This month, I’m trying a new feature on the Substack called the Open Q&A. On Friday, you sent in more than 400 questions and now I’m responding to the most thought-provoking. Leave a comment if you want to do this again next month.
Irishka: It looks like Wokeism/Marxism has replaced religion. Do you see a religious revival in the American future? And do you feel it’s necessary for us to win? To be one nation under God we have to be “under God.”
This is the million-dollar question, and the best book for you to read about this is actually from an Italian philosopher named Augusto Del Noce. He has The Problem of Atheism and a number of essays about the cultural changes in the 1960s that are just as relevant in the United States. And the basic thesis that comes from Del Noce is that this great process of secularization—the building up of secular state bureaucracies—has launched us into new philosophical crises.
And from an American perspective, the “woke” revolution is the first large-scale social movement, on the Left or the Right, without a religious foundation. The abolitionist movement was a Christian religious movement. The temperance movement rallied in the churches and religious organizations at the time. And the 1960s civil rights movement, all of the leaders of this movement, such as Martin Luther King were religious figures and leaders in their own communities. The woke revolutionaries are pursuing a different tack, an explicitly Marxist secularist, atheist, political ideology. And I think that’s really why it has a lack of depth, a lack of humanity. And like the Marxist revolutionaries of the twentieth century, you see how this can go so sideways and turn into negation, destruction, and nihilism.
On the other hand, as the American social scientist Charles Murray has pointed out in his work, all of the great movements against social decay and social pathologies in American history are Great Awakenings driven by a new religious spirit. And so, I really believe whatever religious background you might have—even if you’re a secularist or an atheist—we really need to revive these American religions and religious expressions, if we want to have a different epistemology, a different anthropology, a different vision of politics than the woke.
Do I see this kind of religious revival in America’s future? It’s hard to say. Do I think that it offers a more robust alternative to left-wing racialist ideology? The answer is absolutely yes. And optimistically, I’m seeing this, especially among people in my generational cohort, millennials, who have lived through their twenties, maybe even their early thirties with a secular millennial mindset or ideology, now actually returning to churches and religious institutions, because they sense that there is something lacking and they sense that there is something important in their lives they could find through faith and religious practice.
Chris Lawrence: How do Republican state legislators go about removing college system DEI administrators, guides, hiring practices, and documents? How should they message it?
This is something I’ve been working on very hard since the beginning of the year. I’ve published model legislation with my colleague, Ilya Shapiro at Manhattan Institute, that shows state legislatures exactly how to abolish DEI bureaucracies and restore colorblind equality in public universities. I’ve also been doing an investigative reporting series looking at DEI bureaucracies in Florida and now in Texas, exposing them for what they are and giving legislators the ammunition they need to start talking about this issue.
And what I’ve found is that many legislators, especially in red states like Texas and Florida, when you show them the analysis and reporting, they immediately understand. They’re armed with the language and strategy for speaking persuasively about these issues. But those of us on the outside have to do the initial work, both at the level of public policy and at the level of journalism, which they need in order to make the case to their voters. Because, ultimately, politicians are very busy people. They have a million issues that they’re working on. They have to go raise money. They have to do constituent work. They have, in many cases, full-time jobs or businesses outside their legislative positions. And so, it’s up to those of us working in think tanks, publications, NGOs, and other organizations to provide them everything they need to be successful.
So, if you want to become active on this, do public records requests, model your work based on what I’ve done in these other states, and connect it with those great state legislators, so they know exactly what’s happening and they know how to solve it.
Johnny: How do teachers effectively stand up against woke ideologies, disinformation, and misinformation when the administration has bought into it so fervently?
If you’re a teacher, especially in a red state public school system, and you have an administrator that is pushing these DEI policies, you’re in a tough spot, because you have to go against the leadership and your own bureaucracy. And if you’re in a blue state, you also have to go against the leadership at the political level. So it gets more difficult when the powers and authorities are more left-wing. This is obvious, left-wing states and left-wing school districts are going to have left-wing DEI bureaucracies and left-wing school curricula.
So, you have two options: voice or exit. Exit is pretty simple. You say, “This isn’t for me. They’re forcing me to do stuff I don’t believe in. I’m going to get a job at a different school within the district or a different school outside of the district, or even move states altogether.” I’ve seen this over and over. The second option is voice, which means trying to reform and advocate changes from within.
I’ll be honest: voice is not an easy path. But if you want to pursue it, here is some advice. First, you cannot do it alone. You have to get parents, teachers, and administrators who are like-minded. You have to come together and express your voice through numbers. You have to show up at that school board meeting with not just two or three people, but ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred people. And second, you need a successful media narrative, meaning that you need to have actual information about what’s happening that is going to engage people at an emotional level, that’s going to get people off the sidelines and into political advocacy or activism at that school board level.
And then, ultimately, you need to change the minds of administrators or school board members who have chosen so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion. And you have to say that instead of DEI, they should be focusing on equality, merit, and colorblindness, and having a school policy that treats everyone equally as an individual.
John: What recommendations and concrete steps do you have for faculty at these woke universities to fight back?
Faculty are in a slightly different situation than public school teachers. Faculty, in many cases, have tenure. Faculty have more robust First Amendment rights. Faculty can also publish their research and advocacy and other opinion or editorial work without having heavy-handed interference from school administration.
I’ve been working on university reform and I’ve made great alliances with many conservative professors who are starting to push back. I think someone who’s done a very good job at this is Scott Yenor, who’s a public university professor in Idaho and a Claremont Institute fellow. He started publishing reports, op-eds, and social media materials exposing what was happening within his university. He’s had an outsized impact, because DEI administrators like to push their ideology behind the scenes, and when you actually show the world exactly what’s happening, you can be much more powerful, even as an individual, than it might seem.
Of course, this also carries risk. There are going to be people within your department, within your administration, within your state government, who hate this. They want to operate in total secrecy. And so, you’ll have to be sophisticated, you’ll have to be smart, you’ll have to figure out what your risk tolerance is as you start to push back. But, at the end of the day, my personal view is that if you have tenure and your university is violating your most basic sense of how our institutions should be run, you have a moral obligation to speak out.
Dale Tremont: One 800-pound gorilla in this whole mess is the fully captured mainstream media. Their lockstep march has resulted in a large portion of the population being utterly impervious to “other” voices or messages—i.e., those of us who see what’s actually happening can all too easily be dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.” It’s really difficult to combat, because one can understand the disbelief of the masses that the entire media complex is colluding to drive such ugly narratives. I’m continually shocked by the ignorance of so many otherwise intelligent people. It’s the greatest mass psy-op in history. How do we combat this aspect of the problem?
Everyone knows the problem, but there are two causes for optimism. The first is the real exposure of the mass media’s collusion with government and tech companies, most prominently with the Twitter Files from Matt Taibbi, Mike Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and others, who showed how all of the sausage was being made, with tech, NGOs, and government all working together behind the scenes to suppress “dangerous information,” which was really just dangerous information for left-wing narrative control. And so, the public is now very aware and very conscious of this, and the powers that be can’t get away with it like they could previously.
And the other point of optimism is that social media itself, even with all of these censorship problems baked into it, still allows for more voices than ever to be part of the mainstream conversation. I publish in mainstream publications, but my Twitter account is probably more powerful for cementing and driving political narratives than any other platform, including the mainstream platforms. We now have Substack, Twitter, and YouTube, and, even with the censorship—which again, I think is outrageous and should be opposed—we have many more voices than we’ve ever had.
Twenty-five years ago, if you weren’t in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, network television, or the 24-hour cable news programs, you were really shut out of the national debate altogether. You could write a column in National Review that got distributed to thousands of households, but these avenues were really restricted in terms of reach. And, as a consequence, I think a lot of stories were just ignored completely that should have been within the discourse.
And so, we just have to keep pushing. We have to keep pushing against the censorship and against the collusion, and we also have to keep pushing on building up alternative voices using the new means and methods of communications.
Steve Gordon: Florida has been a fantastic test for implementing sane policies opposing the “woke” agenda, but what advice would you have for making incremental advancement in a blue state where the levers of the state are in the hands of the woke foot soldiers?
There are two answers to this question. First, start locally. If you live in a red legislative district in the State of Washington, for example, sanity still prevails. I know this because I live in one, I send my kids to school in one, and I have great relationships with my neighbors and local policymakers, who are on board with my philosophy. And so, there’s a great opportunity, even if you’re despairing at the state legislative level, to get involved locally, to put money into local school board races, local mayors races, local prosecutors races, and to make sure that whatever happens in your blue state legislature, you can actually protect your local district. If you live in a very blue jurisdiction in a blue state, my best advice would be to move. As long as you can do it, as long as work permits, family permits, et cetera, you’re going to have a much greater chance at success, even within the same state, in a different locality.
And second, once you work on building up that local power, the best strategy is to then start working at that state legislative level, figuring out where are your swing districts and whether it is the House, the Senate, or the governorship that is most likely to flip, and then focusing all of your resources on wherever it is that would have the most payoff. Because, look: if you’re in California, it probably seems hopeless. The recall against Governor Newsom crashed and burned. But maybe there are a couple of House or Senate races that could flip the balance of power.
So shore up those red districts, then put all of your efforts where it could have the highest chance of payoff. And I think there’s really no other way than that.
The questions were excellent as were the realistic advice. This should be a monthly column
Yes! Please keep this idea moving forward. The Place of The Conservative Intellectual at this moment in history: Finding the way out means accenting the intellectuals who are leading. You, Rufo, definitely are leading and you always credit other leaders which allows us to unify. Conservative politicians and elected officials on the state and local levels need the conservative intelligentsia to publish and appear on media such that the ideas - and Western Culture’s survival is at stake - how to save our heritage can take their proper place in culture as well as in governing institutions. It’s been a long, long falling away, but the can-do ( so-called “adolescent”) heart of the USA and not the staid aristocratic European model will once more save our common heritage. And “our” means European as assimilated here, holding forth the the best of the ancient world’s achievements! Ironically, while Africa awakens to its first trials of the Western tradition for itself, and China -like Japan before her - has the potential to understand the Western tradition and incorporate rather than replace it, only the USA has the open active line of reasoning of the conservative scholars who lead the fight to save us.
American culture has two choices which Rufo sees clearly: fail, and therefore fall into a sensual revelry of chaotic Dionysian despotism, a style of life “ cluelessly” preached as “gospel” by ( among others) a pussy-hat hoard of manic Agave “mommies” their son’s decapitated heads raised high, “ Look daddy, I killed a lion” ( nothing speaks more clearly our times than Euripides The Bacchae) ... the other choice is Reason, order, and the discipline necessary to pass forward the heritage of The West - a heritage that’s not the better angels of our nature - but the only angel of it! Sink into debauchery and pretend it is normal? Never! It’s time the intelligentsia sound the alarm, come what may!
The funny thing is that there are Leftists who SHOULD feel the prescence behind the shockwaves directed at them, but they stick their heads up their asses or appeal to emotion the entire time.
My taste was always for Aeschylus - it has taken me a long time to understand what you have just said of Euripides - that he was the poet of decline. Living through the absurdities of decline has made me appreciate him in just the way you suggest.
It happened to me by way of Nathaniel West - a very unwholesome writer.
The Bacchae is an amazing play so psychologically and politically and philosophically deep the translator William Arrowsmith put it best : “ elusive, complex, and compelling the play constantly recedes from our grasp moving into higher order and deeper chaos such that it lands only God knows where - which is to say where it matters. “ That’s a critique using the languages of oppositions to reiterate how perfectly imbedded within that masterpiece are the expressed characterizations of mankind especially his blindness to his death-wish and the fierceness of his untamed Id or worse - his Creator’s vengeance ( to use “ id”a Freudian phrase for the vile murderous nihilism within a human and thus rife in cultures) . Sophocles in Oedipus - inspiring Aristotle’s critique of humanity as revealed in theatre - goes nowhere near the more repulsive truth of The Bacchae.
Having caught a glimpse of this atrocious beast so clearly made manifest in Euripides Bacchae, and later done my own study of our scientists and the culture creating nuclear weaponry, I can assure us all that Euripides got it right. the value of such a revelation should be the necessity of humility. Yet few define our space or times in terms of its reality.
What’s left? Fight the decadence no matter the reality.
Thank you so much for taking the trouble to make such a reply. I thought that I had understood you, and it seems that I have.
I will read the Bacchae - I have not yet. I worry about what I will find, of course.
Cordially,
You will be amazed how it reveals our exact moment in history ! I guess we are on repeat ! Thanks for deciding to see the work - it won’t disappoint ! It was fun to share “ the tradition” somewhere 😊🌼🌼🌼
Thanks for the comment.
"The questions were excellent as were the realistic advice."
Very much so - it connects what we read of or witness with immediate, practical advice for how to proceed - which is modelled more fully and in more detail in C.R.'s more lengthy publications, and pointed to in his Twitter publications.
Agreed.
Weekly with all the questions he is going to receive!
This was a great Idea Mr. Ruffo, love the Q&A.
I might be old school.
I cant believe no one is really standing up against all this madness.
I cant believe that our administration has gotten away with this for decades.
I cant believe that People really belive that they are fighting for a good cause when using terroristic tactics instead of debating and working things out like grown adults.
I cant believe that we dont have the power to stop this two years ago.
I Do believe that America is a Sovereing Nation under God, and He is in control.
I
Not enough people bring up how not baking a cake for a gay couple was enough to run an independent baker out of town.
And yet there's people preaching about how conservatives are supposed to be the bad guys cuz they didn't agree with Disney for allegedly going back on their word with no way to disprove them. It just doesn't make sense.
In a world full of lies and deception. The only thing that will save us is the Truth!
Yeah I definitely think religion will make a comeback. I'm on the older half of the millennial generation and used to hear all the atheist arguments and or mocking of religion, usually dishonest caricatures. I never was that much of a skeptic but in recent years as I've seen the depravity and emptiness of the dominant ideology which is opposed to religion I feel like religion is looking a lot better by comparison.
Same.
We will be here, Brother.
This should definitely be a monthly column. Distinct question and well-reasoned short analysis.
“So shore up those red districts” resonates with me at a local level.👌🏻
In Regards to Texas Transgender Bill
https://youtu.be/qBI3KjlUyO8
Please Share! God Bless!
This is great 👍
Thanks.
Thank you for highlighting the importance of exposing college administrators’ political agenda. In the last few decades, colleges and universities added layers upon layers of administrative positions that now control campus life, influence curricula, and champion students’ grievances. It’s interesting that, in bemoaning student debt, Dems don’t begrudge the costs associated with this rise of administrative class.
Many with insurance who have worked hard for many years are discouraged from "overusing" their insurance (breast exams for women and PSA exams for men) on the basis of "demographic outcomes" (as if your life is a statistic - which is what they are actually saying), and yet, the insurers have found quite a reservoir of funds to pay for sex-changes and other related cosmetic surgeries, medical prescriptions, etc.
I believe the gender critical side must develop combined physical and mental health therapies to help "identity-confused" teens and adults. As a trans widow, I saw my former husband develop a vacant focus while he distanced himself from his sexed, physical self during "transition." The only emotion he brought up readily was rage, and that was often. Here's my idea for wellness movement, let me know if you see that as a possible path away from "gender-world."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1SvNi3O1Sc&list=PLOFlPPQm71Ii-l-xoAlBZc5Iy9xZyfbUY
I find it interesting how Twitter libs could easily downplay that if you bring it up to them, but you should pack a tazer and some pepper spray.
Well, I'm banned on twitter, just for using the term, trans widow. Thanks
Unnerving.
Thank you for encouraging us here in CA! We are trying to stay and fight but it is getting harder. I loved format as well. God bless all your efforts!
On the subject of religion, those on the left tend toward an instinctive negative reaction. They're afraid. They think you want to take away women's right to vote or institute a theocracy. However, if you can get them beyond that, even liberals can be quite reasonable. The key here is, as Chris says, to be specific.
No sane person actually believes that men can become women by just saying they are. Liberals like to talk about theoretical intersex people, but given a few real examples of the absurdity of "I say I'm a woman so I am" phenomenon, they are at a loss. The best examples are schools and prisons, preferably local ones: convicted rapists in women's prisons ; 16 year old Amy sharing a locker room with penises; a male athlete beating out girls for a college sports scholarship.
The trans lunacy is a giant balloon of postmodernist unreality. A needle anywhere can cause a cascade failure. (Eg: "if prisoners really should be separated by biological sex, are there any other spaces where that makes sense?"; "if men do tend to have an advantage in some sports, are there any other real differences between men and women?", etc...) You don't have to ask these things, they percolate up logically from the small puncture you've made in the balloon.
I suspect the DEI front is similar, although I have less experience with it. DEI is also a model of postmodernist unreality. Westerners tend to value fairness very highly (lots of psych experiments back this up) and liberals even more so. Liberals also pride themselves on being champions of the oppressed, so a few specific examples of how their principles have actually caused unfairness and oppression for specific people might work.
Your goal is to make a pinprick in the balloon, not cause an explosion. What you're attempting is nothing short of a religious conversion -- not necessarily to Christianity but away from wokeness. Religious conversions are long term undertakings.
Chris, great suggestions. Good format. Thanks so much.
Thank you, Chris! Looking forward to get my my copy of "The problem of atheism" soon (sadly, from Amazon :( ). So far the best book I read on the difficulty of holding onto one's religion was "The lonely man of faith", by R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik. I am Jewish, but I think a lot of issues raised in this essay apply to anyone who believes in the Creator and is looking to live according to His will, and help build families and societies according to His blueprint.
I also wanted to share this. Thank you Mr. Rufo.
We are thrilled to announce that HB3502 has been placed on the calendar for a House floor vote tomorrow, Wednesday, May 10! Please call your representative tomorrow to ask them to vote“YES”! Use the link below to find their name and number.
https://house.texas.gov/members/find-your-representative/
HB3502 Beyond Transition – Wed., May 10
Leach, Oliverson, Leo-Wilson
HB3502 is being held up by national organizations as model legislation! It is the only bill of its type in the country.
HB3502 will help all Texans who have accessed gender transition treatments.
Process and procedures will be developed to care for this population beyond transition.
Care will be handled through traditional insurance processes.
Corinna Cohn, Prisha Mosley, Soren Aldaco and Abel Garcia testified to the health concerns they have. The only bill in consideration right now that will ensure ongoing healthcare to those who have transitioned and those who wish to detransition is HB3502. Please help us get it across the finish line.
Thanks for your help!
https://youtu.be/qBI3KjlUyO8
Taking on the issue of secularization - a difficult subject!
Its source and progression are important questions, as is its culmination-point. If Secularization is the replacement or appropriation of God's Divine Providence with "our" own, then it must almost certainly culminate in technology - in the human subordination to technology. This is because "we" cannot gain the needed control over reality without our technology - it is integral to "The Project."
Of course, we don't really replace God - we will still die and all of Creation will carry on. What we will do is create a "bubble" and "call it a day" - that is all we are capable of. The 70's movie "Zardoz' actually captures this - a serious movie with a lot of "camp" and absurdity, but which comprehends the fundamental problem - assuming that you can keep watching once you have seen Sean Connery's get-up (a fashion-show-runway camp version of Pancho Villa's purported "attire.")
Quite difficult, but more and more important. Will continue to address it in future writing.
Rufo, I have to challenge you on the following statement: "And from an American perspective, the “woke” revolution is the first large-scale social movement, on the Left or the Right, without a religious foundation."
Woke absolutely has a religious foundation. "Woke" has its foundation in "Social Justice". Social Justice has its foundation in the religion of Reform Judaism the majority of whose members reside in America. This isn't controversial. Reform Judaism has named Social Justice as part of its published official religious doctrine for decades. Reform Judaism has also officially listed Progressivism as a foundational religious tenet also. Progressivism is a religious process of constant revelation, review and change.
It was this Progressivism that allowed Social Justice to be reborn and updated as Woke and Woke will be reborn and updated as something else and on and on it will go in a never ending and evolving process as new information comes to light. A process that never looks back.
The Reform Jews successfully proselytized the Progressive and Social Justice doctrines to the Unitarian Church a long time ago and a growing number of Christian Denominations now also embrace Social Justice and Progressivism as central to their religious beliefs.
There's some good stuff here, but I don't consider the "woke" part much of a threat. I support DeSantis and Musk in ther actions, but not by words.
Wokeness is clearly a religion. Jesus rose from the dead. A man can become a woman. Both are examples of a kind of magical thinking protected in the US by the First Amendment as is my belief as an atheist that they are religious nonsense.
If you are a considered atheist - and I assume that you are - then you must face the "pari" of Pascal - as did even Machiavelli, on his deathbed. Because atheism is a philosophical understanding, it is not permitted dogmatism (on pain of no longer being philosophical and so no longer atheist).
You cannot know whether God created and rules all things, or whether the atoms are eternal and all is accident. Philosophical positions can never be final - philosophy cannot rule out religion.
As to Wokery, it is a gnostic pseudo-religion which is parasitical upon The Faith (by which I mean Catholicism and Judaism) and upon philosophy - it purports to mystically complete both by answering the questions which philosophy says cannot be answered finally and which The Faith says are matters of Divine Revelation. It has, as you intuit, a religious structure.
The "pari" cannot culminate in gnosticism, as it assumes that we cannot know everything (gnosticism says - without warrant - that we can). Wokery is, perhaps, a mystery cult.
Social Justice + Progressivism' (now 'Wokery') are officially stated doctrines of existing religions and originated in Reform Judaism religious doctrine. There's no "pseudo".
I did not know of the relation between progressive "social justice" and Reform Judaism. I am not very surprised, though I might have guessed Liberal Protestantism.
When I speak of religion, I mean orthodoxy. You are certainly right to say that there are plenty of gnostics who call themselves Christian, and even Catholic -even to the point that their heresy swallows their faith. It is an old problem.
Jesus rose from the dead is official published religious doctrine.
Social Justice and Progressivism is official published religious doctrine.
Not all Magical Thinking is official religious doctrine.
The distinction matters because there are laws mandating separation of church and state.
There are no laws mandating the separation of magical thinking and state.
Great idea! Please implement
Please try this in YOUR OWN state! Let's do this in Washington. Yes, it's a liberal nightmare here. I am willing to help. PLEASE!!!
There is nothing about wokeness that would qualify as Marxist. Rather, what it resembles is the Feminist concept of patriarchy as a devil. Wokeness extends this concept to include whiteness as well.
This belief in Satan (although not called such by name), as literally a real entity messing with people's lives, is indeed a faith. Even more of a faith than ordinary religion, which regards Satan as at least partly a metaphor.
All the concepts of wokeness have a facet that is actually good for humanity. However, they are put into a framework that reifies evil while relegating good to a mere shadow. As such, the mention of these principles drives followers to fulfill the opposite.
And I mean literally opposite, not reciprocal. Wokeness is not sponsored by minorities like it claims it is. Rather, it's a rebranding of the Reagan era "anti rock and roll" crusade, and just as pro-white, pro-male, and conservative as the original.
What are some of your religious beliefs? Do you believe Jesus is a god? I’ve tried to find an answer to that question, and I haven’t succeeded. Given how much you seem to appeal to Christians in your analysis of political culture, I’d imagine it would be much easier to find that answer.
This is extremely disappointing.
Banishing the absurdities of Robin Di Angelo and Ibram X. Kendi and preventing easy access to hormonal and surgical treatments for children and teens who think they may be trans is one thing. The treatment of Jenna Barbee, who showed a Disney PG-rated film in which a young boy mentions having a crush on another young boy is quite another:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/15/us/florida-teacher-disney-movie-gay/index.html
If your child is gay, that's nature taking its course. Children confused about their sexual identitities--or who gain access to irreversible treatments and regret them five years later--that's different. Please comment, Mr. Rufo, on the differences and on what the law is doing regarding such harmless mentions of lifestyle in a Disney cartoon
Here is Our Battle, may God have Mercy on us!
A Must Watch....how its hapzpening...
https://michaelnayna.substack.com/p/the-reformers-an-accompaniment?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#play
Speaking out against woke exceeds most faculty risk tolerance at the university level. It's political suicide, especially if you are not in the humanities or some other field where talking about DEI could be your "research".
And as David Sabatini found out the hard way, this is the one area where it is easy to remove anyone woke administrators dislike. The federal funding agencies will blacklist you, too, and then your career is over unless you have billionaire friends. Hope your WiFi income is good, lol.
I think the solution for faculty is to get involved in the university politics, and play politics hard. If they are woke, you have to vote against their tenure, keep them from positions of power. Meanwhile, play the games, learn the language, appear one of them. Never complain. Each bit of service you take, is one the wokie doesn't get. Get the bureaucrats to like you. And then subvert. On one hand, woke is flexible enough that as long as you appear one of them, you have a blank check to argue against anything.
On the other hand, being loudly pro-DEI and pushing them too far may spur backlash that solves the problem. You'll notice the admin all go into hiding as soon as the media storm comes. A&M, UT, Texas Tech all hid/removed their DEI statements and told varying degrees of lies to conceal the fact to lawmakers they intend to resume the moment legislative session ends. Would a public statement right now from a department at one of those unis telling Rufo to shove it help or hurt the woke cause more? (Do the students at these unis even know there were articles published about the DEI bureaucracy at their uni? Will give 10-1 odds fewer than 5% know. But easy to spread news of it by complaining about the article to the students)
The other thing needed is an underground communication network, and organization. Support each other, talk to each other, and coordinate better than the whiny honors students. Document the nonsense and/or the dates. "Accidentally" be lax in your email security vs FOIA. Feed info (via NON-uni email and NOT on uni servers) to non-uni people who can make the FOIA requests and compile the stories. Contacts with friendly media so that they can be tipped off to maintain outrage in the general population (especially uni outreach partners/donors/Regents) and bring outside pressure.
One of the more effective tactics used by the LGBT community was targeting corporations to hold them accountable to their "values". Do the same to the university donors and Regents.
These last points are where this community would be great to help. I suspect many of them want to help, but don't have primary access like faculty do.
Also still think weaponizing the students against the wokies, and boosting their voices is low hanging fruit we're all missing. On one hand, they're the future, and if they feel the attacks by the woke crazies, they'll be deprogrammed for life. Also, automatic high ground if you're defending a student from an unjustified attack, or a colleague from shrill calls to give all the students As.
Excellent and informative. Please do this again!
"The parable of Sodom and Gomorrah rings true now more than ever. It teaches that this sinful act of degradation and destruction is spread from the afflicted to the innocent."
I completely agree.
Atheism - true atheism (there are very few atheists, though many believe that they are) is a philosophical idea which holds that all of reality is (eternally existing) atomic particles and that our world - and everything - is accident of those particles.
Perhaps that is the case - it is possible. And yet, it faces its own difficulties. For instance, did the particles make themselves? The questions may exceed human understanding.
Epicurus and Lucretius, and Machiavelli are infinitely beyond "The New Atheism" in their subtlety and understanding of these problems.
I am sympathetic with what you say and what you hope for as a conservative non-believer (and therefore my neighbor), but there will be no "Cultural Christianity" without Christians. Our cultural influence is an effect of our presence.
Cultural Christianity doesn't have the foundation, it will dissipate without real faith.
You should try it anyway. Not every Christian could withstand the intellectual challenge of New Atheism, but Christianity itself would withstand the challenge and then happily dance a jig around the supposed intellectual rigor of any kind of atheism. Gather a panel of each - It would be fun to watch.