Converting To Christianity, Islam: Does It Prove Anything? – Book Review

"From fire by water: My journey to the Catholic faith," by Iranian American Sohrab Ahmar

 July 11, 2023 

By Eric Walberg

Religious conversions later in life are generally greeted as evidence that something terrible must have happened to the converter. The Onion published a satire in 2016, ridiculing Paul D’Amatol, who took up a life of Christian piety in late middle age. It must be ‘drugs or maybe he killed someone in a car accident. Something super messed up.’ 

No room in satire for something good as the cause. Interestingly, it’s not Protestant evangelical born-again-ism but the Catholic bells-and-smells and Islamic mysticism that attract those interested in spiritual growth as they approach the end, despite (because of?) Rome’s/ Islam’s hard teachings on divorce, homosexuality, the ordination of women. Catholics and Muslims take their religion seriously.

From fire by water: My journey to the Catholic faith, a memoir by Iranian American Sohrab Ahmari, is provocative, to say the least.

Such conversions are rare and never casually broadcast. Muslims do not look kindly on such apostates. You can interpret that as you like, but I figure it is a good indication that they take their beliefs seriously, something that we can’t say about most of the Christianities or Judaisms on offer. Yes, schisms abound; even the monolithic Catholic church struggles to keep the faith in this truly godless age of ‘anything goes’.

But good for Ahmari. His own life has been charmed, from a bohemian childhood in post-revolutionary Iran to Wall Street Journal London correspondent and still in his mid-30s. He remembers his grandparents being pro-revolution, as Iranians generally are bitter about foreign meddling, with good reason. But many of the urban, educated young look to the West. The taste of western living under the Shah, the open culture, comedy, the arts, racey theatre, the high life – all suddenly gone. His uncle went to the US right away. Ahmari and his mother emigrated in 1993.

His religious training in Tehran was actually stimulating and entertaining. His first instructor was clearly from the wild tribal lands, hair disheveled, shirt half tucked in, a rube from the hicks thrust into downtown Tehran. His acting out of the Battle of Karbala transfixed little Ahmed. He learned that Hussein stuck by his friend unto death. Stood for the Truth.

He lived what is probably a typical 1990s childhood in the urban upper middle class – pirate Hollywood films, Shah-era soap operas, Twain, Salinger, whatever foreign. He finally cursed God for his frustrations, his dysfunctional home, the unjustice ways of adults, though he realized if there is no god, then there is no one to address. And called himself atheist.

Morality police

He recounts a trip to the Caspian second house of friends, a long standing Iranian tradition of group parties at large vacation homes. Booze in hot water bottles. The low grade fear of a swoop by the morality cops. Much of the conversation during the party weekend is about incidents evading, sweet talking, bribing them. 

Once, when he was 13, this happened at noon. Cop to party host: ‘Aren’t you ashamed? Not even noon prayer time and you stink of gin.’ Turning to Ahmed, ‘How old are you?’ ‘5,’ he mumbled. He still can’t explain what was going through his mind, maybe if he was younger they wouldn’t be so severe?

Well, that broke everyone up. Even the chief cop couldn’t stop chuckling, and said: ‘I guess you’re just out having some fun. So let’s taste your sweets.’ The guests hurried rounded up their cash and gave it to him.

The whole scene is ridiculous. You can interpret as you like. The ‘victims’ were in fact sinning, realized it, and managed to get out of the scrape with punishment. Yes, such morality police are not pretty, but is our lack morality police, lack of any such control over our sins, really better? To Ahmari’s credit, he depicts the police more as keystone cops and the adults as children scolded for being naughty.

Life really would be better without the constant need to get plastered to enjoy yourself. In rape and car deaths alone. Egypt has a workable model. Only Copt Christians can sell wine and spirits, and there are a few miserable holes-in-the wall on a back street to buy a red or white local wine and ouzo. i.e., discourage it. Do NOT promote it. It’s a social evil. The incidence of alcoholism is minuscule in Egypt. 

So I sympathize with any government trying to follow that sensible morality. The Taliban have wiped out drug addiction and poppy growing. No help from the West, just sanctions and loud whining about western values. It is easy to be an armchair critic of Islamic states for their harsh justice, but all evidence points to the US invasion of Afghanistan as the cause of soaring opium production, and the US absence and Taliban policy was the way to stop it. If we bothered to listen, the Taliban would explain that in Islam human life is sacred, and allowing people to defile themselves as addicts is haram.

America, Nietzsche, Marx, Kerouac

A budding atheist at this point and in love with America, Ahmari finally gets to Utah, only to find himself and his mother in a seedy trailer park with an old truck that barely functioned. From well off in Tehran to dirt poor in Mormon land, which was just as oppressive to him as living under the mullahs. ‘At least the mullahs let you have a-tea-and-a-cigarette in peace.’ 

Conversation at his uncle’s was as specious and boring as non-Iranian Americans, about new cars, classic cars, trucks. ‘This wheels-and-gears babble I found so tedious as to make me long for the weather talk. For all the miseries of the Islamic Republic, there at least people had something to say.’ He joined the nihilist teen crowd but didn’t have sex as the local teens were doing. 

He later read the Egyptian Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb’s reflections on his stay in the US in 1949, expressing horror at the sexually charged atmosphere he saw everywhere. Qutb reacted by becoming a Muslim radical, reacting to Nasser’s secular socialism. Ahrami was reacting to Islamic fundamentalist Iran, so ‘I took my discomfort at physical contact with strange women to be a shortcoming–on my part. I was insufficiently modern and rational in my habits and ways.’

Discovering Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zarathustra was a turning point for him, ironically beginning his path to Catholicism. God is dead, biblical morality reflects the will to power of slave-like men, invented for and by people who envied the strong and virile, proscribes strength and virility. The superman is beyond good and evil. Values may be relative but the superman’s actions are by definition better. And the herd, the ‘last men’, live a sterile, gray happiness. 

That explained for Ahmari what he saw first in Utah, then Washington State. He joined the local Trotskyist group. For Ahmari, again ironically, Marxism’s greatest attraction was its fanatics, its religious spirit, which he later dismissed as ‘secularized theologies’. The two great critiques of religion, Neitzsche and Marx, were Ahmari’s path to enlightenment. 

He had one more detour, postmodernism and identity politics. Marx claimed to reveal the truth about capitalism, but post-Marxists like Foucault,* reframed civilization as a repressive apparatus designed to discipline and control human difference, whether sexual, racial or cognitive. Even empirical science amounted to a sort of performative ‘language game’ that served the needs of power. We ‘perform’ gender in response to societal expectations (Butler). Politics is no longer to seize the means of economic production but to resist racist and sexist hegemony, starting with language. 

All this materialism denied the existence of human nature. The individual is a victim of impersonal forces, be they language, economics or history, so not responsible for his actions. i.e., a license to sin. 

He dabbled in the Beats, Kerouac, Burroughs, fascinated as much by their dissolute lives as their prose and verse. Debauchery as an authentic style. Which he aped with his own. And increasingly disgusted himself. He dropped the Trotskyist politics, as it was the much like the petty intriguing of mullahs in Iran. Just different hats. 

Virtue over intersectionality

His radical studies pushed him into a stint of social injustice, teaching disadvantaged Americans for four years with Teach for America. His best friend was Yossi, an Israeli American whom he admired for his strict discipline with the undisciplined underachievers, who loved this squeaky dynamo precisely for bringing them to order, and for his genuine enthusiasm, making him the outstanding teacher with by far the best results in English. A virtuous teacher. A novelty in inner city Brownsville, on the Mexican border.

Ahmari had turned into a Don Juan and binge drinker by then, his Iranian modesty discarded. He was slowly realizing the lefty emphasis on ‘intersectionality’, the hidden ‘structures of oppression’ race, gender and sexuality, the need for more money, vs good old-fashion discipline, honesty, and excellent teaching, was wrong. Throwing more money, new technology at a broken system will not improve things. The whole left agenda is a recipe for disaster. ‘The friendship with Yossi proved to be a providential source of grace and a spur to conversion.’ More irony: Zionist Yossi joins Neitzsche, Marx and Beat poets as Ahmari’s spiritual mentors.

He realized there are universal, underlying truths, virtue, and that awareness of these universals come from an inner voice, conscience, the soul, urging him to do good and shun evil. He realized there must be a personal god as the ultimate source of absolute truths. 

His Marxist theories dumped, his leftist views dumped. Welcome to the club of ex-Trotskyists, born-again neocons. ‘I wanted nothing more to do with man-made utopias of any kind. In fact, I wanted to rededicate my life to thwarting the utopians. I became a conservative almost instantly.’ I would identify this as Ahmari’s ‘conversion’, at least as far as his working life goes. Who cares if you pray now, just be sure to keep the neocon engine purring along.

That is not to dismiss Ahmari’s sincerity concerning his beliefs about truths and virtue. I agree with Ahmari that ‘character and morality trump and determine the order of material things, rather than the other way around.’ Class war won’t improve society unless there is a foundation in society of morality, virtue, that both sides in the ‘war’ respect. And we have Darwin to prove it. A flexible personal code can never replace moral precepts. 

But then he goes and spoils it: ‘I had made peace with American society.’ 

Slave mentality vs free will

He saw through his earlier love of Nietzsche; while he still agreed that Christianity was behind egalitarian democracy, he saw this as a good thing, not a weakness. ‘The real peril was that western democracy would detach itself from its religious underpinnings.’ i.e., we could descend again into Auschwitz. As for Auschwitz, it was ‘possible because God had been pronounced dead and all the old ‘thou shalts’ declared null and void.’ ‘Western democracies were morally superior in large part because they still hewed to a Judeo-Christian line, however faded.’ 

Ahmari is definitely a foe of Iran’s Islamic state, seeing ‘Khomeini’s stern glare on my back’ when he reads of IS men blowing themselves up, though he fails to mention that Iran has been leading the fight against IS. WSJ journalist Ahmari’s knowledge of facts is sometimes faulty, and he dismisses Islamic governance as just more totalitarianism—no free will—a la Soviet Union or Nazism. Though Christian and Islamic theologies around such principles are largely the same, somehow, in his view, Christianity allows free will, is ‘better’. 

His critique of western decadence aligns with the Islamic critique. And he realizes this. ‘A skeptical and infertile West lacked the spiritual resources to deal with an energetic and virile Islam.’ But then he denies the value of shariah courts and insists the US firmly assimilate Muslim immigrants.

Ahmari’s next career move coincided with Iran’s suppression of the Green movement of 2009, when he was just starting out as a journalist. There is no doubt Ahmari is a talented writer, and when he offered the Wall Street Journal commentaries during that disputed months, he suddenly became a useful talking head articulating the western view with an Iranian face. His career took off and he was London editor by 2016, as he finished his conversion.

Conversion – beyond identity politics

The upshot: ‘My two decades as an atheist now appeared as squandered years, during which I had turned my back on God and neglected my immortal soul. Christianity was the precondition of true universality and true brotherhood.’

I would concur with Ahmari but replace Christianity with Islam as the preeminent religion of universality and brotherhood. Ahmari’s journey is quixotic, as he admits. The Judeo-Christian tradition is weak, very weak, and getting weaker as wokeness dissolves spiritual truths, and religious belief–apart from Islam–continues to decline.

Why Catholic? ‘My decision turned precisely on the question of liturgy.’ The smells-and-bells, the Latin Mass. ‘The metaphysical indifference so pervasive in England and the rest of western Europe’ he finds ‘positively revolting’. ‘Endless consumer choice and kaleidoscopic lifestyles, lifestyle-ism—clean eating, mindfulness, banana treatments—was all they had.’ 

The quasi secular post-Vatican II laid-back Catholicism was almost as bad as the evangelical Anglican church. ‘Evangelical Protestantism, for all its Spirit-infused hand raising and arm swaying, struck me as profoundly abstract. A ‘personal relationship’ built on words alone was incomplete.’ He now relished the supernatural things, which Protestantism downplays in the interest of scientism. 

Ahmari provides a sharp critique of postmodernism and the emptiness of modern ‘civilization’. Sin, salvation, the mystery of evil and the reality of his conscience, all pushed him out of his secular what-me-worry life. He committed to the strong version of Catholicism, praying every day at dawn, midday, dusk, preferably in church with others, kneeling. 

Almost exactly as if he had returned to Islam, brushed up on his Arabic, and rejoined the ummah as they prostrate in communal prayer five times daily, a vast ripple eternally revolving around the world following the sun. If some space aliens are monitoring us, that surely will impress them.

Like Ahmari, my decision to convert was at least part liturgy. Regular daily prayer is essential to a vibrant faith. One detail that further convinced me about Islam is the insistence on removing your shoes when you enter the prayer hall. Socks or bare feet leave worldly cares behind, leaving you to commune freely with Allah, united and in unison in full-body prayer. Another essential in worship is segregation and modest dress to minimize distractions from your focus in prayer. All of this is much as Christianity was practiced in the middle ages, when it was robust.

I kept looking for a convincing critique of Islam vs Christianity as the truly universal religion, but couldn’t find it. No doubt Ahmari purposely left Islam out to avoid a Salmon Rushdie fate, but I doubt he has taken his search for soul, spirit, conscience that far, or that, in deed, there is a convincing argument there.

Crusade redux

Ahmari points to legendary converts Cardinals Newman and Manning, GK Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene. The list of converts to Islam is also impressive: from Richard Burton (19th c), Marmaduke Pickthall, Leopold Weiss, to Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Keith Ellison, Dave Chappelle. 5,000 Britons convert every year. Converts add vigor to any religion but Catholicism and Islam seem to get the cream.

Ahmari has sampled everything, starting as a Muslim, atheist, Marxist, postmodernist, post-postmodernist, finally landing at the beginning, the alpha-omega, the monolithic Catholic church. For Ahmari, the jump is from the Islamic Jesus-as-prophet to the Christian Jesus-as-God, That is a rare transition, and, no unsurprise, seen as threatening to Muslims, especially when articulated and promoted in the West. Crusade redux.

As a convert, but the other way, from Presbyterianism to Islam, I wish Ahmari well in his new faith, and hope his spiritual growth continues. But his story is flawed. He conveniently converted to the empire‘s religion (that goes back to the founding of the establishment Church under Emperor Constantine), while admitting that the Judeo-Christian tradition has lost its pull, that only Islam is vibrant. He should look again to see why Islam is so resilient, and how that should shape his own spiritual journey.

He spent a third of a lifetime worshipping idols—the idol of ‘history’, ‘progress’, above all the idol of the self. English Catholicism especially attracts him, because it had suffered so much, despised and ridiculed, and yet was stronger that the ‘soupy and fast-secularizing Anglicanism that encircled it.’ Sadly, he doesn’t see that he’s still worshipping an imperial idol.

Alas, if he had reverted to Islam, though welcomed by the ummah, he would have been hounded, despised, no longer a famous WSJ journalist enjoying the perks of US hegemony wherever he is on the planet. No nice memoir dissing Islam. Perhaps the fate of another one-time darling of the empire. Keep on your journey, Sohrab.

—

*Ironically, in search of social justice, Foucault interviewed Khomeini and embraced the Iranian revolution in 1979.

Eric Walberg

Canadian Eric Walberg is known worldwide as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia. A graduate of University of Toronto and Cambridge in economics, he has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s. He has lived in both the Soviet Union and Russia, and then Uzbekistan, as a UN adviser, writer, translator and lecturer. Presently a writer for the foremost Cairo newspaper, Al Ahram, he is also a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Global Research, Al-Jazeerah and Turkish Weekly, and is a commentator on Voice of the Cape radio.

J.D. Vance, MAGA Friendly Leftists and Fraudulent Populism

By Chris Green

August 5, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Sunrise Movement activists rally to protest J.D. Vance’s ties to Big Oil outside his office in Washington on Monday. (Photo: Adah Crandall)

Last month, when Donald Trump picked Ohio US Senator J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential running mate, corporate media labeled Vance as an authentic economic populist. The Economist described Vance as a crusader against Big Tech and wrote that he was “staunchly anti-establishment, attacking what he saw as business elites benefitting from moving factories abroad and paying low wages at home.” The New York Times noted that, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC), Vance “cast Wall Street’s titans as villains.” Vance thundered that the Republican Party was “done catering to Wall Street.” Major Republican donors like the hedge fund mogul Ken Griffith were reportedly upset by the nomination of Vance, a populist demagogue “openly hostile to Wall Street” in the words of the Times.

Among those excited by Vance’s nomination were multiple writers and activists that have sometimes been called “post-left.” Many of these brethren are notable for holding conventional anti-corporate and anti-war left wing views; at the same time, they align with MAGA on issues like immigration, Covid vaccine mandates and “woke” identity politics (especially trans issues). Many of them are notable for arguing that there are many positive aspects to MAGA populism that align with the anti-corporate progressivism of Bernie Sanders.

One notable “post left” thinker is Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald is known for his former position as an investigative journalist at the radical left publication The Intercept and for his involvement in landmark whistleblower cases involving Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. In more recent years, he has been known for his numerous friendly appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program, his defense of Alex Jones and his breathtakingly bizarre efforts to prove that MAGA aligns with traditional left wing anti-war and anti-corporate values. In 2021, he told the Daily Caller podcast that he considered Carlson and Steve Bannon to be socialists–and that Trump ran as a socialist for president in 2016. Yes he actually said that Trump ran as a socialist in 2016.

It is no surprise that Greenwald has been deeply impressed by the populist figure presented by J.D. Vance. He was pleased when no less an authority than Teamsters president Sean O’Brien spoke to the RNC last month and attested that Vance was a true friend of the working class. In a tweet on X, Greenwald noted excitedly that O’Brien praised Vance–and his fellow senate Republican populist Josh Hawley–for engaging in what Greenwald called “relentless pro-labor acts.”.Regarding Vance, Greenwald described O’Brien as “gushing over how much he’s done for workers.” Indeed, O’Brien told the RNC delegates that Vance “has been right there” in supporting organized labor’s point of view “on all our issues.” .

Like Greenwald, Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani are former investigative journalists at The Intercept. While not embracing MAGA in the extreme manner of Greenwald, both share some of his MAGA friendly “post left” views. Last month, Fang–in an article on his Substack page–and Jilani–in an article for Compact magazine and in an appearance on Democracy Now!–echoed Greenwald’s celebration of Vance for what Fang called the Ohio senator’s “populist, anti-corporate record.” Both cited a nearly identical list of Vance’s progressive accomplishments. The relatively short list featured a number of legislative bills Vance introduced or cosponsored with Democratic colleagues, all of which have stalled in the senate. The list includes bills to: reduce swipe fees imposed on merchants by credit card companies; to cap out of pocket insulin expenses under private health insurance at $35; to tighten regulations on freight rail carriers carrying toxic chemicals after a February 2023 train derailment heavily contaminated the community of East Palestine, Ohio; and to increase capital gains taxes on shares acquired in large corporate mergers.

Jiliani was somewhat nuanced and cautious in his praise of Vance, compared to the mindless cheerleading on the latter’s behalf by Fang and Greenwald. In his Democracy Now! appearance, Jilani noted that Vance would never support Medicare for All; he conceded that Vance opposes the proposed legislation known as the PRO Act, which is designed to make it easier for workers to organize unions. Vance, after all, said Jilani, is a conservative populist, not a democratic socialist. But Jiliani insisted that Vance represented a sincerely populist faction within the Republican Party. This faction represents the view that the promotion of conservative family values requires good paying jobs; the creation of those jobs requires modest governmental intervention in some areas of the economy to regulate the excesses of unfettered capitalism. Jilani noted that Vance’s populist stance is a small minority within a Republican Party which still largely hews to an orthodox big business agenda of tax cuts and deregulation.

Meanwhile Fang laid particular emphasis on Vance’s praise of Lina Khan, Biden’s chair of the Federal Trade Commission, as proof of his populist bonafides. Vance has supported Khan’s vigorous fight for antitrust measures, particularly against Big Tech. Fang noted that Vance quietly filed an amicus brief in a recent Ohio court case in which he argued that Google should be regulated as a common carrier.

Vance’s Record: The Reality

Some have questioned the sincerity of Vance’s populist stance. After all, it wasn’t that long ago when he was an orthodox pro-business Republican who professed disdain for Trump and his voters. Critics have speculated, not implausibly, that once Vance observed Trump’s success, he decided to reverse himself and follow the political winds, becoming a fierce MAGA partisan. Also, as the independent journalist Ken Silverstein observed, there is the fact that while Vance poses as the champion of ordinary people against Wall Street and Big Tech, his top campaign contributors are….Wall Street elites and Silicon Valley billionaires. Vance himself made millions as a venture capitalist. There is plenty of evidence belying Vance’s claim to be a fighter on behalf of ordinary people.

Whether or not he sincerely believes in the above mentioned progressive legislative bills cited by Fang and Jilani, he has shown a vulnerability to backtrack in his support of them under the influence of corporate lobbyists. For example, credit card industry lobbyists recently reported that Vance had backed off on his support of proposed legislation to cap fees for merchants on credit card swipes.

Vance has also worked to dilute the railroad safety legislation he introduced with Ohio’s other US Senator, Democrat Sherrod Brown, in the wake of the 2023 East Palestine, Ohio train derailment. This disaster occurred in Vance’s home state, an extreme act of corporate malfeasance occurring in broad daylight. Even here, as Lever News reported in June 2023, Vance quietly agreed with railroad lobbyist requests to amend his legislation to move back the required date that the rail industry must adopt safer tank cars carrying hazardous materials from 2025 to 2029.

It was profoundly false of Sean O’Brien to say in his RNC speech that Vance was aligned with organized labor on “all” its issues . (Why O’Brien made this statement or spoke at the RNC in the first place is a subject beyond the scope of this article). It is true that Vance opposes Right to Work laws and made a 2023 photo op appearance on a United Auto Workers picket line. However, Vance, as noted above, opposes the PRO Act. One reason he has given for objecting to it is because he wants to institute European style “sectoral” collective bargaining in the US; he falsely claimed that the PRO Act would prevent this. He also criticized it because, as he told Politico, it would “hand over a lot of power to a union leadership that is aggressively anti-Republican.”

As he objected to the PRO Act, he also cosponsored the Team for Employees and Managers Act of 2024 (TEAM). Like previous versions introduced by congressional Republicans in 2022 and 1995, this proposed legislation would reinstitute company unions, which were banned nationwide by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Company unions, of course, are not genuine collective bargaining institutions: they are workplace organizations entirely funded by the employer (which can dissolve the organizations at their own will at any time). Republicans have marketed the TEAM Act as populist in the sense that it supposedly would enhance “worker voice” at companies. The TEAM Act is apparently the brainchild of Oren Cass’s think tank American Compass, an institution which has had considerable influence on Vance’s policy proposals. Like Vance, Cass has evolved from an orthodox business friendly Republican–he was Domestic Policy Director of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign–into a so-called right wing populist. Cass’s mission has been to come up with “populist” ideas to give a pro-worker sheen to the generally anti-worker Republican Party. Besides such drivel as the Team Act, Cass has advised Republicans to drop their support for Right to Work laws and to scapegoat immigrants as a cause for depressed wages among native born Americans.

Speaking to the Claremont Institute in December 2023, Vance outlined a distinction between “good unions” and “bad unions.” His example of a “good union” was the Fraternal Order of Police. An example of a “bad” one was the Starbucks baristas union. He denounced the latter for attacking Israel. He said “if your politics lead you to defend the baristas union as they defend Hamas, then you should have a different politics.” The baristas, of course, were not actually defending Hamas but objecting to genocidal Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip–crimes which Vance has wholeheartedly supported.

There are other cases belying the claims of Sean O’Brien that Vance has been “right there” with labor on issues affecting working people. For example, Vance voted against legislation codifying into law the joint-employer rule of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The rule–before it was rejected by a federal court–established that companies must participate in unfair labor practice complaints filed with the NLRB against companies they employ as contractors. The rule was supposed to help hold companies accountable for participation in labor abuses by preventing them from shielding themselves behind contracting companies. Meanwhile, using talking points used by steel industry lobbyists, in late 2023 Vance successfully lobbied the Environmental Protection Agency to substantially weaken one of its rules limiting carcinogenic emissions from the manufacture of coke, a component of the steelmaking process. Such emissions have had serious negative public health consequences for steelworker communities.

Politico noted that Vance, in opposing the PRO Act, was “in the awkward spot of trying to position himself as [a] ‘pro-worker conservative’ while simultaneously seeking to contain the political power of organized labor, the only entities in American society that reflect–however imperfectly–the actual will of workers.”

Vance’s Actual Constituency

Vance’s pose as the champion of ordinary people should not be taken seriously. Underneath his populist veneer, Vance, like Donald Trump, is devoted to enhancing the ability of economic elites to exploit ordinary people. His “populist” rhetoric inciting racism against Latino immigrants, Islamophobia and transphobia only serves to divide the US working class and strengthen ruling elites.

Vance’s primary constituency is clearly not ordinary people. An informative Washington Post report of July 28th described his real constituency: a network of Silicon Valley venture capitalists centering around Peter Thiel–the latter helped Vance himself get started as a venture capitalist in the early 2010s. These oligarchs provided the financial backing for Vance’s meteoric political rise. Thiel and David Sacks (another prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist) both reportedly personally lobbied Trump to choose Vance as his running mate. Elon Musk is also known as a strong supporter of Vance.

Specific objections of members of the Thiel network to Biden administration policy–amplified by their messenger boy Vance–were outlined by progressive populist Matt Stoller (research director at the American Economic Liberties Project think tank) in an article on his Substack page last month. In the article and in other writings, Stoller has seemed to take too much at face value Vance’s pretense of being an authentic populist. This is not surprising as Stoller has been noted for problematically collaborating with Oren Cass in trying to find common ground between right wing populists and progressives on economic issues. Nonetheless his Substack analysis of Vance’s financial backers is intelligent, well informed and worth reading.

Stoller noted that Peter Thiel, a billionaire, views himself as an underdog, representing “little tech” fighting against Big Tech monopolies. Thiel invests in startups in industries often dominated by a few companies. Stoller wrote that Vance experienced similar conditions as a venture capitalist: in the mid-2010s, he observed multiple digital advertising startups. These were quality companies, Vance believed, but they would die quickly because they could not compete with Google’s dominance in the online advertising industry. This is the root of Vance’s support for the antitrust actions against companies like Google and Facebook by Lina Khan, Biden’s FTC chair. It is an example of the true nature of Vance’s populist pose which has so impressed the likes of Lee Fang and Zaid Jiliani: he is for the “little guy” i.e. billionaires funding startups who are battling against other billionaires controlling more established companies.

Stoller wrote of a particularly interesting case: the prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist partners Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. After Vance became Trump’s running mate, the billionaire duo pivoted to supporting the Trump/Vance ticket after primarily funding Democratic candidates for years. Last month, Andreessen and Horowitz filmed a podcast episode where the two discussed their objections to Biden administration policy. Their objections, as laid out by Stoller, are interesting because they are illustrative of the nature of the particular elements of the capitalist class that Vance represents.

First the two objected to Biden’s proposed “unrealized gains” tax on investments, which they claimed would destroy the venture capital industry. Second, they denounced the tight regulation of cryptocurrency and the blockchain in general(in which they are significant investors) by Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission. Third, Biden’s FTC prevented the sale of one of the duo’s companies (Maze Therapeutics)–which possessed an experimental treatment for a condition called Pompe disease-to the pharmaceutical company Sanofi. Horowitz claimed that the FTC’s blocking of the sale had effectively strangled all venture capital investments in US biotechnology.

Stoller observed that the duo had left out some important details in their complaining about Democratic policy. For example, Stoller noted that “at no point in their praise of the blockchain do they bring up that large swaths of crypto, if not the entire apparatus, turned out to be a giant scam.” The fraudulent nature of so much cryptocurrency is why the FTC has been regulating it and blockchain networks. As far as the blocked sale of Maze Therapeutics, Stoller noted that the pair left out a few important facts:

“The FTC stopped Sanofi from buying Maze Therapeutics not for no reason, but because Sanofi was engaged in an illegal scheme of trying to kill a rival treatment for Pompe disease so it could preserve its ability to charge $750,000 for an annual course. And Maze Therapeutics quickly found a different company to buy their treatment, for the exact same price.”

Stoller observed that–echoing Andreessen and Horowitz–Vance also denounced the Biden SEC’s regulation of blockchain, claiming that SEC chairman Gary Gensler was a “candidate for worst person” in the Biden administration. Vance said he worried whether “a lot of the crypto stuff is fundamentally fake” but argued that it needed to be deregulated in order to fight Big Tech monopolies. Stoller observed that “that’s exactly how Andreessen and Horowitz pitch crypto, its ‘little tech’ challenging the big guys”

The Bottom Line

The truth is that politicians–ranging from a highly dubious reactionary opportunist like J.D. Vance to a much more serious populist like Bernie Sanders–are limited in their ability to pursue progressive economic reform. When powerful economic interests dislike a particular legislative proposal they are able to utilize enormous resources to defeat it: campaign contributions to politicians, enormous armies of corporate lobbyists, legal challenges in the courts, paid advertising on corporate media (where many commentators share a point of view with business). There are innumerable examples of this dynamic at work. For example, Kamala Harris–when she first ran for president in 2019–backtracked on her initial support for Medicare for All after a campaign funded by wealthy financial interests was launched against it (primarily targeting Bernie Sanders). After much flailing around and incoherence, she settled on a reform proposal that left private health insurance in the driver’s seat of US health care.

If business–particularly the financial industry–is upset by governmental policies they can always engage in capital flight: a mass sell-off of assets and withdrawal of investment capital from a country. Liz Truss (who has adopted a right wing populist pose not dissimilar to that of Donald Trump) faced this when she became British Prime Minister in 2022. British financial markets strongly objected to Truss’s proposed fiscal policy of combining tax cuts with energy subsidies for British consumers. The financial markets crashed the British economy and Truss was forced to resign after a month and a half in favor of Rishi Sunak, a more conventional business friendly conservative.

Short of overthrowing the capitalist system, the only hope for serious redistribution of power in favor of ordinary people in the United States is mass social movements that exert overwhelming pressure on ruling class politicians in favor of progressive reform. In the meantime, some of us really need to stop being so credulous about ruling class politicians who adopt populist poses.


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COUGH FOR JESUS
Here’s what it is like at Liberty University — which has refused to shut down due to coronavirus
March 26, 2020 By Agence France-Presse


by Alec MacGillis

Three Liberty University students, a young man and two women, sat eating lunch on Wednesday afternoon at a small table in the common dining area of the student union on the sprawling campus perched high above Lynchburg, Virginia. They compared notes on the suntans and burns they’d gotten on beaches during spring break last week. They joked about what it would be like to take the college’s gun-range classes remotely. A fourth student with a backpack strolled up to the table to chat with them for a few minutes.

The young man seated at the table mentioned that he was thinking of going to a Starbucks off campus but wasn’t sure it was safe to do so given the coronavirus raging across the country, which has sickened at least 65,000 people nationwide, more than 400 of them in Virginia and a few of them in Lynchburg.

His mention of the risk was striking given the context: There he and more than a dozen other students were, sitting in clusters around the dining area despite stickers scattered haphazardly across tables: “Closed for Social Distancing.”

This is the odd tension on display now in Lynchburg, where Liberty president Jerry Falwell Jr. has caused a stir by keeping the campus of the large evangelical Christian university open to students despite the calls of state officials and public health experts for social distancing to slow the virus’s spread and despite the university’s having recently shifted all instruction online to conform with state orders.

Falwell has minimized the threat of the coronavirus for months — two weeks ago, he compared it to the H1N1 “swine flu,” which experts say is not a comparable case — and he initially vowed not to follow the lead of other colleges in shutting down on-campus instruction, until Gov. Ralph Northam’s March 17 ban on gatherings of more than 10 people gave him no choice.

Falwell’s decision to keep the campus open to students this week after spring break was in keeping with his provocatively contrarian approach, and it buttressed the vows of President Donald Trump, whom Falwell has supported since early in the 2016 campaign, to lift social-distancing strictures as soon as possible. “I think we have a responsibility to our students — who paid to be here, who want to be here, who love it here — to give them the ability to be with their friends, to continue their studies, enjoy the room and board they’ve already paid for and to not interrupt their college life,” Falwell told the Richmond Times-Dispatch this week.


At the same time, Liberty’s decision to keep the campus open has met with such criticism — from a faculty member worried about her colleagues’ safety since they are still required to hold office hours, and from city leaders and the governor’s office— that the university is clearly feeling pressure to show that it is trying to minimize any public health risks. This has produced an odd dissonance between earnestly worded safety signs and notices on campus and Falwell’s ongoing ridiculing of coronavirus worries as alarmist, which make it hard for students to take the safety exhortations seriously.

Calum Best, a senior business and finance major from Alexandria, Virginia, and a member of the student government, has seen the effect of that dissonance since returning from break. He sees Falwell and other university officials calling the safety worries overblown in the national media, and then he sees classmates hugging and taking pictures of each other on the student center steps, or a group of at least a half dozen huddled together for a study session, or a professor of his standing in close conversation with another student and a campus security officer, or classmates heading off to game nights or group dinners at off-campus apartments. In an unusual turn, a university known for its strict “Liberty Way” — no premarital sex, alcohol, smoking or cussing — is now in a sense the most permissive. There aren’t even any more curfews in the dorms, since many residential advisers are gone.

“The real problem is just providing students a capacity and a venue to come back and do stupid things,” Best said in an interview. “Consistently, consistently, leadership is overemphasizing the effectiveness of the measures they’ve actually taken and downplaying the significance of this virus.”

Best added that there is a case to be made for keeping campus open — for foreign students, or students who really rely on the campus meal plan, or students like him whose parents are worried about having him at home and possibly infecting them — but it would need to be executed much better than what he has observed.

“It is a genuinely tough decision to close a university,” he said. “We can imagine a world in which they actually did everything they could to encourage sanitary measures and social isolation on campus. It wouldn’t necessarily be a terrible thing to keep campus open if you could be ensured of the reliability of safety measures. But they’re not.”

Students have received scant information from administrators about how to keep themselves safe from the virus, Best said. As damaging, he said, is the general message from the top, which has included Falwell spinning conspiracy theories about COVID-19 being a North Korean or “elite liberal” plot. “They could also just not be misleading and deceptive in their communications about the virus, and they’re deliberately choosing to do that,” Best said. He has been scolded for his outspokenness already: this week, Liberty’s senior vice president of university communications, Scott Lamb, called him at night to take him to task for a nonpublic Facebook post criticizing Falwell for hypocrisy for not yet issuing refunds to students who now have to settle for online classes. (Lamb did not respond to a question about the call.)

University officials estimate that about 1,900 students have returned to campus so far — a fraction of the 15,500 who normally attend classes there, about half of whom live in campus housing — but they say they expect that number could grow as high as 5,000. The feel on campus is of a college during summer break, when a small minority of students hang around for jobs or summer-term classes. As sparsely populated as the campus is, though, it’s startling to see students congregating in ways that are not happening at the countless colleges that have shut down.

At the student center, students dutifully stand 6 feet apart in line for their pita wraps and salads. But then they sit together to eat in the communal dining area, in ways that are no longer allowed at any restaurant in Virginia.

In the Jerry Falwell Library, named for the college’s famous founder, the father of the current president, social-distancing signs abound and some of the couches are piled on each other and strung in police tape. But some of the small glassed-in study rooms have at least four students grouped around the table, putting them much closer than six feet from each other. On Wednesday, a “Closed for Social Distancing” sign on a table didn’t stop one student from spreading her books and notes out across it for a study session. A librarian came through the periodical room, where The New York Times is conspicuously unavailable, and chided two students for sitting too close to each other. “You need to be 6 feet apart,” she said. “If one of you can’t lie down in between you, you’re too close.” As she walked away, they traded eyerolls.

In Green Hall, a large building on the north end of campus that includes a food court, students disregarded the distancing marks in the lines for the Dunkin Donuts and Chick-fil-A until food service workers reminded them.

Near Green Hall, a graduate student from Pennsylvania was leaving his job serving as an assistant to professors, which he said was what had required him and many other graduate assistants to return to campus after break. He questioned the decision to reopen the campus, even with the purported distancing measures. “They could have avoided all that if they just didn’t have anyone here,” he said.

Nearby, Ingrid Lindevaldsen, an undergraduate fashion major, was getting in her car to head back to her off-campus housing. She said that the university could have done a better job of limiting the students on campus to foreign students and those who truly had no other option. She herself had to come to campus to use the sewing machines for one of her classes, but she said she tried to leave as soon as possible once that was done. “I try to stay away, because there are so many kids here,” she said.

Adding irony to Falwell’s insistence on keeping the campus open is that Liberty is better positioned than most other universities to weather enforced distance learning. It has developed a hugely profitable separate operation called Liberty University Online, with as many as 95,000 people around the country taking courses in a given year. Many traditional undergraduates at the college already take some of their courses online. (The online classes have a reputation for being much less demanding.) If the coronavirus scare carries into the fall, colleges with a heavy online presence like Liberty would seem well poised to capitalize.

So far, though, the crisis has caused only turbulence for the online operation, due to the university’s insistence that the several hundred people who work for LUO — manning call centers, processing course registrations — continue reporting to work at the former insurance building where LUO is housed, according to several Liberty employees. A few employees with health conditions have been allowed to work from home, but on Wednesday, the LUO parking lot was still full of dozens of vehicles. “I’m just a worker,” shrugged one employee who was taking a break in his car when asked about the requirement to report to the office. “I come to work here.”

A similar scenario has played out at the Guillerman Financial Center, where about 250 people handle all of the university’s tuition and financial aid in an open office divided into two large spaces. One employee told me that workers have been growing increasingly anxious about infection and wondering how the office can be allowed to continue operating, given that it contains far more than the 10-person maximum and is hardly “essential.” “There are a lot of people coughing in that building,” the employee said. “I know it’s scaring a lot of people. Every time people cough, someone would say, ‘my God.’”

But on Wednesday morning, the staff was suddenly instructed to spread out more through the building, into training rooms, into supervisors’ offices, according to the employee. And in the early afternoon, they were told to disperse even further: go work from home for the next couple days. Their understanding, the employee said, was that a state inspector was headed to the building that afternoon.

Asked about the continued use of the two office buildings for hundreds of employees, Lamb, the university spokesman, pointed to an official statement from Falwell on Monday arguing that that the governor’s ban on gatherings of more than 10 did not apply to Liberty’s offices, because they were exempted the way any business workplace would be. “To the extent possible, in our workplace, we are adhering to social distancing recommendations, enhancing sanitation practices on common surfaces, and acting on appropriate workplace guidance from government officials,” Falwell said in the statement.

All this commotion, both in the office buildings and in pockets of the campus, stands in contrast to the handsome, historic downtown of Lynchburg, where there was barely a soul in sight on Wednesday afternoon. In one of the few businesses that were still open, a small gift store, owner Ron Schoultz was making protective face masks out of patterned cotton fabric to sell for $15 each. He flared immediately when asked about the decision by the big college on the hill to welcome hundreds of carefree students back to campus.

“It’s terrible,” he said. “It’s awful. It’s putting everyone else at risk.”

Will Young contributed reporting.

Liberty University is staying open because Jerry Falwell Jr. wants to own the libs
Bonnie Kristian

Illustrated | Getty Images, AP Images, iStock
March 24, 2020

Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr.'s allegiance isn't faltering.

President Trump spent the first few weeks of COVID-19's spread downplaying the seriousness of the risk and Falwell has taken up the charge. But the difference between Falwell and your average pandemic skeptic is he runs the largest Christian university in the country, and he has decided to use that position to make a potentially deadly political point.

While other universities, including private, Christian schools, have closed their campuses and emptied their dorms of all but the few students who truly have nowhere else to go, Falwell has taken Liberty in a different direction. Virginia's prohibition on gatherings of more than 10 people prevents most classes at the Lynchburg school from meeting in person, so the bulk of Liberty's instruction has moved online. But the dorms, normally housing about 16,000 students, remain open and ready to welcome residents back from spring break.

"Most of the students, from what we can tell, are coming back, and they're gonna live in the dorms, and they're gonna do their classes online," Falwell said in a radio interview on March 18. "They don't want to sit at home in the basement and have to do their own laundry," he added, laughing with his host. In the same conversation, Falwell referred to the novel coronavirus as "this flu," said he's "not worried about it," and declared the media response to be "just politics," an effort to "destroy the American economy just to hurt Trump."

Falwell's estimate that "most" students would return isn't quite accurate — the school actually anticipates around 5,000, a third of the residential student body — but that number is still far higher than those housed by comparable schools. In Lynchburg, for example, other universities' remaining on-campus population is in the double or even single digits. Liberty is also keeping its fitness center open, operating dining halls on a take-out or limited seating basis, and requiring faculty without a health exemption to hold in-person office hours and teach online courses from campus instead of in their homes. (In an unfortunate slip of the tongue, Falwell initially resisted moving to online instruction because, he said, the school's extant online classes, which instruct about 85 percent of Liberty's student body under normal conditions, are "really not the same quality of education" as residential courses.)

Falwell has never been coy about his politics and priorities, and here he has mostly stayed true to form. Though in his official capacity Falwell cast his decision as a way to let students "enjoy the room and board they've already paid for and to not interrupt their college life," he has elsewhere made his political rationale inescapably clear: Liberty's dorms are open because Falwell wants to own the libs.

Thus recent posts on his personal Twitter account, which models Trump's feed in its intemperance if not its pace, see Falwell repeatedly using the pandemic as an occasion to praise the president, critique former President Barack Obama, and accuse the media and Democratic politicians of making the "corona flu" an excuse to "destroy the U.S. economy."

Liberty University professors outside of the law school do not have tenure, a fact Falwell has touted as a "sound business decision" to suppress dissent from administration decisions. It is rare for current faculty to disagree with Falwell publicly, as doing so puts their livelihoods at stake. Thus it is not surprising that Marybeth Davis Baggett, the faculty member who spoke out against Falwell's coronavirus policy, first on Facebook and then in a Religion News Service article picked up by The Washington Post, has already secured employment elsewhere for the fall semester.

"Falwell cavalierly assumes no responsibility for at least an enabling and at most an incentivizing the students' decision to return," Baggett wrote. "Rather than provide the steady leadership needed at this sober time, Falwell has chosen to indulge and endanger the students." On her Facebook post, she shared dozens of private messages from Liberty faculty, staff, students, and alumni expressing dismay that the campus is open and that work which could be completed remotely is required to be done on campus. (I've received an unsolicited off-record message from a Liberty employee to similar effect.) Baggett concluded her article with a call for the decision to close Liberty's campus to be taken out of Falwell's hands by Liberty's board of trustees. Falwell responded by calling her "the 'Baggett' lady" on Twitter, linking to a new statement reiterating his plan for the school that often seems to function as his personal fiefdom.

As classes resume at Liberty this week, Falwell shows no sign of backing down, evincing a pointedly lackadaisical attitude about the risks of continuing campus life. He told the Lynchburg News & Advance he wants to "to give [students] the ability to be with their friends." And in the statement Liberty published Monday, Falwell described himself walking around campus, meeting and joking with returning students (a bid to be Liberty's own Typhoid Jerry, perhaps). A petition for the university board to fire Falwell will almost certainly go unheeded unless, as Baggett warns, his plan leads to a "disaster for which he would be primarily to blame."

Like Baggett, my hope and prayer is that the risk Falwell's choice courts will never come, that the campus will not become a grim experiment in what happens when the intemperate right's pandemic imprudence is allowed to set policy for thousands. Firing may be the comeuppance Falwell is due for his politically motivated recklessness, but it would be a comeuppance bought at a tragic price.

Jerry Falwell Jr. says he’s ‘protecting‘ students by calling them back to Liberty University amid pandemic

March 24, 2020 By Shawn Langlois

Jerry Falwell Jr. serves as the president of Liberty University,

founded by his father in 1971. Getty

‘I think we have a responsibility to our students — who paid to be here, who want to be here, who love it here — to give them the ability to be with their friends, to continue their studies, enjoy the room and board they’ve already paid for and to not interrupt their college life.’

That’s Liberty University President and fierce Donald Trump supporter Jerry Falwell Jr. telling the News & Advance that school’s back in session for up to 5,000 students who will be allowed to return from their spring break to the Lynchburg, Va., campus.

This while, according to the Virginia Department of Health, there are at least 290 cases of COVID-19 in Virginia, including 45 people who have been hospitalized and six who have died.

Classes will resume online for the semester in order to comply with a state ban on gatherings of more than 10 people. Campus buildings, like the library and residence halls, will, however, remain open, and instructors are expected to hold office hours. Dining halls will be takeout-only operations.

“I think we, in a way, are protecting the students by having them on campus together,” said Falwell, who has been downplaying the pandemic in recent weeks. “Ninety-nine percent of them are not at the age to be at risk, and they don’t have conditions that put them at risk.”

Earlier this month, Falwell went on Fox News to suggest coronavirus concerns were overblown and the media was using the pandemic as a tool to take down President Trump.

“It’s just strange to me how so many are overreacting,” he said. “The H1N1 virus in 2009 killed 17,000 people, it was the flu also I think, and there was not the same level of hype. You just didn’t see it on the news 24/7 and it makes you wonder if there’s a political reason for that.”

COVID-19, the coronavirus-borne disease that has killed more than 18,000 since being identified in December, is not an influenza subtype. H1N1 was.

Not everybody at the school is on board. Longtime English professor Marybeth Davis Baggett called on Liberty’s trustees to overrule Falwell’s decision to keep campus open.

“Lives are at stake,” Baggett told the News & Advance. “I think this decision is a recipe for disaster, and I have been trying to push that as much as I have been able to internally.”

SEE
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/03/from-jerry-falwell-jr.html


https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/03/jerry-falwell-jr.html