A roundup of news and commentary from around the interwebs.
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Over at World, Kevin DeYoung has a good critique of David French and a handful of others who make a large portion of their salaries critiquing “white evangelicals” from elite platforms. It’s easy to make money criticizing Christians in mainstream magazines—those audiences want to believe that evangelicals are poisonous to America. It’s more difficult to prime your critiques—and there are plenty of valid ones—to actually persuade your audience rather than constantly condemn them.
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A male identifying as transgender has won the right to use the female locker rooms in El Cajon, California:
Wood, who remains a gym member, told The San Diego Union Tribune that he was delighted by the outcome of the lawsuit. “The real thing that makes me joyously happy is that the word is out there now that you can’t pull this with the transgender community.” He said, continuing, “Whether you are uncomfortable or not is irrelevant.”
If you’re a woman uncomfortable changing next to a brawny Navy veteran—tough luck. That’s “irrelevant.”
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Over at the must-read Substack “The Postliberal Order,” Chad Pecknold has a great essay titled “Therapists of Decline.” An excerpt:
In a haunting recent essay, Sam Kriss writes that “we are living in an age of ambient unwellness.” It’s a phrase I’ve been thinking about a lot. Our institutions are unwell, and we are unwell. Our mania about productivity and safety veil our fearfulness, our intuition that we must outrun our collapse, or be consumed by imminent death and decay. Our politics reflect our “unwellness,” and this includes political opinion on the right and the left. As Patrick Deneen recently considered the pessimism of the left, I want us to also consider a different kind of therapeutic pessimism on the right.
Pecknold critiques both Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher—if you follow those folks, this essay is a must-read.
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Parents are reaching the breaking point on the transgender issue. From the New York Post:
Parents of swimmers competing alongside transgender University of Pennsylvania record-breaker Lia Thomas are demanding she [sic] be barred from future girls’ events — calling current rules a “direct threat to female athletes in every sport.”
A group of around 10 UPenn parents sent a letter to the NCAA last week demanding it changes the controversial rules that have allowed Thomas, 22, to smash numerous records, according to DailyMail.com.
“At stake here is the integrity of women’s sports,” the parents reportedly wrote in the letter also forwarded to the Ivy League and university officials.
Lia Thomas, of course, is a male. If you want get a sense of just how much of a biological advantage he has, watch this video of the young man destroying his female opponents:
Just to show you how absurd this is. Here’s the trans swimmer “Lia” Thomas crushing all of the female competitors by 40 seconds. This is what that looks like in real time. A total farce.
Ed West has a depressing but important article on why, despite gains, he doesn’t think the war against wokeness is anywhere close to won.
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For a more optimistic take, Andrew Klavan thinks the tide may have turned.
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If you need any more reasons to pull your kids out of public school, give this report by The Daily Wire a read:
Multiple high schools are encouraging their students to apply for a “scholarship” by sending their name, phone number, and physical and email addresses to a doctor who surrendered his medical license after being repeatedly accused of meeting young aspiring medical professionals online and tricking them into filming porn that he sold or posted to shame them.
In May and June, two university students separately sued Philip T. Sobash, an Arkansas doctor, saying he is “a serial sexual predator who convinces unwitting young women into sending nude images to him and then posts the images with his victims’ names and other personal identifying information onto notorious websites, inciting others to anonymously harass and attack his victims. He sells the images for personal gain. But, more than that, he enjoys harming his victims.”
Finally, there’s a thought-provoking article by Damir Marusic, “The Unserious Generation,” on how–well, on how we are a fundamentally unserious generation. I tend to agree with him.
