Tikvah Fund Pagans: The Right Wing Free Speech Grift Cancel Culture
David Shasha
Tikvah Fund Pagans: The Right Wing Free Speech Grift Cancel Culture
I just praised New York Times Right Wing columnist David French for his attack on MAGA, while his Neo-Con allies David Brooks and Pamela Paul were going full Reagan:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/LpoR-fuok44
Sadly, I must note that Mr. French was back to his Rufo ways in a New York minute:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/opinion/free-speech-campus-universities-promising-news.html
The complete article follows this note.
Here is how the Free Speech Grift works in real time:
Left and right tend to challenge free speech on campus in different ways. Left-leaning students have led shout-downs and disrupted events, while right-leaning legislators have passed or considered laws stifling the expression of controversial ideas about race and gender. Both sides have proved capable of mobilizing online outrage to punish professors who offend their constituencies.
But if you are expecting to see DEATH SENTENCE and his book bans in the article, good luck – the Florida Torquemada is nowhere to be found:
https://pen.org/florida-book-bans-not-a-hoax/
The following article from The Palm Beach Post shows us that not only is DEATH SENTENCE banning books and creating chaos in Florida schools and libraries, he is also working to stifle criticism of his anti-democratic actions:
Though, of course, you will find him in Catholic Fascist Ross Douthat’s parallel Sunday column, “Why DeSantis Needs to Run This Year”:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/opinion/desantis-2024.html
The complete article follows this note.
It is an interesting article, given that DEATH SENTENCE is now trying to do the Dobbs dance, as the Anti-Abortion extremism is not playing well politically:
https://apnews.com/article/abortion-republican-desantis-politics-1280a04a2ba1011c3be8300cf7be4908
So, Douthat’s article comes right in the nick of time to protect the book-banner!
The Catholics still love Torquemada.
French’s Cancel Culture Rufo article, as we have seen, does the usual Right Wing Fascist both-sides-ism – and even has the nerve to reference Frederick Douglass in favor of Trumpscum “Judge” Kyle Duncan!
I have already posted two items on the reprehensible Duncan:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/VZJ9KiNDWz0/m/t2HA_JGOAAAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/eEG40E3Xfuw/m/pUM635E6BAAJ
Free Speech means to protest Fascism in order to protect our Constitutional Democracy, as it being shredded by the Trumpscum judiciary.
Which means Pornographer Thomas:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/4Hudx2E_C7M
Anti-Abortion extremist Matthew Kacsmaryk:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/XvsS61EpRA0
And of course, their patron Leonard Leo, King of the Dark Money:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/qnw25YmUn-I/m/1ORRqsXsBAAJ
As we remember Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, we should remember all the Jewish groups rightly demanding protest and obstinately refusing Silence:
https://www.yadvashem.org/podcast/and-the-world-remained-silent-part-i.html
Indeed, those who attack the Trumpscum Fascist judiciary are to be commended, as those who fight against those who would deny human rights to Americans.
As I was writing this note, I received the following Cancel Culture attack on the NYT by the Jewish Fascists of Agudath Israel:
The complete article follows this note.
Lastly, I would also like to highlight the new Liel Leibovitz article from – where else? – Commentary magazine, which does an excellent Troll the Libs Trumpscum Fascism:
https://www.commentary.org/articles/liel-leibovitz/paganism-afflicts-america/
The complete article follows this note.
In his usual Trumpscum fashion, Leibovitz goes from attacking LGBTQ rights, praising fellow traveler J.K. Rowling, to citing Neo-Con enabler Jonathan Haidt, then attacking Climate Change activists, the CDC and COVID lockdown measures, and elevating Augustine of Hippo as a real Tikvah Jews for Jesus hero.
And we even get a reference to Tacitus.
Boy, is Leibovitz a Jewish Genius!
It is a classic piece of Zalman Bernstein derangement that forgets the way The Tikvah Fund has aggressively embraced Hellenism and Pagan culture:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mPuTFFszLO7fbsK6MOu510pAY5YtJxQf/edit
And Rebbitzin Bengelsdorf’s union with Pagan Hellenizer Douglas Murray:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/4xeG7WR_Hgc/m/RialrwbpAAAJ
Indeed, it is all about Roman Power!
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/gSKqlE4_ZJw/m/kuhJI49aAQAJ
Leibovitz is All In with the Trumpscum Fascism, a movement rooted in the most debased aspects of Paganism, as we saw with the Trump Golden Calf idolatry:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/2/26/22302887/trump-cpac-2021-republican-gold-statue
But do not ever expect Leibovitz, or any of the Tikvah MISHPOCHEH, to attack the Zombie Orange Pig and the Alt-Right cult.
Paganism, I suppose, is in the eye of the beholder!
In the end, it is ultimately how vigilant we are about fighting for the values of Religious Humanism and Tikkun Olam, as Liberalism is being eroded and trampled on by the Right Wing fanatics.
And it is that crowd which demands Cancel Culture and the outrages of Pagan Capitalism, and the concomitant screwing over of the poor and weak in the name of Freedom.
David Shasha
The Moral Center Is Fighting Back on Elite College Campuses
By: David French
William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” has been called the most plundered poem in the English language, and it’s easy to see why. The poem, written in the immediate aftermath of World War I and during the height of the Russian Civil War, vividly captures the feeling that events are sliding out of control. Three lines in particular resonate in troubled times. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” writes Yeats. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
When I read these words, dramatic, violent events come first to mind. The Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6 is a prime example of the “passionate intensity” of one of the worst movements in American life. With each mass shooting, I think, “Things fall apart.”
But there are other ways in which the center finds itself under siege. The extremist attack on free speech (from right and left) degrades American democracy, and that attack is especially acute on college campuses, whether it comes from angry left-wing students who shout down conservative speakers, vengeful right-wing legislators who pass laws restricting free expression in the academy or the online activism that often demands that universities discipline scholars for engaging in provocative (but constitutionally protected) speech.
I’ve never interpreted the center in Yeats’s poem to mean something like a politically moderate middle but rather a moral foundation, the ideological core of a nation and its people. The United States is certainly a nation built through raw power, as so many nations are, but at its best, it’s also built around a series of ideas, a declaration that its center requires, at a bare minimum, the promises of the Bill of Rights, including freedom of speech.
This isn’t a column about doom, however, but rather about hope. There is no question that the worst are still “full of passionate intensity,” and we do live in a precarious place in our national life. But there are also some signs that the center is fighting back on some of the most elite campuses in the country, that some of the “best” still do, in fact, possess the necessary convictions. I litigated free speech issues on college campuses for almost 20 years, and I’ve never seen such widespread, institutional academic support for free expression.
Let’s take Stanford University, for example. In the days and weeks since law students shouted down and disrupted a speech by a federal judge, the center has taken a stand. The dean of Stanford Law School, Jenny Martinez, penned a powerful, 10-page memorandum that mandated a half-day of instruction on free speech and legal norms, reaffirmed the school’s dedication to the Stanford Statement on Academic Freedom and declared: “Unless we recognize that student members of the Federalist Society and other conservatives have the same right to express their views free of coercion, we cannot live up to this commitment nor can we claim that we are fostering an inclusive environment for all students.”
Then there’s Cornell University. In March, the school’s undergraduate student assembly unanimously approved a resolution calling for trigger warnings in syllabuses to warn students of “graphic traumatic content” in course content. Cornell’s president, Martha E. Pollack, promptly vetoed it.
In a joint letter with Cornell’s provost, Michael I. Kotlikoff, she explained that the trigger warning policy “would violate our faculty’s fundamental right to determine what and how to teach, preventing them from adding, throughout the semester, any content that any student might find upsetting.” Moreover, the letter said, the policy would “have a chilling effect on faculty, who would naturally fear censure lest they bring a discussion spontaneously into new and challenging territory, or fail to accurately anticipate students’ reaction to a topic or idea.”
The faculty at Harvard University is also stepping up. In an opinion essay in The Boston Globe, Harvard’s Steven Pinker and Bertha Madras announced the creation of the Council on Academic Freedom, a coalition of 50 faculty members and several other Harvard employees “devoted to free inquiry, intellectual diversity and civil discourse.”
On Monday, Vanderbilt University will announce the expansion of the American branch of the Future of Free Speech Project, an initiative run by the Danish think tank Justitia, which will include an international focus on free expression. I spoke to the project’s executive director, Jacob Mchangama, and he emphasized that American support for free speech can have a global impact in combating tyranny. He pointed to a piece he wrote in Foreign Policy noting that American legal standards have influenced foreign courts, specifically by enhancing press freedom. In our conversation, he made a point that’s critical in contemporary debates. “Free speech and equality,” he said, “are mutually reinforcing, not mutually exclusive.”
That’s four elite American academic institutions that have doubled down on free speech in just one month.
And we cannot forget the University of Chicago. Since 2014, it’s arguably been the single most influential academic institution in the United States supporting academic freedom. Its statement on free speech declares the “university’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the university community to be offensive, unwise, immoral or wrongheaded.” A version of the Chicago statement has been adopted by almost 100 colleges, universities and state university systems, including Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University and the North Carolina and Wisconsin state university systems.
I share this not to declare that the battle for free speech on campus is won. Far from it. The Stanford statement was in response to a student disruption. This month, the former N.C.A.A. swimmer Riley Gaines alleged she was assaulted after speaking at San Francisco State University in opposition to transgender women competing in women’s sports. There’s video evidence that Gaines was chased through the halls by angry protesters and that her event was disrupted by chanting, foot-stomping protests.
And disruptions like those we witnessed at Stanford and San Francisco State have occurred alongside hundreds of recent attempts to fire or punish scholars for speech that’s protected by the First Amendment or basic principles of academic freedom.
It’s important to emphasize that the fight over free speech on campus is not left versus right. Attempts to suppress ideas and stifle speech come from both ends of the political spectrum. The faculty and administrators at Stanford, Cornell, Harvard and Chicago who are making their stands aren’t a collection of conservatives taking on woke college students. Instead, they represent the moral and legal center of the American academy taking on the extremes.
Left and right tend to challenge free speech on campus in different ways. Left-leaning students have led shout-downs and disrupted events, while right-leaning legislators have passed or considered laws stifling the expression of controversial ideas about race and gender. Both sides have proved capable of mobilizing online outrage to punish professors who offend their constituencies.
The First Amendment cannot be tied to one side of our partisan divide. It’s not a Republican value or a Democratic value but rather an American value, and it’s a value that’s particularly important in the academy.
In 1957, during a previous wave of censorship aimed at eliminating “subversive” people from public employment, the Supreme Court issued its most ringing declaration of support for academic freedom: “Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die.”
This language might seem dramatic, but it’s true. Free speech is indispensable to the American idea. It protects us from tyranny more thoroughly and effectively than any other constitutional right. As Frederick Douglass proclaimed after his own brush with mob censorship, “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.”
America’s most elite academic institutions can, in fact, demonstrate conviction. The “passionate intensity” of the extremes remains, but the center can hold. Douglass was correct. Free speech is the “dread of tyrants,” and sustaining that freedom — against left-wing protests and right-wing lawmakers — will preserve America’s democratic experiment. There is no path to American equality or justice absent the freedom of speech.
From The New York Times, April 16, 2023
Why DeSantis Needs to Run This Year
By: Ross Douthat
The resurgence of Donald Trump in the 2024 primary polls, the unsurprising evidence that his supporters will stand by him through a prosecution, and the tentativeness of Ron DeSantis’s pre-campaign have combined to create a buzz that maybe DeSantis shouldn’t run at all. It’s been whispered by nervous donors, shouted by Trump’s supporters and lately raised by pundits of the left and right.
Thus the liberal Bill Scher, writing in The Washington Monthly, argues that Trump looks too strong, that there isn’t a clear-enough constituency for DeSantis’s promise of Trumpism without the florid drama, and that if DeSantis runs and fails, he’s more likely to end up “viciously humiliated,” like Trump’s 2016 rivals, than to set himself up as the next in line for 2028.
Then from the right, writing for The Spectator, Daniel McCarthy channels Niccolò Machiavelli to argue that while DeSantis probably will run, he would be wiser to choose a more dogged, long-term path instead — emphasizing “virtu” rather than chasing Fortune, to use Machiavelli’s language. In 2024 Trump might poison the prospects of any G.O.P. candidate who beats him, while Joe Biden could be a relatively potent incumbent. But if the Florida governor continues to build a record of conservative accomplishment in his home state, “2028 would offer a well-prepared DeSantis a clear shot.”
I think they’re both wrong, and that if DeSantis has presidential ambitions he simply has to run right now, notwithstanding all of the obstacles that they identify. My reasoning depends both on the “Fortune” that McCarthy invokes and on an argument that Scher’s piece nods to while rejecting: the idea that presidential candidates are more likely to miss their moment — as Chris Christie did when he passed on running in 2012, as Mario Cuomo did for his entire career — than they are to run too early and suffer a career-ending rebuke.
It’s true that fortune doesn’t always favor the bold. (As McCarthy notes, that phrase originates in Virgil’s “Aeneid,” where it’s uttered by an Italian warlord just before he gets killed.) But the key to the don’t-miss-your-moment argument is that when it comes to something as difficult as gaining the presidency, mostly fortune doesn’t favor anybody. Every would-be president, no matter their virtues as a politician, is inevitably a hostage to events, depending on unusual synchronicities to open a path to the White House.
A great many successful political careers never have that path open at all. A minority have it open in the narrowest way, where you can imagine threading needles and rolling lucky sixes all the way to the White House. Only a tiny number are confronted with a situation where they seem to have a strong chance, not just a long-shot possibility, before they even announce their candidacy.
That’s where DeSantis sits right now. The political betting site PredictIt places his odds of being president in 2024, expressed as a share price, at 23 cents, slightly below Trump and well below Biden, but far above everybody else. Those odds, representing a roughly 20 percent chance at the White House, sound about right to me. If you look at national polls since Trump’s indictment, DeSantis’s support has dipped only slightly; if you look at polls of early primary states he’s clearly within striking distance, Trump has a floor of support but also a lot of voters who aren’t eager to rally to him (his indictment may have solidified support, but it didn’t make his numbers soar) and DeSantis has not yet even begun to campaign. He’s in a much better position than any of Trump’s rivals ever were in 2016, and you could argue that he starts out closer to the nomination than any Republican candidate did in 2008 or 2012.
Not to run now is to throw this proximity away, in the hopes of starting out even closer four years hence. But DeSantis’s current position is itself a creation of unusual political good fortune. Yes, he’s been skillful, but that skill wouldn’t have gotten him here without events beyond anyone’s control — the Covid-19 pandemic, the woke revolution in liberal institutions, the split between Mike Pence and Trump after Jan. 6, the strength of the Florida economy, and more.
It’s obviously possible to imagine a future where fortune continues to favor DeSantis and he goes into 2028 as the prohibitive favorite. But time and chance are cruel, and there are many more paths where events conspire against him, and he wakes up in 2027 staring at PredictIt odds of 5 percent instead.
If he were at 5 percent odds right now — if Trump were leading him 75-20 in New Hampshire and Iowa rather than roughly 40-30, or if Biden’s approval ratings stood at 70 percent instead of 43 percent — I would buy the argument for waiting.
But DeSantis today is a man already graced by Fortune. And even if the goddess doesn’t always favor boldness, she takes a stern view of those to whom favor is extended who then refuse the gift.
From The New York Times, April 16, 2023
Orthodox Jewish Group Urges Pulitzer Board to Withhold Coveted Journalism Honor from NY Times Anti-Hasidic Articles
KnowUs, a new, coordinated movement to counter misleading, negative portrayals of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, penned an open letter to the Board of the Pulitzer Prize urging it to refrain from granting the award to The New York Times for its deeply offensive and flawed series of articles attacking these thriving communities. Prize winners are scheduled to be announced in May.
Since September 2022, KnowUs has chronicled a Times crusade of one-sided, inaccurate articles mischaracterizing Orthodox Jews. The activist reporting is widely rumored to have set its sights on the journalistic award.
KnowUs mailed the letter to each of the 18 Pulitzer Board members on Monday morning. The 30-page letter includes 70 endnotes, and not only catalogs the offensive tropes irresponsibly amplified by the Times in an environment of rising, dangerous antisemitism, but also demonstrates that the Times knowingly employed sources with extensive conflicts of interest, something it failed to disclose; falsely claimed credit for real-world impacts; presented misleading data; misrepresented basic educational funding elements; and repeatedly engaged in unwarranted negative associations.
The Pulitzer Prize guidelines contain sparse official requirements for attaining its coveted award. It merely states that “entries must adhere to the highest journalistic principles… that exemplifies the longstanding ethics of the journalistic profession. These include a commitment to honesty with both readers and the subjects of our work. The best journalism is transparent about its sources and methods. The rigor and completeness of sourcing is an important factor in judging the quality of submissions.”
KnowUs, which was formed under the auspices of Agudath Israel of America following broad outrage at the articles, undertook this project because it felt the critical need for the Pulitzer Prize Board to review, in an informed manner, the articles’ adherence to “the highest journalistic principles” the Pulitzer Board so values.
KnowUs writes: “We believe that awarding these articles, in any way, will be seen not only as a tacit approval and furtherance of offensive, antisemitic tropes, but would diminish the standing of the Pulitzer Prize by celebrating articles of demonstrably poor journalistic integrity.”
KnowUs is not alone in its critical scrutiny of The New York Times reporting. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), among many others, have decried the coverage.
Any legitimate issues the paper sought to raise or explore were buried by these, and other, serious breaches of journalistic ethics, and by the articles’ creation of bigoted caricatures of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, further othering an already marginalized community.
To read the open letter, please click here.
From Agudath Israel, April 10, 2023
The Return of Paganism
By: Liel Leibovitz
When a 28-year-old person identifying as transgender shot up a Tennessee school in March, killing three children and three adults, the usual grim afterlife of tragedy was underlined by an odd note: One by one, media outlets rushed to apologize for “misgendering” the shooter, who, they explained, had been born female but had recently begun identifying as male.
How to make sense of such a statement? And what to do when a newspaper headline tells you about a “trans woman left sobbing in JFK Airport after TSA agent hit her testicles”? Appealing to reason hardly helps, as J.K. Rowling and others learned the hard way when trying to ask simple questions such as how one might define sex if not according to the chromosomes rooted in literally every cell of our bodies. Instead, anyone wishing to find his way through the thicket of American public discourse these days should start by embracing one simple and terrifying idea: The barbarians are at the gates.
I mean this almost literally. Everywhere you turn these days, pagans are afoot, busily hacking away at the Christian and Jewish foundations of American life and replacing them with a cosmology that would have been absolutely coherent to followers of, say, Voltumna, the Etruscan earth god, or to those who worshipped the Celt tribal protector Toutatis.
If you think the above paragraph is a little bit overblown, consider the numbers. In 1990, scholars from Trinity College set out to learn just how many of their fellow Americans practiced some form of pagan religion. The numbers were unsurprisingly small: about 8,000, or enough to pack your average Journey reunion concert. But the researchers asked again in 2008, and this time, 340,000 Americans said yes to paganism. A decade later, the Pew survey posed the same question, and, if it is to believed, there are now about 1.5 million Americans professing an array of pagan persuasions, from Wicca to the Viking lore, making paganism one of the nation’s fastest-growing persuasions. So fast-growing, in fact, that my colleague Maggie Phillips recently reported in Tablet magazine about the thriving, and officially recognized, pagan faith groups within the U.S. Army. “What’s important now,” one of its leaders, Sergeant Drake Sholar, told Phillips, “is showing religious respect and understanding across the board as Norse Pagans, or Heathens, return to a distinguishable religious practice.”
Amen, selah. But as we respect and understand those who profess paganism outright and sincerely, we should worry about those—many more of them—who go by other names and profess different affinities yet whose worldview is consistently, coherently, and crushingly pagan. There are millions more heathens who would shudder to be called such, yet who offer a vision of a perfectly pagan American future. It behooves us, then, to reckon with the paganism in our midst.
And that, it turns out, is not an easy task, mainly because “pagan” is somewhat of a loaded term. If you have an appetite for good origin stories, you might as well place the birth of the notion with St. Augustine in the fifth century C.E. Pressed to explain to his readers why Rome had been sacked by the Visigoths so shortly after embracing Christianity, Augustine wrote his famous treatise, The City of God. Its full title? De civitate Dei contra paganos, or The City of God Against the Pagans. The latter, he opined elsewhere, had delivered unto mankind nothing but a “hissing cauldron of lusts” that have so spoiled our souls and driven us so far from God that the downfall was imminent. The moral stain of Augustine’s description stuck, and it often colors both our historical vision and the observation that “pagan” describes a dizzying array of peoples and beliefs—from the Slavic tribes who believed that the sky god Perun had beget all other deities that control nature to the Germanic peoples and their complex mythology of giants, dwarves, elves, and dragons, familiar to us from Wagner’s operas.
Leaving permutations and particularities to the pedants, though, it’s quite possible to observe paganism as one sweeping vista and find common themes and threads that haunt us still. Let us begin: Just what do pagans believe?
The answer, while wonderfully complex, may be distilled to the following principle: Nothing is true, everything is permitted. These were the last words, allegedly, of Hasan i-Sabbah—the ninth-century Arab warlord whose group, the Hash’shashin, gave us the English word “assassins.” And his dictum perfectly captures the soul of paganism, illuminated by the idea that no fixed system of belief or set of solid convictions ought to constrain us as we stumble our way through life.
To the pagans, change is the only real constant. Just consider the heathens of old: Believing, as they did, in the radical duality of body and spirit, they enjoyed watching their gods breathe the latter into a wide array of incarnations. To please himself or trick his followers, a god could become a swan or a stone, manifest himself as a river or adopt whatever shape suited his schemes. Ovid, the greatest of Pagan poets, captured this logic perfectly when he began his Metamorphoses with a simple declaration of his intentions: In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas corpora, or, “I am about to speak of forms changing into new entities.” This was not understood as fickle behavior by the gods’ cheerful followers. To the contrary. With no dogma to uphold, the sole job of deities was simply to be themselves. And the more solipsistic a deity chose to be, the better. Nothing, after all, radiates inimitable individuality more than marching to the beat of your own drum and no other.
If that’s your understanding of the gods, or whatever you’d like to call the hidden forces that arrange the known universe, how should you behave? Again, lacking a prescribed credo passed down from generation to generation, pagans began answering this question by casting off the tyranny of fixity. The gods are precarious and ever-changing? Let us follow their example! We should sanctify each sharp transformation in our behaviors and beliefs not as collective madness but as a sign of the wisdom of growth.
Still, change alone does not a belief system make, and pagans, despite differences galore, unite by providing similar answers to three seminal questions: what to do about strangers, how to think about nature, and how to please the gods.
First, the question of difference. What to do with those who are not like us? Easy enough, argued the pagans: Observe any group of humans, no matter how small, and you’ll see it striving to differentiate itself from the group next door. The nomadic Bedouins expressed this idea neatly in an idiom: me and my brothers against our cousins, us and our cousins against our neighbors. Tell children at summer camp that a color war’s afoot, and pretty soon Team Red is likely to develop healthy disdain for Team Blue. Rather than seek to transcend this basic instinct, the pagans sanctified it: It wasn’t for nothing that the Slavs, for example, named their top god Perun, an Indo-European word meaning to strike and splinter, and portrayed him as swinging a mighty axe and engaging in ongoing battles with his fellow divines.
The same spirit, alas, is alive and well among our newest pagans: For them, tribal warfare isn’t just a way of life—it’s a system of divination, with power and privilege waxing and waning to reveal who is pure and worthy and who evil and benighted.
Consider, for example, intersectionality, the academic doctrine that is as close as contemporary paganism gets to a formalized gospel. Its ideas, like most of academia’s excretions these days, aren’t worth studying in any real depth, but the key concept is simple. We each have several components to our identity—sometimes referred to, in the flowery language of assistant professors, as “vectors of oppression and privilege”—and their interplay determines the discrimination we suffer or the violence we may be tempted to wield against others. This means that each introspection is nothing more than an invitation to a fight with those who have more power, real or imagined, than you.
This is what gave Lori Lightfoot, Chicago’s grotesquely inept mayor, the temerity to avoid blaming her recent defeat on, say, the fact that she had called on her city to defund the police, then watched crime soar—with more than 800 murders in 2021 alone, the highest rate in nearly 30 years—and then begged the federal government to help her out of the predictable mess she created. No, she had been defeated for being “a black woman.” For a pagan, tribal identity isn’t the beginning of the conversation; it’s the end, an affiliation beyond which lies nothing but battle for dominance.
Still, merely affirming their own and rejecting others and spending their days trying to decipher who belongs to which group is hardly the sort of theological engine that can power faith for long. Next, then, the pagans turn their lonely eyes toward nature, asking themselves how to understand the creations in their midst. Here, too, a relatively straight forward answer presents itself immediately: If the boundaries between the human world, the natural world, and the divine world aren’t clearly defined—if Zeus, say, can transform himself into a beautiful white bull so that he may rape Princess Europa—then nature should be revered as the repository of divine revelation and rebirth. The Roman historian Tacitus, for example, tells us that the ancient Germanic tribes often worshipped in groves rather than temples. It’s easy to figure out why: Observe the oak in winter, and it stands, barren and leafless, a pillar of death. Visit it some weeks later, when spring is in full bloom, and you see it flourish again. The oak, like the gods, is change embodied, and therefore deserving of worship.
Scan the modern pagan cosmology, and you’ll see much that would have made those ancient Germanic cultists nod in recognition. Consider the eco-protestor who, last year, stormed the court just before Roger Federer’s last career tennis match and set his own arms on fire to protest climate change. Or the Brit who, shortly thereafter, poured human feces on a statue to call attention to environmental causes. Or the lunatics from Just Stop Oil, a radical environmentalist group, who slung soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Just like the Scandinavian pagans who offered precious gifts to appease the Askafroa, the spirit of the Ash Tree, a vengeful entity that demanded sacrifice lest it wreak havoc, many of today’s green activists seem much more intent on appeasing an angry god than solving a scientific conundrum. And the scientists themselves aren’t helping much either: In 2018, for example, one prominent Columbia University climate scientist took to Scientific American to write that she refuses to debate…climate science. “Once you put established facts about the world up for argument, you’ve already lost,” she wrote, capturing the opposite, more or less, of the scientific method, which is little more than a constant and unfettered argument about established facts, new evidence, and the possible correlations or contradictions therein.
But if pagans have always found the questions of how to treat others and how to live in nature relatively uncomplicated, the third question—that of how to please the gods—is infinitely more shaded. What do the gods want? Study pagan mythologies and you’ll emerge none the wiser, in part because the gods, like their human worshippers, seem to consist of little more than appetites and caprices. But while they may not be understood, they have to be appeased—and this left classical pagans with a question of a more practical order, namely what might they possess that the all-powerful deities could possibly want.
Gold, silver, and other dear things were frequently the answer, but rarely exclusively: Being the creators of the natural world, after all, the gods could hardly care that much about things that they can easily forge themselves, ex nihilo, by virtue of their divine will. And so the pagans scanned the horizon for something truly precious and exquisite, something whose sacrifice would be an unmistakable sign of devotion. And, across time and across cultures, they alighted on exactly the same thing: kids.
At once the embodiment of innocence and the object of our deepest and most sincere emotions, children, the most vulnerable of mortals, were the ultimate offering to the gods—proof that the pagan believer was so certain in his belief that he would offer up his own offspring to show the gods the strength of his faith, appeasing them and avoiding potential punishment. So prevalent among the heathens of antiquity was the practice of child sacrifice that the Torah issued a strongly worded prohibition against it, in Leviticus 18:21: “Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molek.”
Child sacrifice, alas, is alive and well in America these days, too. We may not, like the Vikings, toss our young into wells as offerings to the heavens, but turn over every rock in our craggy contemporary political landscape and you’ll find some pagan policy offering up the well-being of children to the gods of virtue. In March 2020, to choose one stinging example, Sweden bucked the global trend and responded to Covid-19 by keeping schools open. The results of this experiment were available shortly thereafter: Zero dead kids, almost zero kids sick, and very little, if any, risk to teachers. By January 2021, a study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention affirmed that Covid rates in schools that had reopened were 37 percent lower than the rates in the same communities at large. The Biden administration largely ignored this evidence; it took some liberal cities such as New York a full 18 months to reopen their schools.
The results: dramatic upticks in juvenile mental-health crises, sharp declines in basic academic proficiency and just about every other metric of human misery visited on our children. A rational society, to say nothing about one guided by traditional values, would have curbed this suffering long before it blossomed so terribly; the pagans instead composed a fanciful narrative of what constitutes righteous behavior and then forced it on their children, whose pain was then explained away as a necessary evil if one wanted the forces of science to vanquish the darkness and cleanse the soul. When Anthony Fauci said, “I am the science,” he couldn’t have sounded more like the mighty Perun had he worn a cape and a crown.
Maybe you’re a kinder person than I, one more inclined than I am to give fellow human beings the benefit of the doubt. Pandemics are stressful times, and even the most well-meaning public health officials may be forgiven their missteps when the entire world is crackling. No sooner had the wrath of Covid subsided, though, than our pagan witch doctors jumped in with another way to sacrifice the well-being of the young on the altar of ideological convictions. According to a recent Reuters report, for example, 15,172 Americans ages six to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2017; by 2021, that number nearly tripled. How to explain this stratospheric rise? Have doctors gotten better at detecting this particular medical condition? Has the science simply improved?
A 2018 study by Lisa Littman, assistant professor of behavioral sciences at Brown, addressed this very question. Teens, Dr. Littman concluded after studying 256 subjects, were highly susceptible to what she called “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” When spending time, particularly online, with groups of people who favorably discussed the idea of being transgender, teens were much more likely to become gender dysphoric, a phenomenon Dr. Littman described as “peer contagion.”
The paper was accepted by PLOS One, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but after transgender activists protested, the article was removed, and a Brown dean explained that censorship had been necessary because Dr. Littman’s findings “invalidate the perspectives” of the transgender community. Meanwhile, the Reuters report also confirmed that the past four years have seen a doubling of the rates of both hormone therapy and puberty blockers prescribed to teens. This uptick, coupled with school policies that now actively seek to exclude parents from conversations about their child’s gender identity, has led lawmakers in 27 states to draft 100 bills to halt so-called gender-reaffirming care.
Meanwhile, the intellectual-industrial complex continues to push its pagan convictions. The University of Pennsylvania recently announced an anonymous $2 million gift that would allow it to hire Alok Vaid-Menon, a self-identified “non-binary transfeminine person,” as a scholar in residence. Vaid-Menon is the author of Beyond the Gender Binary, a children’s book encouraging young readers to understand that “man” and “woman” are but two of an infinity of gender-related options.
But it’s not merely the hotly debated issues in the center of our cultural skirmishes that point to the pagan propensity for child sacrifice; it’s the pagan style of politics itself. A study published in 2022 and led by Columbia epidemiologist Dr. Catherine Gimbrone examined the longitudinal data collected by the Monitoring the Future project, which asks high-school students a wide array of questions about attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Dr. Gimbrone’s findings were alarming: Before 2012, there had been no differences between boys and girls, and none between self-identified conservatives and liberals, when it came to mental health. Then, depression scores began to soar for liberal girls and rise considerably for liberal boys. Conservative children registered a far less significant spike. Put crudely, the obsessive and relentless pagan emphasis on gender, ideology, and other divisions was literally driving kids crazy.
Writing about the roles schools played in destabilizing the mental well-being of children, NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt and journalist Greg Lukianoff argued that our academic institutions were practicing “reverse CBT.” While Cognitive Behavioral Therapy teaches its adherents to catch catastrophic thoughts before they turn into full-fledged panics, schools were now teaching children to see the world in black and white, perceive opposing viewpoints as harmful, and surrender to their worst fears.
What, then, are we to do when confronted with so much lunacy? Three urgent steps come to mind.
First, let us realize that all of the above-mentioned permutations are far from random. They’re not aberrations to be gawked at separately. They’re part of a cohesive belief system, paganism, that is gripping those who have rejected monotheistic ethics and mores. This recognition is particularly important because the pagans themselves vehemently deny it. They print stickers with slogans like “believe the science,” not realizing that they have just admitted, however tacitly, that theirs isn’t a logical and rational product of the Enlightenment but a religious system like any other, complete with its quirks and its zealotry. Only when it is understood as such can it be confronted; only if we deny the pagans the right to don a white lab coat or a tie and claim impartiality can we provide a sober accounting of their actions.
Second, we must understand that the good, old-fashioned faith traditions that the pagans so often reject as oppressive, patriarchal, racist, misogynistic, or any number of other trendy terms have seen it all before. Judaism has been facing down pagans for millennia now and answering each of their deathly dicta with sound, humanistic alternatives. Here’s a taste: We were all, the Bible tells us, created in God’s image, and even though God elected one people to preserve and protect his Torah, the arc of history bends toward togetherness. God’s house, Isaiah wisely reports, “shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.” In other words, while people are different, and while their differences are meaningful and instrumental in shaping their unique experiences, they also form the bridge that could one day lead to a common house of prayer. The biblical story begins and ends with a universalist message; its meaty middle, the story of the chosen people and their travails, is a crucial reminder that cultivating our own tribal beliefs and rituals is, ultimately, an exercise in self-awareness without which we can never truly empathize with anyone anywhere. Know thyself so you may know others—as credos go, this one is unimprovable and so much more compassionate than the pagan call for perpetual warfare.
Which leads us to step three, the most urgent yet most difficult one: Save your children by shielding them from an ideology that perpetually seeks ways to harm them; root them instead in traditions that nurture them and give them dignity, hope, and a future. At the very least, this means refusing to enlist your children in political crusades, no matter how just they may appear. Resist hagiographical books about activists and rabble-rousers. Realize that taking your kids to a march or a demonstration doesn’t make them better citizens—as if civic duty can be learned by osmosis—but merely ladens them with the anxiety of ideology, a burden no child should ever have to bear. If you can, rescue them from pagan schools as well, or, at least, teach them that there are better options.
When pagans waving the banner of diversity, equity, and inclusion insist that we judge others by the color of their skin, not the content of their character, tell your children that the Hebrew prophets offered a much more transformational vision of racial justice, one that inspired everyone from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. When pagans calling themselves environmentalists tell your children to worship the earth, introduce them to the Talmud for a superior attitude that is as mindful of production as it is of conservation. When pagans quarrel and cancel, teach your children the value of building real communities, and of the tried-and-true blueprints for real human happiness given to us by our faith traditions.
If we do that, we may very well discover that history, God bless, always repeats itself: The heathens ululate and then fold, subdued by the demonstrable advantages of better faith traditions. We’re long overdue for another cycle of pagan defeat; let’s do our best to bring it on soonest.
From Commentary magazine, May 2023