First thing I do in the morning when I wake up is check The New York Times to see what happened overnight. Naturally the website today is filled with commentary about how the Uvalde massacre is the fault of gun rights. It turns my stomach reading this stuff — and not because I’m some big Second Amendment guy. What I hate is how easily we slot these horrific acts into a politically affirmative narrative. The Buffalo mass shooter — it’s white supremacy, it’s Tucker Carlson, they said, even though anybody who read that freak’s long manifesto could see that white supremacy was just the latest thing the kid’s deranged mine latched onto. A few years earlier, he was calling himself a Communist.

The killer in Uvalde was Hispanic, so he didn’t fit the white supremacist narrative so beloved of the Left. So they default to guns. To be clear, I believe in gun rights, but I also don’t believe gun rights should be absolute. Nevertheless, based on what we know now (meaning: this could change), that young man bought his guns legally. Should it not be possible for adults to buy guns legally now? I know there are a lot of people who want that to be the case, but it’s not going to happen, and it shouldn’t happen. So how would we have stopped Salvador Ramos?

This Washington Post story about him has rich detail about his sad life. Excerpts:

That kid, Ramos, was lost. No wonder he was a nihilist. And yet — and yet! — lots of people have terrible family situations, and they don’t go shoot up elementary schools.

It is only natural that we seek to come up with a reason for this violence. But what makes me sick is how so many of us are quick to assign blame because it makes us think that the world is controllable — that if only we pass the right laws, or implement the correct procedure, or marginalize the Bad People, that these things wouldn’t happen.

The truth is that the veneer of our civilization — of life in America — is thinning. Bari Weiss writes:

You don’t need another writer telling you what you already know: that mentally ill people getting their hands on guns to commit mass murder this easily is deranged and wrong. Accepting this as normal has nothing to do with respecting the Second Amendment. You don’t need another writer pointing out that this doesn’t really happen in other places and maybe the fact that America has more guns than any other nation on Earth has something to do with it. There’s nothing well-regulated about Salvador Ramos, though it appears he bought those assault rifles legally on his 18th birthday. There’s simply no world in which our founders would look at inner-city gun violence and these sick teenagers in suburban schools and say this was their intention.

Gun rights activists will argue that other countries have guns and that murderers don’t need guns to kill and that some of the cities and states with the strictest gun laws in the country have the highest rates of violent crime and that people kill people guns don’t kill people and that anyway good guys with guns kill bad guys with guns. (Uvalde police officers and a school resource officer reportedly fired at the shooter. They couldn’t stop him.)

Here’s where I think they are right, if inadvertently: The social rot that’s come over America, the nihilism and hatred of each other, is part of the cause here. The dissolution of our social ties—and with them the accountability and responsibility that an actual community demands—has allowed insanity to fester unnoticed. Lockdowns accelerated the isolation, the purposelessness, the lack of meaning that was already overcoming us.

If we insist on viewing this shooting as part of some isolated issue or species of violence, then we miss the point. The point is the country is being consumed by what Philip Roth famously called “the indigenous American berserk.” It stretches back many decades, or longer, and for ages, it was possible to ignore or compartmentalize. Now the brokenness is everywhere we look and it is impossible to unsee it.

This morning a Hungarian friend texted to say

People can call Hungary autocratic, a dictatorship etc, but whatever it is, it’s a place where mass shootings don’t occur.

That made me reflect on how stable Hungarian society seems compared to our own. Hungary is much less wealthy than America is, and it has its own social problems. But you feel so safe there. When my American friend and his young son came to visit, I was struck by his initial anxiety over being in Budapest. He naturally assumed it was as unsafe as most American cities. It took a couple of days for him to realize that no, this city is safe. Nobody is going to harm you as you go about your business. This is not America, where you cannot make that assumption.

We tell ourselves so many stories to make the nihilism of American life today bearable. For me, it was good to spend three months abroad this spring, to gain a certain perspective on life back home. To find yourself trying to explain to foreigners why the US has become a culture in which we are all being forced to believe men can be women and women can be men because of desire, law, and, when applicable, chemicals and surgery — you realize that we have lost our f*cking minds in this country. When you try to explain to foreigners how it is that the US has become a place where privileging certain races because of the color of their skin is a virtue to progressives, you realize that we have lost … you know. They look at you and wonder how we Americans think we’re going to hold our society together if that’s how we choose to live. And they’re right.

Here’s a really superb essay by Mark Bauerlein on the Joshua Katz affair at Princeton. As you will have heard, Princeton fired Katz on dubious charges. What Katz had really done was to challenge the progressive racism of the school. Katz spoke out against an outrageous set of demands black faculty and allies had posted, and he criticized as “terrorists” a black student faction that had previously bullied people on campus — including other black students — into compliance. Here’s Bauerlein:

The reason is simple. In higher education in America in the 2020s, if you have tenure and a decent record of publication and teaching, you can argue over many things, raise doubts about this or that leftist dogma, pose worries about identity politics, challenge the secular religion that rules the departments, and only suffer a little ostracism here and some discrimination there. If you do it with a smile, firmly but collegially, some will surely despise you, but others will stay polite and even pleasant. Everyone knows you are no threat to the prevailing order, and life goes on.

But—you must never, ever criticize students of color, especially the black students. At elite universities, those individuals are sacred. Really, they are. They possess a moral authority that surpasses that of everybody else. Those 19-year-olds scare the presidents and provosts and deans to death. If you ever want to see a $500,000-per-year college leader, usually so composed and involved, turn to stone—no confidence on his face anymore, the firmness gone from his posture—just get eight black students to march down the corridor to his office with menacing scowls on their countenances.

Our president knows what it means: nothing but pain. Remember, those kids were recruited to Ivy U with prophecies of success and joy and welcome. “You will prosper and thrill at our most inclusive and inspiring haven,” they were told. Promises were made, and if those students one year in weren’t happy, if their lesser grades knocked them out of pre-med, if they didn’t find the school’s traditions to their liking, well, that’s the school’s fault. Administrators and professors told them so every time they raised the question of systemic racism and noted the rarity of black professors in their own departments.

Katz wouldn’t play this dishonest game. He blurted a discomfiting truth about those sacred ones. When he called this one activist group “terrorists,” the charge could not stay put as a narrow description of the nasty acts of specific persons, which, we may add, Katz stated were perpetrated against other black students as well as whites. No, a taboo had been broken; no qualifying distinctions could be admitted. Katz had chided a black group, period. He was guilty, the verdict was instantaneous, and termination was inevitable. All that remained to do was to find a pretext for the execution, one that went beyond words (and thereby didn’t deny Katz’s academic free speech). The old case of a student relationship was revived, the patent farce of it being the time of the involvement: 2006.

The whole sorry affair reveals a sickness in elite academia that goes much deeper than political bias. It’s not an ideology—it’s an anthropology. Our leading intellectuals have made skin color into a focus of taboos, prohibitions, shame, crime, and punishment. In the name of antiracism, they have countenanced overt wrongs against conscience. They have elevated racial difference into a treacherous and imposing reality. How one behaves relative to it is closely watched. The ones who operate cannily within it, who know how to exploit its codes—not just obey them—and who cleverly direct its policing toward inconvenient personages—they prosper. You don’t get to be president of such institutions unless you are an unprincipled, scheming, finger-always-in-the-wind, ever so flexible, superficially conscientious and deeply calculating bureaucrat, as is the current holder of that post at Princeton.

Katz couldn’t take it anymore. He had to speak up and speak out. His blunt Thoreauvian dissent did, indeed, offend his colleagues and supervisors. The identity politicians knew immediately that this brand of refusal had to be shut down. They didn’t want him to inspire any imitators.

As for the more or less moderate liberals on campus, those utterly bourgeois figures who flirt with radicalism in a nice, safe way, they had a different response, though still a reactive one. Katz made them uncomfortable, especially where they agreed with him. He put them on the spot: “You know how illiberal this letter is—I have protested—you should, too.” In other words, he pressured them to live up to their own pretensions, and they didn’t like that. No way would they swim against the woke tide. His action forced them to acknowledge their own weasel character. To have done that to a group of people who regard themselves as superior beings was unforgivable.

What a great essay — read it all. 

I bring it up here to ask you this: would you defend a system that treats its Joshua Katzes this way? I wouldn’t. I’ve mentioned before in this space how almost 20 years ago, in a newsroom, a black co-worker leveled an utterly absurd charge against me of creating a “hostile work environment” because of a line I had written about terrorists. The allegation was beyond crazy — but I knew that the Human Resources department at the paper, and the liberal gatekeepers in management, were terrified of being called bigots, and would not have defended me had this co-worker gone to them with a complaint. I backed down because I couldn’t afford to lose my job, but from that point on, lost all confidence in the paper. I knew that this was a place — a newspaper! — where it was taboo to say anything that a black employee might find offensive, no matter how trivial and groundless the claim.

My point in bringing that up again is that more and more, our system — the one created and administered by elites — is increasingly not one that deserves our respect or loyalty. A friend of mine who is a military veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan is so disgusted by the way our civilian and military leadership handled all that that he has lost faith in them. I feel the same way — it’s why I talked my 18 year old son out of joining the military (that, and the fact that I told him as an Orthodox Christian in the woke military, I wouldn’t want him to have to choose between obeying his superiors or obeying his conscience).

In fact, it’s hard for me to think of a single institution in this country in which I have confidence. I don’t know whether I am being unduly pessimistic, or realistic. I could list a whole bunch of things here, and I bet you have your own list. The thing is, even though I have zero confidence in our elites — in just about any institution — I don’t think this is simply a matter of changing out elites. Every society has elites; hierarchy is natural to the human condition. What is it about American culture today that cultivates the virtues needed to build a strong, resilient, morally worthy society?

“America is lost,” an elite conservative told me abroad not long ago. This man had served in the upper echelons of power, so he wasn’t just talking. Other elite conservatives who work within institutions testify similarly to the rot they see all around them. They aren’t abandoning their posts; they’re just trying to be realistic about what they see around them, and the future. These people all have kids, too.

I meet people — conservative people, sometimes religious conservatives — who are dealing with teenage children who now claim to be transgender, and who refuse to argue about it. As the brave detransitioner Helena Kerschner keeps saying, institutional culture in the US has aligned with popular culture to press, and press hard, the narrative that if you think you are trans, then you are trans, and anybody who challenges that narrative is Evil. Almost a decade ago, I met a reader of this blog in my travels. She was telling me how worried she was that her daughter, who was slightly on the spectrum, was going to embrace a trans identity, because it had become a huge fad at her suburban East Coast high school. The woman told me that this was not only big among the kids, it was pushed by the guidance counselors, and the culture of parents whose kids had transitioned aggressively pushed the Narrative, making any parent who questioned it feel isolated and despised.

When her daughter turned 18 and went off to college, she visited the university health center, got testosterone, and now sports a beard to complement her vagina.

Insane. What sane person can possibly support this social and cultural order? Who can trust those who administer it?

And now look: Washington is maneuvering us further towards war with Russia. I don’t know if you can read Niccolo Soldo’s latest Substack essay (I’m a subscriber), but he cannot believe the hubristic insanity of the US right now:

Hubris is the present condition of the USA on the global stage. This is best exemplified by two current facts:

1. the USA seeks to confront and reduce the power of both Russia and China simultaneously to preserve its own hegemony
2. the USA is doing absolutely nothing to pit these two targets against one another in order to engage in the tried and tested strategy of divide et impera (divide and conquer)

This unwillingness to turn China against Russia and vice versa and instead pushing the two together in an anti-American alliance shows us that the USA is so utterly confident in its own ability to shape the world in its desired image that such logical and historically successful strategies as divide and conquer don’t even enter into their own calculations. They will take on both, and even incentive both of them to work together to try and stop them in their ambitions.

We’re going to fight in Ukraine, and we’re going to fight in Taiwan, according to our senile president. Great, just great. Our own country is rotting from within, but we’re so damned confident in our Way Of Life that we’re going to court these disasters. Oh, and look at what our State Department elites are doing in one of the most radical Islamic countries on the planet:

Hubris. They think we can impose our will on the world. This, I hardly need to say, did not go unnoticed and uncommented on in Pakistan.

Do you have any confidence in corporate America? I don’t. It started with the 2008 stock market crash, and reached terminal status with the advent of Woke Capitalism. I now see Big Business as an Enemy almost as much as any socialist does, though for a different reason. Take the insurance company State Farm:

State Farm, the household name insurance company, has launched a program that would enlist hundreds of staff volunteers across the country to distribute LGBTQ-themed books to teachers, community centers, and libraries, explicitly targeting children as young as kindergartners.

In collaboration with the GenderCool Project, State Farm aims to “help diversify classroom, community center and library bookshelves with a collection of books to help bring clarity and understanding to the national conversation about Being Transgender, Inclusive and Non-Binary,” an employee whistleblower email obtained by Consumers’ Research, dated January 18, 2022, reveals.

“The project’s goal is to increase representation of LGBTQ+ books and support out communities in having challenging, important and empowering conversations with children Age 5+,” the email from Jose Soto, State Farm’s Corporate Responsibility Analyst, to all Florida agents reads.

After this became public, State Farm reversed course. Like a good neighbor, State Farm wants to groom your children. We can win some of these fights (I’ll say it again: the fearless Christopher Rufo is more valuable than any number of grifter Conservatism Inc. organizations; redirect your political tithes to him).

The thing is, all of these big corporations are woke. They all want to groom your kids for life as sexually and genderfluid, deny your kids employment or employment advancement (if they are the wrong race), and fragilize them to make them dependent. Does your church stand up to this stuff? Some churches are woke, some have lost their minds in right-wing conspiracy theory, and many others just don’t want to get involved.

I could rant about the broken family, but nobody wants to hear it from a right-wing Christian whose wife is divorcing him. Though obviously I can’t talk about the divorce in detail, for the sake of privacy, I can tell you that our divorce has nothing at all to do with general social breakdown. It wasn’t infidelity, it wasn’t feminism, it wasn’t toxic masculinity, or any of the other things that people blame. What the divorce does reveal how even strong conservative religious and social conviction cannot shield a marriage and a family from this chaos and disintegration. It has been humbling, let me tell you.

What’s the point of this rant? Only this: Salvador Ramos doesn’t come from nowhere … but he comes from anywhere. That is, lots of young men are just as lost as that kid was, but they don’t do what he did. Yet somehow, it is easier to contemplate doing that kind of thing today. When I despair for my country, I think about the patriotism of the father of the actor Wendell Pierce. Amos Pierce, who is still alive in his nineties, was drafted into a segregated US Army, out of a segregated New Orleans, and sent to the war in the South Pacific. When he returned home, a racist Army clerk denied him the medals he had been awarded. He never told anybody, and raised his boys to be patriotic. His son Wendell, upon learning a few years back about the injustice that had been done to his father, worked with then Sen. Mary Landrieu to right that wrong.

My point is this: how did Amos Pierce maintain his faith in an America that did him and black people so wrong? The answer is because he believed that America’s better days were ahead. He had hope that America would change, would become more just for all. And he was right: it did!

Do you believe that now? If so, why? I’m not asking rhetorically. I don’t believe it, and I don’t know what to do with that lack of faith.

One more thing: in Wendell’s memoir, The Wind In The Reeds, he tells the inspiring story of his grandparents, living in rural St. James Parish under segregation. These were poor black country people living in KKK times. And yet, they held everything together, educated their kids, and prepared them for a better life. It’s an all-American story. It’s a version of the story that my own father grew up on, in rural Great Depression poverty. They were all taught to believe that America was a country where a man who worked hard and lived a life of self-discipline could advance. It was certainly more true for someone of my dad’s race than for Wendell’s dad’s race, but the point is, this was the Narrative that held America together, and gave people the faith to endure and to sacrifice.

I would like to say that Christianity was a part of that too: that people believed suffering meant something in God’s mysterious plan. That suffering could be borne with God’s help. I don’t really know to what extent that kind of Christianity was taught in the churches of my father’s day, and Wendell’s father’s day, but my sense is that it somehow permeated the local culture.

The point is not that America was ever a paradise. But it was a place people believed in. My father was a lifelong conservative, but he loved Huey P. Long and Franklin D. Roosevelt, because as he once told me, you felt like people in power were looking out for little people like us, and trying to help us.

Do people feel that way now, about any of them, R or D? The question itself makes me smile wistfully.

We used to not be a country where people sent their little kids off to elementary school in the morning, and went to identify their bodies shot to pieces in the afternoon. But now we are. What happened to us? What if the risk of a Ramos is the price we pay for our American idea of freedom?

One more time: Do you have faith that America can pull out of this downward spiral? If yes, why? If not, why not? And in either case, what do you propose to do about it?

I hope that we can have a meaningful discussion about this in the comments section. I’m really not interested in the usual suspects blaming the usual other suspects. The sickness overtaking our country today is beyond political categories. Given my own core beliefs, I plainly think it is a problem primarily of the cultural left. But that is not even close to a sufficient explanation, and that must be admitted. I’m just so damned sick of the people who have the hot takes and ready-made narratives whenever things like this happen. We’d all understand it better by reading Dostoevsky than The New York Times. The respectable nihilism of those who have marched through institutions and formed elite networks results in the hard nihilism of a demon like Ramos, who has nothing to live for, and only wants to kill innocent children because he can.

Now the brokenness is everywhere we look and it is impossible to unsee it.

Oh, but we can unsee it. Offloading all the blame onto the Other is a way of unseeing that tempts us all.

And yet, what if the answer is that there is no answer? That Ramos’s evil deed was just one of those things? What if evil ultimately cannot be understood, but is, at bottom, a mystery? At some point, we have to recognize that there is something about the nature of human evil that defies our ability to encompass with reason. To encompass something wild with reason is to attempt tame it, to bring it under our control. Tell me, what form of reason could tame the demon that possessed Salvador Ramos?