Category: 9th Commandment Watch

Saturday, 11/29/25

As December impends, we have our first substantial snowfall of the year in my fair city. I am belatedly thankful for snow blowers.

Right Relativism

Jonah Goldberg, who I don’t read that often, grabbed my attention with the title of his Thanksgiving Day post: The Truth, the Whole Truth, Everything but the Truth. It was good enough for promotion to my lead item today.

Just one little snip:

It’s amazing to me how many people on the right can (rightly!) denounce the 1619 Project … but yawn at the … tendentious denunciations of the American regime by conservative intellectuals and various “influencers.” As shoddy as the 1619 Project was, it was vastly more serious and grounded in facts than “the Jews did Pearl Harbor” or the idea peddled on Carlson’s show that the Holocaust was an accident of poor planning by the Nazis.

When I was in university, Saul Alinsky didn’t come to my attention (neither did Foucault, Derrida and other figures now widely blamed for various ills). But some on the right, tired of losing and convinced that the Left’s tactics were giving them victories, have now embraced Alinsky for their own purposes. For instance:

We have successfully frozen their brand—”critical race theory”—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.

That’s “national conservative” Alinskyite Christopher Rufo, boasting in 2021. He’s my personal “Exhibit A” in indicting the Right. Compare Alinsky (via Goldberg):

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it,” and “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”

I didn’t recognize the echo of Alinsky when I first read Rufo’s Tweet back in ’21, but I knew immediately that Rufo was being dishonest and thus was not my idea of a conservative. (Yeah, I guess I’m one of those “beautiful losers.”) He still isn’t my idea of a conservative, and remains one of my top two or three least favorite “respectable” conservatives. (I will grant that he’s “consequential”—my favorite way of damning with pseudo-praise.)

It may not be pas d’ennemis à droite, but I don’t recall any other conservatives condemning him. So I will: Lines must be drawn somewhere, and Rufo belongs on the same side of the respectability line as Tucker2025.

Rant over.

Goldberg (without citing Rufo, though I absolutely couldn’t help going there) explains some of the bad metaphysics of it. I recommend his piece to everyone, but I implore people who think of themselves as American conservatives (a habit I can’t shake) to read it carefully, because it hit bullseye after bullseye on the intellectual defeat of what passes for conservatism in the U.S. these days. Would that Rufo were one of his targets.

The American Right

Even apart from the widespread dishonesty on the American Right, I don’t hold out much hope for it to cohere rather than falling into civil war with one another.

Damon Linker made that point, outlining the multiple factions:

FactionPersonalitiesCore Beliefs
National ConservativesYoram Hazony, Josh Hammer, Christopher Rufo, Kevin Roberts, R.R. Reno, Viktor Orbán, JD Vance (honorary)Nationalism modeled on Israeli Zionism; view liberalism as imperialist and neo-Marxist; anti-wokeness; hawkish realism or restrained foreign policy.
PostliberalsSohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, JD VancePolitics oriented toward a theological “Highest Good”; critical of U.S. liberal founding; push for social conservatism combined with pro-family/worker policies; skeptical of foreign military aid.
ClaremonstersMichael Anton, Thomas Klingenstein, John Eastman, Charles Kesler, Larry Arnn, JD VanceStrongly defensive of a traditionalist interpretation of the American founding; view modern progressive changes as heretical; advocate aggressive opposition to “leftist” forces.
Hard Right UnderbellyCurtis Yarvin, Costin Alamariu (Bronze Age Pervert), Charles Cornish-Dale (Raw Egg Nationalist), Darren Beattie, Nick Fuentes, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson.Reactionary extremism; engage with fascist and anti-establishment conspiracy theories often ironically.
Silicon Valley Tech BrosPeter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc AndreessenWealth-driven influence on right-wing politics; skepticism about democracy; interest in economic monopolies and authoritarian tendencies; cultural dynamism and natalism.
Foreign Policy RestrainersStaff of The American Conservative, Quincy Institute, Tucker Carlson (partially), JD Vance (occasionally)Oppose hawkish neoconservative foreign policy; skeptical of U.S. support for Ukraine and Israel in current conflicts.
Make America Healthy AgainRobert Kennedy Jr., writers linked to Tablet magazine and The Free Press, novelist Walter Kirn.Anti-vaccine skepticism; anti-establishment public health stance arising from pandemic distrust.
Zombie ReaganitesChristopher Long, Thomas Lynch (former ISI leaders)Opposition to federal government expansion since the New Deal; radical libertarian Old Right ideas

In addition to the inconsistent core beliefs, there are temperamental tendencies to further complicate things.

If you noticed one name over and over again, though, you’re right. JD Vance is enough of a chameleon (my characterization) that he might be capable of unifying most of the larger factions.

On avoiding information bubbles

I wrote some time previously (probably years ago) about my catholic reading habits, spanning a very wide spectrum of Left, Right and Center. I realized recently that I’ve narrowed my reading since then.

I haven’t narrowed my Overton Window—my conception of what opinions are admissible in a good society—but I’ve lost interest in reading some admissible opinions.

This narrowing is partly from a rather recent forsaking of political controversy. If I can barely be roused to rail against Donald Trump (from a truly conservative, not populist or progressive, promontory), then what else should rouse me?

But I think a bigger part is that I’m getting old and I have a fairly fixed vision of the world—a constrained vision, in the distinction made by Thomas Sowell.

For my reading habits, the constrained vision leaves me viewing writings from an unconstrained vision as at best tending toward delusion. For my politics, the constrained vision led me to repudiate my identification with the GOP when George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural an American goal of ending tyranny in the world, an unconstrained vision.

I’m just not interested any more in reading things that are incompatible with my vision of the world. Nothing has fundamentally shaken my vision during my long adult lifetime, and I don’t reasonably expect that anything ever will. I don’t (necessarily) hate opinions from a unconstrained vision, but I think there are better things to do with what time remains to me than to read them just to avoid the charge of living in an information bubble.

Call that “hydebound” if you must, but I prefer to think of it as stopping the search for the truth now that I think I’ve found that. C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton would approve.

An Open Note to My Congressmen

To: Jim Baird, Todd Young, Jim Banks

I only joined AARP to get discounts on stuff. I’ll let you know when I really care about you supporting an AARP position. Don’t assume it.

Very truly yours,
Your cantakerous constituent
(who just got a letter asking him to lobby you along the AARP party line)

Shorts

  • As Bette Midler once said: “When it’s 3 o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London.” (Keith McNally)
  • Silence, remember, is violence — perhaps the most profoundly anti-liberal slogan ever invented. (Andrew Sullivan)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Never say Never

I never imagined that I would recommend listening to an accordion player. But the YouTube channel Sergei Teleshev Accordion is astonishing. I’ve never (that I can recall) seen accordions like that (they’re called button accordions, I guess) or heard them making serious, even thrilling, music, like this father and daughter do. (The daughter is 16, by the way.)

Trigger warning: The remainder of this post is (more or less) political

The Calvinball Presidency

I like arguments about ideas. The only way to have a good argument about ideas is if the person or people you’re arguing with have some degree of sincerity about what they are arguing for—or against. Being a political commentator in the Trump era is like being a sportscaster covering a game of Calvinball. The rules change all the time, so arguing about them is an exhausting waste of time.

Jonah Goldberg, The Boredom of Writing in the Trump Era – The Dispatch

Inspectors General

When hoodlums start disabling security cameras, you can bet they’ve got nothing good in mind.

The Trump administration on Wednesday withdrew funding for the Council of Inspectors General, a federal watchdog group, and the entity’s website was disabled. The group oversaw a network of 72 inspectors general. According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration had decided last week to pull the group’s funding.

The Morning Dispatch

Algorithms

[W]e are a nation divided by algorithms. If your algorithm knows you as conservative and interested in military matters, you got a lot of videos of young soldiers and sailors acting out the past few years, and of service branches tweeting out showy political sentiments. You felt understandable alarm. If your algorithm knows you as liberal and not interested in military affairs, you haven’t seen that content, and will have been surprised by Mr. Hegseth’s reference to “dudes in dresses.” We are all getting different versions of reality every time we look at a screen, and it’s hurting us.

Peggy Noonan, The Embarrassing Pete Hegseth.

As if on cue, some folks known to the algorithm as conservative and interested in military matters let it be known that they thought Hegseth’s show was just fine:

Much depends on the details and execution, but if implemented with both verve and prudence, Hegseth’s commonsense reforms will profit the American profession of arms.

As noted in my standard footer for blog posts, I am a participant on something called micro.blog: I follow people I’ve found interesting and some of them follow me. Yet I sensed it wasn’t like Facebook or Twitter/X. It was pleasant. It was sane.

I think Noonan has put her finger on why it is so: it has no algorithms.

In fact, I don’t think I frequent any websites that use algorithms to target my inferred vulnerabilities.

Grooming codes and Flag Codes

Speaking of The Embarrassing Pete Hegseth, Kevin D. Williamson has a few choice words:

I will believe that Hegseth is serious about this stuff when Hegseth starts acting like he is serious about it. As a few observers have pointed out, Hegseth’s Beverly Hills, 90210-style sideburns often extend to a length that would be prohibited under military grooming standards. But there is another area of dress convention that Hegseth violates in practically every public appearance, one that is in fact relevant to his current position: the Flag Code.

The Flag Code is written into federal law, though there is no penalty for violating it. It forbids wearing the flag as an article of clothing, a rule Hegseth routinely flouts with his dopey flag-lined suits. It specifically forbids using the flag as a handkerchief, which Hegseth does habitually, tucking it into his chest pocket as a decorative pocket square—and surely, surely not because doing so makes it look like he is wearing some kind of military decoration. Hegseth, Donald Trump, and the members of the movement they represent are habitual violators of the Flag Code, which is not merely an aesthetic concern. 

Part of the point of the Flag Code is the notion that the flag is not to be treated as though it were merely an item of personal property. It is not to be used for tawdry, tacky, or self-interested purposes such as advertising. Hegseth has obvious contempt for rules of this kind, and Trump has equally obvious contempt for any kind of rule that would put any kind of limitation on his self-aggrandizement and vanity. You can be sure that if Hegseth or Trump preferred to wear a beard, then beards would be mandatory in the military, possibly even for women.

…

The allure of delusional self-adoration can be powerful. When a junior high vice principal made me cut my hair (picture your obedient correspondent at 15 with a blond Robert Smith-circa-Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me rats’ nest), I was much offended. I believed, in the sincerest possible way, that I was a unique, very special, possibly heroic 15-year-old, one destined for great things, and, above all, one whose autonomy and personal sense of self had to be respected at all times, damn the rules. It all seemed incontrovertible at the time. But I am not in junior high school anymore. Pete Hegseth somehow is. Princeton owes him a refund. 

Mau-mauing the NFL

I’d bet a modest amount that our Censor-in-Chief will figure out some threat to the NFL sufficient to motivate a change of the Superbowl Halftime Show from Bad Bunny to someone markedly more WASPish.

In any event, I’ll miss the game and the show. I’m expecting an emergency call then.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

TDS, 8/8/25

Vibes all the way down

Trump, Claiming Weak Jobs Numbers Were ‘Rigged,’ Fires Labor Official
Economists said ousting the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics could undermine confidence in government economic data.

New York Times

As Trump testified once in court

My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings … Yes, even my own feelings, as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day.

Some data, such as the number of votes he received at the polls in 2020, initially refused to budge. But with a little bit of threatening from some extra-patriotic patriots, the election turned out to have been a Trump blowout. Just ask any elected Republican; they’ll tell you!

…

Fumbling around in a fog of vibes and misinformation and things you saw on Fox News is good enough for the president; why should the rest of us ask for anything better? Soon, no one will know what is happening—what the problem is, or what remedies to apply. What sectors are booming and which are contracting, whether interest rates should be higher or lower, whether it’s hotter or colder than last year, whether mortality has gone up or gone down. It will be vibes all the way down. Soon we will all be bumping around helplessly in the dark.

That’s a good thing …

Alexandra Petri

Comprehensively failing the Solzhenitsyn test

In his 1970 Nobel lecture, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The problem presently before the United States is that the Trump administration will be staffed in its upper reaches by political appointees who, without exception, have failed this test.

To get their positions, these men and women have to be willing to declare, publicly if necessary, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that the insurrectionary riot of January 6, 2021, was not instigated by a president seeking to overturn that election.

Eliot A. Cohen

I’ve wondered how Republicans lost their balls. Apparently Putin got them and added them to his own:

Trump Has Soured on Putin. Putin Couldn’t Care Less.

Killing the messengers

Terminating BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer because her agency delivered bad news on the economy is the most cartoonishly banana republic move Trump has pulled in his second term so far (that is, apart from shipping people off to prison in an actual banana republic without due process to be abused).

…

His reaction to the latest jobs report isn’t much different, in fact, from his reaction to the early spread of COVID in the United States in 2020. “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,” the president famously complained. Then, as now, when confronted with information that might create trouble for him, his instinct is to suppress it.

…

There’s a fourth way in which firing McEntarfer was stupid. Ironically, a weak jobs report combined with downward revisions of the May and June numbers greatly strengthens the president’s case to the Fed to lower interest rates. But Trump couldn’t seize the obvious opportunity here because his narcissism wouldn’t let him: He’d rather pretend that job growth is stronger than the BLS believes, undercutting his own argument for a rate cut, than allow that the economy is cooling off and needs some heat.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

Nick Catoggio

If the President can fire the head of BLS, an agency whose purpose is the nonpartisan and objective collection, distillation and publication of economic data, I may need to think the Unitary Executive theory. Donald Trump’s willfulness will do that to you.

Four (more) flavors of stupid

“If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”

…

One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn’t be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, quoting Zaphod Beeblebrox.

Hegseth’s stewardship of our military

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, surely suffering from imposter syndrome, is systematically stripping military education of humanizing and broadening elements. Hegseth’s Headlong Pursuit of Academic Mediocrity. (gift link)

Cohen is not exaggerating. What could better illustrate David Brooks’s unsurpassed distillation of Trumpism:

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.

Power is in the pain and humiliation

George Orwell is a useful guide to what we’re witnessing. He understood that it is possible for people to seek power without having any vision of the good. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” an apparatchik says in 1984. “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.” How is power demonstrated? By making others suffer. Orwell’s character continues: “Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.”

David Brooks, I Should Have Seen This Coming

Attacks on Judges

[N]ever forget this: Whenever you see a public attack on a judge, know that it is like a signal flare. It galvanizes some of the worst people in America to make threats, dox family members and harass public officials into a state of fear and misery.

David French on the explosion of death threats against Judges, their families, and their loved ones. (shared link)

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.

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.

Tuesday Tasties, 8/5/25

Do better, Republicans

I try not to overdo on politics, but I consider my first two items today tacit moral admonitions. I don’t even think that their factual predicates are open to honest dispute.

Vibes all the way down

Trump, Claiming Weak Jobs Numbers Were ‘Rigged,’ Fires Labor Official
Economists said ousting the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics could undermine confidence in government economic data.

New York Times

As Trump testified once in court

My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings … Yes, even my own feelings, as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day.

Some data, such as the number of votes he received at the polls in 2020, initially refused to budge. But with a little bit of threatening from some extra-patriotic patriots, the election turned out to have been a Trump blowout. Just ask any elected Republican; they’ll tell you!

…

Fumbling around in a fog of vibes and misinformation and things you saw on Fox News is good enough for the president; why should the rest of us ask for anything better? Soon, no one will know what is happening—what the problem is, or what remedies to apply. What sectors are booming and which are contracting, whether interest rates should be higher or lower, whether it’s hotter or colder than last year, whether mortality has gone up or gone down. It will be vibes all the way down. Soon we will all be bumping around helplessly in the dark.

That’s a good thing …

Alexandra Petri

Comprehensively failing the Solzhenitsyn test

In his 1970 Nobel lecture, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The problem presently before the United States is that the Trump administration will be staffed in its upper reaches by political appointees who, without exception, have failed this test.

To get their positions, these men and women have to be willing to declare, publicly if necessary, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that the insurrectionary riot of January 6, 2021, was not instigated by a president seeking to overturn that election.

Eliot A. Cohen

I’ve wondered how Republicans lost their balls. Apparently Putin got them and added them to his own:

Trump Has Soured on Putin. Putin Couldn’t Care Less.

Culture more broadly

Not “what” but “whether”

[W]e’re well past canon wars at this point. The question isn’t what people are going to read on the other side of the bottleneck; it’s whether they’re going to read anything at all. If you want a perfect example of not getting it, consider the conservatives complaining about books assigned in K-12 schools, and the liberals complaining about book-bans. How can either side keep pretending that the problem is with what students are reading? The world in which that debate made sense no longer exists. Even at elite universities, nobody reads books anymore.

…

If we are indeed entering a “new dark age” – one full of “shining devices” and for that reason mostly empty of literate persons – then Christian institutions today may have a similar mission to fulfill: saving the best of the secular world from the new bottleneck of technological “progress.” Maybe in the future it will only be students at Christian universities who read Freud and Marx and Nietzche and all the other great anti-Christian thinkers, because it will only be students at Christian universities who still read anything at all.

Adam Smith in Christian Scholars Review.

Shedding Enlightenment Values

When readers interact imaginatively with a book, they are still following the book’s lead, attempting to answer the book’s questions, responding to the book’s challenges and therefore putting their own convictions at risk.

When we interact with A.I., on the other hand, it is we who are driving the conversation. We formulate the questions, we drive the inquiry according to our own interests and we search, all too often, for answers that simply reinforce what we already think we know. In my own interactions with ChatGPT, it has often responded, with patently insincere flattery: “That’s a great question.” It has never responded: “That’s the wrong question.” It has never challenged my moral convictions or asked me to justify myself.

David A. Bell, A.I. Is Shedding Enlightenment Values

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

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

Saturday, 7/26/25

Cultural

The cost of convenience

The Sleep Number bed is typical of smart home devices, as Harvard business school professor Shoshana Zuboff describes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It comes with an app, of course, which you’ll need to install to get the full benefits. Benefits for whom? Well, to know that you would need to spend some time with the sixteen-page privacy policy that comes with the bed. There you’ll read about third-party sharing, analytics partners, targeted advertising, and much else. Meanwhile, the user agreement specifies that the company can share or exploit your personal information even “after you deactivate or cancel” your Sleep Number account. You are unilaterally informed that the firm does not honor “Do Not Track” notifications. By the way, its privacy policy once stated that the bed would also transmit “audio in your room.” (I am not making this up.)

Matthew B. Crawford, Defying the Data Priests

The source of some of our sickness

The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal, to use living things as if they were machines, to impose scientific (that is, laboratory) exactitude upon living complexities that are ultimately mysterious.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

Touching politics

What’s remotely “risible” here?

Cyril Hovorun, a Ukrainian theologian … believes the Russian [Orthodox] church waded into Africa to spread propaganda and stoke hostility towards the West. The idea is less risible than it may at first seem. The Russian church’s favourite subject—“traditional values” and how the decadent West wants to pervert them—aligns with conservative religious views in Africa, where clerics tend to oppose homosexuality.

The Economist, January 25, 2024.

The idea did not at first seem risible to me, and it still does not.

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. had Ambassadors giving the middle finger to traditional lands by flying Pride flags at embassies and marching in gay rights parades (see here and here). Are we so clueless that we don’t recognize that putting lightning-rod sexuality issues front-and-center in our foreign policy makes us vulnerable to adversary countries who aren’t yet out of their minds?

Money Quotes For The Week (excerpted from Andrew Sullivan)

“You know that scene in an action movie when the bad guy runs through the kitchen of a restaurant and pulls down all the pots and pans behind him to slow down his pursuers? We’re in that part of the Trump presidency,” – Jason Kander.

“So lemme get this straight: The Biden Admin (2021-2025) fabricated the Epstein Files before 2019 but did NOT release them before the 2024 election — instead expecting that Trump would demand their release only to do an about-face because Biden in fact made it all up. Got it,” – Daniel Goldman.

…

“People are mocking [Speaker Mike Johnson] but it’s important to realize the moral progress it represents for the GOP: less than 20 years ago the Republicans chose an actual pedophile, Denny Hastert, to be Speaker, whereas Johnson merely is running interference for pedophiles,” – Matt Sitman.

How it ends

The uproar over Jeffrey Epstein increasingly feels more like a simulacrum of a political scandal than an actual scandal.

…

[W]e all, and I do mean all, know how this will end.

Donald Trump is going to let Ghislaine Maxwell out of prison early in exchange for absolving him of wrongdoing related to Epstein.

What will his fans say when he does?

Nick Catoggio

For the record, I did not “know” that. I didn’t even suspect it. I’ve apparently been paying too little attention to the simulacrum.

But now that he mentions it, that denouement seems consistent with Trump’s overall shamelessness and abuse of the pardon power.

More:

I myself theorized four days ago that Team Maxwell had leaked the “bawdy” 2003 letter (allegedly) from Trump to the Wall Street Journal in the hopes of pressuring the president to make a deal with her. Lo and behold, today we find that the deputy attorney general wants to meet her. After six months of watching how postliberals operate, we’re all conspiracy theorists now. Take one look at this and try to imagine trusting this administration to behave on the up-and-up.

Events since Catoggio published this have swung me toward thinking he’s right about what’s it the works.

Despite it all, including my contempt for Trump, I would wager a moderate amount that Trump will not be shown to have partaken of Jeffrey Epstein’s adolescent delights. Do you really think the Biden DOJ wouldn’t have at least leaked it if he had (leaks could avoid unmasking Democrat ephebophiles)? (See Andrew Sullivan’s second quote of the week, above.)

I would not wager, though, that Trump didn’t know roughly what Epstein was up to.

Lest you think I’m being pedantic, by the way, I generally make it a point to distinguish ephebophilia from pedophilia because the latter always strikes me as more perverted, less understandable. Dennis Hastert, for instance, was an ephebophile, not a pedophile.

Apology accepted, sir.

I am writing to offer an apology. The short version is this: I severely underestimated the threat posed by a Donald Trump presidency. The never-Trumpers—who never seemed to stop issuing their warnings and critiques—struck me as psychologically and emotionally weak people with porcelain-fragile sensibilities. It turns out their instincts were significantly better attuned than my own.

… I, like many, took a transactional view of Trump. In the middle of a debate, he suddenly announced he had become pro-life (something Rudy Giuliani refused to do in 2008, which derailed his campaign). He also adopted a list of potential judicial nominees that accorded with constitutional conservatism. The author of The Art of the Deal drove the bargain that would take him to an unlikely presidency.

While some conservatives remained never-Trumpers, the rest, including me, made peace with Trump as the alternative to Hillary Clinton in a binary political system. Had we lived in a country with a multiparty system, we would have voted for the Christian Democrats and hoped for a part in a governing coalition, but that option didn’t exist.

Hunter Baker at Public Discourse, 1/21/21 (bold added)

I want to use this occasion to reiterate that I, a never-Trumper, have voted for America’s Christian Democrat party three quadrennia in a row. It is an option.

Unserious people governing an unserious people

Mediaite: Tulsi Gabbard Argues Obama Is Guilty of Treason Because ‘There Has to Be Peaceful Transition of Power’

On The Charlie Kirk Show, Kirk asked Gabbard to back up her “fighting words.”

“Can you make the case– can you present the arguments– the best bill you can with unclassified information and public information what makes you believe that this reaches that sort of threshold?” he asked.

Gabbard’s smoking gun? Obama — she claimed — disrupted the peaceful transfer of power.

“When we look at our Democratic Republic, Charlie, our system is built on the foundation of the American people casting their votes for who they want to be in office, to be our president and commander-in-chief.” said Gabbard. “In this system, there has to be a peaceful transfer of power.”

The Morning Dispatch

I’m pleasantly surprised that Charlie Kirk, himself something of a MAGA grifter, would challenge Gabbard on accusing Obama of treason.

I’m not surprised that Mediaite had to state the obvious because Kirk apparently didn’t pursue it:

Neither the Obama administration nor Obama himself ever claimed that Trump did not legitimately win the election. The former president never attempted to obstruct the certification of the election, he never told a news outlet that Clinton was the real winner, and he never encouraged supports to take matters into their own hands and attempt to stop the transition of power.

Gabbard’s boss, however, engaged in all of these actions repeatedly. President Trump claims, to this day, that he won the 2020 election. He actively fought against the certification of election results, and he was impeached for inciting an insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Kirk, Gabbard and Mediaite all leave it to me, though, to point out that Trump “treasonously” interfered with Obama for eight freakin’ years through his birtherism BS. And that Obama has an airtight defense against treason.

And as long as I’m free-associating, what brainworm makes wing-nuts insist that the wives of politicians they don’t like are really men (not that the Macron marriage isn’t a little odd, mind you)?

A unified theory of Trump

Early the evening of the assassination attempt on candidate Trump, Peggy Noonan got a call from:

a friend … from California … He had been very close with Mr. Trump once, and was no longer. He asked my thoughts and I said wow, that was some kind of moment. He said that wasn’t spirit, it’s rage. I quote from memory: “He said ‘fight fight fight’ because he wants everyone fighting, because the game of dominance and defeat is everything to him.” That is him, my friend said, and the fight isn’t for something, it’s just what he likes.

…

In just the past week Mr. Trump accused one of his predecessors, Barack Obama, of treason. Not of a dereliction or mistake but actual treason—betraying his country and giving aid and comfort to its enemies. He told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday that, in National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard’s recent report on Mr. Obama’s actions regarding Russia-gate, “It’s there, he’s guilty. This was treason.” “Obama was trying to lead a coup . . . This is the biggest scandal in the history of our country.”

You can say, “He’s just trying to distract from his Jeffrey Epstein problem” and yes, of course he is. But it’s also fight for the fight’s sake, and unthinkingly destructive. Is it good for young people, for instance, to hear one president accuse another of an act so wicked the penalty of conviction is death? It is not good for them.

Before the Journal last week broke the story of the Jeffrey Epstein bawdy birthday book with its letter bearing Mr. Trump’s signature, Mr. Trump threatened “I’m gonna sue the Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else.” He filed suit last Friday against the Journal and reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo.

An ardent Trump supporter might say, “Good, never let up.” Maybe Mr. Trump says that to himself. But it’s no good for the country for its president to attempt to muscle the press in this way, and it’s no good even for him. If and when the suit goes forward Mr. Trump will be forced to testify under oath on his history with Epstein. There is no way on earth that will be a net positive for him. Which surely he knows. He fights even when he will hurt himself, because the fight is all.

… He is like a strange general who can’t quietly establish camp or dig new fortifications. He shoots his cannon for no reason, just for the sound.

…

Of all his weaknesses that is one of his greatest, that he’d rather hurt himself than not fight. He’d rather hurt the country than not fight. The fight is all.

Peggy Noonan (gift link to one of her gems).

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

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

Thursday, 7/17/25

The Main Event

Culture

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

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

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

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

Frank Bruni

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

Correctionist history

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

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

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

Pronouns

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

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

Faith Hill, Andrea Gibson Refused to ‘Battle’ Cancer

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

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

Politics

GOP: You Are Dead to Me

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

…

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

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

Wall Street Journal

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

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

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

Legalia – of my former profession and its practitioners

Thinking of the children

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

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

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

Josh Blackman

Integrity

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

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

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

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

Reuters report via Lafayette Journal & Courier.

Adiaphora

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

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

The high cost of low trust

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

…

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

…

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

Kevin D. Williamson, The High Cost of Low Trust

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

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

The Epstein Conspiracy Theory

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

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

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

Freddie DeBoer

Cui bono?

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

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

First weekend of Spring

Give it back!

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

Daily Beast via The Morning Dispatch

Incel Integralists

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regrets

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin D. Williamson

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

The corrupting effect of corrupt rulers

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

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

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

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

Peter Wehner, Trump’s Revenge Campaign

Thumbnail history of the GOP since 2008

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

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

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

…

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

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

What’s your hurry?

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

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

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

Peggy Noonan. More:

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

Judiciary 101

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

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

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

Miscellany

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

All via Andrew Sullivan

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

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

I have no need of any other hypothesis.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Can this be happening here?

Denial at its most alluring

My Experience of Trump 2.0 so far

Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be happening!”), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

See also On Minding What Happens (Or Not)

Phase-shift

I realized suddenly on Wednesday morning that I could not bear listening to Trump — not even short sound clips from his address to Congress as part of a critical story.

Every other word Trump utters is a lie, and the words come in Tsunami waves. Some people apparently don’t care about the lies because letting those waves roll over them feels good.

They don’t make me feel good, and I don’t have the bandwidth or patience to filter out the lies. Hate-listening is spiritually sick even outside of Lent, so better not to listen at all.

It can’t be happening here

The extent to which the United States is embroiled in a major political crisis would be obvious and apparent if these events were unfolding in another country. Unfortunately, the sheer depth of American exceptionalism is such that this country’s political, media and economic elites have a difficult time believing that anything can fundamentally change for the worse. But that, in fact, is what’s happening right now.

Jamelle Bouie, There Is No Going Back

Antichrist

It’s typical political rhetoric to say you “stand with Israel” or that you “stand with Jewish Americans against antisemitism.” Trump offers a different claim: If you fail to support him, you hate your own religion. Trump wants to judge religion in light of his political interest, but detests a religious judgment on him or his politics. Politicians have long appealed to religious voters, but Trump wants religious voters to appeal to and accommodate him.

Have you noticed that the term “values voters” is essentially absent from national political discourse since Trump solidified his hold on the GOP? It’s not because the media is more progressive or antagonistic toward social conservatives now than they were pre-Trump. It’s because Trump’s case was not based on shared values. George W. Bush said at a presidential debate that his favorite philosopher was Jesus Christ. Donald Trump told a crowd of Christian conservatives that he does not need God’s forgiveness. He rejected Jesus’ teaching to love your enemies at the National Prayer Breakfast. He does and says these things all while insisting on his audience’s religious obligation to support him. In so doing, Trump fundamentally disrupted the typical understanding of what large, influential swaths of religious voters were looking for in a politician, and how a politician must approach them. It’s hard to sustain the moniker “values voters” when the candidate receiving the support of those voters regularly disregards, or even flagrantly undermines, those values.

… It took an extra four years, but with Trump’s second administration underway, the leader of GOP—the party that has been viewed as more “friendly to religion”—is casting aspersions on the very idea of religious organizations receiving federal money, and openly attacking the credibility and sincerity of the Catholic Church regarding work it has done for centuries.

…

Not even the pope provokes magnanimity or respect from Trump and his White House. When asked about Pope Francis’ letter to American bishops regarding God’s care for migrants and the dignity of the human person, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, responded: “I got harsh words for the pope: the pope ought to fix the Catholic Church … and focus on his work, and leave border enforcement to us.”

…

Trump’s new paradigm doesn’t have to be what replaces the old one. The paradigm Trump offers requires a set of circumstances, real and perceived, that make it plausible. To seek a protector, you must feel you need—and therefore prioritize—protection. To cut a deal, you must feel sufficient anxiety about the future without one. To seek refuge with someone who will make light of what you believe, you must feel that discomfort to be more desirable than the alternatives on offer.

What Trump promises is a future for Christianity, while claiming that the future he is promising is the only one on offer. Eric Trump claimed his father “literally saved Christianity.” During the last presidential campaign, Donald Trump told a gathering of Christians that “in four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

Michael Reneau and Michael Wear, The New Era of Religion and Politics

To borrow from Josh Barro (about the Democrat base, below), “These people don’t have good intentions; they have a worldview that is wrong, and they need to be stopped.” I’m feeling very affirmed in rejecting both major parties in the last three election cycles. And I’m blessed not to be in a cult that cheerfully votes en masse for an Antichrist.

TDS is dead (because it’s now totally rational)

Trump 2.0 is what you get when you take Trump 1.0 and subtract nearly every element of accountability. Since his first term in office, the president has gained a considerable degree of legal impunity from the Supreme Court, almost limitless political impunity from his supporters and the cowards in Congress who represent them, absolute administrative impunity from the slavish cronies with whom he’s staffed his government, and electoral impunity from the fact that, one way or another, he’ll never face voters again.

…

If there ever were such a thing as irrational “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” it died in the Oval Office on Friday.

Nick Catoggio

Sometimes Buttegieg is spot-on

At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting

…

Yet Buttigieg pulled his punches, emphasizing the good “intentions” of the people who have led Democrats down this road of being off-putting and unpopular.

These people don’t have good intentions; they have a worldview that is wrong, and they need to be stopped.

Josh Barro, Democrats Need to Clean House

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Friday, January 10, 2025

Trump 47

I’m leading with Trump because his coronation is imminent and I’ve encountered a few unfamiliar worthy “takes” on him.

The Solzhenitsyn test

In his 1970 Nobel lecture, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The problem presently before the United States is that the Trump administration will be staffed in its upper reaches by political appointees who, without exception, have failed this test.

To get their positions, these men and women have to be willing to declare, publicly if necessary, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that the insurrectionary riot of January 6, 2021, was not instigated by a president seeking to overturn that election. These are not merely matters that might be disputed, or on which reasonable people can disagree, or of which citizens in the public square can claim ignorance. They are lies, big, consequential lies that strike at the heart of the American system of government, that deny the history through which we have all lived, that reject the unambiguous facts that are in front of our noses. They are lies that require exceptional brazenness, or exceptional cowardice, or a break with reality to assert.

…

Whatever the defenses they come up with, however, the senior appointees of the Trump administration will have to enter public service having affirmed an ugly lie, or several. No matter what other qualities they have to their credit, that will remain with them. That, in turns, means that we can never really trust them: We must always suppose that, having told an egregious lie to get their positions, they will be willing to tell others to hold on to them. They can have no presumption of truthfulness in their government service.

That in turn will change them fundamentally. In Robert Bolt’s marvelous A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More explains to his daughter why he cannot yield to Henry VIII’s demand that he declare the king’s first marriage invalid, allowing Henry to marry Anne Boleyn, and hopefully get the male heir the kingdom desperately needs. More knows that that declaration is in the public interest. He also knows that his refusal will sooner or later lead him to the execution block.

When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then—he needn’t hope to find himself again.

To land a top job with Donald Trump, you have to open your fingers. It is, as Solzhenitsyn suggested, the end of your integrity.

Eliot A. Cohen, The Solzhenitsyn Test

The imbecilic clown show 1/6/21 was the least of it

We use “January 6” as a shorthand to talk about what Trump did after losing the 2020 election, but it is important to understand—and I think historians will agree about this—that the imbecilic clown show at the Capitol was the least important and least dangerous part of that episode. Trump’s attempt to suborn election fraud—which is what he was up to on that telephone call with the Georgia secretary of state on January 2, 2021—was the more serious part of the attempted coup d’état. Some coup-plotters are generalissimos who just march their troops into the capital and seize power, but many of them—many of the worst of them—take pains to come up with some legal or constitutional pretext for their actions. Often, the pretext is an emergency, as it was with Indira Gandhi, Augusto Pinochet, the coup that brought Francisco Franco to power, etc. You’ll remember that Donald Trump called for the termination of the Constitution as an emergency measure: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote in his trademark kindergartner’s prose. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

John Adams knew the secret in the heart of democracy: a death wish. “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,” he wrote. And so the American people, in their belligerent stupidity, have again given the awesome power of the presidency to the man who attempted to overthrow the government the last time he was entrusted with that power. Trump has, of course, promised to pardon those who carried out the violence and chaos of January 6, which is no surprise: The riot was conducted on his behalf, and that is the kind of riot he likes. His contempt for the law is utter and complete, and the only law that he honors is the one inscribed on his heart: “I should get whatever I want.”

Kevin D. Williamson

Cheap date

Trump is the CCP’s cheapest date: Trump is scrambling to save TikTok. He’s filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court asking them to treat him like he’s already president and to stop this terrible ban of his favorite piece of Chinese spyware. As The Wall Street Journal editorial board puts it: “The brief is extraordinary in several ways, none of them good.”

As background, Trump was against TikTok until. . . TikTok investor Jeff Yass and his wife Janine dropped about $100 million into Republicans in recent years. And then, what do you know, he’s all in for TikTok! Trump asked the Supreme Court not to act all sus on TikTok’s rizz.

Shadow president Elon Musk has deep business entanglements with China, so it’s a given he’s going to be compromised on this. But Trumpo—Mr. CHYNA—made nationalism his whole thing. And all it took was one Republican donor with cash, but not even that much for China, to continue the colonization of teenage American minds through the infectious disease known as TikTok. Democrats at least genuinely believe in the CCP. Like, they prefer it on an intellectual level. Republicans don’t; they’re just for sale, and cheap.

Meanwhile, the White House confirmed this week that a ninth American telecommunications firm has been hacked by China. Per the AP: “Though the FBI has not publicly identified any of the victims, officials believe senior U.S. government officials and prominent political figures are among those whose communications were accessed.” China just reads all our texts and no one even cares. To explain this in a way you TikTok-addled people might understand: America is the unconscious patient in surgery, and our lawmakers are the surgeons and nurses doing a viral dance around our slack-jawed body.

Nellie Bowles. Remember: This is part of Bowles’ weekly sardonic news wrap-up. Take it seriously, not literally.

Simon won his bet with Ehrlich

Be it remembered that Julian (“The Ultimate Resource Simon, in my younger lifetime, made a wager with Paul (“The Population Bomb”) Ehrlich about what would happen to five key commodity prices over the period of the wager. Ehrich predicted that the prices would rise, Simon that they would fall.

As I read The Ultimate Resource, I thought “surely this is some very clever sophistry.” But Simon won the wager. All five commodities fell in real price.

Infinite growth in a finite world still seems impossible (though Simon probably would say the world isn’t finite in any economically significant way because of human ingenuity). There’s also the matter of externalities, about which “human ingenuity” seems kind of cavalier.

But Simon won the wager. That’s not nothing, and it doesn’t fit the left narrative.

Northstar

Dreher proposed the best way forward for the Republican Party when he wrote Crunchy Cons. In case anyone has forgotten the manifesto, here it is again in brief:

* Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism.
* Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
* Culture is more important than politics and economics.
* A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
* Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract.
* Beauty is more important than efficiency.
* The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
* The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.

Live Not by Lies From Neither the Left Nor Right (Front Porch Republic)

This is the version of Rod Dreher that first caught my so favorable attention. I’m keeping a wary eye on the current version.

UBI

→ UBI really doesn’t work: It pains me to write this. But yet another study was published that shows universal basic income (UBI) doesn’t work.

Researchers gave $500 a month to a group of California households and compared them to a control group who received no money—quite the short straw to draw. The households that received the stipend ended up only $100 richer and actually purchased more cigarettes. So basically, UBI makes people French. They found that UBI had no positive effect on psychological or financial well-being. It didn’t even improve food security. Except that cigarettes make it so you don’t need lunch, so I guess food security is relative.

I was hoping universal basic income would become a reality nationwide. Then I could pursue my true passions: horseback riding, debutante balls, and cyberbullying.

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

Title IX

The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex. Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless.

Chief Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky, rejecting the Biden administration’s novel interpretation of Title IX through federal rule-making.

First-world problems

The FBI has issued a formal warning to sports leagues about organized robberies of professional athletes. Since September, nine pro athletes have had their homes broken into, including Kansas City Chiefs stars Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, Dallas Mavericks guard Luka Dončić, and Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow. According to the FBI, organized crime groups from South America have used high-tech surveillance and hacking methods to spy on athletes and disable their security systems. (It also helps to know when a team is playing an away game.)

Madeleine Kearns, The Free Press

Terrifying Parenting advice

What answer did writer Fyodor Dostoevsky give a concerned mother about how to teach her son the difference between good and evil? “His answer both eased my anxiety and terrified me,” Vika Pechersky wrote for Christianity Today. “On the one hand, Dostoevsky gives simple advice to a set of very complex questions. There is no need to master elaborate philosophical systems and social theories to teach my children the meaning of good and evil. According to Dostoevsky, people have a natural yearning for truth, and this yearning comes to our aid in the work of parenting. Herein lies the terrifying part, for the work of parenting starts with my own self—my love of truth, rectitude, goodness of heart, freedom from false shame, and constant reluctance to deceive. I have to embody the love of truth and goodness and live them out in my daily life if I want to teach my children to love what is good.”

Happy New Year From The Dispatch!

In my anecdotal experience, he’s right.

AI Update

I am, relatively speaking, a grouch about AI, so I’m happy to pass along the bad news.

AI is losing money faster than any technology in human history.

I was stunned when OpenAI said it would charge $200 per month for an AI subscription.

That adds up to $2,400 for a full year. Who pays that much for a chatbot?

But the story gets crazier. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman now admits that the company still loses money at that price—the cost of providing AI to premium subscribers is more than $200 per month.

Ted Gioia

Traffic congention

An online forum was getting slower and slower, and users were complaining. An investigation found that the traffic was not coming from users.

Dennis Schubert, who discovered this, shared his irritation in a testy post:

Looks like my server is doing 70% of all its work for these fucking LLM training bots that don’t to anything except for crawling the fucking internet over and over again.

Oh, and of course, they don’t just crawl a page once and then move on. Oh, no, they come back every 6 hours because lol why not. They also don’t give a single flying fuck… [about making] my database server very unhappy, causing load spikes, and effective downtime/slowness for the human users.

I guess this is the new role for human beings in the digital economy. We teach the bots how to replace us.

Those greedy bots will come back again in a few hours—they always do. So get busy and start posting.

Ted Gioia again.

Why would anyone want to read that?

AI F1 A -FRIEND of mine who sings the praises of AI has suggested that I might farm out Touchstone fundraising letters to Al or perhaps even have it write an article or two for the magazine. What could I say? I shook my head in silence. Failing to catch my meaning, he assured me that improvements to Al over the past year have it writing at a professional level.

“So what?” I said. “Why would anyone want to read it?”

“Because,” he said, “it writes well.”

Again I said, “So what?”

I have all but given up trying to explain my opposition to Al to those who seem to think that, if Al can be programmed to mimic the best writing of which men are capable, then why wouldn’t I want to use it? I tell them that I presume Al is now every bit as capable as they say and will be doubly so six months from now. And still I say, “So what?” And still they earnestly try to convince me that Al writes every bit as well as I just conceded it does.

My friend is a Formula 1 racing fan, so I tried a new angle: “I am certain that if they took the men out of the cars (and the pit crews out of the pits), Al drivers could churn out better lap times than their human counterparts every time.”

He found my suggestion ridiculous. “Who would want to watch that?”

-J. Douglas Johnson, Touchstone magazine, January/February 2025

Patience takes a lot out of you

His father said, “Kindness takes more strength than I have now. I didn’t realize how much effort I used to put into it. It’s like everything else that way, I guess.” … “Maybe I’m finding out I’m not such a good man as I thought I was. Now that I don’t have the strength—patience takes a lot out of you. Hope, too.”

Marilynne Robinson, The Gilead Novels (I can’t way which Gilead novel; I have a Kindle version including all three.)

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Equinox

I haven’t checked on whether today is actually the Autumnal equinox. I learned in school that it was September 21 and I’m stickin’ to it.

Springfield, OH

The accusation that Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city are abducting and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs relies not on one falsehood but on a web of them. The rhetoric evokes racist tropes about “savages” who do not conform to our civilized Western world. There’s also a religious angle: the idea that Haitian refugees are voodoo occultists who might be worshipping the devil. As an evangelical Christian who actually believes in the existence of Satan, I agree that we can indeed see the work of the devil at play here, only it’s not on the menu of the Haitian families but rather in the cruelty of those willing to lie about them.

There is little ambiguity about whether Springfield, Ohio, is a hellscape of raptured pets, held at the mercy of marauding refugees. Law enforcement has told the world that there’s no evidence of this behavior, and the mayor and governor have confirmed this. But in the social-media age, none of that matters against A friend I know there knew somebody who said that she knew somebody whose cat was gutted and hanging from a tree. Other conflict entrepreneurs, when asked to provide evidence, sound like a radical deconstructionist in a 1990s faculty lounge, appealing to the “larger reality” of immigrant crime that is so true that the facts of the particular case, even if shown to be untrue, are beside the point.

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To sing praise songs in a church service while trafficking in the bearing of false witness against people who fled for their life, who seek to rebuild a life for their children after crushing poverty and persecution, is more than just cognitive dissonance. It’s modeling the devil himself, whom Jesus called “the father of lies” (Jn 8:44). That’s especially true when the lies harm another person. “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer,” the apostle John wrote, “and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (1 Jn 3:15).

Russell Moore

Conversion Therapy bans

The Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ban on conversion therapy (attempts by licensed professionals to change the sexual orientation, and (perhaps) “gender identity”, of an adolescent patient):

Judge Rossman dissenting said in part:

The issue in this case is whether to recognize an exception to freedom of speech when the leaders of national professional organizations declare certain speech to be dangerous and demand deference to their views by all members of their professions, regardless of the relevance or strength of their purported supporting evidence. As I understand controlling Supreme Court precedent, the answer is clearly no…. 

In particular, a restriction on speech is not incidental to regulation of conduct when the restriction is imposed because of the expressive content of what is said. And that is the type of restriction imposed on Chiles….

The consensus view of organizations of mental-health professionals in this country is that only gender-affirming care (including the administration of drugs) should be provided to minors, and that attempts to change a minor’s intent to change gender identity are dangerous—significantly increasing suicidal tendencies and causing other psychological injuries. The organizations insist that this view reflects the results of peer-reviewed studies.

But outside this country there is substantial doubt about those studies. In the past few years there has been significant movement in Europe away from American orthodoxy…..

Source: Religion Clause

Epistemic crisis

Related to the prior item is a generalized crisis of trust in experts because, among other things, experts have repeatedly beslimed themselves by spewing nonsense and claiming it was “science.” The American Academy of Pediatrics, which once innocently misled us on peanut allergies is now doubling down on nonsense about puberty blockers for adolescents who suspect they were born in the wrong sexed body.

I’m a broken record on this but to be clear, here are a few examples of misinformation that have been banned. From the top! Talking about whether Covid came from a lab; Hunter Biden’s laptop; anything to do with the various trans debates. Take basically any hot-button topic of the last decade, and whatever isn’t the progressive line is called misinformation.

Nellie Bowles

It doesn’t help that one Presidential ticket makes shit up for the delight of its base of trolls.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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