Category: Economia

Primary Eve

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

Making modernity

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

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

Insatiable

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

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

Book Criticism on the decline

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

Via Frank Bruni

Flat-out politics

What Democratic elites would prefer to do

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

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

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

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

Ross Douthat, Slouching Toward Kamala Harris

America needs a better Democrat party than that!

Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered

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

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

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

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

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

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

That would be a lovely result in 2026 because:

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

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

War crimes

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

Max Boot.

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

The fallacy of Boromir

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

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

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

Shorts

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

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

T.S. Eliot

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.

In tempore belli

A vast bureaucracy in the service of appetite

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

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

SPLC

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

  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.
  6. Karma is real. OR “paybacks are hell” if you prefer.

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

Trolls and bootlickers — of the Left!

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

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

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

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

Trump

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

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

Time’s up on your stupid war, sir

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

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

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

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

Nick Catoggio

World Historical

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

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

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

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

Conservatives versus power-seekers

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

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

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Wednesday, April 29

White House Corresponents Dinner

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

Nick Catoggio.

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

Royalty meets Pretender

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

Life among the North American Banana Republicans

All items from a Wall Street Journal newsletter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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.

Tuesday April 7

Rapacity

Just another widget

“You want to leave a place better than you found it,” he told me. And for a long time, he felt like he had.

But that was before LifePoint Health, one of the biggest rural-hospital chains in the country, saw his hospital as a distressed asset in need of saving through a ruthless search for efficiencies, and before executives at Apollo Global Management, a private-equity firm whose headquarters looms above the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, began calling the shots. That was before Gose realized that, in the private-equity world, hospitals were just another widget, a tool to make money and nothing more.

Megan Greenwell, The Wyoming Hospital Upending the Logic of Private Equity

Digital robber barons

These claims to lawless space are remarkably similar to those of the robber barons of an earlier century. Like the men at Google, the late-nineteenth-century titans claimed undefended territory for their own interests, declared the righteousness of their self-authorizing prerogatives, and defended their new capitalism from democracy at any cost. At least in the US case, we have been here before. Economic historians describe the dedication to lawlessness among the Gilded Age “robber barons” for whom Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism played the same role that Hayek, Jensen, and even Ayn Rand play for today’s digital barons.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Legalia

The hills worth dying on

Like any of its predecessors, the Trump administration appeals only a small number of losses in the lower courts and then takes an even smaller share—the cases it thinks it is most likely to win—to the Supreme Court. And how is that going? The Supreme Court has rejected Trump on tariffs and on domestic deployment of the National Guard, and it seems almost certain to reject the administration on birthright citizenship. The court has stymied the president’s efforts to purge the Federal Reserve and to deport people without due process under the Alien Enemies Act. Where the Trump administration’s top policy preferences have been in conflict with the law—as they often will be in a lawless administration—the Supreme Court has reliably sided with the law.

…

The court has, indeed, emerged as the federal government’s preeminent conservative institution. That is not to say conservative in the sense of politically right-wing—the American right, currently in revolutionist mode, has ceased to be conservative in any meaningful sense, and the high court’s conservatism can be seen in its limiting of Donald Trump’s abuses and pretenses as clearly as anywhere. The Supreme Court, rather, is conservative in the sense of defending and fortifying the American constitutional order, which is what it is there to do. In anno Domini 2026, a branch of government that is content to simply try its best to do its job is as great a display of conservatism as a realistic American could hope to see.

Kevin D. Williamson (bold added).

The ramifications of the boldface observation above seems lost on the nihilists who want to tear down the courts as no more than political hacks in robes.

But I’m starting to think that “the cases it thinks it is most likely to win” misses something. Unless Trump has no competent legal advisers, I’m inclined to modify that to “the cases it thinks it is most likely to win or the hills it’s willing to die on.”

The stupid ideas that Trump is willing to defend all the way to SCOTUS probably have some kind of coherent common impulse behind them. If you connected the dots, I don’t think the picture would look much like the American I grew up in. We owe more to SCOTUS than the nihilists are willing to acknowledge.

An Aha! moment

I just learned, in the Advisory Opinions podcast’s discussion about the Supreme Court’s Chiles v. Salazar decision, that the legislative and other advocates of banning “conversion therapy” do not really have categorical “mounting evidence that conversion therapy is associated with increased depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts.” Rather, “the lawyer for the state had to acknowledge that all of the studies that they were basing this on were aversive therapy, you know, electroshock therapy or other types of behavioral therapy, um, that were quite different.”

There was no evidence that mere counseling (“talk therapy”) about sexual orientation was harmful, and it likely contributed to Ms. Chiles’ SCOTUS victory that talk therapy was all she did.

As the ACLU’s Chase Strangio had to admit to SCOTUS in an earlier case, the narrative that denying “gender-affirming care” leads to suicidality in adolescents is not supported by evidence. Now another progressive narrative about adolescent gender dysphoria bites the dust.

I’m starting to get the feeling that someone with an agenda is just making this stuff up.

Legal abuse

Though vexing in this situation, it probably is for the best that we do not have a law under which the prosecution of Pam Bondi would be convenient—if Bondi’s career as attorney general shows us anything at all, it is that in our current debased political environment the DOJ could not be entrusted with a statute containing provisions flexible enough to treat as a criminal matter such abuses of power as Bondi’s. A law meant to curtail such abuses of power would, ironically, almost certainly facilitate new ones.

Kevin D. Williamson

Politics

Losing trust

Delta Airlines, you might have noticed, does not run negative TV ads about USAir. It does not show pictures of the crash of USAir Flight 427, with a voice-over saying: “USAir, airline of death. Going to Pittsburgh? Fly Delta instead.”

And McDonald’s, you might also have noticed, does not run ads reminding viewers that Jack in the Box hamburgers once killed two customers. Why? Because Delta and McDonald’s know that if the airline and fast-food industries put on that kind of advertising, America would soon be riding trains and eating box-lunch tuna sandwiches.

Yet every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.

Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter.

Trump Needs Smarter Sycophants

The former secretary of homeland security, the jettisoned attorney general and the embattled secretary of defense have often seemed like President Trump’s ideal cabinet officials: selected for televisual looks and energy, lacking any political constituency apart from Trump himself, serving without qualm as pure conduits of his will. So their struggles offer a lesson for Republicans contemplating service in this administration’s 33 (but who’s counting?) remaining months: What Trump appears to want and what he actually wants are not exactly the same thing.

The seeming desire of the president is for loyalty, sycophancy and TV-ready swagger. He wants to turn on Fox News and see his top officials performing like reality-show characters in the drama of his administration. He wants to sit in a cabinet meeting and listen to a litany of his accomplishments. He wants the decisions made in the West Wing or at Mar-a-Lago to be simply rubber-stamped in his departmental fiefs.

He wants all that, but at the same time he also wants victory rather than defeat, and he definitely doesn’t want embarrassment. His metrics for success are unusual by normal presidential standards: He has a high tolerance for unpopularity, to put it mildly, and a remarkable shamelessness around corruption. But there is a point at which, even inside his cocoon, Trump senses that things aren’t going well for him. And then sycophancy doesn’t work, and it doesn’t matter if you were acting on his orders; you will be punished for that unsuccessful service just as surely as if you’d tried to thwart his aims.

Ross Douthat

No Kings

I’m all for protests, it’s our right as Americans. But nailing down the reason for No Kings is more like spinning the Wheel of Defeatists Complaints. Signs noted fascism, wars, school funding, billionaires, LGBT issues, allowing illegal immigration, even the Epstein files. And really, the rallies are mostly about Donald Trump’s winning the election. Forget protests, they’re more of a massive primal scream therapy session.

Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal

This jumped out as a bit of sanity amid a column that otherwise made me want to cancel my WSJ subscription.

I haven’t gone to a No Kings March for this reason. The soup lacks a worthy theme.

Miscellany

Gay versus Queer

I was gay, I had faced discrimination, and I had fought for my rights. But now that gay rights had become “LGBTQ” rights, I found myself force-teamed with a lot of people whose values were nothing like mine. I didn’t experience my life as a rebellion against reality. I didn’t want to be an identity insurgent. I wanted to participate in the world as a normal person.

The most important thing I learned at Columbia was this: I am gay, but I am not queer. My sexuality doesn’t obligate me to embrace a particular ideology or to reject the moral inheritance of the society that made my life possible. Progress happens by acknowledging shared human values and working within our reality rather than declaring war on it.

Ben Apel, I’m Gay, but That Doesn’t Make Me ‘Queer’ (gift link).

(Andrew Sullivan has often made the same point, with less emphasis on the “critical theory” aspect.)

So what’s the new “learn to program”?

I’ve been on the faculty at Duke University for five years now, and this past one has been the most challenging and the strangest by far.

That’s not about Duke. It’s about higher education. It’s about America. It’s about dynamics — chiefly, this country’s tilt toward authoritarianism and the rapidly accelerating advances of A.I. — that render our tomorrows even hazier than usual. None of us knows what we’re in for and up against, and that confusion crystallizes on college campuses, which are by definition gateways to the future. They’re supposed to leave students with maps, routes, a destination. Not with compasses whose needles gyrate this way and that.

For much of the past decade, college students flocked to computer science, wagering that few majors were surer on-ramps to employment. A.I. has exploded that roadway. I teach in Duke’s school of public policy, where many students point themselves toward jobs in government or nonprofit groups. The ax that fell in the first months of Trump’s present term deforested that landscape.

Those are just examples, and this is hardly the first generation of young people to face disruption and major economic shifts. I can’t say just how unusual, in a historic sense, the unease that I feel around me is.

But I can tell you that my previous nine semesters at Duke are no rival for this one when it comes to the number of students who initiate conversations about what they should do next, what they should expect after that, where the country is headed, whether they’ll have any real say in that.

Frank Bruni, Teaching in an American University Feels Very Strange Right Now

Don’t forget: luxury beliefs

There are all kinds of ideas and policies that would have bad effects if implemented. But there is a special class of bad ideas and policies that proliferate in good part because those who hold them, being insulated from their effects, have never seriously thought about the consequences that would ensue from their implementation. The reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves.

Yasha Mounk

Regular features

Shorts

  • I was thinking this week that Mr. Trump’s vision of himself as primarily a dealmaker is unsuited to a necessity of presidential leadership, which involves laying out the logic of a difficult case. Deal makers gain advantage through strategies that don’t necessarily involve transparency and forthrightness. (Peggy Noonan)
  • Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth uses language the way an adolescent boy uses Axe body spray — subtlety’s for wimps. (John McWhorter)
  • If four out of ten Americans cannot see how truly awful this is, how vast and long-lasting the domestic and global damage this president is inflicting on this country is, our 250 years really are up. (Andrew Sullivan).
  • In The Times, Yonatan Touval stressed the limits of the spycraft and technology behind Israel’s development of strike coordinates in Iran: “That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting. Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation.” (via Frank Bruni)
  • The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
  • What is a TikTok video if not a digital Dorito? (Cal Newport; H/T Frank Bruni)
  • Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. (Isaac Asimov via the Economist)

Elsewhere is 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.

Saturday March 28, 2026

Universities

There is a difference between an understandable overreaction to a real problem and derangement, pure and simple. The Manhattan Institute’s statement, with the incendiary, idiotic, and dangerous suggestion that “the universities” have “declared war” on Americans is the latter, not the former. And there is no arguing with derangement. There are plenty of conservative thinkers out there, in places like Compact magazine, who have made serious and sensible and often deservedly harsh critiques of tendencies within the American university system. With them, I’m happy to talk. With a ranting deranged person (and I’m a New Yorker—I have plenty of experience in this department), you need just to walk away.

David A. Bell, Derangement. I quote this not because I think all is well, or even that the Manhattan Institute got this all wrong, but because I appreciate that there’s just no arguing with some people over their obsessions.

Fairness

I and my colleagues at YourMorals.org had done a poor job of capturing conservative notions of fairness, which focused on proportionality, not equality. People should get what they deserve, based on what they have done. We had assumed that equality and proportionality were both part of the Fairness foundation, but the questions we used to measure this foundation were mostly about equality and equal rights. We therefore found that liberals cared more about fairness, and that’s what had made these economic conservatives so angry at me. They believed that liberals don’t give a damn about fairness (as proportionality).

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind

The exaggerated Rule of Law

Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes based, I would say, one the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in interpreting and manipulating law. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required. Nobody will mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk. It would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn: Harvard Commencement Address (A World Split Apart)

Traditional Catholics versus tradCaths

Matthew Schmitz suggests in the Washington Post (The unreligious religiosity of Christian identity politics), among other things, that a new Religious Right (e.g., Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, Florida Gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback) are “tradCaths,” “drawn to the traditional Latin mass and alienated from the church hierarchy.”

  1. Sometimes, it helps for someone to point out the obvious. This helpfully fits part of my picture of the current Religious Right.
  2. At least two of Schmitz’s three examples lean heavily antisemitic, unlike the dispensational premillenialists in a big chunk of the Protestant Religious Right; that could play out weirdly.
  3. As an Orthodox Christian, I’ve generally felt closer to Catholics than to Protestants these past few decades, and I have much sympathy for traditional Catholics pushing back against their Church becoming crypto-Protestant.*** But I’m not sure that these “tradCaths” are the same as traditional Catholics or that they’re an improvement over a dispensational premillenialist Religious Right.

That’s all I have to say for now, since I haven’t fully digested this new “data.”

SAVE Act

By itself, the SAVE Act seems likely to hurt Republicans more than Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. (The Republicans seem not to have grasped the demographic shifts that have made them the party of the less-than-fully-diligent.) Because it’s likely to backfire, I’m disinclined to lose much sleep over the fate of that devious law.

But the SAVE Act doesn’t stand alone. It’s part of a multifront Republican plan to corrupt future elections.

In a February podcast with Dan Bongino, former deputy director of the FBI, Trump urged that “Republicans should say … we should take over the voting … nationalize the voting,” because of what he claimed were “crooked” state-run elections. Trump has suggested the federal restrictions he wants can guarantee victory for his party. “For 50 years, we won’t lose a race,” he said in a Feb. 19 speech in Rome, Georgia.

David Ignatius

So because I think SAVE is a bad law, constitutionally dubious even if the supposed problem it addresses were real instead of a Trump invention,** I’m opposing it.

Coincidence?

The Wall Street Journal investigates The Well-Timed Trades Made Moments Before Trump’s Policy Surprises. This table is synthesized from that article.

DateEvent DescriptionMarket Activity DetailsOutcome / Reaction
March 23, 2026Trump postponed strikes on Iranian power plants via Truth Social post (~7:05 a.m. ET)$760M+ oil futures traded in a 2-minute window (6:49–6:51 a.m. ET); similar spike in S&P 500 futures; no clear catalyst.Oil prices dipped during volume spike; fell sharply after post; stocks rallied. Critics allege insider trading but no evidence found.
Feb. 28, 2026U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran beginCrypto prediction market Polymarket saw “suspected insiders” make $1.2M betting on U.S. strike date.Polymarket tightened rules against insider trading.
Jan. 2, 2026Trump ordered military operation against Venezuelan leader Maduro late at nightMystery trader placed ~$34K on Maduro losing power bets; final wager under an hour before order; earned $400K+ profit.Identity unknown; led to congressional bill proposal banning federal officials from trading on nonpublic info.
Oct. 10, 2025Trump threatened 100% tariffs on China after rare-earth export restrictionsTwo accounts made large bets on bitcoin and ether falling just before Trump’s tariff post; closed positions for $160M profit.Could be reaction to China’s restrictions; one account later lost $128M on a bad bet; suspicion but alternative explanations exist.
April 9, 2025Trump paused “Liberation Day” tariffs, reversing a stock selloffBullish call options on S&P 500 ETF (SPY) surged just after 1 p.m. ET, right before Trump’s post; bets paid off if index rose sharply.Some see insider trading signs; others attribute to positive Treasury auction results; Democratic calls for investigation dismissed by allies.

Make of it what you will. My Hypothesis: All the crazy stuff Donald Trump does, especially reversing course repeatedly, is to allow his friends collectively (possibly including family, though probably not directly because of the risk) to make billions of dollars on this kind of “insider trading.”

Shorts

  • Our culture’s true religion is the Second World War, a faith centered not on the positive moral example of Jesus Christ but the negative one of Adolf Hitler. Perhaps we still believe that Jesus is good, but not with the same fervour and conviction that we believe Nazism is evil.* (Alec Ryrie via Christopher Gehrz)
  • Trump in a nutshell (even if it is fake)
  • In order to conduct fair elections, the county elections board must have members who are willing to accept the basic proposition of any democracy: that in a given election, their party can lose. (Dana Barrett and Mo Ivory, of Fulton County Georgia, How We Stopped a Bid to Seat Election Deniers in Fulton County)
  • Self-driving cars must be understood as one more escalation in the war to claim and monetize every moment of life that might otherwise offer a bit of private head space. (Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive)
  • NOMINEE, n. A modest gentleman shrinking from the distinction of private life and diligently seeking the honorable obscurity of public office. (Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary,” via George Will)
  • Liberals are people who would like to see things improved, and conservatives are people who would like to see things not worsened. (Daniel Patrick Moynihan via George Will)
  • “This is like the horrible, lame-dad cover band version of the worst of American foreign policy,” said Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy. (Of the Iran war via Michelle Goldberg)
  • The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it. (Jonathan V. Last)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld (the real spicy stuff)

Notes

  • * In case you’re unaware, there are heretics who think Winston Churchill was the baddie in World War II, and they may be multiplying in internet petri dishes.
  • ** “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof ….” But there’s a second clause that casts shade on the absoluteness of state power. See this annotation from Cornell Law School.
  • *** I probably should note that my closest traditional Catholic acquaintance turned out to be a pretty sick puppy, and we’re estranged now. Maybe my admiration-in-theory should take a closer look at how traditional Catholics trend in practice.

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.

February 19, 2026

Never smoked?

This is the 50th anniversary of one of the times I quit smoking. The last time I quit was maybe 7 to 9 years later (of that time, I lost track) – long enough ago that, as I understand it, my history of smoking is no longer medically relevant. Some of my medical records even say, incorrigibly as history but perhaps accurately as a medical term of art, “never smoked.”

The cultural shift against smoking in my lifetime has been remarkable.

Punked

[Poet Rolfe] Humphries may be best known, these days for a literary joke. He had received an assignment from Poetry magazine for a “Draft Ode for a Phi Beta Kappa Occasion,” in which, the editors asked, there needed to be one classical reference per line. Humphries sent in the requested poem, which appeared in the June 1939 issue, and began: “Niobe’s daughters yearn to the womb again, / Ionians bright and fair, to the chill stone.”

But the poet nursed a hated of Nicholas Murray Butler, the long-time president of Columbia University (who, it must be said, had no editorial role at the Chicago-based Poetry magazine), and so Humphries built the poem as an acrostic, the initial letters of each line spelling out “Nicholas Murray Butler is a horses ass.”

“Not being accustomed to hold manuscripts up to the mirror or to test them for cryptograms, the editors recently accepted and printed a poem containing a concealed scurrilous phrase aimed at a well-known person,” the magazine apologized later that summer, and I have to say that while I appreciate snide poetry, my sympathies are with the editors who got used in the incident.

Joseph Bottum, commenting on the poet and his poem A Song for Mardi Gras.

Perspective

When it’s the most powerful nation on earth conducting a decades-long campaign of retaliative obliteration against multiple countries (one of which had precisely nothing to do with the inciting incident), leaving upward of a million civilians dead, revenge becomes a temporarily useful virtue. When it’s a herder on the other side of the planet burning an American flag after a drone operator in an Idaho strip mall mistook his children for terrorists, revenge becomes grotesque, the irredeemable realm of savages.

Omar El Akkadm One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Ah, those touchy conservatives!

Some Slate headlines over the past few days:

A New Version of Woke Is Coming. Conservatives Aren’t Going to Like It.

Why a Floppy-Haired 27-Year-Old Olympic Skier Is Making Conservatives So Very, Very Angry 

Conservatives Are Terrified That People Like Me Are Buying Guns Now.

Do you see the theme there?

… In the current era, when right-wing rhetoric amounts to very little more than sneering and bullying—“liberal tears,” “cry more,” etc.—it should be no surprise to see our friends on the left arguing that if x discomfits or hurts conservatives, then x must be good, which is the subtext of those Slate headlines. But I do not think that this sort of thing is really a reaction to the Trumpist style, inasmuch as it precedes the emergence of that style as the dominant form of expression on the right. “Your uptight Christian parents are going to hate this!” is a very, very old marketing ploy, one part “Banned in Boston!” and one part “Republicans pounce!” Incidentally, I spent a lot of time with right-wing gun nuts, and I have yet to meet one who is upset that nice suburban liberals are buying firearms—and the Slate report has not convinced me that these fearful conservatives actually exist beyond the anecdotal level.

Kevin D. Williamson (bold added).

Conservatisms

I graduated from Chicago in 1983, and at about the same time a group of people graduated from Dartmouth. We all moved to Washington about the same time. I knew them, and some of them have become famous, like Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but I came out of Chicago earnestly reading Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and all that, and my friends and I became pro-conservative. But the Dartmouth Review folks were not pro-conservative, they were anti-left. So in retrospect, I can see how big and vast a difference there was between people that I thought were part of the same movement. The sad news is that they now dominate conservatism and the Republican Party. Whereas my friends became Never Trumpers.

David Brooks

Caricatures

I spent most of my adult life thinking ill of [Jesse] Jackson, probably because of his infamous “Hymietown” remark in the 1984 presidential race … Then, about seven years ago, I met him for breakfast in New York. The man I spent an hour with was gracious, reflective, engaged, knowledgeable and more than a touch sad, probably because he was aware of his Parkinson’s diagnosis. It reminded me that people are never the caricature that others make of them, and that there can be a lot to like and learn from people with whom we often disagree.

Bret Stephens

Shorts

  • It is not easy being transgressive in an era when there are few norms remaining to transgress. Undaunted, he tries. (George Will of VP JD Vance)
  • After cancer, I feel like a connection to God, whatever that is, is kind of the whole point of this exercise on this planet. (James Van Der Beek)
  • Attention without feeling is only a report. (Poet Mary Oliver)
  • I’m at peace, and I’m excited, but my Oura Ring will tell you I’m not sleeping well. (David Brooks on his departure from the New York Times to take an interesting new position at Yale.)
  • The problem is that he overreacts. It’s like going to a doctor with acne and the doctor says, “You know what will fix acne? Decapitation.” That’s Trump. What he’s doing with scientific research is horrific. (David Brooks again.)
  • The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. (Margaret Thatcher via Bret Stephens)
  • President Trump — who’d dip himself in gold if he were confident that it wouldn’t seal his mouth shut and prevent him from yammering. (Frank Bruni)
  • Someone who had been a Catholic longer than five minutes would perhaps grasp the irony of claiming a minority group had dual loyalty. (Sarah Stewart on the antisemitism of Carol Prejean Boller, washed-up beauty queen, “influencer,” and recent Catholic convert.)
  • My job is to turn out students who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck. (A headmaster at the Stowe School, quoted by David Brooks.)
  • Vigilence is metabolically expensive. (Lisa Feldman Barrett)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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.

February 16, 2026

Corriging the incorrigible

For some years now, I’ve been tearing my hair out over the faddish dogmas of adolescent gender dysphoria — the dogmas that treated as axiomatic the appropriateness of medical and surgical interventions for kids claiming gender dysphoria, and opposition as genocidal. Let’s try that again: dogmas that insisted on allowing sexual mutilation of kids experiencing some discomfort about their biological sex and that hated and defamed anyone urging caution.

The dogmas seemed incorrigible. And then, just like that, they seem to gotten corriged, or whatever the participle is for corrigible. The turning point appears to have been the Cass Report, which was officially rejected by the U.S. medical establishment but appears to have been tacitly adopted in public discourse and acquiesced in even among the medical establishment.

It doesn’t hurt that there’s been a malpractice verdict against some medical butchers with a $2 million dollar damage award to the breastless female plaintiff.

So, my inner Eeyore sometimes gets stymied by something, somewhere, getting better. Gloria in excelsis deo.

A southern stoic gets religion

In the mid-1950s, Walker Percy’s southern gentry stoicism pointed one way, his new Catholicism another:

“Faith had led him away from the plantation. Philosophy had given faith an intellectual basis and a practical rationale. Far from turning him abstract, as Shelby Foote had warned him it would do, philosophy had coaxed him down off the magic mountain and onto level ground to consider the mortal struggle of everydayness. It emancipated him from his Uncle Will and the scheme of Stoic noblesse oblige. It helped him to solve his own problems and ponder the affairs of the day. It made him, finally, an ordinary man.”

Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own. I can’t put my finger on just why, but I think the short section including this quote was worth the price of the book (and the hours I’ve already spent reading it).

Maybe I just don’t know what time it is

Dreher’s writing is a useful indication of just how angry and pessimistic even the most thoughtful conservatives have become in recent years. He seems to see America as a hellscape, drained of religion and hope, drugged and distracted by the false gods of the internet. The renewal he imagines is not the sunlit, future-oriented conservatism of the Reagan era, and he doesn’t look to the Founding Fathers for inspiration. If anything, Dreher’s compass points in the opposite direction. He wants his country to turn back toward Europe—not the homogenized, secular continent of today but premodern Christian Europe, before the Enlightenment and the disenchantment set in.

…

His greatest admiration is reserved for people who commit themselves to “a fixed place and way of life,” as he wrote about Saint Benedict.

Yet Dreher seems resigned to living as a rootless exile, shorn of his family and condemned to wander a landscape of what the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman—one of Dreher’s favorite thinkers—called “liquid modernity.”

Robert F. Worth, Rod Dreher Thinks the Enlightenment Was a Mistake.

One additional, and very disheartening, item from this story:

But lately Dreher’s insights have come with an ominous political corollary. He believes our institutions are so rotten that they need a good slap from people like Trump and Orbán, even if it means losing some of them. “Maybe what’s being born now will be worse, I dunno,” he wrote as Trump and Elon Musk were using DOGE to dismantle the federal bureaucracy in early 2025. “We’ll see. But bring it on. I’ve had it.”

I quote this to observe that “bring it on” equals “burn it down,” and that glee about burning down institutions because something better might rise from the ashes is the paradigmatic marker of a revolutionary, not a conservative.

Maybe I just don’t know “what time it is.”

Political

I’ve generally been relegating political commentary to “Elsewhere in Tipsyworld,” below. But these are too important.

America’s concentration camps

“A concentration camp exists wherever a government holds groups of civilians outside the normal legal process — sometimes to segregate people considered foreigners or outsiders, sometimes to punish,” Andrea Pitzer writes in “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.” Conditions within the administration’s detention facilities certainly meet the bill.

Here’s how a Russian family described its four-month ordeal at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in an interview with NBC News:

“Worms in their food. Guards shouting orders and snatching toys from small hands. Restless nights under fluorescent lights that never fully go dark. Hours in line for a single pill. “We left one tyranny and came to another kind of tyranny,” Nikita said in Russian. “Even in Russia, they don’t treat children like this.”

Or consider this ProPublica exposé of the same facility, focused on the children who have been caught in the administration’s immigration dragnet.

Kheilin Valero from Venezuela, who was being held with her 18-month-old, Amalia Arrieta, said shortly after they were detained following an ICE appointment on Dec. 11 in El Paso, Texas, the baby fell ill. For two weeks, she said, medical staff gave her ibuprofen and eventually antibiotics, but Amalia’s breathing worsened to the point that she was hospitalized in San Antonio for 10 days. She was diagnosed with Covid-19 and RSV. “Because she went so many days without treatment, and because it’s so cold here, she developed pneumonia and bronchitis,” Kheilin said. “She was malnourished, too, because she was vomiting everything.”

…

During the 2024 presidential campaign, I asked readers to think seriously about Trump’s plan to remove millions of people from the United States:

Now, imagine the conditions that might prevail for hundreds of thousands of people crammed into hastily constructed camps, the targets of a vicious campaign of demonization meant to build support for their detention and deportation. If undocumented immigrants really are, as Trump says, “poisoning the blood of our country,” then how do we respond? What do we do about poison? Well, we neutralize it.

What we see now, with the immigration dragnets in American cities and the horrific conditions in the administration’s detention facilities, is what the president promised in his campaign. He said he was going to punish immigrants for being immigrants, and here he is, punishing immigrants for being immigrants, with every tool he has at his disposal.

Jamelle Bouie (gift link)

Are you cool with the concentration camps, Rod?

History Rhymes

With his contempt for elections he did not win, Lenin put an end to all semblance of democratic procedure. He made it clear that he would insist on ruling whether he had popular support or not. The legitimacy of Bolshevik rule was to be based on Marxist theory, not on the sovereignty of the people, and that made a police state ruled by force inevitable.

Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire.

“Why haven’t you killed anyone?”

Several decades ago I realised I had a temper, and I went to see a specialist about this. I didn’t want anger slouching into my approaching parenting. How do you feel the second before you erupt? they asked.

Vulnerable.

That was the gold, that two minute conversation. I’m generally wired now to recognise the state and stay there as long as necessary.

But the red mist comes down and I can’t control it, I said. The specialist looked me right in the eye:

Then why haven’t you killed anyone?

Learnt behaviour. I would go far, but not that far. They showed me I could create a new boundary, and through repetition, walk it into my psyche.

Martin Shaw, storyteller and author of the New York Times bestseller Liturgies of the Wild.

Anti-Zionism versus Antisemitism

There is a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I just know there is.

Surely it’s theoretically possible to oppose the state of Israel’s behavior without animus toward Jews per se, right?

Oddly, in the realm of thought experiments, it’s even possible to hate Jews and be pro-Zionist, on the theory that Zion is where all the hated Jews should be sent. (I don’t think I’ve seen this kind of jackalope in the wild.)

But whatever the difference is, I cannot say that the line is “clear” because people keep insisting they (or their ideological allies) are merely anti-Zionist, not anti-Semite when it seems reasonably clear to me that they’re anti-Semites.

With the caveat that I hurt especially for the plight of Palestinian Christians (especially the Orthodox) at the hands of the Israeli government, I’m staying away from either label.

The AI Revolution

Damon Linker is in fairly close alignment with my hunches on AI:

What do you think is likely to follow from tens of millions of white-collar, college-educated workers finding over the coming years that their entire sector of the economy has been fed into a woodchipper? That they are becoming unemployed, are being forced to undertake a job search at roughly the same time as just about everyone else who held similar positions, and must face the reality that their practical, on-the-job experience and skills have become worthless in a workplace transformed by AI?

What will they have to do to make a living? How will they need to reinvent themselves? Will corporate middle managers need to repurpose themselves as nurse’s aides or orderlies, cleaning bedpans and changing soiled sheets? Or go back to school, taking on a second pile of student loans at midlife, to learn a new, more marketable skill? Or will AI be taking over so many jobs that require specialized education that they will be forced to downgrade their expectations still further, to seek out work in the service sector, for dramatically lower pay and status? Or scramble to learn how to use AI and then attempt to make a go of it as some kind of entrepreneur in a marketplace flooded with such self-starters, each trying to devise and market the Next Big Thing that might catapult them into a more comfortable income bracket? A few will do well at this; most will not.

Then this killer footnote:

For those inclined to discount the likelihood of such destabilizing events by predicting the adoption of a Universal Basic Income in the wake of widespread AI-induced job losses, I tend to think this gets the lines of causality wrong. There is no way the rich in this country would tolerate the imposition of tax rates necessary to pay for a UBI unless proverbial or literal guns were pointed at their heads. What I’m describing at the end of this post is the scenario that puts the guns there. Whether a UBI follows from it is another matter ….

Freddie DeBoer, on the other hand, isn’t buying all the revolution talk.

Shorts

  • The Bad Bunny dancing was too sexy, apparently, and also, it was almost entirely in Spanish, so TPUSA planned ahead to make a separate show with nothing sexy at all and everything in the Queen’s English. Which is why they tapped Kid Rock, conservative America’s greatest living artist. (Nellie Bowles)
  • “The ‘woke’ halftime show features a wedding, people dancing joyously and smiling. The conservative alternative was a grayscale grievance fest,” – Corey Walker.
  • Life involves divisions of labor, and conservative values just don’t make for groundbreaking art or incredible sourdough loaves, I don’t know why but it’s just the truth and we all know it. Like how the new conservative-run Kennedy Center is shutting down for two years, since too many artists were flaking. All the people with conservative values are busy at home or the office not doing art. (Nellie Bowles)
  • “Trump is delusional, okay? You need to know this. Trump is sick. He’s a delusional person … I know first-hand from people talking to the president,” – Nick Fuentes via Andrew Sullivan
  • “Small reminder: if you took conservative positions on the Constitution, the economy, foreign policy, or basic morality and then radically changed them solely because a Republican was elected president who changed the party’s positions, you were never really a conservative, you were just a Republican,” – Jonah Goldberg.
  • “My PhD student is being advised left and right to let Claude do her lit review, write her qualifying presentation, summarize the books she needs to read to prepare. She is holding fast to the conviction that this slow, frictionful work is the work she signed on for. Immensely proud of her.” (Sara Hendren on micro.blog) I guess (1) that’s the way of the world today, but (2) there are conscientious objectors.
  • “… a deliriously verbose writer on Substack.” Robert F. Worth, of Rod Dreher, in Worth’s Atlantic article Rod Dreher Thinks the Enlightenment Was a Mistake.

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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.

Thursday, 12/18/25

Quietly grassing up the neighbor

Of the Bondi Beach terrorist shootings by Muslim men Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram (unconfirmed by police at this writing) and the heroic intervention of one Ahmed al-Ahmed:

Let it be said, and said with firmness and gratitude, that a Muslim fruit seller named Ahmed al-Ahmed rushed one of the gunmen and disarmed him, saving Jewish lives and taking a couple of bullets himself for his trouble. May God bless that brave man. Here is video of him courageously tackling the gunman. This brings to mind something I was told back in 2002 by a Jewish friend who worked in counterterrorism. Be careful not to accuse every Muslim, she said. Some of our best sources are Muslims within Muslim communities who hate what they’re seeing, but know that if they speak out publicly against it, they will be killed. So they come to us quietly.

Rod Dreher

I wish we could figure out what makes many Muslims exemplary citizens, others murderous fanatics. Though I reject Islam as a false religion, I don’t want to think it’s simply that the former don’t take it seriously.

I have a theory, but it’s at a high enough level of generality that it’s not much use, I fear: that Islam, like Evangelicalism, has no authority beyond a sacred text, so Imams/Preachers can twist the text as they wish, limited only by what their congregants will tolerate.

The Other Terrorists

“Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years,” the Center for Strategic & International Studies concluded after examining terror plots in the United States from 1994 to May of this year. “Right-wing extremists perpetrated two-thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.”

Nicholas Kristof, The Lawbreakers Trump Loves (August 29, 2020)

AI moves fast, breaks things

A woman in a service industry, an immigrant to America from Eastern Europe who’s been here about 20 years, took me aside recently. Her eldest child, a senior in high school, is looking around at local colleges. She was worried about AI and asked for advice on what her son might study so that in four years he could get a job. We asked ChatGPT, which advised “embodied in-person work” such as heating and air conditioning technician, pool cleaner. She wasn’t happy with that. She’d worked herself to the bone to get her son higher in the world than she is. She wants him to own the pool.

Peggy Noonan, Trump may be losing his touch

Grievance Memoirs

Political memoirs tend to fall into recognizable categories.

There is the sanitized precampaign memoir, gauzy life stories mixed with vague policy projects and odes to American goodness. There is the postcampaign memoir, usually by the losers, assessing the strategy and sifting through the wreckage. There are memoirs by up and comers who dream of joining the arena and by aging politicos rewriting their careers once more before the obits start to land. There are memoirs by former staff members who realize that proximity to power gives them a good story and memoirs by journalists who chronicle power so closely that they imagine themselves its protagonists.

But a recent spate of books highlights the presence of a new category, one well suited to our time: the grievance memoir. In their books, Eric Trump (“Under Siege”), Karine Jean-Pierre (“Independent”) and Olivia Nuzzi (“American Canto”) are all outraged by affronts real and imagined, fixated on nefarious, often unspecified enemies, obsessed with “the narrative” over the facts and oblivious to their complicity in the conditions they decry.

The authors (a third child embracing on to his father’s legal and political grudges, a former White House press secretary groping for a new brand, a boutique political journalist enmeshed in a self-made scandal) are animated, above all, by a certainty that they’ve been wronged not just by people or institutions but also by broader forces. They are ancillary characters inflating themselves into victims, heroes, even symbols. It is the inevitable memoir style for a moment when everyone feels resentful, oppressed, overlooked — in a word, aggrieved.

Carlos Lozado (who’s famous among his New York Times colleagues as a voracious book-reader).

Add to Lozado’s list a longish article by Jacob Savage in Compact magazine, which Rod Dreher found “one of the most powerful essays I’ve read all year.” Its gist seems to be that straight, white, young men can’t catch a break any more – for reasons predating AI.

Ross Douthat thinks Savage has a point; that Douthat has an opinion suggests that Dreher isn’t just playing Chicken Little again.

I’m fortunate to be chronologically beyond gathering personal straight white male grievance anecdotes (and that my grandson is thrilled at, not resigned to, the prospect of a sort of Shop Class As Soulcraft career).

Are we the baddies?

Remizov and other conservative democrats complain that modern Western liberalism is in fact anti-democratic, as it tramples on national traditions and subordinates national authorities to international ones and to the impersonal forces of globalization.

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism. This book is pretty good at giving the gift to see ourselves as others see us.

When your only tool is anger, every little problem looks infuriating

Trump has never shined in moments that call for dignity and restraint … This is what makes Trump’s post about the Reiners not just despicable and cruel but also bad for the country. In moments of national mourning or trauma, a president can seek to bring people together … But not Trump. He finds the most divisive way to insert himself … His choices … take moments that could be unifying—surely Americans of all political views can agree on the greatness of When Harry Met Sally and The Princess Bride—and turn them into opportunities for anger.

Which is, in effect, Trump’s political project.

David Graham, Trump Blames Rob Reiner for His Own Murder

Shorts

  • I like ebooks because nobody can tell that I’m performative reading. (@restlesslens on micro.blog)
  • Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. (Gustave Flaubert)
  • Insofar is not the same as inasmuch, and I don’t know why the current style is to break the former into three words.
  • I remember mocking people for thinking the Covid vaccine was Bill Gates’ way of getting microchips into us. Hmmm.
  • This is the paradox of politics: Every time you solve a major problem, you’re removing a weapon from your political arsenal. (Peggy Noonan, Trump may be losing his touch)
  • If “TDS” is the tendency to become irrationally obsessed with Donald Trump and project that obsession onto everyone else, then somebody is indeed deranged, and it wasn’t Rob Reiner. (David Graham, Trump Blames Rob Reiner for His Own Murder.
  • A tool always implies at least one small story[:] There is a situation; something needs doing. (L.M. Sacasas)
  • Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it. (L.M. Sacasas)
  • After this awful weekend, Trump has once again lowered the bar for what we can expect from the president. (The Free Press, Mr. President, Don’t Mock the Dead)
  • The odds are good, but the goods are odd. (Advice given to incoming women at Georgia Tech).

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

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.

Thursday, 12/4/25

Luxury Beliefs

There are all kinds of ideas and policies that would have bad effects if implemented. But there is a special class of bad ideas and policies that proliferate in good part because those who hold them, being insulated from their effects, have never seriously thought about the consequences that would ensue from their implementation. The reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves.

Yasha Mounk, Luxury Beliefs Are Real.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the young man who coined this phrase. It strikes me as analogous to the whoring and wenching of the rich and famous which does not, shall we say, translate well to kids in The Projects (but is more like a transgressive raised-middle-finger than a “belief”).

The Hive Mind

Consider this ominous anecdote from Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin:

I require substantial writing in my 400-person U.S. history survey course—but now I largely receive 400 variations on the same essay. The wording, structure, transitions, tone, even the closing sentences are largely identical.

This is eerily like the zombie-ish characters in Pluribus, who all say the exact same thing.

But in Mintz’s case, this is real behavior from real students. They have voluntarily abandoned their individual opinions and embraced the hive mind.

And the hive mind is available to all of them via Chat GPT.

…

I actually take some solace in TV series such as Pluribus and Severance. They show how anxious we are about this threat. At some deep level in our souls, we know that the destruction of our autonomy and selfhood is not a good thing.

It isn’t progress. It isn’t utopia. It isn’t liberation.

And that is the first step in escaping the ant hill. The next step is to bring others along with us.

This is why I keep talking about a New Romanticism (see here and here). That is our counter-offensive, and it’s already starting.

Ted Gioia, The New Anxiety of Our Time Is Now on TV (bold added)

Fundamental law

Ultimately, however, constitutionalism means that society must accept an unpopular policy that respects constitutional limits over a popular policy that violates them. The very foundation of constitutionalism is that certain fundamental protections—whether for free speech or the separation of powers—must be beyond the reach of popular majorities. There will almost always be some policy that is popular but unconstitutional.

Andrew O’Donohue on “court-baiting.”

The Reality of Irreligious Violence

The shift from church power to state power is not the victory of peaceable reason over irrational religious violence. The more we tell ourselves it is, the more we are capable of ignoring the violence we do in the name of reason and freedom.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence.

I have published this on several Sundays over the years, I’m sure, but with our POTUS and ever-so-manly-and-full-of-lethality “Secretary of War” gleefully murdering supposed drug dealers in the Caribbean in the name of fighting “narco-terrorism,” it seems like a worthy weekday reminder now.

As a Chosen People with what Niebuhr refers to as a “Messianic consciousness,” Americans came to see themselves as set apart, their motives irreproachable, their actions not to be judged by standards applied to others.

Andrew Bacevich in his Introduction to a 2008 University of Chicago Edition of Rheihold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History.

Shorts

  • What’s important to notice is that it isn’t, and never was, “Orthodoxy is masculine.” It only felt masculine, in comparison with the general run of American churches. (Frederica Matthewes-Green)
  • Put someone with a complex about not being respected in charge of an agency with guns and you’re asking for trouble. (Nick Catoggio, A Few Bad Men)
  • The problem is not so much that public policy has failed as that it has succeeded at the wrong things. (Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Monday, 11/17/25

It’s been a while since a non-Sunday post, so a few of these items may be a bit stale.

Heritage Foundation

Is the wind shifting?

Kevin Roberts, clutching Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson to his heart, walked into a buzzsaw. Despite back-tracking, the consequences may be getting even more consequential.

David French marks the occasion (gift link) and prognosticates:

“We will always defend truth,” Roberts said. “We will always defend America, and we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”

“That includes Tucker Carlson,” Roberts continued, “who remains — and as I have said before — always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail.”

It’s hard to overstate how much this approach tends to work in the modern Republican Party. The hatred of the left — and of conservatives who are critical of Donald Trump — is so overwhelming that even the most basic acts of moral hygiene are considered weak or woke, or worse.

Even if you are uncomfortable with the words or actions of your fellow Republicans, there is relentless pressure to swallow your tongue. There should be no enemies to your right. The left is the true existential threat to the United States.

Except suddenly it appears that enemies to the Right just might be permissible after all:

Readers might be a little bit stumped. Wait, this is what’s splitting the right? A podcast conversation? It’s not that dialogues like this don’t matter (they do), but after everything that America has seen and endured since 2015, why now?

For French’s conjectures on “why now?”, and his prognosis, follow the gift link above.

Forfeiting influence for clicks

Kevin D. Williamson was on fire Monday:

I would not say that Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation is an antisemite. He is arguably an apologist for antisemites. He is without question an apologist for apologists for antisemites. 

And, under his incompetent—I do not see how you could call it anything else at this point—leadership, Heritage has followed rage-addled small-dollar donors down to the bottom of the political gutter.

…

Beyond the moral repugnance that necessarily attends being an apologist for apologists for neo-Nazis, Heritage’s recent organizational trajectory also has been idiotic from a merely calculating point of view: Heritage has always had a more activist character than organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute or Cato (and I should note here that I am affiliated with the Competitive Enterprise Institute), but the point of being an activist organization is to influence outcomes, to push a party, a coalition, or a faction in a particular policy direction. Heritage has taken the opposite approach: It simply takes its marching orders from Donald Trump and then backfills in whatever arguments or analysis are necessary—which is to say, it does not use activism to shape outcomes but uses propaganda to further someone else’s agenda. Explaining his position on one of the great policy disputes of his time, William Jennings Bryan reportedly said: “The people of Nebraska are for free silver, so I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later.” Heritage has been demoted—by its own leadership—to the role of research assistant for the Trump administration.

…

It is not impossible to imagine an organization such as the Heritage Foundation trying to turn itself around, but Heritage will have the same problem as the Republican Party it serves: Recovering lost popularity or position is not the same thing as recovering lost credibility.

Immigration/Emigration

ICE

What do you do when you took a perfectly honorable government job but a new Administration turns it into a dishonorable spectacle?

Veteran ICE officials I spoke with view the use of masks as an unquestionably negative development. But most of them see an evil that is necessary.

The job, under Trump, has changed. Immigration enforcement has traditionally happened more quietly and administratively, in jails or at ICE check-in offices, where the work is more akin to case management. Trump officials ordered officers into the streets and pressured them to meet arrest quotas, while turning the job into a kind of public performance by bringing news cameras and the administration’s own film crews to make Department of Homeland Security propaganda videos. Activist groups and protesters record everything too, trailing the agents and officers with cellphone cameras, berating them and broadcasting the ugliest moments. Every encounter carries the risk of a viral interaction and online infamy that could lead to doxxing or something worse.

Nick Miroff, Why They Mask

It’s easy to say to confliced ICE agents “quit,” and some have done exactly that, but as a financially secure retiree, I try not to set myself up for “easy for you to say” rejoinders.

Seamless web redux

The holistic pro-life view doesn’t just ask, “Is a baby being harmed?” It asks, “Are people being harmed?”

David French

Greasing the Wheels

There is one aspect of living abroad that is rarely mentioned in travel books and completely ignored in the printed guides, even though it often causes more anxiety than any other. It is how to handle financial inducements. Everyone hears that if you expect services in countries around the Mediterranean you have to oil the wheels. This is not, we are told, immoral; it is simply a different way of doing things. But there’s a dearth of reliable information on how to set about it.

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul: Patmos.

Other

Porn

Don’t think that Nellie Bowles isn’t serious just because she’s funny:

Porn flood meets its first dam: People have finally figured out how to stymie online porn, and it’s with age verification. Because no one wants to upload a photo of their driver’s license to Pornhub, which most certainly will get hacked and leaked one day, and then your grubby paw holding that ID will certainly be online. Everyone knows this. And now we have the data: In the UK, website traffic to Pornhub is down 77 percent since the introduction of the age verification rule in July. Under the new Online Safety Act, anyone in the UK visiting pornographic sites now has to verify they’re over 18 through age checks.

I’m mixed here. As a freedom-loving, narc-hating American, I’m anti–age verification rules. I also think porn is neutering men and making them into eunuchs who can’t reproduce without Viagra, and I want to shake hands with whoever came up with this plan. I’m impressed by the efficacy of the anti-porn crusaders, but I fear the nanny state they portend. Just promise to keep to NSFW content, okay? Pornhub, the most-visited porn site in the world, reporting a 77 percent traffic reduction in Britain? One must admit, their trick works. The remaining 33 percent of Pornhub visitors—those brave British men who uploaded age verifications, proudly standing on their indecencies with legal identification, as if handing over to an officer their license, registration, and tighty-whities—are already lost to society. We don’t speak of them.

Adrift at sea with no populist panacea

Populists are destined to be bad at policy for the same reason they’re destined to be authoritarians, I think. They believe that social problems result from failures of will, not failures of imagination. If America is bedeviled by some ill, it’s not because the incentive structure created by policymakers to remediate it is flawed. It’s because policymakers lack the nerve to deter the villains behind the problem by inflicting enough pain on them to make them stop.

Through a populist lens, every complex problem is simple. According to progressives, for instance, the wealth we need to make America equitable and prosperous for all already exists. It’s just being hoarded by the rich. Muster the will to seize it, and our problems will supposedly be solved.

The right’s cultural populism is even simpler: Whatever the problem might be, the solution is to get rough. Deter drug dealing by blowing up boats in the Caribbean. Deter illegal immigration by letting ICE go rogue. Deter resistance to the administration by threatening critics or indicting them. Win wars by letting American soldiers commit war crimes. With enough ruthlessness, any impediment to asserting one’s will can be overcome with ease. It’s not a coincidence that Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination running on a message as elementary as “build the wall.”

You can understand, then, why the affordability crisis would leave him feeling at sea and sounding like a lost tourist. Unlike the type of cultural fracas in which he typically involves himself, it’s not a problem that lends itself to a dopey “get rough” solution. High grocery prices, expensive homes, and sky-high health insurance premiums are three complicated and distinct challenges, and Republicans don’t have the ideological luxury that Democrats do of shouting “tax the rich!” or “Medicare for all!” to address them.

Nick Catoggio

Last Chopper out of Nam

… married people watch gen z dating and feel like they caught the last chopper out of Nam ….

Leah Libresco Sargent, How to Fix Our Broken Dating Culture, in First Things, quoting someone else’s Tweet. Libresco Sargent has been on my radar for so long that it’s tempting just to call her “Leah.” She’s current on the book circuit with her The Dignity of Dependence and formerly wrote Arriving at Amen.

Infinite length, zero depth

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

J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know.

Losing focus

The Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice. Then It Tore Itself Apart. – The New York Times (gift link).

The problem is pretty clear, yet Sierra Club leadership persists in its folly.

There was a time I’d have felt schadenfreude over a story like this. But:

  1. My wife and I were members of Sierra Club for a number of years early in our marriage.
  2. We can ill afford the self-destruction of liberal-coded institutions when there’s a formidable and relatively cohesive MAGA movement.

Just as we need (at least) two healthy political parties (currently we have zero), so do we need healthy parapolitical institutions of various stripes.

What’s missing?

You might notice a paucity of stuff about Trump and Trumpism. I’m experimenting with moving that elsewhere, if not reducing the volume. As somebody told a preacher, “nobody gets saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.” I’ve preached for more than twenty minutes here.

As a consequence, I accidentally just kept adding items that weren’t TDS rage-bait until this unusually long big post had crept up on me.

I have posted these TDS-related items elsewhere:

  1. The Broken Windows Presidency
  2. Imagining Trump’s Brain
  3. I hadn’t heard this before

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

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.