February 23, 2026

The Continuing Battle of Minneapolis

Many of the people abducted by the government [in Minneapolis/St. Paul] are taken without cause. When the government runs out of excuses to hold them, or is forced to release them by the courts, they send them out the front door of the Whipple Building, often in the dead of night. Alone. No cell phone. No jacket. In the freezing cold and snow.

A civic group called Haven Watch now stands guard at Whipple around the clock so that former prisoners of the regime do not freeze to death after release. While we were at Whipple talking to observers, a mother and two small children emerged from the building. They had nothing with them other than the clothes on their backs. It was about 15 degrees, the day after an unexpected snow. The three small humans haltingly made their way across the ice and slush in the road. Someone from Haven Watch met them and ushered them into a warm car.

I ask you: What do you think would have happened to this woman and her children had the United States government sent them into the cold and snow, far from taxis or transport, with no way of contacting anyone for help?

What do you think would have become of these three vulnerable human beings at the hands of our government had the people of Minnesota not stepped in to care for them?

This is Anne Frank territory; the stuff of the Stasi and East Germany, or Kosovo and Sarajevo. And the only way it ends is with victory for the regime or a reckoning for all those who waged this war against America.

However alarmed you are, it’s not enough.

Jonathan V. Last, What I Saw at the Battle of Minneapolis

The Tariff Decision

The Tariff decision in wider context

Put on your thinking cap for this one; it’s fairly heavy going for someone who doesn’t follow the Supreme Court’s doings:

3. A very significant aspect of the Chief Justice’s MQD [Major Questions Doctrine] analysis is that three conservative justices embraced it to rule against President Trump’s signature policy. And they did so in the most difficult possible context, with an issue involving national security and foreign affairs. This is a rebuttal to those who have claimed that the Court, or at least those three justices, invoke the doctrine opportunistically and politically to hurt Democratic presidents. And I think it signals more clearly than ever that, going forward, this Court is going to view broad delegations of statutory authority to a president to act, and/or extravagant presidential interpretations of authorizations to act, with skepticism. The three justices firmly committed here to the MQD can (if they wish) ensure that outcome in a case of just about any political configuration.

To the extent this is true, it is a hugely important complement to the Court’s emerging broad view of the unitary executive. Put another way, it is a vindication of Sarah Isgur’s view that the tradeoff on the Court for enhancing vertical unitary presidential control is “for the court to rein in Congress’s bad habit of delegating vast and vague powers to the executive branch,” including through MQD. It also puts in a better light the Court’s interim orders [the so-called “shadow docket”] to date in Trump 2.0, a large number of which, due to the application strategy of the Solicitor General, involved issues of vertical control. The tariff opinion gives the lie to the notion that the Court is in the bag for the president and also makes its approach to issues of presidential power in Trump 2.0 both clearer and more nuanced.

Jack Goldsmith

Let’s see if I can make clearer (and broader) sense of that; Goldsmith, after all, is writing mostly for lawyerly types:

As a preliminary matter, don’t worry about what the Major Question Doctrine is; it really didn’t control the outcome here as three of six justices voted to strike down the tariffs without it. (I don’t think they were wrong.)
SCOTUS here signaled that Congress is going to have to clearly delegate sweeping powers to the Executive Branch for the court to uphold the Executive’s use of those powers.
Combine that with the “vertical unitary executive” and you’ve got the President (including future Presidents) in almost absolute control of the Executive Branch but, importantly, an Executive Branch that has been slimmed down in the powers it lawfully wields. That’s Sarah Isgur’s take anyway.
The administration has a very strong record in the Court because the Solicitor General has made sure that the adverse lower-court decisions (there are hundreds) they appeal are very likely winners, often under the “Unified Executive” theory. (i.e, If you don’t appeal losers, you’re likely to have a good appellate win record.)
Contrary to almost every snot-nosed Democrat and crypto-Democrat in the commentariat, this Supreme Court is not in Trump’s pocket, dammit!

Trump’s tariff tantrum

Note that no one is even pretending that Trump’s new 15 percent tariffs for the entire world are being imposed for anything resembling legitimate economic reason. The president is angry about the Supreme Court defeat, and he wants to show members of the court’s majority that they can’t constrain him for long—and show the rest of the country and the world that he’s still The Boss. That’s it. That’s the entirety of the justification.

Trump wants to wield absolute, arbitrary power, because doing so allows him to project strength that he can deploy at will to reward friends, harm enemies, and exact monetary concessions (in the form of bribes and kickbacks from domestic and foreign companies and governments around the world). That is what all of this tariff nonsense has always been about. Tariffs in the abstract can play a role in helping to shape a country’s trade policy—but not when they are imposed in a capricious way and without even an elementary understanding of international economics. I, for one, would love to see the courts internalize the presumption of Trumpian bad will in their assessment of future cases involving tariffs—and hopefully in other areas of policymaking as well.

Damon Linker

I’m with Linker up to that last sentence, and I might even go along with it if by “internalize” he means “assume but do not say it out loud.” It’s as if Linker is not just abandoning the “presumption of regularity” but reversing it to a “presumption of irregularity.”

What the Supreme Court does

The justices did not determine whether or how to issue refunds for the duties.

(TMD).

It reflects civic ignorance that media have to write things like that.

SCOTUS is not an omniscient über-government. It’s not a second legislature setting up detailed mechanisms.

It decides issues. The issue decided Friday was whether IEPPA authorized tariffs. Yeah, this only kicks the ball down the road, but it wouldn’t be right or prudent for SCOTUS to try to negate all tariffs under all imaginable statutory or constitutional authorities.

If you want to avoid chaos, do not elect chaos agents – and don’t expect the courts to bail you out if you do.

They may well succeed

The America I love is not a stretch of soil or a place where the people of my blood lived and died. It’s a set of impudent and improbable goals: the rule of law and equality before it, liberty, freedom of speech and conscience, decency. We have always fallen short of them and always will, but we wrote them down and decided to dedicate ourselves to pursuing them. That’s worth something.

The people I despise, and who despise me, believe America’s values and goals are blood, soil, swagger, and an insipid and arrogant conformity. They are the values of bullies and their sycophants. They may prevail. There’s no promise they will not.

Ken White (Popehat), The Fourth of July, Rethought

Cozy Girls

Now for something cozier

There is a certain kind of person, usually self-styled as clear-eyed, hard-headed, and immune to trends, who regards the cozy girl lifestyle with undisguised contempt. She sees cozy culture as unserious, quiescent, and politically regressive. She insists that the things celebrated by cozy girls are so celebrated because they replicate the preferences of the wealthy, of the bourgieosie. … Some of these criticism have a little merit, but I find myself entirely unable to join in that contempt. In a winner-take-all society where ordinary life has been systematically stripped of dignity, the turn toward “cozy” is less a retreat from reality into the past and more a rational adaptation to the unhappy present.

…

You’ve heard this song from me before many times: we live in an era in which the range of lives publicly regarded as worthy of living has contracted almost to nothing. Our culture confers esteem on a vanishingly small number of roles, and those roles are largely defined by being visible – that is to say, by attracting public attention, of which there is a necessarily finite supply. … Everything else – teacher! paralegal! office manager! dental hygienist! retail supervisor! random white collar office email job that’s basically fine! – is flattened into an undifferentiated gray. These are necessary roles, some of them pay well, but they certainly aren’t glamorous ones, and young Americans seem increasingly convinced that a life that doesn’t inspire envy among others – when broadcast online, naturally – isn’t one worth living.

… [A]lmost everyone who tries to get rich quick will fail, but everyone can choose to be cozy.

The genius of the cozy aesthetic is that it identifies sources of pleasure that are widely accessible and modest and treats them as inherently worthy of serious cultivation: a soft sweater, a well-made cup of tea, a public library card, a crockpot recipe that reliably produces something warm and nourishing, a Saturday morning with nowhere to be. You may find any one or all of these more or less attractive based on your own preferences, but whatever they are, they’re not signifiers of elite achievement, they’re all available in low-cost forms, and they’re all reliable and attainable. They’re not blue-check credentials, they don’t require venture capital or viral reach, and you don’t need to chew your fingernails waiting for the wheel to spin to see if you’ve won them. These simple pleasures are, instead, elements of an ordinary life lived with intention.

Freddie DeBoer, Cozy Girl Lifestyle is a Rational Response to a Winner-Take-All Culture (Shared link)

Shorts

When people think you can’t tell the difference between a man and woman, they’re not going to buy anything else you say. (Andrew Sullivan, who doggedly keeps pointing out that L, G and B have very little in common with T, let alone with QIA2S+++.)
[T]his Congress is for Trump what the Duma is for Putin: an echo-chamber of irrelevance and submission. (Andrew Sullivan)
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. (W.H. Auden)
We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand. (Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire) So much for Chesterton’s Fence.
Alan Jacobs contrasts modern and classic political invective.

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Cheesefare Sunday 2026

Orthodox Mardi Gras

I’ve never been a fan of Mardis Gras, which I took to be “let’s sin a lot on the eve of Lent.” That just never sat right.

On the other hand, looking at my scale last Monday morning, I’d say we Orthodox (Americans at least) have something analogous: last weekend’s “Meatfare Sunday,” the last day meat is allowed before entering full Lent a week later (tomorrow). My attitude was “Whoopee! Let’s eat a lot of meat today!”

Forgiveness Sunday

Later today begins full Lent for Orthodox Christians:

This Sunday is the last day before the beginning of Great Lent, our 7-week journey to Pascha on April 12 … Lent begins at Sunday evening Vespers, followed by the ancient rite of forgiveness.

That’s when we line up and stand face-to-face with every member of the church in turn. We bow to them, honoring the presence of Christ in them, and say “Forgive me, my brother (or sister), for all my sins against you.” You put it in your own words, however you want to say it. That person says “I forgive you,” then goes on to say, “And forgive me for all the ways I have sinned against you” (phrasing it however they like.)

Even if there was no deliberate sin aimed against this person, you still ask forgiveness for contributing to the world’s burden of sin. A friend of mine says, “Forgive me for the way my sins pollute the world you have to live in.”

Frederica Mathewes-Green.

I found this helpful, because it has always seemed odd to ask forgiveness of someone I barely know. This idea of needing forgiven for the sort of cosmic effects of sin makes sense of it.

Yes, this implies that there are no “victimless crimes.”

A felicitous pairing

To see ourselves as a smart atheist sees us …

Christianity is a highly adaptable collection of faiths … It can be liberal or conservative or apolitical. It can be hellfire and brimstone or love and forgiveness. It can be whatever it needs to be to survive, [and] it will.

T.J. Kirk a YouTuber for twenty years as “The Amazing Atheist”, via Nick Pompella.

Christianity as a “collection of faiths” ought to jar those of us who are serious Christians, but I can certainly see how an outsider could reach that conclusion. Ecumenical bonhomie and back-slapping do nothing to throw a wet blanket over it.

“It can be whatever it needs to be to survive” also is an understandable conclusion for an atheist who watches the seven sisters jettisoning historic Christian dogmas and sexual morals.

… and as a smart Catholic sees us.

The religious mistake has been to fret over the threat posed by explicitly anti-Christian forces, while ignoring or minimizing the influence that the apostles of pseudo-Christianity exercise over the American soul.

Ross Douthat, Prologue: A Nation of Heretics, in Bad Religion.

Fairly nondescript warehouse-looking buildings

A couple of years ago, my wife and I were driving from our home in rural Illinois to St. Louis. The drive begins with corn fields, but after an hour gives way to the outer ring suburbs commonplace in any major metropolitan area. As we passed an area known mostly for the shopping centers, strip malls, and chain restaurants endemic to suburban sprawl, my wife pointed out a fairly nondescript warehouse-looking building off the highway. It had been freshly painted, and the parking lot had a new coating of asphalt.

The only thing that made this building stand out was a sign with a generic-looking logo — maybe a tree, maybe hands in prayer — and a single word, “Ascend.” “Is it a church?” my wife asked. We googled it. It wasn’t, as we expected, an upstart, non-denominational church. It was a marijuana dispensary, one of a number of stores cropping up on the Illinois side of the Mississippi as a result of the state’s legalization of recreational weed. We laughed about that for the rest of the drive into the city, sure that we couldn’t be the only ones unable to tell the difference between a new church or a dispensary.

Ryan Burge, The Demons of Non-Denoms

Spoiler alert:

Aspect	Traditional Religion	Non-Denominational / New Model
Growth Trend	Declining membership and attendance	Rapid growth, especially since the 1990s
Organizational Structure	Hierarchical, denominational	Loosely organized or disorganized
Leadership	Credentialed clergy, seminary-trained	Charismatic entrepreneurs, minimal formal training
Trust in Institution	Historically higher	Initially low but increasing as they institutionalize
Accountability	Institutional oversight	Often centered on individuals, risk of abuse
Cultural Impact	Cohesive groups like Religious Right	Fragmented evangelical fiefdoms

Is the Church obsolete?

A church that holds up secularized Christian values as the point of the Christian faith is not a church worth attending—let alone giving money to. So I have great sympathy for those who have stopped going to church or who haven’t bothered to try it. Theologically, I am one of those people who believes that every person needs Jesus—that a person lacks true life without him. But the evidence is in: the people have stopped going, and at the risk of saying the obvious, they have concluded they don’t need to go. They’re not getting anything out of church that they don’t already have. Who can blame them for quitting?

Matthew Burdette, Is the Church Obsolete?

I believe Burdette’s target may have been the mainstream Protestant denominations, but that phrase “secularized Christian values” could be applied to churches that are are unconsciously striving for political power as if it were more important than the Gospel:

A lot of covering up of the churches problems it’s motivated by the idea of that if the world knows the problems, we won’t achieve our real objective, which is political power.

David French on the Russell Moore Show.

Real presence?

It’s been decades since I heard it, but I still can’t shake it. The “it” I heard was a story from the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, which says it believes in Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. I am reasonably sure that some other Protestant groups make the same claim, but as they say, “it’s complicated.”

In any event, the LCMS apparently follows the common Protestant practice of serving the blood of Christ (wine) in single-serv plastic cups. A convert to the Orthodox faith from the LCMS recounted what happens after the service.

The remaining single-serv cups’ contents are casually poured back into the bottle in the Church kitchen.
The cups themselves, with some wine residue still present, are thrown in the trash.

I have trouble seeing how this doesn’t mean throwing the blood of Christ into the trash — which surely vitiates the claim that the Church believes Christ is really present.

Your periodic reminder

The shift from church power to state power is not the victory of peaceable reason over irrational religious violence. The more we tell ourselves it is, the more we are capable of ignoring the violence we do in the name of reason and freedom.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence

Orthodox Theology

Theology is offered to the glory of God, not ourselves. Since it is divine, it can never be based on human reasoning, ideas, speculation, or clever argumentation. Orthodox theology can never be disconnected from the spiritual life of the theologian or from the life of the Church. Authentic Orthodox theology is “liturgical, doxological and mystical.”

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou , Thinking Orthodox

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

February 19, 2026

Never smoked?

This is the 50th anniversary of one of the times I quit smoking. The last time I quit was maybe 7 to 9 years later (of that time, I lost track) – long enough ago that, as I understand it, my history of smoking is no longer medically relevant. Some of my medical records even say, incorrigibly as history but perhaps accurately as a medical term of art, “never smoked.”

The cultural shift against smoking in my lifetime has been remarkable.

Punked

[Poet Rolfe] Humphries may be best known, these days for a literary joke. He had received an assignment from Poetry magazine for a “Draft Ode for a Phi Beta Kappa Occasion,” in which, the editors asked, there needed to be one classical reference per line. Humphries sent in the requested poem, which appeared in the June 1939 issue, and began: “Niobe’s daughters yearn to the womb again, / Ionians bright and fair, to the chill stone.”

But the poet nursed a hated of Nicholas Murray Butler, the long-time president of Columbia University (who, it must be said, had no editorial role at the Chicago-based Poetry magazine), and so Humphries built the poem as an acrostic, the initial letters of each line spelling out “Nicholas Murray Butler is a horses ass.”

“Not being accustomed to hold manuscripts up to the mirror or to test them for cryptograms, the editors recently accepted and printed a poem containing a concealed scurrilous phrase aimed at a well-known person,” the magazine apologized later that summer, and I have to say that while I appreciate snide poetry, my sympathies are with the editors who got used in the incident.

Joseph Bottum, commenting on the poet and his poem A Song for Mardi Gras.

Perspective

When it’s the most powerful nation on earth conducting a decades-long campaign of retaliative obliteration against multiple countries (one of which had precisely nothing to do with the inciting incident), leaving upward of a million civilians dead, revenge becomes a temporarily useful virtue. When it’s a herder on the other side of the planet burning an American flag after a drone operator in an Idaho strip mall mistook his children for terrorists, revenge becomes grotesque, the irredeemable realm of savages.

Omar El Akkadm One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Ah, those touchy conservatives!

Some Slate headlines over the past few days:

A New Version of Woke Is Coming. Conservatives Aren’t Going to Like It.

Why a Floppy-Haired 27-Year-Old Olympic Skier Is Making Conservatives So Very, Very Angry

Conservatives Are Terrified That People Like Me Are Buying Guns Now.

Do you see the theme there?

… In the current era, when right-wing rhetoric amounts to very little more than sneering and bullying—“liberal tears,” “cry more,” etc.—it should be no surprise to see our friends on the left arguing that if x discomfits or hurts conservatives, then x must be good, which is the subtext of those Slate headlines. But I do not think that this sort of thing is really a reaction to the Trumpist style, inasmuch as it precedes the emergence of that style as the dominant form of expression on the right. “Your uptight Christian parents are going to hate this!” is a very, very old marketing ploy, one part “Banned in Boston!” and one part “Republicans pounce!” Incidentally, I spent a lot of time with right-wing gun nuts, and I have yet to meet one who is upset that nice suburban liberals are buying firearms—and the Slate report has not convinced me that these fearful conservatives actually exist beyond the anecdotal level.

Kevin D. Williamson (bold added).

Conservatisms

I graduated from Chicago in 1983, and at about the same time a group of people graduated from Dartmouth. We all moved to Washington about the same time. I knew them, and some of them have become famous, like Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but I came out of Chicago earnestly reading Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and all that, and my friends and I became pro-conservative. But the Dartmouth Review folks were not pro-conservative, they were anti-left. So in retrospect, I can see how big and vast a difference there was between people that I thought were part of the same movement. The sad news is that they now dominate conservatism and the Republican Party. Whereas my friends became Never Trumpers.

David Brooks

Caricatures

I spent most of my adult life thinking ill of [Jesse] Jackson, probably because of his infamous “Hymietown” remark in the 1984 presidential race … Then, about seven years ago, I met him for breakfast in New York. The man I spent an hour with was gracious, reflective, engaged, knowledgeable and more than a touch sad, probably because he was aware of his Parkinson’s diagnosis. It reminded me that people are never the caricature that others make of them, and that there can be a lot to like and learn from people with whom we often disagree.

Bret Stephens

Shorts

It is not easy being transgressive in an era when there are few norms remaining to transgress. Undaunted, he tries. (George Will of VP JD Vance)
After cancer, I feel like a connection to God, whatever that is, is kind of the whole point of this exercise on this planet. (James Van Der Beek)
Attention without feeling is only a report. (Poet Mary Oliver)
I’m at peace, and I’m excited, but my Oura Ring will tell you I’m not sleeping well. (David Brooks on his departure from the New York Times to take an interesting new position at Yale.)
The problem is that he overreacts. It’s like going to a doctor with acne and the doctor says, “You know what will fix acne? Decapitation.” That’s Trump. What he’s doing with scientific research is horrific. (David Brooks again.)
The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. (Margaret Thatcher via Bret Stephens)
President Trump — who’d dip himself in gold if he were confident that it wouldn’t seal his mouth shut and prevent him from yammering. (Frank Bruni)
Someone who had been a Catholic longer than five minutes would perhaps grasp the irony of claiming a minority group had dual loyalty. (Sarah Stewart on the antisemitism of Carol Prejean Boller, washed-up beauty queen, “influencer,” and recent Catholic convert.)
My job is to turn out students who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck. (A headmaster at the Stowe School, quoted by David Brooks.)
Vigilence is metabolically expensive. (Lisa Feldman Barrett)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

February 16, 2026

Corriging the incorrigible

For some years now, I’ve been tearing my hair out over the faddish dogmas of adolescent gender dysphoria — the dogmas that treated as axiomatic the appropriateness of medical and surgical interventions for kids claiming gender dysphoria, and opposition as genocidal. Let’s try that again: dogmas that insisted on allowing sexual mutilation of kids experiencing some discomfort about their biological sex and that hated and defamed anyone urging caution.

The dogmas seemed incorrigible. And then, just like that, they seem to gotten corriged, or whatever the participle is for corrigible. The turning point appears to have been the Cass Report, which was officially rejected by the U.S. medical establishment but appears to have been tacitly adopted in public discourse and acquiesced in even among the medical establishment.

It doesn’t hurt that there’s been a malpractice verdict against some medical butchers with a $2 million dollar damage award to the breastless female plaintiff.

So, my inner Eeyore sometimes gets stymied by something, somewhere, getting better. Gloria in excelsis deo.

A southern stoic gets religion

In the mid-1950s, Walker Percy’s southern gentry stoicism pointed one way, his new Catholicism another:

“Faith had led him away from the plantation. Philosophy had given faith an intellectual basis and a practical rationale. Far from turning him abstract, as Shelby Foote had warned him it would do, philosophy had coaxed him down off the magic mountain and onto level ground to consider the mortal struggle of everydayness. It emancipated him from his Uncle Will and the scheme of Stoic noblesse oblige. It helped him to solve his own problems and ponder the affairs of the day. It made him, finally, an ordinary man.”

Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own. I can’t put my finger on just why, but I think the short section including this quote was worth the price of the book (and the hours I’ve already spent reading it).

Maybe I just don’t know what time it is

Dreher’s writing is a useful indication of just how angry and pessimistic even the most thoughtful conservatives have become in recent years. He seems to see America as a hellscape, drained of religion and hope, drugged and distracted by the false gods of the internet. The renewal he imagines is not the sunlit, future-oriented conservatism of the Reagan era, and he doesn’t look to the Founding Fathers for inspiration. If anything, Dreher’s compass points in the opposite direction. He wants his country to turn back toward Europe—not the homogenized, secular continent of today but premodern Christian Europe, before the Enlightenment and the disenchantment set in.

…

His greatest admiration is reserved for people who commit themselves to “a fixed place and way of life,” as he wrote about Saint Benedict.

Yet Dreher seems resigned to living as a rootless exile, shorn of his family and condemned to wander a landscape of what the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman—one of Dreher’s favorite thinkers—called “liquid modernity.”

Robert F. Worth, Rod Dreher Thinks the Enlightenment Was a Mistake.

One additional, and very disheartening, item from this story:

But lately Dreher’s insights have come with an ominous political corollary. He believes our institutions are so rotten that they need a good slap from people like Trump and Orbán, even if it means losing some of them. “Maybe what’s being born now will be worse, I dunno,” he wrote as Trump and Elon Musk were using DOGE to dismantle the federal bureaucracy in early 2025. “We’ll see. But bring it on. I’ve had it.”

I quote this to observe that “bring it on” equals “burn it down,” and that glee about burning down institutions because something better might rise from the ashes is the paradigmatic marker of a revolutionary, not a conservative.

Maybe I just don’t know “what time it is.”

Political

I’ve generally been relegating political commentary to “Elsewhere in Tipsyworld,” below. But these are too important.

America’s concentration camps

“A concentration camp exists wherever a government holds groups of civilians outside the normal legal process — sometimes to segregate people considered foreigners or outsiders, sometimes to punish,” Andrea Pitzer writes in “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.” Conditions within the administration’s detention facilities certainly meet the bill.

Here’s how a Russian family described its four-month ordeal at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in an interview with NBC News:

“Worms in their food. Guards shouting orders and snatching toys from small hands. Restless nights under fluorescent lights that never fully go dark. Hours in line for a single pill. “We left one tyranny and came to another kind of tyranny,” Nikita said in Russian. “Even in Russia, they don’t treat children like this.”

Or consider this ProPublica exposé of the same facility, focused on the children who have been caught in the administration’s immigration dragnet.

Kheilin Valero from Venezuela, who was being held with her 18-month-old, Amalia Arrieta, said shortly after they were detained following an ICE appointment on Dec. 11 in El Paso, Texas, the baby fell ill. For two weeks, she said, medical staff gave her ibuprofen and eventually antibiotics, but Amalia’s breathing worsened to the point that she was hospitalized in San Antonio for 10 days. She was diagnosed with Covid-19 and RSV. “Because she went so many days without treatment, and because it’s so cold here, she developed pneumonia and bronchitis,” Kheilin said. “She was malnourished, too, because she was vomiting everything.”

…

During the 2024 presidential campaign, I asked readers to think seriously about Trump’s plan to remove millions of people from the United States:

Now, imagine the conditions that might prevail for hundreds of thousands of people crammed into hastily constructed camps, the targets of a vicious campaign of demonization meant to build support for their detention and deportation. If undocumented immigrants really are, as Trump says, “poisoning the blood of our country,” then how do we respond? What do we do about poison? Well, we neutralize it.

What we see now, with the immigration dragnets in American cities and the horrific conditions in the administration’s detention facilities, is what the president promised in his campaign. He said he was going to punish immigrants for being immigrants, and here he is, punishing immigrants for being immigrants, with every tool he has at his disposal.

Jamelle Bouie (gift link)

Are you cool with the concentration camps, Rod?

History Rhymes

With his contempt for elections he did not win, Lenin put an end to all semblance of democratic procedure. He made it clear that he would insist on ruling whether he had popular support or not. The legitimacy of Bolshevik rule was to be based on Marxist theory, not on the sovereignty of the people, and that made a police state ruled by force inevitable.

Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire.

“Why haven’t you killed anyone?”

Several decades ago I realised I had a temper, and I went to see a specialist about this. I didn’t want anger slouching into my approaching parenting. How do you feel the second before you erupt? they asked.

Vulnerable.

That was the gold, that two minute conversation. I’m generally wired now to recognise the state and stay there as long as necessary.

But the red mist comes down and I can’t control it, I said. The specialist looked me right in the eye:

Then why haven’t you killed anyone?

Learnt behaviour. I would go far, but not that far. They showed me I could create a new boundary, and through repetition, walk it into my psyche.

Martin Shaw, storyteller and author of the New York Times bestseller Liturgies of the Wild.

Anti-Zionism versus Antisemitism

There is a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I just know there is.

Surely it’s theoretically possible to oppose the state of Israel’s behavior without animus toward Jews per se, right?

Oddly, in the realm of thought experiments, it’s even possible to hate Jews and be pro-Zionist, on the theory that Zion is where all the hated Jews should be sent. (I don’t think I’ve seen this kind of jackalope in the wild.)

But whatever the difference is, I cannot say that the line is “clear” because people keep insisting they (or their ideological allies) are merely anti-Zionist, not anti-Semite when it seems reasonably clear to me that they’re anti-Semites.

With the caveat that I hurt especially for the plight of Palestinian Christians (especially the Orthodox) at the hands of the Israeli government, I’m staying away from either label.

The AI Revolution

Damon Linker is in fairly close alignment with my hunches on AI:

What do you think is likely to follow from tens of millions of white-collar, college-educated workers finding over the coming years that their entire sector of the economy has been fed into a woodchipper? That they are becoming unemployed, are being forced to undertake a job search at roughly the same time as just about everyone else who held similar positions, and must face the reality that their practical, on-the-job experience and skills have become worthless in a workplace transformed by AI?

What will they have to do to make a living? How will they need to reinvent themselves? Will corporate middle managers need to repurpose themselves as nurse’s aides or orderlies, cleaning bedpans and changing soiled sheets? Or go back to school, taking on a second pile of student loans at midlife, to learn a new, more marketable skill? Or will AI be taking over so many jobs that require specialized education that they will be forced to downgrade their expectations still further, to seek out work in the service sector, for dramatically lower pay and status? Or scramble to learn how to use AI and then attempt to make a go of it as some kind of entrepreneur in a marketplace flooded with such self-starters, each trying to devise and market the Next Big Thing that might catapult them into a more comfortable income bracket? A few will do well at this; most will not.

Then this killer footnote:

For those inclined to discount the likelihood of such destabilizing events by predicting the adoption of a Universal Basic Income in the wake of widespread AI-induced job losses, I tend to think this gets the lines of causality wrong. There is no way the rich in this country would tolerate the imposition of tax rates necessary to pay for a UBI unless proverbial or literal guns were pointed at their heads. What I’m describing at the end of this post is the scenario that puts the guns there. Whether a UBI follows from it is another matter ….

Freddie DeBoer, on the other hand, isn’t buying all the revolution talk.

Shorts

The Bad Bunny dancing was too sexy, apparently, and also, it was almost entirely in Spanish, so TPUSA planned ahead to make a separate show with nothing sexy at all and everything in the Queen’s English. Which is why they tapped Kid Rock, conservative America’s greatest living artist. (Nellie Bowles)
“The ‘woke’ halftime show features a wedding, people dancing joyously and smiling. The conservative alternative was a grayscale grievance fest,” – Corey Walker.
Life involves divisions of labor, and conservative values just don’t make for groundbreaking art or incredible sourdough loaves, I don’t know why but it’s just the truth and we all know it. Like how the new conservative-run Kennedy Center is shutting down for two years, since too many artists were flaking. All the people with conservative values are busy at home or the office not doing art. (Nellie Bowles)
“Trump is delusional, okay? You need to know this. Trump is sick. He’s a delusional person … I know first-hand from people talking to the president,” – Nick Fuentes via Andrew Sullivan
“Small reminder: if you took conservative positions on the Constitution, the economy, foreign policy, or basic morality and then radically changed them solely because a Republican was elected president who changed the party’s positions, you were never really a conservative, you were just a Republican,” – Jonah Goldberg.
“My PhD student is being advised left and right to let Claude do her lit review, write her qualifying presentation, summarize the books she needs to read to prepare. She is holding fast to the conviction that this slow, frictionful work is the work she signed on for. Immensely proud of her.” (Sara Hendren on micro.blog) I guess (1) that’s the way of the world today, but (2) there are conscientious objectors.
“… a deliriously verbose writer on Substack.” Robert F. Worth, of Rod Dreher, in Worth’s Atlantic article Rod Dreher Thinks the Enlightenment Was a Mistake.

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Meatfare Sunday

One week from full Lent. Tomorrow, Orthodox Christians are to cease eating meat until Pascha/Easter.

How last Sunday began for me

A young man paced the sidewalk nervously as I approached Church for Matins. We exchanged names, his sounding middle-eastern.

“I’m an inquirer,” he said. “First time in an Orthodox Church?” “Yes.” “What drew you?”

Notable hesitation, then one word: “Repentance.”

“You picked a good Sunday for that. The theme is the parable of the Prodigal Son. Do you know it?”

“No. I just started reading Matthew.”

(Edited to make me sound slicker than I was.)

So I summarized the parable for him and then left to do my part in the services.

Seldom have we had someone starting with such a “clean slate,” innocent of any knowledge of the faith.

But remarkable, too, that seldom have we had someone give a confident answer that “repentance” is what drew him. That is probably the very best of all possible answers. I don’t know where he got it.

He stayed all three hours through the Divine Liturgy. I think God’s up to something in this young man.

His Catechist will have to change or abandon curricula crafted for Catechumens coming from other Christian traditions, sometimes with deep knowledge of scripture but always with some knowledge.

Speaking of repentance …

Repentance is everything you do to get sin, those inborn passions, out of you. It’s reading, thinking, praying, weeding out disruptive influences in your life, sharing time with fellow Christians, following the guidance of the saints. Repentance is the renunciation of what harms us and the acquisition of what is beneficial to us, writes a holy counselor.

Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

The full-meal deal

Almost all the good stuff in the spiritual life is risky, but although the Church knows this, she views the risk differently that Protestants do. Traditional forms of Protestantism are risk-averse; their tendency is to view all spiritual risk as impermissible. But the [Orthodox spirit] is that we should embrace all the good stuff while rejecting all the distortions. Don’t let the harmful things frighten you from enjoying the beneficial ones. Don’t let the false doctrines frighten you from embracing the true. From a[n Orthodox] point of view, that would be like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

For example, to avoid unhealthy attitudes toward the dead, an Evangelical will decline to invoke the intercession of the saints at all. To avoid the temptation of drunkenness, a Baptist will use grape juice, not wine, to commemorate the sacrifice of Christ. To avoid the danger of polytheism, an old-fashioned Unitarian will reject the doctrine of the Trinity ….

Adapted from J Budziszewski, who wrote these sentiments about Roman Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy.

This is one of the ways in which Catholicism retains much of the Orthodox spirit.

Thin memory

In churches with thin memory, Christianity quietly reorganizes itself around personalities … Authority is denied in principle and exercised constantly in practice. Someone still decides what matters, what counts as faithful, what gets emphasized—but those decisions are no longer accountable to anything older than the present moment.

When tradition is pushed aside, it doesn’t leave neutrality behind. It leaves a vacuum.

And into that vacuum rush charisma, moral urgency, cultural pressure, and the unspoken anxieties of the age.

…

I didn’t return to the creeds because I wanted certainty. I returned to them because I realized I couldn’t keep pretending faith was a solo project.

… Faith was never meant to be sustained alone. The creeds weren’t written to stifle thought or end conversation. They were written to ensure that what Christians confessed together remained recognizable across time and place.

When we say “I believe” together, we are admitting something deeply unfashionable: belief is not something we invent from scratch. It is something we receive. Something we are carried by when our own confidence runs out.

The Church remembers on our behalf. It holds words steady when our language falters. It confesses truths that do not depend on our clarity, enthusiasm, or emotional health.

…

Tradition does not eliminate authority. It restrains it. It binds teachers and leaders to something older than themselves.

Tradition does not promise certainty. It promises continuity.

Adam Finkney. As always, the caveat that “Mere Orthodoxy” is not an Orthodox site; it is a site full of thoughtful young Calvinistish guys (mostly) who sometimes stumble hearteningly close to the truly old truths.

The Orthodox difference

But how could we ever relate to God or, even more challenging, truly unite with Him? Of all religions, only Orthodox theology emphasizes union with God—in a real and actual sense—as the goal and purpose of all human life. We rarely speak of “going to heaven,” as though it were a destination. We do not speak of experiencing a “beatific vision” of God, as though God could be viewed but remained at some distance from us. Rather, Orthodox Christianity speaks of theosis, the divinization of the human person. We expect, hope, and strive for actual union with the perfect, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, and changeless God. But we are flawed, limited, and come into existence for a brief time; we are confined to one place at one time, and we are constantly changing. So how is union with God possible? The Incarnation, the enfleshment of the Son of God, gave us the ability to truly connect to God and become united with Him, transformed and illumined by Him, not simply because He died for us but because of the way He lived among us.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Friday the 13th

Winter Olympics

We are not the first Americans who have had to wrestle with complex feelings about cheering for our nation in troubled times. In 1936, Nazi Germany hosted the Summer Olympics. The towering figure of those games was the African American track and field athlete Jesse Owens. His own life epitomized the tension and potential of the Olympics. He proved that you can represent your country well even when you stand in stark opposition to its laws and the way it treats its people.

Born in my home state of Alabama, the child of sharecroppers, he won four gold medals — a feat that would not be equaled for nearly half a century. His wins served as a repudiation of Nazi myths about “Aryan” supremacy and revealed the power of sport to challenge ideologies that dehumanize, corrupt, and destroy.

And then that symbol of American resistance to Nazism returned home to a segregated United States.

Even though he’d become something of an American symbol, cheering for him, especially if you were African American, did not mean you were cheering all of America, including its legalized second-class citizenship for Black people or the lynchings that still plagued the country.

Owens’s gold medals, instead, challenged the American racist ideology of the time in much the same way he challenged Germany. Jesse didn’t represent what America was; he represented what it might yet be: a nation that values all its citizens and residents.

Esau McCaulley, Team U.S.A. Is Not Team White House

Keeping people ignorant

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

Heda Margolius Kovaly and Helen Epstein, Under a Cruel Star

Is the public’s best interests one of those substitutes?

A majority of Americans (57%) express low confidence in journalists to act in the best interests of the public, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis from the Pew-Knight Initiative. This includes 40% who say they have not too much confidence and 17% who say they have none at all. By comparison, 43% of adults say they have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in journalists. (Source: pewresearch.org)

John Ellis.

What in the world does it mean for a journalist to “act in the best interests of the public”? That sounds paternalistic to me, as, for example, “protect the public from unpleasant news.”

May I should start a regular section for unintelligible polling questions. I encounter them all the time.

“Gender confirmation” as lobotomy

It has been clear to me for some time that there are many clinicians working in the field of so-called “gender-affirming care” who deserve to lose their licenses, plus a few who deserve to go to prison. Try and forget, for the moment, the social whirlwind that has surrounded this area of medicine—the celebrity endorsements, the glossy TV portrayals, the craven journalists. All served to distract us from what has really been going on.

Think, instead, about what is actually involved in trying to make a person superficially look like a member of the opposite sex. Not only the off-label use of powerful drugs, but also the removal of perfectly healthy breasts and genitals, paired with procedures like colovaginoplasty and phalloplasty that attempt to create new organs out of the wrong tissue, sometimes leading to disastrous complications. Try googling “bottom surgery ruined my life,” and see how many horror stories emerge.

…

It’s easy to look back at the uncritical acceptance of medical wrongdoing in the past and see what C.S. Lewis described as “chronological snobbery.” It seems obvious now that bloodletting and trepanning were acts of idiocy. But the widespread acceptance of “gender-affirming” medicine in our own time ought to cure us of this hubris.

Perhaps the closest historical analog to the emerging scandal around gender medicine is the practice of lobotomy, a type of brain surgery that doctors performed approximately 50,000 times in the U.S., most between 1949 and 1952, with the same goal: to relieve the symptoms of mental illness.

The most important figure in the rise of lobotomy in the U.S. was Walter Freeman, a talented surgeon who came from an esteemed medical family and could trace his lineage back to the Mayflower. This was an era when that kind of prestige conferred enormous power on doctors, and Freeman pursued his experiments with very little restriction, although plenty of his colleagues voiced concerns. As his biographer Jack El-Hai wrote, “Freeman made it plain that he found such ethical complaints a waste of time.” He refused to be deterred from his humanitarian mission.

…

If our forebears were transfixed by Freeman’s status as an eminent WASP, we have been bewitched by the social-justice messaging around gender-affirming care. We have heard, like Fox Varian’s mother, that if patients aren’t given access to these treatments, they will surely kill themselves. We have heard, too, that a failure to endorse this area of medicine betrays a lack of empathy for suffering patients. Some who raised concerns have been socially ostracized or forced out of their jobs.

Louise Perry

Too full of themselves

The most charitable gloss on the administration style—here we’re thinking of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s blithe announcement that he wants to cut defense spending 8% a year for the next five years—is that they’re simply riding high and have grown full of themselves, as opposed to clinically insane. The other day I remembered an old story about Muhammad Ali. The great boxer was flying to a championship bout, feeling on top of the world. As the plane taxied down the runway, a dutiful stewardess kept coming by: “Sir, please fasten your seat belt.” He smiled. “Superman don’t need no seat belt.” She said, “Superman don’t need no airplane. Buckle up.” And he did.

Peggy Noonan, A Stiff Drink from the Trump Fire Hose

The duopoly

So please, Democrats, look in the mirror and show a little humility. You’re not nearly as self-evidently wonderful or widely loved as you’d like to believe. You are not destined to prevail anywhere. You share a country with a large group of people who hate your guts, and who aren’t going to submit to your rule or go along with your giddy plans to remake the nation in your image. It’s time to start acting like you understand this implacable fact and all it implies about the limits of your power and the parameters of the possible.

American politics is a war of attrition right now. The sooner Democrats learn to live with that fact, the better.

Damon Linker, The left just got crushed (11/4/24)

I don’t think the Democrats have learned to live with that yet. They’ll never say “open borders” out loud, but I think they’ll re-open them again — wide open — if elected again in 2028. And that’s exactly the reason I don’t expect them to win in 2028.

The insanity of this duopoly makes me queasy, yet people keep on eating the sh*t sandwiches.

Shorts

There’s a kind of motion that passes for virtue now … We rarely admit how much of our “growth” is merely our ability to change surroundings faster than our interior life can catch us. (Steve Herrmann)
The algorithm isn’t a devil, but it disciples the same impulse: never remain long enough for silence to become revelation. (Steve Herrmann)
“Thoughts that can survive being written into words are on average truer than thoughts that never leave the mind. You know how you can find a leak in a tire by squirting dish soap on it and then looking for where the bubbles form? Writing is like squirting dish soap on an idea: it makes the holes obvious.” Adam Mastroianni via Frank Bruni.
Adjusting to retirement: “Am I lost, depressed or quietly content? Do I need to name what I feel or can I simply flow through these shifting states of emptiness and ease, confusion and calm, and call it life?” Mona Leano-Arindaeng via Frank Bruni.
If a wise man has an argument with a fool, the fool only rages and laughs, and there is no quiet. (Prov. 29:9)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Trump Announces May Event to “Rededicate America as One Nation Under God”
Trump ties Wilson for racism
National Prayer Breakfast
Remove Your Ring Camera With a Claw Hammer
The TPUSA Halftime Show (I knew next to nothing about Charlie Kirk before his murder. Would he have approved such an inchoate tribal gesture?)
Truth-telling in Congress
What’s Trump got over Gallup?
A victory of sorts

Sunday of the Prodigal Son

Today is the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, part of the Church’s preparation for Lent.

Hesitating at the threshold

During my years as an Orthodox priest, I have had visitors to my parish who sheepishly told me that they had visited for a number of weeks but had never gotten out of their cars. They came to Church, but could not go in. When I’ve been told such a thing, I understood that I was speaking with someone who had, at last, found the courage to cross the threshold, to take a step beyond the bulwark of unbelief and to risk an encounter with God. They already understood that the consequences of such an encounter would change their lives. That this has been a not uncommon story across the years speaks volumes to me about the perception of Orthodox Christianity.

In Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Mr. Beaver says this about Aslan (the Christ figure) when asked, ‘Is he safe?’:

“Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”

The great contradiction in Christianity is the claim that Jesus Christ was crucified, dead and buried, and has risen from the dead. It is a supernatural claim that echoes through every sentence of the New Testament. It was the contradiction voiced by every martyr standing before the flames, the sword, the lions, and every wicked form of torture. The tomb was empty. Christ rose from the dead…

“and was seen by Cephas [Peter], then by the twelve. After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. After that He was seen by James [the Brother of the Lord], then by all the apostles. Then last of all He was seen by me [Paul] also, as by one born out of due time.” (1 Corinthians 15:5–8)

The instinct within us that hungers for the transcendent is not a fluke nor a mistake. It is a whisper (or a shout) that calls us to stand face-to-face before the contradiction of our age. It says, “You are known. You are loved. You have purpose. You have meaning. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Fr. Stephen Freeman (bold added)

Jake sorta gets it

If you want people to be bewildered by church, then church needs to be weird in some way. It does not need to be weird in the way Shaw’s Orthodox parish is. But if church seems to consist largely in confirming people in their priors—either by an explicit endorsing of their political vision, as if Jesus shared their exact politics or through a consumeristic liturgy that is nearly indistinguishable from a fusion of concert and TED talk—then I suspect that even when a sincere seeker stumbles into our church, as Shaw did in his book, that seeker will not find anything that helps them to actually encounter Christ and grow into Christian maturity. The life of the church impedes the life of indulgent self-expression. And as Wendell Berry said long ago, it is the impeded stream that sings.

Jake Meador, reviewing Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild

As the White House tutors us about the “real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

Imperfectionism and more

Imperfectionism

This extract from my first book has been widely quoted over the years. And it helped launch a new approach to art—known today as imperfectionist aesthetics.

Imagine T.S. Eliot giving nightly poetry readings at which, rather than reciting set pieces, he was expected to create impromptu poems—different ones each night, sometimes recited at a fast clip; imagine giving Hitchcock or Fellini a handheld camera and asking them to film something—anything—at that very moment, without the benefits of script, crew, editing, or scoring; imagine Matisse or Dali giving nightly exhibitions of their skills—exhibitions at which paying audiences would watch them fill up canvas after canvas with paint, often with only two or three minutes devoted to each ‘masterpiece.’

These examples strike us as odd, perhaps even ridiculous, yet conditions such as these are precisely those under which the jazz musician operates night after night, years after year.

…

Imagine a computer that has been programmed to compose musical works in any style. Even if the computer produced works stylistically and qualitatively indistinguishable from Mozart’s, we would still be unwilling to consider them as comparable to the Austrian composer’s pieces. The two are incommensurable. Mozart’s works are artistic masterpieces, and the computer’s output, however admirable, is something else entirely. The latter’s perfection no more reflects on the composer’s art than the existence of motor boats affects our judgment of how difficult it is to swim across the English Channel.

Thus, not only is our interest in the human element in art a justifiable concern, it is in fact a necessary concern….Art, in the words of the great modern aesthetician Benedetto Croce, is “expressive activity,” and lives and dies by the success of that expression.

Ted Gioia, whose capacity to surprise me on a very wide range of issues makes his Substack one of my favorites. The title and topic of this one is My Warning About AI Music from 1988.

Ted’s brother is poet Dana Gioia. It would have been ever so interesting to be a fly on the wall of their childhood home.

What parties do

I know many Democrats consider it frustrating and fundamentally unfair that they struggle so badly in Senate contests—something that is likely to get worse over the coming years. But to treat this as a structural impediment to power is badly mistaken. It is only a structural impediment to power if Democrats assume the party’s current policy commitments and moral stances are set in stone, non-negotiable, incapable of adjustment for the sake of doing better in senatorial and presidential elections. But such adjustments are part of what parties do. The GOP, for example, is now competitive in ways that it wasn’t when Mitt Romney was the presidential nominee—because Donald Trump changed its policy commitments and moral stances and thereby began appealing to different groups of voters than those that had been voting for Republicans in recent, Reaganite decades.

Damon Linker

This was inevitable

When ideologues have medical licenses, or doctors get the impression that they could be the leading edge of the Next Big Thing, it’s a formula for trouble.

I saw this first development coming and probably wrote about it here. The second is important in helping establish the Standard of Care to which doctors will be held in malpractice cases:

The last week has seen two big developments in the debate over transing children. The first was a lawsuit that won $2 million in damages from a gender doctor for a rushed double mastectomy on a 16 year old. The second was the response to it: both the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the American Medical Association came out formally against “gender-affirming” surgery for minors.

That removes yet another argument made repeatedly by the queer groups: that every American medical association supports what is “settled science.” They don’t. And the science is obviously not settled. The lawsuit deals with one of the less concerning procedures: a mastectomy for a 16 year old. That’s nowhere near as irreversible as puberty blockers and cross sex hormones that alter your endocrine system for good, and after puberty, where most “gender affirming care” is focused on those about to enter puberty. But it’s a start.

The silence from the [LGB]TQ+ groups this past week — HRC, GLAAD, et al. — is also revealing. They hounded journalists who sought to pursue the story, and bullied countless others away from it. They called us bigots and transphobes for simple legitimate concerns about kids. And of course, they will never apologize or explain. Why should they? The one thing we know about the woke is they are never held accountable for the human wreckage they so blithely leave in their wake.

Andrew Sullivan, who of course is gay but has been rock solid on crazy transing of children and teens.

RD and JD are pretty much dead to me

[Vance is] relishing the opportunity to seem cold-blooded [over Pretti’s death], and from someone who pretends to be a pious Catholic toward a man whose death was mourned by the Catholic Church. … [He’s] a hollow shell of a man who defends the murderers of American citizens more vigorously than he has ever defended his own family from the bigots he’s trying to court for 2028. There has never been such a pathetic figure in public life.

Pedro L Gonzalez via Andrew Sullivan.

Were it not for a puff piece by Rod Dreher, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, his introduction to public life, would probably have continued its poor sales and Vance wouldn’t be Vice President today. Dreher and Vance became personal friends before Vance’s political career sort “took off,” if that’s what you call being Vice President under this dementing toxic narcissist.

Now one of the reasons I’ve stopped reading Dreher is his continued pretense that everything about Vance is perfectly normal. I understand not stabbing your friend in the back, but maybe you could just, like, shut up about him, y’know?

There was a time when Dreher knew better:

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher

Shorts

Chicago is where American stopped being Europe. (David Mamet)
[Y]ou can’t fully understand Trump’s approach to Ukraine without understanding his view of Canada (or Mexico or Greenland or Panama) — and vice versa. David French

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Retire These Words!

I never, ever want to hear the phrase “Trump derangement syndrome” again.

There is no derangement among those of us horrified by Trump. There never was. There was simply honest recognition of a spectacularly dishonest and disgraceful bully who showed his colors from the start, before his first election to the presidency, when he mocked John McCain’s years of confinement and torture as a prisoner of war, when he mused about some gun enthusiast taking a shot at Hillary Clinton … He was as ready then to lay waste to democratic traditions and institutions as he is now. He was the same aspiring autocrat, just with less practice and power.

“Derangement syndrome” itself should go away. It’s a glib, hyperbolic dismissal of substantive concerns. People on the right who repeatedly raised alarms about Biden’s cognition and health were accused of “Biden derangement syndrome,” but beneath the exaggerations and gracelessness in which some of them indulged were rational observations. “Derangement syndrome,” like so much else these days, shuts down meaningful debate, turning it into so much mud slinging.

With Trump, language has been challenging. There was the period of respectful, reflexive disinclination to use “lies” or “lying,” until the growing tower of euphemisms and synonyms toppled under its own absurdity. “Fascist” was a red line that’s now receiving something of a green light.

“Until recently, I resisted using the F-word to describe President Trump,” Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Atlantic about a week ago, later adding: “Reluctance to use the term has now become perverse. That is not because of any one or two things he and his administration have done but because of the totality. Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.”

How I wish I could label that assessment deranged.

Frank Bruni

Often I post things just because they’re interesting. Other times I post things to amplify them because I believe them. This post is one of those times.

I don’t expect ever to need to retract this. I can only hope that some day I can write “… but the American people finally got fed up and drove him from office.”

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher

Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee, 2026

Recommendation

Two guys who know what’s going on in Evangelicalism these days sat down for a chat a few months ago: Russell Moore and David French. I only heard it this past week, and it’s really awfully good. It’s available as a podcast as well as the linked YouTube video.

I’m used to David French as a legal and political commentator, but he’s a pretty darned good observer of his religious milieu — as, of course, is Russell Moore whose life work is pervasively religious.

Sizing things up realistically

On the one hand, I trust in God’s providence.

On the other hand, there was a whole lot about the America I grew up in, and worked in, that I’m going to miss now that it’s gone. I’m reminded of the Brit who said of losing the war something like “I should not be able to number all the things I would miss.”

Here comes the acid test of “I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”

Reading the Riot Act to Social Media “Theologians”

You have to accept that if you only know English and you can only read the Church Fathers and the Bible in translation, you at some point are going to have to … find someone who actually knows the original languages who you trust, and just believe them about what it says.

You don’t have to go learn those languages, but if you’re not going to go and learn those languages, you’re not entitled to an opinion on this … Shut up. Shut up on social media. Stop causing trouble. Stop trying to cause factions in the Church. That’s a sin. That’s a grievous sin … You have to learn before you can teach.

Stole Something? Kill a Goat!.

This blunt quote is directed particularly at Orthodox laymen who argue for substitutionary atonement based on reading the Church Fathers translated, in most instances, by Philip Schaff, a Calvinist Protestant. Substitutionary atonement (Christ in place of me) is not the position of the Orthodox Church (more like Christ on behalf of me — setting aside our different view of “atonement” itself).

But I’m confident that Orthodox Christians aren’t the only autodidact “theologians” quoting Church Fathers from Schaff. I own Schaff’s translations (as I did before becoming Orthodox, I believe). I honor his monumental work in translating so much. Heck, I even honor, in relative terms, the Mercerburg Theology with which he is associated. But I dare not trust him very far.

The least you can do

The man and woman cannot utterly sink who on every seventh day is obliged to appear in decent apparel, and to join with all the standing and respectability of the community in a united act of worship.

David Hacket Fischer, Albion’s Seed. I don’t recall who, or when, or in what region of America, Fischer was quoting, and it doesn’t seem worth looking up.

How do you measure comfort care?

Gonzalez is troubled to learn that the nuns “consistently fail to provide statistics on the efficacy of their work.” But there is no ready yardstick to measure the success of outreach programs to lepers. And how does one measure the efficacy of programs designed to comfort the dying?

Bill Donohue, Unmasking Mother Teresa’s Critics.

There are swaths of reality that are not susceptible to meaningful metrics and statistics. It’s prudent to ask for statistics on some things, yes, but monstrously reductionist to treat as some kind of scam the inability to produce statistics on other things.

Ecumenical Winter

The foremost divides in Western Christendom for some time fell along Protestant and Roman Catholic dividing lines, from the sixteenth century well through the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But today all Christians with even the most basic (creedal) orthodox theology and shared vision of human sexuality, the sanctity of life, and more find themselves as co-belligerents in a struggle with an inhumane and secularizing Western society and progressivist religion. There is far greater good will towards one another for that reason alone than there was in the past five centuries, culminating in cooperation such as Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Gone with the vanishing Protestant Mainline is the milquetoast ecumenism wherein “doctrine divides, service unites.” Here to stay is an emerging ecumenism where the things held in common run to the core of one’s commitments in life and in death.

Joshua Heavin, Confessional Protestantism in Ecumenical Winter

Ancillary reading

The first time I went to India, it was such a shock for me, the different culture, and everything was a new experience for me. I had so much to learn. The second time it was more like everyday life. The main thing I understood the second time was that I didn’t need as many things as I thought. Not at all. I could live with what I could carry in one backpack. With a family, I had thought I needed all that furniture and tables and kitchen equipment and washing machines and a vacuum cleaner. I realized I really can live simply. After that, I thought, I could live exactly this way anywhere.

Andy Courturier, The Abundance of Less

Highly recommended for seeing how life could be different without being worse. Like the Tao Te Ching (directly and through Christ The Eternal Tao), this book helped me see some things more vividly because of the foreign setting.