Category: Legalia

Friday, 1/30/26

David Brooks bids the Gray Lady farewell

I’ve long believed that there is a weird market failure in American culture. There are a lot of shows on politics, business and technology, but there are not enough on the fundamental questions of life that get addressed as part of a great liberal arts education: How do you become a better person? How do you find meaning in retirement? Does America still have a unifying national narrative? How do great nations recover from tyranny?

…

We have become a sadder, meaner and more pessimistic country. One recent historical study of American newspapers finds that public discourse is more negative now than at any time since the 1850s. Large majorities say our country is in decline, that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular people. Only 13 percent of young adults believe America is heading in the right direction. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say they do not believe in the American dream.

Loss of faith produces a belief in nothing. …

Nihilism is the mind-set that says that whatever is lower is more real … Disillusioned by life, the cynic gives himself permission to embrace brutality, saying: We won’t get fooled again. It’s dog eat dog. If we’re going to survive, we need to elect bullies to high places …

Multiple generations of students and their parents fled from the humanities and the liberal arts, driven by the belief that the prime purpose of education is to learn how to make money.

We’re abandoning our humanistic core. … As a result of technological progress and humanistic decay, life has become objectively better but subjectively worse. We have widened personal freedom but utterly failed to help people answer the question of what that freedom is for.

The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values. This privatization of morality burdened people with a task they could not possibly do, leaving them morally inarticulate and unformed. It created a naked public square where there was no broad agreement about what was true, beautiful and good. Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle disputes; it’s impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred — sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals — and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results.

It shouldn’t surprise us that, according to one Harvard survey, 58 percent of college students say they experienced no sense of “purpose or meaning” in their life in the month before being polled. It shouldn’t surprise us that people are so distrusting and demoralized. I’m haunted by an observation that Albert Camus made about his own continent 75 years ago: The men of Europe “no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man; the secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life.”

David Brooks’ farewell column for the New York Times (gift link) reprises the concerns about which he has been writing of late, which writing made him my favorite at the Times. (See below for an example.) I hope he won’t just disappear into some Yale classroom, never again to share his wisdom with the wider world.

The idea that “the prime purpose of education is to learn how to make money” has outraged me for as long as I can remember — perhaps because I succumbed to it for what seemed like an adequate personal reason (an engagement to be married in a year when I was 19), but then never got back formally to the humanities when that reason vanished. I’ve been an autodidact ever since, envious of those who studied the humanities more formally, in the give-and-take of a well-run classroom.

Devouring “the news”

Something I still aspire to

One journalist I knew (who worked for a far bigger outlet as a political correspondent) once told me that the news was the first thing she read when she opened her eyes, and the last thing she saw before falling asleep.

Perhaps this is how some journalists need to live their lives. If reporting the daily news is their calling, they must be deeply aware of what is going on. Even if it means watching and reading all the time.

But it is not for you and me, friends. This sort of news consumption will reign your emotions: it will drive you to anger, terror, annoyance, and despair. It will make you feel helpless. It will divorce you from the daily, real things happening in your own home. Take it from someone who’s lived it: knowing absolutely everything that is happening right now—whether in Iran, or Ukraine, or Washington, D.C., or Minnesota—is not your calling. It can actually serve as a dangerous distraction from the vocations of your own life, neighborhood, and community.

…

Here are some boundaries I’ve set in place for my news consumption since 2020. They have been very helpful. I pray they are helpful to you.

  • Check one site, and check it once every couple days at most. If you can, check it once a week. That’s it. Find a reliable source that you trust—preferably a site that tries not to follow a party line. It is more likely to give you the nuance partisan news outlets neglect. If the events of the hour are truly and lastingly important, they will still be talked about a week later. If a credible news outlet, one you find trustworthy and careful, isn’t talking about it, there’s a good chance you should not worry about it. This filters out a lot of momentary “noise,” and allows you to attend to what truly matters.

Gracy Olmstead.

Olmstead is the second person who tacitly or explicitly recommends what strikes me, at the gut level, as excessive disengagement: once-weekly news exposure. Alan Jacobs, who only reads the Economist, and that only when it arrives at his home, is the other.

I was raised in such a way that, by precept or example (I don’t remember the precept being vocalized), I absorbed the message that “good citizens stay on top of the news.” I don’t know that it was ever right. Maybe it was in the 1950s. But “the news” is far vaster today than it was then, and more polarized, and frequently (especially if you get social media news) insane.

All that aside, I sense that I’m spending too much time on the news because, well, I sit down for morning devotions and news around 5:30 am and often am still sitting there at 10 am. Like today, for instance, he typed at 10:00 am.

I’m retired, so it’s not like I’m robbing from my employer. God, maybe, but not, god forbid, my employer.

I’m aware of this. I think I’m making progress.

Re-orientation

Alan Jacobs sympathizes with people who are tempted to give up reading the news because it’s too depressing. But that:

is an inadequate response; it has a tendency to leave you fretful and at loose ends. 

What helps is to read works from the past that deal with questions and challenges that are structurally similar to the ones we’re facing but that emerged in a wholly different context. Right now I am reading the Psalms, especially those that deal with questions of justice and injustice, and the Hebrew prophets. Though comparisons of the current moment to the rise of Nazism often strike me as overblown, they seem increasingly apt these days, so I am returning to Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. I am also reading, perhaps surprisingly but quite appropriately and illuminatingly, Machiavelli’s Discourses. Machiavelli himself was breaking bread with the dead: reading Roman history as a way of understanding the challenges of 16th-century Florentine politics. 

This practice offers a threefold reorientation: 

  • Emotional, because it gives you a break from people who are continually trying to stoke your feelings of anger and hatred; 
  • Intellectual, because in comparing past situations with ours you get an increasingly clear sense of what about our current situation is familiar (and therefore subject to familiar remedies) and what unusual or even unique (and therefore in need of new strategies); 
  • Moral, because, as Aragorn says to Éomer, “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”

Radicalization

Ambition versus lust for domination

The 18th-century English historian Edward Wortley Montagu distinguished between ambition and the lust for domination. Ambition can be a laudable trait, since it can drive people to serve the community in order to win public admiration. The lust for domination, he wrote, is a different passion, a form of selfishness that causes us to “draw every thing to center in ourselves, which we think will enable us to gratify every other passion.”

The insatiable lust for domination, he continues “banishes all the social virtues.” The selfish tyrant attaches himself only to those others who share his selfishness, who are eager to wear the mask of perpetual lying. “His friendship and his enmity will be alike unreal, and easily convertible, if the change will serve his interest.”

…

Tacitus was especially good at describing the effect the tyrant has on the people around him. When the tyrant first takes power, there is a “rush into servitude” as great swarms of sycophants suck up to the great man. The flattery must forever escalate and grow more fawning, until every follower’s dignity is shorn away. Then comes what you might call the disappearance of the good, as morally healthy people lie low in order to survive. Meanwhile, the whole society tends to be anesthetized. The relentless flow of appalling events eventually overloads the nervous system; the rising tide of brutality, which once seemed shocking, comes to seem unremarkable.

David Brooks

History based on reality

I have suspected that part of the reason for a rightward swing in young people [blood-and-soil nationalism,, though] may be that the holocaust is not seared into their worldview and identity as it is in my generation. I was born after the war, but was acutely aware of its horrors. I specifically recall Life’s Picture History of World War II in my childhood home. A child who viewed that repeatedly, as I did, isn’t likely to forget.

When I think about the distortion of history, I remember when I was updating my history of Jerusalem and a friend rang me and said she had an “indispensable history of the Jewish people that you have to read.” She sent it over, all wrapped up. When I opened it, I was surprised to find it was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the antisemitic forgery created by the czar’s secret police. History matters, but more than ever, we need to assert that it be based on real events.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, How Holocaust Denial Became Mainstream

No natural immunity

As Harvard professor Stephen Pinker once said:

A way in which I do agree with my fellow panelist that political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population whose affiliation might be up for grabs comes from the often highly literate, highly intelligent people that gravitate to the alt-right – internet savvy, media savvy – who often are radicalized in that way – who “swallow the red pill” as the saying goes from the Matrix – when they are exposed for the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or in the New York Times or in respectable media. It’s almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity, and they are immediately infected with both an outrage that these truths are unsayable, and no defense against taking them to what we might consider rather repellent conclusions.

Aaron Renn, The Manosphere and the Church (September 2020)

Presumption of Regularity Redux

Early in Trump’s second administration, handwriting appeared on the walls of the Department of Justice and the offices Federal District Attorneys:

Integrity will not be tolerated if it requires candor to the court about weaknesses in the Administration’s position.

If you’ve ever been even a mediocre lawyer, you know that intransigence toward a judge who has figured out your case’s weakness is not wise even in the short term. In the longer term, it tells the court you can’t be trusted to be honest.

In Federal Courts, there was a longstanding “presumption of regularity” in the doings of government lawyers. That has been lost so completely that it’s no longer even talked about in the news, especially when there are new Administration theatrics to talk about.

But I’m going to talk about something related. Minneapolis is a “sanctuary city” of a fairly rigorous sort. It won’t cooperate with DHS/ICE even so modestly as to let them know when they have illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes in their custody. That’s part of Trump’s rationale, at least after-the-fact, for sending in 3000 ICE agents ostensibly to deal with welfare fraud that didn’t involve illegal immigrants but US Citizens who were once immigrants. So something smells fishy.

Those ICE agents are wearing masks. They’re behaving provocatively. The news has stories about them grabbing brown kids as they leave school, then returning them hours later because they’re here legally, and about American citizens of foreign origin being snatched and sent to hellhole foreign prisons.

The new guy in charge of ICE in Minneapolis says he’ll draw down his troops if Minneapolis will start cooperating on the transfer of immigrant prisoners to ICE control.

Can you, Minneapolis official, entertain any presumption of regularity on the part of ICE? Can you presume that American Citizens won’t be manhandled, tortured, deported by these masked goons?

iPhone, the Kleenex for wiping up ICE

The iPhone [note iPhone standing in for all smartphones, like Kleenex=facial tissue] seems to be the only serious threat to ICE’s violence. We know they feel emboldened to do virtually anything to anybody and have been granted a rhetorical “absolute immunity.” We also know that the federal government will tell big, beautiful, massive lies to justify any and all ICE abuses — before any investigations.

So Renee Good was a “deranged lunatic,” Karoline Leavitt declared. Good didn’t just try to run over an ICE officer; she did run him over, and it was unclear if he would survive his injuries, said the president. She was engaged in “domestic terrorism,” according to Stephen Miller. Equally, Alex Pretti was another “would-be assassin” who walked up to ICE officers “brandishing” a gun, trying “to murder federal agents” who, fearing a “massacre,” fired solely in self-defense. He was an “insurrectionist” rightly “put down,” in the words of one MAGA congressman. Last night, Trump repeated his description of Pretti as an “insurrectionist” and “agitator.”

…

We’ve become worried — with very good reason — about the damage phones have done to our brains, our attention span, and our democracy. But without them, the Trump lies about Minneapolis might well have prevailed.

…

In a country with a fascistic government that disseminates massive lies — ours — iPhone videos become essential to keep democracy and objective truth on life support. There are dangers, of course. Lack of context can deceive; AI has made every video’s authenticity suspect; people can subjectively interpret things any way they want. But what happened this past week in America was that, even with all those caveats, a big majority of sane Americans emerged out of the woodwork, looked at the videos, rejected tribalism, and said: Nah, ICE is lying. And ICE had to retreat.

Andrew Sullivan, Can the iPhone Save Our Democracy?

Civic hygiene: another reason to hold onto my phone while many around me are (vocally) giving up theirs. I don’t struggle with compulsive smartphone use; if you do, your mileage may vary.

Really, the only qualms I have about my phone are about the Chinese factory workers who make them — and that’s always a tough call because some jobs just are hard or boring, and the line between that and metaphorical slavery is indistinct.

The death of the magazine

But a magazine I always thought of as a relatively small group of identifiable writers, connected with some broad themes. They could disagree with each other. They had some broad agreements, creating this little thing that would have a variety of their views.

The Atlantic is now just now a machine. I mean, it has hundreds of staffers. It has hundreds of writers. … The magazine itself, of course, was directly challenged by the internet in ways that probably impossible to recreate. The fact that you had to have these writers stapled together with paper really did create a particular cultural product that cannot be done anymore.

Kevin D. Williamson

It’s not easy being a lawyer in this DoJ

Throughout the extensive litigation over the [Alien Enemies Act], in this case and others, the Trump Administration has claimed the president deserves absolute deference when he claims that an “invasion” exists. The absurd implications of this position were highlighted in yesterday’s argument, when Fifth Circuit Chief Judge Jennifer Elrod (appointed by George W. Bush) asked whether the president could invoke the AEA in response to the “British Invasion” of rock stars, like the Beatles. “What if,” she asked “the [President’s] proclamation said ‘we’re having a British invasion.’ They’re sending all these musicians over to corrupt young minds…. They’re coming over and they’re taking over all kinds of establishments.” Could courts then rule the president’s invocation of the AEA was illegal? In response, Justice Department lawyer Drew Ensign admitted the government’s position would require courts to still defer to the president, and allow him to wield the extraordinary emergency powers that can only be triggered by an actual “invasion.”

Ilya Somin, Could the President Invoke the Alien Enemies Act in Response to the “British Invasion” of Rock Stars Like the Beatles?

Felicitous sentences

  • Rachel Louise Snyder appraised the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who killed Renee Good: “The man, with his face covering, his tactical vest, his handgun and his shorn hair, was kitted up to playact in a war against unarmed everybodies. He was frailty wrapped in fatigues.” (Karla Holomon, Cary, N.C., and Molly Gaffga, Sanatoga, Pa., among many others)
  • Maureen Dowd parsed this cursed second term of Trump’s: “Trump Redux is infatuated with drone strikes and airstrikes, tumescent with the power of the world’s greatest military, hungry to devour the hemisphere in one imperialistic gulp.” (Ellen Casey, Hope, R.I., and Kate Kavanagh, Concord, Mass.)

Via Frank Bruni.

Shorts

  • I’ve always been kind of anti-populist because I know people. And the more people you know, the less of a populist you are, I think. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • From the perspective of political theory, my argument falls within the category of “political indifferentism”–that is, the notion that politics is mostly a matter “indifferent” to core human interests. (Ephraim Radner, Mortal Goods)
  • [T]he world is controlled by forces against which reason can do nothing …. [from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in aid of the aforementioned re-orientation].
  • There are many who do not know they are Fascists, but will find it out when the time comes. (Ernest Hemingway via Kevin D. Williamson)
  • Of all his weaknesses that is one of his greatest, that he’d rather hurt himself than not fight. He’d rather hurt the country than not fight. The fight is all. (Peggy Noonan)
  • Creation is the gift that invents its recipient. (Andrew Davison, likely channeling Henri de Lubac)
  • “Today,” says de Lubac, “when the essential doctrine of the unity of the human race is attacked, mocked by racism,” we should feel anguish that it is so weakly defended by Christian leaders. (James R. Wood)
  • Nihilism is the mind-set that says that whatever is lower is more real. (David Brooks in his farewell NYT column)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Thursday, 1/22/26

Political Theory

The next two items, though illustrated by our present political circumstances, are intended to make points that will continue to be important in new circumstances.

Integrity matters

The health of the American experiment rests far more on the integrity of any given American president than we realized.

We trusted that presidents would impose accountability on the executive branch. We trusted that presidents wouldn’t abuse their pardon power — or, if they did, then Congress could impeach and convict any offenders. And so we manufactured doctrine after doctrine, year after year, that insulated the executive branch from legal accountability.

It’s hard to overstate how much this web of immunities — combined with the failure of Congress to step up and fulfill its powerful constitutional role — has made the United States vulnerable to authoritarian abuse.

In Federalist No. 51, James Madison wrote some of the most famous words of the American founding. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” Madison wrote. “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

David French (shared link)

The Prerogative State

The David French column continues. I broke it in two because I thought it was important, once again, to warn against ever again electing high officials of such low character.

But there’s a specific ramification I hadn’t identified:

[Y]ou can see the emerging dual state in action in Minneapolis right now. In much of the city, life is routine. People create new businesses, enter into contracts, file litigation and make deals as if life were completely normal and the rule of law exists, untainted by our deep political divide.

But if you interact with ICE, suddenly you risk coming up against the full force of the prerogative state. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the ICE agent’s video of the fatal encounter between Renee Good and ICE is that it’s plain that Good thinks she’s still in the normative state. She has no idea of the peril she’s in.

She seems relaxed. She even seems to have told the agent that she’s not mad at him. In the normative state, your life almost never depends on immediate and unconditional compliance with police commands.

But she wasn’t in the normative state. She had crossed over the border to the prerogative state, and in that state you can be shot dead recklessly, irresponsibly and perhaps even illegally, and no one will pay the price. You might even be rewarded with more than $1 million in donations from friends and allies.

David French (shared link)

Competing, revealing, metaphors

In February … I spoke at a gathering of conservatives in London called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship …

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

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

The warriors tend to think people like me are soft and naive. I tend to think they are catastrophizing narcissists. When I look at Trump acolytes, I see a swarm of Neville Chamberlains who think they’re Winston Churchill.

David Brooks, I Should Have Seen This Coming, April, 2025.

Occasionally, I achieve a complete mind-meld with Brooks. This was one of those times, at least for the first third of his article; after that, he notes some things that I hadn’t noticed until he pointed them out.

Sanctuary City primer

So-called “sanctuary cities” and “sanctuary states” choose not to assist the federal government in finding or deporting illegal aliens, and they have a constitutional right to make that choice.

What does noncooperation look like on the ground? A flash point involves immigration detainer orders, which call on state and local law enforcement agents to transfer into ICE custody illegal aliens who are about to be released from state custody.

…

The administration says that Minnesota is refusing to honor ICE detainers and has released hundreds of illegal aliens “onto the streets” instead of turning them over to ICE. Minnesota denies this accusation and insists that it’s honoring all immigration detainers.

Whichever side is correct, federal courts have held that ICE detainers issued to state agencies are “requests,” not “orders.” …

…

The federal government does have a mechanism for getting states and cities to voluntarily do what they can’t be forced to do. It’s called money. Congress could deny states or cities certain funds unless they abolish their sanctuary policies. There are limits to this strategy: Washington can’t shut off unrelated funds that states or cities need to keep functioning. But immigrant-related federal funding—for example, money devoted to sheltering new, legal immigrants—could presumably be denied to states and cities that maintain sanctuary policies.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump declared that after February 1, “We are not making any payments to sanctuary cities or states having sanctuary cities.” But while Congress could condition state and local funding on cooperation with ICE, the president’s powers are more limited. Trump has tried this strategy before. Both in his first term and second, he issued executive orders calling for sanctuary states and cities to be denied federal monies. Except in narrow circumstances, courts have not been receptive, holding that without congressional approval, the president could not unilaterally deny states money that Congress had already appropriated for them.

Jed Rubenfeld

The name “Sanctuary City” has always struck me as a bit preening, but the principle that that cities and states are not (normally, though if there are exceptions, I can’t think of one) obliged to assist in enforcement of federal law or in advancement of federal priorities. A non-immigration example is marijuana legalization by the states, whereas marijuana remains illegal in national law. If and when the DEA comes to bust up a dispensary, local officials presumably won’t help, but the principle doesn’t allow them to interfere, either.

Of being a conservative radio talk-show host back in the day

So for years, when someone sent me something that was a conspiracy theory, or false, or just misleading or unfair, I would be able to push back and say “this is not true; there are not bodies stacked up in the Clinton warehouses; no this is not happening over here,” and people would say “thank you, Charlie for setting me straight” …

[I]n 2015 and 2016, what I found, very gradually but very forcefully, was that it became harder and harder to push back; it became harder and harder to give them any information that would change their mind.

And that’s when I realized that we had been too successful, that we had destroyed all the immune system to false information, to this kind of propaganda. And this was kind of an “Oh, shit!” moment for me.

Charlie Sykes, interviewed by Andrew Sullivan.

Morality, Law and Religion

The public should be absolutely concerned about whether a nominee for judicial office will be willing and able to set aside personal preferences. That’s not a challenge just for religious people. That’s a challenge for everyone.

Amy Coney Barrett (italics added)

Pet peeve: The idea that “separation of church and state” requires religious public officials and employees to set aside their religious beliefs when conducting public business. The tacit message in that is either that (1) morality and law are completely separate or (2) that religion is inherently irrational whereas other moral beliefs are not. In truth, there is no neutral, preference‑free judicial standpoint, and the available standpoints all are larded with moral intuitions that either can be accused of irrationality.

Yes, I have advocated in public meetings where I wished that others on “my side” would shut up if all they had to contribute was dubiously-applicable Bible proof-texts. But those kinds of folks never get nominated for any federal bench, and they’d be eaten alive if they were.

Consequences

The yield spread between three-month Treasury bills and 10-year bonds has widened by some 0.6 percentage points since early November. “The Fed may want lower interest rates, but the market ain’t buying it,” said Willian Adler, an Elliott Wave technical analyst.

He warns that the conditions are in place for a serious sell-off across risk assets. It could be similar to the bond rout that spooked Trump after the “liberation day” tariffs.

This rising spread may simply reflect fears of resurgent inflation as front-loaded stimulus from the “one big beautiful bill” juices the economy over the coming months, with the risk of full-blown overheating if Trump hands out $2,000 a head as a pre-electoral bribe.

But it may also be the first sign that America is starting to pay a price for the collapse of political credibility.

(Telegraph UK via John Ellis)

Unpopular opinions

I keep a private list of my truly unpopular opinions – opinions so far outside the Overton Window that I could lose friends if I voiced them.

I review and supplement the list occasionally, but never before have I decided that something doesn’t belong on the list any more (or maybe never belonged on it in the first place). This one probably never belonged on the list:

1. Subsidies for pro sports, including stadium construction, are damnable boondoggles. I would vote against every one of them until the franchise-owning billionaires ran me out of office.

While I’m at it, these too can come off the list:

2. Abolitions I supported that may well have hurt America:

  • The military draft Politicians who have anything to do with war policy should have skin in the game, even if it’s the skin of their descendants.
  • The Fairness Doctrine. We opened Pandora’s box before cable TV and the internet obliterated it. I don’t see a way back to sanity through reinstating the policy.

While I’m on a roll, here’s one that’s never been on the list:

3. The states should stop running primary elections. Neither major party is worth the powder to blow it up. Let them run their own elections or go back to “smoke-filled rooms” (which incidentally yielded better candidates than crackpot “base voters” have been yielding).

Logic mincing

Q: Which is better: a ham sandwich or complete happiness in life?
A: A ham sandwich, of course! Nothing is better than complete happiness in life and a ham sandwich is better than nothing.

  1. Something must be done!
  2. This is something.
  3. This must be done!

Shorts

  • No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom. The assertion that “foul is useful and fair is not“ is the antithesis of wisdom. (E.F. Shumacher) Small Is Beautiful is a classic for good reason.
  • The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency. (Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, citing the president’s authority to impose tariffs in an economic emergency, arguing that America’s supposed need to control Greenland is a national emergency.)
  • The health of the American experiment rests far more on the integrity of any given American president than we realized. (David French)
  • The pervasiveness of legal sports gambling can make an undefeated season and a 6-point victory in the national championship game feel like a loss if “the margin” was 7.5. (Moi)
  • At some point, we’ll reach the bottom of this dystopian populist abomination, but no one thinks we’re there yet, do they? (Nick Catoggio)
  • “The Trump Denmark letter is his Biden debate moment,” one Twitter user claimed.
  • Donald Trump is a peacock among the dull buzzards of American politics. (Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium).
  • A clown with a flame thrower still has a flamethrower. (Charlie Sykes to Andrew Sullivan)
  • When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
  • TikTok is still a danger. America no longer cares.
  • The souvenir is a fetish object that substitutes for the finite experience of the destination. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher

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, 1/13/26

Jerome Powell and the Fed

I know, I know—as a conservative, I’m required to hate the unaccountable administrative state. But in this case, Jerome Powell’s unaccountability is the only thing making it safe-ish for him to call foul on the more sinister unaccountability of Trump’s gangster regime.

The institution that Powell leads has a special role in America’s international preeminence and therefore also arguably a special duty to resist when a Peronist president goes about trying to smash that preeminence on a rock. Divorcing monetary policy from national politics helped make the United States a safe haven for global investors, a place people could park their cash without needing to worry that some dummy in the White House would slash interest rates irresponsibly to goose hiring in an election year. In trying to undo that, Trump is now following in the footsteps of economic basket cases like Argentina, Turkey, Russia, Zimbabwe, and—ta da—Venezuela.

“One of the biggest hurdles for developing nations getting foreign investment is demonstrating they are stable, and their economies aren’t run on rampant, capricious corruption,” former Biden economic adviser Jesse Lee wrote last night after news of the criminal probe of Powell broke. “Trump weaponizing DOJ against the Fed Chair is the loudest possible signal we aren’t a place to invest.” Powell isn’t even the only Federal Reserve director facing trumped-up accusations (pun intended) from the administration, for cripes sake.

Nick Catoggio

On ICE

Video as proxy war

We’re fighting over a shooting video as a proxy for the fight over whether ICE is doing normal law enforcement work or something more fascistic and extreme.

At the moment, regardless of your interpretation of the video evidence, I don’t think there’s a way to establish the normalcy of intense interior enforcement without some concessions to ICE’S nonradical critics. Concessions like agents’ no longer going masked in so many public situations. Or operations being slowed and training extended to encourage professionalism and cut down on harassment. Or allowing a full investigation of any agent-involved shooting before the White House or its agencies denounce the shooting victim.

The administration would presumably characterize some of these concessions as surrender. Longer training would not make the protests stop, unmasked ICE agents could indeed face more danger, and the most reckless protesters might be emboldened by any hint of retreat.

But if you are trying to build a stable immigration enforcement policy, you need backing from the conflicted middle of the country, even if that comes at some cost to your ideal approach.

Ross Douthat

Put on a tie!

Allow me to address the ladies and gentlemen at ICE in what apparently is their mother tongue: Take off the masks and put on a f—–g tie.

…

[W]e dress them up like the world’s most slovenly stormtroopers. 

And then we are surprised when they act like the world’s most slovenly stormtroopers. 

…

[T]here are a dozen ways for a professional law enforcement agent to deal with a vehicle blocking a public street, and none of them involves screaming obscenities at the driver or giving her contradictory orders. That the ICE agents on the scene do not seem to have been able to agree among themselves what should be done about the lurking menace of … an unarmed woman in a Honda who was poking fun at them … suggests very strongly a lack of credible command on the scene. 

…

This isn’t one of those colorable disagreements—the story that Trump, Vance, Noem, et al. are trying to tell—that Good was a rioter and terrorist who was trying to run down ICE agents—is a lie. A dumb, easily disproved lie. 

But Donald Trump has built a movement on dumb, easily disproved lies. 

… It is worth keeping in mind that in the lead-up to the attempted coup d’état of January 2021, Trump’s people retailed even more ridiculous stories about Venezuelan hackers messing with U.S. election results. (Possibly in cahoots with the North Koreans or Bigfoot or Elvis.) Trump understands something about his base: They enjoy being lied to.

Kevin D. Williamson

Artist unrelated to blogger

Precisely the point, n’est çe pas?

In essence, the rap on Churchill is that he was a 19th-century man parachuted into the 20th.

But is that not precisely to the point? It took a 19th-century man—traditional in habit, rational in thought, conservative in temper—to save the 20th century from itself. The story of the 20th century is a story of revolution wrought by thoroughly modern men: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and above all Lenin, who invented totalitarianism out of Marx’s cryptic and inchoate communism (and thus earns his place as runner-up to Churchill for Person of the Century).

And it is the story of the modern intellectual, from Ezra Pound to Jean-Paul Sartre, seduced by these modern men of politics and, grotesquely, serving them ….

Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter

Bruni Sentences

  • Also in The New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells considered a riot of reflections on the military operation in Venezuela: “Key administration personalities have taken to network television and social media, offering their own post-facto theories of the case. They have been like the sweepers in curling, trying to coax a runaway stone onto an advantageous track.” (Maxwell Burke, Seattle, and Barbara Douglas, Manhattan)
  • In The Washington Post, Chuck Culpepper saluted those who follow and love the Indiana University football team, which, after many decades of mediocrity, suddenly shot to glory: “They’re quite possibly the happiest fans anyone ever saw — steeped in amazement while still free of the poison of expectation.” (Joe Bellavance, Indianapolis)
  • And in The Wall Street Journal, after Indiana walloped Alabama in the Rose Bowl, Jason Gay admitted: “I’ve given up trying to understand this Indiana turnaround. We’ve crossed the river from Cinderella to Whathehella.” (Bruce Newman, Santa Clara, Calif.)

Items from Frank Bruni’s “For Love of Sentences” (shared link). The first part of his post is very perceptive as well,

Shorts

  • The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism. (Hannah Arendt via @jonah on micro.blog)
  • A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power. (Rod Dreher, 2021)
  • The news industry is Society’s appendix – permanently inflamed and completely pointless. You’re better off simply having it removed. (Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News)
  • Trump Is Not Playing Five-Dimensional Chess in Venezuela. After a strong first move, he’s eating all the pieces. (Garry Kasparov)
  • Richard Russell, the arch-segregationist senator …: The Civil Rights Act only passed, he groused, because “those damn preachers got the idea that it was a moral issue.” (Ross Douthat, Bad Religion)
  • For all the administration’s screeching about swarthy immigrants, it ain’t Somalis in Minnesota who are making the federal government run like that of a “sh-thole country.” It’s Trump who’s to blame for that. (Nick Catoggio)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld:

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher

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

Thursday, 12/4/25

Luxury Beliefs

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

Yasha Mounk, Luxury Beliefs Are Real.

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

The Hive Mind

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

Fundamental law

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

Andrew O’Donohue on “court-baiting.”

The Reality of Irreligious Violence

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

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence.

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

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

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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.