Sick of the woke folk? Well, I sure am, but I’m sick of the unwoke too. This is a bit of an unbalanced rant, going off in several different directions at once, occasioned by three pieces by three ill-assorted unconventional (I guess) conservatives, Ross Douthat’s Where Liberal Power Lies, Rod Dreher’s commentary on Ross’s piece, Douthat on the Pink Police State, and semi-outlier Andrew Sullivan’s Why Is Wokeness Winning?. Ross is a Catholic (a convert), while Andrew is an Irish Catholic who ignores the Church’s prohibition on homosexual behavior, and Rod is a former Catholic, a convert who left the Church out of disgust for its massive and continuing concealment of rampant sexual corruption among the priesthood, migrating to the Eastern Orthodox Church as a result. All three have a marked tendency to decry the lack of “transcendence” in today’s secular society.
The holy three bring together a grab bag of secular horror stories that make one—or, at least, me—very happy to be living in good old Washington, DC rather than among the woke folks on the West Coast or in the trendy Northeast.1 It doesn’t hurt that I’m also retired, and immune to the pressures of the workplace, not to mention that hellhole of modern iniquity, oppression, thought control, and all-around horror known as (shudder!) the Academy! Still, I would say that the “trigger” for much of this concern, including Ross’s piece, was stunningly unimpressive, the “censorship” by Twitter and Facebook of the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop (also known as the New York Post’s non-story about Hunter Biden’s laptop).
“This is what totalitarianism looks like in our century,” bellowed the Post’s Op-Ed editor, Sohrab Ahma [also a Catholic convert]. “Not men in darkened cells driving screws under the fingernails of dissidents, but Silicon Valley dweebs removing from vast swaths of the internet a damaging exposé on their preferred presidential candidate.”
The idea that a story, published in a major newspaper, appearing on that paper’s website, easily linked worldwide by millions, was, in any meaningful sense of the word “censored” (though of course both Twitter and Facebook covered themselves in righteous banality by refusing to accept it) is to my mind, utterly absurd. The whole episode (again, to my mind) could only engender bellowing in a spirit like Mr. Ahmari’s, congenitally predisposed to bellowing. One can only wonder what Mr. Ahmari’s reaction would be were he to actually have screws driven under his fingernails, the sort of treatment, of course, that Ahmari’s hero, Donald Trump has frequently endorsed.
Well, if one excepts Mr. Ahmari’s bellowing, my transcendent trio, as I say, have a point—indeed, have multiples. But one has to ask, what do the transcendents themselves have to offer? One of the most outspoken critics of today’s “militant secularists” is our Catholic attorney general, William Barr. And no attorney general in our history has so abused his authority as William Barr, a few of whose outrages I have limned here.
If you want more, and you should, a 252-page report from the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania and the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Report on the Department of Justice and the Rule of Law Under the Tenure of Attorney General William Barr will give you an earful. And if that isn’t enough, an organization known as the Department of Justice Alumni have been keeping track of what Barr is doing to the administration of justice in the United States—which is to say, he is wrecking it, with his constant pre-judging of investigations, his unscrupulous and false statements about the “dangers” of absentee ballots, and his interference in the criminal cases of Trump cronies Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. Some “transcendence”, eh, guys?
But let’s cut to the chase, the Catholic Church itself. There is much talk these days of “QAnon” and its bizarre fantasies of huge pedophile rings organized by liberal types such as Hillary Clinton. But guess what? The Catholic Church was a huge pedophile ring, discussed by Sullivan last year in his post The Corruption of the Vatican’s Gay Elite Has Been Exposed. If any government bureaucracy was responsible for one-hundredth of the corruption displayed by the Church, there would be convictions by dozen, and the bureaucracy itself would have been abolished.
When Pope Benedict XVI “retired” in 2013, it was treated as a non-event. The first pope to resign in, you know, seven hundred years?2 That’s not a story? Of course, it was a huge story, a story that very few people are interested in discussing. There is remarkably little on the web: this one item “Why Did Pope Benedict XVI Resign?”, by Tim Ott, giving an outline of the multiple sexual and financial scandals coming to light during Benedict’s tenure, was about all I could find.3 There have, of course, been endless stories about continued revelations of corruption and coverup within the church, but their relation to Benedict’s departure somehow seems to continue as a topic forbidden for discussion. If conservatives are so concerned about censorship, why don’t they check this one out?
1. Why is DC markedly “different”? DC is still about 50% black. Blacks, while strongly “liberal” on economic issues, are much less so on social ones. Furthermore, since they are, you know, black, they don’t feel the need to engage in the frenzied virtue-signaling so much in vogue among privileged liberal white kids, who desperately seek to “confess” their privileges in order to hold onto them. “We don’t deserve to be in charge because we’re better than you, we deserve to be in charge because we know how terrible we are! But we do deserve to be in charge!”
2. Gregory XII was forced to resign in 1415 in the culmination of a power struggle that saw three men laying claim to St. Peter’s chair, the era of the “Western Schism”. Ultimately, all three were pushed out, to be replaced by Martin V. The other two popes, Benedict XIII and John XXIII, were deposed. All three men had more or less equal claim to power, but apparently the pretense was that Gregory was the “true pope”. Earlier, in 1294, Nicholas IV made what a disappointed Dante called “il gran rifiuto”, withdrawing from power and allowing Boniface VIII to take over. Nicholas was a timid, “saintly” man, 80 years old, chosen as a reformer but entirely unsuited for power, and entirely unsuited to contend with a ruthless man like Benedetto Caetani, who helped push him out and became Boniface VIII. As pope, Boniface set in motion the events that led to Dante’s exile from Florence.
3. The New Yorker has a piece, “What Pope Benedict Knew About Abuse in the Catholic Church, but I can’t read it because I don’t have a subscription.
