Friday, 1/30/26

David Brooks bids the Gray Lady farewell

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

…

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

Loss of faith produces a belief in nothing. …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Devouring “the news”

Something I still aspire to

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

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

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

…

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

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

Gracy Olmstead.

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

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

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

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

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

Re-orientation

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

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

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

This practice offers a threefold reorientation:

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

Radicalization

Ambition versus lust for domination

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

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

…

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

David Brooks

History based on reality

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

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore, How Holocaust Denial Became Mainstream

No natural immunity

As Harvard professor Stephen Pinker once said:

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

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

Presumption of Regularity Redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

iPhone, the Kleenex for wiping up ICE

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

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

…

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

…

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

Andrew Sullivan, Can the iPhone Save Our Democracy?

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

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

The death of the magazine

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

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

Kevin D. Williamson

It’s not easy being a lawyer in this DoJ

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

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

Felicitous sentences

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

Via Frank Bruni.

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Tuesday, 1/13/26

Jerome Powell and the Fed

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

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

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

Nick Catoggio

On ICE

Video as proxy war

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

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

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

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

Ross Douthat

Put on a tie!

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

…

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

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

…

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

…

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

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

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

Kevin D. Williamson

Artist unrelated to blogger

Precisely the point, n’est çe pas?

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

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

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

Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter

Bruni Sentences

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

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld:

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

Rod Dreher

Monday, 11/17/25

It’s been a while since a non-Sunday post, so a few of these items may be a bit stale.

Heritage Foundation

Is the wind shifting?

Kevin Roberts, clutching Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson to his heart, walked into a buzzsaw. Despite back-tracking, the consequences may be getting even more consequential.

David French marks the occasion (gift link) and prognosticates:

“We will always defend truth,” Roberts said. “We will always defend America, and we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”

“That includes Tucker Carlson,” Roberts continued, “who remains — and as I have said before — always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail.”

It’s hard to overstate how much this approach tends to work in the modern Republican Party. The hatred of the left — and of conservatives who are critical of Donald Trump — is so overwhelming that even the most basic acts of moral hygiene are considered weak or woke, or worse.

Even if you are uncomfortable with the words or actions of your fellow Republicans, there is relentless pressure to swallow your tongue. There should be no enemies to your right. The left is the true existential threat to the United States.

Except suddenly it appears that enemies to the Right just might be permissible after all:

Readers might be a little bit stumped. Wait, this is what’s splitting the right? A podcast conversation? It’s not that dialogues like this don’t matter (they do), but after everything that America has seen and endured since 2015, why now?

For French’s conjectures on “why now?”, and his prognosis, follow the gift link above.

Forfeiting influence for clicks

Kevin D. Williamson was on fire Monday:

I would not say that Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation is an antisemite. He is arguably an apologist for antisemites. He is without question an apologist for apologists for antisemites.

And, under his incompetent—I do not see how you could call it anything else at this point—leadership, Heritage has followed rage-addled small-dollar donors down to the bottom of the political gutter.

…

Beyond the moral repugnance that necessarily attends being an apologist for apologists for neo-Nazis, Heritage’s recent organizational trajectory also has been idiotic from a merely calculating point of view: Heritage has always had a more activist character than organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute or Cato (and I should note here that I am affiliated with the Competitive Enterprise Institute), but the point of being an activist organization is to influence outcomes, to push a party, a coalition, or a faction in a particular policy direction. Heritage has taken the opposite approach: It simply takes its marching orders from Donald Trump and then backfills in whatever arguments or analysis are necessary—which is to say, it does not use activism to shape outcomes but uses propaganda to further someone else’s agenda. Explaining his position on one of the great policy disputes of his time, William Jennings Bryan reportedly said: “The people of Nebraska are for free silver, so I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later.” Heritage has been demoted—by its own leadership—to the role of research assistant for the Trump administration.

…

It is not impossible to imagine an organization such as the Heritage Foundation trying to turn itself around, but Heritage will have the same problem as the Republican Party it serves: Recovering lost popularity or position is not the same thing as recovering lost credibility.

Immigration/Emigration

ICE

What do you do when you took a perfectly honorable government job but a new Administration turns it into a dishonorable spectacle?

Veteran ICE officials I spoke with view the use of masks as an unquestionably negative development. But most of them see an evil that is necessary.

The job, under Trump, has changed. Immigration enforcement has traditionally happened more quietly and administratively, in jails or at ICE check-in offices, where the work is more akin to case management. Trump officials ordered officers into the streets and pressured them to meet arrest quotas, while turning the job into a kind of public performance by bringing news cameras and the administration’s own film crews to make Department of Homeland Security propaganda videos. Activist groups and protesters record everything too, trailing the agents and officers with cellphone cameras, berating them and broadcasting the ugliest moments. Every encounter carries the risk of a viral interaction and online infamy that could lead to doxxing or something worse.

Nick Miroff, Why They Mask

It’s easy to say to confliced ICE agents “quit,” and some have done exactly that, but as a financially secure retiree, I try not to set myself up for “easy for you to say” rejoinders.

Seamless web redux

The holistic pro-life view doesn’t just ask, “Is a baby being harmed?” It asks, “Are people being harmed?”

David French

Greasing the Wheels

There is one aspect of living abroad that is rarely mentioned in travel books and completely ignored in the printed guides, even though it often causes more anxiety than any other. It is how to handle financial inducements. Everyone hears that if you expect services in countries around the Mediterranean you have to oil the wheels. This is not, we are told, immoral; it is simply a different way of doing things. But there’s a dearth of reliable information on how to set about it.

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul: Patmos.

Other

Porn

Don’t think that Nellie Bowles isn’t serious just because she’s funny:

Porn flood meets its first dam: People have finally figured out how to stymie online porn, and it’s with age verification. Because no one wants to upload a photo of their driver’s license to Pornhub, which most certainly will get hacked and leaked one day, and then your grubby paw holding that ID will certainly be online. Everyone knows this. And now we have the data: In the UK, website traffic to Pornhub is down 77 percent since the introduction of the age verification rule in July. Under the new Online Safety Act, anyone in the UK visiting pornographic sites now has to verify they’re over 18 through age checks.

I’m mixed here. As a freedom-loving, narc-hating American, I’m anti–age verification rules. I also think porn is neutering men and making them into eunuchs who can’t reproduce without Viagra, and I want to shake hands with whoever came up with this plan. I’m impressed by the efficacy of the anti-porn crusaders, but I fear the nanny state they portend. Just promise to keep to NSFW content, okay? Pornhub, the most-visited porn site in the world, reporting a 77 percent traffic reduction in Britain? One must admit, their trick works. The remaining 33 percent of Pornhub visitors—those brave British men who uploaded age verifications, proudly standing on their indecencies with legal identification, as if handing over to an officer their license, registration, and tighty-whities—are already lost to society. We don’t speak of them.

Adrift at sea with no populist panacea

Populists are destined to be bad at policy for the same reason they’re destined to be authoritarians, I think. They believe that social problems result from failures of will, not failures of imagination. If America is bedeviled by some ill, it’s not because the incentive structure created by policymakers to remediate it is flawed. It’s because policymakers lack the nerve to deter the villains behind the problem by inflicting enough pain on them to make them stop.

Through a populist lens, every complex problem is simple. According to progressives, for instance, the wealth we need to make America equitable and prosperous for all already exists. It’s just being hoarded by the rich. Muster the will to seize it, and our problems will supposedly be solved.

The right’s cultural populism is even simpler: Whatever the problem might be, the solution is to get rough. Deter drug dealing by blowing up boats in the Caribbean. Deter illegal immigration by letting ICE go rogue. Deter resistance to the administration by threatening critics or indicting them. Win wars by letting American soldiers commit war crimes. With enough ruthlessness, any impediment to asserting one’s will can be overcome with ease. It’s not a coincidence that Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination running on a message as elementary as “build the wall.”

You can understand, then, why the affordability crisis would leave him feeling at sea and sounding like a lost tourist. Unlike the type of cultural fracas in which he typically involves himself, it’s not a problem that lends itself to a dopey “get rough” solution. High grocery prices, expensive homes, and sky-high health insurance premiums are three complicated and distinct challenges, and Republicans don’t have the ideological luxury that Democrats do of shouting “tax the rich!” or “Medicare for all!” to address them.

Nick Catoggio

Last Chopper out of Nam

… married people watch gen z dating and feel like they caught the last chopper out of Nam ….

Leah Libresco Sargent, How to Fix Our Broken Dating Culture, in First Things, quoting someone else’s Tweet. Libresco Sargent has been on my radar for so long that it’s tempting just to call her “Leah.” She’s current on the book circuit with her The Dignity of Dependence and formerly wrote Arriving at Amen.

Infinite length, zero depth

When the Supreme Court announced a “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”, some thought it was rejecting the very idea of natural law. Really it was asserting a degenerate theory of natural law, one widely held in the culture—or at least in those parts of it which our controllers choose to recognize, such as law schools, abortion facilities, and liberal seminaries. It was propounding a universal moral right not to recognize the universal moral laws on which all rights depend. Such liberty has infinite length but zero depth.

J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know.

Losing focus

The Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice. Then It Tore Itself Apart. – The New York Times (gift link).

The problem is pretty clear, yet Sierra Club leadership persists in its folly.

There was a time I’d have felt schadenfreude over a story like this. But:

My wife and I were members of Sierra Club for a number of years early in our marriage.
We can ill afford the self-destruction of liberal-coded institutions when there’s a formidable and relatively cohesive MAGA movement.

Just as we need (at least) two healthy political parties (currently we have zero), so do we need healthy parapolitical institutions of various stripes.

What’s missing?

You might notice a paucity of stuff about Trump and Trumpism. I’m experimenting with moving that elsewhere, if not reducing the volume. As somebody told a preacher, “nobody gets saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.” I’ve preached for more than twenty minutes here.

As a consequence, I accidentally just kept adding items that weren’t TDS rage-bait until this unusually long big post had crept up on me.

I have posted these TDS-related items elsewhere:

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

Friday, 10/10/25

Nonpartisan

Levelers

Emily Ruddy was traveling the country with her new husband, Mike, when news reached them of Charlie Kirk’s shooting, then death:

Back in the car with Mike, approaching the Florida border, I’m looking at pictures of Charlie Kirk on my phone. He is staggeringly tall, taller than I ever realized, with a celebratory fist in the air. Reading his Wikipedia page, which has now been changed to past tense, I am reminded of a story I first read in middle school: Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.” The story is set in the late twenty-first century, in a dystopian America where the authorities have taken it upon themselves to ensure no person is better than another, be it in athleticism, intelligence, or beauty. The strong citizens get weighed down with bags of bird shot. The attentive citizens are intermittently bombarded with hideous sounds through tiny radios in their ears. The most beautiful faces are concealed by hideous masks.

But it’s the title character, Harrison Bergeron—exceptionally tall, handsome, brilliant and outspoken—who is shackled most heavily. At the end of the story he breaks through the shackles, and as punishment he is shot down on live TV: a warning to whoever tries to pull a similar stunt. Or at least, it would be a warning, if the viewers’ memories weren’t instantly blasted away by the ear radio’s next awful sound.

Emily Ruddy, Battle Above the Clouds.

If you haven’t read Harrison Bergeron, a (very) short story, by all means do. It’s freely available, like, for instance, here.

After Christian faith dies

The biggest confusion among my own students used to be rudderless moral relativism. Although there is still a lot of that, it seems to be on the decline. Now the problem is the explicit embrace of evil. The suggestion that one must never do what is intrinsically evil for the sake of a good result is a hard sell. Many of students are strongly attracted to “consequentialism,” the view that whether an act is right or wrong is determined only by the result. To say that the ends do not justify the means puzzles them.

The decline of faith has also produced changes in character. Young people who were raised in Christian homes, but then abandoned Christianity, often used to retain vestiges of their moral upbringing, and accepted such ideas as courtesy, love of neighbor, and the sacredness of innocent human life. Today, having grown up in faithless homes, many seem to think that courtesy is for fools, that no one with whom they disagree is their neighbor, and that they should hate those they consider wrong instead of praying for their repentance and restoration. As for the sacredness of innocent human life – for them, that idea went out when they embraced abortion.

…

I don’t spend much time asking what is going to happen, but I do ask what God would like me to do in my own place. He sees the whole shape of things. I can’t, but like a faithful bone, I can try to turn nimbly in the joint where I’m placed.

J Budziszewski, How Can I Think About the Assassination?

Budziszewski’s description of the decline of faith, as early as the second generation (the first generation of lapsed Christians lives on the vapors of the empty tank), is a description of devolution toward the “nasty, short and brutish” of pre-Christian antiquity.

If you think I’m just making a casual partisan slur, take a look at either of these two books, the first lengthy, the second shorter and more focused.

Wordplay

Frank Bruni’s back with recent favorite sentences. (Do not read this with beverages or food in your mouth.):

Also in The New Yorker, Jessica Winter read the infamous Jeffrey Epstein birthday book so that you and I don’t have to: “Sometimes it’s like you’ve discovered a rich man’s contract with the devil, and next to his signature, he’s drawn a little penis cartoon.” (Matthew Ferraro, East Providence, R.I.)
And Kelefa Sanneh, reporting from a recent Bad Bunny concert, described an ecstatic fan who “danced so vigorously with a decorative plant that he seemed to be trying to pollinate it.” (Bob Marino, Paris)
In The Los Angeles Times, Christopher Goffard tried to make sense of a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s rambling: “As he sat down to face questions from the feds, his sentences traveled winding paths through vague precincts to fog-filled destinations.” (Robin April Dubner, Oakland, Calif.)
In The Guardian, Bryan Armen Graham commiserated with the polite subgroup of American fans at an annual Europe-versus-United States golf tournament, who were too often “drowned out by the performative tough guys in flag suits and plastic chains who treat the Ryder Cup like a tailgate with better lawn care.” (John LeBaron, Acton, Mass.)
In The Dispatch, Nick Catoggio regarded the marks that President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made to military leaders last week as “a case of two men who radiate neurosis about their own toughness lecturing a roomful of actual tough guys about how to be tough. It had the feel of Pop Warner players scolding a group of N.F.L. linebackers about the importance of hustle.” (Glen T. Oxton, Mamaroneck, N.Y., and John Sabine, Dallas)
And John McWhorter analyzed the president’s loopy language: “Even Trump’s most positive-sounding coinages are acts of a certain kind of verbal aggression. I sometimes stop to marvel that the House passed something with the actual official title the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act. That goofy bark of a name is a boisterous clap back against opposing views, an attempt to drown out inconvenient facts with braggadocio. It is a linguistic snap of the locker room towel.” (Matt Masiero, Richmond, Mass., and Sue Hudson, Simi Valley, Calif., among many others)

Anarchism

[T]he essential practices of anarchism — negotiation and collaboration among equals — are ones utterly neglected and desperately needed in a society in which the one and only strategy seems to be Get Management To Take My Side.

Alan Jacobs, Should Christians be Anarchists?

Partisan

Transparent pretext

Trump’s remarks on the night of Kirk’s murder redefined violent incitement to include harsh criticism of judges. (“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”) Now [aide Stephen] Miller himself is going after judges.

To call this “hypocrisy” is to engage Miller’s reasoning at a level upon which it does not operate. The essence of post-liberalism is the rejection of the notion that some neutral standards of conduct apply to all parties. Miller, like Trump, appears to believe his side stands for what is right and good, and his opponents stand for what is evil. Any methods used by Trump are ipso facto justified, and any methods used against him illegitimate.

A couple of weeks ago, Miller claimed that a disturbed gunman shooting Charlie Kirk impelled the government to crack down on the left. Now he says a handful of activists protesting ICE impel the government to crack down on the left.

Violence is not the cause of Trump and Miller’s desire to use state power to crush their opposition. It is the pretext for which they transparently long.

Jonathan Chait, Stephen Miller is Going for Broke

Bad faith

You can and should worry about American leaders at any level viewing their opponents as the enemy within, whether it’s the president of the United States or a random [Democratic] candidate for state AG. But if you’re more vocal about the latter than the former, forgive me for thinking you’re more interested in contriving a “both sides” equivalency to minimize what the White House is up to than you are about addressing the problem of incitement.

…

Two things are remarkable about [continuing troop deployments in “blue cities”]. One, which almost goes without saying, is that it’s another case of the Trump administration aiming to normalize unprecedented authoritarian shows of force. But the other is underappreciated: It’s all being done in bad faith, as a provocation, and quite plainly. There’s barely a pretense anymore of a colorable emergency like a riot that might justify the president deploying troops. He’s doing it unbidden and enthusiastically, looking for excuses to intimidate Democrats by symbolically occupying their cities with troops yanked from duty [and civilian jobs] in other states.

…

Needless to say, this is why the Trump White House didn’t get the benefit of the doubt from Judge Immergut on the Portland deployment, or from Judge Waverly Crenshaw on whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia was vindictively prosecuted. It’s also why the case against James Comey will end up in the toilet sooner rather than later. Courts have traditionally given the president and the Justice Department wide discretion in commanding the military and choosing whom to prosecute, but that’s because presidents traditionally haven’t given courts good reason to think they’re acting in bad faith.

Nick Catoggio, American versus American.

I look forward to the day when judges cease giving a “presumption of regularity,” of good faith, to the actions and legal arguments of this Administration. They have forfeited it because so much of what they do plainly is done in bad faith.

On keeping an impossible promise

Anyone with brown skin and the wrong kind of tattoo is therefore now at risk of being carted off to torture by the US government, with absolutely no safeguards that they have gotten the right people. Or do you think that an administration that confuses billions with millions, and puts classified intelligence on a Signal app, is incapable of making an error?

Andrew Sullivan, Two Perfect Months (March 2025)

I will give Trump “credit” for trying to keep his deportation campaign promise. The problems is, it’s impossible even for competent, non-malicious government workers to keep it (it included luridly-high numbers) without wholesale errors and ubiquitous denials of due process (i.e., in context, the process by which we assure that a person truly is subject to deportation under the law).

Your tax dollars at work

Short Circuits is a punchy weekly summary of notable Federal Court of Appeals decision, like this summary of activities by an ICE goon:

ICE agent escorting passenger from Dallas to Miami takes upskirt pictures and videos of flight attendant. He’s convicted of interfering with her flight-crew duties, sentenced to two years’ probation. Agent: I didn’t know that she was aware of my “clandestine video voyeurism,” and that’s an element of the crime. Eleventh Circuit (unpublished): It is not.

Divine retribution in Dallas

The covert operations of the Kennedys haunted Lyndon Johnson all his life. He said over and over that Dallas was divine retribution for Diem. “We all got together and got a goddamn bunch of thugs and we went in and assassinated him,” he lamented. In his first year in office, coup after coup wracked Saigon, a shadowy insurgency started killing Americans in Vietnam, and his fear that the CIA was an instrument of political murder festered and grew.

Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes

Rulebreaker

There are certain unwritten rules in American life, and one of them is that before your face is featured on the nation’s currency you are first obliged to die. There is no constitutional provision that mandates this, nor any law written tightly enough to guarantee it. But, as a general matter, we have shied away from putting living figures on our notes and coins, on the grounds that it is monarchical behavior and that the United States is not a monarchy. Unsurprisingly, this salutary tradition is not of great interest to the Trump administration, which intends to put an image of Trump on both sides of a commemorative $1 coin that will be produced for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. On one side, Trump will appear in profile. On the other, he will appear pumping his fist, with the words “Fight Fight Fight” lining the coin’s perimeter. Answering questions about the plan, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that she was unsure if Trump had seen it, but that she was “sure he’ll love it.” He will. But that’s not really the important point, is it?

National Review week in review email.

Here’s a coin suggestion:

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, 7/22/25

L’affaire Coldplay

If there’s a truly compelling reason not to normalize shaming as a global, always-on public spectator sport, it’s not that it degrades the humanity of the shamed; it’s not even the trite “who among us has not canoodled at a Coldplay concert with his sidepiece” justification. It’s simply this: When we take joy in the distress and ruination of other people, we make monsters of ourselves.

Kat Rosenfield

Apart from taking joy in distress and ruination, I have no reason to seek out the mêmes and other drollery about the ColdPlay kisscam. This, though, came to me unbidden:

Who’s killing the liberal arts?

An unpleasant truth has emerged in [the University of] Tulsa over the years. It’s not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won’t fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.

For those who do care to see liberal learning thrive on our campuses, the work my colleagues and I did at Tulsa should be a model. How did we do it? We created an intentional community where our students lived in the same dorm and studied the same texts. We shared wisdom, virtue and friendship as our goals. When a university education is truly rooted in the liberal arts, it can cultivate the interior habits of freedom that young people need to live well. Material success alone cannot help a person who lacks the ability to form a clear, informed vision of what is true, good and beautiful. But this vision is something our students both want and need.

Jennifer Frey, This Is Who’s Really Driving the Decline in Interest in Liberal Arts Education

Voting consequentially

When people justify their voting choice by its outcome, I always think of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes repeatedly that we cannot make decisions based on the hoped-for result. We can only control the means. If we validate our choice of voting for someone that may not be a good person in the hopes that he or she will use his power to our advantage, we succumb to the fallacy of Boromir, who assumed he too would use the Ring of Power for good. Power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, What ‘The Lord of the Rings’ can teach us about U.S. politics, Christianity and power

I met Jessica some years ago at a conference where she was the Protestant keynoter. We spoke a bit because she was teaching at a University that I don’t even bother putting on my resumé despite spending three semesters there in the very late 60s. I dare say her scholarship was an order of magnitude higher than any of the mediocrities teaching when I was there.

Even the one prof to whom I owe a debt of gratitude earned that by a pretty banal observation that just happened to be what I needed at the moment — and I can’t even remember his name because at the time I didn’t realize how consequential that moment would prove to be.

Shorts

We’ve been telling kids for 15 years to code. Learn to code, we said. Yeah well, AI is coming for the coders. They’re not coming for the welders. (Mike Rowe)
I grew up in San Francisco, walking with my family by the Golden Gate Bridge. I still remember the thick and iconic chain railing that gave the place a sense of distinctiveness. Now the chains are gone, and they’ve been replaced by a soulless metal railing that’s colder than a hospital waiting room. … This is how a culture loses its charm: slowly, quietly. (David Perell).

Quotes via Andrew Sullivan

The convoluted feelings behind the right to be killed

Let us first note that the demand for legal assisted suicide addresses not the legality of killing oneself, but the legality of assisting others to kill themselves. The suicidee (patient? victim?) is secondary. The primary object of the right-to-die movement is the living.

People may kill themselves at any time, without permission or even much pain. Even where it is not legally permitted, suicide, once accomplished, is beyond the reach of legal consequence.

… We must … focus on the desire for someone else to do the killing. Alongside fear of a botched attempt or leaving behind a mess for others, I suggest that the desire for assisted suicide is a perverse expression of the need for recognition. People who wish to kill themselves also want their choice to be socially approved.

… Its advocates say they wish to die with dignity, and then they ask to be euthanized like pets. … [T]he “right” to assisted suicide can only be the right not to be recognized as a human being.

When black Americans were struggling for civil and human rights—for the recognition of their humanity— they arrived at the profound conviction that it was dignified to risk death in that struggle. Assisted suicide represents a perverse inversion: a renunciation of dignity, the demand that one’s humanity go unrecognized. A society that honors that demand will not, in the end, recognize the humanity of anyone.

Matthew Burdette, The Right to Be Killed

From “worst of the worst” to “anybody will do”

Earlier this month, 25-year-old George Retes was arriving for work at a Southern California marijuana farm when federal agents circled his vehicle, broke his window, and sprayed him with tear gas and pepper spray before taking him into custody. Retes, among the more than 360 people to be arrested in the large-scale immigration raid, went on to spend three days in a Los Angeles detention center.

The problem? Retes is a U.S. citizen and Army veteran, and was not charged with breaking any laws. “I want everyone to know what happened. This doesn’t just affect one person,” he told reporters following his release, sharing plans to sue for wrongful detention. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a veteran or you serve this country. They don’t care. They’re just there to fill a quota.”

…

It’s now been six months since President Donald Trump entered office with a promise to remove “the worst of the worst” from American soil. And indeed, arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have shot up as illegal border crossings—and, consequently, detentions by Customs and Border Protection—wane. Yet a significant portion of ICE detainees have no criminal record aside from being in the country illegally, with the Trump administration’s sweeping roundups seemingly targeting individuals on a more or less random basis.

The Morning Dispatch

I don’t particularly care if Trump deports everyone who is in the US illegally, though I doubt that any President will do that as long as we want people to do unattractive jobs for “dirt cheap” — including, I suspect, at Trump’s own Casinos and resorts. On the other hand, I’m not eager for him to do it.

What I definitely object to is the apparatus of terror, with masked ICE agents more-or-less indiscriminately grabbing and gassing people who just might help them meet quota. Or even doing that more discriminatingly, come to think of it.

Dreaming of Europe. And waking up.

Whenever I’m down; whenever I’m blue; whenever I think e.e. cummings retired the poet trophy with one poem; especially whenever I wonder whether it’s too late to become a naturalized Frenchman (or Italian, or …); I should by all means remember this: more Europeans die of heat death—largely due to lack of air-conditioning—than Americans die from gunshot wounds. (Factoid via Tyler Cowen)

I’m not so stupid as to think this is the ultimate answer to whether we’re the greatest country in the world. But even if it’s the best argument we’ve got, it’s not nothing.

It was and is ever so

You can take this to the bank: If the New York Times notices the Buddha, the enlightened one has already left town.

Ted Gioia, The Ten Warning Signs

Two political items

Jonathan Rauch had Trump 2.0 pegged years in advance

In August, 2022, Jonathan Rauch delineated what would happen if America elected Trump again: We Don’t Have to Speculate About Trump’s Next Term

I thought at the time that he was uncharacteristically shrill, even if he was right. But I came across it again, and he was remarkably accurate.

The (In)Effective Executive

President Donald Trump has a couple of problems when it comes to being an effective executive, the top two being: 1) He is an ignoramus and 2) He insists on surrounding himself with yes-men who are too afraid to tell him that he is an ignoramus.

Kevin D. Williamson

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

Immigration

The firehose of commentary on last Thursday’s birthright citizenship/nationwide injunction Supreme Court argument is now more a squirt gun. But I’ve had two very smart takes clipped for days now, and I think it’s time to get them out to readers:

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson put it well in [last Thursday’s] argument:

[T]he real concern, I think, is that your argument [meaning that of the federal government] seems to turn our justice system, in my view at least, into a “catch me if you can” kind of regime from the standpoint of the executive, where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights.

Justice Kagan says let’s assume for the purpose of this that you’re wrong about the merits, that the government is not allowed to do this under the Constitution. And yet it seems to me that your argument says we get to keep on doing it until everyone who is potentially harmed by it figures out how to… file a lawsuit, hire a lawyer, et cetera. And I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law

This is especially true when, as in the birthright citizenship case, there are hundreds of thousands of victims of the government’s illegal policies, and many of them are poor or otherwise unable to readily file a lawsuit.

Ilya Somin, A Simple Defense of Nationwide Injunctions

Only the Supreme Court, the Administration asserts, can declare the policy unconstitutional as to persons who are not party to any lawsuit, and only the Supreme Court can enjoin the government from revoking the citizenship of persons similarly-situated to Able, Baker, and Charlie but located in other judicial districts.

It’s not a totally unreasonable position: only the Supreme Court has truly nationwide jurisdiction, and it alone should be permitted to decide “the law of the land,” not some district court in Texas or Massachusetts or Colorado.

But Justice Kagan identified the fatal flaw in the argument:

If [the government] wins this challenge and we say that there is no nationwide injunction and it all has to be through individual cases, then I can’t see how an individual who is not being treated equivalently to the individual who brought the case would have any ability to bring the substantive question to us…. In a case like this, the government has no incentive to bring this case to the Supreme Court because it’s not really losing anything. It’s losing a lot of individual cases, which still allow it to enforce its EO against the vast majority of people to whom it applies. . . . I’m suggesting that in a case in which the government is losing constantly, there’s nobody else who’s going to appeal; they’re all winning! It’s up to you, [the government], to decide whether to take this case to us. If I were in your shoes, there is no way I’d approach the Supreme Court with this case.

Which is exactly what happened here! …

… paradoxically enough, the more egregious the executive’s conduct – the more obviously and incontrovertibly unconstitutional it is – the more likely it is that it will lose every case, which will mean that the question of its constitutionality never gets to the Supreme Court for a conclusive ruling.

Clever, no? Another seam, or fault-line, in the web of constitutional protections and the separation of powers has been exposed.

I regard this as a fatal objection to a rule prohibiting non-party injunctions in all cases because it fails what we might call the Hitler Test: if we are ever so unfortunate as to have a president who wanted to do Hitler-ian things, would this rule help to prevent that from happening or not? It’s not a terribly high bar, but a rule prohibiting non-party injunctions in all cases doesn’t make it over.

David Post, Nationwide Injunctions and the Rule of Law

I have almost no doubt that the Trump administration will never bring the merits of its absurd birthright citizenship theories to the Supreme Court so long as it can continue acting on them against everyone who lacks the moxie or the wherewithal to file a lawsuit and get an injunction preventing enforcement against them personally. It will feel just fine if 10,000 successful plaintiffs can’t be deported so long as hundreds of thousands or millions can be plausibly threatened because they haven’t sued.

By the way: there are almost no honest politicians in the immigration fights. Everyone knows how to reduce illegal immigration to almost nothing: Congress must make e-Verify mandatory. They won’t do it because the economy relies on the mostly-menial labor of illegal immigrants, but they will bluff and bluster. And I’d give you pretty good odds that Donald J. Trump won’t deport them all for that reason, too. There will be just enough performative cruelty to keep MAGA happy.

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.

A shitposting police state

Le mot juste

“Fascist” slightly misses the mark. M. Gessen hits a bulls-eye:

Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.

The 4chan White House Communications Office

Beyond the fact that this kind of shitposting is so obviously beneath the office, the posts are genuinely sinister. By adding a photo of an ICE arrest to a light-hearted viral trend, for instance, the White House account manages to perfectly capture the sociopathic, fascistic tone of ironic detachment and glee of the internet’s darkest corners and most malignant trolls. The official X account of the White House isn’t just full of low-rent 4chan musings, it’s an alarming signal of an administration that’s fluent in internet extremism and seemingly dedicated to pursuing its casual cruelty as a chief political export.

…

And the posters have goals. The first is to engage and supply their loyal audiences with constant memes and content. The second is perhaps more strategic. The account’s blatant humiliation of immigrants who it alleges have heinous criminal records is intentional. The goal is to goad their opponents into defending people accused of indefensible crimes. The primary accusation from the MAGA faithful toward people who are outraged about the White House’s Studio Ghibli post or the ASMR video is that the left is more concerned with defending fentanyl dealers and immigrants accused of rape and robbery than they are about the safety of the country. “Disappointing that folks are more upset about this meme than they are about the fentanyl crisis,” Dorr said in the same post that the White House pointed me to. But this is a false binary; in all cases, the chief objections are to the dehumanization and glee on display and the worrying lack of due process.

Charlie Warzel

Aspiring Dominatrix-in-Chief Kristi Noem added a $50,000 Rolex to the dehumanization.

Feeling like Abraham

The America I’ve known for all my life is gone. I don’t think it will be back in my lifetime.

I’m not going to complain about God allowing this to happen; I suspect that something like it needed to happen and I trust that my morning prayer for the nation, “Let your judgment be merciful,” is somehow being answered.

But it may be that the merciful thing in the long-term feels very harsh in the moment (and that’s the perception of a citizen who’s relatively safe; imagine the immigrants among us!).

And part of the background thrum that makes the moment unnerving is my concern that the Democrats might do no better.

It feels like an Abraham moment: “Get thee up into a land I will show thee.” No map.

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

A big, beautiful opener from MAGA 2.0

A big beautiful opener from MAGA 2.0

Yes, it’s been a big beautiful opener from MAGA 2.0., hasn’t it?

In all fairness, let’s start with a real, substantive achievement. The Southern border is more secure than it has been in decades. Biden helped a lot with his belated executive orders, but reinstating Remain in Mexico and ending largely fraudulent asylum claims have been even more effective. In February 2024, Border Patrol picked up some 140,641 migrants between legal ports of entry; this February, it was 8,347. Huge success. And proof that previous administrations actively chose to keep the border open.

But the rest is chaos, malice, revenge, and failure, tinged with levels of indecency never before seen from the Oval Office.

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The disaster this week with Mike Waltz’s astonishingly reckless Signal messaging brings it all together. This is a crew of bigots, sycophants, Fox News drunks and bimbos, Hollywood loonies, Claremont nutters, and uber-online edge-lords cosplaying as statesmen. But they aren’t even faintly serious — as Russia and China now fully understand. And their response to being found out was classic Trump: lie, lie, lie and call journalists scum. By any objective standard, this is a clown car.

Andrew Sullivan

“If I’m such a nefarious character, why am I in Mike Waltz’s phone?” – Jeff Goldberg.
“So President Trump is ‘using war authorities’ in the absence of a declared war when he deports Venezuelans, but it’s not ‘war plans’ (just ‘attack plans’) to bomb the Houthis because there is no declared war,” – Ed Whelan.
“This is dystopian. The government does not even allege this woman played a major role in the pro-Palestine protests, like Khalil did. And yet they’re trying to expel her to South Korea, where she hasn’t lived since she was 7. I don’t see how anyone can defend this. It’s un-American,” – Billy Binion on a 21-year-old college senior who’s had a green card since age 7.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Already, a Cabinet portrait

Via Frank Bruni:

“Global Law Firms”

Why are these firms being targeted, and what does Trump hope to get out of this campaign? In the Paul Weiss EO, the government alleges that “global law firms,” as Trump pejoratively calls them, have been involved in “the destruction of bedrock American principles.” They have played a large role in “undermining the judicial process” and engaging in “activities that make our communities less safe, increase burdens on local businesses, limit constitutional freedoms, and degrade the quality of American elections.”

But what’s really going on here, quite obviously, is that these firms have attempted to fight Trump and have represented clients Trump and his voters disapprove of. That is hardly a sin; representing an unpopular client is essential to any fair system. But Trump and his allies don’t want a fair system; they want a system reminiscent of China’s or Russia’s, that scares lawyers away from these clients and disables their opponents from bringing legal challenges against their efforts to rule by executive fiat. Already, some firms are receding from the fight against Trump, declining to represent those who oppose him.

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Taken as a whole, this attack on law firms is nothing short of an assault on the very idea of an independent legal profession. For years, the profession has had a set of overarching principles that are thought to guide its members’ conduct. Among them: Clients should be able to hire whom they wish without worrying about government retribution, and lawyers should be free to zealously represent their clients without the threat of government retaliation. To say otherwise is to betray the fundamental value of fairness that undergirds our justice system. Trump’s actions are an attempt, bluntly speaking, to tilt the scales of justice by using the raw power of government coercion.

Paul Rosenzweig

If you can’t get a lawyer to take a case against the administration, it doesn’t matter that the courts would have ruled for you.

DARVO

Standard protocol for the president and his minions when doing damage control is DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. That’s the playbook Hegseth used on Monday (see for yourself) when reporters confronted him about Goldberg’s story, and no wonder. He learned during his confirmation ordeal that the trick to getting Trump and Trumpists firmly on your side is to start throwing roundhouses at their enemies, irrespective of the facts.

Hegseth sensed that the best way to shore up his political support was to turn this story into a test of credibility between himself and The Atlantic …

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If you elect a criminal who values loyalty above competence; if you confirm an unqualified nominee to lead the military because you’re too cowardly to oppose him; if you incentivize ruthlessness in your leaders by refusing to hold them accountable for failures, you’re handing public policy over to clowns.

And policy run by clowns is destined to become a circus.

The most interesting thing about the behavior here of Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth is that they’re both smart, capable men. Waltz was a colonel in the special forces; Hegseth is an Ivy League grad who served honorably in the military. Removed from the circus culture in which they now operate, I suspect both would recognize instantly how reckless it is to conduct sensitive national security business in an insecure forum.

In fact, I don’t suspect it, I know it.

This failure isn’t a matter of stupidity, in other words, it’s a matter of corruption. Waltz and Hegseth knew that Trump wouldn’t care how securely or insecurely they behaved (I mean, really) and in a pseudo-autocratic operation like this one that’s the only relevant political consideration. Obviously, they would have thought differently if they knew Jeffrey Goldberg would end up on the thread, but that’s a question of getting caught, not a question of behaving responsibly. They assumed they had the president’s approval; that’s all that mattered.

That logic will bite us in worse ways than this before this presidency is done.

Nick Catoggio

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

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.

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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.

“[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.
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

Trump rants 3/19/25

The stripping away of illusions

President Trump does not seem to notice or care that if you betray people, or jerk them around, they will revile you. Over the last few weeks, the Europeans have gone from shock to bewilderment to revulsion. This period was for them what 9/11 was for us — the stripping away of illusions, the exposure of an existential threat. The Europeans have realized that America, the nation they thought was their friend, is actually a rogue superpower.

In Canada and Mexico you now win popularity by treating America as your foe. Over the next few years, I predict, Trump will cut a deal with China, doing to Taiwan some version of what he has already done to Ukraine — betray the little guy to suck up to the big guy. Nations across Asia will come to the same conclusion the Europeans have already reached: America is a Judas.

This is not just a Trump problem; America’s whole reputation is shot. I don’t care if Abraham Lincoln himself walked into the White House in 2029, no foreign leader can responsibly trust a nation that is perpetually four years away from electing another authoritarian nihilist.

David Brooks

Anti-Constitutional

An anti-constitutional act is one that rejects the basic premises of constitutionalism. It rejects the premise that sovereignty lies with the people, that ours is a government of limited and enumerated powers and that the officers of that government are bound by law.

The new president has, in just the first two months of his second term, performed a number of illegal and unconstitutional acts. But the defining attribute of his administration thus far is its anti-constitutional orientation. Both of its most aggressive and far-reaching efforts — the impoundment of billions of dollars in congressionally authorized spending and the attempt to realize the president’s promise of mass deportation — rest on fundamentally anti-constitutional assertions of executive authority.

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There is much to say about the administration’s decision to seemingly ignore a court order to halt or reroute deportation flights for these people and return them to United States. For now, let’s focus on the Justice Department’s initial defense of the president’s order, in which government lawyers argued the following: “Beyond the statute, the President’s inherent Article II authority is plainly violated by the district court’s order. As a function of his inherent Article II authority to protect the nation, the President may determine that [Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang] represents a significant risk to the United States … and that its members should be summarily removed from this country as part of that threat.”

In other words, according to the Justice Department, the president of the United States has an “inherent” power to summarily deport any accused member of Tren de Aragua (and presumably, any foreign national accused of membership in any gang) without so much as a hearing. What’s more, under this logic, the president can then direct his administration to send that person, without due process, to prison in a foreign country.

This is a claim of sovereign authority. This is a claim that the president has the power to declare a state of exception around a group of people and expel them from the nation — no questions asked. It is anti-constitutional — a negation of the right to be free, in Locke’s words, of “the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.”

There is nothing in this vision of presidential power that limits it to foreign nationals. Who is to say, under the logic of the Department of Justice, that the president could not do the same to a citizen?

Jamelle Bouie, Trump Has Gone From Unconstitutional to Anti-Constitutional (shared article).

If Congressional Republicans took their oaths of office seriously, they’d be impeaching Trump and removing him from office. He has already destroyed many of our most important international relationships (see David Brooks, above), and by “destroyed,” I mean that we face a long period of repair even if he were removed this afternoon.

Dems and Damon in the same headspace?

[M]y assumptions and style of analysis bring me back again and again to a feeling of fatalism rooted in the conviction that the time to stop Trump was in November 2016, in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection (via conviction in his second impeachment trial), or in November 2024. I don’t want to succumb to the feeling that it’s already too late to stop him. It’s just that I’m still trying to figure out how to break out of that cul-de-sac.

Damon Linker

How to create a legal banana republic

To collapse the structure of American justice and replace it with a proper banana republic, each pillar holding it up needs to be weakened.

The president spent most of his first two months in office focused on a single pillar: law enforcement. He purged officials at the Justice Department and FBI and replaced them with clownish toadies like Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino. That was a sensible way for an authoritarian to prioritize: Of the institutional players I’ve mentioned, corrupt cops and prosecutors can do the most damage. As long as the DOJ is willing to behave like a secret police force, Donald Trump doesn’t need to send Liz Cheney or Mark Milley to prison to make their lives miserable. Investigations are punishment enough.

His Castro-esque speech on Friday to Justice Department officials reflected his priorities. The president labeled political enemies like former special counsel Jack Smith “scum,” claimed that CNN and MSNBC are behaving “illegally” somehow, babbled about the supposedly rigged 2020 election, and insisted that the January 6 defendants he pardoned were “grossly mistreated.” The speech ended with the song “YMCA,” as you might hear at one of his political rallies.

Watching it felt like watching a dog mark his territory.

Nick Catoggio

Trying not to try

I may not have said this before: Trump’s shock and awe assault on norms, perceived enemies, constitutional limitations and the independence of “independent agencies” are so comprehensive, and so blur together in news coverage, that I couldn’t keep up, and couldn’t cogently predict which actions will ultimately be found unlawful, even if I tried.

And I’m trying not to try.

Oh, I still listen to legal podcasts, and they typically cover some of the cases brewing. If you get an opinion from me on a case, I’ll probably be regurgitating some of them, lightly post-processed.

I don’t feel responsible for Trump. He’s something I’m suffering along with everyone else — and my situation means I’m not personally suffering all that much except anxiety for my living descendants.

I don’t think Trump is the eventuality of true conservatism, though he may be the eventuality of the Moral Majority and other Religious Right activism starting in the 70s. I was never on board with them; I’m even less on board with them since becoming an Orthodox Christian; and I’m pleased to contemplate a knife fight between the New, Improved Religious Right (The New Apostolic Reformation! All you loved about the Moral Majority, but now with added Charismatic flakery!) and the Catholic Integralist “Common Good Constitutionalism.”

(Thoughts prompted by my deciding not to read a Wall Street Journal article on a Federal District court ruling against the demolition of USAID.)

Inflicting trauma

Russell Vought, a graduate of Wheaton College, now describes himself as a “Christian nationalist.” He also says:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.”

He may be a nationalist, but he puts his Christianity open to serious question by such hateful intentions. (Mark 8:36.) He’s rather unpopular at Wheaton, too, which is much to its credit.

Free speech lies

The president brags about ‘ending censorship’ while describing negative coverage about him as ‘illegal.’

Jonah Goldberg’s subheadline to his recent The Trump Administration’s Free Speech Hypocrisy. The whole (relatively short) thing is worth reading.

Weaponizing government

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. And Donald Trump is “Ending the Weaponization of Government”

David Post, Paul, Weiss Next on the Chopping Block

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