Category: transgenderism

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.

Election sundries

Legacy media versus new

Legacy:

Anti-trans rhetoric

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

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

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

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

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

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

New:

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Sullivan, A “Normal Gay Guy” Checks In

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Banana Republicans

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

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

Economist World in Brief 11/3/24

Bret Stephens

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

…

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

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

…

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

David French

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

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

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

…

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

…

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

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

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

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

New York Times Editorial Board

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

Nellie Bowles

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

William McGurn

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

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

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

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

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

Autopsy on an Empire

Abi Millar

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

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Halloween 2024

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

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

The Machine

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

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

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

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

Excising personhood

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

Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For

Trusting obliging liars

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

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

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

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

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

Here are French’s four lessons in summary:

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

Problematizing Geography

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

NYT

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

A Moral Choice

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

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

Frivolous pursuits

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

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

Brides of the State

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

Matthew Crawford, Brides of the State

A Conservative Case Against Trump

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

An Academic’s Case for Trump

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

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

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Election draweth near

Culture

Bad Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

R.R. Reno

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

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

Slinging slurs, pitching pity parties

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

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

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

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

Is it morally acceptable to change your gender?

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

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

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

Journalistic murmurations

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

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

New era, new media, new preoccupations:

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

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

Politics

MVP of Election 2024?

Bret Stephens hits back-to-back homeruns.

With insanity supporters like this, sanity may stand a chance

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

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

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

Nellie Bowles

Nonsequiturland

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

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

(Jason Cohen)

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

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

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

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

Kamala F.B. Harris

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

Frank Bruni‌

Narcissism from a slightly different angle

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

Joseph Epstein

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

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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