Monday, June 1

I recently used AI to generate a title for a blog post. Today, none of its proffers seemed any better than my anodyne offering.

Sportsball

The greatest threat to ethical hooping, if the discourse is any indication, are the Oklahoma City Thunder. On the weaponized shoulders of their star and two-time MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the defending NBA champions have mastered a maximally efficient and spiritually corrosive style of basketball predicated, at least in part, on baiting credulous referees into calling fouls on the opposing team. One way they do this is by flopping, the umbrella term for the parade of pratfalls and head-jerks intended to exaggerate the appearance of defensive contact when shooting. The floppers of yore had the luxury of degrading the sport in an era of less intense scrutiny. Not so with SGA, whose antics have become the cause célèbre of basketball fans everywhere, from the court-side seats in San Antonio, where one Spurs fan was seen brandishing a miniature Academy Award, to the pick-up courts of China, where TikTokers are going viral with videos demonstrating their best SGA imitations.

Why the Oklahoma City Thunder Are a Deserving Villain

I don’t watch the NBA much, but playoffs tend to get my attention. I watched the Thunder win the title last year and didn’t like them. I didn’t like SGA in particular, despite respecting his skills.

So when I saw that San Antonio and OKC were tied at three games each, I watched the end of game seven. I’d say Victor Wembanyama is an upgrade from SGA. Next, I’m keen to see how San Antonio stacks up against the Knicks.

And speaking of the Knicks, Brian Rivel has, over 35 years of his team’s struggles, upgraded his nose-bleed-section Knicks tickets into really choice seats, center-court. Now, he’s got some tough choices to make:

Due to a prior commitment, Rivel will sell his tickets to the Knicks’ first home Finals game. Tickets in his section for that game are going for more than $40,000 on resale markets. Although he plans to attend at least one game in the series with his wife — two, if the series goes to six games — Rivel conceded that the staggering prices might change his calculus. “I could list them at a very high number and get life-changing money, where I could send one of my daughters to college,” he said. “It just all depends on how much somebody is willing to offer for those tickets.”

For a potential game six, which may present a title-clinching scenario for the Knicks, some tickets in Rivel’s section have already been listed in the low six-figures. “I gotta go if there’s a game six, right?” he said, before considering some of the more lucrative scenarios. “Unless somebody offers me $100,000 a ticket. Then I have to make a serious decision.”

Tim Kludt, Knicks Die-hards Wrestle With Attending Finals or Cashing In.

Of course, I would sell those tickets, but then again I never would have bought them in the first place, right?

En masse

The law of group polarization at work

In 2024, I taught an undergraduate class with a catchy title, “Why American Politics Went Insane.” At the risk of shortening a semester to a sentence, the devolution proceeded in three stages, from victory to separation to radicalization.

When the Cold War ended, the United States, for the first time since the wars against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, faced no external challenges to its prosperity and power. We were, in the words of the former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine, the “hyperpower.”

I began with “The End of History,” to borrow a term from Francis Fukuyama’s misunderstood book, but I began with his prescient warning near the end:

If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

That is exactly what we are doing. We are struggling against each other. Some of us are struggling against democracy itself. America is the only nation out of 25 comparable countries in which a majority of people believe that their fellow citizens are morally bad. It should be no surprise, then, that negative partisanship (when you support your party primarily because of your disdain for its opponents) is a central factor in American politics.

This drives us apart. Ever increasing numbers of American citizens live in one-party states or so-called blowout counties, where one side or the other wins presidential elections by 50 points or more.

And what happens when people of like mind gather together? The law of group polarization, first applied to political decision making by the law professor and author Cass Sunstein in 1999, teaches us that when like-minded people deliberate, they become more extreme.

Create a monoculture, and red becomes deep red. Blue becomes deep blue. And as the two sides move farther apart, both geographically and ideologically, we lose even the capacity to understand each other’s lives and thoughts.

If I taught the class over again, though, I’d add a fourth stage: amnesia. The problem isn’t just that we’re at each other’s throats; it’s that we’re turning to the worst of recent history’s alternative ideas in response.

It’s no coincidence that this is happening at a time when a generation of world leaders has no experience with world wars and rising millions of young people have no experience with real fascism and actual communism.

…

We have to know that the world as it is, with all its inefficiencies and injustices, is better than the world that was.

David French. I quoted so much I felt obliged to use one of June’s ten gift links for this one.

Plausible deniability

He knew how to dabble in race-baiting without quite ever going full George Wallace. He had the great skill of propounding absurd or evil things and adding “It’s what I’ve heard” or “People are saying,” so that there was always enough room for The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page to sigh wearily rather than face up to what his words meant.

Eliot A. Cohen, Trump the Genius, Trump the Incompetent, Trump the Bogeyman, writing Trump’s premature epitaph after the 2020 election (which, be it noted, Trump lost).

Gender

How the Gender Fever Finally Broke

Disagreeable contrarians who resisted gender fever are the real oddballs. Some combination of personality quirk and conviction that occasionally makes us obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail-party guests also inoculated us against gender madness. There is no reforming us.

But we served a vital function: Together, a ragtag crew of truculent journalists and outcast researchers stopped the entire herd from running off the cliff. None of us ever expected to be welcomed back into the same elite circles that, only recently, had cheered or looked away as a generation of tormented girls took themselves apart.

Abigail Shrier, How the Gender Fever Finally Broke.

Gender identity is meaningless

Sex therapist Jackie Golob put it the way one most often hears it described: “Gender identity is how you feel about yourself and the ways you express your gender and biological sex. … Biological sex is physical, while gender is feeling.” That is a common view, and it seems to me that it gets it about right. But if gender is a feeling, then there are as many genders as there are people—human beings are unique, individualistic, and idiosyncratic in how they understand themselves as members of sexes—and, hence, meaningless: Words that describe everything describe nothing.

Kevin D. Williamson, The Forgotten Word: Sex Why the Discourse on Sex and Gender Is So Toxic

We know so much better now

“[F]or longtime ultra conservative activists, CRT is the opportunity of a lifetime.” CRT, she explains, is not a threat at all, and there is no proof that it is even being taught. It’s “just a catch-all term repurposed as a conservative boogeyman.”

Andrew Sullivan, Don’t Ban CRT. Expose It. (2021).

CRT is sooooo 2021! Don’t they know that DEI is the real threat to God, Mom, apple pie, the flag and the 4th of July? (Well, maybe Freedom 250 is the real threat to the 4th of July, but that’s a whole nuther kettle of fish.)

Yeah! That’s the ticket! Opposing DEI!

The real “corruption” of SCOTUS

Democrats are free to dislike the Court’s decisions, yet they aren’t helpless. If Democrats abhor gerrymandering, they can argue for a bill to limit how, or how often, states draw House maps. But what really angers Democrats is that the Supreme Court is no longer a second progressive legislature that can impose policies they can’t get through Congress.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, Application error: a client-side exception has occurred.

Sorry, guys, but nothing is more important this Fall than breaking this corrupt — no, not Supreme Court — this corrupt MAGAfied Republican Party. I’m not going to let even the threat of court-packing deter me.

Where there is no vision, the people perish

What makes our culture modern is that despite the explicit beliefs by many citizens, our public institutions—education, government, the arts, entertainment, journalism, science and technology, commerce—all function without any necessary direction from any teleological vision. They operate without working toward any purpose beyond material benefit and the maximizing of choices for individuals.

Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes

Shorts

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. (Stephen Jay Gould via Maria Popova)
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)

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.

Our (mumble-mumble) anniversary

Ode to Miller Lite

Let’s start on two Lite notes.

First, it has been an impossibly long time since the missus and I tied the knot, and it shows no signs of slipping. Though I did discover this morning that poetry I consider brilliantly realistic about our human foibles can strike her as depressing.

Second:

Miller Lite is not a great beer. It’s not even an okay beer. Miller Lite is a bad beer but an incredible beverage. It is neither complicated nor offensive, and it derives its magic from this bland alchemy, this delicate equipoise of fizzy nothingness. Miller Lite does not demand your attention. It does not slap you in the face with flavor; in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any flavor at all. Gun to my head, I’d say it vaguely recalls … sandwich bread? Frozen corn? Off-brand Cheerios, maybe? The tasting notes provided by the Miller Brewing Company include such descriptors as “light to medium body,” “clean,” and “crisp,” all of which are not tastes but textures, as if the most flattering thing the manufacturer has to say about its own beer is that “you will notice it in your mouth.” A review on the brew-rating website Beeradvocate notes that Miller “is a beer best observed in bunches”—a beverage whose most favorable quality is quantity.

This is a beer that provides you with absolutely nothing to think about. It offers a break from the quest to find novel gustatory experience that has come to substitute for culture among much of the American professional class. To drink Miller Lite is to declare that you are a well-adjusted adult—that you do not require excitement at every juncture, that you are capable of sitting with your thoughts, that you have the patience and strength of character to build a buzz slowly.

Tyler Austin Harper, The Bad Beer That’s an Incredible Beverage. I just liked Harper’s deft touch. The negligible amount of beer I drink is invariably the kind that demands your attention.

Digital sackcloth and ashes

I well remember the magnificent tall ships sailing into New York Harbor for America’s bicentennial, which the wife and I watched on a little black & white TV in our apartment in Watonga, OK, with a four-month-old baby nearby.

For the 250th, we’re getting UFC on the White House lawn. I expect to avert my eyes, or blog about it again (based on news reports, not firsthand observation) — digital sackcloth and ashes.

I heard this week about a mature American couple that is expatriating without expectation of return — to the People’s Republic of China, which they have visited often. (Full disclosure: the wife is Chinese, and from a wealthy family, so there’s that.)

I daydream of expatriating (today’s post reflects the dream at several points), but for a number of reasons I know it won’t happen unless I literally must flee as a refugee. I’m having a very hard time internalizing the new American reality, so diminished from what appeared to be true for most of my life.

Would that The Donald had forced himself on us, as he has forced himself on women in the past. But no, 77 million of my countrymen voted for him. By the rules of the game, he owns us fair and square.

Still timely

From the time before Il Duce returned to the Oval Office:

I worry about my country. I wish my fellow Democrats were not so abysmally naïve about the world as so many of us are. I wish the country were united behind our founding principles, but I don’t know that we are. I have a feeling that if Putin launched missiles that wiped out the blue states, Fox America would be happy to cut a deal with him.

Garrison Keillor, Sitting Scared in Church, Thinking About Evil

You could see it coming from 15 months away

No politician in the primary era has been as aggressive as Trump has in boosting electoral challenges to members of his party who buck him. Until 2016, it would have been regarded as somewhere between a faux pas and downright reckless for a sitting president to weaken a congressional incumbent by calling for his or her ouster in a primary. Trump does it regularly now, sometimes out of petty revenge.

That’s why Bill Cassidy went wobbly on Gabbard, Kennedy, and (soon) Patel, of course. He’s up for reelection next year, has drawn a serious primary challenger, and has two strikes against him already by dint of having voted to convict Trump in 2021. Had he opposed one of the president’s Cabinet nominees, any slim chance of him receiving Trump’s endorsement—and salvaging his career—would have evaporated. Cassidy will spend the rest of his life receiving sporadic death threats from populist Republicans either as a sitting senator or as a private citizen; when you frame the choice before him on Trump’s nominees that way, is it any is it any wonder that he chose the way he did?

Nick Catoggio, The Culture of Fear, February, 2025.

So now Cassidy, defeated in his primary by Trump’s toady, gets to endure death threats as a private citizen, because MAGA doesn’t forget.

I’m troubled at the outbursts of violence ~~from the left~~ toward Trump and the Right, but (perhaps it’s the way news gets covered) I fear more the menace of MAGA, from whose hands guns, and from whose lips death threats, are never far.

Speaking of retribution

So Trump has knocked off two, and in a few days probably will have bagged a third, Republican Senators in retributive primary challenges.

So now that they’re lame ducks, just how compliant will they be with his will? This much, I hope.

[N.B.: Trump did indeed bag his third. May they team up and bedevil him through the rest of their terms.]

Farewell, Party; Hello Tribe

Something I hadn’t really noticed is the death of political parties.

Oh, we still have “Republicans” and “Democrats,” but those are names of opposing tribes now, not actual parties.

Principal proof: Any sleazy real estate developer from Queens can run for President as a Republican in primary elections, regardless of his past positions, his [how many?] cameos in porn flicks, his divorces, his misogyny. Heck, the Republicans didn’t even bother with a platform one quadrennium: Whatever The Donald wants today is what we want.

It hasn’t happened on the D side yet, unless you count Fetterman or Platner — neither one a clear R, but sure a poor fit as Deez.

Must we always overshoot?

A nice symbol of this difficulty in the policy of even “just” nations is the ironic embarrassment in which the victorious democracies became involved in their program of “demilitarizing” the vanquished “militaristic” nations. In Japan they encouraged a ridiculous article in the new constitution which committed the nation to a perpetual pacifist defenselessness. In less than half a decade they were forced to ask their “demilitarized” former foes to rearm, and become allies in a common defense against a new foe, who had recently been their victorious ally.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History.

And as long as we’re on Niebuhr:

The fact that the European nations, more accustomed to the tragic vicissitudes of history, still have a measure of misgiving about our leadership in the world community is due to their fear that our “technocratic” tendency to equate the mastery of nature with the mastery of history could tempt us to lose patience with the tortuous course of history.

Id.

Institutions versus platforms

By 2020, people had stopped seeing institutions as places they entered to be morally formed, Levin argued. Instead, they see institutions as stages on which they can perform, can display their splendid selves. People run for Congress not so they can legislate, but so they can get on TV. People work in companies so they can build their personal brand. The result is a world in which institutions not only fail to serve their social function and keep us safe, they also fail to form trustworthy people. The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves.

David Brooks, America Is Having a Moral Convulsion

The French Table

A dinner here does not oppress one. The wine neither intoxicates nor heats, and the frame of mind and body, in which one is left, is precisely that best suited to intellectual and social pleasures. I make no doubt that one of the chief causes of the French being so agreeable as companions is, in a considerable degree, owing to the admirable qualities of their table. A national character may emanate from a kitchen. Roast beef, bacon, pudding, and beer and port, will make a different man in time from Château Margaux, côtelettes, consommés and soufflés. The very name vol-au-vent is enough to make one walk on air!

David McCullough, The Greater Journey, quoting James Fenimore Cooper.

Here’s Putin’s mindset: We’re the Third Rome

I debated whether this should be in Sunday’s faith-focused post, but I think it belongs here as a glimpse into how the Russian state got so thick with the Russian Orthodox Patriarch (leading to things like the Patriarch scandalously backing the war on Ukraine):

After the fall of Constantinople, an obscure monk named Filofey wrote a treatise arguing that the Greeks had been conquered because they were apostate. Three Romes now marked the history of Christendom, he claimed: the first had fallen away in 1054 [i.e., the Great Schism – Tipsy]; the second had done so in 1439 [i.e., the Council of Ferrara-Florence]; and the third, Moscow, would and could never fall until the end of time. This Third Rome doctrine, as it came to be known, was never officially endorsed. But it did illustrate the isolated mentality of Russia as she entered the sixteenth century.

John Strickland, The Age of Division

CCAI

Remember CCM? Well now we have CCAI, Contemporary Christian Artificial Intelligence, or as they seem to prefer, Gloo.

It’s “Values-Aligned AI for Faith & Ministry.”

Ummmm … Whatever.

Shorts

Evangelicals have not promoted a faith of word and sacrament, but one of word preached, word studied, and word shared. (Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind)
By economic standards the country gets richer and richer. By death-accounting standards the nation goes on winning its war forever. And by school standards the population becomes increasingly educated. (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society)
Evil does not want to be tolerated. It needs to be vindicated. It demands to be seen as right. (Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land)
The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is. (René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World)
States, particularly liberal democracies, are heavily dependent on wars for moral coherence. (Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens)
J.D. Vance is more than content to be in harness, happier than a dung beetle at Trump’s all-you-can-eat raw-sewage buffet. (Kevin D. Williamson, who called Vance “coprophagic” in his preceding column. Is there a theme emerging?)
Trump is, indeed, dedicated to running the government like a business—la Cosa Nostra. (Kevin D. Williamson)
In order to avoid believing in just one God we are now asked to believe in an infinite number of universes, all of them unobservable just because they are not part of ours. The principle of inference seems to be not Occam’s Razor but Occam’s Beard: “Multiply entities unnecessarily.” (J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know)
I love my country, but I fit [in Europe]. In part it’s because I love history so much, and Europe has history like Idaho has potatoes. (Rod Dreher)
This takes us to what I think is the most important lesson my time in Europe taught me. It deepened my tragic sense of life, which is a deeply un-American thing, but an important thing to know. (Rod Dreher)
Mr. Paxton represents the serrated edge of the Texas GOP, for which “owning the libs” is the highest political value. (WSJ)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Who less than self their country loved

Congressmen and Senators reveal their real preference …

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country love
And mercy more than life!

Not one of the Republican Congressmen and Senators who sit mute before the most open and flagrant act of Presidential corruption in the nation’s history can claim to love country more than self. Cowardly throne-sniffers! Shameful!

… and a South Carolina state Senator reveals his

First, our system wasn’t designed only to divide power between the different branches of the federal government, but also between the federal government and the sovereign states. Trump should not dominate the federal government, and he should not dominate the state of South Carolina.

“The separation of powers may actually be the most important governmental doctrine that has been created in the history of man,” Massey said. “It is that important. And what the Congress has done to relinquish their authority to the executive is terrible. And we all see the results of that.”

As for South Carolina, there is “another brilliant creation, and that is of federalism and the sovereignty of the states. I don’t want to be a participant in further eroding federalism and further diminishing the essential role of states.”

Republican majority leader of the South Carolina Senate, Shane Massey, on why he won’t vote for or lead his state in redisctricting out its sole safe Democrat Congressional District, via David French (gift link). I’m glad David highlighted this (there’s much more, too, and worth reading). It gives me a glimmer of hope for a return of political normalcy.

A new phase in MAGA loyalty to Il Duce

When NPR interviewed a group of voters recently and asked them to grade the president’s term so far, one awarded him an A++. Aren’t gas prices hurting you, though, NPR wondered? Absolutely, the voter said, but he’s figured out a way to cope.

“Me and my wife have been fasting,” he told the outlet, “and there’s a lot of benefits, including one of those benefits is saving money on groceries.”

That’s the Jonestown phase …

Nick Catoggio

Mark Edmundson’s father was a mensch

Mark Edmundson also grew up in a working-class family, in Medford, Massachusetts. He got into college, something no one else in his family had done, and told his father that he might study prelaw, because you could make a decent living as a lawyer. His father, who had barely graduated high school, “detonated,” Edmundson later recalled. You only go to college once, his father roared, you better study what genuinely interests you. The rich kids get to study what they want, and you are just as good as any rich kids.

Edmundson soon encountered Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson. “They gave words to thoughts and feelings that I had never been able to render myself,” he wrote in his book, Why Teach? “They shone a light onto the world, and what they saw, suddenly I saw, too.” Edmundson now teaches poetry and literature at the University of Virginia.

David Brooks, Something Is Going Right at Universities

Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk.

When asked by Senate Democrats about “the outcome of the 2020 election,” some of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees are turning to a potentially surprising source as inspiration for their answers: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Recent nominees have cited Jackson’s statement that it “wasn’t proper for her to comment on political matters” when she was asked about the 2020 election results during her 2022 confirmation vetting to explain why they, too, are declining to address that election, according to Bloomberg Law. “I think the answer that Justice Jackson gave is the only legally and ethically correct one,” said Matthew Schwartz, whom Trump nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

SCOTUS blog

(Cf. Matthew 22:15-22)

War without a human face

“We shall conquer,“ we were told, “because we are the strongest, because we are the richest. We shall conquer because we have the will to do so.“ As if bons d’armement in themselves could bring about victory. As if war were nothing other than a vast industrial undertaking, a mere matter of capital. Such a war – a war of equipment and weaponry, inhuman, materialistic – yes, we have no doubt lost such a war. We must have the courage to say so. What is more, France could never have won such a war. Otherwise, she would no longer have been France, preeminently humane. If she had won such a war – one without a human face, a war of equipment (the kind of war being presented to us) – she would have lost the most precious thing she possesses, the essential characteristic of her very being. She would have lost that which makes her France, that which differentiates her from every other country on earth.

Vladimir Lossky, Seven Days on the Roads of France, June 1940.

Does this tell you what you need to know?

Nancy French, David French’s wife, had a solid reputation as a political ghostwriter.

In my mind, however, I made a vow: I would not bear false witness against my liberal neighbor. That one decision was the beginning of the end of my political ghostwriting career.

Nancy French, Ghosted

AI Poetry

Katha Pollitt writing for the Nation, May 12:

About a year ago, I asked ChatGPT to write a poem “in the style of Katha Pollitt.” The result was fairly ridiculous: more like a greeting-card jingle than a poem by anyone over the age of 10. Whew! I tested ChatGPT again just now. Apparently it has been taking poetry workshops. Singsong rhyme and meter are out; free verse and wistfulness are in. . . .

[The poem] has all the tics of contemporary mediocre poetry: the knowing nudge (“as meetings do”), the look out the window (“Outside, the city”), the careless mixed metaphors. . . . There is nothing fresh or original here, no wit or zing, no pressure on language or form or voice or thought. It’s full of decorative phrases like “the stubborn verb of living” that sound “poetic” but do no work. It’s boring and generic and there are probably dozens of magazines that would publish it. But do you know what bothered me the most? The thought that this is what ChatGPT “thinks” my poems are like: obedient, saddish, “feminist” but defeated (get that woman a dishwasher!). Please believe me, reader: That is not how I write.

Via the Wall Street Journal

Eighth Day Books’ Warren Farha

Someone strongly recommended a Rod Dreher Substack post and I ended up with a one-week free trial. What follows is a direct, verbatim copy of one item in his Thursday post. I can only offer my 100% endorsement, adding that Warren worried about succession at Eighth Day Books. I hope he got it sorted. There is a fine group of thoughtful and voracious Christian readers in Wichita, organized loosely around the Eighth Day Institute, several of whom would be plausible proprietors of maybe the greatest Christian bookstore in the World. (When I told my wife, who never met him, that he had died, my eyes and nose started running for some reason. And Rod’s not kidding about Warren’s second wife.)

Warren Farha, RIP

Woke up this morning to devastating news: the great Warren Farha has died of pancreatic cancer. Warren was the owner of Eighth Day Books, probably the greatest Christian bookstore in the English-speaking world. If you’ve been, you know I’m telling the truth. He was not only an unparalleled genius at curating books, he was also one of the most humble human beings in the world. Everybody who knew Warren loved him. Here’s a link to a 2015 NYT piece about this special man and his bookstore, which he founded with money paid out after he lost his wife to a drunk driver.

Warren leaves behind three kids, a widow (his wonderful second wife, Chris), countless friends and admirers, and a legacy that will never be matched. Of course I’ll pray for his soul, because that’s what we do, but I am confident that all of us have gained a great intercessor in heaven. I hope Eighth Day Books will survive. If there’s any doubt about that, I will do everything in my power to make it happen, and I know that I am not alone in that.

God, what a fine man Warren Farha was. The best of us.

Shorts

The fundamental obligation of a humanities teacher is to try to develop in students an allergy to ideology and certainty. To acknowledge self-doubt. (Columbia University’s Andrew Delbanco via David Brooks)
The West is an imperial culture. The idea of “world-domination” is the spiritual basis and goal of all its achievements. (Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism)
I’m a left-handed gay Jew. I’ve never felt, automatically, a member of any majority. (The late Barney Frank)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

What if the Furies came for America?

In the political sphere

What if the Furies came for America?

What if the Furies came for America? What does the karma of an entire nation look like in anthropomorphic form?

If Trump is ushering us toward some sort of critical defining moment, perhaps even an apocalypse as so many seem to believe, it’s worth remembering that the definition of an apocalypse is a revealing of previously hidden truths. If we look at President Trump through a symbolic lens, what previously hidden truths are being revealed about America? What does his particular character tell us about our collective character?

Trump, in his crude way, is forcing us to confront the false stories we have told ourselves about who we are.

W. Aaron Vandiver, Trump and the Furies of Empire (Front Porch Republic)

This hit me harder, again and again, than anything I’ve read in a long while on the political state of the world. It’s chock-full of quotable stuff (some of which you’ll be seeing in due course), but the quote above is could be an epigraph.

If you think these days are our nadir, remember that Trump is more the eventuality than the cause of our flaws. 77 million voted for him.

I began saying almost a decade ago that “Trump v. Clinton has God’s judgment written all over it.” I wan’t wrong, but if you prefer “furies” or “Karma incarnate,” well you do you.

There’s only one sour note I noticed in this piece: Vandiver tries to shame Christians out of supporting Trump, which is well and good, but he comes across as a guy who was raised in a mainline Church that taught “be nice” as the heart of the Gospel. So I take his Christian bona fides with a grain of salt. With his makeweight “Christian” argument gone, it’s still a very solid piece.

Sophomoric trickery

[Congressman Don] Bacon recalls that his great-great-great-grandfather John lived near Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. John’s uncle helped maintain it while Jefferson was away being president. John moved to Illinois and in 1861 enlisted in the Union Army. So, in 2020 it seemed like familial piety for Bacon to be a one of two prime movers of legislation to remove from Army bases (Forts Bragg, Hill, Pickett, Hood, Benning and others) the names of Confederate soldiers who did their damnedest to dismember the nation.

The legislation, which included a stipulation that no base would ever again have a Confederate’s name, inspired a provision in the 2021 defense authorization bill that became law over President Donald Trump’s veto. In 2025, however, the second Trump administration, practicing what it evidently considers sophisticated trickery, restored the names. Sort of.

Fort Bragg, which briefly was Fort Liberty, is now renamed back to Fort Bragg. Not, however, for Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, but for Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, who won a Silver Star in World War II. Fort Pickett, which briefly became Fort Barfoot, is again Fort Pickett. This time, however, the name (we are supposed to believe) honors not the Virginian who led Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, but Vernon W. Pickett, a lieutenant who in World War II won a Distinguished Service Cross.

This sophomoric trickery — the cleverness of the dim-witted — by the commander in chief is intended to mock the law. This is what now passes for fulfilling the president’s constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

George Will, Serious. Has a spine. No wonder he’s leaving Congress.

“Republicans” and “Democrats” today

We still have teams that we call Republican and Democrat, but that’s not what a political party actually was, or used to be, at least. It used to be a cohesive group around some policies and principles that would support candidates that supported those policies or principles, and the party existed separate from its candidates. Because of campaign finance reform and the law that was passed in 2002, we basically ended having separate political parties. And so, instead, again, it’s actually increased partisanship. But it’s vibes-based. It’s this sense that you belong to, like, you know, the Starbucks, Trader Joe’s tote bag, matcha latte group. Or you belong to the pickup truck, “Yellowstone”-watching, Walmart group. And it’s not policy based.

Sarah Isgur.

Speaking of political parties, I’m really, really missing the days when they assembled in smoke-filled rooms and came up with candidates who they thought could win elections to advance their ideas. Now we have primary elections wherein the President of the United States sends out his zombie voters to politically assassinate distinguished incumbents who did something that made him mad, as GOP Senators shrug and say, in effect, “Well, it’s his party; he can kick out whoever he wants to.”. The Republican party and incumbency mean nothing to Trump.

Trump took revenge on Senator Bill Cassidy over the weekend and will unseat Thomas Massie on Tuesday. May the instruments of his revenge go down in flames in November.

And may we once again discover the importance of functioning political parties.

Thucydides trap

[On Thursday,] Xi Jinping warned Donald Trump to his face about a “Thucydides trap” potentially unfolding between our two countries.

Like everyone else, my first thought when I heard the news was, “There’s no way Trump knows what a Thucydides trap is.”

A “Thucydides trap” refers to the rising probability of war when a long-dominant power is at risk of being usurped by a rising one. America is in decline and everyone knows it, Xi was implying, and the White House should take care not to let its anxiety about that lead it to foolishly assert itself in defense of Taiwan.

Someone must have explained that to the president following the summit. “When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration,” Trump clarified afterward on Truth Social, not at all defensively.

That was cute spin, but it ain’t Joe Biden whom Chinese nationalists have been moved to publicly thank for destroying U.S. global supremacy. Trump’s “tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States,” the New York Times reported earlier this week, summarizing the analysis of one Beijing think tank.

Nick Catoggio

Somehow, this resonates

“You do know that the party has two kinds of functionaries, right?” “Yes, Father, you’ve told me before.” “The good-for-nothings and the stop-at-nothings. So which are you, Alyosha?”

Giuliano da Empoli and Willard Wood, The Wizard of the Kremlin

Outside the political sphere

Tech just blows my mind sometimes

China has unveiled its latest photonic quantum computer, Jiuzhang 4.0, with researchers saying it can outperform the world’s fastest classical supercomputer by a vast margin … The results, published on May 13 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, mark the latest milestone in China’s rapidly advancing quantum program led by a team of scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China headed by Chinese quantum physicist Pan Jianwei. Jiuzhang 4.0 completed a Gaussian boson sampling task in just 25 microseconds – a calculation they estimated would take the world’s most powerful supercomputer, El Capitan in the United States, more than 10⁴² years to finish, according to the university in the eastern city of Hefei.

John Ellis News Items.

Lingua franca

Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand. Thirty years ago, most middle-class families made some of the old European music a part of the home, partly because they liked it, partly because they thought it was good for the kids. University students usually had some early emotive association with Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms, which was a permanent part of their makeup and to which they were likely to respond throughout their lives. This was probably the only regularly recognizable class distinction between educated and uneducated in America.

Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes

Where’s the poverty?

In America, the land of the free, you can earn a billion bucks and then live however you’d like so long as you wouldn’t like to live as humanely as a middle-class Parisian.

I’m not, alas, in Paris right now. But I can certainly imagine myself in a Parisian cafe, enjoying some steak frites and a glass of wine while taking in the glorious streetscape. What’s harder to imagine is soaking in all that ambiance and thinking, “Yeah, this place is definitely poorer than Mississippi.”

Megan McArdle, Europe has the grandeur. But America has economic abundance.

See also Josef Pieper, Leisure: the Basis of Culture

Shorts

… Ethical Capital Partners, the private equity firm that owns Pornhub. (The Morning Dispatch)
“Once somebody’s proven they’re too frightened of being called ‘bigot’ to defend the most vulnerable, they’ve shown who they are,” – JK Rowling via Andrew Sullivan.
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all,” – Donald Trump, who “obliterated” the nuclear sites last year via Andrew Sullivan.
“[Biden] has one ability I don’t have: he sleeps. … He has an ability to fall asleep while on camera. … You’ll never see me sleeping in front of a camera,” – Trump in 2024 via Andrew Sullivan.
“2019: Donald Trump calls on China to investigate Joe Biden for having son Hunter fly to China on Air Force Two as he sought business in China. 2026: Donald Trump flies son Eric to China on Air Force One as company linked to him explores a deal with a Chinese chipmaker,” – Matt Viser via Andrew Sullivan.
“One of the enduring Two Americas truisms of the decade: Repubs convinced Obama is behind every tree and Dems wishing he would show up in the forest at all,” – Jonathan Martin via Andrew Sullivan.
Pressure on journalists has risen exponentially since the turn of the century. Many media companies require their journalists to produce up to a dozen stories a day – all in pursuit of clicks and likes. Maintaining high standards is impossible. (Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News)
Never have I witnessed a White House so devoted to surfaces. Surfaces caked with makeup. Surfaces puffed up with hair spray. Surfaces glossed with gold. Surfaces that glitter blue — or someday might, if the over-budget overhaul of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ever works out as promised. (Frank Bruni)
In The Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg surveyed television shows inspired by a classic William Golding novel: “It’s easy to recognize that ‘The White Lotus’ has always been ‘Lord of the Flies,’ with turndown service.” (Via Frank Bruni)
Microsoft has rebranded its famed gaming division, Xbox. It will now be called XBOX. We salute the marketing team for their risk-taking, creativity, and awareness of the caps lock key. The Morning Dispatch
Epitaph for Modernity: I came, I shopped, I died. (Fr. Stephen Freeman).
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. (Jeannette Rankin)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Thursday May 14

Pig-in-a-poke

At the heart of the US retirement industry, underpinning the later-life plans of millions of Americans, is a set of financial products that hardly anyone can tell you a thing about. No one knows exactly how much money they control. No one can say how it’s all allocated. No single financial regulator is in charge of them. Yet Collective Investment Trusts are now a multi-trillion dollar business to rival mutual funds or ETFs — and are poised to become the backdoor through which more private assets are added to Americans’ retirement savings. (Source: bloomberg.com)

Via John Ellis. But don’t forget cryptocurrency, Mr. Ellis; its opacity is baked into its very name.

I’m uneasy, by the way, about allowing private assets in Americans’ retirement savings, but if you’re going to insist on its permissibility, professional management and selection of those private assets by something like Collective Investment Trusts seems one of the less bad ways of doing it.

Deep worries

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

Yuval Levin, The Missing Branch (May 6, 2025)

Man versus myth

Thoreau’s cabin, it turns out, was not in the woods, but in a clearing near the woods that was in sight of a well-traveled public road. Thoreau was only a thirty-minute walk from his hometown of Concord, where he returned regularly for meals and social calls. Friends and family, for their part, visited him constantly at his cabin, and Walden Pond, far from an untrammeled oasis, was then, as it remains today, a popular destination for tourists seeking a nice walk or swim.

Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism

In principle and in practice

In a Press Release, ADF (the “Alliance Defending Freedom”) announced that Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has resigned, effective June 7, in order to take a position with them.

From 2002 and a few years after, I provided a few hundred hours of pro bono legal services to “pay ADF back” for training they provided, free of charge, at the Ritz Carlton Kapalua. (It was memorable partly for the return flight, Honolulu to Houston, after which I understood how people can develop dangerous circulatory problems on long flights and vowed never again to fly a Redeye flight other than in an Aisle seat, and certainly not in the center seat of the center section of an L1011, with two sleeping people between me and an aisle. Another memorable part was figuring out ways to “get around” Employment Division v. Smith in pursuing religious freedom claims.) So I’ve kept an eye on ADF.

ADF described itself in the Press Release as “the world’s largest legal organization committed to advancing every person’s God-given right to live and speak the truth” (italics added).

I’m not sure why they chose that italicized part. I suspect it has to do with keeping things vague as they try to attract more donors. I’m pretty sure that ADF and I no longer see exactly eye-to-eye on “truth” (they’re de facto evangelical). I don’t recall any ADF Press Release trumpeting how they vindicated the religious freedom of, say, a Jehovah’s Witness or a Sikh, or even an Orthodox Christian; that isn’t, or at least wasn’t, the kind of case that appeals to their donors. They’re mostly into eccentric evangelicals and devout Catholics.

That’s why my donations for the cause of religious liberty go to Becket Fund. Becket is tightly focused on core religious liberty interests, avoiding peripheral culture warrior battles. And comparing its home page to ADF’s accurately reflects contrasting, public-facing construals of “every person.” And as Becket says, perhaps pointedly, “Becket defends religious liberty for all—in principle and in practice.”

I’m not saying ADF is hypocritical. Other groups with broad mandates, be they “civil liberties” (ACLU) or “free speech” (FIRE) walk a tightrope with their donors, who don’t always appreciate that government threats to people they dislike threaten them as well. I am just saying that, for understandable if somewhat mercenary reasons, ADF falls short of what I want from a religious liberty defender.

Religion (and politics)

As a preliminary matter, I want to record an objection that I feel the need to record from time to time: I do not accept the premise, common in the popular press and pervasive at the New York Times, that religion is just away for people to feel more righteous about their political commitments; that religion is really all about politics.

I don’t buy it because my personal experience tells me it’s a facile falsehood — at least some of the time. It persists because it’s true often enough, especially in the most visible religiopreneurs, to tempt nonreligious reporters into assuming a categorical rule.

Time to change sides?

Dad seemed lost in a depressed daze. He had recently been saying privately that the evangelical world was more or less being led by lunatics, psychopaths, and extremists, and agreeing with me that if “our side” ever won, America would be in deep trouble. But by then Dad was dying and knew he had very little time left. There was no time to change his life or his new “friends.” All I could do was to bitterly regret what I’d gotten him into. I still do.

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God, of the late Evangelical icon Francis Schaeffer, his father.

Frank, who was an angry Evangelical, became an angry Orthodox Christian. I’ve written written about him before and really have nothing new since I’ve lost all track of what he’s currently doing.

Partisanship/Binary Collapse

Ted Gioia moved an essay (which I don’t think I had seen before) from behind the Substack paywall. It’s very timely stuff, I think, even if it doesn’t give a detailed roadmap to the end of America’s vicious tribalism.

How can you tell when you’re living in a binary collapse? Here are seven warning signs:

1. All conflicts are channeled into a single binary opposition between two teams. There is never a third team—if someone tries to create it, one or both of the two teams will work fervently to destroy the third option.

2. Each team is obsessed with punishing the other—and this becomes more important than taking steps that might help their own supporters.

3. The common good turns into an empty concept, and is only mentioned as a rhetorical device in attacking the other team (which is always opposed to the common good). Policies that might help everybody are ignored (as in the Roman example), because they can’t be used to energize team supporters—which is where all power and resources reside.

4. Even institutions and vocations that have no direct connection with the two teams get drawn into the battle. Everything becomes part of the conflict—science, entertainment, math, medicine, architecture, etc.

5. The fault of the other team is never a simple matter, but always involves a long list of extreme accusations. As Rene Girard shows in his book The Scapegoat, the same charges are invariably lodged against the other team—violence, sexual transgressions, greed, ethical abuses, moral corruption, violation of taboos, and a litany of other abuses. Even if the conflict begins with a single difference (class, religion, race, etc.), it soon expands to encompass every one of society’s most feared transgressions. It sounds absurd but, in periods of binary collapse, the opposing team is always accused, sooner or later, of incest, rape, murder, devil worship, profanations of all sorts.

6. Despite their espoused hatred, the two teams repeatedly imitate each other—in fact the hated enemy is also the main role model. Like warring Mafia gangs, they engage in tit-for-tat behavior. Hence, the exact same accusations are made, back and forth. Threats, excuses, reprisals are always identical; even promises for the future (after the victory) are eerily similar. These mirror-like reflections merely increase the polarization and escalate the conflict.

7. People who try to operate outside this binary conflict have no impact. They are literally individuals without a team—which in a binary crisis is always the worst possible situation. They are the weakest of all parties. To have any influence, they must join one of the two teams…and so the cycle continues.

Having rejected the Republican party in 2005 and unable thus far to accommodate myself to Democrat foibles, I am now 21 years politically homeless. So that 7th point isn’t one I instinctively like. But Gioia continues:

Anybody who dares suggest a remedy outside the binary conflict will be attacked by the now massive forces of the two teams.

And they will get lectured endlessly about the “lesser of two evils” theory. (When you start hearing that argument constantly, pay close attention—because it identifies the source of a potential structural shift in the situation.)

This oft-stated theory declares that you must always limit yourself to the best of two bad options—because anything else is EVIL.

Maybe that’s true. But there’s another theory, perhaps even more persuasive. This other theory states that a system which only offers lesser-of-two-evil choices is already broken, and people deserve more and better options.

(Bold added) Yeah! Politically, my placeholder “better option” is the American Solidarity Party. But there’s a hint at still another route:

When athletes play, they turn against a common enemy—the opposing team. But when musicians play, they operate in a purer realm—and the audience still packs into the arena or stadium (the same venues!) for this peaceful way of forming into teams.

Yay, music! “Beauty will save the world.” (Dostoevsky)

Block quotes all from Gioia’s *How to Tell If You’re Living in a Binary Crisis8.

A story on NPR’s All Things Considered on the 13th suggested that what used to be known as American liberal democracy is now American competitive authoritarianism. It seems to fit observed fact and to be congruent with Gioia.

I’m filled with dread that it takes two or more to compete, so we may not get back to liberal democracy any time soon.

Political Evangelicalism

Political evangelicalism is a system that is deeply influenced by depraved men, and it has exactly the features that depraved men will demand of an institution they control.

First, the depraved man will alter the very definition of virtue. He’ll place a higher premium on his thoughts than his actions, so that the goal is theological or ideological purity rather than, say, the fruit of the spirit, which includes kindness, peace, patience, gentleness and self-control.

In this formulation, the absolute worst thing you can be is a heretic, with heresy defined according to the leader’s inflexible interpretation of Scripture.

You can see this temptation across the length and breadth of American religion and politics. How many people see themselves as good because their theology or ideology is pure? How many of the same people then feel righteous even as they inflict extreme cruelty on their theological or ideological foes? To them, cruelty in the name of truth isn’t cruelty at all; it’s a form of tough love.

…

The modern history of political evangelicalism is riddled with [this] kind of story: A powerful man gains a following by casting himself as the heroic warrior against the heretical and the godless. When he uses his power and fame to indulge his basest desires, he treats exposure as an attack and justice as persecution.

And because he’s built a following, he has an army of people ready to leap to his defense. After all, if they stay silent, then the liberals will win, and no one can let the liberals win. Ever.

Against this backdrop, President Trump wasn’t an aberration; he was an inevitability. When he asked evangelicals for their political support, little did he know that he was walking into the house that Paul Pressler built.

David French, primarily about the Southern Baptist Convention’s winking at the homosexual ephebophilia of the late Paul Pressler — but with, I think, broader application.

I’m starting to think that muckraker David French either has exceptionally thick skin against the barbs of his fellow-evangelicals or else he “has had it” with them and is on the cusp of leaving, or prepared to leave if pushed, for another Christianish tradition.

One lame cheer for Russian Victory Day

A day (Victory Day) that was meant to epitomize the military might of Mr Putin’s Russia instead signaled its vulnerability and weakness. In this, at least, it was an accurate reflection of Russia’s battlefield setbacks, and of Russia’s fear of the growing effectiveness of Ukraine’s long-range strikes. For the first time in nearly three years the initiative in the war appears to have shifted in favour of Ukraine. Having got through a harsh winter, when its cities and energy grid were pummelled almost nightly by massed Russian drones and missiles, Ukraine is now turning the tide. It is imposing increasing costs on Russia by almost every measure.

“Overall, it feels like an inflection point in the war,” says Sir Lawrence Freedman, an emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London. “If the Russians have nothing to show for their efforts I would not be surprised if in some places things start crumbling.” Losses of soldiers, running at 35,000 a month, exceed the pace at which Russia can recruit replacements. And behind the raw numbers—nearly 1.4 million killed and seriously wounded since Russia’s invasion—is a grimmer new development. Until last year, the ratio of killed to wounded Russian soldiers may have been between 1:2 and 1:3, poor by modern standards but roughly in line with past conflicts. In March Mr Zelensky said that Russia was suffering almost two dead soldiers for every one wounded. “The stoicism and fatalism of Russian soldiers must be wearing thin,” says Sir Lawrence. (Source: economist.com)

Via John Ellis.

I certainly would not have predicted Ukraine beating Russia. I fully expected Russia to win eventually, and may have written that down in front of God and everybody. Drones and other ingenuity thwarted that.

I have both Ukrainians and Russians in my parish, Russian immigrants in my near family, and some understanding of both nations, so I’m not going to be despondent about either side winning or some stalemate. It has seemed to me a logical treaty concession for Ukraine to give up heavily-Russian regions like Donetsk, which reportedly was ill-treated by Ukraine before hostilities broke out. Sounds close to a win-win solution.

Dependence on the written word

Obviously, here is a paradox, and the present writer is aware of risking another in a book which calls attention to the sin of writing. The answer to the problem seems to be that written discourse is under a limitation and that whether we wish to accept that limitation to secure other advantages must be decided after due reference to purposes and circumstances. In the Good Society it is quite possible that man will not be so dependent on the written word.

Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences.

Pick one: laissez-faire capitalism or family-friendly morality

There is among Republicans little if any appreciation of how the party’s enthusiasm for laissez-faire capitalism—and the idea that economic growth is the raison d’être of our common existence—undermines the communal and social bonds necessary to support the traditional family-centered morality Republicans claim to esteem.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter , The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

Shorts

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.
In an attention economy, one is never not on, at least when one is awake, since one is nearly always paying, getting or seeking attention. (Michael Goldhaber quoted in Charlie Warzel, I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet) (gift link)
Students and professors at elite universities have a long track record of targeting the free speech rights of their conservative colleagues, and Republicans are rationalizing their own constitutional violations as fighting fire with fire. (David French)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Will we destroy the Last Branch Standing?

Conservative versus anti-left

Goldstein: Let me try to tempt you into armchair diagnosing another group of people: politician-critics of elite higher ed who are themselves products of elite higher ed — Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, JD Vance, Ron DeSantis, Elise Stefanik.

Brooks: Stephen Miller.

Goldstein: That’s another one. Is there anything novel going on with these folks? Or is this the latest incarnation of an old story going back to at least Bill Buckley at Yale?

Brooks: What’s happening now is different than Buckley. He genuinely loved Yale, even while critiquing the professors. Let me tell the story this way. 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 and Evan Goldstein upon Brooks’ departure from the New York Times to, among other things, teach at Yale.

This sign, from the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point America and carried by a supporter of the Trump-backed challenger in the nationally-famous 3-vote-margin Indiana race, is not conservative:

Note well: MAGA is not conservative. It is anti-left. Conservatives have been pretty much sidelined in our public life.

Courts

Having knowingly (we knew damn well beforehand) installed a snake in the Oval Office, and having reduced Congress to a bunch of internet trolls and “influencers,” Americans turn their attention to destroying the Courts, the Last Branch Standing between the present mess and the abyss.

The impetus toward postliberalism

The less capable our system is of producing outcomes that the losing side will see as “fair,” the greater that side’s appetite for postliberalism will be. If a process-oriented politics can’t deliver fair results, its frustrated subjects will conclude that a results-oriented system is the only alternative.

To many, a court overturning a vote of millions of Virginians that went in Democrats’ favor on a debatable procedural technicality will seem unfair. A second court dominated by Republican appointees choosing to end majority-minority redistricting coincidentally at the moment the GOP faces an electoral debacle will seem very unfair. The fact that Donald Trump and his party have broken norm after norm over the last 10 years, yet have plainly strengthened their hold on power over the same period, seems especially unfair, making traditional civic norms feel like a sucker’s game and a path to perpetual minority status.

Nick Catoggio, whose concern in The Road to Perdition is less the mid-decade gerrymander wars than the calls for court-packing. The boldest postliberal court-packing scheme I’ve seen is that of the Democrats in Virginia, which dials up to eleven the already outrageous mid-decade gerrymandering frenzy, which the Republicans started.

Suicide in the cause of process over results

The Virginia Court opinion invalidating the referendum-approved pro-Democrat gerrymander was, in my casual consideration, a by-the-book insistence on following the right process to get your desired result. Those who look closer at the opinion, or have deep insight into the Virginia judicial context, might differ.

But even if Virginia Democrats don’t nuke their courts, it will also be the end of the judicial career of the opinion’s author, as I noted elsewhere. You can’t blame the author of doing something that was cheap professionally.

A calming voice

As Justice Elena Kagan bemoaned in her dissent, a plaintiff objecting to district maps that kept Black voters from electing representatives of their choice would need to show that the maps were “motivated by a discriminatory purpose,” something that is “well-nigh impossible.” She thought the court need concern itself only with the racial effects, not racial purpose, as it had from 1986 until last week’s ruling.

But we seem less concerned about effects when other groups of people have limited ability to elect their favorite candidates. We do not think of the white Republican in San Francisco as meaningfully disenfranchised.

The question is whether present-day conditions justify classifying Black people as a special case.

…

W.E.B. DuBois in “The Souls of Black Folk” asked, “How does it feel to be a problem?” If Black voters can be meaningfully represented only by Black candidates, and some shifty Republican operators with their maps can really all but undo 60 years of electoral transformation, then Black Americans remain a problem.

I don’t think we are. There has been enough “good trouble,” as the great John Lewis used to put it, that I highly suspect that, to put it in the modern argot, We Got This.

John McWhorter

There is no d*mn#d ceasefire!

I’ve seen so much abuse of language (and not just from Team Trump) that I was working on the assumption that “ceasefire” was broad enough to cover “we’re shooting at each other a little bit less now.” But we shouldn’t let “them” do that to us.

There is a real challenge for reporters and editors, opinion columnists, and [headline writers] when it comes to covering Donald Trump and his grim, grubby little band of slavering sycophants, which is that it is difficult to write about people who simply lie about everything all the time, from the minor to the major, changing their story from moment to moment, saying the first thing that comes into their minds or whatever it is they think will get them through the next two minutes. The difficulty is in striking a balance between implicitly adopting the assumptions of the people who are lying to you (who you know are lying to you, and who know that you know are lying to you, and you know that they know that you know, etc. ad literal nauseam) and writing as though you were always performing a real-time fact-check in the background of whatever reporting it is you are trying to do or whatever argument it is you are trying to make.

And so we end up with reporters writing about the possibility that a ceasefire that does not exist will cease to exist

…

But a lie is a lie is a lie is a lie is a lie.

That’s important for people in the journalism business, of course—if you can’t write or say that a lie is a lie, or if you feel compelled to treat an obvious lie as though it were something other than an obvious lie, then you really can’t do the work of journalism, whether you are an opinion-and-commentary guy or a straight-news reporter—but, more than that, it is important for us as free men and women in our roles as citizens in a self-governing republic. You can run a fiefdom on deceit, a kingdom on lies, and an empire on baloney, but you cannot long maintain a free society under the rule of law without a reasonably high baseline of honesty in the public conversation. Right now, we have a situation in which federal judges have decided that they can no longer assume that the lawyers serving the executive branch are not simply lying to the courts in their filings and statements. (The legal mumbo-jumbo for this is the “presumption of regularity.”) Once you lose that, you don’t get it back …

Trump is, of course, a pathological liar in his own right, but what is arguably worse is that he makes telling the most risible, shameful, and obvious lies a condition of serving in his administration ….

Kevin D. Williamson.

I didn’t even rush to print with this because I was pretty sure that any day this week (it’s Monday as I’m writing this item) it will still be true that there’s no ceasefire—and that the press will be talking and writing as if the sorta-kinda is.

Another nonsense that gets my nose out of joint is that Congress won’t impeach Trump, and remove him from office, for defying the War Powers Act’s 60-day time limit with the sophistry that “Epic Fury” is over and we’re into “Enduring Freedom” now.

Grrrrrr!

“Russia is safer” than the US

I follow the blog of an older American widower with a young Russian-American daughter, Marina. After his younger Russian wife’s death, they moved back to the U.S.

They’re now back in Russia, and the widower father explains why:

[W]hile I loved being back in the U.S., the political and social disintegration was clear. The economy seemed and still seems to be on the verge of collapse. The national debt is greater than the entire U.S. budget [sic – it’s bigger than the GNP]! I see absolutely no rhyme or reason to major political and military decisions made by Trump, e.g., the attack on Iran. The U.S. simply has to be in war or conflict somewhere …

I did not and do not want Marina raised in such a place. Russia is safer. Further, I sincerely believe she will get a better education in the public schools here, and I don’t have to wonder about any social agenda. For example, Putin has made it clear that the terms “mom” and “dad” will be used, not “parent 1” and “parent 2.”

Were I to become an expatriate, my heart would lead me to France, not Russia, but then I don’t have an impressionable child.

Apparition

			
I walked my fastest down the twilight street;
Sometimes I ran a little, it was so late.
At first the houses echoed back my feet,
Then the path softened just before our gate.
Even in the dusk I saw, even in my haste,
Lawn-tracks and gravel-marks. “That’s where he plays;
The scooter and the cart these lines have traced,
And Baby wheels her doll here, sunny days.”
Our door was open; on the porch still lay
Ungathered toys; our hearth-light cut the gloam;
Within, round table-candles, you — and they.
And I called out, I shouted, “I am come home!”
At first you heard not, then you raised your eyes,
Watched me a moment — and showed no surprise.
Such dreams we have had often, when we stood
Thought-struck amid the merciful routine,
And distance more than danger chilled the blood,
When we looked back and saw what lay between;
Like ghosts that have their portion of farewell,
Yet will be looking in on life again,
And see old faces, and have news to tell,
But no one heeds them; they are phantom men.
Now home indeed, and old loves greet us back.
Yet — shall we say it? — something here we lack,
Some reach and climax we have left behind.
And something here is dead, that without sound
Moves lips at us and beckons, shadow-bound,
But what it means, we cannot call to mind.

		

John Erskine via Poems Ancient and Modern.

I cannot call to mind what this poem means, but I like it.

Shorts

It says a lot about our current president that in response to the news that a giant gold statue of Donald Trump was dedicated this week, you have to ask, “Which one?” (Margaret Hartmann, Gold 22-Foot Trump Statue Definitely Isn’t a False Idol)
The State Department will begin revoking the passports of about 2,700 individuals who owe more than $100,000 in child support. (The Morning Dispatch) That seems, at least superficially, like a good idea. Will they stop deporting individuals who owe more than $100,000 in child support?
“We’re 9 weeks into a 4 week war we won 8 weeks ago,” – Ron Shillman via Andrew Sullivan
“The Iran conflict has entered its metaphysical phase. Like Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment involving a cat that is simultaneously dead and alive, in the Strait of Hormuz there is both a war and a ceasefire,” – Eli Lake via Andrew Sullivan
“Arrived in Palm Beach, drove by a gas staion [sic], $4.50 a gallon. Result of failed @BarackObama leadership,” – Donald Trump tweeting in April 2012 via Andrew Sullivan

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Samaritan Woman/Midfeast

Colonizers

Just as colonial officials and missionaries, travelling to India, had imposed the concept of ‘religion’ on the societies they found there, so did agnostics colonise the past in similar manner. The ancient Egyptians, and Babylonians, and Romans: all were assumed to have had a ‘religion’. Some peoples—most notably the Greeks—were also assumed to have had ‘science’. It was this that had enabled their civilisation to serve as the wellspring of progress. Philosophers had been the prototypes of scientists. The library of Alexandria had been ‘the birthplace of modern science’. Only Christians, with their fanatical hatred of reason and their determination to eradicate pagan learning, had prevented the ancient world from being set on a path towards steam engines and cotton mills.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

Fissiparous

Those who, like him, had dared to repudiate the Roman Church but had then been guilty of what Luther condemned as a failure properly to understand the Spirit, had also been the objects of his ire. Theologians in Swiss or German cities who presumed to dispute his views on the eucharist; Anabaptists, with their wild contempt for infant baptism and secular authority; Henry VIII, who seemed to think he was God. Luther, fretting where it all might lead, had not shrunk from contemplating a nightmarish prospect: a world in which the very concept of truth might end up dissolving, and everything appear relative. ‘For whoever has gone astray in the faith may thereafter believe whatever he wants.’

Tom Holland, Dominion.

“Fissiparous” is my favorite blanket term for the innumerable clans descended from the Reformation. It sounds appropriately sinister to me.

Lofty rhetoric, grubby reality

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

J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know

Catechesis

If you read through the Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem (mid-4th century), you discover that they have a strongly moral character. The “theology” is quite simple and straight-forward. The extended period of catechesis (often three years in length) was about turning Roman pagans into believing Christians. The habits of the heart (another word for “character”) take time to change or be formed. They are, indeed, the product of a lifetime.

…

We modern people have been nurtured in the heart of a great project and the character of “project managers” has been deeply stamped on us. We expect our own salvation to be something of a project and that w e should be its managers. How frustrating it is to be told that “it does not yet appear what we shall be.” How can we manage the project of our salvation if we do not know what it is we are working towards? How can we tell if we are any closer? Our modern character is formed to expect upward movement – improvement. But St. Sophrony taught that “the way up is the way down.”

Fr. Stephen Freeman.

One of the things I can’t un-see

In my youth, we zealous Evangelicals condemned Roman Catholic Bibles for all the annotations that we thought distorted the Bible’s message. We did so, with no sense of the absurdity, while clutching our Scofield Reference Bibles, with notes that, for instance, put Genesis Chapter 1 at 4004 B.C.

This is the sort of thing you can’t un-see once you’ve seen it. That the dispensationalist heresies of the Scofield Reference Bible have (or so I understand) become passé in Evangelicalism doesn’t change that. Newer Bible versions with study notes fill the void, though perhaps the antipathy to Rome has diminished (I simply don’t know).

The Mother of God

Despite the clear views of the original Reformers, the Church’s devotion of honor and love for the Holy Virgin Mary is one of the greatest stumbling blocks for today’s Protestants to overcome. As on many points of Orthodox doctrine and practice, the Protestant view has devolved radically since the time of the Reformation. For evangelicals in particular, the traditional veneration offered to the Theotokos through praise and prayers evokes not merely theological objections, but often highly charged negative emotional reactions.

Michael Shanbour, Know the Faith

Thoughts from a freshly-minted Saint

No matter how ‘right’ you may be on various points, you must be diplomatic also. The first and important thing is not ‘rightness’ at all, but Christian love and harmony. Most ‘crazy converts’ have been ‘right’ in the criticisms that led to their downfall; but they were lacking in Christian love and charity and so went off the deep end.

St. Seraphim Rose, newly-Canonized in one North American Orthodox jurisdiction, via Michael Warren Davis.

The most tragic Orthodox downfall I’ve seen personally fit that pattern.

This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.

I John 1:5-7

Southern Gothic

Her stepdaughter, Kate, is twenty-five, fragile, sensitive, a weak woman raised by a strong one. She yearns to have her suicidal despair overcome through raw experience. Storms make her feel wonderful. Sometimes, she tells Bolling, she stays up all night having “revelations.” The happiest moment of her life, she claims, was when she was in a car crash on the Natchez Trace. Her fiancé was killed. She survived. “I went over and looked at Lyell and everybody thought I was an onlooker. He had gravel driven into his cheek. There were twenty or thirty cars stopped on the road and then a bus came along. I got on the bus and went into Natchez. There was some blood on my blouse, so when I got to a hotel, I sent it out to be cleaned, took a bath and ordered a big breakfast, ate every crumb and read the Sunday paper.”

Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, characterizing a portion of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.

I guess I thought of this as “Sunday fare” because it reminds the reader, albeit with Flannery O’Connor’s “large and startling figures”, just how screwed up we humans are.

I like the Southern Gothic writers, I think, because their literal meaning is opaque; they write what feels like long, evocative poetry.

No graven images

It says a lot about our current president that in response to the news that a giant gold statue of Donald Trump was dedicated this week, you have to ask, “Which one?”

(Margaret Hartmann, Gold 22-Foot Trump Statue Definitely Isn’t a False Idol).

After a 22-foot gold statue of Donald Trump went up outside the Trump National Doral Miami golf course, Pastor Mark Burns, a friend of the president who helped organize the project, felt obliged to explain at its “dedication” that “this is not a golden calf. We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone.” (Margaret Hartmann, ibid.)

Two observations:

Any Protestant who approves of this statue should never again accuse Orthodox Christians of idolatry because of our icons.
Responding to Orthodox Christians saying “We don’t worship icons,” a common Protestant response is “The hell you don’t! You bow and kiss them!” An Orthodox apologist responding to that denied that bowing and kissing was worship, but sort of understood Protestant confusion: “Protestants venerate God and worship nothing.” (Obviously, that stuck with me.)

Incomplete Renunciation

Please let me have
a 10-room house adjacent to campus;
6 bedrooms, 2-1/2 baths, formal
dining room, frplace, family room, screened porch, 2-car garage.
Well maintained.
And let it pass
through the eye of a needle.

(Marilyn Nelson, in Christian Poetry in America Since 1940: An Anthology)

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Primary Eve

I’m publishing today because some states have primary elections tomorrow and I’ve got some thoughts on elections.

Making modernity

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

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue. (That requires a bit more chewing that we may be accustomed to doing.)

Insatiable

The question with which to start my investigation is obviously this: Is there enough to go round? Immediately we encounter a serious difficulty: What is “enough”? Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues “economic growth” as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of “enough.” There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: “Halt! We have enough”? There is none.

E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful. We’re going to need to update Proverbs 30:15–16.

Book Criticism on the decline

Dwight Garner counted the surviving full-time American book critics — and they fit on one hand. “The thin crust of American intellectual life, long flaking, has begun to show bald patches,” he wrote. He expressed envy of England, which has many more newspapers that routinely publish book reviews: “The literary debate over there is more like a boisterous dinner party and less like a Morse code dispatch between distant frigates passing in the night.” Still, America has its scrappy freelancers and part-timers. “I’m cheered by the young critics out there, swimming in this sea without drowning in it, trying not to be cast into gaol by their creditors, and working to make certain that the last snatch of book criticism isn’t three fire emojis, two jazz-hands, a crying face and a facepalm.”

Via Frank Bruni

Flat-out politics

What Democratic elites would prefer to do

The continuing appeal of Harris is a useful indicator of … stasis. Yes, she is unlikely to be the 2028 nominee, and part of her support is name recognition; … many Democrats who find her renomination unthinkable are nonetheless incapable of acknowledging the real reasons that she lost.

I’ll list some of those reasons. First, her party was seen as too beholden to progressive activists on a range of issues, including immigration, crime, education, energy and the transgender debate. Second, Harris’s vice presidency was itself a creation of the 2020 identity politics moment, without which Joe Biden never would have picked her, and she succeeded him without a fight in part because no one wanted to acknowledge her painful limits as a politician. Finally, she tried to solve both the policy problem and the identity politics problem through evasion and distraction and yet more identity politics, with empty rhetoric of “joy” and circumlocution about her past positions and a mediocre Midwestern white guy running mate.

Despite being on the record taking radical positions, Harris was never a radical politician. Rather, she was a perfectly hapless embodiment of a Democratic establishment that aspired to manage its base without ever strongly resisting its demands and that aspired to win moderate voters not by moderating on the issues but through a change of affect or a change of subject.

That’s still clearly what Democratic elites would prefer to do ….

Ross Douthat, Slouching Toward Kamala Harris

America needs a better Democrat party than that!

Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered

Graham Platner isn’t my ideal Senate candidate. Not even close. I’m deeply troubled by the thinness of his political experience, by the primacy of raw anger in his appeal to voters and by the oddities and ugliness, from a Nazi tattoo to a fondness for “gay” and “gayest” as put-downs, in his not-so-distant past. It’s a lot to overlook.

But if I lived in Maine, I’d vote for him in November. I’d do it without any joy and without any hesitation, because he’s a Democrat running against a Republican and I haven’t been kidding around when I’ve said that President Trump has no respect for democracy, no regard for the truth, no patience for Americans who don’t bow to him and no limits to his desire to exploit the presidency for his and his minions’ glorification and enrichment. I can’t recognize the profound moral offense and extreme danger of Trump and then sit out the election or cast a vote that potentially helps his party, which has abetted or ignored his authoritarian designs, win either chamber of Congress. That would be irresponsible, nonsensical and perilous.

But do other voters think the same way? Is their frequently articulated disdain for Trump just a bunch of colorful and cathartic words or a genuine cause for action, for uncomfortable choices ….

Frank Bruni, Are Democrats Scared Enough of Trump to Defeat Him? (my first NYT gift link this month).

I hope that 2026 will be such a wave election — nay, a Tsunami election — that the Republicans’ norm-shattering mid-decade gerrymanders will backfire. The press keeps reporting as if the gerrymanders will, if not stricken down by courts, accomplish exactly what the Republicans want, and I can’t rule that out.

But it ain’t necessarily so: if you take your pool of usually-Republican voters and spread them over more (redrawn) congressional districts, maintaining a theoretical but slimmer Republican majority in more districts, an election fueled by revulsion toward the GOP could see usually-Republican voters staying home or (horrors!) voting for Democrats, and with thinner margins more seats could flip.

That would be a lovely result in 2026 because:

It might frustrate and slow Trump in his last two years.
It would rebuke Trump for his obnoxious effort to steal 2026 by shattering democratic norms. (His 2020 meddling in Georgia, in the form of complaining of vote fraud so persistently that it depressed Republican turnout, got Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock elected to the Senate. Nice job, Mr. Genius!)
It would be a rebuke to those who kiss Trump’s … ummmm, ring … for going along with his obnoxious attempted theft.

In Tuesday’s Indiana primary May 5, I plan to take a Republican ballot (nothing new there) and vote against every candidate endorse by Trump — even the one running against a guy with a non-trivial but remote criminal record who had hoped for Trump’s endorsement over the RINO incumbent. I wish I could vote for Spencer Deery, who put a target on his back by putting Hoosier interests over Washington’s interests when Trump called for redistricting, but he’s in the next Senate district to my west.

War crimes

It has now become routine for U.S. Southern Command to post grainy videos online of boats being blown up, along with claims that “male narco-terrorists were killed,” even though the administration has not offered any evidence that even one of the people incinerated by U.S. firepower was engaged in drug trafficking, much less in terrorism. The administration is so averse to trying to prove wrongdoing in court that, when suspects survive a strike, they are released rather than arrested. Apparently, there is a secret Justice Department opinion justifying the strikes based on the fanciful premise that drug cartels are waging war on the United States.

Max Boot.

In a Wall Street Journal editorial today, James Freeman beclowns himself by pointing out that Barack Obama did sorta kinda the same thing. Now I would have no problem accusing Obama of war crimes if he did the same thing, but even Freeman’s account notes that Obama attacked those “believed to be terrorists,” whereas the Trump administration is labeling narcotics traffickers ipso facto “terrorists” without so much as making a plausible case that they really are narcotics traffickers in the first place.

The fallacy of Boromir

When people justify their voting choice by its outcome, I always think of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes repeatedly that we cannot make decisions based on the hoped-for result. We can only control the means. If we validate our choice of voting for someone that may not be a good person in the hopes that he or she will use his power to our advantage, we succumb to the fallacy of Boromir, who assumed he too would use the Ring of Power for good. Power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, What ‘The Lord of the Rings’ can teach us about U.S. politics, Christianity and power.

I’m not voting against all things Trumpy to seize power, by the way; it’s to destroy Sauron’s power.

Shorts

It was lovely to hear the King’s English, devoid of the vengeance, blasphemy and vulgarity common in our leader’s language. (Maureen Dowd on King Charles’ address to a state dinner during his recent trip to America)
We need stories – sometimes subtle, gentle things – that restore in us a sense of goodness. Not just jagged bitterness frothing at the mouth or bonkers political hijacking of deep religious themes. (Marin Shaw)
Our economically RINO administration is tariffing globalization to death. Democrats are writing the eulogy. (Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal)

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

In tempore belli

A vast bureaucracy in the service of appetite

In order to ameliorate the resulting clash of commitments to divergent, incompatible preferences and pursuits, political leaders and other elites rely heavily and increasingly on platitudinous rhetoric and consumerism, the latter involving citizens’ widespread conformity to a seemingly insatiable acquisitiveness regardless of their income level. Were the flow of prosperity’s spigot seriously to wane, however, citizens’ clashes would likely intensify, reversing the dominant trajectory through which Westerners have willingly permitted their self-colonization by capitalism since the seventeenth century. Hence the necessary ideological commitment of modern Western states to unending economic growth, which perpetuates “the notion of the state as a vast bureaucracy in the service of appetite, aimed above all at the promotion of economic life and comfort.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

SPLC

Even more than two things can be true at the same time:

Southern Poverty Law Center did good work on civil rights decades ago;
Instead of declaring victory and closing up shop, SPLC became a grifting media darling with lazy leftwing slop like its “Hatewatch”;
Had you asked me if SPLC used moles to infiltrate right-wing groups, I probably would have paused for a few seconds and then answered “Why, yes; I suppose they do.” Were I an SPLC donor, I don’t think that would have deterred me.
To all appearances, the criminal indictment of SPLC is, if not garbage, at least garbage-adjacent. It looks like a typical Trump DoJ stunt.
The criminal indictment will cost SPLC not just defense costs, but lost revenue: This week, Fidelity Charitable and Vanguard Charitable said they had paused grants from Donor-Advised Funds to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Karma is real. OR “paybacks are hell” if you prefer.

I encourage you to contemn SPLC2026 and stop filling its ample coffers, but don’t expect that a criminal conviction is very likely.

Trolls and bootlickers — of the Left!

How quickly the winds have shifted! Yesterday’s elites promulgated ideas that I scorned, but it never occurred to me that the Successor Ideology was foreshadowing the populist trollery of today’s MAGA Right, albeit to opposite tribal effect. James Howard Kunstler distills some of it:

Are you against reason itself? For all your talk about the primacy of science, your agenda militates furiously against it: Math is “racist,” there’s no biological basis for understanding sex, all science is a “white colonial way-of-knowing,” masculinity is “toxic,” women can have penises and men can menstruate. Do you really believe these absurd fantasies manufactured in the graduate schools in the service of academic careerism at all costs — or do you just go along with them for the sake of protecting your own careers and perquisites?

James Howard Kunstler, Round-up at the Wokester Corral.

(Pointless aside: I sing in a quite good choir and I use voice recognition a lot for writing in short bursts. Voice recognition has never gotten “chorale” right, always rendering it “corral,” regardless of context.)

Trump

I apologize for so much focus on Donald Trump. His unlawful and idiotic war against Iran (as I understand it, military war gamers always knew Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz in a war with the U.S.) makes it urgent to push back.

We’ve probably already lost “America as we knew it,” but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t get worse.

Time’s up on your stupid war, sir

For years, America’s cowardly political leadership class has pretended that the War Powers Act entitles the president to bomb whoever the hell he wants for 60 days without approval from Congress. Only after those 60 days have run does he have an obligation to seek authorization from the legislature.

Three seconds of thought about why the law was written will reveal why that’s stupid.

The War Powers Act was passed in 1973 to rein in Richard Nixon after he expanded the war in Vietnam by secretly bombing neighboring Cambodia. The point of the law, obviously, wasn’t to justify that bombing retroactively by granting Nixon a 60-day free pass. The point was to affirm that, with very limited exceptions, the president can’t engage in hostilities with a country unless Congress says so.

Nixon vetoed the bill when it reached his desk, but lawmakers felt so strongly about it that they overrode his veto by bipartisan supermajority margins. It was a bold play by the legislature to claw back its rightful war-making authority under Article I—not to create a massive two-month exception to it for the executive branch.

Nick Catoggio

World Historical

Publicly, Trump compares himself to Washington and Lincoln. Privately, it’s Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte.

I always recognized the narcissism, but I pretty much missed the delusions of grandeur.

And they are “delusions,” considering the eulogistic connotations of “grandeur.”

But I think I’ve already acknowledged that Trump is an extremely consequential President, and “consequential” carries no eulogistic connotations. Under that rubric, he may indeed prove world historic. How could a chaos agent who has seized semi-dictatorial power over the world’s hegemon not have a shot at “world historic” if he’s willing to stoop low enough?

Conservatives versus power-seekers

As the conference went on, I noticed a contest of metaphors. The true conservatives used metaphors of growth or spiritual recovery. Society is an organism that needs healing, or it is a social fabric that needs to be rewoven. A poet named Joshua Luke Smith said we needed to be the seeds of regrowth, to plant the trees for future generations. His incantation was beatitudinal: “Remember the poor. Remember the poor.”

But others relied on military metaphors. We are in the midst of civilizational war. “They”—the wokesters, the radical Muslims, the left—are destroying our culture. There were allusions to the final epochal battles in The Lord of the Rings. The implication was that Sauron is leading his Orc hordes to destroy us. We are the heroic remnant. We must crush or be crushed.

David Brooks, I Should Have Seen This Coming. I don’t know that there’s a single real conservative in Trump’s administration. I once thought J.D. Vance was conservative, but Trump’s reverse Midas Touch hexed him.

Shorts

Pete Hegseth didn’t appreciate one congressman’s questions about the Iran war last Wednesday, so he accused him of “false equivolation.” (My own ears from CBS news)
[I]n Washington this past week, Charles came into his own. Forty years after Diana’s Cinderella turn, Charles got to be Cinderfella … In a country rife with No Kings protests, this king was a tonic. He presented himself with elegance, intelligence and wit — everything that has been wanting in Washington during the Trump era. Maureen Dowd

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

Wednesday, April 29

White House Corresponents Dinner

Security at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner performed as well as one would expect any American institution to perform in 2026. That is, it was competent enough to accomplish its basic task yet incompetent enough to leave everyone wondering whether the country survives mostly on luck.
Treating Saturday’s assassination plot as cause to ignore the legal niceties and plunge ahead with construction [of the White House ballroom] anyway felt like absurdist satire of the “emergency” rationales authoritarians are forever concocting to rationalize their power grabs and lawbreaking. The president’s life is in danger! Only a fabulously luxe gilded ballroom built to his exact specifications without any oversight whatsoever stands between America and catastrophe!

Nick Catoggio.

The luxe gilded ballroom Trump is building summarily like, I dunno, a dictator or something, wouldn’t come anywhere close to accommodating the White House Correspondents Dinner (2000+ guests versus ~900 capacity of the WH ballroom), apart from any other symbolic or logistical issues.

Royalty meets Pretender

[T]he trick of the royal family is to make everyone feel special, however brief their acquaintance. Some presidents realize that this is a necessary illusion …

…

In “The Godfather, Part II,” Michael Corleone tells his treacherous brother Fredo that he no longer means anything to him. “You’re not a brother, you’re not a friend,” he says. “I don’t want to know you or what you do. I don’t want to see you at the hotels, I don’t want you near my house. When you see our mother, I want to know a day in advance, so I won’t be there. You understand?” Michael issues strict instructions to his aides that nothing should happen to his brother while his mother is alive.

It’s a story that might ring a bell. Just a few years after the queen’s death, Charles stripped his brother, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, of his title and evicted him from his home. The image handed down to posterity will be of Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor slumped in the back of a police car, desperately trying not to be seen.

This week Charles will be smiling benignly and nodding politely, but it’s worth remembering that beneath that good humor and politesse there is a layer of steel. Courtesy can be tactical as well as virtuous.

Craig Brown, Beneath the British Monarchy’s Polite Smiles Is a Layer of Steel

I hope that the King won’t allow any meeting with Trump to be recorded. I guess Trump is kind of star-struck by the British Royals and might actually behave himself, but I wouldn’t risk it.

Life among the North American Banana Republicans

All items from a Wall Street Journal newsletter

The Justice Department secured an indictment against James Comey in connection with a photo showing seashells arranged in a way that prosecutors said could be interpreted as a threat to kill President Trump.

The case is the Trump administration’s second attempt to prosecute the former FBI director, a prominent Trump critic. He was charged in September with lying to Congress, but a judge dismissed that case. The latest indictment centers on a 2025 Instagram post. At the time, Comey said it didn’t occur to him that the post would be read as a threat, and that he opposed such violence. Comey and his lawyers didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Nobody believes this was a threat. Trump’s DOJ is indicting one of Trump’s enemies for publishing on Instagram a wry, cryptic and mild criticism of him because a deranged person (like the President, a toxic narcissist) might interpret as a threat.

This is what they do in authoritarian regimes. I only once did a piece of a Federal Criminal Law matter and have no opinion on how the courts will deal with this. I can only hope that they will deal with it summarily and with a stern rebuke to the government.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr is launching an early review of Disney’s broadcast TV licenses, the regulatory agency said.

Trump yesterday called for late-night host Jimmy Kimmel to be fired for joking that first lady Melania Trump had “a glow like an expectant widow.” His show is broadcast by Disney’s ABC network. Kimmel made the remark days before an alleged gunman opened fire outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that Trump attended on Saturday. Yesterday, Kimmel called his prior remarks a “very light roast.”

A crypto venture linked to men sanctioned in a scam-ring probe partnered with the Trump family’s crypto company.

Last fall, the Trump administration announced criminal charges against what it said was a transnational criminal syndicate that had stolen billions of dollars through online scams. Less than a month later, World Liberty Financial announced that it had partnered with a virtual-currency venture, one of whose projects had been led by two men sanctioned in the U.S. crackdown. A lawyer for World Liberty said it has never had any association or relationship with the sanctioned individuals. “WLF takes its compliance obligations very seriously,” he said. The lawyer said his client first became aware of allegations that the venture was connected to a project that had involved sanctioned individuals in January this year.

Shorts

In The Toronto Star, Rosie DiManno pondered piety and pooches: “Sitting at the right hand of God-Trump is Vice President JD Vance, a converted Catholic all of seven years. That’s 49 in lapdog years.” (Via Frank Bruni)
In his newsletter, I Might Be Wrong, Jeff Maurer responded to commentary about overlong movies — including in my newsletter last week — by observing that the huge piles of money spent on key sequences all but guarantee those blockbusters’ bloat. “This isn’t just sunk cost fallacy — this is sunk cost fallacy plus the knowledge that if you go to your boss and say, ‘We wasted $10 million of your money,’ your boss will say, ‘I understand, I respect your honesty, now step into this rocket: I’m going to fill it with scorpions and fire it into a volcano’,” Maurer wrote. (Via Frank Bruni)
Wishful thinking is the alchemy that turns fools’ gold into silver linings. (Kevin D. Williamson)