Category: Legalia

Thursday, 12/4/25

Luxury Beliefs

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

Yasha Mounk, Luxury Beliefs Are Real.

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

The Hive Mind

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

Fundamental law

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

Andrew O’Donohue on “court-baiting.”

The Reality of Irreligious Violence

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

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence.

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

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

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Saturday, 11/22/25

Postliberalism

Post-liberalism usefully refers to two distinct but overlapping tendencies: First, the rejection of the liberal consensus of the post-Cold War era, usually described as “neoliberalism” (another highly contested term), in favor of a more right-wing or left-wing politics that still probably belongs inside the liberal tradition. Second, a more root-and-branch rejection of the entire liberal order — often reaching back for inspiration to liberalism’s religious and reactionary critics, sometimes repurposing Marxist thought, sometimes looking ahead to a future that’s post-liberal because it’s post-human as well.

It makes sense to group these different ideas together under the rubric of post-liberalism for two reasons. First, they have gained ground collectively as a response to liberalism’s perceived crisis and amid a shared experience of destabilizing technological and cultural change. Second, thinkers and writers often move back and forth between “soft” and “hard” forms of post-liberalism, making definitions slippery even in individual cases.

…

Political post-liberalism, however, does not begin with post-liberal ideas. It begins with the inchoate populist revolts of the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, which precious few intellectuals anticipated, and it has taken various ad hoc and unstable forms since then.

Ross Douthat, What Is Post-Liberalism, Anyway? (shared link)

Of the travails at the Heritage Foundation

For those of you who don’t live your lives online, I perhaps should set this stage. Marcionite heretic Tucker Carlson a few weeks ago conducted a “softball interview” with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Then

the Heritage Foundation’s (of Project 2025 fame) president, Kevin Roberts, defended Carlson and took a swipe at Carlson’s “globalist” critics.

Cathy Young, The Alt-Right to Heritage Foundation Pipeline: a 10-Year Journey. Controversy ensued, and members of Heritage’s Board have resigned.

Stage now is set.

Sadly, the problem here goes beyond the bigotry of a few “influencers” or the flaws of specific leaders at Heritage and some other conservative institutions. Rather, as Kim Holmes put it, this is the predictable consequence of “replacing conservatism with nationalism.” A conservative movement that increasingly defines itself in ethno-nationalist terms as a protector of the supposed interests of America’s white Christian majority against immigrants and minority groups cannot readily avoid descending into anti-Semitism, as well.

Ilya Somin

I ❤️ Becket Fund

Colorado has repeatedly been rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court for its religious hostility …

Colorado officials have taken the position that Catholic preschools cannot ask families who want to enroll to support the Catholic Church’s teachings, including on issues related to sexuality and marriage. … But secular schools require similar alignment all the time: Many Montessori schools, for example, require parents who enroll to sign a statement agreeing to the school’s fundamental principles …

With the help of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the archdiocese and its parish preschools have been fighting against this religious bigotry in court.

Nicholas Reaves, Colorado Needs Another Schooling on Religious Freedom.

I’d give Becket a 90% chance of winning this. The key is that Colorado apparently has no problem with the cited practice of Montessori schools—a toleration that destroys it’s claim of neutrality when it forbids Catholic Preschools to do the same.

(The 10% chance of a loss comes from the possibility of courts reversing course.)

I didn’t intend to write about Jeffrey Epstein …

… but Peggy Noonan has brought a whiff of clarity into the miasma:

What the Epstein story is really about is unloved girls. It’s about the children in this country who aren’t taken care of, who are left to the mercy of the world. It’s about teenagers who come from a place where no one cared enough, was capable enough, was responsible and watched out for them. That’s how most of those girls wound up in a room with Jeffrey Epstein.

Here is what sexual abusers of children know: Nobody has this kid’s back. Mom’s distracted or does drugs, dad isn’t on the scene or doesn’t care. The kids are on their own. Predators can smell this, the undefended nature of their prey.

It’s what the Epstein indictment meant when it called the children “particularly vulnerable.”

It’s what Virginia Giuffre reports in her posthumously published memoir, “Nobody’s Girl.” She says she was sexually abused by her father starting at age 7, that she was later molested by a friend of her parents. She was a runaway at 14, lived on the streets and with foster families.

I think the Jeffrey Epstein obsession long ago ceased being good for anything and now has descended into something conspiratorial and a bit kinky. If I never see anything more about it, that would be good.

Somali thumb on the scale

Great news about autism: Looks like that spike in autism might just be Somali fraudsters gaming the system to siphon money to the al-Shabaab terrorist group back home.

At this point, I thought the author was insane, but then this:

Yes, today I bring you a City Journal article headlined: “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer.” A ton of Somali immigrants to Minnesota are gaming the autism diagnosis system and setting up fake treatment centers to get taxpayer cash. And a lot of it. From the article: “Autism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota have skyrocketed in recent years—from $3 million in 2018 to. . . $399 million in 2023.” Honestly, I’m not a taxpayer in Minnesota so this seems like a them problem. But I’m a worried mom, and I love hearing that autism rates are being inflated by scammers. We’re healthier than we thought. That’s great news.

Nellie Bowles

Faith and politics

[A] naked public square is a morally ignorant public square. American public debate was healthier and the conversation more profound when religious leaders like Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fulton Sheen brought their faith to bear on public questions. Today morality has been privatized and left up to the individual. The shared moral order is shredded, and many people, morally alone, have come to feel that their lives are meaningless.

…

My problem with the Kirk memorial service and all the conversation about his assassination generally is that many people seem to have no coherent idea about the proper relationship between faith and politics. In their minds, the two spheres seem all mixed together higgledy-piggledy.

One faith leader told my Times colleague Elizabeth Dias about a conversation she had had with Charlie Kirk, who told her, “I want to talk about spiritual things, and in order to do that, I have to enter the political arena.”

Why on earth would Kirk believe that?

As people eulogized Kirk, it was rarely clear if they were talking about the man who was trying to evangelize for Jesus or the one trying to elect Republicans. A spokesperson at Turning Point declared, “He confronted evil and proclaimed the truth and called us to repent and be saved.” Is that what Kirk was doing when arguing with college kids about tariffs?

…

What happens when people operate without any coherent theory of how religion should relate to politics?

First, people treat electoral politics as if it were a form of spiritual warfare …

Second, the process of moral formation is perverted …

Third, people develop an addiction to rapture …

The problem is that politics is prosaic. Deliberation and negotiation work best in a mood of moderation and equipoise. If you want to practice politics in the mood best suited for the altar call, you’re going to practice politics in a way that sends prudence out the window.

Fourth, a destructive kind of syncretism prevails. Syncretism is an ancient religious problem. It occurs when believers try to merge different kinds of faith. These days, it’s faith in Jesus and the faith in MAGA all cocktailed together. Syncretism politicizes and degrades faith and totalizes politics.

Fifth, it kicks up a lot of hypocrisy …

Finally, it causes people to underestimate the power of sin. The civil rights movement had a well-crafted theory of the relationship between religion and politics. The movement’s theology taught its members that they were themselves sinful and that they had to put restraints on their political action in order to guard against the sins of hatred, self-righteousness and the love of power. Without any such theory, MAGA imposes no restraints, and sin roams free.

David Brooks (gift link)

Shorts

  • “When you select for ‘fighters’ in your leadership, you’ll get leaders who treat politics as performance art.” Nick Catoggio
  • “Like ‘cancel culture’ not so long ago, post-liberalism has become a crucial signifier in our debates without anyone agreeing on what it actually describes.” Ross Douthat
  • “A solid gold toilet sold at Sotheby’s last night for $12.1 million—the winner narrowly outbidding the decorators at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” The Morning Dispatch
  • “[A] decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes ….” (If you don’t know the source of this, you might not be able to pass the current citizenship test.) Is it just me, or does our nation no longer have any respect for the opinions of mankind?
  • “The revolution always winds up eating its own, as Robespierre and Trotsky found out. Trump was the guy who let the lunatics out of the conservative asylum, Greene foremost among them. And now, no surprise, she’s turned on him.” (Bret Stephens)
  • “[I]t is now quite possible that the Republican Party could lose control of the House in part because the Trump administration was too incompetent to rig the [Texas] districts properly.” David French
  • The Guardian: January 6 Rioter Who Was Pardoned by Trump Arrested for Child Sexual Abuse

Elsewhere in the Tipsysphere

Tuesday, 11/18/25

Tucker the Marcionite Heretic

Jason Willick’s Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and the targeting of Judeo-Christian tradition was deeply disappointing in many ways, but it levels a charge against Tucker Carlson that I’m going to assume arguendo is substantially true (I assume that because I’m not going to wallow in audit Carlson’s entire logorrheic output to synthesize my own opinion on it):

The former Fox News host is targeting a distinctively American, 20th-century concept: The Judeo-Christian consensus … A recent theme of the podcaster is that the Old Testament (the part of the Bible subscribed to by both Jews and Christians) is dark and tribal, while the New Testament (the part subscribed to only by Christians) is the fount of enlightened Western values …

Carlson explained in an August podcast that on a recent reading of the Old Testament, he “was pretty shocked by — as I think many people who read it are — shocked by the violence in it, and shocked by the revenge in it, the genocide in it.” By contrast, he explained this month as the Fuentes controversy raged, “Western civilization is derived from the New Testament.” …

Carlson is trying to heighten what he sees as contradictions between the Old and New testaments — and by implication between Judaism and Christianity.

I’m not going to pause to defend the Old Testament’s “violence,” “revenge” and “genocide.” There’s a whole lot of theology behind any such defense and I no longer delude myself into thinking I’m a pretty good “lay theologian.”

But I am going to point out that Carlson’s belief about the contradiction between Judaism and Christianity rhymes with an ancient heresy, Marcionism:

Marcion preached that the benevolent God of the Gospel who sent Jesus into the world as the savior was the true Supreme Being, different and opposed to the malevolent deity, the Demiurge or creator deity, identified with Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible … Marcionism was denounced by its opponents as heresy and written against by the Church Fathers – notably by Tertullian in his five-book treatise Adversus Marcionem (Against Marcion), in about 208 … The premise of Marcionism is that the ministry of Jesus is incompatible with the actions of God in the Old Testament … Marcionites held that the God of the Hebrew Bible was inconsistent, jealous, wrathful and genocidal, and that the material world he created was defective, a place of suffering ….

Wikipedia (hyperlinks omitted).

For me, at least, identifying Tucker as Marcionite or Marcionite-adjacent is more potent than the vaguer charge of “Christian identity politics.”

(For purposes of politics in 2025, moreover, it seems prima facie relevant that the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 A.D. and the expulsion of Jews from Judea destroyed “Second Temple Judaism,” forcing the formation over subsequent centuries of today’s “Rabbinic Judaism, which rests on more than the Old Testament.” So it’s not as simple as “Judeo-Christian” in 2025 amounting to a discordant and untenable mashup of a blood-stained Old Testament with a sublime New Testament. This is part of what Willick omits that makes his piece a disappointment.)

MTG Repents?

It is very late in the game for Marjorie Taylor Greene to suddenly be waking up to this, particularly given the occasional harassment and intimidation to which she stooped in her not-very-long-ago activist days. “I would like to say humbly I’m sorry for taking part in the toxic politics,” she told CNN in an interview when asked about that on Sunday. “It’s very bad for our country, and it’s been something I’ve thought about a lot, especially since Charlie Kirk was assassinated … I’m committed, and I’ve been working on this a lot lately, to put down the knives in politics. I really just want to see people be kind to one another.”

Nick Catoggio, who’s having none of it:

I don’t believe a word of it. Her conscience was never bothered before (publicly, at least) when Trump put a Democrat or centrist Republican in MAGA’s crosshairs, which he does routinely. No one with earnest qualms about leopards eating people’s faces would wait until their own face was devoured to articulate them.

But the fact that she’s insincere shouldn’t blind us to the significance of her pretending otherwise.

I have no need to decide whether she’s sincere and, unless you’re in her Congressional District, you probably don’t either. That doesn’t stop Kevin D. Williamson, though.

James Comey walks

Well, not yet, technically, but I’d bet a modest amount that he will walk, without a trial, especially after this:

It is extremely unusual for judges to examine how prosecutors act in front of grand juries, let alone to openly criticize their conduct. But that is exactly what Judge Fitzpatrick did to Ms. Halligan.

He noted that during her grand jury presentation she appears to have misrepresented a basic tenet of the law by suggesting that Mr. Comey did not have the right, under the Fifth Amendment, to avoid testifying at his own trial.

She also appears to have made another astonishing error, Judge Fitzpatrick said. In his ruling, he pointed out that she told grand jurors that they did not have to rely solely “on the record before them” to return an indictment against Mr. Comey, but instead “could be assured the government had more evidence — perhaps better evidence — that would be presented at trial.”

Alan Feuer, Judge Says Justice Dept. May Have Committed Misconduct in Comey Case

Between the Lines: The Trump Department of Justice deservedly has lost the “presumption of regularity” in this court, and is busily losing it in others.

Shorts

  • Oh, look, it’s a road sign saying, “Lame Duck-ville, next three exits.” (Jim Geraghty, The first glimpse of post-Trump MAGA has arrived)
  • To be honest, I’ve expected a primary ever since I came out against mid-cycle gerrymandering. But I ran on not becoming a politician, and I’m trying to teach my kids to do what’s right, no matter the consequences — so there was never really another option. (Indiana State Senator Spencer Deery, on his unwillingness to approve mid-decade gerrymandering of Indiana’s Congressional districts, via Based In Lafayette)
  • None of this is presidential, any more than it’s precedented. It is, instead, pestilential. (Jill Lepore via Frank Bruni).
  • The American university system is the envy of the world, and we are burning it down because there’s a couple of nonbinary gender studies professors at Bryn Mawr who say crazy stuff from time to time and there is a brain-dead gaggle of Jew-hating weirdos at Columbia. Of course, there is room for reform. But you don’t have to love every feather on the goose when it is laying golden eggs. (Kevin D. Williamson via Frank Bruni.)

Elsewhere in the Tipsysphere

Imagine that!

Speaking at an event over the weekend about tensions with the United States, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro broke out into song with John Lennon’s “Imagine.” And with that, TMD officially endorses regime change in Venezuela.

The Morning Dispatch November 17

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

No Kings Saturday, 10/18/25

No kings!

Binding precedent

Protesters have protested at an ICE facility a few miles west of Chicago for the past 19 years—with somewhat more intensity recently following the announcement of Operation Midway Blitz. A month after the announcement, the president federalized the Illinois National Guard. District court: Enjoined. Seventh Circuit: Just so. Political opposition is not rebellion, and a protest doesn’t become a rebellion merely due to a few isolated incidents of violence. Without that, none of the statutory predicates for federalizing the National Guard have been met.

Institute for Justice, Short Circuits for 10/17/25 (bold added). This is now the law in the 7th U.S. Circuit – Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.

Look for the Administration to try to provoke a rebellion it can crush. Everyone who’s paying attention knows Trump wants to invoke the Insurrection Act (as he stuffs his pockets and those of his family).

Wanted: a viable counternarrative

Trump’s actions … are part of one project: creating a savage war of all against all and then using the presidency to profit and gain power from it. Trumpism can also be seen as a multipronged effort to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit—learning, compassion, science, the pursuit of justice—and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego, appetite. Trumpism is an attempt to make the world a playground for the rich and ruthless, so it seeks to dissolve the sinews of moral and legal restraint that make civilization decent.

…

Trumpism, like populism, is more than a set of policies—it’s a culture. Trump offers people a sense of belonging, an identity, status, self-respect, and a comprehensive political ethic. Populists are not trying to pass this or that law; they are altering the climate of the age. And Democrats think they can fight that by offering some tax credits?

To beat a social movement, you must build a counter social movement. And to do that, you need a different narrative about where we are and where we should be heading, a different set of values dictating what is admirable and what is disgraceful. If we fail to build such a movement, authoritarian strongmen around the globe will dominate indefinitely.

David Brooks.

You can’t beat something with nothing. I can’t come up with a political counternarrative to Trumpism. The Democrats can’t come up with a political counternarrative, either. Brooks couldn’t come up with a strong political counternarrative.

I can only hope and pray that people will look for their compelling (counter-)narrative to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. (And that meantime there will be some legal counternarratives to prevent irretrievable damage, as in the preceding item.)

Music Reviews

There may be nothing better than old music reviews to let you know that it’s okay to like what you like, critics be damned.

I like Debussy’s La Mer, and I don’t care what the stupid early reviews said:

On today’s date in 1905, Claude Debussy’s orchestral suite La Mer or The Sea was performed for the first time in Paris. Today this music is regarded as an impressionistic masterpiece, but early audiences — especially those in America — found it rough sailing.

“We clung like a drowning man to a few fragments of the tonal wreck,” wrote a 1907 Boston critic, and suggested that instead of The Sea Debussy should have titled his piece Sea-Sickness.

“The Sea is persistently ugly,” wrote The New York Times that same year. “Debussy fails to give any impression of the sea … There is more of a barnyard cackle in it than anything else.”

And in 1909, this on La Mer from The Chicago Tribune: “It is safe to say that few understood what they heard and few heard anything they understood … There are no themes … There is nothing in the way of even a brief motif that can be grasped securely enough by the ear and brain to serve as a guiding line through the tonal maze. There is no end of queer and unusual effects, no end of harmonic complications and progressions that sound so hideously ugly.”

Ah, the perils of “modern music” in the early 20th century!

Giving the Devil his due, impressionism had to be a real mind-blower for critics attuned to, say, the sonata-allegro form.

Comprehensive tradition

We’re often not very aware of the “tradition” in which we live. A student in a classroom would readily agree that the words of a teacher or professor were a “traditioning” of sorts. But they will fail to notice that how the room is arranged, how the students sit, what the students wear (or don’t wear), how the professor is addressed, how students address one another, what questions are considered appropriate and what are not, and a whole world of unspoken, unwritten expectations are utterly required in the process. The modern world often imagines that “online” education is equivalent to classroom education since the goal is merely the transmission of information. But the transmission of information includes the process of acquiring the information and everything that surrounds it. Those receiving the “tradition” online will have perhaps similar information to those receiving it in a classroom – but they will not receive the same information.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Tradition of Being Human

Stages of life

Two questions:

  1. Do I want to read/watch/listen to this?
  2. Should I read/watch/listen to this?

When I was younger the second question often dominated my decision-making. Now that I am officially ancient that question has virtually disappeared and the first one is usually the only one I ask. That’s been the single most notable change in my personality in these my declining years.

Alan Jacobs

Alan is a decade or more younger than me, yet I only very recently seem to have arrived at this point, especially regarding political matters.

Note that he’s talking about a change in personality. This isn’t a life rule. There are things that younger people should read/watch/listen to, in order to become well-formed human beings.

Two ways

[R]evival begins with the people proclaiming, by word and deed, “I have sinned.”

MAGA Christianity has a different message. It looks at American culture and declares, “You have sinned.”

David French

Noteworthy

In the aftermath of Kirk’s murder, we witnessed young people at vigils rather than at “mostly peaceful” demonstrations.

R.R. Reno in First Things

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Sunday evening

“We took the freedom of speech away …”

At the round table … he diverted to a tangent about flag burning, saying he had instituted a “one-year penalty for inciting riots.”

“We took the freedom of speech away because that’s been through the courts and the courts said, you have freedom of speech,” Mr. Trump said. “But what has happened is when they burn a flag, it agitates and irritates crowds.”

Charlie Savage, Trump Baselessly Claims He ‘Took the Freedom of Speech Away’ From Flag Burners.

Trump’s word salads are incoherent, but I think he’s saying that he recognizes a heckler’s veto on flag-burning, like the one he tried on Colin Kaepernick for kneeling.

Sorry, Donnie: Street v. New York (1969).

Quick, easy, and stupid pigeon-holing

Using the old Left-Right duality distorts our political thinking. Consider what counts as “Leftist” today: Open immigration, transgenderism, antiracism, gay marriage, opposition to Israel’s incursion in Gaza, violence against conservatives and Christians, unbending support for Ukraine, pro-choice, anti-Trumpism.

Once these positions are grouped as “Left,” anyone who holds one “Left” position is labeled a “Leftist.” If you have reservations about Trump (as I do), question Trump’s immigration policies, believe African Americans have suffered and still suffer injustices, or express sympathy for Palestinians in Gaza, you’ll get lumped in with transgenders and homosexuals, rioters and assassins.

…

Everybody but everybody condemns “third way” Christian political agendas. That condemnation is childish, first because it’s utterly unhistorical. The specific contours of the American Left and Right are entirely contingent, constantly shifting political outlooks and moods. They don’t exhaust our political options.

Peter Leithart

Losing the real storyline

Ross Douthat is definitely one of my favorite journalists these days, but, bless his heart, whenever I see a column about Donald Trump’s “policies,” I get the feeling that the author is trying too hard to make him a normal President.

Setting the record straight on “sanctuary cities”

I have very high regard for professor J Budziszewski, who writes on natural law and blogs at the Underground Thomist. But his latest post blows it, not because of illogic, but because of a badly mistaken premises. I write because his mistake is very wide-spread.

The topic is so-called “sanctuary cities.” Here’s Budziszewski’s false premise:

So called sanctuary cities … claim … that … any locality may invalidate federal laws within its territory. This isn’t about the form of the federal union. It is a rejection of federal union.

Sanctuary cities claim no power to invalidate federal law. What they claim is the power to refuse cooperation in the enforcement of federal laws (typically involving immigration) that they don’t like (or even, during the reign of terror of Trump 2.0, if they don’t like the way the feds are enforcing the law via jack-booted, masked goons).

I don’t want to get into the weeds too far, but:

  • States are not obliged to cooperate with the federal government in enforcing federal law. “Commandeering” is the term frequently used to describe federal efforts to force cooperation.
  • Cities, as subdivisions of the state and as entities that normally have a degree of home rule to determine their financial priorities, are not necessarily obliged to cooperate with the federal government in enforcing federal law. This only becomes controversial when cities engage in grandstanding like “sanctuary city” declarations.
  • Non-cooperation isn’t the same as interference, which would be dubious at best.
  • States may forbid cities to withhold cooperation with the feds because cities are not in themselves sovereigns. Some states have purportedly done so, though laws forbidding sanctuary cities could easily stumble over their own sort of grandstanding.
  • Feds probably can retaliate by denying some or all federal aid to sanctuary cities.

I have not been a fan of sanctuary cities because they made a big, virtue-signaling deal out of what could be done quietly. The tactics of ICE under Trump is unlikely to change my mind, though even then I’m inclined to favor quiet non-cooperation. Trump, after all, is itching to declare insurrection and to impose martial law, and virtue-signaling declarations of non-cooperation provide a readier excuse than passive-aggression.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Friday, 10/10/25

Nonpartisan

Levelers

Emily Ruddy was traveling the country with her new husband, Mike, when news reached them of Charlie Kirk’s shooting, then death:

Back in the car with Mike, approaching the Florida border, I’m looking at pictures of Charlie Kirk on my phone. He is staggeringly tall, taller than I ever realized, with a celebratory fist in the air. Reading his Wikipedia page, which has now been changed to past tense, I am reminded of a story I first read in middle school: Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.” The story is set in the late twenty-first century, in a dystopian America where the authorities have taken it upon themselves to ensure no person is better than another, be it in athleticism, intelligence, or beauty. The strong citizens get weighed down with bags of bird shot. The attentive citizens are intermittently bombarded with hideous sounds through tiny radios in their ears. The most beautiful faces are concealed by hideous masks.

But it’s the title character, Harrison Bergeron—exceptionally tall, handsome, brilliant and outspoken—who is shackled most heavily. At the end of the story he breaks through the shackles, and as punishment he is shot down on live TV: a warning to whoever tries to pull a similar stunt. Or at least, it would be a warning, if the viewers’ memories weren’t instantly blasted away by the ear radio’s next awful sound.

Emily Ruddy, Battle Above the Clouds.

If you haven’t read Harrison Bergeron, a (very) short story, by all means do. It’s freely available, like, for instance, here.

After Christian faith dies

The biggest confusion among my own students used to be rudderless moral relativism.  Although there is still a lot of that, it seems to be on the decline.  Now the problem is the explicit embrace of evil.  The suggestion that one must never do what is intrinsically evil for the sake of a good result is a hard sell.  Many of students are strongly attracted to “consequentialism,” the view that whether an act is right or wrong is determined only by the result.  To say that the ends do not justify the means puzzles them.

The decline of faith has also produced changes in character.  Young people who were raised in Christian homes, but then abandoned Christianity, often used to retain vestiges of their moral upbringing, and accepted such ideas as courtesy, love of neighbor, and the sacredness of innocent human life.  Today, having grown up in faithless homes, many seem to think that courtesy is for fools, that no one with whom they disagree is their neighbor, and that they should hate those they consider wrong instead of praying for their repentance and restoration.  As for the sacredness of innocent human life – for them, that idea went out when they embraced abortion.

…

I don’t spend much time asking what is going to happen, but I do ask what God would like me to do in my own place.  He sees the whole shape of things.  I can’t, but like a faithful bone, I can try to turn nimbly in the joint where I’m placed.

J Budziszewski, How Can I Think About the Assassination?

Budziszewski’s description of the decline of faith, as early as the second generation (the first generation of lapsed Christians lives on the vapors of the empty tank), is a description of devolution toward the “nasty, short and brutish” of pre-Christian antiquity.

If you think I’m just making a casual partisan slur, take a look at either of these two books, the first lengthy, the second shorter and more focused.

Wordplay

Frank Bruni’s back with recent favorite sentences. (Do not read this with beverages or food in your mouth.):

  • Also in The New Yorker, Jessica Winter read the infamous Jeffrey Epstein birthday book so that you and I don’t have to: “Sometimes it’s like you’ve discovered a rich man’s contract with the devil, and next to his signature, he’s drawn a little penis cartoon.” (Matthew Ferraro, East Providence, R.I.)
  • And Kelefa Sanneh, reporting from a recent Bad Bunny concert, described an ecstatic fan who “danced so vigorously with a decorative plant that he seemed to be trying to pollinate it.” (Bob Marino, Paris)
  • In The Los Angeles Times, Christopher Goffard tried to make sense of a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s rambling: “As he sat down to face questions from the feds, his sentences traveled winding paths through vague precincts to fog-filled destinations.” (Robin April Dubner, Oakland, Calif.)
  • In The Guardian, Bryan Armen Graham commiserated with the polite subgroup of American fans at an annual Europe-versus-United States golf tournament, who were too often “drowned out by the performative tough guys in flag suits and plastic chains who treat the Ryder Cup like a tailgate with better lawn care.” (John LeBaron, Acton, Mass.)
  • In The Dispatch, Nick Catoggio regarded the marks that President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made to military leaders last week as “a case of two men who radiate neurosis about their own toughness lecturing a roomful of actual tough guys about how to be tough. It had the feel of Pop Warner players scolding a group of N.F.L. linebackers about the importance of hustle.” (Glen T. Oxton, Mamaroneck, N.Y., and John Sabine, Dallas)
  • And John McWhorter analyzed the president’s loopy language: “Even Trump’s most positive-sounding coinages are acts of a certain kind of verbal aggression. I sometimes stop to marvel that the House passed something with the actual official title the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act. That goofy bark of a name is a boisterous clap back against opposing views, an attempt to drown out inconvenient facts with braggadocio. It is a linguistic snap of the locker room towel.” (Matt Masiero, Richmond, Mass., and Sue Hudson, Simi Valley, Calif., among many others)

Anarchism

[T]he essential practices of anarchism — negotiation and collaboration among equals — are ones utterly neglected and desperately needed in a society in which the one and only strategy seems to be Get Management To Take My Side.

Alan Jacobs, Should Christians be Anarchists?

Partisan

Transparent pretext

Trump’s remarks on the night of Kirk’s murder redefined violent incitement to include harsh criticism of judges. (“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”) Now [aide Stephen] Miller himself is going after judges.

To call this “hypocrisy” is to engage Miller’s reasoning at a level upon which it does not operate. The essence of post-liberalism is the rejection of the notion that some neutral standards of conduct apply to all parties. Miller, like Trump, appears to believe his side stands for what is right and good, and his opponents stand for what is evil. Any methods used by Trump are ipso facto justified, and any methods used against him illegitimate.

A couple of weeks ago, Miller claimed that a disturbed gunman shooting Charlie Kirk impelled the government to crack down on the left. Now he says a handful of activists protesting ICE impel the government to crack down on the left.

Violence is not the cause of Trump and Miller’s desire to use state power to crush their opposition. It is the pretext for which they transparently long.

Jonathan Chait, Stephen Miller is Going for Broke

Bad faith

You can and should worry about American leaders at any level viewing their opponents as the enemy within, whether it’s the president of the United States or a random [Democratic] candidate for state AG. But if you’re more vocal about the latter than the former, forgive me for thinking you’re more interested in contriving a “both sides” equivalency to minimize what the White House is up to than you are about addressing the problem of incitement.

…

Two things are remarkable about [continuing troop deployments in “blue cities”]. One, which almost goes without saying, is that it’s another case of the Trump administration aiming to normalize unprecedented authoritarian shows of force. But the other is underappreciated: It’s all being done in bad faith, as a provocation, and quite plainly. There’s barely a pretense anymore of a colorable emergency like a riot that might justify the president deploying troops. He’s doing it unbidden and enthusiastically, looking for excuses to intimidate Democrats by symbolically occupying their cities with troops yanked from duty [and civilian jobs] in other states.

…

Needless to say, this is why the Trump White House didn’t get the benefit of the doubt from Judge Immergut on the Portland deployment, or from Judge Waverly Crenshaw on whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia was vindictively prosecuted. It’s also why the case against James Comey will end up in the toilet sooner rather than later. Courts have traditionally given the president and the Justice Department wide discretion in commanding the military and choosing whom to prosecute, but that’s because presidents traditionally haven’t given courts good reason to think they’re acting in bad faith.

Nick Catoggio, American versus American.

I look forward to the day when judges cease giving a “presumption of regularity,” of good faith, to the actions and legal arguments of this Administration. They have forfeited it because so much of what they do plainly is done in bad faith.

On keeping an impossible promise

Anyone with brown skin and the wrong kind of tattoo is therefore now at risk of being carted off to torture by the US government, with absolutely no safeguards that they have gotten the right people. Or do you think that an administration that confuses billions with millions, and puts classified intelligence on a Signal app, is incapable of making an error?

Andrew Sullivan, Two Perfect Months (March 2025)

I will give Trump “credit” for trying to keep his deportation campaign promise. The problems is, it’s impossible even for competent, non-malicious government workers to keep it (it included luridly-high numbers) without wholesale errors and ubiquitous denials of due process (i.e., in context, the process by which we assure that a person truly is subject to deportation under the law).

Your tax dollars at work

Short Circuits is a punchy weekly summary of notable Federal Court of Appeals decision, like this summary of activities by an ICE goon:

ICE agent escorting passenger from Dallas to Miami takes upskirt pictures and videos of flight attendant. He’s convicted of interfering with her flight-crew duties, sentenced to two years’ probation. Agent: I didn’t know that she was aware of my “clandestine video voyeurism,” and that’s an element of the crime. Eleventh Circuit (unpublished): It is not.

Divine retribution in Dallas

The covert operations of the Kennedys haunted Lyndon Johnson all his life. He said over and over that Dallas was divine retribution for Diem. “We all got together and got a goddamn bunch of thugs and we went in and assassinated him,” he lamented. In his first year in office, coup after coup wracked Saigon, a shadowy insurgency started killing Americans in Vietnam, and his fear that the CIA was an instrument of political murder festered and grew.

Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes

Rulebreaker

There are certain unwritten rules in American life, and one of them is that before your face is featured on the nation’s currency you are first obliged to die. There is no constitutional provision that mandates this, nor any law written tightly enough to guarantee it. But, as a general matter, we have shied away from putting living figures on our notes and coins, on the grounds that it is monarchical behavior and that the United States is not a monarchy. Unsurprisingly, this salutary tradition is not of great interest to the Trump administration, which intends to put an image of Trump on both sides of a commemorative $1 coin that will be produced for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. On one side, Trump will appear in profile. On the other, he will appear pumping his fist, with the words “Fight Fight Fight” lining the coin’s perimeter. Answering questions about the plan, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that she was unsure if Trump had seen it, but that she was “sure he’ll love it.” He will. But that’s not really the important point, is it?

National Review week in review email.

Here’s a coin suggestion:

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Tuesday, 10/7/25

Epigrams

Dig in obituaries long enough and you may hit pay-dirt. Ashleigh Brilliant, Prolific ‘Pot-Shots’ Phrasemaker, Dies at 91. (Gift link)

Brilliant wrote such gems as “I may not be perfect, but parts of me are excellent.”

He wrote epigrams full-time. The most his business ever made was $100,000 per year.

We owe him.

Legal unethics

The strike suit is a pernicious business practice: It is deployed to extract cash, not to resolve a dispute. Its target must decide whether to pay the costs of legal defense or the costs of settlement. Essentially, the defendant must play a hand of poker against an opponent who pushes out a large and menacing raise: The options are to match the bet—and face the prospect of even more raises in the future—or fold. The settlements produced by strike suits are of little social value—they’re just one of the costs of doing business. 

Such a tactic is even more pernicious when the litigant is the president of the United States, because its target now faces even weightier reasons to settle: presidential control over federal bureaucracies with immense regulatory power. This new business model is lawfare on steroids.

Earlier this year, Paramount Global agreed to cut a settlement check for roughly $16 million to Trump’s future presidential library and his lawyers. That payment was the culmination of Trump’s suit last year accusing CBS News, a Paramount subsidiary, of broadcasting a deceptively edited interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump’s complaint alleged that the edits were designed to “tip the scales in favor of the Democratic Party” in last year’s election. The theory was questionable: Trump argued that the broadcast edits had violated a Texas consumer protection statute and had caused him personal financial harm. 

The ultimate settlement was also questionable, and not just because of the cramped view of the First Amendment that Trump’s argument implied. Paramount’s sale to Skydance Media was on the horizon—a sale that the Federal Communications Commission (dominated by Trump-friendly Republicans) could either approve or scuttle. The pending merger made the specter of litigation significantly more costly for Paramount; a $16 million payoff is a small price to ensure an $8 billion sale.

Dan Greenburg.

I quote this not, for a change, to berate the President directly, but to ask a different question: Why has no lawyer been disbarred (or merely sanctioned) for filing these frivolous lawsuits?

There is a rule being breached:

(b) Representations to the Court. By presenting to the court a pleading, written motion, or other paper—whether by signing, filing, submitting, or later advocating it—an attorney or unrepresented party certifies that to the best of the person’s knowledge, information, and belief, formed after an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances:

(1) it is not being presented for any improper purpose, such as to harass, cause unnecessary delay, or needlessly increase the cost of litigation;

(2) the claims, defenses, and other legal contentions are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or for establishing new law;

(3) the factual contentions have evidentiary support or, if specifically so identified, will likely have evidentiary support after a reasonable opportunity for further investigation or discovery; and

(4) the denials of factual contentions are warranted on the evidence or, if specifically so identified, are reasonably based on belief or a lack of information.

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11(b). Most state court rules mirror this Federal rule.

Trump’s strike suits are designed to harass and impose cost of litigation. They are frequently unwarranted by law or good faith arguments for changing the law.

So again: Why has no lawyer been punished for filing them? Why are the rules so toothless?

Please don’t tell my I’m majoring in minors. I’ve had plenty about the majors, and I’m a retired lawyer, son of a lawyer, and father of a lawyer, who oddly enough cares about the devolution of the legal profession. So sue humor me.

Progressive illiberalism, populist illiberalism

Progressivism in the last 10 years has pursued increasingly radical measures through complex, indirect and bureaucratic means, using state power subtly to reshape private institutions and creating systems that feel repressive without necessarily having an identifiable repressor in chief — McCarthyisms without McCarthy, you might say.

Over the same period, populism has consistently rallied around charismatic outsider politicians who attack the existing political class as hopelessly compromised and claim to have a mandate to sweep away any rule or norm that impedes their agenda.

There are exceptions to this pattern, but it’s pretty consistent across Western countries. Whether with Trump or Nigel Farage in Britain or Marine Le Pen in France or Viktor Orban in Hungary or Giorgia Meloni in Italy, the drama of postliberal populism is intensely personal, serving up figures who become the focus of profound loyalty and intense opposition, who present themselves as champions of the forgotten man while they’re attacked as strongmen in the making.

The drama of postliberal progressivism, in contrast, is a drama of ideological influence and institutional power, in which activists and elites effect dramatic change outside the democratic process and then try to survive or sidestep backlash from the voters. It’s a drama where sudden changes seem to just happen — unprecedented waves of immigration on both continents, a radical shift in official American norms around race or sex, a new regime of euthanasia in Canada — without having a singular progressive leader who claims responsibility and provides the policy with a charismatic face.

Ross Douthat, Can Left and Right Understand the Other Side’s Fears?. This is not an adequate summary, so I’m providing a gift link for you to get the rest.

Birthright citizenship

[Friday], the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit issued a decision that Donald Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants and non-citizens present on temporary visas is unconstitutional. It also ruled that it violates a 1952 law granting naturalization to children born in the United States, and upheld a nationwide injunction against implementation of the order. This is the second appellate court decision ruling against Trump’s order, following an earlier Ninth Circuit decision. Multiple district court judges (including both Democratic and Republican appointees) have also ruled that the order is illegal, and so far not a single judge has voted to uphold it.

Judge David Barron’s opinion for the First Circuit runs to 100 pages. But he emphasizes that this length is the product of the large number of issues (including several procedural ones) that had to be considered, and does not mean the case is a close one:

The analysis that follows is necessarily lengthy, as we must address the parties’ numerous arguments in each of the cases involved. But the length of our analysis should not be mistaken for a sign that the fundamental question that these cases raise about the scope of birthright citizenship is a difficult one. It is not, which may explain why it has been more than a century since a branch of our government has made as concerted an effort as the Executive Branch now makes to deny Americans their birthright.

I won’t try go to through all the points in the decision in detail. But I think Judge Barron’s reasoning is compelling and persuasive, particularly when it comes to explaining why this result is required under the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case, and why the 1952 naturalization statute provides an independent ground for rejecting Trump’s order.

Ilya Somin, First Circuit Rules Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Executive Order is Unconstitutional

Giving the Devil his due

If I keep my perspective through this Administration’s deliberate sowing of chaos, its flooding of my zone with B.S., I will from time to time acknowledge something they’ve gotten more or less right. I’ll especially look for things that don’t require a parenthetical caveat along the lines of “but of course they should have done it this other way.”

Entry Number 1, not because it’s necessarily the most important: The purpose of our Armed Forces is to defend us through an obvious ability to win wars. It is not to conduct sociological experiments or to redress internal structural injustices.

I could indeed elaborate on that or insert caveats, but I’ll let it stand.

Oh, heck, I do need one caveat: I was (and believe I remain) a conscientious objector, so I don’t like it that nations keep stocks of sabers and rattle them menacingly at each other. But it’s futile to tell them to stop, and we’re still at a place where I’m not waiting for the barbarians.

Prediction

There is no serious doubt in my mind that Donald J. Trump fully intends to make his deportation efforts so odious that they will provoke mass protests (which probably will include some violence by the protestors – and there will be undercover provocateurs to assure that they do), to give himself an excuse for imposing martial law in many blue cities.

I’m not sure of his endgame, but utter corruption of the 2026 Election (a signature of authoritarianism) and suspension of 2028 no longer seems like a leftist fever-dream.

Deadening the creative spark

Loathing is hard to make interesting or readable. It’s one of the flattest emotions, and it deadens the creative spark.

Gareth Roberts. Fortunately for me, I’m generally satisfied with letting others express our shared loathing.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Authoritarianism in the 21st century

My father died 27 years ago today. It was too early, but I wouldn’t have wanted to see him at the age he’d be now.

This just might be faintly relevant

There isn’t a single instance of a fentanyl seizure in the Caribbean:

Last month, the U.S. cutter Hamilton returned to Florida with what the agency called “the largest quantity of drugs offloaded in Coast Guard history”: 61,740 pounds of cocaine and 14,400 pounds of marijuana (that’s the weight of about three city buses). The haul, gathered by multiple federal agencies during 19 seizure incidents in the Caribbean as well as the Pacific, had an estimated street value of $473 million. But there wasn’t any fentanyl on the boat.

(Nick Miroff)

Authoritarianism in the 21st century

We are living in an authoritarian state.

It didn’t feel that way this morning, when I took my dog for his usual walk in the park and dew from the grass glittered on my boots in the rising sunlight. It doesn’t feel that way when you’re ordering an iced mocha latte at Starbucks or watching the Patriots lose to the Steelers. The persistent normality of daily life is disorienting, even paralyzing. Yet it’s true.

We have in our heads specific images of authoritarianism that come from the 20th century: uniformed men goose-stepping in jackboots, masses of people chanting party slogans, streets lined with giant portraits of the leader, secret opposition meetings in basements, interrogations under naked light bulbs, executions by firing squad … I’d be surprised if this essay got me hauled off to prison in America. Authoritarianism in the 21st century looks different, because it is different. Political scientists have tried to find a new term for it: illiberal democracy, competitive authoritarianism, right-wing populism …

… To keep their jobs, civil servants have to prove not their competence but their personal loyalty to the leader. Independent government officers—prosecutors, inspectors general, federal commissioners, central bankers—are fired and their positions handed to flunkies. The legislature, in the hands of the ruling party, becomes a rubber stamp for the executive. Courts still hear cases, but judges are appointed for their political views, not their expertise … There are no meaningful checks on the leader’s power.

…

Today’s authoritarianism doesn’t move people to heroic feats on behalf of the Fatherland. The leader and his cronies, in and out of government, use their positions to hold on to power and enrich themselves. Corruption becomes so routine that it’s expected; the public grows desensitized, and violations of ethical norms that would have caused outrage in any other time go barely noticed. … At important political moments it mobilizes its core supporters with frenzies of hatred, but its overriding goal is to render most citizens passive. If the leader’s speech gets boring, you can even leave early (no one left Nuremberg early). Twenty-first-century authoritarianism keeps the public content with abundant calories and dazzling entertainment. Its dominant emotions aren’t euphoria and rage, but indifference and cynicism. Because most people still expect to have certain rights respected, blatant totalitarian mechanisms of repression are avoided. The most effective tools of control are distraction, confusion, and division.

…

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt said near the end of her life. “And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

These are the features of the modern authoritarian state. Every one of them exists today in this country …

… It sometimes seems as if the only check on Trump’s power is his own attention span.

George Packer, America’s Zombie Democracy.

Railway to the Moon

Imagine if you were trying to write intelligently about the socioeconomic impact of the railroad in the middle of the 19th century, and half the people investing in trains were convinced that the next step after transcontinental railways would be a railway to the moon, a skeptical minority was sure that the investors in the Union Pacific would all go bankrupt, many analysts were convinced that trains were developing their own form of consciousness, reasonable-seeming observers pegged the likelihood of a train-driven apocalypse at 20 or 30 percent, and peculiar cults of engine worship were developing on the fringes of the industry.

What would you reasonably say about this world? The prime minister of Denmark already gave the only possible answer: Raise your alert levels, and prepare for various scenarios.

Ross Douthat, Drones, Denmark and Dark Magic

PK snippets

  • “I’m not proposing a political program,” he told me. “This isn’t some Christian civilizational vision. It’s much more personal.” You decide how and where to wage battle: at a community garden, on the Appalachian Trail, in a mosque.
  • He was struck by how commonplace legal cannabis had become. “It’s a really, really useful drug for the state to be legalizing,” he said. “Because it’s not like alcohol. It doesn’t get you violent. And maybe life is a bit less crappy. It’s the best antidote to revolution that you could possibly have.”
  • “When you’re sitting in your living room with your Punjabi wife reading a bunch of stuff about how you’re a white nationalist, it makes you want to punch people in the face,” he said. “Luckily, I’m a Christian, so I don’t do that.”

Paul Kingsnorth via Alexander Nazaryan in the New York Times

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk and his memorial service

I don’t want to keep banging on about this, because two weeks ago all I consciously knew about Charlie Kirk was that he was affiliated with Jerry Falwell Jr. around the time Falwell made spiritual shipwreck. My impression of him is more favorable now (mama was right: you’re known by the company you keep).

I suspect that Charlie will stop occupying our mind-space relatively soon. Meanwhile, here are some observations I think trenchant.

False note

Some “Evangelicals” are reportedly are starting to style Charlie Kirk as a Christian martyr. Rachel Roth Aldhizer gives examples and cautions that they’re playing with fire.

I have a more fundamental objection: the hagiography should stop not because of dangerous eventualities, but because it’s false.

Not every Christian who is murdered is a Christian martyr, and a Christian martyr is not a murdered Christian who is liked by lot of people, even a lot a people who are good at wordcraft.

Rather, a martyr must be murdered because of his Christian faith. The “tell” in this “Christian martyr” tale is the pronoun “they.” “They killed Charlie because ….“

No, “they” did not, and so far as we know at this point, based on very sketchy information, “he” didn’t either. What little we know points toward the lone shooter perceiving Kirk’s politics as hate-filled.

Plus ça change …

In most secular colleges and universities the largest evangelical organization was Campus Crusade for Christ, founded in 1951 by Bill Bright, a conventionally right-wing Presbyterian, to evangelize students and instruct them in conservative religion and politics.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals. Is Turning Point USA the new Campus Crusade?

Erika Kirk

Erika Kirk set a stellar moral example yesterday despite immense emotional and political temptation to be vindictive. All but uniquely for a MAGA Republican, her country is better today for her public influence.

Then the president spoke.

“He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them,” Donald Trump said of Charlie Kirk, seemingly praising the dead. Then he veered off-script: “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Erika.”

He joked that maybe she could convince him that hating one’s enemies isn’t right, which turned her moving statement of Christian witness into a set-up for a punch line. The crowd laughed. When it was over, Mrs. Kirk embraced him.

I’ve heard of political “big tents,” but I’ve never heard of one big enough to accommodate two moral systems that aren’t just contradictory but irreconcilable. “Christ’s message, followed by its very antithesis,” philosophy professor Edward Feser wrote of the contrast between Kirk’s and Trump’s remarks. “It’s almost as if the audience is being put to a test.”

Almost, yeah.

It’s been many years since I read the gospels, but I do remember Matthew 6:24: “No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.” That’s the test. Many American Christians, possibly including Erika Kirk, seem to reject the premise.

Nick Catoggio

The audience failed the test. They cheered Erika Kirk, but also cheered Trump, who logically they should have booed.

MAGA theology laid bare

Many people who saw or read about the rally were puzzled by what they perceived as a contradiction. How can you cheer love and hate at the same time? How can you worship Jesus and cheer such a base and gross description of other human beings, people who are created in the image of God?

My reaction was different. Finally, I thought, curious Americans who tuned in got to see MAGA theology more completely — and what they witnessed was the best and worst of MAGA Christianity.

…

The objection to Trump isn’t so much that he’s aggressive — Abraham Lincoln was aggressive against the Confederacy, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt was aggressive against the Axis powers — but that he’s malicious and unjust. And when Trump says that he hates his political enemies, it’s a confession that he’s governing through his basest desires.

David French

The attack on free speech

Our fundamental bargain

Every generation of Americans must come to terms with the fundamental bargain of free speech: we agree that we won’t use the mechanism of the state to punish speech we don’t like and will talk back instead … Every generation has to accept the deal that they’re going to refrain from censorship to protect their own right to speak. Plenty of us still don’t accept that bargain, but if a critical mass of people don’t accept it, then it stops working. Free speech is Tinker Bell; if enough kids don’t clap, she dies. Or as Learned Hand put it more poetically: “liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”

Popehat

That was then, this is then plus a few months and an opening to act more fashy

Then there’s the Big Guy. In his inauguration speech this year: “I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America. Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.” Trump now: “The [networks] give me only bad publicity, press. I mean, they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.” And this: “That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”

Andrew Sullivan.

Plutocrats in the C-Suite

One of the lesser-noted disturbing developments (because of all the higher-profile more “urgent” news) is the takeover of a vast swath of our media by family of billionaire Trump supporter Larry Ellison.

As Thomas Edsall notes in the linked article, this sort of thing is one of the ways Hungary’s Viktor Orbán built an illiberal democracy. They still have elections; they still have free speech; but anti-Orbán speech faces hurdles because Hungarian media are controlled by Orbán supporters.

Donald Trump is a much nastier man than Viktor Orbán. His instincts, unchecked by Congress as they are, are likely to take us to a place that makes Hungary look like paradise.

Chew on this

[T]he most trenchant point about the Kimmel saga was made by civil-rights lawyer Matthew Segal. “In my opinion, when companies or institutions cave to Trump despite the law being on their side, they are not misunderstanding the law,” he wrote. “They are making educated guesses that the U.S. is heading in a direction where, in practice, the law won’t matter.”

…

Go to court, one might say. Okay—but court is expensive, takes a long time, and risks winning the battle but losing the war. That’s Segal’s point: Even if Disney had prevailed in a legal battle with the FCC, our vindictive president would have looked for other levers of federal power to pull to damage the company. Keeping Jimmy Kimmel on the air and then turning around to find that the FCC has canceled your multibillion-dollar merger out of spite is the definition of a pyrrhic victory.

Nick Catoggio. I can’t say that’s entirely wrong, but this may be a better explanation. As to Jimmy Kimmel in particular, this too is relevant:

If CBS and ABC, two networks that have lately bowed to the president, gave half a hoot, they would easily have prevailed on First Amendment grounds if they put up a fight.

That is, if they prized their network TV businesses sufficiently as businesses, as opportunities to display stewardship, or even as instruments of influence. But they don’t.

Their network news and late-night talk shows are money-losing artifacts of an industry model their parent companies have no intention of investing in or taking risks for.

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Miscellany

A well/ill (choose one) founded fear of persecution

Hannah Kreager, a “trans woman,” fled Tucson for Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and promptly filed for asylum. Kreager had discerned which way the wind was blowing, and it was not propitious:

“If this had been just George Bush or some run-of-the-mill Republican president, I wouldn’t have left,” Kreager said. “I’d have stayed, written to my legislators, and protested because that’s what you do in a democracy. But this feels like an authoritarian regime.”

Rupa Subramanya, The Americans Seeking Refuge from Trump in Canada.

I don’t think Donald Trump feels any personal animus against transgender people, but he knows that quite a few in his base do feel such animus, and he panders to them periodically. Moreover, he is busily demolishing the rule of law in America, and one doesn’t know where he’ll turn next. I can’t say a fear of persecution is less than well-founded, although the Canadian government may, for diplomatic reasons, have trouble admitting that.

Trump lied, children died

The Trump administration has claimed that no one has died because of its cuts to humanitarian aid, and it is now trying to cancel an additional $4.9 billion in aid that Congress already approved. Yet what I find here in desperate villages in southwestern Uganda is that not only are aid cuts killing children every day, but that the death toll is accelerating.

Stockpiles of food and medicine are running out here. Village health workers who used to provide inexpensive preventive care have been laid off. Public health initiatives like deworming and vitamin A distribution have collapsed. Immunizations are being missed. Contraception is harder to get. Ordinary people are growing weaker, hungrier and more fragile. So as months pass, the crisis is not easing but growing increasingly lethal — and because children are particularly vulnerable, they are often the first to starve and the first to die.

It’s difficult to know how many children are dying worldwide as a result of the Trump aid cuts, but credible estimates by experts suggest that the child death toll may be in the hundreds of thousands this year alone — and likely an even higher number next year. In short, President Trump’s cuts appear to be by far the most lethal policy step he has taken.

…

Let me introduce Trump to the mothers of children that his cost-cutting has killed.

Nicholas Kristoff (Gift Link)

We are all gatekeepers now.

Comparing the top-down “gatekeeper” suppression of the full Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination to the easy access to videos of Charlie Kirk’s assassination:

The gatekeepers are long gone and will never return, but we can’t live as a healthy society without them. We prove this every day.

So you have to be the gatekeeper for your family. You have to be the gatekeeper for yourself. You have to hit delete as the stain tries constantly to creep in, you have to look away and guide others to look away. The school has to be a gatekeeper (removing smartphones from class is a gatekeeping action).

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan.

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Wenesday evening

Poking the Bear

Many sober voices warned that an expansion of NATO to Russia’s border would poke the Bear, leading to an inevitable war. As long ago as 1998, following the U.S. decision to expand NATO eastwards, George Kennan said the following to Thomas Friedman:

I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.

Patrick Deneen. (Link may be inaccurate; I don’t think it was on Substack when I read it.)

Unless we’re prepared to drop our Monroe Doctrine, we ought to be able to understand Russia’s prickliness about Ukraine’s loving glances at the West and the West sidling up to Russia’s “near abroad.”

Spencer Cox

If you had asked me last week to handicap Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s chances of winning the 2028 Republican presidential primary, I’d have said 1 percent. But after watching him demonstrate impressive moral leadership in calling on Americans to unite after Charlie Kirk’s murder, I’ve changed my mind. It’s zero percent.

The governor is a good man in a party that’s led by hideous people and backed by voters who consider being a hideous person a political virtue …

Nick Catoggio

Catoggio continues, pivoting to an important distinction I hadn’t made and that few others seem to have made, either:

Cancel culture, properly understood, is an attempt to bully institutions like businesses into enforcing one faction’s cultural preferences in the absence of moral consensus around those preferences. It doesn’t involve subjects about which we’re all in broad moral agreement, like whether pedophilia should be a crime. It involves subjects about which we disagree, like whether trans women are women. As Thomas Chatterton Williams put it in The Atlantic, “Cancel culture is more fundamentally about solidifying norms that haven’t yet been established.”

That seems like a very sensible way to distinguish “cancellation” of those who celebrate Kirk’s murder from cancellation of those who pointed out that Kirk was no saint (e.g., me, humanizing him) or even demonized him (tastelessly, given the timing).

Is this possible, circular-firing-squad style?

Vacationing in Michigan, I’m struck by all the Marijuana stores. People have spent a lot of money to build or remodel stylish stores in densities that boggle the mind (at least along major roads).

I hate it. So I was heartened by the account of a native Michigander who tells me that competition is so fierce that prices have dropped 91%. That’s one of those facts that’s too good to check. I hope every last one of them is driven out of business by every last one of them.

I’ll spare you catching up on commentary

I’ve been wading through a backlog of reading as my vacation permits. A lot of it, from guttersnipes to established journalists at major publications, comes down to arguing that the other guys are more prone to lethal political violence.

I have concluded (actually, had concluded before Charlie Kirk’s murder) that lethal political violence is bad. I’ve also concluded that the argument about which side is guiltier of it is stupid and likely to be forever inconclusive.

You’re welcome.

Loyalty over competence

Word on the street is that the attorney general is a moron.

Could be. I’m open to the possibility.

Accusing the head of the Justice Department of being an idiot would seem like a lazy smear during any other administration, but Pam Bondi wasn’t selected for her legal acumen. She was picked for the same reason that Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth were, because the president wants the most dangerous arms of the federal government led by people whom he knows will choose him over the law.

When you select for loyalty instead of competence in staffing your government, you’re guaranteeing yourself a higher than usual quotient of morons ….

[Bondi’s moronic comments about “hate speech” and “discrimination” omitted.]

We’re left with two explanations, then. One is that Pam Bondi truly is a moron, irresponsibly BS-ing her way through questions on what can and can’t legally be said in the United States like a 1L who hasn’t done the reading. The other is that Pam Bondi knows what time it is.

In a government distinguished by extreme malevolence and extreme incompetence, it’s hard to tell.

…

Postliberals don’t worry about what Democrats will do when they return to power because they have the ability right now, or so they believe, to make sure that Democrats never do.

That’s the alternate explanation for Pam Bondi’s “hate speech” comments. She’s not stupid. She just “knows what time it is” and is proceeding accordingly.

Nick Catoggio, riffing off Pam Bondi’s unironic rant and declaration of war against “hate speech.”

Why Tyler Robinson shot Charlie Kirk

I submit that we don’t really know why, and that Nick Cattogio raced just a bit ahead of the evidence here:

Unless the indictment omitted something important, though, the motive was straightforward: Like practically every progressive in this country, he abhorred Kirk’s condemnations of transgenderism. That’s legibly leftist.

Nick Catoggio.

I find that very plausible, but I don’t think we’re to the point where the official allegations or known evidence compel it.

In point of fact, Catoggio and I, as inactive and retired lawyers respectively, probably should be saying “it’s not looking good for him, but Robinson is innocent until proven guilty.”

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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