Exposed: Harvard's elite law journal accused of discriminating against white men



For years, many have suspected that Harvard, America's oldest and most revered educational institution, has artificially tampered with the racial and gender makeup of its student body by denying admission to highly qualified white and Asian applicants in favor of members of other racial groups, even those with less impressive skills, test scores, and resumes.

Those suspicions were confirmed in 2023 when the Supreme Court determined that Harvard College and the University of North Carolina had violated the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against Asian-American applicants in their undergraduate admission processes. The decision effectively ended affirmative action admissions at the college level altogether.

Now it appears that the Harvard Law Review, perhaps the most prestigious legal journal in the country, has likewise repeatedly considered race, gender, and other personal characteristics when evaluating submissions and editorial applicants, according to a series of damning reports from the Washington Free Beacon.

'A spoils system in which the race of the legal scholar is as, if not more, important than the merit of the submission.'

When President Donald Trump retook office in January, his administration immediately picked up where the courts left off, investigating Harvard for multiple questionable practices, including alleged "race-based discrimination" at Harvard University and the Harvard Law Review.

"Harvard Law Review’s article selection process appears to pick winners and losers on the basis of race, employing a spoils system in which the race of the legal scholar is as, if not more, important than the merit of the submission," acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a statement.

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A flawed system

The Harvard Law Review is technically an independent nonprofit that is separate from the esteemed college, university, and law school, a point often reiterated in news reports about the federal investigations into alleged discrimination. However, Harvard Law Review trades on the vaunted Harvard reputation and operates in a building located on the Harvard campus.

HLR also hires only second- and third-year Harvard Law students to serve as editors. A student-run editorial staff at a journal like HLR means that some of the most accomplished legal scholars in the world humble themselves by submitting their thoughtful legal analysis and argumentation to amateurs for approval.

Few of them succeed.

Because of its prestige, HLR and other journals like it publish just a tiny fraction of the thousands of submissions they receive. Thus, HLR can — and should — subject these submissions to a rigorous vetting process.

'The author cited 20 men by name,' one editor complained, but only '9 women and 1 non-binary scholar.'

Unfortunately, HLR student editors appear more concerned with giving members of "underrepresented groups" a platform than with publishing sound scholarship, even though a recently published HLR fact sheet insists "the Review does not consider race, ethnicity, gender, or any other protected characteristic as a basis for recommending or selecting a piece for publication."

Back on April 25, the Free Beacon revealed that it had read and analyzed internal Harvard Law Review documents that implicated the journal in what reporter Aaron Sibarium described as "pervasive race discrimination."

Sibarium, as they say, brought the receipts. According to his reports and the documents linked to them, HLR has:

  • encouraged prospective student editors to provide an expository statement in their applications that "will not be evaluated for quality of writing or editing" but will supposedly provide a "holistic" picture of the ways their personal "attributes or experiences" might enhance their contributions at HLR;
  • passed a resolution in 2021 making "the inclusion of qualified editors from underrepresented groups" its "first priority";
  • selected minority women almost exclusively since 2018 to write the foreword for its renowned Supreme Court issue; and
  • invited authors to provide their race and gender when submitting work for consideration — and included "trans"-identifying and "gender nonconforming" options in the drop-down menu.

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Screenshot of HLR website

According to a 2023 HLR orientation presentation shared by the Free Beacon — a presentation that lists "diversity, equity, and inclusion" first on a slide about "living our values" — HLR receives about 3,000 submissions, presumably on an annual basis. Articles editors then use what Sibarium called a "race-conscious rubric" to drain that pool of submissions quickly by giving them a basic read and then assigning them a number between 1 and 5, with 1 being the lowest score and 5 being the highest.

Multiple drafts of the screening rubric shared by the Free Beacon highlight "diversity" — including "author diversity" and "author experience" — as a "plus" that might help HLR achieve its "goals" for a particular volume. According to these drafts of the rubric, the "diversity" component is either present and the piece therefore merits a 5 or is not and the piece is not assessed a diversity score at all.

"We should consider expediting this piece" to the next round, the explanation on the draft rubric says of those given a 5 for diversity. Diversity is the only criterium listed on the rubric that prompts readers to consider "expediting" the piece to the next level.

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Screenshot of draft of Volume 138 Screening Rubric

In its fact sheet, which may have been published after the initial Free Beacon report, HLR claims it "does not expedite the consideration of articles based on an author’s race, ethnicity, gender, or other protected characteristic." The fact sheet indicates HLR mainly expedites articles in cases in which "less-established professors" have received "exploding offers" from other journals.

In 2024, just 412 submissions to the Harvard Law Review made it to the second screening phase, meaning the "race-conscious rubric" and its "diversity" criterium helped editors filter out about 86% of the total submissions the journal received, according to the Free Beacon.

Those few hundred pieces are then given closer scrutiny in what is known as the "Rotopool" phase. At this point, the identity of the author is concealed, and a randomly assigned student editor reads the piece and summarizes and assesses it in a document known as a memo.

Each of the 50 or so pieces that advance to the third phase is then given to an articles editor, who then writes a more detailed memo called an M-Read. These pieces have since been unblinded, so articles editors know the identities of the authors as well as their race and gender.

The submissions that survive an M-Read continue on through at least three more rounds of evaluation before publication. Only 12 to 16 pieces of the original 3,000 ever make it to print, the orientation presentation noted.

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Photo by Spencer Grant/GHI/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

In more than 500 HLR documents from 2024 and 2025, including memos from different phases, the Free Beacon discovered the following:

  • "The author cited 20 men by name," one editor complained, but only "9 women and 1 non-binary scholar."
  • "Despite occasional references to the 'cisgendered' and 'heterosexual' power-brokers and power structures that dominate in our contemporary era … the article advances a binaristic conception of gender that does not reflect contemporary understandings of gender diversity," said another editor about an article described as a "feminist analysis of antitrust law." "The DEI values advanced by the piece are limited," the editor also lamented.
  • "This author is not from an underrepresented background," yet another editor noted in the "negatives" section of an M-Read memo.
  • One editor bemoaned that an author cited mainly "male scholars who do not appear to be from underrepresented groups" but who do represent one of the top 14 law schools in the country, abbreviated throughout the memos as "T14."
  • A piece by an Asian-American male scholar from Yale that made it all the way to an M-Read was ultimately cut, with one editor suggesting at a meeting about his submission, "We have too many Yale JDs and not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors," according to the meeting minutes.

While terms referring to whites and males were apparently used often as pejoratives at HLR, other racial and gender identifiers and indicators were considered bonuses in some cases. For instance, one editor made sure to mention that publishing a particular author would provide "the opportunity to elevate a female scholar from a non-T14 school earlier in her career."

One editor effused that an author cited "predominantly Black singers, rappers, and members of Twitter," while another editor — whose personal writing style seems to involve the overuse of exclamation points and the word extremely — gushed that a piece referred to "a Kendrick song in the Conclusion!"

Recommendations on a 2024 HLR spreadsheet regarding who should write the foreword for the Supreme Court issue — an especially selective process that includes members of the Women, Nonbinary, and Trans Committee as well as another diversity committee — revealed just how fixated editors were on so-called "underrepresented groups":

  • The candidacy of one female scholar was promoted because she would be "the first hijabi, Muslim woman to write the Foreword."
  • Another candidate would be "one of few Latino professors in this space."
  • Yet another would be "the first tenured female Asian American law professor in the US."

The Harvard Law Review did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News. HLR previously indicated that the Free Beacon had "selectively" taken some old internal documents out of context.

Legal journal faces legal fallout

Fallout from the revelations in the Harvard Law Review documents has been widespread. Just three days after the initial Free Beacon report was published on April 25, the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services announced a joint Title VI investigation into the alleged use of "race-based criteria ... in lieu of merit-based standards" at both Harvard University and the Harvard Law Review.

The DOJ launched another probe into Harvard for alleged race-based discrimination just a few weeks later. The multifront federal investigations prompted an order for the organizations to retain and preserve their documents.

HLR then apparently retaliated against Daniel Wasserman, a recent HLR editor and Harvard Law School graduate who allegedly leaked the internal documents to the Free Beacon, has since cooperated with the feds in the investigation, and now works in the White House under deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

The journal reportedly demanded that Wasserman force all parties with whom he allegedly shared the documents to "delete or return" them. Days later, HLR apparently issued Wasserman a "formal reprimand."

"This Formal Reprimand informs you that your actions violate Law Review policies and do not reflect our community expectations," the HLR disciplinary committee wrote on May 22, according to the Free Beacon, which reviewed emails about the matter. "Continued violations may give rise to additional disciplinary proceedings."

Elite institutions like Harvard have been able to get away with 'objectively un-American and discriminatory behaviors' for years because those in power have supported certain forms of race-based discrimination — until Trump.

The reprimand was rescinded just five days later, after allegations that HLR had violated federal protections for whistleblowers. HLR claimed it was not aware at the time it was issued that Wasserman was working with the government.

Former DOJ civil rights division official Jason Torchinsky likened HLR's apparently punitive efforts against Wasserman to witness intimidation.

"What do they call it when a criminal tries to intimidate the witness?" Torchinsky said, according to the Free Beacon. "If you know someone is a witness in a federal investigation, and you try to intimidate them into stopping cooperation with the government, that in itself is its own offense."

Wasserman declined a request for comment from the New York Times.

In response to a request for comment, the Department of Education directed Blaze News to the press release about the investigation. Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.

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Alexander "Shabbos" Kestenbaum, who graduated from Harvard with a master's degree in religion in 2024, filed a lawsuit against Harvard in the wake of the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing anti-Semitism that erupted on campus. The plaintiffs claimed the school allowed anti-Semitism to grow and intensify without consequence, resulting in "antisemitic discrimination and abuse."

Kestenbaum told Blaze News that elite institutions like Harvard have been able to get away with "objectively un-American and discriminatory behaviors" for years because those in power have supported certain forms of race-based discrimination — until Trump.

"Up until President Trump, we never had a government — we certainly never had a White House — who was interested in upholding the law and investigating these universities because in many instances, like with President Biden, they actually agreed with these policies that you should artificially elevate individuals based on their sexual orientation, based on their ethnic makeup, based on their racial identities," he explained.

This group of the "cultural elite," Kestenbaum continued, simply does not believe that anti-white, anti-male, or anti-Jewish discrimination is "wrong."

"They actually believe in what Harvard is doing."

Kestenbaum and other plaintiffs reached an undisclosed settlement with Harvard just a few weeks ago. The university did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

Others are likewise incensed by the apparent discrimination scandal at HLR.

Scott Yenor, a political science professor at Boise State University and the senior director of state coalitions at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, told Blaze News: "The HLR practices violate the current understanding of the law, though they are the almost inevitable conclusion of the disparate-impact regime that the Trump admin and Sec. of Ed. Linda McMahon are seeking to get out of our so-called elite institutions."

Aaron Sibarium suggested in a statement to Blaze News that racial discrimination is just one problem at HLR and that the journal should reconsider its entire business model.

The documents from the law review don't just reveal a pattern of race-based decision-making. They illustrate the downsides of a system in which publication decisions are made by students who haven’t even passed the bar.

Whether they submit to the Harvard Law Review or some other journal, legal academics do not have the benefit of a jury of their peers. They are at the mercy of second- and third-year law students — many of them to the left of the average law professor — whose judgments of scholarly merit are saturated with ideological influence.

That’s not to say the peer-review process in other disciplines is apolitical. But it may provide a baseline of maturity and expertise that — if the documents from Harvard are any indication — many law students seem to lack.

Editor's note: Matthew Peterson, the editor in chief of Blaze News, is a Washington fellow for the Claremont Institute.

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AP has to fix headline for its hit piece on DeSantis nominee to UWF board, Scott Yenor



Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) made eight new appointments to the University of West Florida's board of trustees on Monday. Among them was Scott Yenor, a professor of political science at Boise State University and a Washington fellow at the Claremont Institute.

Whereas individuals at the university appear happy to have Yenor aboard, scandal-plagued liberals such as Debbie Wasserman Schultz and elements of the liberal media were prickled by the appointment of a conservative both supportive of the family and keen on "dismantling the rule of social justice in America's universities."

In its rush to discredit Yenor ahead of his likely confirmation by the Florida Senate, the Associated Press distorted the truth this week and found itself having to correct another headline.

The Thursday article appears to have originally been titled, "DeSantis appointee to university board says women should become mothers, not pursue higher ed," but has since been retitled, "DeSantis nominee for UWF board says women shouldn't delay motherhood for higher ed, career," and fitted with a correction noting that Yenor has advocated prioritization of motherhood, not for women to opt out of education altogether.

'There can be no great countries without great families.'

In the hit piece, the AP's Tallahassee-based education reporter Kate Payne clutched pearls about the professor's warnings about the dangers of DEI — which a damning Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University study revealed in November "may foster authoritarian mindsets, particularly when anti-oppressive narratives exist within an ideological and vindictive monoculture" — as well as about the declines of traditional marriage and American birth rates.

After trying her best to tether Yenor to the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, about which the Associated Press previously spread falsehoods, Payne quoted from Yenor's 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando in an apparent effort to damn him with his own words.

Payne was evidently prickled by Yenor's Chestertonian critique of America's denigration of the institution of motherhood and his characterization of universities as "indoctrination camps."

"Our feminist culture points women, especially young women, away from marriage and family life through its celebration of careerism. Thus more and more women, every generation, delay marriage and increasingly forgo marriage," Yenor said in his speech. "As women delay and forgo marriage, they're increasingly likely to delay and forgo having children."

"We lie to young women when we tell them that it is easy to become pregnant whenever one wants in life," said Yenor. "Never does anyone say to the young women that the peak period for pregnancy is between the late teens and the late 20s. Rarely are young women told that their ability to conceive children declines quite a bit after their late 20s and declines rapidly after the mid-30s. Ancient people used to pray to the gods of fertility. We pray to infertility gods."

"There can be no great countries without great families," emphasized Yenor. "And today, America is destroying family life."

Yenor, whom leftist journalists have long been trying to get fired for membership in religious, pro-family groups, told Blaze News last year that the anti-natalist messaging he has railed against largely comes down to a "set of mores and manners that are the natural result of our sexual revolution and its associated ideology."

'My most important work of my life was being a mother.'

"'I think you need to wait to get married until you have a job and are stable.' Well, that's a great way of delaying marriage, and marriage delayed and deferred is much less likely to happen. That's a form of cultural messaging that's widely accepted," said Yenor. "Whereas previously, it was thought that marriage would be a foundation for life; that you kind of learn to live together with another person and go through life's struggles and have moments where you weren't prosperous. And now we have marriage as a kind of capstone to all of life's achievements."

"That new cultural messaging obviously leads to different kinds of marriages and later marriages and fewer children and more fertility problems. The fertility problems themselves are the result of waiting until you're 30 to get married," continued Yenor.

Payne packaged her AP article with comment from a single and, of course, critical voice from UWF, faculty union president and earth sciences instructor Chasidy Hobbs, who called Yenor's comments "disheartening" and "offensive."

"My most important work of my life was being a mother," said Hobbs, unwittingly reinforcing Yenor's argument, "while also working as a professional woman in a career that I find almost as important as motherhood — to help the future generation learn to think for themselves."

"Publishing quotes pulled off the sparsely stocked shelves of dirt every time Yenor successfully advocates for reform in higher education (which he does often!), [Payne] has done the intrepid journalistic work of adding a new headline to his @NatConTalk speech of 2021!" tweeted Andrew Beck, vice president of communications at the Claremont Institute and partner at Beck & Stone.

"Given the current decline of vast swaths of America's higher education institutions and the decay of its culture, I'm not sure how many, except for the most militant, reality-denying feminists, would naturally think these statements are unfounded, outrageous, and worthy of broadcasting when you can hear hundreds of women saying the same thing on social media every day," continued Beck. "All this shows that it is not Professor Yenor or Governor DeSantis who are out of line, but Kate and the Associated Press, who are out of touch with Floridians and what they want out of their universities: to do better, so that America can be better."

Yenor noted on X, "What @AP's reporter considers awful are things that are increasingly music to people's ears."

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Blaze News investigates: Family or fallout — experts assess the threats now facing the nuclear family



Rampant divorce, juvenile depression and delinquency, abortion, loss of parental rights, plummeting fertility rates, euthanasia, loneliness, apostasy, and addiction — these are consequential issues that all have something to do with the health of the family: an institution that has been both attacked for millennia by antipathetic radicals and undermined by policies from both sides of the American political binary.

Given the centrality of the family, not only to these issues but to civilization itself, and the repeated claim that the family is a thing under siege, it is worth assessing the battlefield and defining key terms.

What is the family? What does optimal functionality look like? Why is the institution important, not just for the individuals involved and their communities, but for the nation at large? If it is the case that the family is under attack or sick, then what are some possible defenses and remedies?

To answer these questions, Blaze News recently spoke to three experts who have long written and spoken about the family: Yoram Hazony, Dale Ahlquist, and Scott Yenor.

All three appear to agree that the family is the basis for civilization, comprising, at a minimum, a married mother and father and child — although Hazony emphatically tied the well-being and function of the family to its multi-generationality; that the family's stability is reflected in the overall health of the nation; that its defense is largely a matter of local and cultural action, contra top-down fixes and legislation; and that divorce is one of the greatest weakening forces affronting the family today.

Background

Hazony is an Israeli-American philosopher, biblical scholar, and political theorist who serves as the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation as well as the president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem.

In his latest book, "Conservatism: A Rediscovery," Hazony not only disentangles conservatism from libertarianism or what others might term "classical liberalism," detailing the robust "empiricist, religious, and nationalist" traditions of America and the U.K., but drills deep into the matter of the family, explaining why God, Scripture, family, and congregation are essential to conservatism.

Dale Ahlquist is the president and cofounder of the Society of G.K. Chesterton, publisher of Gilbert magazine, the creator and host of the EWTN series "G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense," and cofounder of Chesterton Academy — the flagship of the growing Chesterton Schools Network, which has over 60 schools in five countries.

Ahlquist recently released "The Story of the Family: G.K. Chesterton on the Only State That Creates and Loves Its Own Citizens" — a book that captures virtually all of the late Catholic apologists' writings on the family and bridges them and their corresponding insights to the present.

Scott Yenor is a professor of political science at Boise State University and a Washington fellow at the Claremont Institute, and leftist journalists have been trying to get Yenor fired for his reported membership in religious, pro-family groups.

Yenor's latest book, "The Recovery of Family Life: Exposing the Limits of Modern Ideologies," explores "the ends and means of family policy" along with what would amount to optimal policies in a liberal society.

The choice-less blessing of the mini-state

Ahlquist, quoting Chesterton, noted that the family is the "only state that creates and loves its own citizens."

"Chesterton recognizes that the family is a mini-state, and it is therefore the building block of the larger state. So, it is the fundamental unit of society. If the family breaks apart, then that means the whole foundation of the society starts coming apart as well," said Ahlquist.

"If you can get along with your family, Chesterton says you can get along with the whole world," said Ahlquist.

In a chapter on the institution of the family published in "Heretics" in 1905, G.K. Chesterton noted that in "a small community our companions are chosen for us." Blaze News asked Ahlquist why it is important that individuals have no choice over their membership in a family or over the natural constituents of the family.

Ahlquist suggested that this lack of choice — or what liberals today might call consent — is by design and for our own good.

"The world is full of people that are our neighbors that we also can't choose. I mean, I can't choose Canada for my neighbor, right? Same thing exists in the world. You can't really choose your neighbors but the one's you really can't choose are the ones born into your family along with you. You can't choose your parents. You don’t choose your uncles or your cousins. You are given them. And the fact is that those people are all challenging to get along with. If you can get along with your family, Chesterton says you can get along with the whole world," said Ahlquist.

"That's a wonderful lesson," continued the Chestertonian. "The most challenging people in our lives are our family. Learn how to love them and live with them, yeah; then we are set for getting along with anybody else."

A biological unit with a common good

Pressed for a working definition of family, Yenor told Blaze News, "The family is a biological unit formed by a married man and a woman that brings kids into the world and raises them to honorable adulthood."

"[The family is] dedicated to satisfying necessities in a common life, so shelter and common meals, reproduction — all of the blunt facts of reality are central to what I call the biological reality of the family," continued Yenor. "One other aspect of it that I would mention is that a family always has a common good that the members of the family love."

Echoing the Chestertonian understanding raised by Ahlquist, Yenor noted that the family is "not chosen. It's an unchosen number of people and collection of people, but they share a common good, usually around meeting those necessities."

When pressed on whether the notion that the family shares a common good is built into the modern concept of the family or is instead tied to a premodern understanding, Yenor said, "I think it transcends both or unites both. ... The classical family might have a thicker and more substantial version of the common good, but it nevertheless shares with the modern family the idea that families are built around a common good."

Hierarchical order and value

For Hazony, this basic biological unit is situated within and derives its strength from an extended network. He noted that "human beings, by nature, are healthy, and they do well when they grow up in a hierarchical order."

That order begins with the immediate family but does not end there, according to Hazony. After all, the "immediate family is just part of a broader society, so the family is part of a larger congregation or community, and that congregation or community is part of a larger tribe, which is part of a larger nation."

"In a liberal society, what we've done is to assert and to teach over and over again that human beings don't need to be in family, community, tribe, and nation in order to be happy and healthy; that they should be independent; that they should think for themselves; that they should dictate their own values to themselves. And obviously, there's some truth to these liberal claims, but basically, the bottom line is that when you raise two or three generations of children to think that they're independent of their parents when they get to age 18 or 20, that they're separate individuals with their own values and no obligations to anybody, and their life is theirs — when you teach them that, they become incredibly unhappy because they find it extremely difficult to know what it is that they're supposed to do."

Hazony suggested that extra to liberalism's flattening, anti-traditional reflex, there is an underlying assumption that everyone must come up with and dictate their own values in a Nietzschean fashion in an effort to make themselves grand and important.

"Empirically, we find out that is absolutely not true. ... When young people are taken away from the traditional hierarchies in which they grew up, they become lost and confused and depressed and mentally ill, and they temporarily are willing to believe almost any crazy thing."

Children, families, and society will instead thrive within "an economy of honors" where members give honor upward while enjoying the education and training that are transmitted downwards through the hierarchy.

The hierarchical nature of the family is reinforced by its multigenerational nature, which Hazony said is "inherent in the natural family structure."

Having multiple generations simultaneously engaged not only affords members with a strong support network but aids in the transmission of values, the reinforcement of culture, and with education.

"And in terms of multi-generationality, the part that's important to remember is that human beings are not designed to stop learning from older people when they get to be 18 or 20," said Hazony. "In healthy human societies, young people get married, have children, and continue learning from their parents how to raise their children for decades."

Faith and the family

The family is bound not only by structure but by common beliefs and values.

"There is a strong link between practicing faith and [a] strong family," said Yenor. "Not simply affirming God’s existence or something like that, but as I say, practicing faith, going to church regularly. People who go to church regularly have a much higher birth rate, a much higher marriage rate, and lower divorce rate than those who don’t. And these things are very well established by scholars of the left and the right."

"The commonsense wisdom that public morality is built on the back of private families, and private families are the direct result of religious faith that you found with the American founding, seems to be borne out by a lot of contemporary evidence."

When asked whether the family would be imperiled by increasing secularization, Yenor highlighted the link between secularization and declines in marriages.

"The greater the amount of secularization, the fewer people marrying. It's not going to die out entirely, but just the strength and the cultural power will wane," said Yenor.

"We're seeing the loss of Christian influence in our society," said Ahlquist.

Ahlquist agreed that the family prospers in a religious environment.

"I think the evidence [shows] the rise of Christendom was built on strong family units that became strong village units, and Europe was highly civilized because it respected the family, and the families that were respected within a community built a great civilization on that philosophy and on that protection," said Ahlquist. "There was always a devotion to the Mother of God. There was a devotion to St. Joseph, which will play out in the devotion to human fathers and human mothers in a regular setting."

"But what are we seeing around us right now? We're seeing the loss of Christian influence in our society. Most people are unbelievers. Guess what? The family is falling apart. High divorce rates. High illegitimacy. High abortion," added Ahlquist.

Hazony similarly indicated that a belief system serves as glue for the family and society by extension.

"I think everywhere that we look, thriving societies, thriving families, are based on some kind of a broad framework for how you think about life," said Hazony.

"Ok, so in the West, in a Christian context, it's very easy to take 'faith-based' to be something very similar to the Christian religion, but if you look at Chinese religion or Indian religion, they're somewhat different from Christianity, but they still always are seeking to hand down a broad view of how human beings should live; what's the relationship to their people and their ancestors; what's their relationship to God and to right and wrong. All of those things are an integral part of the traditional family, which is part of an extended family like a congregation," added Hazony.

The honor system

Hazony indicated that many of the societal problems referenced at the top correspond, at least on some level, with the disruption of the familial honor system.

Children removed from the natural system where parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents are honored, then dumped into a system "where they don't know who God is" may end up honoring "pop stars and other kinds of meaningless things, but in the end, they end up honoring nobody."

"They basically give all honor to people who are their age, to these kind of little gangs and cliques that they create, which are based on no reliable tradition on how one should lead one's life," said Hazony. "And the result is people are depressed and scared and violent and don't know what they're supposed to do with themselves."

The family, according to Hazony, serves to provide a lifelong education to young people entering society in exchange for lifelong obligations of giving honor."

"Giving honor doesn't just mean you always have to obey your parents, but you always have to be on their side, you always have to be looking out for their good name, and making sure that they feel that you take what they say seriously. Traditional family is built on that exchange, and it's lifelong, and nothing changes when it gets to 18 or 20. So, it's almost the opposite of Locke and Rousseau, where the whole purpose is that by the time you get to be 20, you're supposed to be independent. In a traditional society, you're never independent. You're inheriting things from your parents, and you're upholding things that were important to them."

"They cut off the chain of transmission and then we're surprised that they don't honor God, they don't honor Scripture, they don't honor the law or the Constitution."

Hazony noted that in every audience, there will inevitably be one individual who asks, "'Well, what if your parents don't deserve to be honored? You know, what if they abuse you and so forth?'"

The Israeli-American philosopher indicated there are always exceptions and workarounds, such as rerouting honor to others in the familial network.

"In a liberal society, what we've done is we have turned those exceptions into the rule. Every adolescent thinks, 'Oh, my parents don't deserve to be honored so I can't learn anything from them.' They cut off the chain of transmission and then we're surprised that they don't honor God, they don't honor Scripture, they don't honor the law or the Constitution. Why? Because they're incapable of inheriting anything; because the training ground for being able to inherit crucial things from the past is the training ground of being small and honoring your parents, learning to honor your parents all the time, even when it hurts and even when you disagree with them."

"As soon as you eliminate that, we stop talking about honor, that commandment disappears completely from our vocabulary, then the kids, as soon as they get to be teenagers ... they're all puffed up with self-importance, they think that they know better than their parents. ... There are 8-year-olds who think that they know better than their parents. It's just like a social sickness that comes from giving up on the hierarchical family."

Unholy attacks and holy matrimony

Ahlquist stressed that the human trinity of father, mother, and child — the "fundamental family and the basic unit" — "is the thing that isunder attack, fundamentally, in our society today. Chesterton saw it under attack in his society as well."

"All the things that Chesterton wrote about really have come to pass. He warned against easy divorce, which breaks up the family. And he warned against the wage-slave mentality where both father and mother worked outside of the home, and breaking up the family. He warned about public school systems, which separate parent from child and interfere with the raising of the child. And then, of course, he warned against contraception and abortion 100 years before these really became hot issues."

When asked whether the attack on the family is a coordinated effort or just a confluence of dark forces that appear to look like they're working in concert, Ahlquist said, "Well, let's go back to the Holy Family."

"How did the [Holy Family] begin? With Satan trying to kill it, all right. Herod sends his soldiers to kill all the babies in Bethlehem. So, here are the forces of evil at work, first on the Holy Family, and then on the rise of the normal family. It is an evil act," said Ahlquist.

"Chesterton says in his book 'The Everlasting Man,' you have a very sophisticated culture, Carthage, with its high art and its high education and its well-developed commercial system and they would throw their babies into the furnace to the god Moloch. So, there is an evil force that is attacking the family. Certainly, anything that wants to kill a baby, the most innocent of all things, is truly evil."

While abortion was among the various weapons Ahlquist indicated has been and continues to be used against the family, he underscored the gravity of divorce.

"We've become sort of immune to divorce. It’s just, ‘Oh, yeah, that marriage failed. So sorry to hear that,'" said Ahlquist. "That was the first thing that Chesterton spoke out against, and I think that we need to start going back to the idea that marriage is a permanent relationship. It’s a permanent bond. It is for better or for worse."

"If the parents are strong, then the rest of the family will be strong. It's the breakup of these marriages, for one reason or another, that's really, really hurt the family the most. ... We have to return to the idea of preparing for holy matrimony. That's what we have to think about marriage — holy matrimony. And the word 'mother' is inside 'matrimony.' The purpose of getting married is to have a family, and that's what we're forgetting," added Ahlquist.

Anti-family messaging

When asked a similar question, specifically whether anti-natalist cultural messaging and other trends that serve to undermine the family amount to a coordinated attack, Yenor said, "I think it's coordinated but not by a single master plan or mastermind. Rather, it's a set of mores and manners that are the natural result of our sexual revolution and its associated ideology."

"'I think you need to wait to get married until you have a job and are stable.' Well, that's a great way of delaying marriage, and marriage delayed and deferred is much less likely to happen. That's a form of cultural messaging that's widely accepted," said Yenor. "Whereas previously, it was thought that marriage would be a foundation for life; that you kind of learn to live together with another person and go through life's struggles and have moments where you weren't prosperous. And now we have marriage as a kind of capstone to all of life's achievements."

"That new cultural messaging obviously leads to different kinds of marriages and later marriages and fewer children and more fertility problems. The fertility problems themselves are the result of waiting until you're 30 to get married," continued Yenor. "I think there are thousands of agents of this cultural messaging, but I definitely think it is there, and it shapes the way people approach that important decision in their life."

Some of the most effective anti-family messaging appears to come from the ideological forces Yenor regards as two of the greatest threats to the family today: modern feminism and sexual liberation theory.

"Feminism changes the priority of women, and family goes down several notches on the priority list and maybe disappears altogether off the priority list. Same with motherhood. And that's a big threat to the family," said Yenor.

"Sexual liberation theory disconnects sex from the family and from marriage. As long as that is honored and taught, it's difficult to see how the fundamental necessity at the heart of marriage and family life —that is procreation — will be elevated and prioritized by people. So, I think both of those things are fundamental to the threat to the family. But I don't want to say one is worse than the other."

Against the gates of hell

In a February 2016 public lecture, Ahlquist called for a counteroffensive regarding the war on the family.

"We have to defend the family — the basic unit of civilization. We have to defend these things, but we have to understand that we are not fighting a defensive war. ... We are the church militant! We are the ones doing the attacking, and of course Satan will put up a fight, but the gates of hell will not prevail against us"

Blaze News asked Ahlquist what this fight might look like.

Ahlquist joked, "I'm surprised I said something that well back in 2016."

"What we're doing with the Chesterton Academies is certainly an offensive move and not a defensive move. It is taking the control of our children's education into our own hands as a small community of Catholic believers who are faithful not only to the church but to each other and to each other’s children as well."

"Changes tend to come from the bottom-up. There are no top-down solutions," said Ahlquist.

"We are teaching something that's completely countercultural, starting with the Incarnation as the central truth that informs everything. ... We're not doing it by lighting the wagons on fire and circling them, we are sending these kids out in the world, and they know their faith, they know how to spread their faith, to defend their faith, but it's the most important thing is to live their faith."

"When they start their own families, they will be the model of what a Christian family looks like, and that's how you start a grassroots movement by a whole bunch of people doing it right. All the strength is on their side because the enemy is quite scattered — and the whole point about the offensive is that the gates of hell are not an offensive weapon. They are a defensive weapon. So prevailing against the gates of hell is, you know, conquering hell. That's what we are out to do."

Ahlquist emphasized that these big "changes tend to come from the bottom-up. There are no top-down solutions."

"It would be nice if we had more helpful laws that weren't so antagonistic to the family, but in the meantime, we can't control the legislature, and we just have to make some changes in our lifestyle and in the way that we are raising our children, and hopefully, that spreads to some of our neighbors as well. But yeah, this is a grassroots revolution," added the Chestertonian.

Like Chesterton — whom Ahlquist indicated was "an anti-globalist in just about every respect" — Ahlquist believes winning solutions are found at the local level, even if the results manifest at the national level.

"I think that all major political problems have to be solved starting locally. We have to start making local changes and then those spread to the top. Not the other way around. Because whether it's the family or whether it's the way a local community is run, if you have a remote, centralized power trying to organize things, that simply doesn't work. And so as Chesterton says, 'You have to keep your politician close enough to kick him.'"

Culture first

Yenor indicated that "cultural support is way more important than economic support from the state."

"In the absence of any widely felt and articulated sense of public honor attached to the family ... there must be little communities that provide that honor to family life, and those who practice family life in a strong way will attach themselves to that. Eventually, having a dominant culture that is pro-family is probably necessary and that’s going to require vast economic support, and not simply cultural support, but also eventually legal support."

With the understanding that "culture follows law, and law follows culture," Yenor suggested there will be a political and legislative component to any successful effort to fully turn the tide, providing the example of no-fault divorce.

"Having no-fault divorce be the dominant approach to marriage dissolution weakened marriage, and it's very difficult to imagine a strong marriage culture existing when no-fault divorce is the default position in our public. Eventually, that position of no-fault divorce would have to change in order for there to be a strong marriage culture in the country. But pockets of strong marriage culture can nevertheless exist within the dominant culture of no-fault divorce."

To make significant inroads on the legislative front, Yenor indicated the culture piece still takes priority.

Helpful laws will be adopted only when "the family culture itself is strong and that, I think, ultimately is not a governmental matter but a church matter, where churches' cultural messaging puts family at the center, tries to attract people and convert as a result of real pro-family messaging."

Yenor added that without these institutions "unapologetically defending the integrity and really the priority of family life, it's difficult to see how any kind of Renaissance would happen."

In the way of religious organizations and groups presently putting up a good fight, Yenor said traditional Catholics, some prominent Presbyterian pastors, and others have great messaging on the family.

"I think, actually, throughout the shrinking Christendom, conservatives are kind of waking up to this problem. Conservatives within various other non-denominations are changing their behavior and uniting with like-minded people. So, it's not just the Catholics and the Presbyterians I mentioned, but also other denominations. ...There are reasons for hope in that respect."

A God- and Bible-based solution

When it comes to turning the tide, Hazony said, "The great imperative is for governments to get out of the way of states and communities and regions where there's still a Christian majority or a biblical majority or a pro-biblical majority. I mean, not everybody has to be a believing Christian or a Jew. We're talking about a society where there's — in those cities or states — a majority that has seen the neo-Marxist revolution coming, and they don’t want it. What they need to do is they need to agree that our public culture is going to be based on Scripture, so in most places that means on Christianity."

"Once you have an agreement that the public culture is based on Christianity, there is a tremendous amount of work to do," said Hazony. "Schools need to be God-based, Bible-based schools. If you're a Christian and you're sending your children to somewhere that’s not a Christian school, then don't expect your children to come out Christians. But that has to change everywhere, everywhere where there’s a majority."

Hazony recommended that families in locales where their faith is not the represented majority ought to move.

"You know, it's hard enough to raise children. Raising children is not that easy to do, even in the best situations. But you know, raising them in a society where the schools are programmed to destroy them. That's completely unfair to your children. So, the first things that need to happen are at the level, at the parenting level."

Extra to seeking out a community where the family's values are supported, Hazony suggested families not presently raising their children in a multigenerational home should reconsider.

Sidelong to this family- and community-level conservative revolution, Hazony said there needs to be a rejection of the theory of church and state at the governmental level.

"It's not in the U.S. Constitution. It was never thought to be in the U.S. Constitution until the 1940s. It's part of the liberal revolution to overthrow America's Christian traditions, its American tradition as a Christian people. And so, at the level of government, at the level of the courts, provision needs to be made to allow states that want to go back to America's traditions where the public life was Christian and assumed God and assumed Scripture — those communities that are willing to give it a try, the government needs to get out of their way. These false constitutional constructions that imply that you're doing something wrong if you want your public life and your city to be based on Christianity, they just need to be rejected."

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