Saturday, 4/6/24

Today is that day the Purdue Boilermaker Men advance to the NCAA Championship game by ending the fairy tale run of DJ Burns and NC State. Remember, you read it here first. (Caveat: I have no money riding on any games and you certainly shouldn’t put money on my prediction.)

Rackets

EVs

With their heavy weight and quick acceleration, EVs tend to burn through tires about 20% faster than internal combustion vehicles do, according to consultancy firm AlixPartners. And the tires cost about 50% more.

Via Dense Discovery Issue 282

Trump looting the GOP

One might assume that a presidential nominee who generates as much devotion as Mr. Trump would be a financial boon to his party. One would be wrong. With Mr. Trump, everything is about Mr. Trump … While the Republican base may be smitten with Mr. Trump, plenty of big-money donors are skittish about bankrolling his nonsense. The former president has been scrambling to close the gap, leering at potential funders as if they were contestants at the Miss Universe pageant.

Michelle Cottle, Trump Is Financially Ruining the Republican Party

I haven’t seen gullibility like today’s GOP since Harlem stood by its man Adam Clayton Powell.

Has Leonard Leo turned mercenary?

Formerly friendly, I’m now a little leery of Leonard Leo.

Leonard Leo (not the Federalist Society) provided Donald Trump with the list of outstanding conservative prospective Supreme Court Nominees that Trump ran on in 2016 and that probably made the difference in the Election. Kudos to him for that. I didn’t believe Trump would keep his promise to nominate from that list, and for that and other reasons, I didn’t vote for him.

But about the time Leo got on the Trump train, his life appears to have take a dramatic turn:

The Campaign for Accountability’s complaint alleges that “Leo-affiliated nonprofits” paid BH Group and CRC Advisors a total of $50.3 million between 2016 and 2020.

During this period, according to the complaint, Leo’s lifestyle changed:

In August 2018, he paid off the 30-year mortgage on the Mclean, Va. home, most of which was still outstanding on the payoff date. Later that same year, Leonard Leo bought a $3.3 million summer home with 11 bedrooms in Mount Desert, an affluent seaside village on the coast of Maine, using, in part, a 20-year mortgage of $2,310,000. Leonard Leo paid off the entire balance of that mortgage just one year later in July 2019. In September 2021, Leonard Leo bought a second home in Mount Desert for $1.65 million.

The complaint was based in part on a March 2023 Politico story by Heidi Przybyla. She wrote that her “investigation, based on dozens of financial, property and public records dating from 2000 to 2021, found that Leo’s lifestyle took a lavish turn beginning in 2016,” citing Leo’s purchases of the Maine properties along with “four new cars, private school tuition for his children, hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Catholic causes and a wine locker at Morton’s Steakhouse.”

Thomas B. Edsall, Trump’s Backers Are Determined Not to Blow It This Time Around

Part of my leeriness is probably because I’m smack dab in the middle of reading Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, which describes Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stevenson’s extremely profitable financial con in his promotion of the 1920s Klan. The story is full of MAGA-like personalities (right down to the rapes) and profiteering.

Trump’s second term, with Leonard Leo’s help, is shaping up to be a nightmare for true conservatism and a repudiation of much of the excellent work Leo’s judicial list did in the first Trump term. Truly Donald Trump has a reverse Midas touch.

Just asking questions

I’m no longer a Ben Shapiro fan, but when he’s right, he’s right.

Election 2024

Political Therapeutic Deism

Political Therapeutic Deism is a system of beliefs which invoke religious terms for the purposes of affirming one’s politics. It includes beliefs like:

God is on my political party’s side.

My views on political issues are a leading indicator that I am a true Christian.

My actions in politics are justified in light of God’s general approval of my politics.

I do not understand how other “Christians” could vote for my candidate’s opponent.

It is clear and obvious which political issues are most important to God.

Political Therapeutic Deism makes sense of why we’re seeing sorting in churches by politics, over and above theology or other factors. It makes sense of why we’ve seen steep declines of religious affiliation among Democrats over the last several decades, and why growing numbers of Trump supporters identify as evangelical, even if they don’t share evangelicals’ theological beliefs. …

Political Therapeutic Deism has the benefit of making clear what we are seeing is the misappropriation of religious language and symbols for political ends. It also harkens to a term (Moral Therapeutic Deism) which has been thoroughly rejected by some of the very kind of people “Christian nationalists” seek to persuade to their way of thinking. They want to equate opposition to their political proposals as opposition to Christianity itself. Why would we help them?

Michael Wear

Until a better term comes along, I expect to use political therapeutic deism for the faux-evangelical Trumpists that MSM calls “white Christian nationalist.”

“But the judges” no longer applies

For many legal conservatives, a two-word incantation—“but judges”—defined the Trump era. It began as an exhortation or, perhaps, a justification. Later it became a coping device, edging into gallows humor. As the shadows lengthened in the last days of a desperate and increasingly lawless presidency, it became a rueful question. A mob, incited by the president who refused to accept a lawful election, sacked the Capitol, assaulted police officers, interrupted the electoral count, and hunted down officeholders—“But … judges?”

Conservatives who had wagered the Trump gambit worth the risk got the upside of their bargain. Trump nominated many excellent men and women to the judiciary. A confident conservative majority, grounded in originalism and textualism, now controls the Supreme Court. The white whale of Roe v. Wade—long emblematic of lawless usurpation of policymaking by the Court—fell.

Contrary to the fears of liberals and the misplaced hopes of Trump, conservative judicial appointees upheld the principle of judicial independence. They refused to serve as reliable partisans and handed Trump and his administration important legal defeats. Crucially, Trump’s nominees rejected his baseless claims of a stolen election.

But these advances in jurisprudence came at a deep civic cost. The president with whom legal conservatives allied themselves used his office to denigrate the rule of law, mock the integrity of the justice system, attack American institutions, and undermine public faith in democracy. Beyond the rhetoric, he abused emergency powers, manipulated appropriated funds for personal political ends, and played fast and loose with the appointments clause, all at the cost of core congressional powers.

Republicans in Congress barely resisted these actions and increasingly behaved more like courtiers than members of a co-equal branch of government.

…

Partisans promise that Trump in a second term would nominate judges more loyal to the president while Trump-friendly, post-liberal thinkers develop theories like “common-good constitutionalism” in which conservative judges would abandon originalism in favor of promoting certain ends. Adrian Vermeule, the leading academic proponent of the latter view, has argued that “originalism has now outlived its utility, and has become an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.” It would be deeply ironic, and the ultimate failure of the movement, if the “but judges” bargain were to end with purportedly “conservative” judges legislating from the bench.

Gregg T. Nunziata, The Conservative Legal Movement Got Everything It Wanted. It Could Lose It All

Anyone who says “but the judges” to justify voting for Trump in 2024 is seriously misguided. He’s disappointed with his first-term SCOTUS nominees in particular, as they’ve not been the kinds of toadies he wants. Next time, he’ll nominate toadies, not excellent jurists, and since the Senate is going to flip (11 Republicans are up for re-election, 23 Democrats) he’ll get them confirmed.

Good advice, since abandoned

Listen to me. Listen. If the twentieth century tells us anything, it’s that whenever you hear anyone standing before a crowd, winding them up about the cause of creating utopia on earth, you had better run.

Rod Dreher, December 12, 2020. I’m sorry to say that he has since reconciled himself to a supposed necessity to vote for Trump.

Miscellany

Rowling throws down the gauntlet

Scotland has a new hate speech law that criminalizes “stirring up hatred” against a series of “protected characteristics,” including race, age, religion, disability, and “transgender identity.” J.K. Rowling threw down the gauntlet:

On Monday, the day the law came into effect, the Harry Potter author posted a dare on X. In it, she named 10 transgender women, called them all men, and said: “If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offense under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested.” … “If they go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I’ll repeat that woman’s words and they can charge us both at once.”

The Free Press

Bomb-thrower

Responding to an Emma Green New Yorker article on classical education:

I am a fan of almost anything that disrupts the hegemony of this fatuously self-righteous and profoundly anti-intellectual educational establishment, which exists not to lift up the marginalized and excluded but rather to soothe the consciences of the ruling class. May the forces of disruption flourish.

Alan Jacobs, against the factory of unreason

Nellie snippets

Trump Media lost $58 million and brought in $4 million in revenue last year. Yet, the market is valuing DJT at $6.4 billion. That there’s a meme stock. (I could have pulled this for “Rackets,” above.)
It is odd that Trump got the reputation of being The End of the American Press, when Biden is really the one who hates questions and shuns journalists. Remember Trump? How he would actually never stop talking? How he’d sit and antagonize reporters endlessly? But oh, he’d talk. It was alarming, often described as “rambling.” But at least we all knew exactly what was going through his mind (chaos, tangents, rage, pettiness, pretty good jokes, Rosie O’Donnell, more Rosie O’Donnell, why was it always Rosie O’Donnell).
[S]tudent loan relief is the wrong approach. Colleges should simply not cost this much. Solution: eliminate 90 percent of university administrator roles, since at least that many are fully fake. Offer incentives for kids to enroll in trade schools or community colleges. Boom, loan crisis solved, you’re welcome. Next topic.
From Reuters
America’s leading women’s rights group of yesteryear is still arguing that it’s white supremacy to maintain girls’ sports. Here’s NOW, the National Organization of Women: “Repeat after us: Weaponizing womanhood against other women is white supremacist patriarchy at work. Making people believe there isn’t enough space for trans women in sports is white supremacist patriarchy at work.” Yes, it’s white supremacist patriarchy to argue. . . that someone who’s gone through male puberty might have an unfair advantage in, let’s say, rugby. Interesting. Fascinating. I will repeat until I am clean.

Nellie Bowles

I’m that guy

When I think of the consciousness that generates the circular sorrow of “Ifs eternally,” or the one trying to find the one thing that will unify all the disparate experiences of one life, I think of a man—almost always a man, though there are notable exceptions—sitting alone in a room and doggedly trying to figure it all out.

Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone

April Fools Day

Schism and “church growth”

Protestantism thus gradually came to lose the primitive Christian horror of schism. As time went on, with the continuing multiplication of Protestant denominations, what now matters among them is purity of doctrine, not unity—and sometimes doctrine takes a back seat to lesser things. The concept of schism has all but vanished from the theological glossary of Evangelicals: if they don’t like their church, they simply leave and start another one down the street. What the Fathers decried as schism is now regarded as normal church growth. So long as the new church does not make a point of denying the Trinity, it remains a part of the una sancta.

Fr. Lawrence Farley, The Necessary Revolution (hyperlink added)

I’ve mused for decades that calling schisms “church growth” was an attempt to make a virtue out of a wicked “necessity” (compulsive fissiparousness, rooted in disagreements about what the Bible teaches).

Will liberal Protestantism ever fail utterly?

For generations the more liberal-leaning Protestant denominations have been declining. But liberal Christianity is a renewable resource, as long as there are conservative Christianities to inspire rebellion and disillusionment.

Ross Douthat

Holy Week in MAGAworld

The signs are everywhere. First, there’s the behavior of the savior himself, Donald Trump. On Monday of Holy Week, he compared himself to Jesus Christ, posting on Truth Social that he received a “beautiful” note from a supporter saying that it was “ironic” that “Christ walked through his greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you.”

On Tuesday, he took to Truth Social to sell a $60 “God Bless the USA Bible” (the “only Bible endorsed by President Trump”), an edition of the King James Bible that also includes America’s founding documents. “Christians are under siege,” he said. The Judeo-Christian foundation of America is “under attack,” Trump claimed, before declaring a new variant on an old theme: “We must make America pray again.”

Two weeks ago, Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, told a Christian gathering that Democrats “want full and complete destruction of the United States of America.” Kirk is a powerful Trump ally. He has millions of followers on social media and is hoping to raise more than $100 million in 2024 to help mobilize voters for Trump.

“I do not think you can be a Christian and vote Democrat,” Kirk said, and “if you vote Democrat as a Christian, you can no longer call yourself a Christian.”

All of this is unfolding against the backdrop of so-called prophetic utterances that place Trump at the center of God’s plan to save America. According to these prophecies, Trump is God’s choice to lead America out of spiritual darkness, to save it from decline and despair. In this formulation, to oppose Trump is to stand against the will of God.

David French.

Yes, the signs are everywhere: Trump is an antichrist.

Oh wait! That’s not what French said! He said the signs were of this:

When people are angry and afraid, they will look for a savior. When that anger and fear is latched to faith and prophecy, they will yearn for a religious crusade.

There’s a version of this same story playing out in the United States, but because the anger and fear are so overwrought, the prophecies so silly, and the savior so patently absurd, we may be missing the religious and cultural significance of the moment. A significant part of American Christianity is spiraling out of control.

On my second reading, I lost my frustration that French was missing the point. I think he gets the antichrist point just fine, but that talk of “antichrist” is a little bit alien to a PCA Presbyterian and utterly alien to the New York Times. This is as clear as French and his employer can make it. Let him who has ears hear.

An distracting mistake

Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Orthodox Christians, who together claim around 1.5 billion members, describe the Bible as a final authority in matters of faith …

Esau McCaulley

I cannot think of a sense in which Prof. McCaulley is correct here. Sola scriptura (the Bible as a final authority in matters of faith) was a Protestant Reformation novelty, not a claim of the ancient church. And McCaulley’s mistake contributes little or nothing to his argument about the outrage of Trump’s Holy Week endorsement of a MAGA Bible.

McCaulley continues:

… Evangelicals, who have overwhelmingly supported Mr. Trump over the course of three election cycles, are known for their focus on Scripture, too. None of these traditions cite or refer to any American political documents in their doctrinal statements — and for good reason.

Well, duh! You know what else Orthodox Christianity doesn’t say in its creed?* It doesn’t say that the Bible is an authority in the Christian faith at all.

Our practice shows how highly we regard the scriptures, as our liturgies and other services are pervaded with them. But scripture is not of creedal status. Indeed, the New Testament canon was not settled until decades or more after the Nicene Creed was formulated.

Again, Prof. McCaulley’s banal observation adds little to his argument about MAGA Bible.

[* Two eye-openers for me in the Orthodox Church were (1) the use of scripture and (2) the source and use of the creed and other decisions of ecumenical counsels. But those are beyond today’s scope.]

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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

Gregory Palamas Sunday

Evangelicals

Evangelical Subculture according to Russell Moore

I hesitate to share this, but not knowing who my readers are, I can’t know that somebody doesn’t need this as a wake-up call:

Writing for Christianity Today, Russell Moore unpacked how the evangelical subculture rejected virtue, “driven specifically by the very same white evangelical subculture that once insisted that personal character—virtue, to use a now distant-sounding word the American founders knew well—matters.” He continued: “Part of the vulgarization of the Right is due to the Barstool Sports/Joe Rogan secularization of the base, in which Kid Rock is an avatar more than Lee Greenwood or Michael W. Smith. But much more alarmingly, the coarsening and character-debasing is happening among politicized professing Christians. The member of Congress joking at a prayer breakfast about turning her fiancé down for sex to get there was there to talk about her faith and the importance of religious faith and values for America. The member of Congress telling a reporter to ‘f— off’ is a self-described ‘Christian nationalist.’ We’ve seen ‘Let’s Go Brandon’—a euphemism for a profanity that once would have resulted in church discipline—chanted in churches. If we are hated for attempted Christlikeness, let’s count it all joy. But if we are hated for our cruelty, our sexual hypocrisy, our quarrelsomeness, our hatefulness, and our vulgarity, then maybe we should ask what happened to our witness. Character matters. It is not the only thing that matters. But without character, nothing matters.”

The Morning Dispatch

Moore also wrote:

[W]ere he to emerge today, [Ned] Flanders would face withering mockery for his moral scruples—but more likely by his white evangelical co-religionists than by his beer-swilling secular cartoon neighbors.

On the other hand …

This makes sense to me. Evangelical Christianity emphasizes the personal relationship with Christ. It puts more emphasis on what Kierkegaard said was the core Christian way of responding to the Gospel: as something to be lived out actively, requiring personal conversion, not just a social habit.

Rod Dreher, Kierkegaard on Easter

It is, as they say, ironic. Evangelical theology is almost antinomian in terms of salvation having anything to do with what you do, versus the notions in your head (what you “believe”).

But there they are, bless their hearts, in Church oftener than not.

Reformational Protestants

Putting it bluntly

If you want the full posting: The Works of the Law

Every man a Pope

I frequently quote Nathan Hatch’s masterful The Democratization of American Christianity in my posts. It explains so much.

But I just discovered that one of my favorite Orthodox bloggers, Fr. Stephen Freeman, has noticed the same democratizing theme:

[I]n contemporary Christianity, it is said that “every man is a Pope.” Whereas a few generations ago, people asserted that the Bible alone had authority, today, that, too, has been overthrown. Each person is his own authority. And I will add, that if every person is his own authority, then there is no authority.

…

I am fully sympathetic with the political place of democracy …

I am, however, deeply interested in the spiritual disease that accompanies the interiorizing of the democratic project. We have not only structured our political world in a “democratic” manner, we have spiritualized the concept and made of it a description for how the world truly is and how it should be. The assumptions of democracy have become the assumptions of modern morality and the matrix of our worldview …

…

Much of what today passes for Protestantism is nothing of the sort. Rather, it is a thinly veiled cloak for the democratic spirit at “prayer.” “Salvation by grace through faith” is a slogan for individualism, a Christianity “by right.” There are no works, no requirements, only a “grace-filled” entitlement. For the ultimate form of democracy is the person who needs no one else: no Church, no priest, no sacrament, only the God of my understanding who saves me by grace and guarantees that I can do it alone.

…

It is a great spiritual accomplishment to not be “conformed to this world.” The ideas and assumptions of modern consumer democracies permeate almost every aspect of our culture. They become an unavoidable part of our inner landscape. Only by examining such assumptions in the light of the larger Christian tradition can we hope to remain faithful to Christ in the truth. Those who insist on the absence of spiritual authority, or demand that nothing mediate grace will discover that their lives serve the most cruel master of all – the spirit of the age.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Madness of Democracy – A Spiritual Disease

The common feature of American religion

Nevin and Schaff also discerned certain common intellectual patterns and reflexes beneath the rampant pluralism of American Protestantism. They attributed the breakdown of theological coherence to attitudes that American Christians had assumed. These two felt that a radical Bible-centeredness was the reigning theory among Protestant sects. After surveying the statements of belief of fifty-three American denominations, Nevin surmised that the principle “no creed but the Bible” was the distinctive feature of American religion.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

Fifty-three denominations that just follow the Bible but cannot agree on what it means. What’s wrong with this picture?

Christianity generally

A constant temptation

Christianity in this instance is no longer even a worldview—or what John Rawls calls a “fully comprehensive doctrine”—much less an institutionalized worldview. It is conceived as one wedge in the pie of an individual life, a matter not of shared obedience to the Word incarnate with eternal life in the balance, but of preferred inclination toward the “company or conversation of those whose Customs and Humours, whose Talk and Disposition they like best.”

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

An article I keep coming back to

This is an article I’ve been revisiting and wrestling with regularly:

There is a reason why so many evangelical and Protestant graduate students in theology move toward “higher church” traditions. Intellectually, they discover thinkers and writings their own “lower church” traditions either ignore or lack; liturgically, they discover practices handed down century after century that function like a lifeline in a storm. Reading Saint Ignatius or Saint Justin or Saint Irenaeus or Saint Augustine, it occurs to them that they don’t have to imagine what the church’s ancient liturgy looked and felt like; they can simply visit a church down the street.

…

It isn’t strange to learn that Prestigious Scholar X on the law/econ/poli-sci faculty at Ivy League School Y is Roman Catholic. It is a bit of a surprise to learn that he’s an evangelical. The moment you hear it, though, you wonder (or ask) whether he’s an evangelical Anglican or some such.

Brad East, Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline

A cartoon for the rest of Election 2024

For those whose churches don’t have formal confession, understand that we confess our sins without suggesting that they were justified by our neighbor’s provocation. It sounds so easy, but not being able to self-justify, not even a eensy-weensy bit, can be surprisingly hard.

East and West

I don’t think his focus was Christianity, but Guenon was (inadvertently?) not wrong about the relative emphasis in Western versus Eastern Christianity.

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

Midweek dump (3/28/24)

Culture

The most gruesome conversion therapy

Discussing the new free documentary Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood, about boys who apparently were pressured toward “transitioning”:

The irony hasn’t gone unnoted that while trans activists position themselves in the same stream as gay and lesbian activists, this gruesome “treatment” functions as the most extreme form of “conversion therapy,” more nightmarish by far than the silliest South Park caricature of a “pray the gay away” evangelical …

For Alex, insight has gradually dawned that his more sensitive interests in poetry and music simply made him “a romantic type.” They didn’t make him “effeminate” per se. Nor, he adds, did they make him “gay.”

Bethel McGrew, The Island of Lost Boys

The insight behind that second paragraph has haunted me ever since “gender confirmation surgery” became a public phenomenon.

“Is there no room left for tomboys and sissies?”, asks the old cisgendered white guy (who isn’t exactly an exemplar of all manly stereotypes)? Who decided that tomboys are really boys and that sissies are really girls?

Not my kind of guy

The Journalism Herd seems to have decided it’s time for a reprise of Christine Blasey Ford, which reminds me that my lightly-held position at the time of the Ford-Kavanaugh face-off was that Brett Kavanaugh might have done what she said (tried to remove her swimsuit, as I recall) because he was drunk on beer as was so usual for him and his pals at the time. (I also read a high-level hatchet-job on Ford that made a decent case that she was lying.)

I didn’t consider a drunken adolescent mistake reason enough to disqualify him for SCOTUS after many years of responsible adulthood. But I made a mental note that he’s not my kind of guy.

(Side note: Parents winking at teen boozing is a major reason we didn’t send our son to a Catholic High School, and why he won’t send our grandchildren there, either.)

American multiculturalists

The American multiculturalists similarly reject their country’s cultural heritage. Instead of attempting to identify the United States with another civilization, however, they wish to create a country of many civilizations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society. A multicivilizational United States will not be the United States; it will be the United Nations.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Restlessness

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.

Flannery O’Connor, born on the Feast of Annunciation in 1925. Garrison Keillor has anecdotes.

Abroad

It’s barbaric — and it’s working

Before the war, Israelis estimated Hamas had dug around 100 miles of tunnels. Hamas leaders claimed they had a much more expansive network, and it turns out they were telling the truth. The current Israeli estimates range from 350 to about 500 miles of tunnels. The tunnel network, according to Israel, is where Hamas lives, holds hostages, stores weapons, builds missiles and moves from place to place … in this war, Hamas is often underground, the Israelis are often aboveground, and Hamas seeks to position civilians directly between them. As Barry Posen, a professor at the security studies program at M.I.T., has written, Hamas’s strategy could be “described as ‘human camouflage’ and more ruthlessly as ‘human ammunition.’” Hamas’s goal is to maximize the number of Palestinians who die and in that way build international pressure until Israel is forced to end the war before Hamas is wiped out. Hamas’s survival depends on support in the court of international opinion and on making this war as bloody as possible for civilians, until Israel relents.

David Brooks

Hate

When people say they want to ban hate speech, what they really mean is that they want to ban hate. And you may as well say that we should ban jealousy, or anger, or greed, or fear. Hate is an endemic part of the human experience and so hate speech always will be too, even after they implant behavior-modification chips in our brains. Ban all the words you like; people will find new ways to express hate.

Freddie deBoer, ‌You Can’t Censor Away Extremism. Scotland replies: Hold my beer.

Domestic Politics

Be it remembered …

In a court filing Tuesday, failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake chose not to contest allegations that she defamed Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer when she accused him of committing election fraud during the state’s 2022 elections. She had failed to file a response to Richer’s June lawsuit, which accused her of baselessly claiming Richer stuffed ballot boxes with fake ballots and intentionally made the ballot confusing for voters in an effort to “rig” the election. Lake has asked the court to convene a jury to decide the damages she owes Richer in the case.

The Morning Dispatch

Two from Thomas

Ban the Bland!

Newt Gingrich believed that the brand of politics Bob Michel practiced had contributed to House Republicans’ 40-year sojourn in the political desert. Gingrich decided to change this, starting with Republicans’ vocabulary and tactics. This proved effective, but at the cost of rising incivility and declining cooperation between the political parties. Once the use of terms such as “corruption,” “disgrace” and “traitor” becomes routine in Congress, the intense personal antipathy these words express is bound to trickle down to rank-and-file party identifiers.

Thomas B. Edsall, Lean Into It. Lean Into the Culture War

What’s the point of electing Republicans if they’re not barbarians?

On Nov. 5, North Carolina will determine whether a slate of Republican candidates who believe that the 2020 election was stolen, who dismiss Trump’s 91 felony charges and who are eager to be led by the most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency, can win in a battleground state.

Pope McCorkle, a Democratic consultant and professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, argued in an email that the results of this year’s Republican primary election on March 5 demonstrate that “the North Carolina G.O.P. is now a MAGA party. With the gubernatorial nomination of Mark Robinson, the N.C. G.O.P. is clearly in the running for the most MAGA party in the nation.”

As they are elsewhere, MAGA leaders in North Carolina are confrontational.

In February 2018, Robinson, the first Black lieutenant governor of the state, described on Facebook his view of survivors of school shootings who then publicly call for gun control. They are “media prosti-tots” who suffer from “the liberal syndrome of rectal cranial inversion mixed with a healthy dose of just plain evil and stupid permeating your hallways.”

In a March 2018 posting on Facebook, Robinson declared: “This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash.”

In an October 2021 sermon in a North Carolina church, Robinson told parishioners, “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth. And yes, I called it filth.”

There are many ways to express MAGA extremism.

On May 13, 2020, Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee for North Carolina Superintendent of Public Schools, responded on X (formerly Twitter) to a suggestion that Barack Obama be sent to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp on charges of treason. Morrow’s counterproposal?

I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad. I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.

In Morrow’s world, Obama would be unlikely to die alone. Morrow’s treason execution list, according to a report on CNN, includes North Carolina’s current governor, Roy Cooper, former New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, Representative Ilhan Omar, Hillary Clinton, Senator Chuck Schumer, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates — and President Biden.

Thomas B. Edsall, One Purple State Is ‘Testing the Outer Limits of MAGAism’

[ ] Vulgar attacks? Check (“prosti-tots” and “rectal cranial inversion”)
[ ] Holocaust denial? Check
[ ] Crazed charges of “treason” with proposed mass public executions? Check

You know what North Carolina needs. It needs “bloodbath” of MAGA jackasses on November 5.

But truth told, I’m not sure that these freshly-minted MAGA/populist “Republicans” will care about a massive voter repudiation so long as meanwhile they performatively own the libs.

Explain this one away

Fuggedabout “bloodbath” blather:

“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Those are Trump’s words, verbatim. He wasn’t talking about Chinese automotive imports.

Kevin D. Williamson, Giving Permission to Political Violence

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Sunday of Orthodoxy

(This is how Orthodoxy views this Sunday; it celebrates Orthodox iconodules triumphing over iconoclasts.)

“You are not Jesus”

[I]t’s good to remind ourselves periodically of the first rule of Scriptural exegesis: You are not Jesus. Whenever you read a story about Jesus’s life, you should not identify with Jesus. You should identify with the sinner whom He is healing/converting/forgiving/upbraiding/flagellating/etc.

…

Whenever a traditional Christian defends some point of traditional Christian morality, you’ll hear one of our lefty friends cry, “I thought Jesus ate with prostitutes and tax collectors!” Once again, the proper response is: Do you identify with Jesus in that parable?

This is where liberal Christianity becomes—ironically; hilariously—elitist. Sorry, folks, but God’s not saying you must condescend to eat with sinners. No: you are the sinner. He condescends to eat with you.

As for us recovering sinners (i.e., Christians) Saint Paul gives us a different rule: “But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person” (1 Cor. 5:11). Why? Because, not being Jesus, you can’t trust yourself not to fall into their vice.

Michael Warren Davis, You’re Not Jesus

I don’t know how to discern when a Substack is public, but this one is so good, I’d urge you to at least try reading the whole thing.

Hangovers

It was not that we got drunk. No, it was this strange business of sitting in a room full of people and drinking without much speech, and letting yourself be deafened by the jazz that throbbed through the whole sea of bodies binding them all together in a kind of fluid medium. It was a strange, animal travesty of mysticism, sitting in those booming rooms, with the noise pouring through you, and the rhythm lumping and throbbing in the marrow of your bones. You couldn’t call any of that, per se, a mortal sin. We just sat there, that was all. If we got hangovers the next day, it was more because of the smoking and nervous exhaustion than anything else.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

I had totally forgotten this passage, which both came as a shock and struck me as very perceptive.

Chesterton loves him some saints

St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting optimist than Walt Whitman. St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil, could paint the world blacker than Schopenhauer.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Trajectories

The Methodist rhetorical trajectory

American followers of John Wesley found it easy to forget his advice never to scream and never to raise the voice above its natural pitch.

Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

But then eventually they lowered their voices again.

The decline of denominations and the rise of crypto-baptists

[A] new rightist group has emerged to “reinvigorate” the Southern Baptist Convention, which it fears is sliding into wokery. Its executive director is a self-identified “Christian nationalist.” Count me skeptical that many Southern Baptists are succumbing to progressivism. I’m also skeptical that the Southern Baptist Convention, which has been declining for nearly 20 years, will exist as a strong denomination ten years from now. Its churches and seminaries likely will align with non-denominationalism, whose ethos is chiefly Baptist.

The decline if not collapse of denominations in America means Christians, even if they remain in denominations, no longer are influenced by centralized structures but are mainly influenced by their self-chosen social media. Decades ago progressives gained control of Mainline denominations whose members were still mostly traditional. In post-denominational America that strategy is no longer relevant. Unalloyed religious progressivism can be found at outlets like Sojourners, which long tried to stay friendly to orthodox Protestants and Catholics but now touts transgenderism and a phalanx of other progressive causes. Fifteen to twenty years ago, the National Association of Evangelicals, as I noted nearly a decade ago, shifted from conservative to more centrist. But groups like NAE, like the National Council of Churches, no longer count a great deal in post-denominational America.

Mark Tooley, Where is the Religious Left?

The missionary trajectory

Cluain Patrick (the Irish word Cluain translates as ‘meadow’) is still a working community well, and one way you can tell is that a new altar has been built near it. This is not unusual at wells near towns, where an outdoor mass is often held on the saint’s day. Perhaps one will be happening here today. Here is the local priest at work three years back:

You may have noticed that this priest is not a native Irishman. This is increasingly common across the country. The land which used to produce one priest per family can now barely find a handful of Irish men who want the job. As a result, there has been an influx of priests from other nations, and those nations are usually outside Europe, in parts of the world where Christianity is still taken seriously. I don’t know where the priest in this picture is from, but in my local Catholic church the African pastor is from Nigeria – and yet he has the deliciously Irish name of Father Ciaran. I hadn’t realised until recently that Nigeria was originally evangelised by Irish Christians. Now it seems the favour is being returned. We are the pagans now, and we need all the help we can get.

Paul Kingsnorth

I’ve expected for a few decades that the day would come when Christian Africa would be evangelizing the West. I didn’t expect I’d still be alive when that day arrived.

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

Saint Patrick’s Day

St. Patrick’s Day

St. Patrick, a Saint of the first millennium, is recognized as a Saint in the Orthodox Church as well as in the Christian West.

I, in my old age, strive after that which I was hindered from learning in my youth.

Attributed to St. Patrick

Also attributed to St. Patrick is the gist of this imagined conversation, long a favorite of mine.

Restorationists

I posed a passing question recently about whether Restorationists — a blanket term for the denominations and heretical movements arising around the Second Great Awakening — are properly called Protestant. I encountered this distillation in trying to answer it:

The restorationists are usually totally ignorant of what the early Church was really like. They assume that it was congregational, not hierarchical. They assume it was non-liturgical and non-sacramental. They assume it was Bible-based. They assume there was no clergy and that the congregation met in people’s homes. They don’t have any evidence for these assumptions, and all of these assumptions are simply not true, or if they were true in some isolated places they are not the whole truth …

The reason the primitivists are ignorant of what the primitive Church was really like is because they are largely unaware of the writings of the early Church Fathers. Most of them do not know that we have documents telling us just what the early Christians believed, how they worshipped, and how the Church was structured.

Fr. Dwight Longnecker (Roman Catholic), The Problems with Primitivism.

As we agree on the sanctity of Patrick, Enlightener of Ireland, so I agree about this. That still leaves a lot unsaid and unanswered.

Contra today’s restorationists

It is a mere cavil that objects that this sort of thing is “highbrow.” It has nothing to do with brows, or with taste, or anything else. Only a sorry provincialism actually insists on camp-meeting songs, folk songs, or songs of personal testimony over the Te Deum because these songs are somehow more “relevant.” Relevance itself, in this light, becomes a pitiable thing. What is the touchstone of relevance: subjective sentiments or seventeen centuries of Christian worship?

Tom Howard, Evangelical Is Not Enough

Wordplay: Reality Observers

Authors who are not Christian but are looking around at the world, recognizing what is real, what is happening to what is real, and are trying to do something to address it.

(Via Jake Meador. His proximate example was Mary Harrington (Feminism Against Progress), but I would add Jesse Singal, Freddie deBoer, Matthew Crawford (although he fairly recently became Christian), Bari Weiss, and doubtless several others I can’t immediately bring to mind. Many of these folks are fairly young, and they may find their observations of reality eventually leading to Christian faith.)

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

Saturday, post-Ides, pre-Paddy

Culture

I’ve been soaking in a culture for a few days — the culture of Hoosier basketball mania. It’s a great year to be a fair weather fan living in Purdue-land. I’ll be tuning in again in moments.

Right too early, they’d like their lives back, please

NHS England has just announced it will no longer be prescribing puberty blockers to children with gender dysphoria (a fancy term for distress at being the sex you are, which explains precisely nothing). There is, it turns out, “not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness” of this form of treatment. Other countries, such as the Netherlands, home of “the Dutch protocol”, are now acting with greater caution. It seems as though the doubters — those of us “radicalised” into believing what everyone else believed until six or seven years ago — were right all along.

…

As I’d often be reminded when I raised objections, I’m not an endocrinologist, or a psychologist, or a queer theorist, or a porn-addled New York writer, or a four-year-old child speaking in gendered tongues. It is hard to pinpoint precisely which field makes you an expert on whether puberty blockers are a good idea, because for so long the only acceptable qualification has been insisting that they are a good idea.

As Hannah Barnes documented in Time to Think, experienced clinicians at London’s Tavistock clinic ceased to be considered experts the moment they no longer toed the line …

It is staggering to realise just how flimsy the evidence in favour of all this was. Experiments have been conducted on the bodies of children due to the political cowardice of adults. Humans cannot change sex. We cannot go through any other puberty than the one our body is destined to go through. This is what makes us adults. It is obscene that so many have lied to children, and by doing so put them at risk of so much long-term damage ….

Victoria Smith, NHS puberty blocker ruling will save lives

Puberty blockers to be discontinued in England: In a seismic moment in this long debate, the National Health Service in England has officially ended the use of puberty blockers for gender-dysphoric children. From the NHS: “We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of (puberty blockers) to make the treatment routinely available at this time.” The drugs will be prescribed only as part of carefully watched clinical trials. You don’t need me to remind you what these drugs do but I will anyway: prescribed at the start of puberty, they impact bone density and height and can do things like cause teeth enamel to shed and crack; if followed with cross-sex hormones, they can leave the child entirely sterile and unable ever to orgasm. There is no evidence of improved mental health outcomes from this treatment plan.

Now, the early critics of puberty blockers are asking for their lives back. Here’s James Esses, who was studying to be a therapist: “For daring to say that children should not be prescribed irreversible and harmful puberty blockers, I was expelled from my Masters’ degree. As of today, it is official NHS England policy. Yet, I remain expelled.” Will James see this reversed? Will any of the people who fought to achieve this protection for kids get apologies? Doubtful. Their arguments may be official English medical policy now, but it’s best to leave them in the gulags of their professions anyway. It’s a shame they had to be right so early.

Nellie Bowles

It’s interesting to me that some gays and lesbians are the most trenchant critics of trans ideology. Nellie’s lesbian, and gay Andrew Sullivan is particularly eloquent in voicing his concerns.

Ideology

Speaking of ideology:

An ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea … its thought movement does not spring from experience but is self-generated, and … it transforms the one and only point that is taken and accepted from experienced reality into an axiomatic premise…. Once it has established its premise, its point of departure, experiences no longer interfere with ideological thinking, nor can it be taught by reality.

Hannah Arendt via Mark Shiffman guest-writing at Matt Crawford’s Substack

Turning a discussion into a power relation

Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X . . . This is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. (One never says, Speaking as a gay Asian, I feel incompetent to judge this matter.) It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned.

Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal

Nexuses* of power

Comparisons between Silicon Valley and Wall Street or Washington, D.C., are commonplace, and you can see why—all are power centers, and all are magnets for people whose ambition too often outstrips their humanity.

Adrienne LaFrance, The Rise of Techno-authoriarianism.

(* Yes, I checked. The plural is “nexuses”.)

Conspiracy theorists

There was a time, not that long ago, when mainstream-news consumers pitied people who had succumbed to the sprawling conspiracies of QAnon. Imagine spending your days parsing “Q Drops,” poring over cryptic utterances for coded messages. Imagine taking every scrap of new information and weaving it into an existing narrative. Those poor, deluded, terminally online saps. What a terrible modern affliction.

And then some of my friends became Kate Middleton truthers ….

Helen Lewis, QAnon for Wine Moms

Election 2024

There’s more to a quadrennial US election than the Presidency, but just for the sake of old-timey water-cooler talk, let’s act like there isn’t much more.

The darkest timeline

Not for another seven and a half months will there be truly meaningful news at the polls to analyze, but I suppose Tuesday night’s primary results warrant a word or two.

So here’s a word or two: We remain, as a people, trapped in the darkest timeline.

By choice, of course. Most Americans oppose having Joe Biden or Donald Trump back on the ballot in November, but partisans are comfortable with it. And in our terrible system of choosing party nominees via primaries, partisans call the tune.

Democratic primary voters weren’t offered a serious alternative to the president this year and never put pressure on their leadership to provide one. Republican primary voters were offered serious alternatives to their own nominee but preferred to stick with an adjudicated rapist who attempted a coup on January 6.

The fact that we’ve saddled ourselves with a rematch between two unfit geriatrics whom most of the population dislikes is a window onto a decadent country’s depleted civilizational will. A people that no longer takes politics or its role in the world seriously predictably can’t muster the effort to provide itself with capable leadership options for its most important job. No wonder Aaron Rodgers is suddenly being touted as a potential vice presidential candidate; in 2024 America, why wouldn’t he be?

Nick Catoggio, It’s Later Than You Think

Stuck with these crazy old coots

[O]verall this is an absurd moment. Everything’s settled but nothing feels stable. A nation now knows who its two major party candidates will be, after relatively easy contests, and that nation doesn’t want those candidates! The polls show it. The general feeling: We’re stuck with these crazy old coots.

Neither candidate can, as they say in politics, do optimism. Neither can make you see a better tomorrow. Mr. Trump is American carnage; everything’s terrible and only he can repair it; the worse things are, the better his chances. That’s why he didn’t want the recent bipartisan immigration bill. On a problem that’s, say, a foot long, it offered 2 inches of progress. Can’t have that! Mr. Biden can’t do optimism because when he speaks of the sunny side he sounds out of touch. He’s not believable and does not have a plan beyond keep on keepin’ on. He sounds like a politician who’s just word-saying.

Peggy Noonan

Who would vote for these hucksters?

What to say about these characters of 2024? Representing the “Outs” is a grifting bullsh*t artist who will spend the next four years monetizing his entire administration. Meanwhile, representing the “Ins” is a mumbling, bumbling old Cold Warmonger, slave to a soulless and increasingly discredited ideology who will continue to project our power abroad like it is 1991, arrogantly clueless to how both the world and his own country have shifted under his feet since he first entered the Senate during the Nixon administration.

Who would vote for either of these hucksters? I will tell you. It is your brother-in-law; your favorite cousin; your neighbor; your best friend from college; your co-worker; the nice lady you talk to at the dog park; the server at your favorite restaurant; and that cute young couple with the adorable new baby. In our unique political culture, the sublime and the lovely and beautiful merge seamlessly with the hideously absurd.

Terry Cowan, Pogoland

Why Biden’s struggling

Trying to explain why Biden is struggling despite the availability of so many arguments that things are going well:

Something like the following process appears to happen: A group of left-leaning activists declares that certain words, claims, or arguments should be considered anathema, tainted as they supposedly are with prejudice, bigotry, racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, or transphobia; then people in authoritative positions within public and private institutions (government, administrative and regulatory agencies, universities, corporations, media platforms, etc.) defer to the activists, adjusting the language they use to conform to new norms; and then, once the norms and expectations have been adjusted, a new round of changes gets mandated by the activists and the whole process repeats again, and again, and again.

I suspect that to many millions of Americans (and to lots of people living in democracies across the world where something similar is going on) the process feels a bit like a rolling moral revolution without end that makes them deeply uncomfortable … I’d be willing to bet that for many … the negative reaction follows from the sheer bossiness of it, with schools, government bureaucrats, HR departments at work, movie stars, and others constantly declaring: You can’t talk that way anymore; you must speak this other way now; those words are bad; these words are the correct ones. A lot of people are ok with this. But many others respond with: Who the f-ck are you to tell me how I’m allowed to talk? Who elected or appointed you as my moral overseer and judge?

…

[C]onsider what happened after Biden, in an unscripted remark during the SOTU, used the words “an illegal” to describe a foreign national who allegedly murdered a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia last month. Immigration activists and others on the left wing of the Democratic Party sharply criticized Biden for this, calling the term “dehumanizing,” and two days later, he apologized, saying: “I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal.’ It’s ‘undocumented.’”

… The president misused the official moral vocabulary of our moment.

But who set those rules in the first place? Who made them so official that violating them required a public apology from the president? Who is Biden afraid of offending? The answer in this case is single-issue pro-immigration activists and social-justice progressives on the leftward edge of the Democratic Party. The self-correction therefore announced to the world that when it comes to such matters as how one speaks and thinks about the status of immigrants in our country, the president takes his orders from—he defers to—moral busybodies on the left wing of his party.

…

The reason the subterranean influence of social-justice progressivism is worth focusing on is that it may be a major contributing factor to the collapse of the center-left bulwark against the populist right. The rolling moral revolution is intensely disliked by a sizable faction of the electorate …

The problem for Democrats, very much including Joe Biden, is that the activists pushing the new moral dispensation are part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition. For that reason, any time a person unhappily encounters an example of social-justice progressivism in their lives, it’s easy and not unreasonable to direct the resulting anger at the Democratic president, even though he’s not leading the charge but merely going along with and deferring to it.

This might not be the sole or even primary factor behind Biden’s persistently soft approval numbers. But I’m quite sure it’s one important factor—and one the Democratic Party’s leading officeholders and professional strategists seem reluctant even to acknowledge, let alone address.

Damon Linker (boldface added), in some of his very sharpest commentary of this election cycle.

The downticket – or maybe even RFKJr.

Two years ago, Democratic outfits spent money in GOP primaries on ads designed to help crank populist candidates prevail over more formidable mainstream opponents. “Cynical” doesn’t begin to describe the mindset of liberals who routinely warn voters that MAGA Republicans are a threat to democracy and then quietly spend millions of dollars to help those same Republicans advance to the general election.

But that’s what Democrats did in 2022, believing that their own candidates would have an easier time defeating cranks in November. Annnnnnd … they were right.

Nick Catoggio

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Why history didn’t end

Negation rather than contradictions

Following the horrors of 9/11, Fukuyama and his ideas were derided as triumphalist nonsense. But he was only half wrong. Fukuyama, a Hegelian, argued that Western democracy had run out of “contradictions”: that is, of ideological alternatives. That was true in 1989 and remains true today. Fukuyama’s mistake was to infer that the absence of contradictions meant the end of history. There was another possibility he failed to consider. History could well be driven by negation rather than contradiction…

In the end, Trump was chosen precisely because of, not despite, his apparent shortcomings. He is the visible effect, not the cause, of the public’s surly and mutinous mood.

Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

Joe Biden did not expire on camera

The State of the Union should be an easy topic for a writer. It’s a televised event; you watch it; you react.

But it’s actually quite challenging to find anything non-obvious to say about it, especially in 2024. Suspense around the address used to derive from what the president might say. Now, given his age, it derives from whether he might expire before the speech ends.

Joe Biden did not expire last night. Read any analysis today and that’s the top-line takeaway.

…

Then came Sen. Katie Britt to deliver the Republican rebuttal to Biden’s speech. Of her performance, the less said, the better. Watching it, I found myself wondering whether she had seized the opportunity to deliberately sabotage her chances of becoming Donald Trump’s running mate, mindful of how close the last guy who held that position came to being murdered.

There isn’t much else to say about Thursday night. Biden is plainly too old to serve competently for another four years, one “fiery and confident” address notwithstanding, and his agenda is too liberal to make any conservative happy.

I’ll be at the polls early on Election Day to vote for him.

Nick Catoggio, The State of Our Union

I’ve probably said this before, but I plan to vote for neither. Why? The Electoral College.

I fully expect the polls to show that my fair state is going, again, to deliver its Electors to Donald Trump. Therefore, I’m at liberty to write in the American Solidarity Party slate.

That’s how I’ve calculated whether to hold my nose and vote for one of the major party candidates starting in 2008, when I chose John McCain over Barack Obama (whose affect I liked almost as much as I abhorred his brief political policy record) because the polls said my state was a toss-up (Obama won). I may have voted for Romney without holding my nose; I honestly don’t remember. If I did, it wasn’t under the misimpression that he was a stellar conservative.

The corrosion of American character

[Emmanuel] Todd is a critic of American involvement in Ukraine … He believes American imperialism has not only endangered the rest of the world but also corroded American character.

In interviews over the past year, Mr. Todd has argued that Westerners focus too much on one surprise of the war: Ukraine’s ability to defy Russia’s far larger army. But there is a second surprise that has been underappreciated: Russia’s ability to defy the sanctions and seizures through which the United States sought to destroy the Russian economy. Even with its Western European allies in tow, the United States lacked the leverage to keep the world’s big, new economic actors in line. India took advantage of fire-sale prices for Russian energy. China provided Russia with sanctioned goods and electronic components.

…

As Mr. Todd sees it, the West’s decision to outsource its industrial base is more than bad policy; it is also evidence of a project to exploit the rest of the world. But ringing up profits is not the only thing America does in the world — it also spreads a system of liberal values, which are often described as universal human rights. A specialist in the anthropology of families, Mr. Todd warns that a lot of the values Americans are currently spreading are less universal than Americans think.

…

Mr. Todd is not a moralizer. But he insists that traditional cultures have a lot to fear from the West’s various progressive leanings and may resist allying themselves on foreign policy with those who espouse them.

Christopher Caldwell, The Prophetic Academic Emmanuel Todd Now Foresees the West’s Defeat

Rod Dreher elaborates on how the US pushes dubious “universal human rights:”

Boy, do we ever see that in Hungary, and throughout Eastern Europe. The US and the EU are fanatical about promoting LGBT. I mean, truly fanatical. When the Hungarian parliament in 2021 passed a law forbidding what it (accurately, in my view) sees as LGBT propaganda for children and minors, European elites went berserk. Mark Rutte, at the time the prime minister of the Netherlands, said that Hungary ought to be kicked out of the European Union over it.

Mind you, it’s routine for European governments to ban information aimed at children, who are (correctly) believed to be incapable of discerning truth and falsehood in them. In 2021, for example, the European Parliament voted to ban online advertising aimed at kids. So you can’t sell kids candy bars online, but Hungary’s refusal to allow people to sell transgenderism and sodomy to children is thought so egregious by European elites that many of them want the country thrown out of Europe.

Readers of this newsletter are well aware of how passionate the US State Department is about shoving LGBT in the faces of the world. Much of the world hates this, and sees it as a vivid sign of US cultural imperialism. Hungary is fairly tolerant on LGBT matters; same-sex couples can have registered partnerships, and almost every time I go out on the street in Budapest, I see at least one same-sex couple holding hands. But as we all know, in the eyes of these elites, to decline to accept the full and ever-changing panoply of LGBT demands is to be a horrible bigot not fit for civilized society.

(Emphasis added)

I’ll put in my 2 cents’ worth. I thought that surely 9/11 would open our eyes to how odious we are to much of the world. It didn’t. I’ve felt since then that we’re past the point of no return (I should add “humanly speaking”) when that became apparent. It hasn’t been an entirely unbroken descent; people have occasionally been red-pilled on some minor issue or another while the major trends continue downward.

So what are we to do?

Keep on keeping on, that’s what.

As C.S. Lewis preached in the Fall of 1939, shortly after Great Britain was undeniably at war with the Nazis:

I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.

I’d bet that if we are supernaturally spared the destruction I expect (which may be something like a definitive demotion from “indispensable nation” to “just another large chunk of geography” — “the end of a world,” not “the end of the world”), our supernatural saviors will make their activity deniable, so we can attribute it proximately to people who just faithfully kept on going, like humans rather than LARPing caricatures.

The One Phone of Power

I’ve been reading Tolkien again lately, and I’ve been struck by how easily one can substitute “smartphone” for “the Ring.” Take, for instance, this paragraph early on in which Gandalf invites Frodo to rid himself of the ring.

L.M. Sacasas

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk … every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk … every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.

Kierkegaard, via the selfsame L.M. Sacasas

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Grushenka and the Grumbler

Grushenka, a character in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, relates a now-famous fable about an old woman:

Once upon a time there was a woman, and she was wicked as wicked could be, and she died. And not one good deed was left behind her. The devils took her and threw her into the lake of fire. And her guardian angel stood thinking: what good deed of hers can I remember to tell God? Then he remembered and said to God: once she pulled up an onion and gave it to a beggar woman. And God answered: now take that same onion, hold it out to her in the lake, let her take hold of it, and pull, and if you pull her out of the lake, she can go to paradise, but if the onion breaks, she can stay where she is. The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her: here, woman, he said, take hold of it and I’ll pull. And he began pulling carefully, and had almost pulled her all the way out, when other sinners in the lake saw her being pulled out and all began holding on to her so as to be pulled out with her. But the woman was wicked as wicked could be, and she began to kick them with her feet: ‘It’s me who’s getting pulled out, not you; it’s my onion, not yours.’ No sooner did she say it than the onion broke. And the woman fell back into the lake and is burning there to this day. And the angel wept and went away.

It reminds me of a small scene in CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce. Angels are trying to help a soul make the journey from hell to heaven. One, a woman, seems mostly to a grumbler. Lewis’ soul has this conversation with his own guide:

‘I am troubled, Sir,’ said I, ‘because that unhappy creature doesn’t seem to me to be the sort of soul that ought to be even in danger of damnation. She isn’t wicked: she’s only a silly, garrulous old woman who has got into a habit of grumbling, and feels that a little kindness, and rest, and change would due her all right.’ ‘That is what she once was. That is maybe what she still is. If so, she certainly will be cured. But the whole question is whether she is now a grumbler.’ ‘I should have thought there was no doubt about that!’ ‘Aye, but ye misunderstand me. The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. If there is a real woman— even the least trace of one— still there inside the grumbling, it can be brought to life again. If there’s one wee spark under all those ashes, we’ll blow it till the whole pile is red and clear. But if there’s nothing but ashes we’ll not go on blowing them in our own eyes forever. They must be swept up.’

Both stories have in common a tiny, insignificant thing: an onion, a grumble. There is in Scripture a similar “tiny thing,” a single moment that serves as a hinge in a human life. The exchange between the “Good Thief” and Christ on the Cross is hymned during Holy Week with the words, “The Wise Thief entered Paradise in a single moment…” It is a remembrance of the extreme measure of God’s grace.

Father Stephen Freeman, bringing together two of my favorites. Then there’s this:

The story of the Old Woman and the Onion is a parable stated in the extreme manner of absurdity. I was first drawn to it by the simple fact of its willingness to ascribe such mercy to God. A single, rotten onion, given as charity would be sufficient to get you out of hell! It was the imaginative force of such a thing that shook my soul when I first read it. In my childhood, there could never have been such a Christian mercy. Hell is hell is hell.

He’s not wrong about that, and I now think that the Grushenka story is truer than “hell is hell is hell.”

Ecclesial Christians

I’m pretty sure it was the late Richard John Neuhaus who described “ecclesial Christians” as “Christians for whom faith in Christ and faith in His Church is one act of faith, not two.”

I like that very much and my experience as a former non-ecclesial Christian who became ecclesial 26+ years ago, it rings true.

IYKYK, as the kids say

A distinction that may be of interest

For the Roman Catholic prayer, said by the priest after the penitent confesses, states, “I absolve you,” whereas in the Orthodox Church the wording reflects the original understanding: “May God forgive you, through me, a sinner.”

Michael Shanbour, Know the Faith

Entertainment

The Divine Liturgy is rightly understood as a theophany – an appearance of God (Christ) in our midst. We stand in the place of Moses, and wrestle in the place of Jacob. We gaze with Ezekiel and the fiery wheels with the Son of Man in their midst. We stand with St. John the Theologian and the vast crowds of heaven before the Lamb-slain-from-the-foundation upon the altar with the four beasts and angels surrounding Him.

…

This is profoundly significant. Our culture has trained people to become an audience. A theater performance, a concert, and a Church service are all of a piece. Worse than this, we are trained to be an audience that expects to be entertained ….

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Getting priorities straight

Photographers have long had an uneasy relationship with the sacred. There is the age-old anxiety that a photograph can steal a soul. And last week, more than 900 wedding photographers signed a petition complaining that “problematic vicars” can be “rude, humiliating, aggressive and abusive”. The fact is, the sacred has a deep and visceral distrust of the whole business of taking photos, which — in our Instagram-addled age — has resulted in a colossal culture clash.

One photographer, Rachel Roberts, who launched the petition, took a pop at problematic vicars. “They basically forget the fact that two people are getting married, and it’s the most important day of their lives. They put their own objectives and their own rules first and forget the reason why we’re all actually here.” Talk about getting things the wrong way round. The reason we are all there is for two people to enter into holy matrimony, not for wandering photographers to get the best angle for the album.

The problem is that photographs don’t just record reality — they change it. Quantum physicists talk of the observer effect: the very act of observing reality causes a disturbance within it, and thus changes it. Something similar is true of wedding photography. We pose for photographs. We behave differently when we are being captured on film …

So when the photographer turns up 10 minutes before the service and tells me how it’s going to be, that this is how the bride wants it, it makes little difference. They will stay behind the pillar and take photographs from the back, and not follow the bride down the aisle as if this were some catwalk show. They hate it, of course. But you don’t just walk into the house of God and expect the place to bend to your needs. The fact that this space is different, reflects different values, is precisely why people choose to be married here.

Giles Fraser, The narcissism of wedding photographers

Others

A seed was planted today in my head, and I don’t know where it will go. It is the possibility, even the likelihood, that a lot of people we call “Protestants” are not unequivocally Protestant because they’re not rooted in or in continuity with the classical Protestantism of the Reformation.

That’s all the speaker said, but already I’m thinking about the many denominations that grew out of the American revivalism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, much of which was explicitly in rebellion against the Reformed/Calvinist stream of Reformation thought.

We probably call them “Protestants” because we don’t have a term for “not Roman Catholic, not Orthodox, not unequivocally Protestant, but calling themselves Christians.”

“Protecting” God, stripping away all meaning

[Jonathan] Edwards sought to intensify God’s control of creation. Yet ironically, Edwards ended up colluding with the Gnostic denigration of the material world to the degree that his entire philosophical project aimed at guarding God from the perceived threat posed by materiality. For God to truly be glorified, things in the world cannot have distinct natures or identities; rather, God must impose all meaning externally through will-acts that remain, in the final analysis, purely arbitrary. There is no actual meaning within the realm of space and time because the cosmos is simply a passive instrument of divine control.

Robin Phillips, Recovering the Goodness of Creation

Be it remembered

Margaret Sanger specifically drove the Evangelical Protestants into the pro-birth control column. She used the ever-reliable anti-Catholic sentiment of this group to overcome their natural aversion to birth control and to the Progressive Social Gospel Mainline. Thanks to Sanger’s efforts, by the time of the Griswold v. Connecticut decision, the entire country considered opposition to birth control to be a uniquely Catholic position.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

March 9, 2024

Fiat justitia ruat caelum

One thing always catches my eye in the Morning Dispatch: Items captioned “Presented without Comment.”

So here’s a few of my own:

Okay, I can’t resist a little comment. The three are grousing about the Colorado ballot exclusion case, Trump v. Anderson.

George Conway, author of the third listed column, sums up what I think happened:

It may be noble-minded for someone like me, sitting in the cheap seats, to incant my favorite Latin legal maxim, Fiat justitia ruat caelum—“Let justice be done though the heavens may fall.” But I don’t hold a lifetime appointment to decide how justice is to be done. And however much I’d like to think that judges really believe … that they “cannot allow [their] decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to [their] work,” the fact is that judges are human. Their decisions are affected at times by their perception of what the public reaction may be.

…

I could go on picking apart the weaknesses and inconsistencies in the Court’s opinion, and legions of law professors will do so for ages to come, but the Court’s lack of convincing reasoning is, frankly, beside the point. The Court’s decision wasn’t about law. It was about fear.

I think SCOTUS reached the right conclusion on the wrong rationale. You can make fun of me, but I think the theory is correct that the President is not an “officer” subject to section 3. I think that for having read some of the history around section 3, which I find more persuasive than one Senator’s (disingenuous?) assurance to another that the amendment indeed “hid an elephant (POTUS) in a mousehole” (“other officers”). And I return to that ideé fixe after feeling, as I recall, some passing doubt about it during the oral argument.

Well, at least SCOTUS was “unanimous.” Now I can only hope that never-Trump Republicans, who Trump has disinvited from his party, will oblige him in sufficient numbers to assure his defeat, fair and square, in the November balloting.

Political

On not feeding the Christian Nationalist beast

After a longform survey of the Christian Nationalist landscape, Jake Meador delivers the potent point:

What worries me now, though, is not the Christian Nationalists themselves. Frankly, many of them are too reckless, undisciplined, and reactive to be able to accomplish the revolutionary change they seek. What worries me is that there are a great many socially conservative evangelical voters who love the democratic life who are constantly being called “Christian Nationalists” by the likes of Heidi Przybyla for believing things that are utterly unremarkable in Christian history. If our secular media outlets continue to tell them that “Christian Nationalism” is the belief in things virtually all Christians across history have believed, I fear they will listen. And they will find these ethno-nationalist totalitarian aspirants and, not realizing what they are doing, they will make common cause with them.

After all, they’ve already been told that they are ‘Christian Nationalists,’ haven’t they? They’ve been told that protecting the unborn makes them a Christian nationalist, that wishing to promote natural marriage makes them a Christian nationalist, that wanting men to support their children makes them a Christian nationalist. They’ve even been told that believing our rights come from God makes one a Christian nationalist.

Eventually they will start to believe it.

Here is my request: If you are a secular person who wants Christian Nationalism to lose, you should stop helping the Christian Nationalists win.

(One hyperlink added)

It was quite adolescent of me, with my actual adolescence a mitigating factor, but there were several times in my younger life when I was falsely accused of things and reacted by actually doing them.

So I hope you can forgive me for agreeing heartily with Jake Meador on this one.

White Rural Rage

White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy
By Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman
Random House, 320 pages, $32

Why does a book like this exist? For one thing, it exists to serve the demand for books among people who lack the patience for reading literature. These books are some of the many consumer items that serve as tokens of college education. By visiting the front-most display table at Barnes & Noble and picking up a copy of The Sixth Extinction or Freakonomics, one affirms one’s place among the civilized few who “read.” With White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller toss another forkful of silage into the troughs of the book-club class.

Of course, a book like this is also intended to provoke a reaction from its targets. The authors are counting on it, as they make clear when they predict that some will conclude that “as two coastal cosmopolitans, we have no right to offer this critique of White rural politics.” The anticipated backlash is an essential part of the marketing strategy.

…

It is the third part of their thesis on which I would like to raise some points of information. Waldman and Schaller assert that, despite their ruling stature, rural whites “paradoxically” fail to demand anything of their political leaders. The authors admit that rural whites have some legitimate sources of anger, particularly the economic hollowing out of their regions by “late-stage capitalism.” However, having despaired of correcting this, rural whites lend their electoral clout to Republicans, who offer a program of cultural vengeance without any redress of rural whites’ material grievances. There is a lot of truth to this. I would just add that pretty much all Americans have seen their communities hollowed out by capitalism, and pretty much all of them have despaired of receiving very much from their representatives. Those who plan to trudge submissively to the polls for President Biden in November are hardly more demanding subjects than those who will cast a vote for Donald Trump.

…

Consider this remark from the authors, in reference to a 2023 conference in Nebraska about preventing agricultural monopolies: “Rural folks are gradually realizing that corporate consolidation, not socialism, is destroying their economies.” Judging by the record of the Grangers, the People’s Party, William Jennings Bryan (who is briefly cited in the book as a typical rural bigot) the Non-Partisan League, the American Society of Equity, Robert LaFollette, the National Farmers’ Organization, Estes Kefauver, the American Agriculture Movement, the National Save the Family Farm Coalition, Tom Harkin, Paul Wellstone, and others, I would suggest that rural people made some hesitant advances toward this insight before 2023. Indeed, a poll conducted by Open Markets Institute in 2018 showed that 54 percent of Trump voters favored the government breaking up monopolies, and only 28 percent were opposed. Moreover, some of the most visible MAGA firebrands are thoroughgoing antimonopolists. Perhaps some of the “gradual realization” Waldman and Schaller delight in when it is expressed in small activist conferences is also reflected in the far more formidable MAGA movement.

Hamilton Craig, The Truth About ‘White Rural Rage’

Sully’s take on SOTU

Not everyone was totally bowled over by Joe Biden’s Thursday SOTU. Andrew Sullivan had the most colorful, detailed neutral take I’ve seen:

Yes, he did. That’s the core headline. Biden had to convince the American public, and to some extent the world, that he retains the vigor and marbles of his former self. And this he largely accomplished.

He still looks very old though. The first thought I had watching him emerge into the House was that he looks less like Biden than someone wearing a Biden Halloween mask. The features are all there in some kind of uncanny valley, buoyed by fillers, stretched by Botox into a mask whose weirdness hovers somewhere between Joan Rivers and John Kerry, the pure black raisin-eyes peering from within the carved carapace of what was once a face. The Botox is so severe that he has a habit of looking and listening to someone without any measurable change in expression, as if frozen until his mouth can prove he’s not a mannequin. That gives him the open-mouthed squint expression that makes him seem angry at something and yet clueless about why at the same time.

And the vigor was achieved by shouting half the address at about twice the speed required for it to be fully intelligible. The unholy pace made it inevitable he would slur his words as well, so at times, I felt like I was trapped in an Irish pub with a drunk unintelligibly yelling at me for some reason, and I couldn’t get away. And then there was the occasional tone of a fierce, marital squabble: the sudden rising cadence and rhetorical stamp of the foot, as he expressed his volcanic displeasure at something or other. In time, as the adrenaline (or something else) wore off a bit, he became more understandable, but I confess I kept turning the volume down. The Abraham Simpson vibe was strong.

Ouch!

Conservatives and Republicans

[T]he overlap in a Venn diagram of conservatism and capital-R Republicanism has never been smaller.

The Dispatch, in its fourth-ever editorial: * https://thedispatch.com/article/the-american-people-deserve-better/*.

What is a sound foreign policy?

Nuland shows no sign of rethinking her ideological commitments, however. A few weeks ago, in a speech at the Center for Security and International Studies marking the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, she declared: “Our continued support for Ukraine tells tyrants and autocrats everywhere … that we will defend the rights of free people to determine their own future … and that the world’s democracies will defend the values and principles that keep us safe and strong.”

Such rhetoric shouldn’t be dismissed as pure posturing. Rather, proponents of realism and restraint in foreign policy must reckon with the fact that statements like these reflect the hawks’ deep-seated, immensely consequential convictions about America and its place in the world. Put another way: Nuland & Co. really do mean it when they say such things—and that lack of cynicism is precisely what makes them so terrifying. Their conception of foreign policy as an endless international crusade against ideological enemies, rather than a tool for realizing state interests, fails the American people and risks bringing the world to the precipice of catastrophe.
Mark Episkopos, The False Religion of Unipolarity

WPATH

Carcinogenic transitions

→ WPATH Files: This week, the leading organization for doctors who perform gender transitions on minors is reeling from a major leak of internal documents, emails, and conference calls. What the leak mostly shows: doctors really had no idea about a lot of the long-term impact of these interventions. Would the kids put on blockers and then cross-sex hormones ever be able to orgasm? Wow, we’re finding out that they can’t, because they’re saying they can’t. Will puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones (the yellow brick road of medical transition) stunt a kid’s growth, one clinician asks? Answer seems like yes: “Blockers, by suppressing puberty, keep growth plates open longer, so younger teens have a potential to grow longer, however their growth velocity is typically at prepubertal velocity, without typical growth spurt.” Or watch this video of clinicians trying to figure out how to get their 14-year-old patients to do informed consent to lifetime sterility (often starting at age 9 with puberty blockers). From the video: “It’s a real growing edge in our field to figure out how we can approach that. I’m definitely a little stumped on it.” I am also stumped on how to get gender-dysphoric children to consent to sterility—maybe we can wait till they’re 18? Just an idea. Just a thought. One practitioner talks about meeting former patients now in their 20s who want to start families, and he jokes that when they find him, he responds: “Oh, the dog isn’t doing it for you?”

The biggest news is that these groups knew that the hormone therapies were causing cancer. I’ve said it before, but as a one-time butch teenager with rabid political opinions and the knowledge that I was Correct About Everything, now a happy gay adult with no political opinions and the knowledge that I am Usually Wrong: thank god this movement wasn’t around when I was 14. That said, when I’m done having kids, given the state of things post-breastfeeding, a double mastectomy sounds sort of nice.

Nellie Bowles

Monsters

Newly released internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) prove that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical.

I’ve downloaded the files but have only heard excerpts from critics of WPATH. The files are so damning that WPATH has not admitted their authenticity nor, to my knowledge, have they denied it. Since mainstream media don’t like to be shown up as gullible, they’ve embargoed stories on the WPATH files for now.

Andrew Sullivan, a gay writer, has an unusual beef with WPATH. It might be distilled thus: “Doctors who medically transition adolescents are doing so with disregard for autism, mental health comorbidities, and questionably “informed consent. The consequence is that countless kids who have translated their homosexual urges into ‘I’m in the wrong body’ are being sexually mutilated and rendered non-orgasmic.”

But that’s how I would have distilled it last week. Now, with the release of the WPATH files, he’s white-hot:

What does one say of medical professionals who experiment on children in this fashion, and then publicly lie about it? One thing we can say is that they are not medical professionals. And WPATH is not a medical professional outfit, like, say, the American Medical Association. It has many activists and nutballs as members who have no medical or mental health expertise. But in so far as its “guidelines” are used by real medical groups and real doctors, and taken as gospel by woke MSM hacks, it has huge influence and no guardrails. What we are discovering is a grotesquely unethical experiment on vulnerable gender-dysphoric (and often gay) children, performed without meaningful consent, based on manipulative lies (the suicide canard), and defended by a conscious campaign of rank misinformation and ideological bullying.

I used to think there was some good in some of this, and that these experiments were being conducted with entirely good intentions by ethical doctors, who would never violate the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm.” We all know better now. These quacks treat informed consent as optional, deploy emotional blackmail to alter a child’s endocrine system for life, and care little about the long-term consequences for the victims of their lucrative craft. They have never seen a guardrail protecting children that they didn’t want to remove — and recently abolished any lower limits on the ages at which children can be transed.

At some point the perpetrators of this unethical abuse of vulnerable, troubled kids need to face consequences, and not just in the broken, mutilated bodies of the children they have so callously abused.

Lawyers with the balls to buck the narrative and sue these monsters for malpractice deserve the rich financial rewards they’ll work so very hard to get.

Lost in the Cosmos

Assume that you are quite right. You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth—and who are luckily exempt from depression—would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Walker Percy, *Lost in the Cosmos

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Meta

America the experiment

No sheaf of papers can protect us

Luxury beliefs before 2019

And again I say, “Beauty Will Save the World”

Rackets

EVs

Trump looting the GOP

Has Leonard Leo turned mercenary?

Just asking questions

Election 2024

Political Therapeutic Deism

“But the judges” no longer applies

Good advice, since abandoned

Miscellany

Rowling throws down the gauntlet

Bomb-thrower

Nellie snippets

I’m that guy

Schism and “church growth”

Will liberal Protestantism ever fail utterly?

Holy Week in MAGAworld

An distracting mistake

Evangelicals

Evangelical Subculture according to Russell Moore

On the other hand …

Reformational Protestants

Putting it bluntly

Every man a Pope

The common feature of American religion

Christianity generally

A constant temptation

An article I keep coming back to

A cartoon for the rest of Election 2024

East and West

Culture

The most gruesome conversion therapy

Not my kind of guy

American multiculturalists

Restlessness

Abroad

It’s barbaric — and it’s working

Hate

Domestic Politics

Be it remembered …

Two from Thomas

Ban the Bland!

What’s the point of electing Republicans if they’re not barbarians?

Explain this one away

“You are not Jesus”

Hangovers

Chesterton loves him some saints

Trajectories

The Methodist rhetorical trajectory

The decline of denominations and the rise of crypto-baptists

The missionary trajectory

St. Patrick’s Day

Restorationists

Contra today’s restorationists

Wordplay: Reality Observers

Culture

Right too early, they’d like their lives back, please

Ideology

Turning a discussion into a power relation

Nexuses* of power

Conspiracy theorists

Election 2024

The darkest timeline

Stuck with these crazy old coots

Who would vote for these hucksters?

Why Biden’s struggling

The downticket – or maybe even RFKJr.

Negation rather than contradictions

Joe Biden did not expire on camera

The corrosion of American character

The One Phone of Power

Grushenka and the Grumbler

Ecclesial Christians

A distinction that may be of interest

Entertainment