With the horrific event at Bondi Beach in Australia, the past weekend was a rough time for the Jewish community, including my family and me. There is something else very wrenching, meanwhile, going on within the world of ideas, not unrelated, that I want to highlight for you. In my lifetime, I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s been called a civil war among conservatives.
Ostensibly, the civil war has Israel as its focus, but, as it has become clear to me, that is just a cover for seeking to cast Jews in the darkest light possible and, even more, to alienate American Christians from American Jews, at whatever cost to our country. My work involves social media, and the flood of hateful insinuation that I see there thanks to the algorithm, along with outright Jew-baiting, has become part of my daily life.
There are many wonderful reasons to be grateful for Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture as the year comes to a close. One that I don’t want to let you lose sight of is that that Discovery and the CSC are unequivocally on the morally right side of the current painful debate. I am terribly thankful for our leadership, and for my colleagues.
An Institutional Catastrophe
It was last month that another prominent think tank — with a lot of great people there, including friends of mine — split down the middle over the organization’s partnership with that tireless insinuator Tucker Carlson. The leadership of that organization, in my view, failed spectacularly. It hurt many on the staff, not least Jewish staff, with a number of resignations resulting from this including from the Board of Trustees. It was an institutional catastrophe, and recovery, if it comes, will take years.
Immediately after that, at a routine, planned staff meeting, Discovery Institute leadership spoke to us about all this. They could have ignored it. After all, another think tank’s self-immolation is not an obvious action item for us. CSC Managing Director John West addressed the situation directly, including about the related rise of some proponents of so-called “Christian Nationalism,” who use the mask of faith toward dark ends. Discovery President Steve Buri also spoke. Their frank views, which I share entirely, did not surprise me. But I was very moved to hear them articulated so promptly, forcefully, and publicly. After the meeting, John West proactively encouraged me to write about Tucker in relationship to the Alt Right and what’s often called the Woke Right, which I did here. He did not need to do that either.
For a Colleague’s Own Protection
To say that I felt supported by Discovery leadership would be an understatement. It’s too bad I can’t tell you about other pertinent details, but I’ll just mention that we have someone else in our Discovery circle, a Christian, whose courage extends to frequently putting himself at physical risk in order to do the right thing in this context. Sorry I have to be vague about that, for his own protection. But again, as a Jew, I’m grateful for it, as I am for the friendship of CSC Director Stephen Meyer, Discovery Founder Bruce Chapman, and others.
The Center for Science and Culture works to bring clarity to ultimate questions about the origin of the cosmos, of life, and of biological complexity. If being clear about those issues did not draw along with it clarity on other questions, that would not be a very strong endorsement of our efforts. Instead, I’m very glad to share with you that Discovery Institute is fully on the correct side of today’s anguishing divide.