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The Great Conservative Exodus

Hints that social, political, and religious conservatives in a variety of professions are getting out before they are cancelled
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You see that this week, the woke succeeded in cancelling Norman Mailer? No kidding:

Random House has reportedly cancelled the publication of a collection of Norman Mailer essays, which would correspond to the 100-year anniversary of his birth next year, because a ‘junior staffer’ objected to the title of his 1957 essay entitled ‘White Negro.’

The project had an editor assigned and the agreement from the Mailer estate, according a best-selling author Michael Wolff.

‘With slow-mo hammer-dropping predictability, Norman Mailer’s long-time publisher has recently informed the Mailer family that it has canceled plans to publish a collection of his political writings to mark the centennial of his birth in 2023, confirms the film producer Michael Mailer, the author’s oldest son,’ best-selling author Michael Wolff, who penned the piece, writes.

A junior staffer! Where the hell are the spines among senior publishing executives? “The White Negro” was massively discussed, pro and con, when it came out in 1957. Mailer was writing as a man of the Left. James Baldwin criticized his piece; Eldridge Cleaver praised it. Those horrible, repressive 1950s were a time when we could actually talk about these things, like a real culture. Not anymore. We are too progressive for that now. They have cancelled Norman effing Mailer, because publishing executives are afraid of junior staffers who were in elementary school when Mailer died.

This week I’ve been communicating with some conservative friends who are highly placed within their professions. They are telling me about an ongoing exodus of high-ranking conservatives from those fields. I can’t be more specific, at their request, but this is remarkable stuff — though entirely predictable. One of them, who is on the way out of his field over fear of seeing his career destroyed by accidentally getting on the wrong side of the woke, told me that Live Not By Lies is prophetic, that the things it talks about are “already happening” in his world.

Some are going into retirement. Others are taking lesser positions at companies or non-profits where they can continue to work with a lesser fear of persecution. One of my sources said that the good news is that religious conservatives are starting to live the Benedict Option, but the bad news is that this means that culture-forming institutions will be bereft of religious conservatives.

Is this surrender? Some might say so, but those with whom I’ve talked — and again, I have to respect their privacy by not being too specific — tell me about situations in which people who hold their views have decisively lost the internal struggle within their organization and/or profession. The situation they are facing is one in which they have concluded that they cannot do any good (so much for “faithful presence”), and by staying, risk losing everything, or know they will be put into a situation where they will have to violate their conscience to keep their jobs.

In every single case I’m talking about, these are jobs that until only a few years ago were not political. Now they have been overrun by wokeness. One of my interlocutors reached out yesterday after seeing my PragerU video about soft totalitarianism, and said from where he sits, it is well underway. Given his profession, which he is preparing to leave, he’s right.

I know some of these people personally, and I can tell you that when they leave their respective fields or companies, the profession will lose some serious expertise. The managers in these fields do not care; they only want to be Righteous, according to the gospel of Ibram X. Kendi and the Human Rights Campaign.

I suspect there is a lot of bargaining going on inside the minds of some conservatives. It’s the kind of thing that conservative Christian parents do when faced with whether or not they should keep their kids inside of morally problematic public schools. It’s the old “salt and light” dodge, e.g., “We think that we should keep Katelynn in that school so she can be salt and light to the other fourth graders.” There is zero chance that little Katelynn will lead those other kids to Christ, and a serious chance that the anti-Christian culture in that school will lead Katelynn away from her faith. But some parents might balk at the financial commitment Christian school requires, and other parents who can afford it financially may have other reasons to avoid making that hard choice — for example, incurring the judgment of their parental peers.

Yet for other social and religious conservatives, the bargaining period is over. This is when they understand that the Benedict Option is a survival strategy for Christians in a post-Christian, and increasingly anti-Christian, culture. I got word from a friend late this morning that he has cancelled his plans to pursue a humanities PhD, because he no longer has confidence that he can do so in an academic environment in which he is free to think and write, as opposed to parrot an ideological line. Knowing his circumstances, I am certain he made the right decision. The world will not suffer overmuch from having one less humanities PhD, but universities that drive intellectually diverse aspiring scholars away because of their ideological rigidity will ultimately die of irrelevance.

What about you? Are you facing a similar decision now, or do you anticipate facing it sometime this year? Tell us about it in the comments section. What are your thoughts? What do you think would happen if you stayed? What do you expect to happen to your profession if this exodus of conservatives becomes more general?

UPDATE: Readers, I am not interested in reading general complaining about conservatives in the comments, or general speculation about the state of the world. Stick to the topic, please (“the topic” includes Norman Mailer, if you like).

UPDATE.2: Reader Phil:

I wouldn’t characterize my whole (former) field of employment as woke, but I watched up close a woke takeover of an organization I worked for. I’m not going to mention its name, because in the end they treated me well on a personal level and it’s unlikely anyone reading this would have heard of it anyway.

My parents were missionaries in the Middle East and I grew up speaking Arabic. We weren’t quite bilingual, but close to it. I had some pretty unique exposure to conflict zones that is rare for people in the early stages of their careers. Came back to the US for college – Middle East studies and PoliSci – and got a job at this organization, whose sole goal was to try to influence US government policy on Middle East issues. It wasn’t exactly a lobbying outfit (we were technically nonprofit) but that was the goal. I got to work with some pretty serious people, former career ambassadors, Assistant Secretaries of State, etc. We were pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, but generally trended left and anti-war. After the Bush years and the disaster that was the US invasion of Iraq, I was OK with that.

It was during the collective freakout over Brexit that I realized something was wrong. Brexit and the EU had nothing to do with us, so when senior staff started having meltdowns it clued me in that there was ongoing mission creep. As Trump derangement syndrome set in, it became clearer by the day that our work wasn’t really ultimately about the Middle East any more. It was about positioning ourselves within a broader progressive network of organizations and activists that had incredibly wide-ranging goals, including protecting access to abortion, advancing LGBT causes, unfettered immigration, and the rest. We started getting funding from George Soros.

The thing is, on paper our mission never changed. But the staff did what all woke activists do when they take over an institution or organization: they gradually hollow it out from the inside by incrementally changing the nature of its mission to support woke goals. Instead of “accomplish X” the mission becomes “accomplish X by advancing social justice”. Because intersectionality, or something. It’s always very vague.

The board was not woke, but they were very carefully handled by the staff. They weren’t that involved in the everyday operations, so they couldn’t see how the organization was changing. The staff ran circles around them. They held strategy meetings on how to manage the board, when and how to make a pitch for this or that incremental shift, what they should or shouldn’t say to get this or that board member on their side, which members were allies and which were opponents. The board was pretty pliable to begin with, but staff was also very savvy about managing them.

I was pretty junior, but it got to the point where it was clear that I was going to have to say things that I knew were lies in order to continue working for them. I didn’t believe, for example, that the slaughter of X Middle Eastern people was “just like the plight of black Americans, who are being butchered wholesale by the police.” (Not a verbatim quote, but you get the idea.)

Republicans are for the most part pretty awful on Middle East issues, and in general working inside the Beltway is a difficult environment if you’re trying not to live by lies. I played with the idea of going into the intelligence community, but I sure am glad I didn’t do that since wokism has taken over there too. (I had a few offers but ironically my actual real life overseas experience, which is what made me a good candidate, also made me a “security liability.”) Fortunately I didn’t have kids and was young enough to start over. I moved far away from DC to a deep red state and now spend most of my time building stuff and working on machinery. I’ve never been happier.

I wish that somebody with money and organizational skills — neither of which I have — could set up an organization to coordinate employment among people who have been cancelled or otherwise driven out of their businesses because of wokeness. I would happily patronize businesses and services that were affirmatively anti-woke, and offered jobs to well-trained, competent workers who were driven out of their jobs for political reasons. I sometimes get people who complain that I haven’t done boo to set up Benedict Option-style organizations and structures. The truth is that I am a writer who gets by on a writer’s income, and who has zero time and no skills for organization. I appeal to those who are gifted in those ways to step forward and start building. I will promote you and do all I can to help!

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