#christian hegemony library

[jessicalprice]

Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (1. Preface)

I often tell people that there's a book they should read on the subject of a particular discourse, but I doubt they do--after all, I rarely follow through when random people on the internet tell me to read a particular book.

So I'm going to break down and summarize Denise Kimber Buell's Why This New Race?: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity, because I think it's a really important read in understanding Christian hegemony, Christianity's relationship to whiteness, and antisemitism in Christianity throughout its history.

But before I talk about Buell's book, I have a few prefatory remarks of my own.

Sorry, but the Book of Context is quite a tome.

"Fake" Christianity and the fall from grace

In particular, Buell challenges the narrative lurking behind so many contemporary discussions of Christian hegemony, white nationalism, Christian racism, etc. that there was some sort of original, "pure" Christianity and that modern Christianity's issues are due to corruption from this prelapsarian ideal.

Or put another way, Christianity doesn't just posit a human fall from grace. The meta-narrative offered--when Christians don't deny that Christians are doing horrible things--is that those people are following a distorted form of Christianity that has fallen away from its original benevolent form.

This is the reactive form of a long-standing trope in Christian culture (that is, basically the entire West) that equates Christianity with goodness. If you read American or British books prior to about 1990, they are replete with people saying things like, "it's the Christian thing to do," to reference performing some basic act of human decency.

"More Christian than most Christians"

It was also popular for some time--although thankfully, it seems to be fading (at least on social media, as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and other members of non-Christian cultures push back) to state that a Jew or other non-Christian who'd performed some sort of exemplary act of compassion or said something wise was "more Christian than most Christians."

This accolade, while almost certainly well-intentioned, is actually deeply insulting. The implication is that this Jew, unlike almost all others of their kind, has managed to catch up to Christians in compassion, that the universal standard of compassion is Christianity, and that it is surprising and unusual that this non-Christian has managed to overcome the moral inferiority of their people to meet or even exceed the Christian standard.

These assertions of Christianity (or at least "true" Christianity) as the moral standard for humankind largely go unquestioned, as do basic antisemitic tropes like the idea that the problem with Christians behaving cruelly is that they're getting too much of their Christianity from the Old Testament and not enough from the New.

Quite to the contrary, people who are purportedly not (or no longer) Christian are usually the first in line to denounce whichever Republican politician is proposing starving children in the name of Jesus as a "fake Christian." Progressive Christians, still more invested in protecting Christianity's brand than actually cleaning their own house, are often just as loud.

This No True Scotsman-ing is preservation of Christian supremacy and hegemony, and deeply intertwined with the idea that there is a single, pure, original Christianity that was unquestionably benevolent.

There is no One True Christianity

But the truth of the matter is that it is impossible to wring any sort of single, consistent moral philosophy from the New Testament without ignoring parts of it.

Christians that most of us might perceive as wielding their Christianity in cruel or unjust ways usually aren't more ignorant of the text or history than Christians (or ex-Christians) who see "real" Christianity as simply "love your neighbor" and understand Jesus as a beatific, gentle pacifist.

Both of those groups have to ignore large swaths of the New Testament to get to their ideology, and interpret the same passages differently (a Christian attempting to use the law to relegate non-Christians to second-class citizen status or refuse aid to non-Christians can interpret passages commanding kindness as applying to people within the Christian community only with as much textual support as one insisting they apply to all humankind).

Christians you don't like aren't "fake." You just disagree with them about what Christianity should be.

But in the west, Christianity generally holds the unique status of demanding that it be judged only on what it states its ideal form is, and not on what it actually is.

No such largesse for non-Christian cultures

Jews generally don't try to claim that other Jews who engage in bad behavior aren't Jewish. Much as we might wish Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller weren't members of the tribe, and much as we might say that they are bad Jews, their bad behavior didn't trigger a flood of opinion pieces about how they're "fake" Jews. (Ivanka is a special case, but that's about anti-convert sentiment within some Jewish communities.)

Neither was there a flood of articles about how the 9/11 attackers were "fake" Muslims. The meta-debate in the US and much of Western Europe after 9/11, in fact, was about whether all Muslims were terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, as Michael Hobbes recently noted on an episode of Cancel Me, Daddy. He went back and did a survey of journalism in the wake of 9/11, and almost all the coverage, on the opinion page and in purportedly objective journalism (where it was generally presented in question form, or as simply "reporting" on a national debate) was about whether only some Muslims were bad, or whether it was the entire culture.

When there was pushback, it was almost always in terms of the views of the terrorists are not representative of what most Muslims think or feel, not they aren't actually Muslim.

The myth of Christian innocence

As my Twitter friend Chrissy Stroop continually hammers home, the "fake Christian" framing upholds "the myth of Christian innocence" and is harmful to everyone except practicing Christians. It gaslights both members of non-Christian cultures who have experienced centuries-long structural and institutional (as well as individual) harm at the hands of Christians, and former Christians who experienced individual abuse in their families and/or communities of origin.

To tell queer people who grew up in authoritarian Christianity, or Jews who are missing entire sections of their family trees due to Christian genocide, or Indigenous people taken from their families as children and abused in the name of Jesus, that they have not been harmed by Christianity, that it was a few bad actors and not the religion itself, that it was all a misunderstanding, is to be more interested in protecting Christianity's reputation than facing real human pain.

As Chrissy Stroop often says, Christianity is what Christians do. It does not deserve special status among human cultures in which it is judged only by its imagined ideal form, and not by its actual effects upon actual living humans.

How does this relate to this book?

All of this is context for what Buell does in her book, which shouldn't be radical, but unfortunately--due to the habit of taking Christianity at its word about what it is and what it was originally--is unusual at best.

Buell decides to investigate how early Christians understood their own identity, and not to simply accept the prevailing Christian understanding that "ethnicity and race were irrelevant to early Christians—an argument that has been used to accomplish important modern antiracist work yet relies on and perpetuates anti-Judaism in the process."

Scholarly work on Christianity, especially early Christianity, is a trip. Most of it, obviously, has been done by Christians, which--when it comes to studying antisemitism and other harms in Christian history and how they might come from Christianity itself--is leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse.

(This is a subject for a different post, but Christian academics often say the most deranged things about how first-century Judaism functioned and the relationship between first-century Jews and Christians. They cite sources, of course, but if you look up those sources, you find that they're citing other sources, and if you trace it back to the original source, it's usually some Victorian preacher just... making up something to fit his parable exegesis.)

If you challenge some of this Accepted Scholarly Consensus, you are often met with spluttering indignation and insistence that any challenge to it is a "fringe viewpoint" and not accepted by any "real" NT scholars. It's always fascinating how often "fringe" usually means "written by people who weren't Christian."

So anyway, Buell decided to do something that, if you're not invested in Christianity, seems pretty basic and non-controversial: she decides to look at how early Christians understood their own identity.

I revisit scholarship and early Christian texts that destabilize the prevailing view that Christian universalism can be understood as mutually exclusive with “particularity”—a split that is often correlated with the nonethnic/ ethnic binary... To understand the elusive but entrenched presence of race in contemporary scholarly models, we need to cultivate a prismatic vision that can reimagine the relevance of race and ethnicity to ancient articulations of Christianness in light of the continued political, social, ideological, and theological challenges posed by modern racism and anti-Judaism.

Prismatic vision

I want to dig into that concept of "prismatic vision" for a moment, because it's a beautiful metaphor.

To aim for diffraction in how one sees—to see prismatically—is to value the production of patterns of difference and to resist the “false choice between realism and relativism.”

One of the things I often struggle to get people from Christian backgrounds to understand about Judaism is that, in having a culture without centralized authority, in having a relationship to the text in which authority lies in the discussion itself and not in any one voice, Jews usually don't privilege the idea of some Objective Truth the way Christians do.

I'd say most of us probably believe there is objective truth out there, but we also understand that we can only perceive and understand it subjectively.

We might all be looking at the same star, but we're all standing in slightly different places on the planet.

"Moral relativism" was a big bogeyman for Christians in political discourse from about 10-20 years ago.

In the most basic sense, they have a point when it comes to constructing rules for a society. We do need some basic, agreed-upon rules to live together. (I don't think we need nearly as many as Christians seem to think we do, but I am absolutely in favor of having systems for addressing harm, for ensuring that people can get their basic needs met and have their personhood acknowledged and respected, etc.) In service of not having to negotiate absolutely everything about every single interaction we have with other humans, both rules and accepted norms are a useful shorthand and safeguard (which is a statement of general principle--obviously individual rules and norms can be bad or misused, entire systems can be corrupt or badly designed in the first place, etc.).

Every moment is infinite

But when it comes to understanding the reality of something as fuzzy-edged and ambient as culture and viewpoint, there is no such thing as one objective truth that any of us can understand.

I was thinking about this as I paused for a moment on a corner during a walk yesterday. The intersection was in a quiet residential area, and I stood there and fell into a soft gaze, looking at the square of sidewalk I was standing on.

The air was chilly and damp, holding the scent of wet leaves, of the grass next to me, of someone smoking pot somewhere, of dog waste on someone's lawn, of a faint chemical sweetness that I think came from the school they were building about a half mile away, of the tar patching cracks in the street, of the laundry soap I use lingering between the fibers of my sweater, of the coffee smell from the coffee shop I'd been at clinging faintly to me, of the pile of fallen cedar needles across the street, of someone cooking onions somewhere, of the silly brave daffodil opening a blossom far too early in the lawn beside me, of the cut grass on that lawn, of the sap in the broken pine branch on the tree next to me and the wet bark of that tree, of... of... of...

And that was only the scents I noticed. That is only about what I could perceive of reality with a single sense.

I don't often fully open any of my senses that way--I have trouble ignoring stimuli as it is, and being overwhelmed by sensory input triggers my migraines. I spend most of my life doing my best to block out things. But every so often, when I'm somewhere relatively quiet, I drop that constant effort and just absorb. Not for long--while I was standing there, passively attentive rather than focused, the plane on the horizon became painfully loud--but just to stretch.

And then I closed all that up and pulled back into myself and thought about the things I couldn't perceive with my senses.

I did not know exactly when the houses that were around me were built, what the social and economic forces that willed them into being were. I don't know what the people inside them were doing at that moment, let alone all the social and personal context shaping their behavior and feelings and thoughts and thought-feelings.

I didn't know the billion-year history of each molecule of water creeping out in a dark aureole from the decaying leaf-litter on the edge of the sidewalk, or what the life of each leaf had been (some trees are functionally immortal, did you know? they call it phoenix regeneration). I didn't know the story of any of the pebbles embedded in the cement, what rock they had come from or where it had formed or through where it had traveled or how long it had been small. I didn't know when or by whom this square of sidewalk had been installed, how it had affected the area and the people who lived in it to have a sidewalk there, if there had been a street there before there was a sidewalk, if this was the original or a replacement.

Even if I narrowed my focus just to the square of sidewalk on which I stood, the truth of it was infinite. Merely what I could perceive with my own senses standing in that one spot and what background knowledge I have of things like the area the corner was in and how cement gets made and what streets do was too much to hold and synthesize. How much bigger, everything I didn't know and couldn't perceive?

We say there are as many Judaisms as there are Jews. But there are as many Christianities as there have been Christians and people who have ever interacted with Christians.

If there is any objective truth about it, it is made up of all the subjective experiences of it, and is beyond anyone's ability to comprehensively understand.

Which is why I find Buell's metaphor of "prismatic vision" so compelling: the idea of looking at a thing and seeing components of it and also knowing that there are parts of the spectrum that you can't see.

resist the “false choice between realism and relativism.”

Realism isn't the opposite of relativism, in these things--it's the sum total of all the relativisms. It's a point that may or may not exist, that we can only, hopefully, use as a direction to head in.

On to the Introduction.

[whovianwholikesgirls]

I was sooooo fucking excited to collect data for my favorite class this year and write about the discrepancies in libraries were more books about Christianity are checked out because Christian hegemony and Judaism and Islam are left behind but ofc they're all catalogued together like they're all the same religion somehow I'm going to scream

[dwellordream]

“Daughters’ skirmishes with mothers cut close to the bone, working the borders of identity often blurred by shared location within the home. With their responsibility for the reproduction of domestic roles, mothers lay centrally in the line of command over the lives of their daughters. Of course their authority was shared power—power that originated with wages earned by husbands and fathers.

Traditional patriarchy had been in decline for some time in the late nineteenth century. Without land to disperse, fathers had been losing their authority over their sons’ destinies, and as they moved to cities and took up work outside of the home, fathers were less and less involved in the delegation of work within the home. But in fundamental and important ways, they still ruled.

Those responsible for advising girls on their role in life reminded them of their continuing need to curry favor with fathers —and with reason. The Victorian patriarch could appear unexpectedly, thwarting plans, making pronouncements, breathing moral fire. Yet he was not always successful in these less and less common rulings. When opinion at home had congealed elsewhere—particularly when mothers and daughters agreed—the Victorian patriarch could find his authority hollow. Especially as daughters matured from childhood and found their lives inscribed with the expectations of gender, fathers receded from the line of command, expecting of their daughters, as they did of their wives, not obedience but domestic ministration.

Fathers’ familial responsibility for daughters translated into responsibility for guidance in two particular arenas beyond the walls of the home. Men were responsible for supervising their daughters’ academic education and for assisting them in their studies in religion. This responsibility is well communicated in the kinds of gifts bestowed by fathers on daughters on birthdays—prayer books, writing books, pens, dictionaries, atlases, library subscriptions. Fathers’ responsibilities for higher duties were reflected in their stern communications with daughters at midcentury. Agnes Lee received letters re- inforcing the importance of studies from her father, Robert E. Lee, in the 1850s when she was away at a female seminary.

He took issue with a bit of exuberant homesickness: ‘‘I must take you to task for some expressions in your letter. You say, ‘our only thought, our only talk, is entirely about our going home.’ How can you reconcile that with the object of your sojourn at Staunton! Unless your thoughts are sometimes devoted to your studies, I do not see the use of your being there.’’ It was often fathers to whom daughters recited lessons, and whose words of commendation were particularly meaningful. Fathers’ responsibilities for their daughters’ educations represented a vestigial authority for a family’s competency in the world—and continued when responsibility for other aspects of daughters’ lives had receded.

The same was true, though to a lesser degree, for fathers’ responsibilities for daughters’ souls. Kathryn Kish Sklar has written powerfully about the intertwining strands of patriarchy and evangelical culture which bedeviled Catharine Beecher’s quest for a conversion experience early in the nineteenth century. As mothers took up their newly won roles as moral exemplars, they supplemented but did not replace fathers as the guardians of familial faith. Robert E. Lee encouraged his daughter’s relationship with God as well as her studies, and his daughter wrote back a shy profession of faith, offered to her father as to one to whom it was owed: ‘‘I have something to tell you which I know will make you very happy. It is, I believe both of your daughters are Christians. I am sure Annie is, and O Papa I am resolved to doubt no longer that there has been a great and blessed change wrought in my wicked heart.’’

Though absent from the day-to-day dealings of the household, fathers’ interest in the state of their offsprings’ souls extended to the their moral training as well. Margaret Tileston’s diary, which included financial accounts, also included a moral accounting with her father. ‘‘I told Papa of a lie I told him about a week ago, last Tuesday or Wednesday.’’ It was in such a grave consciousness of his paternal responsibility for the character of his daughter that Albert Browne wrote a long letter to his daughter Nellie as she was preparing to leave school, ending with the admonishment that ‘‘a true christian woman, should make it a religious duty, to blend gentleness and dignity, as to win love, and command respect.’’ Albert Browne had no doubt of his authority over his daughters’ transition to womanhood, just as over other family matters.

…The conservative Ladies’ Home Journal in 1895 attempted to re- affirm masculine authority in what must be seen as a reactionary challenge to feminized domesticity. In reasserting ‘‘The Father’s Domestic Headship,’’ the Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst, D.D., acknowledged a ‘‘great deal of domestic reciprocity’’ but pronounced that ‘‘the husband and father is the point of final determination.’’ He sought an analogy for the moral authority of hus- band and wife in anatomy: ‘‘The bone and sinew of character will probably be a quotation from the father, and the delicate tissue with which it is over- laid will as likely be a bequest from the mother.’’ This late-century contrast between the strong force of paternal dictum with the more diffuse ‘‘tissue’’ of the maternal presence acknowledged a long-standing reality—that absent fathers would need to make their authority felt concisely in worded dictates, rather than through the steady example of a more present maternity.

By 1895, however, when Parkhurst was writing, he was in many ways too late. His assertion of masculine hegemony in the household was regressive— and claimed an authority for fathers in their daughters’ lives that they could not count on. Those girls in the postwar years most likely to reveal their dependency on paternal dictates—for instance, the reformer Jane Addams growing up in the late 1860s and Mary Thomas away at school in Georgia in the 1870s—used their fathers as live models of correct conduct with good reason, for both their mothers were dead. If daughters empowered by the increasing moral authority of their mothers were beginning to feel free to challenge paternal prerogative, fathers themselves showed, over the nineteenth century, a diminishing sense of identification with their daughters.

Fathers like Robert E. Lee and Albert Browne took seriously their paternal responsibility for providing guidance to their maturing daughters, but that guidance often required setting a new form of reference—the inscribing of gender on girls defined previously by their status as children. Albert Browne’s advice to Nellie intended to prepare her for that new station. He reminded her that leaving school would require that she end her time as a ‘‘mere’’ schoolgirl to take her part ‘‘in the drama of life’’ as ‘‘a true woman.’’

Doing so would mean surrendering part of her genetic inheritance, and becoming only part of who she had been. For Browne admonished his daughter to emulate her mother’s qualities of ‘‘mildness and amenity, love and kindness,’’ so ‘‘as to temper and subdue any unruly and unamiable tendencies which may have come to you from your Father.’’ This gendered lesson, of course, was a distancing one which signaled the attenuation of a relationship as well as a stage of life.

Girls who had been accorded the freedom of childhood by fond fathers found this withdrawal of paternal identification to be painful. Writing in the late century, Mary Virginia Terhune recounted such a moment: ‘‘I have now before me the picture of myself at ten years of age, looking up from the back of my pony into my father’s face, as in the course of the morning ride we daily enjoyed together.’’

They had been conversing about politics, and the child had offered an apt analysis. ‘‘My comments called up a smile and a sigh. ‘‘ ‘Ah, my daughter! If you had been born a boy you would be invaluable to me!’’’ Terhune recalled the sense of destiny. ‘‘I hung my head, mute and crushed by a calamity past human remedy or prevention. There is a pain at my heart in the telling that renews the real grief of the moment.’’

Terhune had been taking advantage of a latitude granted to Victorian children of both sexes; she observed that some of ‘‘the finest women, physically and mentally,’’ were ‘‘famous romps in their youth.’’ Such girls, she noted, ‘‘during the tomboy stage lamented secretly or loudly that they were not their own brothers; regrets which were heartily seconded by much-enduring mothers and disappointed fathers.’’

Literary historians have observed that the 1860s saw the emergence of a new literary type—tomboys—who, as Barbara Sicherman has observed, were ‘‘not only tolerated but even admired—up to a point, the point at which they were expected to become women.’’ The extension of the rights to romp and play to girls confirmed their identity as children, a state that often ended surprisingly and arbitrarily, with fathers’ rejections.

Terhune’s memory of paternal humiliation recalls from earlier in the century young Elizabeth Cady [Stanton]’s realization that she could not remain the confidante and paternal protégé she had been as a child. In her perhaps mythic retelling of the tale, that youthful epiphany produced a sense of injury and injustice which would help to fuel the woman’s rights movement itself. Both Stanton and Terhune gained their sense of betrayal from the contrast between their spirited childhoods and their sense of gendered destiny descending to restrict them in their teens.

Mary Virginia Terhune concluded with an admonition to fathers which gave them responsibility for this curtailment of aspiration in the world: ‘‘Your girl wants to help her father and to be of use in the world. Make her feel that a woman’s life is worth living, and that she has begun it. Do not brand her from the cradle, ‘Exempt from field duty on account of physical disability.’’’ For both Stanton and Terhune, it was a shock to discover that life ‘‘as a romp,’’ ‘‘as a half-boy,’’ in fact as a Victorian child, was only temporary, conditional. Their fathers, who often had invited their daughters along in their common round, withdrew that invitation as they approached maturity.

By later in the century, urban fathers were often absent from the beginning of their daughters’ lives, working in shops and offices away from home. When Louisa May Alcott commented on this new order, as she did most pointedly in An Old-Fashioned Girl, she depicted the father of her modern family as absent, ‘‘a busy man, so intent on getting rich that he had no time to enjoy what he already possessed.’’ In a later passage, he ‘‘had been so busy getting rich, that he had not found time to teach his children to love him,’’ neglecting both sons and daughters. His son he ordered ‘‘about as if he was a born rebel,’’ and was always ‘‘lecturing him.’’ His daughters, however, he let ‘‘do just as they liked.’’

By today’s accounting, the Victorian father was notable for the extent to which he assumed and discharged a role as paterfamilias. However, that brief moment (if there ever was one) when fathers presided supremely over a small, nurturant family was in decline as soon as it was constituted. The movement of men’s labor outside of the home also removed them from their role as the preeminent guide and adjudicator of their daughters’ conduct. As women challenged men’s domestic authority, so did men increasingly abdicate, letting go of prerogatives they were not in place to oversee.

Girls remained dependent on fathers, however, a condition that their increasing participation in the labor force would diminish but never erase. Conservative advice givers made it their business to remind girls of this status. Multiple authors in the Ladies’ Home Journal, starting with the Journal ’s editor, Edward Bok, urged on girls their responsibilities to practice as apprentice wives in their ministrations to their fathers. ‘‘Helping her father to remember his daily engagements, seeing that his accounts are properly balanced, following his personal matters—all these things enter into the life of a girl when she becomes a wife,’’ Bok wrote.

A girl should not imagine ‘‘that her father represented a money-making machine, bound to take care of her and give her a good time,’’ the Journal ’s columnist Rush Ashmore added. It was the daughter who owed her father a good time. She should remember that it is ‘‘her honor to be his daughter’’ and greet him with a smile. ‘‘He who is out in the busy world earning the bread and butter doesn’t want to be met with complaints and cross looks; he wants to be greeted with a kiss, to be entertained by the mind which he has really formed by earning the money to pay the teachers to broaden and round it, and to be able to look at the bright, cheery girl, neat in her dress, sweet in her manner and ever ready to make merry those who are sad.’’

Increasingly teenage daughters’ approaches to fathers, like those of their mothers, focused on the interaction of two separate worlds. Advisers’ exhortations that daughters should be affectionate and ‘‘pet’’ their fathers rather than ‘‘obey’’ them suggested the ways in which the family had become an arena of intimate exchange rather than hierarchical responsibility. Increasingly fathers did not induct their growing daughters into adulthood but instead looked to their daughters to offer them an escape from that world.”

- Jane H. Hunter, “Houses, Families, Rooms of One’s Own.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

[grenade-maid]

Working at a library is interesting, because occasionally you'll find a book that strips away the artifice of a certain issue, laying bare the truth in exacting detail. Tonight I found such a book, called Fundamentalist U.

See, in our education section, just about every other book is about the same topic: universities are turning today's students into radical liberal communists, who, in their effort to uhh *checks notes* deplatform Nazis and get rapists to face consequences, are destroying the very fabric of American democracy and freedom of speech. The thinking goes, students have been brainwashed by PC culture, and their efforts will quash the spirit of free inquiry and halt the exchange of diverse ideas in the halls of academia.

Then comes this book, Fundamentalist U, which explicitly praises the noble agenda of conservative Christian colleges in their efforts to shape students into future evangelicals who will march in line with the church and state. I'm not exaggerating, check out the jacket description below. Belief in creationism is listed as one of the core tenets being hammered into student's heads. Christianity Today, in their review of the book, even describes the unique duty of Christian universities to "quash leftist radicalism in favor of traditional and conservative Americanism."

So wait, what happened to critically engaging with diverse ideals and freely inquiring into challenging concepts in the halls of the academy? Shouldn't it be a travesty for colleges to openly push for their students to think in certain terms, especially when those terms (in the case of creationism) have been discredited by science? Well friends, that argument is a sham, a hoax, a ruse. The underlying animating principle of these arguments has always been to maintain and uphold conservative Christian hegemony in the halls of power. They don't want free speech or free inquiry, they want the dominance of white supremacist intellectual ideals to go unchecked. I know, water is wet. But it's rare to see it admitted to clearly and concisely in these terms, free of any artifice.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Far-Right Bolsonaro's Secretary Of Culture Fires Latest Round in Brazil Culture War

Brazil's government has drawn criticism after launching a project that aims to revamp the country's arts scene, with a focus on nationalism and religion. The project is part of the far-right administration's answer to what it sees as decades of leftist hegemony in the cultural sphere — from art to education and family.

Though cash-strapped, the government of President Jair Bolsonaro will spend $4.9 million to foment the production of literature, theater, opera, music and other arts. It was announced by Bolsonaro, Education Minister Abraham Weintraub and culture secretary Roberto Alvim from a library of the official presidential residence in a live Facebook video.

Alvim, the driving force behind the initiative, is a born-again Christian who found renewed faith while recovering from cancer. He delivered a separate message about the initiative using a phrase local paper O Globo compared to a speech by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels; Alvim said on Facebook on Wednesday that it was merely a “rhetorical coincidence.”The president of Brazil's lower house said on Twitter the video went beyond the pale, and that Bolsonaro should remove Alvim from his position immediately.

“When culture becomes sick, the people become sick, too,” Alvim said in the video. “Brazilian culture was deliberately sickened during the recent decades. Culture is the basis of the homeland.”

The government will stimulate film projects that focus on Brazil's independence and historical figures, and be aligned with conservative values, Alvim said.

At the building next door, in the culture's secretary's office, Alvim's promised crusade is underway. On Twitter, he regularly uses the hashtag #DeusVult, or "God wills it,” echoing the Christian battle cry of Middle Ages crusaders. It's also popular with white nationalists in the U.S.

Speaking in a recorded message released Thursday, with a wooden cross atop his desk, Alvim said he wants 2020 to mark a historic cultural rebirth to “create a new and thriving Brazilian civilization”. He sat beneath a framed picture of Bolsonaro, and orchestral strings played lightly in the background. The music is from an opera by Richard Wagner, often associated with Nazism and German nationalism.

Continue reading.

[emjee]

Oh my God once you have your eyes opened to Christian hegemony it’s fucking everywhere

(I know that’s what hegemony means. I’m a little drunk rn.)

I am so sorry. Oh my God. This is the worst.

This tipsy post brought to you by: having a cocktail at my public library (yes my library has a bar, it’s a very fancy library in a city that thinks highly of itself) and they’re playing songs I would sing in church. It’s not Christmas yet, and more importantly, get that out of my public library! It’s a publicly funded institution!!!

[arcticdementor]

Sohrab Ahmari, who previously wrote a decent takedown of the exemplar of nominative determinism Max Boot, but who I’ve otherwise never heard of before, wrote an article in First Things opposing “David Frenchism,” a “persuasion or a sensibility” that he names after the National Review writer who Bill Kristol named as the ideal #NeverTrump candidate for president.

The “Frenchist” disposition, according to Ahmari, is a nice, liberal one. It sees politics as a matter of procedure, institutions, and ‘decency’; it seeks to defend the conservative cause by appeal to the liberal logic of autonomy, and it inherits from its English nonconformist roots a “great horror … of the public power to advance the common good,” leading it to insist that political challenges be solved by the depoliticized measures of “personal renewal” and somehow-organic cultural change.

…

But the apparent endorsement of far-left political violence by American Interest writers is a manifestation of a broader failure on the right: its agreement to the now-bipartisan rule of pas d’ennemis à gauche, pas d’amis à droit. David French is quite willing to endorse intersectionality in the pages of Vox; but Donald Trump is too far. (As Liel Liebovitz pointed out, David French endorsed the Russiagate conspiracy theory.)

This rule, in fact, is part of what ‘Frenchist’ niceness means in practice. Civility and decency are all well and good in the abstract, but who defines them? To what extent can ‘Frenchists’ extricate themselves from the influence of those who insist that the leftist platform is a simple matter of civility and decency? Furthermore, why should the civility among lawyers that French advocates generalize outside the professional realm? What percentage of truly political victories, rather than the legal-procedural ones that French concerns himself with, were won by politeness alone? Our goal must not be to remain unfailingly polite as our losses pile up; it must be to win. Ahmari is right about this: decency is a tactic, and becoming attached to a tactic is a mistake. This doesn’t mean we ought to follow the left in, say, launching coordinated attacks on random children; what it means is that, at least in David Hines’s account of leftist tactics, perhaps those attacks wouldn’t have happened if the journalists had gotten a little more operant conditioning

…

Ahmari’s position, however, is equally untenable. Using the state to forcibly reorder the public square toward the (Christian if not specifically Catholic) “Highest Good” would require a higher level of religiosity, and, more importantly, a higher level of willingness to dispense with old American liberal principles, than can be found in America today, where only half of the population is even nominally Catholic or Evangelical, fewer than two fifths claim to go to church every week, and the single largest religious group is ‘none’. The integralist Adrian Vermeule has argued that the election of Trump demonstrates that the American political landscape can change on a dime; but that doesn’t imply it’s likely to change in that direction. It’s true that the Fifth Great Awakening, or the sixth or seventh ones, could produce mass conversions to Catholicism and usher in an integralist America, but it’s equally true that it could produce the revival of the cult of Tengri and the remythologization of the United States as the greatest steppe empire since the Yamnaya expansion. Get ahead of the curve  — buy your cowboy hats now!

…

But what else does the election of Trump represent? Ahmari positioned his article against ‘Frenchism’ as an explication of a manifesto of sorts that he signed after the 2016 election, which he and others took as a sign of the death of the pre-Trump conservative consensus; but this manifesto is less a comprehensive rethinking of American conservatism than a denunciation of free-market ‘fusionism’ by a religious, socially conservative faction of that consensus, which already had inclinations toward economic populism before Trump. Furthermore, Ahmari’s objection to ‘Frenchism’ is entirely concerned with the socon cause  —  remember what prompted his article!

How can this be said to be the message sent by the election of Donald Trump  — who, as French points out, hangs a Playboy cover on the wall of his office? If anything, the case is stronger for the opposite: for a reading of Trump’s election as signifying the complete collapse of the pre-Trump conservative consensus, the bankruptcy of both right-neoliberal Reaganomics and the ‘political Christianity’ of the Moral Majority, and the prospect (albeit a mostly unrealized one) of conservative reorientation toward worker-friendly economic pragmatism combined with social moderation, rejection of the ludicrous and corrosive bipartisan consensus on immigration, and insistence that America was not fundamentally illegitimate before 1968.

…

Establishment conservatism, it seems, is doubling down on its refusal to reckon with the realities of the American political landscape. It’s true that the ascendant left wants to revoke religious liberty, with the goal of subordinating Christianity (specifically Christianity) to the whims of the woke state; but this is only one facet of its platform. It also promotes a view of white Americans reminiscent of the ethnic hatred stoked against market-dominant minorities in certain countries in the 20th century (never mind that white Americans aren’t even the richest demographic!); claims that our country is fundamentally illegitimate; calls for the destruction of our borders; pushes for a credentialist economy in which no one can succeed without first obtaining permission from a committee of progressive priests, who will dispense it based more on loyalty to the cause than on any apolitical notion of merit; advocates for the abolition of the nation-state in favor of a tightly controlled and managed ‘inclusive society’ in which the inevitable ethnic conflict will provide the ruling structure with a bottomless well of opportunities to justify its own expansion; and seeks to subordinate everything, from colleges to corporations to open-source software organizations to knitting groups, to an arbitrary and intentionally byzantine code of conduct, in order to purge infidels from the whole of society. This is not ‘libertine,’ it is totalitarian. And the totality of that agenda must be opposed.

The conservative debate thus far has been premised on the idea that the proper response to Trump, the proper way forward, is to simply revitalize the platform of the Moral Majority. Not only does this fail to address many of the problems facing our country today ⁠— it has little, if anything, to say about immigration, which is necessarily the most pressing issue because its effects are permanent and irreversible  —  it offers little potential for attaining true hegemony. The conflict between moralists and libertines in America predates the United States itself and is unlikely to result in a decisive victory anytime soon (in other words, it’s Lindy), and it’s sufficiently orthogonal to the main dimension of American politics that there are strains of progressivism that have evolved to accommodate both. Many progressives even oppose drag!

But simply banning drag queens from California’s libraries won’t make America great again. The question of what will remains open, but here are some components of a new conservatism that will be necessary: an end to mass unskilled migration, stricter immigration controls, and an uncompromising defense of borders and the nation-state system; the establishment of policies and culture that support marriage, family formation, and homeownership; a serious drive to retake cultural hegemony from the progressives; a willingness to combat the conspiratorial demographic hatred which casts men as sub-rational pigs and whites as the nefarious, scheming villains of history; and the abandonment of the dead consensus of social conservatism and little else, in favor of a new nationalism that protects both Christian and ‘pagan’ Americans and works to preserve the civilization they have built.

[sciencespies]

How College Dorms Evolved to Fit America's Gender and Racial Politics

https://sciencespies.com/history/how-college-dorms-evolved-to-fit-americas-gender-and-racial-politics/

How College Dorms Evolved to Fit America's Gender and Racial Politics

The residence hall in the United States has come to mark the threshold between childhood and adulthood, housing young people during a transformational time in their lives. When parents drop their kids off at college, do they pose in front of a classroom building or the library? Maybe. But it’s the unloading of clothes, computers, and comforters at the dorms that defines the break between childhood and adulthood.

This rite of passage is taken much more seriously by Americans than by people in other countries. In the United States, largely because of Americans’ romantic attitude toward the universities of Oxford and Cambridge—where young men once lived and studied together and forged lasting identities based on shared housing—students living together in one building has come to be seen as an essential part of the college experience. Students spend just 12 or 15 hours per week in class, plus a few hours of study; the rest of the time they are socializing, working out, gaming, managing clubs, politicking, making music, and relaxing with friends. In short, they are forging connections that will last a lifetime and establishing a network that will benefit their careers.

But living on campus—and the social benefit Americans place on it today—was never inevitable. American universities haven’t always intended for dorms to bring people together; campus housing was also organized, for many years, to keep groups of students apart. In fact, the very first purpose-built residence for college students in America was the Indian College at Harvard University, constructed by a British religious society in the mid-17th century to house Native American students and keep them separate from white boys.

And while today’s residence life experts tout diversity as the key reason for residing with fellow students, from the 17th century to the early 20th century, anti-diversity was the norm. Dormitories introduced young men to other men like themselves, and anchored young women in the domestic sphere they were expected to inhabit later on—and architects and university leaders came up with physical designs that furthered these social goals.

In the colonial period, college buildings were often single, multipurpose structures that housed all the functions of a school, including the president’s home, faculty apartments, student bedrooms, chapel, library, dining hall, and classrooms. Harvard’s first governing board reported in 1671, “It is well known … what advantage to Learning accrues by the multitude of persons cohabiting for scholasticall communion, whereby to acuate the minds of one another, and other waies to promote the ends of a Colledge-Society.” Since the actual curriculum was limited, Christian morality was a large part of what boys absorbed at the colonial college. This character formation was gained by observing role models; professors and students sharing living space was good for moral development. This attitude was an essential intellectual and emotional precondition for the American dormitory.

A uniquely American sense of religious identity provided the ongoing impetus for sorting students into dorm-style housing during the 18th and 19th centuries. Great Britain had one official state religion, Anglicanism, which dominated life at both Oxford and Cambridge. But in the United States, religious freedom expressed itself in dozens of sects—each of which wanted its own college, with its own moral imprint on its members. Religious leaders often founded small schools in rural districts, away from the crime and vice of the city; assigning students to live together in a dormitory allowed young boys to bond with each other and their tutors, reinforcing their social connections. Ideally, a young man’s roommate had a marriageable younger sister, tightening the bond once more.

Although dorms were exclusionary, on balance, university-sponsored housing was still more democratic than the houses built by the private fraternities for white men in the late 19th century. As fraternities surged in popularity, they erected houses for dwelling, partying, and secret rites on many American campuses. They soon began to dominate college social life, and by the 1870s a non-Greek student (also called an “independent”) had little chance of becoming student body president or first trombone in the marching band. As historian Nicholas Syrett has explained, “Like any society that includes some people and excludes others, fraternities gain prestige precisely through that exclusion.”

In the service of solidifying their status, fraternity men also pushed the boundaries of acceptable student behavior. At Cornell University, the University of Michigan, and other colleges, fraternity brothers made it known that so-called coeds (female college students) were not allowed at their parties, and that local women were the preferred guests. The brothers saw lower-class women as sexually available and “ostracized those female classmates who threatened their hegemony on campus,” Syrett writes.

College deans maintained that the gulf separating fraternity men from other men on campus could be blamed on housing. In 1930, S. L. Rollins, a dean of men at Northwestern University, spoke plaintively, “[It is an] undesirable result when the fraternity men are well housed while the independents are not. This inequality in housing is the predominant cause for the feeling of inferiority [among non-Greeks] and for their animosity toward the fraternity men.” Today it might seem laughably naïve that anyone thought animosity arose from poor housing, rather than racial and religious discrimination, but Rollins and other administrators felt that the construction of good dormitories was a positive intervention that would smooth the torn fabric of college life. So, in the early decades of the 20th century, many university leaders lobbied strenuously for a new sort of residence hall to serve as a democratic alternative to the elitist fraternity.

Many of these pre-World War II dorms were arranged around a quadrangle, much like Cambridge and Oxford, to shut out the bustling city, create a private outdoor space, and hark back to vaunted English forebears. The University of Wisconsin’s Adams and Tripp Halls, built in 1924-26, are typical. They face away from Lake Mendota, making them cozy and self-contained, and they are laid out in the shape of a square donut, with four sides built to the same height and a central courtyard inaccessible to anyone other than a resident.

The University of Wisconsin’s Adams and Tripp Halls, pictured here on a 1926 postcard, were designed to level class distinctions.

(Courtesy of Carli Yanni)

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College deans wanted to establish the same esprit-de-corps within houses as could be found in an exclusive fraternity, but that required engineering. Each man had a single bedroom, so to create community out of these single rooms, students were organized into houses, formed vertically off of a staircase in a porous arrangement sometimes called the staircase or entryway plan. A brochure directed at incoming Wisconsin students emphasized the possibility that dorm life in places like Adams or Tripp Halls could level class distinctions, noting that the son of a banker and a farmer’s boy could converse and relax in front of the crackling logs of the fireplace.

Unfortunately, for all these widespread claims of egalitarianism, the dormitory still perpetuated barriers. Black students, for instance, weren’t permitted to live in white dorms—at Wisconsin or nearly anywhere else in the U.S. When the enormously popular University of Wisconsin chef Carson Gulley, who was African-American, couldn’t find housing in Madison in pre-civil rights America (before the mid-1960s), university leaders assigned him an apartment in Adams Hall—but it was in the basement, and Gulley’s family had to enter through a separate entrance that was reminiscent of a servants’ door.

Chef Gulley’s apartment was shoehorned into an existing dormitory; in contrast, nearly every space at Howard University in Washington, D.C., was built by black architects for black students. At historically black colleges and universities like Howard, the social value placed on the dormitory was high. Black colleges represented in physical form the acquisition of land, the aspirations for education, and successful uplift of African-Americans—and a certain style of dorm life became part of the program. But that came with a private cost: The handbook for Howard students said, “Always remember that a Howard student is a marked student. Each represents more than himself or herself, because the University entrusts its honor and reputation to each student.”

In particular, the construction of Howard’s Women’s Dormitory (known today as Harriet Tubman Quadrangle), demonstrates how these spaces were expected to protect and prepare their residents. The building was overseen by Lucy Diggs Slowe—a nationally respected educator, tennis champion, writer, and founder of the first African-American sorority (Alpha Kappa Alpha) who was dean of women at Howard for 15 years. Built under her close direction in the 1930s, the Women’s Dormitory resembled Adams and Tripp Halls at Wisconsin in that it was a completely enclosed. Its courtyard was larger, however, and there were fewer points of entry to the inside of the dorm—it was closed off from the city for the protection of the young women. Howard’s administration assumed that female students needed greater protection and surveillance, so the dorm’s architect, Alfred Cassell, organized room entrances around long corridors instead of the entryway plan.

Lucy Diggs Slowe (front row, fourth from left), dean of women at Howard University and a highly regarded educator in the nascent field of student affairs, stands in front of the newly completed women’s dormitory with the national professional organization of deans of women in February 1932.

(Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution)

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On the first floor of one side of the quadrangle, Cassell, at Slowe’s behest, supplied a panoply of social spaces, including parlors, a music room, and a social hall that could be used for special parties or for everyday dining. “A dormitory should be as much like a well-ordered home,” Slowe wrote, “as it is possible to make it”—in other words, a ladies’ dormitory was where the refinements of a carefully managed home would develop. Students entertained guests in order to learn to be good hostesses, and (later) good wives and mothers. The female students needed the extra living space, in part because they were not to go inside men’s dormitories; if a woman was meeting a date (chaperoned of course), he had to come to her dormitory. The female students at Howard were being trained in “thoughtfulness, courtesy, and hospitality,” Slowe said. Socializing was a goal of living in the dorm; the residence hall set a high standard for social behavior. The beautifully appointed parlors and music rooms were a stage set for enhancing students’ moral development.

Over the decades, American educators have cherished the residence hall as a transformational space in which adolescents turned into adult, morally conscious citizens. Of course, this may seem strange today, when living in a residence hall might just as well lead to a decline in moral character.

Either way, in the weeks around the start of the fall semester, students should stop and think more deeply about the physical space of their residence hall. What possibilities does it offer? Does it reinforce class and race divisions, or does it breakdown social expectations? Corridors make keeping tabs on students easy, but echo with noise; staircase plans prevent roughhousing but offer no communal space; lavish lounges in women’s halls were once intended to civilize male visitors, as were specially designed benches for courting couples. In spite of the fact that college housing policies often allowed for discrimination according to class, race, and gender, deans persisted in their vision of residence hall as a democratic alternative to the elitist fraternity. Against the backdrop of sweeping societal changes, communal living endured because it bolstered networking, if not studying. It’s no wonder families still pose next to the freshly made bunk bed.

Carla Yanni is a professor of art history at Rutgers University and the author of Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory.

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#History

[blackkudos]

Elijah Muhammad

Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Robert Poole; October 7, 1897 – February 25, 1975) was an African-American religious leader, who led the Nation of Islam (NOI) from 1934 until his death in 1975. He was a mentor to Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Muhammad Ali, and his son, Warith Deen Mohammed.

Early years and life before Nation of Islam

Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Robert Poole in Sandersville, Georgia, the seventh of thirteen children of William Poole, Sr. (1868–1942), a Baptist lay preacher and sharecropper, and Mariah Hall (1873–1958), a homemaker and sharecropper.

Elijah's education ended at the third grade to work in sawmills and brickyards. To support the family, he worked with his parents as a sharecropper. When he was sixteen years old, he left home and began working in factories and at other businesses.

Poole married Clara Evans (1899–1972) on March 7, 1917. The Poole family was among the hundreds of thousands of black families forming the First Great Migration leaving the oppressive and economically troubled South in search of safety and employment. Poole later recounted that before the age of 20, he had witnessed the lynchings of three black men by white people. He said, "I seen enough of the white man's brutality to last me 26,000 years".

Moving his own family, parents and siblings, Elijah and the Pooles settled in Hamtramck, Michigan. Through the 1920s and 1930s, Poole struggled to find and keep work as the economy suffered during the Great Depression. During their years in Detroit, Elijah and Clara had eight children, six boys and two girls.

Conversion and rise to leadership

While he was in Detroit, Poole began taking part in various Black Nationalist movements within the city. Most prominently, he joined the Universal Negro Improvement Association founded by Marcus Garvey. In August 1931, at the urging of his wife, Elijah Poole attended a speech on Islam and black empowerment by Wallace D. Fard. Afterward, Poole said he approached Fard and asked if he was the redeemer. Fard responded that he was, but that his time had not yet come. Fard taught that Blacks, as original Asiatics, had a rich cultural history which was stolen from them in their enslavement. Fard stated that African Americans could regain their freedoms through self-independence and cultivation of their own culture and civilization. Poole, having strong consciousness of both race and class issues as a result of his struggles in the South, quickly fell in step with Fard's ideology. Poole soon became an ardent follower of Fard and joined his movement, as did his wife and several brothers. Soon afterward, Poole was given a Muslim surname, first "Karriem", and later, at Fard's behest, "Muhammad". He assumed leadership of the Nation's Temple No. 2 in Chicago. His younger brother Kalot Muhammad became the leader of the movement's self-defense arm, the Fruit of Islam.

Fard turned over leadership of the growing Detroit group to Elijah Muhammad, and the Allah Temple of Islam changed its name to the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad and Wallace Fard continued to communicate until 1934, when Wallace Fard disappeared. Elijah Muhammad succeeded him in Detroit and was named "Minister of Islam". After the disappearance, Elijah Muhammad told followers that Wallace Fard Muhammad had come as Allah, in the flesh, to share his teachings that are a salvation for his followers.

In 1934, the Nation of Islam published its first newspaper, Final Call to Islam, to educate and build membership. Children of its members attended classes at the newly created Muhammad University of Islam, but this soon led to challenges by boards of education in Detroit and Chicago, which considered the children truants from the public school system. The controversy led to the jailing of several University of Islam board members and Elijah Muhammad in 1934 and to violent confrontations with police. Muhammad was put on probation, but the university remained open.

Leadership of the Nation of Islam

Elijah Muhammad took control of Temple No. 1, but only after battles with other potential leaders, including his brother. In 1935, as these battles became increasingly fierce, Muhammad left Detroit and settled his family in Chicago. Still facing death threats, Muhammad left his family there and traveled to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he founded Temple No. 3, and eventually to Washington, D.C., where he founded Temple No. 4. He spent much of his time reading 104 books suggested by Wallace Fard at the Library of Congress.

On May 8, 1942, Elijah Muhammad was arrested for failure to register for the draft during World War II. After he was released on bail, Muhammad fled Washington D.C. on the advice of his attorney, who feared a lynching, and returned to Chicago after a seven year long absence. Muhammad was arrested there, charged with eight counts of sedition for instructing his followers not to register for the draft or serve in the armed forces. Found guilty, Elijah Muhammad served four years, from 1942 to 1946, at the Federal Correctional Institution in Milan, Michigan. During that time, his wife, Clara, and trusted aides ran the organization; Muhammad transmitted his messages and directives to followers in letters.

Following his return to Chicago, Elijah Muhammad was firmly in charge of the Nation of Islam. While Muhammad was in prison, the growth of the Nation of Islam had stagnated, with fewer than 400 members remaining by the time of his release in 1946. However, through the conversion of his fellow inmates as well as renewed efforts outside prison, he was able to redouble his efforts and continue growing the Nation. From four temples in 1946, the Nation of Islam grew to 15 by 1955. By 1959, there were 50 temples in 22 states.

Muhammad preached his own version of Islam to his followers in the Nation. According to him, blacks were known as the 'original' human being, with 'evil' whites being an offshoot race that would go on to oppress black people for 6,000 years. He preached that the Nation of Islam's goal was to return the stolen hegemony of the inferior whites back to blacks across America. Much of Elijah Muhammad's teachings appealed to young, economically disadvantaged, African-American males from Christian backgrounds. Traditionally, Black males wouldn't go to church because the church did not address their needs. Elijah Muhammad's program for economic development played a large part in the growth in the Nation of Islam. He purchased land and businesses to provide housing and employment for young black males.

By the 1970s, the Nation of Islam owned bakeries, barber shops, coffee shops, grocery stores, laundromats, a printing plant, retail stores, numerous real estate holdings, and a fleet of tractor trailers, plus farmland in Michigan, Alabama, and Georgia. In 1972 the Nation of Islam took controlling interest in a bank, the Guaranty Bank and Trust Co. Nation of Islam-owned schools expanded until, by 1974, the group had established schools in 47 cities throughout the United States. In 1972, Muhammad told followers that the Nation of Islam had a net worth of $75 million.

Death

On January 30, 1975, Muhammad entered Mercy Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, suffering from a combination of heart disease, diabetes, bronchitis, and asthma. He died of congestive heart failure on February 25, the day before Saviours' Day. He was survived by many children, including his two daughters and six sons by his wife, most notably future leader Warith Deen Muhammad. He is buried at Mount Glenwood Memory Gardens.

Legacy

During his time as leader of The Nation of Islam, Muhammad had developed the Nation of Islam from a small movement in Detroit to an empire consisting of banks, schools, restaurants and stores across 46 cities in America. The Nation also owned over 15,000 acres of farmland, their own truck- and air- transport systems, as well as a publishing company that printed the country's largest Black newspaper. As a leader, Muhammad served as mentor to many notable members, such as Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Louis Farrakhan and his son Warith Deen Mohammed. The Nation of Islam is estimated to have between 20,000 and 50,000 members, and 130 mosques offering numerous social programs. Upon his death, his son Warith Deen Mohammed succeeded him. Warith disbanded the Nation of Islam in 1976 and founded an orthodox mainstream Islamic organization, that came to be known as the American Society of Muslims. The organization would dissolve, change names and reorganize many times. In 1977, Louis Farrakhan resigned from Warith Deen's reformed organization and reinstituted the original Nation of Islam upon the foundation established by Wallace Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad. Farrakhan regained many of the Nation of Islam's original properties including the National Headquarters Mosque #2 (Mosque Maryam) and Muhammad University of Islam in Chicago, IL.

Controversies

Rift with Malcolm X

Rumors were circulating among Nation of Islam members that Muhammad was conducting extramarital affairs with young Nation secretaries—​​which would constitute a serious violation of Nation teachings. After first discounting the rumors, Malcolm X came to believe them after he spoke with Muhammad's son Wallace and with the women making the accusations. Muhammad confirmed the rumors in 1963, attempting to justify his behavior by referring to precedents set by Biblical prophets.

On December 1, 1963, when asked for a comment about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X said that it was a case of "chickens coming home to roost". He added that "chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad." The New York Times wrote, "in further criticism of Mr. Kennedy, the Muslim leader cited the murders of Patrice Lumumba, Congo leader, of Medgar Evers, civil rights leader, and of the Negro girls bombed earlier this year in a Birmingham church. These, he said, were instances of other 'chickens coming home to roost'." The remarks prompted a widespread public outcry. The Nation of Islam, which had sent a message of condolence to the Kennedy family and ordered its ministers not to comment on the assassination, publicly censured their former shining star. Malcolm X retained his post and rank as minister, but was prohibited from public speaking for 90 days.

The extramarital affairs, the suspension, and other factors caused a rift between the two men, with Malcolm X leaving the Nation of Islam in March 1964 to form his own religious organization, Muslim Mosque Inc. After dealing with death threats and attempts on his life for a year, Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965. Many people suspected that the Nation of Islam was responsible for the killing, which Muhammad denied.

George Lincoln Rockwell

Muhammad's pro-separation views were compatible with those of some white supremacist organizations in the 1960s. He allegedly met with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan in 1961 to work toward the purchase of farmland in the deep south. He eventually established Temple Farms, now Muhammad Farms, on a 5,000-acre (20 km2) tract in Terrell County, Georgia. George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party once called Muhammad "the Hitler of the black man." At the 1962 Saviour's Day celebration in Chicago, Rockwell addressed Nation of Islam members. Many in the audience booed and heckled him and his men, for which Muhammad rebuked them in the April 1962 issue of Muhammad Speaks.

Wives and children

Elijah married Clara Muhammad in Georgia in 1917, with whom he had eight children. Elijah also had three children with Lucille Rosary Muhammad, one child with Evelyn Muhammad, and four children with Tynnetta Muhammad and is rumored to have also fathered several children from other relationships. In total, it is estimated that he had 21 children.

Malcolm X as well as other former believers in Nation of Islam theology were also indignant that Muhammad allegedly used the organization's funds to support his many children and their mothers, as well as his own family. After Elijah Muhammad's death, nineteen of his children filed lawsuits against the Nation of Islam's successor, the World Community of Islam, seeking status as heirs. Ultimately the court ruled against them.

Children with Clara Muhammad

They had eight children, including two daughters and six sons:

Emmanuel Muhammad, b. 1921

Ethel Muhammad, b. 1922 (deceased)

Lottie Muhammad, b. 1925 (deceased)

Nathaniel Muhammad, b. 23 June 1926

Jabir Herbert Muhammad, b. 1929 d. 2008

Elijah Muhammad, Jr., b. 1931

Wallace Delaney Muhammad, b. 1933 d. 2008 (later known as Warith Deen Mohammed)

Akbar Muhammad, b. 1939

Honors

In the early 1990s the city of Detroit co-named Linwood Avenue "Elijah Muhammad Boulevard."

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Elijah Muhammad on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

Portrayals in film

Elijah Muhammad was notably portrayed by Al Freeman, Jr. in Spike Lee's 1992 motion picture Malcolm X. Albert Hall, who played the composite character "Baines" in Malcolm X, later played Muhammad in Michael Mann's 2001 film, Ali.

Muhammad was also thanked in the 1996 documentary When We Were Kings, and the film is dedicated to him.

Wikipedia

[jessicalprice]

Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (2. Introduction)

(Part 1 is here.)

On to the introduction.

With the context I outlined in the previous post, Buell opens with a question from the Epistle to Diognetus, one of the earliest known examples of apologetics, a discipline primarily within Christianity that attacks other cultures/systems of belief and defends Christian ideology.

Why this new race [genos]? the author asks about Christianity.

The question, asked almost 2000 years later, is a challenging one. As Buell notes:

Most people—Christian or not—do not think of Christianity as necessarily linked with race or ethnicity. Indeed, most historical reconstructions published in the last twenty years depict earliest Christianity as an inclusive movement that rejected ethnic or racial specificity as a condition of religious identity.

She discusses some attempts to associate Christianity with particular race(s) much later in its history (guess when!), which are of course about as gross as you'd expect. Put a pin in that.

Sidebar: The poisonous legacy of Renan's The Life of Jesus

In general, and in contrast, the idea of Christianity as above race has been almost universally seen as positive.

Christianity [is] a kind of religion that is defined by its being not linked to race, and... higher value [is] accorded to Christianity on this basis.

Indeed, most academic study of Christianity has been marked by:

[A] widespread view of Christianness as emphatically not a race. In the study of Christianity, and especially Christian origins, this shift has translated into an emphasis upon defining the difference between Christianity and Judaism as that of an ideally universal religion versus a religion of a particular people.

Christianity can be liberatory for some of its adherents, and I don't want to suggest that that experience of it isn't real. But one of the reasons empires have found Christianity a useful religion of empire is because while it can be liberatory, it can also be pacifying. Its liberation can be all in the realm of the spiritual and not at all in the realm of the material or political. After all, in positioning suffering and martyrdom as holy and instructing slaves to obey their masters, Christianity can be constructed to reinforce social hierarchies and oppression and abuse by treating life as a testing ground and promising a reward--and equality--after death.

Over and above whom?

The problem is it generally gets there by scapegoating Jews:

[C]laims that earliest Christianity transcended ethnoracial distinctions have often been formulated over and against a definition of Jewishness... [D]efinitions of Christianity’s racially inclusive ideal will perpetuate a racially loaded form of anti-Judaism if the implied point of contrast to Christianity’s inclusiveness is Jewishness.

(It also often serves as a loophole letting white Christians off the hook in examining their own racism--after all, if Christianity is the solution to racism, they can see themselves as antiracist simply by being Christian.)

As I discussed in the preface, this also contributes to one of the defenses of what Lee Leviter has dubbed "the myth of Christian innocence." This particular defense of Christian innocence posits a single, original, "pure" Christianity from which modern iterations have fallen, allowing defenders to posit anything bad that comes from Christianity as an example of "fake" Christianity (a largesse, one might note, that extends only to Christianity--other cultures are judged on what their adherents do, while Christianity can only be judged on its ideal form).

The interpretation of these New Testament passages as indicative of explicitly nonracialized Christian origins depends on a historical model of Christian history that moves from “pure” origins to less pure realizations of Christianity over time. When Christian practices and structures contribute to racist and ethnocentric oppression, this outcome has often been interpreted as a failure to realize the universalistic and egalitarian ideals inherent in earliest Christianity.

The problem can never be anything about Christianity itself--it can only be because people aren't actually doing Christianity. (This is diet culture logic writ large: if you don't get the results you want, the problem is clearly with you and not with the diet. If you are harmed by Christianity, the problem is, in essence, with you for thinking it was Christianity that harmed you, when actually, it was this imposter Christianity.)

Fluid or fixed ethnicity

So, we have a Christian vision of early Christianity as something that liberated people from their ethnic specificity.

And yet:

Christians also referred to themselves using other language that their contemporaries would have understood as positioning Christians as comparable to groups such as Jews, Greeks, and Romans: the terms ethnos, laos, politeia (Greek), and genus and natio (Latin) pepper early Christian texts... Instead of positioning Christianness as not-race, or aracial, many early Christian texts defined their version of Christianity as a race or ethnicity, sometimes in opposition to other rival articulations of Christianness, and sometimes in contrast to non-Christian groups and cultures (including, but not limited, to those defined as “Jews”).

So how do we reconcile a Christianity anyone can join--indeed, a Christianity that has as its end goal a world in which everyone has joined--with an early Christian self-conception of Christians as a race or ethnicity?

Buell's answer is that the difficulty is due to a false binary.

Race and ethnicity are positioned as irrelevant to early Christian self-definition because they seem to contrast with universalism. In this way of thinking, racially or ethnically specific forms of Christianity may exist, but these variations are viewed either as incidental (not affecting a perceived underlying essence of Christianity) or as problematic (obstructing the achievement of a Christian ideal to dissolve racially or ethnically linked forms of religion and society). This interpretation of the relationship of race/ethnicity to Christianity was especially elaborated in modern historical contexts in light of arguments that race/ethnicity are natural, biological traits.

She argues that this has led to a modern understanding of race/ethnicity as "fixed," a characteristic that wasn't necessarily as present in the ancient world. (The non-fixity of membership in a people certainly makes sense from a Jewish perspective--one can join the Jewish ethnoreligion, and that makes one fully Jewish.)

A universal ethnicity

An ancient-world conception of ethnicity/race as dynamic makes it possible to understand both Christian self-conception as a race/ethnicity and Christian univeralism:

Christians conceptualized themselves not only as a group formed out of members of other peoples, but also as a people themselves... Like Romans, early Christians do not view descent as a bar to (or a precondition of) becoming Christian; nonetheless, Christians also develop and ritually elaborate claims of primordial descent as a basis for defining the Christian community.

In the end, though, we can still use contemporary understanding of these terms to help us parse early Christian self-definition.

The central argument of this book is that early Christian texts used culturally available understandings of human difference, which we can analyze in terms of our modern concepts of “ethnicity,” “race,” and “religion,” to shape what we have come to call a religious tradition and to portray particular forms of Christianness as universal and authoritative.

Four reasons for ethnic reasoning

Buell outlines four reasons that ethnic reasoning was useful to early Christians:

First, race/ethnicity was often deemed to be produced and indicated by religious practices.

Christians (cultural and practicing) often have trouble grasping that Judaism is an ethnoreligion--they often want Jews to identify either as "religious Jews" or "ethnically Jewish." That distinction is not natural to Judaism: Jews are a people with our own culture, and that culture has, as part of it, distinctive religious elements.

Today, in a hegemonic Christian society, being an ethnoreligious culture makes us unusual, but it's important to remember that it was normal in the ancient world.

Second, although ancient authors frequently refer to membership in a genos, ethnos, laos, and phylon as a matter of one’s birth and descent (that is, as fixed or ascribed), such membership was nonetheless seen to be mutable.

Again, this is something about the way Judaism functions now (it's a people/ethnicity that you can join under certain circumstances) that often trips people up, but that's not because Judaism is unique, it's because we're using an older understanding of peoplehood than contemporary Christians do.

Third, this juxtaposition of fluidity and fixity enabled early Christians to use ethnic reasoning to make universalizing claims, arguing that everyone can, and thus ought to, become a Christian.

Finally, early Christians also used ethnic reasoning polemically, especially to compete with one another.

Framing is everything

Buell notes that attempts to reconstruct and understand early Christianity are usually framed by two questions:

“What is the original form of Christianity?” and “How and why did Christianity ‘succeed’?” Although it may not appear so at first glance, both of these questions rely on modern ideas about race for answers.

She outlines how the first question treats Christianity and its development as if it were biological:

It also contains within it a prior question: what makes Christianity different, distinct, or unique (that allows us to even speak about it having an origin)? Christianity is then studied implicitly in organic terms as a life form, with the presupposition that there is a fundamental essence or structure to this life form that may be altered in subsequent strains but which can be uncovered by tracing Christianity back to its original roots.

This biological framing leads to some interesting hangups:

Moreover, these metaphors encode organic notions of racial and sexual difference that appear in preoccupations with what we might call miscegenation. Three concepts in particular signal this concern with early Christianity’s sexual/racial purity: “syncretism,” “Judaizing,” and “heresy.” All three are used to explain differences within Christianity in terms of improper “mixing” of some original essence of Christianity with allegedly external elements... There is an irony here. Naturalized ideas about race help to structure the very classifications of religions despite the insistence on defining Christianity as not-race.

And of course, that leads both to gendering things like heresy (both in terms of describing it in feminized and sexualized terms, such as whoring, and in belief that women are especially susceptible to heresy, especially Judaizing) and scapegoating Jews and Judaism as especially racialized.

By distinguishing Christianity as universal and racially unmarked, Judaism is constructed as its constitutive other—the racially marked particular... [T]he Jew becomes the “other” by which the self is defined.

On to Chapter 1. (To come)

[drrobw]

How American Christians Can Break Free from ‘Slaveholder Religion’

It’s been a century and a half since the American Civil War ended, but according to Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, the slaveholder religion of that era has quietly persisted until today. But to understand this development, a history lesson is in order.

In the mid-19th century, Christian abolitionists used the Bible to make a case for racial equality. Plantation owners could not let this stand, so they paid preachers to use the Bible to argue for white supremacy. This oppressive theology is what Wilson-Hartgrove calls “slaveholder religion.”

“After the South lost the Civil War, slavery was abolished, but slaveholder religion never went away,” he says. “It never repented. And it is with us still.”

Not convinced? Neither was Wilson-Hartgrove until he went back to read the many sermons and books from the mid-19th century, which remain in many American theological libraries until today. He was shocked by how familiar they felt. Slaveholder propaganda was eerily similar to the messages propagated by 21st-century conservative white evangelicals.

In Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion, Wilson-Hartgrove wrestles with the troubling history and theology held by many believers. But more importantly, he explains what must be done to break free from these oppressive views and spark a more just expression of Christianity in America.

Does Donald Trump promote “slaveholder religion,” in your opinion? If so, how?

The crucial point is that slaveholder religion promotes him. It doesn’t seem that the basic message of Christianity was ever personally appealing to Donald Trump. But candidate Trump discovered the incredible political power of slaveholder religion while attacking America’s first black president.

When researching this book in 2016, I spent a lot of time reading sermons by white Southern preachers during Reconstruction — the brief period when black people had political power after the Civil War. I was struck by how much they sounded like Trump.

The nation was in trouble, Washington was a den of corruption, and somebody needed to rise up and “take our country back.” This was the language of slaveholder religion after abolition. It was all about white supremacy, but it was framed as a moral crusade. Historians call it the “Redemption Movement” because it really was a matter of faith for white Southerners. Just as “Make America Great Again” is a matter of faith for many today.

What about the religious leaders and pastors who have supported and advise Trump? People like Jerry Falwell, Jr., and Paula White and Robert Jeffress? Are they promoting a slaveholder religion?

Yes, but they don’t see it. They think they are standing up for righteousness over and against the liberal media. This is where religion is so powerful. It gives people a capacity to believe in spite of the evidence. Which means you’ll never prove to them that they’re wrong. But I don’t know how to explain Trumpvangelicals apart from white Christianity’s long history of justifying and defending white supremacy. How else do you reconcile “America first” with “the last shall be first”?

Still, I don’t want to let the rest of us off too easy. As I talk to folks in churches around the country, most people find Trumpvangelicals to be extreme. Falwell and Jeffress are on TV a lot, but Christianity today has distanced itself from them. They’re hardly guiding lights for most evangelicals.

But another pattern of slaveholder religion is to separate personal faith from political engagement. If you’re not going to fight for white hegemony, slaveholder religion would like you to stay focused on personal piety and compassion ministries — to not be “too political.” So we also have to face the silence of white moderates as a vestige of slaveholder religion. It’s not just the Trump defenders who got us here. It’s also all the good Christian people who did nothing when a man who was endorsed by the KKK became a candidate for president.

Why is it that a white man is writing a book about “slaveholder religion” anyway? Shouldn’t we be lifting up minority voices in this conversation rather than speaking on behalf of the marginalized?

Yes. But I’m not speaking for anyone else in this book. I’m confessing my — and my people’s — complicity in slaveholder religion. And I’m trying to share the good news that another way of being Christian is possible. Even for white folks.

Twenty years ago, when I was trying to get a foot into the world of the Christian Right, I hit a dead end. I was nauseated by the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of it all when I saw it up close. And I didn’t know what to do.

I’m still a Christian today because I was invited into the black-led freedom movement and learned the long history of another way of being Christian in America. I showed up like Saul — a blind man who only knew I’d heard the voice of Jesus ask, “Why are you persecuting me?” A lot of this book is about what I learned from the Ananiases who shepherded me into beloved community. They are the ones who took me by the shoulders, looked me in the eyes, and said, “You have to talk to white people about this. Maybe they’ll be able to hear it from you.”

When writing about your escape from slaveholder religion, you call yourself a “man torn in two.” What does this mean?

That the line between the Christianity of the slaveholder and the Christianity of Christ runs through all of us.

In order to tell the truth about myself, I’ve had to learn to say two things that seem to contradict one another: first, that the people who raised me and taught me to love Jesus gave me an incredible gift, and second, that those same people also passed on to me the habits and assumptions of slaveholder religion.

Until we’re honest about this, we can’t be saved. But as Martin Luther said, only the gospel that kills gives life. Once we stop trying to justify ourselves and deal with the hard truth, the Bible comes to life. Every chapter in this book ends with a rereading of a gospel story. The Bible comes to life when we release it from the bondage of slaveholder religion. I’m a preacher. I want people to hear and believe this good news.

How do church communities — often unaware — promote racial blindness and even racism? 

By telling us stories that make us feel righteous about our segregation. One example: I’ve come to see how profoundly it shaped my understanding of the world that I learned rap music was bad music. Evil, even.

I mean, any white guy who grew up in rural North Carolina heard country music on the radio and bluegrass at the family reunion. That’s our culture. But it took religion to teach me that someone else’s culture was sin. I was a minister at the local black church in my neighborhood before one of our youth pulled me aside 15 years ago and said, “You need to listen to Tupac.” It wasn’t just about the music. He was inviting me to understand how he saw the world.

Racial habits are the hundreds of little ways we perpetuate systemic racism every day just by living the way we’ve always lived. Churches aren’t alone in reinforcing these habits, but the fact that the church remains the most segregated institution in America suggests that slaveholder religion still holds more sway than most of us want to believe.

You’re a progressive Christian and so is Rev. William Barber, who wrote your foreword. What about your conservative brothers and sisters? Do you see them fighting the same battle or are progressives carrying all the weight?

I think most people in the media understand “progressive Christian” as a political label. Folks who believe everyone deserves health care, a living wage, and equal protection under the law are labeled “progressive.” If Christian faith compels you to believe that, you’re a “progressive Christian.”

But Franklin Graham says progressives are atheists. Slaveholder religion makes racial politics a matter of faith. It wasn’t enough to argue that we didn’t have the money to pay for Obama’s policies or that they didn’t stand up to constitutional scrutiny. For Graham and others, efforts to expand democracy and access in America were an assault on God’s order. His 50-state “Decision America” tour in 2016 was really about framing “Make America Great Again” as a 21st-century Redemption movement.

I don’t think most people who send their monthly donation to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association think they are supporting a political movement. They want people to know the love of Jesus. But their religion has been hijacked by extremists. And we’re all going to have to decide which side we’re on. We need a lot more people who think of themselves as moderate or conservative to stand up and say, “What’s happening in our name is extreme, and we’re not going to allow it anymore.”

Some people would acknowledge that the problems you address are real, but they might critique your tone. For example, I can imagine some would say that phrases like “slaveholder religion” are extreme and inflammatory and unnecessarily divisive. How would you respond to such criticisms?

It’s hard to speak softly when the house is on fire. When the people you love are in danger, you holler. Of course, a lot of people don’t feel this way because their families aren’t being torn apart by deportations. Their kids aren’t getting shot by the police. But this is my family. These are my kids. I’ve been to too many funerals.

James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” American Christianity hasn’t faced our legacy of slaveholder religion. Ultimately, I don’t know whether white people, as a group, are willing to change. But I’m going to do everything I can to make sure we face this. I’m doing it because I love white people. But I’m also doing it because, when the house is burning down, there’s no way to just save your room. We’re all in this together, whether we want to be or not.

This modified interview originally appeared at RNS.

How American Christians Can Break Free from ‘Slaveholder Religion’ was originally published on Dr. Robin Weinstein

[arcticdementor]

We continue to move left, faster and faster. But trees do not grow to the sky, nor do they stabilize at some limit. They grow till they fall over. Leftism will not stabilize. It will suffer radical collapse, the question being, how soon, and how many of us will it kill in the process. We have been down this path before, many times. We are now at the stage that preceded the civil wars in Russia, Spain, and France, and the coup in Chile. If we lose the civil war, then, as in France and Russia, the red terror, unless a Cromwell stabilizes things before the red terror. Usually a Stalin or a Sulla stabilizes things after the red terror, rather than before, taking advantage of the precedent set by radical leftists to deal with radical leftists.

Cromwell murdered the King, but then saved England from becoming revolutionary France or revolutionary Russia, and then leftism quietly died a natural death for lack of new applecarts to knock over and a lack of shiny apples rolling about. Stalin saved revolutionary Russia from becoming Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and then leftism quietly died a natural death for lack of new applecarts to knock over and a lack of shiny apples rolling about, but that is a long, slow, and painful path through the left singularity. Not to mention that losing the civil war really bites.

The left always continues to move left faster and faster. This always happens. No one expected anything different. For it to stop, it has to become at least as dangerous to be too far left as too far right. Which is mighty dangerous.

The left always falls over eventually, usually killing very large numbers of people in the process.

Our existing right wing politics, like our existing Christianity is not stable. It has been following the left leftwards for two centuries, and is now attempting to hold a position that twelve years ago would have been considered over the top ultra left madness, a parody of radical leftism.

The only system that can endure is the system that endured for millenia. Center right is now attempting to hold, but cannot hold, a position that is intolerably evil and insane, that daily grows more evil and insane, and which grows daily less endurable. We have to reinstall the old operating system for society, because this one is broken. Most recent working version is England around 1800 or so.

We did not vote our way into this, and cannot vote our way out of this. Leftism always collapses sooner or late, usually killing a great many people in the process.

There will be civil war. There always is. Leftism always leads to civil war. Perhaps this election, perhaps the next. Civil war this election is looking increasingly likely.

If we lose, there will be mass murder and we will have to wait for the left to devour itself as in revolutionary Russia and France. If we are lucky, we get a Cromwell or a Stalin who halts movement ever leftwards, with the result that the left slowly fades away, leaving the regime a hollow shell that falls apart at a tap. But the fading away takes a while.

If the left wins the civil war, and no Stalin then puts and end to movement ever leftwards, the left kills everyone, as in Szechuan province. Or or if we get lucky they kill each other first, as in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, but by the time that finishes, they will have killed everyone with an IQ above room temperature.

So our best option is winning the civil war.

If we win, as in the Spanish civil war, we will have not yet won, because the left will still hold the institutions of large scale cooperation.

If they continue to control pretty much the entire media, education and most of the other institutions, they can’t lose a long term struggle. If they lose the civil war, they will, as in Spain, just fall back and regroup.

For us to win, Harvard, Yale, and the Judiciary will have to be cancelled, deplatformed, and demonetized. The prosecutorial system will have to be depoliticized, which will require removing most existing prosecutors to the gulag. It has to become as dangerous to be too far left, as it is to be too far right.

Then the left stops moving ever leftwards, ever faster, and leftism quietly hollows out and evaporates.

Deplatforming the judiciary seems like an unthinkably radical measure, but it is not. The judiciary always goes quiet and strangely fails to notice when its power is ignored or bypassed. When Tony Abbott, frustrated by courts finding that each and every illegal immigrant was entitled to live in Australia on crime, welfare, and voting for Tony Abbott’s political opponents, started mass imprisoning illegals without due process and just plain keeping them locked up, and/or deporting them to third world places, frequently third world prison camps, the courts just quietly shut up, indeed turned around and stopped all lawfare on the question dead in its tracks, perhaps out of fear that lawfare would expose their impotence, irrelevance, and unpopularity.

I was in Davao when Duterte was mayor. His death squad solution was hugely popular. I did not see anyone opposing it, except people who probably needed killing.

Every time someone in power bypasses the judiciary, the judiciary silently fall into line rather than ruling it illegal.

To roll up Academia, take down the center – which is Harvard and Yale.

Either level it with tanks, or install old type Christianity in charge. Except that you make sure that those in charge are males with faithful wives and well behaved biological children to avoid the risk of the lavender mafia, which has always been a terrible vulnerability of old type Christianity.

Everyone then sees on which side their bread is buttered, and leftism slowly, quietly, and silently evaporates everywhere in the entire American hegemony.

Plan A for academia: You fix the funding for academia, so that instead of the money flowing through an incestuous maze of incrutable committees, it flows through president of the board. Then you fix the board if needed, but they will probably fall into line when they see which way the wind blows. Then the top academics fall into line, or get relocated behind the water heater in the basement. Then the schools fall into line. Create an academia where the people at the top are married men with faithful wives and well behaved children, who give at least lip service to old type Christianity and country. Then everyone else falls into line.

Every tenured academic everywhere in the world abruptly changes position overnight when the wind from Harvard and Yale changes. They will abruptly change their position and forget they ever held a different position, as they have changed and forgotten so many times already.

Or, if there is substantial resistance, Plan B: send the tanks into Harvard and knock down their newer and uglier buildings. Confiscate their limited circulation libraries, the stuff that they make difficult for anyone to read who has not been approved as politically correct, scan them, and put them on the internet. (Thus crippling their power to revise history and present reality. “Who controls the past controls the future”.) Then you will find that plan A goes more smoothly.

Once Harvard and Yale is rolled up, the schools will roll up. We have seen abrupt changes in the line before. Another abrupt change in the line will hardly be noticed. Every Academic everywhere will chant “Four legs need guidance by two legs” with the same enthusiasm as every academic everywhere formerly chanted “Four legs good, two legs bad”, and scarcely notice that their chant has changed. I have seen it happen before, it can happen again. Every single academic everywhere in the entire western Hegemony did a U turn on Darwin overnight, and every single academic everywhere in the entire western hegemony did a U turn on Cambodia overnight. The enemy has one throat that can be cut in one slice. The enemy pretends to have decentralized and dispersed power, but its power is in fact highly centralized and concentrated, and thus highly vulnerable to a small amount of precisely targeted violence.