Category: Justice

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.

Dateline, Weimar America, 8/28/25

CrackerBarrelGate

This story strikes me as stupid, stupid, stupid. Here, through the voices of others, is why.

The chain was founded in 1969 — not 1776. It adopted the country branding because down-home cooking and folksy kitsch were trendy back then, not because they were trying to restore America to the Good Ole Days. Now, the market has moved on, and Cracker Barrel has been trying to adapt …

We have confused brands with moral values, and we demand to see our politics reflected everywhere, even in restaurant signage. We have also confused social media with social lives. And alone with our screens, too many of us have become addicted to rage, mashing the refresh button for the dopamine that rushes through us every time we discover that someone, somewhere, is wrong on the internet.

The addiction is so consuming that when no ready source of rage is available, we start cooking up our own out of whatever we can find in the cupboard. But if the cupboard is really this bare, I suggest people put down the phone and head to Cracker Barrel, rock themselves to serenity in the chairs on the porch, then head inside for a delicious helping of hashbrown casserole.

Megan McArdle

This, too:

The Cracker Barrel farce … is the first case of “cancel culture” I’m aware of in which the accusers couldn’t articulate why the accused was being canceled. 

Which was to their advantage, I think. An offender charged with a particular thoughtcrime can answer the charge but an offender charged with nothing in particular has little choice but to surrender. Which is what the company did on Tuesday.

…

Christopher Rufo, probably the New Right’s most influential culture warrior, admitted that he’s never set foot in the restaurant but declared war on it nonetheless in the name of making an example of any business “considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’”

“The Barrel must be broken,” he announced with no apparent irony. If a progressive culture warrior had said something as clownishly imperious, self-important, and Stalinist as that 10 years ago, right-wingers would still be making scornful jokes about it today.

Nick Catoggio.

In a Man-Bites-Dog story, Christopher Rufo recently wrote a little piece that was not knee-jerk shit-stirring! But this episode tells me he hasn’t really mended his ways.

I expect no better from Rufo, frankly, but Hillsdale College has no excuse — and no more respect from me, though I thought very highly of it ten years ago when it was, like I was and am, conservative, not Trumpist. (Two Hillsdale alums, who became expats for a while, were cool on their alma mater well before I was. I guess they read the signs: Hillsdale becoming a caricature of anti-woke education.)

Television rights, National rites

They will never do it, because it’s too tacky to bear, and they don’t need the money, but here’s an interesting thought exercise for media dorks: What would the price be if Swift and Kelce were to sell the live rights to their wedding for television? 

We know the NFL collects more than $110 million for a single playoff game—that’s what Peacock paid, and that was two whole years ago. Your standard live sports deal now hits 10 figures, easy. March Madness gets a billion annually to show college kids bricking 3-pointers. Paramount is set to pay more than $1 billion a year for humans pounding each other inside a steel cage.

A Swift-Kelce nuptial is bigger than all of that, mainly because of Swift, whose fame is vast and fierce, and if you don’t believe that, try criticizing one of her singles on Reddit sometime. There would be outrageous interest for both a live telecast and repeat viewing—you could do remixes, Taylor’s versions, on and on.

…

I think $500 million. That would be the absolute floor.

Jason Gay, Wall Street Journal

My better half wants a televised wedding opposite the State of the Union address, but that would reduce revenues quite a bit.

That is, I suppose it would reduce revenues. Who knows? I didn’t even know that Travis Kelce wasn’t a quarterback.

Nobel Laureate

FBI agents searched the Maryland home and Washington, D.C., office of former national security adviser John Bolton on Friday morning, reportedly as part of an investigation into his potential mishandling of classified documents. Bolton was not charged or detained during the operation. President Donald Trump—who revoked Bolton’s security clearance and Secret Service protection days into his second term—told reporters he had no prior knowledge of the searches but described Bolton, who has been a sharp critic of Trump in recent years, as “a real sort of a low life” and “not a smart guy.”

The Morning Dispatch

Congratulations, Mr. Bolton! Being described by Donald Trump as “a real sort of a low life” and “not a smart guy” is like winning a Nobel Prize for Integrity and Rectitude.

UPDATE: Even a blind pig finds the occasional acorn, or even a truffle: John Bolton Inquiry Eyes Emails Obtained by Foreign Government – The New York Times. So maybe Bolton actually, technically kinda broke a law. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” (Lavrentiy Beria, Soviet secret police chief).

The most miserable habitation in the world

The fundamental structural problem of our government during the Trump administrations is this: our constitution assumed the George Washington was President. It assumed that our high officials would be men of high character, virtuous men. It assumed that of the American people as well.

So John Adams was dead right in this quote, the last sentences of which are fairly well-known:

While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Adams, October 11, 1798

This President of the United States is not a virtuous man, but a vicious one. Empowered by shrewd and evil advisors (no more “adults in the room”) and motivated by avarice, ambition, and revenge, he is the whale breaking through the net, pushing the “unitary executive theory” (which wouldn’t be a problem were George Washington President) to the breaking point, turning the Department of Justice into the Department of Revenge and now trying to take over the Federal Reserve System – the better to blow a bubble from the bursting of which we may never recover.

I’m not going to resume lamenting what else bothers me about this administration (David French has some of the receipts), but I thought the fundamental problem, though it is not my original insight, might be helpful to pass along.

Do we have any reason to hope that men and women of high virtue will fill the Oval Office and Congress come 2029?

To be a conservative in 2025 …

To be a conservative in 2025 is to be politically homeless—but perhaps not entirely politically friendless.

…

At home, the party of Donald Trump—the party of J.D. Vance and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Tucker Carlson, not to mention supposed normies such as Mike Pence, et al.—currently is engaged in answering a question I hadn’t thought anyone was asking: “What would national socialism look like if antisemitism were less of a political priority?”

Kevin D. Williamson

Apropos of the first paragraph, the bulk of Williamson’s column is about how liberals-in-the-American-polarity-sense are starting to discover some timeless truths that just might allow conservatives to become allies if not intimates.

On that lone hopeful note, adieu!

Nick Catoggio:

[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.

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

New, chill Tipsy

Rules, Codes

The modern sexual marketplace

Half a century on from the contraceptive technology transition, and Greer’s call for women to emancipate desire from family formation, some 40 percent of Americans now meet their partners via the frictionless, boundary-less, disembodied free-for-all of online dating. And what this delivered wasn’t the blossoming of sexuality Firestone imagined: it was the modern ‘sexual marketplace’. In this ‘marketplace’, age-old sexed asymmetries have returned in cartoon form – without social codes to govern their action.

Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress

Weird, democratic, recognizable rules

Of HBO’s series The Gilded Age:

I think we like its picture of a society that had brute but recognizable rules that, in some weird way, were democratic. Make a whole pot of money, be generous with it to gain notice but enact modesty when thanked, learn to imitate personal dignity and a little refinement, and you’re in. It wasn’t much tighter than that. Now it’s more just the money, no one has to bow to some phony old value system, and the money spurts in all directions, creating a themeless chaos, and tech billionaires in sweatshirts give us moral lectures from Jeffrey Epstein’s plane.

Peggy Noonan

How are things holding up?

Can anything good come out of DOGE?!

My provisional verdict on the Trump administration is written and published and I do not intend to dwell on it anymore. But when DOGE started on its rampage, I wondered if the lads might, incidentally, do some good with their techie tools.

It appears that they have, and the tool was an AI thingamajig called SweetREX Deregulation AI. Who can object in principle to identifying regulations that are not required by statute and to flagging them for possible repeal? I cannot.

Hey, Mussolini reportedly made the trains run on time.

The judicial system still stands

I’m happy to say that the judicial system is serving as a fairly effective check on some of Trump’s worst impulses. And I say this, despite the sloppy narrative in the progressive press that the Supreme Court has become a rubberstamp for Trump. (One suspects that they’ve been written for months, just waiting for a few “statistics” to plug in before running them.)

Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith methodically demolishes much of the nonsense channeled from Adam Bonica through Thomas Edsall at the New York Times. Goldsmith’s is a substack and likely is paywalled.

Suffice for now that the most dramatic claim, which involves federal District Court ruling against Trump more than 93% of the time and the Supreme Court upholding Trump more than 93% of the time is really preposterous. Goldsmith:

This analysis points the most fundamental problem with Bonica’s efforts to draw inferences from the Court’s Trump-related interim orders. The Court reviews only applications filed by parties. The Solicitor General seeks interim relief when he thinks the chances of success are relatively high. As Steve Vladeck explained in June, there are “literally dozens of adverse rulings by district courts that the Trump administration has been willing to leave intact—either by not appealing them in the first place, or by not pushing further after being rejected by courts of appeals.” (By my count that number is around four dozen right now.)==

… When Bonica says that the Supreme Court “reverses almost automatically,” he is ignoring the crucial fact that the Court sees only a fraction of lower court rulings, and then only ones that are skewed for likely government success.

Bonica and the New York Times are committing a variant of the political science sin of “testing on the dependent variable”: they draw sweeping conclusions from a subset of cases that is small, highly unrepresentative, and unexplained. Other critical claims in the Edsall piece ignore this fundamental point.

Goldsmith (bold added)

Jonathan Adler’s subsequent comments on Edsall and Goldsmith are not paywalled. Adler largely agrees with Goldsmith.

My point is not that Trump is exactly “right” about anything. It’s more that some of the wrongness is not illegal or unconstitutional.

Ailments and symptoms

[R]esistance is treating the symptom, not the ailment. The ailment is the tide of global populism that has been rising across the developed world for years, if not decades. And the cause is that our societies have segregated into caste systems, in which almost all the opportunity, respect and power is concentrated within the educated caste and a large portion of the working class understandably wants to burn it all down.

David Brooks, America’s New Segregation (gift link)

Authority

Following

Let’s begin by considering the sentence “We must follow the science.” It is one we have heard, in various forms, repeatedly since about the middle of March 2020 via the various propaganda platforms that saturate our lives: the electronic billboards, the websites, the TV ads, the Tweets and Instagram posts. No sentence better captures the core convictions and commitments of our well-educated, well-heeled, and well-regarded.

Think of the parallel commands never heard. No one who is today in a position of cultural authority ever says, “We must follow our guts.” No one says, “We must follow tradition.” No one says, “We must follow our religious leaders.” No one says, “We must follow the poets.” No one says, “We must follow what the majority decides.” No one says, “We must follow those who have displayed wisdom.”

Importantly, no one in a position of cultural authority even says, “We must follow no one but ourselves. No one can legitimately set limits on our behavior!”

No, the widely held, seemingly unchallengeable cultural belief is: We must follow the science.

Jeremy Beer, Limits, Risk Aversion, and Technocracy

Xenogender: just one question, but it’s kind of tough

If you read the UNESCO documents on childhood sexuality education …, you will find pages and pages about protecting children from sexual abuse.  Sprinkled through them are much briefer passages which let the cat out of the bag — but you have to look for them.  It’s true that the activists who run these agencies don’t want children to be raped.  But they do want to sexualize them, and they want it very much.

They explain that “comprehensive sexuality education” “equips” young people including children to develop sexual relationships.  Among its many goals are that five-to-eight year olds are to be taught that they can masturbate and it will give them pleasure; nine-to-twelve year olds, that abortion is safe; and twelve-to-fifteen year olds, that there are various and sundry “gender identities” which deserve equal respect.

Speaking of so called gender identities:  The UNESCO documents don’t list them, but did you know that activists now claim that some people are “xenogender”?  That’s a gender “that cannot be contained by human understandings of gender.”

I wonder:  If it can’t be contained by human understandings of gender, then how do the activists know that it is one?

J Budziszewski (bold added)

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

Thursday, 7/17/25

The Main Event

Culture

You’d have to be stupid not to specialize in generalizing

[C]olleges’ pre-professional bent — reflected, too, in some schools’ elimination of such unpopular humanities majors as classics and art history — can be as imprudent as it is unimaginative. The modern job market has a flux and furious metabolism that routinely make a mockery of the best laid plans. “The Computer Science Bubble Is Bursting,” read the headline on an article in The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch last month. It noted that while the number of computer science majors in the United States had quadrupled between 2005 and 2023, it was now on the decline because of “a grim job outlook for entry-level coders.” “Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words,” Horowitch wrote. “This means it is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it.”

So, consulting is the ticket? Not so fast. “If consulting was a stock, I’d be shorting it right now,” the entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel told Joe Nocera for an article in The Free Press last week. Its headline: “The Consulting Crash Is Coming.” Its subhead explained that consultants, like coders, are being “outpaced by A.I.”

The moral of those two stories is that the smartest approach to college may be precisely the one that its trajectory of late has conspired against: range widely across subject offerings and focus not on a skill that could become obsolete but on intellectual dexterity and powers of judgment with better odds of enduring relevance. “A liberal arts degree is a pre-professional degree — you just don’t know what the profession is,” said Zimmerman, who teaches a seminar for first-year students at U-Penn called “Why College?”

Frank Bruni

“Learn to code” seemed the veriest wisdom, until suddenly it wasn’t. It has been so my whole lifetime: “We have a shortage of X; therefore, the smart college major is X” has never been very good at assuring that X is a remunerative profession even in the short-term.

Correctionist history

We have a view of the war that emphasizes the decisive American involvement, and with Hollywood’s aid, has become part of our national myth. I do not discount that. My mother had a brother who fought in the Pacific, my dad had three brothers who saw active duty, my father-in-law served, and countless kinsmen of my wife saw combat. But our victory in the West was made possible by the Russians pulverizing the Germans in the East. It was a great victory to us, but to the Russians it was existential. We think that the October Revolution of 1917 defined Russia. It did not, as it did not ultimately “take,” and died the death of all imposed ideologies. But the Great Patriotic War does define modern Russia. Their struggle to protect the Motherland is perhaps one of the most important components that define their national identity.

… Use any metric you want, the Russians far exceeded any of the other Allies.

Terry Cowan. If you doubt Terry, read Anthony Beever’s Stalingrad.

Pronouns

When the poet Andrea Gibson learned two years ago that their ovarian cancer was incurable, the news marked a turning point; Gibson would often say it led to some of the most joyous moments of their life.

Before the terminal prognosis, they were always afraid. They had severe anxiety and chronic panic attacks; they were petrified of the ocean; they couldn’t bring themselves to eat nuts on a plane, in case they turned out to have developed a new allergy and might suffocate in flight. For years, they’d lived in constant fear that everything would come crashing down. Then, of course, it did. And just at the moment when patients are frequently pushed to start “battling” cancer, Gibson finally learned to stop fighting. In an interview last year with the website Freethink, they remembered telling themself: “I will allow this.”

Faith Hill, Andrea Gibson Refused to ‘Battle’ Cancer

I am, I guess, a troglodyte. I cannot help but consider a person with ovarian cancer a woman, whose pronouns therefore are “she” and “her.”

Had I known Faith Hill, I would have tried to use her preferred pronouns in speaking to her as a matter of courtesy. But she’s gone now, and the two quoted post-mortem paragraphs speak for themselves about how awkward and artificial the pronoun thing can be.

Politics

GOP: You Are Dead to Me

JAN. 6 RIOTERS ARE THE NEW HOT EVENT IN TOWN FOR REPUBLICANS
County parties say they want to hear directly from people charged with storming the Capitol; former defendants are eager to recast the narrative

…

The Davis County Republican Party in the Salt Lake City suburbs held its annual Abraham Lincoln Day Dinner in March at $75 a plate. One marquee speaker was a pardoned defendant who federal prosecutors said knocked back a shot of Fireball whiskey in the conference room of then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“This was not an insurrection,” the speaker, Treniss Evans, told the crowd. “This was Kent State. This was Tiananmen Square.”

Wall Street Journal

See Mona Charen, Why I’m a Single-Issue Voter, too.

I think what I need to do in response is the presume every Republican supports Trump and the insurrectionists unless they affirmatively show otherwise.

As always, this does not mean that I’ll begin default-voting for Democrats. They just get less of my bile because I had no high hopes that they have shattered.

Legalia – of my former profession and its practitioners

Thinking of the children

I think Skrmetti, Mahmoud, and Free Speech Coalition can be summed up in a meme: Won’t somebody please think of the Children? But more precisely, the Court was protecting children from misguided parents. https://www.youtube.com/embed/q3D8670smTI?feature=oembed

In Free Speech Coalition, the Court allowed the state to protect children from accessing pornography that their parents might wish to access. In Skrmetti, the Court allowed the state to protect children whose parents approved puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. And in Mahmoud, the Court allowed parents to protect their children from the school board.

These three cases are not the same, but at bottom, they were all about protecting the children.

Josh Blackman

Integrity

The U.S. Justice Department unit charged with defending against legal challenges to signature Trump administration policies – such as restricting birthright citizenship and slashing funding to Harvard University – has lost nearly two-thirds of its staff, according to a list seen by Reuters.

Sixty-nine of the roughly 110 lawyers in the Federal Programs Branch have voluntarily left the unit since President Donald Trump’s election in November 2024 or have announced plans to leave, according to the list compiled by former Justice Department lawyers and reviewed by Reuters.

… Reuters spoke to four former lawyers in the unit and three other people familiar with the departures who said some staffers had grown demoralized and exhausted defending an onslaught of lawsuits against Trump’s administration.

‘Many of these people came to work at Federal Programs to defend aspects of our constitutional system,’ said one lawyer who left the unit during Trump’s second term. ‘How could they participate in the project of tearing it down?’

Reuters report via Lafayette Journal & Courier.

Adiaphora

I considered cutting these, especially the second, because everyone is talking about Jeffrey Epstein and MAGA bucking the Boss over his attempted denouement.

But I’m publishing the first largely because I share Kevin Williamson’s sense that a certain ink-stained wretch at the Daily Wire is particularly wretched, unreliable, and transgressive of the Ninth Commandment; the second because even on a subject as tired as Epstein’s ephibophilia, Freddie DeBoer is unlikely to write anything outworn; the third because it, too, is about l’affaire Epstein, and you might want to be spared it.

The high cost of low trust

There’s the obvious moral thing, of course, and the specifically religious scandal of a bunch of people who invoke their Christian faith every third sentence publicly taking consecutive high-volume hippopotamus dumps on the Ninth Commandment (“Thou shalt not bear false witness”) in each of the other two sentences. Watching my conservative-leaning, Trump-supporting, Christian friends, from the Catholics to the evangelicals, try to explain that away, twisting themselves into metaphorical knots that Dante would have done something awful with, fills me with dread. J.D. Vance, who lies about immigrants with comprehensively amoral facility, may be thinking about his place in history, but he should be thinking about his place in eternity.

…

Which brings me to Megan Basham, a dim, boring liar who is nonetheless useful as an example of what politics on the right looks like in our time. Basham, who plays in the right-wing Christian sandbox (you can read my review of her excruciatingly stupid and dishonest Shepherds for Sale here, and I don’t know whose cornflakes I pissed in to keep getting these assignments) recently tweeted this carefully composed casserole of imbecility and insipidity: “We need a new red scare. And a new McCarthy.”

…

McCarthy’s low character did not make it easier to fight Moscow’s agents in the United States—his sodden stupidity and willful dishonesty made it much, much more difficult, a fact for which his enablers bore some responsibility. In our time, the United States needs immigration reform, and consistent enforcement is going to have to be a part of that—and Donald Trump is going to make it a lot harder to get that done. J.D. Vance is going to make it harder to get that done. The clutch of fools around them—Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Robert Kennedy Jr.—is going to make it harder, because they have the net effect of undermining trust in government, including those such as Kennedy who are not directly involved in immigration. They do not seem untrustworthy—they are untrustworthy.  Cheerleaders and enablers and turd-polishers great and small, from big noises such as Sean Hannity and Robert Jeffress to little fish such as Megan Basham, are making the kinds of reform they purport to desire harder to achieve, too.

Kevin D. Williamson, The High Cost of Low Trust

Speaking of Megan Basham, this needs to be said about her demonization of George Soros, and Kevin D. Williamson said it better than I could:

There isn’t any question that Soros and his Open Society project hope to influence prominent institutions, including conservative-leaning churches and religious associations. Soros is engaged in a social change project, and that is what social change projects do. His ends are not generally ends that I share, but that doesn’t make it nefarious.

The Epstein Conspiracy Theory

It’s an old saw, but for good reason – conspiracy theories tend to flourish because they are in some strange sense comforting. They create the appearance of order in a universe filled with chaos. If a lone nutcase can kill John F. Kennedy, then there’s a certain inextinguishable randomness to the violence that governs human affairs. But if it was all a conspiracy, one involving the CIA and the FBI and the KGB and the mafia and the Freemasons and the Knights Templar and Opus Dei and – if it’s all a vast and magisterial conspiracy, well, then in a deep sense the world is governed by rules. Cruel and unjust rules, maybe, the kind that rob the country of their telegenic leader. But still, there is a logic to that injustice, a cold sort of stepwise purpose. No wonder even a president can be killed, if the most powerful forces in the world were conspiring to end his life! And that’s a lot more comforting, isn’t it? If Lee Harvey Oswald was just some guy with a gun, well… who among us is safe?

… And that’s exactly what I think of when I see all of this fixation on Jeffrey Epstein; it’s a record of our desire to force the most disturbing crime of all to make sense.

Epstein was a true monster and I wish he had not successfully avoided jail, even though he did so through suicide. I’m glad Ghislaine Maxwell will likely die in prison. I don’t doubt that powerful people were involved in their systematic abuse of underage women, and in a perfect world we’d be able to name them, shame them, and prosecute them. I want whatever was true of his death to come to light, and if there was a coverup, I want whoever was involved to face consequences. (But this is the United States so lol.)

Freddie DeBoer

Cui bono?

I haven’t been reading Michelle Goldberg, a progressive New York Times columnist, but recently read some praise for her writing. So despite my low interest in Jeffrey Epstein, I read her Monday musings (gift link) on the disappearance/nonexistence of Epstein’s client list.

I think she’s onto something, especially when she points out the curiosity that “Among those on the right who believe there’s an Epstein cover-up, few seem to be entertaining the idea that Trump is protecting himself.”

That he, Bondi and all are protecting him was my first thought when they sandbagged us. But not the QAnon-addled Trump-worshippers of MAGA. They thought he was secretly waging war on a cabal of child-molesting Democrat cannibals. (See Michelle Goldberg’s column on that.) That he, a serial-adulterer buddy of Epstein (who once non-judgmentally noted that Jeff “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”) might have enjoyed a bit of facilitated statutory rape himself never occurred to them.

On the same sorry topic, Jonathan Chait has an interesting opener:

Donald Trump’s ham-fisted reversal on his promise to release a secret list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients has accomplished something long considered impossible by virtually everybody, including Trump himself: He has finally exceeded his followers’ credulity. The Epstein matter is so crucial to Trump’s base, and the excuse offered is so flimsy, that the about-face has raised questions within perhaps the most gullible movement in American history.

Bonus

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

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

Political 5/30/25

What it takes to tick off David Brooks

Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”

This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth.

In fact, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, JD Vance used his precious time to make a point similar to Deneen’s. Vance said, “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”

Elite snobbery has a tendency to set me off, and here are two guys with advanced degrees telling us that regular soldiers never fight partly out of some sense of moral purpose, some commitment to a larger cause — the men who froze at Valley Forge, the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy and Guadalcanal.

But that’s not what really made me angry. It was that these little statements point to the moral rot at the core of Trumpism, which every day disgraces our country, which we are proud of and love. Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

Mild-mannered David Brooks, popping a vein (shared link, bold added).

The rest of the column was quite good, but the idea that a primitive, atavistic President would deploy his “throne-sniffing sycophants” (H/T Kevin D. Williamson, below) to reduce the nation to primitive atavism struck me as (a) too sophisticated conceptually, but perfect temperamentally, for Trump (a “stupid, lazy and angry” man — Kevin D. Williamson again); (b) exactly what his smart and unprincipled intimates would realize is necessary for their success; and (c) the kind of radical moral rot that Brooks sniffs out and exposes to us all.

And for his ability to distill evils to their essence, I am grateful.

Stupid, lazy and angry

We’ve been here before, of course. Donald Trump and his team have been three weeks away from announcing a groundbreaking new health care plan for … what, just about a decade now? Donald Trump’s confidence in addressing a complex subject has a linear relationship to his ignorance regarding that subject, and so we have got gems like this presidential declaration of ineptitude: “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” It isn’t the case that nobody knew—lots of people knew. Some of those people had good ideas, some had terrible ideas, but they knew it was complicated. The guy who didn’t know? The one who spent most of his life as a Manhattan gadfly, a game-show host with side hustles in pro wrestling and porn. That guy didn’t know.

…

There are no conspiracies. There are no secrets. Everything is more or less what it seems. … [T]he obvious explanation for Trump’s eccentricity (or most anything else) is almost always the correct explanation. Which is why I have been writing for all these years that the key to understanding the Trump administration is that its central figure, Donald Trump, is stupid, lazy, and angry …

There are people around Trump, such as Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, who are not stupid or lazy (though both are distinctly angry men) but are functionally indistinguishable from the stupid and the lazy because they are throne-sniffing sycophants who dread a return to the private sector more than almost anything else in this life.

…

It’s all right there to see: Trump, the supposed master negotiator, is as a matter of practical fact able to effectively negotiate exclusively in situations in which no substantial negotiation is required: with people he can fire, for example, or with utterly dependent parties. He calls this “negotiating from a position of strength” instead of “bossing around your cowering flunkies.”

Kevin D. Williamson

It didn’t take long for the courts to figure this out

The Abrego Garcia ruling and the Alien Enemies Act litigation have left legal scholars warning of a constitutional crisis. But a more tangible effect, attorneys told me, has been the erosion of the “presumption of regularity”—the benefit of the doubt given to the government in court proceedings. It’s based on the idea that federal officers and attorneys are operating in good faith, and not trying to achieve political goals through acts of subterfuge.

As judges see the administration saying one thing in public and another in court, they have started to treat the government’s claims with more skepticism and, sometimes, with outright suspicion of criminal contempt. A recent Bloomberg analysis found that the Trump administration has been losing the majority of its immigration-related motions and claims, regardless of whether the judges overseeing their cases were appointed by Democrats or Republicans.

Nick Miroff, In Trump Immigration Cases, It’s One Thing in Public, Another in Court

I’m not by any means certain that it will all be alright, i.e., that the courts can protect us from Trump’s lawlessness. But denying his administration the presumption of regularity is an important and needed step.

Note well that when a government lawyer tried to address the court honestly, the Attorney General fired and defamed him:

When a senior ICE official said in sworn testimony in March that Abrego Garcia had been deported to El Salvador because of an “administrative error,” the Justice Department attorney who initially represented the Trump administration, Erez Reuveni, relayed that characterization to the court. When asked why the administration hadn’t taken steps to correct the error and bring Abrego Garcia back, Reuveni said his client—the Trump administration—hadn’t provided him with answers.

The top Trump aide Stephen Miller soon began insisting publicly that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was not, in fact, an error—the opposite of what the government admitted in court. Vice President J. D. Vance claimed that Abrego Garcia is a “convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here,” even though he has no criminal convictions in the United States or El Salvador. Attorney General Pam Bondi cast the error as missing “an extra step in paperwork” and said that Abrego Garcia should not be returned.

Reuveni was fired. Bondi said he had failed to “zealously advocate” for the government. “Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences,” she told reporters.

Nick Miroff

It’s a good time to be a retired attorney or, failing that, to practice outside a Department of Justice that requires you to lie (the normal term for Bondi’s “zealously advocate”) in court.

Marks of dystopia

Speaking of lying to court and losing in court:

I offer you the most dystopian thing I’ve read about the state of the federal government this year—so far:

Amid rising tensions between the Trump administration and the judiciary, some federal judges are beginning to discuss the idea of managing their own armed security force.

…

The Supreme Court has its own dedicated police force, but other federal judges are protected by the U.S. Marshals Service, which reports to Attorney General Pam Bondi. Security committee members worried that Trump could order the marshals to stand down in retaliation for a decision that didn’t go his way.

A country where judges need their own bodyguards because they no longer trust the president to guarantee their safety if they rule against him (and understandably so) is a country waaaaay too far down the slope of banana republicanism to chastise anyone else about failing to live up to Western “virtue ethics.”

…

[Trump named Ed Martin acting U.S. attorney in Washington] earlier this year despite the fact that he hadn’t worked a day in his life as a prosecutor. The president later nominated him to fill the position permanently, but that required Senate confirmation. And although Senate Republicans have set the bar for confirming Trump cronies on the floor, somehow Martin still failed to clear it. You need to be awfully sketchy—like, Matt Gaetz levels of sketchy—for John Thune’s conference to bork you.

…

From time to time I think back to what Sen. Susan Collins said when she was asked during Trump’s first impeachment trial whether she’d vote to convict him for demanding a quid pro quo of Ukraine. No, she answered, there’s no need. “I believe that the president has learned from this case,” she told CBS News. “The president has been impeached. That’s a pretty big lesson.”

He did learn a lesson. What he learned was that Senate Republicans would never hold him accountable for blatantly abusing his power.

Nick Catoggio

Whole-of-Government Gaslighting

[W]hy is the Justice Department not only settling the lawsuit that [Ashli] Babbitt’s relatives filed but also mulling an apology in the millions? Because Trump’s alternate reality demands it. Because that is how you turn truth entirely on its head.

You don’t simply challenge what really happened at the Capitol, which is that lawless hooligans in thrall to Trump’s delusions attempted a kind of coup. You chip-chip-chip away at it in so many ways over so much time and with such unflagging frequency that many people who thought they understood what they were seeing aren’t wholly sure anymore — or give up trying to make sense of it.

Trump recast a day of shame as a “day of love.” The rioters became “patriots” and Babbitt a martyr. As soon as Trump returned to the Oval Office, he pardoned nearly all of the roughly 1,600 people criminally charged in connection with the rioting. He even floated the idea of a compensation fund for them. Everybody gets a prize!

To live in fiction, commit to it. That’s the moral not merely of Trump and Jan. 6 but of Trump, period. Yesteryear’s hand-wringing about whether to label his individual falsehoods “lies” and those periodic tallies of his misstatements now seem quaint; they don’t do justice to the scope and audacity of what he’s up to. Nor does the occasional current chatter about “propaganda.” Trump is engaged in a multifront, multipronged attack on any and every version of events that impedes his goals and impugns his glory. It makes the spin control of presidents past look like child’s play.

Frank Bruni (shared link) This is so good I probably would have shared one of my ten monthly links even if it weren’t the end of the month.

86ing the important stuff

Kash Patel Says He’s Prioritizing Social Media Mocking Trump Over ‘Child Sex Predators, Fentanyl Traffickers, Terrorists’ – Above the Law

He didn’t say that in so many words, but his meaning was clear:

FBI Director Kash Patel took a break from his busy schedule of hanging out in Las Vegas instead of actually running the FBI, to go on Fox News last night to rant a bit about James Comey. After Comey posted his beachside “8647” insta, Patel quickly took to social media — where all professional law enforcement vents about its investigation priorities — to pretend that “86,” a century old term for bouncing unruly customers or canceling food orders, actually amounted to an assassination threat directed at Donald Trump.

This was, to use the technical term, f ****** stupid. Though against all odds, it was not nearly as stupid as Patel’s next move. Per the Daily Beast:

“Do you know how many copycats we’ve had to investigate as a result of that beachside venture from a former director?” he asked Baier. “Do you know how many agents I’ve had to take offline from chasing down child sex predators, fentanyl traffickers, terrorists?”

Hopefully some career law enforcement professional within the FBI intervened to make sure the answer to both questions is close to zero.

First of all, since threats to the president are the jurisdiction of the Secret Service — something Patel publicly acknowledged at the time — why the hell is he pulling agents off ANYTHING to run down a soccer mom who took a picture of her bottomless mimosa brunch bill having tipped to make sure the total was 8647?

So our President’s ego is more important protecting us from child sex predators, fentanyl traffickers, and terrorists. Keep that in mind. It’s barely 19 months to Retribution Day 2026.

That’s assuming the Democrats can serve up something palatable. But they’re convened in luxury hotels to do some

soul-searching after November’s defeat. “Democratic donors and strategists,” Goldmacher writes, “have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.”

One of those proposals is a $20 million effort “to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online.” The goal is to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.”

David French.

This is a reprise of this era’s Democrat delusion: “We just aren’t communicating our message right.” Au contraire, mon frere: your message is your problem.

86 both major parties.

Woke Right

Richard Hanania is a longtime critic of DEI, but has a few bones to pick with Trump 2.0 fake demolition of it:

Unfortunately, it is now clear that, rather than sticking to the principles of colour blindness, merit and individual liberty that I believe in, the Trump administration seeks to implement its own version of thought control and federal-government overreach.

This can be seen most clearly in the letter of demands the administration sent to Harvard on April 11th and its announcement that it was cutting off research funds to the university. The letter stated that Harvard must cease all DEI and affirmative-action policies in hiring, promotions and admissions.

So far, so good …

… [T]here is a direct contradiction between the goal of viewpoint diversity and the principle of merit, which the administration is claiming to defend. We all have an interest in our top institutions selecting students and faculty based on intelligence, competence and their fit within a programme. Having ideological litmus tests for professors and scientists would do more damage to the principle of merit than race and sex preferences ever have, given how few individuals with advanced degrees identify as conservatives …

… Harvard may never be an institution where MAGA has a large constituency. Accepting that is necessary for being at peace with the idea of America as a pluralistic society.

An influential voice from the right laments Trump’s attack on universities

When the rhetoric comes home to roost

“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” said Vanessa Cowart, a friend of Ms. Hui from church. “But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.”

She paused. “This is Carol.”

A Missouri Town Was Solidly Behind Trump. Then Carol Was Detained. – The New York Times (shared link)

Prelude to a pissing contest

Elon Musk said he would step down as a “special government employee” with the Trump administration. The billionaire has led a radical effort to overhaul the American state through the Department of Government Efficiency. He has been critical of Mr Trump’s budget bill, which would add trillions to debt. He recently said he wanted to spend more time on his businesses—which have themselves suffered a backlash.

The Economist

Neither Trump nor Musk can keep his mouth shut. The Bromance is over. The divorce oughta be good — “good television” as Trump likes to say.

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.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my rusty credentials without thinking it through.

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

100% Political. Sorry.

“Lawfare” in a nutshell

What the federal courts are facing from the Trump administration is trolling, outright defiance, administration attorneys making representations to the court with the administration refusing to follow through, and in general, a double game:

(1) Trump 2.0 says “The establishment is broken. We need to come in and wreck the place. We need to up-end everything.. We need to start throwing tables. Everything’s got to change. We are an administration unlike any other.”
(2) The legal system responds as if Trump 2.0 is an administration unlike any other.
(3) Trump 2.0 complains that they are being treated differently.

David French on the Advisory Opinions podcast (lightly paraphrased).

I hesitate to distill it further, all the way down to “Trump is a hard case, and hard cases make bad law,” because I want to give fair-minded MAGA people (if any there be) a chance to see why he’s a hard case.

Another alternative is “this administration has forfeited the ‘presumption of regularity’ normally afforded the Executive branch,” but that’s a bit too in-the-weeds and also doesn’t explain the “why” of the forfeiture.

The One Big Beautiful Bill

As regular readers know, I try to keep things upbeat in this newsletter. So let me tell you what I like about The One Big Beautiful Bill that passed the House (barely) several hours ago.

I like the fact that it reflects the degree of seriousness with which Americans now govern themselves.

That’s satisfying. In a democracy, representatives are supposed to vote in accordance with the will of the people. If the people demand the policy equivalent of eating out of garbage cans, Congress should deliver. And it has.

The salient fact about this legislation isn’t that it’s “bad,” although it is, for reasons we’ll get into. Bad legislation isn’t noteworthy. We all expect it.

What’s striking about The One Big Beautiful Bill is that it makes no pretense of trying to grapple seriously with America’s problems, even though it’s the centerpiece of the president’s agenda.

…

House Republicans have given up on trying to improve the country. All they wanted was to pass the class, which they did this morning by a single vote on the House floor. The One Big Beautiful Bill is to legislation what an AI-generated essay is to education.

Meditate on this: When I call it “The One Big Beautiful Bill,” I’m not mocking the president by mimicking his habit of speaking in dopey Trump-ese. I’m using the official name given to the bill by House Republicans. American government has become so self-consciously unserious that it’s now advertising that unseriousness in how it refers to its own policies.

Nick Catoggio

Jeffrey Epstein

Say what you will about notorious sex trafficker and financier Jeffrey Epstein, at least he killed Jeffrey Epstein. That was the conclusion of the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice’s inspector general back in 2019, but many Americans—including more than a few in the ranks of the MAGA movement—insisted that some sinister conspiracy, likely connected to powerful Democratic officials, killed Epstein before he could destroy more reputations and implicate others in his sordid deeds. Now, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have weighed in after reviewing the evidence, concluding that Epstein committed suicide. The pair made the declaration in an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, and it’s hard to begrudge the handful of MAGA social-media types who reacted with surprise and a sense of betrayal. In fact, as recently as February 7, Bongino was talking up Epstein’s connections to the Clintons on his podcast and declaring, “It’s time to start overturning that rock, and seeing what’s underneath.” Apparently, sometimes when you turn over a rock, all you find is the bottom of a rock.

National Review Weekly email.

I’m shocked that Patel and Bongino passed up an opportunity to stir the pot. Will they be fired now for not following the game plan?

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.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my rusty legal credentials without thinking it through.

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

Bright Thursday

I don’t know about your Inbox, but mine tends to fill up especially on Friday. So I’m posting this now rather than in the wee hours tomorrow.

Trump 2.0

I haven’t been able to eliminate sharp criticism of Trump from today’s post because there are too many issues and I’ve read too much that isn’t just “same old same old.” As has become my habit, I’ve posted most of my anti-Trump stuff here.

National “Emergencies”

Source: Andrew Sullivan

The Meta-Concern about summary deportation

United States law allows for a quite expedited process to remove people from the country, to deport them. You don’t get a big trial. You don’t get a jury trial. You are moved rapidly because the theory of the case is: First, you don’t have a right to immigrate to the United States, so you have not been deprived of your rights. And secondly, once you’re removed from the United States, you remain a free person. You are sent back to the place you came from or some other place to which you have some connection, and then you’re free to go about your business. You’re not sent to a prison—not sent to a prison for life.

But as I talk about this, the thing that has most gripped my mind with worry and anxiety is not only the effect on the individuals themselves, some of whom may be genuinely innocent, but the effect on those who are sending human beings to a prison without a hearing.

You know, the United States government is now building an apparatus of lawyers, of officials of all kinds, who plan and think every day, How can we apprehend people on American soil and bundle them to a prison without giving them any show of a hearing? They’re building skills and competencies at non-due-process forms of arrest and incarceration that are going to be very hard to limit.

… I remember when I was a Canadian citizen in the United States on a student visa, we were warned if you got into a bar fight, you could theoretically lose your student visa. Now, in those days, that meant that you’d have to go back to Canada and go to school in Canada, which is not the end of the world. In today’s America, that could mean you could lose your student visa and be accused of terrorism, and a bag put over your head and be put into a car and sent to a prison in El Salvador for the rest of your life.

Now, maybe that doesn’t happen in every case. Maybe that doesn’t happen in many cases. But there are people in the employ of the United States government, paid by taxpayers to think about how can we daily broaden the category of people who can be arrested and detained and imprisoned without any showing to any authority at all, without any opportunity to make themselves heard, without any evaluation by an independent fact finder—by any of the things we call due process.

David Frum, introducing a terrific conversation about The Crisis of Due Process with Peter Keisler. (bold added)

Do we really believe in free speech?

Trump 2.0 has been deporting foreign students and others for constitutionally protected speech, using as its current go-to bad-faith excuse that the speech is antisemitic.

The late British-American journalist Christopher Hitchens is a more recent testament to the long tolerance of America toward foreign dissent. Before becoming a U.S. citizen in 2007, Hitchens spent decades as a legal resident—and as one of America’s most acerbic public intellectuals. He accused Ronald Reagan of being “a liar and trickster,” called Israel America’s “chosen surrogate” for “dirty work” and “terrorism,” lambasted Bill Clinton as “almost psychopathically deceitful,” and accused the George W. Bush administration of torture and illegal surveillance. If a student can be deported for writing a campus op-ed critical of Israel, any of Hitchens’ views could have been used to justify deporting him.

Jacob Mchangama, A New McCarthyism

Law and its limits

This isn’t how our system is supposed to work. When a president does the kinds of things Donald Trump is doing, his popularity should sink so low that Congress will feel empowered to stand up to him. Ideally, they would impeach and remove him from office for attempting to govern like an absolute monarch. Short of that, Congress and the courts would be working in tandem to impose and enforce constraints on the wayward executive until the next election strengthens their hand against him.

But none of this is happening—because our system has broken down. The parties are ideologically sorted, with almost no remaining overlap. And Trump has transformed the GOP into a cult of personality more loyal to him personally than to the Republican Party, the other institutions of American democracy, the law, or the Constitution.

In a situation like this, the only thing preventing the president from transforming himself into a tyrant is his own willingness to do it. The courts can tell him to stop. But will he? If he does, democracy survives, at least for the time being. If he doesn’t, democracy is over, at least until it can be reconstituted at some point in the future.

One should never hope to live through a moment of great political precarity like our own. But one tiny compensation is that such moments bring clarity about certain fundamental matters. How has the United States managed to survive for nearly 250 years without evolving into a dictatorship? The answer really may be this simple: By never electing a man willing to do what it takes to effectuate the change.

Until now.

Damon Linker

It’s not clear that the courts will suffice, but the courts — having already, and deservedly, come to treat the Administration as bad-faith, untrustworthy actors — will provide partial deterrence and may help sway public opinion by the cogency (and sometimes, the tartness) of their reasoning.

[I]f you want a really extraordinary example of that, you would look at the order that the Court issued at 1 a.m. on Saturday morning this last weekend, because even though they had held that everybody has to be given meaningful notice before they could be removed in this way, there was credible evidence that the administration was loading people onto buses without giving them anything like the notice that was required. And the ACLU went to the Supreme Court and said, you know, Please, as you listen to the rest of this case and get briefing, stop this from happening.

And if the administration were a normal administration and had compiled a record so far of being a normal administration, the Court would’ve said, Well, I can be confident they’re not going to do this while we are hearing your petition, so let’s give the government a chance to respond. Let’s see what they say, and then we’ll decide what to do. Because, of course, the government wouldn’t spirit these people away while we are actually in the process of deciding whether it can do so on this emergency application you filed. But they knew that the government had done exactly that with the first 200 or so people they had sent away.

The case was before a district judge, and they rushed to secretly get the people out before he could issue an order. And they didn’t quite succeed on that, which is why you have these issues of contempt floating around now. But at 1 a.m., the Court by a 7–2 vote said, Don’t remove anybody in the class represented by these lawyers until you hear otherwise from us.

And that shows that there is a cost to the administration of acting the way it’s acting towards the courts, because if you squander the reputation that governments of both parties have had for credibility and fair dealing and honest brokering with the Court, then they’re going to treat you different because they know they can’t quite trust you.

Peter Keisler with David Frum

Miscellany

The new Republican coalition

Thus we have arrived at a new Republican coalition that looks like this:

  • The tech right, which is essentially a weirder and more evil upgrade of the pro-business libertarians
  • The barstool right, which is a genuinely new constituency made up of hedonistic anti-woke libertarians that has replaced the Christian conservatives
  • The neo-conservative foreign policy hawks, who are the weakest member of the coalition, but can still get what they want on certain issues, as seen with the attacks on the Houthis as well as the saber rattling regarding Greenland

In other words, the Christian influence on actual Republican policy items and their political vision is going to be exceedingly negligible going forward. Sure, Vice President Vance will make an appearance at the March for Life. President Trump will show up to the National Prayer Breakfast. But even when he does acknowledge a Christian event, it often will come loaded with hatred and vile self-aggrandizement, as seen yesterday:

And ultimately when push comes to shove on the policy level, Christian concerns will always be backgrounded or eliminated relative to the priorities of the three above groups, as we have already seen on abortion, marriage, and PEPFAR.

Jake Meador

I originally thought to post this on a Sunday, when my focus is narrower, but it didn’t fit there because I don’t value “religion” for its instrumental partisan-political value.

It was a very few years ago when I warned (as had others) “If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait ‘till you see the irreligious Right.” Well you’ve been seeing them in power for three months now.

Beta-testing tyranny in the Sunshine State

Ron DeSantis walked so that Donald Trump could run. When the time came to formulate a policy response to the woke left, no one mattered more than the governor of Florida.

He tried to ban critical race theory in education. He sharply limited discussion of gender and sexuality in public schools. He tried to limit the free speech of university professors. He retaliated against Disney when it had the audacity to exercise its freedom of speech to criticize the governor’s policies.

And through it all, DeSantis declared that Florida was the place where “woke goes to die.”

In his second term, Trump is a scaled-up version of DeSantis. Every element of the DeSantis model has been deployed against Trump’s ideological enemies …

…

At first I was optimistic about the anti-woke right. Their free speech argument resonated with me. I’d spent decades litigating free speech cases, after all, and I’d never really seen anything like a mass movement for free expression.

But my optimism quickly faded. In 2021, the anti-woke right embraced a series of state laws that were designed to ban critical race theory. Rather than meet critical race theorists in the marketplace of ideas, the right chose to try to suppress their expression.

A movement that had spent decades fighting speech codes on college campuses was now enacting speech codes of its own. States that once passed laws meant to protect free speech on campus were now passing laws suppressing the discussion of so-called divisive concepts about race.

By this time I was familiar with the right’s authoritarian turn — and getting very worried about it. In 2019, parts of the intellectual right were consumed with a fight over liberalism itself, with the new right arguing that liberal values — freedom of speech and free trade, for example — were hollowing out American culture, creating a nation of atomized individuals who were consumed with self-actualization (and consumption itself) at the expense of family and community.

David French, The Anti-Woke Right and the Free Speech Con

Context

Ironically, the left, now alarmed by the federal government’s intrusive reach [into, say, Harvard], bears direct responsibility for crafting the very legal weapons wielded against the universities it dominates. Almost four decades ago, progressive legislators demanded sweeping amendments to civil rights law, expanding federal oversight over higher education. The sequence of events reveals a cautionary tale of political hubris: progressive confidence that state power would reliably serve their ends overlooked the reality that governmental authority, once unleashed, recognizes no ideological master. Today’s circumstances starkly illustrate how expansive federal control over civil society, originally celebrated by progressives, returns to haunt its architects. The left’s outrage ought to focus not on this particular administration but on its own reckless empowerment of the state.

Yet for all its courage, Harvard’s response stopped short of making the argument that would best protect the values for which it was fighting. It defended the university’s independence without explaining why that independence deserves protection. It invoked values like “pluralism” and “inquiry,” but it did not fully explain why those values are essential to a liberal democratic society. The letter therefore missed an opportunity to articulate what a university is for — not just to students or donors, but to the country. And this matters, because Trump’s attack against this and other universities is not only about the balance of power between universities and the government. It is, at bottom, about the legitimacy of higher education as a public good.

Alan Jacobs, quoting, respectively, John O. McGinnis and Edward Frame

Dangers of debunking

The danger of being a professional exposer of the bogus is that, encountering it so often, one may come in time to cease to believe in the reality it counterfeits.

Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943

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.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

First weekend of Spring

Give it back!

Raphael Glucksmann, a member of the European Parliament, feels that America has reneged on the values that led to the statue being gifted. “We’re going to say to the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants, to the Americans who fired researchers for demanding scientific freedom: “Give us back the Statue of Liberty,” he said at a convention of his center-left party, Place Publique, Sunday. “We gave it to you as a gift, but apparently you despise it. So it will be just fine here at home,” Glucksmann added.

Daily Beast via The Morning Dispatch

Incel Integralists

The Harvard Law School chapter of the Federalist Society was taken over last week by “Common Good Constitutionalism” disciples of Professor Adrian Vermeule (i.e., wokesters of the Right). The chapter’s former president, Sarah Isgur, has some thoughts about the incel Integralists and their pyrrhic victory:

Freedom is turned on its head. Individual freedom does not exist if it does not enhance the general welfare (again, defined by them). To break it down: Speech that is good is protected. Speech that is bad is not. And the government gets to define what is good.

But they misunderstand Fed Soc’s strength. So let me explain: It came from its size and its diversity of thought. When you shrink it down to only those people who agree with you on outcomes, you have stripped it of its source of power.

The Vikings can be resentful that we didn’t let them into our club. They can even burn down the club. But they still won’t be in the club. They’ll just be standing over its ashes, still sad, and confused, and angry, and without clerkships, and without girlfriends.

History is littered with the stories of young men who are frustrated and can’t get chicks. They’re called “Jacobins.”

(A combination of Twitter, and the Advisory Opinions podcast.)

Regrets

Trigger warning: Do not read the following with your mouth full of scrambled eggs or hot coffee. I speak from experience.

In Oedipus Tex, the mathematician-composer P.D.Q. Bach’s 1990 comedic answer to Stravinsky’s tragic oratorio, the titular hero discovers the truth of his situation—that he has married his mother, Billy-Jo Costa, Queen of the Rodeo—and, fulfilling the requirements of tragedy, he takes the rhinestone-covered barrettes out of her hair and gouges out his eyes. At which point the chorus sings:

“And immediately after he’d put out both his eyes, he … kind of wished he hadn’t.”

Everybody has regrets. Nations and their governments do, too. When things are upside down in the state, you end up with Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, or the Trump administration. 

Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian activist involved in the Columbia protests who was arrested in a Keystone Kops-level caper launched by Marco Rubio’s incompetent State Department, which proposed to revoke a student visa that Khalil doesn’t have. Khalil is, in fact, the holder of a green card, meaning that he has been given permanent resident status in the United States by the U.S. government. Which is to say, Khalil is in this country as a permanent resident thanks to a decision of the U.S. government, which, after looking back on what it had done, kind of wished it hadn’t.

Kevin D. Williamson

My regret is that I cannot read Kevin D. Williamson or Nick Catoggio more regularly without breaking my promise to myself not to wallow in politics during the Trumposcene, but rather to enjoy the inumerable things that humans can enjoy even under the governance of jackasses or jackboots.

The corrupting effect of corrupt rulers

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, in a section on corruption and the vices of rulers in a democracy, warned:

In a democracy private citizens see a man of their own rank in life who rises from that obscure position in a few years to riches and power; the spectacle excites their surprise and their envy, and they are led to inquire how the person who was yesterday their equal is today their ruler. To attribute his rise to his talents or his virtues is unpleasant, for it is tacitly to acknowledge that they are themselves less virtuous or less talented than he was. They are therefore led, and often rightly, to impute his success mainly to some of his vices; and an odious connection is thus formed between the ideas of turpitude and power, unworthiness and success, utility and dishonor.

Tocqueville’s concern was that if citizens in a democracy saw that unethical and corrupt behavior led to “riches and power,” this would not only normalize such behavior; it would validate and even valorize it. The “odious connection” between immoral behavior and worldly success would be first made by the public, which would then emulate that behavior.

That is the great civic danger posed by Donald Trump, that the habits of his heart become the habits of our hearts; that his code of conduct becomes ours. That we delight in mistreating others almost as much as he does. That vengeance becomes nearly as important to us as it is to him. That dehumanization becomes de rigueur.

Peter Wehner, Trump’s Revenge Campaign

Thumbnail history of the GOP since 2008

David French, reflecting on his (supportive) relationship to the Tea Party movement and cautioning Democrats against trying to reproduce it in the Democrat party:

But it all turned bad, and the reasons it turned bad are directly relevant to Democrats today.

Republicans built a movement around both anger and ideology. My mistake was in believing that the ideology was more important than the anger, but it was the anger that gave the Tea Party its political momentum, and that anger eventually swallowed the ideology. Rage is now the defining characteristic of Trump’s Republican Party.

…

My first interpretation of Tea Party anger was precisely that it was in service of higher values, specifically a return to founding constitutional principles and an embrace of free markets and fiscal responsibility. But that was wrong. The ideology mattered only if it could serve the anger.

Another way of putting it is that Tea Party members embraced constitutional conservatism and libertarianism as a tactic, not as a principle, and the instant that a different, Trumpist ideology emerged — a better vehicle for the party’s raw rage — they welcomed it with open arms.

What’s your hurry?

Could this be the meta-explanation of what the ochre emperor is doing?:

DOGE is in a race with the courts. From the first days of the administration it was all shock and awe. Take an agency everyone knows is a problem, such as USAID, and kill it. Tell employees to go home, put a guard outside and lock the door, cover the agency’s name in gaffer’s tape, have a functionary send an email terminating employment, then disable email accounts. Staffers can’t reach each other, can’t find the reporter’s address—confusion kills the will to resist. Other agencies watch, and it puts the fear of God into them.

It’s all a race to get as much accomplished now as possible. Once something goes to the Supreme Court, there will be clear limits. Until then, maybe months, maybe a year, get it done.

Peggy Noonan. More:

Here I confess my conservative lizard brain likes seeing unhelpful and destructive parts of any organism, very much including government, cut and sometimes obliterated, and for the usual reasons. But the non-lizard parts—those that are analytical, involve experience, and have observed human nature and seen who’s doing the cutting, and at what size and speed—recoil, and see great danger ahead.

Judiciary 101

“The good news here is, we did put 235 judges, progressive judges, judges not under the control of Trump, last year on the bench, and they are ruling against Trump time after time after time,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said a few days ago.

You do the judiciary no favors talking like that, Sen. Schumer.

  1. “[C]onservative judges, judges (supposedly) under the control of Trump,” are ruling against him, too — just as they did with his b*llsh*t 2020-21 election challenges.
  2. No federal judge is “under the control” of the President who appointed him or her. That’s kinda the point of life tenure on good behavior.

Miscellany

  • “If you weren’t outraged that the law and due process weren’t followed when Biden let 10+ million people into the country, don’t expect voters to be outraged by accusations Trump isn’t following due process when he deports them,” – Mark Hemingway.
  • “I still can’t get over the power of negative polarization where liberals genuinely convinced themselves that the lab leak was the racist theory of Covid origins, but the ‘it’s just the disgusting hygiene and superstition of Chinese wet market customers’ was the non-racist theory,” – Michael Brendan Dougherty.
  • Colin Wright: “‘Christ Is King’ Is the Woke Right’s ‘Black Lives Matter.’”

All via Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan’s main essay is on how Anthony Fauci intentionally misled us about the origins of Covid.

Why on earth would panicked scientists believe that Covid was probably a lab leak and then write a landmark paper “trying to disprove” it? It’s the essential question. One obvious answer is that Fauci realized that if his beloved gain-of-function research had led to the death of millions in a plague, he might not go down in history as a medical saint.

I have no need of any other hypothesis.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Tuesday, 8/6/24

The Left

Cynics

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

Nick Cattogion, The Nuclear Option – The Dispatch

Bait and switch, not “slippery slope”

Recall that gender ideology was never sold to the American people. Parents were sold on “inclusivity.” Gender ideology itself was sold to their grade-school kids. This was another of the Left’s “bait-and-switch” maneuvers, and it succeeded so well, the gender ideologues had essentially a decade’s head start on American parents.

Metaphors matter. They can elucidate, but they can also elide and confuse. For a long time, the conservative metaphor for the Left’s tactics has been “slippery slope.” It’s a bad metaphor. It suggests that radical efforts to harm American families are all just the result of the gravitational pull of the earth, or the inevitability of logical progression. That isn’t the case. The tactics used against American families are far more clever. And they invariably involve a “Bait and Switch.” Sell the American people on a principle we can all agree on: “inclusivity,” “tolerance” and “anti-bullying.” Then, smuggle in an entirely different program under its name. That is how gender ideology ended up part of the mandatory “anti-bullying” curriculum, as opposed to the “sex education curriculum,” which is subject to parental opt out.

Abigail Shrier, California’s New Law Lets Schools Keep Secrets from Parents

I like the bait-and-switch framing, which I think reflects the intentions of the core gender ideologues.

Grifters gonna grift

GLAAD Paid For CEO’s Lavish Spending, Documents Reveal – The New York Times

Kamala’s Lawfare against conservatives

We keep looking for an issue, any issue, on which Kamala Harris differs with the Democratic left, but we keep coming up empty. That includes her party’s use of lawfare against political opponents, as an episode while she was California Attorney General reminds us.

Ms. Harris made headlines a decade ago by threatening to punish nonprofit groups that refused to turn over unredacted donor information. She demanded they hand to the state their federal IRS Form 990 Schedule B in the name of discovering “self dealing” or “improper loans.” The real purpose was to learn the names of conservative donors and chill future political giving—that is, political speech.

…

Free-market nonprofits challenged the Harris dragnet, suing the AG’s office in a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta in 2021, the High Court ruled 6-3 that the AG’s disclosure demand broke the law. The Court pointed out that a lower court had found not “a single, concrete instance in which pre-investigation collection of a Schedule B did anything to advance the Attorney General’s investigative, regulatory or enforcement efforts.”

The Court said California’s claim that it would protect donor information lacked credibility, since during the litigation plaintiffs discovered nearly 2,000 Schedule B forms “inadvertently posted to the Attorney General’s website.” It noted that the petitioners and donors faced “threats” and “retaliation.”

The Supreme Court said Ms. Harris’s policy posed a risk of chilling free-speech rights, and it cited its 1958 NAACP v. Alabama precedent, which protected First Amendment “associational” rights. Ms. Harris is citing her experience as state AG as a political asset, but the Bonta case is a warning to voters that she’s willing to use the law as a weapon against political opponents.

WSJ, Harris and the First Amendment

The Donald

The Low Road

The outrageousness of Trump’s remarks at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention on Wednesday afternoon reminded everyone that Trump will always choose the low road of bigotry and smarmy insinuation over any kind of debate about ideas or policy. This is a man who launched his political career by suggesting, without evidence, that the country’s first black president held the office illegitimately because he was born abroad and therefore not a true American.

Damon Linker

Trump’s Shtick

Can Mr. Trump shift gears? He grew up, as I did, watching “The Ed Sullivan Show.” I’m sure it was on every Sunday night at 8 at the Trump house in Queens. On that show you saw every week the great Borscht Belt comics of 1950-70. Their timing—“Take my wife—please!”—is ingrained in him. What he does now is shtick, because he likes to entertain and is a performer. The boat’s sinking, the battery’s spitting, the shark’s coming! As Hannibal Lecter said, “I’d love to have you for dinner!”

This works so perfectly for those who support him. For everyone else it’s just more evidence of psychopathology. He has to freshen up his act. Can he?

Peggy Noonan, who is taking Kamala Harris very seriously.

It had never in the last nine years occurred to me that what Trump is doing is shtick. That’s just perfect!

If Trump continues his bizarre race-baiting instead of beating up the Border Czar on her failures and her past radical positions, he deserves to lose. (He deserves to lose categorically, but that’s another matter; I’m writing about political stupidity here.)

“But wait!”, you say. “Kamala has repudiated all her past radical positions!”

Yeah, right. And Barack Obama was against same-sex marriage, too. On that, too, Noonan is pitch-perfect:

On policy she is bold to the point of shameless. This week she essentially said: You know those policies I stood for that you don’t like? I changed my mind! Her campaign began blithely disavowing previous stands, with no explanation. From the New York Times’s Reid Epstein: “The Harris campaign announced on Friday that the vice president no longer wanted to ban fracking, a significant shift from where she stood four years ago.” Campaign officials said she also now supports “increased funding for border enforcement; no longer supported a single-payer health insurance program; and echoed Mr. Biden’s call for banning assault weapons but not a requirement to sell them to the federal government.” It’s remarkable, she’s getting away with it, and it’s no doubt just the beginning. It will make it harder for the Trump campaign with its devastating videos.

Will the left of her party let her tack toward moderation? Yes. She’s what they’ve got, and in any case people on the wings of both parties have a way of recognizing their own. Progressives aren’t protesting her new stands: That’s the dog that didn’t bark.

(Emphasis added)

The Culture

LOTR goes New Right?

I was dumbstruck to read that

Critical factions of the new right at home and the far right in Europe have latched on to Tolkien’s work. By “new right” I mean the post-Reagan right, a movement that embraces state power as a means of fighting and winning the culture war.

I still can’t quite believe it. It’s just so utterly tone-deaf.

Tolkien, in fact, was concerned with the way that good can become evil. He understood that even the best of people are vulnerable to the temptations of evil, and that that temptation is perhaps most powerful when we believe we are engaged in a fight against darkness.

That’s the brilliance of the conceit of the One Ring, the ring of ultimate power, in Tolkien’s trilogy. Throughout the story the ring calls out to the heroes, speaking to their hearts, telling them that only by claiming power can they defeat power. In a very real way, the will to power is the true enemy in Tolkien’s work. The identity of the villain, whether it’s Morgoth and Sauron in “The Silmarillion” or Sauron and Saruman in “The Lord of the Rings,” is less relevant than grasping after power.

Anyone over the age of 14 or so (where’s Jean Piaget when I need him?) who reads LOTR and doesn’t get a glimmering of what the One Ring is about is not very ight-bray.

Thanks, I think, to David French for so heavily taxing my credulity.

Childless Cat Ladies

I’ll concede that it’s super-smelly to the tone-sniffing police dogs to quip, during a campaign for U.S. Senate (as I recall), about “childless cat ladies” being a problem. But J.D. Vance was at fault for being too colorful, not for being entirely wrong:

I have seen in the political discourse around J.D. and children a sense of resentment over the idea that having children gives one greater wisdom.

I’m sorry, but it does. Not in every case — it is possible to be a bad mother or bad father, and to learn nothing from the experience of parenthood (J.D.’s own troubled childhood testifies to this — but generally, yes, of course it does. This doesn’t make the childless morally less worthy, or the childbearing morally greater. But for most people, having kids gives you more wisdom about life — wisdom to which the young and childless ought to defer.

…

having a baby changed the way I thought about politics and a lot of things, and it did so for a predictable reason: when you have kids, you have a stake in the future in a way you could not have had as a childless person. I moved away from liberalism toward conservatism dramatically after 1989, when I graduated from college and moved off campus. Suddenly having to pay taxes, and having to deal with the reality of crime, made me start thinking hard about what the world would be like if most people held the liberal views I did. I saw — and I felt — that my liberal ideals were incommensurate with lived reality. So I changed.

In a similar way, some of my untested conservative views began to change after my son was born. Without realizing what was happening to me at first, I suddenly became aware of how thin some of my libertarian views were when I thought about the kind of world that libertarianism would create for my son to grow up in.

…

Being a parent doesn’t immunize you against stupidity, but it really is an apprenticeship for life beyond the confines of the home. Future historians, I suspect, will look back on our culture and civilization and see a people who had an insane disregard for the future. This is not a point I’m making against liberals. It’s almost as true of conservatives. We are not a civilization that makes proper provision for our descendants.

…

A people that ceases having children will cease to exist. It is not the case that everyone who can have children should have children, but a culture in which childbearing isn’t seen as the norm, and indeed a good and noble thing that all members of society should support, is a culture that is already dead and doesn’t know it.

Rod Dreher, The Secret Life of Parents

Be it remembered that Dreher is thick with JD Vance, and indeed did an interview with him that launched Hillbilly Elegy, theretofore languishing, to the Best Seller list. But don’t you dare dismiss his argument on that basis.

Seduced and abandoned

The postliberal Right, heavily Christian, went almost overnight from Benedict Option to MAGA:

The outcome is that the postliberal right, which began in conversations around The Benedict Option about how to better catechize young people and create thick communities of Christian belief has, in just under 10 years, shifted into something primarily partisan and quite often linked to white nationalism.

The irony in all this is that just as the postliberal right has become maximally partisan in its outlook and sensibilities, it has been abandoned by the very party and leader it looked to for security. Last month’s Republican National Convention included the GOP abandoning its commitment to the cause for life, leaving behind what little remained of its support for natural marriage, and platforming Amber Rose, a social media star who routinely posts pornographic images on her social media handles and only a few months ago praised Satanist groups for helping women secure abortions. Five years after Ahmari sold many on the notion that the authoritarian leadership of Trump was necessary to advance the good life, the party of Trump now resembles a more sexually progressive version of the 1990s-era Democratic Party.

… The false human story told by many progressives and conservatives alike in the years since Reagan, a story built around individual identity creation and the limitless pursuit of wealth through “free” (but to what end?) markets, often at the cost of transcendent truth, had left many people and places adrift. 

The signs are not hard to identify even now: soaring rates of reported loneliness, an increased openness to euthanasia, shattered trust within communities, a strong anti-natal turn among many young Americans which has correlated unsurprisingly with freefalling birth rates, and all of that with a rising generation coming that is racked by anxiety and depression. These realities were present in 2015 and still are a decade later. If anything, the GOP’s capitulation on life and marriage suggests it will become even more entrenched on the American right as the GOP comes to be ever more dominated by what Matthew Walther has called the barstool conservatives. Yet the devouring need for truth, for genuine life together, and for higher goods than a purely individualistic freedom remain.

Jake Meador, normally of Mere Orthodoxy but writing this time for The Dispatch

Institutional arsonist new media grifters

Given this inclination toward mistrust it is not surprising that media producers, often working in fairly desperate financial positions themselves, are finding ways to profit off that mistrust and sell it to others.

Viewed sympathetically, media projects working in this space are good and legitimate journalistic endeavors meant to shine a light on corruption or injustice and to aid those who wish to correct that problem. Corruption should be exposed, of course. But also presumptions of corruption should not be normalized or encouraged. In practice what these works can do is provide ordinary people with scripts that teach them how to interpret the behavior of institutional leaders: That pastor said something that made me uncomfortable (maybe it was the Holy Spirit convicting you?), therefore he must be abusive. That pastor quoted Tim Keller favorably, therefore he must be a shepherd for sale. In short, these projects of institutional arson encourage community members in habits and practices that corrode common life because they encourage them to assume the worst of their own leaders and ascribe motivations to them which may or may not even be true. The problem, at bottom, is simply this: Common life is not safe, nor does it necessarily tend toward each individual becoming exactly who they wish to be defined purely by themselves. To live in community is to be obstructed and offended and frustrated and then learning that oftentimes in those offenses and obstructions and frustrations that you were the one at fault. It is, in short, to be confronted by the truth that Eliot spoke of here:

You are not the same people who left that station …
Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.

The common life we experienced through RUF and the church and the university and through many other places besides was a life that forced us to recognize that we needed to change, that we could not be the people who had once left that station, nor were we now the people who would one day disembark.

What is troubling about institutional arsonist media is that in its attempt to spotlight genuine abuses it often overreaches and consumes many good people and good places that unfortunately found themselves in the blast radius. And when those good institutions and good leaders are gone, how will the next generation have that experience that we did? Who will tell them the things we needed to hear? Who will walk with them as they learn and grow?

I cannot speak to the motives of the people who produce these works, of course. But I can see the ramifications by simply looking around and observing: Sometimes the sin of one institutional leader becomes a template that is then retroactively applied to anyone unfortunate enough to slightly resemble that failed leader. In other cases, the habits of suspicion and cynicism have caused us to leap to conclusions, ascribing the least charitable motives and not even pausing to consider if we might be wrong.

Healthy institutions, above all else, require trust. I am grateful that in my formative years that trust still held. I hope that by the time my kids are the age I was in those vital years that they will be as fortunate as I was. But that hope now hangs from rather slender threads.

Jake Meador again, back on his home turf (emphasis added).

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Friday, 6/7/24

Legalia

Musical rackets

Copyright law is just a big steaming mess. Whenever you think it can’t get crazier, it always does.

YouTube is the ultimate battlefield for copyright claims gone wild. Even when I do a short YouTube video about music, I can never play examples from actual recordings. (That’s why I’ve never given an online course on music history. Corporate lawyers would shut me down in a New York minute.)

Consider the case of the YouTuber whose video got demonetized because his “Samsung washing machine randomly chimed to signal a laundry cycle had finished while he was streaming.”

How is that even possible? But it gets even stranger.

Ashley Belanger reports in Ars Technica:

Apparently, YouTube had automatically scanned Albino’s video and detected the washing machine chime as a song called “Done”…[but it] actually comes from the song “Die Forelle” (“The Trout”) from Austrian composer Franz Schubert.

The song was composed in 1817 and is in the public domain. Samsung has used it to signal the end of a wash cycle for years.

I’m not sure what Schubert would make of all this. But I can assure you that none of his heirs will get a penny from this. That’s not the purpose of song copyrights anymore.

Ted Gioia, in a thoroughly disheartening chronicle of where AI appears to be taking us.

See also James O’Malley, Music Just Changed Forever

One crime with 34 cooties

I have added a P.S. to my recent post “34 Counts!”:

I don’t think I’ll dwell on the 34 counts any more, and regret having done so. The 34 counts were 34 bookkeeping entries. In most courts — and in best practice — this would have been charged as one crime, or so I’m told.

Politics

Sheep

Most Church leaders—conscious that to condemn Nazis for blasphemous kitsch might prove risky—opted to bite their tongues. Some, though, actively lent it their imprimatur. In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle hymn. In Berlin Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.

Tom Holland, Dominion

I heard David French tell a story about masculinity today that was very David Frenchy in that it was based on a movie, American Assassin:

This is the story of Chris Kyle. And it was — I remember seeing it here in Tennessee. And you couldn’t find a parking spot in our theater. That movie was an absolute sensation.

And one of the most memorable parts of that movie is when Chris Kyle is involved in a playground fight, and his father goes through this sheepdog, sheep, wolf analogy. And that is there’s three kinds of people in this world. There’s the sheep, there are the wolves who prey on the sheep, and the sheepdogs who protect the sheep from the wolf.

And he says, I’m not raising any sheep in this household. So what are you? And at that point, Chris Kyle identifies himself as a sheep dog, as somebody who protects the weak against the wolf. OK? And so it’s a very anti-bullying sort of vision of male courage.

And then here comes Donald Trump, who fits to a T the definition of a wolf, of a bully. The story the right told about itself was that they would be inoculated against the wolf, against the bully, because they have this ethos of the sheepdog.

But then when the wolf arose and the bully arose, they went with the bully, the very person that a generation of young right-wing men were warned about. And so that’s what makes this, in many ways, so much more deeply disturbing even than it otherwise been (sic), because it called into question kind of the cultural enterprise that was happening before Trump.

On that same podcast, Jamelle Bouie, riffing on Trump’s first post-conviction public appearance being UFC (Universal Fight Club), quipped that “Professional wrestling is camp for straight men..”

Not a referendum on Trump?!

I believe I recently passed on an opinion that both Trump and Biden want this election to be a referendum on Trump. Now I pass along the opinion that it’s a referendum on Biden:

[Y]ou can just look at the polls in the US: 51 percent of Americans now support mass deportations of the kind Trump is proposing; including 42 percent of Democrats, and 45 percent of Hispanics. That was unthinkable four years ago — and it’s entirely on Biden. The revolt against this basic failure of governance is now strong even in big cities, run by Democrats, and among non-whites, who are moving toward Trump.

Joe Biden’s main campaign theme seems to be that he alone can defend liberal democracy from Donald Trump. What Biden has never understood is that restricting immigration is absolutely critical to defending liberal democracy. Everything else is just words, condescending words. If Trump triumphs in November, Biden will be responsible for simply ignoring basic political reality, alienating the very people he needs.

…

One person was responsible for Trump’s first term: Hillary Clinton. And one will be responsible for his second: Joe Biden.

I guess it’s worth reiterating at this point that I’m not anti-immigration. It remains the lifeblood of America, and immigration is vital for our future fiscal balance. I’m a proud immigrant myself — and America will always be able to integrate newcomers in ways European countries simply cannot. But, like a huge majority of Americans, I’m in favor of legal, orderly, controlled immigration — and not the chaos we now see everywhere in the West. This is not racism or xenophobia; it’s a recognition that borders and the rule of law matter; and that without secure borders, we risk losing the core reality of a nation-state; and without a better-paced influx, we risk delegitimizing immigration altogether, and balkanizing our societies.

Andrew Sullivan

Loser Trump

Trump’s base does not win elections outside of party primaries. It did not win the midterms for the Republican Party in 2018, it did not win re-election for the Trump in 2020, and it did not win a red wave for Republicans in 2022. The signature Republican victory of the last four years, the election of Glenn Youngkin over Terry McAuliffe in the 2021 Virginia race for governor, rested on an effort to marginalize the Trump base so that party leaders could engineer a nominee with the ability to distance himself from the former president and his movement.

Jamelle Bouie.

And true to form, the RNC’s Lara Trump has issued a fatwa against Larry Hogan, Republican candidate from U.S. Senate from Maryland, for saying the public should respect the process and the verdict in the Trump felony trial. Kiss that seat goodbye, GOP.

Chicken Littles of the Left

Some people reportedly (I haven’t met one outside of click-bait stories) are worked up that some Trump supporters want to ban IVF, contraception, and recreational sex. Though I know some arguments against each of those sacred cows, this strikes me as a reverse mirror-image of QAnon.

I would welcome more careful thought about IVF, but I’m an outlier. Anyone who thinks that a lame duck Donald Trump is going to pander to a very small group of ideologues who are seriously out of step with 90%+ of their countrymen needs to take a deep breath. Anyone who thinks that Donald Trump (who probably has frequent sperm donor perks at the fertility clinics of Manhattan) is personally opposed to IVF, contraception and recreational sex (“I never did anything that needed forgiveness” or something like that, he said) needs inpatient psych care.

Culture

Defining deviancy down … and up

When and why did American life become so coarse, amoral and ungovernable? In his classic 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down”, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered a semantic explanation. He concluded that, as the amount of deviant behaviour increased beyond the levels the community can “afford to recognise”, we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt conduct we used to stigmatise, while also quietly raising the “normal” level in categories where behaviour is now abnormal by any earlier standard. The reasons behind this, he said, were altruism, opportunism and denial — but the result was the same: an acceptance of mental pathology, broken families and crime as a fact of life.

In that same summer, Charles Krauthammer responded to Senator Moynihan with a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He acknowledged Senator Moynihan’s point but said it was only one side of the story. Deviancy was defined down for one category of society: the lower classes and black communities. For the middle classes, who are overwhelmingly white and Christian, the opposite was true. Deviancy was in fact defined up, stigmatising and criminalising behaviour that was previously regarded as normal. In other words, there was a double standard at work.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Presented without express comment

A new poll from Ipsos has found that support for same-sex marriage among Americans has fallen to just 51% approval.

…

Following a years-long rise in support for gay marriage, a groundswell of anti-woke sentiment emerged around 2021, much of it directed at LGBT activism as parents gained a new window into their children’s curriculum when schooling went remote during the Covid-19 pandemic …

Gay rights have since been lumped in with trans rights in the popular imagination, which may have chipped away some public support for gay marriage at the margins. …

Bev Jackson, co-founder of the LGB Alliance, said the decline in support for same-sex marriage had causes on both the Left and the Right. “Blame for the fall in US support for gay marriage lies partly with the homophobic religious Right. But equally to blame are treacherous organisations like GLAAD and the ACLU which promote insane, deeply unpopular concepts such as gender self-ID and child ‘transition’,” she said. “Gender identity ideologues have been riding on LGB’s coattails for too long, and they’re helping to destroy support for the rights we fought for decades to win.”

Laurel Duggan

Junk info

Junk info is often false info, but it isn’t junk because it’s false. It’s junk because it has no practical use; it doesn’t make your life better, and it doesn’t improve your understanding. Even lies can be nourishing; the works of Dostoevsky are fiction, yet can teach you more about humans than any psychology textbook. Meanwhile, most verified facts do nothing to improve your life or understanding, and are, to paraphrase Nietzsche, as useful as knowledge of the chemical composition of water to someone who is drowning.

Gurwinder

Privileging victims, real and imagined

The intuitive moral structure of our modern social imaginary prioritizes victimhood, sees selfhood in psychological terms, regards traditional sexual codes as oppressive and life denying, and places a premium on the individual’s right to define his or her own existence.

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

Safetyism today

They want revolutionary ends, but they want to hide behind establishment credibility.

Jonah Goldberg, describing the successor ideology, which has famously “march[ed] through the institutions.”

Tipsy the squish

I finally had to replace the color toner cartridges on my laser printer. I opened the red-and-white Canon box I’d ordered months ago. I found unfamiliar packaging of the cartridges and unfamiliar cartridge configuration. I figured out how to install them and then looked for the instructions on recycling them (back to Canon). It was nowhere to be found.

Having seen the word “compatible” a few times, I looked more closely at the box. Where the word Canon should have been, the word “Cartridge” appeared.

I remembered when I purchased them my shock at the low price, but I double- and triple-checked. I thought I was getting an inexplicable price on Canon goods. They still conned me with the Canon-looking box.

Now I’ve got three laser cartridges I can’t recycle, and it bothers me more than such a thing is supposed to bother a conservative.

Which reminds me again of how close “conservative” today is to “barbarian.” My gut-identification today remains “conservative,” but my considered identification is center-right.

Progress

Progress should be about improving the quality of life and human flourishing. We make a grave error when we assume this is the same as new tech and economic cost-squeezing.

Ted Gioia, I Ask Seven Heretical Questions About Progress

GD Misinformation

Mainstream coverage of this issue is a buffet of sanctimonious overclaiming. It says authoritatively that kids in the US can’t go on blockers or hormones prior to lengthy, in-depth assessment (false). That no one under 18 is getting surgery (false). That the worldwide rise in referrals to youth GD clinics is almost entirely the result of reduced stigmatization (no one knows). That GD, or the perception that one has GD, can’t spread through adolescent social networks (almost certainly false on the basis of anecdotal evidence and any familiarity with developmental psychology). That it’s a ‘myth’ that significant number of kids who believe themselves to be trans will later feel differently (false, according to all the existing data). That only a tiny percentage of people detransition (we have no data at all on this in the context of youth gender care in the States).

What the Media Gets Wrong on Gender Reassignment. This is from 2021 when the elites were uniformly purveying lies about Covid, gender dysphoria and who knows what all else. Things have gotten markedly better in recent months on adolescent gender dysphoria.

Capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball

For many of our applicants—and this, of course, is what the program is about, what the humanities are about—learning has, or ought to have, an existential weight. Beneath their talk of education, of unplugging from technology, of having time for creativity and solitude, I detected a desire to be free of forces and agendas: the university’s agenda of ‘relevance,’ the professoriate’s agenda of political mobilization, the market’s agenda of productivity, the internet’s agenda of surveillance and addiction. In short, the whole capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball of coerced homogeneity. The desire is to not be recruited, to not be instrumentalized, to remain (or become) an individual, to resist regression toward the mean, or meme.

William Deresiewicz, Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul H/T Frank Bruni (who led me to actually read a piece I’d only skimmed). Ted Gioia, My Lifetime Reading Plan, practiced it before Deresiewicz preached it.

Losers

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality-without exploiting them for fun and profit.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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