A few pieces of information I gleaned from conversations over Christmas with out-of-towners. Make of this what you will.

A cousin who lives in the Blue Ridge mountains came down for the first time since Covid struck. He works in a gun dealership. He said that they have been doing a land office business since the George Floyd spasm of violence. He said it might surprise me to know that about 40 percent of their customers are women, and they have also had an unprecedented number of gay men from the posh Atlanta Buckhead neighborhood buying weaponry from them. The stories the salesmen get from people living down in Atlanta are pretty scary, he said. Many people have lost faith in the authorities to protect them.

One of his customers is a woman who relocated to their rural enclave from Chicago with her retiree husband. The Chicago woman told my cousin that the reality on the ground in Chicago, regarding crime, is worse than what the media are reporting. She and her husband were glad to put the city behind them.

I asked my cousin if he detected any sense of “white flight” in his customers. He laughed, and said that’s 100 percent what it is: middle-class and upper-middle class people either escaping black criminal violence in the cities, or arming themselves against it. But nobody can speak openly about any of this, he said, only in whispers and knowing glances.

At church on Christmas Day, we had some Orthodox people who were back in the city for Christmas. I sat with some of them at a table during coffee hour after the liturgy. One of them is a college student who said that he is troubled about the state of the world, and is thinking of going into politics so he can do something about it. At the far end of the table sat a man I judged to be in his late twenties. He told the younger man that he has worked for years in politics, for the GOP, and he would not advise the younger man to follow in his footsteps. He explained that he went into politics right out of college as a College Republican type who was excited about what he could accomplish in politics. Now, though, he is changing his career path, and is about to change his voter registration to Independent.

I told him that I almost always vote GOP, without any enthusiasm, and that I had changed my registration to Independent in 2008, out of disgust with the Bush administration and the party’s failures on the war and economics. I asked him what prompted his disillusionment. He said that the lack of vision among anyone in the party finally wore him down. He said that none of the elected officials and candidates with whom he worked had any substantive vision of the good. Trump stumbled onto some good points, but was too incompetent and flawed to do much with the opportunity history handed him. And, said the young man, Trump managed to accelerate wokeness without fighting it with any effectiveness, leaving conservatives worse off than before.

He concluded by saying that in all his time working in the GOP establishment, he met not one official who wanted power to do anything, other than pass tax cuts. My interlocutor thinks the Democrats and their policies are bad for the country, but they at least want to accomplish things. He used Orwell’s terms in describing our two parties: both parties are essentially one entity, but the GOP is the “Outer Party,” and the Democrats are the “Inner Party.” That is, the Democrats are the ones who determine the direction of the government, while the Republicans exist only to slow down what the Democrats want, and ultimately to ratify it.

The young man said it was disconcerting to be in one’s twenties and working at a high level in a state party, and to discover that one, and one’s young colleagues, had more knowledge and passion for politics than party members who actually hold office. He described most of them as being men and women who enjoy holding power, but who don’t really have any idea what to do with it. He said that he has lost faith in politics, and has decided to use his skills for something else.

We had another young visitor who asked me if I was the guy who wrote The Benedict Option. Yes, I said. We talked for a bit, and I told her about my newer book, Live Not By Lies. When I explained the premise, she told me about a college friend whose parents escaped from Cuba, and who now say all the time that they can’t believe they came to America, and now are living through the rise of the same totalitarian left-wing mentality.

We also had in our church on Christmas an academic whose Slavic accent betrayed Soviet bloc origins. As we talked, I brought up the fall of the USSR on this day thirty years ago. The professor’s family back home in the Warsaw Pact did not celebrate on that day, because they were too afraid that showing joy at the collapse of Communism would land them in prison. I brought up the premise of Live Not By Lies, and asked the professor about it. The academic said that conditions in universities now are punishing, because one doesn’t know what one can say without risking ideological punishment. The atmosphere is stifling and fearful, and one fears to speak the truth. The academic’s spouse overheard us talking, and said, “Just wait till the bridges start falling down. Then we will finally understand what this insanity is costing us.”

UPDATE: Oh yeah, this:

The horror in Waukesha happened over a month ago and yet there is almost zero national coverage of it today. No pieces profiling the victims, nothing on how the community is recovering. Nothing on the motivations of the suspect. It’s like it has been memory-holed.

— Daniel Darling (@dandarling) December 27, 2021

Mass murder of white people carried out by a black man with a public record of race hatred. There is not yet any solid evidence that he drove his car into that predominantly white crowd out of racial motivation — but there is also no evidence whatsoever that our media, which are so vigilant to suss out racial animus when the perpetrator is white, actually want to find out the answer here. So much journalism today is not reporting the news, but managing the narrative.