Category: journalistic murmurations

A little whataboutism (and more)

Whataboutism

The truths that must not be named

I’m not sure there’s anybody in the second Trump administration, save Marco Rubio, to which I would extend a defense on almost anything. But whataboutism isn’t a defense.

So long as Democrat nominees to high office cannot affirm that men do not become pregnant (a stock Republican gotcha question), they lack standing to criticize Trump nominees’ refusal to affirm that Joe Biden won the 2020 election (a stock Democrat gotcha question).

(Heck, in one sense, the Democrats are worse. I’m not sure I, who detest Trump, could affirm Biden’s victory in terms stronger than “I believe he won because it has been reported so, and certified so, and I know no credible evidence to the contrary.”)

Who’s the more partisan Justice?

Who’s more partisan:

  • Justice Samuel Alito, who on questions of central importance to Trump, votes with him 87% of the time? Or maybe it’s …
  • Ketanji Brown Jackson, who on questions of central importance to Trump, votes against him 98% of the time?

Somehow, the press just isn’t interested in the KBJ side of that. (H/T Sara Isgur)

Trump doesn’t give a rip about the GOP

The only thing good things to say about Trump’s speech Thursday night were that he reportedly kept it down to 25 minutes and didn’t harp on the supposed theft of the 2020 Election. Other than that, his party was almost certainly damaged badly:

In early 2021, Republicans were poised to win a majority in the U.S. Senate … All they had to do was win the two Senate seats in Georgia headed to a runoff in January.

Then Donald Trump opened his yap. He had just lost the presidency. To assuage his own ego injury, Trump attacked the election as fake and rigged. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the effect of this talk in Georgia … Trump had discouraged his own voters and energized his foes. His party lost both seats and any hope of retaining the Senate.

Tonight, Trump repeated …

If … you are pro-Trump, you heard a message of despair. Your president, in whom you trust, described a hopelessly compromised voting system, so broken that it fooled even Trump himself in his first presidency. Between the Chinese, the illegal aliens, and the hated liberal media, your vote will probably count for nothing. Plus, it’s crooked and unpatriotic to vote by mail. It’s all hopeless. Why bother?

… Trump’s message was one of futility, as if to say: It doesn’t matter how many of us show up, because of all the sinister plots against us. We’re doomed almost no matter what we do.

That message makes psychic sense for Trump. He’s probably going to lose at least one congressional chamber in November, perhaps two, and he desperately needs an explanation as to why it’s not his fault.

… among those who watched for sure—the hard-pressed Republican candidates begging for Trump to throw them a frickin’ bone on some issue of concern to voters—how mad are they tonight?

Trump is always about Trump first. Tonight was about Trump alone. He’s abandoned his allies because it’s his nature; he cannot help it. Soon he’ll discover what it’s like to be even more isolated and embattled than he needed to be, because he could not speak for—or about—anything other than himself.

David Frum, Trump Dooms His Own Party. See also Tom Nichols, Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China.

Someone wrote about this recently.

To every thing there is a season

If there is a season to everything, and a time to every purpose under heaven (Eccles. 3:1), then there are right and wrong ways to observe the landmarks of life. It simply does not make sense for secular authorities to use this extraordinary national birthday as the vehicle for eliciting waves of national guilt and launching a search for means of atonement. Compare this to, say, the way we characteristically observe a human birthday. When someone turns one hundred years old, do we see it as the opportunity for a struggle session, in which we browbeat that person into confessing the many misdeeds that have accumulated over the course of a long life? Or do we instead use it as an opportunity for the expression of love, and of our gratitude for the remarkable fact that this person is still among us? To what season does this occasion belong?

Wilfred M. McClay, A Nation’s Birthday

The End of Reading

My avoidance of reading The End of Reading is Here despite repeated recommendations (it’s so looooong!) reflected that even geezers can fall prey to the malady. Excerpts:

  • Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.
  • [A]s writing eroded individuals’ memories, the media theorist Andrey Mir has observed, it improved society’s collective memory.
  • Trump is our first postliterate president. It is difficult to imagine him being elected leader of a country where information is primarily spread through text. Ahead of the 2024 election, an NBC News poll of 1,000 voters found that Joe Biden had a 49-point lead among respondents who read newspapers. Trump has pioneered a style of communication that exploits our distracted, disputatious age.
  • Politicians on the right and the left have figured out how to exploit these new platforms. Reihan Salam, the president of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, described to me how this plays out. “You name an enemy and you polarize the public,” he said. “You don’t allow for nuance, because nuance is just a confusion when you’re in a struggle for power.” (Ironically, Salam is the boss of Christopher Rufo, who calculatedly used exactly this strategy to attack “critical race theory”.)

Don’t be like me. Read it. Reading something that long by itself begins the cure.

A linguistic curiosity

In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense.

Orhan Pamuk and Ara Guler, Istanbul

AI detection

Freddie de Boer has an interesting piece on the brittleness of AI-detector Pangram (which I hadn’t heard of by name, though I knew the concept).

I’m fortunate to be able to subscribe to many interesting things. But I still have only 24 hours in my day, like everyone else. I’m just not that interested in whether a human or a machine wrote a logical, even persuasive, argument; what matters is the truth, falsity, or fruitfulness of it in my situation. Only if I’m trying to decide whether the putative author is trustworthy would the AI question come up.

This is not to indict as foolish those who are interested in things like Pangram. I’m only saying that given my situation in life and reading habits, it’s not of interest to me — and that some of my readers might similarly be in a situation where the human or cyber source of a writing is irrelevant.

Luigi: The Musical

The hard part of selling liberalism or American conservatism (which seeks to conserve the liberal principles of the American founding) is not how we talk about the philosophy—the trouble is with the philosophy itself. Restraint is (barring some kink) unsexy. There is nothing thrilling about acknowledging the necessity of trade-offs, the role of prudence applied ad hoc to individual cases, or that the best-case scenario we are offering is a series of good-enough second-best settlements and accommodations. (Kevin D. Williamson)

I recently reviewed Luigi: The Musical, which closes with the titular antihero (Luigi Mangione is being tried for the murder of health insurance executive Brian Thompson) singing a song in which he proposes to keep murdering people until there is peace and justice upon the land while the chorus behind him sings about policy trade-offs, the complexity of health care as a social issue, and the necessities of compromise and negotiation. Of course, Luigi drowns out the chorus. That is how it goes. 

Kevin D. Williamson

How I use AI

AI is controversial in many ways, and I know a few people who consciously shun it completely. I, in contrast, use it while continuing to read about the dangers, horror stories, and other things to hone discernment.

I came across a list of recommendations for AI use that I agree with completely:

  • Avoid using AI chatbots for personal, spiritual, or emotional matters.
  • Restrict use strictly to non-personal tasks (e.g., recipes, summaries).
  • Do not seek consciousness, spiritual counsel, or relationship advice from AI.
  • Those with mental health issues or in vulnerable states should be warned against AI chatbot use.
  • Recognize that while most chatbot interactions are neutral, there is an elevated risk for spiritual deception.

(H/T Jordan, The AI Chatbot as Digital Oujia Board)

In addition, I just haven’t been comfortable with the thought of speaking directly to a chatbot. I’ll dictate questions, then cut-and-paste into it instead. I think I’m trying to avoid any faux-personal relationship.

So how does this cash out? Of what use is AI if those things are out of bounds?

Maybe this will help. Here are some questions I’ve posed to it or some requests I’ve made over about 14 months:

  • Why do so many organizations I give to send me membership cards? Is that supposed to create some special bond?
  • Is there any evidence that any of the Minneapolis protesters of ICE immigration enforcement were “paid agitators”?
  • Please compare English translations of The Brothers Karamazov, ranking them if there is a critical consensus.
  • Can you please summarize, in 1000 words or less, the change from Second-Temple Judaism to Rabbinic Judaism?
  • I’m trying first to recall and then to flesh out an assertion I heard or read in podcast, print or another “public-like” forum./The assertion was something along the lines that whether extraterrestrial intelligent life exists will never be definitively answered because it is impossible (as a matter of physics?) for such life to travel inter-galactically (or was it impossible from one solar system to another?)/Can you help me pin it down, and give a simplified not-too-scientifically-sophisticated explanation, not just the conclusion some have reached?
  • How prevalent is “birth tourism” in the United States?
  • How is the post-flood restoration of Asheville, NC coming along?

Then there were a couple of dialogs to get things done. Omitting those related to my work with some Boards of Directors, these include:

  • I used Claude AI to help me dress up my micro.blog posts with a custom CSS (since I don’t understand CSS it’s not worth the time it would take to learn).
  • My most ambitious use of an AI agent was to migrate a couple of years of Common Place Book entries from a run-on Markdown file, with date and time metadata for each separate entry, to DayOne, a Mac journaling app that just looks way nicer. I did the same with a run-on Markdown file of Diary entries.

My commonest AI use by far is a separate service, a browser plug-in called Voilá. I think it’s built on Chat GPT, and it has capabilities beyond my humble but time-saving use: Unless I know a writer as someone I read for the writing skill, not just for the opinion or other content, I repeatedly, multiple times per day, have Voilá summarize webpages for me to see if they’re worth reading. If I save the article, I typically prepend the Voilá summary to orient me if and when I come back to it.

Shorts on the Department of Justice

  • In 2019 Bill Barr, then Mr Trump’s pick for attorney-general, said that Americans “have to know that there are places in the government where the rule of law—not politics—holds sway” and that the Department of Justice “must be such a place”. Mr Trump has no time for that. Less than halfway through his second term, he has turned the DoJ from an arm of the law into a muscular limb of the presidency.(The Economist)
  • With warrants and subpoenas, the DoJ is pursuing Mr Trump’s critics and his hobby-horses, from political adversaries to election fraud to leaks in the press. The number of lawyers has dwindled by 20%; former prosecutors point to an incompatibility between the president’s agenda and the fair application of law. The DoJ is retreating from certain types of criminal enforcement. And, increasingly, judges are telling government lawyers that they cannot be taken at their word. (The Economist again)

Shorts

  • “It’s sad for Senator Lindsey Graham that the last person he spoke to on this earth was the president who stole his soul,” – Tina Brown. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
  • “14,000 Europeans died due to heat in June. This is the same continent that doesn’t believe in installing air-conditioning. For context, [14,000] is over 10 times the number of people who get murdered in America with a gun,” – Steve Guest. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
  • In The Atlantic, Helen Lewis processed Vice President JD Vance’s recent three-hour chat with Joe Rogan: “Watching Vance’s media appearances is uniquely painful. He lacks the authentic berserk of Kash Patel, or the pageant-queen polish of Karoline Leavitt, or his boss’s unique corkscrew approach to conversation. Like Stephen Miller, Vance desperately wants to be funny and cool. Like Stephen Miller, he is neither.” (Alex Gontscharow, Ashburn, Va., and Mike Marquard, Portland, Ore.) (Via Frank Bruni)
  • … “It’s not that nothing happens. It’s that the same thing almost happens, over and over, for two hours. A promising run, broken up. A cross to no one. A shot into the third row. Soccer isn’t really about scoring. It’s about the threat of scoring, endlessly deferred. It’s all foreplay, no sex.” (Sam Downing, Houston ) (Via Frank Bruni)
  • And in his newsletter, Ron Charles captured the vertical charms — and challenges — of Portugal’s capital: “We walked 24,000 steps, and somehow 23,000 of them were uphill. Lisbon, we’ve discovered, is basically an antique StairMaster tiled blue.” (Donna Peremes, Hyattsville, Md.) (Via Frank Bruni)
  • These are just horrible people, doing horrible things, on purpose. (David French regarding the Trump administration siccing their attack dogs on federal judges, and even on their law clerks).

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

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

Friday, July 17 Political Potpourri

Department of Injustice

It’s over.

The Justice Department’s most significant case stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol — the seditious conspiracy convictions of high-ranking members of the far right Proud Boys — has officially been erased.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, who presided over the six-month trial that led to the jury convictions, reluctantly granted a Justice Department motion to drop the case on Friday, concluding that he had no power to second-guess prosecutors once they decided to abandon it.

“In light of fundamental separation of powers principles … the proper course here is for the Court simply to grant the motion in full,” Kelly concluded, dismissing the case “with prejudice,” which means a future Justice Department is barred from revisiting the charges.

“No one should mistake the Court’s granting of the Government’s motion for its agreement with those decisions,” the judge added.

Politico (H/T John Ellis)

Grade inflation

Because I want my own students to stretch and because I want an A to make them robustly proud, I’m sparing with that mark, at least by today’s standards. I typically award A’s to no more than a quarter of the students in any class. But I give A- grades to too many of them, and I often feel obliged to tell students, at the start of the semester, that if they’re intent on a G.P.A. close to 4.0, I’m not a safe bet. A few drop the class, and I respect that. Most stay — but they stay knowing what’s what, which saves all of us awkwardness and bitterness.

I shouldn’t have to issue that warning. I shouldn’t be giving only a handful of B+ and B grades. I should be distributing a diversity of marks that speak to the many variations in student performance, even at Duke. It’s not that I want to be harsher; I want to be honest. Isn’t higher education about the pursuit of truth?

Frank Bruni

Ideology #FAIL (and success)

[Incorrigible narcissist and foulmouthed Pastor Douglas] Wilson has been hitting all these notes to a string of wide-eyed interviewers for some time now. But one point deserves scrutiny: his idea for household voting, in which the head of each household would be the sole voter. This is often characterized as the disenfranchisement of women because, for married couples, Wilson would have only the husband vote.

But here’s the funny thing: As marriage rates in America have declined, there are many single, female heads of households, and unmarried women lean ever more Democratic. If Wilson’s household voting plan were implemented, disenfranchising married women, it would empower the Democratic Party for decades and shut Republicans out of the White House.

Exit polling makes this unmistakable. In 2022, for example, scholars from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) summarize:

Fifty-eight percent of married voters supported GOP House candidates while 59 percent of unmarried respondents voted Democratic. Married men and women did not differ significantly from one another: 59 percent of married men and 56 percent of married women voted GOP. But there was a large gap in the unmarried category: A bare majority of unmarried men, 52 percent, voted for GOP candidates; only 31 percent of unmarried women did.

When the AEI scholars looked more closely at state-level races in Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, and Texas, the same pattern held. In all four states, they reported, “non-married women were the most Democratic group and married men the most Republican.”

Bonnie Kristian, Doug Wilson’s Household Voting Plan Could Empower Democrats for Decades (Christianity Today).

I paid a little bit of not unfavorable attention to Wilson prior to my entry into Christian Orthodoxy because he passed for some kind of Calvinist and was amusing. I think he has shifted more extremely to the right since then; I know I’ve changed, so his only interest to me now is as the leader of “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth’s chosen schismatic denomination and as having some affiliation with the current Christian-ish slice of the manosphere and other far-Right trollery.

Mainstream press has been giving a lot of “Be afraid. Be very afraid” attention to Wilson and his group. I don’t entirely buy it, but you really never know which crackpot cabals have the potential to take flight and which can be disregarded safely.

Sometimes, the press coverage itself helps launch things. Do you really think Donald Trump would be President if he hadn’t been broadcast into America’s living rooms as the masterful boss on Apprentice for a couple of decades?

Morally cleansing metal

Somehow, I gather, a $40K hybrid SUV getting 31 mpg, and the intercontinental energy and material flows that brought it into being, are more “green” than a ratty-looking old Volkswagen assembled from cast-off parts, foraged locally, that gets 32 mpg. There is a certain aesthetic of cleanliness that must be adhered to. Better yet, invisibility. To count as green, those ugly chunks of rusting 1970s steel would need to be removed and recycled: melted down in a coal-fired blast furnace and sent across an ocean to become raw material for, say, an electric (i.e., coal-powered) car, to be returned to the U.S. on a diesel-powered container ship. Such details are best kept out of mind; the main thing is that this journey accomplishes a moral cleansing of the metal.

Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive.

One of these ten is not like the others

  • A third man, 28, died Tuesday in St. Augustine, Florida, when a tractor-trailer struck him as he fled federal immigration agents.
  • Since Trump returned to office last year, at least 10 people have died during encounters with immigration agents.

The Morning Dispatch.

Please, Dispatch, do not confuse matters by including cases like the St. Augustine man in statistics about ICE lethality. It may be literally true that this was ”during” an encounter with ICE, but for once I’m having trouble seeing ICE culpability in that death.

The Game is Up

Dear MAGA America:

Just last night, your Lord, God and Savior Donald Trump made it clear yet again that the elections are rigged. He even released a tranche of documents that prove it.

So I don’t see much sense in you going out to vote any more.

Stay home, pop another cold one, turn on some Apprentice re-runs, and leave the voting to us fools who don’t know what time it is.

Yours,

Tipsy

Shorts

  • On Defector, David Roth nailed the president’s style of, um, oratory: “Things come out of Donald Trump’s mouth, then just keep on coming out of it.” And Trump has wed incontinent words to incoherent actions. “The sum of the wreckage this has made is staggering; fixing it will take a long time, or not happen at all. This is just one of those things you have to walk around knowing.” (Via Frank Bruni)
  • [F]or the first time, I’m contemplating the possibility of a Democratic Party that shares none of my values, which include empiricism, free speech, and being able to say words other than “oligarchy,” “Zionist,” and “don’t judge me by my old tweets.” (Jeff Maurer, Any Advice for the Soon-To-Be Politically Homeless?)
  • “Where is the line between opportunism and pragmatism? After January 6, 2021, Graham appeared to break with Trump, saying on the Senate floor, ‘Count me out. Enough is enough.’ A few months later, he acknowledged Trump’s continued hold over the Republican Party. ‘Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no,’ he said. ‘I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.’” (Robert Reich)
  • “Graham’s career arc also showed why so many Republicans of so many different stripes were tempted to embrace Trump. The senator ultimately succeeded in steering an inexperienced, ideologically malleable, and easily flattered president toward many of his own lifelong priorities.” (Benjy Sarlin)
  • To call him “the quintessential politician of this era” is as much a compliment as an insult, recognizing his prodigious retail skill and genius for schmoozing. No wonder Donald Trump, a huckster’s huckster, liked him so much. (Nick Catoggio)
  • The New York Times noted that Trump held only 61 rallies before November 2024, about five times fewer than in 2016. (Persuasion) Grrrr! “five times fewer” is better than “five times less,” but it’s still innumerately incoherent.

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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

February 19, 2026

Never smoked?

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

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

Punked

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

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

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

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

Perspective

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

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

Ah, those touchy conservatives!

Some Slate headlines over the past few days:

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

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

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

Do you see the theme there?

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

Kevin D. Williamson (bold added).

Conservatisms

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

David Brooks

Caricatures

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

Bret Stephens

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Christmas Eve

Religion and secularity

The religious/secular distinction is not a neutral set of descriptive categories, and the idea that religion has a greater tendency than the secular to promote violence is not a commonsense observation about the world. Both are ideological constructs that privilege certain Western secularist arrangements.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idoloatry

Don’t try to titrate poison

This French reactionary antisemitism came to a head in 1940, when the Nazis invaded, France surrendered, and Philippe Pétain became the dictator. Right-wing reactionaries, (including the vast majority of French bishops) were all too happy for the regime to enact laws that limited the civil rights of Jews. Many of those same bishops would later regret this when the cruelty of the anti-Jewish legislation became too blatant to ignore. In the end, around 70,000 Jews who had been under the jurisdiction of Vichy France would perish in concentration camps.

Thomas D. Howes, The Catholic Church Has Faced Antisemitism Before

I sometimes worry that populist rabble-rousers, with the roused rabble SWATting and making death threats against recalcitrant authorities, were the inevitable result of the “conservative” politics I long favored.

I don’t think that’s true, but once stung, twice cautious: these days, when I see an opinion piece that seems to make sense, but with comment boxes full of cheering conspiracy theorists and antisemites, I reflexively drop (or at least loosen my grip on) the opinion.

If you’re looking for rigorous logic in that, you’ll not find it. It’s just one geezer’s heuristic.

Primarying faithful legislators

The first time I recall hearing of Charlie Kirk was in connection with “The Falkirk Center,” the name being a portmanteau of “Falwell” and “Kirk.” Yeah, that Falwell. The Junior one. The sleazy one driven out of Liberty University eventually.

So I had a bias against Kirk from the start. No, he didn’t deserve to be murdered. Nowhere near. But 3+ months is long enough. I’m not going to bite my tongue any longer about the him and his Turning-Point-this-and-Turning-Point-that constellation of Christianish MAGA adjuncts.

He wasn’t my cup of tea. His Christianity was substantially alien to any traditional Christianity. I object to him being lionized as a Christian martyr and to the erection of a sort of cult around him. The more I learn about Turning Point shamelesslessly subordinating its version of Christianity to the will of über-pagan narcissist Donald Trump, the more it nauseates me.

All that to introduce much less:

[A]s early as August 18, Charlie Kirk said in an X post: “We will support primary opponents for Republicans in the Indiana State Legislature who refuse to support the team and redraw the maps.” Months later, on the eve of the vote, Trump ratcheted up the warnings to Indiana Republicans, saying as part of a lengthy post on Truth Social: “Indiana Senate ‘Leader’ Rod Bray enjoys being the only person in the United States of America who is against Republicans picking up extra seats. … He’s either a bad guy, or a very stupid one!”

David M. Drucker, Why Trump’s Redistricting Push Failed in Indiana.

The way primary elections tend to turn out the most extreme members of the party base, it’s possible that primarying Indiana Legislators who voted for the will expressed by the people of Indiana, rather than for the imperious wills of Donald Trump and Turning Point Action, will succeed. But I think not. I think the spell is broken. I’m looking forward to three years of quacking.(Yeah, that’s got a bit of wishcasting in it.)

Turning Point just concluded its conference

I suppose if Turning Point USA wanted its conference to make a big splash, it accomplished its mission. But a movement led by a president who made regular appearances in the world of professional wrestling now has rallies that resemble WrestleMania with podcasters, complete with boasts and threats and chest-thumping.

When you book a bunch of clowns, don’t be surprised if you end up with a circus.

Jim Geraghty, Turning Point USA conference was WrestleMania with podcasters

Wherein I register a rare disagreement with Kevin D. Williamson

A person who evacuates is emptying his bowels. A person removed from a place of danger is a person being evacuated. If you have 100,000 people evacuating all at once … well, maybe they won’t notice it too much in Seattle.

Those 100,000 were not ordered to evacuate; they were ordered to leave, to seek safety, to head for the hills, to make for higher ground, etc.

Kevin D. Williamson.

I love Williamson, but he’s lost me on this one. From the Department of Usage Makes Proper, evacuate has become broader than he insists. Even I, a card-carrying curmudgeon, would not use “evacuate” as he does; I’d add “evacuates his bowel” if that’s what I meant.

Having driven my stake in the ground, I confirmed my righteousness: the primary meaning of “evacuate” is to remove or empty.

I completely agree with Williamson on something else, though. After alluding to things like “messaging” in the upcoming election, he simplifies things:

I would like to suggest a relatively simple approach: Democrats should run on a platform of what it is they actually intend to do in office, and that platform should be what they believe to be the right thing. I would offer the same advice to Republicans if they had not made it so perfectly clear that they cannot and will not do any such thing, that their party and their movement is incapable of candor and good faith.

Thoughts at 3 am

That’s a metaphor. I rarely if ever fret about things at 3 am, and it I fret, it’s likelier to be about family or things closer to me than politics.

My current “political” concerns, though, seem to be antisemitism and the quest for certainty — even false certainty preferred to uncertainty.

  • According to the Manhattan Institute’s recent survey of registered Republicans and others who voted for Donald Trump last fall, no less than 25 percent of those under 50 admit—admit—to expressing antisemitic views. Among those over 50, just 4 percent do.

The Nazis gave antisemitism a bad name. The memory of that is fading.

On the quest for certainty, see Gary Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty, Then and Now. This is from Public Discourse, which I formerly visited daily. They seem to be on a bit of a roll, so I’m going to resume that.

The journalistic enterprise

[Bari] Weiss has an impossible dilemma [in running CBS]. She’s in charge of a first-world news organization that aims to hold government accountable (especially when it’s run by Republicans) but was appointed to the position to satisfy a third-world regime led by a demagogic boor who believes “news” should look like … this.

…

“The Failing New York Times, and their lies and purposeful misrepresentations, is a serious threat to the National Security of our Nation,” the president declared this morning. “Their Radical Left, Unhinged Behavior, writing FAKE Articles and Opinions in a never ending way, must be dealt with and stopped. THEY ARE A TRUE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” He didn’t specify the supposed “national security” threat that prompted that, but earlier this month he accused the Times of “seditious, perhaps even treasonous” behavior for reporting on his obviously declining health.

That’s the kind of media Trump wants. Not one where Stephen Miller does more interviews but one where you go to prison if you acknowledge the plainly observable fact that the president sounds addled.

Nick Catoggio

This particularly cursed holiday week kicked off in earnest last night when my father turned his iPad in my direction. On its screen was a terribly disturbing post on X containing two images. In the first, Jeffrey Epstein was hugging and kissing a little girl. In the second, that girl was bound and gagged on a bed.

Dad was rightly outraged and disgusted. He asked me if I’d seen the photos in my time going through the Epstein files. I immediately recognized the first image of Epstein and deduced that it had been Photoshopped from a widely distributed photo of Epstein hugging Ghislaine Maxwell. The second image seemed to be an AI rendering. (To add to the confusion, images reportedly do exist of Epstein cuddling children.) I let him know that the imagery was fake, and a distinctly non-yuletidy conversation ensued. Yes, Epstein was a heinous pedophile and convicted sex offender. Also, the internet is awash in fake, traumatizing slop that’s being used to score points in an ongoing information war. Happy holidays!

Charlie Warzel

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer, Via Peggy Noonan

Shorts

  • In such an ugly time, the true protest is beauty. (Phil Ochs)
  • He is like a strange general who can’t quietly establish camp or dig new fortifications. He shoots his cannon for no reason, just for the sound. (Peggy Noonan describing you-know-who)
  • He just can’t do intimacy. He can’t do reassurance. His fireside manner has always been gasoline. (Andrew Sullivan)
  • Prediction markets may promise clarity, but what they really offer is another way to feel excitement in a world that feels rigged. (Charlie Warzel)
  • Having elevated her in large part for her willingness to say outrageous things about her opponents, people on the right are now surprised by her willingness to say outrageous things about them. (Michelle Goldberg about the rise of toxic influencer Candace Owens)
  • In The Times, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer … mused about Trump’s troubles prosecuting his perceived enemies: “Revenge, it turns out, is a dish best served with evidence.” (Via Frank Bruni)
  • In her newsletter, Stacey Patton recognized the humiliation of the Trump administration’s repeated failures to convince a grand jury of its case against Letitia James: “In federal court, a prosecutor not getting an indictment is like a chef burning cereal.” (Via Frank Bruni)
  • A fundamentalist can see every person who’s wrong as a kind of Patient Zero in a potential pandemic of paganism. (David French)
  • AI Sends School Into Lockdown After It Mistook a Student’s Clarinet for a Gun. (Futurism – H/T TMD)
  • We take the state’s monopoly of violence for granted, but when that monopoly is challenged, people turn to gangsters to keep the peace. Eli Lake, A History of Tough Jews (podcast episode)
  • Why these people are coming our way is that Heritage and some other voices and commentators have embraced big-government populism and have been willing to tolerate antisemitism. (Former Vice President Mike Pence on the (ahem!) evacuation of the Heritage Foundation, with refugees fleeing to a Pence-founded, more traditionally conservative, alternative.)

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

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

Saturday, 7/26/25

Cultural

The cost of convenience

The Sleep Number bed is typical of smart home devices, as Harvard business school professor Shoshana Zuboff describes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It comes with an app, of course, which you’ll need to install to get the full benefits. Benefits for whom? Well, to know that you would need to spend some time with the sixteen-page privacy policy that comes with the bed. There you’ll read about third-party sharing, analytics partners, targeted advertising, and much else. Meanwhile, the user agreement specifies that the company can share or exploit your personal information even “after you deactivate or cancel” your Sleep Number account. You are unilaterally informed that the firm does not honor “Do Not Track” notifications. By the way, its privacy policy once stated that the bed would also transmit “audio in your room.” (I am not making this up.)

Matthew B. Crawford, Defying the Data Priests

The source of some of our sickness

The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal, to use living things as if they were machines, to impose scientific (that is, laboratory) exactitude upon living complexities that are ultimately mysterious.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

Touching politics

What’s remotely “risible” here?

Cyril Hovorun, a Ukrainian theologian … believes the Russian [Orthodox] church waded into Africa to spread propaganda and stoke hostility towards the West. The idea is less risible than it may at first seem. The Russian church’s favourite subject—“traditional values” and how the decadent West wants to pervert them—aligns with conservative religious views in Africa, where clerics tend to oppose homosexuality.

The Economist, January 25, 2024.

The idea did not at first seem risible to me, and it still does not.

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. had Ambassadors giving the middle finger to traditional lands by flying Pride flags at embassies and marching in gay rights parades (see here and here). Are we so clueless that we don’t recognize that putting lightning-rod sexuality issues front-and-center in our foreign policy makes us vulnerable to adversary countries who aren’t yet out of their minds?

Money Quotes For The Week (excerpted from Andrew Sullivan)

“You know that scene in an action movie when the bad guy runs through the kitchen of a restaurant and pulls down all the pots and pans behind him to slow down his pursuers? We’re in that part of the Trump presidency,” – Jason Kander.

“So lemme get this straight: The Biden Admin (2021-2025) fabricated the Epstein Files before 2019 but did NOT release them before the 2024 election — instead expecting that Trump would demand their release only to do an about-face because Biden in fact made it all up. Got it,” – Daniel Goldman.

…

“People are mocking [Speaker Mike Johnson] but it’s important to realize the moral progress it represents for the GOP: less than 20 years ago the Republicans chose an actual pedophile, Denny Hastert, to be Speaker, whereas Johnson merely is running interference for pedophiles,” – Matt Sitman.

How it ends

The uproar over Jeffrey Epstein increasingly feels more like a simulacrum of a political scandal than an actual scandal.

…

[W]e all, and I do mean all, know how this will end.

Donald Trump is going to let Ghislaine Maxwell out of prison early in exchange for absolving him of wrongdoing related to Epstein.

What will his fans say when he does?

Nick Catoggio

For the record, I did not “know” that. I didn’t even suspect it. I’ve apparently been paying too little attention to the simulacrum.

But now that he mentions it, that denouement seems consistent with Trump’s overall shamelessness and abuse of the pardon power.

More:

I myself theorized four days ago that Team Maxwell had leaked the “bawdy” 2003 letter (allegedly) from Trump to the Wall Street Journal in the hopes of pressuring the president to make a deal with her. Lo and behold, today we find that the deputy attorney general wants to meet her. After six months of watching how postliberals operate, we’re all conspiracy theorists now. Take one look at this and try to imagine trusting this administration to behave on the up-and-up.

Events since Catoggio published this have swung me toward thinking he’s right about what’s it the works.

Despite it all, including my contempt for Trump, I would wager a moderate amount that Trump will not be shown to have partaken of Jeffrey Epstein’s adolescent delights. Do you really think the Biden DOJ wouldn’t have at least leaked it if he had (leaks could avoid unmasking Democrat ephebophiles)? (See Andrew Sullivan’s second quote of the week, above.)

I would not wager, though, that Trump didn’t know roughly what Epstein was up to.

Lest you think I’m being pedantic, by the way, I generally make it a point to distinguish ephebophilia from pedophilia because the latter always strikes me as more perverted, less understandable. Dennis Hastert, for instance, was an ephebophile, not a pedophile.

Apology accepted, sir.

I am writing to offer an apology. The short version is this: I severely underestimated the threat posed by a Donald Trump presidency. The never-Trumpers—who never seemed to stop issuing their warnings and critiques—struck me as psychologically and emotionally weak people with porcelain-fragile sensibilities. It turns out their instincts were significantly better attuned than my own.

… I, like many, took a transactional view of Trump. In the middle of a debate, he suddenly announced he had become pro-life (something Rudy Giuliani refused to do in 2008, which derailed his campaign). He also adopted a list of potential judicial nominees that accorded with constitutional conservatism. The author of The Art of the Deal drove the bargain that would take him to an unlikely presidency.

While some conservatives remained never-Trumpers, the rest, including me, made peace with Trump as the alternative to Hillary Clinton in a binary political system. Had we lived in a country with a multiparty system, we would have voted for the Christian Democrats and hoped for a part in a governing coalition, but that option didn’t exist.

Hunter Baker at Public Discourse, 1/21/21 (bold added)

I want to use this occasion to reiterate that I, a never-Trumper, have voted for America’s Christian Democrat party three quadrennia in a row. It is an option.

Unserious people governing an unserious people

Mediaite: Tulsi Gabbard Argues Obama Is Guilty of Treason Because ‘There Has to Be Peaceful Transition of Power’

On The Charlie Kirk Show, Kirk asked Gabbard to back up her “fighting words.”

“Can you make the case– can you present the arguments– the best bill you can with unclassified information and public information what makes you believe that this reaches that sort of threshold?” he asked.

Gabbard’s smoking gun? Obama — she claimed — disrupted the peaceful transfer of power.

“When we look at our Democratic Republic, Charlie, our system is built on the foundation of the American people casting their votes for who they want to be in office, to be our president and commander-in-chief.” said Gabbard. “In this system, there has to be a peaceful transfer of power.”

The Morning Dispatch

I’m pleasantly surprised that Charlie Kirk, himself something of a MAGA grifter, would challenge Gabbard on accusing Obama of treason.

I’m not surprised that Mediaite had to state the obvious because Kirk apparently didn’t pursue it:

Neither the Obama administration nor Obama himself ever claimed that Trump did not legitimately win the election. The former president never attempted to obstruct the certification of the election, he never told a news outlet that Clinton was the real winner, and he never encouraged supports to take matters into their own hands and attempt to stop the transition of power.

Gabbard’s boss, however, engaged in all of these actions repeatedly. President Trump claims, to this day, that he won the 2020 election. He actively fought against the certification of election results, and he was impeached for inciting an insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Kirk, Gabbard and Mediaite all leave it to me, though, to point out that Trump “treasonously” interfered with Obama for eight freakin’ years through his birtherism BS. And that Obama has an airtight defense against treason.

And as long as I’m free-associating, what brainworm makes wing-nuts insist that the wives of politicians they don’t like are really men (not that the Macron marriage isn’t a little odd, mind you)?

A unified theory of Trump

Early the evening of the assassination attempt on candidate Trump, Peggy Noonan got a call from:

a friend … from California … He had been very close with Mr. Trump once, and was no longer. He asked my thoughts and I said wow, that was some kind of moment. He said that wasn’t spirit, it’s rage. I quote from memory: “He said ‘fight fight fight’ because he wants everyone fighting, because the game of dominance and defeat is everything to him.” That is him, my friend said, and the fight isn’t for something, it’s just what he likes.

…

In just the past week Mr. Trump accused one of his predecessors, Barack Obama, of treason. Not of a dereliction or mistake but actual treason—betraying his country and giving aid and comfort to its enemies. He told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday that, in National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard’s recent report on Mr. Obama’s actions regarding Russia-gate, “It’s there, he’s guilty. This was treason.” “Obama was trying to lead a coup . . . This is the biggest scandal in the history of our country.”

You can say, “He’s just trying to distract from his Jeffrey Epstein problem” and yes, of course he is. But it’s also fight for the fight’s sake, and unthinkingly destructive. Is it good for young people, for instance, to hear one president accuse another of an act so wicked the penalty of conviction is death? It is not good for them.

Before the Journal last week broke the story of the Jeffrey Epstein bawdy birthday book with its letter bearing Mr. Trump’s signature, Mr. Trump threatened “I’m gonna sue the Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else.” He filed suit last Friday against the Journal and reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo.

An ardent Trump supporter might say, “Good, never let up.” Maybe Mr. Trump says that to himself. But it’s no good for the country for its president to attempt to muscle the press in this way, and it’s no good even for him. If and when the suit goes forward Mr. Trump will be forced to testify under oath on his history with Epstein. There is no way on earth that will be a net positive for him. Which surely he knows. He fights even when he will hurt himself, because the fight is all.

… He is like a strange general who can’t quietly establish camp or dig new fortifications. He shoots his cannon for no reason, just for the sound.

…

Of all his weaknesses that is one of his greatest, that he’d rather hurt himself than not fight. He’d rather hurt the country than not fight. The fight is all.

Peggy Noonan (gift link to one of her gems).

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

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

Eleventh Day of Christmas

Liberal democracy versus Populism

For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. “Liberal democracy,” he says, “offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.”

M. Gessen, New York Times

Limited supply, infinite demand

What a lot of people who are celebrating Thompson’s death and demonizing UnitedHealthcare don’t seem to understand—or don’t seem to want to understand—is that in every modern health-care system, some institution is charged with rationing care. In some, it’s a government bureaucracy. In others, it’s a private for-profit or nonprofit insurer. In America, it’s a mix of all three. Many insurers, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Permanente, are nonprofits. The biggest insurers are Medicare and Medicaid, which are single-payer public programs. So is the Veterans Affairs Department. Other insurers are for-profit companies, like UnitedHealthcare.

You don’t have to be a fan of the way that UnitedHealthcare makes its decisions to acknowledge the difficulty of mediating between providers and patients. Private insurers make their rationing decisions in ways that are relatively transparent but always far from perfectly simple or fair. But if they didn’t do it, someone else would need to, Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me. The reality of scarcity is not their fault, nor is it “social murder.”

Peter Wehner (emphasis added)

“Scarcity” doesn’t mean we should educate more doctors, build more hospitals, etc. (nor that we shouldn’t). It means that aggregate demand for healthcare services will always exceed the funds available to pay for them all, in every imaginable system of funding healthcare.

Everybody knows the Emperor is naked

[I]f you want to understand what happened in politics this year, you can get by with two sentences from the Washington Post: “[Joe] Biden and some of his aides still believe he should have stayed in the race, despite the rocky debate performance and low poll numbers that prompted Democrats to pressure him to drop out. Biden and these aides have told people in recent days that he could have defeated [Donald] Trump, according to people familiar with their comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.”

…

Never Trump is heavy on moralizing, and how could it not be? Trump hasn’t just upended the conservative agenda, he’s cultivated an anti-morality in the American right that’s turned scumminess into a leadership credential. For Reaganites of a certain age, watching traditional “values” voters grant moral carte blanche to a seedy authoritarian is so baffling that it leaves one thinking there must be a conscientious impulse still buried in them somewhere that might be roused if only the right appeal can be made.

And so we Never Trumpers often end up behaving like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes. If only we say out loud that the emperor is wearing nothing at all—and say it and say it and say it—the spell will eventually be broken and the crowd will come to its senses. By all means, run Liz Cheney out on the campaign trail with Kamala Harris and have her recite the thousandth iteration of her civic indictment of Trumpism. Maybe the thousandth time will be the charm.

… Most Americans understand very well, after all, that Emperor Trump is sleazy, oafish, and dangerous. But they concluded that there would still be more upside to his presidency, warts and all, than to Harris’.

They know the emperor is naked. They watched the news on January 6. They either like it that way, as Trump’s base does, or they don’t care overly much, as swing voters ultimately did not. Never Trumpers reminding them of it incessantly anyway—surely you’re not going to reelect the coup-plotter—resembles the so-called definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Nick Catoggio

Nick has given a good description of me for the last eight-or-so years. I finally grokked why voters might reject the Democrats in favor of Trump (for instance), but I’d cast a protest vote for Angela Davis first, I think.

And that’s quite apart from the absurd journalistic murmurations to protect Joe Biden.

A wan Audie Murphy

I am an admirer of Audie Murphy, the celebrated yet troubled hero who was the most decorated U.S. soldier of World War II but struggled with mental illness and addiction for the rest of his relatively short life before dying at the age of 45 … 

He was a hell of a soldier, by all accounts. 

Nobody ever thought he should be secretary of defense. 

Pete Hegseth is something of a soft echo of Audie Murphy—an Ivy League version for our wan times. Like Murphy, Hegseth served honorably in combat (you will have heard that he was awarded two Bronze Stars), went into the entertainment business (his last job was as one of the hosts of Fox & Friends Weekend), took up drinking, wrecked some marriages (he is on his third), etc. He is today one year younger than Murphy was when he died. 

Hegseth has an excellent general education, having done his undergraduate degree at Princeton and his master’s in public policy at Harvard. Harvard’s MPP program will graduate almost 700 students in its next class, and those are the only 700 people in the world who think any of them ought to be the next secretary of defense.

Kevin D. Williamson

Scientific realism

European scientists have started work on a project to create simple forms of life from scratch in the lab, capitalizing on theoretical and experimental advances in the fast-growing field of synthetic biology … “Success would constitute a landmark achievement in basic science,” said Eörs Szathmáry, director of the Centre for the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the Parmenides Foundation in Germany, who is a principal investigator on the ERC grant. “De-novo creation of living systems is a long-standing dream of humanity.”

John Ellis (hyperlink relocated from omitted text)

For the records, de-novo creation of living systems is not a dream of mine. Rather, I think of C.S. Lewis when I read things like this: “Man’s ‘power over nature’ is the power of some men over other men with nature as their instrument.”

Wonder not

Wonder not that Evangelicals are ga-ga over Donald Trump. “Evangelicalism is Protestant populism.” (Brad East, Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline)

God, Human Rights and other woo-woo

[T]he existence of human rights [is] no more provable than the existence of God.

Tom Holland, Dominion

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.

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.

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.

Election draweth near

Culture

Bad Religion

More than three decades ago, Nathan Hatch published The Democratization of American Christianity, a history of the Second Great Awakening, arguably the most important religious episode in American history. At the recent Intercollegiate Studies Institute annual homecoming, I served on a panel that discussed the award-winning book. It was a pleasure to do so. Hatch gives a magisterial account of the upsurge of religious populism that shaped the new American republic in decisive ways. Anyone who wants to understand the last ten years of American politics should read The Democratization of American Christianity.

Denunciations of the “swamp” echo the Second Great Awakening’s polemics against the clerical establishment of its day, which itinerate preachers derided as complacent, more interested in high salaries and comfortable parsonages than in gospel preaching. Trump rallies follow in the tradition of raucous, call-and-response camp meetings. Commentators wonder at the fact that respectable people support Trump, not knowing that some of the most important leaders of the religious populism of the early 1800s were elites such as Barton Stone, who embraced the new, raw, and uncouth style of religious revival.

Elias Smith was a renegade preacher and journalist who, in 1808, launched America’s first religious newspaper, Herald of Gospel Liberty. He mocked and abused the Calvinist grandees, the “clerical hierarchy” that dominated Protestantism at that time. Establishment clergy like Lyman Beecher raged against preachers like Smith who were disturbing the religious landscape. It does not take much imagination to cast Tucker Carlson in the role of a latter-day Elias Smith. He thrills his populist devotees and outrages the guardians of political respectability such as George Will, a Lyman Beecher of our time.

Hatch raises larger themes. The Second Great Awakening took place during a time of rapid social change. The new republic gave rise to radicalisms of many sorts. People were on the move, as territories west of the Appalachian Mountains were settled. Old institutions and authorities lost their power. As I note above, recent decades have seen similar changes. Globalization, demographic change, the sexual revolution, social media, and other factors have precipitated a quite different but equally significant crisis of authority. We should not be surprised, therefore, that populism has returned, as it did in the late 1800s, when America was transformed by industrialization, urbanization, and swelling waves of immigrants.

Hatch documents that revivalist preachers were confident that their individualist, evangelical Christianity would fulfill the sacred mission of America. In their sermons and broadsides, populist religion mixed freely with populist politics, as was the case for William Jennings Bryan and subsequent American populists. Today’s Trumpian populism is different. To be sure, many pious people support Trump and other populist politicians. Avatars of popular religion like Paula White lurk on the peripheries. But the movement lacks an explicitly religious dimension, which is striking when we compare it to the administration of George W. Bush, an establishment figure who was not shy about his evangelical convictions.

Which makes me wonder: In spite of fascinating parallels to the outpouring of Christian enthusiasm and political radicalism in the Second Great Awakening, does today’s populism ironically contribute to an important elite ambition, the establishment of a post-Christian, entirely secular political culture in America? I hope not.

R.R. Reno

After several readings, I’m not sure what Reno is trying to say here. My impression until that penultimate paragraph was that he though our last decade’s populism just fine and dandy, as was the ferment of the 19th century; then he raises the possibility that the lack of a “religious dimension” is at least a bit worrisome.

But what an odd thing for a Catholic (or Orthodox) to believe. In case after case, the wake of the Great Awakenings was destructive of the Christian institutions that evidenced stability and left us, in the characterization of Ross Douthat, A Nation of Heretics.

Slinging slurs, pitching pity parties

I have no idea how one is supposed to respond to polling questions about the morality of changing one’s gender.

That’s mostly because I don’t think changing gender is possible. How can an impossible thing be immoral?

It’s also partly because I hold open the possibility that presenting as the opposite sex, with or without surgery and hormonal interventions, may for some individuals be the optimal way to quiet intractable gender dysphoria. (Who am I to condemn cosplaying in the cause of lessening psychic pain?)

But I’ll tell you something that is immoral. This kind of un-empathetic poor-mouthing about people disapproving (or denying the reality of) “trans lives”:

Is it morally acceptable to change your gender?

Just over half the country doesn’t think so — a proportion that has stayed fairly stable since 2021, the year after I disclosed my gender transition. It’s disheartening to reflect on the fact that every other person you meet, statistically speaking, disapproves of your existence.

Gina Chua. Nothing in the Gallup poll in question suggests that anyone disapproves the existence of people who’ve carried through on the putatively immoral decision to transition.

We are a low-down, debased people who have made ourselves indisposed toward intelligent discussion of issues. We sling slurs and pitch pity parties.

Journalistic murmurations

World Ends in Nuclear conflagration. Women and children most affected.

Something like this was an old jab at the New York Times’s stylistic preoccupations.

New era, new media, new preoccupations:

Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics

H/T Nellie Bowles, who didn’t seem to think it the least bit odd that 404 Media’s fears turned immediately to red states tracking their handmaidens to blue state abortuaries.

Politics

MVP of Election 2024?

Bret Stephens hits back-to-back homeruns.

With insanity supporters like this, sanity may stand a chance

Tucker Carlson spoke at the Turning Point USA Trump rally this week and gave the absolute best anti-Trump speech I’ve ever heard. Tucker’s speech is here and excerpted below, somehow kinky and alarming and rousing at the same time: 

“There has to be a point at which Dad comes home [crowd cheers]. Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful. He loves his children, disobedient as they may be. He loves them because they’re his children,” said Tucker Carlson, a grown man and a major respected figure on the right. “And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not gonna hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not gonna lie. It’s gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. And it has to be this way.’ ” 

If someone spoke like this to me on the street, I would pepper spray them. If I heard someone speak like this to someone else, I would pepper spray them and myself. Tucker Carlson’s endorsement of Trump makes me want to mainline MSNBC. Tucker’s endorsement makes me think Democracy Is On the Line, and Christopher Steele is a respected member of the intelligence community, and I heard there was a box of White House stationery at Mar-a-Lago illegally. Tucker’s endorsement just made me start knitting a pussy hat. Trump is not daddy. America is not his little girl. I believe in free speech except when a grown man is saying the words bad little girl. And Tucker Carlson needs to keep his kinks private and shameful like the rest of us.

Nellie Bowles

Nonsequiturland

Also from the echo chamber of Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller:

Democrats have continued to liken Trump to Adolf Hitler and assert he poses a grave “danger” to the planet if he is reelected, even after two recent assassination attempts against him.

(Jason Cohen)

How pray tell, Mr. Cohen, do two assassination attempts disprove Trump being a grave danger (or require suppression of the truth)? Do you tacitly call on Trump to cool it when his rhetoric generates death threats to election officials?

(Note that all the hyperlinks in my quote are to other Daily Caller stories; that’s why I thought “echo chamber” was apt.)

Would it help if it were done by image rather than words?

(If you don’t get the allusion, search for “distracted boyfriend même.)

Kamala F.B. Harris

  • In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last thanked the vice president for taking on Trump: “I believe that for all her political ambition, Kamala Harris is carrying this burden for us. She’s not Barack Obama, basking in the warmth of a cultural moment en route to becoming a cultural icon. She’s more like Frodo Baggins, walking toward Mordor while carrying a millstone around her neck, in an attempt to save all of Middle-earth from a dark fate.” (Sally McDonald, Cairns, Australia)

Frank Bruni‌

Narcissism from a slightly different angle

I find his immodesty not only a serious character flaw but a danger to his governing ability. I don’t believe he wishes to abolish the Constitution, undermine our democracy, set himself up as dictator. But such full-court immodesty has to work against one’s perspective, make impossible anything resembling a sense of history, allow for necessary accommodations with reality. A man who sees no other picture but those with himself in the center is not a man you want to run your nation.

Joseph Epstein

I quote this not to beat a dead horse, but because it is almost identical in its insight to one of the points I made long ago: Trump’a narcissism distorts his vision of the world, and that kind of distortion is intolerable in a POTUS. It’s so disqualifying that I don’t care what his “positions” are on “the issues.”

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.