Solidarity on the Right

We can win if we stand together

There is a lot going on in the world as we head into the Christmas holiday and the New Year. Elon Musk is implementing a new era of free speech in social media, the lame duck Congress is trying to pass everything and the kitchen sink before they adjourn, and our own legislators are preparing some audacious bills for the next session, with issues such as school choice, ESG, and protecting children from grooming on the docket.

I will have much to say about each of these things, but today I want to look at how one man fought back against the cancel mob, and how his experience can be a model for how to win against the militant left.

Scott Yenor has long been a professor of political science at Boise State University. He digs deep into the wells of history and philosophy to explain why the traditional structure of the family is the best foundation for our society. He has spoken boldly about the way in which the traditional nuclear family has been attacked and undermined, and what we should do to defend it. “There can be no great countries without great families,” Professor Yenor told the audience at the 2nd National Conservatism Conference in October 2021:

Professor Yenor’s speech was bold; you might even call it controversial. He called out not only radical feminism, but Republicans and conservatives who have adopted the feminist lines about how women must be unshackled from the home and family in order to live out their best lives. This attitude might best be demonstrated by way in which the official Republican Party Twitter account cast the Biden economy as a problem of mothers being out of work:

Yenor would surely say that this is absolutely backwards thinking, and I would agree. Why do Ronna McDaniel and the GOP want to see more women leaving their children to go back to the office? It’s not as if most jobs today are essential for maintaining our society. Government bureaucrats, journalist drones, university diversity commissars, and corporate HR officials are not exactly modern day Rosie the Riveters. Nevertheless, American women have been taught for generations that the proper thing to do is to outsource the raising of their children (if they have them at all!) and then go work in some soulless office, and anyone who questions this arrangement is called backward, misogynistic, a Christian Taliban.

It is a simple biological reality that without fathers and mothers, society ends. It is not misogyny to say that children deserve both a father and a mother, and that mothers are best equipped to raise young children. Yet the modern left is at war with nature and with God - everything from birth control to transgenderism is a revolt against a natural order.

None of this is to say that women should be barred from any profession they desire to enter, and Yenor did not say that either. He only suggested that conservatives should not join the left’s crusade to recruit women to traditionally masculine roles. Would our country be better off if 50% of CEOs were women? What about 50% of soldiers? 50% of coal miners? 50% of trash collectors? I do not believe there is a contradiction in saying that traditional roles are best for society while recognizing that some women have achieved and can achieve great things - after all, many of Idaho’s most based conservative politicians are women, and I am certainly thankful for their service.

In any case, reaction to Yenor’s speech was swift. Students and fellow faculty members alike at Boise State University began complaining about him, and BSU administrators egged on these complaints, hoping to get him to resign from his position or find pretext to fire him. Removing a tenured professor can be difficult but not impossible, and BSU decided to use Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Professor Yenor explains what happened in a new essay for First Things:

Boise State made a show of defending academic freedom against the swarm. Their media relations flunky, Mike Sharp, released a statement affirming free speech, but also urging all who felt that they had been discriminated against or harassed to file charges. Within days I received a Notice of Investigation and Allegations from Boise State, alleging that I had “graded women lower than their male peers based solely on sex and not performance” and that I had not “engaged with women in class to the same degree” as I had with men. Monitors would attend my classes to ensure that I did not discriminate against or harass students. Someone would contact me about the investigation soon. More charges might be forthcoming.

Sadly, it was not only the woke left that attacked Professor Yenor. Many in the evangelical Christian community have decided that being winsome is more important than the truth. They have marinated in modern American culture for so long that they do not even realize how much their perspective comes from progressivism rather than biblical truth:

The most concerning complaints were from evangelical acquaintances. Some came in the form of letters demanding my resignation from the Ambrose School, a classical Christian school on whose board of directors I have served for twenty years. These evangelicals equated being winsome with being Christian. Defending the family is one thing, but my words had been “neither respectful nor gentle.” I did not meet the “general requirements” to be an elder—in fact, my “remarks were hurtful, sexist, discriminatory, degrading, and demeaning.” Nearly every one of these letters presumed a secular feminist worldview.

The whole essay is worth reading. To make a long story short, Scott Yenor triumphed over the false charges levied against him. How did he defeat the woke cancel mob? First, he kept copious documentation of his classes. The accusations that he graded female students more harshly than male students, or that he only called on men in his classrooms were easily defeated by his records showing that he treated all students equally. Even though the game has been rigged against us, truth is still a defense against false witness.

Second, Yenor stood his ground. Too many conservatives, when faced with a mob like this, will attempt to apologize, even if they don’t believe they did anything wrong, in hopes of making the problem go away. We tend to think our opponents think the same way we do, and we appreciate sincere apologies. Not them, however. Apologizing when you have not done anything wrong will not placate the mob, rather it will energize them, as sharks that smell blood in the water. Professor Yenor did the right thing by refusing to back down, and because of that he was able to win.

Yenor’s victory should be a lesson to the supposedly winsome Christians who threw him under the bus at the first opportunity. Christian pundit Megan Basham responded to Yenor’s essay by calling out our fickle Christian leaders:

What struck me most in Professor Scott Yenor’s story of cancellation is the degree to which Christians in academic and political leadership let the Left set the parameters for respectable discourse and viewpoints. They threw an incisive Christian scholar and persuasive communicator to the wolves in order to protect their own reputations and professional prospects.

Yenor’s story reminds me of another incident. In January 2019, students from Covington Catholic High School attended the March for Life in Washington, DC. While they were waiting at the Lincoln Memorial to return home, some Black Hebrew Israelites began taunting the group. Another man, Native American activist Nathan Phillips, walked toward Covington student Nick Sandmann, playing his drum and singing. Sandmann did not engage with Phillips, neither did he back down, rather he simply stood his ground and smiled.

Philips told a story to news media about how the Covington students were heckling the Black Hebrew Israelites and threatening him and his fellow activists. As with Professor Yenor, the attacks came swiftly. Left-wing media denounced the students, calling them racists and demanding they be punished. Some pundits such as CNN’s Reza Aslan even threatened physical violence. Conservative commentators such as Ben Shapiro and Rod Dreher denounced the students without ever hearing their side of the story. When video of the incident was posted, showing that they did nothing wrong, most pundits had to eat crow, though many leftists still think to this day that the students were somehow in the wrong.

Rod Dreher is a famous conservative Christian author and commentator. His book The Benedict Option argues that Christians need to build and maintain our own communities where true faith is protected and nourished while the secular world falls apart around us. He implicitly called upon Christians to have each others’ backs, to protect each other from the slings and arrows of the outside world. However, when it came time for him to put his money where his mouth was, Dreher absolutely failed.

Dreher wrote that Christians should support each other against a hostile world, but when given the chance to do just that he missed. Rather than standing up for Sandmann and his classmates, or even simply waiting until the full story came out, he joined the cancel culture mob, just like so many evangelicals did when Yenor was in the dock. Too many conservatives are too worried about what the New York Times thinks of them to stand up for people on their own side, and this is a huge problem in our movement.

To his credit, Dreher apologized after he saw longer videos of the incident. Yet what does it say about a conservative Christian leader when his first instinct was to condemn his own side without knowing all the facts?

We must be better than this. Conservatives and Christians need to stand in solidarity, not do the left’s work for them by shooting our own. The next time left-wing media runs a hit piece on this or that controversial figure and demands you perform the ritual disavowals, tell them instead to go away. Show the same loyalty to our own side that the left shows the violent extremists on theirs.

Scott Yenor’s story shows that we need not fear the mob, but should instead boldly speak the truth knowing that we have truth on our side. We must build our worldview on eternal truth, not a fickle zeitgeist.