Category: transgenderism

Birth of John the Baptist

So far as I know, we have little or no evidence for when John the Forerunner/Baptist was born, but both Orthodox and Roman Catholics commemorate it on June 24. It’s a big enough deal that my parish had a liturgy for it.

The rest of this post has nothing to do with that.

At Stake in Harvard Grants

Harvard is unique both in the volume of its research output and the extent of these cuts — the government has threatened to end every research dollar to the university. The canceled grants accounted for here add up to about $2.6 billion in awarded federal funds, nearly half of which has already been spent according to government data.

“Even ‘grant’ is a problematic word, because people think they’re just sort of handing this money out for us to do what we want with,” said Marc Weisskopf, who directs a center for environmental health at Harvard that lost its funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

On the contrary, the government is much more explicit in competitive research applications and grant reviews: It wants more neuroscientists. It wants better opioid treatment. It wants to know how lightweight origami-inspired shelters and antennas can be unfurled in war zones.

The money the government sends to Harvard is, in effect, not a subsidy to advance the university’s mission. It’s a payment for the role Harvard plays in advancing the research mission of the United States.

This is the science model the U.S. has developed over 80 years: The government sets the agenda and funds the work; university scientists design the studies and find the answers. The president’s willingness to upend that model has revealed its fragility. There is no alternative in the U.S. to produce the kind of scientific advancements represented by these grants.

Emily Badger, Aatish Bhatia and Ethan Singer, Here Is All the Science at Risk in Trump’s Clash With Harvard

GOP 2012 redux

Many have made the point, but it’s nonetheless true: Presidents can now do pretty anything they want in foreign policy without seeking congressional authorization, provided it involves dropping bombs on other countries.

Five months into the second Trump administration, isn’t it astonishing that we have a Republican president: pushing for passage of a budget bill that cuts Medicaid and Medicare; pursuing an immigration policy focused on workplace enforcement, deportation of non-criminals, and the encouragement of “self-deportation”; and a happy John Bolton cheering the bombing of Iran? After a decade of debates about What Trump Means for the Right, we’ve ended up governed by the GOP circa 2012, as if the Trump administration were just the asshole version of the Romney/Ryan administration we were spared by Obama’s successful bid for re-election that year.

Damon Linker

Received financial wisdom

The longer I live, the more I appreciate that we can’t know everything, and that we live our lives mostly on the basis of trust. What we trust depends largely on our milieu (the polite term for “tribe” for present purposes), despite trying to avoid echo chambers.

Several of my social media cyberfriends (see footer) are living quite counterculturally, and one of them introduced me to the Dense Discovery newsletter. I probably give it awfully short shrift most weeks, but today caught my attention and led to something pretty thought-provoking, starting with a graph:

Okay, but let’s talk about the prescribed wealth hoarding model in the United States, otherwise known as prudent financial planning (supposedly). The conventional advice from financial planners is that people of my age are supposed to accumulate something like $1 million in order to retire. Or maybe $1.5 million.1 In case you’re not hip to the logic here – I wasn’t until I married a very specific kind of nerd – we’re supposed to amass so much wealth that we can live off the interest and dividends until we die. It’s not enough to save what we’ll need to make it to the end of our life; we need (ostensibly) way more than that. We need to accumulate so much wealth that we can live off the wealth that our wealth earns. We need – we are told – enough that we never have to touch the principal, and we can pass our wealth along to our next of kin, whoever they may be.2

Interdependence is My New Retirement Plan – by Lisa Sibbett

My father, a professional, seemed to live fairly consistently with the values Lisa Sibbett suggests. My widowed mother had enough and to spare, but their church saw a lot of money over the years, too, and his kids occasionally got gifts at the end of a bountiful year.

My father-in-law, a tradesman, lived the “conventional advice from financial planners,” and we are now benefitting from his success at that model.

I’ve lived somewhere in between those two models. Though I (credulously?) aspired to the “conventional advice” model, I just couldn’t resist living life along the way, and not waiting until I was properly fixed for life. Unlike my parents’ generation, I did not live through any Great Depression and didn’t feel that possibility in my bones. I don’t regret it.

One caveat with Sibbett’s approach is that it requires long-enduring personal bonds. You’ll need to sink roots somewhere, and that somewhere will need to be where others are sinking roots as well. It requires long-enduring personal bonds. It’s not for individualist nomads.

The unmentionable elephant in the room

I confess that I struggled with the reasoning of the Supreme Court in Skrmetti although I reluctantly welcomed the outcome.

I was not alone. Josh Blackman and Hadley Arkes (not a lawyer, but an Amherst professor of Jurisprudence) were in the same position as me, but Arkes in particular pointed to the root problem:

The truth that dares not speak its name here is that this wide array of gender-affirming therapies and surgeries is simply predicated on a falsehood. And yet those are the words that the conservative justices apparently see themselves as barred from speaking. Something in conservative jurisprudence holds them back from appealing to the inescapable and objective truth that lies at the heart of these cases. But without it, what were these accomplished jurists able to explain here? What was their ground of justification in overriding the judgments of those parents who were absorbed in the grief and confusion that seized their children? . . . .

The only “instruction” that would be relevant, Justice Thomas, is the unyielding fact that the child is in a state of confusion: he is not occupying some body apart from his own; his sex was not “assigned” at birth but marked inescapably in the organs of reproduction, in the arrangement of his body. His sex is immutable and printed plainly upon him.

Those were the words that Chief Justice Roberts and five colleagues could not move themselves to speak. Or they thought they were constrained from speaking by a jurisprudence that bars them from invoking truths beyond the text of the Constitution—even on the question of what is a human being, the bearer of rights, and when does that “human person” begin? . . .

Without those points in place, the judgment of the Court simply dissolves into a chain of ipse dixits. Why was it not legitimate for the parents of stricken youngsters to order the procedures that might relieve their “gender dysphoria?” Answer: The legislature of Tennessee did not think it a legitimate medical remedy to choose—even though the children and the parents did not share that judgment and were willing to take their risks. One judgment had to prevail, and it was the judgment backed by the power of the State. To put a high finish on it, that “power” represented the authority of a people to govern itself through elected representatives. But when the people speak through their representatives, and override the judgments of parents about their children, they are still obliged to say something more than “we have brute the power to impose this judgment through brute enactment of the law.”

Arkes singles out Justice Thomas, I suspect, because he said “so-called experts have no license to countermand the ‘wisdom, fairness, or logic of legislative choices.’” (Justice Thomas, concurring in U.S. v. Skrmetti, via Eugene Volokh.) Arkes’ re-formulation, I guess, is that the legislature can tell the experts “your elaborations are predicated on the falsehood that a person can be inhabiting a body of the wrong sex.”

That’s not the end of the story, but it’s a starting point for re-writing a story written up to now by activists hiding something only a few clicks less deranged than the whack-a-doodle Chase Strangio ideology:

Strangio disputed that a trans woman could be “born with a male body” or “born male”; in his view, a trans woman was born a woman just like any other woman. There was no such thing as a “male body,” Strangio told his colleagues: “A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.” Before the advertisement aired, Strangio elaborated on his critique in an article in Slate. “Many advocates defend the use of the ‘born male’ or ‘born with a male body’ narrative as being easier for nontransgender people to understand,” Strangio wrote. “Of course it is easier to understand, since it reinforces deeply entrenched views about what makes a man and what makes a woman. But it is precisely these views that we must change.”

My own position hasn’t changed in 39 months. I think we’re still seeing a cultural contagion of trans claims in adolescents and must be very cautious – which is a bit easier now that even Strangio has given up on the “live son or dead daughter” emotional blackmail.

Patience, Mercy, Tolerance

For defenders of political liberalism there is perhaps no more pressing problem than this: How do you make a compelling case for liberalism in an era of ascendant [illiberalism or] strong gods? The idea of “strong gods” comes from the book Return of the Strong Gods by R. R. Reno, editor of the conservative ecumenical journal First Things.

By “strong gods” Reno means the kind of visceral or agonistic forces that can compel political or social action through deeper existential or even guttural appeals. The strong gods work not by chiefly targeting the intellect, but the appetites.

Michael Reneau, Evan Spear, and Jake Meador, A Virtue-Centric Argument for Political Liberalism (shared link). This article was welcome in light of the ascendance of various illiberalisms.

With a little help from AI, I got this summary table:

VirtueRole Against Postliberalism & Strong GodsRoot/Source
PatienceProvides long-term perspective, allowing growth and changeChristian theology & history
MercyBreaks cycles of retribution, fosters trust and forgivenessScripture, Shakespeare
ToleranceIntellectual humility; suspends harsh judgment; enables coexistenceLiberal philosophy & Scripture (e.g., parable of wheat and tares)

Wordplay

I know every one of these carries political freight, but that’s the burden of many writers these days:

  • Glenn Thrush, Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman remarked on the right-wing ire confronting Patel and Pam Bondi, the attorney general, as they fail to substantiate the accusations that they hurled in their bid for power: “They are running what amounts to a conspiracy theory fulfillment center with unstocked shelves.” (Jeff Lebsack, Buffalo, and Marianne Painter, Tacoma, Wash., among others)
  • In The Financial Times, Edward Luce worried that certain scenes from the Los Angeles protests played into the president’s hands: “Every rock hurled lands like a penny in Trump’s wishing well.” (Todd Lowe, Simpsonville, Ky., and Al Gallo, Huntersville, N.C., among others)
  • In The Washington Post, Philip Bump expressed skepticism about the government’s claim that immigration officers must wear masks for self-protection: “We should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value.” (Patrick Bell, Carmichael, Calif.)
  • Also in The Post, Dana Milbank took in Trump’s pleasure at some sycophantic Republicans’ suggestion that the D.C. Metro be renamed the “Trump Train”: “It’s a great idea. Qatar will donate the subway cars, which will be powered by coal. Passengers will pay for fares with cryptocurrency after first showing proof of citizenship. And the trains will reverse themselves regularly and without warning — never quite reaching their original destination.” (Mary Ellen Maher-Harkins, Orwigsburg, Pa., and Stan Shatenstein, Montreal)

Via Frank Bruni

Ceci n’est pas un phone

Methaphone. Like Methadone. Get it?

In case you’ve been wondering …

No, you’re not imagining it. The main source of political violence in the USA in this century has been right-wing, not left. Jamelle Bouie, Right-Wing Violence Is Not a Fringe Issue:

It is simply a fact that the far right has been responsible for most of the political violence committed in the United States since the start of the 21st century.

I had been wondering, because there has been some leftwing violence against persons, and much against property.

Poor fit

If it seems that America’s colleges and universities are poorly suited to the average American eighteen-year-old, perhaps that’s because they were never designed to serve him.

Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

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

Summer Solstice

Israeli ingenuity

As news circulated about the stupendous success of Israel’s attack on Iran, my first thought was that if you told me Mossad had figured out a way to part the Red Sea, at this point I’d believe you. The feats of intelligence and ingenuity that Israel has managed over the past year at the expense of Iran and its proxies would seem far-fetched as fiction, but here we are. It’s reassuring to see a Western nation demonstrate such competence as the United States descends into malevolent dark-age populist anarchy.

Nick Catoggio

Speed-reading

60 or so years ago, I took “Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics” (a current version here) to increase my reading speed. After teaching us a technique for dragging our eyes down a page via a hand movement, they said “Resolve that from now on you’ll never read without this.”

I said to myself “The day I speed-read the Psalms that way would be a very sad day.”

I recently installed a browser extension to generate AI summaries of the current browser tab. It is saving me quite a bit of time on humdrum news and opinion.

But the day I settle for a structured outline of Nick Catoggio (or Kevin D. Williamson) instead of reading their own sprightly writing will be pretty sad, too.

Skrmetti

Experts

The Court rightly rejects efforts by the United States and the private plaintiffs to accord outsized credit to claims about medical consensus and expertise. The United States asserted that “the medical community and the nation’s leading hospitals overwhelmingly agree” with the Government’s position that the treatments outlawed by SB1 can be medically necessary. … The implication of these arguments is that courts should defer to so-called expert consensus.

There are several problems with appealing and deferring to the authority of the expert class. First, so-called experts have no license to countermand the “wisdom, fairness, or logic of legislative choices.” … Second, contrary to the representations of the United States and the private plaintiffs, there is no medical consensus on how best to treat gender dysphoria in children. Third, notwithstanding the alleged experts’ view that young children can provide informed consent to irreversible sex-transition treatments, whether such consent is possible is a question of medical ethics that States must decide for themselves. Fourth, there are particularly good reasons to question the expert class here, as recent revelations suggest that leading voices in this area have relied on questionable evidence, and have allowed ideology to influence their medical guidance.

Taken together, this case serves as a useful reminder that the American people and their representatives are entitled to disagree with those who hold themselves out as experts, and that courts may not “sit as a super-legislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.” … By correctly concluding that SB1 warrants the “paradigm of judicial restraint,” … the Court reserves to the people of Tennessee the right to decide for themselves.

Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring in U.S. v. Skrmetti, via Eugene Volokh (citations omitted).

Strategic error

Representative Sarah (formerly Tim) McBride (D., Del.), the first transgender member of Congress, has admitted that the Democratic Party moved too quickly on pushing transgender issues. The lawmaker believes the left “went to Trans 201, Trans 301, when people were still at a very much Trans 101 stage.” Yet the representative still fails to understand the root of the problem: The left’s strategy on transgenderism failed because the left is wrong on transgenderism. Men cannot become women. Pretending like accepting the most outré claims of transgenderism is achievable through taking higher-level classes won’t change that. Besides, Americans are increasingly uninterested in enrolling in such courses. Polls show that support for so-called gender-transition procedures for children has declined, and Americans believe that trans people should use the bathroom that matches their sex, not their “gender identity.” The activists’ problem isn’t that they have failed to finesse their message; it’s that they have failed biology.

National Review Weekly email

The Barbarian Right

For many of the conservatives who embraced it—myself included—the Trumpian moment promised a more populist, pro-worker GOP. Yet the latest iteration of Donald Trump has dashed these hopes, playing down the themes that propelled his 2016 campaign, and sounding more and more like a conventional Republican nominee—only more erratic.

In the realm of right-wing ideas, meanwhile, something far grimmer is afoot: the rise of a cohort of writers, pseudo-scholars, and shitposters dedicated to reviving some of the darkest tendencies in the history of thought, including the idolatry of strength (as cartoonishly personified by the likes of Andrew Tate); the notion of supposedly “natural” hierarchies; IQ-based eugenics; overt racism and antisemitism.

Call them the Barbarian Right: The master subject of this worldview is the Nietzschean barbarian or “aristocrat of the spirit” who overthrows the egalitarian—and essentially feminine—structures that have long shackled him, restraining his yearning for adventure and excellence. Nazi apologia is par for the course.

Sohrab Ahmari

Christian Nationalist crackup

“Political idolatry,” he observes, “assumes worship, and worship assumes some kind of confidence in the thing being worshiped,” but few of the people obsessively following politics have much real faith in it anymore. It has become for many a kind of spectator sport, or live-action role-playing, far easier to participate through digital media, yet harder to take seriously. There is a performativity to our culture wars now that I suspect was not there in the 90s.

…

Over the past six months, I have observed two communities of discourse. One, which I’ve observed as a bemused spectator, is the increasingly inane conversation of Very Online Christian Nationalism. Much of this discourse had long since descended into self-parody, but the loss of a clear and present common enemy after Trump’s victory swiftly accelerated the splintering of the movement. At time of writing, many of the movements principles were publicly devouring one another over whether, and to what extent, one should blame the Jews for the moral rot of modernity.

Brad Littlejohn, The Resilience of America’s Hybrid-Enlightenment, Mere Orthodoxy (magazine) Winter 2025.

I’m reminded of how the New Atheists, having gathered around the non-existence of God, found that they had nothing else in common and dispersed again. I suspect the MAGA Right has nothing in common beyond worship of our Orange Sun King.

Golden Age

Kevin Roberts (Heritage Foundation, Project 2025) and Kellyanne Conway went north to Canada to take the affirmative on the debate question “Is this America’s Golden Age?.” It was shared with permission on the Ezra Klein show because Ezra was one of the debaters taking the negative.

Roberts and Conway beclowned themselves and offended the audience (e.g., mentioning Canada’s possible status as a 51st state) and then complained that the debate was rigged when they drew audible disapproval and contempt.

In my estimation, the negative side “chewed them up and spit them out,” but I grew too impatient and mortified at our national debasement to wait for the audience’s verdict.

Whence innovation?

Musical innovation tends to happen at crossroads and port cities. It’s spurred by outsiders not insiders. It rises from centers of multiculturalism and diversity—where different ideas come together.

The ruling class recognizes this, but it takes about 40 or 50 years. So fifty years elapse from Bob Dylan emerging as a rebel critic of the system, to becoming a Nobel Prize laureate. Almost fifty years elapse between Mick Jagger getting censored and becoming Sir Mick Jagger, an honored knight.

You eventually have this process of legitimization but the new style always starts on the outskirts—in the port cities and border cities.

…

Because of the internet, every place is now a port city.

Ted Gioia. So Ted thinks the venture capitalists in entertainment are at a dead end with sequels, prequels, and every other “do-it-again-and-again” strategy.

The slippery euthanasia slope

[A] justification for suicide that emphasizes the cry for help that medicine can’t answer, the need for control over the uncontrollable, the desire to cure suffering that doctors can’t relieve, will struggle to maintain terminal illness as a special category. There are just too many people in this exceptional position but with no endpoint to their pain.

Ross Douthat, Why the Euthanasia Slope is Slippery

Nellie snippets

  • Meanwhile, in the U.S. of A., Whoopi Goldberg says that being black in America is worse than being a woman in Iran. Here was The View co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin: “I think it’s very different to live in the United States in 2025 than it is to live in Iran.” Whoopi retorted: “Not if you’re black.” Alyssa, have you possibly considered sitting your ass down and letting Whoopi speak her truth? The only place worse than Iran to be a woman might well be the panel on The View. I’ll take the veil over fighting with Joy Behar about DEI any day of the week.
  • Asked about Tulsi’s earlier testimony on Iran, Trump said simply: “I don’t care what she said.” All jobs under Trump are fake. All titles are fake. He makes decisions alone, meditating in the comforting glow of Fox News, turned up to the highest volume. He gets vibes off Truth Social. He asks an empty Diet Coke can if she ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon. He throws a groundhog in the air and sees if it lands on the bunker buster button. He shakes Marco Rubio and turns him upside down, and if the coins that fall out of his pockets land on heads, we’re going in.
  • Fascinating new scams: The Trump Organization announced it plans to sell a $499 smartphone, with a gold-colored, T-engraved case, set to be released this year. Trump Mobile will also offer a phone plan for $47.45 per month. The 47 Plan. What will the Golden Trump phone do? How bad will reception be? Who will it call? Will it automatically block my lib friends (Bari)? When it comes out, we’ll do an unboxing just for TGIF. In some ways, the Trump family are artists, true creatives. Week after week they come up with scams I’ve never imagined.
  • Obsessed with this mysterious Trump aide: Sergio Gor, director of presidential personnel, is one of the most powerful figures in the White House, responsible for vetting all potential employees—around 4,000 executive branch staff. But a recent report found that he himself was never vetted. Gor has not submitted Standard Form 86, or SF-86, a set of questions required of all those government employees who, like him, need security clearances. The form inquires into foreign connections and birth countries—and Gor, who claims to be from Malta (though Maltese officials could not confirm this), has mysterious origins and declined to provide his birthplace when the New York Post asked, which is apparently something people working in government can do. He also advocated to end the use of the SF-86 when hiring government employees. The man in charge of vetting new Trump admin employees is not vetted (poetic, isn’t it?). And he’s in the job now, specifically campaigning against vetting government employees. I desperately need to know more about Sergio. I need a movie about Sergio (which is absolutely not his real name).

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

Miscellany

Prerequisite

In order for a boy to believe he is a girl, he must first be taught that there is a wrong way to be a boy.

Sam Morgan via Andrew Sullivan

Schooling

In a schooled world the road to happiness is paved with a consumer’s index.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Obsessives

Henry Longfellow, who made a return visit to Paris in 1836, loved the crowds as much as anything about the city. When a friend from home, accompanying him on a walk, showed no interest in the passing parade, but insisted on talking about predestination and the depravity of human nature, it was more than Longfellow could bear.

David McCullough, The Greater Journey

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

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

May 9, 2025

Trump, Trumpism

Two Americas in a nutshell

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

Peggy Noonan

Ends and means

How can it be wrong when it feels so right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conservative critics of Trumpism

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

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

Jonah Goldberg, Right Ends, Wrong Means

Gangster government

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

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

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

Nellie Bowles

The great film menace

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

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

Nick Catoggio (emphasis added).

It never was about antisemitism

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

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

Rose Horowitch, Trump Finally Drops the Anti-Semitism Pretext

Crypto

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

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

Congress’ default

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

…

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

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

…

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

Yuval Levin

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

Excerpts from Sully

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

Andrew Sullivan

Without Comment

Other stuff

Transing the gay away isn’t entirely new

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

Andrew Sullivan

Sports stadiums, data servers, and other boondoggles

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

The Dispatch

NYT stylesheet

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

R.R. Reno (hyperlink added)

Datapoint

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

Quoted in the Dispatch from a New York Magazine article.

A lighter note

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

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

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

Friday, May 2, 2025

Why Trump, lamentably, wins

There aren’t many original insights or approaches to political topics, but there are a few. I commend to you David Brooks, Trump’s Single Stroke of Brilliance. (Shared link)

I’ll single out what most grabbed my attention.

Of Trump:

He is not a learned man, but he is a spirited man, an assertive man. The ancient Greeks would say he possesses a torrential thumos, a burning core of anger, a lust for recognition. All his life, he has moved forward with new projects and attempted new conquests, despite repeated failures and bankruptcies that would have humbled a nonnarcissist.

Of his adversaries:

The people who succeeded in the current meritocracy tend not to be spirited in the way Trump is spirited. The system weeds such people out and rewards those who can compliantly jump through the hoops their elders have put in front of them.

Members of the educated elite (guilty!) tend to operate by analysis, not instinct, which renders them slow-footed in comparison with the Trumps of the world …

Fatally, America now has an establishment that is ambivalent about being an establishment. Back in the day, those WASP blue bloods like Roosevelt were utterly confident in their right to rule, utterly confident they could handle whatever the future might throw at them. But since the 1960s, successive generations, raised on everything from Woodstock to hip-hop, have been taught that the establishment is bad. They have been taught, in the words of those famous Apple commercials, to celebrate “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels.”

When those people grew up and became the establishment — holding senior posts in law, government, universities, media, nonprofits and boardrooms — they became the kind of ambivalent souls who are unwilling to take their own side in a fight. They refuse to accept the fact that every society has a leadership class and that if you find yourself in it, your primary job is to defend its institutions, like the Constitution, objective journalism and scientific research centers, when the big bad wolf comes to blow it all down.

Lots of food for thought. I fear the contrast between Trump and the meritocracy is accurate and that it bodes ill for us.

Man of Destiny

There’s a tendency, sometimes very explicit, to see Donald Trump as a world-historical figure, especially after last summer’s failed assassination attempt. Trump even alludes to his own changed self-perception.

But why should that man-of-destiny sense assume that the destiny is good, not merely consequential?

If you see the hand of Providence operating through George Washington and John Adams in the founding of America, you could see the hand of Providence operating through Donald Trump in the chastisement of America – that Trump is a great man of history whose role is to chastise the liberal intelligentsia, and the never-Trumpers, and all these groups that failed to govern America, but it doesn’t mean at the end of the day that he’s actually saving America. Sometimes it’s just a chastisement.

I feel like that possibility deserves more consideration from the people that have this kind of mystical reaction to the drama of the Trump era.

Ross Douthat, interviewing rightwing figure Jonathan Keeperman. (It was a very lively conversation; Keeperman’s no fool.)

I have felt, and said, that two of the past three Presidential elections “had the judgment of God” written all over it,” so it should come as no surprise that I felt more than a little kinship with Ross over his observation.

Americans Don’t Do This

I have a pretty high tolerance for student protests, even as the outrageous cost of college has turned many of them into exercises in bourgeois decadence. But the Columbia protests have been different from past campus uprisings in several stark ways. They have exposed the whole “belonging” and “inclusion” system of handling offensive speech as fraudulent. The amount of intimidation and harassment experienced by Jewish students over the past year and a half should have been more than enough to alert that particular cavalry, but Jewish students turn out to belong to the only religious minority unprotected by it. (A regular talking point to emerge from last year’s encampment was that no Jewish students at the university had reason to feel harassed or intimidated by the protests, an assertion that was at best ignorant and at worst sinister.)

And yet despite my strongly held feelings about these matters, when I learned that Mahmoud Khalil had been arrested in the lobby of his New York apartment building, handcuffed, folded into an unmarked vehicle by men who would not give their names, and transported first to a facility in New York, then to a detention center in New Jersey, and then to one in Louisiana, every siren in my body screamed.

Down to the marrow of my bones, I am an American. And we don’t do this.

Everything that has failed in American universities has failed because of the opposition to freedom of expression.

Caitlin Flanagan, Americans Don’t Do This

Caution on transitioning

On January 28, Donald Trump issued one of his innumerable executive orders, provocatively Titled Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation, providing among other things that “within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) shall publish a review of the existing literature on best practices for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion.”

I heartily approve of this mandate for a review of existing literature on best practices. I disapprove of the President announcing his conclusions (with which i substantially agree, but I’m just some guy, not POTUS) before the reviews. That’s not the way it should be done and it provides instant fodder for undermining the report that arrived on Thursday.

I trust nobody on the transing-of-teens issue more than I trust Jesse Singal, who got an advance copy of the report and summarized his admiration, including of the high-caliber authors (officially undisclosed for now). Singal is, or at least was very recently, a man of the fairly hard left, but intellectually honest. That he’s broken with his tribe on this issue, and has published extensively on it, is reassuring, as I’m not so keen about topic this to read 409 pages myself.

Be careful what you wish for

I think I keep wallowing in the news because I’m still trying to get my head around what it means that my frequently expressed wish has been fulfilled.

That frequently expressed wish was that America could become just a regular country again and stop trying to be a crypto-imperial power. Like the jokes about genies who fulfill wishes painfully literally, too little did I appreciate what a tawdry and corrupt thing a regular country could be.

I guess I somehow thought we could be “regular” and “exceptional” at the same time. So very American of me.

How could anything possibly go wrong?

DOGE Put a College Student in Charge of Using AI to Rewrite Regulations | WIRED

If you think this is a plausible idea, you have a different experience with federal regulations or Artificial Intelligence than I do.

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

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

Lazarus Saturday

Today, we commemorate Christ raising Lazarus from the dead. Essentially, I’m now in an eight-day marathon until Pascha/Easter — serving at least two services daily.

Miscellany

FWIW

There was a time when I’d have devoured an article like Best Wireless Headphones (2025): Tested Over Many Hours | WIRED.

Now I think “why bother; what I’ve got is amazing, and quite good enough even if it’s not ‘best’.”

What is the point of being a Republican senator?

“What is the point of being a Republican senator?” one of my editors asked this morning.

It was a rhetorical question.

The remark was inspired by news that former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu won’t run for Democrat Jeanne Shaheen’s Senate seat next year …

No thanks, Sununu said Tuesday. “It’s not for me,” he explained in an interview. “I talked to the White House this morning. I talked to Tim Scott [the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee]. Thanked him for all their support and confidence. But I don’t have to be the candidate, and I’m not going to be the candidate.”

“I don’t have to be the candidate” is interesting phrasing. It’s what you’d say when refusing an unwelcome burden ….

Nick Catoggio

Nellie Bowles excerpts

  • Chiming in on the factory work fetish is—who else?—former gay-turned-antigay Milo Yiannopoulos: “Men are depressed and addicted and broken because they have nothing to do. They get no stimulation or satisfaction from BS email jobs. I’m telling you, white Americans will love working in factories again. Making things, in the image and likeness of God the Maker.” Let me tell you: The image of God is not in the microscopic iPhone screw you’ll be mastering until your eyes burn out, Milo. Installing airbags until your elbows give out is—well, that one’s maybe in His image.
  • [Trump tariff advisor Peter] Navarro’s books have often cited an economist named Ron Vara, who is entirely made up. It’s just an imaginary friend Navarro uses in arguments, created through an anagram of his last name. So he earned his nickname [Peter Retarrdo].
  • Mississippi now has the best standardized test scores for fourth graders, when adjusted for demographics (i.e., taking into account socioeconomic status, native language, race, whether your parents raised you to have enough self-esteem, ate enough broccoli, etc.). The rise follows a 2013 decision to use phonics-based learning statewide and to hold back third graders who failed to pass a reading test, which may seem mean until you realize that blue states are letting entirely illiterate kids graduate into the world, a world that—for now—still requires literacy. Meanwhile, Oregon, whose fourth graders have the lowest demographically adjusted test scores, has paused the use of any standardized test as a graduation requirement until at least 2029 and is, of course, obsessed with the Lucy Calkins school of teaching kids reading with vibes. Sigh. The real tragedy is that these kids will never be able to read my columns. Luckily for them, I will read it out loud!
  • During a lowkey argument over lawn chairs at a track meet, a teenager named Karmelo Anthony allegedly stabbed Austin Metcalf in the heart, killing him. Within days, both 17-year-olds had fundraisers opened in their names. Karmelo’s has raised $330,000, keeping a rough pace with the victim’s. The moment has turned into a race war, with people donating as if these were two teams in some cosmic battle. As if supporting one or the other is part of racial pride. It’s very scary ….
  • Anderson Cooper, leading a town hall with Bernie Sanders, got chastised for using she/her pronouns for a completely normal-looking woman, with a completely normal-woman name of Grace. Called upon by Cooper, she snaps: “I use they/them pronouns actually, thank you,” clearly annoyed, clearly relishing the moment. Then she starts her question, which is about why men aren’t compelled by the Dems anymore, and no, I’m not kidding: “Polling and turnout data indicate that men of all racial demographics are turning away from the Democratic Party. . . ” Yes, it is a great mystery, Grace, they/them. I’m obsessed with Bernie’s face as this is unfolding:
  • John Oliver dedicated his entire show to a monologue about how there are no differences between men and women in athletics, and transwomen should be able to compete against natal females. “Bigger and stronger bodies are not automatically advantaged in every scenario. . . we have no research about how being trans or undergoing gender-affirming treatment impacts athletic performance in teens.” Which is sort of like saying we have absolutely no research indicating that a giraffe is bigger than a goldfish—no double-blind peer-reviewed studies have been done to date, so really, how can you say which is bigger? …

Nellie Bowles

Speaking of John Oliver

Oliver is such a pitch-perfect caricature of progressive self-regard – snarky, aloof, judgmental, incurious – that I sometimes wonder if his show is a brilliant op pulled off by the Heritage Foundation.

Freddie DeBoer

Over/Under

I’ve been puzzling over the term “over/under,” which increasingly seems to be one of the two numbers reported in sports stories where I’m looking for a straightforward prediction of who wins and by how many points.

Since I do not bet on sporting events, I never bothered to try to figure out the term. But the increasingly it is appearing as shorthand in political reporting, e.g.:

One Dispatch colleague told me he’d set the over/under on how many Senate Republicans would vote to convict in the scenario I described at 1.5—and that he’d take the under.

Nick Catoggio

So I finally took the trouble to look it up. You can, too, if you’d like.

It’s not a useless way to express a prediction, but I really hate gambling terminology, becoming obligatory for political discourse. Nick’s Dispatch colleague could have said “I don’t think Senate Republicans could get more than one vote.”

Not so much about Trump as about DC

In a recent members-only Dispatch conversation, Steve Hayes argued that Trump enjoys nothing as much as the exercise of power, and I disagreed with him: It seems to me that Trump does not at all enjoy the actual exercise of power, which is very difficult and demanding work of precisely the sort that he has spent a lifetime avoiding. The counterintuitive fact is that one of the big problems in Washington is that almost nobody enjoys the actual exercise of power, which is why the three branches of government keep trying to hand responsibilities off to each other: from our drama-queen president to our do-nothing Congress to the tortured pseudo-institutionalism of the chief justice, we have a government run by a team of Bizzaro World Kobe Bryants—guys who only know how to pass and never take a shot. Trump wields power in Washington in approximately the way a man playing Macbeth wields power in Scotland. In Trump’s case—which is our case—the damage is real, of course, but that is no more an actual exercise of political power than a drunk crashing his Buick into a school bus is an example of motorsport.

Kevin D. Williamson

Five Current U.S. Protestant Political Outlooks

[MAGA Christianity] is nostalgic for America’s past but not necessarily for America’s founding constitutional principles, which can impair its ambitions.

Mark Tooley, Juicy Ecumenism.

Strongly agree. More:

It mostly hat tips to traditional Christian views about abortion and marriage but is willing to subordinate those stances to wider political ambitions. With the rest of MAGA, it is skeptical if not hostile to American international commitments and to free trade. It’s also impatient with the humanitarian values of the old Religious Right, which it sometimes disdains as signs of weakness if not wokeness. Pentecostal preacher Paul White Cain, the White House faith advisor sometimes associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, is a leading figure. But many others who were conventional Religious Right have aligned with MAGA Christianity. Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA is a leading cheerleader.

The overall story was about “Five Current U.S. Protestant Political Outlooks.” The other four are:

  1. Religious Left
  2. Religious Right
  3. neo-Anabaptist left
  4. TheoBro right

I find all five options unpalatable. There’s no paywall, so take a look for yourself.

Let’s us three make a deal

Strikingly, … some of the shrewdest officials and analysts in such capitals as Beijing, Brussels and Washington are focused on a challenge to the established world order that is harder to see or hear. To them, the most disruptive force in geopolitics today is Mr Trump’s apparent desire to huddle with other world leaders, and quietly carve up the world together.

The Economist, The dangers of Donald Trump’s instinct for dealmaking

Trump 2.0

For the good of my soul, I’ve got to stop paying so much attention to Donald Trump.

(That paragraph replaces several paragraphs of TMI.)

Due Process

Of all the lawless acts by the Trump administration in its first two and a half months, none are more frightening than its dumping of human beings who have not had their day in court into an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador — and then contending that no federal court has the authority to right these brazen wrongs.

Lawrence Tribe and Erwin Chemerinsky

I have been reminded several times lately that this doesn’t quite tell the entire story.

Many of the people swept up and shipped to El Salvador did have their day in court: in ordinary procedures under the Immigration and Naturalization Act, where they were adjudicated deportable. Instead of self-deporting, they remained in the US where nobody got around to deporting them until someone quite suddenly did with lots of fanfare.

Others indeed had no day in court, but were swept up dubiously under the Foreign Enemies Act and summarily deported. They are fairly described by Tribe and Chemerinsky. Moreover, without due process we have no reason to trust that they were deportable at all.

None of this is to defend the prison conditions to which any of the deportees are being subjected and for which we are paying.

Chris Krebs

Lost yesterday amid the public jubilation over being liberated from “Liberation Day” was the signing of two new executive orders, one aimed at Chris Krebs, the other at Miles Taylor.

Krebs led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during Trump’s first term, placing him in charge of, among other things, detecting and preventing any tampering with America’s election technology. The president fired him on November 17, 2020 not for doing his job poorly but for doing it honestly and well. Krebs insisted repeatedly after Election Day that there had been no security breaches involved in Joe Biden’s victory. That qualified as insubordination in the Trump White House.

…

Trump’s new memorandum on Krebs accuses him of various offenses, including “censoring” conservative viewpoints, but the true nature of his grievance is right there in the text: “Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”

That’s nakedly retaliatory, just like the executive orders targeting law firms that caused legal trouble for the president in the past. Once again, Trump’s corruption is right out in the open. But I believe this is the first time he’s gone as far as to officially penalize someone for rejecting his conspiratorial nonsense about the 2020 election, a position shared by a large majority of the American public and even by some of his own Cabinet nominees. Or former nominees, anyway.

Nick Catoggio

And if he had said there were security breeches, he’s be saying he’d failed at his job.

Dare I suggest that you cannot win working for Donald Trump?

We should have seen this coming

I highly recommend David Brooks’ Article in the Atlantic, I Should Have Seen This Coming

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Bishops, cynics, and sundries

Fearing for their lives?

Andrew Sullivan nails it:

As for Bishop Budde, she said:

There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and Independent families, some who fear for their lives.

But why should any gay, lesbian, or trans child be afraid for their lives? Who is trying to kill them? No one. The only reason some kids are scared is because the adults who have been brainwashing them in critical gender theory are scaring them, and Budde is joining in. If anything, a pause on medical experiments on children should be a cause for relief, not fear. And fear-mongering, in any case, is not a Christian message.

The spirit of Voltaire lives!

Voltaire, according to whom “the people is between man and beast,” wrote that “I want my attorney, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, and I think that I shall then be robbed and cuckolded less often.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Political sundries

  • Here is House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries this week with a Braveheart cry for DEI initiatives: “Diversity, equity, and inclusion are American values. . . . Never surrender.” Right. Never surrender. Technically, you didn’t surrender, you just lost every major election and the popular vote. But I guess we can blame Liz Cheney, which, fair.
  • Meanwhile, the Lincoln Project guys are still just going on about January 6: “What happened to the Republicans? They once stood for law and order. But today, the party has taken their position: standing with violent insurrectionists over the people who keep us safe from them.” Please, I beg you, move on from January 6. It’s been done! Democrats see themselves as the January 6 Remembrance Party. And I’m telling you, that’s cool, but it can’t be the whole thing. You have to have one other thing! Many people (me) want to be proud Dems. Just give us one policy. Do one infrastructure bill. And no, it cannot be January 6–related.
  • New York mag crops out all the black MAGA folks: New York magazine covered MAGA inauguration parties and mentioned more than once that almost everyone at the party was white. And I’m sure that’s true-ish, truth-adjacent. But to get that to be Fully True, the magazine cropped out all the black attendees from their own picture of one of the parties, and the magazine neglected to mention the host of the party was black. There’s certainly a neo-racist, neo-Nazi scene coming up on the right, but when you’re trying to say an event was a white supremacy rally, well, you gotta shoot to kill.

Nellie Bowles

Sundry sundries

  • We try in vain to teach our children love of the true, the good and the beautiful if our actions reward bullshit, transgression and power.
  • Weird things: the little homily before protestant baptisms explaining to people that baptism doesn’t actually do anything.
  • Political fundamentals: don’t run on boutique issues in a Walmart nation
  • Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. (Allan Watts)
  • What if they gave a war and nobody came? (A favorite bumper sticker from my youth.)
  • The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits. (Mis-attributed to Albert Einstein; probably from a French equivalent by Alexandre Dumas)
  • It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. (James Baldwin)
  • The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. (Susan Sontag via The Economist)
  • You truly possess only what you cannot lose in a shipwreck.(Sufi saying via Pico Iyer)
  • The Episcopal Church used to be “the Republican Party at Prayer.” Now it’s NPR at Prayer.
  • The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it. (George Orwell)
  • Ridicule is the only honourable weapon we have left. (Muriel Spark via the Economist)

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Thursday, 1/16/25

American Meritocracy

For most of my professional career, I’ve been a skeptic of the American meritocracy. Not a skeptic of the basic idea that competent and intelligent people should fill positions requiring competence and intelligence, but a skeptic of the idea that a system of frantic adolescent hoop-jumping and résumé-building, designed to skim the smartest kids from every region and segregate them from the rest of society for college and beyond, has actually created an elite that’s more responsible, effective, morally grounded and genuinely cosmopolitan than the more quasi-aristocratic upper class that it displaced.

Ross Douthat

NAR

I’ve spent most of my life thinking that I was well-informed on the American religious scene — especially Evangelicalism. For a long time, that self-regard may have been warranted.

No more. I recently passed the 27th anniversary of my reception into the Orthodox Christian faith. And it may be time to admit that I’ve lost track of what’s going on in the American Evangelical world.

Stephanie McCrummen of the Atlantic has recently published two articles on the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and those who share its outlook with or without conscious acknowledgement of NAR.

I’ve had my eyes on NAR for a few years, but here’s where McCrummen floored me:

What was happening in the barn in Lancaster County did not represent some fringe of American Christianity, but rather what much of the faith is becoming. A shift is under way, one that scholars have been tracking for years and that has become startlingly visible with the rise of Trumpism. At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy.

What she’s describing in NAR That 40% figure got my back up as absurd until I realized that I was basing it on the typical doctrinal commitments of Evangelicalism more than 27 years ago. In fact, it’s been 45 years since I unequivocally identified as Evangelical, being for 18 subsequent years (before my Orthodox reception) only Evangelical-adjacent.

So I can’t say she’s wrong. I also can’t say she’s right, but if she’s right, it would go fairly far in explaining the great Evangelical murmuration from “character matters” (Bill Clinton) to, in effect, “he may be a rapist sonofabitch but he’s our rapist sonofabitch.” So the NAR “prophets” have spoken.

Metaphors: Choose Wisely

Metaphors matter. They can elucidate, but they can also elide and confuse. For a long time, the conservative metaphor for the Left’s tactics has been “slippery slope.” It’s a bad metaphor. It suggests that radical efforts to harm American families are all just the result of the gravitational pull of the earth, or the inevitability of logical progression. That isn’t the case. The tactics used against American families are far more clever. And they invariably involve a “Bait and Switch.” Sell the American people on a principle we can all agree on: “inclusivity,” “tolerance” and “anti-bullying.” Then, smuggle in an entirely different program under its name. That is how gender ideology ended up part of the mandatory “anti-bullying” curriculum, as opposed to the “sex education curriculum,” which is subject to parental opt out.

Abigail Shrier

Greenland, Canada and the Canal

When an authoritarian-minded leader poised to control the world’s most powerful military begins overt saber-rattling against neighbors, the most obvious and important question to ask is whether he intends to follow through. That question, unfortunately, is difficult to answer. On the one hand, Trump almost certainly has no plan, or even concepts of a plan, to launch a hemispheric war. Seizing the uncontrolled edges of the North American continent makes sense in the board game Risk, but it has very little logic in any real-world scenario.

On the other hand, Trump constantly generated wild ideas during his first term, only for the traditional Republicans in his orbit to distract or foil him, with the result that the world never found out how serious he was about them. This time around, one of his highest priorities has been to make sure his incoming administration is free of officials whose professionalism or loyalty to the Constitution would put them at risk of violating their loyalty to Trump. We cannot simply assume that Trump’s most harebrained schemes will fizzle.

An easier question to answer is why Trump keeps uttering these threats. One reason is that he seems to sincerely believe that strong countries have the right to bully weaker ones. Trump has long insisted that the United States should seize smaller countries’ natural resources, and that American allies should be paying us protection money, as if they were shopkeepers and America were a mob boss.

Jonathan Chait, Donald Trump’s Performative Imperialism

We’ll know he’s a Christian by his blasphemy

So let’s run the race marked out for us. Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let’s fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire. And let’s fix our eyes on the author and perfecter of our faith and our freedom and never forget that where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. That means freedom always wins.

Mike Pence, at the 2020 Republican National Convention, via William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry. Compare this the Hebrews 12:1-2 and ask yourself “just how low is the bar for being considered a devout Christian Republican?”

Cui bono?

Cui bono? Whom did this new story serve? Who benefits from a world of consequence-free sex, weak ties, the putting off of childbearing and family? Today, the pharmaceutical and medical industries benefit, by selling decades-long prescriptions for contraceptives, and then various attempts at ART [Assisted Reproductive Technology] later on. Corporations and employers benefit: they gain a new labor force unsaddled by commitments to family, place, or other less-than-profitable concerns.

Christine Emba quoted by Alan Jacobs

Pathetic wankers get their day at SCOTUS

On Wednesday America’s Supreme Court examined a Texas law mandating age verification for websites where a third or more of the material is “sexual” and “harmful to minors”. A district judge blocked the law, which is similar to measures recently passed by 18 other states, but an appeals court reinstated it last year.

A trade association of adult entertainers, known as the Free Speech Coalition, is arguing that the law restricts adult Texans’ access to protected speech and violates the First Amendment. The Supreme Court struck down a similar law (the federal Child Online Protection Act) in 2004, the plaintiffs point out. Texas’s defence relies on a high-court ruling from 1968 that upheld a law banning erotic bookstores from selling their wares to children. But online commerce, the plaintiffs retort, is a world apart: adults may be reluctant to reveal their identities to porn sites because they worry about “identity thieves and extortionists”.

Economist World News in Brief for 1/15/25.

That last sentence should be a real eye-opener. Paraphrasing: “We’re such pathetic wankers that we do business with identity thieves and extortionists. We have a right to be pathetic wankers, so to hell with the kids who get exposed.”

That’s not the whole case the “Free Speech Coalition” could make against the Texas law (and about the logic of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals) but it’s got to be among the most risible.

Glimmers

Woke retreat

Recently, [Mark] Zuckerberg ordered tampon machines to be taken out of men’s bathrooms in all of Meta’s offices. Commenter Richard Hanania said,

This is like pulling down the statue of Saddam. Now you know wokeness is dead.

… Nobody could have imagined that a vulgar, orange billionaire from New York and an anti-woke South African immigrant in Silicon Valley might be the champions Europe needs to find its own courage and Make Europe Great Again. But then again, despite the false faith of the left-wing ideologues and their bureaucracies, the march of history follows no predictable path.

Rod Dreher

Cabinet of the Cancelled

[F]or those of us who have run afoul of the Left’s dogma, particularly in public, it’s harder to worry over the Trump cabinet’s failure to harmonize with the views of credentialed bureaucrats.

Abigail Shrier, Trump’s ‘Cabinet of the Cancelled’

Devouring one another

Look no further than MAGA mega-toady Steve Bannon declaring war on MAGA mega-toady Elon Musk.

Bannon has had a bee in his bonnet about Musk for the better part of a month, ever since Elon went to the mat in support of H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants. “He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” he told an Italian newspaper recently, vowing to have Musk “run out of here by Inauguration Day.” Turning to Silicon Valley’s habit of hiring migrants instead of Americans, Bannon took the gloves off—and sounded a little, well, woke in the process:

“No blacks or Hispanics have any of these jobs or any access to these jobs,” Bannon said.

“Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” Bannon observed. “He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

Well then.

Pity poor Elon, who spent Christmas week defending Indian engineers from Groypers calling them sewage-drinking subhumans only to have Groyper-adjacent nationalist Steve Bannon turn around and accuse him of being racist. The rift over immigration policy developing between red-pilled tech bros, color-blind nativist ideologues, and gutter white supremacists will be a fun one to follow over the next four years.

But it won’t be the only one. There are numerous rifts opening on the right as Donald Trump prepares to take office. The GOP caught the proverbial car on Election Day and now each of its factions wants to drive; watching them tear each other apart will be one of the small silver linings of a second Trump presidency.

Nick Catoggio

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

December 28, 2024

Culture

Texas

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

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

Pacifying the bathroom battlefield

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

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

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

Burke

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

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

Exiting the bubble

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

Joe Nocera, It’s Okay to Change Your Mind

Pity the pacific

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

Duncan Trussell via Andrew Sullivan

Abigail Shrier

What she learned in 2024

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

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

Duplicity

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

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

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

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

Trump 47

Taming the press

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Cover the children’s eyes and ears

Is Mr. Trump an irrevocable break with the past?

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

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

Could a Lincoln become president today, a Reagan?

Peggy Noonan

Health Care

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

Kevin D. Williamson

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Of adolescent “gender medicine”

A few years ago (confirmation hearings, I suspect):

[U.S. Surgeon General nominee Rachel] Levine refused to answer, choosing merely to say that “transgender medicine is a very complex and nuanced field with robust research and standards of care that have been developed.” Paul hit back that “the specific question was about minors,” and accused Levine of having “evaded the question.” Paul continued: Do you support the government intervening to override the parent’s consent to give a child puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and/or amputation surgery of breasts and genitalia? You have said that you’re willing to accelerate the protocols for street kids. I’m alarmed that poor kids with no parents, who are homeless and distraught, you would just go through this and allow that to happen to a minor.

Rand Paul Demands Answers on Puberty Blockers for Minors (February 2021)

That “robust research and standards of care” is essentially a incestuous echo chamber. In that echo chamber, “everybody knows” some things that aren’t true. But gradually, clarity intrudes, first in the Cass Report from Great Britain, most recently on Thursday just passed:

There were a couple of moments in the oral arguments in US vs. Skrmetti this week that were truly clarifying, I think. The first was about suicides among children and teens with gender dysphoria. They are — as the ACLU lawyer, Chase Strangio, finally conceded when questioned by Justice Alito — “thankfully and admittedly rare.”

That’s a big deal. It’s a big deal because the most common argument used by doctors and activists for child sex-changes for years is that if the kids do not transition, they will kill themselves. “Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?” is the question that has been repeatedly, routinely, posed to freaked-out parents with a dysphoric child. That’s why the Biden administration routinely refers to life-saving “gender-affirming care.” It’s transition or death. In every discussion I have ever had on this topic with someone who supports sex changes for kids, this has always been the first point raised.

…

We sometimes think of this trans controversy as a debate about civil rights and medicine. But it is useful at times to step back and truly grasp the radicalism of the ideology fueling the “LGBTQIA+” movement, to see what its vision of humanity is. We are socially constructed abstractions, not bodies. We have no core sex. The core goal of critical gender and queer theory — which is what is behind the child sex change craze — is to end the sex binary entirely as an organizing principle for our society. It is to remove nature from our understanding of what it means to be human. It is as extreme in its epistemological gnosticism as in its philosophical nihilism.

It is not about helping the few, and never has been. It’s about revolutionizing us all.

Andrew Sullivan

He’s not wrong. But M. Gessen seems more wrong than right:

Trans and gender-nonconforming people have existed as long as humans have used gender to organize themselves — think Joan of Arc; think Yentl; think many, many real and fictional people in-between — but in Western culture, it’s only in the last half-century that trans people have asserted ourselves as a group. It was only when we became more visible that the onslaught of new discriminatory laws began.

M. Gessen (f/k/a Masha Gessen) at the New York Times.

Two observations:

  1. “Trans and gender-nonconforming people” don’t belong together as a category. Lumping them together feeds the fad Andrew Sullivan calls “transing away the gay,” whereby gender-nonconforming adolescents are told “Maybe you’re a boy in a woman’s body” (or vice-versa), which isn’t a real thing.
  2. It’s nothing new for subterranean activity to be ignored by the law until it surfaces (“asserts itself”). Then, sometimes, the law decides it’s bad and disfavors it in various ways. There’s even a maxim for it: the law isn’t made until first it’s broken. An assertive movement based on the fantasy of women in men’s bodies and vice-versa is likely to be rejected fairly decisively.

Finally, Nellie Bowles may have the best response to the nonsense — mockery:

Chase Strangio is on the wrong side of the vibe shift: The Supreme Court this week heard arguments over whether to strike down Tennessee’s ban on medical gender transitions for minors (i.e., no puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries till 18). The ACLU sent their most famous lawyer and the face of the organization, Chase Strangio, to argue the case. Before things started, Chase laid out the stakes to CNN’s Jake Tapper: “These are young people who may have known since they were two years old exactly who they are, who suffered for six, seven years before they had any relief.” So: a two-year-old. When I say to my two-year-old that she’s a funny bunny, she says, “No, kitty cat.” Which to me indicates an extremely advanced and gifted conception of herself. Anyway. Surgery for her tail is next week. She has been consistent that she’s a “kitty cat” for months now. She wears kitty cat ears, a woeful stand-in for the real thing that I’m sure some excellent doctors can arrange.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson compared banning medical transitions for minors to bans on interracial marriage. I’m no legal scholar, but it honestly must be fun for your job to just come up with crazy analogies and throw them back at terrified lawyers. I’m just not sure I see the connection she’s making, but I also sometimes throw spaghetti at the wall when nothing’s working. It’s my “why not” business strategy. It’s the “you know what else was illegal once? Interracial marriage” approach.

Nellie Bowles

The reality as it comes to me is that many kids with gender dysphoria are working through a growing awareness of attraction to their own sex. We know how tumultuous modern adolescence is, and confusion about sexuality adds yet another layer of tumult.

Given time, and denied “affirmation” that the real them is trapped in the wrong body (though not denied love and “watchful waiting” medical and psychological care), they emerge as fairly well-adjusted homosexuals. Affirmed, too many of them only later realize that they and they enablers were too hasty, and they de-transition insofar as the changes wrought are reversible.

Maybe that’s just something I picked up in my echo chamber, but I haven’t heard anyone deny the part about “watchful waiting” leading to resolution without transition — or, rather, the only denial I’ve heard is the bogus “live daughter or dead son” trope.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Potpourri

Not (especially) political

Wisdom from the third world

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

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

Serenity in leisure

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

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

What do you do for a living?

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

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

… but liars can figure

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

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

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

So, is someone lying?

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

Infrastructure century

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

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

How long will this hold?

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

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

Trans teen health

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

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

Wordplay

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

Jake Meador

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

Matthew Crawford

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

C.S. Lewis

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

A Catholic expat friend of Rod Dreher

Two from Dreher’s latest book

Politics

Thankfulness

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

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

Pete Hegseth

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

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

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

Pardon power

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

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

Feather pillows

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

Kevin D. Williamson

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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