Category: transing the gay away

Thursday, March 5

I seem to be publishing more frequently. That’s at least partly because I hate to write something and then have it obsoleted by, say, a 2 am Truth Social Administration reversal. Better obsoleted after I publish.

Truth and Facticity

I recall, as a High School Senior, giving a metaphorical side-eye to our English teacher, fresh out of college, barely 3 years older than us (because he flew through college), somehow distinguishing truth from fact.

I was having none of it, and began to suspect that he was unsound (this was, for those who don’t recall my life story, an evangelical Christian school). Squishy non-factual “truths” clearly were an oxymoronic slippery slope (though “slippery slope” wasn’t yet in common coinage so far as I can recall).

These days, it feels as if I’m mostly interested in supra-factual truths: myths, poetry, tall tales generally. Before there was Iain McGillchrist, there was Michael Polanyi, and then, if not earlier but undetected, the spell of fact had been broken.

I’ve joked that my gravestone should read “Darn! Just when I almost had it all figured out!” I’m still reading as if I’ll figure it all out some day, but “it” is now rarely popularized treatments of science, or political polemics, or even “theology” in a cataphatic key.

Iran war

My spirit animal writes on Iran

Meanwhile, the best thing I’ve seen on our war on Iran so far is from center-left Damon Linker: Zero Cheers for Trump’s Regime Change War. That was true when I wrote it Monday or Tuesday and it’s still true.

Linker and I had similar breaks with the GOP, but he wised up 22 months or so before I did:

  1. He broke with the GOP over the Iraq war, which he opposed from before the onset and ended center-left. I thought that Bush was under a regrettable political necessity, wrought by 9/11, to do something big and hostile in the Middle East.
  2. I didn’t break until Dubya pledged in his second inaugural address to eradicate tyranny from the world. I ended on the center-right, if only because I’m very concerned about the insanity I’d be associated with if I were further right.

I find an awful lot of wisdom in what Linker has to say.

An explanation of the war

President Metamucillini can’t give a consistent account of our objectives in Iran, but our co-belligerent did:

A senior Israeli military official said Israel’s objective was to “dismantle the regime’s military infrastructure, including the IRGC” as well as Iranian nuclear sites, military production facilities and space and cyber capabilities. “We’re preparing for several long weeks,” the official said. They said the “third phase” of the war was under way. That followed a first phase that consisted of deadly opening strikes in Tehran on Saturday targeting the Iranian leadership, followed by a second phase of “100 hours” focused on destroying ballistic missile, drone and air-defence capabilities. A former senior Israeli official who is familiar with the current war plans warned that “this will take time . . . There is a lot of work to be done. Iran is huge.”

Financial Times via John Ellis News Items for March 5. Note that the Israeli official does not mention regime change, though dismantling the IRGC would come pretty close to that.

The Free Press and The Dispatch

I am a charter subscriber to both the Free Press and the Dispatch. I’m not giving up on either of them, but it seems to me, at least this morning after a weekend flurry of Free Press articles on our Israel-aligned attack on Iran, that the Free Press has a stableful of clever contributors with prominent names while the less prominent folks at the Dispatch not too infrequently achieve something wise or at least wisdom-adjacent.

We’ll see if that impression sticks. It may just be a side-effect of the Free Press covering so many things that do not interest me. It seems almost flighty, nerve-wracking. Maybe that’s because I’m trying to cut back on news consumption.

Sissy boys

As an adult, I vowed to help create a world where sissy boys like me could find space in society to be themselves, without any pressure to change—a goal that still feels urgent today. What I know now is that gender nonconformity didn’t disqualify me from being male. Effeminate boys, however atypical, are a natural variation of their own sex. The notion that they are really girls is anything but progressive.

My childhood experiences make me skeptical about pediatric gender medicine today. In many kids who grow up to be gay, gender nonconformity manifests long before overt same-sex attraction does. Yet from peers, from social media, and even from some school districts’ teaching material, kids learn simplistic lessons that equate gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria—in essence, If you act and dress like a girl, you are one. In recent years, many doctors and hospitals have been willing to provide puberty blockers and gender-related hormone treatments to minors after only the briefest evaluation of each patient’s circumstances, and LGBTQ activists have cheered the lack of gatekeeping.

Ben Appel. I highly recommend this article if you’re unsettled about “LGBT” issues. Appel has been through, and thought through, a lot, with a personal authority I lack. (That doesn’t mean I agree with everything he, a clever writer, says.)

Some of those gender nonconforming kids grow up to be gender nonconforming straight adults, too. Tomboys aren’t all lesbians; sissy boys aren’t all gay. It’s the flip side of the macho guy hidden in the closet.

The assumption that they are all LGBs of some sort is a subset of stereotyping. Stereotypes arise for a reason, but they’re not infallible guides. We probably can’t function without them, but they can do a lot of harm, too. Being a sometimes-thoughtful American, I’m thinking foremost of racial stereotypes in the harmful category, but sexual stereotypes are in the frame, too.

I haven’t sorted through that beyond musing that (1) we must resist unjust stereotypes and (2) our inevitable failures are part of why we need grace — from God and between one another.

That’s right, I’m not from Texas

I lived in Texas briefly, and I liked it. My inlaws lived in Texas briefly. I have a brother and some of his descendants settled in Texas, not briefly.

But I’m glad I don’t live in Texas now:

“The correct strategy for any candidate is to tie yourself as closely to President Trump as possible,”Rice University political science professor Mark Jones told TMD. “We can expect the Paxton campaign to really hit him [Cornyn] hard on this … that he’s insufficiently conservative, and that his track record has not always been nearly as supportive of President Trump as Ken Paxton’s record.”

Jones told TMD that while “Paxton has been a die-hard Trump supporter from the very beginning, Cornyn has ebbed and flowed” in his support for Trump. The Cornyn campaign has taken steps to address this, such as flagging that he votes in line with the White House 99 percent of the time. But Paxton—who appealed the 2020 election results to the Supreme Court, seeking to throw out electoral votes from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, based on Trump’s spurious claims of voter fraud—has worked to position himself as the authentic MAGA option.

…

“Republican primary voters are very much aware of his legal baggage,” but they “discount it pretty heavily as partisan,” Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillison told TMD. “They know that he has ethical and legal baggage, but they see him as a knife fighter, and that’s what they want.”

Peter Gattuso, James P. Sutton, Ross Anderson, The Texas Primaries.

So why does this make me glad I don’t live in Texas?

  1. It sounds like Texans don’t know there’s a difference between following Trump and being a conservative.
  2. Although Paxton and Cornyn will have a runoff election in May, in a sane state a corrupt knife-fighting Trumpist would not have come close enough to a proven conservative to force a runoff.

But what do I know? I’m not from Texas.

Thumbnail Geek autobiography

For a guy of my advance years, I’m a bit of a geek. Oh, I long ago gave us being my lawfirm’s tech guy, and left the Microsoft cosmos at the office when I retired to my cozy Appleworld.

But as I typed a Markdown file recently, I had a flashback to my former bafflement with the idea of hyperlinks, and trying to figure out what they’d be useful for (versus a cute useless parlor trick).

I remember, earlier, standing slack-jawed at the Novell booth at the ABA’s Technology in the Practice of Law show/conference in Boston, in 1988, wondering why in the world anyone would need to connect computers to one another. (I went to Boston that year with a TRS0-80 Model 100 for daytime note-taking and a 16-pound NEC Multispeed HD luggable for evening processing — which ironically required a primitive connection between computers).

Now it’s AI I don’t understand, only this time I’m reassured that nobody understands it, and bummed that everybody’s fearful about it.

When you believe in things
You don’t understand
Then you suffer
Superstition ain’t the way

(Wonder, Stevie, Superstition, 1972)

What ultimately made me back off may have been that questions arose faster than I could find answers and I decided to leave it to guys who figured out those things for a living, focusing on what I did for a living.

I still have impulses, like glancing longingly at Linux, but I’ve learned to stop at loving glances most of the time.

Now, I’ve got to go figure out some more of the settings on my new Android-based e-reader. It’s not like iOS you know.

Unitary Executives

Listening to the March 3 Advisory Opinions podcast, I agree with Sarah and David that the current occupant of the White House doesn’t justify altering “Unitary Executive Theory,” but the occupant being Donald J. Trump instead of George Washington (the president when Article II Section 1 was adopted) does focus the mind on a question:

  1. Was and is the strong Unitary Executive Theory wrong?; or
  2. Is the strong Unitary Executive Theory right, and we must simply rely on impeachment if we continue electing, ummmm, less than optimally stable and conscientious Presidents?

I’m increasingly leaning toward strong Unitary Executive Theory being wrong, neat and tidy though it be. I also confess that if someone sane were in the White House exercising strong Unitary Executive Theory, fewer articles would have been written revisiting it (here, for instance) and I would have been less eager to read them.

Routed

Speaking of unstable and unfaithful Presidents, Team Trump has fled the federal courts, tail between its legs, on one of its earliest and most egregious outrages: the effort to intimidate the entire legal profession by punishing firms who employ lawyers who sometime or other were adverse to Donald J. Trump (shared link).

The judge overseeing Perkins Coie’s case, Beryl Howell, said the executive order “sends little chills down my spine,” later writing that the administration had sent a clear message, “Lawyers must stick to the party line, or else.” The orders, she wrote, were “an unprecedented attack” on foundational constitutional principles.

And this from the New York Times Editorial Board:

The larger goal of the executive orders was chilling. The president attacked a bedrock principle of the law, which is that everybody deserves legal representation. He sought to frighten lawyers from representing people who had the temerity to criticize him. By extension, he sought to frighten any Americans who might criticize him.

Fighting the executive orders took courage, and the four firms deserve praise and gratitude for standing up to the president. They all risked losing clients and even having their firms collapse. Nine other firms folded and struck deals intended to mollify the president.

Pre-publication “update”: maybe not.

Shorts

  • Peace means the ascent from simple coexistence to co-operation and common creativity among countries and nations. (Mikhail Gorbachev via Economist World in Brief)
  • SOTU
    • Most of the people I know declined to watch Trump’s State of the Union remarks. They’re not living in denial. They’re preserving their sanity for better days. (Frank Bruni)
    • I agreed wholeheartedly with a few of Trump’s [SOTU]comments. “What a difference a president makes.” Truest words he has ever spoken. “Nobody can believe what they’re watching.” I nodded so hard I’m pretty sure I fractured one of my cervical vertebrae. (Frank Bruni)
  • I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly. (Marilynne Robinson)
  • The tide has so turned on adolescent “gender confirmation” hormones and surgeries, a madness and abdication of adult responsibility that long horrified me, that I don’t even read all the latest news items and commentary about the return to sanity.
  • There is no great performance — not even a theatrical one whose surface is, by design, artifice — that doesn’t have truthfulness at its core. The search for truth is an artist’s life’s work. (Jonathan Biss, Music, at Least, Doesn’t Lie)
  • There were planning Ghosts who implored them to dam the river, cut down the trees, kill the animals, build a mountain railway, smooth out the horrible grass and moss and heather with asphalt. (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce. The “Ghosts” were hell-dwellers on a day trip to heaven.)
  • They took paradise and put up a parking lot. (Joni Mitchell)
  • Beauty will save the world. (Dostoevsky)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Wednesday, 7/9/25

Culture and stuff

America: Belated July 4 preface

The America I love is not a stretch of soil or a place where the people of my blood lived and died. It’s a set of impudent and improbable goals: the rule of law and equality before it, liberty, freedom of speech and conscience, decency. We have always fallen short of them and always will, but we wrote them down and decided to dedicate ourselves to pursuing them. That’s worth something.

The people I despise, and who despise me, believe America’s values and goals are blood, soil, swagger, and an insipid and arrogant conformity. They are the values of bullies and their sycophants. They may prevail. There’s no promise they will not.

Yet I am still moved to tell this Fourth of July story. It’s become an act of defiance, because the story is contrary to the prevailing values of 2025 ….

Popehat (Ken White), introducing his annual July 4 post about a 1992 Naturalization Ceremony.

Legalia: Why now?

Will Baude at the Divided Argument blog has some speculation about why it took the Supreme Court so long to rein in universal injunctions issuing from Federal District Courts.

Remembering that it’s speculation, I nevertheless find it fairly convincing, and the answer I find convincing is not that the court is partisan hacks. There’s too much evidence to the contrary, such as conservative justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas, along with Justice Kagan, who’ve long said that the injunctions were dubious.

Journalism: Dumbest imaginable editorial

This has got to be one of the dumbest, most perverse uses of Opinion Page space ever: “AI fact-checked Donald Trump and this is what we learned”.

So the Washington Post writers asked major AI sites to opine on the truthfulness of 20 claims by Donald Trump. The AI sites, which learn their stuff from things like digesting newspaper opinion columns, plus the blogs and substacks of bien pensants, gave the answers that the columnist would have written without AI.

Mind you, I don’t disagree with the responses because I’m one of those bien pensants (in this context at least). But I have zero percent greater confidence than before AI reinforced my priors — and a 10% lower opinion of the Washington Post (which dropped its prices so low I couldn’t say “no” any longer) for effectively enlisting pattern engines (that’s what AI is, really) to write a literally mindless column.

Conversion therapy today

After the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors, “LGBT” organizations issued statements condemning the court’s decision. I’m gay, and I welcome the court’s decision. So-called gender-affirming is a new form of “conversion therapy.” Instead of “praying away the gay,” we are “transing” it away.

…

When I reached adulthood and began to accept myself as the gay male that I am, I resolved to help create a world where children are told that it’s OK to be an unconventional boy or girl. For a while, I thought we were on the right track. But now, instead of making more space for nonconformity, we’re medicalizing it. Instead of telling kids they’re fine the way they are, we’re saying the opposite: No, it’s not OK to be this way. There is only one way to be a boy and one way to be a girl. You don’t fit. We have to fix you.

Two years ago I interviewed psychologist Laura Edwards-Leeper, who in 2007 adapted the Dutch protocol for use in the U.S. During that conversation, Ms. Edwards-Leeper used the word “cult” five times to describe what had become of pediatric gender medicine. When I told her about my own childhood, and said I feared that, if I were growing up now, I might have been falsely affirmed as a “trans girl,” she responded, “I’m sure you would have.”

Ben Appel, ‘Transgender’ Kids Usually Grow Up Gay

I listened to all of the New York Times podcast “The Protocol,” and read Nicholas Confessore’s long piece in the Times as well. I gained fresh appreciation for the subjective good faith of many youth gender medicine practitioners who I had tended to view as profiteers and limelight-seekers.

But I have not read or heard a mainstream treatment of these fraught transitioning issues in many months that acknowledges the truth of Appel’s title: untransitioned kids with gender dysphoria usually grow out of the dysphoria and end up gay. That’s is a constant premise of Andrew Sullivan writing on trans issues, for instance. I’ve never heard it refuted, and it sure seems relevant.

An example from Sullivan, frustrated at the takeover of his gay and lesbian world and feeling briefly liberated by one of Trump’s Executive Orders on the sexual binary:

Every human being in the entire history of our species produces either sperm or eggs — that is the core truth of our species’ reproductive strategy, and it applies to intersex people too. No sane society should replace this truth with ideology about purely subjective “genders” of which there are now over a hundred (and counting) …

…

But I feel particularly liberated in this moment as a man who has been openly gay before many of these transqueers were born, who lived through the AIDS epidemic, and was front and center in the fight for marriage equality and military service (and thereby loathed by the transqueers). My gay and lesbian world has been captured by gender and “LGBTQIA+” zealots ever since we won marriage equality. They control every aspect of our community with a grip that tolerates no debate or dissent. … Lesbian bars are being shut down by governments just like the old days. But this time, it’s because these lesbians don’t want biological men in their spaces. The left is now doing to gays and lesbians what the far right used to do: police our bars.

The transqueers and their MSM stenographers have renamed us — without any actual debate — as “LGBTQIA+”, deliberately stripping us of our identities as gay men and lesbians, and conflating us with trans people with whom we have almost nothing in common.

Andrew Sullivan.

The AI tell


Source

Before proceeding let me ask a simple question: Has there ever been a major innovation that helped society, but only 8% of the public would pay for it?

Ted Gioia.

This is why, Gioia postulates, Big Tech (notably Microsoft) is building AI into its products, upping the price, and giving consumers no choice to opt out.

That said, my means and interests led me to Voilà, an AI browser extension, for which I am paying since it saves me quite a lot of time reading articles with intriguing headlines but no substance that I’m really interested in. It’s even more amazing to have it to summarize a YouTube video, which turns a 2+ hour listen into an almost instantaneous outline.

Altruism processed through the left brain

Family relationships, or skilled roles within society, such as those of priests, teachers and doctors, which transcend what can be quantified or regulated, and in fact depend on a degree of altruism, would become the object of suspicion. The left hemisphere misunderstands the nature of such relationships, as it misunderstands altruism as a version of self-interest, and sees them as a threat to its power. We might even expect there to be attempts to damage the trust on which such relationships rely, and, if possible, to discredit them. In any case, strenuous efforts would be made to bring families and professions under bureaucratic control, a move that would be made possible, presumably, only by furthering fear and mistrust.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

What are women good for?

Women, it turns out, are for what privileged, powerful men have decided everyone is for: working forty-plus hours per week to make enough money to support a consumerist lifestyle.

Charles Camosy, Beyond the Abortion Wars

Almost enough to make me a conspiracy theorist.

The Justice Department contradicted conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein.

How? It released a memo saying case files on the sex offender and former financier do not include an incriminating “client list.” It also said Epstein killed himself in prison in 2019.

Why it matters: Attorney General Pam Bondi previously said a client list existed and was “on [her] desk.” Right-wing media personalities lashed out at her on social media yesterday.

Washington Post (italics added)

I thought “Right-wing media personalities” were just grifting about Epstein, but that “Bondi previously said a client list existed and was ‘on [her] desk’” is as good an excuse for a conspiracy theory as any. Too bad I don’t care enough about Epstein to join in the fracas.

Optimal trade-offs

Serious policy discussions are generally focused on things such as tradeoffs, incentives, and transaction costs; unserious policy discussions are almost always moralistic.

…

Most of us (including most pro-choice people, I think) would like to see fewer abortions—ideally none, from my point of view, but see above about why that probably isn’t the optimal number. There are also those among us who prefer anti-abortion policies that are vindictive or extreme because they are vindictive or extreme, irrespective of the practical effect these might have on the incidence of abortion. The more charitable reading of that familiar tendency is that the law is a teacher as well as a judge, communicating shared priorities and expectations, and, as such, a more stringent approach might pay long-term dividends by influencing public attitudes. The less charitable account is that vindictiveness and extremism are emotionally satisfying to the intellectually immature and the emotionally deformed.

Kevin D. Williamson, Clear But False

Politics

Gangster President

To bribe or not to bribe: When voters turn their country into a banana republic by making a gangster president, kickbacks become part of the cost of doing business. If I were a CFO in 2025 in need of government approval for some new project, I’d feel obliged to allot a certain amount of the budget for a “donation” to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Casino.

Nick Catoggio

Will the Texas GOP nominate a gentleman incumbent or a lout?

If [John] Cornyn is renominated, his reelection would be highly probable, so securing it would not burden the national party. With [Ken] Paxton as its nominee, the Republican Party might have to spend $250 million (Texas’s 20 media markets devour $2 million a week for saturation advertising) to drag him to victory. Even that sum might fail to do so.

Also, every national dollar spent in Texas cannot be spent elsewhere. So, if Texas’s Republicans pick Paxton in the March 3 primary next year, this would improve Democrats’ now-slim hopes for capturing the Senate.

Another dimension to the Cornyn-Paxton contest is aesthetic but has civic importance. Plainly put, Cornyn is a gentleman. This might seem like an eccentric, because anachronistic, consideration. It has, however, contemporary relevance: Any subtraction from the Republican Party’s supply of civility increases the party’s already large quotient of loutishness.

George Will

I try to keep my nose out of other states’ business, but Ken Paxton is irresistibly odious.

Choose one. Is that too much to ask?

On the unsightly sausage-making of the One Big Beautiful Bill majority:

And there were oodles of lib-owning, each example stupider than the last.

On Wednesday, Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio announced that he’d had a change of heart about the bill. He had voted against the original House legislation in May, but now planned to support the even worse Senate version. Why? Quote: “Democrats’ reaction helped me persuade that, wow, maybe this bill does, does do some really good things.”

J.D. Vance broke the news about another belated convert on Thursday morning as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered a lengthy floor speech attacking the legislation. Vance claimed on Twitter that a Republican congressman texted him, “I was undecided on the bill but then I watched Hakeem Jeffries performance and now I’m a firm yes.”

Dumbest of all was Trump flunky Jason Miller, who simplified the stakes of the debate for wary Republicans yesterday. “You can vote with [Donald Trump], or you can vote with the Democrats,” he wrote on X. “If you vote with the Democrats, you’re not voting with the Republicans. Buckle the f— up. It’s a binary choice.

…

“House Conservatives Warn They Can’t Back Senate Bill to Enact Trump’s Agenda,” the New York Times reported on June 24, in a piece written by Catie Edmondson.

The story was accompanied by a photo of—who else?—Rep. Chip Roy of Texas looking pensive. Roy is an old-school Tea Partier, always ready with a quote about the disgust he feels for Congress’ latest indefensible spending splurge. “I would not vote for it as it is,” he said last week of the Senate’s version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. As recently as Tuesday, he was posting point-by-point analyses on Twitter explaining why the bill was a nonstarter.

You know where this is going.

…

By Thursday morning his Twitter posts had shifted to explaining how, actually, the Senate bill is a win for conservatives on Medicaid. Hours later, he completed the cave by voting for the legislation.

I don’t fault Chip Roy, a politician, for being a politician. The Republican Party since 2015 is a comprehensive study in political cowardice; it feels churlish to single him out. What I fault him for is persisting in embarrassing ideological peacocking every time a terrible bill, which we all know conservatives are going to roll over for, hits the House floor. You can prioritize good policy or you can prioritize getting reelected: Just choose one and own it. Is that too much to ask?

Nick Catoggio

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

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

Summer Solstice

Israeli ingenuity

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

Nick Catoggio

Speed-reading

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

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

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

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

Skrmetti

Experts

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

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

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

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

Strategic error

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

National Review Weekly email

The Barbarian Right

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

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

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

Sohrab Ahmari

Christian Nationalist crackup

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

…

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

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

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

Golden Age

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

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

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

Whence innovation?

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

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

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

…

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

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

The slippery euthanasia slope

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

Ross Douthat, Why the Euthanasia Slope is Slippery

Nellie snippets

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

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

Miscellany

Prerequisite

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

Sam Morgan via Andrew Sullivan

Schooling

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

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Obsessives

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

David McCullough, The Greater Journey

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

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

May 9, 2025

Trump, Trumpism

Two Americas in a nutshell

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

Peggy Noonan

Ends and means

How can it be wrong when it feels so right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conservative critics of Trumpism

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

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

Jonah Goldberg, Right Ends, Wrong Means

Gangster government

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

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

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

Nellie Bowles

The great film menace

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

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

Nick Catoggio (emphasis added).

It never was about antisemitism

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

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

Rose Horowitch, Trump Finally Drops the Anti-Semitism Pretext

Crypto

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

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

Congress’ default

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

…

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

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

…

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

Yuval Levin

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

Excerpts from Sully

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

Andrew Sullivan

Without Comment

Other stuff

Transing the gay away isn’t entirely new

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

Andrew Sullivan

Sports stadiums, data servers, and other boondoggles

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

The Dispatch

NYT stylesheet

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

R.R. Reno (hyperlink added)

Datapoint

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

Quoted in the Dispatch from a New York Magazine article.

A lighter note

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

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

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

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.

Thursday, 12/19/24

Huzzah for the new Tory leader!

The thing that drove me crazy was seeing how the lives of young gay, sometimes autistic, children were being destroyed on the altar of trans activism … and meeting young people who had effectively been sterilized. It’s horrific,” –

Kemi Badenoch, the new British Tory leader, on child sex reassignment. Via Andrew Sullivan.

Long-term forecast: deja vu

The resentment over the expulsion of Stephen Kappes as chief of the clandestine service was ferocious. Kappes, an ex-marine and former station chief in Moscow, represented the very best of the CIA. In partnership with the British intelligence service, he had only recently played a leading role in a triumph of intelligence and diplomacy by persuading Libya to abandon its long-running program to develop weapons of mass destruction. When he questioned Goss’s judgment, he was shown the door. The new director surrounded himself with a team of political hacks he had imported from Capitol Hill.

Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes

If you think Team Trump values competence over sycophancy, you haven’t been paying attention.

Destruction — creative or not

On the other side of the Channel, the mass protests of the London taxi drivers both expressed and contributed to the Brexit mood. This was a fight for economic sovereignty by highly trained professionals against the threat posed by foreign ride-hailing firms that rely on map software, U.S. military satellites, and the subsistence drivers of the gig economy. Essentially, Uber created a system of labor arbitrage to sidestep and nullify local control.

Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive

(Crawford is talking about Uber/GPS displacing London Cabbies, who take years learning every street in London by heart in order to be licensed.)

Shorts and Wordplay

The inability of some critics to connect the dots doesn’t make pointillism pointless.

Georges Seurat

Notes to self: Don’t take criticism from someone you wouldn’t take advice from.

Steve Brady on micro.blog, though I doubt that it’s original with him.

If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (Sounds like the Lord of Spirits guiding principle.)

… the eerie, vaguely-writing-flavored products that programs like ChatGPT generate ….

Phil Christman, Does Teaching Literature and Writing Have a Future?

Trump is history in a golfcart

Ross Douthat (who’s pretty sure he stole it but can’t remember from whom)

There is nothing that I may decently hope for that I cannot reach by patience as well as by anxiety.

Wendell Berry

Trump’s super power has always been to get his opponents to bust norms in the name of shutting him down.

Nick Gillespie

Your life is not about you.

Bp. Robert Barron, quoted by Molly Worthen

It was a pleasure to have dinner the other night with Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada.

Donald Trump.

Trump Tells Trudeau He Won’t Annex Canada if They Admit Their Bacon Is Just Ham.

The Babylon Bee

[T]he idea that Russia always wins wars of attrition may have exceeded its expiration date.

Andrew Sullivan

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.

Wednesday, 10/2/24

You may be relieved to know there’s nothing today explicitly about the 2024 Election or any of the candidates in it, save for this one personal thing.

In a fit of righteous (I hope) indignation, I believe I recently wrote that if Indiana is in play come November 5, I would vote for Kamala Harris. Reminded of the centrality of permissive abortion to her campaign, and of the extremity of the national Democratic Party’s support for “transitioning” as its signature (and aggressive) response to adolescent gender dysphoria, I retract that ill-considered position. I could say more about why these two issues combined are deal-breakers, but I’d be borrowing heavily from J Budziszewski if I did (see also Concurring with Exemplary Clarity below).

I re-affirm that I will write in Peter Sonski & Lauren Onak.

Where are the conservative yard signs?

Think about yard signs. The progressive ones read:

Black Lives Matter
Women’s Rights = Human Rights
No Human Is Illegal
Science Is Real
Love Is Love
Diversity Makes Us Stronger
Kindness Is Everything

What would ours say? There are “conservative” yard signs for sale. But they contain no moral vision, nothing to believe in, only an effort to “own the libs.”

Our cupboard is so bare that young men are filling auditoriums to hear Jordan Peterson tell them to clean their rooms.

Oren Cass, Constructing Conservatism.

In my weaker moments, I’ve been known to look for an “own the libs” yard sign in response to the mincing sentiments of the progressive sign quoted, but nothing I found (and I found very little) was anything I’d put up in my yard.

The Nicene Creed might fit on a sign, but it would illegible to passing drivers, and I would be taking God’s name in vain if I put it up in rainbow hues.

From Front Porch Republic’s Saturday recommendations

  • “Wendell Berry at 90.” Jonathon Van Maren reflects on why Wendell Berry means so much to so many of his readers: “Berry’s fiction is not only a record of rural life and the slow death of agricultural America, but also a record of the interior lives of Americans before we outsourced our thinking to digital devices and absorbed our worldviews from screens. His novels lack the frantic pace of so many of his contemporaries; reading them, I had to slow my own mind and detach from the mile-a-minute culture wars to match the pace of the men and women of Port William. Always, his stories left me feeling refreshed.”
  • “Why Christian Parents Should Resist School-Issued Screens.” Patrick Miller offers a set of arguments supported by research to help parents push back against the lure of progress. He draws from his own experience on a school board: “We were offered tens of thousands of dollars in grants to pay for one-to-one devices in our classrooms. Saying no felt like stealing something from students. It felt like resisting progress. But we said no anyway, because our pressing question wasn’t ‘How can we restructure our curriculum around new technology?’ but ‘What technologies are best suited to serve our educational mission?’ Technology wasn’t our master; it was the servant. And there wasn’t enough research to prove it was a good servant.”
  • “Life on Mars.” Grace Mackey pens a thoughtful review of Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation: “As a member of Gen Z, this was not a light read. When you spend your teens owning a smartphone, you grow used to hearing your parents and teachers blame your problems on a phone— It gets tiresome. I understand the skepticism towards Haidt and the concern that he is a grumpy old man tired of watching the online world expand into something foreign to him. I had some of that skepticism. Regardless, I picked up his book because I was genuinely curious if he offered explanations of anxiety that I hadn’t heard before. This past year, I started therapy because I needed help managing my anxiety disorder. While reading, it didn’t take long for my skepticism to fade and alarm to set in. I was struck by how deeply I resonated with what Haidt described.”

Front Porch Republic

“I was there” at the founding of Front Porch Republic, having followed several of the founding curmudgeons (e.g., Patrick Deneen, Jason Peters) before they coalesced. FPR has changed, but I still find it very much worth reading still — the Saturday curation of others’ articles especially.

Concurring with exemplary clarity

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Texas handed down a decision (Texas v. Loe) upholding that state’s law prohibiting medically irreversible and damaging transgender treatments for minors. The Court held that, in passing the statute, the Texas legislature employed its constitutionally legitimate power to promote the health and welfare of the state’s citizens. The law does not infringe upon the rights of parents to determine the medical care of their children or the rights of doctors to provide care.

Justice Jimmy Blacklock wrote a concurring opinion that laid out the issues at stake with exemplary clarity. He observed that the case turned on fundamental and mutually exclusive assumptions about what it means to be human.

Within the Traditional Vision, human males and females do not “identify” as men and women. We are men and women, irreducibly and inescapably, no matter how we feel. Proceeding from these moral and philosophical premises, the Traditional Vision naturally holds that medicinal or surgical interference with a child’s developing capacity for normal, healthy sexual reproduction is manifestly harmful to the child, an obvious injustice unworthy of the high label “medicine.”

Against this view, Blacklock ranges the alternative—“call it the Transgender Vision.” This view “holds that we all have a ‘sex assigned at birth,’” and thus assigned, it “may or may not correspond to our inwardly felt or outwardly expressed ‘gender identity.’” Under these assumptions, “the Transgender Vision holds that an adolescent child who feels out of place in a biologically normal body should in many cases take puberty-blocking drugs designed to retard or prevent the emergence of sexual characteristics out of line with the child’s gender identity.” It manifestly follows that parents and children have a right to this kind of treatment, just as they have a right to other medical procedures that promote well-being.

The Traditional and Transgender Visions “diverge at the most basic level.” The disagreement is metaphysical, as it were. Judges need to recognize that debates over medical procedures and disputes about empirical claims concerning the efficacy of transgender treatments “are merely the surface-level consequences of deep disagreement over the deepest questions about who we are.” The Traditional Vision sees the treatments as “self-evidently harmful to children,” whereas the Transgender Vision regards the same treatments as “necessary medical care.”

The constitutional question amounts to this: Does the Texas Legislature have the proper constitutional authority to legislate in accord with the Traditional Vision? Or does the Transgender Vision enjoy a special, privileged constitutional status, which the court must honor? Blacklock observes that it would be very strange for a judge to answer “no” and “yes.” How could anyone reasonably hold that the Traditional Vision, which has held sway from time immemorial, can’t serve as a rational basis for determining what accords with the health and welfare of citizens? And on what basis can a judge determine that the Transgender Vision enjoys privileged status, given the fact that it has never “obtained the consent of the People of Texas”?

A great deal of testimony in this case came from medical experts, who insisted that interventions to facilitate “transitioning” enjoy the approval of medical associations and other professional bodies. Blacklock notes that such testimony is irrelevant. “The Texas Constitution authorizes the Legislature to regulate ‘practitioners of medicine.’ It does not authorize practitioners of medicine to regulate the Legislature—no matter how many expert witnesses they bring to bear.” Quite right. Doctors and researchers are free to adopt metaphysical assumptions. But so are legislators. And when those assumptions conflict, those of elected legislators determine the law, not those of “experts.”

Blacklock gets to the nub of our debates about transgender ideology (and pinpoints the specious reasoning of the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision): Those urging transgender rights “claim that the Transgender Vision is an established matter of science, not a matter of belief.” But saying it does not make it so. “From the perspective of the Traditional Vision”—I would say, from the perspective of any clear-thinking person—“any such assertion is an inherent conflation of speculative philosophy and empirical science. Neither a philosophical proposition (‘gender identity is real’) nor a moral rule (‘gender identity should be affirmed’) can be proven with scientific method or the tools of medicine.”

Medical associations, academic journals, and universities have become captive to progressive ideologies, transgender ideology among them. They are certainly not trustworthy sources of moral wisdom. And they are increasingly untrustworthy sources of empirical truths. Kudos to Justice Blackwood for so clearly explaining why their distorted moral presumptions and perverted science should not be accorded transcendent legal authority.

R. R. Reno in First Things.

Reno has steered First Things so far in a MAGA (and Roman Catholic) direction that I was resolved to drop it. Then came the October issue, with Oren Cass’ article, Constructing Conservatism, three erudite responses to it, and this item, which I had not seen elsewhere. I guess I’ll be in for another year, but it sure is a bleak landscape most months.

Effete aristocrats

The dirty secret of “content moderation” everywhere is that it’s a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it.

…

In prerevolutionary France, even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. They have no honor, no belief, no poetry, art, or humor, no patriotism, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They’re simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.

Matt Taibbi on fighting back against the censors

The Airplane Class

A: One plane flight a year cancels out a lot of “environmentalist” talk.
B: I have been saying this for years. It’s even more true if CO2 emissions are all you care about; on those grounds alone you’re better off trading your Tesla for an F250 and canceling that trip to Europe. But airplanes are to one class what trucks are to another, and it’s the airplane class that runs things. Environmental policy, like everything else, is too often a matter of whose ox is being gored.
C: The airplane class is definitely a thing–and boy how [do] they love to lecture the bumpkins.

I didn’t ask permission to identify the writers (none of which was me), but thought the “Airplane Class” was a useful construct.

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.

Saturday, 8/17/24

A hectic week in which I forgot things, including blogging (though not clipping blog fodder). Enjoy.

Culture

America the unadorned ugly

While I was driving through some of America’s most majestic natural beauty, almost everything in it built by humans was unadorned ugliness. Pre-fab bland buildings that look like they were airlifted in and plopped down in plots of land bulldozed flat, with zero shade or attempt to integrate them into the surrounding nature.

It didn’t help that I was also feeling physically gross, unable to walk, and eating trash, since that’s what’s almost exclusively available on the road in the US, because that’s what most Americans eat — prepackaged globs of fat and sugar.

America’s diet, outside of a minority of successful neighborhoods, has gotten worse since my last American Dream trip, with everything now somehow bigger, sweeter, and fattier: Mass produced, highly processed gunk, that has as much connection to what the rest of the world considers food as pornography does to intimacy.

… [M]y last three years of trips to countries as different as Vietnam, France, Uganda, and Istanbul, has highlighted and strengthened my view that while the US certainly provides our citizens with the most opportunity, and the most stuff, we don’t provide them with the most fulfilling, beautiful, and elevating life.

Chris Arnade

Changing from Häftlinge to men again

When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working. And so it was agreed. Only a day before a similar event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said: “eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor,” and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead. It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again.

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

My pet peeve

When Sarah Kate Ellis was named president of GLAAD more than a decade ago, the LGBTQ advocacy organization was in dire financial straits. “I was given a scary mandate,” she told The New York Times in 2019: “Fix it or shut it down.”

She should have done the latter.

Founded in 1985 as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the nonprofit originally had the mission of promoting more empathetic media coverage of people with AIDS. Over the years, its remit expanded to countering negative portrayals of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in advertising and entertainment. Today, the proliferation of LGBTQ characters on our screens, largely sympathetic coverage in mainstream media, and the ubiquity of same-sex couples in advertisements and commercials all suggest that GLAAD achieved its mission. The group should have long ago taken the win and dissolved—just as the organization Freedom to Marry announced it would do shortly after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the summer of 2015.

Accepting victory, however, can be difficult for people who devote their lives to a cause, and not only for emotional reasons. The impulse among activists, once successful, to keep raising money necessitates that they find things to spend it on ….

James Kirchick, How the Gay-Rights Movement Lost Its Way

I may be particularly sensitive to this sort of thing because my father once joined “Ad hoc Committee [to Accomplish Somethingorother].” They accomplished it, but soon Dad got a letter, on the Committee’s letterhead, supporting some other cause, and listing him as a committee members. I don’t recall if he didn’t support the new cause at all of if he merely had not enlisted to go on record on that cause, but some co-belligerent failed to grok “ad hoc.”

I’m confident there are conservative groups that should have declared victory and gone home (some have crossed my mind in the past but I don’t now recall them. Right to Life is not an example because it wanted to outlaw abortion, not just reverse Roe.). Human Rights Campaign is another example on the sexual-liberation Left:

Flailing about for relevance since the legalization of same-sex marriage, many gay-rights groups pivoted to a related but fundamentally different cause: transgender rights. Rather than emulate the movement’s past approach—seeking allies across the political spectrum and accepting compromise as a precondition for legal and social progress—they have taken hard-line left-wing positions. LGBTQ groups repeat the mantra “the science is settled” on the extremely complex and fraught subject of youth gender medicine and insist that anyone who questions the provision of puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children is transphobic. They continue to spread this message even as many European countries have backed away from such treatments after concluding that the evidence supporting them is weak. The reflexive promotion of major medical interventions for minors should be a red flag for gay men and lesbians, considering the research indicating that many gender-distressed and gender-nonconforming children grow up to be gay.

Whence the phrase “transing away the gay” as the newest iteration of “praying away the gay” (and checking some of the same emotional boxes). The whole Kirchick article is quote-worthy, and I commend it to you.

Politics generally

BOTS

Blunt talk:

[T]he key to a Harris win in November won’t be the support of black Americans or Indian Americans or even “brown Americans” — though she has identified at various points in her political life as all three. Rather, Harris is a flesh-and-blood avatar of a much more numerous, powerful, and radically dissatisfied demographic: never-married and childless American women between the ages of 20 and 45.

Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. In doing so, they have become the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic and decisive constituency. According to a recent Pew survey, these Brides Of The State (BOTS) support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72-24%, providing the Party with its entire advantage in both national and most state elections. Married American women, by contrast, support Republicans by 50-45, which more or less matches the pro-Republican margin in every other age and gender demographic. Without the overwhelming support of BOTS for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid-majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide.

The Democratic Party’s political engineers first sensed the centrality of BOTS to the Party’s power base during Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. The Obama campaign then duly rolled out a storybook ad called “the Life of Julia”, which explained how Obama’s policies, from Head Start to Obamacare to contraception coverage to Medicare reform, would care for Julia from graduation through motherhood and finally to the grave without her needing to form a human relationship with anyone outside the government.

David Samuels, The march of Kamala’s brides

Fundamentalist America at Defcon 2

What you’re seeing throughout American Christianity now is the fundamentalist wing is really exerting itself. And so what that means is when you encounter somebody who’s a fundamentalist and you say, “I’m not voting for Trump,” they often don’t look at that as a debatable point for which Christians in good will can disagree. They will look at this and say, “It is the natural and inevitable consequence of applying Christian principles that you will support Donald Trump.”

David French

As long-time readers know, I spent most of my first three decades as a Wheaton College/IVCF-flavored Evangelical. What I’ve mentioned less often is that schools of that flavor had some taboos that, although mostly sensible, did not merit the label “biblical.” How often Christians who purport to base everything on the Bible come up with extrabiblical Shibboleths is telling.

Political violence and threats of violence

Political violence and threats of violence have no place in the American democratic process. Yet threats and intimidation follow the MAGA movement like night follows day. One of the saddest stories of our time is the way in which even local election officials and local school board members fear for their safety. The level of threat against public officials has escalated in the MAGA era, MAGA Republicans often wield threats as a weapon against Republican dissenters, and every American should remember Jan. 6, when a mob of insurrectionists ransacked the Capitol.

David French, To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris

I appreciate French reminding me about the violence and intimidation that follows MAGA, even quite apart from January 6. He will suffer attempts at intimidation as a result of this piece.

(For the record, though, some Trump supporters allegedly fear the consequence of letting it be known that they support Trump)

French also points out some legitimate complexifiers even on abortion, which so many millions consider a categorical reason to vote Republican: (1) the 2024 GOP platform plank on abortion is effectively pro-choice; (2) abortion rates and ratios have been lower under pro-abortion democrats.

“Caring” politicians

About 4 in 10 say Harris is someone who “cares about people like you” while about 3 in 10 say that about Trump.

Via John Ellis news items. It’s gratifying that a majority is directionally correct about politicians caring about people like them. But nobody, not even 1 in 10, should be so stupid as to think that Trump cares about anybody but Trump.

Trump in particular

On message?

The silliest spectacle in politics this month has been Republicans pleading with Trump to get back on message, as if he’s somehow forgotten that inflation and immigration are his strongest lines of attack against Harris.

He didn’t forget. And he assuredly does want to win. He’s off-message because he can’t help himself. There’s something wrong with him.

The New York Times reported this weekend on a dinner he held with wealthy donors in New York on August 2. “Some guests hoped Mr. Trump would signal that he was recalibrating after a series of damaging mistakes,” the paper noted. Instead he babbled about stolen elections, repeated his “black or Indian?” critique of Harris, and assured the crowd that he’s “not nicer” following the attempt on his life last month that had supposedly left him a changed man.

One attendee told the New York Post’s Charles Gasparino that when a donor advised him to tone down some of his attacks, Trump replied, “They tried to put me in jail; they tried to ruin my reputation and then they tried to assassinate me. At some point, you have [to] be truthful to yourself.”

Being true to himself is the whole problem. His advisers are “deeply rattled by his meandering, mean and often middling public performances since the failed assassination attempt,” per Axios. One source claimed that Trump “is struggling to get past his anger,” the sort of thing one might say about a temperamental child (no wonder), not the nominee of a major party fewer than 100 days out from an election.

Trump being undisciplined and self-indulgent isn’t news, though, any more than him resorting to childish cruelty toward his enemies is. What’s newsy is how his anxiety about Harris’ surging popularity has led him into outright fantasy to try to explain it.

Nick Catoggio

Ominous words, especially from this quarter

“It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath,” LaCivita said in a recent interview with Politico at the Republican National Convention. “It’s not over on Election Day, it’s over on Inauguration Day.” An investigation by Rolling Stone last month found that nearly 70 pro-Trump election deniers serve as election officials in key battleground counties.

In Georgia, Trump supporters on the state election board have adopted rules requiring “reasonable inquiry” before election results are certified, a move that could give GOP county-election-board members the ability to reject the 2024 election’s outcome. And as The Guardian reports, the lawyer and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell “has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections.” At the national level, the Republican National Committee says that it hopes to mobilize 100,000 volunteers, including thousands of poll watchers, to focus on “Democrat attempts to circumvent the rules.” Meanwhile, one RNC senior counsel for election integrity, Christina Bobb, was criminally indicted earlier this year for her role in trying to overturn the 2020 election (she pleaded not guilty).

Then there is the mood of the MAGA base. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have become a litmus test in the GOP, and a recent Pew Research Center poll found that although 77 percent of Democratic voters believe that the election will be conducted “fairly and accurately,” less than half of Republican voters have faith in the system. Despite Harris’s recent surge, the majority of Trump supporters are confident that he will be victorious. (A recent YouGov poll found that nearly eight in 10 Trump supporters think he would win if pitted against Harris.) Trump fully intends to stoke his supporters’ disbelief and anger at the possibility that he could lose. As Wehner warned recently: “If you have friends who are Trump worshippers, a word of counsel: They’re heading to a very dark place psychologically … They felt this race was won; now it’s slipping away. Expect even greater self-delusion and more toxic rants.”

Charles Sykes, Trump Is Setting the Stage to Challenge the Election. The only steal of the 2024 Election is the one Trump and his minions are planning — and strategically placed to advance.

Not the unity they craved

Never has the GOP been more unified, and Donald Trump deserves all the credit. The issue uniting pundits, editorial boards, virtually all Republican politicians, GOP consultants, MAGA warriors, and rallygoers: the need for Trump to lay aside personal gripes and grievances and to stick to the issues and attack Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz on their records.

Jonah Goldberg

A Political Fat Elvis

The whole landscape of the campaign has been transformed. The rise of Harris instantly cast Trump in a new light. He formerly seemed more ominous and threatening, which, whatever its political drawbacks, signaled strength; now he seems not just old but low-energy, stale, even pathetic. He has become the political version of Fat Elvis.

Trump is much better equipped psychologically to withstand ferocious criticisms than he is equipped to withstand mockery. Malignant narcissists go to great lengths to hide their fears and display a false or idealized self. Criticism targets the persona. Mockery, by contrast, can tap very deep fears of being exposed as flawed or weak. When the mask is the target, people with Trump’s psychological profile know how to fight back. Mockery, though, can cause them to unravel.

Peter Wehner, Trump Can’t Deal With Harris’s Success

Lazy, stupid, childish

Trump’s three big problems as a candidate are precisely the same qualities that mitigated the worst of what might have been a much worse Trump presidency the last time around: He is lazy, he is stupid, and he is childish. 

I can hear you objecting: “Hey, we came here for serious analysis, not name-calling!” But, in this case, the analysis and the name-calling end up in the same place: finding that the most politically relevant traits of Donald Trump are that he is lazy, stupid, and childish.

… Anyone who has heard Trump speak or read his unedited writing knows that he is not an especially intelligent man. But his native stupidity is compounded by his ignorance—which is to say, by the fact that he is too lazy to do his homework and acquire the kind of grasp of the issues that would make him a more effective candidate.

… There is a reason he wanders all over the place in his speeches—it isn’t only arrogance and self-centeredness. He’s dumber than nine chickens. That’s why he was an incompetent real-estate investor even though he was a successful reality-television grotesque. He isn’t the first dumb person to find success in the celebrity business, where stupidity seems to be an asset.

…

His penchant for using demeaning nicknames as a substitute for political argument might be thought of as an aspect of his laziness or his stupidity, but it is, at heart, part of his childishness. The same childishness is what has him insisting that he doesn’t need to run a conventional campaign, because he is a very special little boy. Never mind that after his fluke win in 2016, he has led his party from one electoral defeat to another—often in close succession, as when he pissed away Republicans’ chances in Georgia in a snit after his humiliating loss to the human eggplant in 2020.

Trump’s personality defects were, perversely enough, this country’s saving grace while he was president. He wanted to be a caudillo but ended up being very little more than a poisonous buffoon thanks to the laziness, stupidity, and childishness that kept him from realizing the worst of his ambitions as president. That very well may keep him from realizing any of his political ambitions in 2024.

I am not quite sure that I believe the maxim that “character is destiny.” Stupidity, on the other hand …

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.