I just finished reading The Old Faith in a New Nation, a 2023 book by one Paul J. Gutacker. I can write no better summary of the author’s purpose than the publisher’s:
Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and “the Bible alone.” The Old Faith in a New Nation challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition, most optimistic and forward-looking, and most confident in their grasp of the Bible, evangelicals found themselves returning, time and again, to Christian history. They studied religious historiography, reinterpreted the history of the church, and argued over its implications for the present. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, American Protestants were deeply interested in the meaning of the Christian past.
The book
I concur with the 4-star rating at Amazon, mostly because the sympathetic academic author obviously spent a lot of time researching a narrow topic, off-the-beaten track. When I stumbled across it, I knew that I needed it to challenge the “conventional wisdom” resident in my own imagination.
It would be churlish to complain of faults in a book that did what I wanted it to do, and was passably readable to boot. I now have a better idea of how nineteenth-century American Evangelicals (and a few mainstream Protestants and Unitarians) treated Christian history.
Generally, the Evangelicals settled for tendentious 18th-Century historiography. It’s hard to blame them — the laymen, at least. There are only 24 hours in a day, and the 8-hour workday didn’t exist. We’re still that way:
The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have “too much information” is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.
A lover of obscure mots justes, I was pleased to meet the word mnemohistory, which to my disappointment isn’t even in the online Merriam-Webster. It is “the history of memory … The past is not only remembered by later generations, it also exerts by itself an influence on later times.” A near-equivalent, I guess, is “cultural history.”
The 19th-century American Evangelical mnemohistory was fiercely anti-Catholic — especially, and oddly, anti-celibacy, though the anti-Catholicism was comprehensive.
Somewhat to my surprise (I had already read in Frances Fitzgerald that it was anti-Calvinist), it was quite contemptuous of the Protestant Reformation as well — largely because the Reformation wasn’t adequately anti-Catholic. The Reformers baptized infants? Mumbled vague nothings about Christ’s presence in the Eucharistic elements? Damnable papacy!
Though the Magisterial Reformation opened Pandora’s box with its sola scriptura même, I’m newly-appreciative of its merits, at least compared to what followed. The Magisterial Reformers didn’t intendthe whirlwind, and Rome did need reform.
That the best-laid plans chronically go astray is enough to make one suspect all is not right in the pre-eschaton world. (It’s also an imaginative buttress for temperamental conservatism.)
The acid test
The acid test of American Evangelical mnemohistory came in the debates over slavery, when there arose an urgent need to shuffle the deck chairs. Gutacker summarizes:
This was only one of many ironies in the debates over slavery, which saw Catholics ignoring or reinterpreting papal decrees, Episcopalians celebrating early American Puritans, Presbyterians defending medieval society while criticizing the Reformation, Baptists treating patristic exegesis as authoritative, and anticlerical abolitionists praising the pope. Not all of this irony was lost on contemporaries. As has been discussed, African American historians, in particular, took pleasure in pointing out the hypocrisy of proslavery authors who cited North African church fathers in their arguments for white supremacy.
Antebellum 19th-century American Evangelicals didn’t so much revere history as to use it to confirm their priors. They rejected tradition and precedent, those inconvenient facts, in favor of congenial theories they called “history” — again, a relatable vice, but it’s how we got Baptists andSouthern Baptists, Methodists andSouthern Methodists, and even Presbyterians and Southern Presbyterians (a division that leaves fewer contemporary traces than the Baptist and Methodist schisms).
Oh, yeah, almost forgot: It’s also a substantial explanation of how we got a Civil War.
I think that qualifies as failing the acid test.
Bless their hearts!
I’m fond of the expression “making a virtue of necessity.” 19th-century schisms over slavery were lamented at the time. Today’s more mercenary schisms pass without much objection as “isn’t-it-nice-that-there’s-a-church-for-all-preferences?” nondenominationalism. All hail the religiopreneur! (Bless their hearts!)
Christians were until recently (and in ecclesial Christianity, still are) horrified by schism. But what to make of the continued fissiparousness of movements themselves born in conscious schism, as was post-Second Great Awakening evangelicalism? Is it all that bad when badness can’t cohere?*
I confess a bit of schadenfreude, mitigated morally by faint hope for the epiphany “this isn’t working; our first principles must be wrong” — and for return to the Church that remained, albeit centered outside the West, when the Roman Church went into schism from it. There, Holy Tradition is preserved and transmitted as the warp and woof of liturgies, hymns, prayers, scripture, and all that goes into a lived faith.
* (An aside about coherence: Ken Myers, muse of Mars Hill Audio Journal, once suggested that today’s evangelicalism coheres, is united, not by orthodoxy but by orthpathos — not rightshareddoctrine but right shared feeling. Insofar as it does loosely cohere, I have no better explanation, and if I did it would be a topic for another day.)
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
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.
“Georgians fear their country is becoming like Russia,” proclaims the Economist headline. It’s a bit confusing because most of the Georgians the article discusses actually seem more concerned, if only tacitly, about their country becoming like America. (Did the author hear explicit concerns about Americanization but didn’t report them?)
Witness:
By the Kura river in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, a group of old women wearing black clothes and headscarves had stopped on the pavement, clearly lost. They were trying to work out how to get to Rustaveli Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare, where a large crowd was forming. It included Orthodox priests, people carrying framed icons, families with children waving small Georgian flags and teenagers from a dance school dressed in traditional clothing.
The throng was markedly different from the young, mainly English-speaking protesters who had massed on the tree-lined avenue a few days before. On Tuesday May 14th the government, led by the Georgian Dream party, passed a law that will force organisations that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as foreign agents. …
This gathering, on the Friday after the law was passed, was more subdued. It was in honour of Family Purity Day, a celebration of “traditional values” that the Georgian Orthodox church has held annually since 2014 (a riposte to the International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia). This year, Family Purity Day was a public holiday for the first time.
…
The Georgian Dream party claims that Orthodox Christian family values are threatened by a foreign “LGBT agenda”, and that rich foreigners fund NGOs in Georgia to promote this sinister plot. It’s a narrative copied almost word for word from Russia and Hungary, whose scaremongering leaders, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban, it has served well. Since pro-democracy and anti-corruption NGOs do indeed depend heavily on western philanthropy, labelling them “foreign agents”, which sounds a lot like “spies”, is a handy way to stifle scrutiny of ruling parties.
…
Bells rang out as we reached the cathedral. We stood outside, on a huge plaza with views across the city. Some of the people I met seemed sincerely committed to the cause. Other marchers’ motivations were less clear. Before I had a chance to ask them where they were from, several told me that they were locals and hadn’t been paid to be there. Clearly they were sensitive to the rumours that a recent pro-government rally had been populated by rent-a-crowds, bussed in from outside the city.
The Economist free-lancer is worried about where in Georgia the demonstrators for Family Purity Day came from, but strangely dismissive of their concerns. It doesn’t cross her mind that a concern shared by Russia, Hungary and Georgia just might possibly be valid; it’s just a cut-and-paste “narrative.”
Meanwhile, she’s utterly incurious about the bona fides of the “English-speaking protesters who had massed” on those streets days before, demonstrating in favor of unfettered foreign influence. In my admittedly limited experience it would be hard to assemble a “mass” of Anglophones from among the Georgian population. Where did they all come from?
If you read between the lines, even assuming the bona fides of the Anglophone protesters, Georgia is divided between people wanting to westernize and people wanting to maintain traditional values. Since Putin also purports to favor traditional values, it’s low-hanging fruit to draw analogies between traditionalist Georgians and Russia. That, too, is a convenient “narrative.”
It’s not just the Economist writing unself-aware critiques of Georgia, though. From Sunday’s New York Times:
America’s Foreign Agents Registration Act, or F.A.R.A., written in 1938 to combat Nazi propaganda and all but forgotten until Russia began meddling in American elections, basically requires persons or entities engaged in lobbying or advocacy for foreign governments to register with the Department of Justice. It has now become a major tool for exposing efforts by Russia, China and other autocratic states to manipulate the Western public through media, governmental or commercial outlets they control. The European Union is now working on a similar law.
…
On balance, a law that helps the public understand who is funding foreign influence operations is useful and needed at a time when foreign meddling in elections or other domestic processes is becoming more insidious and widespread. The fact that democratic countries have such legislation does not negate their obligation to speak and act against its perversion by governments and politicians seeking to destroy the very transparency that such laws are intended to provide.
Schmemann is far more cosmopolitan than I, but here he sounds provincial. The logic seems to be “OurForeign Agents Registration Act is directed against foreign subversion, but when they require that “foreign agents” self-identify, it is sinister, directed at NGOs that are all about sweetness and light and all that America currently stands for by gorry by jingo by gee by gosh by gum.” Ipse dixit.
Too many of us assume that the desire of the nations is the USA. But it’s not that simple. It’s really not that simple.
A cyber-friend who follows world affairs more closely than I do (and spends far more time in Georgia, too), weighs in not specifically on Georgia, but on the world more widely:
Yesterday I saw an interview with Tony Blinken. … [H]e said that, in talking with people from around the world, he finds that there is a real “thirst” for American leadership. If you think that is true, or even marginally so, then I predict that the next several decades are going to be disquieting ones for you. … I rather assiduously follow news on the five other inhabited continents, and with the exception of the British, I have found exactly no one “thirsting” for American leadership (and with the British, this is largely due to the fact that we are basically them with a twang.)
If you were to compare, for instance, American global hegemony to a hotel, you would find most guests checking out of the Hotel Americano. The most attentive and independent have already left, while others are following suit-out at the curb, awaiting their taxis. Stragglers remain in their rooms, but packing or googling to find better accommodations. No one is staying other than a few hard-core residents, ensconced in their lounge chairs in the lobby asking What? What? That is what happens when Management becomes insufferable.
… The Cold War bloc mentality is how we still look at the world, and it saves us from having to confront real history, one in which we are complicit up to our eyeballs; one that includes just about everything that has happened since the Cold War actually ended, by negotiation, in 1989. …
… When we speak of American “values,” we still think it means something. Perhaps it does, but to the rest of the world it is not at all what we think it is. We have become a shambolic nation, stumbling blindly forward in the only way we know, impervious to warning signs and flashing lights.
The future is Multipolarity, which is the old Westphalian balance of power expanded globally; to-wit: BRICS. That should not scare us at all. Why should it? Failure at unipolarity is actually, on a real level, success. We think we have to be “Great,” Number one, with all the power, making all the rules. We even have a name for it: the rules-based international order. Who makes the rules? We do. What are the rules? Whatever we say they are at the time.
We believe that if we are not on top, then we have lost. That is true only if Power is your guiding principle (and to nearly all politicians, it is that.) If we even had the slightest and most tenuous attachment to the tenets of the Faith we supposedly espouse, then we would realize that that kind of thinking is of the Devil. If we were a schoolkid on the playground, would you want to play with us?
Wouldn’t it be okay just to be a “good nation,” rather than a great one? Frankly, the fact that we are not going to be leading the future world doesn’t bother me one whit.
On Monday, not a holiday in Georgia, the veto override on the foreign agents law began. If I wait for the smoke to clear, I may never publish. So I’ll put a bow on it and send it out: Any Georgian who sees wisdom in staying on friendly terms with Russia has ample “Made in America” justification.
I fear the Greeks, especially bearing gifts.
Virgil, The Aeneid
Men will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and truth is seldom offered to them by their friends: for this reason I have spoken it.
Alexis de Tocqueville , Democracy in America
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
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 cathartic venting, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
… churches centered on the Bible, evangelism, and personal faith in Jesus; often but not necessarily nondenominational, with moderate to minimal emphasis on sacraments, liturgy, and ecclesiastical authority; and marked by a revivalist style as well as conservative beliefs about sex, marriage, and other social issues. Historically, … white and middle- to lower-class …
Brad East, describing the sorts of churches in which he has noticed a loosening of social taboos (and in some cases, abandonment of prior understandings of scripture), and some putting on of liturgical airs, in The Loosening of American Evangelicalism.
East describes a lot of the changes he sees, and then speculates on the reasons for them. His fourth suggested reason got my attention as a plausible “silver lining” to secularization:
Fourth and finally, there are no sectarians in post-Christian foxholes. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the same forces leading evangelicals to start drinking, getting tattoos, and watching HBO are also leading them to say the creeds, receive ashes on their forehead, and read Pope Benedict XVI. When the world feels arrayed against faithfulness to Christ, you need all the friends you can get. Doctrinal differences that aren’t relevant to current cultural battles—think infant baptism, not theologies of sex and gender—can be overlooked in a pinch.
What intellectuals are searching for
[S]uppose you are an atheist or agnostic exposed, over time, to the desert fathers, or to the pro-Nicene fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, or to Saint Maximus Confessor or Saint John of Damascus, or to Benedictine monks, or to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, or to Julian of Norwich, or to Saint Francis or Saint Bernard or Saint Anselm. It would simply never occur to you that what you find in these authors is what you’d find in the Methodist congregation on the corner, or the Baptist church around the block, or the non-denom start-up across town. Not only do the devotional and liturgical, spiritual and theological worlds conjured by these writers and texts not exist in such spaces. The traditions themselves do not claim the figures in question. You go, therefore, to the people and the places who are bold enough to say, “Those names are our names; those saints are our saints; those books are our books. We nurture and preserve and pass them on. Come learn them from us; indeed, come learn from us what they learned themselves, in their own time.”
In sum: What intellectuals, especially agnostic intellectuals in midlife, are restlessly searching for is something not man-made, but divine; not provisional, but final; not a question, but an answer. They are looking for rest, however penultimate in this life, not more open-ended restlessness. Something that lasts. Something that can plausibly make a claim both to antiquity and to permanency. A bulwark that will not fail. Something to defer to, submit to, bow one’s head in surrender to; something to embrace and be embraced by: a teacher but also a mother. And the truth is that Rome plausibly presents itself as both mater et magistra, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Orthodoxy does as well. The plausibility explains why so many intellectuals find port of harbor with each of them. The reverse, in turn, explains why so few of those sorts of people convert from rudderless adult atheism to Protestantism with a capital-p.
Brad East, musing on why intellectuals and other public figures convert to Christianity in Catholic, Orthodox (or perhaps Anglican) traditions.
A life-giving gift
I’m almost certain I’ve shared this before, but I share it again not only because it seems wise, but because I lived it — with a big caveat: happy-clappy is not confined to youth groups, and I wasn’t young when I discovered ancient Christianity.
For those young people who are either scared or suspicious of happy-clappy versions of youth group Christianity, ancient Christian disciplines and historic Christian worship can be received as a life-giving gift. When you have only seen forms of piety that value spontaneous expression and clichéd sincerity, to be given the cadences and rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer can be like receiving the gift of tongues. In my experience, many young people are intensely ritual animals without realizing it. And when they are introduced to habit-forming practices of Christian faith, invited into ways of following Jesus that are ancient and tested, their faith is given a second life.
Context includes not only the historical and cultural setting and textual elements such as literary arrangement and relationship of the words. Context includes the original setting in which the Scriptures were written—the Church. The author belonged to the community of faith, as did his anticipated audience…
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
The democratic spirit at prayer
Much of what today passes for Protestantism is nothing of the sort. Rather, it is a thinly veiled cloak for the democratic spirit at “prayer.” “Salvation by grace through faith” is a slogan for individualism, a Christianity “by right.” There are no works, no requirements, only a “grace-filled” entitlement. For the ultimate form of democracy is the person who needs no one else: no Church, no priest, no sacrament, only the God of my understanding who saves me by grace and guarantees that I can do it alone.
I returned to following the Mere Fidelity podcast after a year or two absence (when I was more preoccupied with other things). One back episode I manually downloaded was Moral Complicity, which took as its springboard a controversy over one Alistair Begg’s faux pas.
It was an interesting episode, part of which lamented Evangelicalism’s lack of tools and training in moral reasoning, leaving Evangelicals to live in ambiguous situations based on shibboleths.
I was surprised at my own inability to justify my reaction to the particular question posed. Then I remembered that even my tiniest prayer book has some resources:
NINE WAYS OF PARTICIPATING IN ANOTHER’S SIN
By counsel.
By command.
By consent.
By provocation.
By praise or flattery.
By concealment.
By partaking.
By silence.
By defense of the sin committed.
THE CHIEF SPIRITUAL WORKS OF MERCY
To admonish sinners.
To instruct the ignorant.
To counsel the doubtful.
To comfort the sorrowful.
To suffer wrongs patiently.
To forgive injuries.
To pray for the living and the dead.
Wise eunuch
Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go near and overtake this chariot.” So Philip ran to him, and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and said, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he asked Philip to come up and sit with him.
Acts 8:29-31.
I was rather old when I learned (as I understood it) that reading silently, sola mentes, was unknown in the ancient world.
I wasn’t quite as old when I realized that “How can I, unless someone guides me?” was a wise answer, not a pathetic one.
Col. R.B. Thieme, Jr.
“Well-nigh 50 years ago,” wrote the geezer, “I heard a guy who in retrospect was the weirdest, but most mainstream, preacher I ever heard.”
Thieme was not outside the Evangelical Overton Window, but I recall two really weird things he said during the week or so of meetings I attended in Prescott, Arizona (I have a vague idea that I listened to him on the radio even longer):
Nothing pleases God more than doctrine in the frontal lobe. It is fair to say that this was an obsessive theme of Thieme, if you’ll pardon the wordplay.
The human ovum is the only sinless cell in the human body. Were it not sinless, Christ would have inherited sin from Mary.
I immediately thought the first thing quoted (almost verbatim) was weird and off-key. Now I’m quite sure it was wrong to the point of heresy. God desires several things more than storing up doctrine in one’s wetware. It is spiritually perilous not to value them as He does.
But the idea that mastery of doctrine was paramount was mainstream western Christianity. Since Thomas Acquinas, over-intellectualizing the Christian life has been (dare I say it?) a major way of avoiding actual encounter with God. In that sense, he was mainstream. And his website doesn’t put this idea front and center, portraying instead an extraordinarily hard-working dispensational premillennial evangelical pastor — adherent to a doctrinal scheme that led me to distance myself from evangelicalism around the time I encountered Thieme, though I don’t recall any cause-and-effect relationship.
The ovum remark was not an obsession, in my limited experience. The idea of inheriting sin and guilt is ubiquitous in Western Christianity (and repudiated in Eastern Christianity, which recalls that the wages of sin is death, not guilt — but that’s a longer story, and one that I’m probably not qualified to tell). Nevertheless, I don’t recall any other teacher ever making anything like Thieme’s weird remark.
Wedding rites
Contrast the vision of family carried in these cultural liturgies—and played out in television dramas and romantic comedies—with the countercultural, biblical vision that is carried in an Orthodox wedding rite. The rite has two “movements” or stages. The first is the Service of Betrothal. In the entrance or vestibule of the church, the priest asks both the groom and the bride a question. To the groom: “Have you, Nicholas, a good, free, and unconstrained will and a firm intention to take unto yourself to wife this woman, Elizabeth, whom you see before you?” And to the bride: “Have you, Elizabeth, a good, free, and unconstrained will and a firm intention to take unto yourself to husband this man, Nicholas, whom you see before you?” Each in turn replies, “I have,” and these are the only words they will speak in the ceremony. This won’t be an expressive opportunity for them to “show their love.” There’s no fixation on novelty in the idiosyncratic writing of their own vows. The actor and agent here is the Lord, the church’s Bridegroom, and their lives as husband and wife (and as mother- and father-to-be) are here being taken up into that life. The Triune God is the center of this ceremony, exhibiting a vision of marriage in which this is also true. This is beautifully signaled in vows that echo their baptism “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
It occurred to me as I was posting this that Smith’s book is one of extremely few contemporary Protestant-written books I can commend — not that I read all that many, mind you. It’s one of a few (along with books by Hans Boersma) that leave me wondering “why haven’t these guys shed their obviously uncomfortable Protestantism for Orthodoxy?”
When I heard the learn’d theologian …
When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Last night, I began reading Paul Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past. Gutacker doesn’t buy the standard narrative that bibicist American Evangelicalism has no interest in Church history and traditions. It sounded promising enough that I bought it without any personal recommendations from trusted sources.
I’m especially interested to see whether it will call into question anything I’ve internalized from Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity. So far, it seems to accept Hatch’s work.
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
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.
For several years, I’ve been reading the blog of Hal Freeman, an American who was living in Russia with his younger Russian wife and their children.
But then his wife, Oksana, died, leaving him a single father in a land whose language he hadn’t mastered. His lack of mastery made daily life difficult, and to an extent left him at the mercy of his late wife’s family. And with them, the clash of cultures, American versus Russian, became a big problem.
So he and his youngest daughter returned to the U.S., leaving some sons in Russia. After a month or so of visiting his U.S. sons from a prior marriage, he posted again, including this touching passage:
It has been very hard moving without a wife. I am not just talking about the help in getting things packed and unpacked. It is hard not having someone so close with whom I can discuss what is going on and what we are going through. I have appealed more than once to C.S. Lewis’ book, “A Grief Observed,” and the analogy he used of a man who had a leg amputated. At first the pain can be sharp and overwhelming when touched. Over time, there is healing. The sharp pain and the extreme sensitivity fades. He learns to get around much easier over time. Nevertheless, when he gets into a car or the bath, he remembers that he is an amputee.
It has been well over two and a half years since Oksana departed this life. I don’t have those times of sharp, excruciating pain in my soul anymore. I have learned to move on and accept that I am a single father. Yet, the move has made the memory of her departure more difficult again. And, I am facing the reality that at my age and with my rather different circumstances, I probably will never have the joy and contentment of a life companion again. And I can honestly say–and I believe I speak for many others who have lost their spouse–it really isn’t so much about missing what she could do for me. I miss doing things for her. There is great emotional reward in caring for and doing things for the one you love. As someone else who had gone through the grief said to me, “Grief is love that has nowhere to go.”
Barring simultaneous death in an accident or something, my wife and I face that prospect sooner rather than later, both of us having attained our allotted threescore and ten. She, having kept up roughly four close friendships, probably would cope better than I would.
Transing the gay away
At the risk of being accused of concern-trolling, I’m passing this along because it really does bother me.
[T]he entire category of gay kids has been abolished by, yes, gay groups. Gay kids are now conflated with entirely different groups: children who believe they are the opposite sex, straight kids who call themselves “queer,” an entirely new category of human beings called “nonbinaries,” and a few hundred new “orientations” and “genders” — including eunuchs! All of these kids are now deemed “gender diverse,” essentially living the same “LGBTQIA+” life, defined as being queer and subverting any and all cultural and social norms. Homosexuality? It has effectively evaporated into “gender diversity.”
…
The last thing a gay boy needs to be told is that he might actually be a girl inside — and that might be the source of all his troubles. It’s psychologically brutalizing and scarring.
… It’s the deepest, oldest homophobic trope: that gay boys aren’t really boys. And it is now being deployed by gender theorists as gleefully as it once was by bigots.
… The overwhelming majority of detransitioners are gay men and lesbians who were persuaded they were trans in childhood. In the old days, sorting through these feelings just required growing up — no need to make a decision until you’re an adult — and every decision was reversible. In the age of “affirmation-only” and “gender-affirming care,” all this becomes ever more fraught as kids are required to make a decision against a pubertal clock. And this is not a hypothetical. We know it has happened; we know it is happening. For many gender-dysphoric children, there is no doubt that “gender-affirming care” is literally transing the gay away.
What greater manifestation of “internalized homophobia” could there be than deciding that my attraction toward boys must mean I’m a girl (or vice-versa)? Yet, valorizing this madness has become “progressive” dogma.
Presidential “debates”
The first televised presidential debates were between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960. The contrast between them and the last debates between Trump and Biden is striking—and appalling. The 1960 candidates soberly aired their views on issues of the day, differing with one another firmly but in a civil manner. The events were reasoned, mature, and valuable. There were reasons Nixon’s sobriquet was “Tricky Dick” and they were widely known. But on camera in those debates he, from today’s vantage-point, seems almost professorial, measuring his words and tackling serious issues.
Donald Trump is incapable of meaningful participation in such an event. Only in the sense that “match” can apply to both chess and mud wrestling could the word “debate” apply both to the Kennedy-Nixon event and to Trump’s on-stage behavior. Trump cannot help but distort a debate into a cage-fight. He will, again, shamelessly lie and endlessly interrupt.
This is especially problematic because Trump’s behavior during such events can be misleadingly seductive … To many, Trump’s unplugged alpha splatter lends an enticing sense of vigor, strength, and even leadership quality … Trump’s verbal towel-snapping is extreme—he is now renowned for the ability to entrance an audience while communicating all but nothing of importance.
I not infrequently post provocative things I may not agree with. This is not one of those posts. There are other ways Biden could have declined “debate” (e.g., “I will not debase the office of the Presidency by engaging with a man under 91 criminal indictments”), but he’s made that harder by getting his Irish up and smack-talking Trump.
Body-snatched?
It seems that the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito flew and upside-down American flag for as many as several days shortly after the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Justice Alito attributes that to his wife’s response to a pissing contest with progressive neighbors.
Our friend David French reminded his readers today of one of Jonah Goldberg’s most famous columns, the Invasion of the Body Snatchers piece from March 2016. It was written just as Trump was locking up the Republican presidential nomination for the first time. The influence of ascendant MAGA populism on conservatives whom he’d known for years wasn’t merely profound, Jonah wrote. It was eerie.
He described the change his way: “Someone you know or love goes to sleep one night and appears the next day to be the exact same person you always knew … Except they’re different, somehow. They talk funny. They don’t care about the same things they used to.”
That was eight years ago. By now, every person reading this has had extensive personal experience with the phenomenon he observed. It’s happened again and again, in plain sight.
That experience is inescapable context for the reaction to the Times’ story. Maybe the Alitos are getting a bad rap about the flag. Maybe the justice is prepared to thwart Trump’s unconstitutional ambitions in a second term.
Or maybe another body is on its way to being snatched. Why should the Supreme Court be immune from to an ideological virus that’s convinced right-wingers that vindicating America’s constitutional vision requires empowering Donald Trump?
Until the body-snatcher era ends, no one who shows evidence of having been snatched gets the benefit of the doubt. Not at the bottom of the conservative movement and not at the top either.
Culture war debt forgiveness
You’ll notice we are not having a national debate about paying off poor people’s mortgages. We could do that just as easily if the self-declared champions of the poor had any interest in anything other than their own status and their own appetites. They don’t.
National Review, The College-Debt Debate Is a Culture-War Battle
When theology fails
Harm to you is not harm to me in the strict sense, and that is a great part of the problem. He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom. But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I’m afraid theology would fail me. That may be one great part of what I fear, now that I think of it.
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.
The heart of Gilead is not religious extremism, but social engineering.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Handmaids themselves, and the Ceremony that defines their role. The idea that women can be used outside of the confines of marriage as incubators for strongly desired children would be abhorrent to the vast majority of religious conservatives who seem to be The Handmaid’s Tale‘s targets. But it is all the rage in certain secular and progressive circles—and by no means is it limited to the fringes. It has become especially popular among homosexual couples, many of whom pay top dollar for Handmaids who serve a purpose they cannot fulfill themselves.
Not original with me, but I’ve lost the original source.
Schrödinger persons
On a related note:
When the industry makes promises to prospective parents about in vitro fertilization, it leans on images of cherub-cheeked babies. And when it pitches to egg donors, it speaks the language of altruism: You can help make a family. But when something goes wrong, the liability-shy industry is quick to retreat to the language of cells and property. IVF relies on treating the embryos it creates, freezes, and often discards as Schrödinger’s persons: we cannot make a moral pronouncement about what they are until we know whether they’re intended for life or death.
Argentina, for all it’s faults, is a Democracy, and the people keep electing very flawed politicians. They keep electing tumult, and choosing short term satisfaction. They keep voting for the candidate that promises to give them the most things, while also taking stuff away from others. They keep doing that because now, after a century of disarray, part of their national identity is a cynicism that’s reached nihilistic levels.
That sounds like the trajectory of another country I know well. I noticed a report this morning that Trump is 6 points ahead in (some) polls.
I can relax but I’m not going to enjoy it.
Aaron Burr = DJT
Charlie Sykes, The choice Republicans face is too good for me to just pull excerpts. I didn’t know what kind of low, narcissistic character Aaron Burr was, and how close he came to being President. We need some Alexander Hamiltons in the GOP (but I fear the GOP is too far gone).
David Frum painstakingly explains why Even Bill Barr Should Prefer Joe Biden by gaming out what’s likely to happen if Trump is elected. Maybe that will prove persuasive to a handful of Trump voters, but it suffices for me that Trump, like Aaron Burr, is a “dangerous, narcissistic mountebank and ‘a man of extreme & irregular ambition.’”
POTUS candidate age disparity
At the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday, Joe Biden joked that age is an issue in the election, because “I’m a grown man running against a six-year-old.” (New York Post)
Hungry for coverage of last Thursday’s SCOTUS arguments on Presidential criminal immunity, I was nauseous as most of my sources were doing the usual “we know this Court is corrupt; let us now find proof in the hypothetical questions they ask on this case we’re afraid might not go our way.”
Then finally I found sanity:
As several of the justices pointed out, they aren’t making a rule for Donald Trump. They’re making “a rule for the ages,” as Justice Neil Gorsuch put it—one that has to apply to good presidents and bad ones, Republicans and Democrats, high-minded prosecutors and partisan ones. It can be easy to focus on “the needs of the moment,” as Justice Brett Kavanaugh said.
And here’s the fear. If the high court gives presidents too much immunity, the White House could turn into a “crime center,” as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said. Too little immunity, and there’s an endless cycle of prosecutions. The ability to find some vague statute will “be used against the current president or the next president,” Kavanaugh said, “and the next president and the next president after that.”
So how will this all shake out? I can’t say for sure, of course. And oral arguments—even a two-hour and 40-minute session—can tell you only so much. But I predict this will be a unanimous ruling instructing the district court to determine which of the charged acts were clearly outside the authority of the president, whether it was an official act or not.
Every time you see the word disinformation, remember that The New York Times said it was “a conspiracy theory” that Covid came from a lab.
In Santa Monica, a new 122-unit homeless housing project is moving ahead; it’s projected to cost $1 million per unit to build. That’s the optimistic projection! And in San Francisco, the city built special housing just for the middle class. The result: 80 percent of units in some of these buildings are empty. Why? “A city bureaucracy so convoluted that qualifying for an apartment involves a tortured and time-consuming process,” according to a great San Francisco Chronicle story. I promise that if you let capitalism work, supply will meet demand. Alternatively, we can keep trying these government scams, raise taxes to 70 percent, and build more empty construction and overpriced pot shops and Sombritas and a single charging station.
David Frum’s odd characterization of a televised Biden-Trump Presidential debate: “The networks want their show, but to give the challenger equal status on a TV stage would be a dire normalization of his attempted coup.”
Xitter
Someone’s (Charlie Sykes? coinage for X, formerly known as Twitter. I like it for the rich possibilities of how to pronounce it.
Could a child ever dream about a Lucid or Rivian? These are generically good-looking, low-emissions vehicles that only a cyborg could lust over. They are songs sung through Auto-Tune, with clever and forgettable lyrics composed by ChatGPT.
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.
Unnoticed, I had filled my cup to overflowing. Pour yourself a cup and enjoy the (mostly) curation.
Trans turning point?
Keeping score
“Males have stolen over 879 trophies, medals, and titles from women and girls across 423 different competitions in over 28 different sports,” – Reilly Gaines.
In Great Britain, the Cass Report, a comprehensive four-year study of transgender medicine for pre-adults, has case deep shade on past practices — practices Europe is backing away from frantically but which the US Medical establishment still supports. Andrew Sullivan gives them both barrels:
Big Pharma created lucrative “customers for life” by putting kids on irreversible drugs for a condition that could not be measured or identified by doctors and entirely self-diagnosed by … children.
And what if over 80 percent of the children subject to this experiment were of a marginalized group — gay kids? And the result of these procedures was to cure them of same-sex attraction by converting them to the opposite sex? I simply cannot imagine that any liberal or progressive would hand over gender-nonconforming children, let alone their own children, to the pharmaceutical and medical-industrial complex to be experimented on in this way.
…
Accountability? Good luck with that. Will any of the Twitter mobs who hounded the skeptics take stock? Will the ACLU’s Chase Strangio feel any regret for trying to censor the first major book raising the alarm? Will groups like GLAAD and HRC confess to their grotesque lies — “The Science Is Settled” — and ugly bullying tactics to suppress reporting on the question? Will they cop to having supported gay conversion therapy in which many gay kids were “fixed” by being turned physically into the opposite sex?
Will HRC and countless educators temper the curriculum that tells small children that their bodies are irrelevant to whether they are a boy or girl, and that they can change their sex at will? Will these ideologues ever concede the foul homophobia behind questioning the maleness of a girly boy or the femaleness of the tomboy? Will they ever admit that their ideological extremism, and their “queer” conflation of trans and gay experiences, has led to one of the greatest medical abuses of gay kids in history? Of course they won’t. As I write, HRC and GLAAD have not uttered a peep about the report’s findings. They are intellectually and morally bankrupt institutions, desperate for money, and using the scarred bodies of gender-dysphoric children to fundraise.
In a sane world, the doctors who pushed these lucrative treatments and the leaders of the transqueer groups responsible for the wreckage of so many young gay and lesbian lives should resign in shame. So should the MSM journalists who were stenographers for these fanatics, acting to suppress the truth rather than expose it. So should the gay doctors who supported this insanity. This was — and remains — a horrifying case of gays betraying our own — and the most vulnerable and helpless among us.
History will be brutal to those responsible. But almost certainly not brutal enough.
For me, it has always been sufficient that “woman in a man’s body” or vice-verse isn’t a real thing. The sexual binary is real. We are “assigned” names at birth, not sex, which is discovered then (if not previously). We do nobody any favors by saying “Sure, sweetie; you are whatever sex you say you are.”
Gender dysphoria is a real thing, too — a form of mental illness that should be treated with all due skill and compassion. I cannot imagine non-surgical approaches having been exhausted before a minor becomes an adult.
Transgender madness
Nothing that so captures the essence of the Cass Report as this:
Instead of taking narrow claims of dysphoria at face value, Cass adopts a holistic approach, arguing that such statements must be considered “within the context of poor mental health and emotional distress among the broader adolescent population.”
Nina Power, The Trans Reckoning is Here. Considering the context doesn’t mean ignoring, but exploring all possibilities before doing something radical.
No longer, in the sentient world, will doctors be valorized for taking narrow claim of dysphoria at face value — what has come to be called “affirming,” and beginning the process that leads to sexual mutilation in the name of sex-change.
Some U.S. legislatures had already arrived at the unfashionable conclusion that “affirming” kids with gender dysphoria through “social transitioning,” puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and such was bad medicine, and some, including my own, went so far as to ban the medical transitioning as to legal minors. I have my doubts about legislatures practicing medicine, but the provocation was great, and I have little doubt that legislative bans will protect more kids than they hurt.
So I was feeling pretty good about the turning of the tide on trans when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a front-page, above-the-fold story in my local Gannett rag about the woes of Hoosier kids with gender dysphoria who no longer can get their desired trendy treatments in-State. The story included all the groin pieties about puberty blockers being safe and reversible — some of the very claims debunked by the Cass Report. Had they intended that story as a provocation, it could not have been better timed.
The Cass Report is fairly fresh off the press, and is the work of but one researcher, although she was very well-credentialed and took four years on the project. It probably will be critiqued — carefully, one hopes, although there may instead be an effort to mob-cancel it for want of rational criticisms.
Meanwhile, it is as if the Report gave permission for common sense to speak what it has been intimidated from saying for too long.
In my home, the local Gannett rag will be cancelled.
This is a huge step emotionally. I grew up on newspapers. My older brother had a huge paper route. Reading the daily newspaper was one of the things responsible adults did. But smaller-market newspapers have been killed by the internet. Our local rag has descended into a collection of celebrity gossip, feature stories, and a smattering of news stories from other Gannett rags in the state. It doesn’t even include enough advertising and coupons to justify hanging on any longer. That trans propaganda was just the last straw.
I’ll try to replace it with a combination of:
A retired newsman’s substack. He’s been scooping the newspaper frequently already — and his stuff is timelier, not delayed by 48 hours.
Local television websites.
Two local funeral home websites for obituaries.
We’re in a strange new world.
Culture
Billy Joel
I vividly remember the first time I heard Billy Joel on the radio. Mainstream pop/rock radio was not part of my childhood listening diet, so I was already in my early teens. I was having lunch in a university roadhouse with my father and a visiting scholar, a young neo-classical composer. We took turns poking fun at the songs on the roadhouse channel, until “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” struck up. Then the composer paused to listen, raised a finger and said, dead serious, “This is a great song.”
As [Annie Dillard] put it so memorably, the difference between a partial and a total solar eclipse is like the difference between kissing a man and marrying him.
Virtues
I’m reminded of my colleague David Brooks’s distinction between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.” As David described it, résumé virtues “are those skills you bring to the marketplace.” Eulogy virtues, by contrast, “are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?” Most of the “manosphere” influencers look at men’s existential despair and respond with a mainly material cure. Yes, some nod at classical values (and even cite the Stoics, for example), but it’s in service of the will to win. Success — with money, with women — becomes your best revenge.
The problems with this approach are obvious to anyone with an ounce of wisdom or experience, but I’m reminded of a memorable line from “The Big Lebowski”: “I mean, say what you want about the tenets of national socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” It’s hard to counter something with nothing, and when it comes to the crisis confronting men and boys, there is no competing, holistic vision for our sons.
When I attended prepper conventions as research for my book, I found their visions of a collapsed American Republic suspiciously attractive: It’s a world where everybody grows his own food, gathers with family by candlelight, defends his property against various unpredictable threats and relies on his wits. Their preferred scenario resembled, more than anything, a sort of postapocalyptic “Little House on the Prairie.”
There was a dramatic jump upward in divorce rates at the beginning of the 1970s. Women whose husbands walked out were faced with the prospect of raising large families on the minimum wage. I remember that time well. Divorce laws were not particularly favorable to women in many places. One reaction was for mothers to teach their daughters never to put themselves in such a vulnerable position. This kicked off the spiral of demands for more pay and more opportunities in education and the workplace. Arguably, the pendulum has now swung too far, and men are disadvantaged by divorce laws. Why work to become a marriageable man if marriage is now such a risky proposition, especially in an era of relaxed sexual norms?
… (in most US states, the highest-paid public servant is a football or basketball coach at a state university)
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs
NPR
“NPR is why I got into journalism. But it’s also partially why I left legacy media. By 2018, Trump voters wouldn’t talk to me, and I didn’t blame them — we often painted them as racists. And if I ever booked a white man, I’d better have a reason why,” – Olivia Reingold.
I really do think that the internet, in its original open form, is an amazing thing and a genuine contributor to human flourishing — but the occlusion of the open web by the big social media companies has been a disaster for our common life and for the life of the mind. My plan, and my hope, is to keep going here long after I have lost the ability to publish anywhere else. This is my home on the web and also the place where I can most fully be myself as a writer. And that’s worth a lot.
In The Financial Times, Anjana Ahuja questioned the potential of a new meat: “With half the U.K. population reporting anxiety about snakes and about one in 50 harboring a phobia, the idea of snakes as the new livestock of choice might not have legs.” (Lois Russell, Somerville, Mass.)
Ezra Dyer paid tribute to an automotive throwback, the Dodge Challenger Black Ghost: “It’s a stupid car, really, peak mouth-breather, screaming of wretched excess. But its analog mechanical brutality activates some primal lobe deep in our brains, the one that catalyzes noise into adrenaline. The final V-8 Challenger rolled off the line on Dec. 22 last year, another dinosaur obliterated by the E.V. asteroid.” (Gerry O’Brien, Goderich, Ontario)
In The London Review of Books, Michael Hofmann took pointed issue with some right-wing warriors: “It seems there is only one model for today’s ‘man of action,’ and that is shock and awe. Overwhelming force deployed suddenly and overwhelmingly. A theatrical performance with no audience as such, only a houseful of victims. The lions eat the circus and then tweet about it.” (William Wood, Edmonton, Alberta)
Mercy
The mercy of the world is you don’t know what’s going to happen.
Mat, in Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow
Abortion
Donald Albatross Trump
The problem for pro-lifers is that … efforts at persuasion have become markedly less effective over a timeline that overlaps closely with Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party
…
[O]ne does not need to be a monocausalist to see how the identification of the anti-abortion cause with his particular persona, his personal history and public style, might have persuaded previously wavering and ambivalent Americans to see the pro-life movement differently than they did before.
…
With that kind of standard-bearer, the accusations of your opponents — that your cause is organized more around repression than protection, more around hypocrisy than high ideals — are going to carry more weight. And some people who might have been your allies, who share your general moral worldview, are going to find reasons to disassociate themselves from your political project.
… [T]he form of conservatism that he embodies is entirely misaligned with the pro-life movement as it wants and needs to be perceived.
That’s the price of the bargain abortion opponents made. The deal worked on its own terms: Roe is gone. But now they’re trapped in a world where their image is defined more by the dealmaker’s values than by their own.
Kevin D. Williamson comes out swinging on abortion politics:
The conservative legal view of Roe v. Wade—which is not necessarily an anti-abortion view—is that the Supreme Court exnihilated a federal right to abortion straight out of the penumbras of Justice Harry Blackmun’s posterior based on very little more than pure political will, and that Dobbs rightly reversed this act of judicial superlegislation, returning the matter to the democratic process and, mainly, to state legislatures. A person who generally supports abortion rights could easily hold that position—and, indeed, many do. By no means is it the case, however, that, as Trump stated, vacating Roe was something “that all legal scholars [on] both sides wanted.” (Even on the most serious of moral issues, Trump cannot help but lie, stupidly, blatantly, and to no purpose. He lies out of habit and because he enjoys it.) The argument about Roe was an argument about law, not an argument about abortion.
Now comes the argument about abortion.
Overturning Roe provided only the opportunity to have that argument, and, for the moment, the anti-abortion side is not having a lot of luck advancing its case. Possibly this is because the anti-abortion movement has chosen a leader who so transparently does not give a fig about abortion or any other moral or political question except to the extent that it serves his interests …
…
Consensus-building in this matter is not something undertaken in order to accommodate abortion enthusiasm in the interest of advancing a broader political agenda but rather the opposite: Consensus-building is the only way to build a stable, long-term policy that actually protects the lives of the unborn and reduces—in fact, not in theory—the practice of abortion. Consensus-building is the way toward anti-abortion goals, not a detour from them. As I have written before: The pro-life movement doesn’t win when nobody can get an abortion—it wins when nobody wants one.
This is what an interactive Economist article thinks about my Presidential vote in November:
Switch me to California and it flips strongly. I’m told the paywall is down, so size up yourself.
FWIW
The Democratic National Committee paid President Joe Biden’s legal bills while he was under investigation by special counsel Robert Hur over whether the president mishandled classified documents, Axios reported Friday. While the Biden campaign has attacked former President Donald Trump for using campaign funds to pay his compounding legal bills, the committee paid $1.5 million—mostly between July 2023 and February 2024—to attorneys and firms representing Biden during Hur’s probe. While Trump has spent funds from his Save America political action committee on legal fees, it is unlikely that his campaign is using money from the Republican National Committee for that purpose.
Trump has repeatedly challenged Biden to debate him even though he skipped all of the debates in the Republican presidential primary.
David M. Drucker, Charles Hilu and Michael Warren Camp Biden is hinting that he won’t debate. I don’t blame them: Trump doesn’t really debate; he slings insults and one-liners (last item) that demean any “debate” he’s in. Add to that a Democrat candidate who has lost a step or two, and the opening Trump gave him by not deigning to debate his inferiors, and I’m in Camp Biden on debating.
P.S. David Frum says it better than I:
President Biden’s spokesperson should answer like this: “The Constitution is not debatable. The president does not participate in forums with a person under criminal indictment for his attempt to overthrow the Constitution.”
Hoist with his own petard
New York Judge Juan Merchan—who is overseeing former President Donald Trump’s hush money criminal trial—on Friday rejected one of Trump’s final efforts to delay the proceedings set to begin later today. Trump and his team asked for the trial to be pushed “indefinitely” on the grounds that the media attention surrounding it would make it impossible for Trump to receive a fair trial. Merchan, however, held that Trump intentionally generates much of the media attention. “The situation Defendant finds himself in now is not new to him and at least in part, of his own doing,” the judge wrote.
In Dallas, Texas, last Thursday night, four people walked onto a stage: a libertarian, a recent dropout from the Democratic race for president, an economic populist, and Ann Coulter, who needs no introduction.
They were all asked a single question, which is also the No. 1 issue that will affect the 2024 election: Should the United States close its borders?
It’s the kind of topic that’s become impossible to talk about out loud and in public. One side accuses the other of xenophobia and racism; the other of lawlessness and cheating the electoral system.
But at The Free Press, we believe that the issues that matter most to Americans are worth talking about in public, without fear. That’s why we partnered with FIRE to launch our new series, the America Debates, moderated by our founder, Bari Weiss.
So on Thursday at the Majestic Theatre in downtown Dallas, we welcomed a crowd of 700 from states all over the nation including Utah, Indiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. We even met a few readers who flew in from London.
There were best friends from high school, women in cowboy boots, and married couples on either side of the issue—including Dr. Nina Niu Sanford, who immigrated to the U.S. from China at age three, and her husband, a native Texan born to a Mexican immigrant. (She voted in favor of America shutting its borders; he voted against.)
“If you want to hear an exchange of ideas it’s basically relegated to AM radio,” a pregnant woman from Rhode Island who flew 1,700 miles to the event told me. “But you never get people like this, just sitting on a stage together, hashing out ideas.”
Jake Billings, a 34-year-old from Utah, said he arrived believing in an open border. But when he heard Ahmari list the ways Americans without college degrees get the short end of the stick because of illegal migration, he felt swayed in a different direction.
“He just laid out how it hurts the working class, which is where I come from,” said Billings, who shared that his mother was one of 13 kids. “What can I say? I’m a facts person.”
This summary was preceded by “The full video of the event will be available soon to paid subscribers of The Free Press. So if you’re not already a paid subscriber, become one today.” The Free Press has become Substack’s subscription champion for good reason.
If you’re not a Free Press subscriber, you’re missing some awfully good stuff. Same for the Dispatch. If I had budget woes, those would be among the last to go.
I try to avoid a Manichean outlook on the world, but even without White Knight delusions, there’s a case to made, and Coats makes it well without a facile Putin = Hitler narrative.
Why the new Christian right keeps losing
For the most part, the new Christian right is almost entirely lacking in the discipline, self-control, and judgment required to secure real political victories in a democratic system. Small wonder many of them want a totalitarian dictator, then. Maybe that’s the only way they’ll ever actually accomplish anything legislatively.
“I don’t think the fixes that most conservatives propose would fix anything,” he said. “I don’t think bringing back in the props of official Christianity is going to get at the darkness at the center of all this.” To him the Christian worldview had become just too remote in America, and worse, millions of Americans denied the very notion of the objective truth. Like many other conservative evangelicals at the end of the century, Mohler spoke of “postmodernism” rather than “secular humanism” as the condition of godless modern America.
Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals. I occasionally agree with Albert Mohler, and this is one of those occasions.
Maxine Waters changes her tune
In the young and fun days of 2018, Maxine Waters encouraged protesters to confront politicians in restaurants. In those Olden Times, she said: “If you see anybody from that cabinet [Trump’s] in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” (H/t Dan O’Donnell for tracking this video down.)
Fast-forward a few years and here is Maxine Waters, after facing mild protest from a single person at a single restaurant: “As a member of Congress, where people—you know—who evidently had a racist attitude, and recently even one confronted me in a restaurant—and they don’t say racist things but what they say is they don’t like something I said. They don’t like a position that I took. But you know that—you know—if you were not black, you would not be approached that way.” Exactly. A dissatisfied constituent has never approached a white politician.
…
Meanwhile, everyone at Harvard is upset that conservative activist and writer Chris Rufo keeps finding egregious plagiarism in this or that beloved professor’s work. And The Harvard Crimson this week has a proposal: “We can’t let outsiders control the plagiarism narrative. Harvard and other universities must stay ahead of the game, surfacing instances of plagiarism and addressing them before malicious actors can hurt the University’s credibility.” I do believe Chris Rufo will accept those terms.
In February 2016, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote: “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” His words captured a widely shared assumption that the rise of Donald Trump signaled not only the death of the religious right, but the birth of an irreligious right animated by white racial grievance.
No, I don’t think that’s clear at all. As Schmitz notes, there is a surprising move of many Hispanics and Blacks toward the GOP, and that puts a caveat on the “white racial grievance” part of Douthat’s assumption. But I don’t think it clearly disproves it.
This is but a quibble about Schmitz’s article, which I was prepared to dislike (perhaps even hate), but which I found interesting and helpful in several ways.
No, Trump’s Presidency Wasn’t Worth It
The price tag of the Trump presidency exceeds its value exponentially. The tax cuts, deregulation, judicial appointments, executive orders, and cultural counter-offensives (“he fights”) are trinkets compared to the way he has undermined the values and norms required to sustain the rule of law and the constitutional order.
I just heard the story of a candidate who was furious with his estranged wife for not posing for a family photo with the kids. I can’t say more for fear of too precisely identifying the situation, in which wife and children are quite innocent and don’t need the hassle.
Our six primary candidates for governor aren’t much better, although their badness differs from his.
Politics is so phony it makes me want to puke. Well, actually, it makes me want to post.
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.
“How has it come about,” C. S. Lewis once asked, “that we use the highly emotive word ‘stagnation,’ with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called ‘permanence’?” It is, Lewis suggests, because the dominance of the machine in our culture altered our imagination. It gave us a “new archetypal image.”
Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes
Considering how excellent an interviewer Ken Myers is, I’m surprised I don’t have more highlights from this oldish book by him. But this one surfaces just often enough to seem ever green. It’s especially dear to me because one of the common lazy criticisms of Orthodox Christianity is that it’s “stagnant.”
Feckless Diktator
Tens of thousands of people marched in Budapest, Hungary, on Saturday to protest Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government. Péter Magyar, a former diplomat who was once a senior member of Orbán’s Fidesz party, organized the demonstration and has presented himself as a changemaker with plans to challenge Orbán in upcoming European parliament elections this summer. The rising opposition figure has promised to root out corruption and repair ties with the European Union—of which Hungary is a member—if elected.
What kind of authoritarian would allow such a thing? Could it be that our press has giving him a bum rap? Surely not!
NCAA wrap-up: Defense always travels
“We’ve played against athletes, played against some really good defensive guys this year in the tournament,” Painter said. “But not the collection of defensive players like UConn has. We play against somebody, they would have a lock-down defender. These guys are bringing lock-down defenders off the bench. Defense always travels. Tip of the hat to them. They were great.”
I’ve said without embarrassment that I’m a “fair weather fan.” I think I’ve learned enough about basketball, and about Purdue Coach Matt Painter’s approach to coaching, to change that to “Purdue Men’s basketball fan.”
Caitlin Clark helped the generalized fandom, too.
Where’s a pro-lifer to go in 2024?
I am conflicted. It is tempting to join the pro-lifechorus proclaiming that Donald Trump is not a pro-life candidate (because it’s true). But I don’t agree that his not-so-new abortion federalism is the proof that he’s not pro-life.
Abortion federalism is what the law should be. It’s what I said for darn near 50 years that the law would be after the reversal of Roe, and I’m not going to do a bait-and-switch.
So I guess I’m stuck with my fundamental objection that Donald Trump is a toxic narcissist, incapable of reckoning with facts that are inconvenient to him (like “You lost the election, sir”), yet capable of poisoning the culture.
For maybe a decade, from the earlyish eighties forward, I really was a single-issue anti-abortion voter (anti-abortion and pro-life aren’t the same thing, but seamless-garment-of-life candidates were rare). I became disenthralled of single-issue voting when NRLC and its affiliates endorsed nasty people who unconvincingly claimed they were pro-life — like maybe Trump in 2016 (I don’t recall whether they endorsed him; I wouldn’t have paid attention if they had.)
Trump’s pledge to appoint Supreme Court Justices from Leonard Leo’s list, which I only half believed, was not enough to gain my vote in 2016, and nothing he could say about “life issues” in 2024 would outweigh his baneful influence on everything he touches.
A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.
Other disaffected seamless-garment pro-lifers should join me in voting for this party.
Gaining Perspective
A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Can we afford the rich?
While we talk a lot about the private jet emissions of the rich, the biggest environmental impacts of inequality are actually ‘psychosocial’:
“The well-publicized lifestyles of the rich promote standards and ways of living that others seek to emulate, triggering cascades of expenditure for holiday homes, swimming pools, travel, clothes and expensive cars. Studies show that people who live in more-unequal societies spend more on status goods. … Inequality also makes it harder to implement environmental policies. Changes are resisted if people feel that the burden is not being shared fairly.”
Fierce competition for social status not only turbocharges consumerism, it also reduces social cohesion, worsens mental health and increases crime:
“By accentuating differences in status and social class – for example, through the type of car someone drives, their clothing or where they live – inequality increases feelings of superiority and of inferiority. … Even affluent people would enjoy a better quality of life if they lived in a country with a more equal distribution of wealth, similar to a Scandinavian nation. They might see improvements in their mental health and have a reduced chance of becoming victims of violence; their children might do better at school and be less likely to take dangerous drugs.”
Trump aims at the FBI, kills FISA; gee, thanks Mr. Revenge!
Donald Trump has a special talent for creating chaos that benefits no one except Donald Trump, and doesn’t even do that in the end. That’s the only way to understand his destructive intervention Wednesday on the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in Congress. “Kill FISA,” he wrote on Truth Social, and the House Republican dunce caucus obliged.
On Tuesday evening the House Rules Committee voted out a rule that would have allowed lawmakers to vote on renewing FISA along with substantive reforms. The proposed bill, a consensus project between the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, was written to improve safeguards for Americans in Section 702’s surveillance database, which lets intelligence agencies eavesdrop on the communications of foreigners overseas.
…
Mr. Trump instructed Republicans to kill FISA because “IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” Nice to know that the man who wants to become Commander in Chief again has his eye on his own revenge, rather than public safety.
For those of a certain age — who hear the word “modernist” as modern — it’s an astonishment that a good portion of William Carlos Williams’s poetry is out of copyright. After noticing how often the Internet routinely violates poetry copyrights (currently protecting works after 1928), we decided early on here at Poems Ancient and Modern that we would try to be vigilant about copyright, which prevents us (in our current poverty) from running anything from W.H. Auden, Silvia Plath, Delmore Schwartz, Philip Larkin, and many others. But not only is the first modernist generation, with the likes of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, coming into the public domain, but so increasingly is the second generation of such modernists as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. It’s been a hundred years since the high modernists were the cutting edge of the modern.
The Indiana Court of Appeals rejects a demand that a third “gender” designation be available on drivers licenses:
BMV asserts its binary-only policy for state credentials is designed to accurately, consistently, and efficiently identify licensees. The agency indicates that recording an individual’s objective characteristic of sex better advances the state interest in accurate identification than would recording a person’s subjective non-binary identity. Additionally, identifying an individual’s sex on their state credentials promotes consistency within the system as other statutes require the licensee’s sex to be identified and recorded. Finally, BMV suggests that issuing credentials identifying an individual’s sex better serves to further administrative efficiency than reporting a subjective status with innumerable designations.
Quango: a Quasi-NGO; an organisation to which a government has devolved power, but which is still partly controlled and/or financed by government bodies.
4
Sodcasting: a term coined in Britain for playing music on your phone in public — after “sod” for “sodomite”, i.e. something that only a total ASSHOLE would do. H/T Andrew Sullivan, who adds:
It’s not as if there isn’t an obvious win-win solution for both those who want to listen to music and those who don’t. Let me explain something that seems completely unimaginable to the Bluetoothers: If you can afford an iPhone, you can afford AirPods, or a headset, or the like. Put them in your ears, and you will hear music of far, far higher quality than from a distant Bluetooth, and no one else will be forced to hear anything at all! What’s not to like? It follows, it seems to me, that those who continue to refuse to do so, who insist that they are still going to make you listen as well, just because fuck-you they can, are waging a meretricious assault on their fellow humans.
5
fundamentalist, n. Anyone who is more serious about religion than I am, especially if he owns a gun.
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.
Today is that day the Purdue Boilermaker Men advance to the NCAA Championship game by ending the fairy tale run of DJ Burns and NC State. Remember, you read it here first. (Caveat: I have no money riding on any games and you certainly shouldn’t put money on my prediction.)
Meta
America the experiment
America as an experiment is genuinely important to the world not because of the accidents of history that made us the most powerful nation on Earth, but because America is the first real experiment in building a large, multiethnic, multicultural democracy. And we don’t know yet if that can hold. There haven’t been enough of them around for long enough to say for certain that it’s going to work,
Joseph de Maistre. Writing in 1809, he scoffed at the idea that any document written by mortal hands could ever design and establish genuinely new foundational laws. The spirit of any such laws was invariably already written on the hearts of those men who attempted to crudely reduce them to mere lines on a piece of paper. “Precisely what is most fundamental and most essentially constitutional in the laws of a nation cannot be written,” he wrote. The true constitution of a strong and functional nation was always “that admirable, unique, and infallible public spirit, beyond all praise, which directs everything, which protects everything. What is written is nothing.”
…
What is America’s implicit constitution today? Naturally, it’s never been fully captured in writing, though some authors, such as Christopher Caldwell, have variously attempted to nail it down here and there. If pressed to summarise, I might say it is one that values safety and security over freedom; top-down control over self-governance; empty egalitarian posturing over excellence; material comfort over virtue; entitlement over responsibility; bureaucracy over accountability; narcissistic emotivism over duty; fantasy over reality; global ambitions over national loyalty; dreams of progress over eternal and transcendent truths — in short, the same spirit that animates our out-of-control managerial regime. It’s the spirit which saw that regime not hesitate to impose Covid lockdowns, or trash the rule of law and attempt to jail political opponents (and for half the country to view this as acceptable or even admirable); it’s what has produced Supreme Court justices who fret free speech would undermine the security state.
The neologism “luxury beliefs” is only five years old, but what it describes was noted decades ago (if not earlier):
Harlem itself, and every individual Negro in it, is a living condemnation of our so-called “culture.” Harlem is there by way of a divine indictment against New York City and the people who live downtown and make their money downtown. The brothels of Harlem, and all its prostitution, and its dope-rings, and all the rest are the mirror of the polite divorces and the manifold cultured adulteries of Park Avenue: they are God’s commentary on the whole of our society.
At my shows, I like to have the audience sing, just for the sensuous warmth of it. We sing “My country, ’tis of thee” and in the South we can sing a hymn or two a cappella and it’s amazing to observe this from the stage, people who are surprised and delighted and moved by the beauty of their voices mingled with the others. They learned this as Baptist kids and then (I imagine) lapsed into secular humanism and went through doctrine therapy and devoted themselves to vintage wines and dark coffees and French baking, and now, as I sing “When peace like a river attendeth my way and sorrows like sea billows roll,” the words come back to them and they sing like risen saints at the Sunday camp meeting and they dab at their eyes with a hanky.
With their heavy weight and quick acceleration, EVs tend to burn through tires about 20% faster than internal combustion vehicles do, according to consultancy firm AlixPartners. And the tires cost about 50% more.
One might assume that a presidential nominee who generates as much devotion as Mr. Trump would be a financial boon to his party. One would be wrong. With Mr. Trump, everything is about Mr. Trump … While the Republican base may be smitten with Mr. Trump, plenty of big-money donors are skittish about bankrolling his nonsense. The former president has been scrambling to close the gap, leering at potential funders as if they were contestants at the Miss Universe pageant.
Leonard Leo (not the Federalist Society) provided Donald Trump with the list of outstanding conservative prospective Supreme Court Nominees that Trump ran on in 2016 and that probably made the difference in the Election. Kudos to him for that. I didn’t believe Trump would keep his promise to nominate from that list, and for that and other reasons, I didn’t vote for him.
But about the time Leo got on the Trump train, his life appears to have take a dramatic turn:
The Campaign for Accountability’s complaint alleges that “Leo-affiliated nonprofits” paid BH Group and CRC Advisors a total of $50.3 million between 2016 and 2020.
During this period, according to the complaint, Leo’s lifestyle changed:
In August 2018, he paid off the 30-year mortgage on the Mclean, Va. home, most of which was still outstanding on the payoff date. Later that same year, Leonard Leo bought a $3.3 million summer home with 11 bedrooms in Mount Desert, an affluent seaside village on the coast of Maine, using, in part, a 20-year mortgage of $2,310,000. Leonard Leo paid off the entire balance of that mortgage just one year later in July 2019. In September 2021, Leonard Leo bought a second home in Mount Desert for $1.65 million.
The complaint was based in part on a March 2023 Politico story by Heidi Przybyla. She wrote that her “investigation, based on dozens of financial, property and public records dating from 2000 to 2021, found that Leo’s lifestyle took a lavish turn beginning in 2016,” citing Leo’s purchases of the Maine properties along with “four new cars, private school tuition for his children, hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Catholic causes and a wine locker at Morton’s Steakhouse.”
Part of my leeriness is probably because I’m smack dab in the middle of reading Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, which describes Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stevenson’s extremely profitable financial con in his promotion of the 1920s Klan. The story is full of MAGA-like personalities (right down to the rapes) and profiteering.
I’m no longer a Ben Shapiro fan, but when he’s right, he’s right.
Election 2024
Political Therapeutic Deism
Political Therapeutic Deism is a system of beliefs which invoke religious terms for the purposes of affirming one’s politics. It includes beliefs like:
God is on my political party’s side.
My views on political issues are a leading indicator that I am a true Christian.
My actions in politics are justified in light of God’s general approval of my politics.
I do not understand how other “Christians” could vote for my candidate’s opponent.
It is clear and obvious which political issues are most important to God.
Political Therapeutic Deism makes sense of why we’re seeing sorting in churches by politics, over and above theology or other factors. It makes sense of why we’ve seen steep declines of religious affiliation among Democrats over the last several decades, and why growing numbers of Trump supporters identify as evangelical, even if they don’t share evangelicals’ theologicalbeliefs. …
Political Therapeutic Deism has the benefit of making clear what we are seeing is the misappropriation of religious language and symbols for political ends. It also harkens to a term (Moral Therapeutic Deism) which has been thoroughly rejected by some of the very kind of people “Christian nationalists” seek to persuade to their way of thinking. They want to equate opposition to their political proposals as opposition to Christianity itself. Why would we help them?
Until a better term comes along, I expect to use political therapeutic deism for the faux-evangelical Trumpists that MSM calls “white Christian nationalist.”
“But the judges” no longer applies
For many legal conservatives, a two-word incantation—“but judges”—defined the Trump era. It began as an exhortation or, perhaps, a justification. Later it became a coping device, edging into gallows humor. As the shadows lengthened in the last days of a desperate and increasingly lawless presidency, it became a rueful question. A mob, incited by the president who refused to accept a lawful election, sacked the Capitol, assaulted police officers, interrupted the electoral count, and hunted down officeholders—“But … judges?”
Conservatives who had wagered the Trump gambit worth the risk got the upside of their bargain. Trump nominated many excellent men and women to the judiciary. A confident conservative majority, grounded in originalism and textualism, now controls the Supreme Court. The white whale of Roe v. Wade—long emblematic of lawless usurpation of policymaking by the Court—fell.
Contrary to the fears of liberals and the misplaced hopes of Trump, conservative judicial appointees upheld the principle of judicial independence. They refused to serve as reliable partisans and handed Trump and his administration importantlegal defeats. Crucially, Trump’s nominees rejected his baseless claims of a stolen election.
But these advances in jurisprudence came at a deep civic cost. The president with whom legal conservatives allied themselves used his office to denigrate the rule of law, mock the integrity of the justice system, attack American institutions, and undermine public faith in democracy. Beyond the rhetoric, he abused emergency powers, manipulated appropriated funds for personal political ends, and played fast and loose with the appointments clause, all at the cost of core congressional powers.
Republicans in Congress barely resisted these actions and increasingly behaved more like courtiers than members of a co-equal branch of government.
…
Partisans promise that Trump in a second term would nominate judges more loyal to the president while Trump-friendly, post-liberal thinkers develop theories like “common-good constitutionalism” in which conservative judges would abandon originalism in favor of promoting certain ends. Adrian Vermeule, the leading academic proponent of the latter view, has argued that “originalism has now outlived its utility, and has become an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.” It would be deeply ironic, and the ultimate failure of the movement, if the “but judges” bargain were to end with purportedly “conservative” judges legislating from the bench.
Anyone who says “but the judges” to justify voting for Trump in 2024 is seriously misguided. He’s disappointed with his first-term SCOTUS nominees in particular, as they’ve not been the kinds of toadies he wants. Next time, he’ll nominate toadies, not excellent jurists, and since the Senate is going to flip (11 Republicans are up for re-election, 23 Democrats) he’ll get them confirmed.
Good advice, since abandoned
Listen to me. Listen. If the twentieth century tells us anything, it’s that whenever you hear anyone standing before a crowd, winding them up about the cause of creating utopia on earth, you had better run.
Rod Dreher, December 12, 2020. I’m sorry to say that he has since reconciled himself to a supposed necessity to vote for Trump.
Miscellany
Rowling throws down the gauntlet
Scotland has a new hate speech law that criminalizes “stirring up hatred” against a series of “protected characteristics,” including race, age, religion, disability, and “transgender identity.” J.K. Rowling threw down the gauntlet:
On Monday, the day the law came into effect, the Harry Potter author posted a dare on X. In it, she named 10 transgender women, called them all men, and said: “If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offense under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested.” … “If they go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I’ll repeat that woman’s words and they can charge us both at once.”
I am a fan of almost anything that disrupts the hegemony of this fatuously self-righteous and profoundly anti-intellectual educational establishment, which exists not to lift up the marginalized and excluded but rather to soothe the consciences of the ruling class. May the forces of disruption flourish.
Trump Media lost $58 million and brought in $4 million in revenue last year. Yet, the market is valuing DJT at $6.4 billion. That there’s a meme stock. (I could have pulled this for “Rackets,” above.)
It is odd that Trump got the reputation of being The End of the American Press, when Biden is really the one who hates questions and shuns journalists. Remember Trump? How he would actually never stop talking? How he’d sit and antagonize reporters endlessly? But oh, he’d talk. It was alarming, often described as “rambling.” But at least we all knew exactly what was going through his mind (chaos, tangents, rage, pettiness, pretty good jokes, Rosie O’Donnell, more Rosie O’Donnell, why was it always Rosie O’Donnell).
[S]tudent loan relief is the wrong approach. Colleges should simply not cost this much. Solution: eliminate 90 percent of university administrator roles, since at least that many are fully fake. Offer incentives for kids to enroll in trade schools or community colleges. Boom, loan crisis solved, you’re welcome. Next topic.
From Reuters
America’s leading women’s rights group of yesteryear is still arguing that it’s white supremacy to maintain girls’ sports. Here’s NOW, the National Organization of Women: “Repeat after us: Weaponizing womanhood against other women is white supremacist patriarchy at work. Making people believe there isn’t enough space for trans women in sports is white supremacist patriarchy at work.” Yes, it’s white supremacist patriarchy to argue. . . that someone who’s gone through male puberty might have an unfair advantage in, let’s say, rugby. Interesting. Fascinating. I will repeat until I am clean.
When I think of the consciousness that generates the circular sorrow of “Ifs eternally,” or the one trying to find the one thing that will unify all the disparate experiences of one life, I think of a man—almost always a man, though there are notable exceptions—sitting alone in a room and doggedly trying to figure it all out.
A 2023 account of these car dealers by Slate’s Alexander Sammon recounts the awesome scale of their collective wealth and influence on Republican politics: “Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1%” while making up “a majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year”; members of the industry association donate to Republicans “at a rate of 6-to-1”, through which they have worked “to write and rewrite laws to protect dealers and sponsor sympathetic politicians in all 50 states”. Such figures help to make sense of Moreno’s and his fellow car dealers’ status as the cream of the crop among America’s local elites.
Cuenco seems to overlook the difference between wealth and prestige.
Sportsball
Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.
Eugene McCarthy, via the Economist’s World in Brief
Dictator or not?
On the drive into Budapest from the airport, travelers can see billboards erected by the Hungarian political opposition, featuring a photo of Prime Minister Viktor Orban with the slogan “God? Homeland? Pedophilia!” It’s a reference to the recent scandal involving a presidential pardon of a politically connected man who had been convicted of aiding in a pedophilia cover-up. The scandal cost the ruling Fidesz party its top two female politicians: President Katalin Novak and former Justice Minister Judit Varga.
Associating the prime minister, who apparently did not know about the pardon until the media reported it, and who quickly called for resignations of these top allies, is a low blow. But that’s how it goes in Hungary. Fidesz is not above similar tactics. If you expect Magyar politics to be a tea party, you are going to be disappointed.
Still, bearing in mind how the U.S. president recently denounced Orban as a “dictator”—a slur widely repeated in Western media and public discourse—you have to wonder what kind of strongman would allow himself to be publicly criticized as a promoter of pedophilia. If Orban really were a dictator, wouldn’t these billboards have been banned? Wouldn’t those who paid for them be eating goulash in a gulag now?
… Hungary, which supposedly groans under the burden of the Orban dictatorship, enjoys far more freedom of expression than countries whose media and whose leaders condemn it as repressive. You have to wonder why.
Rod Dreher in the European Conservative (no paywall).
Eugenics for the age of The Machine
Servility
Will we reach the point where nobody thinks they could start their own little business?
Political
Meet the new boss, Trumpier than the old boss
Washington Post: Was the 2020 Election Stolen? Job Interviews at RNC Take an Unusual Turn.
Those seeking employment at the Republican National Committee after a Donald Trump-backed purge of the committee this month have been asked in job interviews if they believe the 2020 election was stolen, according to people familiar with the interviews, making the false claim a litmus test of sorts for hiring.
The closest I get to liking Donald Trump is when he evinces contempt for those who idolize him.
I feel guilty about that, as one shouldn’t sympathize with con artists. But you know how it is with scams: At a certain point of extreme gullibility, the mark starts to seem more contemptible than the person preying on them. If you’re still falling for “Nigerian prince” emails in 2024, the problem lies chiefly with you, not with the flimflam man responsible.
The sheer laziness with which Trump has courted evangelical voters since 2015 has always betrayed a degree of sincere disdain for them that’s unusual in a man not otherwise known for honesty. It would have been trivially easy for him to brush up on Christian dogma after he entered politics in the name of convincing the Republican base that he’d seen the light after a dissolute adulthood. But … he couldn’t be bothered to do so.
He’s never cared enough about the faith espoused by most of his supporters to even pretend to take it seriously.
A man who lies like he breathes somehow can’t get motivated to lie persuasively about being pious, even as a gesture of minimal respect for his own fans. That’s remarkable. And insofar as most evangelicals have shrugged it off and rolled over for him anyway, my sympathies lie more with him. He’s been sending them the political equivalent of “Nigerian prince” emails for nine years; if they haven’t wised up yet, that’s a problem with them more so than with Trump.
…
His first political priority, even above maximizing his chances of reelection, is purging the Republican Party of anyone who would question his right to rule. He doesn’t want independent-minded Christians in the GOP any more than he wants the traditional conservatives who preferred Nikki Haley in the primary. He’ll win without them—and if he can’t, he’ll at least have consolidated his power over one-half of America’s political establishment in the process.
In that context, whether by design or by happenstance, the “Trump Bible” operates as a sort of litmus test for evangelicals who have stuck with him this far through thick and thin. You won’t abandon me if I make a mockery of your faith, will you? No, of course you won’t.
…
The devolution of evangelicalism in the Trump era is itself an interesting mix of radicalism and transactionalism, mirroring Trump’s personality. Many Christians made a cynical bargain with him in 2016, suppressing their moral discomfort and offering him their votes in exchange for guarantees that he’d enact their agenda, starting with limits on abortion. Insofar as his poor character and irreligiosity troubled them, some may have idly hoped that their influence over him, and the influence of figures like Mike Pence, would turn his heart toward God in time. He might be remade in Christianity’s image.
That transaction didn’t pan out the way they’d hoped. For many, Christianity has been remade in his image.
How to reach Republicans with the anti-Trump Gospel
Carville has been sounding an alarm about progressives getting too censorious since he advised Hillary Clinton in 2016. He disparaged liberals’ snooty, elitist “faculty lounge” attitudes long before he blew off the faculty lounge himself. He complained that “woke stuff is killing us,” that the left was talking in a language that ordinary Americans did not understand, using terms like “Latinx” and “communities of color,” and with a tone many Americans found sneering, as in Hillary’s infamous phrase “basket of deplorables.”
“There are a lot of people on the left that would rather lose and be pure because it makes them feel good, it makes them feel superior,” Carville said. And that, he said, is how you end up with Dobbs.
He thinks Donald Trump’s voters see him as akin to King Cyrus or King David in the Bible, a flawed messenger, so it’s best to use a biblical narrative about betrayal.
“If you say, ‘You dumb son of a bitch, how can you ever think that this fat, slimy, rapist, criminal, racist should be president?’ they’re going to recoil,” he said. “I think Democrats should say: ‘Look, you believed in him. You felt like you weren’t being seen, you were being culturally excluded. But he betrayed you. You thought he was going to be for you and helping you, but he was really for TikTok and tax cuts to the rich.’”
I submit that what changed when Trump entered the political arena on the highest levels isn’t that he gained powerful enemies who resolved to take him down by any means possible, nefarious or otherwise. What changed is that he was now a magnet for all kinds of scrutiny—journalistic as well legal …
Isn’t this the most obvious thing in the world? What is the first thing that anyone entertaining a run for the White House is asked by anyone who understands the process? Do you have any skeletons in the closet? Better get them out in the open now, because they will be discovered during the course of the campaign, and they will sink you, especially if you seek to cover it up.
Because Trump’s alleged crimes and misdeeds were extremely complex and deeply embedded in his sprawling business empire—and because the wheels of justice (rightly) grind extremely slowly—it’s taken many years for numerous lines of investigation to culminate in several trials all at roughly the same time, just as Trump is gearing up for a third attempt to win the White House. That’s not great. But as Jonathan Chait has argued quite cogently, the reason why it’s happening is that Donald Trump is a crook! If he wanted to continue getting away with being a crook, he could have decided not to run for president! Instead, he launched a campaign, won, lost, and is now running again. That’s nearly nine years (and counting) of ensuring the Klieg lights of public scrutiny are trained on every aspect of his life and business. What did he expect?
Since Trump trends toward imbecility, he may be surprised and outraged about this. But his defenders really should know better.
Jonah Goldberg on NBC’s difficulty finding commentators to defend Trumpy positions:
I’ve said it a million times on here: When we were all growing up, […] the word “RINO” meant someone who was squishy on abortion, or taxes, or foreign policy, or something like that. It was about issues. Now, by Trump’s own admission, RINO only refers to people insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. And so you get this weird kind of thing where you have to find people who are supposedly intelligent conservatives who are also willing to talk about Donald Trump as if he’s comrade Stalin. And that’s a really tiny universe of people because it almost demands that you have no integrity or that you lie. And that’s how Ronna McDaniel starts to look attractive.
Wordplay
Tina Brown assessed King Charles: “Even with the best prognosis for his cancer, he has been left with a rueful rump of a reign.” (Ann Madonia Casey, Fairview, Texas)
Jesse Green reviewed a new Broadway production: “Romantic musicals are as personal as romance itself. What makes you sigh and weep may leave the person next to you bored and stony. At ‘The Notebook,’ I was the person next to you.” (Christopher Flores, San Antonio)
And Bret Stephens, conversing with Gail Collins, skewered the social media site affiliated with Donald Trump: “I take it you’re referring to Truth Social, which in an honest world would be renamed Lies Sociopathic.” (Ross Payne, Windermere, Fla.)
Okay, I can’t resist a little comment. The three are grousing about the Colorado ballot exclusion case, Trump v. Anderson.
George Conway, author of the third listed column, sums up what I think happened:
It may be noble-minded for someone like me, sitting in the cheap seats, to incant my favorite Latin legal maxim, Fiat justitia ruat caelum—“Let justice be done though the heavens may fall.” But I don’t hold a lifetime appointment to decide how justice is to be done. And however much I’d like to think that judges really believe … that they “cannot allow [their] decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to [their] work,” the fact is that judges are human. Their decisions are affected at times by their perception of what the public reaction may be.
…
I could go on picking apart the weaknesses and inconsistencies in the Court’s opinion, and legions of law professors will do so for ages to come, but the Court’s lack of convincing reasoning is, frankly, beside the point. The Court’s decision wasn’t about law. It was about fear.
I think SCOTUS reached the right conclusion on the wrong rationale. You can make fun of me, but I think the theory is correct that the President is not an “officer” subject to section 3. I think that for having read some of the history around section 3, which I find more persuasive than one Senator’s (disingenuous?) assurance to another that the amendment indeed “hid an elephant (POTUS) in a mousehole” (“other officers”). And I return to that ideé fixe after feeling, as I recall, some passing doubt about it during the oral argument.
Well, at least SCOTUS was “unanimous.” Now I can only hope that never-Trump Republicans, who Trump has disinvited from his party, will oblige him in sufficient numbers to assure his defeat, fair and square, in the November balloting.
What worries me now, though, is not the Christian Nationalists themselves. Frankly, many of them are too reckless, undisciplined, and reactive to be able to accomplish the revolutionary change they seek. What worries me is that there are a great many socially conservative evangelical voters who love the democratic life who are constantly being called “Christian Nationalists” by the likes of Heidi Przybyla for believing things that are utterly unremarkable in Christian history. If our secular media outlets continue to tell them that “Christian Nationalism” is the belief in things virtually all Christians across history have believed, I fear they will listen. And they will find these ethno-nationalist totalitarian aspirants and, not realizing what they are doing, they will make common cause with them.
After all, they’ve already been told that they are ‘Christian Nationalists,’ haven’t they? They’ve been told that protecting the unborn makes them a Christian nationalist, that wishing to promote natural marriage makes them a Christian nationalist, that wanting men to support their children makes them a Christian nationalist. They’ve even been told that believing our rights come from God makes one a Christian nationalist.
Eventually they will start to believe it.
Here is my request: If you are a secular person who wants Christian Nationalism to lose, you should stop helping the Christian Nationalists win.
(One hyperlink added)
It was quite adolescent of me, with my actual adolescence a mitigating factor, but there were several times in my younger life when I was falsely accused of things and reacted by actually doing them.
So I hope you can forgive me for agreeing heartily with Jake Meador on this one.
White Rural Rage
White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy By Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman Random House, 320 pages, $32
Why does a book like this exist? For one thing, it exists to serve the demand for books among people who lack the patience for reading literature. These books are some of the many consumer items that serve as tokens of college education. By visiting the front-most display table at Barnes & Noble and picking up a copy of The Sixth Extinction or Freakonomics, one affirms one’s place among the civilized few who “read.” With White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller toss another forkful of silage into the troughs of the book-club class.
Of course, a book like this is also intended to provoke a reaction from its targets. The authors are counting on it, as they make clear when they predict that some will conclude that “as two coastal cosmopolitans, we have no right to offer this critique of White rural politics.” The anticipated backlash is an essential part of the marketing strategy.
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It is the third part of their thesis on which I would like to raise some points of information. Waldman and Schaller assert that, despite their ruling stature, rural whites “paradoxically” fail to demand anything of their political leaders. The authors admit that rural whites have some legitimate sources of anger, particularly the economic hollowing out of their regions by “late-stage capitalism.” However, having despaired of correcting this, rural whites lend their electoral clout to Republicans, who offer a program of cultural vengeance without any redress of rural whites’ material grievances. There is a lot of truth to this. I would just add that pretty much all Americans have seen their communities hollowed out by capitalism, and pretty much all of them have despaired of receiving very much from their representatives. Those who plan to trudge submissively to the polls for President Biden in November are hardly more demanding subjects than those who will cast a vote for Donald Trump.
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Consider this remark from the authors, in reference to a 2023 conference in Nebraska about preventing agricultural monopolies: “Rural folks are gradually realizing that corporate consolidation, not socialism, is destroying their economies.” Judging by the record of the Grangers, the People’s Party, William Jennings Bryan (who is briefly cited in the book as a typical rural bigot) the Non-Partisan League, the American Society of Equity, Robert LaFollette, the National Farmers’ Organization, Estes Kefauver, the American Agriculture Movement, the National Save the Family Farm Coalition, Tom Harkin, Paul Wellstone, and others, I would suggest that rural people made some hesitant advances toward this insight before 2023. Indeed, a poll conducted by Open Markets Institute in 2018 showed that 54 percent of Trump voters favored the government breaking up monopolies, and only 28 percent were opposed. Moreover, some of the most visible MAGA firebrands are thoroughgoing antimonopolists. Perhaps some of the “gradual realization” Waldman and Schaller delight in when it is expressed in small activist conferences is also reflected in the far more formidable MAGA movement.
Not everyone was totally bowled over by Joe Biden’s Thursday SOTU. Andrew Sullivan had the most colorful, detailed neutral take I’ve seen:
Yes, he did. That’s the core headline. Biden had to convince the American public, and to some extent the world, that he retains the vigor and marbles of his former self. And this he largely accomplished.
He still looks very old though. The first thought I had watching him emerge into the House was that he looks less like Biden than someone wearing a Biden Halloween mask. The features are all there in some kind of uncanny valley, buoyed by fillers, stretched by Botox into a mask whose weirdness hovers somewhere between Joan Rivers and John Kerry, the pure black raisin-eyes peering from within the carved carapace of what was once a face. The Botox is so severe that he has a habit of looking and listening to someone without any measurable change in expression, as if frozen until his mouth can prove he’s not a mannequin. That gives him the open-mouthed squint expression that makes him seem angry at something and yet clueless about why at the same time.
And the vigor was achieved by shouting half the address at about twice the speed required for it to be fully intelligible. The unholy pace made it inevitable he would slur his words as well, so at times, I felt like I was trapped in an Irish pub with a drunk unintelligibly yelling at me for some reason, and I couldn’t get away. And then there was the occasional tone of a fierce, marital squabble: the sudden rising cadence and rhetorical stamp of the foot, as he expressed his volcanic displeasure at something or other. In time, as the adrenaline (or something else) wore off a bit, he became more understandable, but I confess I kept turning the volume down. The Abraham Simpson vibe was strong.
Ouch!
Conservatives and Republicans
[T]he overlap in a Venn diagram of conservatism and capital-R Republicanism has never been smaller.
Nuland shows no sign of rethinking her ideological commitments, however. A few weeks ago, in a speech at the Center for Security and International Studies marking the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, she declared: “Our continued support for Ukraine tells tyrants and autocrats everywhere … that we will defend the rights of free people to determine their own future … and that the world’s democracies will defend the values and principles that keep us safe and strong.”
Such rhetoric shouldn’t be dismissed as pure posturing. Rather, proponents of realism and restraint in foreign policy must reckon with the fact that statements like these reflect the hawks’ deep-seated, immensely consequential convictions about America and its place in the world. Put another way: Nuland & Co. really do mean it when they say such things—and that lack of cynicism is precisely what makes them so terrifying. Their conception of foreign policy as an endless international crusade against ideological enemies, rather than a tool for realizing state interests, fails the American people and risks bringing the world to the precipice of catastrophe.
→ WPATH Files: This week, the leading organization for doctors who perform gender transitions on minors is reeling from a major leak of internal documents, emails, and conference calls. What the leak mostly shows: doctors really had no idea about a lot of the long-term impact of these interventions. Would the kids put on blockers and then cross-sex hormones ever be able to orgasm? Wow, we’re finding out that they can’t, because they’re saying they can’t. Will puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones (the yellow brick road of medical transition) stunt a kid’s growth, one clinician asks? Answer seems like yes: “Blockers, by suppressing puberty, keep growth plates open longer, so younger teens have a potential to grow longer, however their growth velocity is typically at prepubertal velocity, without typical growth spurt.” Or watch this video of clinicians trying to figure out how to get their 14-year-old patients to do informed consent to lifetime sterility (often starting at age 9 with puberty blockers). From the video: “It’s a real growing edge in our field to figure out how we can approach that. I’m definitely a little stumped on it.” I am also stumped on how to get gender-dysphoric children to consent to sterility—maybe we can wait till they’re 18? Just an idea. Just a thought. One practitioner talks about meeting former patients now in their 20s who want to start families, and he jokes that when they find him, he responds: “Oh, the dog isn’t doing it for you?”
The biggest news is that these groups knew that the hormone therapies were causing cancer. I’ve said it before, but as a one-time butch teenager with rabid political opinions and the knowledge that I was Correct About Everything, now a happy gay adult with no political opinions and the knowledge that I am Usually Wrong: thank god this movement wasn’t around when I was 14. That said, when I’m done having kids, given the state of things post-breastfeeding, a double mastectomy sounds sort of nice.
I’ve downloaded the files but have only heard excerpts from critics of WPATH. The files are so damning that WPATH has not admitted their authenticity nor, to my knowledge, have they denied it. Since mainstream media don’t like to be shown up as gullible, they’ve embargoed stories on the WPATH files for now.
Andrew Sullivan, a gay writer, has an unusual beef with WPATH. It might be distilled thus: “Doctors who medically transition adolescents are doing so with disregard for autism, mental health comorbidities, and questionably “informed consent. The consequence is that countless kids who have translated their homosexual urges into ‘I’m in the wrong body’ are being sexually mutilated and rendered non-orgasmic.”
But that’s how I would have distilled it last week. Now, with the release of the WPATH files, he’s white-hot:
What does one say of medical professionals who experiment on children in this fashion, and then publicly lie about it? One thing we can say is that they are not medical professionals. And WPATH is not a medical professional outfit, like, say, the American Medical Association. It has many activists and nutballs as members who have no medical or mental health expertise. But in so far as its “guidelines” are used by real medical groups and real doctors, and taken as gospel by woke MSM hacks, it has huge influence and no guardrails. What we are discovering is a grotesquely unethical experiment on vulnerable gender-dysphoric (and often gay) children, performed without meaningful consent, based on manipulative lies (the suicide canard), and defended by a conscious campaign of rank misinformation and ideological bullying.
I used to think there was some good in some of this, and that these experiments were being conducted with entirely good intentions by ethical doctors, who would never violate the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm.” We all know better now. These quacks treat informed consent as optional, deploy emotional blackmail to alter a child’s endocrine system for life, and care little about the long-term consequences for the victims of their lucrative craft. They have never seen a guardrail protecting children that they didn’t want to remove — and recently abolished any lower limits on the ages at which children can be transed.
At some point the perpetrators of this unethical abuse of vulnerable, troubled kids need to face consequences, and not just in the broken, mutilated bodies of the children they have so callously abused.
Lawyers with the balls to buck the narrative and sue these monsters for malpractice deserve the rich financial rewards they’ll work so very hard to get.
Lost in the Cosmos
Assume that you are quite right. You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth—and who are luckily exempt from depression—would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
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.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 