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)

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

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

Saturday, 6/28/25

The Blind Men and the Iranian Elephant

Source	Assessment
Leaked DIA Report	Strikes delayed Iran’s bomb development only “a few months”; facilities not fully destroyed; 400 kg of highly enriched uranium still intact.
President Trump & Officials	Insist on “total obliteration” of targets; intelligence from Israeli operatives on the ground confirms destruction.
CIA Statement	Confirms “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

Summer Solstice

Israeli ingenuity

As news circulated about the stupendous success of Israel’s attack on Iran, my first thought was that if you told me Mossad had figured out a way to part the Red Sea, at this point I’d believe you. The feats of intelligence and ingenuity that Israel has managed over the past year at the expense of Iran and its proxies would seem far-fetched as fiction, but here we are. It’s reassuring to see a Western nation demonstrate such competence as the United States descends into malevolent dark-age populist anarchy.

Nick Catoggio

Speed-reading

60 or so years ago, I took “Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics” (a current version here) to increase my reading speed. After teaching us a technique for dragging our eyes down a page via a hand movement, they said “Resolve that from now on you’ll never read without this.”

I said to myself “The day I speed-read the Psalms that way would be a very sad day.”

I recently installed a browser extension to generate AI summaries of the current browser tab. It is saving me quite a bit of time on humdrum news and opinion.

But the day I settle for a structured outline of Nick Catoggio (or Kevin D. Williamson) instead of reading their own sprightly writing will be pretty sad, too.

Skrmetti

Experts

The Court rightly rejects efforts by the United States and the private plaintiffs to accord outsized credit to claims about medical consensus and expertise. The United States asserted that “the medical community and the nation’s leading hospitals overwhelmingly agree” with the Government’s position that the treatments outlawed by SB1 can be medically necessary. … The implication of these arguments is that courts should defer to so-called expert consensus.

There are several problems with appealing and deferring to the authority of the expert class. First, so-called experts have no license to countermand the “wisdom, fairness, or logic of legislative choices.” … Second, contrary to the representations of the United States and the private plaintiffs, there is no medical consensus on how best to treat gender dysphoria in children. Third, notwithstanding the alleged experts’ view that young children can provide informed consent to irreversible sex-transition treatments, whether such consent is possible is a question of medical ethics that States must decide for themselves. Fourth, there are particularly good reasons to question the expert class here, as recent revelations suggest that leading voices in this area have relied on questionable evidence, and have allowed ideology to influence their medical guidance.

Taken together, this case serves as a useful reminder that the American people and their representatives are entitled to disagree with those who hold themselves out as experts, and that courts may not “sit as a super-legislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.” … By correctly concluding that SB1 warrants the “paradigm of judicial restraint,” … the Court reserves to the people of Tennessee the right to decide for themselves.

Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring in U.S. v. Skrmetti, via Eugene Volokh (citations omitted).

Strategic error

Representative Sarah (formerly Tim) McBride (D., Del.), the first transgender member of Congress, has admitted that the Democratic Party moved too quickly on pushing transgender issues. The lawmaker believes the left “went to Trans 201, Trans 301, when people were still at a very much Trans 101 stage.” Yet the representative still fails to understand the root of the problem: The left’s strategy on transgenderism failed because the left is wrong on transgenderism. Men cannot become women. Pretending like accepting the most outré claims of transgenderism is achievable through taking higher-level classes won’t change that. Besides, Americans are increasingly uninterested in enrolling in such courses. Polls show that support for so-called gender-transition procedures for children has declined, and Americans believe that trans people should use the bathroom that matches their sex, not their “gender identity.” The activists’ problem isn’t that they have failed to finesse their message; it’s that they have failed biology.

National Review Weekly email

The Barbarian Right

For many of the conservatives who embraced it—myself included—the Trumpian moment promised a more populist, pro-worker GOP. Yet the latest iteration of Donald Trump has dashed these hopes, playing down the themes that propelled his 2016 campaign, and sounding more and more like a conventional Republican nominee—only more erratic.

In the realm of right-wing ideas, meanwhile, something far grimmer is afoot: the rise of a cohort of writers, pseudo-scholars, and shitposters dedicated to reviving some of the darkest tendencies in the history of thought, including the idolatry of strength (as cartoonishly personified by the likes of Andrew Tate); the notion of supposedly “natural” hierarchies; IQ-based eugenics; overt racism and antisemitism.

Call them the Barbarian Right: The master subject of this worldview is the Nietzschean barbarian or “aristocrat of the spirit” who overthrows the egalitarian—and essentially feminine—structures that have long shackled him, restraining his yearning for adventure and excellence. Nazi apologia is par for the course.

Sohrab Ahmari

Christian Nationalist crackup

“Political idolatry,” he observes, “assumes worship, and worship assumes some kind of confidence in the thing being worshiped,” but few of the people obsessively following politics have much real faith in it anymore. It has become for many a kind of spectator sport, or live-action role-playing, far easier to participate through digital media, yet harder to take seriously. There is a performativity to our culture wars now that I suspect was not there in the 90s.

…

Over the past six months, I have observed two communities of discourse. One, which I’ve observed as a bemused spectator, is the increasingly inane conversation of Very Online Christian Nationalism. Much of this discourse had long since descended into self-parody, but the loss of a clear and present common enemy after Trump’s victory swiftly accelerated the splintering of the movement. At time of writing, many of the movements principles were publicly devouring one another over whether, and to what extent, one should blame the Jews for the moral rot of modernity.

Brad Littlejohn, The Resilience of America’s Hybrid-Enlightenment, Mere Orthodoxy (magazine) Winter 2025.

I’m reminded of how the New Atheists, having gathered around the non-existence of God, found that they had nothing else in common and dispersed again. I suspect the MAGA Right has nothing in common beyond worship of our Orange Sun King.

Golden Age

Kevin Roberts (Heritage Foundation, Project 2025) and Kellyanne Conway went north to Canada to take the affirmative on the debate question “Is this America’s Golden Age?.” It was shared with permission on the Ezra Klein show because Ezra was one of the debaters taking the negative.

Roberts and Conway beclowned themselves and offended the audience (e.g., mentioning Canada’s possible status as a 51st state) and then complained that the debate was rigged when they drew audible disapproval and contempt.

In my estimation, the negative side “chewed them up and spit them out,” but I grew too impatient and mortified at our national debasement to wait for the audience’s verdict.

Whence innovation?

Musical innovation tends to happen at crossroads and port cities. It’s spurred by outsiders not insiders. It rises from centers of multiculturalism and diversity—where different ideas come together.

The ruling class recognizes this, but it takes about 40 or 50 years. So fifty years elapse from Bob Dylan emerging as a rebel critic of the system, to becoming a Nobel Prize laureate. Almost fifty years elapse between Mick Jagger getting censored and becoming Sir Mick Jagger, an honored knight.

You eventually have this process of legitimization but the new style always starts on the outskirts—in the port cities and border cities.

…

Because of the internet, every place is now a port city.

Ted Gioia. So Ted thinks the venture capitalists in entertainment are at a dead end with sequels, prequels, and every other “do-it-again-and-again” strategy.

The slippery euthanasia slope

[A] justification for suicide that emphasizes the cry for help that medicine can’t answer, the need for control over the uncontrollable, the desire to cure suffering that doctors can’t relieve, will struggle to maintain terminal illness as a special category. There are just too many people in this exceptional position but with no endpoint to their pain.

Ross Douthat, Why the Euthanasia Slope is Slippery

Nellie snippets

Meanwhile, in the U.S. of A., Whoopi Goldberg says that being black in America is worse than being a woman in Iran. Here was The View co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin: “I think it’s very different to live in the United States in 2025 than it is to live in Iran.” Whoopi retorted: “Not if you’re black.” Alyssa, have you possibly considered sitting your ass down and letting Whoopi speak her truth? The only place worse than Iran to be a woman might well be the panel on The View. I’ll take the veil over fighting with Joy Behar about DEI any day of the week.
Asked about Tulsi’s earlier testimony on Iran, Trump said simply: “I don’t care what she said.” All jobs under Trump are fake. All titles are fake. He makes decisions alone, meditating in the comforting glow of Fox News, turned up to the highest volume. He gets vibes off Truth Social. He asks an empty Diet Coke can if she ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon. He throws a groundhog in the air and sees if it lands on the bunker buster button. He shakes Marco Rubio and turns him upside down, and if the coins that fall out of his pockets land on heads, we’re going in.
Fascinating new scams: The Trump Organization announced it plans to sell a $499 smartphone, with a gold-colored, T-engraved case, set to be released this year. Trump Mobile will also offer a phone plan for $47.45 per month. The 47 Plan. What will the Golden Trump phone do? How bad will reception be? Who will it call? Will it automatically block my lib friends (Bari)? When it comes out, we’ll do an unboxing just for TGIF. In some ways, the Trump family are artists, true creatives. Week after week they come up with scams I’ve never imagined.
Obsessed with this mysterious Trump aide: Sergio Gor, director of presidential personnel, is one of the most powerful figures in the White House, responsible for vetting all potential employees—around 4,000 executive branch staff. But a recent report found that he himself was never vetted. Gor has not submitted Standard Form 86, or SF-86, a set of questions required of all those government employees who, like him, need security clearances. The form inquires into foreign connections and birth countries—and Gor, who claims to be from Malta (though Maltese officials could not confirm this), has mysterious origins and declined to provide his birthplace when the New York Post asked, which is apparently something people working in government can do. He also advocated to end the use of the SF-86 when hiring government employees. The man in charge of vetting new Trump admin employees is not vetted (poetic, isn’t it?). And he’s in the job now, specifically campaigning against vetting government employees. I desperately need to know more about Sergio. I need a movie about Sergio (which is absolutely not his real name).

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

Miscellany

Prerequisite

In order for a boy to believe he is a girl, he must first be taught that there is a wrong way to be a boy.

Sam Morgan via Andrew Sullivan

Schooling

In a schooled world the road to happiness is paved with a consumer’s index.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Obsessives

Henry Longfellow, who made a return visit to Paris in 1836, loved the crowds as much as anything about the city. When a friend from home, accompanying him on a walk, showed no interest in the passing parade, but insisted on talking about predestination and the depravity of human nature, it was more than Longfellow could bear.

David McCullough, The Greater Journey

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

Pure politics, 6/5/25

The Courts

Petulant Trump disavows his signature success (1)

Mr. Trump lashed out at the Federalist Society, blaming it for bad advice on whom to appoint to judgeships. He singled out Leonard Leo, a former longtime leader of the Federalist Society who helped recommend his first-term nominees and who exemplifies the conservative legal movement.

“I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use the Federalist Society as a recommending source on judges,” the president wrote. “I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.”

Mr. Leo and Mr. Trump had a falling out in 2020, but the personal attack was a sharp escalation. In a statement, Mr. Leo said, “I’m very grateful for President Trump transforming the federal courts, and it was a privilege being involved.”

Still, Mr. Trump’s tirade strained an already uneasy relationship with traditional legal conservatives.

Many share the president’s goals of strengthening border security, curbing the administrative state and ending “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs, said John Yoo, a conservative law professor. But, he added, they dislike some of Mr. Trump’s methods, whether that is prolifically invoking emergency powers or insulting judges who rule against his administration.

And Professor Yoo, who wrote memos advancing sweeping theories of presidential power as a Bush administration lawyer, said Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Leo were “outrageous.”

“Calling for the impeachment of judges, attacking Leonard Leo personally and basically calling him as traitor as far as I can tell — Trump is basically turning his back on one of his biggest achievements of his first term,” he added, referring to the reshaping of the federal judiciary.

Charlie Savage, Trump, Bashing the Federalist Society, Asserts Autonomy on Judge Picks

For what it’s worth, Trump’s pledge to appoint federal judges from a list compiled by Leonard Leo (not the Federalist Society, which doesn’t do endorsements) was pivotal to his 2016 Election victory, especially among abortion foes who understandably did not trust a twice-divorced narcissist playboy with gambling and porn connections. Charlie Savage hasn’t forgotten that, but I shouldn’t quote his whole article.

If the Senate has a couple of Republicans with integrity, hack appointees like Emil Bove will not be confirmed. C’mon, guys! Save him from himself!

Petulant Trump disavows his signature success (2)

There are many stories in literature about people making deals with the devil. Weirdly, in most of them the devil is a square dealer.

That is, he keeps up his end of the bargain. He offers the protagonist wealth or power in exchange for something ethereal, like their immortal soul, and when they agree he delivers. The Prince of Lies turns out not to be a swindler. Most of the drama happens after he makes good on his promise and comes to collect.

The moral of those stories isn’t that you’re a fool to trade with Beelzebub because you’ll be cheated. It’s that you’re a fool to sacrifice your noblest self for something as fleeting as worldly power.

Conservatives made a deal like that in 2016. Donald Trump offered to stock the federal judiciary with their favorite judges, beginning with the vacancy left by Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court; in return they would set aside their moral, civic, and ideological objections to him and support him in virtually anything he wanted to do, even if it affronted their conservative beliefs. Or basic decency.

The bargain was struck—and he delivered. Three eminent conservative jurists were added to the Supreme Court. Hundreds more were confirmed to federal appellate and district courts. The great white whale of social conservatism, Roe v. Wade, was harpooned in 2022 after a 50-year chase. Many other landmark legal victories for the American right have accumulated since Trump took office in 2017.

Conservatives weren’t cheated. The devil made good.

Fast-forward to last night …

[Leonard] Leo spent many years as the Federalist Society’s sherpa on judicial nominees, advising Republican presidents on whom to appoint and helping to shepherd candidates through the confirmation process. With the exception of Mitch McConnell, no one has done more this century to build a federal bench of originalist judges. But Trump didn’t want originalists—he wanted flunkies—and so Leo’s influence, and the influence of the organization he serves, have gone up in smoke …

Conservatives got the judiciary they wanted in exchange for supporting a man who radiates contempt for the constitutional order. In doing so, they empowered a postliberal movement that despises judges who do their jobs conscientiously instead of dutifully midwifing a Trumpist autocracy. As the Republican Party proceeds further down the path to fascism that those conservatives enabled, eventually the federal judiciary will consist entirely of believers in the “living Constitution,” half authoritarian and half progressive. In the long run, as Reaganites age out and are replaced by younger Trumpists, conservative judges as we’ve known them will go mostly extinct.

That’s what conservatives got for their bargain. The devil has come to collect.

Nick Catoggio

Pardons

The concept of a pardon, of course, is extremely hard for Trump to understand. Traditionally, a pardon is due to someone who has completed (or nearly completed) their sentence, expressed remorse, and turned their life around — and thereby been the recipient of mercy. But remorse is a concept unknown to a pathological narcissist. Mercy is even stranger. After all, who wins and who loses in an act of mercy? It’s one of those acts defined by grace — another literally meaningless concept for Trump. For him, all human conduct is built on a zero-sum, winner-vs-loser foundation. So a pardon is always instrumental — a way to reward allies, win credits, and enlarge his power by announcing to the world that he alone is the ultimate rule of law, and can intervene at any point to ensure his version of justice is the dispositive one. A monarch, in other words.

…

But Trump is the real outlier (and Biden, in his defense, used Trump’s abuse as a justification for his own self-dealing). In recent times he’s out in front in numbers: more than 1,700 full pardons so far, and we have three-and-a-half years to go. Nixon’s 863, Carter’s 574, Clinton’s 396, W’s 189, and Obama’s 212 put it in perspective. But these previous presidents abused the power occasionally — it’s an absolute power after all — while largely respecting the contours of the rule of law.

Trump has dispensed with any pretense of that. He is an instinctual tyrant — see his immigration overreach and his unilateral tariff mania — and the pardon power was almost made for him. The weakness of any constitution is the virtue — or, more often, the lack of it — in its office-holders. And Trump has the civic virtue of Jeffrey Epstein. The pardon power was always going to be a loaded gun in his tiny, careless hands.

… [H]e is using the pardon power all the time, rather than waiting till the end of his term. It replaces the rule of law with monarchical discretion. That’s why he could not tolerate Jeff Sessions all those years ago. Because Sessions, for all his passionate partisanship, still understood the system he was operating in and still believed that the appearance of impartial justice was integral to liberal democracy’s survival. Sessions was an American.

…

A majority of the American electorate, mind you, endorsed this lawlessness last November. It’s hard to pity them, as they absorb or ignore all the corruption they voted for and are still content to tolerate. They love crypto-monarchy as long as their king is on the throne. They do not seem to understand that this version of monarchy is still an elected one, and that another king from the other tribe may wear the crown some day. They may miss the benefits of liberal democracy once they have succeeded in killing it.

Andrew Sullivan, Pardon The Death Of Liberal Democracy

TACO

I’m not an active investor. I tend to buy and hold Mutual Funds and ETFs. (That’s just me; you do you.) But it did not escape my notice, even before the term was coined, that what’s now dubbed “TACO trades” could be profitable.

Wall Street is all over the “TACO trade,” another instance of people realizing they shouldn’t take the president at face value. “TACO” is short for “Trump always chickens out.” Markets have tended to go down when Trump announces new tariffs, but investors have recognized that a lot of this is bluffing, so they’re buying the dip and then profiting off the inevitable rally.

A reporter asked Trump about the expression on Wednesday, and he was furious. “I chicken out? I’ve never heard that,” he said. “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.” The reaction demonstrates that the traders are right, because—to mix zoological metaphors—a hit dog will holler. The White House keeps talking tough about levying new tariffs on friends and geopolitical rivals alike, but Trump has frequently gone on to lower the measures or delay them for weeks or months.

Foreign leaders had figured out that Trump was a pushover by May 2017, and a year later, I laid out in detail his pattern of nearly always folding. He’s a desirable negotiating foil, despite his unpredictable nature, because he doesn’t tend to know his material well, has a short attention span, and can be easily manipulated by flattery. The remarkable thing is that it’s taken this long for Wall Street to catch on.

David A. Graham, The TACO Presidency

Now that the cat’s out of the bag, the profitability will diminish and what’s left will mostly be the pleasure of annoying Velveeta Voldemort.

The most incompetent administration ever

A federal appeals panel ordered officials not to deport a 31-year-old to El Salvador. Minutes later, it happened anyway. The government blamed “administrative errors.”

Alan Feuer, NYT

Will Trump pay any price for this fishy string of “administrative errors”?

Among his voters, I doubt it. But with the courts, the toll is steep and rising. They just cannot believe anything Administration lawyers promise. And they shouldn’t.

DJT, the anti-conservative

[I]t’s hard to think of a more anti-conservative figure than President Donald Trump or a more anti-conservative movement than MAGA. Trump and his supporters evince a disdain for laws, procedures, and the Constitution. They want to empower the federal government in order to turn it into an instrument of brute force that can be used to reward allies and destroy opponents.

Trump and his administration have abolished agencies and imposed sweeping tariffs even when they don’t have the legal authority to do so. They are deporting people without due process. Top aides are floating the idea of suspending the writ of habeas corpus, one of the most important constitutional protections against unlawful detention. Judges, who are the target of threats from the president, fear for their safety. So do the very few Republicans who are willing to assert their independence from Trump.

In one of his first official acts, Trump granted clemency to more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those convicted of seditious conspiracy. The president and his family are engaging in a level of corruption that was previously unfathomable. And he and his administration have shown no qualms about using the federal government to target private companies, law firms, and universities; suing news organizations for baseless reasons; and ordering criminal probes into former administration officials who criticized Trump.

The Trump administration is a thugocracy, and the Republican Party he controls supports him each step of the way. Almost every principle to which Republicans once professed fealty has been jettisoned. The party is now devoted to the abuse of power and to vengeance.

…

The significance of this shift can hardly be overstated. A party that formerly proclaimed allegiance to the Constitution and the rule of law, warned about the concentration and abuse of power, and championed virtue, restraint, and moral formation has been transmogrified. The Republican Party now stands for everything it once loathed.

Peter Wehner

Thugocracy update

And she has been frank about the dilemma faced by Republicans like her who are dismayed about the president’s policies and pronouncements but worried that speaking out about them could bring death threats or worse.

“We are all afraid,” she told constituents in April, adding: “I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”

Catie Edmondson, Lisa Murkowski Isn’t Using ‘Nice Words’ About Life Under Trump

I do acknowledge threats against Trump’s life, too. Several isolated nuts have been arrested and charged. But it seems to me that a President and his supporters holding Congress hostage for fear of their lives is an order of magnitude worse.

No laughing matter

Next month will be the first anniversary of Tim Walz’s branding of Donald Trump, JD Vance and, by implication, some of their political associates as “weird,” and it’s obvious now that Walz spoke too soon, before Trump won in November and his administration turned weirdness into a credential and an operating principle, before weirdness started afflicting Trump allies who seemed a little less weird in the past, before episodes of Trump-adjacent weirdness proliferated.

… [T]his pageant of peculiarity isn’t a laughing matter. It reflects Trump’s confusion of nonconformity with boldness. It speaks to his love of performance, even if it’s the fruit of a loopy performer. It demonstrates his desire to rattle, no matter how infantile the rattling.

Frank Bruni

Same column, change of topic:

If I’m subjected to one more lamentation, one more rant, about how lost and pitiable and shameful the Democratic Party is, my head is going to explode. Not because the Democratic Party is in good shape — it isn’t. Not because it can make do with only minor adjustments — it can’t. It’s guilty of the arrogance and incompetence of which it’s accused. And the country’s future as a reasonably healthy and prosperous democracy depends on Democrats’ recognition and remedy of that.

But some of the extravagant lashing of the party carries the implicit suggestion that Republicans, by contrast, have their act together. Excuse me? If success at the polls is the only metric for that, then sure, yes, they’re in an enviable spot. But it’s a wretched (and, I have to believe, vulnerable) one. Republican lawmakers who rightly gaped in horror at the events of Jan. 6, 2021, later developed collective amnesia, putting power several light-years above principle. They then indulged or outright applauded Trump’s laughable cabinet picks and his adoration of Musk and his cockamamie tariffs and his abandonment of due process and his swag from Qatar and his sadistic humiliation of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and so many other cruelties and outrages that this sentence could go on forever. I struggle to admire Republicans’ political chops. I’m too distracted by their moral rot.

For love of sentences

In Esquire, Dave Holmes marveled at Senator Lindsey Graham’s suggestion, in a social media post before the conclave, that cardinals consider the idea of Trump as the next pope: “I guess he had not yet closed the day’s humiliation ring on his Apple Watch.” Holmes added that while Graham was probably joking, “You can’t be tongue-in-cheek when you are actively licking the boot. There is just not enough tongue for both jobs.” (Susan Fitzgerald, Las Cruces, N.M.)

Frank Bruni (a prior week)

Dissing the Dems

I confess that my laser-focus on Trump can sound like excusing the Democrats’ problems. It really isn’t. I’m just madder at my former party than at the I party whose Presidential nominee I voted for only once, 53 years ago.

An Andrew Sullivan podcast this week with the authors of Original Sin reminded me of just how screwed we are in the other of our major-party choices, the Dems, and how Joe Biden fooled me with his “nice guy” schtick. Though I didn’t vote for him, I would have done so if my fair state hadn’t been a lock for Trump.

Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is the tribute paid to virtue by vice.

I will give Trump 2.0 credit for not adding hypocrisy to its countless other sins.

On second thought, his attacks on Ivy League universities for suffering antisemites gladly may qualify.

The best jokes

It has been said that the best jokes are dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

On Wednesday, a dangerous joke was told in the Oval Office. The South African president turned to the American president and said: “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.”

NYT

FWIW

Trump lost 96% of federal court cases in May. Even GOP-appointed judges ruled against him 72% of the time,” – Jack Hopkins.
“The Washington Post has now confirmed that it was Trump who asked the Qataris to gift him the plane for free (rather than the Qataris offering it), and that Qatar is demanding a written memo from the White House to this effect before the deal is finalized,” – Tom Malinowski.

Andrew Sullivan, Pardon The Death Of Liberal Democracy

PBS

… and by the numbers 86 and 47.

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)

Political 5/30/25

What it takes to tick off David Brooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stupid, lazy and angry

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

…

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

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

…

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

Kevin D. Williamson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nick Miroff

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

Marks of dystopia

Speaking of lying to court and losing in court:

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

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

…

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

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

…

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

…

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

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

Nick Catoggio

Whole-of-Government Gaslighting

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

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

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

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

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

86ing the important stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David French.

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

86 both major parties.

Woke Right

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

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

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

So far, so good …

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

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

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

When the rhetoric comes home to roost

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

She paused. “This is Carol.”

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

Prelude to a pissing contest

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

The Economist

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

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Political (5/27/25)

Shooting us in the foot

Defunding Science

I don’t think I elevate science unduly, and I even try to burst the bubbles of those who do. I think we’ve neglected the humanities in worshiping the almight STEM.

But Steven Pincker has a long and passionate defense of Harvard in the New York Times opinion section. Remembering that Trump’s attack is largely based on alleged antisemitism at Harvard, this in particular struck me as key:

Just as clear is what won’t work: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.

Mr. Trump’s strangling of this support will harm Jews more than any president in my lifetime. Many practicing and aspiring scientists are Jewish, and his funding embargo has them watching in horror as they are laid off, their labs are shut down or their dreams of a career in science go up in smoke. This is immensely more harmful than walking past a “Globalize the Intifada” sign. Worse still is the effect on the far larger number of gentiles in science, who are being told that their labs and careers are being snuffed out to advance Jewish interests. Likewise for the current patients whose experimental treatments will be halted, and the future patients who may be deprived of cures. None of this is good for the Jews.

The concern for Jews is patently disingenuous, given Mr. Trump’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers and Hitler fans. The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch. As JD Vance put it in the title of a 2021 speech: “The Universities Are the Enemy.”

Steven Pinker, Harvard Derangement Syndrome (shared link)

Leave them all alone

A German concept used to validate the society-saturating politics infecting Europe 90 years ago was Gleichschaltung. It denoted totalistic government: the “coordinating” or “harmonizing” of all important social institutions. A foreign word, but no longer a foreign practice.

As a candidate in 2023, Donald Trump vowed to “choke off the money” to schools assaulting “Western civilization itself.” As he defines this, and as he defines “assaulting” it. What could go wrong?

America’s research universities are sources of U.S. economic dynamism and vital to technology-dependent national security. It is folly (and unlawful) to punish entire institutions for the foolishness of a few departments. When English departments are “decolonized” — dead White men purged from the curriculum — the only victims are students deprived of Shakespeare. Ideological indoctrination is rarer in engineering departments, where knowing the right facts rather than having the right feelings matters, otherwise bridges crumble and skyscrapers tumble. Leave all departments alone, some because their silliness does not matter much, others because their excellence matters greatly. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

George Will via John Ellis

Keeping score

SCOTUS and the “Shadow Docket”

We have plenty of things to worry about in constitutional law today. But those worried about how the court will confront the unprecedented and sometimes unlawful actions of the Trump administration should save their outrage for other cases.

In the two cases here, the court held that the president was likely to prevail in his unitary executive claim, that the administration was unduly harmed by allowing the officials to keep their offices while the case was pending, and that this reasoning would not imperil the independence of the Federal Reserve. It did all of this in an emergency order, rather than waiting for the issues to arrive on the court’s regular docket.

…

The president’s ruinous tariffs, purported cancellation of birthright citizenship, renditions to foreign prisons and retaliations against his political opponents all raise far graver constitutional problems than the court’s ultimately unsurprising order in these cases. We should focus our concern there.

Will Baude in the New York Times.

I had Will’s father, Pat Baude, for several Constitutional Law classes, and he, too, was brilliant. I only wish he had lived long enough to bust his buttons at his son’s brilliance and esteem in the legal community.

The Big Picture: A Hostage Crisis

This newsletter concerns itself with the great patriotic project to turn America into a banana republic, but something gets lost by doing that episodically. Each day we study some crooked new tree that Donald Trump’s administration has planted; rarely do we step back and consider how large the forest has already become.

Here’s Andy Craig at The UnPopulist, stepping back:

Since Jan. 20, the United States has been in a state of rapid constitutional collapse. Congress’ power of the purse, its most fundamental prerogative, has been usurped; statutory laws have been suspended by claimed “emergency” powers; the requirement for Senate confirmation has been made irrelevant; a transparently political purge of both the civil service and the armed forces has been launched; the president has threatened aggressive military force against longtime allies; a decree was issued to strip constitutional citizenship rights; our treaty obligations have been blown up with a self-sabotaging trade war; mass pardons have been used to gleefully sanction political violence; courts have been defied to send innocent people to a Central American torture camp; the world’s richest man has deployed a gaggle of racist hackers to shut down government agencies on a whim; and, just as we were going to press, news broke that Harvard University has been barred from enrolling foreign students because of its refusal to hew to the president’s ideological demands.

What Craig is describing is essentially a hostage crisis.

An authoritarian state is a national hostage crisis … Most hostage crises aren’t orchestrated by coolly ingenious master-planners. They’re what happens when someone who’s ruthless, audacious, volatile, and cunning but not very bright makes a mess of his caper, like a bank robber whose hold-up takes longer than expected. He turns to leave and finds cop cars pulling up outside, causing him to panic and to start taking hostages instead.

There’s no “plan.” He just doesn’t know what else to do now that a wildly reckless, dangerous course of action like robbing a bank has suddenly gone sideways.

That was also the theme of yesterday’s newsletter, not coincidentally. The One Big Beautiful Bill that passed the House on Thursday is incomprehensible as a plan to strengthen America fiscally. It makes sense only as a desperate act in the midst of a dangerous caper gone bad: Having decided long ago that making Trump happy is more important than protecting the country, House Republicans acted accordingly when forced to choose.

Nick Catoggio

Amnesiac Nation

The background fact of this second Trump impeachment trial was how broadly popular it was. In January, a Monmouth survey found that 56 percent of Americans wanted Trump convicted. Quinnipiac reported that 59 percent regard him as responsible for inciting violence against the U.S. government. According to ABC/The Washington Post, 66 percent believe that Trump acted irresponsibly during the post-election period. According to polls, fewer than a quarter believed that Trump did “nothing wrong” on January 6.

Those are not the numbers on which to base a Grover Cleveland–style comeback tour—especially not when the majority of Americans also believe that Donald Trump did a bad job handling the COVID-19 pandemic and that President Joe Biden is doing a good job.

David Frum.

There came a time when “President Joe Biden” became a legal fiction, and that boosted Trump’s stock.

Abundance Agenda

Jonathan Chait writes about the civil war in the Democrat party over a proposed “abundance agenda” for the party.

Here are the pieces of that agenda, according to Chait:

[T]he canonical abundance agenda consists of three primary domains.

The first, and most familiar, is the need to expand the supply of housing by removing zoning rules and other legal barriers that prevent supply from meeting demand …

The second focus of abundance is to cut back the web of laws and regulations that turns any attempt to build public infrastructure into an expensive, agonizing nightmare …

The third domain, and the one that has received the least attention from commentators, is freeing up the government, especially the federal government, to be able to function. Policy wonks call this issue “state capacity.” The government itself is hamstrung by a thicket of rules that makes taking action difficult and makes tying up the government in lawsuits easy. The abundance agenda wants to deregulate the government itself, in order to enable it to do things.

The problem is that there’s a bloc of progressive special interests within the party (“the groups,” per the abundance agenda proponents), and the groups are large and unified (or at least in alliance):

The progressive movement seeks to maintain solidarity among its component groups, expecting each to endorse the positions taken by the others.

Much of the most vociferous opposition to the abundance agenda has zeroed in on its betrayal of this principle. The Roosevelt Institute’s Todd Tucker attacked Ezra Klein on X for his “survivor island approach to coalitions—first unions and Dems team up to vote enviros off the island, and then Dems turn on labor.” David Sirota, a left-wing journalist, complained, “Abundance Libs are insisting the big problem isn’t corporate power & oligarchs, it’s zoning laws & The Groups? Come on.” Austin Ahlman, a researcher at the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly advocacy organization, mused, “You have to wonder whether the Abundance faction stuff would have landed better if the proponents had not laid the groundwork for it by first broadsiding every other organized constituency in the democratic tent.”

This angry response is not merely a knee-jerk reaction to criticism, but the logical outgrowth of a well-developed belief system. Since the Obama era, many of the component groups in the progressive coalition have drifted further left on their core demands. (Single-issue lobbies are naturally incentivized to grow more extreme over time—what organization is going to decide its pet cause is too unpopular or costly to merit a strident defense?)

At the same time, they have grown more purposeful about their belief that each group must stand behind all the positions outlined by the others. That is why civil-rights groups will demand student-debt relief, abortion-rights groups endorse abolishing the police, or trans-rights groups insist that Palestine should be liberated. Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an heir to the Hunt oil fortune who became a full-time progressive organizer, and who has raised and donated millions to causes such as the Sunrise Movement, the Debt Collective, and Black Lives Matter, articulated the principle of cross-endorsements in her book, Solidarity. She argues for “the necessity of working in coalition with progressive social movements,” and of resisting the opposition’s efforts “to weaponize a movement’s fault lines.”

Such progressives are not wrong to see the abundance agenda as a broader attack on their movement.

The Coming Democratic Civil War – The Atlantic

I have long believed that “the groups” impede Democrat success by alienating Democrats in the cultural mainstream. And as I’ve long said, whatever else Trump’s triumph means, it means major political realignment. The Democrat party’s travails over the abundance agenda, and controlling the toxic “groups,” could further advance that realignment, but I’m not sure it will benefit the Democrats all that much.

But then what do I know? I’m almost completely alienated from a country that can elect Velveeta Voldemort.

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.

Bright Thursday

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

Trump 2.0

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

National “Emergencies”

Source: Andrew Sullivan

The Meta-Concern about summary deportation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do we really believe in free speech?

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

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

Jacob Mchangama, A New McCarthyism

Law and its limits

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

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

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

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

Until now.

Damon Linker

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Keisler with David Frum

Miscellany

The new Republican coalition

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

The tech right, which is essentially a weirder and more evil upgrade of the pro-business libertarians

The barstool right, which is a genuinely new constituency made up of hedonistic anti-woke libertarians that has replaced the Christian conservatives

The neo-conservative foreign policy hawks, who are the weakest member of the coalition, but can still get what they want on certain issues, as seen with the attacks on the Houthis as well as the saber rattling regarding Greenland

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

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

Jake Meador

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

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

Beta-testing tyranny in the Sunshine State

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

Context

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

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

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

Dangers of debunking

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

Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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