Go Outside, Progressive Writers

Do America’s progressive writers know anybody who isn’t . . . a lunatic? I ask this because, in the course of my morning reading, I came across two widely shared pieces that, had they been presented to mixed company at the pitch stage, would ineluctably have yielded raised eyebrows, widespread confusion, and, eventually, a friendly “are you feeling all right?”

The first contribution is from the Atlantic. It’s called “How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol,” and it claims that those shadowy, ever-present “Christian nationalists” have started combining sacramental beads and “gun culture.” To underscore the idea, its artwork is in the form of an animated gif that replaces a Rosary’s beads with bullet holes. This claim is typical of the whole:

Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.

The conclusion:

The “battle beads” culture of spiritual warfare permits radical-traditional Catholics literally to demonize their political opponents and regard the use of armed force against them as sanctified. The sacramental rosary isn’t just a spiritual weapon but one that comes with physical ammunition.

As an example of the “I saw a few weird things online and fed them into my paranoia” genre, it’s an instant classic. As a reflection of real life in America, it is a disaster. I would say that the author needs to stop trawling the Internet and go out and meet some actual American Catholics, but, having looked him up, I learned that he lives in Canada. That, at least, provides him with an excuse. I’m not sure what the Atlantic‘s is.

The second piece is from MSNBC. It’s called “How the loss of Roe directly serves white supremacists’ horrifying plot,” and its thesis is that, in the post-Dobbs world, there is a “dangerous and somewhat convoluted relationship between white extremists and the state of reproductive rights in the United States.” The evidence for this proposition is the existence of a fringe neo-Nazi group called “Rapekrieg” that, before federal authorities got involved, was “reportedly spearheading a mass murder of minorities and mass rape of ‘white women to increase production of white children,’ according to Rolling Stone.”

Which is terrible, certainly, but which . . . well, which no more justifies the claim that “the layers of danger here are hard to overestimate” than would any other facet of American life that I could pick at random. After a thousand or so frantic words about the “landscape” — words in which the author does her level best to insinuate that pro-lifers are Nazis while pretending she is doing no such thing — we learn that

groups like Rapekrieg are fringe extremists whose violent plots clearly constitute terrorist action. But in a post-Roe world, a plot to force women to become pregnant, however fringe it might be, takes on a whole new meaning.

Does it, though? Couldn’t we do this with anything? Extremist groups benefit from the First Amendment. Does that mean that it “directly serves” any given white supremacist’s “horrifying plot”? What about the Fourth Amendment? Is there a “dangerous and somewhat convoluted relationship between white extremists” and the “right to be secure from all unreasonable searches, and seizures of his person, his houses, his papers, and all his possessions”? What about lenient prosecutors, or the abolition of bail, or defunding the police?

At the end of the piece, the author asks, “How many more Rapekrieg-type plots will it take for this to change?” Perhaps more than one? I don’t want to be flippant here, but unless one thinks that “what if a neo-Nazi group tried to organize a mass rape?” is a convincing rhetorical case for the maintenance of Roe v. Wade, then the whole piece is just extraordinarily silly, and, as with the Atlantic‘s treatise on the rise of high-capacity Assault Rosaries, the authors, editors, and audience for this sort of stuff would do well to put down their cellphones, take off their tinfoil hats, and spend more time outside — where, sure, they’ll meet a few kooks amid the sea of well-adjusted people, but notice that, while those kooks are indeed off their meds, none of them seem to get paid to place the fruits of their derangement in prestigious magazines.