The Price Of Orthodoxies
They can blind us to uncomfortable reality, hideous crimes, and powerless victims.
The first response of most human beings to news of irredeemably evil acts is to ask who committed them. And if the answer makes us deeply uncomfortable, we tend to move on pronto. You see this most obviously on social media with news of an atrocity. Was the shooter white, a Democrat, a Republican, Muslim, MAGA, woke, trans? And where did the victim fit into these categories?
Our priors instantly color our moral judgment, and even our sense of the seriousness of the offense. And the temptation simply to deny what seems to be in front of our nose can be overwhelming.
As a passionate enthusiast for the Iraq War, I remember very, very distinctly when I first heard the rumors about alleged war crimes by US forces during the occupation. I assumed they were enemy propaganda and didn’t look into it any further. In November 2003, I even described Robert Fisk as “nutty” because the Spectator reported that he had “haunted the prison of Abu Ghraib ... exclusively searching for American brutality.” My view of the ethics of the US military simply precluded such barbarism. But more importantly, I didn’t want it to be true because it would destroy the entire moral rationale for the war, in which I’d invested a huge amount. It took the images of Abu Ghraib many months later for me to wake the fuck up.
The more intense the horror, the more powerful the instinct to doubt when you first hear of it. The sex-abuse scandal in my own church first numbed and incapacitated me. It took some time for me to see the totality of what had happened, and how deeply it had destroyed Catholic moral authority. Again, when I first read about, say, the Catholic school for deaf children where a priest had picked his victims among those whose parents did not know sign language, the feeling of horror was almost too much to process at all. And as with the Bush administration’s torture policy, it took even more time to grasp how this moral rot had been enabled by the very top.
This is why, I think, the scandal of Britain’s Pakistani rape-gangs, and the institutional negligence toward tens of thousands of underage victims over several years, has had a second burst of life. A serious national inquiry on the scandal was conducted years ago (its recommendations not yet implemented). But several towns with the worst records were omitted from that inquiry; and the sheer scale and depravity of what happened has finally begun to sink in. The precipitant was Elon Musk pontificating about the scandal on X, as part of his campaign to bring down Keir Starmer.
The details are hard to absorb. Think of the hideous abuse suffered by that extraordinary French woman, Gisèle Pelicot, sedated and raped by dozens of French men, organized by her husband. Now think of that kind of organized gang-bang — but make it close to ubiquitous in some towns and the victims under-age girls: raped, brutalized, mutilated, beaten, their lives destroyed. Yes, it was that bad. Tens of thousands of rape victims across the country. This is how one British judge addressed some culprits at sentencing:
You coerced her into providing sex to vast numbers of strangers. Up to four or five men would be invited to addresses so they could have sex with her ... Threats were made to kill her ... If she resisted, she would be coerced. Customers would become angry … If oral sex was required, her head would be pushed down, her hair pulled and she would be slapped. Strangers would burn her with cigarettes. A stranger almost throttled her. One deliberately scratched her vagina with his nails. One inserted a hairbrush into her vagina.
The victim was just 13 years old. And she wasn’t unconscious. In just one town, a “conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited” between 1997 and 2013. And in communities dominated by men of Pakistani origin, largely from the Mirpuri region of Kashmir, who held huge sway over the police and local community — just like the Catholic Church in Boston — cover-ups were routine.
Among the abuse concealed: gang-rapes of a single minor by 20 men; putting a pump into a girl’s anus so more men could penetrate her at once; and constant threats of murder of the girls or their families if anyone spoke up. In one case, a minor was arrested and charged with prostitution for having oral sex in a car with a john. When she attended her trial, she discovered that the magistrate in charge of her case was the man she’d fellated. No one knows the full number of minor girls affected, but it is in at least the tens of thousands, and possibly in the six figures.
Why was this allowed to go on for so long? For the same reason the Catholic Church covered up child rape for decades, and Dick Cheney covered up torture. Because the orthodoxies of Catholicism, of the American military, and, in this case, the multicultural experiment were respectively involved. These orthodoxies were sacred, their cultural power extreme. Catholic Boston, conservative America, and elite liberal Britain therefore defended their own orthodoxies for a very long time. And with every successful deflection of responsibility, the number of victims increased.
The truth damns the multicultural project in Britain. Rather than integrating these men of Pakistani heritage, insisting that they adopt the laws and mores of the native population, and treating them like everyone else, the UK elites celebrated cultural difference, enabled the siloing of these populations, bemoaned their own white working-class populations, and forbade any criticism of Islam. So if you called out this stuff, you were instantly called racist. After all, to accuse a non-white minority of raping white girls was a trope right out of white-supremacist fever dreams. And yes, it is a hideous racist trope — from the depths of the American South. But sometimes the trope is the truth.
In all the major cases, I’ve found no reported evidence of Pakistani or Muslim girls being groomed and raped — only poor, white natives. The justification among the rapists, moreover, was that these non-Muslims were sluts who were asking for it and beneath contempt. Racist insults were common as these girls were brutally abused. These were not just rapes, but hate crimes of a grisly sort.
It’s not true that the Brit media ignored the scandal. But it is also true that the space they gave it was trivial compared with, say, coverage of the George Floyd murder, thousands of miles away. And ask yourself: if it had been discovered that there were gangs of white nationalists singling out Pakistani-heritage girls for rape and abuse, with racist and Islamophobic slurs added for good measure, what would the media response have been? The question answers itself.
And if a white Brit had been found guilty of organizing the brutal gang-rape of a Pakistani 12-year-old girl, it’s hard to imagine him receiving a sentence of just three years. To get a sense of why the British public is pissed, it’s worth noting that last year, a white Brit was sentenced to a longer 38-month sentence for writing a social media post. More punishment for a white man’s inflammatory speech than for a non-white man’s gang-rape of a child: a near definition of wokeness. And you wonder why they call him Two-Tier Keir.
I think it’s the accumulated frustration at these things that has led to the new outburst of attention. Musk’s rescue of Twitter from woke control and censorship has allowed the story to gain new oxygen. Trump’s re-election and the collapse of woke credibility (if not power) has disinhibited many. The “racist” accusations have lost their power to silence dissenters, as the consequences of that silence have played out.
And this is a good thing for two reasons.
The first is that we haven’t had real accountability at the top for any of these atrocities. No one in the police or local government has faced legal consequences for their enabling of the gang-rapes. Many have gone on to have new careers in government. Just as the entire Catholic hierarchy escaped any legal punishment for their crimes of negligence and complicity in child abuse, so too did Dick Cheney and George W Bush bust open the Geneva Conventions only to be protected by Obama. One of the key architects of the torture regime, Gina Haspel, even became CIA director.
The second is that in all these cases, the victims were among the least powerful in the world: dark-skinned prisoners accused of terrorism, young boys whose word was usually dismissed in favor of the priest’s, and white, uncouth girls of the British underclass. I also cannot stop thinking of the countless gay and lesbian children with gender dysphoria who have been recklessly experimented on these past several years, fed lies by their doctors, and abandoned by gay and lesbian adults: all to sustain the orthodoxy of critical queer and gender theory. And you know full well that none of these cowards and quislings will ever be held to account.
So let it rip. Expose it all. After all, 76 percent of the British public want the new, more focused inquiry that Starmer just denied them: 91 percent of Reform voters, 84 percent of Tories, 71 percent of Liberal Democrats, and 65 percent of Labour voters. And don’t balk at legal prosecution of the enablers. It takes time to absorb horror, and hold it properly to account.
Orthodoxies are not without their legitimate uses. We need them to make sense of the world at times. But they need to be held loosely, and be capable of adjusting to new facts. When they become ways to deny reality, to exculpate criminals, to censor dissent, and to take the souls and bodies of the least of our fellow humans, we need to re-examine them too. Before they consume more victims.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a civil debate with Adam Kirsch over Israel and “settler colonialism”; listener emails on many recent episodes; reader dissents over the things I got right in 2024; ten notable quotes from the week in news; 21 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of movie moments from 2024; an ominous window from the LA wildfires; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
A new subscriber writes, “I’m supporting the Dish because I like good conversation, even in print, and brain-motivated points of view.” From a fellow Substacker:
I had an extra spring in my step on my way to work this morning. Thank you so much for subscribing to my substack. I cannot describe how encouraged I felt seeing your name. I have been following your writing and podcast for some years now, and you have inspired my politics, my work in policy, and my decision to take my writing seriously and do it publicly. Despite being on the left, I rank you as one of my biggest influences.
New On The Dishcast: Adam Kirsch
Adam is a literary critic and poet. He’s been a senior editor at The New Republic and a contributing editor for Tablet and Harvard Magazine, and he’s currently an editor in the Wall Street Journal’s Review section. The author of many books, his latest is On Settler Colonialism: Violence, Ideology and Justice. I’ve been fascinated by the concept — another product of critical theory, as it is now routinely applied to Israel. We hash it all out.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the reasons why Europe explored the world, and the bastardization of the term “genocide”. That link also takes you to listener commentary on our recent pods with Mary Matalin, Brianna Wu, and Musa al-Gharbi. Plus, there’s a variety of political emails from readers, a medieval look at gay marriage, a key correction for my writing on sinus health, and Truman touching snow!
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Andrew Neil on UK and US politics, John Gray on the state of liberal democracy, Jon Rauch on his new book on “Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy,” Sebastian Junger on near-death experiences, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Yoni Appelbaum on the American Dream, Nick Denton on the evolution of new media, and Ross Douthat on how everyone should be religious.
Please send any guest recommendations, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Dissents Of The Week
A reader responds to my last column of 2024:
Yes, you were right, so take your victory lap, pat yourself on the back, and gloat a little. But please realize that even people who agree with you are sick of hearing about woke, week after week. It’s time to move on to more pressing subjects, like the coming autocracy/kleptocracy.
I’ll be tackling the Trump administration’s authoritarian and kleptomaniac tendencies with my usual skepticism. Starting next week. But woke is not dead or over. And the next four years are going to be critical in destroying it.
Read two more dissents here, along with my responses. Follow more Dish discussion on the Notes site here (or the “Notes” tab in the Substack app). As always, please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
In The ‘Stacks
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the LA wildfires, Trump and Biden’s tariffs, DOGE, and H-1B. Some examples:
From a Line editorial on Trudeau’s exit: “Jesus Christ, the absolute self regard of this fucking Muppet.”
Sally Bedell Smith pans Meghan Markle’s new series — but major sympathy to Meghan for losing her rescue beagle.
The Point, a philosophy mag, joins Substack.
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the VFYW). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Here’s a followup on the most recent contest, concerning Dish reader Nick Cave:
I always enjoy our musical sleuth’s entries, and given the depth of Nick Cave’s catalog, it’s impossible to highlight everything. But I must object to the omission of “Ghosteen”. It was written in the aftermath of Cave’s loss of his teen son Arthur (a twin), and it’s so unbearably poignant in its navigation of the shoals of grief that it can be hard to take in one sitting:
But it is not maudlin! The opposite. The word that comes to mind is “ecstatic” — in the metaphysical sense of a mystic’s encounter with great living mystery. The album, in wrestling with death, brims with life — and afterlife. It feels like a breakthrough in Cave’s composition process — less “constructed”, more “discovered” or “experienced”. This is a community that openly grapples with grief, so I would feel remiss if I didn’t point people to what may be the high-water mark of Cave’s catalog.
See you next Friday.