Category: Virtue signaling

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

SPLC

SPLC backgrounder (from a skeptical position I share)

The [Southern Poverty Law Center] was founded in 1971 to fight genuine white-supremacist terror in the American South. For almost two decades, it did necessary and often courageous work: bankrupting Klan chapters through civil litigation, winning judgments that shuttered paramilitary training camps, forcing accountability where local prosecutors had refused to. By the late 1980s, most of its original mission had been accomplished. The Klan was largely irrelevant. The overt neo-Nazi movement had been driven to the margins.

A healthy institution would have declared victory and wound itself down. Instead, roughly coinciding with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the SPLC began its transformation from a vessel of emancipation into a vessel of subversion. The legal work shrank. The direct-mail operation grew. The enemy was no longer the Klansman in the hood but the dissenter at the lectern—the Muslim reformer, the border-enforcement advocate, the Catholic theologian, the parents’ group. The SPLC became an institution that retained its old license while pivoting toward new, softer targets.

…

Consider allegations that “F-37,” an SPLC informant, helped plan the Charlottesville rally that killed Heather Heyer and traumatized a nation. According to the indictment, this individual actively coordinated transportation, participated in planning meetings, and posted racist content to maintain credibility within white supremacist circles. Moreover, it charges, the SPLC paid F-37 $270,000 over eight years to embed within the very movements it publicly condemned. When Americans witnessed the horror of torch-bearing neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us,” they were watching a performance partly choreographed by someone on a civil rights organization’s payroll, according to the indictment.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The SPLC Targeted Me. Now Its Reckoning Has Come.

The SPLC thought, while there was a fatwa against her life, that Ayaan Hirsi Ali had an Islamophobia problem. I don’t have much sympathy for SPLC’s legal problems now even if the prosecution’s motives are suspect (as is everything the Trump DOJ does; but “suspect” doesn’t mean “guilty.”)

SPLC Legal Update

A few months ago, I expressed some ambivalence about the Trump administration charging the Southern Poverty Law Center criminally:

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

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

Last week, Team Trump followed up with charges against a fairly high-ranking individual within the SPLC, and the Dispatch has weighed in with some analysis:

Approaching Beirich’s arraignment—which is scheduled for this Wednesday—and the jury selection and criminal trial set to take place in October, the Trump administration’s charge that the SPLC defrauded banks looks stronger than its claim that the organization defrauded its own donors….

[Analysis of the weak charges for “fraud” from paying informants to infiltrate groups omitted.]

The government’s allegations of bank fraud may prove stronger. After Beirich’s arrest, Blanche said that Beirich had helped open bank accounts in the names of fictitious companies. Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told TMD that most lawyers he speaks to consider the bank counts “more likely to cause real trouble for the SPLC in court.”

“One of the reasons for that is that the laws on false statements to banks are drawn in a very pro-prosecution way,” he said. And the SPLC has few defenses on these counts, Olson explained, because the laws on bank fraud mean that “it doesn’t matter what the bank thinks of this—for example, it doesn’t matter if the bank doesn’t want you prosecuted.”

“If you have misstated things to a bank, and … if it passes a threshold of somehow being material or important, then tough penalties apply,” Olson said.

…

But even if the case is ultimately dismissed, the controversy is also drawing attention to larger questions about the SPLC’s use of its funds. CharityWatch, a nonpartisan nonprofit that rates charities, gives the organization an “F” rating for continuing to raise money while already holding large reserves—$787 million in net assets, according to the center’s most recent financial filing.

“They’re doing okay from a financial efficiency perspective, but we analyzed their assets, and what we determined is that this organization could continue to operate at 2024 spending levels for six years without raising another penny of revenue,” Laurie Styron, CharityWatch’s CEO and executive director, told TMD “So our criticism is, ‘Why are you continuing to fundraise when you have six years’ worth of money available to operate your organization that you haven’t spent?’”

Blowback from the Congress Hegseth holds in contempt

There is, in short, good reason Congress isn’t rushing to rubber-stamp the staggering defense budget. The House, by a narrow margin, passed a $1.15 trillion defense budget and a $73 billion supplemental to fund the Iran war. In addition to the money in the House bills, the White House wants another $350 billion via a reconciliation bill that can’t be filibustered by Democrats. But that measure appears to be DOA in the Senate. With time running out, the armed forces are likely to begin the new fiscal year on Oct. 1 under a “continuing resolution” that provides “only” $838 billion. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has no one but himself to blame. He has been contemptuous of Congress, so it’s hardly surprising that its members are not rushing to hand him a massive pot of cash. If Hegseth wants to win bipartisan support for the defense budget — something that was taken for granted in years past — he needs to start briefing Senate Democrats, not just Republicans. And he needs to do a much better job of addressing lawmakers’ concerns about controversies such as the unexplained firings of general officers, the lawless attacks on alleged drug boats, the deteriorating conditions aboard an aircraft carrier deployed to the Middle East and the failed war with Iran.

…

Under Hegseth’s weak and woeful leadership, the defense budget has become a piggy bank not just for Trump’s impractical flights of fancy but also for Trump family members. The Washington Post reported that companies in which the president’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. have invested have received at least $3.2 billion in defense contracts since the start of Trump’s second term.

Perhaps there’s a case for a $1.5 trillion defense budget, but, so far, Hegseth hasn’t made it, at least not convincingly. Indeed, The Post reported earlier this year that military officers were scrambling to figure out how to spend an extra $500 billion. Hegseth seems to have picked $1.5 trillion as the “top line” arbitrarily, rather than conducting a rigorous bottom-up analysis of what the military needs.

Trump, for his part, hasn’t given a single speech providing a detailed justification for the defense budget. His argument for it remains at the bumper-sticker level, claiming that all that extra spending will produce a “Dream Military.” But at what cost?

A far greater Republican president — Dwight D. Eisenhower — recognized that the nation must provide for its defense today without “plundering … the precious resources of tomorrow.”

Max Boot

I take every opportunity to say “I told you so,” but this is not a fair opportunity. It never occurred to me that we could attack Iran and not beat them. It never occurred to me that we could frightfully deplete vital munitions in a foolish war on Iran, imperiling our ability to honor other commitments around the world. I never thought about how Iran would strike back if we attacked.

But I think I can say that if I sat in the Oval Office, I’d have listened carefully to top military officials who could and probably would have told me those things – and that I consequently would not have started this stupid war.

No bail

The Tate brothers want bail pending their extradition proceedings to the United Kingdom. Unfortunately for them, it’s very hard to get bail when you’re pending extradition, and also their social media is full of statements about how they are flight risks. “You can’t ban me from driving, I have nine drivers licenses. You can’t freeze my passport, I have four.” Yeah… they’re not going to be getting out anytime soon.

Josh Barro and Ken White

Postliberalism

Liberalism is the system of government most Americans recognize as legitimate: The rule of law, constitutionalism (written or unwritten), democratic accountability (i.e., politicians are accountable to voters), individual rights variously defined, and to one extent or another, commitment to the free market.

A postliberal is someone who believes that liberalism was either a mistake from the beginning (they heap a lot of scorn on poor John Locke), or—like Marx—argues as an objective observation that it is a spent force in need of replacement. The specifics of what that new replacement order should look like are often hard to find, and even when some give it a shot, I haven’t seen any that aren’t exceedingly vague, aspirational, platitudinous, or too narrow to be the basis of a consensus (I am open to correction).

Jonah Goldberg, Thank God the Constitution is Liberal

Legal Miscellany from the Short Circuits newsletter

  • Plaintiff: My gov’t employer cooked up baseless allegations to fire me in retaliation for my whistleblowing. State court (round one): Sounds like a claim that requires discovery, which means you should file a plenary proceeding. State court (round two): Whoops! Turns out that round-one decision precludes all your state-law claims in this here plenary proceeding. Federal district court: And that all looks like res judicata for your constitutional claims, too! Second Circuit: Guys. Guys. Calm down. Nothing has been judicataed, and somebody needs to listen to this lady’s claims. Case undismissed!
  • If a Fifth Circuit opinion considering a challenge to gas stove regulations begins, “The Biden Administration proposed numerous regulations to make home appliances more expensive and less useful,” you probably know how it’s gonna turn out.
  • Sixth Circuit: Forcing a compliant suspect to pee in his front yard when there were plenty of officers on hand to supervise a trip to the toilet is an obvious Fourth Amendment violation. No qualified immunity. Case undismissed. Dissent: At the Founding, public urination was probably not a crime in these circumstances.
  • Minnesota Jane Doe, who was sexually assaulted at age 14, provides evidence for a rape kit. Anoka County police do not test the kit for over 16 years, then find it contains DNA implicating the assailant she identified. She sues the police for failure to investigate. Eighth Circuit: Crime victims have no standing for that sort of thing.
  • Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are sold as a targeted tool to catch dangerous criminals and find missing persons. And we like both of those things. But the frequency with which officers use ALPRs for non-law-enforcement purposes (chiefly stalking) or wind up tracking and detaining the wrong people (sometimes at gunpoint) is downright alarming. Officers rarely record specific reasons for ALPR searches, and even where they are supposed to, as we learned in litigation against Norfolk, Va., officers ignore those internal department requirements without consequence. (One officer repeatedly wrote “la la la la,” and no one noticed.) Which is all to say that constitutional safeguards are desperately needed, and we have a sensible proposal that we’re bringing to a courthouse near you: If the police want to track someone, they have to get a warrant. Click here to learn more.

Right hand, meet left hand

Religio-Legal from WaPo:

Virginia requires chaplains serving in the Virginia National Guard to obtain a theology-related master’s degree. Yet despite providing tuition assistance for other types of degrees, it recently denied tuition assistance to Trace Stevens, a National Guard member enrolled in a master’s program at Liberty University to pursue the type of theology degree necessary to become a chaplain. The state claimed that such degrees are too religious to receive state support.

Things I’d rather not talk about

Surrogacy is one of those issues that conservatives simply don’t want to talk about. It is often heart-wrenching when couples are not able to have children, and IVF and surrogacy are viewed as miracles to let these couples have children. To raise any moral or legal objections to this practice is sometimes seen as a third-rail, even in Republican pro-life circles …

Yes, this is true.

… And on the left, how many of the women who wore bonnets from the Handmaid’s Tale to protest Justice Barrett hired poor women in Eastern Europe to carry their children? This is an issue that needs to be discussed more on both sides of the spectrum.

Josh Blackman

I’m one of those muzzled conservatives. “I think IVF is dodgy” was the shorthand for IVF and for surrogacy that I put in my running list of unpopular opinions.

But I’m friends with people who have children via assisted reproductive technologies that I find “dodgy.” To discuss it risks the friendship. And their children are precious however conceived.

“Woke” (properly speaking)

“Woke” has come to be used as shorthand for anything that feels like an extremist position on the left: defunding the police, favoring open borders, supporting medically invasive “gender affirming care” for teens over the wishes of their parents, etc. But, rightly understood, none of those are woke. They are public policies favored by left-wing activists. Wokeness was (and is) something distinct: a method of leveraging cultural power to reshape public opinion, thereby creating an electorate more likely to embrace those and other progressive views in the future.

That reshaping takes place outside of the political sphere—in cultural institutions in the private sphere. It can be driven by grassroots agitation (from below) or by elite agenda-setting (from above).

Conservative pundit Kevin Williamson getting hired by The Atlantic and then fired two weeks later because junior staffers at the magazine demanded it was an example (one of many) of the first. Applicants and recent hires for teaching positions at universities across the country being forced to sign documents promising to teach a specific narrative about race and gender in all of their classes, regardless of their specialized fields or research and teaching interests, was (and is) an example of the second.

A mob of progressives on Twitter circa 2019 attempting to get a conservative or “reactionary centrist” fired for staking out the “wrong” position on this or that issue of the day is an example of the first. Millions of employees being forced to sit through DEI training sessions run by their employer’s department of human resources, which is in charge of hiring, firing, and promotion for the company, is an example of the second.

The problem with and novelty of these developments is not that they involve crowds and institutions imposing or enforcing certain norms. The problem and novelty is entirely a function of the fact that the norms they seek to impose or enforce are expressions of a moral vanguard.

Damon Linker, “looking left” as his Substack regularly and explicitly does.

But note that there are right-leaning versions of something very like “woke,” too. Does Linker’s definition of woke excludes them unnecessarily, or is there something distinctive about, say, Laura Loomer (right-coded grassroots agitator, whose McCarthyite lists got a whole lotta people fired in Trump 2.0) or Ron DeSantis (an elite right-wing agenda-setter for the state of Florida)?

Shorts

  • ‌If God wanted us to have unlimited free energy He would have put a giant fusion reactor in the sky.
  • The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born. (J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know)
  • Religion has declined in the West, but Taylor thinks the more interesting story is the explosion of different forms of religion in modernity, its fragmentation. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry
  • If sex is just a social construct, or even if gender is just a social construct, why is there any need for medical “transitioning” starting with hormone injections? (Tipsy, H/T Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)
  • How much would you pay for a smarter baby? — I can imagine the lawsuits later: “We paid for a smarter baby but instead we got a child who’s compassionate and generous! We’ve been screwed!” (Alan Jacobs)
  • Joe Biden’s political appointees had left the week before, and I was now the senior intelligence official in the White House. For the incoming Trump administration, the trans woman would man the gates. (Julia Curlee, The Wrong Kind of American)
  • If this is Making America Great Again, I wish he’d stop. (Rod Dreher, who voted for Trump in 2024)
  • Anywhere there was power to protect, doublespeak was, sooner or later, right there in the midst of it. As the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing put it, one realizes that “they are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.” (Russell Moore)
  • While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar. (Sen. Jon Ossoff, in a remark that seems to have gotten under Trump’s skin)
  • Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics. Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country. It’s because he’s a radical, extremist Dumocrat. (Steven Cheung, White House Communications Director)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

Farewell, Golden Rule; G’bye, Beatitudes

To hell with the Golden Rule (and the Beatitudes, too)

I don’t look to Ezra Klein for spiritual insight. He delivered anyway. Christopher Nolan Stared Into Elon Musk’s Soul.

We’re not just teetering on postliberal; the GOP is emphatically post-Christian (or is it pre-Christian?), glorifying power and humiliation of foes. Paraphrasing the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, to hell with the Golden Rule:

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time. … [W]e are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce.

…

The United States is the power of NATO, for the United States to secure the Arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests. Obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States.

…

We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our own backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries, but not to us, to hoard weapons from our adversaries, to be able to be positioned as an asset against the United States rather than on behalf of the United States.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen “Wormtongue” Miller to Jake Tapper

Sacrilege

I also began to understand why the American culture wars involved so many battles over sacrilege. Is a flag just a piece of cloth, which can be burned as a form of protest? Or does each flag contain within it something nonmaterial such that when protesters burn it, they have done something bad (even if nobody were to see them do it)? When an artist submerges a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, or smears elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, do these works belong in art museums? Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, “If you don’t want to see it, don’t go to the museum”? Or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane, and more degraded?

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.

The book has been around for a while. Do our culture wars still fit this pattern? I’m not sure we consider the same things sacred or sacred-adjacent.

Dare I suggest that the progressives today consider the feelings of certified victim groups (e.g., “sexual minorities”) sacred while that MAGA right increasingly considers “heritage America” so sacred that it’s sullied by the wrong sort of immigrant?

Trump Targets ‘Birth Tourism’ …

Speaking of “the wrong kind of immigrants”:

After the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at limiting access to birthright citizenship, the Trump administration and Republican allies have focused their attention on ending “birth tourism” – that is, when “foreign nationals [travel] to the US with the purpose of giving birth.” “The Justice Department has told US attorneys’ offices and the Criminal Division to prioritize the prosecution of birth tourism schemes,” according to Bloomberg Law. “Stepped up enforcement could result in intense scrutiny of visa applicants and travelers to the US and charges for people facilitating birth tourism, former consular officials and federal prosecutors said.”

This push may reflect misplaced priorities (see below), but I have no principled problem with enforcing the law.

I just don’t think we’ve got a serious “birthright tourism” problem.

Let’s try a definition of birthright tourism: women traveling to the U.S. in order to give birth so that their child will be a U.S. citizen. Is that fair? Note that it excludes births to women who give birth while here on business, or as students, or for some other reason other than to have a citizen-child.

But Penn State researchers using comprehensive national birth data (2014-2024) calculated 5,000 to just under 10,000 births per year to women on tourist visas—which is 0.3% of all U.S. births, and surely not all women who gave birth while on tourist visas came here in order to give birth and secure birthright citizenship for their child — i.e., they weren’t “birth tourists.” Team Trump can counter with a figure of 33,000 per year, but not surprisingly, it’s a less credible figure.

Delegitimizing “legitimate politics”?

Illinois Democrat appeals corruption conviction to Supreme Court
Zach Schonfeld, The Hill

Former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, a Democrat, “ask[ed] the Supreme Court to review his corruption conviction,” according to The Hill. “The longest-serving legislative leader in U.S. history was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for using his position to financially reward himself and political associates.” “Madigan raised several arguments in his appeal, including that he didn’t act ‘corruptly,’ as is required by the federal program bribery statute.” “The novel bribery theories the government zealously pursued against Speaker Madigan stretch federal bribery law in ways that threaten to criminalize and chill lawful interactions between state and local officials and their constituents,” his lawyers wrote. The Hill noted that Madigan is “the latest in a line of elected leaders ensnared in corruption scandals who’ve taken claims to the nation’s highest court that they’re being criminally prosecuted over legitimate politics.”

Tough luck, kid

The . . . English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past . . . He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

Flannery O’Connor

Shorts

  • The great benefit to be derived from reading pre-modern authors is to come to realise that after all we [moderns] might have been mistaken. (Edward Feser, Aquinas)
  • Early in the war, the zoo had killed its poisonous snakes and spiders, anticipating that if their enclosures were destroyed, these creatures would pose a significantly greater hazard than, say, a fugitive koala bear. (Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile)
  • “It is a nasty game,” Mr. Smith said of politics. “But I figured out a long time ago that you’re either in the game or you’re out of the game, and I needed access for some of the industry issues.” (Sell the Company for $400 Million? He’s Giving It Away Instead. – The New York Times)
  • [T]here is an irony in folks who do not hesitate to call the [New York] Times “fake news” simultaneously demanding that one of their own be granted the prestige and recognition of writing for the paper [as a successor to Ross Douthat]. It’s a bit like demanding the Catholic Church appoint a Baptist bishop. (Jonah Goldberg)
  • [I]f you want to claim “The Odyssey” for your own worldview, to insist that the dominant movie of the summer is speaking directly to your concerns, the banal didacticism of Nolan’s script is unusually amenable to personalized interpretations. (Ross Douthat)
  • Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. (James Baldwin)
  • Secularism was not a neutral concept. The very word came trailing incense clouds of meaning that were irrevocably and venerably Christian. (Tom Holland, Dominion)
  • As far as the official version of events is concerned, Islamist terrorism is a response to a continuous crime against the Muslim community – a crime committed by everyone who notices that Muslim customs are in friction with the traditional social order of France. (Roger Scruton, Conservatism)
  • AI is a Swiss Army knife. It does everything and excels at nothing. / That’s exactly why it wins. The best tool is not the sharpest one, it’s the one already in your pocket. (Joroen Sangers)
  • He is the dirtiest man I have ever liked. (Igor Stravinsky of W.H. Auden)
  • “Socialism just means you’re for garbage collection.” (Ruy Teixeira describing DSA “sanewashing.”)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

July 1

Times less

I have been asked to weigh in on this several times, but I don’t think I can improve on Evelyn Lamb writing in Scientific American:

There is a phrase, or a type of phrase, that instantly causes me to feel like I’ve stumbled into Wonderland or some other topsy-turvy dream world. “X is n times less than Y” is the basic formulation, where X and Y are quantities that can be compared and n is some number, usually (but not always) a whole number.

Most recently, I encountered it in an article that stated that Spain’s maternal mortality rate is five times less than that of the USA. I don’t want to pick on that article alone, both because I don’t want to trivialize the problem of maternal mortality and because I see similar phrases everywhere. Actual growth of energy demand is three times lower than Duke Energy estimates. Graphene paper is six times lighter than steel. Relative risk ratio for immunological graft rejection is 15 times lower than DSEK (whatever that means). YouTube runs five times slower on Chrome than on Firefox. When I read one of these phrases, I can almost feel my brain rejecting it like an ill-fated transplant, perhaps one that used DSEK instead of an immunological graft.

…

When I first noticed my negative reaction to this type of phrase, I thought I just needed to think through the situations carefully, but I’ve come to the conclusion that my rejection is wholly warranted. Please, stop writing “three times less than” or “six times lighter than” or “twenty times thinner than.” Think of your long-suffering, literal-minded math writer friends and rewrite! “Steel is six times as heavy as graphene paper.” Thank you. Now I can continue my day without a pesky brain reboot.

People get funny about numbers, particularly when trying to communicate relative scale or importance. The desire to write something that sounds dramatic leads the clumsy writer astray. For example, you’ll read about a car collector who “owned more than 28 cars.” More than 28? Like, 29? Or like 2,849,999,431,291, which also is more than 28. Check my English-major theoretical mathematics here, but I think there is a whole infinity of numbers more than 28.

Kevin D. Williamson. And here I thought I was all alone in this pet peeve. I literally don’t know what this “times less” means. If it’s five times less, is the five the numerator of a fraction? That’s called “a fifth,” not “five times less.”

And I could use a fifth of something about now.

Becket Fund

On a happier note, I felt like time another paean to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty:

[T]he Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and its annual Canterbury Medal dinner, [recall] the infamous 12th-century clash between King Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket. Their feud ended with Becket murdered by four knights of the king in Canterbury Cathedral. Becket thus became a martyr for the idea that you don’t render unto Caesar the things that are God’s.

“The constitutional order that Jefferson helped create has sustained a deeper and more diverse religious life than even the Founders themselves anticipated,” says Mark Rienzi, a law professor at Catholic University who serves as president and CEO of Becket.

As galas go, Becket’s is a doozy, with guests sporting kippahs, turbans and zucchettos.

William McGurn, What Real Diversity Looks Like (Wall Street Journal)

I’m pretty passionate about religious liberty, and I put a non-trivial amount of money where my mouth is. All of that money goes to Becket, none to ADF (the Alliance Defending Freedom, formerly Alliance Defense Fund).

I appreciate having gotten some religious liberty (and other) training from ADF, in exchange for which I gave sundry people 450 hours of pro bono legal services over three years. But (caveat: I do not follow ADF obsessively and my impressions may be skewed) it seems to me that ADF is and always was has been a servant of Evangelicalism and its political preoccupations much more broadly than a servant of religious freedom for all.

A visit to their website June 30 tends to confirm that, as it’s clickbaity homepage stories were:

  1. The State of Washington Let Males Wrestle Girls. She Paid the Price. Kallie Keeler was sexually assaulted by a male opponent during a girls wrestling match. School officials stayed silent about it for months. Will you give today to help Kallie receive the justice she deserves?
  2. Maryland teacher asks US Supreme Court to review gender policy requiring educators to lie.
  3. School District Coughs Up $95K After Censoring Student’s Charlie Kirk Memorial
  4. Professor Gregory Brown Explains Why Men Shouldn’t Compete in Women’s Sports
  5. He Invited Friends to Pray at Home. An Ohio City Called It an Illegal Synagogue.

Becket’s homepage is (ahem!) a marked contrast.

Becket is unbeaten (13-0) in the Supreme Court; ADF pushes the envelope harder and fails oftener. So far as I can tell superficially (I didn’t click through), I don’t disagree with ADF’s take on any of its featured cases, but my preoccupations are not theirs.

Your mileage may vary.

The limits of choice

I recently asked a waitress at a Paris restaurant for a medium-rare steak. She explained that the kitchen prepared its steaks only rare or medium. I asked politely if the cook could leave the steak on the grill for somewhere between the time it took to make it rare and the time it took to make it medium. She looked at me as though I had asked her to bring me the cow so I could introduce myself.

When it comes to politics, it’s the other way around. In Europe, you will get short shrift if you ask the barista for a nonfat, no-foam, vanilla-flavored double-shot latte. But if you want a similarly tailor-made representative in government, the choice is yours.

You can have your politics served Communist, nationalist, Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, Green, Socialist, conservative, liberal and anything in between. In Britain—which, as in most things, used to look a bit like America but now seems dysfunctional and weird—there’s a six-way contest: Labour, Conservative, Reform, Green, Liberal Democrat, plus nationalists in Scotland and Wales. That isn’t including those who think it’s time Count Binface or Howling Laud Hope was given his chance.

In America, political choice is binary: R or D. There’s no soy doppio macchiato on the ballot. You can have it black or white. Next customer.

…

Few things could induce me to vote for another four years of the sort of Republicanism we are enduring now. But one of them is definitely the alternative of Islamist-friendly, open-the-borders, defund-the-police, kill-the-billionaires socialists running the country. Out of America’s vast diversity we are somehow at risk of narrowing our choice to that between a rampantly corrupt, inept, ideologically and practically capricious personality cult of a party and a party of graduate student activists with terrorist sympathies and ideas about economics that were discredited half a century ago.

Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal

I hate sports gambling …

It feels like it has been too long since I petted my peeve about sports betting. Rick Reilly at the Washington Post tees it up for me perfectly since I’d rather have a root canal than watch golf:

the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in golf was on Sunday at the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills in New York: Bros with a live betting app on their phones, cold White Claws in their hands, tried to can-open his head.

I’ll drop $1,000 on Wyndham Clark to lose and then keep screaming at him until he does.

They heckled him all day, chirped at him, messed with his mind.

“Don’t choke, Wyndham!” they yelled. “The bogeyman’s coming!” they yelled. They rooted for his ball to go into the bunker or the rough or out of bounds. They cheered when his ball trundled off the greens. They yelled at him as he drew the club back. Some of the Jabronis got thrown out for it.

…

An Irish fan living in New York named Desmond McGoldrick posted online about the “horrible behavior” at Shinnecock on Saturday, with an “infestation of young men” who were “betting on players making putts, and when they missed, yelling obscenities at them.”

I’ve been working on a golf book for the past two years, and I can tell you the phone-app wrecking of the sport is getting worse. Jabronis have realized they can’t do anything at an NFL or NBA game to improve their chances of cashing in, but they sure can at a golf tournament, where the traditional cocoon of silence before a shot is just waiting to be trashed.

Heckling from app-wielding bettors is wrecking golf

… And I’m not too crazy about predatory “Prediction Markets”, either

In his videos, George Makihara appears to have a lucrative side hustle making bets on Polymarket.

In January, the college student posted a video that showed him winning $100,000 on a wager that President Trump would publicly say the word “McDonald’s” that month.  

The bet was one of 145 that Makihara appeared to place on Polymarket’s website between January and mid-May, based on his videos—bets adding up to almost $410,000. 

But none of those bets were real, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation.

Makihara, who declined to comment, is one of dozens of mostly college-age creators Polymarket paid to film themselves making fake trades and sometimes scoring fake wins, according to an analysis of more than 1,100 videos by the Journal, along with instructional materials and interviews with creators who have worked with the company.

On Polymarket’s actual site, more than 50 accounts made the McDonald’s bet in January, public data shows. All of them lost.

In its push to draw users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket has flooded social media with videos like Makihara’s, which appear genuine at first glance. In reality, Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket.

Wall Street Journal, They Looked Like They Were Getting Rich on Polymarket—but None of It Was Real

DSA

Candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America are surging to victory on the claim that they are proponents of “a government by, for and of the working class” that will wrest power from both “far-right Republicans and corporate Democrats.”

Here’s the problem. Most of the leadership of the D.S.A. and a majority of voters who back its candidates are in no way working class. Instead, an elite made up of well-educated professionals dominates this insurgency.

The D.S.A.’s agenda, in turn, is packed with policies supported by left-wing liberals, white progressives in particular, but strongly opposed by both white and minority working-class (defined, in pollster shorthand, as non-college-educated) voters.

Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times (gift link)

That opening was your mic drop moment, Mr. Edsall. I’m not sure you needed the rest of the column (which I accordingly did not read)

Three readings of the book of JD

Despite being a relatively simple book, [J.D. Vance’s Communion] is susceptible to three distinct readings, none of them particularly Catholic. The first is that Communion is a book animated, despite its author’s conversion, by a particular kind of historical, political Protestantism, the faith of petty kings and princes always eager to bend faith in service of the crown. The second is that it is a book about Christianity as a secular force, a thin gruel of moralizing talk disconnected in all but name from the demands of real faith. The third, and perhaps most likely, is that it is what it plainly is: a book about how J.D. Vance would like to be the president of the United States.

Emmett Rensin, A Reading From the Book of J.D. Vance

What Do Americans Think When No One Is Watching?

I can’t quite shake What Do Americans Think When No One Is Watching?. It’s as if we’re relatively sane in private but we’re living a non-stop troll-a-thon in public, which even extends to the secret “public” of the voting booth.

Housing

Cities have largely lost the power to say yes to construction. To prevent officials from acting against the public interest, we have drained them of the power to act in the public interest. Every decision can be appealed, every complaint must be heard, every objection weighed. We are so committed to fairness that we have lost sight of the unfairness of doing nothing.

Binyamin Appelbaum via Frank Bruni

Shorts

  • … Donald Trump, the world’s most powerful man yet possibly the world’s smallest … (Bret Stephens)
  • New York Post: Trump Official Says US Control of Greenland Could Bring Back All-You-Can-Eat Shrimp at Red Lobster (TMD)
  • For at the end of the day, a church’s raison d’etre has to rest on more than just a lusty oaf of a king who couldn’t keep it in his pants. (Terry Cowan, explaining why the worldwide Anglican communion is of little interest to him.)
  • Although it may be true that nostalgia views the past through rose-colored glasses, such a criticism misses the point. To see the good while blinkered against evils is, nevertheless, to see the good. (Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic)
  • No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom. The assertion that “foul is useful and fair is not“ is the antithesis of wisdom. (E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful)
  • The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is. (René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World)
  • An AI use case: remembering the half-remembered, the “I seem to recall” stuff of life. (Tipsy)
  • No one hates like President Trump. He hates expansively, ornately, aerobically. He hates in sprawling speeches in the middle of crowds in the middle of the day. He hates in social media expectorations in lonely moments in the dead of night. Most of Trump’s talents are exaggerated or invented, usually by him. They’re his con. Hate is his core, and he’s an undisputed master at it. (Frank Bruni)
  • When someone reacts to yesterday’s birthright citizenship decision by saying there’s a calculated program of “birthright tourism,” remember they’re the same bastards who said Haitians were stealing and eating neighbors’ dogs and cats in Ohio.

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I offloaded a lot of Never Trumpery from this edition to elsewhere:

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

Res publicae tempore belli

At the waters’ edge

I’m surprised by my reaction to the war on Iran.

  • We are at war.
  • Everything about our entry into this war was wrong.
  • Articles of Impeachment should have been passed by now, with the Senate gearing up for trial.
  • Much as I detest Trump, I cannot root for America to lose.
  • But I can root for Americans, hurt in the pocketbook by his tariffs and the disruption of world oil flow (his general barbarity having passed without objection), to get furious and crush his bootlickers this Fall.

Mind you, this is reaction, not analysis. I have no qualifications to analyze the conduct of the war.

Liberating students from stultifying AI cheating

In his final year of teaching in Baylor’s Honors College, Alan Jacobs appears to be at the top of his game. He in particular has made me aware that there are, in theory, ways for conscientious profs to liberate their students from the stultifying pressure to let AI write their essays for them.

Now in his first column for the Dispatch, he gets a bit more concrete. For instance:

When I have talked with my fellow professors in the Great Texts program at Baylor’s Honors College, I have learned a few things. Some professors have for many years been giving oral examinations in the old Oxford and Cambridge tutorial style, where students read their papers aloud, and the professor interrupts to ask questions like “What do you mean by that word? What does that phrase mean?” This allows the professor to discover whether the student actually knows what he or she is talking about. In such situations, and in full oral exams, there are few ways to hide your ignorance. Professors who teach this way can largely (if not wholly) ignore the AI freakout.

…

Properly understood, the disruption of humanities teaching by AI is a gift, and I plan to receive it as such, rather than complain about a burden. As a teacher, I find these new conditions invigorating and refreshing. I feel like Charles Foster Kane when he started his career as a newspaper publisher: I don’t know how to teach masterpieces of literature and philosophy and theology, I just try everything I can think of. I find that my students—even if they’re not always as excited as I am—welcome these experiments and are quite willing to engage in them.

…

[F]or me, the rise of the chatbots has been an unexpected, late-career gift. It has made my teaching more fun for me, and I think more interesting for my students. And I believe the lessons I have learned can be generalized.

…

By depriving students of constant AI use—or, to put it more accurately, by allowing them some respite from the tyranny of the chatbots over their lives—we actually enable them to exercise their minds in unfamiliar, and for some unprecedented, ways. 

In short, there’s a great opportunity here for those who want to take it. Humanities professors of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our self-forged chains.

What AI Is Teaching Us About Humanities Education

What money is teaching us about education reform

Also in Texas, the private start-up University of Austin suffered an exodus of academic talent after its principal funder, Joe Lonsdale, strong-armed the institution into embracing “the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, [anti]-identity politics, and anti-Islamism.”

Len Gutkin, The Right’s Academic Civil War.

This is a bitter, bitter disappointment for me, as I suspect it is for Pano Kanelos, who left the Presidency of the estimable St. John’s College – Annapolis to become the Founding President of University of Austin.

Is the idea of starting a new, excellent and free university Quixotic in the 21st century? Will moneyed barbarians always be in the saddle?

Tu quoque

Every one of these ideas is terrible — because every one of them follows from a fundamental failure to grasp the character of political reality in the United States. Hauling members of the opposing party before state tribunals for official condemnation, packing the country’s highest court with judges guaranteed to hand down decisions favorable to progressives, or otherwise altering the rules of American politics to systematically enhance the power of one party while diminishing the power of its opponents — none of that would move the country toward anything resembling “reconciliation.” On the contrary, it would move the country several steps closer to being torn apart.

Damon Linker (October 2020). Note the date.

The same observations apply to MAGA smashing norms in 2025-26 “to systematically enhance the power of one party while diminishing the power of its opponents.” The main difference is that MAGA is explicit about seeking to smash and humiliate, not reconcile.

Infantile rebellion

There is something infantile about rebellion and transgression. The need to perform and draw attention to oneself by constantly overthrowing and despising anything considered valuable or sacred by a previous generation has a rather Oedipal ring to it. Growing up used to be about learning and internalizing the values of the past in order to take one’s place in society. But a society built around transgression is really a society committed to a permanent state of immaturity.

Carl Trueman, Pride Month and the Infantilization of Society – First Things

Wordplay

So many felicitous phrases to brighten my day (via Frank Bruni)!:

  • In The Guardian, Dave Schilling considered an icy spectacle that has received more attention than usual lately: “Ah, hockey. The most impish of sports. A bunch of blissfully beefy individuals wearing colorful sweaters zoom around in skates chasing a wee little object called, of all things, a ‘puck.’ It’s adorable. It’s like ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ for people missing teeth.”
  • In The Times, Wesley Morris argued that the real appeal of the hit television series “Heated Rivalry,” set in the world of professional hockey, isn’t the sex: “The talking is the strength of the show. On the one hand, big deal. Men have never been doing more talking. They’re talking so much that we now refer to that talking as the manosphere, meaning that the chat has achieved a degree of gaseousness that only earth science can name.”
  • W.J. Hennigan pondered the prickliness of a member of Trump’s cabinet: “For a guy who calls himself the secretary of war, Pete Hegseth sure is defensive.”
  • In a post on X, Sean Davis, the chief executive of The Federalist, made fun of many Republicans’ tortured efforts not to call the attack on Iran by a certain three-letter word: “It’s not a war unless it comes from the war region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling combat.”
  • In The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait wondered about Trump’s focus and coherence amid his shifting explanations for military strikes against Iran: “The president’s strategy seems more sundown than Sun Tzu.”

Shorts

  • …sexless epileptics jerking and lurching across a dance floor, lewd yet without the touch of a human hand. (Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes, describing school dances of the period)
  • … “Richard Cory,” that poem whose last line seems written expressly for the purpose of startling high-school students out of their first-period-English slumbers. (Poems Ancient and Modern)
  • Thomas B. Edsall, Trump’s Smash-and-Grab Presidency Reaches New Heights (bold added).
  • I recently heard of some new protein-heavy martini, which a comedian said tastes like a podcast. (My social medium friend Jeremy Abel, a fellow Hoosier.)

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.

Monday March 2

A keeper

Damon Linker discusses (shared link) the debates among Right illiberals, not nut-picking but citing scholars and a Notre Dame Republican student group.

Then he puts his finger on the key question they disagree about:

The question is whether the country today is actually facing a threat dire enough to justify or excuse otherwise unjustifiable or inexcusable acts. Are we facing a genuine threat to our continued existence as a country? Determining the answer boils down to judgment.

Starting at least with Michael Anton’s 2016 “Flight 93 Election” essay, there are plenty on the right excusing unjustifiable or inexcusable acts on the premise that the Democrats are an “existential threat.” I don’t believe them, and if I did it’s no longer clear to me that I would take the illiberal Right’s side in the fight. There’s a lot of evidence that they’re a bigger threat than the Democrats.

I plan to revisit Linker’s essay at least once; I’m not sure I’ve sucked all the juice from it yet.

The first thing the communists do when they take over is to systematize snitching

When I was living, fairly briefly, in Oklahoma 50 years ago, we heard not only the usual “first thing the communists do when they take over is,” but an interesting variant.

The usual, of course, was “outlaw guns.” The variant was “outlaw cock-fighting.” I’m not kidding. I do not claim that the variant was common or held by a substantial number of Okies, but it was there.

The marks of authoritarianism and totalitarianism are debated, but I suggest that one of them is recruiting people to snitch on each other even about trivial deviations from the government’s line. Kids reporting to teachers naughty things their parents or siblings said, for instance.

Making due allowance for his youth at the time and signs of subsequent growth, it nevertheless is an authoritarian blot on the late Charlie Kirk’s legacy that one of his early Turning Point USA initiatives was Professor Watch, a website for student to snitch on their professors.

If I were more obsessive about the dangers from MAGAworld, I would keep a list of the dubious stuff TPUSA has done since Kirk’s death, like the All-American Halftime Show in 2026. (That, at least, was not clearly authoritarian, but it was petty as hell.)

For now, suffice that one of TPUSA’s earliest initiatives was a tool of authoritarian wannabes.

Beating a dead(ish) horse

Wokeness is often thought to be a form of virtue signalling.  This is subtly wrong, for it is more often a kind of status signalling.  The wokist wants to be seen as belonging to “the right kind of people.”  He drapes himself with wokeness the same way that in another day and age people paraded their memberships in prestigious clubs, or that today they flaunt the brands and styles of shoes and clothing that they wear.  If ethics comes into the matter at all, it comes in not via the thought “I would never do that,” but via the thought “I’m not the kind of person who would do that.”  You know, the deplorables.

I am not suggesting that such a person is aware of his craving for status.  Very few people are fully aware of their own motives.  In a society which professes to believe in equality, and pretends to despise snobbery, it is hard for a snob who knows he is a snob to think well of himself; therefore he has to convince himself that he isn’t a snob.  With its faux concern for The People (most of whom have no interest whatsoever in the cause of woke), wokeness is a convenient way to do that.  My very expensive jeans must have holes in them.

J Budziszewski

Budziszewski’s not wrong, but a parallel takedown of MAGA vice-signallers couldn’t be all that hard. I’m not a pas d’ennemis á droite kind of guy, but I’m not going to take the time to write it — only to point out that the Right has unclean hands of its own. Do you have eyes to see that or are you blinkered?

We need to “get out” more

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

C.S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time, from Weight of Glory

Incommensurable

[O]ne is compelled to admire a man of such verbal agility as not only to conceal from his readers and audiences the shallowness of his own thought, but to persuade them that in admiring his work they were giving evidence of their own intelligence as well. I do not say that Shaw could have succeeded alone, without the more plodding and laborious minds with which he associated himself; but by persuading lowbrows that they were high-brows and that high-brows must be Socialist, he contributed greatly to the prestige of Socialism. But between the influence of a Bernard Shaw or an H.G. Wells, and the influence of a Coleridge or a Newman, I can conceive no common scale of measurement.

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 on George Bernard Shaw, inter alia.

Manipulation in a good cause

Ten years in, and Democrats still don’t know how to handle Donald Trump. He used them as foils and they allowed it, sitting there snarling, at points screaming. Part of how to handle him is if he tries to manipulate you into doing the right thing—if, for instance, he challenges you to stand in respect for a mother mourning the murder of her daughter—you put aside that you’re being manipulated and stand. Because it is right to show human sympathy and regard. The thing to do is look better than Mr. Trump, not worse. You say: My base demands coldness. Then get a new base. If you can’t, leave before you are reduced to a soulless husk of the eager, happy person who walked into that chamber a decade ago.

Peggy Noonan, The Oprah State of the Union.

The same advice could and should be given to Republicans when their one-man “base” in the White House demands dishonor of them.

Regime Change

As Americans, we do not need regime change abroad; we need it at home. We must escape the ghastly bloodlust and other demonic impulses of the Democratic and Republican parties. Men and women of goodwill must unite in solidarity to build an alternative to evil.

Jack Ternan, Chair of the National Committee of the American Solidarity Party

Shorts

  • Two tongue-in-cheek descriptions of The Bulwark: “Pro market, anti-polio”; “The capitalist wing of Antifa.”
  • “…preposterously self-satisfied, preternaturally nasty and profoundly delusional …” (Frank Bruni’s top-line characterization of Trump’s 2026 SOTU)
  • I don’t know who coined the expression “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining,” but it fits the overall tone of the speech. (Bret Stephens’ top-line characterization of Trump’s 2026 SOTU)
  • That’s what’s nice about politics, Yevgeny: anything that makes people believe in power actually increases that power. (Giuliano da Empoli and Willard Wood, The Wizard of the Kremlin.)
  • No, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s much worse—it’s a consensus. (R.R. Reno on “the progressive takeover of higher education … or DEI’s reign over corporate America”)

I had another few items, but after the USA and Israel attached Iran, they could have been too easily misunderstood.

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

Saturday, 7/26/25

Cultural

The cost of convenience

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

Matthew B. Crawford, Defying the Data Priests

The source of some of our sickness

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

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

Touching politics

What’s remotely “risible” here?

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

The Economist, January 25, 2024.

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

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

Money Quotes For The Week (excerpted from Andrew Sullivan)

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

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

…

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

How it ends

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

…

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

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

What will his fans say when he does?

Nick Catoggio

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

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

More:

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

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

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

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

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

Apology accepted, sir.

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

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

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

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

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

Unserious people governing an unserious people

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

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

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

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

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

The Morning Dispatch

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

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

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

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

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

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

A unified theory of Trump

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

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

Public Affairs

On the one hand, I express no profound personal opinions here; on the other, I have some smart and provocative “takes” from others and some comments on them.

Stupid opinions on why a Trump conviction will be reversed

Any conviction obtained at the so-called “trial” of former President Donald Trump’s alleged alteration of financial records will be reversed on appeal, if necessary by the U.S. Supreme Court, because altering financial records is only a crime in New York if you do it to conceal some other crime. Paying Stormy Daniels money is NOT a crime. …

Steven Calabresi (emphasis added).

I would wager a substantial sum that the U.S. Supreme Court will not reverse a New York conviction of Trump at all, let alone on the basis that New York Courts misapplied New York law.

If the law is as Calabresi says, State appeal courts should reverse, but state Courts have the last word on what state law is.

Steven Calabresi is not a stupid man. This outburst was an example of motivated reasoning.

It’s still quite possible that the Manhattan jury will convict Trump on the 34 felony charges Bragg has brought. But there is no chance the conviction will withstand appeal, particularly given that it relies so heavily on Cohen’s testimony.

Eli Lake (emphasis added).

I would wager even more that a conviction will not be reversed because it relies too heavily on Michael Cohen’s testimony. No Courts will have any idea what the jury relied on. That’s not how jury trials work.

I cannot vouch for Elli Lake not being stupid on legal matters. It rather appears that he is.

Note: This is not to say that Courts won’t reverse because particular testimony of Cohen was admitted over timely objection. Nor am I saying that this prosecution is solid and will not be reversed. There’s a lot of non-dopey analysis that thinks if very shaky. I’m just faulting stupid arguments that mislead non-lawyer readers.

History Rhyming?

I’ve been surprised at the intensity of the electorate’s hostility to post-Roe restrictive abortion legislation. I thought public opinion was more closely divided.

As we think about why voters are so hostile, though, it may be illuminating to remember the Protestant landscape pre-Roe. For one common instance:

The great majority [of pre-Roe Southern Baptists] favored such “therapeutic” abortions, but a small minority objected that abortion was murder, and another small minority argued that it should be legal in all cases. The divide, however, did not fall along the usual conservative-moderate lines, but rather, it seems, along the spectrum of anti-Catholicism.

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals. Voters may just be reverting to pre-Roe positions.

I care a bit about what the various states do. But I’m still committed to federalism, unconvinced that this is an appropriate topic for national legislation.

Commencement Addresses

It’s like the opening parable of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement address: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”

James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love

But what sort of use does it make of this freedom? Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no true moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to his readers, or to his history — or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? It hardly ever happens because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist usually always gets away with it. One may — One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Harvard Commencement Address, 1978

Equality

In these powerfully written essays Oakeshott points to the damage done when politics is directed from above towards a goal – whether liberty, equality or fraternity – and where all policies and negotiations are formulated by reference to that goal.

Roger Scruton, Conservatism

We in the US are suffering from a putative commitment to the goal of equality, “where all policies and negotiations are formulated by reference to that goal.”

I say “putative” because we seem to have lost the ability to identify which things truly are alike, and so should be treated alike, the ability to recognize that not all discrimination is invidious. Sometimes “discrimination” is the necessary consequence of discernment.

If the preceding seems impenetrably opaque, think about the dogma “trans women are women.” If that makes perfect, incontestable sense to you, you probably are loving our present love affair with “equality.” If you hesitate or disagree with “trans women are women,” you may be on my wavelength.

Elites and normies

Elites require control over the information sphere because their policy obsessions—on immigration, gender, and climate, for example—are not popular with the normies. By necessity, progressive fantasies must be imposed on our mediated reality, even as dissenting opinions are cast out into the dark. The internal combustion engine will destroy the earth; windmills will save it. Trump is a wannabe dictator; Biden, the adult in the room. Antagonists are always “far right”; there’s no such thing as “far left.” The ambition to conquer the empirical world with words approaches magical thinking.

It rarely works. The chaos and contingencies of the digital age allow the normies and their chosen tribunes, the populists, too much room to maneuver. Trump’s rise in the opinion polls would otherwise be inexplicable.

Martin Gurri

Why the meritocracy is not viewed as a legitimate ruling class

Now comes the kicker. By the competition it unleashes, bourgeois society creates unprecedented wealth, but also unprecedented inequality of wealth. It does so even while proclaiming equality to be its great insight, innovation and foundation, an inalienable right of man. The contradiction of bourgeois society is such that “its development belies its principle, and its dynamic undercuts its legitimacy.”

In earlier societies, inequality held a legitimate status, assigned by nature, tradition, or providence. In bourgeois society, inequality is an idea that circulates sub rosa in contradiction with the way individuals view themselves; it nevertheless pervades the environment in which they live…. The bourgeoisie did not invent the division of society into classes, but by cloaking that division in an ideology that renders it illegitimate, they tinged it with suffering.

One result is that we are deprived of a fundamental requirement of any polity: a ruling class that will be perceived as legitimate.

…

At bottom, we see a refusal of the ruling class to take responsibility for its rule, preferring to LARP at the barricades.

Matthew B. Crawford, Why the meritocracy is not viewed as a legitimate ruling class

Why so few pro-Trump columnists

There aren’t many pro-Trump columnists at major papers because there aren’t many pro-Trump columnists anywhere.

In past years, it hardly seems possible that a major publication wouldn’t have a supporter of Ronald Reagan on George W. Bush on its staff. That is why in 2024, newspapers would love nothing more than to have an in-house columnist on Team Red Hat/Tie.

But Trumpism is a visual medium – it cannot withstand the scrutiny of a written column. Trump supporters can go on Fox News or Newsmax or OAN and say whatever they want in the moment without being fact-checked beforehand. But writing a column means having editors and fact checkers verify the claims you’re making.

And because no editor will rubber-stamp a claim like “the 2020 election was stolen,” someone who tries to argue Biden didn’t win the last election or that the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were “political prisoners” will never be able to make their way to a legacy print outlet. A columnist that wanted to say, for instance, Vice President Mike Pence had the ability to choose his own electors in 2020 would be like a columnist earnestly arguing a woman is safer if she encounters a bear rather than a human man in the woods.

This phenomenon is glaringly obvious any time Trump goes on a network like CNN for a town hall or a debate. The falsehoods come so fast out of his mouth, the moderator can’t keep up, leaving 90 percent of his claims unchallenged. If the reporter stopped Trump to correct him on every lie he told, the event would be more moderator than candidate.

That is because being a Trumper is based almost solely on emotion and doesn’t rely on facts. Trumpism is a clenched fist, not an argument. And newspapers print arguments.

Christian Schneider, Where Are All the Pro-Trump Newspaper Columnists? (emphasis added; H/T The Morning Dispatch)

I am predisposed to credit Schneider’s argument because of people like Eric Metaxas.

Metaxas, a Yale grad, is an intellectual of sorts. He writes books. He hosts high-tone “Socrates in the City” conversations. I have it on fairly good authority that he’s genial and fun to talk to.

But he’s bereft of arguments for his election denialism. He has rock-solid certainty. As a word guy, he makes reductio ad Hitlerum analogies. He may have had mystical visions. But he has zero evidence. (Did I mention the rock-solid certainty?)

Checking in on the further-right

Charlie Kirk is worked up. “The world is in flames, and Bidenomics is a complete and total disaster,” the conservative influencer said during a recent episode of his podcast The Charlie Kirk Show. “But it can’t and won’t ruin my day,” he continued. “Why? ’Cause I start my day with a hot America First cup of Blackout Coffee.” Liberals have brought about economic Armageddon, but first, coffee.

… “Rest assured knowing that you’re ready for whatever the globalists throw at us next,” Kirk said at the end of one ad for medical-emergency kits … The commercial breaks sounded like something from an alternate universe. The more I listened to them, the more I came to understand that that was the point.

…

Some of Kirk’s ads … sound a little jarring: “You are nine meals away from anarchy,” he said in one ad for buckets of food rations, from a website called MyPatriotSupply.com. Yet as the world of right-wing-coded products has expanded, so has the weirdness of ads for them. “For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America’s only Christian-conservative wireless provider,” started another ad. Switching to Patriot Mobile, Kirk explained, would mean that “you’re sending the message that you support free speech, religious liberty, the sanctity of life, the Second Amendment, our military veterans and first-responder heroes” while getting “the same coverage you’ve been accustomed to without funding the left.”

Ali Breland, Why Is Charlie Kirk Selling Me Food Rations?

Another Denialism

Just as the Bishop of Oxford refused to consider that he might be descended from an ape, so now are many in the West reluctant to contemplate that their values, and even their very lack of belief, might be traceable back to Christian origins.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Trust the science

The strong, as science had conclusively demonstrated, had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.

Tom Holland, Dominion

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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 cathartic venting, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

420 2024

I have to be reminded every year that “420” is a winky feast for weed afficianados.

Trans in the news

MSM largely ignores the voice of sanity on teen trans

A short note on the MSM coverage of last week’s publication of the Cass Report — the most comprehensive review of all the scientific evidence around the sex reassignment of children. There was barely any. Nada at CNN. Zippo by the Washington Post. NPR — surprise! — ignored it. So did NBC, which covers trans issues obsessively, and CBS.

The transqueer groups who’ve backed transing children with gender dysphoria — primarily HRC and GLAAD — have also said nothing on their websites. GLAAD was the group that brought a van with the words “The Science Is Settled” to intimidate the NYT into not covering the issue. You might think they’d say something, now that a definitive study has shown the science is anything but settled. But nah.

The New York Times ran a real story; so did the WSJ; David Brooks has a piece today praising the fairness and compassion of the Cass Repot; and the Washington Post, despite its news division, published a remarkable op-ed by a gay detransitioner, reflecting on how his own internalized homophobia had led him astray under the guidance of the trans industry. That’s the first time I’ve read in the MSM how transing children is putting countless gay kids at terrible risk — a vital point, deliberately obscured by formerly gay rights groups that have now gone fully trans. So there’s hope in the wilderness. But not much.

Andrew Sullivan (bold added)

“Protecting trans kids”

Being in favour of the sterilisation of autistic and gay children — or “protecting trans kids”, as it’s been known — has long been a way to advertise one’s right-side-of-history credentials.

Victoria Smith, Puberty blocker ruling won’t cure Scotland’s gender problem

If that quote makes no sense to you, have you considered

  • the prevalence of autism in gender dysphoric kids (a “co-morbidity”) and
  • the prevalence of homosexuality among kids who, once gender dysphoric, grow out of it?

(Surely you know that sterility is a side-effect of medical interventions via surgery or even just hormones.)

Culture

René Girard, call your office

Pierre Valentin … who authored the first French study of the woke phenomenon, described wokeness as “a spirit of sheer negation.” He insightfully observed that wokeness is an inversion of the traditional scapegoat mechanism. The scapegoat mechanism sacrifices the exception, the outsider, for the sake of preserving the whole. But in the woke paradigm, you sacrifice the whole to coddle the exception.

Rod Dreher, reporting from the National Conservatism Conference that Brussels’ mayor tried to cancel three times. A midnight court hearing turned back those efforts.

Liberalism’s trajectory

I’m kind of with those who say there’s a trajectory within classical liberalism toward where we are now because, you’ve got to just keep finding new groups to liberate, and new forms of oppression, and then the ever-increasing focus on the self and the sovereignty of choice. But that’s such a desert landscape.

… [W]e’re beginning to see some really frightening instances: people are so tired of wokeism and the exaggerated forms of liberalism that they want the absolute contrary as you take solace or consolation in something that’s a violent overthrow of that.

Catholic Bishop Robert Barron via Juicy Ecumenism

Meatspace

The greater the social value produced by a job, the less one is likely to be paid to do it.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

These are the jobs done in meatspace, which jobs manifested their importance during the Covid pandemic.

Sleepwalking despite it all

Even after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that collapsed the twin towers of the World Trade Center and sliced through the Pentagon, America is are still sleepwalking into the future.

James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency

NPR

Wokeness is illiberal

The point I have been trying to make for years now is that wokeness is not some racier version of liberalism, merely seeking to be kinder and more inclusive. It is, in fact, directly hostile to liberal values; it subordinates truth to ideology; it judges people not by their ability but by their identity; and it regards ideological diversity as a mere dog-whistle for bigotry. [NPR CEO Katherine] Maher has publicly and repeatedly avowed support for this very illiberalism. If people with these views run liberal institutions, the institutions will not — cannot — remain liberal for very long. And they haven’t. Elite universities are turning into madrassas, and media is turning into propaganda.

Yes, Fox News is worse. The right-leaning media, apart from the WSJ, is woefully lacking in solid reporting and sober argument. But that’s why it matters that the big fish remain liberal. And it’s one thing when propaganda pervades private institutions, but at NPR, you and I are also subsidizing it with our tax dollars. I fail to see how that is in any way fair or sustainable — for its listeners or donors.

NPR’s biggest staff cuts since the Great Recession and its rapid decline in listenership — while radio and podcasts are booming everywhere else — are telling us something. It’s just something that the smug fanatics now running the place don’t want to hear.

Andrew Sullivan, Katherine Maher is not a Liberal

Relativist on facts, absolutist on morals

For [NPR CEO Katherine] Maher, authoritative platforms have a duty to control knowledge production and police the boundaries of speech, imposing formal relativism while writing the Good People’s moral precepts into the parameters of what is sayable and knowable. Meanwhile, the counter-melody of NPR’s staffers contesting [Uri] Berliner’s article reminds us that while we may not like Maher’s moral framework, she’s right about the politicisation of truth.

Maher would never put it so bluntly, but the difference between the free circulation of information in the print and the digital eras is gatekeeping, effectively on the basis of intelligence and wealth (via the proxies of reading ability and leisure to write).

Mary Harrington

Politics

Why Biden shouldn’t debate Trump

A consortium of television networks yesterday released a joint statement inviting President Joe Biden and his presumptive opponent, Donald Trump, to debate on their platforms: “There is simply no substitute for the candidates debating with each other, and before the American people, their visions for the future of our nation.”

President Biden’s spokesperson should answer like this: “The Constitution is not debatable. The president does not participate in forums with a person under criminal indictment for his attempt to overthrow the Constitution.”

…

Until tried and convicted, Trump must be regarded as innocent in the eyes of the law.

But the political system has eyes of its own. No doubt exists about what Trump did, or why, or what his actions meant. Trump lost an election, then incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol. He hoped that the insurrectionists would terrorize, kidnap, or even kill his own vice president in order to stop the ceremony to formalize the victory of Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris. By disrupting the ceremony, Trump schemed to cast the election’s result to the House of Representatives, where Republican voting strength might proclaim him president in place of the lawful winner. Many people were badly injured by Trump’s violent plan, and some died as a result.

…

Imagine watching the debate with the sound off—what would you see? Two men, both identified as “president,” standing side by side, receiving equal deference from some of the most famous hosts and anchors on American television. The message: Violence to overthrow an election is not such a big deal. Some Americans disapprove of it; others have different opinions—that’s why we have debates. Coup d’état: tip of the hat? Or wag of the finger?

For Biden to refuse to rub elbows with Trump won’t make Trump go away, of course. The Confederacy did not go away when Abraham Lincoln refused to concede the title of president to Jefferson Davis. That’s not why Lincoln consistently denied Davis that title. Lincoln understood how demoralizing it would be to Union-loyal Americans if he accepted the claim that Davis was a president rather than a rebel and an insurrectionist. Biden should understand how demoralizing it would be to democracy-loyal Americans if he accepted the claim that Trump is more than a January 6 defendant.

David Frum

Ornamenting Orange Man

[H]is life with his family — his feelings about his family — are something we can’t see. And that blind spot is a significant part of what can make him seem so inhuman.

His predecessors in the White House had their own family dramas. Can we talk about Bill and Hill? But in President Clinton’s voice and eyes — when he spoke of Hillary, when he looked at Chelsea — there were genuine sorrow for the screw-ups and a whole riot of raw emotions. His lack of discipline wasn’t a lack of heart.

George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s interactions with their wives and daughters were suffused with a palpable tenderness.

But when Trump talks about Melania, Ivanka, Donald Jr.? Even as he praises them, he seems really to be complimenting himself. And he uses the same stock phrases, the same braggart’s diction, the same isn’t-my-life-enviable boilerplate with which he discusses his foreign policy, his economic record, his golf resorts, his crowds. It could be A.I.-generated: ChatDJT.

Are his family members’ meanings to him more ornamental than sentimental? … And Melania? How much does she matter to him, and vice versa?

Frank Bruni

Is this the understatement of the decade?

After Jan. 6, 2021, any future election involving Donald Trump was going to make a sizable bloc of Americans anxious about the state of U.S. democracy.

Thomas Shull

Erick’s got some ‘splainin’ to do

“There was no insurrection. That is a left/media talking point. It was a riot, yes. It was not an insurrection. Those who believe this don’t actually care about the truth though,” – Erick Erickson this week.

“This was insurrectionist, and it was inspired by the President of the United States — I don’t care about your damn feelings this morning. … [Trump] encouraged people to storm the United States Capitol to stop a democratic election after lying [about it] for two months” – Erickson on January 7, 2021.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Neville Chamberlain

Irritated by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s tireless dedication to serving Moscow’s interests, Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz offered an amendment to the Ukraine aid bill that would have renamed her office the “Neville Chamberlain Room.” It was an ugly, stupid, juvenile insult.

Say what you will about Marjorie Taylor Greene, she is no Neville Chamberlain.

Neville Chamberlain was an honorable and decent man …

…

What was Winston Churchill’s judgment? He eulogized his former rival in Parliament: 

It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.

Neville Chamberlain made the wrong decision at the most important juncture of his public life. But he was an authentic statesman who put service over self, even at the cost of his reputation, personal fortune, and health. For most of the world—and particularly for Americans, who care so little for history—all that remains of Neville Chamberlain is his worst mistake. But he did what he thought was right, received very little thanks for it in the end, and never stopped working for his country until the last few weeks of his life, when he was physically unable to continue. He died, as he wished, plain Mr. Chamberlain.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is no Neville Chamberlain. Not on her best day.

Kevin D. Williamson.

I share this in equal parts to contemn MJT and to marvel at the rhetorical gifts of Winston Churchill, of whom and of which gifts I stand in awe.

Tell us what you really think, Kevin

The winner of the Democratic primary on April 23 will have the honor of almost certainly losing the R+8 district to House Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry, the sycophantic cretin and half-assed QAnon cultist who helped to execute the legislative leg of Donald Trump’s failed coup d’état in early 2021. There must be something in the water down in Dillsburg.

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.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

March 5, 2024

Art

Popular “unpopular art”

[A]art is in a peculiar and dangerous position these days. This week, over 17,000 artists and activists signed an open letter demanding that Israeli artists be excluded from the Venice Biennale festival in Italy, simply because they are Israelis. And even while that attempt at censorship is launched, other artists proclaim how brave they are for art on certain pet causes, violating taboos that no one has enforced for decades and everyone they know already mocks. There is no real cost to such stands.

Joseph Bottum

Popular art

Meet Frankey, the Street Artist Delighting Amsterdam – The New York Times (shared link, no paywall). I was afraid this story would be about another Banksy type graffiti artist (I viscerally hate graffiti). Not at all. It’s sheer whimsical delight.

IVF

The ephemeral threat to IVF

In June 2022, the court ended federal access to abortion, kicking abortion policy back to the states.

Since then, nine states—Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Tennessee—have outlawed abortion outright, not even allowing the procedure when women become pregnant through rape or incest. (Alabama’s IVF ruling is the most extreme pro-life ruling yet.) …

How Abortion Became ‘the Defund the Police of the GOP’ | The Free Press

Alabama Supreme Court’s decision might ramify unpopularly, bearing in mind the conservative adage that there are popular “unpopular opinions” (i.e., “popular among our leftcoastal readers, less so in flyover country”) and unpopular “unpopular opinions (i.e., “popular among the fundamentalist deplorables in flyover country but vilified by leftcoastal types).

But I digress. The Alabama decision was a ruling in favor of IVF-availing parents whose frozen embryos were negligently destroyed by another patient for lack of safeguards at the IVF clinic. There were no sinister designs on IVF in the opinion at all.* So constantly throwing the decision into the abortion mix strikes me as shit-stirring clickbait.

And “they” must stir the shit, and bait the clicks, vigorously and now, because IVF is in fact popular and the Alabama legislature is hastening to protect it from unintended consequences of the Court’s decision. (I’d say “nobody would dare try to outlaw IVF” except that people are daring some pretty bizarre things these days.)

* Alabama’s Supreme Court had earlier ruled that wrongful death action was allowed to parents for loss of descendants en ventre sa mere; the recent case clarified that intrauterine or extrauterine descendants were within contemplation of the parental wrongful death law.

The case against IVF

While we’re on the subject, I think it’s important for people in secure positions occasionally to voice unpopular unpopular opinions — opinions that others may be too cancelable to voice.

For the record, I have serious moral qualms about IVF, based on a combination of (a) knowing that in the U.S., IVF practice knowingly creates large numbers of embryos that will eventually be destroyed and (b) some Roman Catholic influence that tells me babies should be made in marital beds, not laboratories.

J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know briefly sketches the Roman Catholic case against IVF (thought his immediate target is cloning).

So you would say that aspirin, surgery to remove a tumor, and cloning “respect” nature, too.
Not cloning.
Why not? Doesn’t it assist the natural function of having babies?
Once more: our nature is our design. We are designed to have babies, but we are not designed to have them in that way. To put it another way, our design includes not only certain ends but certain means. There is a difference between repairing the reproductive system and bypassing it.
Well, it doesn’t seem to be a big deal anyway.
I think it is a very big deal. When you try to turn yourself into a different kind of being, you are not only doing wrong but asking for trouble. He who ignores the witness of his design will have to face the witness of natural consequences.

If you think this argument has (not “should have”) any appreciable political valence in the USA, you need to get a grip. I’m just saying it should have some valence.

I don’t know where I ultimately would come out on IVF it were there an opportunity to discuss it, not just Roman Catholic voices crying in the wilderness versus reflexive dismissal of those voices.

Law

Witless Ape returns to ballot

[I]t was a perfectly defensible position to hold that Trump should be disqualified. What was indefensible was the air of swaggering certainty that permeated so many of those takes. … self-evident. Common sense. Obvious. Indisputable. Automatic.

Damon Linker

David French was in the “Common sense. Obvious. Indisputable. Automatic.” camp, and he’s not going down without a final howl of protest:

It’s extremely difficult to square this ruling with the text of Section 3. The language is clearly mandatory. The first words are “No person shall be” a member of Congress or a state or federal officer if that person has engaged in insurrection or rebellion or provided aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. The Section then says, “But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.”

In other words, the Constitution imposes the disability, and only a supermajority of Congress can remove it. But under the Supreme Court’s reasoning, the meaning is inverted: The Constitution merely allows Congress to impose the disability, and if Congress chooses not to enact legislation enforcing the section, then the disability does not exist. The Supreme Court has effectively replaced a very high bar for allowing insurrectionists into federal office — a supermajority vote by Congress — with the lowest bar imaginable: congressional inaction.

David French

I guess the Supreme Court considers whether it’s best to shade the law when following it fearlessly could unleash chaos. It’s days like yesterday that make that obvious, indisputable.

(H/T Kevin D. Williamson for the “Witless Ape” image; he minted it, and the linked item is a classic.)

The exceedingly long arm of Russian law

The media reported last week that Russian authorities had arrested Ksenia Karelina, a U.S.-Russian dual citizen, and charged her with treason for donating a nominal sum to an organization that aids Ukraine … The charges against Ms. Karelina are an assault on what it means to be American. The Russian state contends that for a U.S. citizen to make a donation to a U.S. charity and to attend a peaceful protest on U.S. soil is a punishable offense on arrival in Russia.

Dora Chomiak in the Wall Street Journal

Trump’s immunity claims

People who want Donald Trump tried, convicted and jailed before November, for acts while he was in office, have my sympathy, but as we head ever deeper into a tit-for-tat polarized political world, I must substantially agree with Lee Kovarsky instead: Trump Should Lose. But the Supreme Court Should Still Clarify Immunity. – The New York Times.

Trump’s immunity claims are far too broad, but ex-Presidents need at least narrow immunity. Running for high office is already so fraught that I question the sanity of anyone who runs. Add to the existing ugliness the prospect of criminal prosecution, with no possible immunity if the other party wins next time, and we’ll have nobody but saints and sociopaths willing to risk it.

Qualified Immunity

In Indiana, we have a political novice candidate for governor whose first major media buy was an ad with him sitting in a rustic church, slightly misquoting the Bible and earnestly telling us he’s a “man of faith.” It kind of turned my stomach.

The second major media buy was an ad with a well-spoken Rwandan refugee, who became his foster daughter, telling us he’s a “man of faith.” It was much more believable.

His third major media buy simplistically says that qualified immunity (over which governors have little or no control) protects police and so protects us and brillig, and slithey toves, gyring and gimbling in the wabe, and “as governor, your safety will always come first” (sic).

Eric Doden has now lost me for sure. Qualified Immunity, a court-created line-item veto, effectively turns “every person” in 42 USC §1983 into “precious few people.”

Miscellany

[Expletive deleted] AI

It is not possible to say definitively who negatively impacted society more, Elon Musk tweeting memes or Hitler. Both have had a significant impact on society, but in different ways.

Google’s Gemini AI via Nellie Bowles

Pride before the Fall

No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.” Such words smacked of hubris, the excessive pride that goes before a fall. And so they would turn out to be, expressing a mistaken vision that would lead to cruel and tragic consequences for the South. Lulled into a false sense of economic security by the illusion that cotton was invincible and its prices would never fall, the South would become fatally committed to a brutal social and economic system that was designed for the lucrative production of cotton on a massive scale but that achieved such productivity at an incalculable cost in human and moral terms. It placed the region on a collision course with changing moral sensibilities in the world, and with fundamental American ideals.

Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope

Psychological Man

My grandfather left school at fifteen and spent the rest of his working life as a sheet metal worker in a factory in Birmingham, the industrial heartland of England. If he had been asked if he found satisfaction in his work, there is a distinct possibility he would not even have understood the question, given that it really reflects the concerns of psychological man’s world, to which he did not belong.

Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Where paranoia is the mark of sophistication

In the offline world, paranoia is a liability. It inhibits you from seeing the world clearly. In parts of the online world, you’re considered a rube if you’re not paranoid, if you’re not seeing a leftist plot around every corner, if you’re not believing that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s romance is a Biden administration psy-op that culminated with rigging the Super Bowl.

David French, Why Elon Musk Is the Second Most Important Person in MAGA


So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Purdue at Rutgers

I have nothing to say about basketball. That title is just my answer to the question “how is this Saturday different than all others?”

Update: Purdue plays Rutgers Sunday the 28th. I blew that.

Culture

Fairy tales

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

G.K. Chesterton, writing the original lines, in Tremendous Trifles, Book XVII: The Red Angel (1909)

If Hef had died eight days later

Half the trick of business is knowing when to get out, and Hugh Hefner was a great businessman. “His timing was perfect,” said the New York Times obituary, when he died in September 2017 … But the obituarist was more right about Hefner’s timing than she could have known. Eight days after his death, the same paper published its devastating expose of Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual assaults against women, and the #MeToo movement quickly assembled in response. You can’t exactly call it luck when a 91-year-old dies, but if Hefner had lasted two weeks longer, the memorials would have been far harsher judgement about his influence on the 20th century.

Sarah Ditum, Crystal Hefner came too late.

(Beyond that nice lead-in, there’s not an awful lot to see in Ditum’s article. Take it or leave it.)

Right-Wing Progressives

Who/what is a Right-Wing Progressive (RWP)? Start by picturing a Silicon Valley elite who is by now well-and-truly fed up with the Woke left. But the causes for the RWP’s objection to the Woke mind-virus and its regnant regime differ significantly from those of a traditional conservative. The conservative loathes the Woke for their revolutionary assault on the moral, cultural, and social order, on foundational structures of civilization like the family, and on the True, the Good, and the Beautiful writ large. In contrast, the RWP is likely to consider these things to be at most tangential to his main concern. His anti-Wokeness is motivated mostly by an assessment that the ideology is degrading meritocracy, promoting irrational stupidity, inhibiting scientific innovation, diverting investment into worthless causes, and limiting long-term economic performance – in other words that it is holding back progress.

RWPs are what Virginia Postrel, in her 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies, approvingly dubbed “dynamists”: individuals whose primary vision for a good society is a state of constant Promethean invention, discovery, growth, and transformation. They see their true enemies as what Postrel labels “stasists”: nostalgia-ridden, backwards-looking brutes who hate change and for some unimaginable reason want to keep everything old and therefore obsolete from being replaced by new and better things. Today, from the RWP’s point of view, the forces of stasism just happen to include the Woke left in addition to conservatives.

N.S. Lyons, The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives

Cute. Maybe even valuable (if you’re a sucker for clickbait)

Downworthy: A browser plugin to turn hyperbolic viral headlines into what they really mean. The concept is amusing and the webpage thus worth a view.

The arts

The hard sciences help us understand the natural world. The social sciences help us measure behavior patterns across populations. But culture and the liberal arts help us enter the subjective experience of particular people: how this unique individual felt; how this other one longed and suffered. We have the chance to move with them, experience the world, a bit, the way they experience it.

David Brooks, * How Art Creates Us*

Substack Nazis

Virtue signalling on Substack

[I]t’s … my belief in original sin that makes me skeptical of one particular kind of story: the “Doing this hurts me but darn it I simply must stand up for my principles” story — which is the tale that a number of former Substackers are telling these days. “Substack is great for me but I simply can’t be on the same platform with all these Nazis” — though as many people have pointed out, Substack has maybe half a dozen Nazis among its zillions of users, and none of the platforms these people are decamping for are Nazi-free either. 

Here’s what I believe: This has absolutely nothing to do with Nazis. The purpose of the campaign is not to expel Nazis from Substack but to create a precedent. If Substack said “Okay, the Nazis are gone, the response would not be “Thanks!” It would be, “Cool, now let’s talk about Rod Dreher.” And then Bari Weiss, and then Jesse Singal, and then Freddie DeBoer, etc. etc. The goal is not to eliminate Nazis; the goal is to reconstitute the ideological monoculture that Substack, for all its flaws — it’s not a service I would ever use —, has effectively disrupted.

Alan Jacobs.

It’s especially affirming that Jacobs lists three Substackers I subscribe to plus one I dropped fewer that two weeks ago (because his logorrheic posts have what feels like a very low signal-to-noise ratio).

A lighter touch

Checking my cellphone bill the other day, I found myself wondering just how many Nazis use the same service as me. Probably hundreds, since I use one of the three biggest cell providers in the country. What were the ethics, I wondered, of paying a company that was being used to spread hate?

Megan McArdle, on the absurdity of “Nazis on Substack.” H/T Andrew Sullivan

Legalia

The judge-made doctrine of “qualified immunity” makes a mockery of our civil rights laws, over and over and over again, as police get away with outrages. Judge Don Willet is fed up with it:

[O]ne of the justifications so frequently invoked in defense of qualified immunity—that law enforcement officers need “breathing room” to make “split-second judgments”—is altogether absent in this case. This was no fast-moving, high-pressure, life-and-death situation. Those who arrested, handcuffed, jailed, mocked, and prosecuted Priscilla Villarreal, far from having to make a snap decision or heat-of-the-moment gut call, spent several months plotting Villarreal’s takedown, dusting off and weaponizing a dormant Texas statute never successfully wielded in the statute’s near-quarter-century of existence. This was not the hot pursuit of a presumed criminal; it was the premeditated pursuit of a confirmed critic.

Also, while the majority says the officers could not have “predicted” that their thought-out plan to lock up a citizen-journalist for asking questions would violate the First Amendment—a plan cooked up with legal advice from the Webb County District Attorney’s Office, mind you—the majority simultaneously indulges the notion that Villarreal had zero excuse for not knowing that her actions might implicate an obscure, never-used provision of the Texas Penal Code. In other words, encyclopedic jurisprudential knowledge is imputed to Villarreal, but the government agents targeting her are free to plead (or feign) ignorance of bedrock constitutional guarantees.

In the upside-down world of qualified immunity, everyday citizens are demanded to know the law’s every jot and tittle, but those charged with enforcing the law are only expected to know the “clearly established” ones. Turns out, ignorance of the law is an excuse—for government officials. Such blithe “rules for thee but not for me” nonchalance is less qualified immunity than unqualified impunity. The irony would be sweet if Villarreal’s resulting jailtime were not so bitter, and it lays bare the “fair warning” fiction that has become the touchstone of what counts as “clearly established law.”

H/T Eugene Volokh

Politics

Scene: The US Senate, January 6, 2025

Having so recently pledged not to blog about Donald Trump, I find myself needing to clarify that pledge: it does not extend to commenting on procedures by which we elect presidents.

Which brings me to this stunner:

[N]o matter how the Court rules in Trump v. Anderson [the Colorado ballot excusion of Trump], do not expect Senate President Kamala Harris or a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, on January 6, 2025, to count electoral votes cast for Donald Trump who all Democrats believe is disqualified from being re-elected as President by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. The President of the Senate and a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives will not feel bound to follow the ruling of a Republican Supreme Court. And, that is even without factoring in the likelihood that Trump will be convicted of at least some of the 91 charges on which he has been indicted and that he may lose the popular vote even if he wins in the Electoral College.

Do I think this would be unfair and wrong as a matter of constitutional law? Of course, I do! I, after all, signed a brief by three former Republican Attorneys General in Trump v. Anderson saying that Donald Trump is not barred from being re-elected by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. But, if you want to know what Democrats think about this, and what they will do on January 6, 2025, take the time to read Yale Sterling Professor of Law Akhil Reed Amar’s amicus brief, co-written with his brother Vikram, in Trump v. Anderson. The Amar brothers think a Democratic President of the Senate and a Democratic majority in the House are not bound by the Republican Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson. I would be stunned if all of legal academia and the press did not end up agreeing with them along with some conservative legal academics. So, even if Donald Trump were to win in the Electoral College in 2024, Kamala Harris and the House of Representatives would not count his electoral votes. There is simply no way that Donald Trump can win the 2024 presidential election.

Steven Calabresi, who I don’t think is a “Democrats are utterly evil” nut-case.

So imagine January 6, 2021 in reverse. Mob or not (and if the Dems talk about it in advance, there will be a mob or two or four …), the Senate may do what Mike Pence refused to do: throw out electoral votes for the opposing party. And they’ve got one legal heavyweight behind them already, not a John Eastman whispering deranged theories in secret.

If the Senate does that, all bets on a swell coming decade or two are off. Better for the Country would be that Biden win fair and square. Best of all (I suspect, but dare not pray): that Providence remove both of the geriatric candidates from the race, and soon.

The Republican Party is now useless for conservatives

Accepting Dobbs as the long-term compromise [on abortion] at the federal level is desirable and necessary for reasons unrelated to the abortion issue itself. My own belief—as a pro-lifer and a conservative who also cares a great deal about the rest of the conservative agenda—is that the Republican Party is a lost cause. Right-wing populists–the people who now dominate the GOP–ultimately have no enduring interests beyond symbolic culture war skirmishing and maintaining long-term welfare benefits and other economic subsidies important to white people (SNAP and other programs associated rightly or wrongly with nonwhite urbanites will be on the chopping block, while Social Security and Medicare must be held sacrosanct and corporate welfare remains popular). A new center-right coalition will have to be forged, and a party organized to support it, if conservative policies are to be advanced by democratic and legislative means. The Republican Party is no longer available, in a practical sense, as a vehicle for those purposes.

Kevin D. Williamason

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.