Category: antisemitism

Thursday, 12/18/25

Quietly grassing up the neighbor

Of the Bondi Beach terrorist shootings by Muslim men Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram (unconfirmed by police at this writing) and the heroic intervention of one Ahmed al-Ahmed:

Let it be said, and said with firmness and gratitude, that a Muslim fruit seller named Ahmed al-Ahmed rushed one of the gunmen and disarmed him, saving Jewish lives and taking a couple of bullets himself for his trouble. May God bless that brave man. Here is video of him courageously tackling the gunman. This brings to mind something I was told back in 2002 by a Jewish friend who worked in counterterrorism. Be careful not to accuse every Muslim, she said. Some of our best sources are Muslims within Muslim communities who hate what they’re seeing, but know that if they speak out publicly against it, they will be killed. So they come to us quietly.

Rod Dreher

I wish we could figure out what makes many Muslims exemplary citizens, others murderous fanatics. Though I reject Islam as a false religion, I don’t want to think it’s simply that the former don’t take it seriously.

I have a theory, but it’s at a high enough level of generality that it’s not much use, I fear: that Islam, like Evangelicalism, has no authority beyond a sacred text, so Imams/Preachers can twist the text as they wish, limited only by what their congregants will tolerate.

The Other Terrorists

“Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years,” the Center for Strategic & International Studies concluded after examining terror plots in the United States from 1994 to May of this year. “Right-wing extremists perpetrated two-thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.”

Nicholas Kristof, The Lawbreakers Trump Loves (August 29, 2020)

AI moves fast, breaks things

A woman in a service industry, an immigrant to America from Eastern Europe who’s been here about 20 years, took me aside recently. Her eldest child, a senior in high school, is looking around at local colleges. She was worried about AI and asked for advice on what her son might study so that in four years he could get a job. We asked ChatGPT, which advised “embodied in-person work” such as heating and air conditioning technician, pool cleaner. She wasn’t happy with that. She’d worked herself to the bone to get her son higher in the world than she is. She wants him to own the pool.

Peggy Noonan, Trump may be losing his touch

Grievance Memoirs

Political memoirs tend to fall into recognizable categories.

There is the sanitized precampaign memoir, gauzy life stories mixed with vague policy projects and odes to American goodness. There is the postcampaign memoir, usually by the losers, assessing the strategy and sifting through the wreckage. There are memoirs by up and comers who dream of joining the arena and by aging politicos rewriting their careers once more before the obits start to land. There are memoirs by former staff members who realize that proximity to power gives them a good story and memoirs by journalists who chronicle power so closely that they imagine themselves its protagonists.

But a recent spate of books highlights the presence of a new category, one well suited to our time: the grievance memoir. In their books, Eric Trump (“Under Siege”), Karine Jean-Pierre (“Independent”) and Olivia Nuzzi (“American Canto”) are all outraged by affronts real and imagined, fixated on nefarious, often unspecified enemies, obsessed with “the narrative” over the facts and oblivious to their complicity in the conditions they decry.

The authors (a third child embracing on to his father’s legal and political grudges, a former White House press secretary groping for a new brand, a boutique political journalist enmeshed in a self-made scandal) are animated, above all, by a certainty that they’ve been wronged not just by people or institutions but also by broader forces. They are ancillary characters inflating themselves into victims, heroes, even symbols. It is the inevitable memoir style for a moment when everyone feels resentful, oppressed, overlooked — in a word, aggrieved.

Carlos Lozado (who’s famous among his New York Times colleagues as a voracious book-reader).

Add to Lozado’s list a longish article by Jacob Savage in Compact magazine, which Rod Dreher found “one of the most powerful essays I’ve read all year.” Its gist seems to be that straight, white, young men can’t catch a break any more – for reasons predating AI.

Ross Douthat thinks Savage has a point; that Douthat has an opinion suggests that Dreher isn’t just playing Chicken Little again.

I’m fortunate to be chronologically beyond gathering personal straight white male grievance anecdotes (and that my grandson is thrilled at, not resigned to, the prospect of a sort of Shop Class As Soulcraft career).

Are we the baddies?

Remizov and other conservative democrats complain that modern Western liberalism is in fact anti-democratic, as it tramples on national traditions and subordinates national authorities to international ones and to the impersonal forces of globalization.

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism. This book is pretty good at giving the gift to see ourselves as others see us.

When your only tool is anger, every little problem looks infuriating

Trump has never shined in moments that call for dignity and restraint … This is what makes Trump’s post about the Reiners not just despicable and cruel but also bad for the country. In moments of national mourning or trauma, a president can seek to bring people together … But not Trump. He finds the most divisive way to insert himself … His choices … take moments that could be unifying—surely Americans of all political views can agree on the greatness of When Harry Met Sally and The Princess Bride—and turn them into opportunities for anger.

Which is, in effect, Trump’s political project.

David Graham, Trump Blames Rob Reiner for His Own Murder

Shorts

  • I like ebooks because nobody can tell that I’m performative reading. (@restlesslens on micro.blog)
  • Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. (Gustave Flaubert)
  • Insofar is not the same as inasmuch, and I don’t know why the current style is to break the former into three words.
  • I remember mocking people for thinking the Covid vaccine was Bill Gates’ way of getting microchips into us. Hmmm.
  • This is the paradox of politics: Every time you solve a major problem, you’re removing a weapon from your political arsenal. (Peggy Noonan, Trump may be losing his touch)
  • If “TDS” is the tendency to become irrationally obsessed with Donald Trump and project that obsession onto everyone else, then somebody is indeed deranged, and it wasn’t Rob Reiner. (David Graham, Trump Blames Rob Reiner for His Own Murder.
  • A tool always implies at least one small story[:] There is a situation; something needs doing. (L.M. Sacasas)
  • Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it. (L.M. Sacasas)
  • After this awful weekend, Trump has once again lowered the bar for what we can expect from the president. (The Free Press, Mr. President, Don’t Mock the Dead)
  • The odds are good, but the goods are odd. (Advice given to incoming women at Georgia Tech).

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[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.

Nick Catoggio

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.

Saturday, 11/22/25

Postliberalism

Post-liberalism usefully refers to two distinct but overlapping tendencies: First, the rejection of the liberal consensus of the post-Cold War era, usually described as “neoliberalism” (another highly contested term), in favor of a more right-wing or left-wing politics that still probably belongs inside the liberal tradition. Second, a more root-and-branch rejection of the entire liberal order — often reaching back for inspiration to liberalism’s religious and reactionary critics, sometimes repurposing Marxist thought, sometimes looking ahead to a future that’s post-liberal because it’s post-human as well.

It makes sense to group these different ideas together under the rubric of post-liberalism for two reasons. First, they have gained ground collectively as a response to liberalism’s perceived crisis and amid a shared experience of destabilizing technological and cultural change. Second, thinkers and writers often move back and forth between “soft” and “hard” forms of post-liberalism, making definitions slippery even in individual cases.

…

Political post-liberalism, however, does not begin with post-liberal ideas. It begins with the inchoate populist revolts of the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, which precious few intellectuals anticipated, and it has taken various ad hoc and unstable forms since then.

Ross Douthat, What Is Post-Liberalism, Anyway? (shared link)

Of the travails at the Heritage Foundation

For those of you who don’t live your lives online, I perhaps should set this stage. Marcionite heretic Tucker Carlson a few weeks ago conducted a “softball interview” with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Then

the Heritage Foundation’s (of Project 2025 fame) president, Kevin Roberts, defended Carlson and took a swipe at Carlson’s “globalist” critics.

Cathy Young, The Alt-Right to Heritage Foundation Pipeline: a 10-Year Journey. Controversy ensued, and members of Heritage’s Board have resigned.

Stage now is set.

Sadly, the problem here goes beyond the bigotry of a few “influencers” or the flaws of specific leaders at Heritage and some other conservative institutions. Rather, as Kim Holmes put it, this is the predictable consequence of “replacing conservatism with nationalism.” A conservative movement that increasingly defines itself in ethno-nationalist terms as a protector of the supposed interests of America’s white Christian majority against immigrants and minority groups cannot readily avoid descending into anti-Semitism, as well.

Ilya Somin

I ❤️ Becket Fund

Colorado has repeatedly been rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court for its religious hostility …

Colorado officials have taken the position that Catholic preschools cannot ask families who want to enroll to support the Catholic Church’s teachings, including on issues related to sexuality and marriage. … But secular schools require similar alignment all the time: Many Montessori schools, for example, require parents who enroll to sign a statement agreeing to the school’s fundamental principles …

With the help of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the archdiocese and its parish preschools have been fighting against this religious bigotry in court.

Nicholas Reaves, Colorado Needs Another Schooling on Religious Freedom.

I’d give Becket a 90% chance of winning this. The key is that Colorado apparently has no problem with the cited practice of Montessori schools—a toleration that destroys it’s claim of neutrality when it forbids Catholic Preschools to do the same.

(The 10% chance of a loss comes from the possibility of courts reversing course.)

I didn’t intend to write about Jeffrey Epstein …

… but Peggy Noonan has brought a whiff of clarity into the miasma:

What the Epstein story is really about is unloved girls. It’s about the children in this country who aren’t taken care of, who are left to the mercy of the world. It’s about teenagers who come from a place where no one cared enough, was capable enough, was responsible and watched out for them. That’s how most of those girls wound up in a room with Jeffrey Epstein.

Here is what sexual abusers of children know: Nobody has this kid’s back. Mom’s distracted or does drugs, dad isn’t on the scene or doesn’t care. The kids are on their own. Predators can smell this, the undefended nature of their prey.

It’s what the Epstein indictment meant when it called the children “particularly vulnerable.”

It’s what Virginia Giuffre reports in her posthumously published memoir, “Nobody’s Girl.” She says she was sexually abused by her father starting at age 7, that she was later molested by a friend of her parents. She was a runaway at 14, lived on the streets and with foster families.

I think the Jeffrey Epstein obsession long ago ceased being good for anything and now has descended into something conspiratorial and a bit kinky. If I never see anything more about it, that would be good.

Somali thumb on the scale

Great news about autism: Looks like that spike in autism might just be Somali fraudsters gaming the system to siphon money to the al-Shabaab terrorist group back home.

At this point, I thought the author was insane, but then this:

Yes, today I bring you a City Journal article headlined: “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer.” A ton of Somali immigrants to Minnesota are gaming the autism diagnosis system and setting up fake treatment centers to get taxpayer cash. And a lot of it. From the article: “Autism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota have skyrocketed in recent years—from $3 million in 2018 to. . . $399 million in 2023.” Honestly, I’m not a taxpayer in Minnesota so this seems like a them problem. But I’m a worried mom, and I love hearing that autism rates are being inflated by scammers. We’re healthier than we thought. That’s great news.

Nellie Bowles

Faith and politics

[A] naked public square is a morally ignorant public square. American public debate was healthier and the conversation more profound when religious leaders like Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fulton Sheen brought their faith to bear on public questions. Today morality has been privatized and left up to the individual. The shared moral order is shredded, and many people, morally alone, have come to feel that their lives are meaningless.

…

My problem with the Kirk memorial service and all the conversation about his assassination generally is that many people seem to have no coherent idea about the proper relationship between faith and politics. In their minds, the two spheres seem all mixed together higgledy-piggledy.

One faith leader told my Times colleague Elizabeth Dias about a conversation she had had with Charlie Kirk, who told her, “I want to talk about spiritual things, and in order to do that, I have to enter the political arena.”

Why on earth would Kirk believe that?

As people eulogized Kirk, it was rarely clear if they were talking about the man who was trying to evangelize for Jesus or the one trying to elect Republicans. A spokesperson at Turning Point declared, “He confronted evil and proclaimed the truth and called us to repent and be saved.” Is that what Kirk was doing when arguing with college kids about tariffs?

…

What happens when people operate without any coherent theory of how religion should relate to politics?

First, people treat electoral politics as if it were a form of spiritual warfare …

Second, the process of moral formation is perverted …

Third, people develop an addiction to rapture …

The problem is that politics is prosaic. Deliberation and negotiation work best in a mood of moderation and equipoise. If you want to practice politics in the mood best suited for the altar call, you’re going to practice politics in a way that sends prudence out the window.

Fourth, a destructive kind of syncretism prevails. Syncretism is an ancient religious problem. It occurs when believers try to merge different kinds of faith. These days, it’s faith in Jesus and the faith in MAGA all cocktailed together. Syncretism politicizes and degrades faith and totalizes politics.

Fifth, it kicks up a lot of hypocrisy …

Finally, it causes people to underestimate the power of sin. The civil rights movement had a well-crafted theory of the relationship between religion and politics. The movement’s theology taught its members that they were themselves sinful and that they had to put restraints on their political action in order to guard against the sins of hatred, self-righteousness and the love of power. Without any such theory, MAGA imposes no restraints, and sin roams free.

David Brooks (gift link)

Shorts

  • “When you select for ‘fighters’ in your leadership, you’ll get leaders who treat politics as performance art.” Nick Catoggio
  • “Like ‘cancel culture’ not so long ago, post-liberalism has become a crucial signifier in our debates without anyone agreeing on what it actually describes.” Ross Douthat
  • “A solid gold toilet sold at Sotheby’s last night for $12.1 million—the winner narrowly outbidding the decorators at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” The Morning Dispatch
  • “[A] decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes ….” (If you don’t know the source of this, you might not be able to pass the current citizenship test.) Is it just me, or does our nation no longer have any respect for the opinions of mankind?
  • “The revolution always winds up eating its own, as Robespierre and Trotsky found out. Trump was the guy who let the lunatics out of the conservative asylum, Greene foremost among them. And now, no surprise, she’s turned on him.” (Bret Stephens)
  • “[I]t is now quite possible that the Republican Party could lose control of the House in part because the Trump administration was too incompetent to rig the [Texas] districts properly.” David French
  • The Guardian: January 6 Rioter Who Was Pardoned by Trump Arrested for Child Sexual Abuse

Elsewhere in the Tipsysphere

Monday, 11/17/25

It’s been a while since a non-Sunday post, so a few of these items may be a bit stale.

Heritage Foundation

Is the wind shifting?

Kevin Roberts, clutching Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson to his heart, walked into a buzzsaw. Despite back-tracking, the consequences may be getting even more consequential.

David French marks the occasion (gift link) and prognosticates:

“We will always defend truth,” Roberts said. “We will always defend America, and we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”

“That includes Tucker Carlson,” Roberts continued, “who remains — and as I have said before — always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail.”

It’s hard to overstate how much this approach tends to work in the modern Republican Party. The hatred of the left — and of conservatives who are critical of Donald Trump — is so overwhelming that even the most basic acts of moral hygiene are considered weak or woke, or worse.

Even if you are uncomfortable with the words or actions of your fellow Republicans, there is relentless pressure to swallow your tongue. There should be no enemies to your right. The left is the true existential threat to the United States.

Except suddenly it appears that enemies to the Right just might be permissible after all:

Readers might be a little bit stumped. Wait, this is what’s splitting the right? A podcast conversation? It’s not that dialogues like this don’t matter (they do), but after everything that America has seen and endured since 2015, why now?

For French’s conjectures on “why now?”, and his prognosis, follow the gift link above.

Forfeiting influence for clicks

Kevin D. Williamson was on fire Monday:

I would not say that Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation is an antisemite. He is arguably an apologist for antisemites. He is without question an apologist for apologists for antisemites. 

And, under his incompetent—I do not see how you could call it anything else at this point—leadership, Heritage has followed rage-addled small-dollar donors down to the bottom of the political gutter.

…

Beyond the moral repugnance that necessarily attends being an apologist for apologists for neo-Nazis, Heritage’s recent organizational trajectory also has been idiotic from a merely calculating point of view: Heritage has always had a more activist character than organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute or Cato (and I should note here that I am affiliated with the Competitive Enterprise Institute), but the point of being an activist organization is to influence outcomes, to push a party, a coalition, or a faction in a particular policy direction. Heritage has taken the opposite approach: It simply takes its marching orders from Donald Trump and then backfills in whatever arguments or analysis are necessary—which is to say, it does not use activism to shape outcomes but uses propaganda to further someone else’s agenda. Explaining his position on one of the great policy disputes of his time, William Jennings Bryan reportedly said: “The people of Nebraska are for free silver, so I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later.” Heritage has been demoted—by its own leadership—to the role of research assistant for the Trump administration.

…

It is not impossible to imagine an organization such as the Heritage Foundation trying to turn itself around, but Heritage will have the same problem as the Republican Party it serves: Recovering lost popularity or position is not the same thing as recovering lost credibility.

Immigration/Emigration

ICE

What do you do when you took a perfectly honorable government job but a new Administration turns it into a dishonorable spectacle?

Veteran ICE officials I spoke with view the use of masks as an unquestionably negative development. But most of them see an evil that is necessary.

The job, under Trump, has changed. Immigration enforcement has traditionally happened more quietly and administratively, in jails or at ICE check-in offices, where the work is more akin to case management. Trump officials ordered officers into the streets and pressured them to meet arrest quotas, while turning the job into a kind of public performance by bringing news cameras and the administration’s own film crews to make Department of Homeland Security propaganda videos. Activist groups and protesters record everything too, trailing the agents and officers with cellphone cameras, berating them and broadcasting the ugliest moments. Every encounter carries the risk of a viral interaction and online infamy that could lead to doxxing or something worse.

Nick Miroff, Why They Mask

It’s easy to say to confliced ICE agents “quit,” and some have done exactly that, but as a financially secure retiree, I try not to set myself up for “easy for you to say” rejoinders.

Seamless web redux

The holistic pro-life view doesn’t just ask, “Is a baby being harmed?” It asks, “Are people being harmed?”

David French

Greasing the Wheels

There is one aspect of living abroad that is rarely mentioned in travel books and completely ignored in the printed guides, even though it often causes more anxiety than any other. It is how to handle financial inducements. Everyone hears that if you expect services in countries around the Mediterranean you have to oil the wheels. This is not, we are told, immoral; it is simply a different way of doing things. But there’s a dearth of reliable information on how to set about it.

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul: Patmos.

Other

Porn

Don’t think that Nellie Bowles isn’t serious just because she’s funny:

Porn flood meets its first dam: People have finally figured out how to stymie online porn, and it’s with age verification. Because no one wants to upload a photo of their driver’s license to Pornhub, which most certainly will get hacked and leaked one day, and then your grubby paw holding that ID will certainly be online. Everyone knows this. And now we have the data: In the UK, website traffic to Pornhub is down 77 percent since the introduction of the age verification rule in July. Under the new Online Safety Act, anyone in the UK visiting pornographic sites now has to verify they’re over 18 through age checks.

I’m mixed here. As a freedom-loving, narc-hating American, I’m anti–age verification rules. I also think porn is neutering men and making them into eunuchs who can’t reproduce without Viagra, and I want to shake hands with whoever came up with this plan. I’m impressed by the efficacy of the anti-porn crusaders, but I fear the nanny state they portend. Just promise to keep to NSFW content, okay? Pornhub, the most-visited porn site in the world, reporting a 77 percent traffic reduction in Britain? One must admit, their trick works. The remaining 33 percent of Pornhub visitors—those brave British men who uploaded age verifications, proudly standing on their indecencies with legal identification, as if handing over to an officer their license, registration, and tighty-whities—are already lost to society. We don’t speak of them.

Adrift at sea with no populist panacea

Populists are destined to be bad at policy for the same reason they’re destined to be authoritarians, I think. They believe that social problems result from failures of will, not failures of imagination. If America is bedeviled by some ill, it’s not because the incentive structure created by policymakers to remediate it is flawed. It’s because policymakers lack the nerve to deter the villains behind the problem by inflicting enough pain on them to make them stop.

Through a populist lens, every complex problem is simple. According to progressives, for instance, the wealth we need to make America equitable and prosperous for all already exists. It’s just being hoarded by the rich. Muster the will to seize it, and our problems will supposedly be solved.

The right’s cultural populism is even simpler: Whatever the problem might be, the solution is to get rough. Deter drug dealing by blowing up boats in the Caribbean. Deter illegal immigration by letting ICE go rogue. Deter resistance to the administration by threatening critics or indicting them. Win wars by letting American soldiers commit war crimes. With enough ruthlessness, any impediment to asserting one’s will can be overcome with ease. It’s not a coincidence that Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination running on a message as elementary as “build the wall.”

You can understand, then, why the affordability crisis would leave him feeling at sea and sounding like a lost tourist. Unlike the type of cultural fracas in which he typically involves himself, it’s not a problem that lends itself to a dopey “get rough” solution. High grocery prices, expensive homes, and sky-high health insurance premiums are three complicated and distinct challenges, and Republicans don’t have the ideological luxury that Democrats do of shouting “tax the rich!” or “Medicare for all!” to address them.

Nick Catoggio

Last Chopper out of Nam

… married people watch gen z dating and feel like they caught the last chopper out of Nam ….

Leah Libresco Sargent, How to Fix Our Broken Dating Culture, in First Things, quoting someone else’s Tweet. Libresco Sargent has been on my radar for so long that it’s tempting just to call her “Leah.” She’s current on the book circuit with her The Dignity of Dependence and formerly wrote Arriving at Amen.

Infinite length, zero depth

When the Supreme Court announced a “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”, some thought it was rejecting the very idea of natural law. Really it was asserting a degenerate theory of natural law, one widely held in the culture—or at least in those parts of it which our controllers choose to recognize, such as law schools, abortion facilities, and liberal seminaries. It was propounding a universal moral right not to recognize the universal moral laws on which all rights depend. Such liberty has infinite length but zero depth.

J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know.

Losing focus

The Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice. Then It Tore Itself Apart. – The New York Times (gift link).

The problem is pretty clear, yet Sierra Club leadership persists in its folly.

There was a time I’d have felt schadenfreude over a story like this. But:

  1. My wife and I were members of Sierra Club for a number of years early in our marriage.
  2. We can ill afford the self-destruction of liberal-coded institutions when there’s a formidable and relatively cohesive MAGA movement.

Just as we need (at least) two healthy political parties (currently we have zero), so do we need healthy parapolitical institutions of various stripes.

What’s missing?

You might notice a paucity of stuff about Trump and Trumpism. I’m experimenting with moving that elsewhere, if not reducing the volume. As somebody told a preacher, “nobody gets saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.” I’ve preached for more than twenty minutes here.

As a consequence, I accidentally just kept adding items that weren’t TDS rage-bait until this unusually long big post had crept up on me.

I have posted these TDS-related items elsewhere:

  1. The Broken Windows Presidency
  2. Imagining Trump’s Brain
  3. I hadn’t heard this before

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[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.

Nick Catoggio

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.

Lil’ Nicky & The Groypers

Much ink has been spilled on the softball interview of Groyper-in-Chief Nick Fuentes by what-the-hell-do-you-call-him-these-days Tucker Carlson.

This post is entirely about that from various perspectives. If you’ve had enough of that, wait for my next post, coming soon.

Grifter?

I find it impossible to defend [him] against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclastic temperament.

William F. Buckley, said or written about Pat Buchanan.

Buckley was perhaps the foremost foe of antisemitism in conservative ranks from the 60s until his death.

There’s unfortunately a fresh need today for some policing of the ranks, but by whom, and how? Kevin D. Williamson sees the problem:

The times being what they are—and what they are is poisoned by social media, which has taken down all of the fences that once stood around mass imbecility—there is now another kind of antisemitism to take into account: digital, entrepreneurial antisemitism. There is a market for antisemitism, and there are careers to be had servicing that market. Nick Fuentes, who has recently been in the news, is an entrepreneurial antisemite. Tucker Carlson is another.

(Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation is a fool and a coward who wants to bank the profits of that antisemitism without taking any moral responsibility for it. With apologies to my friends who will be hurt by this: It is impossible for any self-respecting person to be associated with his Heritage Foundation.)

Kevin D. Williamson, The Antisemitism Grift.

“But isn’t that cancel culture?”, I seem to hear. Not according to a workable definition that I’m pretty sure comes from Williamson or his colleague Nick Catoggio. Paraphrasing, “Cancel culture” is an attempt to enforce a not-yet-existent consensus, to narrow the Overton Window; enforcing an existing consensus, like those against the Nazis and, yes, antisemitism, doesn’t qualify.

Charlie Kirk’s Successor?

I was disinclined to believe that Fuentes Is Becoming Charlie Kirk’s Successor, the explicit thesis of Michelle Goldberg’s Wednesday opinion piece at the New York Times.

Goldberg got my attention. As I suggested, it’s uncertain that anyone on the Right today has the stature and the will to decree a cordon sanitaire against the likes of Fuentes. This is no substitute for reading her whole piece, but I thought it framed the problem well:

Kirk, who came of age in the pre-Trump conservative movement, was still sometimes willing to police boundaries. But in the wake of his killing, there’s surprisingly little sense on the right that that part of his legacy should be upheld. Rather, prominent voices insist that Kirk’s murder necessitates the final loosening of all remaining restraints. “I cannot ‘unite’ with the left because they want me dead,” the influential podcaster Matt Walsh posted after Kirk’s death. “But I will unite with anyone on the right.”

Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard law professor who has helped create the intellectual foundation for the post-liberal right, put it more elegantly this weekend, as the fight over Carlson, Fuentes and Roberts roiled conservatives. “History records many cases in which cities fell to siege because, even with the enemy at the very gates, factions within the city could not put aside their mutual struggle for domination,” he wrote on social media. Lest there be any doubt about which factions he was scolding, he made it clear in a subsequent post: “I’ll be resolutely ignoring the views of those who profess a certain ‘conservatism’ but who have never actually challenged the liberal consensus on anything that might endanger their careers.”

Vermeule is a cultivated man who, as Field writes, is part of a movement that “thinks it has a monopoly on things like ‘the true, the good and the beautiful.’” Yet however lofty his rhetoric, its moral logic leads inexorably to Groyperism, and the elevation of Fuentes, Kirk’s foe, into his successor.

(Italics added)

Elsewhere in the Times, Ross Douthat chimes in on how to gatekeep against antisemitism in a digital age, with the case of Fuentes front and center. That’s an important question, but it feels to me as if Ross is a little more than a helpful start. For now, I can only heartily endorse two partial solutions:

  • Whatever share of Capitol Hill interns or think tank employees are actually Fuentes sympathizers, the institutional right must not permit radicalized junior staffers to steamroll or puppeteer their nominal superiors.
  • Create a zone where normal criticism of Israeli strategy is possible but clearly distinguish those normal debates from paranoid and antisemitic criticism.

Heritage Foundation (and the “intellectual energy” on the Right)

As for Kevin Roberts, can you guess how eager he’s been to have a hard conversation about January 6? I bet you can.

His tenure at Heritage mirrors the wider right’s hostility to dissent. A few days ago, Jonah Goldberg reminded us that Roberts’ organization is unusual among think tanks in insisting on a “one voice” policy that requires staff to “always publicly advocate for a single, unified position.” That is, not coincidentally, also how Donald Trump runs the GOP, ruthlessly “canceling” any party official who challenges his policies by threatening to fire them or primary them out of their job. But message discipline in a political party, particularly a highly authoritarian one, is to be expected.

In a think tank, whose experts should be having all sorts of interesting disagreements over law and policy, it’s downright weird. It should welcome illuminating “hard conversations” among its employees, and usually think tanks do—except for the Heritage Foundation, whose highest purpose under Roberts appears to be supplying ideological cover for Republicans’ drift toward Peronism.

Nick Catoggio.

Catoggio continues on the Right more generally:

[I]t’s no longer the Buckleyites who supply the right’s intellectual energy, such as it is. It’s postliberals like Adrian Vermeule, Curtis Yarvin, and Patrick Deneen. Carl Schmitt, not Antonin Scalia, is in vogue among new right legal thinkers. That’s what I meant when I said that Roberts’ quote is preposterous for more than one reason: When he calls on the conservative movement to have hard conversations about its direction, he’s implying that a “conservative” movement still meaningfully exists and that it retains the power to cancel postliberals if it so chooses.

It doesn’t. Rather the opposite: As Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Jeff Flake, and a gajillion other Reaganites might tell you, all of the canceling being done in the modern GOP is of conservatives by ascendant postliberals.

Finally, the “one voice” of Heritage Foundation checks in at the Wall Street Journal:

Your editorial “The New Right’s New Antisemites” (Nov. 3) gives the impression that the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, is an apologist for anti-Jewish hate or, worse, a promoter of it. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

In the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Heritage hosted one of the first public events to condemn the terrorism and the blatant antisemitism it unleashed. Shortly thereafter we created the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism to help coordinate the efforts of like-minded organizations.

In October 2024, we launched Project Esther, an initiative to combat antisemitism in the U.S. through legal and legislative remedies. This effort has found allies across the political spectrum and raised awareness among the general public and the Trump administration of the immediate threat that left-wing antisemitism poses to America’s Jews and the U.S.

Months later I published my book, “The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel and America Can Win,” a large portion of which is dedicated to this issue. Our three nonresident fellows live in Israel. The Davis Institute for National Security, which I lead, focuses on defeating antisemitism, as do our colleagues in the domestic-policy and legal departments.

Your editorial ignores this record, none of which would have been possible without the direct and enthusiastic support of Mr. Roberts. Many who have criticized him in recent days, moreover, have ignored his admission that his video supporting Tucker Carlson was a mistake that didn’t clearly articulate the institution’s rebuke of Holocaust deniers and antisemitism. Mr. Roberts has always given us the necessary resources to fulfil our mission and has participated in the work himself.

He isn’t antisemitic; nor does he tolerate anyone who is. Mr. Roberts is instead leading the conservative charge against this ancient bigotry: an insidious cancer that has degraded once-great societies and can’t be allowed to spread in America. All of us at Heritage look forward to continuing this fight under his direction.

Victoria Coates
Heritage Foundation

(Bold added)

UPDATE: The National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism has severed its ties to Heritage Foundation.

My thoughts

The absence of anyone with the stature to read Fuentes and/or Carlson out of the “conservative movement” suggests that Catoggio is right: the intellectual energy on the Right is now (currently?) postliberal, and if anyone is cancelled, it’s the “conservative movement” itself. Adrian Vermeule, for instance, has contemned any “conservative” who isn’t sufficiently bloody-minded:

History records many cases in which cities fell to siege because, even with the enemy at the very gates, factions within the city could not put aside their mutual struggle for domination,” he wrote on social media. Lest there be any doubt about which factions he was scolding, he made it clear in a subsequent post: “I’ll be resolutely ignoring the views of those who profess a certain ‘conservatism’ but who have never actually challenged the liberal consensus on anything that might endanger their careers.

That is very grim. I remain with the true conservatives, though I’ve finally, I think, gotten a handle on the grievances that gave rise to Trump and MAGA. Grievances generally don’t build anything worthwhile.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[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.

Nick Catoggio

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.

Dateline, Weimar America, 8/28/25

CrackerBarrelGate

This story strikes me as stupid, stupid, stupid. Here, through the voices of others, is why.

The chain was founded in 1969 — not 1776. It adopted the country branding because down-home cooking and folksy kitsch were trendy back then, not because they were trying to restore America to the Good Ole Days. Now, the market has moved on, and Cracker Barrel has been trying to adapt …

We have confused brands with moral values, and we demand to see our politics reflected everywhere, even in restaurant signage. We have also confused social media with social lives. And alone with our screens, too many of us have become addicted to rage, mashing the refresh button for the dopamine that rushes through us every time we discover that someone, somewhere, is wrong on the internet.

The addiction is so consuming that when no ready source of rage is available, we start cooking up our own out of whatever we can find in the cupboard. But if the cupboard is really this bare, I suggest people put down the phone and head to Cracker Barrel, rock themselves to serenity in the chairs on the porch, then head inside for a delicious helping of hashbrown casserole.

Megan McArdle

This, too:

The Cracker Barrel farce … is the first case of “cancel culture” I’m aware of in which the accusers couldn’t articulate why the accused was being canceled. 

Which was to their advantage, I think. An offender charged with a particular thoughtcrime can answer the charge but an offender charged with nothing in particular has little choice but to surrender. Which is what the company did on Tuesday.

…

Christopher Rufo, probably the New Right’s most influential culture warrior, admitted that he’s never set foot in the restaurant but declared war on it nonetheless in the name of making an example of any business “considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’”

“The Barrel must be broken,” he announced with no apparent irony. If a progressive culture warrior had said something as clownishly imperious, self-important, and Stalinist as that 10 years ago, right-wingers would still be making scornful jokes about it today.

Nick Catoggio.

In a Man-Bites-Dog story, Christopher Rufo recently wrote a little piece that was not knee-jerk shit-stirring! But this episode tells me he hasn’t really mended his ways.

I expect no better from Rufo, frankly, but Hillsdale College has no excuse — and no more respect from me, though I thought very highly of it ten years ago when it was, like I was and am, conservative, not Trumpist. (Two Hillsdale alums, who became expats for a while, were cool on their alma mater well before I was. I guess they read the signs: Hillsdale becoming a caricature of anti-woke education.)

Television rights, National rites

They will never do it, because it’s too tacky to bear, and they don’t need the money, but here’s an interesting thought exercise for media dorks: What would the price be if Swift and Kelce were to sell the live rights to their wedding for television? 

We know the NFL collects more than $110 million for a single playoff game—that’s what Peacock paid, and that was two whole years ago. Your standard live sports deal now hits 10 figures, easy. March Madness gets a billion annually to show college kids bricking 3-pointers. Paramount is set to pay more than $1 billion a year for humans pounding each other inside a steel cage.

A Swift-Kelce nuptial is bigger than all of that, mainly because of Swift, whose fame is vast and fierce, and if you don’t believe that, try criticizing one of her singles on Reddit sometime. There would be outrageous interest for both a live telecast and repeat viewing—you could do remixes, Taylor’s versions, on and on.

…

I think $500 million. That would be the absolute floor.

Jason Gay, Wall Street Journal

My better half wants a televised wedding opposite the State of the Union address, but that would reduce revenues quite a bit.

That is, I suppose it would reduce revenues. Who knows? I didn’t even know that Travis Kelce wasn’t a quarterback.

Nobel Laureate

FBI agents searched the Maryland home and Washington, D.C., office of former national security adviser John Bolton on Friday morning, reportedly as part of an investigation into his potential mishandling of classified documents. Bolton was not charged or detained during the operation. President Donald Trump—who revoked Bolton’s security clearance and Secret Service protection days into his second term—told reporters he had no prior knowledge of the searches but described Bolton, who has been a sharp critic of Trump in recent years, as “a real sort of a low life” and “not a smart guy.”

The Morning Dispatch

Congratulations, Mr. Bolton! Being described by Donald Trump as “a real sort of a low life” and “not a smart guy” is like winning a Nobel Prize for Integrity and Rectitude.

UPDATE: Even a blind pig finds the occasional acorn, or even a truffle: John Bolton Inquiry Eyes Emails Obtained by Foreign Government – The New York Times. So maybe Bolton actually, technically kinda broke a law. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” (Lavrentiy Beria, Soviet secret police chief).

The most miserable habitation in the world

The fundamental structural problem of our government during the Trump administrations is this: our constitution assumed the George Washington was President. It assumed that our high officials would be men of high character, virtuous men. It assumed that of the American people as well.

So John Adams was dead right in this quote, the last sentences of which are fairly well-known:

While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Adams, October 11, 1798

This President of the United States is not a virtuous man, but a vicious one. Empowered by shrewd and evil advisors (no more “adults in the room”) and motivated by avarice, ambition, and revenge, he is the whale breaking through the net, pushing the “unitary executive theory” (which wouldn’t be a problem were George Washington President) to the breaking point, turning the Department of Justice into the Department of Revenge and now trying to take over the Federal Reserve System – the better to blow a bubble from the bursting of which we may never recover.

I’m not going to resume lamenting what else bothers me about this administration (David French has some of the receipts), but I thought the fundamental problem, though it is not my original insight, might be helpful to pass along.

Do we have any reason to hope that men and women of high virtue will fill the Oval Office and Congress come 2029?

To be a conservative in 2025 …

To be a conservative in 2025 is to be politically homeless—but perhaps not entirely politically friendless.

…

At home, the party of Donald Trump—the party of J.D. Vance and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Tucker Carlson, not to mention supposed normies such as Mike Pence, et al.—currently is engaged in answering a question I hadn’t thought anyone was asking: “What would national socialism look like if antisemitism were less of a political priority?”

Kevin D. Williamson

Apropos of the first paragraph, the bulk of Williamson’s column is about how liberals-in-the-American-polarity-sense are starting to discover some timeless truths that just might allow conservatives to become allies if not intimates.

On that lone hopeful note, adieu!

Nick Catoggio:

[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 social medium.

Pure politics, 6/5/25

The Courts

Petulant Trump disavows his signature success (1)

Mr. Trump lashed out at the Federalist Society, blaming it for bad advice on whom to appoint to judgeships. He singled out Leonard Leo, a former longtime leader of the Federalist Society who helped recommend his first-term nominees and who exemplifies the conservative legal movement.

“I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use the Federalist Society as a recommending source on judges,” the president wrote. “I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.”

Mr. Leo and Mr. Trump had a falling out in 2020, but the personal attack was a sharp escalation. In a statement, Mr. Leo said, “I’m very grateful for President Trump transforming the federal courts, and it was a privilege being involved.”

Still, Mr. Trump’s tirade strained an already uneasy relationship with traditional legal conservatives.

Many share the president’s goals of strengthening border security, curbing the administrative state and ending “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs, said John Yoo, a conservative law professor. But, he added, they dislike some of Mr. Trump’s methods, whether that is prolifically invoking emergency powers or insulting judges who rule against his administration.

And Professor Yoo, who wrote memos advancing sweeping theories of presidential power as a Bush administration lawyer, said Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Leo were “outrageous.”

“Calling for the impeachment of judges, attacking Leonard Leo personally and basically calling him as traitor as far as I can tell — Trump is basically turning his back on one of his biggest achievements of his first term,” he added, referring to the reshaping of the federal judiciary.

Charlie Savage, Trump, Bashing the Federalist Society, Asserts Autonomy on Judge Picks

For what it’s worth, Trump’s pledge to appoint federal judges from a list compiled by Leonard Leo (not the Federalist Society, which doesn’t do endorsements) was pivotal to his 2016 Election victory, especially among abortion foes who understandably did not trust a twice-divorced narcissist playboy with gambling and porn connections. Charlie Savage hasn’t forgotten that, but I shouldn’t quote his whole article.

If the Senate has a couple of Republicans with integrity, hack appointees like Emil Bove will not be confirmed. C’mon, guys! Save him from himself!

Petulant Trump disavows his signature success (2)

There are many stories in literature about people making deals with the devil. Weirdly, in most of them the devil is a square dealer.

That is, he keeps up his end of the bargain. He offers the protagonist wealth or power in exchange for something ethereal, like their immortal soul, and when they agree he delivers. The Prince of Lies turns out not to be a swindler. Most of the drama happens after he makes good on his promise and comes to collect.

The moral of those stories isn’t that you’re a fool to trade with Beelzebub because you’ll be cheated. It’s that you’re a fool to sacrifice your noblest self for something as fleeting as worldly power.

Conservatives made a deal like that in 2016. Donald Trump offered to stock the federal judiciary with their favorite judges, beginning with the vacancy left by Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court; in return they would set aside their moral, civic, and ideological objections to him and support him in virtually anything he wanted to do, even if it affronted their conservative beliefs. Or basic decency.

The bargain was struck—and he delivered. Three eminent conservative jurists were added to the Supreme Court. Hundreds more were confirmed to federal appellate and district courts. The great white whale of social conservatism, Roe v. Wade, was harpooned in 2022 after a 50-year chase. Many other landmark legal victories for the American right have accumulated since Trump took office in 2017.

Conservatives weren’t cheated. The devil made good.

Fast-forward to last night …

[Leonard] Leo spent many years as the Federalist Society’s sherpa on judicial nominees, advising Republican presidents on whom to appoint and helping to shepherd candidates through the confirmation process. With the exception of Mitch McConnell, no one has done more this century to build a federal bench of originalist judges. But Trump didn’t want originalists—he wanted flunkies—and so Leo’s influence, and the influence of the organization he serves, have gone up in smoke …

Conservatives got the judiciary they wanted in exchange for supporting a man who radiates contempt for the constitutional order. In doing so, they empowered a postliberal movement that despises judges who do their jobs conscientiously instead of dutifully midwifing a Trumpist autocracy. As the Republican Party proceeds further down the path to fascism that those conservatives enabled, eventually the federal judiciary will consist entirely of believers in the “living Constitution,” half authoritarian and half progressive. In the long run, as Reaganites age out and are replaced by younger Trumpists, conservative judges as we’ve known them will go mostly extinct.

That’s what conservatives got for their bargain. The devil has come to collect.

Nick Catoggio

Pardons

The concept of a pardon, of course, is extremely hard for Trump to understand. Traditionally, a pardon is due to someone who has completed (or nearly completed) their sentence, expressed remorse, and turned their life around — and thereby been the recipient of mercy. But remorse is a concept unknown to a pathological narcissist. Mercy is even stranger. After all, who wins and who loses in an act of mercy? It’s one of those acts defined by grace — another literally meaningless concept for Trump. For him, all human conduct is built on a zero-sum, winner-vs-loser foundation. So a pardon is always instrumental — a way to reward allies, win credits, and enlarge his power by announcing to the world that he alone is the ultimate rule of law, and can intervene at any point to ensure his version of justice is the dispositive one. A monarch, in other words.

…

But Trump is the real outlier (and Biden, in his defense, used Trump’s abuse as a justification for his own self-dealing). In recent times he’s out in front in numbers: more than 1,700 full pardons so far, and we have three-and-a-half years to go. Nixon’s 863, Carter’s 574, Clinton’s 396, W’s 189, and Obama’s 212 put it in perspective. But these previous presidents abused the power occasionally — it’s an absolute power after all — while largely respecting the contours of the rule of law.

Trump has dispensed with any pretense of that. He is an instinctual tyrant — see his immigration overreach and his unilateral tariff mania — and the pardon power was almost made for him. The weakness of any constitution is the virtue — or, more often, the lack of it — in its office-holders. And Trump has the civic virtue of Jeffrey Epstein. The pardon power was always going to be a loaded gun in his tiny, careless hands.

… [H]e is using the pardon power all the time, rather than waiting till the end of his term. It replaces the rule of law with monarchical discretion. That’s why he could not tolerate Jeff Sessions all those years ago. Because Sessions, for all his passionate partisanship, still understood the system he was operating in and still believed that the appearance of impartial justice was integral to liberal democracy’s survival. Sessions was an American.

…

A majority of the American electorate, mind you, endorsed this lawlessness last November. It’s hard to pity them, as they absorb or ignore all the corruption they voted for and are still content to tolerate. They love crypto-monarchy as long as their king is on the throne. They do not seem to understand that this version of monarchy is still an elected one, and that another king from the other tribe may wear the crown some day. They may miss the benefits of liberal democracy once they have succeeded in killing it.

Andrew Sullivan, Pardon The Death Of Liberal Democracy

TACO

I’m not an active investor. I tend to buy and hold Mutual Funds and ETFs. (That’s just me; you do you.) But it did not escape my notice, even before the term was coined, that what’s now dubbed “TACO trades” could be profitable.

Wall Street is all over the “TACO trade,” another instance of people realizing they shouldn’t take the president at face value. “TACO” is short for “Trump always chickens out.” Markets have tended to go down when Trump announces new tariffs, but investors have recognized that a lot of this is bluffing, so they’re buying the dip and then profiting off the inevitable rally.

A reporter asked Trump about the expression on Wednesday, and he was furious. “I chicken out? I’ve never heard that,” he said. “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.” The reaction demonstrates that the traders are right, because—to mix zoological metaphors—a hit dog will holler. The White House keeps talking tough about levying new tariffs on friends and geopolitical rivals alike, but Trump has frequently gone on to lower the measures or delay them for weeks or months.

Foreign leaders had figured out that Trump was a pushover by May 2017, and a year later, I laid out in detail his pattern of nearly always folding. He’s a desirable negotiating foil, despite his unpredictable nature, because he doesn’t tend to know his material well, has a short attention span, and can be easily manipulated by flattery. The remarkable thing is that it’s taken this long for Wall Street to catch on.

David A. Graham, The TACO Presidency

Now that the cat’s out of the bag, the profitability will diminish and what’s left will mostly be the pleasure of annoying Velveeta Voldemort.

The most incompetent administration ever

A federal appeals panel ordered officials not to deport a 31-year-old to El Salvador. Minutes later, it happened anyway. The government blamed “administrative errors.”

Alan Feuer, NYT

Will Trump pay any price for this fishy string of “administrative errors”?

Among his voters, I doubt it. But with the courts, the toll is steep and rising. They just cannot believe anything Administration lawyers promise. And they shouldn’t.

DJT, the anti-conservative

[I]t’s hard to think of a more anti-conservative figure than President Donald Trump or a more anti-conservative movement than MAGA. Trump and his supporters evince a disdain for laws, procedures, and the Constitution. They want to empower the federal government in order to turn it into an instrument of brute force that can be used to reward allies and destroy opponents.

Trump and his administration have abolished agencies and imposed sweeping tariffs even when they don’t have the legal authority to do so. They are deporting people without due process. Top aides are floating the idea of suspending the writ of habeas corpus, one of the most important constitutional protections against unlawful detention. Judges, who are the target of threats from the president, fear for their safety. So do the very few Republicans who are willing to assert their independence from Trump.

In one of his first official acts, Trump granted clemency to more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those convicted of seditious conspiracy. The president and his family are engaging in a level of corruption that was previously unfathomable. And he and his administration have shown no qualms about using the federal government to target private companies, law firms, and universities; suing news organizations for baseless reasons; and ordering criminal probes into former administration officials who criticized Trump.

The Trump administration is a thugocracy, and the Republican Party he controls supports him each step of the way. Almost every principle to which Republicans once professed fealty has been jettisoned. The party is now devoted to the abuse of power and to vengeance.

…

The significance of this shift can hardly be overstated. A party that formerly proclaimed allegiance to the Constitution and the rule of law, warned about the concentration and abuse of power, and championed virtue, restraint, and moral formation has been transmogrified. The Republican Party now stands for everything it once loathed.

Peter Wehner

Thugocracy update

And she has been frank about the dilemma faced by Republicans like her who are dismayed about the president’s policies and pronouncements but worried that speaking out about them could bring death threats or worse.

“We are all afraid,” she told constituents in April, adding: “I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”

Catie Edmondson, Lisa Murkowski Isn’t Using ‘Nice Words’ About Life Under Trump

I do acknowledge threats against Trump’s life, too. Several isolated nuts have been arrested and charged. But it seems to me that a President and his supporters holding Congress hostage for fear of their lives is an order of magnitude worse.

No laughing matter

Next month will be the first anniversary of Tim Walz’s branding of Donald Trump, JD Vance and, by implication, some of their political associates as “weird,” and it’s obvious now that Walz spoke too soon, before Trump won in November and his administration turned weirdness into a credential and an operating principle, before weirdness started afflicting Trump allies who seemed a little less weird in the past, before episodes of Trump-adjacent weirdness proliferated.

… [T]his pageant of peculiarity isn’t a laughing matter. It reflects Trump’s confusion of nonconformity with boldness. It speaks to his love of performance, even if it’s the fruit of a loopy performer. It demonstrates his desire to rattle, no matter how infantile the rattling.

Frank Bruni

Same column, change of topic:

If I’m subjected to one more lamentation, one more rant, about how lost and pitiable and shameful the Democratic Party is, my head is going to explode. Not because the Democratic Party is in good shape — it isn’t. Not because it can make do with only minor adjustments — it can’t. It’s guilty of the arrogance and incompetence of which it’s accused. And the country’s future as a reasonably healthy and prosperous democracy depends on Democrats’ recognition and remedy of that.

But some of the extravagant lashing of the party carries the implicit suggestion that Republicans, by contrast, have their act together. Excuse me? If success at the polls is the only metric for that, then sure, yes, they’re in an enviable spot. But it’s a wretched (and, I have to believe, vulnerable) one. Republican lawmakers who rightly gaped in horror at the events of Jan. 6, 2021, later developed collective amnesia, putting power several light-years above principle. They then indulged or outright applauded Trump’s laughable cabinet picks and his adoration of Musk and his cockamamie tariffs and his abandonment of due process and his swag from Qatar and his sadistic humiliation of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and so many other cruelties and outrages that this sentence could go on forever. I struggle to admire Republicans’ political chops. I’m too distracted by their moral rot.

For love of sentences

In Esquire, Dave Holmes marveled at Senator Lindsey Graham’s suggestion, in a social media post before the conclave, that cardinals consider the idea of Trump as the next pope: “I guess he had not yet closed the day’s humiliation ring on his Apple Watch.” Holmes added that while Graham was probably joking, “You can’t be tongue-in-cheek when you are actively licking the boot. There is just not enough tongue for both jobs.” (Susan Fitzgerald, Las Cruces, N.M.)

Frank Bruni (a prior week)

Dissing the Dems

I confess that my laser-focus on Trump can sound like excusing the Democrats’ problems. It really isn’t. I’m just madder at my former party than at the I party whose Presidential nominee I voted for only once, 53 years ago.

An Andrew Sullivan podcast this week with the authors of Original Sin reminded me of just how screwed we are in the other of our major-party choices, the Dems, and how Joe Biden fooled me with his “nice guy” schtick. Though I didn’t vote for him, I would have done so if my fair state hadn’t been a lock for Trump.

Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is the tribute paid to virtue by vice.

I will give Trump 2.0 credit for not adding hypocrisy to its countless other sins.

On second thought, his attacks on Ivy League universities for suffering antisemites gladly may qualify.

The best jokes

It has been said that the best jokes are dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

On Wednesday, a dangerous joke was told in the Oval Office. The South African president turned to the American president and said: “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.”

NYT

FWIW

  • Trump lost 96% of federal court cases in May. Even GOP-appointed judges ruled against him 72% of the time,” – Jack Hopkins.
  • “The Washington Post has now confirmed that it was Trump who asked the Qataris to gift him the plane for free (rather than the Qataris offering it), and that Qatar is demanding a written memo from the White House to this effect before the deal is finalized,” – Tom Malinowski.

Andrew Sullivan, Pardon The Death Of Liberal Democracy

PBS

… and by the numbers 86 and 47.

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?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks)

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 social medium. I am now exploring Radiopaper.com as well.

May 9, 2025

Trump, Trumpism

Two Americas in a nutshell

America continues divided into two groups. One thinks, “He is something that happened to us.” The tone is shocked, still, and bewildered: Did I live in this country all this time and not understand it? The other thinks, “He is something we did.” The tone is pride and, still, surprise: I didn’t know we could seize things back.

Peggy Noonan

Ends and means

How can it be wrong when it feels so right?

I’ve now listened to two podcasts in which journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon defends Trump.

I don’t think she really believes it. Some verbal tics when challenged suggest she doesn’t really believe it (notably, her repeated retreats into “I’m just a journalist explaining why people like him” when that’s plainly false). I suspect she has just found a niche (Center-Left Journalist Becomes Ardent Trump Defender!) that gets attention.

But whether or not she believes it, most of it is gibberish, nonsense-on-stilts — and it ignores Trump’s norm-breaking, due process and other constitutional violations, focusing on the (supposed) policy goals which (refrain) 80% of voters want, so they’re entitled to it immediately.

Well no, they’re not necessarily entitled to it at all, let alone immediately. The Constitution of the United States is deliberately counter-majoritarian in several of its structural provisions (e.g., the Electoral College and the Senate) and even more of the Bill of Rights.

Even the “right” policy, if executed unconstitutionally, is wrong.

I’m resolved not to inflict Batya Ungar-Sargon on myself again. She’s a vexation to my soul. But I’m still waiting for a coherent defense of Trump. Surely I’m missing something.

Conservative critics of Trumpism

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about being a conservative critic of Trumpism is that you often start by agreeing with Trumpworld about ends while disagreeing about means.

This pleases nobody. The left, broadly speaking, considers the ends as illegitimate as the means, and the pro-Trump right thinks that if you’re against the means you really don’t desire the ends. I’m against the abuse of power, even for my own “side.”

Jonah Goldberg, Right Ends, Wrong Means

Gangster government

When Amazon reportedly considered displaying the added cost of tariffs on the price of items, Trump was furious. Here’s what an official anonymously told CNN: “Of course he was pissed. Why should a multibillion-dollar company pass off costs to consumers?” Fascinating. This is like when socialists, during the pandemic inflation, were talking about how greedy grocery store owners were to let prices go up. This is so phenomenally economically illiterate. Their argument is that Amazon should absorb the cost of the tariffs? What they really want is for Amazon not to point the tariffs out.

So Trump called Jeff Bezos, perhaps threatening to use the full weight of the U.S. government to make his life miserable (though Trump later described him as a “good guy” and said that Bezos “solved the problem very quickly.”). Amazon then told CNN “this was never approved and [was] not going to happen.” Right. . . so we’re in a gangster government now. The White House will personally target you if you don’t comply with their harebrained schemes. That’s a nice logistics and web services company you got there, Jeff, would be a real shame if the U.S. government went after it. Even Jeff Bezos—a man who is flying ladies to space for fun—caved. Our gangster government means conservative values are whatever Trumpo says they are, capisce? And Trumpo says it’s tariffs—or your other option is to buy $MELANIA coin, do you hear me? [Knee digs deeper into neck.] Am I not being clear, Jeff? Do I gotta enunciate more, Jeff?

Speaking of gangsters, a new private club for MAGA has launched in D.C. It’s called Executive Branch, and the membership fee is $500,000. Well, do you want your corporate merger approved or not?

Nellie Bowles

The great film menace

Of Trump’s Tweeted Truthed declaration Sunday, declaring that foreign flicks are a National Security threat and authorizing institution of “a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” (Since when do we tariff national security threats, by the way!?)

Hollywood and its foreign counterparts are “reeling” today from Sunday’s post, with studio executives reportedly convening emergency calls to plot a way forward financially. Billions of dollars and countless jobs here and abroad will turn on a random thought that the president had, one which he may or may not lift a finger to follow through on … We’re all living in a demented baby boomer’s endless nostalgia trip.

Nick Catoggio (emphasis added).

It never was about antisemitism

What you will not find in the [Secretary of Education Linda] McMahon letter [to Harvard] is any mention of the original justification for the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on elite universities: anti-Semitism. As a legal pretext for trying to financially hobble the Ivy League, anti-Semitism had some strategic merit. Many students and faculty justifiably feel that these schools failed to take harassment of Jews seriously enough during the protests that erupted after the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. By centering its critique on that issue, the administration was cannily appropriating for its own ends one of the progressive left’s highest priorities: protecting a minority from hostile acts.

Now, however, the mask is off. Aside from one oblique reference to congressional hearings about anti-Semitism (“the great work of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik”), the letter is silent on the subject. The administration is no longer pretending that it is standing up for Jewish students. The project has been revealed for what it is: an effort to punish liberal institutions for the crime of being liberal.

Rose Horowitch, Trump Finally Drops the Anti-Semitism Pretext

Crypto

Were I not already leery of cryptocurrency as a scam, Trump’s creation of a même-coin on the cusp of his second term, and the way it’s being openly used to buy access to him (putting untold millions of actual U.S. dollars into his pockets), would have made me leery.

Another impeachable offense (foreign emoluments clause, for instance), but I’m pissing into the wind to note that.

Congress’ default

Congress is not doing its job, and the vacuum that its dereliction has created is encouraging presidential and judicial overreach. Congress’s weakness is our deepest constitutional problem, because it is not a function of one man’s whims and won’t pass with one administration’s term. It is an institutional dynamic that has disordered our politics for a generation. It results from choices that members of Congress have made, and only those members can improve the situation. It is hard to imagine any meaningful constitutional renewal in America unless they do.

…

[Newt] Gingrich advanced an almost-parliamentary model of the House of Representatives. He empowered the speaker and majority leader at the expense of the policy-focused committees, and set in motion a process that robbed most members of the opportunity for meaningful legislative work. His moves dramatically accelerated what was by then a 20-year trend toward the centralization of authority in the hands of congressional leaders. House leaders of both parties have pushed further in that direction in this century, and the Senate has largely followed suit. These efforts were intended to make Congress more effective, but in practice, they rendered most legislators almost irrelevant.

As a result, many ambitious members of Congress have concluded that their path to prominence must run not through policy expertise and bargaining in committees but through political performance art on social media and punditry on cable news. Our broader political culture has pushed in the same direction, encouraging performative partisanship. And the narrowing of congressional majorities has put a premium on party loyalty, further empowering leaders, and leaving many members wary of the cross-partisan bargaining that is the essence of legislative work.

…

In his first 100 days, Donald Trump signed only five bills into law—fewer than any other modern president. In a period rife with constitutional conflict in Washington, the first branch has done essentially nothing.

Yuval Levin

Since Levin wrote this, Congress has gotten on the stick by passing the vital bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico. Marjorie Taylor Greene led the charge. And if that’s not serious enough for you, you’re probably out of luck.

Excerpts from Sully

  • “The Trump admin was about to send a former POLICE OFFICER to be imprisoned in El Salvador without trial because an ICE officer looked at his social media and said his ‘hand gestures’ meant he was a gang member,” – Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.
  • Bonus track (Not Suitable For Work) about the decor of the Trump Oval Office.

Andrew Sullivan

Without Comment

Other stuff

Transing the gay away isn’t entirely new

“It is of interest to note that [the patient’s family] were all reassured to discover that George was not a homosexual. The diagnosis of ‘transexual’ provided an explanation for his feminine behavior and was, especially for the parents, psychologically relieving,” – a 1970 report on teen transition..

Andrew Sullivan

Sports stadiums, data servers, and other boondoggles

Writing in Reason, Marc Oestreich explores what data server farms and new sports stadiums have in common. “The recent announcement that Microsoft is investing over a billion dollars into a vast new data center campus in La Porte, [ Indiana], is expected to be transformational for the town of 22,000 people. Microsoft was given a 40-year tax abatement on equipment, a renewable state sales tax exemption through 2068, and just $2.5 million of payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT) over four years—roughly 30 percent of what it would normally owe. After that? Nothing. Local utilities would cover the infrastructure.” For Oestreich, this sounds familiar. “Just 60 miles up the toll road sits Soldier Field, home of the Chicago Bears. The stadium’s 2002 post-modern renovation cost $587 million, $387 million of which was shouldered by taxpayers. Two decades and two dozen quarterbacks later, Chicago only has $640 million (thanks to $256 million in interest) left to pay,” Oestreich writes. “Today’s stadium boondoggle is a server farm … The sales pitch is nearly identical to the stadium era: ‘It’ll create jobs. It’ll put us on the map. It’s worth the investment.’”

The Dispatch

NYT stylesheet

A friend drew my attention to a January 21, 2025 article in the New York Times. The topic was the Trump administration’s effort to limit the scope of birthright citizenship, the constitutional provision that accords citizenship to anyone born in the United States. The article’s title: “Undocumented Women Ask: Will My Unborn Child be a Citizen?” When the issue is abortion, the New York Times would never dream of referring to an “unborn child.” Apparently, that editorial discretion falls away when illegal immigration is under discussion.

R.R. Reno (hyperlink added)

Datapoint

College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point.

Quoted in the Dispatch from a New York Magazine article.

A lighter note

We have seen some of the most grotesque costumes, along the line of the railroad, that can be imagined. I am glad that no possible combination of words could describe them, for I might then be foolish enough to attempt it.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

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?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Thursday, 9/5/24

Culture

A key moment in modernity

One of the key moments in the creation of modernity occurs when production moves outside the household. So long as productive work occurs within the structure of households, it is easy and right to understand that work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of those wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains. As, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Why essays?

Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind … certain images in advance and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead (emphasis added)

Interrogating “Self-expression”

[A]lthough everything we do is self-expression, we normally describe an action as self-expression only to say “this is good.” Used that way, the term is powerful. For example, foul pictures and language weren’t formerly counted as free speech because they didn’t communicate ideas and arguments. Today, though, they are counted as free speech, just because we say they “express” the “self.” And of course, logically, they do. If I spout a stream of profanities, I may be expressing nothing more of myself than an urge to blow off steam. But I may also be divulging my desire for attention, my craving to sound tough, my enjoyment of filthiness, or even my inability to express a cogent argument.

But why should the term “self-expression” have such power to connect itself with our approval? Probably for at least two reasons. The first is that the idea of expressing ourselves validates our narcissism. The second is that it shields us from criticism.

J Budziszewski

Modern finance is a shell-game

John Lanchester:

Lending money where it’s needed is what the modern form of finance, for the most part, does not do. What modern finance does, for the most part, is gamble. It speculates on the movements of prices and makes bets on their direction. Here’s a way to think about it: you live in a community that is entirely self-sufficient but produces one cash crop a year, consisting of a hundred crates of mangoes. In advance of the harvest, because it’s helpful for you to get the money now and not later, you sell the future ownership of the mango crop to a broker, for a dollar a crate. The broker immediately sells the rights to the crop to a dealer who’s heard a rumour that thanks to bad weather mangoes are going to be scarce and therefore extra valuable, so he pays $1.10 a crate. A speculator on international commodity markets hears about the rumour and buys the future crop from him for $1.20. A specialist ‘momentum trader’, who picks up trends in markets and bets on their continuation (yes, they do exist), comes in and buys the mangoes for $1.30. A specialist contrarian trader (they exist too) picks up on the trend in prices, concludes that it’s unsustainable and short-sells the mangoes for $1.20. Other market participants pick up on the short-selling and bid the prices back down to $1.10 and then to $1. A further speculator hears that the weather this growing season is now predicted to be very favourable for mangoes, so the crop will be particularly abundant, and further shorts the price to 90 cents, at which point the original broker re-enters the market and buys back the mangoes, which causes their price to return to $1. At which point the mangoes are harvested and shipped off the island and sold on the retail market, where an actual customer buys the mangoes, say for $1.10 a crate.

Notice that the final transaction is the only one in which a real exchange takes place. You grew the mangoes and the customer bought them. Everything else was finance – speculation on the movement of prices. In between the time when they were your mangoes and the time when they became the customer’s mangoes, there were nine transactions. All of them amounted to a zero-sum activity. Some people made money and some lost it, and all of that cancelled out. No value was created in the process.

That’s finance. The total value of all the economic activity in the world is estimated at $105 trillion. That’s the mangoes. The value of the financial derivatives which arise from this activity – that’s the subsequent trading – is $667 trillion. That makes it the biggest business in the world. And in terms of the things it produces, that business is useless. (Source: lrb.co.uk)

John Ellis News Items

Word-of-the-day

Word of the day: coprophagia

Definition: gobbling up Tucker Carlson other than for a detailed exposé. (Note that there are three hyperlinks in the preceding sentence.)

I don’t think Carlson has lost his mind, or at least no more so than anyone who’s been politically radicalized has. He’s been engaged in a coherent, if despicable, ideological project for years. As far back as 2017, he was airing segments in Fox News prime time on the gypsy infiltration of America. He surrounded himself at the network with white-nationalist chuds. He’s become a committed postliberal. It was inevitable that he’d start pulling his chin one day about the supposed moral complexity of World War II.

There’s nothing unusual about populists Nazi-pilling themselves with historical revisionism in search of their next contrarian high. What’s unusual about Tucker is that he’s maintained a degree of national popularity and even mainstream acceptance as he goes about trying to make the world unsafe for democracy. 

How? He’s taking advantage of a leadership vacuum on the right.

…

Creeping fascism on the right has been a-creepin’ since at least 2016. If you’re shocked, shocked to find that there’s gambling going on in here in 2024, it can only be because you went out of your way for tribal reasons not to notice.

Nick Catoggio

Covering what others don’t

If there is a criticism I’ve gotten over the past several years it’s that I pay too much attention—and apply too much scrutiny—to the excesses of the illiberal left at the expense of the illiberal right. Wasn’t I ignoring the elephant and allowing myself to get distracted by the gnat?

My response to that is twofold.

The first is that there is no shortage of writers, reporters, and outlets focusing on the dangers of the far right. I saw the far left as conspicuously overlooked by people who otherwise take a great interest in political extremism. And I understand why they were averting their gaze: The social cost of noticing this subject is very high. Given that the job description of a journalist is to observe the world, uncover things in the public interest, and then tell the plain truth about it, choosing topics where others fall silent seems wise to me. It still does.

The second is that I have been concerned for years now that the illiberal ideology that has become increasingly mainstream on the political left—one that makes war on our common history, our common identity as Americans, and fundamentally, on the goodness of the American project—would inspire the mirror ideology on the right. 

And that is exactly where we find ourselves, with an illiberal left that defaces Churchill statues—and an illiberal right that defaces Churchill’s legacy. With a left that insists 1619 was the year of the true founding of America—and a right that suggests the Greatest Generation was something closer to genociders. With a left that sympathizes with modern-day Nazis in the form of Hamas—and a right that sympathizes with the original ones.

Bari Weiss

Public affairs

Military valor

[Adam] Kinzinger’s political stance—his willingness to criticize the most popular and feared figure in his party, when the overwhelming majority of his colleagues have either gone silent or defended the ex-president’s indefensible actions—can’t be understood apart from his military service.

“Because we ask [service members] to die for the country, we have to be willing to do the same thing. But”—here he turned incredulous—“we’re too scared to vote for impeachment, because we’re going to lose our job? Like, seriously?”

For most of Kinzinger’s colleagues, the answer is: Yes, seriously. When I asked Kinzinger how many Republican votes there would have been in favor of impeachment if it had been a secret ballot, he told me 150. Instead, there were only 10.

The Man Who Refused to Bow

Richard Lugar

Tuesday, a bronze statue of Richard Lugar was unveiled in Indianapolis, with considerable ceremony including a speech by, appropriately, Condoleeza Rice.

I recall when I first was awed by Lugar. At our County’s Lincoln Day dinner (the closest I ever got to being a partisan activist) around 1982 or 1983, he was the featured speaker. He spoke for a very long time, without notes, mostly about his trip to the Phillipines, which had just ended. He shot straight, eschewing the B.S. about Ferdinand Marcos. One of the “conservative” talking points of the day was that Marcos’ only opponents were communists. “Don’t you believe it,” Lugar essentially said. “His only supporters are the oligarchs of the country. Small business, the Chamber of Commerce types, oppose him strongly.”

It all seemed to cohere. I couldn’t give such a speech even with notes. That he’d been a Rhodes Scholar showed.

Lugar was the kind of statesman who’d have voted to convict Trump on the Articles of Impeachment. If more Republicans had his balls, Trump would be behind us by now.

Understudy to Russia’s role as whipping boy

Yesterday Politico dropped a story about how “former GOP officials are sounding the alarm over Trump’s Orban embrace.” Gosh, where would we be without Former GOP Officials, eh? The story attempts to demonize anyone who has anything to do with the Hungarian prime minister. Excerpt:

The Conservative Partnership Institute, a nerve center for incubating policies for a second Trump administration, co-sponsored a discussion in October 2022 about how to bring “peace in Ukraine” featuring Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter Szijjarto.

Audience members included conservative policy and national security officials and GOP strategists, according to a person familiar with the meeting. Once seated, they were given pamphlets pushing unabashedly pro-Russia talking points.

“Russia has the will, strength, and patience to continue war,” warned the document, which was given to POLITICO by a participant. “U.S aid to Ukraine must be severely constricted and Ukrainian President Zelensky should be encouraged by U.S. leadership to seek armistice and concede Ukraine as a neutral country.”

“If the U.S. continues to enable war, it will result in the destruction of Ukraine and provoke further Russian aggression toward the West, with the potential for nuclear conflict,” it said.

You see what Politico is doing here? We are not supposed to evaluate these claims; we are supposed to reject them out of hand as “pro-Russian talking points.”

This is the same kind of manipulation the Blob used to manufacture consent of the American people to support the Iraq War. What, you think Arabs don’t deserve democracy? You want Iraq to create a mushroom cloud over an American city? You want the terrorists to win?!

The Orban government might be wrong in its analysis of the Ukraine war, but characterizing it as nothing more than “pro-Russian talking points” does a profound disservice to democratic publics in the US and Europe, who are financing NATO’s participation in this war. If Orban’s government is wrong, then explain how they’re wrong. Don’t talk to people like we’re morons.

Rod Dreher (who you can safely ignore because he just channels pro-Russian talking points).

The Best fall outcome, in the long-term, for the GOP

For the GOP, might the ingredient for long-term success be its defeat in the 2024 election? “The best possible outcome in November for the future of the Republican Party is for former President Donald Trump to lose and lose soundly,” Jonathan Martin wrote for Politico. “Trump will never concede defeat, no matter how thorough his loss. Yet the more decisively Vice President Kamala Harris wins the popular vote and electoral college the less political oxygen he’ll have to reprise his 2020 antics; and, importantly, the faster Republicans can begin building a post-Trump party,” Martin continued. “For most Republicans who’ve not converted to the Church of MAGA, this scenario is barely even provocative. In fact, asking around with Republicans last week, the most fervent private debate I came across in the party was how best to accelerate Trump’s exit to the 19th Hole. … Yes, moving past Trump in the aftermath of another defeat will hardly be easy. But it’s essential if Republicans want to become a viable national party once more.”

The Morning Dispatch

Politics more narrowly

Kamala Harris is an enemy of free speech

In 2019, well before the January 6 riot that ultimately led to President Trump’s Twitter ban, then–Senator Harris publicly and repeatedly called on Twitter to ban him. On October 1, 2019, in a letter to Dorsey, Senator Harris called Trump’s tweets “blatant threats,” and claimed that other users “have had their accounts suspended for less offensive behavior.” She tweeted at Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey, pleading with him “to do something about this.”

Apparently surprised by Harris’s casual use of her pulpit to call for Twitter to ban a sitting president, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Harris in an interview: “How is that not a violation of free speech? The president has the same rights that you have, that I have. How would that not be a slippery slope to ban half the people on Twitter?” 

Harris doubled down: “I’ve heard that argument, but here’s the thing, Jake. A corporation—which is what Twitter is—has obligations and in this case, they have terms of use policy. Their terms of use dictate who receives the privilege of speaking on that platform and who does not. And Donald Trump has clearly violated the terms of use, and there should be a consequence for that,” she said [emphasis mine]. “Not to mention the fact that he has used his platform, being the president of the United States, in a way that has been about inciting fear and potentially inciting harm against a witness to what might be a crime against our country and our democracy.”  

In case Twitter had somehow failed to notice the directive, then–Senator Harris said: “And I am asking that Twitter does what it has done on previous occasions, which is revoke someone’s privilege because they have not lived up to the advantages of the privilege.”

Two weeks after the Tapper interview, at the Democratic primary debate on October 15, 2019, Harris repeated her call for Twitter to ban President Donald Trump from its platform. Harris claimed that the mass shooter at an El Paso Walmart had been “informed by how Donald Trump uses that platform.” She several times urged Elizabeth Warren, “Join me in saying his Twitter account should be shut down.” Even

Even Elizabeth Warren seemed appalled. She refused with a simple “No.” She is a law professor, after all. 

After that debate, Harris told Tapper flatly:  “The bottom line is you can’t say you have one rule for Facebook and another rule for Twitter. The same rule has to apply which is that there has to be a responsibility placed on social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and that has to stop.” [empahsis mine]

Did you get that? It’s worth watching: Harris said social media sites should not be able to communicate information directly with the public without government oversight.

Abigail Shrier, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Our Government Censors

This item via Bari Weiss’s Free Press, as she does indeed cover what others don’t. (See above.)

Swing states

I don’t believe we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states … As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.

Liz Cheney

I have just one question: Is Wyoming really a swing state?

Trump’s off his game

I get the sense that the assassination attempt spooked him more than he’s willing to admit and also slowed him down. And yes, there are those niggling details about him being a nut, a narcissist, a boor, a bigot, a blowhard, a tornado of baloney — a man who, to borrow from an old joke, could commit suicide by leaping from his ego to his I.Q.

Bret Stephens

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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, my primal screams, here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Friday, 7/12/2

Culture

Anti-Christian, anti-religion, anti-tradition

The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is.

René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World.

Creepier than frank laxity

Just don’t do it again, promise? Remember those kids who got suspended from Harvard after setting up encampments on the lawn and then harassing other students? Well, the Harvard College Administrative Board has reversed the decision, a win for the “student intifada,” which I thought was slanderous but is actually just what they call themselves. And then over at Columbia, the administrators who texted each other vomit emojis during a panel discussing a rabbi’s op-ed about his fears for Jews on campus—they were fired, right? Well, actually they were just put on leave and will be assigned to different jobs later. And remember the Columbia students who were arrested after they occupied a campus building? Most of their charges were dropped. There’s something way creepier about punishing people in the moment only to reverse it as soon as the zeitgeist moves on to the next thing versus not punishing them at all.

Suzy Weiss

Prescient

This was not written of Team Biden, but it sure seems to fit:

The elites who manage the system no longer believe in a way forward. Stuck in the muck, they strive simply to endure: après moi le deluge.

Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

Not a flattering juxtaposition

  • In The Guardian, Marina Hyde: “It’s incredible to think that only a short while ago we thought we’d eradicated measles and Nigel Farage. Both have now been brought back, largely by the same people.”

Via Frank Bruni. (I didn’t call this “Politics” because it’s foreign politics.)

Enemies of Article III

Federal Court critics

Never forget, most commentary about the Supreme Court is performative. Critics have a vested interest in making the decisions seem so much worse than they really are.

Josh Blackman, Everyone Needs To Take A Deep Breath About Trump v. United States

AOC, ever-performative, is “trying” to impeach Justices Alito and Thomas — a kind of performative commentary uniquely available to congress-critters.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, supported by left-wing interest groups, demanded that Judge Don Willett of the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals recuse himself from a case challenging the CFPB’s rule on credit-card late fees. One of Judge Willett’s child college savings accounts held around $2,000 of stock in Citigroup, which wasn’t a party to the case.

…

Normally, parties to a lawsuit have a strong incentive not to provoke judges with baseless recusal demands. That makes it surprising the CFPB would join in such an unwarranted demand. But the bureau seems to be more an extension of certain Democratic politicians these days than a federal agency respectful of the rule of law. Several members of Congress, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, responded to the committee’s opinion with a hyperbolic letter declaring that the opinion and Judge Willett’s decision not to recuse himself “represent ongoing threats to the integrity of the judicial system.”

…

Recusal tactics have become more outrageous. Normally, only parties directly involved in the litigation can file a motion to recuse a judge for an alleged conflict of interest. But we now see coordinated campaigns to pressure recusals. Left-wing interest groups are submitting demands for recusal, coupled with press releases and press conferences. This practice should stop. There is no formal mechanism for outsiders to file such recusal demands, and for good reason. They clog courts with additional briefings and hearings, causing delays and distorting outcomes. Courts should refuse to entertain these ill-intended requests, and the lawyers and litigants responsible should be subjected to sanctions.

Theodore B. Olson, Proliferating Recusal Demands Threaten the Judiciary

Politics, more or less

What liberal democracy sounds like

In America, it can be easy to forget what liberal democracy sounds like. But it used to sound something like this:

Whilst he has been my political opponent, Sir Keir Starmer will shortly become our prime minister. In this job, his successes will be all of our successes and I wish him and his family well. Whatever our disagreements in this campaign, he is a decent public-spirited man who I respect. He and his family deserve the very best of our understanding as they make the huge transition to their new lives behind this door, and as he grapples with this most demanding of jobs in this increasingly unstable world.

Those are the words of former British prime minister Rishi Sunak in his farewell speech last week outside Number 10, Downing Street. This is how Keir Starmer responded:

I want to thank the outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, his achievement as the first British-Asian prime minister of our country. The extra effort that that will have required should not be underestimated by anyone, and we pay tribute to that today. And we also recognize the dedication and hard work he brought to his leadership.

He went on:

If you voted Labour yesterday, we will carry the responsibility of your trust as we rebuild our country. But whether you voted Labour or not, in fact, especially if you did not, I say to you directly, my government will serve you.

And, if you listen to them say these words, they even seemed to mean it. That’s what it takes to put a toxically divided country back on track toward liberal democracy, after a woundingly divisive period centered on Brexit.

No one claimed fraud. No one derided the lopsided unfairness of the parliamentary results, where Labour got 34 percent of the vote and a whopping 63 percent of the seats, and where the new rightist Reform Party won 14 percent of the vote and got only 5 seats. Those were the rules ahead of the game, and they were the rules everyone had agreed to.

There is one reason and one reason only why this kind of conciliatory exchange cannot happen any time soon in America, and that is Donald J. Trump ….

Andrew Sullivan, pitch-perfect.

I wish it were true that Trump is the whole problem, but he tapped into something that won’t go away just because he sheds this mortal coil.

Art of the Deal

  • “That the sheep are still on the air, dispensing undiminished certitudes, is evidence of two things. That — outside of a few bastions of meritocracy and accountability, such as professional sports — there is no penalty for failure in contemporary America. And that many prominent people have the scary strength that comes from being incapable of embarrassment.” (George Will on the Dem/MSM bunker)
  • “If Trump is elected again, Dems should get over it and try to do more deals with him like they did on the USMCA and First Step Act. Trump isn’t an ideologue and just has an enormous ego anyone can exploit,” – Zaid Jilani.
  • “Some will say now that I am calling America a Christian Nation. So I am. And some will say that I am advocating Christian Nationalism. And so I do,” – Josh Hawley.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Comments:

  • Zaid Jilani’s advice is brilliant! We need more like that!
  • There is all kinds of play in the joints of “Christian Nationalism,” but any politician of Josh Hawley’s intelligence who demagogues the term is playing with fire and is going to find me unmoved when he tries to disambiguate it into something benign. Once a bright hope for the GOP, he’s gone shamelessly whoring after Trump.

You can have my delegates when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers

In his selfish desperation to retain control of his party, the president has resorted to political hostage-taking. His pitch to Democrats for sticking with him has nothing to do with sketching out a compelling plan to win or demonstrating his mental agility by holding numerous live events or even outlining a policy program for a second term. It’s simply this: The delegates he earned by winning this year’s primary (under false pretenses about his fitness) are pledged to him and he’s not giving them up.

Nick Catoggio, The Return of the Smoke-Filled Room

The window into Trump’s id

The best window into Trump’s ignorant and destructive id is often his Truth Social account. While normal Americans were making plans for Independence Day, an obsessive on Truth Social was declaring, “Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason. Retruth if you want televised military tribunals.” “Retruth,” in the idiom of Truth Social, means “to repost.” Trump of course retruthed. The former president also took time to retruth a post calling for Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Cheney, and a dozen prominent Democrats to be jailed because they saw fit to tell the American people the truth that the 2020 “elections were fair.” Republicans would be wise to remember that character is destiny and that Trump has never had any.

National Review, The Week

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Culture

Made Men

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A perennial favorite for the internet age

I can take a virtual tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, or of the deepest underwater caverns, nearly as easily as I glance across the room. Every foreign wonder, hidden place, and obscure subculture is immediately available to my idle curiosity; they are lumped together into a uniform distancelessness that revolves around me. But where am I? There doesn’t seem to be any nonarbitrary basis on which I can draw a horizon around myself—a zone of relevance—by which I might take my bearings and get oriented. When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular.

Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

Another oldie

To say that we and the Soviet Union are to be compared is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes the old lady into the way of an oncoming bus, and the man who pushes the old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus, are both people who push old ladies around.

William F. Buckley via Douglas Murray

New Illustration for the Urban Dictionary

Cringe: It’s like this.

(H/T Nellie Bowles)

Owning the full weight of your worldview

One doesn’t see this sort of observation much any more:

Reason is an absolute … Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning.

C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory

Good Dad

Dad only had three stages in his day. He was either (1) drinking coffee, (2) had just finished drinking coffee, or (3) was brewing a fresh pot right now.

Ted Gioia, How Coffee Became a Joke. Unlike Ted, I rather like Starbucks, but the only frou-frou I ever ordered was one, and only ever one, Pumpkin Spice Latté, just to see what the buzz was about. Otherwise, I’m happy with whatever dark roast is on offer or even Pike Place if necessary.

Ruso-Ukraine war and NATO

Be it remembered:

Many sober voices warned that an expansion of NATO to Russia’s border would poke the Bear, leading to an inevitable war. As long ago as 1998, following the U.S. decision to expand NATO eastwards, George Kennan said the following to Thomas Friedman:

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.

“We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a lighthearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs. What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was. I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe.

Patrick J. Deneen, Russia, America, and the Danger of Political Gnosticism

And recently, we’ve had people in the know bragging that we are going to bring Ukraine itself into NATO, though “we have neither the resources nor the intention” of following through by vigorously defending, with troops, a new member that was already under attack when admitted to NATO.

Campus Protests

Coddled2

[S]ociety takes the attitudes and antics of the young far too seriously. In an era when we are reliably informed that adolescence persists well into the twenties, it is strange that we deem the views of anyone under the age of thirty to have any real significance or merit. Yet it seems to be an unspoken assumption that young people, especially young, angry, and opinionated people, are to be indulged as important … 

This exaltation of youth is simultaneously the exaltation of ignorance and incompetence. Early claims of Israeli occupation of Gaza and the continued sloppy use of the language of genocide, fueled by people at the U.N. who could benefit from using a dictionary, are two obvious examples of the former. As for the latter, when, for example, did adult revolutionaries hold hunger strikes lasting a whole twelve hours or seize buildings and then demand that the university authorities give them food and water? I have no affection for Che Guevara, but he did at least spend time in a Bolivian jungle while trying to foment revolution. I presume he never once considered whining to the Bolivian government about the harsh conditions of jungle life and had to find his own food and water. A cynic might say that even our revolutionaries are pathetic these days.

Carl R. Trueman, ‌What the Pro-Palestinian Campus Protests Are Really About

One of the voices on the Matter of Opinion podcast Friday likened Columbia University getting police to clear our an occupied hall to “calling the police on your own kids” because the University is in loco parentis. I think the voice belonged to someone named “Van Winkle.”

I was in college when students effectually abolished in loco parentis. They didn’t want anyone telling them what to do and what not to do. But, giving credit to Ms. Van Winkle, they did generally whistle a different tune when there was the threat of police being brought in.

I’ve long thought take your pick; you don’t deserve protective in loco parentis (“we’ll take care of this ourselves, officer”) if you’re not willing to live by university rules (“here’s the rules you’re expected to live by”).

Radical Revolutionaries on the cheap

And of course the protesters all want (and I’m sure will get) the arrests taken off their records. They want to be radical revolutionaries holding a radical protest. They also want the protest catered ASAP. And when it’s done for summer, they want good grades in all the classes and squeaky-clean records. McKinsey doesn’t staff itself!

Nellie Bowles.

Another thing I seem to remember is that civil disobedience includes taking the consequences for breaking an unjust law. Scott free for breaking a just law does not compute.

Forewarding illiberalism

As readers know, I’m deeply sympathetic to the argument that Israel has over-reached, over-bombed, and over-reacted in its near-unhinged overkill of Palestinian civilians, especially children, in the wake of 10/7’s horrors. It has been truly horrifying. I begrudge no one demonstrating passionately to protest this. But as I watch the rhetoric and tactics of many — but not all — of these students, I’m struck by how this humane concern is less prominent than the rank illiberalism and ideological extremism among many.

Preventing students from attending classes, taking exams, or even walking around their own campus freely is not a protest; it’s a crime. So is the destruction of property, and the use of physical intimidation and violence against dissenting students. The use of masks to conceal identity is reminiscent of the Klan, and antithetical to non-violent civil disobedience. It’s a way for outsiders to easily infiltrate and a way to escape responsibility for thuggishness. It’s menacing, ugly and cowardly.

It did not have to be this way. Imagine if students simply demonstrated peacefully for a cease-fire, placed the victims and hostages at the forefront of the narrative, and allowed themselves to be arrested proudly on camera and face legal consequences for their actions, as the civil rights movement did. Imagine if they were emphatically non-violent and always open to debate.

But they aren’t, because they are not the inheritors of the Christian, universalist civil rights movement but its illiberal, blood-and-soil nemesis, long curated in the Ivy League.

…

And they will help Trump get an Electoral College landslide, just as the new left handily elected Nixon in 1968 and 1972.

Andrew Sullivan

Politics

Life in the Stupid Party

(I don’t remember the source, but someone called our two major parties the Evil Party and the Stupid Party.)

The so-called hard right in the House is learning an old lesson: Life is hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.

Kevin D. Williamson

On Democrats’ promise to help defeat Marjorie Taylor Greene’s effort to oust Speaker Mike Johnson:

Republicans, rather than fume that Democrats have denied them a chance to self-destruct, should consider that perhaps this is the inevitable result of the mid-session motion-to-vacate game that has brought them to the brink of losing their majority without an intervening election. A conference that can’t bear to see any of its members lead the House will soon enough encounter a cure for that.

National Review, The Week email for 5/3/24.

Meanwhile, over at the Evil Party

Once someone determined Trump was so bad it was okay to lie about him, it set the precedent that the only thing that mattered was a subject’s politics.

Matt Taibbi via James Howard Kunstler

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.