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‘Woke’ Effectively Describes The Left’s Insanity, And That’s Why They Hate When You Say It


BY: SAMUEL MANGOLD-LENETT | MARCH 17, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/17/woke-effectively-describes-the-lefts-insanity-and-thats-why-they-hate-when-you-say-it/

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Woke-ism is intentionally ambiguous. So when you describe it, that offends those who wish for its intentions to remain murky.

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When was the last time you were called racist? When was the last time you actually cared about being called racist? Odds are you get called it quite often and care (or should care) about being called it very little.

That’s because lobbing accusations of racial bigotry at anyone who gets in their way is second nature for the left. So when people stopped taking these accusations seriously — realizing it is simply impossible for everything to be racist — the left began decrying “white supremacy,” semantically invoking Nazism.

When accusations of racism failed to coerce enough action, the left moved on to a pejorative with far worse aesthetics while maintaining the same message. Accusing people and institutions of “racism” had lost its utility due to rhetorical inflation, and the era of “systemic white supremacy” had begun.

According to some, the conservative movement and the American right writ large are experiencing a similar ongoing dilemma with the word “woke.” Many suggest the word has come to mean nothing due to right-wing over-saturation, while others insist it has taken on a far more nefarious tone.

Nevertheless, the question remains: Why has the word “woke” become so problematic?

Bad Faith

On Tuesday, Bethany Mandel, co-author of “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation,” appeared on The Hill’s “Rising” to discuss leftism’s role in damaging American families. 

During the discussion, Briahna Joy Gray, co-host of the “Bad Faith” podcast, inquired if Mandel would “mind defining ‘woke,’ ’cause it’s come up a couple [of] times, and I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page.” What followed was a brief moment of self-consciousness in which the author stumbled over her words before offering a generally accepted definition of the term.

Despite this, the moment was clipped, and the author was lambasted as both a bigot and buffoon across the web. 

The whole point of this exercise was to humiliate someone offering a coherent definition of woke-ism that was insufficiently deferential to the whims of leftist ideologues. However, this attempt was unsuccessful. 

What Is Woke?

Dragging Mandel through the digital public square did not result in the typical groveling struggle session that has come to be expected whenever people explain their opinions in public, but it did inspire many to inquire about the nature of the term “woke.”

The term started to increase in prevalence in the early-to-mid-2010s back when “Black Lives Matter” referred to a hashtag, not an organization, and when the hot-button social issue du jour was the legalization of homosexual marriage. Despite its original meaning, used in common parlance simply to refer to personal vigilance, “woke” quickly took on social and political meanings. Like how every other community uses specific language to signify in-group allegiance, “woke” was used to inculcate oneself among the broader cause of the burgeoning leftist cultural hegemony and, by extension, the Democrat Party.

But as the term became more and more associated with the party, it became less specifically connected with racial protest movements and more so a shibboleth for supporting the party platform — “stay woke,” the slogan went.

It is undeniable that woke-ism and the people who get protective of the identifying label “woke” have an influential presence on the political and cultural left. There was even a short-lived Hulu series titled “Woke” that chronicled a previously apolitical black cartoonist’s journey through the intersectional landscape of identity politics. And in 2018, “Saturday Night Live” poked fun at the concept of corporate fashion brands using woke-ism to market schlock to well-intentioned hipsters.

Woke-ism came to define a movement so insurgent among the institutionalized powers of the left that even its vanguards like former President Barack Obama and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who undeniably had a role ushering it in, bemoaned its rancorous presence and how it distracts from the Democrat Party’s larger goals. 

This was something the Democrats fully embraced until they could no longer fully control the semantics around it.

It’s a Good Bad Word

Woke-ism is simultaneously a persistent ideological framework and a general inclination — it depends on the person or institution in question at the time. But both rely upon a consistent smorgasbord of Marxian dialectics and ideological accouterment — gender theory, critical race theory, et al. — that seeks to usurp the ideals of the American founding and impose contemporary whims. 

The word has become as commonplace among the current-day conservative movement as MAGA hats and “lock her up” chants were at 2016 Trump rallies. And this is, to be fair, totally warranted; what other slogany-sounding word really works as a catch-all for what leftism has become? 

Sure, it would help if the right had a more tactical approach to diagnosing and labeling each and every radical change introduced to our society at breakneck speed, but that’s not how people work. The right can and should identify the unique threats of identitarian Marxism, managerialism, and contemporary Lysenkoism, but is labeling all of these things useful? 

Using “woke” as a catch-all label for radical leftism is effective. That’s one of the major reasons why the left hates it. They lost complete control of the English language, and the word they used to indicate their radicalism to one another is being used to expose that radicalism to the rest of the world.

Woke-ism is an intentionally ambiguous framework that is meant to keep out interlopers and reward its advocates. Therefore, simply describing it as what it is, is anathema to those who wish for its intentions to remain ambiguous.

Simply saying “woke” works.

Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @Mangold_Lenett.

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In A Culture Full of Sam Smiths, Christianity Is the Real Subversion


BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | FEBRUARY 07, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/07/in-a-culture-full-of-sam-smiths-christianity-is-the-real-subversion/

Sam Smith and other dancers in "Unholy" music video

Hollywood is in desperate need of new ideas. Take Sunday’s Grammy Awards, for example. If there were ever a spectacle that could simultaneously be described as demonic and trite, it would be Sam Smith’s performance of “Unholy,” which rang the final death knell for the satanic-ritual-as-art trope.

As Federalist contributor Isabelle Rosini wrote, it was as boring as it was unoriginal. Stiletto-clad devils? Latex pants? Whips? Women in cages? Bursts of flame to signify — in case it wasn’t clear enough — that Smith was singing from the pit of hell? “Been there, done that,” artists ranging from Lil Nas X to Lady Gaga would say.

And it all fell flat. Despite the media’s attempts at running interference — with all the typical Republicans–pounce framing — the awards show was decidedly uninteresting, and this points to a broader crisis within the arts world itself. There is nothing it can produce that will shock the American public, quasi-satanic orgies and all.

Modern American culture has become a willing collaborator to the arts world — from Hollywood to the Oval Office, from TikTok to the public school classroom — thanks to the ascendancy of leftist orthodoxy in cultural and political institutions. Art can no longer be subversive once the political and broader media establishments espouse its values, whether those be sexual perversion or anti-religious bigotry.

Thus art has ceased to be interesting or subversive. Instead, the arts world and the establishment have merged — First Lady Jill Biden presented at the award show after all — producing mediocre content according to its tastes. If art wants to become subversive again, it must reject the values most prized by our modern culture. It must discard the idols of the left, from sexual deviancy to bitter racism. It must trash wokeness. Until it comes up with a fresh message, expect a continued mass exodus.

Reactionaries who really want to buck establishment tastes are congregating not in an art museum or mosh pit — but, ironically, at church. As Julia Yost described last summer in an op-ed for The New York Times titled “New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church,” pandemic-weary Manhattanites have rebelled against leftist orthodoxy by embracing traditional morality and the Catholic Church:

By 2020, the year of lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests, progressivism had come to feel hegemonic in the social spaces occupied by young urban intellectuals. Traditional morality acquired a transgressive glamour. Disaffection with the progressive moral majority — combined with Catholicism’s historic ability to accommodate cultural subversion — has produced an in-your-face style of traditionalism. This is not your grandmother’s church — and whether the new faithful are performing an act of theater or not, they have the chance to revitalize the church for young, educated Americans.

Comedian Tim Dillon has noticed the same phenomenon. “All the cool kids now are unwoke and some of them are going back to Christianity because it’s the only way to be rebellious — because everybody’s blue-haired, non-binary, talking about piss orgies,” Dillon said in a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan.

@limitlessbrotherhood

Being woke is not cool anymore. Religious kids are now considered the rebellious ones

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That to be “transgressive” in this day and age means attending church and rediscovering religious orthodoxy is quite the plot twist, but it’s encouraging for the West’s prospects. Let’s hope this trend continues, and that so-called artists like Sam Smith and his tired satanism shtick get the red, latex boot.

Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.

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John Daniel Davidson Op-ed: Ordinary Americans Are Going to Have to Save the Country Themselves, One Town at a Time


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | DECEMBER 20, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/20/ordinary-americans-are-going-to-have-to-save-the-country-themselves-one-town-at-a-time/

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What can regular people do to take back their country from woke radicals? Take over local institutions, one at a time.

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One of the things I get asked from time to time by readers is, what can ordinary people on the right, Christians and conservatives, do to help save the country — besides voting on Election Day?

It’s a good question, and it comes from the very understandable feeling of helplessness many people feel about the direction of the country and, let’s be honest, the collapse of Western civilization that’s now well underway. It’s especially easy to get frustrated after an election cycle like the one we just had, in which Republican leaders thoroughly botched it and left things more or less where they were before the voting. Put another way, if voting doesn’t really change anything in our so-called democracy, what will?

There’s an answer to this question, but you’re not going to like it. The plain truth is this: You’re going to have to save the country yourselves. Donald Trump isn’t going to save it. Ron DeSantis isn’t going to save it. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that a GOP majority in Congress is going to save it.

By all means, keep voting in national elections. Keep making your voices heard at the ballot box. But salvation won’t come from Washington, D.C. If America is going to be saved, or even just parts of it are to be saved, then ordinary men and women, God-fearing patriots all across the country, are going to have to do it themselves, one town at a time. And they will have to do it the old-fashioned and unglamorous way, by taking over the local institutions of civic life, organizing and winning elections for city council and school board, finding reliable and competent people willing to be candidates and staff and volunteers. 

It’s going to be a long, thankless slog, but there’s no other way. Neither is there any guarantee of success. I speak here only of towns and suburbs, not of cities, many of which have become unlivable after decades of failed Democrat governance and leftist policies. Conservatives who can manage it should move to places where they can join with other like-minded Americans to take back their communities and instill a civic culture that reflects their beliefs.

We got into this situation through passivity, and only a sustained effort at the local level will get us out. For decades, conservatives did nothing while the left marched through academia — and then kept right on marching, down from their ivory tower and into the public square, into the schools, the libraries, corporate boardrooms, local police and fire departments, even the churches. These people have radical views far outside the American mainstream but nevertheless control all our institutions. If you want them back, you’ll have to take them back, post by post.

This is not the kind of thing the right likes to hear. By temperament and principle, conservatives would rather be left alone to run their businesses, raise their families, worship in their churches, and build up their charities and local communities. Unlike liberals and leftists, they tend not to be ideologues. They are not trying to fundamentally change the country. They mostly want to be left alone.

But of course, they will never be left alone. The woke radicals will never stop — until someone stops them. A kind of conservative radicalism, or at least activism, is going to be required to accomplish that.

A good example of what I’m talking about is playing out in the small central Texas town of Taylor, population about 17,000. Taylor, some 35 miles north of Austin, is a rather conservative place of the sort you can find all over the country. It recently made national headlines over its traditional Christmas parade; a longstanding town tradition organized by a coalition of local churches. Last year, organizers accidentally approved a parade float for a group calling itself Taylor Pride, which the parade committee naively mistook for the name of a group that was just proud of their town. What they got instead was a float featuring two men dressed in drag, dancing suggestively in what paradegoers assumed was going to be a family-friendly event.

Parents and attendees were understandably perturbed. To ensure it didn’t happen again, the consortium of local churches that runs the parade sensibly decided that this year, parade floats must be consistent with traditional biblical and family values. The point wasn’t to exclude any individuals or groups from attending or even participating, but to ensure the floats were family-friendly and not — like the Taylor Pride drag queen float — contrary to Christian teachings.

The City of Taylor responded by announcing it would stage its own separate LGBT-friendly “holiday” parade, on the same night as the traditional Christmas parade, on the same route, following right behind it. The decision was made not by the elected members of the city council, who are accountable to voters, but by the municipal staff who actually run things. There was no public notice or deliberation and no consultation beforehand with members of the city council. The municipal bureaucracy acted on its own authority to use (or rather misuse) public funds and resources to sponsor a parade that was wildly out of step with the community at large.

Kevin Stuart, a Taylor resident and assistant professor of political science at the University of St. Thomas, wrote about all this recently in The Wall Street Journal, noting that the problem in Taylor has deep historical roots. The outsourcing of decision-making to so-called experts has been happening in American towns and cities for more than a century, such that professional bureaucrats now run small towns across America like “ideological colonizers.”

“There is now a yawning ideological gap between the people who live in American towns and the professionalized cadre of city staff who pass through those towns on their way up the career ladder,” writes Stuart. He goes on to argue that residents of towns like Taylor are partly to blame for ceding too much political power to an expert class whose interests and values don’t align with the people they’re supposed to serve.

He’s right about that — and also about how “communities can’t remain strong if they are unwilling to defend common sense and get involved in the political process.” The lesson of Taylor’s dueling Christmas parades is that even in small, conservative towns in deep-red states like Texas, conservatives can’t be complacent. As I wrote last month about the Taylor fracas, there’s nowhere Christians can run and hide from the left. They have to stand and fight.

In Taylor, that means residents who until now might have never been involved in local politics will have to roll up their sleeves, give up some weekday evenings, and get involved. They will have to put up their own conservative candidates and vote out of office the city councilors who empowered a woke municipal bureaucracy. They will have to fire the cadre of leftist bureaucrats who run things and replace them with their own people. They might even have to change the city charter so that elected members of the city council actually do the work of the public in City Hall, not an unelected city manager who sees the job as merely a steppingstone to a bigger city.

The same goes for the library, the school board, and every other local institution in every American town like Taylor. Conservatives have to take them over if they can. To answer the question we began with, that is what ordinary people can do. And they have to start now. No one is coming to help, and time is running out. 

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Democrats Are Not Going to Relinquish Power Peacefully


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | NOVEMBER 08, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/08/democrats-are-not-going-to-relinquish-power-peacefully/

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A political party convinced the country faces an existential crisis if its opponents win at the ballot box is a threat to democracy.

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The 2022 election results aren’t that hard to predict. Republicans will win and they’ll win big. The only questions on that front are how large will GOP majorities be in the House and Senate, and how many governor’s mansions will the GOP control? Will the red wave be a tsunami or just a massive breaker?

Beyond the numbers game, the larger question looming over this midterm cycle is why, at a time when inflation and the economy are top concerns for the vast majority of Americans, did Democrats choose to run mostly on abortion extremism and hysterical fearmongering about “threats to democracy” — issues that appeal to a rather narrow, left-wing slice of the American electorate that already reliably votes Democratic?

Why didn’t Democrats at least pretend to care about ordinary things like the rising cost of groceries and gas, worsening crime in major cities, and a looming economic recession? It’s one thing for President Biden and Democratic Party leaders in Congress to refuse to address these things as a matter of policy. But it’s quite another thing to refuse even to acknowledge that these are real concerns for most Americans right now.

One would think that simply on the basis of crude self-interest — say, clinging to their razor-thin majority — they would muster the will to pretend to care and at least pledge to tackle these issues, even if they’re lying. But they could not even do that. Why?

The answer doesn’t bode well for the country. Yes, Republicans will carry the day, retire Nancy Pelosi, and shatter the career aspirations of an entire cohort of middle-aged Democrat politicians like Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams. But that’s only half the story, and maybe not the most important half.

Democrats’ inability to moderate even a little bit, their unwillingness to snap awake to reality and respond to voters with some measure of empathy, however small, is of course a consequence of the party’s capture by its radical left-wing base. (Henry Olsen had a good line related to this in The Washington Post recently: “[T]oday’s Democratic Party increasingly looks like the Depression-era Republican Party, which consisted of powerful elites who lost touch with the working-class majority.”)

The danger comes when Democrats refuse to accept that they have no mandate from the people to remain in power, and inevitably seek some other justification for clinging to it. For all their talk of “threats to democracy” from Republican “election deniers” — one of the most asinine political epithets of our era, by the way — it’s Democrats who pose the real threat. This cycle has made it clear that they are not trying to forge a majority coalition. Their appeal is exclusive to left-leaning, college-educated voters and the woke institutions and corporations these people now control. That might be a minority coalition, but it’s such a powerful one that it opens new possibilities to scheming Democrats: that there are other ways than winning elections to gain and retain power.

The mumblings of President Biden about “ending coal” and fossil fuels, saving democracy from insurrectionist election deniers, affirming the radical agenda of the transgender lobby, and championing abortion extremism are no accident, however confused the president might otherwise be about where he is and what’s going on. They are, in effect, signals to the elite power base in American society, and they are meant to convey reassurance: we’ve got your back, ordinary Americans be damned.

In the face of a massive electoral loss, then, do you really think a political party that has aligned itself with elite interests and woke morality, that controls the White House and the administrative bureaucracy, that is supported by corporate media and Big Tech (with the recent exception of Elon Musk’s Twitter) is going to simply relinquish that power? Hand it over to the very people it has been decrying as the destroyers of our democracy? Allow someone like Donald Trump ever to get near the White House again?

No, of course not. What Democrats did in the six months leading up to the 2020 election — not just the rioting and looting, but the rigging or “fortifying” of the election through lawsuits and coordinated online censorship — should be understood as a dry run. The Democrats will use every executive branch agency, every tool of law enforcement, every malign demonstration of force at their disposal to remain in power, or at least to deprive real power from Republicans. 

Even before Trump won the 2016 election, we know the FBI began crafting an “insurance policy,” the Russia collusion hoax, in case he won. Recall, too, how every major Democrat denounced Trump as “illegitimate” after he won, how left-wing street thugs rioted in major cities, how elected Democrats managed to hobble Trump’s presidency through endless investigations and a frivolous impeachment. And above all, we saw how they were determined not to let the same thing happen in 2020. And it didn’t.

Keep that in mind as the midterm results roll in this week (and next). There’s a reason Democrats and the corporate media have been pushing hard the message that we won’t know the results of key races for days, maybe weeks. It’s not just about counting absentee ballots, it’s about getting the rigging in place, either to claim victory or deny the legitimacy of the vote. Whatever Democrats say they fear Republican “election deniers” might do, they themselves are preparing to do the same or worse.

A political party that has convinced itself the country faces an existential crisis if its opponents win at the ballot box, and that doesn’t even pretend to serve anyone other than its base of college-educated leftists, is a toxic combination. Such a party is of course incapable of winning a majority, but it’s also incapable of relinquishing power, which makes it by far the greatest threat to democracy our country now faces. 

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Faced With the Horrific Results of Their Ideas, Leftists Are Backpedaling with All Their Might


REPORTED BY: CASEY CHALK | MARCH 04, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/04/faced-with-the-horrific-results-of-their-ideas-leftists-are-backpedaling-with-all-their-might/

homeless

It would appear that leftists don’t actually like a lot of the radical policies they have been advocating for since the beginning of the lockdowns and the death of George Floyd in spring 2020. From homelessness to crime to Covid policies, the left is backtracking on much of its platform in the face of disastrous results and frustration from rank-and-file liberals. Recent developments in our nation’s capital provide some of the most dramatic examples. 

Cities across the country are taking a more aggressive stance on homeless encampments in response to residents’ complaints, including Washington, D.C. An early February poll conducted by The Washington Post found that three-fourths of Washingtonians support the district’s plan to clear the camps of homeless persons that now proliferate across the city.

That the American Civil Liberties Union and even some D.C. council members oppose Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s cleanups have not stopped their enforcement. Bowser has quite a mandate for this: the number of city residents who want these camps cleared does not substantially change based on respondents’ race, and is above 70 percent for white, black, Hispanic, and Asian residents.

That the district is pursuing this policy with substantial local support is a bit ironic, given that so many prominent leftist organizations, local leftist leaders, and Democratic politicians have been trying for more than a year to protect these encampments. This included Ann Marie Staudenmaier, wife of Maryland gubernatorial candidate Tom Perez, who last year advocated for homeless camps in the district to be permitted and protected. “Don’t evict them from the only place that they have to call home,” she urged.

Perhaps it has something to do with how large numbers of homeless persons affect the cleanliness, security, and attraction of neighborhoods. A separate recent WaPo article cited residents who noted homeless persons in the camp have harassed them. One D.C. resident said downtown is “not pleasant” and that the ubiquity of the encampments threatens the security of local residents.

Although many on the left would likely grimace to say it, national trends on curbing these camps indicate a significant percentage of the rest of America feels the same way.

Refunding the Police

Mayors of America’s largest cities, once responsive to calls to defund the police, have done a dramatic reversal in response to local frustration with higher crime rates. Now “refund the police” has become the cry of many liberal residents.

In D.C., residents’ opinions on crime and police have experienced this shift, given increased crime and murder rates in the city since 2020. According to a recent WaPo poll, a sizable majority (59 percent) now agree that increasing the number of police officers patrolling communities would reduce the amount of violent crime in D.C.

“The share of Washingtonians who say they are not safe from crime has risen to 30 percent this year from 22 percent in November 2019 and is the highest in more than two decades of Post polls,” reports the WaPo.

This is quite a change from the “defund the police” initiatives city residents — and various activist groups — so loudly endorsed after the death of George Floyd. The D.C. government in 2020 supported measures in June 2022 to cut $15 million from the police department budget. At the time, the police chief warned this could lead to the loss of hundreds of officers and that underfunding training and equipment might result in officers using more excessive force.

Thankfully, D.C. is not alone in wanting to refund the police. As NBC reported in February, Democratic politicians are calling the “defund the police” movement “dead” and mayors in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago are “moving to increase police budgets and end ‘the reign of criminals.’”

Surrendering to Pandemic Fatigue

Democratic states are also ending many Covid restrictions in the face of rising complaints from their constituents. Consider D.C. Mayor Bowser’s mid-February announcement that she would lift the city’s vaccine requirement for businesses and “dial back” the city’s indoor mask rules. This announcement followed a number of states — including many governed by Democrats — that have also eased their restrictions as polls come back showing their rising unpopularity. Now D.C.’s party scene is “returning to normal,” reports the WaPo, even though coronavirus case counts in and around Washington remain “high.”

This is a remarkable and speedy shift, especially considering D.C. had some of the most strict Covid restrictions in the country. Perhaps the District’s dramatic about-face has something to do with widespread annoyance with pandemic restrictions, even among liberal voters. Perhaps it results from the rising tide of Democratic politicians listening to their constituencies despite “public health guidance” claiming the country is moving too fast in loosening the rules. 

Perhaps all of these changes also relate to the fact that the District of Columbia is no longer experiencing the population boom and gentrification that have defined the last couple of decades. The capital’s population declined by 2.9 percent from 2020 to 2021, according to the Census Bureau. Living in an increasingly dangerous, filthy nanny-city is apparently not that appealing, even to the District’s majority leftist population. This has been part of a broader national trend as people across the nation in 2021 left Democratic-run states.

Mugged by Reality

To borrow a phrase from the late Irving Kristol, D.C. residents (and liberals across the country) have been mugged by reality — and in some cases actually mugged. Perhaps living in a lefty utopia where the homeless camp wherever they like, undisturbed by a defunded police force, with fickle and irrational health-related restrictions isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

Democrat D.C. residents, like the rest of Americans, don’t actually like their public spaces overrun by homeless persons, their neighborhoods suffering increased violent crime rates, or their cities stuck in a cycle of never-ending draconian public safety regulations.

What this all means is that, thankfully, certain activist narratives that threatened all Americans have lost considerable steam. It also means these policies are likely political liabilities in upcoming elections. Perhaps it also shows there are certain things that all Americans can still agree on.

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.

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