“Restatement of the obvious has become the first duty of intelligent men.”
Last weekend the X account for podcast superstar Joe Rogan posted thirty seconds of video clips featuring happy Amish families, with the comment, “The Amish basically have no obesity, no infertility, no cancer, no diabetes, no metabolic syndrome. They’re having 10 plus kids and they’re incredibly happy.”That’s a pretty innocuous statement, if arguable, but it seemed to trigger a self-described “liberal” activist named Joshua Reed Eakle, who retweeted the clips to his 75,000+ followers, with a snarky insinuation obviously directed at Right-wing opponents of mass immigration from societies that refuse to assimilate into the host culture: “Setting aside half the misinformation in this post, the Amish are also clearly a community that refuses to assimilate to American society. And yet no one on the right seems to care. Curious.”
Eakle is hardly a major player worth anyone’s time, but his post did manage to accumulate over four million views as of this writing, and I suspect his comment represents the perspective of “liberals” generally, so it’s worth refuting. As George Orwell once put it, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” So allow me to lay out the obvious for Josh Eakle and his ilk: why the Right has issues with migrants who refuse to assimilate, but we don’t have a problem with the Amish.
Spoiler alert: contrary to what Eakle was undoubtedly implying (because “liberals” make everything about race in order to demonize their opponents rather than debate the merits of their actual position), the reason has nothing to do with race. The Right doesn’t have a problem with the Amish “not assimilating” not because they’re white, but for the following reasons, which are self-evident to any honest observer:
The Amish are not from a culture that is incompatible with and even hostile to Western civilization. Their beliefs and values may not be wholly mainstream but they are largely Christian, American values.
The Amish don’t have an ideologically supremacist imperative to overthrow the Judeo-Christian, capitalist West and to subdue non-believers.
They don’t fly hijacked planes into the World Trade Center or massacre nightclub patrons.
They don’t behead or knife random non-believers.
They don’t stone adulterers to death or hurl gay people from rooftops.
They don’t view the sexual assault of non-believers as their right.
They don’t establish “Amish Learing Centers” as fronts for defrauding American taxpayers of billions of dollars.
The Amish do have their own communal moral and legal code – the Ordnung (German for “order” or “discipline”) that has historically put them in occasional conflict with federal law: for example, the Ordnung forbids relying on government public assistance. The Amish view this as a failure to trust in God’s providence and a violation of the church’s duty to care for its own elderly and sick, so Congress granted them an official federal exemption to waive their Social Security taxes – which meant the Amish gave up any right to receive future benefits. This is hardly a burden on their fellow taxpayers.
But their default stance is to respect civic authority and pay their taxes. Most importantly, they don’t try to impose the Ordnung on non-believers.
They also don’t view themselves as an oppressed victim class and demand special government privileges. They don’t demand the establishment of prayer rooms in schools, airports, and hospitals or demand that nonbelievers around them participate in their fasting.
There is more, but I rest my case.
I’m sure the Amish have issues of their own as individuals and as a community. They’re human, after all, and fallen, imperfect beings. The point is not that the Amish are a perfect society but that they are not a problem, much less a threat, for their fellow Americans.
Indeed, their neighborliness reaches positively heroic levels. When Hurricane Helene tore through the Southeast and parts of the East Coast in late September 2024, dropping apocalyptic amounts of rainfall on mountain communities and causing massive mudslides and flash floods that completely wiped out historic towns, the government bureaucracy largely failed the affected Americans. The Amish response, by contrast, became a powerful, quiet blueprint for grassroots disaster recovery.
Shortly after the disaster, an influx of Pennsylvania Amish volunteers began traveling down to the hard-hit Appalachian mountain towns. Over the months following the storm, more than 2,000 Amish volunteers rotated in and out of the devastated areas, clearing campgrounds, running drywall, insulating structures, and rebuilding bridges completely free of charge. They provided skilled carpentry, construction labor, and building material without taking a dime. --->READ MORE HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment