Category: Legalia

From grim to grimmer

Bummer

I could have filled this post with many clippings colorfully describing how bad things are. I’ve done it before and I’ll probably do it again. That’s just the kind of guy I am: melancholic.

But it just seems too much this week. I’m having trouble identifying anything going right in the USA.

I came of age in the 60s, and although I’ve been expecting our collapse for a long time, the manner and speed of the seeming collapse are a surprise.

I’ll summarize what’s a bit unsettling, even for me, thus:

  • We are moving rapidly from American hegemony to a multipolar world.
  • The very best President imaginable couldn’t stop, but could at best slow, our relative decline.
  • The very best President imaginable wouldn’t even run because of the politics of personal destruction.
  • But a toxic narcissist, jilted by voters in 2020, would run again in 2024 on a platform of vengeance. “Vengeance” turned out to mean turning America into a “shithole country.” (That will teach us!)
  • The Mainstream media are whistling past the cemetery as all this goes down.
  • UPDATE: Charlie Kirk, who it seems was more consequential than I had realized, gunned down Wednesday. I wrote everything in this post, other than this bullet point, before the murder of young Kirk. I knew little about him. My first impression was unfavorable because he was associated with Jerry Falwell, Jr. at the time that Falwell’s Potemkin Piety was collapsing. Thereafter? Well, I’m about 50 years older than his target demographic. (My wife didn’t even know who he was.) I’ve read a lot about him this morning, but the most interesting observation I read was too frank for this raw moment, so I’ll let you ferret out your own information if you care to.

With that off my chest, I’ll try to edify y’all for a while.

Repelled by conservatism, but not a liberal

Conservatism, as you know, is a complete mess in America right now. But reading conservative authors like Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson does give you an adequate appreciation for the power of nonmaterial forces — culture, moral norms, traditions, religious ideals, personal responsibility and community cohesion.

…

I’ve been driven away from the right over the past decade, but I can’t join the left because I just don’t think that tradition of thought grasps reality in all its fullness. I wish both right and left could embrace the more complex truth that the neocon Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed in his famous maxim: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture and save it from itself.”

David Brooks, Why I Am Not a Liberal. This pretty clearly was one of the ten best things I’ll see in the New York Times this month, so that’s one of my gift links.

Breakneck: what you get in an engineered society

Publishers have figured out how to get limelight for their new titles, and one new title that’s deservedly getting a lot is Dan Wang’s Breakneck, about the astonishing ascendancy of China.

For a solid interview with Dan Wang (interviewer Ross Douthat), click this shared link: This Is Why America Is Losing to China.

Wang attributes this in substantial part to the relative influence of engineers in China versus that of lawyers in the USA. Engineers build; lawyers obstruct.

I find that somewhat plausible. But I write this precis not as an uncritical defense of my former profession, but to call attention to where engineered China went off the rails: trying to engineer China’s demographics led to over 300,000,000 abortions, over 100,000,000 sterilizations, and a population that’s skewed toward males.

That is, in my experience of engineers, classic engineering myopia. China could have benefitted from a bit more rule of law, less engineering “logic.”

What’s “fair” got to do with it?

There are people who get outraged when a court — especially the Supreme Court — impose or affirm what seems like an “unfair” result.

The scare-quote is not because fairness is a fantasy. It’s there because courts’ “unfair” decisions are mostly decisions to follow the law despite any countervailing sense of fairness.

And I approve of that approach. Consider: what is truly “fair” about denying a win to a guy who followed all the legal rules and then got sued by a guy who ignored the rules but somehow feels cheated (and has a good lawyer to sell his sob story)?

Liberalism without illusions

William A. Galston, a blast from the Clintonian past, has a wonderful article in Democracy Journal. I summarize, but I fully intend to read it several more times.

My summary:

Liberal democracy (a/k/a classical liberalism) has some inherent weaknesses:

  1. Because liberal democracy restrains majorities and gives even small minorities a say, it slows the achievement of goals that majorities support. In other words, it requires more patience than many possess.
  2. Liberal democracy requires tolerance for minority views and ways of life to which many citizens are deeply opposed.
  3. Liberal democracy requires a distinction between civic identity and personal or group identity.
  4. Liberal democracy requires compromise.

Liberals (left-liberals, or “liberals” in the modern pejorative sense) complicate these weaknesses with characteristic illusions:

  1. Myopic materialism: the belief, especially pervasive among elites, that economic issues are the real issues and that cultural issues are diversionary, deliberately heightened by unscrupulous leaders to gain support for their anti-liberal agendas.
  2. Parochialism. Yes, transnationalism is the parochialism of elites, because most people in advanced democracies as well as “developing” nations value particular attachments—to local communities and to the nation, to friends and family and compatriots.
  3. Naivete about the course of human events and the possibilities of human nature.

Credit for my discovery of this article goes to Rod Dreher.

Broken Windows

Okay, everyone is writing about it, and Trump’s vehement denials and $10 Billion lawsuit against Dow Jones makes it newsworthy that there’s now potent corroboration of Dow Jones’ (via the Wall Street Journal) claim about Trump’s hand-rendered birthday card for ephebophile Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday. But I can’t say anything smarter than this:

From what I can tell, in fact, there’s no actual theory underlying the impromptu new conspiracy theory that the letter was forged. No one can explain how or why a birthday message purporting to be from Trump to one of his close associates would have been doctored for a privately published book compiled in 2003. Did time-travelers from the present day fake the letter and plant it knowing that it would come out someday and damage him—after he’d already been elected president twice?

If so, their plot failed. This isn’t going to damage him. It’s just another broken window in a neighborhood that’s full of them.

…

Andrew Egger explains at The Bulwark:

In a way, Donald Trump and his allies have spent their entire political lives preparing for this moment. The whole miserable decade of “alternative facts,” of witch hunts, of flooding the zone with sh-t—it all amounted to a long, powerful education for his base. It’s a training in a certain kind of zen meditation, in which stories damaging to Trump pass from the eyes and ears directly out of the body without ever intersecting the brain. By now, the base has gotten in their 10,000 hours. They’ve become masters of the craft. They can perform all sorts of remarkable feats—the media-cope equivalent of lying on beds of nails while cinderblocks are smashed on their chests. These cinderblocks, they whisper serenely, are just a liberal plot. If I pay attention, the Democrats win.

…

The Epstein scandal is the “final boss” of Trump scandals, the supreme test of reality-defying propaganda skills that MAGA has acquired over the course of 10 years. The crime involved, pedophilia, is one of their obsessions; the villain, Jeffrey Epstein, is a lead character in their hysteria about an elite child-abuse cabal; yet the evidence continues to mount that their own messiah, Donald Trump, knew what was happening as it happened and—at best—did nothing to stop it. It’s like the Access Hollywood scandal but with the spin difficulty dialed up by a factor of 10. 

…

Think of American government as a big neighborhood. The neighborhood has started to go to hell. Its residents are adjusting their expectations for it accordingly.

Bad things happen when neighborhoods start to go to hell. As public evidence of minor disorder and neglect rises, crime gets worse. That’s the “broken windows” theory of criminology—the idea that letting lesser offenses like window-breaking go unpunished signals to good guys and bad guys alike that laws won’t be enforced. Criminals respond by escalating to more serious offenses and law-abiding locals become fatalistic or apathetic.

Trump has broken a lot of windows in our government. How can we expect Americans to maintain the same expectations for civic order that they used to have as the proverbial neighborhood falls into disrepair?

Nick Catoggio.

Somehow, this seemed like the time to resurrect an item I only recently deleted from my footer:

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Saturday, 9/6/25

A question to keep you up tonight

The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), particularly Article 92, mandates obedience to lawful orders but distinguishes that unlawful orders—those that require criminal acts or violate the Constitution, U.S. federal law, or international law—must not be followed. Military personnel are legally required to refuse unlawful orders, with the understanding that obeying illegal orders does not absolve one from responsibility under both U.S. military law and international law. This principle was firmly established by precedents such as the Nuremberg Trials, which rejected “just following orders” as a defense for war crimes. (Via Perplexity AI, but confirmed)

If you believe or suspect, as I do, that Donald Trump plans a series of provocations toward the end of declaring martial law and remaining in office, UCMJ Article 92 might come as at least a small comfort. “If they order troops to fire on peaceful civilian demonstrators, the troops should refuse, right?”

Well, “should” is doing a lot of work there. An incident last week gives great pause:

I ran across this dystopian sentence in the New York Times: “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

…

The vice president was asked yesterday to specify the legal authority that entitled Trump to blow up a bunch of people in the Caribbean. The authority, he replied, is that there are “literal terrorists who are bringing deadly drugs into our country and the president of the United States ran on a promise of stopping this poison from coming into our country.”

He and I happened to attend the same law school, so from one alumnus to another: That’s not the correct answer, J.D. The president’s campaign pledges don’t magically acquire the force of law because a plurality of the electorate decided he’d be marginally preferable to his opponent.

…

[So w]here is that authorization? Since 2001, presidents from both parties have strained the logic of the post-9/11 AUMFs against al-Qaeda and Iraq by citing them to justify attacks on adjacent jihadist threats like ISIS. No one seriously believes they can be stretched so far as to encompass drug trafficking in the Caribbean, though. Absent any new approval from Congress, letting Trump mark people for death based on an assessment of “terrorism” by his own State Department amounts to granting him the power to kill anyone whom he deems a threat.

That’s how we ended up with Pentagon lawyers poring over law books on Wednesday, desperately trying to find some statute that might retroactively justify blowing up 11 Venezuelans.

The answer to the question posed to J.D. Vance is that there is no obvious legal authority for what the president did. There’s only what we might call post-legal authority, the idea that—as Trump himself once put it—“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Which, I think, cuts to the heart of the difference between conservatives and postliberals.

…

To ask which legal authority gives Trump the power to kill Venezuelans on mere suspicion of drug trafficking is to engage in non sequitur. The president said he would save the country by preventing drugs from entering the U.S. and he’s going to do that. What does law have to do with anything?

…

On that note, here’s a question to keep you up tonight: If the Times is correct that the Pentagon couldn’t identify a legal justification for Trump’s order to kill a bunch of people, why did it obey his order?

To ask that question is to invite demagoguery about not taking crime seriously or knowing “what time it is,” blah blah, but I know exactly what time it is and it’s exactly the right question for the hour. Our new government fundamentally believes that law is an obstacle to American greatness—that law, normally just a nuisance, has itself become a major problem bedeviling the country—and it intends to solve this problem too. One way is to normalize shooting first and asking questions later. That’s the significance of what just happened to that Venezuelan ship.

Nick Cattogio (bold added)

Mind-boggling

I suspect you haven’t heard more about this because the ramifications boggle the mind:

3. China may have hacked data from every single American in one of the largest-ever cyberattacks, experts fear. Hackers backed by Beijing targeted more than 80 countries, stealing information on telecoms, transport and military infrastructure in a year-long campaign, investigators concluded in a report released last week. Since 2021, the group, known as Salt Typhoon, has accessed data that could enable the Chinese intelligence services to monitor global communication networks and track targets including politicians, spies and activists. Even the telephone conversations of Donald Trump and JD Vance were compromised, according to the FBI. Hackers sponsored by the Chinese government “are targeting networks globally, including, but not limited to, telecommunications, government, transportation, lodging, and military infrastructure networks”, the joint statement, from agencies including the National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and FBI, said. (Source: telegraph.co.uk)

John Ellis News Items

Noted

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Labor Day 2025

HHS

America at last has its own Trofim Lysenko, a crank whose screwy ideas about science gained influence over policy not because of their methodological rigor but because their contrarianism reflected the prejudices of a feral populist revolutionary movement. … You tell me: Is a country that’s transitioning from relying on vaccines to prevent disease—including brain cancer, perhaps—to relying on Ivermectin and beef tallow more or less of a sh-thole than it used to be?

The only good news is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is unlikely to rack up a body count as large as his Soviet predecessor. But he’s sure gonna try.

…

[A] first-world public health agency, the most well-known of its kind on Earth, is about to become a third-world soapbox for voodoo and superstition.

…

The best-case scenario for public health until 2029 is that no one except the populists pays the slightest bit of attention to the federal government’s medical recommendations. Mass resignations would encourage that.

But if that’s not enough, I think resigning is also compelled by basic dignity. Refusing to participate in a corrupt enterprise is a mark of good character and an act of moral hygiene. What Trump and Kennedy are doing is indecent, and decent people being involved in it both obscures that fact and subjects those people to temptations to behave indecently themselves.

Nick Catoggio, Our Own Lysenko

TGIF

Here’s a pet theory of mine: The Democrats’ struggle to cobble together a winning message is at least partly a result of Democratic strategists and spokespeople sucking at their jobs. They expect favorable coverage from the legacy press and have an irksome habit of talking to reporters as though they’re essentially lower-rung party employees.

For example, a guy named TJ Ducklo—a truly fantastic name for a party hack—was briefly a deputy White House press secretary under Biden until he reportedly accused a female reporter of “jealousy” and threatened to “destroy” her. He presumably expected he’d get away with it, because he thought the press worked for him …

Or take Ian Sams, a top Democratic spokesman who was tasked with reassuring reporters that Biden, despite his visible decline, was sharp as a tack. He was in the news recently after he admitted that he met Biden face-to-face only twice. But I’ll always think of him as the guy who, while working for Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign, became furious when a BuzzFeed journalist tweeted something mildly critical of one of Harris’s debate performances.

As reported by The Washington Free Beacon, he went whining to BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief at the time, Ben Smith, that the critical tweet was “whiteness manifest,” whatever that means, and a “really bad look” for the publication. Smith’s reply was spot on: “Do you seriously not have real problems? This text makes me think you are totally, totally unready for an actual presidential campaign.”

Will Rahn, filling in for Nellie Bowles at TGIF. Rahn contrasts Republican press relations, where the GOPsters don’t expect fawning coverage, but I don’t want to borrow too much.

Rahn then pivots to this:

A shooting in Minneapolis: The biggest news of the week is a mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minnesota called Annunciation, and there are no jokes to be made about it. It horrifies me. It’s demonic. And, for the life of me, I cannot understand the Democratic impulse to diminish the power of praying for the victims, children who were shot while praying. It’s like a preprogrammed, knee-jerk reaction that, especially in this instance, is just bizarre and offensive.

Those who seek solace in prayer pray in these situations. We pray for the dead and wounded. We pray for the families. We pray for ourselves. Some might even pray for the soul of the shooter.

I get that you want to make this about gun control. My suggestion is that you shut up about the prayer stuff and just make it about gun control.

Amen! He’s not as funny as Nellie, but I wouldn’t mind too much if Nellie took more time away, leaving him in charge.

He can’t unsee it; I’m trying to bring it into focus

The reason I feel such a tinge of discomfort by the Center Gai scene is not because I care what travelers do, but because I can’t unsee: the forces driving mass hyper-consumptive tourism are the same ones fomenting fascism, science skepticism, kleptocracy, billionaire veneration, labubus, and entertaining ourselves with little colored bubbles until the very second before we die.

Craig Mod via John Brady.

That’s a big claim that I need to chew on a bit. I thought you might want to as well.

Lone-wolf violence in America

In recent years, certain supporters of transgender rights have developed a public language of militancy and conflict, in which familiar habits of left-wing activism — attempts to shut down controversial speech, claims that contrary opinions are fascist or genocidal — are supplemented by an armed-and-dangerous iconography that’s usually associated with the American right.

In the wake of the murders of Catholic school children in Minnesota, the second attack in three years carried out by a transgender shooter against children at a Christian school, it would be relatively easy to write a column holding such militancy responsible for the carnage. All I would have to do is adapt the scripts so often used to blame conservatives for violence, from the J.F.K. assassination (which the scribes of Camelot quickly attributed to the angry rhetoric of Dallas right-wingers) down through the Tea Party and the Trump eras.

If I were making that argument, I would insist that words have consequences: If you tell people that they’re facing “trans genocide,” and that religious conservatives especially are agents of their fascist subjugation, why wouldn’t you expect some troubled souls to opt for vigilante action?

Likewise, if I were laying blame this way, I would insist that violent images inspire violent action: If you sport a shirt with the slogan “Protect Trans Kids” underneath a hunting knife (as the lieutenant governor of Minnesota did in 2023), or if you put a transgender writer toting an AR-15 on your magazine cover (as an alternative weekly in the Pacific Northwest did just two months ago) with a headline asking “Are You Triggered?” you bear some responsibility when the trigger actually gets pulled. Especially when the Minneapolis killer’s own manifesto reportedly trafficked in the same imagery, featuring a “Defend Equality” sticker overlaid with an image of a machine gun.

But I’m not making that case, because it would betray a consistent theme of this column, going all the way back to the attempted assassination of Representative Gabby Giffords in 2011: namely, that all attempts to blame extreme political rhetoric for mass shootings should be treated extremely skeptically, because the phenomenon of lone-wolf violence in America rarely attaches easily to either left-wing or right-wing ideology.

…

“Diabolos” in Greek means accuser, and in that sense the dark spirit that inspires these crimes suffers a defeat when we react with unity and solidarity rather than immediate recriminations.

Whereas it gains a victory every time we respond by immediately blaming our political rivals, and trying to prove over the bodies of the dead that, yes, our ideological opponents are even more evil than we thought.

Ross Douthat, Politics Rarely Explains Mass Shootings (gift link)

Grand Jury Nullification

A federal magistrate found that there was probable cause to support the charge. Yet, on three occasions, a grand jury in the District of Columbia declined to indict. Instead, the U.S. Attorney filed an information for a misdemeanor violation of Section 111. A writer at MSNBC suggests that the grand jury’s refusal to indict may be due to a weak cases being brought by the U.S. Attorney.

Since the failed indictment for Reid, there have been two more grand juries that failed to return a true bill.

It is possible that these juries are carefully attuned to the gradation between felonies and misdemeanors. May I suggest another possibility? Federal grand juries in the District of Columbia, made up (almost) entirely of critics of President Trump, are engaging in nullification of the Trump Administration’s law federal enforcement efforts. I imagine this sort of active resistance will increase as more federal officers are fanned throughout the District of Columbia. …

Historically, at least, the concept of jury nullification was viewed as a popular check against tyrannical governments. I imagine an average D.C. resident who can take time off from work to serve extended periods of federal grand jury duty may see himself in that fashion.

Josh Blackman. This is all the more remarkable because the received wisdom is that prosecutors can get grand juries to indict anyone for anything.

Occam’s Razor

Whenever the White House announces a new criminal investigation into one of Donald Trump’s enemies—an event that occurs with Stalinesque frequency—the administration and its allies have a go-to line: “No one is above the law.” FBI Director Kash Patel, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, and others have gleefully deployed the tagline. It’s a smirking, knowing stand-in for the claim that Joe Biden did the same thing to Trump while insisting that Trump was not above the law, and so turnabout is merely fair play.

[Account of why that dog don’t hunt omitted.]

The Occam’s-razor account of how it is that Trump became the first ex-president to face criminal investigation is that Trump is the first professional crook to be elected president. This would also neatly explain why he invented the idea of locking up the president’s enemies. Crooks are generally cynics who think that everybody in power is a criminal, and the only difference is that some people are hypocrites about it. (“My father’s no different than any other powerful man,” Michael Corleone says in The Godfather.)

Barack Obama did not threaten to lock up John McCain or Mitt Romney. The idea that the law is a weapon the president uses to protect his friends and harass his enemies was brought into American politics by one man. He now happens to be the one man who is very definitively above the law.

Jonathan Chait, MAGA Has a New Favorite Slogan

Summing up

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

Nick Catoggio

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

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.

Saturday, 8/23/25

Public Affairs

Ted Cruz knows better

[Ted] Cruz was an intellectually serious politician of the kind who would quote Hayek and reference Milton Friedman off-the-cuff in private conversation until he discovered—and this is a thing with Texas politicians—that there was more juice to be had from pretending to be the good ol’ boy that he is not than in simply being the Ivy League lawyer he is. Cruz’s current position in American public life is that of a piteous and contemptible figure. … [F]or the moment, he is still a senator caught between the fringeward push of his radicalizing party and the centerward pull of his state’s urbanizing electorate. 

Cruz is (or should be) smart enough to have figured out by now that he is never going to be president, and he ought to allow himself to be liberated by this and take on a new role—one that the genuine Ted Cruz, if there is anything left of him inside the chrysalis of grotesque opportunism and self-degradation in which he has enveloped himself, would be well-suited to undertake: defending the Constitution and the American order from a sustained assault that is coming from within his own party.

It would not take very much: “No, Mr. President, you may not willy-nilly create a new national sales-tax regime with rates based on how you’re feeling that day, even if you call it a tariff; no, you may not federalize the Philadelphia police department or deploy troops in U.S. cities based on whatever phony emergency pretext occurs to you in between social media posts; no, the states are not your ‘agents,’ and they most certainly do not have to do ‘whatever the president of the United States tells them’ to do, even if you put ‘FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY’ in capital letters. And if you refuse to honor the constitutional limits on your office, then you can be removed from that office—with my vote, if necessary, though I would regret it and would probably lose my Senate seat as a result. But there are things more important than winning the next election.” 

No, I do not think Cruz has it in him. 

But he is starting to reach the stage of life when, to borrow David Brooks’ formulation, it is time to stop thinking about one’s résumé and start thinking about one’s eulogy.

Kevin D. Williamson, Ted Cruz Knows Better.

In which I reveal an unpopular opinion

Almost everything I knew about him, and particularly his professional accomplishments and opinions, made me think that Brett Kavanagh would be a good Supreme Court justice, and I haven’t been disappointed.

Why “almost”? It wasn’t really the Christine Ford Blasey accusations, but it was related to them: Brett Kavanaugh was an underage, binge-drinking party boy.

That was never in dispute. And I hate that. From him, there wasn’t so much as a “when I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish” acknowledgment. I don’t care if his parents winked at it or even bought the beer.

Now I don’t recall anyone else who was bothered enough even to shrug it off with “boys will be boys.” I seemingly stood alone in thinking underage binge drinking a blot on his character and fitness to uphold the law — all of it, including the parts that inconvenience him.

It’s not okay, and if that makes me a prig, so be it.

There is no possible religious neutrality in schools. So there!

J Budziszewski wants to make Catholic education more widely available without the governmental “strings attached” of Charter School (or presumably vouchers):

Please let’s not blather about religious “neutrality.”  So called secular education is not neutral, but reflects a bias against faith in favor of irreligion.

In fact, even that way of putting it is not precisely accurate. It isn’t that public schools have no god; in fact they place many gods before God. Superficial thinkers suppose that unconditional loyalties – whether of the “woke” or another variety — don’t count as religion just because they don’t use the word “god” for their gods. But the crux of the matter does not lie in the words they use.

I take a different minor issue with the first paragraph quoted than Budziszewski himself does. What “secular education” does is inculcate indifference. Purporting to teach children what they need to know without telling them anything about religion tacitly tells them that they need not know anything about it.

And this is not a straw man. The two-hundred-page course guide for Advanced Placement (AP) course in U.S. government and politics “doesn’t mention Christianity or the Bible—not once, even though it professes to cover ‘the intellectual traditions that animated our founding.’” (Mark Bauerlein)

But that’s not the same as teaching hostility toward religion (“irreligion”).

On the point about unconditional loyalties I couldn’t agree more. I just don’t know what we do about it. Deschooling Society?

DOGE

I have had a faint hope that we would discover that DOGE has begun modernization of software and strategic use of AI in the agencies they blitzkrieged immediately after our latest Presidential inauguration.

But they appears at this point to have been engaged in pure, nihilistic destruction — a style that, along with vengeance-destruction, appears to be what this 47th Presidency is all about.

Capitalist Economy

Pay no heed to the man in the management handcuffs

Ted Gioia was writing a book and looking for a publisher:

This person ran a legendary publishing house, and was also a jazz lover. He was a fan of my writing. We exchanged some emails, and then had a phone conversation.

“Ted, I love the book you’re writing,” he told me. “The sample chapters you sent are outstanding. You’re a special writer, and I’d love to sign you a contract. But…”

My head was already spinning. These people typically pay out big advances. I could finish the book and pay all my bills—no sweat! But before I could pursue these daydreams any further, this famous editor went on:

“I’d love to sign you to a contract. But I can’t.”

“Why not?” I asked—and even I could hear the plaintive note in my voice.

“Well, I’m sure your book would sell. But we evaluate books on their projected sales during the three years following release. If a book doesn’t have a three-year payback, we don’t do it.”

“I don’t think I understand this,” I whimpered in reply. “What are you saying?”

“It’s simple. Your book will probably sell for the next ten years or more. But I can only consider the first three years in making an offer—that’s why I have to turn you down.”

Okay, I understood discounted cash flow even better than this editor. I could give you a lecture on the Capital Asset Pricing Model in my sleep. In my early days, I made a living doing this kind of analysis.

But this way of thinking is wrong in the world of arts and culture.

…

When I tell editors that my books demonstrably sell for 25-50 years and longer, this is a turn-off. They actually hate it when I say it.

They won’t be around that long—editors constantly change jobs. They don’t give a hoot what sales will be like in the year 2050. They want something with cocktail party buzz for the six weeks following publication.

That’s the world they live in. But I don’t—and I refuse to move there.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Short-Term Results in My Career (bold added)

There’s a lot more where that came from because Ted Gioia is a freakin’ polymath. His has become (probably) my favorite Substack that doesn’t focus on religious subjects.

Work-life balance

I’m 22 and I’ve built two companies that together are valued at more than $20 million. I’ve signed up my alma mater as a client, connected with billionaire mentors and secured deferred admission to Stanford’s M.B.A. program. When people ask how I did it, the answer isn’t what they expect—or want—to hear. I eliminated work-life balance entirely and just worked. When you front-load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life.

… I averaged 3½ hours of sleep a night and had about 12½ hours every day to focus on business. The physical and mental toll was brutal: I gained 80 pounds, lived on Red Bull and struggled with anxiety. But this level of intensity was the only way to build a multimillion-dollar company.

Emil Barr, ‘Work-Life Balance’ Will Keep You Mediocre

So that’s the world he lives in. I don’t, never have, and I refuse to move there — or to recommend it to anyone I care about.

Culture

Gay race communism

Now, Cracker Barrel is updating its décor and branding—slightly. The bulk of the update is a brighter, less cluttered interior design, but the “controversial” decision is to change its logo. The company removed the old white guy in overalls sitting by a barrel, and now just has a text-only sign that reads “Cracker Barrel.” 

And people are losing their minds, claiming that it has gone “woke.” What seems to have sparked this brouhaha is a tweet saying that the store has “scrapped a beloved American aesthetic and replaced it with sterile, soulless branding.” 

This prompted an outraged “WTF is wrong with @CrackerBarrel??!” tweet from Donald Trump Jr., that loyal guardian of all that is homey and traditional in American life. The very popular End Wokeness Twitter account proclaimed: “Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Masino should face charges for this crime against humanity.”

Chris Rufo then came out with a Cracker Barrel delenda Est pronunciamiento:

Alright, I’m hearing chatter from behind the scenes about the Cracker Barrel campaign and, on second thought: we must break the Barrel. It’s not about this particular restaurant chain—who cares—but about creating massive pressure against companies that are considering any move that might appear to be “wokification.” The implicit promise: Go woke, watch your stock price drop 20 percent, which is exactly what is happening now. I was wrong. The Barrel must be broken.

Now, it’s true that Cracker Barrel has done some LGBT marketing stuff, probably as a result of being criticized for alleged discriminatory policies in the 1990s. But maybe also because gay people—and people who aren’t particularly horrified by gay people—might like good, affordable breakfasts, too. They’ve also tried to cultivate Hispanic customers. I’m not sure this means they’ve been taken over by the Latinx reconquista. 

I am also, shall we say, skeptical that a few old website screenshots of these efforts are proof that, in the words of Federalist co-founder Sean Davis, “Cracker Barrel’s CEO and leadership clearly hate the company’s customers and see their mission as re-educating them with the principles of gay race communism.”

Jonah Goldberg. It’s enough to make me want to try to remember that I keep forgetting to eat at Cracker Barrel.

What nihilists can’t believe

It’s hard enough to get people to believe something, but it’s really hard to get people to believe in belief — to persuade a nihilist that some things are true, beautiful and good.

David Brooks, The Rise of Right-Wing Nihilism (gift link)

I just can’t root for a guy who looks like Caligula

My libertarian and anti-state impulses incline me to be favorable toward Julian Assange, but I’ve never been able to shake how much he looks like John Hurt’s Caligula.

Technology

The technologies we use to try to “get on top of everything” always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Brought to you by the letter “D”

Dust and decay,
ditherers upon the doorstep
of death itself; dried-
up ghosts of daisy-chain
days that were once dappled
with dew and delight.

R.S. Thomas, Anybody’s Alphabet, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000.

The Los Alamos Sin

As Freeman Dyson put it, the “sin” of the scientists at Los Alamos was not that they made the bomb but that they enjoyed it so much.

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

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.

Wednesday, 7/9/25

Culture and stuff

America: Belated July 4 preface

The America I love is not a stretch of soil or a place where the people of my blood lived and died. It’s a set of impudent and improbable goals: the rule of law and equality before it, liberty, freedom of speech and conscience, decency. We have always fallen short of them and always will, but we wrote them down and decided to dedicate ourselves to pursuing them. That’s worth something.

The people I despise, and who despise me, believe America’s values and goals are blood, soil, swagger, and an insipid and arrogant conformity. They are the values of bullies and their sycophants. They may prevail. There’s no promise they will not.

Yet I am still moved to tell this Fourth of July story. It’s become an act of defiance, because the story is contrary to the prevailing values of 2025 ….

Popehat (Ken White), introducing his annual July 4 post about a 1992 Naturalization Ceremony.

Legalia: Why now?

Will Baude at the Divided Argument blog has some speculation about why it took the Supreme Court so long to rein in universal injunctions issuing from Federal District Courts.

Remembering that it’s speculation, I nevertheless find it fairly convincing, and the answer I find convincing is not that the court is partisan hacks. There’s too much evidence to the contrary, such as conservative justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas, along with Justice Kagan, who’ve long said that the injunctions were dubious.

Journalism: Dumbest imaginable editorial

This has got to be one of the dumbest, most perverse uses of Opinion Page space ever: “AI fact-checked Donald Trump and this is what we learned”.

So the Washington Post writers asked major AI sites to opine on the truthfulness of 20 claims by Donald Trump. The AI sites, which learn their stuff from things like digesting newspaper opinion columns, plus the blogs and substacks of bien pensants, gave the answers that the columnist would have written without AI.

Mind you, I don’t disagree with the responses because I’m one of those bien pensants (in this context at least). But I have zero percent greater confidence than before AI reinforced my priors — and a 10% lower opinion of the Washington Post (which dropped its prices so low I couldn’t say “no” any longer) for effectively enlisting pattern engines (that’s what AI is, really) to write a literally mindless column.

Conversion therapy today

After the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors, “LGBT” organizations issued statements condemning the court’s decision. I’m gay, and I welcome the court’s decision. So-called gender-affirming is a new form of “conversion therapy.” Instead of “praying away the gay,” we are “transing” it away.

…

When I reached adulthood and began to accept myself as the gay male that I am, I resolved to help create a world where children are told that it’s OK to be an unconventional boy or girl. For a while, I thought we were on the right track. But now, instead of making more space for nonconformity, we’re medicalizing it. Instead of telling kids they’re fine the way they are, we’re saying the opposite: No, it’s not OK to be this way. There is only one way to be a boy and one way to be a girl. You don’t fit. We have to fix you.

Two years ago I interviewed psychologist Laura Edwards-Leeper, who in 2007 adapted the Dutch protocol for use in the U.S. During that conversation, Ms. Edwards-Leeper used the word “cult” five times to describe what had become of pediatric gender medicine. When I told her about my own childhood, and said I feared that, if I were growing up now, I might have been falsely affirmed as a “trans girl,” she responded, “I’m sure you would have.”

Ben Appel, ‘Transgender’ Kids Usually Grow Up Gay

I listened to all of the New York Times podcast “The Protocol,” and read Nicholas Confessore’s long piece in the Times as well. I gained fresh appreciation for the subjective good faith of many youth gender medicine practitioners who I had tended to view as profiteers and limelight-seekers.

But I have not read or heard a mainstream treatment of these fraught transitioning issues in many months that acknowledges the truth of Appel’s title: untransitioned kids with gender dysphoria usually grow out of the dysphoria and end up gay. That’s is a constant premise of Andrew Sullivan writing on trans issues, for instance. I’ve never heard it refuted, and it sure seems relevant.

An example from Sullivan, frustrated at the takeover of his gay and lesbian world and feeling briefly liberated by one of Trump’s Executive Orders on the sexual binary:

Every human being in the entire history of our species produces either sperm or eggs — that is the core truth of our species’ reproductive strategy, and it applies to intersex people too. No sane society should replace this truth with ideology about purely subjective “genders” of which there are now over a hundred (and counting) …

…

But I feel particularly liberated in this moment as a man who has been openly gay before many of these transqueers were born, who lived through the AIDS epidemic, and was front and center in the fight for marriage equality and military service (and thereby loathed by the transqueers). My gay and lesbian world has been captured by gender and “LGBTQIA+” zealots ever since we won marriage equality. They control every aspect of our community with a grip that tolerates no debate or dissent. … Lesbian bars are being shut down by governments just like the old days. But this time, it’s because these lesbians don’t want biological men in their spaces. The left is now doing to gays and lesbians what the far right used to do: police our bars.

The transqueers and their MSM stenographers have renamed us — without any actual debate — as “LGBTQIA+”, deliberately stripping us of our identities as gay men and lesbians, and conflating us with trans people with whom we have almost nothing in common.

Andrew Sullivan.

The AI tell


Source

Before proceeding let me ask a simple question: Has there ever been a major innovation that helped society, but only 8% of the public would pay for it?

Ted Gioia.

This is why, Gioia postulates, Big Tech (notably Microsoft) is building AI into its products, upping the price, and giving consumers no choice to opt out.

That said, my means and interests led me to Voilà, an AI browser extension, for which I am paying since it saves me quite a lot of time reading articles with intriguing headlines but no substance that I’m really interested in. It’s even more amazing to have it to summarize a YouTube video, which turns a 2+ hour listen into an almost instantaneous outline.

Altruism processed through the left brain

Family relationships, or skilled roles within society, such as those of priests, teachers and doctors, which transcend what can be quantified or regulated, and in fact depend on a degree of altruism, would become the object of suspicion. The left hemisphere misunderstands the nature of such relationships, as it misunderstands altruism as a version of self-interest, and sees them as a threat to its power. We might even expect there to be attempts to damage the trust on which such relationships rely, and, if possible, to discredit them. In any case, strenuous efforts would be made to bring families and professions under bureaucratic control, a move that would be made possible, presumably, only by furthering fear and mistrust.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

What are women good for?

Women, it turns out, are for what privileged, powerful men have decided everyone is for: working forty-plus hours per week to make enough money to support a consumerist lifestyle.

Charles Camosy, Beyond the Abortion Wars

Almost enough to make me a conspiracy theorist.

The Justice Department contradicted conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein.

How? It released a memo saying case files on the sex offender and former financier do not include an incriminating “client list.” It also said Epstein killed himself in prison in 2019.

Why it matters: Attorney General Pam Bondi previously said a client list existed and was “on [her] desk.” Right-wing media personalities lashed out at her on social media yesterday.

Washington Post (italics added)

I thought “Right-wing media personalities” were just grifting about Epstein, but that “Bondi previously said a client list existed and was ‘on [her] desk’” is as good an excuse for a conspiracy theory as any. Too bad I don’t care enough about Epstein to join in the fracas.

Optimal trade-offs

Serious policy discussions are generally focused on things such as tradeoffs, incentives, and transaction costs; unserious policy discussions are almost always moralistic.

…

Most of us (including most pro-choice people, I think) would like to see fewer abortions—ideally none, from my point of view, but see above about why that probably isn’t the optimal number. There are also those among us who prefer anti-abortion policies that are vindictive or extreme because they are vindictive or extreme, irrespective of the practical effect these might have on the incidence of abortion. The more charitable reading of that familiar tendency is that the law is a teacher as well as a judge, communicating shared priorities and expectations, and, as such, a more stringent approach might pay long-term dividends by influencing public attitudes. The less charitable account is that vindictiveness and extremism are emotionally satisfying to the intellectually immature and the emotionally deformed.

Kevin D. Williamson, Clear But False

Politics

Gangster President

To bribe or not to bribe: When voters turn their country into a banana republic by making a gangster president, kickbacks become part of the cost of doing business. If I were a CFO in 2025 in need of government approval for some new project, I’d feel obliged to allot a certain amount of the budget for a “donation” to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Casino.

Nick Catoggio

Will the Texas GOP nominate a gentleman incumbent or a lout?

If [John] Cornyn is renominated, his reelection would be highly probable, so securing it would not burden the national party. With [Ken] Paxton as its nominee, the Republican Party might have to spend $250 million (Texas’s 20 media markets devour $2 million a week for saturation advertising) to drag him to victory. Even that sum might fail to do so.

Also, every national dollar spent in Texas cannot be spent elsewhere. So, if Texas’s Republicans pick Paxton in the March 3 primary next year, this would improve Democrats’ now-slim hopes for capturing the Senate.

Another dimension to the Cornyn-Paxton contest is aesthetic but has civic importance. Plainly put, Cornyn is a gentleman. This might seem like an eccentric, because anachronistic, consideration. It has, however, contemporary relevance: Any subtraction from the Republican Party’s supply of civility increases the party’s already large quotient of loutishness.

George Will

I try to keep my nose out of other states’ business, but Ken Paxton is irresistibly odious.

Choose one. Is that too much to ask?

On the unsightly sausage-making of the One Big Beautiful Bill majority:

And there were oodles of lib-owning, each example stupider than the last.

On Wednesday, Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio announced that he’d had a change of heart about the bill. He had voted against the original House legislation in May, but now planned to support the even worse Senate version. Why? Quote: “Democrats’ reaction helped me persuade that, wow, maybe this bill does, does do some really good things.”

J.D. Vance broke the news about another belated convert on Thursday morning as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered a lengthy floor speech attacking the legislation. Vance claimed on Twitter that a Republican congressman texted him, “I was undecided on the bill but then I watched Hakeem Jeffries performance and now I’m a firm yes.”

Dumbest of all was Trump flunky Jason Miller, who simplified the stakes of the debate for wary Republicans yesterday. “You can vote with [Donald Trump], or you can vote with the Democrats,” he wrote on X. “If you vote with the Democrats, you’re not voting with the Republicans. Buckle the f— up. It’s a binary choice.

…

“House Conservatives Warn They Can’t Back Senate Bill to Enact Trump’s Agenda,” the New York Times reported on June 24, in a piece written by Catie Edmondson.

The story was accompanied by a photo of—who else?—Rep. Chip Roy of Texas looking pensive. Roy is an old-school Tea Partier, always ready with a quote about the disgust he feels for Congress’ latest indefensible spending splurge. “I would not vote for it as it is,” he said last week of the Senate’s version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. As recently as Tuesday, he was posting point-by-point analyses on Twitter explaining why the bill was a nonstarter.

You know where this is going.

…

By Thursday morning his Twitter posts had shifted to explaining how, actually, the Senate bill is a win for conservatives on Medicaid. Hours later, he completed the cave by voting for the legislation.

I don’t fault Chip Roy, a politician, for being a politician. The Republican Party since 2015 is a comprehensive study in political cowardice; it feels churlish to single him out. What I fault him for is persisting in embarrassing ideological peacocking every time a terrible bill, which we all know conservatives are going to roll over for, hits the House floor. You can prioritize good policy or you can prioritize getting reelected: Just choose one and own it. Is that too much to ask?

Nick Catoggio

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.

Howl

My goodness, these people talk like cretins

Imagine being Pete Hegseth … a Princeton- and Harvard-educated … idiot—standing there insisting that the recent attack on Iranian nuclear facilities was “the most complex and secretive military operation in history.”

… “Midnight Hammer” … wasn’t the most complex or secretive military operation of the past ten months—surely that laurel goes to the Israelis and the “Grim Beeper” caper—much less the whole of human history. 

… my goodness, these people talk like cretins. Trump himself is, of course, all superlatives all the time, the sort of man who was born to sell fake Rolexes out of the trunk of a Nissan Altima and would be a tedious barstool blowhard if only he had the decency to drink. When a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst suggested that the Iran mission may have amounted to less than we all hoped, Karoline Leavitt—who is the White House press secretary in large part because she lacks the intellectual sophistication to turn the letters around on “Wheel of Fortune”—raged that the report was the work of a “loser.” Nobody bothered to ask her why it is that Donald Trump, supposedly an executive for the ages, has had so many losers working under him, often in senior security and intelligence roles: John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, Gen. John Kelly, Gen. Mark Milley, Gen. James Mattis, Gen. H.R. McMaster, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, etc. 

…

Trump is out there insisting that he is the greatest president since George Washington—and maybe greater than Washington, too. Eisenhower, who at the apex of his military career outranked George Washington (Washington died a three-star general; his posthumous promotion to his current statutorily unsurpassable rank came in 1976), knew that he would lie in state after his death and insisted that he did so in his regular army uniform, in an $80 standard-issue soldier’s coffin, with a minimum of decoration … (Specifically, only his Army and Navy distinguished-service medals and the Legion of Merit.) Who doubts that Donald Trump will be entombed in whatever Tutankhamun would have dreamed up if he’d had Liberace to consult? 

Kevin D. Williamson, at the top of his game.

Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime

The Trump administration found yesterday that Harvard University’s failure to address antisemitism on campus violated civil rights law. In a letter to Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, officials from four government agencies said the university’s “commitment to racial hierarchies” had “enabled antisemitism to fester.”

The Free Press

Does anybody doubt that if Harvard had suppressed anti-Zionist, anti-Israel or antisemitic sentiments, the Trump administration would have found that Harvard violated free speech rights?

This isn’t about antisemitism; Trump just wants to wound or destroy Harvard for the perverse pleasure of the sans-culottes.

Hocus-Pocus

Republicans are waving a $3.8 trillion magic wand over their tax-and-spending megabill, declaring that their extensions of expiring tax cuts have no effect on the federal budget. The unprecedented maneuver is a crucial part of the GOP plan to squeeze permanent tax cuts through Congress on a simple-majority vote in the coming days. Republicans are expected to endorse the accounting move in a procedural vote early Monday. (Source: wsj.com)

John Ellis News Items

Deporting those nasty Christians

Christianity Today reports that the Trump Administration is targeting Iranian Christian migrants for deportation:

…

If deported back to  their country of origin, Iranian Christians face severe persecution at the hands of Iran’s radical Islamist theocracy. That persecution has actually intensified in recent years, and includes criminalization of the promotion Christianity, and severe punishments for Christians considered to be “apostates” from Islam. This persecution makes Iranian Christians obvious candidates for asylum or refugee status (for which applicants are eligible based on persecution on the basis of religion, among other possible criteria). At the very least, those who have filed such applications must not be deported until those applications have gotten proper consideration.

I’m old enough to remember a time when conservative Republicans saw themselves as defending Christians against radical Islamism. Today, a GOP administration wants to deport Christians to persecution by a radical Islamist regime. The only people Trump considers worthy of refugee status  seem to be white Afrikaner South Africans. While they may have a plausible case (and I don’t oppose admitting them), that of Iranian Christians – and many other severely oppressed groups – is much stronger.

…

People who genuinely oppose socialism and radical Islamism would not close the doors against those regime’s victims. Doing so is both unjust and harmful to the US economy (to which these immigrants contribute) and to America’s struggle in the international war of ideas against these regimes. It’s hard to credibly tell people we are better than these brutal despots when we callously deport their victims back to them, thereby facilitating the very oppression we claim to oppose.

Ilya Somin (hyperlink added).

The entrepreneur’s new clothes

These days, Donald Trump (the man who “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program) and Jeff Bezos (the man whose second nuptials raised the bar for vulgar displays of wealth and celebrity connection) are kindred spirits:

Bezos is a man of extraordinary, awe-inspiring accomplishment. He has changed the way many of us live. But what he seems to be after these days isn’t so much respect as its quicker, lesser cousin — envy. That’s the braggart’s quarry. That’s what Trump wants, too. And it’s pursued not through substantive works but through superficial theater (military parade, anyone?), which is another of the braggart’s tells.

Boasts aren’t deeds. They’re often TikTok-friendly, Instagram-ready substitutes. Somehow, we’ve cultivated a culture that invites such camouflage and elevates the people who don it most shamelessly, even if the less impressionable among us can see it as a sign that the emperor — or entrepreneur — has no clothes.

Frank Bruni

Well, when you put it that way …

“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who authored the majority opinion, wrote, “the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

The Morning Dispatch

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.

Saturday, 6/28/25

The Blind Men and the Iranian Elephant

SourceAssessment
Leaked DIA ReportStrikes delayed Iran’s bomb development only “a few months”; facilities not fully destroyed; 400 kg of highly enriched uranium still intact.
President Trump & OfficialsInsist on “total obliteration” of targets; intelligence from Israeli operatives on the ground confirms destruction.
CIA StatementConfirms “severe damage” to Iran’s nuclear program, requiring years to rebuild.
David Albright (Independent)Satellite images show ventilation shafts and tunnels hit; centrifuge enrichment effectively destroyed; rebuilding will take a long time.
IAEA Director General“Very significant damage” expected; key question remains about location of enriched uranium.
Olli Heinonen (IAEA former chief inspector)Possibility remains for a small secret enrichment facility; threat persists.

(Summary of Was Iran’s Nuclear Program ‘Obliterated’—or Just Set Back a Few Months?).

To some extent, this feels like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Some of the experts are describing impediments to Iran’s bomb development, others how long it would take to rebuild the damaged facilities. Those are not the same question.

Pete Hegseth on the Iran Mission

Everyone with eyes knows this mission was a success! And if you doubt, here are a number of quotes from people brave enough to see what was REALLY there and not just what so-called INTELLIGENCE shows. This is also what I’m like when my loved ones come out of surgery. I don’t need to see the patient. I just want to hear statements from True Patriots about how he’s probably doing. That’s enough for me. If you weren’t FAKE NEWS, it would be enough for you.

Now, thanks to Donald Trump, we are on the historic, unprecedented verge of a thing that we used to have before he tore up the treaty! Where’s the praise? Where’s the adulation?

Alexandra Petri’s Fake News satire of Pete Hegseth’s presser with the fake news after the Iran bombing (bold and hyperlink added).

It seems to me that there’s been too little coverage of (a) the efficacy of the 2015 JCPOA until (b) Trump pulled us out of it in 2018 and the Iran nuclear program shot back up again. Kudos to Petri for alluding to it.

What Bibi got right

Especially over the past 10 months, Netanyahu has impressively followed through on his aim to remake the face of the Middle East. He’s degraded Hamas and Hezbollah, two of the vilest terror regimes on the planet. He has made the Iranian theocracy look pathetic and decrepit. Israel has demonstrated its vast military and intelligence supremacy over its enemies, establishing total freedom of the skies over much of Iran. It has shown that its agents can penetrate enemy organizations and find and kill their militant leaders. Netanyahu’s actions have contributed to the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria and have helped the legitimate Lebanese government regain control of its own territory. The Axis of Terror is in shambles.

This includes the Israeli-U.S. assault on Iran’ s nuclear program. We don’t yet know how much damage that assault has done. An early Pentagon report found that the attacks set the Iranian project back only a few months, which was picked up big-time on one side of the internet. But several other reports, including one from the Institute for Science and International Security, found that the attack “effectively destroyed” Iran’s enrichment program.

We may know in time what the bombings accomplished. In the meantime, we do know that Israel and the United States have the will and capacity to attack Iran anytime and anyplace. We do know that if Iran reconstitutes its nuclear program, Israel and America have the capacity to deliver a much more devastating and regime-threatening blow. We also know that Iran and its proxies have made some insanely self-destructive miscalculations since Oct. 7, 2023, and they must know that, too. These are ominous omens for the theocrats in Tehran.

…

For decades, both Israel and the United States were willing to tolerate the noose [i.e., the growing threat from Iran]. Dismantling it seemed too hard and risky. That changed on Oct. 7. Israel learned, to its shock and dismay, that it lacked the capacity to anticipate and prevent murderous attacks. Suddenly the looming noose began to appear intolerable. Netanyahu, and the Israeli public generally, decided to respond to Oct. 7 not with the limited retribution campaign that many of us outside observers were supporting, but by attempting to dismantle the whole noose, including Hezbollah and the future possibility of Iranian nukes, and that now looks like the right call.

David Brooks, not a Netanyahu fan. (bold added, shared link)

The Trump Doctrine

The closest I ever came to a clear understanding of his contradictory and sometimes incoherent policies was in 2018, at a lunch in the White House with one of his closest aides. We were discussing an article I had published a few years earlier in this magazine, about Obama’s foreign policy, and I said that I thought it might be premature to discern a Trump equivalent. The official responded, “There’s definitely a Trump Doctrine.”

I asked him to describe it. He said, “The Trump Doctrine is ‘We’re America, Bitch.’ That’s the Trump Doctrine.”

The official continued, “Obama apologized to everyone for everything. He felt bad about everything.” Trump, he said, “doesn’t feel like he has to apologize for anything America does.” Another White House official explained it this way: “The president believes that we’re America, and people can take it or leave it.”

Jeffrey Goldberg

This comes as no surprise to me

I have a theory of why Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. I had it even before he bombed them. I even wrote a very brief description of the theory.

But Carlos Lozada scooped me:

There’s a question President Trump likes to ask people around him when he’s facing a major challenge or considering a big decision. It’s not “Why did this happen?” or “What are my options?” or anything so straightforward as “How does this affect American interests?” It’s a more impressionistic question; any answer might sound equally authoritative, even if only one answer is preferred.

“How’s it playing?”

Trump posed it soon after Israel launched its first attacks against Iran. The president “asked an ally how the Israeli strikes were ‘playing,’” The Times reported. “He said that ‘everyone’ was telling him he needed to get more involved.”

Carlos Lozada

Good populism, vicious populism

The Republican Party, rather than embracing the best aspects of populism, has taken on its vices: anti-intellectualism, anti-institutionalism and anti-elitism; feeding off negative emotions like anger, grievances and vengeance; and a propensity to believe and to spread conspiracy theories. Populism often looks for scapegoats, frequently blaming immigrants and those who are ethnically and culturally different. Populists are also historically attracted to demagogues and authoritarian personalities.

Peter Wehner, What Has Happened to My Party Haunts Me

We seem to have turned a corner

Dishheads know I’ve been trying to get a grip on the queer and trans extremists who have run amok with the remnants of the gay rights movement these past few years. But as I watched the transqueers respond to the resounding election defeat with unreconstructed defiance, doubling down on gender extremism, and hurting acceptance of gay men, lesbians, and sane trans people, I felt I had no choice but to try to make a noise that could reach further than Substack, and get through the wall of disinformation that the MSM and queer and trans groups have been perpetrating.

I sent the essay to the NYT as a formality, never expecting it to be accepted. But they did. I expected the editing process to be like the woke-checking at New York Magazine, and I’d have to fight for every sentence. But the process, while it certainly wasn’t without its moments (they did try to water it down a lot), and took a good while to get into the paper, was fine. Even better: they allowed me to say my piece and write at length.

So I spent yesterday in a defensive crouch expecting an avalanche of hate and outrage.

Surprise! I’ve been inundated with thanks and encouragement from my fellow gays and lesbians. NYT readers’ comments were overwhelmingly positive — especially the reader-selected ones. I was stopped in the street in Ptown and congratulated, not yelled at. Old friends, major gay donors, mere acquaintances clogged my mailbox to say things along the lines of: THANK GOD SOMEONE SAID THIS AT LAST. Here’s a text I got from a friend:

I’ve had conversations with a dozen friends today about the trans movement and our unquestioning obedience to it, many of whom had never really considered it before at all and were various degrees of horrified. Thank you for helping make this a conversation we can have, it’s helping.

And that is really the goal: to get a conversation started that should have been happening years ago; to tell gay men and lesbians that something truly dangerous is going on they may not know about; to encourage them to look at it more deeply; and to distinguish clearly between these gender extremists and the gay and lesbian rights movement — so we don’t all get tarnished with the intolerance and incoherence of the gender nutters.

It’s a start. All of which is to say: please speak up if you are hesitating. There is far less support for these crazy experiments on kids and ideological extremism than might appear. Face down the bullies. And face up to the facts. And rescue our cause from those who will otherwise destroy it with overreach.

Andrew Sullivan on Substack

Nobody is above the law

No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law. But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation—in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so. . . . Observing the limits on judicial authority . . . is required by a judge’s oath to follow the law.

Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson [in dissent] skips over that part. Because analyzing the governing statute involves boring “legalese,” she seeks to answer “a far more basic question of enormous practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?” In other words, it is unnecessary to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. Justice Jackson would do well to heed her own admonition: “[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.” That goes for judges too.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett

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.