Category: Journalism

Fanatics and others

Fanaticism

The Minnesota Assassin

The Minnesota political assassin (who I won’t name) had some red flags in initial biographical information. From my perspective (Eastern Orthodox, formerly Evangelical and Calvinist, always active in my faith and never “charismatic”), the biggest one was his invocation of new apostles and prophets as what America needs spiritually — an indication of New Apostolic Reformation beliefs or something adjacent.

(Surprisingly few NAR advocates will own up to it; either it’s so loosely structured that adherence is ambiguous – which I suspect is the case – or they’re told to lie, or something.)

Now Stephanie McCrummen at the Atlantic has dug a little deeper and confirmed my suspicions.

Now comes the hard part: Assuming his guilt (which I’m allowed to do because I’m not a criminal court), dare we blame his assassinations, and the apparent intention to assassinate as many as 70 others, on his NAR ideas, or do we hold open the possibility of insanity or some other explanation?

Blaming NAR is tempting for me because I so detest it. But I have seen no information that NAR actually encourages physical violence, and not just vehement rhetoric. (Their “violent prayer” talk seems, preliminarily, to be a red herring.) The theory of stochastic terrorism has always struck me as plausible, but it’s hard to imagine any forcefully-expressed opinion that has zero chance of pushing some random person over some edge.

So I’m glad Stephanie McCrummen withheld judgment about causation. It’s still the extremely early days in the criminal proceedings, and more, if not all, will be revealed eventually.

Christianity is not an instrument of political power

David French comes closer than McCrummen to linking the assassination effect to the N.A.R. cause, and also had this observation:

Last election cycle I helped create a new Christian curriculum for political engagement …

As I talked about the curriculum in gatherings across the country, I was struck by the extent to which I was asked the same question time and again. “Sure,” people would say, “we need to be kind, but what if that doesn’t work?”

The implication was clear — victory was the imperative, and while kindness was desirable, it was the contingent value, to be discarded when it failed to deliver the desired political results.

David French

A “Christian” who thinks political victory is more important than living as Christ taught (let’s say, in the Beatitudes for instance) is a sorely confused Christian.

I’ve probably said it before, but I’ll say it again. One of the countless blessings I’ve received in Orthodox Christianity is the company of martyrs, many of whom died because they knew that gaining the world wasn’t worth losing one’s soul. If you’re in a “Christian” tradition where leaders or laity act as if that’s a good trade (none of them are wicked enough to actually teach it), get out before it’s too late.

Who are the fanatics?

We know now that the FBI’s infamous Richmond Memo, targeting traditional Catholics as potential terrorists and comparing them with Islamists, was not merely the product of a few rogues in a single field office, as the agency had claimed.  Multiple offices were involved in drafting it, and it was distributed to over a thousand employees.

This post is not going to be a rant against the Biden administration.  What interests me is what was going on in the analysts’ heads.  I credit them with sincerity.  But why did they think traditional Catholicism is comparable to the ideology of radical Islam?

The most generous interpretation which can be placed on the memo is that the analysts thought of fanaticism simply as strong belief, and assumed that any strong belief is potentially violent.

But a sensible definition of fanaticism would emphasize the content of belief, not its strength.  You aren’t a fanatic for believing very strongly that you should “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”  The more strongly you believe that, the less likely you are to be a terrorist.

On the other hand, you really are a fanatic for believing that you should “kill them wherever you find them,” meaning Jews and infidels.  The more strongly you believe that, the more likely you are to be a terrorist.

The content of belief did come into the analysts’ definition in one way.  They plainly believed strongly in their own ideology, yet it seems never to have occurred to them to view themselves as fanatics.  It seems, then, that in their view, the term “fanatic” must have meant not just “anyone who believes strongly,” but rather something like “Anyone who believes strongly enough in God, rather than in progressive dogma, for his belief to influence the rest of his life” – and the full force of the federal government must be used to surveil and suppress all such people.

So by their definition, yes, traditional Catholics are fanatics.  But by a more sensible definition, which ideology is a better candidate for being called by that label?

J Budziszewski

Evangelical Religion

I return to the subject of Evangelicalism so often, I think, because there is some stubborn something within me that believes, against so much journalistic “evidence” (thousands of profiles of self-identified Evangelicals doing bizarre things), that a significant number of Evangelicals are acting and believing in perfect good faith, and that I simply need to find the magic words to help them see what I can’t un-see.

There is some tenderness mixed with my frustration at 28 years of almost complete failure in that regard. And there is some perversity in my rejection of the wisdom of Orthodoxy, which really does not encourage trying to argue people into the Orthodox faith. “Acquire the Holy Spirit and thousands around you will be saved,” said Saint Seraphim of Sarov, but something there is about an American ex-Evangelical that still loves a short-cut.

Over the years, I have cast a lot of shade on the concept of “religion.” I’m starting to think I should have self-critically cast similar shade under the concept of “Evangelicalism.”

Here’s what I think I’ve been doing that’s sorely mistaken:

  1. The “good faith” Evangelicals I’m trying to persuade are basically wealthy white church-going Evangelicals in, or in orbit around, Wheaton, Illinois (and maybe Grand Rapids, Michigan). The former are the kind of people I hung out with for roughly 6 years of my life (five years in school plus one year in my young adulthood), the latter for 15 years. They are the kind of people I see at my Wheaton Academy homecomings every five years. I like them; no, I love them. We don’t talk politics when we get together. I fancy they’re not Trump fans, but I really don’t know and I fear I’d be disappointed if I found out.
  2. The evangelicals I’m yelling about are random self-identified Evangelicals or flakes identified as Evangelical by journalists in mainstream media, who may or may not attend church and who may have adopted the Evangelical label simply because they’re Trump supporters. I have little experience of them. The “good faith” Evangelicals may be as baffled by them as I am.

My impression, which I’ve had but suppressed for rather a long time, is that “Evangelicalism” isn’t coherent, though we seem not to be able to live without it. So when I shout at Evangelicals, it’s like shaking my fist and cursing at the clouds.

It has always been notoriously difficult to define what an Evangelical is. Probably the most widely-accepted attempt is the Bebbington Quadrilateral. But my favorite is from Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio Journal. I’m not going to take the time to dig it up verbatim, but the gist was that Evangelicals recognize one another not by right doctrine, orthodoxy, but by “right feeling,” orthopathos. They sing the same songs, and pray similar extemporaneous prayers, supported Billy Graham Crusades, and so forth.

I don’t know whether that is even true today of the motley crew that journalists identify as Evangelical.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows: You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well … Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story—and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

Michael Crichton (via ChatGPT because I couldn’t remember “Gell-Mann Amnesia effect”).

The press tends to garble Eastern Orthodoxy, so why should I believe them about Evangelicalism?

Many of them probably labeled the Minnesota assassin “evangelical.” Was he? Is the evidence that he wasn’t a No True Scotsman fallacy?

I know Orthodoxy; I just really don’t know Evangelicalism or its outer boundaries any more, if ever I did.

So you have my permission to go back to everything I’ve written about Evangelicals and Evangelicalism and say “he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” because much of the time I’ve been Gell-Mann-ing it.

I’ll try to do better, but old habits die hard.

Sanity (a/k/a The Gospel for people battered by bad religion)

Having dwelt long on some pretty sorry stuff, a very long but infinitely more positive note:

I know that what I’m about to talk about is something I’ve talked about probably even fairly recently on the show, but I find myself in real life — meaning as a priest dealing with a group of parishioners, and trying to help them and guide them and just family members and everybody in general — I find myself having to say this over and over and over again, which tells me that probably if I say it over this microphone to people, there’s probably at least some folks out there who need to hear it again, even if I have talked about it recently.

The Christianity that those of us, at least in the United States — and I can only speak about that experience because I haven’t had any others — the Christianity we grew up around came from one of two categories largely. And people who want to defend those types of Christianity will call this a caricature. I don’t care anymore. But what I’m about to say, even if you think it’s a caricature of what they’re trying to teach, this is what a lot of the people within these traditions have actually received. Right? So it’s very easy to defend some tradition based on what’s in the books, and what we would mean to say, right? But I’m talking about what the people who I encounter, the people who talk to me about spiritual things. come to me and give confessions, what they’ve received from the Christianity they’ve grew up around, how that has shaped them, how they think because of it. And if people, representatives of those groups want to say that’s not what they meant to teach, cool, but maybe some introspection on why that’s not what people are receiving.

Anyway, what people have received comes in two categories. One is sort of the smilin’ Bob Shuler School of, “God loves you just the way you are and you don’t have to do anything. Just don’t worry about it. Just smile and be happy and listen to the hymns of your choice that you enjoy.” … That worked really well with boomers. That seemed to answer something they needed to hear. Maybe they’re a generation who grew up with very dissatisfied perfectionist parents, and so just hearing you’re fine just the way you are was what they needed, right? But that doesn’t work on subsequent generations, because subsequent generations are more realistic or nihilistic depending on your point of view, and know there’s something deeply wrong with themselves and with the world around them. So just telling them over again, “No, no, you’re fine, everything’s fine, it doesn’t work.” That’s why those kind of churches are all empty now.

The other school of thought is pretty much the exact opposite. It’s God doesn’t really love you. Right. In fact He’s pretty angry with you and He’s getting ready to send you to hell. Right? And the only way to avoid that is, depending on your tradition, right, is, for you to love him nonetheless, really sincerely — and there’s a rabbit hole to go down. How sincere am I ever really? — and do that plus live your life at a certain way and follow certain rules. Which will differ based on tradition, and which you will inevitably fail at.

That second one is most of the people who I interact with on spiritual matters, and it’s almost like they’ve been taught and they’ve internalized that. Their life in this world is this sort of really horrible reality show, almost like Squid Games, and like God is about weeding out contestants and narrowing it down to this faithful few and everybody else goes to hell, goes to eternal punishment except for this faithful few who, again, depending on your tradition, he may just pick. Or, you know, they’re the ones who really did it right. They’re the ones who really loved him sincerely, or they’re the ones who really lived their life the right way.

And any way you slice those things, most people again are realistic enough that when they look at their life, they don’t see a lot of evidence in their life and their actions that they’re one of the people God picked, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really sincere about following God, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really toeing the line and living the life they know they should be living, meaning most people are walking around — like religious people — walking around thinking they’re probably going to end up in hell. That God is probably mad at the most of the time, and that He’s looking for them to make some missteps so, boom!, they can get nailed.

Also most atheists are walking around doing the same thing they’re protesting constantly that there is no God because they can’t deal with that guilt and stuff that they’ve internalized. They can’t live like that. No one can live like that their route to trying to live like that and deal with the cognitive dissonance is just to deny that any of it’s true, over and over and over again publicly, loudly to everyone who will listen. Right.

Whereas the religious people are just in this kind of quiet desperation of how do I figure this out. Right.

So let me reiterate again, right, and Penal Substitution plays a big part in this. That’s why I’m bringing it up in this context:

God loves you. Jesus said so. St. John’s Gospel, the Father Himself loves you. He is not angry at you. He does not want to destroy you for your sins. There is no power of justice that commands him to do so. No one commands him to do anything. He loves you. He wants you to find salvation, but salvation is a thing you have to actually do. He wants you to do it. The Bible says so. God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. But you have to do it. He empowers you to do it. He forgives you when you mess up trying to do it. He heals you when you damage yourself trying to do it and failing. He is entirely on your side. The God who created the universe is entirely on your side and the saints are on your side and the church is on your side. Everyone is on your side. Christ is advocating for you. Everything is set up for us.

When Saint Paul says to us, continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. You don’t stop them like Kierkegaard did. Read the next verse because it is God who is working in you to will and to do according to his pleasure. We continue on and we work out our salvation because we know that God is on our side and empowering us to do it and loving us and loving other people through us. We need to pray about that. We need to pray it. We need to repeat it. We need to kind of imitate what the atheists are doing. We need to say it out loud. We need to say it to each other. We need to say it to everyone who will listen right? That God loves you and wants you to find salvation, wants you to be healed, wants you to be set free from sin. He wants all these things for you. It doesn’t mean you have nothing to do. That doesn’t mean you’re fine just the way you are. You know you’re not fine just the way you are, right? But it means that He is there to help you to grow to be transformed into the person who you need to be and want to be. The person he created you to be for eternity. That’s the actual message of Christianity. Don’t accept any substitutes for that, ever at all for any reason.

Fr. Stephen De Young.

I probably will publish this from time to time for the rest of my blogging life.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.

May 9, 2025

Trump, Trumpism

Two Americas in a nutshell

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

Peggy Noonan

Ends and means

How can it be wrong when it feels so right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conservative critics of Trumpism

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

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

Jonah Goldberg, Right Ends, Wrong Means

Gangster government

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

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

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

Nellie Bowles

The great film menace

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

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

Nick Catoggio (emphasis added).

It never was about antisemitism

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

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

Rose Horowitch, Trump Finally Drops the Anti-Semitism Pretext

Crypto

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

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

Congress’ default

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

…

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

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

…

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

Yuval Levin

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

Excerpts from Sully

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

Andrew Sullivan

Without Comment

Other stuff

Transing the gay away isn’t entirely new

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

Andrew Sullivan

Sports stadiums, data servers, and other boondoggles

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

The Dispatch

NYT stylesheet

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

R.R. Reno (hyperlink added)

Datapoint

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

Quoted in the Dispatch from a New York Magazine article.

A lighter note

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

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

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

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

First weekend of Spring

Give it back!

Raphael Glucksmann, a member of the European Parliament, feels that America has reneged on the values that led to the statue being gifted. “We’re going to say to the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants, to the Americans who fired researchers for demanding scientific freedom: “Give us back the Statue of Liberty,” he said at a convention of his center-left party, Place Publique, Sunday. “We gave it to you as a gift, but apparently you despise it. So it will be just fine here at home,” Glucksmann added.

Daily Beast via The Morning Dispatch

Incel Integralists

The Harvard Law School chapter of the Federalist Society was taken over last week by “Common Good Constitutionalism” disciples of Professor Adrian Vermeule (i.e., wokesters of the Right). The chapter’s former president, Sarah Isgur, has some thoughts about the incel Integralists and their pyrrhic victory:

Freedom is turned on its head. Individual freedom does not exist if it does not enhance the general welfare (again, defined by them). To break it down: Speech that is good is protected. Speech that is bad is not. And the government gets to define what is good.

But they misunderstand Fed Soc’s strength. So let me explain: It came from its size and its diversity of thought. When you shrink it down to only those people who agree with you on outcomes, you have stripped it of its source of power.

The Vikings can be resentful that we didn’t let them into our club. They can even burn down the club. But they still won’t be in the club. They’ll just be standing over its ashes, still sad, and confused, and angry, and without clerkships, and without girlfriends.

History is littered with the stories of young men who are frustrated and can’t get chicks. They’re called “Jacobins.”

(A combination of Twitter, and the Advisory Opinions podcast.)

Regrets

Trigger warning: Do not read the following with your mouth full of scrambled eggs or hot coffee. I speak from experience.

In Oedipus Tex, the mathematician-composer P.D.Q. Bach’s 1990 comedic answer to Stravinsky’s tragic oratorio, the titular hero discovers the truth of his situation—that he has married his mother, Billy-Jo Costa, Queen of the Rodeo—and, fulfilling the requirements of tragedy, he takes the rhinestone-covered barrettes out of her hair and gouges out his eyes. At which point the chorus sings:

“And immediately after he’d put out both his eyes, he … kind of wished he hadn’t.”

Everybody has regrets. Nations and their governments do, too. When things are upside down in the state, you end up with Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, or the Trump administration. 

Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian activist involved in the Columbia protests who was arrested in a Keystone Kops-level caper launched by Marco Rubio’s incompetent State Department, which proposed to revoke a student visa that Khalil doesn’t have. Khalil is, in fact, the holder of a green card, meaning that he has been given permanent resident status in the United States by the U.S. government. Which is to say, Khalil is in this country as a permanent resident thanks to a decision of the U.S. government, which, after looking back on what it had done, kind of wished it hadn’t.

Kevin D. Williamson

My regret is that I cannot read Kevin D. Williamson or Nick Catoggio more regularly without breaking my promise to myself not to wallow in politics during the Trumposcene, but rather to enjoy the inumerable things that humans can enjoy even under the governance of jackasses or jackboots.

The corrupting effect of corrupt rulers

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, in a section on corruption and the vices of rulers in a democracy, warned:

In a democracy private citizens see a man of their own rank in life who rises from that obscure position in a few years to riches and power; the spectacle excites their surprise and their envy, and they are led to inquire how the person who was yesterday their equal is today their ruler. To attribute his rise to his talents or his virtues is unpleasant, for it is tacitly to acknowledge that they are themselves less virtuous or less talented than he was. They are therefore led, and often rightly, to impute his success mainly to some of his vices; and an odious connection is thus formed between the ideas of turpitude and power, unworthiness and success, utility and dishonor.

Tocqueville’s concern was that if citizens in a democracy saw that unethical and corrupt behavior led to “riches and power,” this would not only normalize such behavior; it would validate and even valorize it. The “odious connection” between immoral behavior and worldly success would be first made by the public, which would then emulate that behavior.

That is the great civic danger posed by Donald Trump, that the habits of his heart become the habits of our hearts; that his code of conduct becomes ours. That we delight in mistreating others almost as much as he does. That vengeance becomes nearly as important to us as it is to him. That dehumanization becomes de rigueur.

Peter Wehner, Trump’s Revenge Campaign

Thumbnail history of the GOP since 2008

David French, reflecting on his (supportive) relationship to the Tea Party movement and cautioning Democrats against trying to reproduce it in the Democrat party:

But it all turned bad, and the reasons it turned bad are directly relevant to Democrats today.

Republicans built a movement around both anger and ideology. My mistake was in believing that the ideology was more important than the anger, but it was the anger that gave the Tea Party its political momentum, and that anger eventually swallowed the ideology. Rage is now the defining characteristic of Trump’s Republican Party.

…

My first interpretation of Tea Party anger was precisely that it was in service of higher values, specifically a return to founding constitutional principles and an embrace of free markets and fiscal responsibility. But that was wrong. The ideology mattered only if it could serve the anger.

Another way of putting it is that Tea Party members embraced constitutional conservatism and libertarianism as a tactic, not as a principle, and the instant that a different, Trumpist ideology emerged — a better vehicle for the party’s raw rage — they welcomed it with open arms.

What’s your hurry?

Could this be the meta-explanation of what the ochre emperor is doing?:

DOGE is in a race with the courts. From the first days of the administration it was all shock and awe. Take an agency everyone knows is a problem, such as USAID, and kill it. Tell employees to go home, put a guard outside and lock the door, cover the agency’s name in gaffer’s tape, have a functionary send an email terminating employment, then disable email accounts. Staffers can’t reach each other, can’t find the reporter’s address—confusion kills the will to resist. Other agencies watch, and it puts the fear of God into them.

It’s all a race to get as much accomplished now as possible. Once something goes to the Supreme Court, there will be clear limits. Until then, maybe months, maybe a year, get it done.

Peggy Noonan. More:

Here I confess my conservative lizard brain likes seeing unhelpful and destructive parts of any organism, very much including government, cut and sometimes obliterated, and for the usual reasons. But the non-lizard parts—those that are analytical, involve experience, and have observed human nature and seen who’s doing the cutting, and at what size and speed—recoil, and see great danger ahead.

Judiciary 101

“The good news here is, we did put 235 judges, progressive judges, judges not under the control of Trump, last year on the bench, and they are ruling against Trump time after time after time,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said a few days ago.

You do the judiciary no favors talking like that, Sen. Schumer.

  1. “[C]onservative judges, judges (supposedly) under the control of Trump,” are ruling against him, too — just as they did with his b*llsh*t 2020-21 election challenges.
  2. No federal judge is “under the control” of the President who appointed him or her. That’s kinda the point of life tenure on good behavior.

Miscellany

  • “If you weren’t outraged that the law and due process weren’t followed when Biden let 10+ million people into the country, don’t expect voters to be outraged by accusations Trump isn’t following due process when he deports them,” – Mark Hemingway.
  • “I still can’t get over the power of negative polarization where liberals genuinely convinced themselves that the lab leak was the racist theory of Covid origins, but the ‘it’s just the disgusting hygiene and superstition of Chinese wet market customers’ was the non-racist theory,” – Michael Brendan Dougherty.
  • Colin Wright: “‘Christ Is King’ Is the Woke Right’s ‘Black Lives Matter.’”

All via Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan’s main essay is on how Anthony Fauci intentionally misled us about the origins of Covid.

Why on earth would panicked scientists believe that Covid was probably a lab leak and then write a landmark paper “trying to disprove” it? It’s the essential question. One obvious answer is that Fauci realized that if his beloved gain-of-function research had led to the death of millions in a plague, he might not go down in history as a medical saint.

I have no need of any other hypothesis.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Ides of March

Simile of the week

[I] n The New Yorker, Ruth Marcus, who recently resigned from The Washington Post, explained that she and other columnists were confused by the Post owner Jeff Bezos’ new edict that the Opinions section write only in favor of “personal liberties and free markets”: “Without further clarification, we were like dogs that had been fitted with shock collars but had no clue where the invisible fence was.” (Susan Casey, Palm City, Fla.)

Via Frank Bruni

Justice Barrett

After a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s effort to stop $2 billion in foreign-aid spending, Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined with Chief Justice John Roberts and all three Democratic-appointed justices to leave that order in place. The decision provoked a fiery and warranted dissent from Justice Samuel Alito, as well as some bitter complaints about Barrett from the right-leaning commentariat. It is understandable that conservatives might be nervous about the Supreme Court. For good reason, the names “Stevens,” “Souter,” “Kennedy,” and “O’Connor” echo eerily in the originalist mind. But while she was wrong in this particular case, there is no evidence that Barrett is at risk of joining their ranks. She concurred in Dobbs, the case that overturned Roe; in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., the case that barred affirmative action; and in Bruen, the case that expanded the protections of the Second Amendment. More important than those outcomes is how she did so. Unlike the judicial nomads of the past, Barrett has a transparent and well-considered approach to the law that explains her actions even when she disappoints. In the case that prompted the criticisms, she was likely motivated by her mistrust of the shadow docket and her dislike of big cases built atop disputed facts. To conclude from this that Barrett was “a mistake”—or, worse, “a DEI hire”—is absurd. Judges are not supposed to play for a team.

National Review email for 3/14/25

Meritocracy is the death of noblesse oblige

In some ways, we’ve just reestablished the old hierarchy rooted in wealth and social status—only the new elites possess greater hubris, because they believe that their status has been won by hard work and talent rather than by birth. The sense that they “deserve” their success for having earned it can make them feel more entitled to the fruits of it, and less called to the spirit of noblesse oblige.

David Brooks, How the Ivy League Broke America

Gold and Bitcoin

I’ve shunned Bitcoin as an investment because it’s useless other than for criming and speculation.

I’ve always shunned gold for similar reasons. Its industrial and jewelry uses are not the reason for it rising to more than $3,000 per troy ounce.

Regarding this Presidency

Trump censorship worse than cancel culture

I’ve been relegating most of my bile toward Trump and his goons to another blog, referenced in the footer below, but this is so patently un-American that it needs the widest exposure I can give it:

[T]his is not about protection from woke professors or ideologically captured deans. It’s protection from direct surveillance by the federal government. The Trump administration has launched a massive, all-of-government, AI-assisted program called “Catch and Revoke,” which will scan every social media comment and anything online they can use to flush out any noncitizen who might be seen as anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist or anti-Israel or indeed just getting on Marco Rubio’s wrong side.

Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, has not been accused of a crime. And that is the point. …

…

JD Vance — who lectured Europeans on free speech online, while his own administration was using AI to police the web for dissent! — said on Fox that a green card holder “doesn’t have an indefinite right to stay in America.”

Andrew Sullivan

In a Feb. 6 editorial, [Purdue] Exponent editors wrote: “And don’t get it twisted: When letters of visa revocation arrive in these students’ mailboxes and federal agents come to Purdue’s campus, no distinction will be made between ‘pro-jihadist’ and pro-Palestinian. Pro-ceasefire will continue to be conflated with ‘antisemitic.’ Anti-war can only now mean ‘pro-Hamas.’ Such twisting of language to be used as a weapon is contrary to the First Amendment, which gives the Exponent its right to exist just as much as it gives the right to students to protest as they see fit. It is the opinion of the Exponent that standing back while our website is potentially used to identify the state’s enemies would be directly against those principles.”

Based in Lafayette, Indiana

The statute cited by the Trump administration for expelling Khalil is very broad — and vague. I don’t think it will be struck down in its entirety, but surely permanent residents are entitled to know with some clarity what behaviors could get them kicked out of the country.

So I think the likeliest outcome is “unconstitutional as applied” to Khalil.

Living in fear

I spoke on Thursday to a university president who told me he was just advised to hire a bodyguard. He said he’d never seen so much fear in the world of higher education — that many college presidents are “scared to death” about the Trump administration cutting their funding, Elon Musk unleashing Twitter mobs on them, ICE agents coming on campus, angry email flooding their inboxes, student protests over Gaza and Israel, and worries about being targeted for violence. I was a higher education reporter two decades ago, when universities were widely admired in America, and so I asked this president — what went wrong?

He said presidents and professors had taken too many things for granted — they thought they’d always be seen as a “public good” benefiting society, but came to be seen as elitist and condescending toward regular Americans. And Americans hate a lot of things, but they really hate elites condescending to them. Now we are seeing a big reckoning for higher education — ideological, cultural, financial — driven by Donald Trump and the right.

Patrick Healy, introducing a conversation with M. Gessen, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Bret Stephens.

Just sayin’

Narcissism has a very high correlation with conspicuous consumption in an effort to boost social status and self-esteem. Narcissists are focused on the symbolic, rather than functional, importance of commodities, and the symbolism of the products they purchase is often used to compensate for fragile egos and fluctuating self-esteem.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Re-assessing

As I have said any number of times, I have voted for the American Solidarity Party in each of the last three election cycles. But in the 2024 election, I was beginning to feel some sympathy for the people who thought Trump was less bad than Kamala Harris in the forced binary choice too many voters feel.

I no longer have any sympathy for that position, although I’m obviously working with the benefit of hindsight: Ready, Fire, Aim — over and over again ad infinitum. This is no way to run anything, quite apart from the autocracy.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Wednesday, 3/12/25

Trump-related

As is my wavering intent, I have moved my more vitriolic criticisms of Trump 2.0 to another blog. What remains is relatively temperate.

As the twig is bent …

“Dennis Burnham, who lived next door, was a toddler when his mother briefly put him in a playpen in their garden. She returned a few minutes later to find the current U.S. president, then aged five or six, standing at his fence throwing rocks at the little boy. Another neighbor, Steven Nachtigall, now a 66-year-old doctor, said he never forgot Trump … once jumping off his bike and beating up another boy: ‘It was so unusual and terrifying at that age,’” – Trump Revealed.

“When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” – Donald J Trump.

Andrew Sullivan

Tripping over a very low bar

It doesn’t take much to persuade me that some new development in this Administration is really bad. But it takes more than this:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s appointment today of his personal lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a Navy commander in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps reflects not just the norm-breaking approach that Hegseth is bringing to the job, but an odious philosophy of warfare. Like his new boss at the Pentagon, Parlatore has a pattern of providing support to soldiers accused of grave misconduct, even war crimes. He notably represented Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL court-martialed on charges including the murder of a captured fighter (though he was found guilty only of one, lesser charge), along with a second SEAL accused of serious sexual offenses. Elevating a lawyer with this record does not bode well for the armed services Hegseth hopes to build.

Jason Dempsey at the Atlantic.

If we really believe that every criminal defendant deserves competent legal counsel, we must stop insinuating that lawyers who have represented criminals are complicit in their crime and therefore evil. But we’ve done so (albeit selectively, sorted by tribe) all my adult life, and it has always bugged me — even before I was a lawyer.

Dare I think this nasty habit reflects what we really believe:

  1. We should have kangaroo courts or even summary executions without trial — except for members of our respective tribes.
  2. Anyone who facilitates real courts and frustrates summary executions is a money-grubbing lowlife.

For my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law

For all of Trump’s talk about rooting out “anti-Christian bias” from the United States, one of his administration’s first executive actions violated the free speech and religious freedom rights of several Christian congregations. It turns out that Trump wants to protect only his Christian allies from government reprisals. Dissenting believers will face his wrath, and the wrath of the state.

David French, who has the receipts.

This is one of the reasons I don’t buy Aaron Renn’s positive world/neutral world/negative world chronology of Christianity’s status in the US. True and consistent Christianity has never been viewed positively, and the negativity has come from the right as well as the left, albeit for different reasons.

The Plight of the Never-Trump Pundit

I woke up excited to write about the day’s most important political news—before remembering that I said most of what I wanted to say on the subject a few weeks ago.

Never Trumpers who work in media will face that problem every day for the next four years. Good luck finding something new and interesting to say as the president vindicates your arguments against him again and again and again.

Nick Catoggio

The Trumposcene is a great time not to be a professional pundit. Yes, I opine, but I don’t have to do it on a schedule, whether or not I’m feelin’ it.

And I mostly borrow.

Not Trump-related

Resurrecting de Gaulle

[T]he American right should consciously support a stronger France. It should encourage a special relationship between the two republics, support French primacy on the continent, treat Paris rather than Brussels as the European capital and the French military as the keystone of Europe’s security.

In effect, we should revisit Charles de Gaulle’s bid to maintain more French independence within the Western alliance, which made him a thorn in the American side during the Cold War, and recognize that he was right. It was not actually in America’s long-term interests to make Europe our full dependent, because vassaldom encourages weakness, and weakness reduces the value of the alliance in a world that America can no longer simply bestride alone.

…

The French military is limited but still “indisputably the most capable in Western Europe,” as Michael Shurkin noted in a 2023 analysis for War on the Rocks, with a resilient capacity for expeditionary action. Its nuclear-energy strategy has granted it a degree of energy independence that contrasts sharply with the reckless folly of German “green” de-industralization. Its pro-natal policies have given it a sustained demographic advantage; it is aging, but its fertility isn’t collapsing in the style of Italy, Spain or now Poland.

Then, psychologically, France lacks the crippling sense of historical guilt that still pervades Germany, and the junior-partner complex that has made Britain an unsuccessful adjunct of recent American foreign policy mistakes. It embodies two distinct forms of universalism, Roman Catholic and republican, that have more historical appeal across Europe than the Anglo-American style of empire. And the rapid renovation of Notre-Dame de Paris joined to the recent “gentle revival” of Catholic practice amid secularized conditions suggest stronger possibilities for spiritual renewal as well.

This last point is crucial for American conservatives. The current European establishment, secular and socially liberal even in its “conservative” forms, often feels like a natural ally not of the United States in full but of American progressivism alone. So the American right should wish to see a more substantial European conservatism re-emerge — more ambitious than today’s populist factions, and capable, as the right-wing Frenchman Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry put it this week, of affirming Europe’s “Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian” roots in contrast to Anglo-American progressivism.

Ross Douthat

ACB

After Justice Amy Coney Barrett voted against the Administration on one of the many Trump 2.0 “Emergency Docket” cases, she has been attacked I’m told, by the kinds of trolls who trot out canards like “DEI hire” in place of “treacherous bitch.” (I’m not referring to Prof. Josh Blackman, who criticizes the decision on more defensible grounds.)

Kevin D. Williamson is having none of it:

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined with the chief justice to rule against Trump in the matter of his attempt to unilaterally freeze certain federal spending, is a great loyalist—but not the kind of loyalist Donald Trump’s ghastly little sycophants demand that she be. Justice Barrett is loyal to her oath of office, to the law, to the Constitution, to certain principles governing her view of the judge’s role in American life—all of which amounts to approximately squat in the Trumpist mind, which demands only—exclusively—that she be loyal to Trump, and that she practice that loyalty by giving him what he wants in court, the statute books—and the Constitution—be damned. 

The usual dopes demand that she give Trump what he wants because he is “the man who put her on the Supreme Court.” Mike Davis of the Article III Project (not the author of Late Victorian Holocausts; his organization works to recruit Trump-friendly judges) sneers that the justice is “weak and timid” and, because he is a right-wing public intellectual in 2025, that “she is a rattled law professor with her head up her ass.” Davis, a former clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch, presumably is not as titanically stupid as he sounds, but there is a reason Justice Barrett is on the Supreme Court and he is a right-wing media gadfly who describes his job as “punching back at the left’s attacks.”

There is a word for men such as Davis et al.: subjects.

Kevin D. Williamson

Debasing education

Even though I am certainly angry at those students who choose to cheat, the fact is that I also care about them and feel a certain degree of compassion for them. I don’t want them to miss out on the opportunity to become educated, not even as the result of their own poor choices. It’s a bit of a Catch-22. How can we expect them to make good choices, about their studies or anything else, if they have not yet been given the tools to think critically? How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more? Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?

Troy Jollimore via Alan Jacobs

Moral clarity

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

Rod Dreher, Something Demonic Is In The Air, 1/13/2021

I don’t think Rod’s vision is as clear now as it was then.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

December 28, 2024

Culture

Texas

Also, whenever I read this paragraph to people who don’t live in the South, they get hung up on the fact that we had furniture devoted to just guns, but in rural Texas pretty much everyone has a gun cabinet. Unless they’re gay. Then they have gun armoires.

Jenny Lawson, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (a book that I haven’t read, but this quote came to my appreciative attention).

Pacifying the bathroom battlefield

I have a solution to this kind of nonsense: why do we need separate men’s a women’s bathrooms?

In parts of Europe or the Middle East (two areas where I’ve traveled; I can’t remember in which I saw this), toilet cubicles have walls that extend to the floor and close to the ceiling. The doors close against jambs, leaving no vertical cracks people can see through. Men and women queue up, using the same sinks for handwashing but using cubicles one at a time without sexual distinction.

Maybe that’s too grown-up for America, though.

Burke

Society is “a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for; we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and those obligations take priority over our rights.”

Damon Linker’s summary of Edmund Burke’s conservative view.

Exiting the bubble

To work at The Free Press, though, you have to completely exit the bubble. This is one of the things I’ve come to value most about it. My colleagues and our contributors have opinions across the political spectrum—and consequently, we publish articles across the political spectrum. I’ll admit I found it annoying during the presidential campaign that many of my colleagues kept hitting Kamala Harris over the head with a two-by-four. But I couldn’t deny the rationale—that the Democratic presidential candidate fundamentally had nothing to say. When Bari was asked why we focused more on Harris than Donald Trump, she replied that the legacy media was all over Trump, and somebody needed to hold Harris’s feet to the fire. I couldn’t disagree.

Joe Nocera, It’s Okay to Change Your Mind

Pity the pacific

Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he’s supposed to be.

Duncan Trussell via Andrew Sullivan

Abigail Shrier

What she learned in 2024

As my friend Caitlin Flanagan likes to say: “The truth bats last.” Boy, does it ever. And sometimes, the truth knocks it out of the park.

Abigail Shrier, author in 2021 of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, who had a very solid vindication in 2024. That the initial reaction to her sensible observations by the bien pensants was so hysterically negative shows that “craze” was a well-chosen word.

Duplicity

The Free Press had a celebrative article about Abigail Shrier’s vindication:

History should also note that some of the individuals and institutions that are supposed to protect our freedom of expression actively tried to suppress Shrier’s work.

Chase Strangio, the co-director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, and a transgender man, pronounced a kind of epitaph for what the ACLU used to stand for when he tweeted about Irreversible Damage: “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”

This is the same Chase Strangio who, a few weeks ago, was forced to admit to the Supreme Court that the “dead daughter or live son?” question whereby the trans cult emotionally blackmails parents into consenting to medical transition for gender dysphoric daughters is a lie, that suicide is not a major problem in gender dysphoria even without transitioning.

Trump 47

Taming the press

Trump has figured out how to emasculate the media and make them tame lap-dogs. Freedom of press is enshrined in the 1st Amendment, but much of the press (e.g., Washington Post, Los Angeles Times) is owned by billionaires with multiple other business interests that don’t have clear constitutional protection:

The leverage point Trump has recognized is that most major media properties are tied to some larger fortune: Amazon, Disney, NantWorks (the technology conglomerate owned by Soon-Shiong), and so on. All those business interests benefit from government cooperation and can be harmed by unfavorable policy choices. Trump can threaten these owners because he mostly does not care about policy for its own sake, is able to bring Republicans along with almost any stance he adopts, and has no public-spirited image to maintain. To the contrary, he has cultivated a reputation for venality and corruption (his allies euphemistically call him “transactional”), which makes his strongman threats exceedingly credible.

Jonathan Chait, Trump Has Found the Media’s Biggest Vulnerability

A lot of very powerful people seem to have reached the same conclusion. The behavior of corporate America toward Trump this past week can be understood as a product of two beliefs. One: Under the new administration, the U.S. government will function like a protection racket. Threats will be the currency of politics. Either you pay for the president’s “protection” or you get squeezed.

Two: As this unfolds, most Americans won’t care a bit.

…

A news industry owned and operated by oligarchs is easy pickings for an unscrupulous authoritarian because those oligarchs have many points of financial vulnerability. Trump doesn’t need to hurdle ABC News’ First Amendment rights in order to win his suit when he can sidestep those rights by squeezing [ABC’s owner] Disney instead.

Nick Catoggio

The answer may be to get a higher proportion of your news from sources like The Free Press (see Joe Nocera, above) or The Dispatch. (see Nick Catoggio, immediately above, though Nick only does commentary, not news).

Cover the children’s eyes and ears

Is Mr. Trump an irrevocable break with the past?

He isn’t the old-style president who allows you to say to the kids, “I’d like you to be like that man.” Jimmy Carter with his personal rectitude, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush with their virtues—Mr. Trump is a break with that, and the way he spoke when he first announced in 2015 made it clear. When he spoke of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, “and some, I assume, are good people,” which is a very Trumpian formulation, I thought, that’s not how presidents talk, you have to be measured, thoughtful, kindly.

I thought: That’s bad. But my sister and uncle thought it was good. They understood what he was saying and why he was saying it, they agreed with him, but they also knew he couldn’t walk it back. He couldn’t be elected and then say, “Oh, I changed my mind, on second thought we need more illegal immigration.” They felt the crudeness of his language meant that he was actually telling them the truth. It was a relief to them. “Forget eloquence, close the border!” They felt if the right policy requires a brute, get the brute.

Could a Lincoln become president today, a Reagan?

Peggy Noonan

Health Care

We have lots and lots and lots of ordinary, routine, foreseeable medical expenses that we should be paying for as though they were a cup of coffee or a Honda Civic, and we would almost certainly have radically better and more affordable care in those areas if we did. If your complaint is that people can’t afford to do that, then you have a tricky question to answer: If Americans as individuals and families cannot afford to pay for routine health care, then how the hell are Americans as one big indiscriminate national lump supposed to afford paying for routine health care? If nobody can afford it, then how can everybody afford it? Even if you deduct private profit and corporate administrative costs and such from the equation (which is nonsense, but, arguendo), the math doesn’t get a lot better. If your answer is “My nurse practitioner is too greedy—she drives a Lexus!—and rich people don’t pay enough taxes!” then you are a very silly person who doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

Kevin D. Williamson

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Potpourri

Not (especially) political

Wisdom from the third world

We had a lot of trouble with western mental health workers who came here immediately after the genocide and we had to ask some of them to leave. They came and their practice did not involve being outside in the sun where you begin to feel better, there was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again, there was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy, there was no acknowledgement of the depression as something invasive and external that could actually be cast out again. Instead they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to ask them to leave.

A Rwandan talking to a western writer, Andrew Solomon, about his experience with western mental health and depression. I regret losing the URL, but offer the following in complement:

Serenity in leisure

There is a certain serenity in leisure. That serenity springs precisely from our inability to understand, from a recognition of the mysterious nature of the universe; it springs from the courage of deep confidence, so that we are content to let things take their course; and there is something about it which Konrad Weiss, the poet, called “confidence in the fragmentariness of life and history.”

Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, page 47.

What do you do for a living?

Visit a graveyard; you will search in vain for a tombstone inscribed with the words “steam-fitter,” “executive vice president,” “park ranger,” or “clerk.” In death, the essence of a soul’s being on earth is seen as marked by the love they felt for, and received from, their husbands, wives, and children, or sometimes also by what military unit they served with in time of war. These are all things which involve both intense emotional commitment, and the giving and taking of life. While alive, in contrast, the first question anyone was likely to have asked on meeting any of those people was, “What do you do for a living?”

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

… but liars can figure

I saw an item in the Wall Street Journal very recently:

Here’s a statistic to remember next year, as Congress debates extending President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts: The top 1% of income-tax filers provided 40.4% of the revenue in 2022, according to recently released IRS data. The top 10% of filers carried 72% of the tax burden. Self-styled progressives will never admit it, but U.S. income taxes are already highly progressive ….

Then I saw a Politico item lamenting how little income tax the super-wealth pay on their increase wealth.

So, is someone lying?

Yeah, pretty much. Increased wealth doesn’t imply taxable income. I’m confident that the increased wealth figures Politico cited were mostly unrealized capital gains, which we don’t tax for a number of very good (if not ironclad) reasons.

Infrastructure century

Because the highways were gold-plated with our national wealth, all other forms of public building were impoverished. This is the reason why every town hall built after 1950 is a concrete-block shed full of cheap paneling and plastic furniture, why public schools look like overgrown gas stations, why courthouses, firehouses, halls of records, libraries, museums, post offices, and other civic monuments are indistinguishable from bottling plants and cold-storage warehouses. The dogmas of Modernism only helped rationalize what the car economy demanded: bare bones buildings that served their basic functions without symbolically expressing any aspirations or civic virtues.

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

How long will this hold?

Most Americans say media criticism helps hold politicians accountable | Pew Research Center

One of the things I worry about is unaccountable local officials now that the internet has killed smaller local media. The Lafayette Journal & Courier is a wraith, all but invisible were it not for stories fed from other Gannett papers. WLFI has been gutted with departures as its owner, Allen Media Group, bids billions for new acquisitions but doesn’t pay its bills. Only national politics is really covered any more, and that in only a selective way:

Trans teen health

In oral arguments at the Supreme Court Wednesday, ACLU lawyer and transgender ideologue Chase Strangio was forced to admit that gender realignment surgery for children does not prevent suicide—a core claim of many trans activists, notoriously communicated to parents by doctors as “do you want a live girl or a dead boy?” (Source: The Free Press)

What’s left of the trans argument against Tennessee law, in my view, boils down to “it’s sex discrimination to allow estrogen for girls, testosterone for boys, but not vice versa” — an argument that begs the question of whether the brute fact of sexual binary has any implications for law and medicine.

Wordplay

as man became disenchanted with regards to God and the cosmos, he became enchanted instead with himself and his own potential

Jake Meador

Just as clean air makes it possible to breathe, silence makes it possible to think.

Matthew Crawford

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

C.S. Lewis

[T]he forces that are destroying the things I cherish most in the world — faith, family, nation, tradition — all originate in the United States.

A Catholic expat friend of Rod Dreher

Two from Dreher’s latest book

Politics

Thankfulness

The Free Press has its people weigh in on what they’re thankful for at Thanksgiving. Martin Gurri responds:

This year, the petty little man in me is thankful that I won’t have to listen to Joe Biden’s double-dribbling sentences or Kamala Harris’s sitcom canned laughter ever again. The greedy analyst in me is thankful that Donald Trump is coming to burn Washington, D.C., to the ground, so Bari Weiss can keep telling people that I’m the only human on Earth who understands this dread pirate. The lonesome immigrant in me is thankful for my wife, and children, and grandchildren, my country and my street, my plans and my memories—because they make high politics feel like a trivial dream that I wake up from, when I step away from my laptop.

Pete Hegseth

I don’t trust Trump, and it seems to me as if he’s deliberately staffing up with sexual predators — as if that was proof of a decisive “get-things-done” manliness.

Moreover, I distrust pretty boys like Pete Heseth, Gavin Newsom, etc. (Yeah. Maybe there’s a little envy there.)

Nevertheless, I’m withholding my final judgment on Hegseth’s suitability for DoD because his accusers are hiding behind anonymity.

Pardon power

[T]he President is only accountable to the electorate so long as he or his party are up for election. Once the election is over, there’s no one for voters to punish. That’s why Biden waited until after the election to pardon Hunter; why Trump did the same for Steve Bannon and Roger Stone; why Obama did the same when commuting the sentences of Chelsea Manning and the terrorist Oscar López Rivera. And, most notoriously, that’s why Bill Clinton waited until his last full day in office to pardon the fugitive Marc Rich, who had fled to Switzerland to avoid prosecution and whose ex-wife donated $450,000 to the Clinton Library.

Stephen E. Sachs, How To Ban Lame-Duck Pardons

Feather pillows

It is true that in some matters, including a considerable swath of policy issues that he neither understands nor cares about, Trump can be like Lord Derby, who, “like the feather pillow, bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him”—which is no small thing given the assortment of asses we are talking about. But Trump makes a big impression of his own on the feather pillows he encounters.

Kevin D. Williamson

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

On “not going back” (and more)

On “not going back”

Indeed, we’re not going back

While many people voted against Trump because they felt that liberalism or democracy was under threat, many other people moved rightward for the same reason — because they felt that was the way to defend liberal norms against the speech police, or democratic power against control by technocratic elites.

Ross Douthat (unlocked). This is the sort of thing that finally became clear to me in the weeks before the election. I still voted for my third party, but with greater sympathy for Trump voters.

More Douthat:

[T]he first way that we are not going back: We are not returning to the narrowing of political debate that characterized the world after 1989, the converging worldviews of the Reaganite center-right and the Clinton-Blairite center-left, the ruling-out of radical and reactionary possibilities.

Yes, my blog category of “Zombie Reaganism” seems well and truly dead. I haven’t used it in year — probably at least nine — because there isn’t any Zombie Reaganism around any more.

[W]e are also not going back to a world where there is a set of trusted truth-mediating institutions, core sources of news and information that everyone recognizes and trusts, a “mainstream” of argument and opinion-shaping that sets the parameters of debate … the internet remains an acid for trust in institutions and an enabler of rebellions in a way that makes consensus and conformism extremely difficult to sustain.

…

Then there is the global backdrop: After the past four years, it’s clear that we are not going back to a world of unchallenged American primacy or a liberal international order expanding to encompass more and more regions of the globe … The “global” alliance in support of Ukraine is functionally mostly an American and European coalition, with much of the non-Western world distinctly not on our side.

…

The dynamics of the 21st century will favor belief over secularism, Orthodox Jews over their modernized coreligionists, the Amish over their modern neighbors, “trads” of all kinds over more lukewarm kinds of spirituality.

It took a lot of links to this article to make me realize that there was something worthwhile in it — even though it felt much different than most Douthat columns. Again: Ross Douthat (unlocked).

Still defining deviancy down

It’s been a little more than three decades since Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his famous essay on “Defining Deviancy Down.”

…

If Moynihan were writing his essay today, he might have added a section about politics. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency, it was still considered something of a political liability that he had been divorced 32 years earlier. In 1987, one of Reagan’s nominees for the Supreme Court, Douglas Ginsburg, had to withdraw his name after NPR’s Nina Totenberg revealed that, years earlier, the judge had smoked pot. A few years later, two of Bill Clinton’s early candidates for attorney general, Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood, were felled by revelations of hiring illegal immigrants as nannies (and, in Baird’s case, of not paying Social Security taxes).

How quaint.

On Monday, a lawyer for two women told several news outlets that former Representative Matt Gaetz used Venmo to pay for sex with multiple women, one of whom says she saw him having sex with a 17-year-old girl at a drug-fueled house party in 2017. Donald Trump is doubling down on Gaetz’s nomination as attorney general, even as the president-elect privately acknowledges that the chances of confirmation are not great.

…

Still, all this misses the meaning of the Gaetz nomination, the point of which has nothing to do with his suitability for the job. His virtue, in Trump’s eyes, is his unsuitability. He is the proverbial tip of the spear in a larger effort to define deviancy down …

There’s a guiding logic here — and it isn’t to “own the libs,” in the sense of driving Trump’s opponents to fits of moralistic rage (even if, from the president-elect’s perspective, that’s an ancillary benefit). It’s to perpetuate the spirit of cynicism, which is the core of Trumpism. If truth has no currency, you cannot use it. If power is the only coin of the realm, you’d better be on the side of it. If the government is run by cads and lackeys, you’ll need to make your peace with them.

Bret Stephens, Defining Deviancy Down. And Down. And Down. (unlocked)

Donald Trump’s deviancy doesn’t start with nominees. His entire scorched-earth speaking style is nothing any decent person would want to emulate or have his child emulate. (And I’m biting my tongue on at least one other topic.)

Louche is the new Cabinet Qualification

The press is obsessed with whether Fox talking head and Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth sexually assaulted a woman in 2017. I guess none of the proven stuff even matters any more because, hey!, no fault divorce:

The point of my tweet was to mock the efforts of the Trump-supporting right to use photographs like the one I was commenting on to portray the president-elect’s nomination of Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense as some kind of triumph of wholesome masculinity and family-focused fertility.

Hegseth is 44 years old. He’s been married three times. He was unfaithful to his first two wives. Three of his seven children were born from his second wife. Another of the children was born of his third wife, whom he impregnated while he was still married to his second wife. The other three children come from his third wife’s previous marriage.

…

Then there’s the story about the late wife of Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy’s wife killed herself after finding and reading his diary, which recorded details of 37 extramarital affairs, coded by sexual act.

…

It’s not good that John F. Kennedy got away with appalling behavior with women, just as it’s unfortunate that the Democratic Party circled the wagons around Bill Clinton after his Oval Office liaisons with a 22-year-old White House intern were revealed. Yet it’s healthier for a culture when such behavior is concealed, as Kennedy’s was—and even when partisans defend a perpetrator who already holds high office and will be reaching the end of his final term before long—than it is for a culture seemingly to reward such actions when they are already publicly known.

The old line about hypocrisy—that it’s the tribute that vice pays to virtue—is correct: Hypocritical responses from past Democrats were compatible with continuing to uphold the old standards. Actively elevating, and thereby rewarding, men who are known to treat women like playthings to be used, abused, and discarded at will is, quite obviously, not.

Yet that is precisely where we find ourselves today—confronting the predation unleashed by the rise of a thoroughly post-conservative right.

Damon Linker

Admitting the inadmissible

Consider the ways in which both the Right and the Left now routinely avail themselves of what might be called “the appeal to the calendar.” The Left, including former president Barack Obama, have long spoken of the possibility of being “on the wrong side of history,” as if history itself is a moral force that calls us to certain choices and will judge us should we choose wrongly. Yet the Right makes its own appeal to the calendar. Any number of moral horrors are tolerated and justified through the claim that the offending party “knows what time it is,” and therefore must be allowed or even encouraged. Here the claim is that we live in a unique apocalyptic moment in human history and, given the threats facing us, certain actions and words that might have once been beyond the pale are now admissible.

Jake Meador, The Long Defeat of History. Overall, this pairs nicely with Paul Kingsnorth, The Moses Option.

Standards of proof

I think it is likely that Matt Gaetz is guilty of everything of which he is accused and more. But I do not know what to do with that opinion. 

The accusations against Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings seemed to me absurd—out of character for the man, based on supposed wrongdoing when he was a teenager, and obviously timed for a specific political purpose, i.e., to prevent his confirmation to the Supreme Court. The accusations against Gaetz are perfectly in character for the man, they preceded his nomination but are based on relatively recent events, they are attested to by more than one person, etc. But they are only accusations. 

There is a kind of no-man’s-land between the sort of proof that will suffice to send somebody to prison and the kind of proof that will suffice to convince us that a man should not be attorney general or hold some other high office and the kind of proof that just makes us recoil from a man on grounds of general ick. The legal and ethical accusations Gaetz faces are both tawdry and serious–the most serious of them involve an underage prostitute–and, if they are substantiated, losing the AG spot would be the least of his worries. In the case of Gaetz, senators—and the public—are spared the necessity of diving too deeply into that to resolve this issue, inasmuch as there are perfectly adequate reasons to reject the Gaetz nomination that do not require any further proof at all: Gaetz is a cretin and a flunky, his low character is attested to publicly by members of his own party in Congress, he lacks any relevant preparation for the job at hand, etc.

Kevin D. Williamson

Miscellany

Ain’t gonna happen. Nope.

Sophia Feingold writing on homeschooling:

Despite parents’ clear desire for alternatives to public schools, progressives remain concerned about homeschooling. Besides concerns rooted in individual children’s welfare, progressives will sometimes hint that too many homeschoolers might lead to disruption in the civil sphere. (See, for instance, the recent Amazon documentary Shiny Happy People.) These latter fears are overblown. Homeschoolers are nowhere near replacing the American liberal regime with a Christian commonwealth (and even if they were, the evangelicals and the Catholic integralists would never be able to agree on a constitution).

Tricksters

I can’t call The Donald a Trickster in the folkloric sense of the word, mythically, because the Trickster in folklore is a regenerative, taboo-busting energy that is still – in the end in service, somehow – to a sacred outcome. I wouldn’t dream of bestowing that kind of generativity on The Donald. His Tourette level fabrications are mesmerically troubling, and yet his story won. A sizeable amount of the American public is not-yet-done with his tale. Sure, here he comes to ‘fix’ Gaza and the Ukraine, he just needs even more power than last time.

… As my old friend Lewis Hyde states:

Most of the travellers, liars, thieves and shameless personalities of the twentieth century (now 21st) are not tricksters at all, then. Their disruptions are not subtle enough, or pitched at a high enough level… when he lies and steals, it isn’t so much to get away with something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by doing so, open the road to possible new worlds. When Pablo Picasso says that “art is a lie that tells the truth,” we are closer to the old Trickster spirit.

Lewis Hyde and myself on the Trickster, back in 2017

…

So here we go, another four years on the merry-go-round of what will he do next? I turn to the Teacher and ask:

What shall we do Yeshua?

Don’t freak out, says Jesus. He said this two thousand years ago for just this kind of moment.

And Auden pipes up:

Don’t die in your dread.

It’s a liminal moment, as the anthropologists liked to call it. It’s not business as usual. That’s got to make us curious at the very least.

Martin Shaw

Silliness from Nellie Bowles

  • As a reminder of the official Dem line, here is a real-life sentence in Scientific American on the topic: “Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.” Right. Biases. Nothing inherent going on here. I don’t dominate in football because of biases.
  • Employees at the Federal Emergency Management Agency were told not to help people after Hurricane Milton if those people displayed Trump signage around their homes … So we have the taxpayer-funded federal relief agency explicitly denying certain Americans lifesaving service because of their politics. Basically, you get a lifeboat only if you’re also wearing a pride flag pin. But. . . but I was reliably told by The New York Times that this was a conspiracy theory?! … My worldview is shattered! NYT says something is categorically false but it is, in fact, completely true and simply politically inconvenient. Who can I ever trust?
  • Republicans latched on to the left’s strangest political beliefs and exploited them, spending $143 million on ads that highlighted Kamala’s policies around gender, which most Dems can barely defend. Because she really did support federally funded gender transition surgeries for illegal immigrants in jail. The idea sounds like something a dad would say after taking too much cough syrup. It’s like “Okay, Dad, I’m sure she said that, now let’s get you to bed.” But she really did.

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

It occurred to me recently that Nellie Bowles reminds me of the late Molly Ivins, she who said of Dubya that he couldn’t help himself verbally because “he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Treasure Nellie while we’ve got her.

Gaining Independence

[R]eal independence of mind can be won only by a sustained process of submission to authority.

Matthew Crawford, Individualism creates mass men, not individuals

Bad first-world theater

As a Colombia-born friend often reminds me, most of today’s American left has no experience of real poverty or hunger, real political repression, or real civil violence—the kind that leaves a river of blood in the streets. We Americans live in a cocoon of comfort and security compared to most of the rest of the world. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow earns $30 million a year for her progressive views. In effect, American radicalism on the left, especially in our cultural elite, is a performative faith, a kind of ongoing, immanent religious liturgy. It’s bad First World theater produced by the pampered, the privileged, the intellectually extreme, and hangers-on unaware of the uglier ironies of recent history.

Francis X. Maier, Woke Ideology Is Not Dead and Buried

Death of a menschess

One of my heroines has died: Diane Coleman, Fierce Foe of the Right-to-Die Movement, Dies at 71 – The New York Times.

[H]istory is well and truly back. Even Francis Fukuyama agrees.

Mary Harrington at UnHerd

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Election sundries

Legacy media versus new

Legacy:

Anti-trans rhetoric

Rogan and Vance spoke at length about transgender rights early in the conversation, specifically about gender-affirming care for minors and whether people should be allowed to play on sports teams that match their gender identity.

‘I’m the father of a 2-year-old daughter,’ Vance said. ‘I don’t want her going into athletic competitions where I’m terrified she’s gonna get bludgeoned to death because we’re allowing a 6-foot-1 male to compete with her in sports,’ Vance said.

Vance also suggested that wealthy parents might go so far as to coerce their children to undergo gender surgeries to get into better colleges and universities.

‘If you are a middle-class or upper-middle-class white parent, and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, obviously that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper-middle-class kids,’ he said, adding that ‘the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans.’

Vance later argued that he wouldn’t be surprised if Trump won ‘the normal gay guy vote because again, they just wanted to be left the hell alone.’

Karissa Waddick, USA Today. (Note that she styled this as “Anti-trans rhetoric,” a lazy, tendentious and ubiquitous formulation.)

New:

It strikes me as quite remarkable that, this week, JD Vance on Rogan aired a real and fascinating divide in the gay and lesbian world over politics — that hasn’t begun to see the light of day in the activist-controlled legacy media.

The official legacy media line is that there is a single, unanimous “LGBTQ+” community, that every one of us supports indoctrinating children in the core ideas of critical queer and gender theory from kindergarten on and transing those kids who say they are the opposite sex, after a mere couple of hours of therapy, even before they have gone through puberty.

All of this, of course, is a lie. Exit polls, for example, showed that roughly a third of gay men and lesbians voted for Trump in 2020. And despite transqueer bullying, many gay men and lesbians see in gender-dysphoric children their own pasts, and are deeply worried that even more gay and lesbian kids could be transitioned in error, and have their bodies wrecked for life.

This is what Vance described as the “normal gay guy” vote. For those appalled at the very idea of such a thing (there is of course massive pressure within left gay culture to demonize anything faintly “normal”), let me proffer a simple definition: a “normal gay guy” is a man solely attracted to biological men, who doesn’t wish to be a female, who believes in the sex binary, whose politics is rooted in something other than tribal victimology, and who does not identify as “queer”. I’d say, outside the woke “transqueer” bubbles, it’s a clear majority. Good luck finding any coverage of us outside Rogan and the web.

And, yes, many of us see “gender-affirming care” as what Vance called it: “pharmaceutical conversion therapy” for gay and lesbian children. That is, in fact, an inspired definition. We want to stop it. And we can’t believe our own organizations are in the vanguard of imposing it.

Andrew Sullivan, A “Normal Gay Guy” Checks In

These two were describing one and the same Joe Rogan show. Is it any wonder that legacy media are losing trust? I certainly won’t rely on them alone (though I can’t read everybody’s opinion on everything MSM insinuates into their narrative); nor can I imagine relying exclusively on new-media sources.

Essentially, this means that I probably don’t know much of anything reliably, though I’m a retired guy who spends shamefully long hours immersed in news and opinion.

So why do I do it? Because that was a mark of responsible citizenship back in the day, and I’m a creature of habit.

Perhaps I don’t frequent explicitly right-wing media because I’m not really tempted to trust the Left or even the Democrats who claim to be in the center. But if you’re willing to dig through the garbage and sort it carefully, you get a much different picture of reality than you get from legacy media. Park MacDougald, writing for the Tablet (The Democrats Insanity Defense) has done some of that garbage-sorting.

The sequence of events neatly encapsulated a pattern that has played out countless times since Trump entered American political life. Trump says something seemingly insane, to many people’s outrage and disbelief, only to have his supposed “lie” revealed to be wholly or at least significantly true. Often the specific truth revealed—that the outgoing Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team in order to gather information for what later became the Russiagate hoax, to cite another example—is in fact “crazier” than Trump’s exaggerations or garbling of the details. The insanity of the policy becomes the front line of defense against potential blowback: Who would believe that anyone would actually propose or support something so obviously at odds with public opinion and basic common sense? Trump must be a raving nutjob, just like we told you he was.

The reason that this strategy has worked is because Democrats rely on all nonexplicitly right-wing media to adopt their framing of issues and cite the party’s preferred experts, which they do. The party’s influence over the country’s communications apparatus has, for the past decade, emerged into something like a political superpower, allowing it to act outside the normal bounds of American politics without suffering from political blowback.

My vote for POTUS this year is unchanged from what I’ve written repeatedly, but read the whole MacDougald piece and you may feel less despondent if Trump pulls it out Tuesday: the alternative is really quite mad in its own way.

Banana Republicans

Election day in America is on Tuesday, but it may take days to know the result. In 2020 it took nearly four days until news outlets called the race for Joe Biden. Then Donald Trump alleged that it had been stolen and pressured state and local officials, as well as federal lawmakers, to reverse his defeat. If Mr Trump loses to Kamala Harris, expect a similar playbook: allegations of fraud, petitions for recounts and strong-arming of officials to withhold “certification”

Certification is the process by which local and state officials attest to the results’ accuracy. It is mandatory. State officeholders are unlikely to block certification should Mr Trump lose; no election deniers hold those jobs. But some rogue MAGA officials might do so at the county level. Courts would then intervene. If that scenario comes to pass, count on lawsuits until January 6th 2025, when Congress affirms the winner. The conspiracy theories and acrimony will persist beyond.

Economist World in Brief 11/3/24

Bret Stephens

Trump’s one of a kind. He leads the G.O.P. not as a party figure in the mold of Lyndon Johnson or as an ideological icon like Ronald Reagan. He’s a cult of personality figure, in the mold of Juan Perón. He draws his power not only from the adulation he inspires among supporters but also from the hatred he generates from his opponents. If he reversed all of his positions tomorrow, his followers would still love him, and his enemies would still hate him. He’s a once-in-a-century phenomenon.

…

The kind of management-consultant Republicanism epitomized by Romney isn’t particularly responsive to important working-class concerns revolving around, say, rampant opioid abuse, family breakdown or the struggles of alienated and purposeless young people, particularly men, in school and the workplace. I also think my brand of conservatism is probably insufficiently allergic to the cultural left. We dislike it but accommodate it, whereas younger, Trumpier conservatives hate it and mean to wage cultural war on it. Good for them; I lack the energy, and maybe the stomach, to write columns about, say, transgenderism.

On the other hand, some of the G.O.P.’s more populist positions are ones they’ll come to regret. High tariffs on imports sound great until you realize it will raise the prices of thousands of consumer goods without doing much to improve the economy at home. Cutting off aid to Ukraine is another idea Republicans will regret when Russian troops march into Kharkiv and China sees it as a case study in how to wear down the West in its own theater of interests.

…

I also think it’s important to acknowledge that, as much as I detest Trump the man, there are sides of the MAGA movement that deserve respect. I don’t think of it as a collection of unadulterated bigots. Most Trump voters I know are decent people who don’t like being condescended to by a morally smug and self-serving elite that fails to see the many ways in which the federal government fails ordinary people. I also think Trump’s voters see things that too easily escape the notice of Trump’s haters, whether it was the farce of many of the Covid rules and restrictions or the double standards by which Trump’s opponents claim to be defending democracy while using every trick in the book to put him in prison.

David French

I don’t think there’s any doubt that the young activists online and in Washington are very aggressively anti-woke and much more populist. I also think they’re deeply unrepresentative of their generation and their sense of isolation is driving many of them into dark spaces. The level of outright racism and antisemitism emanating from the young activist right is astounding.

It’s hard for me to forget what Aaron Sibarium, a rising-star reporter at The Washington Free Beacon, posted on X: “Whenever I’m on a career advice panel for young conservatives, I tell them to avoid group chats that use the N-word or otherwise blur the line between edgelording and earnest bigotry.” The fact that his advice is necessary is astounding.

I have to dissent from Bret when he says, “Good for them,” about this young activist response to the cultural left. I spent decades in courtrooms fighting left-wing illiberalism on campus, and I don’t believe right-wing illiberalism is an improvement. If you’re drafting speech codes — for example, Florida’s Stop Woke Act — to target left-wing speech, you’re still drafting speech codes. You’ve become the problem to fight the problem.

…

If Harris wins — and finally ends Trump’s political career — after tacking away from the left-wing positions she embraced in 2019, I’m hopeful for continued cooling in the culture wars. If she loses, I fully expect parts of the left to take that loss as proof that the path of moderation is the path of defeat, that Harris never should have opened the door to the likes of Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney and that it’s time to fight fire with fire.

…

While I love and respect many, many people who vote for Trump, I do not have anything good to say about the MAGA movement itself. Perhaps you have to be embedded in deep-red communities to see its effect on the ground, but I have never seen people go deep into MAGA without profound negative effects on their character, their temperament and their relationships with people outside MAGA.

For example, to truly be a member of MAGA in good standing, you have to defer to the election lie. Any movement that requires that degree of dangerous dishonesty as a condition of remaining in good standing is corrosive to the country.

Regarding a second Trump term, I do have some degree of optimism that he’ll continue to nominate judges like many of the judges I know from his first term — high-integrity civil servants who’ve proved to be dedicated to the rule of law. In fact, many of them helped block his effort to steal the election in 2020. But I’m worried even about that. There are deep MAGA resentments against many of Trump’s judges, and there is a sense that they don’t want any more justices quite like Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

Also, and this is no small thing, even if a second Trump administration is far more pro-choice than any Republican administration in my adult lifetime, it won’t try to codify Roe, there will be no move to expand or pack the Supreme Court, and it won’t try to aggressively wield Title IX to coerce compliance with far-left theories about gender or to deny due process on campus. Each of those moves can be blocked by courts or Congress, even if Harris wins, but I’d rather not see a presidential administration try any of those things.

New York Times Editorial Board

You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.

Nellie Bowles

I told you people to stop calling them Latinxs: Latinos have been abandoning Kamala Harris. And now we may have some clues as to why: They never wanted to be called Latinxs. See, for a few years it was necessary that American Democrats call Latino people Latinxs, despite clear and persistent protests. Why? Because Latino and Latina are gendered words, and binary ones to boot, and the Dems needed a nonbinary way to speak about this population in case any Latinxs use they/them pronouns. Literally the whole group was supposed to accept being renamed for the sake of they/them inclusivity. Needless to say, it didn’t work. And now there is a big, serious study out of Harvard University about how being called Latinx made Latinos turn to Trump.

William McGurn

[M]aybe what Americans who vote for Trump are saying is that they don’t believe the whole lot of you: the press that created a narrative of nonexistent Russian collusion, the scientists and health experts who misled us about Covid, the 51 former intelligence officials who released a statement three weeks before the 2020 election saying the Hunter Biden laptop had “the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” the federal and state prosecutors who tried to kill the former president’s re-election by piling up criminal indictments, the FBI that lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in an application for a warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, etc.

Whatever Mr. Trump’s offenses, his voters have concluded that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris are worse, if only because they can count on the media and many of the nation’s most important institutions to back them up.

I have come to appreciate in the last week the case against “the whole lot of you.” I’m not going to rush breathlessly to write more about what I’ve finally seen, but perhaps it will come before too long. Meanwhile, you can read part of what I’ve been reading: Nathan Pinkoski, Actually Existing Postliberalism.

Jack Matlock sheds light on (something rather like) the American Electoral College

I began to get a clearer idea of why Gorbachev shied away from an electoral campaign in 1990, however, when the draft legislation was finally published. According to the draft, presidential elections would be decided by a majority vote in a majority of the republics. This provision was obviously designed to avoid Russian domination of the selection of a president. If a president could be elected by a majority of all votes cast, ethnic Russians could elect a president who did not receive majority support in any other republic. The non-Russian republics would not accept a constitution that made this possible.

Autopsy on an Empire

Abi Millar

[A]mid rising speculation that America’s Christian flame is finally dying, it’s wrong to say the 2024 cycle has been free of spirituality. For if personal appeals to organised religion have been notable by their absence, this election is as metaphysical as ever. Whether in Harris’s subtle nods to secular spirituality, or else Trump’s manichaean cosmology of good and evil, the divine still matters. It’s just that the sandals-and-beard Christ is being elbowed aside by something stranger and darker, with consequences that could yet transform America’s political culture.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Halloween 2024

I’ve been relentlessly venting my spleen against one of the two candidates for President of the United States. Today, I will completely spare you vitriol except to offer this link.

There are, however, a few political comments today, along with much else.

The Machine

That’s not a very imaginative title I came up with. R.S. Thomas is a poet whose Collected Later Poems I bought for some reason, though Thomas was not acclaimed like, say, Dylan Thomas, his fellow Welchman. But I’m very fond of many of his poems.

‘The body is mine and the soul is mine’
says the machine. ‘I am at the dark source
where the good is indistinguishable
from evil. I fill my tanks up
and there is war. I empty them and there is not peace.
I am the sound,
not of the world breathing, but
of the catch rather in the world’s breath.’

Is there a contraceptive
for the machine, that we may enjoy
intercourse with it without being overrun
by vocabulary? We go up
into the temple of ourselves
and give thanks that we are not
as the machine is. But it waits
for us outside, knowing that when
we emerge it is into the noise
of its hand beating on the breast’s
iron as Pharisaically as ourselves.

R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000. Bloodaxe Books. Kindle Edition.

Excising personhood

Every attempt to implement machine learning will come at the cost of removing features of personhood from the world. Already, the cost of housing in person-scale environments like the neighborhood where Jacobs herself lived—Manhattan’s Greenwich Village—has soared beyond the reach of almost everyone, leaving those with more modest means to move to places dominated by highways.

Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For

Trusting obliging liars

When I tell people here in Tennessee that I work for The New York Times, I often get a visible negative reaction. Sometimes, the negative reaction is verbal and I’m condemned to my face as “fake news.”

I try to respond with a spirit of curiosity. I know that we make mistakes and I’m curious as to what specifically made them angry. Rarely do I get a precise answer. There is simply a sense that we can’t be trusted, that we’re on the other side.

When I ask which news outlets they follow, invariably they give me a list of channels and sites that were so comprehensively dishonest and irresponsible in 2020 and 2021 that many of them have been forced into settlements, have retracted stories and have issued apologies under pressure.

Yet all these outlets are all still popular on the right. Long after their dishonesty was exposed, the MAGA faithful continue to believe their reports and share their stories. It turns out that people will in fact trust liars — so long as the liars keep telling them what they want to hear.

David French, Four Lessons From Nine Years of Being ‘Never Trump’ (unlocked)

Here are French’s four lessons in summary:

  1. Community is more powerful than ideology
  2. We don’t know our true values until they’re tested
  3. Hatred is the prime motivating force in our politics
  4. Trust is tribal

Problematizing Geography

How Many Continents Are There? You May Not Like the Answers.
Recent earth science developments suggest that how we count our planet’s largest land masses is less clear than we learned in school.

NYT

Sweeties, everything is less clear than you learned in school.

A Moral Choice

Valerie Pavilonis gives a shout-out to the American Solidarity Party in the pages of the New York Times (Is There a Moral Choice for Catholic Voters?) (unlocked).

The imperfection she cites — questioning no-fault divorce — is just fine with me, by the way. I know the arguments that sold no-fault to America, but I also know the reality, and I don’t like it. No-fault deserves to be questioned.

Frivolous pursuits

“Talking? But what about?” Walking and talking—that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon. In the end she persuaded him, much against his will, to fly over to Amsterdam to see the Semi-Demi-Finals of the Women’s Heavyweight Wrestling Championship.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. I read 1984 long before I read Brave New World. Who in their right mind thinks Orwell saw the future more clearly than Huxley?

Brides of the State

Fifty percent of married women vote Republican, and 45% vote Democratic, which mirrors the GOP advantage in other demographic groups. But, according to Pew, “Women who have never been married are three times as likely to associate with the Democratic Party as with the Republican Party (72% vs. 24%).” In 1980, the number of women over 40 who had never married was around 6%. Now it is 22%, and this has become a crucial bloc for the Democrats.

Matthew Crawford, Brides of the State

A Conservative Case Against Trump

Bret Stephens makes A Conservative Case Against Trump (unlocked). It’s not his best anti-Trump case, in my opinion, but you can judge its persuasiveness for yourself if you like, since the end of the month is nigh and I have unlocked articles to give away still.

An Academic’s Case for Trump

The ideology that believes that humans can change sex; treats children’s and young people’s fantasies as truth; and is willing to put children on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even butcher them with surgery, is barbaric. There is no other word for it. Men who give themselves female names and pronouns, and put on lipstick and a dress, do not magically become women. Pretending that such men are women puts actual women directly at risk. Men, no matter how they dress or what they call themselves, have no place in women’s bathrooms, in women’s domestic crisis centers, in women’s prisons, or—less critically but somehow more obvious to everyone—in women’s sports.

Heather Heying, discussing one of the reasons she is, surprisingly, voting for Trump.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.