Back in 2017, I wrote the following in The Benedict Option:

David Gushee, a well-known Evangelical ethicist who holds an aggressively progressive stance on gay issues, published a column in 2016 noting that the middle ground is fast disappearing on the question of whether discrimination against gays and lesbians for religious reasons should be tolerated.

“Neutrality is not an option,” he wrote. “Neither is polite half-acceptance. Nor is avoiding the subject. Hide as you might, the issue will come and find you.”

Public school teachers, college professors, doctors, and lawyers will all face tremendous pressure to capitulate to this ideology as a condition of employment. So will psychologists, social workers, and all in the helping professions; and of course, florists, photographers, bakers, and all businesses that are subject to public accommodation laws.

Christian students and their parents must take this into careful consideration when deciding on a field of study in college and professional school. A nationally prominent physician who is also a devout Christian tells me he discourages his children from following in his footsteps. Doctors now and in the near future will be dealing with issues related to sex, sexuality, and gender identity but also to abortion and euthanasia. “Patient autonomy” and nondiscrimination are the principles that trump all conscience considerations, and physicians are expected to fall in line.

“If they make compliance a matter of licensure, there will be nowhere to hide,” said this physician. “And then what do you do if you’re three hundred thousand dollars in debt from medical school, and have a family with three kids and a sick parent? Tough call, because there aren’t too many parishes or church communities who would jump in and help.”
In past eras, religious minorities found themselves locked out of certain professions. In medieval times, for example, anti-Semitic bigotry in Europe prevented Jews from participating in many trades and professions, shunting them off to do marginal work that Christians did not want to do. Jews entered banking, for example, because usury was considered sinful by medieval Christianity and was kept off-limits to Christians.

Similarly, orthodox Christians in the emerging era will need to adapt to an era of hostility. Blacklisting will be real.

Five years later, in some professions, it’s worse than I anticipated back then — and the ideology has gone beyond sexuality to take in race. I wrote The Benedict Option to help my fellow orthodox Christians navigate the brave new world, but the destruction of the professions by ideology affects all honest men and women, of any faith and no faith, who aspire to work within them. Is there a place left for honest people there?

Take a look at two pieces of news from today, the first from the world of professional journalism, the second from the psychology profession.

Working with Project Veritas, a whistleblower at the CBS affiliate station in San Antonio exposes the shocking “diversity training” going on at stations like his across the country, owned by the same parent company. Watch this 7:16 video. In it, you will hear diversity trainers caught on video (apparently these trainings were done by Zoom) instructing journalists not to be objective:

These aren’t hidden camera clips from Project Veritas, but clips that were livestreamed to employees taking diversity training from Zoom. One of the trainers is from the Poynter Institute, which, I can tell you from my days in newspapering, is a big deal in US journalism culture. Poynter provides lots of professional training for journalists.

As I’ve said here before, I spoke earlier this year to a working journalist in one of America’s biggest newsrooms, who told me that the younger people there seem to believe that journalists have no obligation to be fair, or to seek out a side of the story that challenges the progressive narrative. The rising generation in that newsroom believes … well, they believe what the diversity trainers in that video above want them to believe. This is the death of professional journalism. Note well that the whistleblower talks about how in the training, the diversocrats had all the participants divide people into demographic categories, and rank them in matter of importance (e.g., race, age). Brett Mauser, the whistleblower, says that this ideology trains people to look at others in terms of group identity — and he correctly compares this to totalitarianism.

Brett Mauser, from inside a broadcast newsroom, directly validates the message of Live Not By Lies. And he brought the receipts to Project Veritas. See them for yourself. You should be wondering whether your go-to media sources are doing the same kind of internal training, to educate the actual journalistic values out of them.

I expect that the usual liberal suspects who comment here will try to discredit this reporting by griping about James O’Keefe and Project Veritas. But more reasonable people ought to watch it to see what the diversity trainers were saying to reporters — and what one anchorman says about how he doesn’t care if people trust him. The seeds for all of this were very much there when I left the mainstream media in 2010, but now it seems to have blossomed fully. If you are young, think hard about this before you train for a career in journalism. You might well find yourself stuck in a print or broadcast outlet that won’t let you do your job, only do propaganda.

It appears that journalists today are being trained to serve Our New Woke Overlords:

One aspect of soft totalitarianism that we didn’t see in the hard version: this is not being imposed by the state, but being welcomed into the professions by crack-brained do-gooders.

Meanwhile, a prominent Canadian psychologist loses his temper:

This is absolutely inexcusable. Come on, psychologists: if you don’t stand up to these self-righteous ideologies who will? Can’t you see what this will mean? No more classic psychotherapy training. Woke investigators on every campus. A nightmare for anyone individual focused. https://t.co/ugtR1BQHKf

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) November 17, 2021

You might look at the list that Peterson cites and say, “What’s the big deal?” The phrase that’s doing all the heavy lifting in that passage is “Human Rights and Social Justice.” An anodyne formulation, but one that in Canada, with its ultrawoke and powerful Human Rights Commissions, should put the fear of God into you. Not only are they ruining psychology by politicizing it, but I predict that psychology will be used by the woke in power in the way the Soviets used it: as a means of pathologizing and punishing critics of the regime. Similarly, journalists will be eager to report on Enemies Of The People, and will give each other awards for doing so. After all, the Pulitzer Prize went to that fraudulent 1619 Project.

It’s all happening, and it’s happening right now. Slowly but with increasing speed, the noose is tightening. If we don’t speak up and fight back now, it won’t be possible before much longer.