No kings!
Binding precedent
Protesters have protested at an ICE facility a few miles west of Chicago for the past 19 years—with somewhat more intensity recently following the announcement of Operation Midway Blitz. A month after the announcement, the president federalized the Illinois National Guard. District court: Enjoined. Seventh Circuit: Just so. Political opposition is not rebellion, and a protest doesn’t become a rebellion merely due to a few isolated incidents of violence. Without that, none of the statutory predicates for federalizing the National Guard have been met.
Institute for Justice, Short Circuits for 10/17/25 (bold added). This is now the law in the 7th U.S. Circuit – Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.
Look for the Administration to try to provoke a rebellion it can crush. Everyone who’s paying attention knows Trump wants to invoke the Insurrection Act (as he stuffs his pockets and those of his family).
Wanted: a viable counternarrative
Trump’s actions … are part of one project: creating a savage war of all against all and then using the presidency to profit and gain power from it. Trumpism can also be seen as a multipronged effort to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit—learning, compassion, science, the pursuit of justice—and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego, appetite. Trumpism is an attempt to make the world a playground for the rich and ruthless, so it seeks to dissolve the sinews of moral and legal restraint that make civilization decent.
…
Trumpism, like populism, is more than a set of policies—it’s a culture. Trump offers people a sense of belonging, an identity, status, self-respect, and a comprehensive political ethic. Populists are not trying to pass this or that law; they are altering the climate of the age. And Democrats think they can fight that by offering some tax credits?
To beat a social movement, you must build a counter social movement. And to do that, you need a different narrative about where we are and where we should be heading, a different set of values dictating what is admirable and what is disgraceful. If we fail to build such a movement, authoritarian strongmen around the globe will dominate indefinitely.
You can’t beat something with nothing. I can’t come up with a political counternarrative to Trumpism. The Democrats can’t come up with a political counternarrative, either. Brooks couldn’t come up with a strong political counternarrative.
I can only hope and pray that people will look for their compelling (counter-)narrative to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. (And that meantime there will be some legal counternarratives to prevent irretrievable damage, as in the preceding item.)
Music Reviews
There may be nothing better than old music reviews to let you know that it’s okay to like what you like, critics be damned.
I like Debussy’s La Mer, and I don’t care what the stupid early reviews said:
On today’s date in 1905, Claude Debussy’s orchestral suite La Mer or The Sea was performed for the first time in Paris. Today this music is regarded as an impressionistic masterpiece, but early audiences — especially those in America — found it rough sailing.
“We clung like a drowning man to a few fragments of the tonal wreck,” wrote a 1907 Boston critic, and suggested that instead of The Sea Debussy should have titled his piece Sea-Sickness.
“The Sea is persistently ugly,” wrote The New York Times that same year. “Debussy fails to give any impression of the sea … There is more of a barnyard cackle in it than anything else.”
And in 1909, this on La Mer from The Chicago Tribune: “It is safe to say that few understood what they heard and few heard anything they understood … There are no themes … There is nothing in the way of even a brief motif that can be grasped securely enough by the ear and brain to serve as a guiding line through the tonal maze. There is no end of queer and unusual effects, no end of harmonic complications and progressions that sound so hideously ugly.”
Ah, the perils of “modern music” in the early 20th century!
Giving the Devil his due, impressionism had to be a real mind-blower for critics attuned to, say, the sonata-allegro form.
Comprehensive tradition
We’re often not very aware of the “tradition” in which we live. A student in a classroom would readily agree that the words of a teacher or professor were a “traditioning” of sorts. But they will fail to notice that how the room is arranged, how the students sit, what the students wear (or don’t wear), how the professor is addressed, how students address one another, what questions are considered appropriate and what are not, and a whole world of unspoken, unwritten expectations are utterly required in the process. The modern world often imagines that “online” education is equivalent to classroom education since the goal is merely the transmission of information. But the transmission of information includes the process of acquiring the information and everything that surrounds it. Those receiving the “tradition” online will have perhaps similar information to those receiving it in a classroom – but they will not receive the same information.
Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Tradition of Being Human
Stages of life
Two questions:
- Do I want to read/watch/listen to this?
- Should I read/watch/listen to this?
When I was younger the second question often dominated my decision-making. Now that I am officially ancient that question has virtually disappeared and the first one is usually the only one I ask. That’s been the single most notable change in my personality in these my declining years.
Alan is a decade or more younger than me, yet I only very recently seem to have arrived at this point, especially regarding political matters.
Note that he’s talking about a change in personality. This isn’t a life rule. There are things that younger people should read/watch/listen to, in order to become well-formed human beings.
Two ways
[R]evival begins with the people proclaiming, by word and deed, “I have sinned.”
MAGA Christianity has a different message. It looks at American culture and declares, “You have sinned.”
Noteworthy
In the aftermath of Kirk’s murder, we witnessed young people at vigils rather than at “mostly peaceful” demonstrations.
We are all gatekeepers now.
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.
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.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 