forsvare seg selv, på samme måte som Qatar er det, eller bør være det.

Som det ovenstående vil vise, er følelser/emosjoner kanskje viktigere enn vi til vanlig tror. Til vanlig tillegger vi følelser/emosjoner et livsområde og et kroppsområde som egentlig ikke angår noe; man har eller ikke har følelser/emosjoner og så kan ingen gjøre noe med det, annet enn å smile litt av dem, neglisjere og nivellere dem og selvsagt: Det er jo deilig å være forelsket. Poltikk generelt, skal holdes utenfor, selv om de i høyeste grad er levende til stede, både til det konstruktive og produktive, til det fullstendig negative, mørke og farlige. Derfor skal man ikke føle seg frem til politikk og ideologi, eller religion, for den del. Man skal argumentere og kunne, ikke føle mer eller bedre enn andre. Og dette er for så vidt vel og bra, det er bare det at følelser spiller en mye større rolle enn vi først går ut fra og agerer på; ja, følelser er noe vi kan ha kontroll på, mener vi, noe som hører til det private, tross alt, men samtidig er det for mange om å gjøre å skaffe seg kontroll over nettopp følelsene.

Mange store tenkere og forskere har vært opptatt av følelser og emosjoner, og med rette, for det er her vi nærmer oss noen av de store livsmysterier og den som har kontroll over menneskers følelser, både på det individuelle og det kollektive plant, han eller de kan så lett gjøre hva de vil, de kan også bestemme hva vi skal tenke og tro om maktmenneskene selv, og nettopp deres anliggender og deres ideologi, tankeforutsetninger og tro. Den som styrer følelsene, styrer fremtiden, med alle politiske implikasjoner, ikke uten dem.

Vi skal nå legge ut noen artikler som viser hvor ærbødig eller uærbødig følelsene noen av våre største tenkere og aktører behandler dem på, nemlig med like stor respekt som (kreativ) forferdelse og vi skal her før vi begynner bare stille spørsmålet: Hvilken pave ville du ha hatt? En som la mest vekt på fornuften eller en som lar seg overmanne og styre av enhver god følelse og som i tillegge forlanger at alle skal følge og føle likedan? Vi begynner med:

… Nietzsche argued that one of the most powerful forces in society was "ressentiment." Similar to the everyday word "resentment," ressentiment lay at the heart of new kinds of morality. In ancient times, nobility was associated with power. The downtrodden, the poor, the weak, the enslaved were ignoble.

… the powerless resorted to a moral revolution, assaulting the concepts of nobility, goodness and morality and rendering them evil in the popular imagination.

… Wrote Nietzsche in his "Genealogy of Morals": "It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and to hang on to the inversion with their teeth ..., saying 'the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God ...'

… "Christianity," he wrote, "was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in 'another' or 'better' life."…

In 2015, our society is shot through with Nietzschean ressentiment. Today it is a great sin on college campuses -- and elsewhere! -- to make anyone other than the "privileged" feel uncomfortable, challenged or otherwise psychologically threatened by the use of the wrong words or concepts.

The University of California recently issued a set of guidelines about the terrible danger of "micro-aggressions" -- small, usually unintended slights that allegedly hurt the feelings of the newly anointed classes of victims. One must no longer say that America is a "melting pot," for to do so is to suggest that minorities should "assimilate to the dominant culture," according to the new moralists at the University of California.

And one mustn't say anything that advances "the Myth of Meritocracy." Saying "America is the land of opportunity" or "everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough" is now a form of bigotry.

… Ressentiment is first and foremost the psychology of blame. It surveys the social landscape and blames the failures and hardships of the alleged have-nots on the successes of the haves. It is more than envy, which is a timeless human emotion -- and one of the seven deadly sins. It is a theory of morality that says the success of the successful is proof of their wickedness.

Such is the allure of ressentiment today that it produces creatures like Rachel Dolezal, the blue-eyed white woman who had to invent an entire narrative around her stolen fictional identity as an oppressed black woman.

… When Nietzsche said "God is dead," he meant that there was no longer an ideal outside of ourselves to which we're all answerable. Everything was a contest of power and will. America isn't there yet, thank God. But it surely seems like that is where we are heading.

By Jonah Goldberg, Jun 22, 2015

https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/bal-nietzsches-ressentiment-alive-and-well-today-20150619-story.html

See No Islam, Hear No Islam, A significant omission in an otherwise good book.

November 14, 2022 by William Kilpatrick

The New Apologetics is a collection of 41 essays by noted Catholic apologists.

It’s a valuable book for those who are interested in spreading the Christian faith in a time of secularism and relativism, as well as for those who merely wish to deepen their own faith.

However, I do have one large caveat. None of the 41 essays deals with Islam. And that, to my mind, is a major omission. Although, The New Apologetics begins with a discussion of threats to Christianity—such as atheism, moral relativism, and scientific materialism—one of the biggest threats is ignored.

For example, the first essay discusses the “nones”—those who claim no religious affiliation. This group is expanding rapidly and it is pulling most of its membership away from Christian Churches. As their numbers increase, the number of those who identify as Christians declines.

I agree that the problem of the “nones” needs to be urgently addressed, but there is another category of “nones” that is equally important, but is absent from the pages of The New Apologetics. I am referring to all those Christians who are “nones” in the sense that none of them is any longer among the living because they have been killed by Muslims in the name of Allah. For example, in Nigeria alone, 18,000 people have been killed by Islamic terrorists in just the last two years (2020-2022). If the rest of Africa is added on, it’s now possible to speak of a Christian genocide in that continent.

The spread of Islam is not just a threat to Africans. Many other parts of the world are under the same threat. Because of the rapid increase in the Muslim population, even Europeans are now at risk of violence.

The essay on the “nones” makes much of the fact that in the U.S. between 1970 and the present, the number of “nones” has increased from three percent to twenty-five percent. But during an even shorter time frame, the percentage of Muslims in numerous European cities has increased by approximately the same amount. In Marseille, the second largest city in France, the percentage of Muslims is closer to 40 percent.

The essay points out that almost 40 percent of those under thirty in the U.S. are “nones”. But the same holds true in many of Europe’s major cities in regard to the Muslim population. According to Giulio Meotti, Islam is now the dominant religion among children in Birmingham, Leicester, Bradford, Luton, Slough and the London boroughs of Newham, Redbridge and Tower Hamlets.

Meanwhile, “Mohamed” has been one of the most popular names for baby boys in Europe for many years. Due to the high birth rate, there are now more Muslims at Friday services than Catholics at Sunday Mass in many cities in France and England.

If Islam really were the religion of peace that Catholic prelates and professors make it out to be, then the discrepancy in birth rates between Muslims and Christians might be no great cause for alarm. But rising crime rates among Muslims in Europe suggest that Islam is not a religion of peace but of aggression.

In France, for example, Muslims commit almost all of the violent crimes and constitute almost 80 % of the prison population. According to Hugh Fitzgerald, “[Muslim migrants] are creating a parallel society, hostile to French authorities and contemptuous of the non-Muslim French.”

In response to the Muslim crime wave, Didier Lallement, the recently-retired head of the Pari police has written a book warning of social breakdown and civil war. He’s not alone. Pierre Brochand, the country’s former top intelligence director has also warned of civil war due to mass immigration. Moreover, in 2021 about 1,000 active servicemen and women, including twenty retired generals signed an open letter to the government warning of civil war due to “religious extremism” (i.e., Islamism.)

The situation is not so dire in the U.S., of course, but let’s not forget the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and in 2001, and dozens of other Islamic terrorist attack, including the Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando which left 49 dead and 53 injured, the San Bernardino massacre which left 14 dead and 24 seriously injured, the Fort Hood massacre which resulted in 14 deaths and over 40 injuries, and numerous other deadly jihad attacks since 2001.

The point is, Islam is a deadly threat to Christians all over the world. Its aggressive and expansionist nature, moreover, is built into its theology. In addition, its founding scripture, the Koran, directly attacks and threatens Christians and Jews. One would expect that at least some Catholic apologists would turn their attention to the subject, but few do.

To the extent that anything is being taught about Islam in Catholic schools and colleges, it is the Pollyannish version that emanates from the Vatican and places such as Georgetown’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding. For its part, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops puts most of its efforts into upbeat dialogues with their Muslim counterparts and into helping Muslims fight a supposed epidemic of “Islamophobia.” Meanwhile, the bishops show little curiosity as to why so many people fear Islam. Don’t Christians and other non-Muslims in Africa who are slaughtered on a regular basis in the name of Islam have good reason to fear Islam? Don’t ask. Such questions are off-limits in Catholic-Muslim dialogue.

A number of years ago I gave a talk on Islam to FOCUS (The Fellowship of Catholic University Students) during one of their training conferences. The organization is made up largely of Catholic university graduates. The group of about 60 that I talked to seemed intelligent and highly motivated. And they seemed to have a good understanding of the Catholic faith. But not of Islam.

Before my talk I administered a twenty- question multiple choice quiz about Islam. The questions were on a very basic level: e.g., “the word ‘Islam’ means________;” “The word ‘jihad’ means________.” Yet only 33 % of the group passed the quiz. Most thought “Islam” meant “peace,” and that “jihad” meant “an interior spiritual struggle.” Most were probably unaware that, in Africa, a Muslim’s “interior struggle” might well be the agonizing decision of whether to use an AK-47 or a machete in the service of Allah.

Undoubtedly, these graduates had been exposed to some first class works of Catholic apologetics, but with a few exceptions such as Fr. James Schall SJ and Fr. Samir Khalil Samir SJ, most Catholic apologists have steered clear of Islam.

Indeed, most of the apologetics work on Islam is being done by Evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and ex-Muslim converts to Christianity. Some of these are “official” apologists in the sense of holding advanced degrees in theology, and some may not even think of themselves primarily as apologists. For example, former-Muslim Nonie Darwish who speaks and writes about Islam might not qualify as an “official” apologist, but her book Wholly Different is one of the most informative, insightful and clearly written books on the subject of the differences between Islam and Christianity that one is likely to find.

Likewise, historian Raymond Ibrahim writes mainly about the history of conflict between Islam and Christianity, and about present-day persecution of Christians. He isn’t exactly doing apologetics, yet his work is packed with the kind of information and insights that Catholics are so badly in need of.

Ibrahim is a Coptic Christian–in other words, a member of the Orthodox Church. Robert Spencer, who has to rank as today’s preeminent authority on jihad and political Islam, is also Orthodox. Once again, I’m not sure if Spencer considers himself a Christian apologist, but it seems to me that he ought to. Although he writes and speaks about all aspects of Islam, he has written frequently and authoritatively about the theological issues that divide Christians and Muslims.

Ironically, Catholics already had, in Spencer, the world’s leading Catholic apologist on the topic of Islam, but Catholic leaders ignored him; and, when that was no longer possible, they tried to censor him. Although Spencer was frequently invited to speak to Catholic audiences, he was almost as frequently banned from speaking by the relevant local bishop. The fact that the Catholic hierarchy treated Spencer as a pariah, probably contributed to his eventual decision to join the Orthodox Church.

The reason that Spencer was suppressed by elements in the hierarchy was that what he had to say about Islam was almost in direct contradiction to the pleasant narrative about Islam that the Church leadership had been pushing ever since the Second Vatican Council.

It’s likely that many Catholic apologists avoid the subject of Islam for the same reason. Presumably, they don’t want to be put in a position where they might have to contradict the prevalent Catholic notion that Islam is a fellow Abrahamic religion that reveres Jesus and embraces the same values that Christians do.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that some Catholic apologists accept the cotton-candy version of Islam. Indeed, Peter Kreeft, one of the leading apologists of our era, and a writer who has frequently been compared with C.S. Lewis, did paint a favorable portrait of Islam in a 2010 book entitled Between Allah and Jesus.

Not long after, Kreeft had a friendly debate with Robert Spencer (who had once taken courses taught by Kreeft) at Thomas More College in New Hampshire. Apparently, Spencer had benefited from the courses because he beat Kreeft handily—a point which Kreeft graciously acknowledged after the debate. Although Kreeft is an accomplished debater, Spencer’s wide-ranging knowledge about Islam carried the day. Peter Kreeft has an open and curious mind, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he eventually changed his mind on the subject.

Coincidentally, Kreeft is one of the featured apologists in The New Apologetics. His essay on Blaise Pascal is well worth reading. So are all the essays in the book. But one wishes that the editor had found some space for an essay on Islam—the political religion that is arguably the major threat that Christians now face.

Unfortunately, Catholic apologists who are inclined to take a critical look at Islam won’t get any support from Rome.

At a time when well-trained Muslim apologists are successfully proselytizing non-Muslims in every corner of the globe, Pope Francis has made it clear that proselytism is no longer acceptable for Catholics. The only kind of evangelization that passes muster in the Vatican these days has to do with “listening,” “accompanying,” and pretending that all religions are essentially the same.

But the Great Commission that Christ gave his Apostles was not to listen but to teach: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (MT. 28:19-20)

Moreover, the misguided message that all religions are essentially the same will only serve to convince Muslims who are dissatisfied with Islam to join the ranks of the “nones” rather than to convert to Christianity.

Catholic apologists are well-advised to follow the command of Jesus rather than the advice of Francis. Catholics and many other Christians as well, are ill-informed about Islam. As a result, they are ill-prepared for what will happen to non-Muslims in a world that is increasingly Muslim.

Muslims, likewise, are poorly informed about Christianity. Many are unaware that there exists a much more profound and powerful version of Christianity than the sketchy one that Islam teaches. Catholics should think twice about the wisdom of withholding the Gospel from them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/see-no-islam-hear-no-islam/

The Desperate Need for TRUE Interfaith Dialogue Between Christians and Muslims

As opposed to the farce recently held in Bahrain. November 17, 2022 by Raymond Ibrahim

A much touted conference in Bahrain, dedicated to promoting “interfaith dialogue” and “coexistence,” recently came to a close. Featuring many leading Christian and Muslim figures—including Pope Francis and Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al Azhar—the conference’s purpose was “to build bridges of dialogue between leaders of religions, sects, thought, culture and media, in cooperation with Al Azhar, the Catholic Church, the Muslim Council of Elders, and other international institutions concerned with dialogue, human coexistence and tolerance.”

While this sounds splendid on paper, in reality, it often amounts to little and arguably makes matters worse.

Put differently, this and all other such conferences between Christians and Muslims that are sponsored by “official” channels are often dedicated to one thing: exonerating Islam of all the misdeeds committed daily in its name.

For example, not only did the Grand Imam—who smiles, hugs, and preaches brotherly peace to the pope while sponsoring radicalism and even death for apostates when speaking to Muslims—repeatedly insist that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, but so too did Pope Francis, blaming “erroneous interpretations” of Islam for the violence and intolerance committed in its name.

To be sure, the pope and imam have long been committed to whitewashing Islam during their many interfaith initiatives. In 2019, they signed a document that blamed jihadist terrorism on “incorrect interpretations of religious [Muslim] texts and to policies linked to hunger, poverty, injustice, oppression and pride.”

Not only do all of these conferences and initiatives conceal the truth, leaving complications to fester and metastasize beneath the surface. They are great but missed opportunities. After all, interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims has great potential—but only if it is honest and sincere, addressing the differences and sources of conflict, rather than continuously stressing (superficial) commonalities.

And, for a millennium, they were.

For instance, around 718—less than a century after Islam’s prophet Muhammad died—Caliph Omar II called on Eastern Roman Emperor Leo III to embrace Islam. This led to a frank exchange in letters. Rather than diplomatically praising though politely refusing Islam, Leo scrutinized its claims as heaven-sent. Among other things, he openly criticized Islam for circumcising and treating women as chattel and for teaching that paradise will be little more than a brothel, where Muslim men copulate in perpetuity with supernatural women.

Leo further contrasted Christ’s peace with Muhammad’s jihad: “You call ‘the Way of God’ these devastating raids which bring death and captivity to all peoples. Behold your religion and its recompense [death and destruction]. Behold your glory ye who pretend to live an angelic life.”

Far from being a godsend, Islam was at war with God’s people, concluded the emperor: “I see you, even now … exercising such cruelties towards the faithful of God [Christians], with the purpose of converting them to apostasy, and putting to death all those who resist your designs, so that daily is accomplished the prediction of our Savior: ‘The time will come when everyone who puts you to death will believe he is serving God’ (Jn 16:2).” [Sword and Scimitar pp. 63-65 has the complete exchange between the emperor and caliph.]

Meanwhile, and even though Christians are being persecuted all throughout the Islamic world, Pope Francis refuses to utter a single word about it. Even at the recent conference, although he passingly mentioned the persecution of Shiites in Sunni-majority nations, he uttered no word concerning Christians, even though millions are savagely persecuted throughout the Islamic world.

Or consider Saint Francis of Assisi, whom Pope Francis so idolizes as to take on his name. While Saint Francis (b.1182) did meet and peacefully dialogue with Sultan al-Malik al-Kāmil of Egypt—as the Vatican often reminds us in an effort to position Pope Francis as walking in the saint’s “bridge building” footsteps—he was no less forthright than Leo. He did not ignore Islam’s violent reality nor apologize for Christian truths to accommodate Muslim sensibilities, as Pope Francis often does. Rather, the saint engaged in true dialogue—and, if the Muslim clerics he debated had their way, would have cost him his head.

Or consider Eastern Roman Emperor Manuel II (b. 1350), who lived nearly 700 years after Leo III. As a man who spent his entire life defending against invading Turks, Manuel was well acquainted with Islam. He understood the three choices Islamic law (shari‘a) imposed on conquered non-Muslims. In his own words, “[1] they must place themselves under this law [meaning become Muslims], or [2] pay tribute and, more, be reduced to slavery [an accurate depiction of jizya and dhimmi status], or, in the absence of wither, [3] be struck without hesitation with iron,” [Sword and Scimitar, p. 217].

In 1390, Manuel was a ward—more realistically, a hostage—of the Turkish sultan, Bayezid, whom contemporary Europeans described as “a persecutor of Christians as no other around him, and in the religion of the Arabs a most ardent disciple of Muhammad.”

At Bayezid’s courts, Muslim clerics regularly accosted Manuel to embrace the one “true” faith. He responded with blunt honesty: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” He too was lucky not to lose his head, as he managed to abscond back to Constantinople.

Interestingly, in 2006, when Pope Benedict passingly quoted Manuel’s aforementioned assertion about Muhammad, Muslims around the world, as if to prove Manuel correct in his assessment, rioted, burned churches, and attacked Christians; an Italian nun who had devoted her life to serving th

Pope Benedict’s successor, Pope Francis, has obviously learned the lesson: the only “interfaith dialogue” acceptable to Muslims is the sort that, instead of asking sincere but tough questions of Islam, covers for it. Hence why Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb—who had severed all ties with the Vatican after Pope Benedict quoted Manuel in 2006—has embraced Pope Francis as a fellow “brother.”

Sadly, and believe it or not, some Muslims actually need to hear the aforementioned criticisms and concerns to be shaken from their complacency and truly evaluate their religion. Reasonable polemics against Islam, as captured by the words of Leo, Saint Francis, Manuel, and many other historical personages, have caused not a few Muslims over the centuries to search their scriptures in order to respond to the charges, only to end up seeing things the infidels’ way. (Indeed, if Christian chroniclers are to be believed, the frank and sincere words of Emperor Leo III and Saint Francis to Caliph Omar II and Sultan al-Malik, respectively, caused the latter two Muslims to apostatize from Islam, if only in secret.)

Be that as it may, one thing is certain: sincere dialogue ultimately empowers that which is true, and thus good—even if it leads to temporary friction; insincere dialogue ultimately empowers that which is false, and thus evil—even if it leads to temporary but artificial cooperation in the now, as in the good show recently put on by Pope Francis and Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb in Bahrain.

This article first appeared on The Stream.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-desperate-need-for-true-interfaith-dialogue-between-christians-and-muslims/

The Radical Inclusive Church, Irish of a traditional bent need not apply.

November 9, 2022 by William Kilpatrick 8 Comments

Most practicing Catholics will have noticed by now that the Church under Francis has changed. And many are not happy with the changes.

For example, Andrea Cionci, author of a new book which questions the validity of Francis’s election, says that Francis’s objective is to “demolish Catholicism.” But it’s not only Francis that traditional Catholics worry about. His plans for the dismantling of the Church are being implemented by a small army of prelates who are, in essence, Francis clones.

Right now, Francis and his supporters are utilizing the Synod on Synodality as the main engine for transforming the Church into something new and strange. Conservative critics of the synod claim that it is a “hostile takeover of the Church,” an “exercise in self-destructive behavior,” and an “open revolution.” This may seem extreme, but many of Francis’s words and actions reveal a man who is deeply hostile to the Catholic Church—a Church which he considers “rigid,” “fundamentalist,” “exclusivist,” and very much in need of opening-up. Moreover, those who are running the Synod share his sentiments.

In reality, the Church has been opening-up ever since the pontificate of John XXIII, but much of what the Church of Francis is engaged in is not simply an opening-up of the Church, but a rejection of it. Church leaders are already in the process of rejecting the Church’s teaching on marriage, adultery, abortion, homosexuality, gender, divorce, polygamy, clerical celibacy, and women’s ordination. To the extent that they are opening the Church, they are opening it to people who dissent from Church teaching on these and other matters.

Perhaps because they realize they are already firmly in control, the “woke” prelates have become quite open about what they plan to do. For example, the Vatican has just released a new document for the Synod on Synodality which calls for “a Church capable of radical inclusion.”

The 44-page document is entitled “Enlarge the space of your tent,” but the tent doesn’t seem to have much space for traditional Catholic beliefs and practices. Rather it encourages dialogue with “those who, for various reasons, feel a tension between belonging to the Church and their own loving relationship, such as remarried divorcees, single parents, people living in a polygamous marriage, LGBTQ people, etc.”

“Polygamous marriage?” One wonders what’s included in “etc.” In any event, this new inclusive model is being suggested as the model the Church should embrace. But don’t assume that the plan is to help the “marginalized” (i.e., adulterers, LGBTQ etc.) to conform their lives to Church teaching. Rather, the plan is to conform the Church’s teachings to the “lived experience” of the marginalized.

“Radical inclusion” sounds vaguely Christian, but it is actually a plan for demolishing the Church—as the word “radical” implies. The word brings to mind images of the radical French Revolution, the radical Russian Revolution, and the radical Sexual Revolution. All three resulted in enormous damage to the societies involved, yet the Synod documents often speak the language of revolutionary change. Moreover, the Synod fathers seem anxious to bless the Sexual Revolution and bring it fully into the Church. “Radical” is not usually thought of as a term of praise, but that’s the way it was used by Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, the Relator General of the Synod, in a recent interview with L’Osservatore Romano. Hollerich praised Pope Francis for being “not a liberal” but a “radical.”

Most Catholics don’t keep up with recent issues of L’Osservatore Romano or with the latest Vatican document. So, relatively few are aware of the radical nature of the changes being proposed in the synods. Perhaps the most prominent synodal theme is “inclusion,” and the promise that no one is excluded. But when the Synod fathers say “no one is excluded,” it should give us pause. Do they also mean “no sins are excluded?” Do they mean that no repentance is required? The numerous synod documents suggest that what progressive Catholics want is an inclusive community without rules—a place where each follows his or her own inner guidance.

But workable communities that last do have rules and, in order to survive, they tend to exclude those who won’t follow the rules. One supposes, for example, that a good number of bishops belong to a golf club. And it’s a good bet they know and observe the rules of the club. If a bishop drives his golf cart in a reckless way after several drinks and several warnings, he can expect to be excluded from the club. He can claim that the club has “marginalized” him, but in reality, he has marginalized himself.

One might counter by observing that the Church is not a golf club. It follows a different—more merciful– set of rules. Cardinal Hollerich has said as much: “[The] Kingdom of God is not an exclusive club.” Rather, he says, its doors are open “to everyone without discrimination.” “This,” said Hollerich, “is simply about affirming that Christ’s message is for everyone.”

All Christians can agree that Christ’s message is for everyone. But most would want “everyone” to hear the full message of Christ, not a highly redacted version. If you read the full message of Christ on the subject of entrance into the Kingdom of God, you would not, contra Hollerich, get the impression that it’s open “to everyone without discrimination.” Not by a longshot.

Take Matthew 25:31-46—the parable about the sheep and the goats. On Judgment Day, “[The King] will separate the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left.” He then invites the sheep to inherit the kingdom, but the goats are sent away “into eternal punishment.”

I don’t know about you, but that sounds discriminatory to me. And frightening as well. Thank Heaven for purgatory.

Christ also discriminates on several occasions in favor of wheat over weeds (or chaff): “Let both grow together until the harvest and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, ‘Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn’” (Mt.13:30).

In another parable he tells his disciples: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind; when it was full, men…sorted the good into vessels but threw away the bad” (Mt. 13:47-48).

Lest there be any misunderstanding, Jesus then explains: “So it will be at the end of the age, the angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous, and throw them into the furnace of fire” (Mt. 13 49-50).

The meaning of these parables seems clear, yet Christ tells several other parables with the same message. In one parable, he tells of five wise maidens who, having made proper preparations, are admitted to a wedding feast; and of five foolish maidens who, having failed to make sufficient preparations, are excluded from the feast.

In another parable about a wedding feast, a guest without a wedding garment is cast out the door: “Then the king said to the attendants, “Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness…For many are called, but few are chosen” (Mt. 22: 13-14).

Hollerich may say that the Kingdom of God is open “to everyone without discrimination,” but the Gospels seem to be saying something different. Hollerich says, in effect, “come as you are,” but Jesus advises us to come wearing a wedding suit (i.e., in a state of grace.) Although well-acquainted with the merciful sayings of Jesus, Hollerich and Francis seem to ignore his more judgmental warnings.

Quite obviously, the words of Jesus are an obstacle to the synodal plans of Hollerich, Francis, and others in the hierarchy. Quite obviously, Jesus will have to go if the synodalists hope to achieve their goals. Expect him to gradually disappear from the new radically inclusive Church. Either that, or expect him to be transformed to better fit the jolly theology of Cardinal Hollerich who tells us that “living in the footsteps of Christ means living well, it means enjoying life.”

In short, expect Jesus to be transformed into some kind of happy genderless hippie who utters woke platitudes and announces the good news that your sins aren’t really sins at all. He just wants you to be happy doing whatever makes you feel good.

It is, of course, a formula for disaster. Canon Lawyer Rev. Gerald F. Murray calls it “a self-destructive Synod.” He notes some of the signs of decline in the Church we have already seen under Francis: “lack of priestly vocations in the developed world; the steep decline in Mass attendance, baptisms, and Church weddings…the collapse of religious orders and the rejection of doctrinal fidelity.”

One doesn’t have to look far to find signs of doctrinal infidelity. Here in the U.S., LGBTQ-activist priest Fr. James Martin has asserted that LGBT Christians are not bound by the rule of chastity. And in formerly Catholic Ireland, an elderly priest was recently suspended by his bishop for speaking of the sinfulness of certain sexual activities.

The priest, Fr. Sean Sheehy, said he was simply stating what was in the Gospel. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Fr. Murray says the Synod is “self-destructive.” But it’s only self-destructive if the intention of the Synod is to preserve and strengthen the Church founded by Christ and revealed to Christians in the gospels. If the intention of the Synod fathers (along with Pope Francis) is to replace the Church of Christ with a humanistic/modernist Church with all the supernatural elements purged out, then the Synod has thus far been a roaring success for them—if not for the rest of us.

It’s possible that the Synod organizers are genuinely well-intentioned. Perhaps they think that by downplaying immorality and by convincing Catholics to “take it easy on yourself,” Catholics will shake-off their burden of guilt and lead happier, healthier lives. But previous attempts at relaxing the rules while ignoring the supernatural dimension of life—such as the Sexual Revolution—eventually resulted in making life harder not easier.

Should the Synod fathers succeed in convincing Catholics that sin is not sinful, the destructive, addictive, and family-wrecking effects of sin will still be at work—both in individual lives and throughout society. The Synod leaders may succeed in bringing about radical change in the Church, but because of their naivete about human nature, the changes will inexorably lead to widespread unhappiness and despair.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-radical-inclusive-church/

… Dumber and Brainwashed: In light of recent test scores and the proliferation of CRT, America’s future is not promising. November 4, 2022 by Larry Sand 5 Comments

… The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – known as The Nation’s Report Card – “gives us a window into the state of our K-12 education system.” The results provide educators, policymakers, elected officials, and parents across the country with information regarding how much students are learning in the U.S.

The scores on the latest test taken in early 2022 – after the nation’s Covid panic subsided – were released last week, and looking in that “window” revealed some scary things. In a nutshell, the scores showed that just 33% of the nation’s fourth graders are proficient in reading and 36% are proficient in math. The eighth graders did even worse: 31% are proficient in reading, while a painful 26% showed proficiency in math. According to the report’s authors, “the national average score declines in mathematics for fourth- and eighth-graders were the largest ever recorded in that subject.”

The brightest spot in a sea of ugly took place in Catholic schools, most of which shut down very briefly, if at all, in 2020 and 2021. Scores in these schools were 17 points higher than the national public school average. In eighth-grade reading, the average score for Catholic school students was 20 points higher than the national public-school average, or about two grade levels ahead.

While it is clear that the test score plunge was affected by the pandemic-related shutdowns, there are some blurry areas. For example, not every school in a given state closed when Covid hysteria gripped the nation, so state-by-state comparisons don’t necessarily yield conclusive data on the effect of online learning.

There is a cohort that is trying to dismiss the shutdowns as a cause for the terrible scores out of hand, however. Typical is Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson who writes “all the bitter back-and-forth between red and blue states about how quickly to reopen schools during the covid-19 pandemic was nothing but political theater, as far as test scores are concerned. Student performance suffered across the board, and it could take years to make up the ground we’ve lost.”

Not surprisingly, teacher union president Randi Weingarten, one of the shutdown’s prime perpetrators, sent out a tweet quoting from a part of Robinson’s piece. Notably, neither Robinson nor Weingarten nor any of the other naysayers ever bothered to explain why kids in Catholic schools fared so much better on the test.

But the deniers are actually on to something, in the sense that there’s more to the problem than shuttered schools. In a RealClear Education piece, penned before the latest NAEP results were announced, scholars Lance Izumi and Wenyuan Wu wrote, “Why Are Student Test Scores Plunging? Look at Politicized Education.”

The authors disclose that many students report increased ideological indoctrination in the classroom, and that is leading to weaker standards and lower expectations. “One California student reported that a teacher at his school told the class that perfectionism and striving for perfection was part of white supremacy culture. Another one of his teachers ‘made it seem like it was bad to have a good work ethic or to be supportive of meritocracy.’ In his school, grades were inflated, low grades were eliminated, late assignments were allowed, and multiple retakes of exams were permitted. Rigor simply disappeared.”

Additionally, the teaching of Critical Race Theory and other forms of radical subject matter don’t leave as much time for traditional concepts such as reading and math. Many on the left, of course, downplay the widespread nature of CRT in the classroom, more or less subjugating it to the “vast right-wing conspiracy” file. But two policy analysts at the Manhattan Institute show that CRT is most definitely being taught. Zach Goldberg and Eric Kaufman queried 18- to 20-year-old respondents (82.4 percent of whom attend public schools) “whether they had ever been taught in class or heard about from an adult at school each of six concepts—four of which are central to critical race theory.”

For CRT-related concepts, 62 percent reported “either being taught in class or hearing from an adult in school that ‘America is a systemically racist country’” and 69 percent said they were taught or heard that “white people have white privilege.” Also, 57 percent asserted that they learned that “white people have unconscious biases that negatively affect non-white people,” while 67 percent said they were exposed to the notion that “America is built on stolen land.” Additionally, 53 percent say they learned that “America is a patriarchal society.” And just for good measure, 51 percent disclose that they were taught or heard that “gender is an identity choice” regardless of biological sex.

Teacher hiring is also affected by the radical agenda. A blatant example of the new racialism came in March when the Minneapolis Public School system adopted a race-based layoff provision which stipulates that white teachers will be laid off or reassigned before “educators of color” in the event Minneapolis Public Schools needs to reduce staff.

Teacher training certainly has not escaped the CRT incursion. The Pacific Educational Group, a San Francisco-based consulting firm founded in 1992, believes that “systemic racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished capacity of all people, and especially people of color and indigenous people, to achieve at the highest levels.”

The father of a high school student in Pennsylvania helped to expose this training scam by suing his local school district. After wrangling over confidentiality issues, it was revealed that documents explicitly citing critical race theory were emailed from 2019 to 2021 by Pacific Educational Group to district administrators in advance of various training seminars. A rubric dated Feb. 4, 2020, encourages participants to “Deconstruct the Presence and role of Whiteness” in their lives.

A March 17, 2020 presentation lists “aspects and assumptions of white culture” in the U.S. “Win at all costs,” “wealth = worth,” and “don’t show emotion” are front and center. “Planning for future” is also considered a blight that infects white culture.

The presentation also spells out “5 tenets of critical race theory” to “better understand the critical intersection of race and schooling.” One tenet, the “permanence of racism,” is the idea that “racism is endemic to all our institutions, systems and structures” in the U.S.

Clearly not every teacher takes this ideology into the classroom, but as the Manhattan Institute study shows, many do.

Another clue that it’s not just the shutdowns that have affected America’s youth is the sinking ACT scores. These tests are used for college admission, and the national average ACT score for the class of 2022 fell to 19.8 out of 36, down from 20.3 in 2021, according to data released this month by the nonprofit that administers the test. Looking through a longer lens, the news gets worse – this is the fifth consecutive year that ACT scores have declined. Hence, things were deteriorating long before the Covid-related lockdowns came to be. Also, the average score is now lower than it’s been since 1991.

So yes, the pandemic related shutdowns did damage but they are now in the rearview. The CRT trend continues unabated, however. Even sadder, a poll administered by researchers at USC in August-September reveals that almost half of all Americans have never heard of CRT or say they have heard of it, but don’t know anything about it.

While many parents are awakening to the reality that they must find out exactly what their kids are being taught, and abandoning their local public school if necessary, too many are still unaware that their school might be somewhat less than beneficial for their children. For the good of their kids and the future of the country, more parents need to get more involved in education matters soon. Very soon.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dumber-and-brainwashed/

A Thoroughly Modern Synod, The Church of What’s-Happening-Now seeks your input.

October 25, 2022 by William Kilpatrick 5 Comments

… Pope Francis just announced that the multi-year Synod on Synodality will be extended another year. Apparently, the synodalists need more time to complete what Cardinal Gerhard Muller describes as a “hostile takeover of the Church.” As the Synod drags on, it threatens to drag many in the Church into apostasy.

One particular worry of synod critics is that its organizers are reviving the Modernist conception of the “development of doctrine” and are using it as a tool to undermine Church teaching.

Modernism became popular with the Catholic intelligentsia of Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. In a recent Crisis article, Julia Meloni explains: “Modernists wanted to ‘update’ the Church according to the spirit of the age. Positing that truth is dynamic and not static, Modernists tried to find novel facets of it—and thus reverse Church positions.”

An amusing satire of a Modernist cleric can be found in C.S. Lewis’s fantasy novella, The Great Divorce. The book concerns souls in Hell who are given the opportunity to take a flying bus trip to Heaven—and stay if they want, providing that they are willing to give up their sinful inclinations. Since Lewis portrays Hell not as a place of torment, but merely as a dismal city which affords free lodging and some comforts, the choice is not as obvious as one might think. Moreover, the terrain of Heaven is initially experience by the visitors from Hell as too sharp and solid for comfort. Even though they are coaxed by heavenly spirits—often friends or relatives from their previous existence—to enter Heaven, many decide to return to Hell.

One of these is a modernist Anglican bishop who is almost convinced to come into Heaven by one of the “bright spirits”—a former friend—but then remembers that he is to deliver a paper to a meeting of “a little Theological Society down there,” and turns down the offer of Heaven.

The bishop is in Hell in the first place because of apostasy and intellectual pride. And in the end, his pride gets the best of him. He is particularly proud of the paper he is to deliver because of its novel thesis. In fact, what he describes is nothing more than the Modernist view of development of doctrine:

I’m going to point out how people always forget that Jesus… was a comparatively young man when he died. He would have outgrown some of his earlier views, you know, if he’d lived. As he might have done, with a little more tact and patience. I am going to ask my audience to consider what his mature views would have been. A profoundly interesting question. What a different Christianity we might have had if only the Founder had reached his full stature!

“His mature views?” For Modernists, “development of doctrine” means that we must move from a primitive understanding of Christianity to a more mature one. Coincidentally, when Francis announced his decision to extend the Synod, he explained that it was necessary so that the fruits of the synodal process “might come to full maturity.”

Christ died at thirty-three. Francis and all of the Synod bishops are well-above that age. Do they, like the free-thinking bishop in Lewis’s story, consider themselves more mature than Christ? Some probably do. If so, they need to think again. Mature people are not, generally, anxious to know “what’s happening now” so that they can follow suit. But the synodalists give the distinct impression that “what’s happening” is very much on their minds. They claim incessantly to be “listening to the Spirit,” but when one reads the preparatory documents for the synod, along with various statements by the synod’s leadership, it seems that they are more interested in keeping up with the spirit of the times than in seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

How do you keep up with “what’s happening now”? Well, you could take an opinion poll. And, sure enough, much of the synod’s time has been taken up with canvassing Catholic lay people for their opinions on sex, marriage, family, and on Church teachings about same. In order to get the hoped-for results, the opinions of non-practicing Catholics and non-religious people will also be included.

It’s easy to see why Meloni, worries that Modernist methods can be used to “reverse” Church teachings. In fact, the results of the relevant opinion polls are already available. According to a 2014 Univision poll, 54 percent of U.S. Catholics supported same-sex marriage, 59 percent supported women’s ordination, 76 percent thought abortion should be permitted in some circumstances, and 79 percent supported contraception. In Europe, approval for these positions was significantly higher.

There are numerous such polls of Catholic opinion. If they’ve been paying attention, the synodalists already know the answers to their questions. So, why all the canvassing? Do the synodalists intend to use the results to buttress the directions in which they already plan to lead the Church?

Looking at the statistics, and following the reasoning of the synod leaders, one could speculate that a more “mature” Jesus would have to revise his teachings on a number of doctrines. He would see that life today is much more complicated than in first century Palestine. He would realize, according to progressives, that it’s time for our notions of sin to evolve into something less exclusive and judgmental.

In the wrong hands, the “development of doctrine” and other Modernist approaches could lead to the destruction of the Catholic Church. And these tools certainly seen to be in the wrong hands. Earlier this year, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, the Realtor General of the Synod, said that Catholic teaching on homosexuality is in error and needs “revision.” Why? Because, said Hollerich, “I believe that the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching is incorrect.”

Hmm…Cardinal Hollerich doesn’t explain what he means but one of the most common ways that sociologists establish their findings is to take a poll. The synod he heads has already commissioned numerous opinion surveys and we can expect many more. Is there any doubt what the surveys will show and what the Modernist synod bishops will do with the results?

What we will likely see is a final summation somewhat along the following lines: “After extensive polling and in consultation with the Holy Spirit, the Synod has determined what modern people think and do. The Synod fathers urge every Catholic to read the attached list of “What’s happening now,” and, in the words of scripture, “Go and do ye likewise.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-thoroughly-modern-synod/

How Not to Teach Morality, Today’s educators substitute causes for virtues. Mon Nov 15, 2021, William Kilpatrick

Is stealing wrong? That is the title of a recent article by Dennis Prager for FrontPage.

According to Prager, many people in our society—particularly those on the left—no longer have a problem with stealing. He cites several examples, including the closing of numerous Walgreens stores in San Francisco because authorities no longer prosecute shoplifters.

He might have added that many people no longer have a problem with lying, cheating, and adultery. Of course, these moral failures have always been with us, but in the past most people considered them to be just that—moral failures. Very few would have come to the defense of lying, stealing, or infidelity.

Why are things different now? Prager lists four reasons for the decline in moral standards. All four are important, but the factor he puts first on the list—moral relativism—deserves special attention.

Moral relativism is the belief that there are no objective standards of morality. Moral relativists claim that morality is relative to the culture one is born into, or to one’s social situation, or even to one’s subjective feelings. In short, “what’s right for you isn’t necessarily right for me.”

Historians link the rise of relativism over the last century and a half to many factors: wars, revolutions, even Einstein’s theory of relativity. But one of the main reasons for the success of the relativist view is that much of what schools have been teaching about right and wrong over the last sixty years is based on relativist assumptions.

Take Values Clarification—a program that became immensely popular in American schools starting in the early 70’s. Many parents incorrectly assumed that the program was designed to teach the traditional values that helped children developed into good citizens and good people.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of passing-on time-tested values to youngsters, Values Clarification was designed, according to its developers to make students “aware of their own feelings, their own ideas, their own beliefs…their own value systems.”

In short, Values Clarification was relativistic from the outset. It assumed that morality was relative to each individual. Society? Parents? Tradition? Religion? To hell with all that. Each child has to make up his own mind about values because values are little more than subjective feelings. A value, in other words, is not what you ought to do, but what you like to do. This is evident in strategy number three: “Values Voting.” The exercise starts with the teacher asking innocuous questions such as “How many of you like to go on long walks?” “How many enjoy going on a picnic?” “How many like yogurt?” But before long, the innocuous questions give way to leading questions: “How many of you approve of premarital sex for boys? For girls?” “How many think we ought to legalize abortion?” “How many would approve of marriage between homosexuals being sanctioned by priest, minister, or rabbi?”

In 1972 when the Values Clarification Handbook first appeared, it’s likely that legalized abortion and homosexual marriage were not issues of great concern for junior high students. But the program ensured that these issues would soon be at the front of young minds. However, they were not to be thought of as profoundly consequential societal issues. The exercises were designed to give students the impression that all values are a matter of personal taste—such as having a preference for yogurt over ice cream.

Values Clarification was an outgrowth of humanistic psychology’s emphasis on self-esteem. Almost all of life’s problems, the experts assured us, could be traced to a lack of self-love. Ever eager to jump on the newest passing bandwagon, many schools made “boosting self-esteem” their number one priority, with the result that learning math, science, and history soon took a back seat to learning to love oneself.

But self-love is close-kin to narcissism, and narcissists tend to have a highly subjective sense of morality. On the assumption that “I’m a wonderful person,” they go on to conclude that “everything I do must be wonderful” too. However, feeling good about oneself is no guarantee that one will do good. Not surprisingly, research on the subject soon revealed that prison inmates tended to score high on tests of self-esteem.

“If it feels good, do it” is not a good recipe for reaching moral maturity, but it was considered sage advice by many in the education establishment during the seventies and eighties.

Some educators, however, did see the problems with a feelings-based approach to moral education, and they tried to come up with something more solid. The most prominent among them was Lawrence Kohlberg of Harvard University, who developed a “moral reasoning” approach to moral education. Kohlberg believed that there were six stages of moral reasoning, and that students could be nudged to higher stages by presenting them with moral dilemmas—much as Socrates and Plato had done in their dialogues with their students. Apparently however, Kohlberg was unaware that Plato thought that the Socratic method was inappropriate for young people. Indeed, he thought it should be reserved for mature men. According to Plato, “one great precaution is not to let them taste of arguments while they are young.” Young minds, like young puppies, said Plato would only “pull and tear at arguments.” They would develop a taste for arguments rather than a taste for truth.

But the precaution was ignored by Kohlberg and his followers, and before long school children were being presented with complex moral dilemmas that would have stumped Middle-East negotiators:

Should a poor man steal expensive medicine that might save his dying wife?
Should a group of snow-bound settlers turn to cannibalism in order to avoid death by starvation?
Should a doctor operate on a ten-year-old boy who has been hit by a car and needs surgery, despite the objections of the boy’s Christian Science parents?

Soon enough, the Value Clarification people got into the act with dilemmas such as this:

You are a passenger in an overcrowded lifeboat in rough seas. Unless some passengers are thrown overboard, all will drown. From the [provided] list decide which passengers should be sacrificed.

So, before the point at which most young people have developed a firm habit of telling the truth, respecting the property of others, and respecting the value of human life, they are faced with thorny situations in which it might be permissible to lie, steal, or even take the lives of others. Such exercises undermine the notion that morality is, for the most part, a solid and settled thing, and instead convey the impression that what’s right and wrong is anyone’s’ guess. And if it is anyone’s guess, then we’re back to relativism. Indeed, Kohlberg’s insistence that there were no right or wrong answers to the dilemmas strongly suggests a bias in favor of subjectivism.

One of the basic problems with Kohlberg’s approach was revealed when he posed one of his stealing dilemmas to a group of prison inmates. Without hesitation the prisoners all said that the man in the dilemma should steal the medicine. “But why would you do that?” asked Kohlberg. “Because we steal things,” came the ready reply.

In other words, the decision to steal or not to steal is only a dilemma for those who already believe that stealing is wrong.

And where do young people get that belief? Initially, they get it from parents who patiently explain to toddlers that it’s wrong to take something that doesn’t belong to them, and who correct their children whenever they steal. Next, the lesson is reinforced by the child’s teachers. At least, that used to be the case. Nowadays, many teachers are too busy stealing minds to be bothered with the task of passing-on bourgeoise notions about morality.

Aristotle, who was no slouch at reasoning, nevertheless thought that an education in morality should be a kind of training. Just as one gets better at gymnastics through practicing gymnastics, one becomes a better person by practicing the virtues. As Aristotle understood, the hard part of morality is not knowing what is right, but doing it. Nine times out of ten we know what we ought to do. The problem is that we may lack the will or the courage or the self-control that enables us to do the right thing.

We may also lack the desire to do good. That’s why Plato recommended that children be brought up in such a way that they would fall in love with virtue. And one of the best ways to do this, he thought, was to expose them to stories, legends, and epics about virtuous people—or, at any rate, people who are striving to be virtuous.

In the past, character education was not a course one took in school. Rather it was woven into the entire school experience. Character was learned by reading good literature, by studying history, by playing sports, and by emulating teachers of good character. It was also absorbed by participating in a disciplined and orderly daily routine.

Of course, character education didn’t work perfectly; and in the sixties and seventies, educators thought they had found something better—namely, value-neutral sex-education, drug education, values clarification, and Kohlberg’s slightly less subjective moral reasoning approach.

Still, Kohlberg was no friend of character education. He dismissed the old approach to building character as the “bag of virtues” approach. He and other innovators complained that educators shouldn’t impose their values on students. Rather, students should be free to think for themselves, and to develop their own values.

Ironically, the relativistic approach they developed eventually led to less independent thinking and more indoctrination. Pope Benedict XVI often spoke of a “dictatorship of relativism,” and you only need to look around to see what he meant. We now live in a world where there is far less freedom and far fewer choices than existed only a short time before. Our increasingly authoritarian society mandates that you wear masks and submit to shots of doubtful efficacy, and it forces you to say things that are untrue, at the risk of losing your livelihood.

The initial promise of all the psychology-based programs was that they were non-directive: children would be free to discover their own values, and find their own truths. But that was a lie. Anyone who takes a close look at these tendentious programs will see that they were designed to lead children in certain directions. And, more often than not, the directions were ones that most parents—had they looked more closely—would not have approved.

By confusing children about basic morality, these supposedly non-directive programs paved the way for today’s highly directive and indoctrinaire attempts to turn children into leftist ideologues: Marxist-based Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, the LGBTQ+ agenda, and, undoubtedly, other initiatives yet to be uncovered.

But the push to capture the hearts and minds of children is not confined to the classroom. It is an all-encompassing, nothing-left-to-chance endeavor. School-wide policies now reflect the leftist agenda: mandatory masking, rainbow posters in the hallways, rainbow flags flying from the flagpole, trans-welcoming bathrooms, Pride Month celebrations, forms that ask intrusive questions about parents, and much more.

In some ways, the current approach resembles the character education approach: Aristotle’s emphasis on learning proper habits of behavior; Plato’s belief that youngsters should fall in love with virtue. Except that today’s educators substitute causes for virtues. They don’t want children to fall in love with virtue, they want them to fall in love with the cause du jour. And to that end, they provide stories of heroic boys and girls who choose to be gay or trans or climate activists—much as the Soviets presented Pavlik Morozov--the boy who denounced his father—as a heroic model for other children to emulate.

Indeed, today’s efforts to get children to commit to leftist causes finds it’s closest analogy in the Hitler Youth movement of the Nazi era, and in the Young Pioneers of the Soviet era. In all cases, one of the prime objectives was (and is) to alienate children from the values of their parents and the past, and to convert them to a collectivist ideology. The first step in resisting the current attempts to kidnap young minds is to understand the radical nature of today’s education system. Our schools are no longer safe spaces for children.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/how-not-teach-morality-william-kilpatrick/

How Not to Teach Morality, WILLIAM KILPATRICK:

In learning right from wrong, young people ought to have the benefit of ideas that have been around for a while. Beginning in the 1960s, however, educators have vied to outdo one another in rushing the newest developments and techniques into the classroom and into young heads.

"It ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people," quipped G. K. Chesterton in 1910. If that guarded approach applies anywhere, moral education would seem to be the place. In learning right from wrong, young people ought to have the benefit of ideas that have been around for a while. After all, when researchers experiment with new treatments in medicine, the policy is to ask for adult volunteers, not to round up children. Common sense would seem to suggest a similarly cautious approach to experiments in teaching values.

For a long time that was the guiding policy in American schools. Teachers understood their main task to be the transmission of the culture: passing on to each new generation the lessons — some of them costly — that had been learned about right and wrong.

The 1960s, however, saw Chesterton's formula turned on its head. In that decade and the next, educators vied to outdo one another in rushing the newest developments and techniques into the classroom and into young heads. Nowhere was this done more avidly than in the field of moral education. The oldest ideas were, in effect, banished from the classroom. Almost overnight, concepts such as virtue, good example, and character formation fell out of favor with educators. We have already examined some of the concepts that took their place. In view of what was at stake, it was a surprisingly bloodless revolution. Teaching right from wrong has as much bearing on a culture's survival as teaching reading, writing, or science. Yet the radical innovations met with little resistance. For the most part they were embraced.

What accounts for this willing acceptance by the schools?

One possibility is that good behavior on the part of youngsters — aside from the normal quotient of rebellion and mischief — was something that educators were able to take for granted. Many educators at the time believed strongly in the idea of natural morality. And the relatively well-behaved youngsters in their classrooms seemed to prove the point. If their charges were, perhaps, somewhat more restive than students of the previous decade, that could be explained by the difficulty of adjusting to the new climate of freedom. What was generally ignored, of course, was the possibility that morality has more to do with culture than with nature: the possibility, that is, that character education had done its job well, and that the relative calm they enjoyed was not the fruit of nature but the lingering benefit of an earlier educational culture. Whatever the case, educators apparently felt they could afford to experiment.

Another explanation for this bloodless coup is simply that the time was ripe for it. Those were the days of the free speech movement, of flower children and campus sit-ins and Woodstock. It was also a time of violence — the murder of civil rights workers, the assassination of King and the Kennedys', the Vietnam War. Something was radically wrong with our culture — or so it seemed to many. And the revelations about Watergate in the early seventies did not help matters. The main sentiment — and it was a sentiment widely shared by educators — was that the culture was something to be ashamed of, not transmitted. It would be better if students started from scratch and developed their own ideas about society.

This was the atmosphere into which the so-called decision-making model of moral education emerged. It was a model that relied on students to discover values for themselves, and it promised that this could be done without indoctrination of any sort. Students would be given tools for making decisions, but the decisions would be their own. The idea gained ready acceptance in schools.

Decision making was exactly what educators were looking for, and they rushed to embrace it.

The decision-making model developed along two different fines. One approach, called "Values Clarification," emphasized feelings, personal growth, and a totally nonjudgmental attitude; the other, known as the "moral reasoning" approach, emphasized a "critical thinking" or cognitive approach to decision making.

Although both shared many assumptions and methods, it is important to understand the differences. Values Clarification got its start in 1966 with the publication of Values and Teaching by Louis Raths, Merrill Harmin, and Sidney Simon — all professors of education. What the authors offered was not a way to teach values but a way for students to "clarify" their own values. The authors took pains to distance themselves from character education and traditional methods of teaching values. In fact, Simon once expressed a wish that parents would stop "fostering the immorality of morality." It was Simon, also, who took the lead in popularizing the new method. His Values Clarification: A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students was published in 1972, and quickly became a best-seller among teachers. According to the promotional blurb on the book's back cover, Values Clarification makes students "aware of their own feelings, their own ideas, their own beliefs ... their own value systems."

But Values Clarification was not exactly a new idea. In reality, it was an outgrowth of human potential psychology. The developers of Values Clarification had simply taken Carl Rogers's nondirective, nonjudgmental therapy technique and applied it to moral education. Indeed, the authors of Values and Teaching were so committed to therapeutic nonjudgmentalism that they felt obliged to note that "it is entirely possible that children will choose not to develop values. It is the teacher's responsibility to support this choice also."

True to its origins in the human potential movement, Values Clarification also puts a heavy emphasis on feelings — so much so that it virtually equates values with feelings. That this is the case is indicated in the very first strategy in the Values Clarification handbook. It is titled "Twenty Things You Love to Do." This exercise is not a prelude to deeper thought ahead. Rather, it sets the tone for the whole book. A value is essentially what you like or love to do. It is not an ought-to but a want-to. In his book Educating for Character, Professor Thomas Lickona relates the story of an eighth-grade teacher who used this strategy with a low-achieving class only to find that the four most popular activities were "sex, drugs, drinking, and skipping school." The teacher was hamstrung. The Values Clarification framework gave her no way of persuading them otherwise. Her students had clarified their values, and they were able to justify their choices with answers they found satisfactory ("Everyone drinks and smokes dope"; "Sex is the best part of life").

Another problem with Values Clarification is that, despite its claim of being value-neutral, it actually conditions children to think of values as relative. This is apparent in strategy number three, "Values Voting." The exercise starts off innocuously enough with questions from the teacher such as, "How many of you like to go on long walks or hikes?" "How many enjoy going on a picnic?" "How many like yogurt?" and so on. But before long, questions of a weightier nature begin to appear in the list: "How many of you approve of premarital sex for boys? for girls?" "How many think we ought to legalize abortions?" "How many would approve of a marriage between homosexuals being sanctioned by priest, minister or rabbi?"

No effort is made to set these loaded questions apart. They are simply interspersed with the innocuous questions in random fashion, as if no significant differences existed among them. In the context of picnics and long walks, however, some of these "items in life's cafeteria," as Simon once called them, seem wildly out of place — like a guest appearance by Madonna on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. At least it would seem that way to a thoughtful adult. But Values Clarification is about getting in touch with feelings, not thoughts. The exercises are designed so that a young student will come away with the impression that all values are simply a matter of personal taste — like eating yogurt. Reading through the Values Clarification book of strategies, one is forced to conclude that its authors are more interested in circumventing the rational mind than in stimulating it.

Values Clarification has suffered some setbacks in the last decade. The anti-intellectual bias is hard to ignore; so is the research, which shows Values Clarification to be ineffectual at best and potentially harmful. Moreover, Values Clarification has come under attack from parents' groups in dozens of states. Despite these difficulties, however, Values Clarification has shown amazing powers of survival. Those who favor the approach have adopted the simple tactic of changing the name while retaining the method. Values Clarification often shows up under the guise of drug education, sex education, and life-skills courses. Although I have put these curriculums first in this book, in actual point of time they came after the introduction of Values Clarification, and relied heavily on its techniques. For example, years before writing drug education curriculums for Quest, Howard Kirschenbaurn had coauthored the Values Clarification handbook with Sidney Simon. Although his newer curriculums contain different exercises, the old message — a value is what you like to do — still comes through clearly.

The moral reasoning approach — the other strand within the decision-making model — seemed to offer a good alternative to Values Clarification. It was the brainchild of Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, a man who was, in many ways, the opposite of Sidney Simon. Whereas Simon was a laid-back popularizer with a mind singularly tuned to the changing moods of the sixties, Kohlberg was a serious scholar whose ideas were buttressed by philosophical arguments, and whose research was highly regarded. Although Kohlberg, like Simon, rejected character education (he called it the "bag of virtues" approach), he had something other than feelings to offer in its place. Kohlberg wanted to turn children into moral thinkers, to teach them a valid process of moral reasoning. Children would still make their own decisions, but their decisions would be based on reason.

How could students be brought to higher levels of moral reasoning? Kohlberg felt that the Socratic dialogue — the method used by Socrates and Plato — was ideal. The Socratic dialogue provided a way of drawing out ideas without imposing values or moralizing. Moreover, the dialogue seemed to create an atmosphere of equality between student and teacher — a goal that at the time seemed highly desirable.

Accordingly, Kohlberg and his colleagues developed a curriculum based on the discussion of ethical dilemmas. Like Socrates or Plato, the teacher poses one of these dilemmas and then encourages an exchange of ideas and opinions while keeping his own values in the background. Here is an example of one such dilemma:

Sharon and Jill were best friends. One day they went shopping together. Jill tried on a sweater and then, to Sharon's surprise, walked out of the store wearing the sweater under her coat. A moment later, the store's security officer stopped Sharon and demanded that she tell him the name of the girl who had walked out. He told the store owner that he had seen the two girls together, and that he was sure that the one who left had been shoplifting. The store owner told Sharon that she could really get in trouble if she didn't give her friend's name.

The dilemma, of course, is to decide what Sharon should do.

A skilled teacher could get quite a bit of mileage out of a quandary like this. Some of the issues that might come up would be lying versus loyalty, self-sacrifice versus self-protection, the cost to the public of shoplifting versus the cost to the girl if she's arrested. In addition, the teacher may further complicate the situation by asking hypothetical questions: "Suppose Jill comes from a poor family and can't afford to buy new clothes?" or "Suppose you knew that other children had been making fun of Jill because of her unstylish clothing?" or "What if Sharon offers to pay for the sweater herself? Should the store agree to drop the matter?" The teacher may go a step further and have students get the feel of the predicament by role-playing the various parts in the shoplifting scenario. Here's another dilemma:

Suppose a ten-year-old boy is hit by a car and brought by ambulance to the emergency room of a hospital. He needs surgery right away but the doctor needs the parents’ permission. When the parents arrive they refuse consent for an operation. They are Christian Scientists and believe in the power of prayer rather than medicine to heal. The doctor could get a court order to override the parents but that might take too long. Should the doctor go ahead and operate despite the parents’ objections?

You can see why the dilemma approach became popular. In the hands of any moderately capable teacher, it’s a surefire formula: the educational equivalent of a roller-coaster ride. Opinions go back and forth, up and down; the argument takes sudden, unexpected turns. Does the class favor an immediate operation? Then the teacher can play devil’s advocate. He can say, “So you don’t really care about freedom of religion. How would you like it if your freedom to practice your faith was taken away? Suppose your religion forbids you to salute the flag, and you are expelled from school for not saluting? Would that be right?” Or he may switch the focus to parental rights: “How would you feel if you were a parent and doctors operated on your child without your permission?” At any moment the discussion can go spinning off in a new direction.

Like a roller-coaster ride, the dilemma approach can leave its passengers a bit breathless. That is one of its attractions. But like a roller-coaster ride, it may also leave them a bit disoriented — or more than a bit. That, as a growing number of critics are suggesting, is one of its drawbacks.

The question to ask about this admittedly stimulating approach is this: Do we want to concentrate on quandaries or on everyday morality? Not many children will grow up to face the doctor’s dilemma described above. More to the point, it is not a dilemma any of them currently face. A great deal of a child’s moral life — or an adult’s, for that matter — is not made up of dilemmas at all. Most of our “moral decisions” have to do with temptations to do things we know we shouldn’t do or temptations to avoid doing the things we know we should do. A temptation to steal money from her mother’s purse is a more common problem for the average girl than deciding whether or not to turn in a friend who is shoplifting. It is certainly more common than deciding whether to perform surgery on an injured child.

The Jill and Sharon dilemma is actually a rather mild example of the form. Dilemmas about homosexuality, wife swapping, extramarital sex, abortion, and even cannibalism are routine on the junior high and high school levels and often make their way into elementary classrooms. The Donner Party dilemma, for example, tells the story of westward-bound settlers trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and faced with the alternatives of death by starvation or cannibalism. Another Kohlberg dilemma concerns a mother who must choose between the lives of her two children. A Values Clarification dilemma places the student in the position of a government bureaucrat who must decide which of several people are to survive in a fallout shelter and which are to die of radiation poisoning.

The danger in focusing on problematic dilemmas such as these is that a student may begin to think that all of morality is similarly problematic. After being faced with quandary after quandary of the type that would stump Middle East negotiators, students will conclude that right and wrong are anybody's guess. They will gain the impression, as Cornell professor Richard Baer has pointed out, "that almost everything in ethics is either vague or controversial ..."

Youngsters are often much more perceptive than adults in sensing where this fine of reasoning leads. As one teacher admits, "I often discuss cheating this way, but I always get defeated because they will argue that cheating is all right. After you accept the idea that kids have the right to build a position with logical arguments, you have to accept what they come up with."

What Chesterton said about teaching "the oldest things" seems to apply here. Classroom time might be better spent in talking about the virtues of friendship, loyalty, and honesty, and how to practice them, rather than in dredging up situations where honesty might not be the best policy or where loyalty and honesty conflict or even where cannibalism might be a legitimate course of action.

Why isn't it done that way? The answer is that the developers of these curriculums are proceeding on the basis of a dubious assumption. They seem to assume that such things as honesty, property rights, and human life are already highly valued by youngsters and, therefore, the only difficulty is to choose among these values when they conflict. That is, they assume a sort of natural goodness and integrity in the child, whereby he or she will always want to do the right thing. If there is a problem, it's only a problem of getting in touch with one's feelings or of learning to reason things out. The old idea that many of us suffer not from a defect in reasoning but from a defect in character is not considered. Thus, in the Jill and Sharon dilemma, it is assumed that boys and girls have already mastered the ABC's of morality, that the kinds of dilemmas they are grappling with are of the higher-order kind that faces Sharon ("Shall I be loyal to my friend or truthful to the authorities?") rather than the lower-order kind that faces Jill ("Shall I take this sweater?"). But what if stealing a sweater is not a dilemma at all for me but my habitual mode of action?

Some of what is wrong with this assumption is revealed in a conversation Kohlberg had with Edwin Delattre shortly before Kohlberg's death. Delattre, who is professor of applied ethics at Boston University, tells it this way:

He [Kohlberg] expressed perplexity about the ineffectiveness of his methods in prisons where he had been working. He told me that he posed for inmates one of his favorite dilemmas: "Your wife suffers from an incurable and potentially terminal disease for which she must take regular doses of a very expensive medicine. The medicine is manufactured by a single company, and you have exhausted all of your financial resources in past purchases of the medicine." The question he posed is whether you should let your wife die or steal the drug.
The convicts were unperplexed. To a man, and without hesitation, they said, "Steal it." "But why," Larry Kohlberg asked them, "would you do that?" Laughing, they answered, "Because we steal things. We wanna know why the stupid husband didn't steal it in the first place."

The point is that the decision whether or not to steal is only a dilemma for those who already think stealing is wrong. As Delattre observes, "no one can really have a dilemma or moral problem without already caring to be the kind of person who behaves well, the kind of person who wants to discover the right thing to do and to have what it takes to do it."

At issue here is the very nature of the moral life itself. Kohlberg's conception seems to be that morality has to do with solving difficult ethical problems. His tendency to view it this way may stem in part from his own experience. As a young man he was involved in the struggle to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. He and the men and women he worked with were constantly faced with difficult, unprecedented, and dangerous dilemmas involving the lives and freedom of others.

The superheated atmosphere in which Kohlberg worked may help to explain the system he later developed. The question remains, however, whether his emphasis on dilemmas is rightly placed. As one of Kohlberg's critics points out, "Not all of what constitutes one's morality consists of responding to problematic social situations ... a person's morality is an ongoing quality of life and not disjointed responses to isolated situations."

In fact, as Delattre suggests, it is the kind of person one is in the first place that determines what will and will not be a "dilemma" in one's life. For a person of good character a temptation to cheat on one's spouse or to cheat a business partner will we recognized as just that — a temptation and not a dilemma. On the other hand, for those lacking character interesting "dilemmas" are always arising. For example, one Kohlberg exercise — the "swapping" dilemma — concerns a number of married couples who want to exchange partners for sexual purposes. Quite obviously, however, this is a dilemma only for people who allow themselves to entertain such possibilities.

"This approach," as Delattre observes of Kohlberg's model, "obscures the fact that relatively few of our moral failings are attributable to inept reasoning about dilemmas. Many more arise from moral indifference, disregard for other people, weakness of will, and bad or self-indulgent habits." The hard part of morality, in short, is not knowing what is right but doing it. And if this is so, the remedy lies not in forming opinions but in forming good habits.

This is not to say that the dilemma approach should never be used. If used judiciously and in an age-appropriate way, it can be a useful teaching tool — particularly in discussing policy issues or current events in the upper grades or in college. But as the first line of approach for developing values, it is woefully inadequate. It involves young people in repeatedly questioning values that may never have taken hold for them in the first place.

In short, it's a strange way to teach morality. An analogy would be an American history course in grade school that concentrated on the ambiguities rather than the achievements — for example on Jefferson's ownership of slaves rather than his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, or on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s adulteries rather than his leadership of the civil rights movement. There is a time and place for learning such facts, but to put them first in a child's experience and then expect him to develop much loyalty to the nation or its values would be foolish.

The same holds true for moral education. Debunking moral values before they are learned is not a good policy. Before students begin to think about the qualifications, exceptions, and fine points that surround difficult cases they will seldom or never face, they need to build the kind of character that will allow them to act well in the very clear-cut situations they face daily. The basics ought to come first.

"We should not," as former secretary of education William Bennett points out, "use the fact that there are indeed many difficult and controversial moral questions as an argument against basic instruction in the subject. We do not argue ... against teaching biology or chemistry because gene splicing and cloning are complex and controversial."

But what about Socrates? And what about Kohlberg's claim to be following in his path? There is certainly much to be admired in Socrates' calm, reasonable method of inquiry and in his patience and goodwill, but Kohlberg seems to have missed a key point about the Socratic method: it was not meant for youngsters. No one speaks more authoritatively about the Socratic method than Plato, and Plato maintained that it was to be reserved for mature men over the age of thirty. "One great precaution," said Plato, "is not to let them [students] taste of arguments while they are young" — the danger being that they would develop a taste for arguments rather than a taste for truth. Young minds, like young puppies, said Plato, would only "pull and tear at arguments." Such a method might keep youngsters entertained but it would certainly not make them virtuous. For Plato it was much more important for young people to learn a love of virtue than to argue about it. The dialogue was for those for whom the love of virtue was already in place.

This is the problem with using the dialogue method prematurely. Another problem is that not everyone using it has the wisdom, integrity, or maturity of a Socrates.

I occasionally used a dialogue/dilemma approach when I was teaching eighth grade in the mid-sixties. Though Kohlberg hadn't come along with his curriculum at that time, it was easy enough to find dilemmas or make them up. I thought I was allowing my students to think for themselves, but I can see now that I was more interested in having them think like me. That was not difficult to accomplish using the dilemma approach. It tended to knock my students off base. I could see that it sometimes also had the effect of alienating them from their parents' beliefs — particularly if their parents had traditional or conservative views. That didn't bother me at the time, but it bothers me now. (By the way, both Socrates and Plato were charged with leading youth away from their parents. I think most scholars of the classics would agree that the charge was not entirely without merit.) In order to make reparations for my past misuse of the dilemma approach, I make a point each semester of telling my college students what is wrong with it. I find I can get the point across by making an analogy to television talk shows, the kind hosted by Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey. Such shows have a lot in common with current moral education classrooms: They thrive on the exchange of ideas and opinions, and they have the same ground rule — all views are to be respected.

Moreover, the tendency of these programs to concentrate on the more unusual arrangements that crop up in life (swapping clubs, the Man/Boy Love Association, mothers and daughters who date the same man) parallels the focus on thorny and rarely encountered dilemmas in the moral education class.

What is the cumulative effect of shows like this on the home viewer? Is he or she converted to swapping or to the cause of man-boy love? Probably not. But there is another effect. Watching the shows makes for increased tolerance for differing viewpoints and behaviors. The viewer may not adopt such viewpoints but he now sees that there is something to them, or at least, that they can be defended in an articulate way. Living in a pluralistic society, we tend to think this is a desirable outcome. It is not stretching the point very much to say that in our culture, tolerance and open-mindedness have become the chief virtues.

It may be important to recall, however, that "tolerance" was not included in the four classical virtues or in the three Christian virtues that were later added to them.

The notion that all ideas are to be respected is a fairly recent one-and not an easy notion to defend. Do the values of the Ku Klux Klan deserve respect? How about the values of the Mafia or the Colombian cocaine cartels? Do we owe respect to the values of the pornography industry? Christina Hoff Sommers, a professor of philosophy at Clark University, notes that this cultivation of tolerance also occurs in moral education classrooms. "But," she adds, "when tolerance is the sole virtue, students' capacity for moral indignation, so important for moral development, is severely inhibited."

Whether in classrooms or on TV, a constant parade of alternative “Values” tends to undermine the virtuous instinct that some things are and ought to be repugnant.

My question to my students about the talk show and the dilemma-centered classroom alike is whether such discussions can do more than develop a generalized — and sometimes excessive — tolerance. More precisely, can a person develop good moral character through participation in a talk show? through classroom rap sessions? Is this the way to develop traits such as courage, self-restraint, perseverance, or integrity? Students grasp the point immediately. Character is not about your skill in debate, it's about the kind of person you are.

Why then is the dilemma approach still in widespread use? One answer is that although it won't do much to develop a love of virtue or a hatred of vice, it will often do a lot for a teacher's popularity.

Neil Postman, a professor of communications at New York University, suggests in a recent article that in order to compete with television, teaching has been reduced to a form of popular entertainment:

Consequently, drawing an audience — -rather than teaching — becomes the focus of education, and that is what television does. School is the one institution in the culture that should present a different worldview: a different way of knowing, of evaluating, of assessing. What worries me is that if school becomes so overwhelmed by entertainment’s metaphors and metaphysics, then it becomes not content-centered but attention-centered, like television, chasing “ratings” or class attendance. If school becomes that way, then the game may be lost, because school is using the same approach, epistemologically, as television. Instead of being something different from television, it is reduced to being just another kind of television.

Kohlberg himself was quite serious about education; he never tried to be an entertainer. Nevertheless, his projects tended to produce educational fiascoes. In 1974, in an attempt to create not just a curriculum but a whole school based on his principles, Kohlberg founded the experimental Cluster School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The "just community" school, as it was sometimes called, lasted only five years. According to Professor Sommers's account,

these student-citizens were forever stealing from one another and using drugs during school hours. These transgressions provoked a long series of democratically conducted "town meetings" that to an outsider look very much like EST encounter groups. The students were frequently taken on retreats ... where many of them broke the rules against sex and drugs. This provoked more democratic confrontations where, Kohlberg was proud to report, it was usually decided that for the sake of the group the students would police one another on subsequent retreats and turn in the names of the transgressors.

None of this worked, however, and serious problems with drugs, theft, sex, and racial division continued unabated. And this despite the fact that the school had only thirty students, who were tended to by six specially trained teachers, dozens of consultants, and Kohlberg himself. In 1978, writing In The Humanist, Kohlberg said:

Some years of active involvement with the practice of moral education at Cluster School has led me to realize that my notion ... was mistaken ... the educator must be a socializer teaching value content and behavior, and not only a Socratic or Rogerian process-facilitator of development ... I no longer hold these negative views of indoctrinative moral education and I believe that the concepts guiding moral education must be partly "indoctrinative." This is true, by necessity, in a world in which children engage in stealing, cheating and aggression.

But, as with Maslow, followers and enthusiasts of the Kohlberg approach seemed to tune out these second thoughts and reassessments. Since the failure of the Cluster School, sixteen school systems have instituted "just community" schools — thus confirming Sommers's observation that "in American professional education nothing succeeds like failure." Newsweek recently described one such school in New York City:

West Indians snub the Bronx blacks, Dominicans won't eat with Puerto Ricans. Today's meeting verges on chaos. Tessa, a sophomore from Belize, has the chair and the attention of perhaps a third of the kids there. The question: should RCS [Roosevelt Community School] make community service a requirement for graduation? Five sullen boys talk steadily in the rear. Kids wander to the sandwich table, chat, write in their diaries. Debaters shout: "Hey, Tiffany, why you opposed, ya dumb bitch?" Allan Sternberg, the history teacher who runs the program, struggles to maintain order.

In the end the students vote against mandatory community service. "Sternberg," reports Newsweek, "tries a plaintive note of regret, but they cut him off. 'You asked us, we said "no," now it's over with,' says one member." Somehow Newsweek manages to find a vague "fragmentary" progress in all this. But it's not, I think it safe to say, the sort of progress parents would like to see.

I have a question that I sometimes pose to groups of parents. It goes as follows:

Suppose your child's school was instituting a course or curriculum in moral education at the fifth to seventh grade level. As a parent which of the two models below would you prefer the school to use?

A. The first approach encourages students to develop their own values and value systems. This approach relies on presenting the students with provocative ethical dilemmas and encouraging open discussion and exchange of opinion. The ground rule for discussion is that there are no right or wrong answers. Each student must decide for himself/herself what is right or wrong. Students are encouraged to be nonjudgmental about values that differ from their own.

B. The second approach involves a conscious effort to teach specific virtues and character traits such as courage, justice, self-control, honesty, responsibility, charity, obedience to lawful authority, etc. These concepts are introduced and explained and then illustrated by memorable examples from history, literature, and current events. The teacher expresses a strong belief in the importance of these virtues and encourages his/her students to practice them in their own lives.

The vast majority of parents will choose B — the character education option. But when I ask groups of teachers and teachers-in-training which of the two models they would choose to teach, they invariably prefer model A. Many teachers say they would not use the second approach under any circumstances.

Parents and teachers in America have been on different wavelengths for quite some time, but I don't think it's necessarily the parents who need to make an adjustment. I believe they prefer character education over the experimental model not because of some knee-jerk conservatism, or because of their limited knowledge of theory, but because they have a better grasp of what is at stake, and because it is their own children who are in question.

A colleague who administered this "questionnaire" to parents in a working-class neighborhood overheard one of them say in reference to the decision-making model, "Make up his own mind? Are they serious?" Not very articulate, but I would wager that what she said was based on a lot of practical knowledge.

Sooner or later, each person does have to make up his or her own mind. However, a person who has learned something of courage, respect for truth, and concern for others, who has begun to put these ideals into practice, and who cares about doing the right thing is better equipped to reach sound moral judgments than one who has been schooled only to exchange opinions. To introduce a child to the complicated and controversial issues of the day without some prior attempt at forming character is a formula for confusing him, or worse. To do it in a format that suggests there are no right answers compounds the confusion and amounts to a loading of the deck. One doesn't have to be exclusively liberal or conservative, religious or nonreligious to be troubled by this scheme.

Like the talk show, the dilemma approach leaves a boy or girl no objective criteria for deciding right and wrong. The only criterion is "what feels right to me," or — in the case of the better managed classes — what I can rationally defend."

But, as we know from the talk show, rationality is an all-purpose tool that will serve any master. Morality seems to require acquaintance with something more basic which, for want of a better term, we can call "moral premises." Moral premises are not reasoned to but are seen or grasped by an intuitive act. And being able to grasp them, as Aristotle suggested, may well be a factor of being virtuous in the first place — or at least, beginning to practice the virtues. There are many things in life that can't be understood from the outside. We don't really understand tennis or chess, for instance, until we begin to play them. In the same way, we can't understand the rightness of charity until we begin to practice it. "Objective," noncommittal discussions of other people's moral behavior allows students to stay outside the "game" while misleading them to believe they are in it. In the absence of deeper foundations, it seems likely that students will simply become adept at "pulling and tearing at arguments" like Plato's young puppies. At the same time, they will gain a facility for rationalizing whatever it is they have an inclination to do. Nothing more is being asked of them.

Islamophobia and Islamoignorance, May 25, 2022 by William Kilpatrick Leave a Comment

… William Kilpatrick is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His books include Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West (Ignatius Press), What Catholics Need to Know About Islam (Sophia Press), and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Jihad.

When the word “Islamophobia” first became current many years ago, I was sure it wouldn’t catch on. People, I thought, would quickly see that it was a gimmick—an obvious attempt to capitalize on “homophobia.” It was also an obvious attempt to stigmatize discussion and/or criticism of Islam as hateful.

I was wrong. The word has entered our language, and it doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon. And even though it is still obviously a ploy to prevent any honest discussion of Islam, very few are willing to admit as much in public.

The word “Islamophobia” is a propaganda tool. It’s used to beat people into submission or silence. Most recently, it was used to influence GOP voters to vote against Kathy Barnette in the Pennsylvania primary election for Senate. One of her chief opponents, Dr. Mehmet Oz (who is Muslim) accused her of having made “Islamophobic” remarks in the past, but so also did conservative icons, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.

Hannity and Levin could have expressed their sentiments differently. They could, for instance, have said something to the effect that Barnette made unwarranted remarks about Muslims or Islam. But by choosing to use “Islamophobic,” they gave the word a legitimacy it does not deserve.

The word itself is an insult of sorts since it suggests that one suffers from a mental disorder. A “phobia” is an anxiety disorder which is defined as an irrational or excessive fear of certain objects or situations. The most common phobias are fear of spiders, fear of snakes, fear of heights, fear of closed spaces, and fear of open spaces. Proximity to these objects or situations can cause intense and even paralyzing fear.

The key word is “irrational.” Although some snakes and spiders are poisonous, most are not. The top floor of a skyscraper might be intimidating for some, but it is no more dangerous than the bottom floor. When President Roosevelt said “The only thing we have to fear is…fear itself,” he might have been speaking about phobias. In his 1933 inaugural address, he spoke of “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed effort to convert retreat into advance.”

On the other hand, Roosevelt did not deny the hardships of the Depression years. He did not pretend that all was roses and clover. And, as I recall, he did not repeat the sentiment during the dark days of World War II when it was obvious to all that there were real dangers to fear.

So, the question about those who are critical of Islam is this: do they suffer from irrational fears or are their fears reasonable?

In recent years, we have gotten into the habit of assuming that most people are decent and trustworthy. “The more you understand others,” we like to say, “the less you fear them.” But that’s not always the case. In the early days of Nazi rule in Germany, many Jews gave the Nazis the benefit of the doubt. But those Jews who really understood what Nazism was all about left while they still could. They survived and most of the others did not.

But we wouldn’t refer to the distrustful survivors as “Naziphobes.” Why? Because their fear of Nazism was perfectly rational. Indeed, many people throughout the world came to fear Nazism and even to hate it.

Coincidentally, Barnette made the same point in one of her “controversial past statements”:

We discriminated against Hitler’s Nazi Germany view of the world, right?…we rejected it. We rejected Stalin’s view of the world, right? Because that’s a particular view of the world we don’t agree with.

In short, it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize and even reject an ideology if that ideology poses a serious threat to one’s society. It would be irrational to pretend that Nazism was a force for peace and justice.

One might argue that Islam is a religion, not an ideology, and should therefore be off-limits to criticism. The question of whether Islam is an ideology or a religion or a mixture of both is a contested one. But even if we assume for the sake of argument that Islam is purely a religion, it is, nevertheless, a system of ideas and beliefs, and thus subject to criticism.

We don’t hesitate to criticize religions of the past. For example, no one now thinks that the Aztec practice of human sacrifice was justified because it was part of their religion. Why should present-day religions be exempt from criticism? Well, they’re not, of course. Catholics are currently coming in for a lot of criticism because of the Church’s pro-life stance. And over the last two decades, Catholic leaders have been severely criticized for covering up priestly sex abuse.

Muslims, however, contend that Islam comes in for much more criticism than other religions, and many in the media agree with them on this point. But is that really the case? When was the last time you came across negative coverage of Islam on television or in newspapers? When was the last time you saw a comedy skit making fun of Islamic beliefs?

I’m guessing it’s been a long time. That’s because the anti-Islamophobia campaign has been quite effective in stifling criticism of Islam. It’s also been effective in quelling almost any discussion of Islam that isn’t favorable to Islam.

Last week, a young white man killed 10 people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. You’ll be hearing about that crime for a long time to come. But do you remember that about a year ago, a young Muslim man shot and killed 10 people in a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado? Probably not. The media memory-holed that story almost as soon as it was discovered that the killer was a radicalized Muslim.

The real danger in America is not Islamophobia but Islamoignorance. News stories that put Islam in a bad light are regularly buried. What’s worse is that Americans know very little about the Islamic belief system. One would think that after 9/11, Americans would have been anxious to find out all they could about Islamic history, culture, and religion. Instead, a fog of political correctness descended on the subject. Educators, politicians, and media personalities joined forces to create a multicultural myth around Islam. All cultures, they assured us, are essentially alike, and Islam is no different. The Islamic religion, they maintained, is just like any other belief system, and they insisted, moreover, that 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam.

It was this whitewashed version of Islam that became the accepted narrative. Public criticism of Islam was and is the rare exception, not the rule.

About 12 years after 9/11, I gave a talk about Islam to a national Catholic student organization that has a reputation for being well-informed about their faith. But they weren’t well-informed about Islam. Before the talk, I administered a short quiz on the basics of Islam. As I recall, more than half failed the exam. Yet the questions were quite simple. For example, “The word ‘Islam’ means ______,” followed by four choices. The majority of these well-educated grads thought that “Islam” means “peace” and that “jihad” is a “spiritual struggle,” and so on.

If college grads don’t know the basics about Islam, it’s a good bet they aren’t familiar with the less well-known and more troubling aspects of Islam: that the prescribed penalty for leaving Islam is death, that criticism of Mohammad can result in imprisonment for those living in Islamic countries, that criticism of Islam is also a crime in many European countries.

Because they were ignorant of many aspects of Islamic faith and culture, Europeans are now desperately trying to cope with issues for which they were ill-prepared, such as widespread polygamy, child marriage, female genital mutilation, and blasphemy laws that severely limit free speech.

Although most Europeans were initially welcoming toward Muslim immigration, polls show that a majority now want a halt to Muslim migration. Europeans are learning the hard way that Islamic culture is quite different from their own. Some say that they are learning the lesson too late: that within a few decades Islam will be the dominant force in Europe.

The problems mentioned above are only a small sampling of the many important facts about Islam that people ought to know, but generally don’t. I haven’t mentioned Islam’s historical record of conquest, or its present-day accumulation of power (how many know that the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Cooperation is the largest voting bloc in the UN?). What Americans don’t know about Islam could fill volumes.

The situation in the U.S. vis-à-vis Islam is not as critical as the situation in Europe. There is still time to learn the lessons that Europeans have been so slow to learn. Those lessons, however, are quite different from the ones we are now being taught. It is not the fabricated dangers of Islamophobia we should fear, but the real dangers of Islamoignorance—ignorance of the realities of Islam.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/islamophobia-and-islamoignorance-william-kilpatrick/

A Hostile Takeover of the Catholic Church?, Does the Synod have a sinister purpose?

October 17, 2022 by William Kilpatrick

In a recent interview on EWTN’s The World Over, Cardinal Gerhard Muller, the former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, warned that the Synod on Synodality was engaged in a “hostile takeover of the Church.”

If you’re not sure what “synodality “means, don’t feel bad, very few know what the Synod of Synodality is all about. As best as I can tell, it’s a multi-year process consisting of numerous meetings and consultations which will culminate in the Synod of Bishops next year in Rome. It has to do with “walking together,” listening to one another, and gathering opinions from the faithful and not-so-faithful.

They haven’t gotten around yet to asking my opinion, so I’ll offer it here in case they never do.

My opinion? I agree with Cardinal Muller that the Synod is intended to be a “hostile takeover” of the Church. The first giveaway is the vagueness of it all. It’s about “listening to the Holy Spirit,” “listening to everybody,” and “not excluding anyone.” It’s the kind of language an HR department uses when it wants employees to think that their opinions are highly valued.

When the Synodal leaders do get more explicit, it only reinforces Cardinal Muller’s charge of a takeover. In speaking of divorced and remarried Catholics receiving Communion, or same-sex couples receiving a blessing, Cardinal Mario Grech, the Secretary General of the Synod of Bishops, said they should be listened to because “this [might] be an opportunity for the Church to listen to the Holy Spirit speaking through them also.”

Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, the Realtor General for the Synod (i.e., the man in charge) seems to already know what the Holy Spirit will say about these issues. Earlier this year, he said that the Church’s teaching on homosexuality is “no longer correct.” “It’s about time,” he said, “we did a fundamental revision of the doctrine here.”

Of course, if the Synod can revise one doctrine, what’s to prevent it from revising a few more? Or even two dozen? There are all sorts of pressure groups within the Church who favor changes to doctrine—changes that will make them feel more comfortable, but may cause enormous damage to the Church.

To get an idea of how the synodal way will likely proceed, it’s useful to consider an example of another “hostile takeover.”

About five years ago, I wrote a piece about the “hijacking” of the Catholic-Muslim dialogue in America by Islamists. Perhaps “hijacking” was too strong a word. “Influence operation” might have been more accurate. In any event, the initial goal of the dialogue—to learn more about each other’s religion—shifted, in the words of one Catholic official, to “advocacy” for Muslims.

Thus, Anthony Cirelli, associate director of the USCCB’s Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs told Catholic News Service that “there is an “urgency to engage more in a kind of advocacy and policy in support of the Muslim community.” He added that U.S. bishops are “coming to stand with our Muslim colleagues…in trying to change the negative narrative surrounding Muslims in our popular media.”

In short, instead of Catholics learning more about Islam, the aim of the dialogues shifted to Catholics helping Muslims to improve their image. The “urgency” was not to understand Islam, but to “stand with our Muslim colleagues…” Against what? Against a supposed tsunami of “Islamophobia.”

But there was very little evidence of any real Islamophobia. Much of the data on anti-Muslim attacks was based on false reports. Moreover, Muslim-on-Muslim attacks (which are relatively frequent) were counted as instances of “Islamophobia.” And the media, far from pushing a false negative narrative about Islam, had instead painted a false positive image—namely, that Islam is a “religion of peace” that has “nothing to do with violence.” If the media was guilty of anything, it was guilty of covering up the massive scale of global Islamic terror attacks.

Nevertheless, Catholic leaders in America and elsewhere fell for the “Islamophobia” scam, and they threw money and resources into the anti-Islamophobia campaign—a campaign that was already well-funded by Arab Gulf States.

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that Catholic dialoguers had been innocent victims. For most of them, the “Islamophobia” narrative was the narrative that they wanted to believe. It fit nicely into the Catholic narrative about Islam that had developed in the wake of Vatican II—namely, that Islam was a fellow Abrahamic religion that shared much in common with Catholicism, especially a desire for peace.

This focus on shared beliefs provided two main benefits to the Catholic dialogue participants. First, it allowed them to avoid the unpleasant business of discussing major theological differences with Muslims and, second, it gave them an opportunity to signal their virtues.

If Muslims could be portrayed as victims of Islamophobia, then Catholic prelates who “stand with our Muslim colleagues” could portray themselves as protectors of the victims—older brothers who would defend their younger siblings from the bullies of the world. As Bishop (now Cardinal) Robert Mc Elroy said at one USCCB dialogue event, Catholics need to take up the fight against “the scourge of anti-Islamic prejudice.”

However, as anyone who is acquainted with recent history ought to know, Islam is hardly a defenseless younger brother. The number of Muslims in the world dwarfs the number of Catholics. And Islam is far more a victimizer than a victim. Anyone who doubts this ought to consult Raymond Ibrahim’s detailed record of the persecution of non-Muslims by Muslims in recent years. Yet, despite this abundant evidence, Catholic bishops seem more interested in protecting Muslims from imaginary crimes than in protecting Christians from real crimes at the hands of Muslims.

I bring up the “hijacking” of the Catholic-Muslim dialogue because what Cardinal Muller calls the “hostile takeover” of the Church by the Synod of Synodality seems to be proceeding by the same method. The Synod organizers are not interested in debating the merits of new movements within the Church, but rather of presenting various dissenting groups as “victims” who deserve justice.

In other words, the aim is not to discuss the pros and cons of women priests or same-sex unions or the LGBT agenda but to convince ordinary Catholics that they must stand with their “persecuted” and “powerless” younger brothers and sisters in Christ.

So just as bishops have come to believe that they have a mission to protect Muslims from “Islamophobes,” they also believe they have a mission to protect dissenting minorities in the Church from “homophobes,” “transphobes,” and every other type of “progressivephobe” (a word which in all probability will soon be added to the lexicon). Moreover, the 24/7 focus on the needs and grievances of these supposed victims deflects attention away from the harm they do to Church and society

As in the case of Muslim “victims” of Islamophobia, these “excluded “groups are presented as beleaguered and powerless minorities when, in fact, they wield considerable power. As is well-known, Pope Francis has stacked the College of Cardinals with progressive prelates who share his own agenda. Moreover, many, if not most, of the top positions in the Vatican are currently held by pro-LGBT and pro-communion-for-everyone cardinals and bishops. It is they, not Cardinal Muller and the handful of other conservative prelates, who are calling the shots.

In this regard, traditional Catholics need to learn a lesson from current political realities in America. In the wake of Joe Biden’s presidential victory, it turned out that the deep state bureaucracy and the Democratic machine had amassed far more power and control over American society than any, except for a few, had imagined. The “hijacking” of America was much further advanced than most had supposed.

Likewise, traditional Catholics should not be surprised when they discover that the “deep Church” of the dissenters wields far more power than they had thought possible.

They also should not be surprised to discover that the supposed “victims” of the Church’s “exclusivity” will turn out to be victimizers. The main victim of the “hostile takeover” will be the Church itself and the gospel revelation entrusted to it. The next set of victims will be all those Christians who have come to rely on that revelation for hope and guidance.

A recent piece in the National Catholic Register puts the matter bluntly: “Some faithful German Catholics are already talking, not of the synodal way, but the suicidal way.”

According to some Catholic officials, the word “synod” derives from two Greek words meaning “to walk together” or “walking together.” Unless it makes a sharp course correction, the current Synod on Synodality may be more accurately described as “walking together over the cliff.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-hostile-takeover-of-the-catholic-church/

The Radical Inclusive Church, Irish of a traditional bent need not apply.

November 9, 2022 by William Kilpatrick

Most practicing Catholics will have noticed by now that the Church under Francis has changed. And many are not happy with the changes.

“Polygamous marriage?” One wonders what’s included in “etc.” In any event, this new inclusive model is being suggested as the model the Church should embrace. But don’t assume that the plan is to help the “marginalized” (i.e., adulterers, LGBTQ etc.) to conform their lives to Church teaching. Rather, the plan is to conform the Church’s teachings to the “lived experience” of the marginalized.

Most Catholics don’t keep up with recent issues of L’Osservatore Romano or with the latest Vatican document. So, relatively few are aware of the radical nature of the changes being proposed in the synods. Perhaps the most prominent synodal theme is “inclusion,” and the promise that no one is excluded. But when the Synod fathers say “no one is excluded,” it should give us pause. Do they also mean “no sins are excluded?” Do they mean that no repentance is required? The numerous synod documents suggest that what progressive Catholics want is an inclusive community without rules—a place where each follows his or her own inner guidance.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds discriminatory to me. And frightening as well. Thank Heaven for purgatory.

Quite obviously, the words of Jesus are an obstacle to the synodal plans of Hollerich, Francis, and others in the hierarchy. Quite obviously, Jesus will have to go if the synodalists hope to achieve their goals. Expect him to gradually disappear from the new radically inclusive Church. Either that, or expect him to be transformed to better fit the jolly theology of Cardinal Hollerich who tells us that “living in the footsteps of Christ means living well, it means enjoying life.”

The priest, Fr. Sean Sheehy, said he was simply stating what was in the Gospel. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Fr. Murray says the Synod is “self-destructive.” But it’s only self-destructive if the intention of the Synod is to preserve and strengthen the Church founded by Christ and revealed to Christians in the gospels. If the intention of the Synod fathers (along with Pope Francis) is to replace the Church of Christ with a humanistic/modernist Church with all the supernatural elements purged out, then the Synod has thus far been a roaring success for them—if not for the rest of us.

It’s possible that the Synod organizers are genuinely well-intentioned. Perhaps they think that by downplaying immorality and by convincing Catholics to “take it easy on yourself,” Catholics will shake-off their burden of guilt and lead happier, healthier lives. But previous attempts at relaxing the rules while ignoring the supernatural dimension of life—such as the Sexual Revolution—eventually resulted in making life harder not easier.

Should the Synod fathers succeed in convincing Catholics that sin is not sinful, the destructive, addictive, and family-wrecking effects of sin will still be at work—both in individual lives and throughout society. The Synod leaders may succeed in bringing about radical change in the Church, but because of their naivete about human nature, the changes will inexorably lead to widespread unhappiness and despair.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-radical-inclusive-church/

How the World Went Woke, The academic roots of today’s social upheavals.

November 14, 2022 by Bruce Bawer

Note: My book The Victims’ Revolution was first published by Broadside Books, a HarperCollins imprint, in 2012. In February, Post Hill Press will issue the paperback edition, which includes a new foreword by Douglas Murray and a new introduction by me. Here is the latter.

Disney, which brought you Bambi and the Little Mermaid, creates a female Muslim superhero named “Ms. Marvel” and a robot who asks a transgender man for advice on female sanitary product. Larry Elder, a black GOP candidate for governor of California, is smeared by the Los Angeles Times as “the black face of white supremacy” for preaching a message essentially identical to that of Martin Luther King, Jr. When an 80-year-old woman complains to her local YMCA about a biological male lurking in the women’s locker room, she’s banned for being a transphobe. The Hachette publishing group cancels the memoirs of our most acclaimed living movie director because of discredited, decades-old molestation charges. The Biden Administration sets down strict vaccination rules for those entering the country with legitimate visas, but exempts people crossing the southern border illegally.

All this insanity didn’t come out of nowhere. Since the 1960s, as I describe in Chapter One of this book, the study of literature and other fields in the humanities and social sciences has been gradually transformed into something very different – and extremely distressing. An increasing focus on group identity – and on the strict division of humankind into oppressor groups and victim groups – fed the growth of such disciplines as Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Chicano Studies. I’m not alone in calling them “grievance studies,” and in considering them to be inimical to the serious study of human beings as complex individuals with a variety of virtues and defects.

This book is about those “grievance studies.” In preparing it, I read voluminously in these fields, attended conferences, sat in on classes, and performed interviews. I knew that I was taking on not just the entire American higher-education establishment but also the elite media that are its ideological allies. So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when the New York Times Book Review ran – on its front page, no less – a loftily dismissive account of my book by a purported education expert who, calling it “out of date,” claimed that identity studies represented “a shrinking sector of academic life” and that his “younger colleagues” at a certain Ivy League college were “returning to close readings of literary classics.”

Those familiar with – and critical of – the actual situation in academia recognized this as a lie, and praised The Victims’ Revolution as truth-telling, plain and simple. Calling it “indispensable,” Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, theorized that the Times had judged the book “too important to ignore,” hence the dishonest review. George Leef of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal agreed. “It’s revealing,” Leef wrote, “that the NYT editor realized that the book couldn’t be ignored, but had to be panned.” And Hoover Institution fellow Bruce Thornton called the Times review “a textbook illustration of how the academic establishment goes after anyone who exposes the corruption of a reactionary, failing institution.”

As it turned out, The Victims’ Revolution wasn’t only right on the money about what was going on at America’s most respected colleges. It was prescient. I don’t know of any other book from 2012 that so much as hinted at what the world of 2022 might look like. But to read The Victims’ Revolution is to see pretty much every crazy social development of the last decade in chrysalis. “The future of America,” I wrote in its last sentence, “hangs in the balance.” My point was that what was being taught widely on America’s campuses wouldn’t be confined to those campuses for long.

Unfortunately, I was right. The ideological toxins at the heart of identity studies escaped the academy like a virus escaping a Chinese lab. The general culture was infected. And suddenly the world was turned upside down.

* * *

To borrow from the current lexicon, the world went woke. It happened because college graduates who’d been marinated in identity studies introduced the cockamamie concepts they’d picked up in class into their new workplaces and communities.

Women’s Studies? The #metoo movement, which started by bringing down serial sex offenders like Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, was soon ruining the lives of men who’d done next to nothing. The vengeful hysteria of many #metoo activists stunned more than a few observers – but wouldn’t have surprised anyone who’d read in my Women’s Studies chapter about students being fed grotesquely exaggerated rape statistics and being taught to regard men (Western men, anyway) as predatory and violent by nature.

Black Studies? The year 2018 saw the publication of White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, who argued that all whites are eternally guilty of race hatred and all blacks their eternal victims. The following year saw the publication of How to Be an Antiracist by Black Studies graduate Ibram X. Kendi and the introduction of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which attributes the American founding to racism. And 2020 saw the death of a criminal named George Floyd, who became an internationally famous martyr and casus belli. Suddenly, Critical Race Theory was everywhere, including in primary-school syllabi. For most Americans it was all new and baffling; but every bit of it was all straight out of Black Studies, which had been founded by race hustlers skilled at guilt-tripping whites – precisely the talent to which both DiAngelo and Kendi owe their success.

Chicano Studies? Donald Trump’s call for a border wall was cheered by American workers who’d seen no wage growth for decades owing to job competition from illegals – but it sparked outrage not only among these illegals’ employers but also among the innumerable college graduates who’d learned in Chicano Studies classrooms to view the U.S. as an an illegal occupier of “Aztlán” – that is, the regions once been ruled by Spain and then by Mexico – and to regard Chicanos, therefore, as America’s dispossessed, having far more of a right to live in the U.S. than any native-born citizen.

Queer Studies? When The Victims’ Revolution came out, gender dysphoria was an exceedingly rare phenomenon. A few years later, claims of transgender identity had become a trendy lifestyle choice and the supposed right of people to be recognized as members of the opposite sex (or of any one of dozens of other gender-identity categories) had become sacred.

This and other recent unsettling developments are natural outgrowths of queer theory, which, as can be seen in my chapter on Queer Studies, is far less concerned with studying sexual orientation than with celebrating gender.

There are other obvious continuities between identity studies and current social trends. The poisonous racism of Whiteness Studies, which a decade ago was almost entirely confined to the classroom, has gone mainstream, with white children being inculcated with self-hatred and black children being trained to see themselves as victims. (Robin DiAngelo, note well, is a leading Whiteness Studies figure.) Similarly, the reality series and fashion-magazine covers that celebrate the morbidly obese can be traced directly to the medically perilous claims of Fat Studies.

In short, the book I published in 2012 about certain unsettling tendencies on American campuses is no longer just about the academy. It’s a guidebook to – and a genealogy of – the most noxious of the strange new ideas that now suffuse our mainstream culture. How lamentable it is that conservatives, moderates, and classical liberals weren’t able to keep these ideas from taking over the colleges and universities; and how alarming it is that the sensible majority of citizens weren’t able to keep them from conquering society at large, where they are now reshaping our culture and rewiring our children’s minds.

As Fifth Circuit Judge James C. Ho said in a September 2022 speech announcing that he would no longer be hiring law clerks from Yale – where these lethal new ideas are particularly prevalent – “Our whole country has become a campus.”

* * *

The question before us today, of course, is what to do now that these toxins have escaped into the mainstream.

To begin with, it’s important to recognize that this isn’t a minor or fleeting development that you or I can hope to ignore, keeping our heads down until the freak parade passes by. These changes have already begun to take root and won’t get uprooted unless the sane and hitherto silent majority of the public resolves to give them the heave-ho.

And how to do that? For one thing, speak up every time you interact with somebody whom you suspect of being a party to this madness. What does your family doctor think, for instance, about giving hormone blockers to children? Ask her. If you don’t like her answer, challenge her on it. And if she stands her ground, tell her you consider her to have betrayed her Hippocratic oath, and then walk away and find another doctor.

Remember that the main reason why so many teachers, school psychologists, endocrinologists, surgeons, and other professionals are going along with trans ideology is not that they believe it: it’s that they’re taking what is, at the moment, the easy route, because virtually all the pressure they’re feeling is coming from the woke side. They need to know that there are more people who oppose this insanity than who support it, and that those opponents can exert pressure, too – and that if they want to preserve their livelihoods, they’d better do what’s right.

Some of the most inspiring videos I’ve seen in the last couple of years have been of school-board meetings at which parents have eloquently challenged the woke politics that schools have been shoving down their children’s throats. If every parent could be that involved, the problems we face would be very quickly and dramatically diminished. Be one of those parents. If you don’t like what your school-board members are saying, vote them off. If necessary, run for school board yourself. If these pedagogical practices aren’t nipped in the bud when your kids are still small, it may already be too late to scrub the nonsense out of their brains.

In fact, you could do worse than to get informed, and get involved, in electoral politics at all levels, from City Council on up. It’s not enough to vote for candidates who don’t parrot the woke agenda. Find candidates who are gutsy enough to oppose it passionately. And if such candidates don’t seem to be on offer in your neck of the woods, run yourself – or talk a like-minded friend into running. This is our country, and the only way to take it back from the woke brigade is to do so one elective office at a time.

Of course, institutions of higher education continue to be Ground Zero for all this drivel. Are you an alumnus of a college that’s gone woke? Do you nonetheless still send that college a check every year? If so, why? Have you ever picked up the phone to complain to the college president, or written a letter to the board of trustees, to criticize the ideological direction that your alma mater has taken? Have you threatened to cut it off financially?

Another crucial point about colleges. However appealing it might seem in the very short term, don’t let your babies grow up to be Yalies. It astonishes me that friends of mine who know very well – and deplore – what’s going on at Ivy League colleges nonetheless brag excitedly about their kids being admitted to these places. Are you one of those parents? If so, ask yourself what’s more important to you: the actual education your kid will get, or the purported cachet of a Harvard or Stanford diploma?

Don’t listen to me. Listen to Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion (and a Yale graduate), who wrote recently: “The educational establishment in its highest reaches is today a cesspool, contaminating the society it had been, at great expense, created to nurture. Still, parents are willing to climb naked over broken bottles and impoverish themselves to send their children to this cauldron of iniquity.” Or listen to Isaac Morehouse of the Institute for Humane Studies, who’s turned off not just by the Ivies but by almost all American colleges: “I can’t count the number of parents I’ve talked with who recognize that college is one of the worst places to learn and degrees are one of the weakest ways to try to get hired, but who still needlessly bite the bullet and send their kid anyway” – even though a college diploma nowadays “only proves that you were willing to follow the crowd.”

Keep in mind that a generation or so from now, either wokeism will have been vanquished, in which case diplomas handed out by the most ideologically corroded universities and colleges in the 2010s and 20s will be sources not of pride but of embarrassment, or it will have followed its natural course of development, resulting in something not unlike the Reign of Terror – in which case your highly credentialed but hopelessly brainwashed kid will eventually be the next sucker in line for the gallows.

If you do want your kids to get a real education, find a state college that still hasn’t gone fully woke. Or try Hillsdale College, whose 2022 commencement speaker was Jordan Peterson. Then there’s St. John’s College in Maryland, famous for its Great Books program. Another promising new option is the University of Austin, which was founded by Bari Weiss – a liberal lesbian who left the editorial board of the New York Times because she wasn’t woke enough for her fellow editors – and which is dedicated to “the fearless pursuit of truth.”

As you may know, even many units of the U.S. military have succumbed to woke ideology. So if your kid wants to join the service, do some research. Will they be using boot camp to build your kid’s character, self-discipline, strength, and resilience, or to produce a woke warrior? If the latter, advise your kid against taking that route – and write letters to the appropriate military officials explaining exactly why they’ll be denied the opportunity to indoctrinate your offspring.

And what about you? Has your employer ever brought in some consultant to subject you and your colleagues to a lecture about systematic racism or sexism? Did you feel that you had no choice other than to bite your tongue and get through it? Well, if it happens again, discuss it beforehand with your colleagues. Almost certainly, most of them feel pretty much the way you do. There’s strength in numbers. Often employers arrange these lectures in the first place because one or two employees pushed them to do it. If the majority of employees refuse to participate in such nonsense, it’ll stop.

Do you feel insufficiently skilled to take on woke thinking? Let me assure you that you’re not. These people are mediocrities, and their ideas are absurd. But if you want to sharpen your thoughts – well, for one thing, read this book carefully. Take notes. Then move on to books like Gad Saad’s The Parasitic Mind (2020), Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage (2020), Helen Joyce’s Trans (2021), Vivek Ramaswamyi’s Woke, Inc. (2021), Andy Ngo’s Unmasked (2021), Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds (2019) and The War on the West (2022), and James Lindsay’s Race Marxism (2022). Valuable interviews with and presentations by all of these writers can be found online, as can podcasts, such as Triggernometry, The Saad Truth, and The Rubin Report, on which woke ideology is discussed from sensible perspectives.

And what about the legacy media? If you read The New York Times every day, or watch CNN regularly, you can easily be deluded into thinking that you’re absolutely alone in your opposition to woke ideology. Put that thought out of your mind. It may seem impossible – it may sound like an outrageous exaggeration – but it’s true: most of the nation’s legacy media organs – including the Times, CNN, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, the network news divisions, and the Associated Press – are now little more than propaganda organs, marching in near-lockstep to push the same woke narrative. Fortunately, their role as go-to places for reliable news and fact-based commentary is increasingly being supplanted by a raft of first-rate online media. And allow me to underscore that this isn’t about left vs. right; it’s about ideology vs. truth. By the way, if I use the term legacy media (or, sometimes, corporate media) instead of mainstream media, it’s because those media are yesterday’s news. Every day they diminish in power and importance. Every day they’re less and less mainstream.

And that’s an important point to keep in mind. Even though woke ideology may seem at times to have conquered Western civilization, its hold on our institutions is still relatively fragile, and its supporters, however loud and aggressive, make up a small minority. To be sure, small minorities can transform a society. As late as February 1917, the Bolsheviks numbered only about 20,000; eight months later, they pulled off the October Revolution, subjecting the largest country in the world to a Communist tyranny that would not collapse until 72 years later. In the 1932 German elections, the Nazis won only 37.3% of the vote – but that was enough to give them an iron grip on the nation that was not loosened until the Allies marched in 13 years later.

But there’s only one way for a small minority of totalitarian ideologues to win in the long term – and that’s if the reasonable, common-sense majority allows itself to be scared into silence. So if this woke madness is affecting your life in any way, that means that there are people in your life who are pushing it. And the only response to that is to push back – and push back hard.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-the-world-went-woke/

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