Category: Political Matters

Keeping America safe from Christian pastors

Our bad-faith INS

My wife’s Church is trying to call a pastor from Indonesia (educated in the US and fluent in English) to fill their “vacant pulpit.”

I’m a sort of bystander, but it has become obvious to me that the Trump Immigration and Naturalization Service is acting in bad faith, obstructively demanding proof that her church is real (photos, financial records, etc.), then escalating their demands (e.g., independently audited financial records) when the church surprises them with compliance. (The list is much, much longer than this.)

The INS is betting that the Church won’t sue; that’s my take. I’d bet a substantial amount that they will not get this pastor unless they do sue or Trump has left office.

I suspect that there are a lot of Trump voters in that church (my wife not being one of them) because it’s chock-full of Republicans (many of them have been city and county officials).

Isn’t it swell having a jackboot in the White House to protect Christians?

Trump’s reverse Midas touch

I generally move short criticisms of Trump elsewhere, but this is so true, and so in accord with what I realized at the time Trump was doing it, that I’m promoting it to the premier blog:

If [Georgia Democrat Senator Jon] Ossoff winds up in the White House, Mr. Trump will have largely himself to blame. The president didn’t just help him win his seat. He also spent years undermining the Republican Party in Georgia, sowing internecine discord, championing losing candidates and destroying conservative voters’ faith in the electoral system. With impressive, if unintentional, drive, Mr. Trump has fostered the conditions that transformed Mr. Ossoff from a charmingly nerdy, vaguely awkward, low-key freshman lawmaker into a political star.

Michelle Cottle

So what’s the alternative?

As I wrote yesterday, quoting historian Jerry Z. Muller, there are two kinds of nationalism: civic nationalism, in which a country organizes around shared ideals, and ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalism makes far more sense in Europe, where each nation was founded by a people, a tribe, a large family, you might say. That’s not how it was with America. It is hard for me to believe that the Founders would have foreseen a future America with so many non-Europeans in it (except for the African descendants of slaves, of course), but that’s the actually existing America today. It’s not going away.

Rod Dreher.

Now I will “play[] the Donald Trump role here– which is somewhat rudely getting at an essential truth that the establishment refused to discuss”: if we don’t procreate our own ancestors, our future workers, the folks who will pay into the Ponzi scheme Social Security system, what alternative do we have to admitting smart, ambitious immigrants to the America Experiment?

Bo French gets his coveted 15 minutes of infamy

How racist can a party’s voters be if they’re willing to nominate a guy named “Vivek Ramaswamy” to be governor of Ohio?

How prejudiced can its leaders be if they’re comfortable placing Harmeet Dhillon, a native of Chandigarh, India, in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division?

And how bigoted can its establishment be if, as seems inevitable, it intends to fall in line in 2028 behind a man married to an Indian American woman, with whom he has four half-Indian children?

It isn’t true that the modern Republican Party hates nonwhites, particularly those of Indian descent. But it is true that the modern Republican Party relies to a considerable degree on voters who hate nonwhites—particularly those of Indian descent.⁠⁠

In fact, after five years of watching J.D. Vance’s political star ascend, that’s the only argument I’ve come up with for wanting him to be president. It’s gratifying to imagine chuds like Bo French having to cope with the reality of first lady Usha Vance ….

Nick Catoggio If you don’t know who Bo French is, check now because if there’s justice in the world, he’s soon to disappear.

The end of sclerotic liberal democracy?

[L]iberal democracy runs contrary to human nature in a significant way. It is natural, he says, for people to be more motivated to help their family and friends than they are inclined to help strangers.

…

Trump, like most other right-populists around the world, was and is responding to something real—namely, the sense that the institutions of the liberal state have grown too constraining. We can’t seem to respond decisively to our problems. Regulations and legal restrictions have gummed up the works, making it extremely difficult to get large, ambitious public projects done, to build much of anything, or to respond to challenges effectively or within a reasonable time horizon.

Fukuyama admits that this is a major problem plaguing liberal governments in our moment—and that the rise of both left- and right-wing populism (including Trump) is partly about a desire on the part of citizens to see this improve. And that’s in part what we see Trump doing: He just acts, ordering (to cite one of many examples) the demolition of the East Wing of the White House and the building of an enormous ballroom without waiting for any kind of regulatory process, external oversight, judicial review, or congressional authorization.

…

[T]he problem with Trump isn’t that he’s demonstrating that it’s possible to just do stuff, as the second administration’s defenders advocated and applauded in its opening weeks and months. Rather, the problem with Trump is that he’s doing stuff incompetently, sloppily, corruptly, and with his own narcissistic fixations setting priorities instead of the country’s most pressing needs. This implies that what the United States really needs is a president who will act with Trumpian boldness but with much greater competence, much less corruption, and a capacity to set national priorities and accomplish them quickly and efficiently. That this is where Fukuyama comes down is confirmed by his criticism, earlier in the conversation, of Barack Obama and his party for failing at the time to eliminate the filibuster so they could accomplish more goals for the American people.

…

I’m sure some of my readers will respond to this summation of Fukuyama’s position with enthusiasm. Eliminating the filibuster has been popular with lots of Democrats and leftists for a long time. I don’t have any principled or even pragmatic objections to doing it, provided Democrats make the change in full awareness that they will be just as disadvantaged as Republicans when they find themselves in the minority. Maybe that’s an acceptable trade-off, but it needs to be recognized as one: The Democrats will be buying greater power when they take majority control of the Senate in return for less power when Republicans preside over the upper chamber.

…

As I’ve argued on any number of past occasions, authoritarian overreach is a big problem and danger for us, but its underlying cause, and the deeper source of our political turbulence, is the depth and narrowness of our national divide. We both deeply disagree about ends and are quite evenly divided in our disagreement. That’s why, when each party is out of power, it uses every means it can (including institutional, legal, regulatory, and technological means) to thwart what the party in power wants to achieve—which, in turn, inspires the party in power to act boldly and with increasing disregard for constraints, even though it usually wins power quite narrowly.

Damon Linker (bold added) summarizing a point of Francis Fukuyama in his interview with Ezra Klein.

Trump’s corruption concerned me a great deal, but in the early days of the Trumposcene it became apparent that my countrymen had looked at it, shrugged, and voted for him anyway. So I shifted my attention to his narcissism, predicting that sooner or later, his narcissism would make him misunderstand something important that wasn’t all about him.

If “sooner” was Trump45, “later” seems to be Trump47, and those narcissistic chickens have come home to roost, emboldened by voter amnesia about January 6 and an intervening SCOTUS decision that, while it prevented him prosecuting Joe Biden for this and that, more importantly provides him with much assurance that he’ll never pay legally for his Presidential depredations.

Oh: and the corruption is on full display, too: for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.

Bold, perhaps …

Steven Calabresi, one of three (sigh!) cofounders of the Federalist Society, has taken up the futile cause of trying to defend most anything Donald Trump does. His latest was defending — no, extolling — the dumbass attack on Iran.

But his fellow-profs at the Volokh Conspiracy (where Calabresi posted the paean — they don’t have a very tight sanity filter) aren’t concurring:

I guess Prof. Calabresi doesn’t see the irony that the decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025 – President Trump called it a complete obliterat[ion]” – was so “wise” that by the immediately following winter Iran was closer than it had ever been – 2 weeks away! – to developing a nuclear weapon.

“President Trump faced the hardest and bravest decision of his life and of his two terms as President in February of 2026. Should he use the military to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, . . . [o]r  should President Trump follow the advice of almost all his top advisors and do nothing.”

That’s a very odd formulation of the decision Trump faced in February 2026. To begin with, does “destroy Iran’s nuclear program” just mean a “do-over” of what we did back in June?  And was his only option, other than “use of the military to destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” to “do nothing”?

It was not.  Prof. Calabresi omits a very wide variety of alternative options that were on the table in February 2026, ranging from toughening the sanctions to diplomacy and negotiations.

Yes, diplomacy and negotiations.  The Soviet Union also wanted to destroy our way of life, and yet from Kennedy-Khrushchev to Reagan-Gorbachev, we found a way to negotiate with them, and the world was a lot better off for our having done so. If Trump was so convinced the Iran Accords were so terrible, perhaps he could have devoted some time to thinking about how a workable multi-lateral enforceable agreement might actually work.

Calabresi continues:

Young advisors like the naïve and inexperienced Vice President, J.D. Vance, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and most of the top generals in the Department of War took the wrong, over-cautious view. They quite rightly said that going to war to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs would be hard, dangerous, and unpopular work. Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, oil and natural gas prices would rise, and the world’s economy, including the U.S. economy, would take a hit. Such a war would be unpredictable, and our European allies would fecklessly decline to help. We would run out of weapons because stockpiles in the U.S. were dangerously low. The war would not be a quick victory like the kidnapping of Venezuelan Dictator Nicolas Maduro; it would instead drag on. Trump might even lose the 2026 midterm elections or fail to keep the presidency in Republican hands in 2028. The American people would never understand why war with Iran was necessary when the Afghan and Iraq Wars were not.

Just for the record, there is absolutely no credible evidence of which I am aware that any of these words were ever spoken in Trump’s presence, or that Trump ever weighed the options in front of him in this, or any other rational, way. None.

Calabresi applauds Trump’s decision to “launch[ ] a knock-out strike on February 28, 2026, that decapitated the Iranian leadership—civilian, theocratic, and military—in a bombing that killed the Supreme Iranian leader (the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), an avowed enemy of the U.S.”

How, exactly, did that bring us closer to the goal of a non-nuclear Iran?

David Post, Bold, perhaps; but not Brave and not Right

Shorts

  • Categorizing and detailing his daily absurdities and obscenities for over a decade has been important work. But another two years of thinking and writing in depth about this monster and his madness? I found myself buckling with nausea at the thought. (Andrew Sullivan who, exhausted with repetitive themes, is re-orienting toward podcasts with guests)
  • There have been multiple attempts at sexual revolution in Britain, as in America, but none gained widespread traction before reliable birth control became widely available. It’s not as though an unplanned pregnancy can be shared equally by both parties, and historically the parent left holding the baby was most often the woman. Under those conditions, societies maintained elaborate social codes to manage contact between horny young men and women – and to channel sexual desire towards commitment and child-rearing. (Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress)
  • Would Roger Williams recognize Al Mohler as a Baptist now? Al Mohler signs on to Christian nationalism
  • When Donald Trump looks at a map, he doesn’t see nations. He sees property. All of those pretty colors do not represent actual places filled with human beings who have distinct cultures, languages, and histories; the planet, to Trump, is a big board game, like Risk or Monopoly. Greenland isn’t a real location — it’s a valuable chunk of territory nestled between Boardwalk and Park Place. (Tom Nichols via Frank Bruni)
  • ⁠⁠[A]t the gym … the other day, I noticed a television advertisement for Jack Daniel’s. Jack Daniel’s is, not to my credit, something to which I have paid excessive attention over the years, but what I thought was: When did they start allowing hard liquor advertising on television? I had thought of whiskey and cigarettes as two of the things that our weird moralistic sensibilities simply would not allow on television, where they would morally cheapen the wall-to-wall sports-gambling and erectile-dysfunction advertising. (Kevin D. Williamson)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

Labor Day (observed, to assure we get extra respite from labor)

Gut punch after gut punch

Freddie deBoer has a psychological disability, about which he is quite open, and muses on the consequences of asking people to make accommodations for the disability:

I have said, in various ways, “My disorder is a big deal,” and I therefore can’t turn around and complain when people act like it’s a big deal in ways I don’t like. This is one of the endless reasons I feel alienated from the disability rights movement; so much of that discourse amounts to people saying “I want you to act like my disability is a very big deal, but only at the times and in the ways I choose.” It doesn’t work like that. If you’re asking for the world’s accommodation you’re first asking for the world’s attention and it’s literally inevitable that sometimes this attention will fall on you in uncomfortable ways. Sorry.

… The history of bipolar disorder is the history of people who thought that they had gotten past it. People are going to interpret me through the lens of a disorder that I myself insist is a big deal. That’s part of my disorder’s unfortunate endowment to me, one small facet of its sad reality. People close to me know to fear the periods where I get too skinny; that this takes agency away from me, denies me ownership of my body, does not change the fact that they have good reason to be so concerned. There’s no use crying over it.

…

In grad school, particularly in the last several years, I was clearly breaking down. My drinking and sleeping around and general instability had become well known; I was increasingly incapable of behaving with even minimal performative professionalism of the type that people on the job market require. My own faculty were kind but the field writ large, the whisper network of chattering tenured radicals who decided who got which job each year – well, they chattered, and not in a way that was good for me. To a person, they would all tell you that they hated ableism and the way the world was built for normative bodies etc etc etc, but I wasn’t a part of their vision of what disability meant, even though they talked constantly about the “invisible wheelchair” of cognitive or behavioral disabilities. I was just some mouthy grad student they didn’t like very much. So they talked, and academia was in bad enough shape that such talk had existential consequences. Then, when I got to Brooklyn College, I was in about as progressive of a workplace as you could possibly find. Certainly almost everyone there had some theoretical commitment to the kind of disability politics that would protect a theoretical employee with a disability. Sadly, I was an actual employee with a disability, and though I had specifically asked for accommodation for the challenges associated with antipsychotic medications, the reasons for my eventual firing were more or less identical to a list of the side effects of said medications. A Disabled Person is an idea, an ideal. I was just a guy, a guy who struggled to pay attention in meetings with enough frequency that disability accommodation was an easy thing to forget.

…

This is an era of distributed opinion, and this ingroup social policing works because that distribution means nobody ever has to be the one to explain anything; meanwhile the actual professional policing goes on behind closed doors, in the backchannel. So I’m not waiting for any explanations. It would perhaps be easier to say, again, that these commitments are only real commitments when they’re hard to live with, that preference becomes principle only when there’s a cost. Like I said, though, the basic structure of digital community means that no individual human is ever in the position of having to answer these unpleasant questions. And at the tip of the spear it’s simple to just say on the company Slack that I should not be engaged with, let alone published.
…
The vast acreage of published disability theory is still insufficient to prompt its acolytes to trouble their simplistic judgment of the types of actions that the actually severely sick engage in. If you follow me.

  • So, they can’t forgive Lindsay Clancy because only a monster kills children.
  • Can’t forgive Kanye West because he’s antisemitic.
  • Can’t forgive a guy who kills his wife and kids because that’s misogyny.
  • Can’t forgive a schizophrenic who mutters racial slurs because that’s racism.
  • Can’t forgive Robert Card, an angry white man with a gun.
  • Can’t forgive the Bondi Junction stabber because he was an Islamic terrorist, or at the very least part of the global intifada, but then again he wasn’t, but still he was clearly a bad guy.
  • Can’t forgive the Paul Pelosi attacker because that’s what MAGA wants.
  • Can’t forgive the latest celebrity addict who acts the way an addict acts, until they overdose and die, after which we can’t forgive the enablers who were caught up in their addiction.
  • Can’t forgive Nick Reiner because, hell, who didn’t love Rob Reiner?
  • Most ludicrously of all, can’t forgive John Davidson for shouting racial slurs at the BAFTAs, can’t forgive a man with Tourette’s for acting like a man with Tourette’s at a ceremony absolutely stuffed with self-regard for its ostensible celebration of people with Tourette’s.

Freddie DeBoer

Freddie’s forthcoming book (from which the above are excerpts) on mental illness is on my wish list, although it would be hard to read chapter after chapter of material as painful as this.

Not worth saving?

Regarding the fights Trump picked with some major universities early in his second administration, Antón Barba-Kay writes:

Enter Donald Trump: our great unmasker.

The efforts of Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, and Harvard to settle their disputes with the Trump administration have forced a reckoning. Those institutions have preferred paying large fines or accepting incursions into their governance to fighting the administration further through the courts. They have concluded that they cannot even temporarily afford to lose government grants while still pursuing what is most essential to their missions. As never before, they have had to clarify just what those missions are, and they have realized, or conceded, that they are primarily in the business of STEM research … They are centers for high-level research and disciplinary training; they depend on the mind-boggling sums those activities consume. They are not, at least in any substantial sense, places for democratic education, moral edification, liberal formation, or contemplation for its own sake.

(Bold added)

I don’t for a second think that Trump intended to unmask the universities, to mock the platitudes about character formation for the whole person. But he did it anyway.

Barba-Kay proposes that the truths unmasked be dealt with by a divorce — the quantitative university and the human-forming university going their separate ways from their irretrievably broken marriage:

I don’t say that the segregation of research from formation would come at no cost. For one thing, the fragmentation of undergraduate education would continue to undermine the sense that Americans have anything in common. But right now we’re getting the worst of both worlds. Students uninterested in the humanities are phoning it in or cheating, while those with an appetite for more serious engagement are demoralized by highly instrumentalized institutional settings.

The sciences would most obviously benefit from this divorce. The development of biomedical research is too important to be derailed by partisan controversies that arise from the meaning-bearing disciplines. Universities already acknowledge this in public statements where, touting their “lifesaving research,” they do not even bother to defend the humanities and the liberal arts more broadly. It is surprising that more scientists, caught in this crossfire, have not clamored to be cut loose.

…

At St. John’s College in Annapolis, my alma mater, there was a story—apocryphal or not—that served as a guiding light to some of us. The Naval Academy, which is across the street from St. John’s, tried to requisition the campus sometime in the 1940s. They needed the land as part of the war effort. It fell to Jacob Klein, a legendary St. John’s tutor and dean who had fled Germany in the 1930s, to object. So, he walked over to the Naval Academy and asked to speak to the admiral in charge. The admiral, who was in the middle of waging a war, saw Klein in and told him he had thirty seconds to explain why the Naval Academy should not seize the campus. Klein lit a match and a cigarette. He took a long drag. Then, after twenty-eight seconds, he rejoined: “Because without places like St. John’s, this country isn’t worth saving from the Nazis.”

Amen! This is an article I’m flagging to re-read (possibly again and again). You should read it at least once.

Freddie again, this time on AI

LLMs are not going to kill The Job, and in the long run I don’t think they’re going to kill jobs in a more quotidian sense either. In the short term, companies desperate to cut payroll (all companies are desperate to cut payroll) may attempt to replace human employees with LLMs. The next few years may very well see waves of mass layoffs, and you’ll likely be seeing a lot of dopey coverage about how jobs are a thing of the past. But in the long run LLMs will result in net job creation rather than net job loss. I know this because that’s what’s happened literally every time a technology has been predicted to be a net job killer in the history of capitalism. (And that’s a facet of another thing I know which most people don’t seem to, which is that the time I live in is not special simply because I live in it.) Again, you can make the extraordinary claim that this time will be different, but you’d have to provide extraordinary evidence, and no one can do that. They just snark and wave their hands at how many people a day are asking Claude “how many beers still can stay under legal limit?”

Freddie deBoer, I Think LLMs Will Prove to Be Consequential

Kiddie porn and the law

There is a 24-year-old Supreme Court precedent that the First Amendment protects Americans’ right to possess virtual child pornography, so long as it doesn’t depict a real child and remains in the home. Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 2002. Katelyn Walls Shelton is not amused:

Child porn, no matter who it depicts or how it is created, is inherently evil. It harms children, even if they are not personally depicted, because it conditions people to view them as sexual objects. And it harms adults, likewise, because it conditions them to view children as sexual objects. This type of harm against society is difficult to measure. But why should we have to measure the sociological effects of a thing before knowing that it’s wrong enough to restrict? … Ultimately, what you do in the private confines of your own home does affect me: It affects me because “your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your character, and your character becomes your destiny.”

Her argument is convincing to me.

I have no idea how realistic AI kiddie porn is today, nor do I intend to find out. Surely it’s better (i.e., morally even worse) compared to 2002.

I hope the Supreme Court will take an appeal and reverse the precedent, which raised my eyebrows at the time and still does. I’m nearly a first amendment absolutist, but possession of porn has always seemed an awkward fit with that amendment.

Converting us to a machine worldview

⁠⁠Humans are mimetic creatures. You don’t have to be a member of the René Girard cult to believe that we’ll begin to assimilate AI ways of thinking. A lot of people already think the human mind works like a computer, even though it doesn’t. A lot of people already believe all thinking is computation, even though it isn’t …

⁠⁠It’s useful to think of AI as a swarm of evangelical missionaries who have come into our world to convert us to their worldview. I suspect they’re going to have a big effect on how we unconsciously process reality.

David Brooks, AI Is Already Making Us Less Human

Natural Selection at work in 2026

12. Reuters:

The percentage of parents and caregivers in the United States refusing a standard vitamin K shot for infants at birth has accelerated sharply this year, an exclusive data analysis for Reuters found, putting more newborns at risk of life-threatening bleeding episodes. The data confirms what a dozen pediatricians, neonatologists and pediatric critical care specialists told Reuters is a top concern: rising refusals of a life-protective shot and a growing wave of mistrust toward vaccines and other newborn interventions. (Source: reuters.com. Italics mine.)

13. Wastewater Levels for Covid-19 (via the CDC):

(Both items from John Ellis News Items for September 2). I have joined the chorus people who find this newsletter nearly indispensable.

Shorts

  • There are three broad spirits in which American television portrays the rich: aspiration, judgment and reassurance. The aspirational spirit makes you want to have what they have, the judgmental spirit condemns them for what they’ve done to get what they have, and the reassuring spirit tells you that you don’t want what they have, anyway. (Ross Douthat)
  • So let’s run the race marked out for us. Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let’s fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire. And let’s fix our eyes on the author and perfecter of our faith and our freedom and never forget that where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. That means freedom always wins. (Mike Pence, whose deep Christian piety this blather always makes me doubt.)
  • When I rolled into Louisiana last night, I went to dinner with some conservative friends here. Man, they are done with Trump. The war, the antics, all of it. These are small-town people in a deep red state, but the through-line of their complaints is that the country is in bad shape, and he’s only making it worse with his instability. That’s only a handful of conservative folks in one small town, but the intensity of their disgust with the president struck me. (Rod Dreher)
  • Without uprooting older communities and ways of life, from English artisan weavers in 1800 to Papuan tribal people in the 2020s, the Machine cannot operate. (Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine
  • In his Encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis denounced the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm in our globalized world: the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions. This makes it clear that technology is not simply a tool. When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency. (Pope Leo XIV)
  • A Disabled Person is an idea, an ideal. I was just a guy, a guy who struggled to pay attention in meetings with enough frequency that disability accommodation was an easy thing to forget.⁠ (Freddie deBoer, Sorry to Bother You)
  • Six justices stayed the June injunction by Judge Talwani as premature. There was nothing to sue over as no “final rule” had been issued at the time of the filing, the majority reasoned. The executive order had only directed agencies to act and the states were required to do nothing until they did. The unsigned order said nothing about the merits of the executive order. However, it did suggest that its implementation might be unlawful. ⁠⁠Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a 23-page dissent, objected that the majority had produced a “Catch-Me-If-You-Can” regime in which election challenges are premature until they are too late. Andy Craig, Trump Can’t Easily Steal the Midterms But He Can Sow Chaos and Doubt
  • ⁠Humans are not picky. We tend to love the ones we’re with. And Claude is always by our side. (David Brooks)
  • ⁠⁠Back in 2009, Joanna J. Bryson wrote a paper called “Robots Should Be Slaves.” She argued that since robots are things, not people, we should treat them as slaves, not companions. But who wants to be a slave master? It hardens your heart and is rotten for your soul. (David Brooks, analogizing to AI)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

SPLC

SPLC backgrounder (from a skeptical position I share)

The [Southern Poverty Law Center] was founded in 1971 to fight genuine white-supremacist terror in the American South. For almost two decades, it did necessary and often courageous work: bankrupting Klan chapters through civil litigation, winning judgments that shuttered paramilitary training camps, forcing accountability where local prosecutors had refused to. By the late 1980s, most of its original mission had been accomplished. The Klan was largely irrelevant. The overt neo-Nazi movement had been driven to the margins.

A healthy institution would have declared victory and wound itself down. Instead, roughly coinciding with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the SPLC began its transformation from a vessel of emancipation into a vessel of subversion. The legal work shrank. The direct-mail operation grew. The enemy was no longer the Klansman in the hood but the dissenter at the lectern—the Muslim reformer, the border-enforcement advocate, the Catholic theologian, the parents’ group. The SPLC became an institution that retained its old license while pivoting toward new, softer targets.

…

Consider allegations that “F-37,” an SPLC informant, helped plan the Charlottesville rally that killed Heather Heyer and traumatized a nation. According to the indictment, this individual actively coordinated transportation, participated in planning meetings, and posted racist content to maintain credibility within white supremacist circles. Moreover, it charges, the SPLC paid F-37 $270,000 over eight years to embed within the very movements it publicly condemned. When Americans witnessed the horror of torch-bearing neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us,” they were watching a performance partly choreographed by someone on a civil rights organization’s payroll, according to the indictment.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The SPLC Targeted Me. Now Its Reckoning Has Come.

The SPLC thought, while there was a fatwa against her life, that Ayaan Hirsi Ali had an Islamophobia problem. I don’t have much sympathy for SPLC’s legal problems now even if the prosecution’s motives are suspect (as is everything the Trump DOJ does; but “suspect” doesn’t mean “guilty.”)

SPLC Legal Update

A few months ago, I expressed some ambivalence about the Trump administration charging the Southern Poverty Law Center criminally:

Even more than two things can be true at the same time:

  1. Southern Poverty Law Center did good work on civil rights decades ago;
  2. Instead of declaring victory and closing up shop, SPLC became a grifting media darling with lazy leftwing slop like its “Hatewatch”;
  3. Had you asked me if SPLC used moles to infiltrate right-wing groups, I probably would have paused for a few seconds and then answered “Why, yes; I suppose they do.” Were I an SPLC donor, I don’t think that would have deterred me.
  4. To all appearances, the criminal indictment of SPLC is, if not garbage, at least garbage-adjacent. It looks like a typical Trump DoJ stunt.
  5. The criminal indictment will cost SPLC not just defense costs, but lost revenue: This week, Fidelity Charitable and Vanguard Charitable said they had paused grants from Donor-Advised Funds to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
    …

Last week, Team Trump followed up with charges against a fairly high-ranking individual within the SPLC, and the Dispatch has weighed in with some analysis:

Approaching Beirich’s arraignment—which is scheduled for this Wednesday—and the jury selection and criminal trial set to take place in October, the Trump administration’s charge that the SPLC defrauded banks looks stronger than its claim that the organization defrauded its own donors….

[Analysis of the weak charges for “fraud” from paying informants to infiltrate groups omitted.]

The government’s allegations of bank fraud may prove stronger. After Beirich’s arrest, Blanche said that Beirich had helped open bank accounts in the names of fictitious companies. Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told TMD that most lawyers he speaks to consider the bank counts “more likely to cause real trouble for the SPLC in court.”

“One of the reasons for that is that the laws on false statements to banks are drawn in a very pro-prosecution way,” he said. And the SPLC has few defenses on these counts, Olson explained, because the laws on bank fraud mean that “it doesn’t matter what the bank thinks of this—for example, it doesn’t matter if the bank doesn’t want you prosecuted.”

“If you have misstated things to a bank, and … if it passes a threshold of somehow being material or important, then tough penalties apply,” Olson said.

…

But even if the case is ultimately dismissed, the controversy is also drawing attention to larger questions about the SPLC’s use of its funds. CharityWatch, a nonpartisan nonprofit that rates charities, gives the organization an “F” rating for continuing to raise money while already holding large reserves—$787 million in net assets, according to the center’s most recent financial filing.

“They’re doing okay from a financial efficiency perspective, but we analyzed their assets, and what we determined is that this organization could continue to operate at 2024 spending levels for six years without raising another penny of revenue,” Laurie Styron, CharityWatch’s CEO and executive director, told TMD “So our criticism is, ‘Why are you continuing to fundraise when you have six years’ worth of money available to operate your organization that you haven’t spent?’”

Blowback from the Congress Hegseth holds in contempt

There is, in short, good reason Congress isn’t rushing to rubber-stamp the staggering defense budget. The House, by a narrow margin, passed a $1.15 trillion defense budget and a $73 billion supplemental to fund the Iran war. In addition to the money in the House bills, the White House wants another $350 billion via a reconciliation bill that can’t be filibustered by Democrats. But that measure appears to be DOA in the Senate. With time running out, the armed forces are likely to begin the new fiscal year on Oct. 1 under a “continuing resolution” that provides “only” $838 billion. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has no one but himself to blame. He has been contemptuous of Congress, so it’s hardly surprising that its members are not rushing to hand him a massive pot of cash. If Hegseth wants to win bipartisan support for the defense budget — something that was taken for granted in years past — he needs to start briefing Senate Democrats, not just Republicans. And he needs to do a much better job of addressing lawmakers’ concerns about controversies such as the unexplained firings of general officers, the lawless attacks on alleged drug boats, the deteriorating conditions aboard an aircraft carrier deployed to the Middle East and the failed war with Iran.

…

Under Hegseth’s weak and woeful leadership, the defense budget has become a piggy bank not just for Trump’s impractical flights of fancy but also for Trump family members. The Washington Post reported that companies in which the president’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. have invested have received at least $3.2 billion in defense contracts since the start of Trump’s second term.

Perhaps there’s a case for a $1.5 trillion defense budget, but, so far, Hegseth hasn’t made it, at least not convincingly. Indeed, The Post reported earlier this year that military officers were scrambling to figure out how to spend an extra $500 billion. Hegseth seems to have picked $1.5 trillion as the “top line” arbitrarily, rather than conducting a rigorous bottom-up analysis of what the military needs.

Trump, for his part, hasn’t given a single speech providing a detailed justification for the defense budget. His argument for it remains at the bumper-sticker level, claiming that all that extra spending will produce a “Dream Military.” But at what cost?

A far greater Republican president — Dwight D. Eisenhower — recognized that the nation must provide for its defense today without “plundering … the precious resources of tomorrow.”

Max Boot

I take every opportunity to say “I told you so,” but this is not a fair opportunity. It never occurred to me that we could attack Iran and not beat them. It never occurred to me that we could frightfully deplete vital munitions in a foolish war on Iran, imperiling our ability to honor other commitments around the world. I never thought about how Iran would strike back if we attacked.

But I think I can say that if I sat in the Oval Office, I’d have listened carefully to top military officials who could and probably would have told me those things – and that I consequently would not have started this stupid war.

No bail

The Tate brothers want bail pending their extradition proceedings to the United Kingdom. Unfortunately for them, it’s very hard to get bail when you’re pending extradition, and also their social media is full of statements about how they are flight risks. “You can’t ban me from driving, I have nine drivers licenses. You can’t freeze my passport, I have four.” Yeah… they’re not going to be getting out anytime soon.

Josh Barro and Ken White

Postliberalism

Liberalism is the system of government most Americans recognize as legitimate: The rule of law, constitutionalism (written or unwritten), democratic accountability (i.e., politicians are accountable to voters), individual rights variously defined, and to one extent or another, commitment to the free market.

A postliberal is someone who believes that liberalism was either a mistake from the beginning (they heap a lot of scorn on poor John Locke), or—like Marx—argues as an objective observation that it is a spent force in need of replacement. The specifics of what that new replacement order should look like are often hard to find, and even when some give it a shot, I haven’t seen any that aren’t exceedingly vague, aspirational, platitudinous, or too narrow to be the basis of a consensus (I am open to correction).

Jonah Goldberg, Thank God the Constitution is Liberal

Legal Miscellany from the Short Circuits newsletter

  • Plaintiff: My gov’t employer cooked up baseless allegations to fire me in retaliation for my whistleblowing. State court (round one): Sounds like a claim that requires discovery, which means you should file a plenary proceeding. State court (round two): Whoops! Turns out that round-one decision precludes all your state-law claims in this here plenary proceeding. Federal district court: And that all looks like res judicata for your constitutional claims, too! Second Circuit: Guys. Guys. Calm down. Nothing has been judicataed, and somebody needs to listen to this lady’s claims. Case undismissed!
  • If a Fifth Circuit opinion considering a challenge to gas stove regulations begins, “The Biden Administration proposed numerous regulations to make home appliances more expensive and less useful,” you probably know how it’s gonna turn out.
  • Sixth Circuit: Forcing a compliant suspect to pee in his front yard when there were plenty of officers on hand to supervise a trip to the toilet is an obvious Fourth Amendment violation. No qualified immunity. Case undismissed. Dissent: At the Founding, public urination was probably not a crime in these circumstances.
  • Minnesota Jane Doe, who was sexually assaulted at age 14, provides evidence for a rape kit. Anoka County police do not test the kit for over 16 years, then find it contains DNA implicating the assailant she identified. She sues the police for failure to investigate. Eighth Circuit: Crime victims have no standing for that sort of thing.
  • Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are sold as a targeted tool to catch dangerous criminals and find missing persons. And we like both of those things. But the frequency with which officers use ALPRs for non-law-enforcement purposes (chiefly stalking) or wind up tracking and detaining the wrong people (sometimes at gunpoint) is downright alarming. Officers rarely record specific reasons for ALPR searches, and even where they are supposed to, as we learned in litigation against Norfolk, Va., officers ignore those internal department requirements without consequence. (One officer repeatedly wrote “la la la la,” and no one noticed.) Which is all to say that constitutional safeguards are desperately needed, and we have a sensible proposal that we’re bringing to a courthouse near you: If the police want to track someone, they have to get a warrant. Click here to learn more.

Right hand, meet left hand

Religio-Legal from WaPo:

Virginia requires chaplains serving in the Virginia National Guard to obtain a theology-related master’s degree. Yet despite providing tuition assistance for other types of degrees, it recently denied tuition assistance to Trace Stevens, a National Guard member enrolled in a master’s program at Liberty University to pursue the type of theology degree necessary to become a chaplain. The state claimed that such degrees are too religious to receive state support.

Things I’d rather not talk about

Surrogacy is one of those issues that conservatives simply don’t want to talk about. It is often heart-wrenching when couples are not able to have children, and IVF and surrogacy are viewed as miracles to let these couples have children. To raise any moral or legal objections to this practice is sometimes seen as a third-rail, even in Republican pro-life circles …

Yes, this is true.

… And on the left, how many of the women who wore bonnets from the Handmaid’s Tale to protest Justice Barrett hired poor women in Eastern Europe to carry their children? This is an issue that needs to be discussed more on both sides of the spectrum.

Josh Blackman

I’m one of those muzzled conservatives. “I think IVF is dodgy” was the shorthand for IVF and for surrogacy that I put in my running list of unpopular opinions.

But I’m friends with people who have children via assisted reproductive technologies that I find “dodgy.” To discuss it risks the friendship. And their children are precious however conceived.

“Woke” (properly speaking)

“Woke” has come to be used as shorthand for anything that feels like an extremist position on the left: defunding the police, favoring open borders, supporting medically invasive “gender affirming care” for teens over the wishes of their parents, etc. But, rightly understood, none of those are woke. They are public policies favored by left-wing activists. Wokeness was (and is) something distinct: a method of leveraging cultural power to reshape public opinion, thereby creating an electorate more likely to embrace those and other progressive views in the future.

That reshaping takes place outside of the political sphere—in cultural institutions in the private sphere. It can be driven by grassroots agitation (from below) or by elite agenda-setting (from above).

Conservative pundit Kevin Williamson getting hired by The Atlantic and then fired two weeks later because junior staffers at the magazine demanded it was an example (one of many) of the first. Applicants and recent hires for teaching positions at universities across the country being forced to sign documents promising to teach a specific narrative about race and gender in all of their classes, regardless of their specialized fields or research and teaching interests, was (and is) an example of the second.

A mob of progressives on Twitter circa 2019 attempting to get a conservative or “reactionary centrist” fired for staking out the “wrong” position on this or that issue of the day is an example of the first. Millions of employees being forced to sit through DEI training sessions run by their employer’s department of human resources, which is in charge of hiring, firing, and promotion for the company, is an example of the second.

The problem with and novelty of these developments is not that they involve crowds and institutions imposing or enforcing certain norms. The problem and novelty is entirely a function of the fact that the norms they seek to impose or enforce are expressions of a moral vanguard.

Damon Linker, “looking left” as his Substack regularly and explicitly does.

But note that there are right-leaning versions of something very like “woke,” too. Does Linker’s definition of woke excludes them unnecessarily, or is there something distinctive about, say, Laura Loomer (right-coded grassroots agitator, whose McCarthyite lists got a whole lotta people fired in Trump 2.0) or Ron DeSantis (an elite right-wing agenda-setter for the state of Florida)?

Shorts

  • ‌If God wanted us to have unlimited free energy He would have put a giant fusion reactor in the sky.
  • The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born. (J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know)
  • Religion has declined in the West, but Taylor thinks the more interesting story is the explosion of different forms of religion in modernity, its fragmentation. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry
  • If sex is just a social construct, or even if gender is just a social construct, why is there any need for medical “transitioning” starting with hormone injections? (Tipsy, H/T Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)
  • How much would you pay for a smarter baby? — I can imagine the lawsuits later: “We paid for a smarter baby but instead we got a child who’s compassionate and generous! We’ve been screwed!” (Alan Jacobs)
  • Joe Biden’s political appointees had left the week before, and I was now the senior intelligence official in the White House. For the incoming Trump administration, the trans woman would man the gates. (Julia Curlee, The Wrong Kind of American)
  • If this is Making America Great Again, I wish he’d stop. (Rod Dreher, who voted for Trump in 2024)
  • Anywhere there was power to protect, doublespeak was, sooner or later, right there in the midst of it. As the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing put it, one realizes that “they are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.” (Russell Moore)
  • While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar. (Sen. Jon Ossoff, in a remark that seems to have gotten under Trump’s skin)
  • Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics. Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country. It’s because he’s a radical, extremist Dumocrat. (Steven Cheung, White House Communications Director)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

Saturday 8/8/26

Legalia

Ten Commandments at the Statehouse?

About 25 years ago, a court order barred the monument from the Indiana Statehouse. After a shift in case law, a federal judge agreed to reopen the case in late May, setting off a renewed legal fight over whether the Ten Commandments can be returned to the Capitol’s grounds.

Gov. Mike Braun and Attorney General Todd Rokita, both Republicans, want the monument restored. They argue it reflects the nation’s history and traditions.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana opposes the move, saying it would violate the First Amendment’s religious freedom clause.

Now, the monument’s fate depends on the federal court system’s appetite to specify what it means to maintain a separation of church and state under modern precedent.

Cate Charron, Indianapolis Star USA TODAY NETWORK (likely paywall)

I’m oddly neutral on the display, though I would have opposed it a few decades ago. That’s what I feel. What follows is “let’s write about it to see what we think.”

I’ve never wanted to thrust Christianity of any sort, strong or debased, into the public square with government’s imprimatur. I’ve moved from opposition to neutrality, then, because I’ve lost even the muscle memory of the Ten Commandments being a key part of Christianity rightly practiced. Underlying that, I think, is that I’m a Realist on the Ten Commandments rather than a Nominalist; the “second tablet” in particular is written on the heart, at least while the heart remains tender. Its value does not so lie in God’s sheer command that God could have as well commanded, rather than forbidden, things like murder, theft and adultery.

So I don’t see the monument as a distinctly Christian or even Judeo-Christian thing, but as an instantiation of American history and traditions, and the Ten Commandments inscribed on the monument as part of what C.S. Lewis called the Tao.

Why not support it then? Because we are, as Ross Douthat said, a nation of heretics, and the Commendments are still, as a matter of American folk-religion at least, “Christian.” My reflexive (but earned) suspicion Todd Rokita (a less blatant version of Texas’ Ken Paxton) led me circuitously to realize that the people he’s pandering to will chortle at this monument as fresh proof that we’re a “Christian nation,” because in their muscle memories the Ten Commandments are distinctively a part of Christianity rightly practiced. We’ve already got quite enough of that kind of high-sulfur Christian Nationalist coal in Newcastle.

It has happened

It was inevitable that DOJ lawyers mandated from the White House to do dumb, dishonest and disreputable things would cease getting any benefit of the doubt (in this context, “presumption of regularity”) from judges, and that inevitability has arrived. Federal Judges now challenge and even mock government lawyers’ representations to the court.

My main consolation is that there ought to be a bunch of idealistic lawyers ready to join up at the DOJ and District Attorney offices as soon as the leadership from the top is no longer trying to corrupt even the legal system. The corruption of DOJ is not a legacy that will last, I believe, hope and pray.

Now our President probably thinks that he’s just doing openly what all his predecessors have done surreptitiously, and that the courts are just picking on him. But that’s what happens when you’re 80 years old and have been pursuing personal gain and sexual conquest and limelight and power all your life: you think everyone else is just like you (only infinitely weaker).

Heck, Frodo’s one advantage over the consummately evil Sauron was that Sauron could not imagine anyone who possessed the One Ring actually seeking to destroy it and its power.

Short Circuits

I get a Friday summary of U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decisions from the Institute for Justice. Their pithy summaries can be pretty funny:

  • When you order food through apps like DoorDash, Grubhub, or Uber Eats, the app gets all sorts of useful consumer data, but the restaurant preparing the food only gets your first name, last initial, and the order contents. New York City thinks that’s unfair because of course they do, so they require the apps to share all the customer information with any restaurant that asks. The apps sue, alleging the law violates the First Amendment. Second Circuit: Correct. Concurrence: I just want to point out that the law is naked economic favoritism toward restaurants, which isn’t a substantial gov’t interest.
  • The Supreme Court has famously (and somewhat dubiously) held that the design on state-issued vanity license plates is “government speech” to which the First Amendment does not apply. But what about the character combination on vanity plates like, say, “FTP&ATF”? Fourth Circuit: Private speech to which the First Amendment applies.

Iran War

Both of the following items are via Rod Dreher. My doubts about Rod’s judgment are at an all-time high (though that may “just be me”), but he publishes so very, very much that he’s bound to get a few things right (or to quote people who get it right).

It has been a while since I filed a clipping under “New World Order,” but that’s where this one fits. We’re no longer undisputed, omnipotent top dog.

At the strategic level, it’s over and we lost

Five months into this conflict, a sober analysis reveals a truth that Washington’s foreign policy establishment refuses to stomach: America’s war against Iran has already been lost at the strategic level. Nothing we do from this point forward can reverse that outcome. All we can do now is limit the damage — or refuse to acknowledge reality and make the cost of failure worse. The roots of our strategic failure lie in a fundamental miscalculation of Iranian leverage.

Daniel L. Davis in Stars & Stripes of all places.

How our loss combines with our past wins to demean us

We are in a pickle. And because we did gain so much strength and we punished so many people in the world, and we destroyed so many civilizations in the world—I mean that—we’re now hated as much as we are looked at as being crazy. And I don’t know how you compensate for that while you try to fix enough so that at least you can go out with a fairly decent—maybe something like England went out after the ’56 Suez crisis. Not a really good example, but nonetheless it’s the end of empire. England had started—Britain had started—going down long before that. But I don’t know. I don’t know how you put this in geopolitical terms, in geostrategic terms, in inexorable power-shift terms, and deal with it with what we have in Washington right now. I don’t know how you can take it apart. He should have been impeached. He should have been relieved of his duties. He should have been frog-marched out of Washington. Indeed, he probably should be in jail, but he’s not. Which, on a lower scale, demonstrates the inadequacy of our structure right now and the feebleness of our structure, as well as its having atrophied over the 250 years it’s been in place.

Excerpt from a recent interview with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (italics added)

Miscellany

“Cultural appropriation” is a dumb name for acknowledging indebtedness

I can choose someone from another century or continent as my creative ancestor. I can imagine myself as an heir to Dante or Miles Davis or Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf or Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Some people will tell you that this is cultural appropriation. But I don’t think they grasp how indebted we all are to the great creators of the past. If we tried to cut ourselves off from them, we would lose all vitality and purpose in our lives. This is the most fruitful way of owning a work of art. All other ways fall far short of it.

Ted Gioia in Image Journal.

Why now this “socialist” surge

Socialism’s most enthusiastic promoters are quick and clever—comparatively well-educated, very online. Their talent lies primarily in media, having been immersed in it from birth—the internet, its apps, its entertainment and information flow. They know all about how people get and absorb a feeling, an impression; they know how to produce a sensation, as opposed to a thought. One of the great tricks in life is to have a talent suited to your times, and they do.

I am sorry to say they never strike me with their warmth, as, say, your great-uncle Billy was warm when he spoke about the Industrial Workers of the World. Today’s socialists strike me as colder, less human, fiercer and occasionally sociopathic. In general, they appear to have an idea of history rather than attachments to existing people and institutions. Most strike me not as people who love America and wish to make it better, but people ready to exploit its freedoms to build a movement that if successful would transform America’s fundamental nature. It will no longer be the freedom place but something else, and more common.

This isn’t happening in our politics only because people “hate the status quo” and “want change.” Americans always hate the status quo and want change. I believe what we’re seeing traces back to these factors:

A voter who is 25 was in grade school during the 2008 economic crash, and saw everything—frightened parents, lost jobs. In the years after, he saw bailouts and no one on Wall Street paying a price. It lessened his allegiance to the free-market economic system.

A voter who is 25 also sees AI rising, and wonders if the economy as it exists today has a place for him. Will he be able to afford a house someday? Widespread home ownership brings a feeling of investment, of stability and satisfaction. What does its absence bring?

The Cold War has receded as a living memory. The enforced communism and socialism of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact was a disaster—shortages, drabness, economic lifelessness. Censorship, secret police, all the bad things big unaccountable governments bring. That was long ago. “Socialism” now is a dream of Scandinavia—national healthcare, generous benefits, equal enjoyment of resources.

As religion recedes, politics takes its place. The young have been educated within a general framework of assumptions and language of the left—structures of power, oppressor groups, critical theory, intersectionality.

…

At a Gaullist campaign rally in 1968, [André] Malraux put his finger on a weakness of conservative economic thought. “ ‘Capitalism’ does not carry us in its heart,” he said. By inference, it’s also hard to carry capitalism in your heart. It isn’t a great belief, only an economic system. Socialism is a belief, and it summons feeling. Capitalism is a thing of reason, a disadvantage in an age of sensation.

Peggy Noonan

Peggy Noonan is a voice who generally sees humanity where others see demons. This was one of those times.

Sacrilege

I also began to understand why the American culture wars involved so many battles over sacrilege. Is a flag just a piece of cloth, which can be burned as a form of protest? Or does each flag contain within it something nonmaterial such that when protesters burn it, they have done something bad (even if nobody were to see them do it)? When an artist submerges a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, or smears elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, do these works belong in art museums? Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, “If you don’t want to see it, don’t go to the museum”? Or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane, and more degraded?

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.

The book has been around for a while. Do our culture wars still fit this pattern — taking offense that the other side is profaning something sacred?

What are the sacred cows of (in broad strokes) American progressives versus American conservatives these days?

Willful ignorance

It was the easiest, silliest con of all time. His story began to unravel with simple plagiarism claims, which I didn’t care about last week because all sociology professors just copy-paste their fake studies, back and forth. For me, it doesn’t matter if “A history of the London fashion scene through a transracial lens, 1914–1916” was plagiarized because it actually doesn’t matter at all. But this week things escalated: First, it looks like Arday truly just invented his research, and quite clumsily (read this from a University of Toronto professor digging through it, or this from the UK Times). Then it snowballed. People started looking into his super believable bio: He says he has autism and didn’t speak until he was 11, then at 18 he learned to read and write and went to university. Seems odd. Kind of miraculous. The claims go on. He says he did volunteer work overseas for a particular water charity (the charity says it never sends volunteers abroad). He says he ran 600 miles between Edinburgh and London in six days. Oh! Also that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, adding that he did the last nine marathons on a broken leg. Right. Prior to his Cambridge appointment, he claimed he was a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University, and an honorary professor at Durham University. All of these institutions have denied that he held such positions. The man is freestyling extracurriculars. The list goes on. Was he even a mute? How much of this is a lie? And how come I had never heard of Arday, who is apparently one of the most accomplished athletes of all time?

When people started to question all this, the defenses were robust, with a group of famous professors, politicians, and other luminaries writing indignantly: “We stand in unwavering solidarity with Professor Arday. We call on universities not only to defend academic freedom and robust scholarship, but also to confront racism wherever it manifests itself, whether overtly or through persistent attempts to discredit exceptional Black academics.” I’m not sure you want to stake all of black academics on Jason Arday and these broken-leg marathons.

Nellie Bowles

I didn’t want to pay any more attention to this story (on which I hadn’t blogged before), but the stupidity of Arday’s defenders breathed fresh life into it.

Valedictory

[W]atching this crisis unfold, I find that I’ve lost my sense of which contemporary worldview is most in need of criticism or opposition, where the good guys and bad guys are. Each major faction seems potentially dangerous, tempted toward the dark side in some unique way, contested or cross-pressured to a degree that makes me uncertain where the side of the angels really lies.

…

Once I would have imagined a valedictory essay offering some stirring brief for religious conservatism, some last foray into the territory where I was most likely to be in disagreement with my readers. But I don’t think that quite fits the moment.

Instead, I’ll express — along with incalculable gratitude to The Times itself, my colleagues and editors — a hope that I have contributed illumination. I hope my writing has added something to your understanding of America’s complexity, the world’s uncertain future and the strangeness of our times.

Ross Douthat‘s final column for the Grey Lady.

Artificial Intelligence

A conundrum

AI hasn’t made any money yet. And I’ve been hearing, repeatedly, that that new AI searches don’t automatically decrease the losses, bringing them close to a profit. That is to say, the marginal cost to the AI company of responding to another chat or project does not go down.

This is a major reason why I would not be surprised at a bursting of the AI bubble (and why I might be a NIMBY about data centers that might be left broke, empty, rusting).

The economics of this puzzled me, so I asked Claude (AI, for all my readers in the distant future after AI collapses) about it:

Most businesses improve their profit margin with additional customers until they hit a maximum. Then they must add staff or equipment or something and suffer higher marginal costs for a while in their new growth toward greater overall profits.

But I’ve been hearing that AI works differently. It sounds as if a hypothetical AI with, say, 100 users experiences more than 10% increased costs by adding 10 more customers.

Is that true? Why?

Turns out I was wrong that 10% more customers adds more than 10% costs, but it does add about 10% — not less.

I’ll very briefly quote the nut of Claude’s reason (I generally don’t quote AI):

Each inference (query) consumes GPU/TPU compute, and each unit of compute costs money. Add 10% more users making queries of similar length, and you add roughly 10% more compute cost—at least at constant hardware efficiency.

If you want more detail, go ask your own AI; this isn’t a tech blog. But maybe for you, like me, this answer’s enough for now. If you’re losing money on every sale, you can’t make up for it by higher volume.

The AI future (if AI survives the present)

I wonder sometimes how AI has changed the practice of law since my retirement.

I was always “the tech” guy within my firm’s four wall (we eventually hired more methodical outside IT support), and I might have been on AI as well.

But I hear theorizing and actual stories about AI turning its human users toward machine-like behavior — for instance, juggling multiple AI Agents (Agents are different than Chatbots) that are performing various tasks with need for human input at frequent intervals. Leaving your agent paused waiting for input is, ahem, sub-optimal.

That indeed sounds dehumanizing, but I can’t say yea or nay to it being the eventuality of AI.

Shorts

  • [I]f you ask me why I robbed an old lady, I could reply: ‘I needed the money’, ‘I had just watched a violent video’, ‘I inherited my dad’s psychopathic tendencies’, ‘I was high on crystal meth’, ‘I heard a voice tell me to do it’, ‘I was brought up in a subculture where it was considered normal to steal’, ‘the government cut my welfare payments’, ‘my serotonin levels were depleted’, and so on. What counts as a possible cause depends on the context of the question. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things.
  • He’s gilding everything: The aging and patinated statues of D.C. are getting regilded. This pair of statues hadn’t been touched since the 1970s, and now they glow, which my Gen-Z translators tell me means shine. Seeing the results here, I’m actually surprised this wasn’t a term-one priority for Trump. By the time the man leaves office the Lincoln Memorial is going to be bedazzled. He is President Liberace, the first gay leader of this nation.(Nellie Bowles)
  • When I look at the biographies of recently-victorious “Democratic Socialist” candidates, I regain my love for the brilliant distillation “luxury beliefs.” (Tipsy)
  • Charisma can be just as repellent as it is attractive, so it usually baffles or disgusts anyone not under its thrall. (Molly Worthen, Charisma Rules the World)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

Farewell, Golden Rule; G’bye, Beatitudes

To hell with the Golden Rule (and the Beatitudes, too)

I don’t look to Ezra Klein for spiritual insight. He delivered anyway. Christopher Nolan Stared Into Elon Musk’s Soul.

We’re not just teetering on postliberal; the GOP is emphatically post-Christian (or is it pre-Christian?), glorifying power and humiliation of foes. Paraphrasing the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, to hell with the Golden Rule:

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time. … [W]e are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce.

…

The United States is the power of NATO, for the United States to secure the Arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests. Obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States.

…

We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our own backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries, but not to us, to hoard weapons from our adversaries, to be able to be positioned as an asset against the United States rather than on behalf of the United States.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen “Wormtongue” Miller to Jake Tapper

Sacrilege

I also began to understand why the American culture wars involved so many battles over sacrilege. Is a flag just a piece of cloth, which can be burned as a form of protest? Or does each flag contain within it something nonmaterial such that when protesters burn it, they have done something bad (even if nobody were to see them do it)? When an artist submerges a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, or smears elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, do these works belong in art museums? Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, “If you don’t want to see it, don’t go to the museum”? Or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane, and more degraded?

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.

The book has been around for a while. Do our culture wars still fit this pattern? I’m not sure we consider the same things sacred or sacred-adjacent.

Dare I suggest that the progressives today consider the feelings of certified victim groups (e.g., “sexual minorities”) sacred while that MAGA right increasingly considers “heritage America” so sacred that it’s sullied by the wrong sort of immigrant?

Trump Targets ‘Birth Tourism’ …

Speaking of “the wrong kind of immigrants”:

After the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at limiting access to birthright citizenship, the Trump administration and Republican allies have focused their attention on ending “birth tourism” – that is, when “foreign nationals [travel] to the US with the purpose of giving birth.” “The Justice Department has told US attorneys’ offices and the Criminal Division to prioritize the prosecution of birth tourism schemes,” according to Bloomberg Law. “Stepped up enforcement could result in intense scrutiny of visa applicants and travelers to the US and charges for people facilitating birth tourism, former consular officials and federal prosecutors said.”

This push may reflect misplaced priorities (see below), but I have no principled problem with enforcing the law.

I just don’t think we’ve got a serious “birthright tourism” problem.

Let’s try a definition of birthright tourism: women traveling to the U.S. in order to give birth so that their child will be a U.S. citizen. Is that fair? Note that it excludes births to women who give birth while here on business, or as students, or for some other reason other than to have a citizen-child.

But Penn State researchers using comprehensive national birth data (2014-2024) calculated 5,000 to just under 10,000 births per year to women on tourist visas—which is 0.3% of all U.S. births, and surely not all women who gave birth while on tourist visas came here in order to give birth and secure birthright citizenship for their child — i.e., they weren’t “birth tourists.” Team Trump can counter with a figure of 33,000 per year, but not surprisingly, it’s a less credible figure.

Delegitimizing “legitimate politics”?

Illinois Democrat appeals corruption conviction to Supreme Court
Zach Schonfeld, The Hill

Former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, a Democrat, “ask[ed] the Supreme Court to review his corruption conviction,” according to The Hill. “The longest-serving legislative leader in U.S. history was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for using his position to financially reward himself and political associates.” “Madigan raised several arguments in his appeal, including that he didn’t act ‘corruptly,’ as is required by the federal program bribery statute.” “The novel bribery theories the government zealously pursued against Speaker Madigan stretch federal bribery law in ways that threaten to criminalize and chill lawful interactions between state and local officials and their constituents,” his lawyers wrote. The Hill noted that Madigan is “the latest in a line of elected leaders ensnared in corruption scandals who’ve taken claims to the nation’s highest court that they’re being criminally prosecuted over legitimate politics.”

Tough luck, kid

The . . . English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past . . . He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

Flannery O’Connor

Shorts

  • The great benefit to be derived from reading pre-modern authors is to come to realise that after all we [moderns] might have been mistaken. (Edward Feser, Aquinas)
  • Early in the war, the zoo had killed its poisonous snakes and spiders, anticipating that if their enclosures were destroyed, these creatures would pose a significantly greater hazard than, say, a fugitive koala bear. (Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile)
  • “It is a nasty game,” Mr. Smith said of politics. “But I figured out a long time ago that you’re either in the game or you’re out of the game, and I needed access for some of the industry issues.” (Sell the Company for $400 Million? He’s Giving It Away Instead. – The New York Times)
  • [T]here is an irony in folks who do not hesitate to call the [New York] Times “fake news” simultaneously demanding that one of their own be granted the prestige and recognition of writing for the paper [as a successor to Ross Douthat]. It’s a bit like demanding the Catholic Church appoint a Baptist bishop. (Jonah Goldberg)
  • [I]f you want to claim “The Odyssey” for your own worldview, to insist that the dominant movie of the summer is speaking directly to your concerns, the banal didacticism of Nolan’s script is unusually amenable to personalized interpretations. (Ross Douthat)
  • Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. (James Baldwin)
  • Secularism was not a neutral concept. The very word came trailing incense clouds of meaning that were irrevocably and venerably Christian. (Tom Holland, Dominion)
  • As far as the official version of events is concerned, Islamist terrorism is a response to a continuous crime against the Muslim community – a crime committed by everyone who notices that Muslim customs are in friction with the traditional social order of France. (Roger Scruton, Conservatism)
  • AI is a Swiss Army knife. It does everything and excels at nothing. / That’s exactly why it wins. The best tool is not the sharpest one, it’s the one already in your pocket. (Joroen Sangers)
  • He is the dirtiest man I have ever liked. (Igor Stravinsky of W.H. Auden)
  • “Socialism just means you’re for garbage collection.” (Ruy Teixeira describing DSA “sanewashing.”)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

The Noise Everywhere: Fauci, Punditry, and the Collapse of Public Authority

We’re on our own

The politicians lied and couldn’t be trusted, the bureaucrats lied and couldn’t be trusted, the government scientists lied about the data in front of their eyes, the national press was a propaganda machine. As much as anything, Chernobyl contributed to the toppling of the Soviet Union.

Looking back on the Covid crisis, a lot of professionals were trusted beyond the point they deserved. So were many politicians. As people on the ground in America rose up against lockdowns, closed schools, mask mandates, closed churches, they were often unheard, or heard slowly, reluctantly and disrespectfully. The medical and scientific establishment didn’t seem to be a part of the public anymore, but handling the public.

And by the end, a lot of people thought they couldn’t trust the politicians and couldn’t trust the scientists.

My fear is that next time, and there likely will be a next time, regular people will think: There’s no one to trust. We’re on our own.

That won’t be a good thing.

Peggy Noonan

Dr. Fauci takes the fifth

It’s true, of course, that pleading the Fifth isn’t proof of wrongdoing, no matter what Josh Hawley might tell you. But it’s also true that it’s a tactic that the public associates with criminal lowlifes like gangsters, or the president. Fauci will never fully recover.

…

The two lessons I gleaned from yesterday’s hearing and the right-wing commentary around it are (1) Fauci isn’t very trustworthy, and (2) if you’re forced to choose between letting him set your scientific policy and letting Republicans do it, take Fauci every time.

That’s what I meant when I said above that the hearing was a missed opportunity for populism. Having effectively discredited the expert di tutti experts, the GOP should have been teed up to assert itself as the superior choice for Americans on public health. It … did not do that.

When I say that Wednesday’s “right-wing commentary” about COVID wasn’t reassuring, I’m not talking about crank randos on social media. I’m talking about Republican lawmakers. Sen. Ron Johnson babbled at the hearing about an alleged epidemic of suicides among people who’ve been “injured” by the COVID vaccine. Rep. John McGuire complained to Newsmax that Americans had been urged to take a vaccine that includes “human fetus baby parts” when they could have simply used ivermectin instead. Then Sen. Tommy Tuberville topped both of them by accusing Fauci of having been responsible for no fewer than 9 million deaths.

Granted, not every Republican in Congress is a lunatic. But they all answer to lunatics, which is how we ended up with Bill Cassidy, M.D., feeling obliged to support the most infamous anti-vaccine advocate in the country to be head of the Department of Health and Human Services. In a declining America, you can have Fauci spearheading pandemic policy in between signing autographs—or you can have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presiding over an unfolding disaster in American vaccine uptake with potentially dire long-term consequences. Take Fauci.

QAnon chronicler Mike Rothschild captured the absurdity of populist strains of thought about COVID with what’s at best a half-joke: “The overwhelming right-wing sentiment is that COVID was an engineered bioweapon that was also harmless. Trump overreacted to it by shutting down the country, then engineered a drive to create a vaccine that was the real bioweapon that killed millions, and it’s Joe Biden’s fault.” …

Nick Catoggio

Explaining noise

As I am writing these lines I see the following headlines on my Bloomberg: →Dow is up 1.03 on lower interest rates. →Dollar down 0.12 yen on higher Japanese surplus. and so on for an entire page. If I translate it well, the journalist claims to provide an explanation for something that amounts to perfect noise. A move of 1.03 with the Dow at 11,000 constitutes less than a 0.01% move. Such a move does not warrant an explanation. There is nothing there that an honest person can try to explain; there are no reasons to adduce. But like apprentice professors of comparative literature, journalists being paid to provide explanations will gladly and readily provide them. The only solution is for Michael Bloomberg to stop paying his journalists for providing commentary.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness.

This doesn’t seem unrelated to the two Covid-related items, above. The public wants explanations and reassurances. There’s some cynical benefit in giving the public what it wants as Fauci did and the financial press continues to do.

AI pundits?

And then, finally, there’s AI. My contempt for generative AI could not be more thorough. I’ve tried to withhold judgment about it while I wait to see what becomes of it. But I’ve now seen enough to conclude it really will strip away an essential element of our humanity if we let it. Writing is a quintessentially human activity; it’s how we communicate our thoughts with one another. It’s an art that takes considerable skill to do well. Why would we seek to relieve ourselves of it? Writing isn’t a burden, any more than thinking is. Yes, it can be hard, but most worthwhile endeavors are. Accomplishing it despite that challenge is part of the reward of undertaking it in the first place.

Yet at a formal level, writing an op-ed isn’t that difficult. Your thesis statement (or “nutgraf,” as editors call it) goes near the top, preceded by an introduction that frames it artfully. Then come the arguments and supporting evidence, plus some examination of contrary arguments (“to be sure” paragraphs), followed by a concession or two and lots of pushback designed to knock down the strawmen. And that’s assuming the writer even aims to do that thing I noted above, where he or she makes an effort to persuade. If the goal, instead, is to foster communal feeling, then there’s no need to look at or even acknowledge counterarguments. Just wield the sledgehammer point by obvious point, followed by a conclusion that says, in effect, as I told you at the start, I am right and everyone who disagrees is either operating in bad faith or a retard. (Have you noticed how many people online—usually on the right, but not always—use the epithet retard in their social-media posts now?)

Why can’t an LLM do that? Believe me, it can. If not flawlessly already, it will be up to the task very soon, I can assure you.

Damon Linker

I don’t want to think that AI punditry is what’s in store for us, but as Linker notes, the New York Times has made little effort to replace departing luminaries on the Opinions page.

Some smear

Tom Tiffany, the Republican running for Wisconsin governor, is smearing his opponent Francesca Hong, the progressive Democrat. Smears such as pointing out that she said she wants to abolish the Senate. Francesca’s team hit back hard: “Tom Tiffany is once again telling lies and inventing quotes, because he can’t run on his record. Rep. Hong has never called for abolishing the U.S. Senate. Tiffany cannot produce a single statement where she did, because it doesn’t exist.”

Hmm. Hmm.

Hmm. This post is still up, so, I think it’s safe to say it exists? That she pretty clearly made the statement?

Some Wisconsin fact-checkers are choosing to “pass” on it, though, with one writing in an email to Tiffany: “As always, thanks for the suggestion, but I think we’re going to pass on this one since it’s one tweet and this doesn’t seem to be her position.” Ohh, got it, so her position is just whatever she says, but the things she says aren’t relevant. Makes sense.

Nellie Bowles

Indiana’s Chud Lieutenant Governor stirs the pot

WEST LAFAYETTE, IN — A late-night post on X by Indiana Lt. Governor Micah Beckwith took aim at the state’s public universities, specifically calling out Purdue after he read a message from a parent of a prospective Boilermaker.

In a post Wednesday night, Beckwith said he received a message from a parent who recently toured the West Lafayette campus. In the message, the parent took issue with the university’s marketing of cultural clubs, which included the “LGBTQ club,” in an informational video produced by the university.

“Then on tour had to point out their diversity tree. Then one of the Muslim guides made sure to proudly mention that she was part of the MSA Muslim student org,” Beckwith’s post said, quoting the parent. “Had to explain to my kid that’s the org that caused all of the violence and hate on campuses everywhere. I hate colleges altogether I think.”

…

In his post, Beckwith asked, “Why are state schools in Indiana the worst?”

”Do yourself a favor, send your kids to Hillsdale College where woke indoctrination won’t happen,” Beckwith said.

Jillian Ellison, Journal & Courier

I didn’t even need added context to see that the “parent of a prospective Boilermaker” was insular and hysterical, and that the Lt. Governor’s response was among his more troglodyte utterances.

But the reporter did provide some added context:

The Diversity Tree, outside the Class of 1950 Lecture Hall along Oval Drive, celebrates the National Pan-Hellenic Council and Multicultural Greek Council, according to the Purdue Arboretum website. The tree is frequently painted with the letters of those member organizations.

So the simple presence of the word “diversity” was enough to set off insular parent and Lt. Governor even though the substance was “lots of fraternities and sororities.”

That leaves two objections intact:

  1. Purdue doesn’t cover up the existence of an LGBTQ Club among its cultural clubs.
  2. Purdue allowed a Muslim to conduct a prospective student and parent around campus and did not forbid her to mention her religion and the existence of a Muslim Student Association on campus, even though some insular and hysterical folks idiots freak out at the mere mention of Islam.

There’s good news and bad news in the background to this story. The good news is that Governor Mike Braun backed another hopeful as his running-mate and reportedly is uneasy with Beckwith, whose public profile and exceedingly thin political resumé (from two years on a local library board to Lieutenant Governor) make him a total loose cannon. The bad news is that the GOP in solemn convention thrust this unqualified pentecostal preacher onto the slate anyway. I think his lack of qualification was a feature, not a bug.

I do hope that Hoosier Republicans are appropriately appalled at Beckwith’s poor choice of targets (Purdue is hardly woke; it’s a Land Grant college, strong on agriculture, engineering, veterinary medicine and such, with a culture about like what you’d expect from future farmers, engineers and animal docs) and at his appalling recommendation of a private college in Michigan over an Indiana public university.

Shorts

  • [T]he difference between Americans and Europeans: Americans think a hundred years is a long time, and Europeans think a hundred miles is a long distance. (Paul Kingsnorth, Zen and the Art of Bear Spotting)
  • It seems anyone who takes up the Cross, or even seeks to do so, hears pretty soon about “works righteousness.” (My cyberfriend John Brady on micro.blog)
  • “Fidel Castro was a billionaire. Putin is a billionaire. The leaders of communist regimes are always rich. They steal and rob from those they govern,” – Ted Cruz. And Trump? (Andrew Sullivan)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

Sophie’s Choice

Sanity returns from exile

[Indiana Fever’s Sophie] Cunningham doesn’t hate trans people, she said, but “I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

Kat Rosenfield.

There was a half-hearted effort to cancel Cunningham over this. It seems to have flopped, though perhaps it still has a spasm or two left. But not only did she get away with this commonsensical opinion, she got away with the truth of “biological men” instead of the shibboleth “trans women.”

And when two girls showed up at the Fever-Storm game in Seattle Tuesday, sporting “Thank you Sophie” signs, and the Storm’ co-owner called them “f*****g insane,” the co-owner got fined and banned from the next five Storm games!

I wouldn’t mention all this but for one thing that I can only reluctantly acknowledge: a lot of stupid taboos have fallen, a lot of euphemisms are barely murmured any more, since Donald Trump took occupancy in the White House. I guess there’s too little energy left for fussing about shibboleths when there’s a genuine menace reigning in the Oval Office.

I’m nowhere near prepared to excuse Trump for his transgressions because of that, but I’m prepared to recognize a correlation that feels even to hostile, never-Trump me, like causation.

Read the whole Rosenfield piece if you want to see how things have turned right-side-up again.

[UPDATE: This was first published calling the Seattle team the “Aces.” I think that’s the Las Vegas franchise. I’m enjoying the WNBA, but I don’t have all the franchise names down pat.]

Oh, damn! We were hoping the maniac was a white Christian!

An Islamist terrorist drives a van into a Berlin Pride parade, killing one person and injuring dozens more. And how is it reported? Much of the media went with the usual formulation: that the attacker might as well have been a self-automated vehicle. The white van “didn’t exactly hit the parade,” one typical report went, but as it drove through the parade it “attacked the people who were going away from the parade.”

As I have had cause to say too many times, this is something which, from Stockholm to Nice, is best understood as the “naughty van” phenomenon. If a van or car is driven into a crowd by an Islamist, you can swiftly tell who the culprit is because the vehicle will be talked about as though it suddenly took on a life of its own and began a rampage.

…

The organizers of the Pride parade gave a press conference in which they admitted that they had hoped the perpetrator had been a white Christian man ….

Douglas Murray.

I read the other day that something like 58% of Muslims in America disapprove of Islamoterrorism. That was supposed to reassure me, but I wondered why it wasn’t 98%. And it didn’t help that the 58% is inert because they are threatened by the terrorists.

I just don’t want to hang around people like that

In February, a Pew Research Center poll found that white evangelical Protestants were the only large religious group in America in which a clear majority still supported all or most of Trump’s plans and policies.

And this brings me to perhaps the least shocking statistic in America. The Billy Graham Center Research Institute at Wheaton College in Illinois recently released polling data showing that almost half — 48 percent — of Gen Z adults surveyed said that Christians’ support for Trump made them less likely to want to attend church, at least to some degree.

David French

Stupid laws make stupid problems

Local news, mid-north Indiana: Recount Commission rejects Copenhaver’s demand to subpoena voters

I am pleased. District 23 is, I believe, pretty solidly “red.” If I were a Democrat (and lived in that District), I likely would have reasoned:

No way is a Democrat getting elected in my district. The best I can do is pull a Republican primary ballot and vote for the less objectionable Republican, the one not backed by Trump because he stood up to Trump.

I’m given to understand that such a vote is against Indiana law. A stupid law: “Don’t register by party but don’t you dare pull the ballot of the party we don’t think you really in your heart-of-hearts belong to.”

The Indiana GOP, however, appears prepared to require registration by party instead of sensibly abolishing the ban on crossover voting.

What Team Copenaver should have done was deploy poll-watchers to challenge those wicked, wicked Democrats who want to be represented by the less bad Republican if they can’t have a Democrat. Then the voters could have pulled a Democrat primary ballot. But no, Team Copenhaver assumed that Trump would carry their gal over the finish line first, and decided only after a narrow loss that the VAR refs shouldn’t count the only vote those wicked Democrat cross-overs cast, disenfranchising them utterly.

The campaign was dirty on both sides, and Deery’s ads were dirtier than Copenhaver’s by my lights.

I hate politics.

Spear Phishing

An AI model doesn’t need to breach a hardened network to do catastrophic damage. It only needs to talk an employee into opening the door. And the victims won’t be only governments and businesses. They will be ordinary people — the elderly, yes, but also anyone busy enough to answer an email or a message on Slack or WhatsApp on autopilot. Many have learned to spot the tells of a mass-produced scam. Few are ready to spot an attack written for an audience of one.

Jeremy Philip Galen, Richard Whaling, AI is gaining ability to personalize cyberattacks, enabling phishing at scale – Washington Post

Data Center Defamation

Some billionaire named Kevin O’Leary (I guess if you watched Shark Tank you may know of him) announced his plan to build a 40,000 acre data center in a remote part of Utah. Opposition predictably arose:

With the controversy heating up, O’Leary and Palandjian had a choice. They could have offered to meet with the project’s opponents and laid out for them the various ways their data center would mitigate their fears. They could have stated publicly something Palandjian told me when I spoke to him—that the permitting process was just in its beginning stages. “Our permit applications will all be a matter of public record, and in some instances, we’ll have hearings that will be open to the public, where the public will have a voice. We welcome a healthy dialogue and a healthy debate,” he added.

But they didn’t do that. Instead, O’Leary went on Fox News and Tucker Carlson’s podcast and accused Kanter and Finlayson, both of whom have deep roots in Utah, of working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. O’Leary is convinced—and he’s hardly alone—that China is funding data center opponents, hoping to slow down the U.S. while it tries to catch up in the race for AI supremacy. There was no publicly available evidence, however, that Kanter and Finlayson were doing China’s bidding. That didn’t stop O’Leary. During one of his appearances on Fox, he said, “They should rename this thing ‘Alliance for a Better China in Utah’ after you look at how much money is coming out of China pouring into this organization.” It wasn’t until Kanter and Finlayson threatened to sue for defamation (which they ultimately did) that O’Leary and Fox acknowledged that they had no proof for this allegation, and issued an apology.

…

Is it any wonder that people are up in arms about all the data centers that are proliferating around the country? Big Tech has never been known for its transparency and accountability, and that is especially true as they rush to build multibillion-dollar data centers to satisfy the voracious needs of AI. Data center developers have bought up land in secret, forced local politicians to sign nondisclosure agreements, and then steamrolled their way to permits and zoning changes ….

Joe Nocera in the Free Press.

(The idea of public officials entering into nondisclosure agreements with billionaire developers gives me a major case of the willies, by the way. Leave it to a retired lawyer to pick that out for highlighting.)

Memento Vivere

The most obvious threat of further confusion about what it means to be alive is posed by artificial intelligence. We often describe AI tools as “thinking.” Some of the advocates and enthusiasts of AI suggest that it is conscious. And we know that people can easily become convinced that it is “alive” in some meaningful way. The famously skeptical atheist Richard Dawkins believes that AI is conscious, capable of complex thought, and alive enough to experience death. What it means to be alive is clearly less obvious to people than it used to be.

…

If a machine is better at “caring” than we are, we are bad at caring. If robots can cure our loneliness, we have more problems than loneliness. If we think AI will improve aspects of our humanity, we do not understand humanity very well. In this context, memento mori is not useless, but it would be more useful to bring memento vivere into the conversation.

…

It’s very possible that if we cannot distinguish between what is alive and what is not, or understand why someone would want to use the good silver, we are not doing much better than unlimited pancakes.

Elizabeth Stice, Memento Vivere – Front Porch Republic

Having been drawn in by the title and that gorgeous illustration at the top, I almost didn’t read this. Shift your mental gears, or suspend incredulity, and savor it.

Shorts

  • [D]octrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief …. (Marilynne Robinson in one of the Gilead novels)
  • [John Williamson] Nevin … depicted Winebrenner as a religious entrepreneur, daring to invent a new and competing church: “It is felt to be as easy to start a new Church, as it is to get up a new moral or political association under any other (Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity)
  • All power tends to coopt and absolute power coopts absolutely. (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue)
  • River Page, Welcome to Secular Sharia (The Free Press)
  • Tact is to lie about others as you would have them lie about you. (Oliver Herford)
  • [T]he last thing Americans need right now is another reason not to make out. (Faith Hill, The Horrible Rise of the Makeout Police. For the record, I don’t think she made her case.)
  • I’m telling you, most Protestants or Catholics today, if they were to time-travel back to [western Europe, 1450-1650], would be tempted to run into the arms of Voltaire. (Rod Dreher, singing the praises of Carlos Eire, Reformations)
  • “We spent $3,000 or $4,000 an acre on the Old Vineyard,” Mr. Hirsch recalled in 2005. “That wouldn’t get you through the paperwork today.” (Quoting David Hirsch, vineyard pioneer of California’s Sonoma coast, who died Tuesday at 81)
  • He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring. (Katie Kingsbury, NYT opinion editor, of Ross Douthat, who’s leaving the Times after 17 years to join CBS 60 Minutes)
  • The problem today is we value what’s countable rather than what’s important. (David Brooks)
  • Americans of all political stripes are sick and tired of pretending they can’t see the emperor’s whole entire ass. (Kat Rosenfield)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

Somehow waiting for Something

Somehow waiting for something.

I find right now it can be hard to speak about anything going on in the world: it’s all moving so fast, very little seems clear, and there is a strange indefinable sense that we are all somehow waiting for something.

Paul Kingsnorth

I suggest we’re waiting for two tangled somethings:

  1. See whether, and how, and how radically, AI shakes up the world as we’ve known it.
  2. See if the tech sector bubble (AI market valuation collectively has reached $27 trillion) bursts and worry #1 flees like a dream in the night.

With all the buzz and confidently-voiced narratives, it’s easy to forget that AI has not yet been profitable, and may never be profitable, but is up to its eyeballs in debt or in equity that likely never will generate enough free cash flow to justify it.

Running on steroids

It was on Wall Street that Luana Lopes Lara, the 30-year-old co-founder of Kalshi, was inspired to start a prediction-markets exchange. As an intern at hedge funds such as Five Rings Capital and Citadel Securities, she was baffled to find fund managers building elaborate portfolios to take positions on forthcoming elections and interest-rate decisions. Kalshi’s users bet directly on events instead. “What we are building is a financial exchange where anyone from a Robin Hood trader to Goldman Sachs to someone in an MIT dorm could trade directly in what their thesis was about the future,” Ms Lopes Lara says.

Among amateur traders, prediction markets have taken off. Everyone from students to delivery drivers seems to be having a flutter. Kalshi processed $33bn of trades in June, according to the Block, a data provider. Its main rival, Polymarket, did $10.7bn on its crypto-based international exchange, plus $3.3bn on its regulated American version. These are tiny sums next to those on big derivatives exchanges. But they are growing fast (see chart). Kalshi and Polymarket are reportedly fundraising at valuations of $40bn and $15bn.

The Economist. I’m pretty certain I’ve voiced by hatred of gambling, and gambling apps, and perhaps even Kalshi and Polymarket by name. But I confess to not having connected them to what was already going on at hedge funds.

Our “healthy” economy is running on steroids and crack even beyond what I thought. For “hedge funds” are available only to accredited and institutional investors (who can afford getting hosed) while Kalshi and Polymarket are available to any random chud. That democratic gesture bodes ill for just about everyone but the owners of Kalshi and Polymarket.

Barbarian art-destroyers

Many fresco paintings were whitewashed away in the so-called Enlightenment; it was that same Enlightenment, in its sanguinary French eruption, that smashed priceless stained glass windows in churches and cathedrals across the country. “Four fifths of [man’s] greatest art,” said Henry Adams, was created in those supposedly dark days, to the honor of Jesus and Mary. The Enlightenment destroyed more great art than it produced, and what the harbingers of the novus ordo saeclorum did not get around to destroying they slandered.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Mature enough for the humanities

I was having a blast. I started looking forward to my evening ‘community service’ with enthusiasm. This was what education was supposed to be like. But why was it happening here, instead of with the young geniuses I was teaching during the day?

Here’s the kicker. When I talked to other Stanford faculty members who were teaching community classes, they all had the same experience.

The adults were more impressive than the college students.

Maybe that wouldn’t have been true if I’d been teaching calculus or computer science or engineering. But anything related to the arts and the humanities needed—and deserved—a mature mind with some experience of the world before it could bear fruit.

Ted Gioia

The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan evidently has taken some artistic license in telling a story about men and women who never actually lived and the war they never actually fought as related by an ancient oral tradition attributed to Homer, a poet who (probably) did not exist. I am not at all sure that a military historian is the person I would consult to evaluate a story about sea monsters and one-eyed giants and witches who (3,000-year-old spoiler alert!) turn men into pigs. In a mythological milieu in which the Greeks’ chief lightning guy turns himself into a swan to rape an entirely different Spartan queen (queen of Sparta is one of the toughest jobs in mythology), you’re telling me that the actor formerly known as Ellen Page cannot play the role of a scrawny Greek redshirt who gets left behind on the beach to take one for the team? If you’re going to complain about Sinon, maybe start with the fact that the character does not appear in the original Odyssey at all—he is imported from the Aeneid.

Kevin D. Williamson, who I’ll read even when he’s writing about a movie I don’t plan to see.

Elena Kagan

I keep and regularly review a list of my truly unpopular opinions — not the edgy things one says or write in hopes of being thought courageous, but the things one dare not say or write in the current milieu.

This is not one of them, though it may be a bit edgy in “conservative” (whatever that term means after ten years in the Trumposcene) circles: Justice Elena Kagan is more than just one of three “liberal” justices on the Supreme Court. She is a diplomat, with stratospheric emotional intelligence, who managed to make conservative students feel welcome at Harvard Law and not infrequently attended Federalist Society meetings. When I hear discussions of SCOTUS decisions, I frequently wonder how Justice Kagan shaped them behind the scenes.

I’ll likely be gone before she is, but I suspect she will go down in history as one of the most consequential justices of the court — top decile at least.

UPDATE: On Tuesday the 28th, Josh Blackmun conveniently published this brief piece on Justice Kagan, which harmonizes well with my view of her.

Mission Creeps

Amnesty International, which once “enjoyed a reputation for defending prisoners of conscience and upholding human rights for all,” appears to be succumbing to succumbing to mission creep.

This has been most clearly demonstrated by Amnesty International UK’s publication on July 8 of a report called “A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK.”

The report branded more than 100 groups as “anti-rights,” including 51 that are dedicated to protecting the freedoms of women and gay people but are dismissed as “gender critical.” The common characteristic of these organizations is that they acknowledge the fact that human beings cannot change sex and that the rights of women and gay people are underpinned by a recognition of biological sex differences. This is apparently sufficient to see them condemned.

Andrew Doyle, Amnesty International UK vs. J.K. Rowling

I’m pleased to see that the push-back is strong.

Get over yourself, JD

The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel criticized Vice President JD Vance’s absenteeism from the Senate, where he is ex officio Senate president. His enforcers came down hard on her:

  • uniparty mouthpiece
  • billionaire lackey
  • corrupt
  • liberal
  • Marxist
  • deep state
  • captive tool
  • liar
  • establishment
  • RINO

She responds:

Can Mr. Vance possibly think this is smart? Successful politicians seek to find new allies, not to alienate longstanding ones, whether elected colleagues, interest groups, the entrepreneurial class or conservative media. Winning is hard enough without a right-on-right cage match. One answer is simply that Mr. Vance is a sensitive bunny. If he wants to be president, he’ll need to get over that.

But the other answer is that Mr. Vance knows his “national conservative” ambitions for the GOP aren’t landing. Republicans are increasingly up in arms over a Vance agenda that sounds like Bernie Sanders. Hence his Vance team’s need to invalidate anyone who disagrees as a “RINO” or a “tool” of special interests or an “elite”—the better to allow them to define what counts as a “real” Republican. A Vance Republican.

Here’s an idea: Make the argument instead. And maybe let others make theirs, too—free of the gaslighting.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, by JD Vance

I was reading Rod Dreher when he “catapulted JD Vance into fame.” Understandably, considering what followed, Dreher and Vance remain close. But even Rod, because he actually cares for Vance, with skin in the game, has written some critical things.

I once cared moderately for Vance, thinking he might reprise the role of Mike Pence. I care for him a little less every week.

Shorts

  • From Barcelona to Bruges by way of Florence, vast swathes of Europe’s once-idyllic cities are a procession of foreigners shopping for souvenirs. Some hilltop villages in Provence or Tuscany now seem to exist chiefly as backdrops for linen-clad types sipping spritzes. … In summer Europeans are not so much residents of their home cities as extras in someone else’s social-media feed. (The Economist)
  • It turns out that when you mix narcissism and nihilism, you create an acid that corrodes every belief system it touches. (David Brooks)
  • Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease. (L.M. Sacasas. This is a periodic, pithy gut-check. It evokes a lot.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

Friday, July 17 Political Potpourri

Department of Injustice

It’s over.

The Justice Department’s most significant case stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol — the seditious conspiracy convictions of high-ranking members of the far right Proud Boys — has officially been erased.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, who presided over the six-month trial that led to the jury convictions, reluctantly granted a Justice Department motion to drop the case on Friday, concluding that he had no power to second-guess prosecutors once they decided to abandon it.

“In light of fundamental separation of powers principles … the proper course here is for the Court simply to grant the motion in full,” Kelly concluded, dismissing the case “with prejudice,” which means a future Justice Department is barred from revisiting the charges.

“No one should mistake the Court’s granting of the Government’s motion for its agreement with those decisions,” the judge added.

Politico (H/T John Ellis)

Grade inflation

Because I want my own students to stretch and because I want an A to make them robustly proud, I’m sparing with that mark, at least by today’s standards. I typically award A’s to no more than a quarter of the students in any class. But I give A- grades to too many of them, and I often feel obliged to tell students, at the start of the semester, that if they’re intent on a G.P.A. close to 4.0, I’m not a safe bet. A few drop the class, and I respect that. Most stay — but they stay knowing what’s what, which saves all of us awkwardness and bitterness.

I shouldn’t have to issue that warning. I shouldn’t be giving only a handful of B+ and B grades. I should be distributing a diversity of marks that speak to the many variations in student performance, even at Duke. It’s not that I want to be harsher; I want to be honest. Isn’t higher education about the pursuit of truth?

Frank Bruni

Ideology #FAIL (and success)

[Incorrigible narcissist and foulmouthed Pastor Douglas] Wilson has been hitting all these notes to a string of wide-eyed interviewers for some time now. But one point deserves scrutiny: his idea for household voting, in which the head of each household would be the sole voter. This is often characterized as the disenfranchisement of women because, for married couples, Wilson would have only the husband vote.

But here’s the funny thing: As marriage rates in America have declined, there are many single, female heads of households, and unmarried women lean ever more Democratic. If Wilson’s household voting plan were implemented, disenfranchising married women, it would empower the Democratic Party for decades and shut Republicans out of the White House.

Exit polling makes this unmistakable. In 2022, for example, scholars from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) summarize:

Fifty-eight percent of married voters supported GOP House candidates while 59 percent of unmarried respondents voted Democratic. Married men and women did not differ significantly from one another: 59 percent of married men and 56 percent of married women voted GOP. But there was a large gap in the unmarried category: A bare majority of unmarried men, 52 percent, voted for GOP candidates; only 31 percent of unmarried women did.

When the AEI scholars looked more closely at state-level races in Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, and Texas, the same pattern held. In all four states, they reported, “non-married women were the most Democratic group and married men the most Republican.”

Bonnie Kristian, Doug Wilson’s Household Voting Plan Could Empower Democrats for Decades (Christianity Today).

I paid a little bit of not unfavorable attention to Wilson prior to my entry into Christian Orthodoxy because he passed for some kind of Calvinist and was amusing. I think he has shifted more extremely to the right since then; I know I’ve changed, so his only interest to me now is as the leader of “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth’s chosen schismatic denomination and as having some affiliation with the current Christian-ish slice of the manosphere and other far-Right trollery.

Mainstream press has been giving a lot of “Be afraid. Be very afraid” attention to Wilson and his group. I don’t entirely buy it, but you really never know which crackpot cabals have the potential to take flight and which can be disregarded safely.

Sometimes, the press coverage itself helps launch things. Do you really think Donald Trump would be President if he hadn’t been broadcast into America’s living rooms as the masterful boss on Apprentice for a couple of decades?

Morally cleansing metal

Somehow, I gather, a $40K hybrid SUV getting 31 mpg, and the intercontinental energy and material flows that brought it into being, are more “green” than a ratty-looking old Volkswagen assembled from cast-off parts, foraged locally, that gets 32 mpg. There is a certain aesthetic of cleanliness that must be adhered to. Better yet, invisibility. To count as green, those ugly chunks of rusting 1970s steel would need to be removed and recycled: melted down in a coal-fired blast furnace and sent across an ocean to become raw material for, say, an electric (i.e., coal-powered) car, to be returned to the U.S. on a diesel-powered container ship. Such details are best kept out of mind; the main thing is that this journey accomplishes a moral cleansing of the metal.

Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive.

One of these ten is not like the others

  • A third man, 28, died Tuesday in St. Augustine, Florida, when a tractor-trailer struck him as he fled federal immigration agents.
  • Since Trump returned to office last year, at least 10 people have died during encounters with immigration agents.

The Morning Dispatch.

Please, Dispatch, do not confuse matters by including cases like the St. Augustine man in statistics about ICE lethality. It may be literally true that this was ”during” an encounter with ICE, but for once I’m having trouble seeing ICE culpability in that death.

The Game is Up

Dear MAGA America:

Just last night, your Lord, God and Savior Donald Trump made it clear yet again that the elections are rigged. He even released a tranche of documents that prove it.

So I don’t see much sense in you going out to vote any more.

Stay home, pop another cold one, turn on some Apprentice re-runs, and leave the voting to us fools who don’t know what time it is.

Yours,

Tipsy

Shorts

  • On Defector, David Roth nailed the president’s style of, um, oratory: “Things come out of Donald Trump’s mouth, then just keep on coming out of it.” And Trump has wed incontinent words to incoherent actions. “The sum of the wreckage this has made is staggering; fixing it will take a long time, or not happen at all. This is just one of those things you have to walk around knowing.” (Via Frank Bruni)
  • [F]or the first time, I’m contemplating the possibility of a Democratic Party that shares none of my values, which include empiricism, free speech, and being able to say words other than “oligarchy,” “Zionist,” and “don’t judge me by my old tweets.” (Jeff Maurer, Any Advice for the Soon-To-Be Politically Homeless?)
  • “Where is the line between opportunism and pragmatism? After January 6, 2021, Graham appeared to break with Trump, saying on the Senate floor, ‘Count me out. Enough is enough.’ A few months later, he acknowledged Trump’s continued hold over the Republican Party. ‘Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no,’ he said. ‘I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.’” (Robert Reich)
  • “Graham’s career arc also showed why so many Republicans of so many different stripes were tempted to embrace Trump. The senator ultimately succeeded in steering an inexperienced, ideologically malleable, and easily flattered president toward many of his own lifelong priorities.” (Benjy Sarlin)
  • To call him “the quintessential politician of this era” is as much a compliment as an insult, recognizing his prodigious retail skill and genius for schmoozing. No wonder Donald Trump, a huckster’s huckster, liked him so much. (Nick Catoggio)
  • The New York Times noted that Trump held only 61 rallies before November 2024, about five times fewer than in 2016. (Persuasion) Grrrr! “five times fewer” is better than “five times less,” but it’s still innumerately incoherent.

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

Semiquicentennial (and other things)

Semiquicentennial

Burnt-Over America

I thought it would be nice to limit this post to observations on the Semiquicentennial but, alas, it was not to be. Only this item and the next are so timely.

I’ve read quite a lot of religious history, including (maybe even disproportionately) the religious history of this nation of heretics. Among the most important influences of American religion is the revivalism and religious ferment of the so-called burnt-over district in New York state, where revival followed revival and where many of our most marginal Christian-ish groups, like Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists, were born amidst a seemingly unchallenged conviction that real Christianity had been lost and needed to be “restored.”

But my focus was on the ferment and spawning of group after group of restorationists. I sort of ignored that “burnt-over district” implies exhaustion of fuel with little left but ashes:

Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) popularized the term: his posthumous 1876 book Autobiography of Charles G. Finney referred to a “burnt district” to denote an area in central and western New York State during the Second Awakening:

I found that region of country what, in the western phrase, would be called, a “burnt district.” There had been, a few years previously, a wild excitement passing through that region, which they called a revival of religion, but which turned out to be spurious. … It was reported as having been a very extravagant excitement; and resulted in a reaction so extensive and profound, as to leave the impression on many minds that religion was a mere delusion. A great many men seemed to be settled in that conviction. Taking what they had seen as a specimen of a revival of religion, they felt justified in opposing anything looking toward the promoting of a revival.

Wikipedia

And indeed, I understand that the former burnt-over district is uncommonly disinterested in religion still today.

Leave it to David French to see this as metaphor for America as a political burnt-over district. People are so much of the mind “I just can’t even” that Trump is getting away with corruption on a scale unprecedented in our history. Meanwhile, antisemitic crypto-communists are ascendent in the Democrat party.

I can scarcely bear to bear to look any more, but through long habit (and a desire for topics readers might find interesting) it’s hard to look away, too.

I personally can’t imagine voting for the party of MAGA or the Democrats, who just when we need them most seem to be succumbing to extremely radical Democratic Socialists of America (i.e., they despise AOC, for instance, as too mainstream) that founder Michael Harrington wouldn’t recognize.

And I don’t even care that I don’t care. I’ve heard that I’m not alone in feeling that way.

In January the president was asked why members of his family had begun doing business overseas during his second term when they had sworn off doing so during his first. If perceptions of influence-peddling were enough to put them off the practice once before, why would he and they engage in it orgiastically now?

“I found out that nobody cared,” he replied, matter-of-factly.

That’s classic Trump. On the one hand, it’s a pristine vista onto a criminal mind. Moral misgivings about monetizing one’s public office are nowhere in sight, nor is there any interest in setting a good example or anxiety about the civic consequences of letting an appearance of impropriety go uncorrected. To him, the question is simply whether the crime, once committed, is likely to go unpunished. If so, proceed.

On the other hand, he’s right. For all intents and purposes, nobody cares.

Nick Catoggio, who first turned my mind to this morose thought. Then French added the metaphor and cemented it.

I’m burnt over on politics. Maybe you are, too.

Pray for America. I do so daily — not that God would Make America Great Again, but more along the lines that we’d repent, and become good for the long run.

Vive la France!

This is a time for thinking about the things we like and love best about these United States but there is a national shortcoming weighing on me that I feel compelled to mention: Of all the many regrettable political developments of the past dozen years, the most regrettable is the fact that the United States has become such a poor friend and a shabby ally, and not only to the French. Americans sneer at NATO, an alliance organized around a collective-defense provision that has been invoked precisely once in its history: rallying to the defense of the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Americans lament—not without reason—the expense of what seems to many to have been a pointless war in Afghanistan, and we mourn the loss of American lives there. We are less likely to mention the 457 British soldiers who gave their lives in that conflict, the 159 Canadians, the 90 French, the 62 Germans, the 53 Italians, the 44 Poles, the 44 Danes, and the Australians, Spanish, Georgians, Romanians, Dutch, Turks, Czechs, New Zealanders, and Norwegians. When the United States under Joe Biden decided to suddenly quit Afghanistan, our government did so with hardly any consultation with the allies who had fought and died beside us there. It was a blunder and an insult. The same administration blindsided the French with the AUKUS agreement that, among other things, torpedoed a French-Australian submarine project–another blunder, another insult. The succeeding administration, it goes without saying, has done everything within its considerable power to make things worse with its childish displays of incompetence, ingratitude, and resentment. There is a certain horrifying symmetry at work: Donald Trump, a man without friends, presides over a nation without allies–or one that will be without allies if we continue on our current course.

…

We didn’t get to 250 by ourselves. There have been times when the United States has carried the world on its back—and times when the United States has been borne up by our friends and allies. We never forget when it’s been us doing the heavy lifting—but we are, at times, shamefully forgetful of what others have done for us.

…

God bless America, yes. We will need His blessing. 

But, also: God bless the friends and allies who have invested their own blood and treasure in the extraordinary project of liberty that we took up 250 years ago. Vive la France!

Kevin D. Williamson

The Other Stuff

SCOTUS

Right outcome, wrong rationale

It was a grievous disappointment to the sort of person whose interest in Republican politics is coextensive with their interest in “the Great Replacement,” which describes a lot of Trump voters. And it’s no answer to tell them that the decision did nothing more than uphold the law as it’s stood for ages. The point of the revolution is to overturn the law as it’s stood for ages. What do you think the word “postliberal” means, exactly?

…

Jonah Goldberg is correct that the new right’s difficulty with that language resembles the left’s difficulty with the Second Amendment more so than conservatives’ difficulty with abortion: “It can’t mean what it says because I really don’t want it to!”

…

Liberalism cares about process, postliberalism cares only about results … Conservatives wouldn’t want a court full of hacks and chuds but postliberals would welcome it.

Nick Catoggio

Because I’m a conservative (i.e., a “right-liberal”) who cares about process, I’m going to eat my words about a result I liked. I wrote: “I’m glad SCOTUS decided the birthright citizenship case as it did because I think the language of the citizenship clause is clear” (italics added). I now, reluctantly, retract that.

I’m reluctant because I think that the Citizenship clause of the 14th amendment is clear enough that we don’t need to look at its “legislative history.”

But there’s a canon besides that “textualist” one: avoid constitutional decisions if there’s a narrower basis. In this case, one or two twentieth-century statutes recognizing birthright citizenship would have trumped Trump’s Executive Order and disposed of the case, leaving the constitutional question for another day should our MAGA Congress repeal those statutes. This narrower statutory basis was what Justice Kavanaugh advocated in his concurrence.

My only excuses for this error are: (1) all the buzz was about the 14th amendment; (2) my perception of the clarity of that amendment’s citizenship clause riveted my attention.

I’m pretty happy with Justice Kavanaugh. I deplore his underage binge-drinking, but he’s not underage any more, and as another underappreciated public figure (not to mention sundry songsters) once said when asked to explain a blemish on his youthful record, “when I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish.”

(David Post at the Volokh Conspiracy blog also commends Kavanaugh’s approach. Some Thoughts on the Court’s Opinion(s) in the Birthright Citizenship Case. I got there before he did, but I’ve been aggregating thing for another multi-topic blogpost.)

The timing couldn’t be worse

Speaking of SCOTUS decisions, I’ve lamented that the “Unitary Executive” theory is being so vigorously exercised by this particularly corrupt and personalist administration, but I sort of assumed the theory simpliciter was correct, probably because it’s pretty easy to understand and apply, partly because it has been supported even by my (non-MAGA) conservative tribe.

Now that it’s 11:59 on the Unitary Executive doomsday clock, I’m reconsidering my position.

[T]here is no question that the federal government needs to delegate authority to officials with the knowledge, skills, and expertise needed to run a complex modern state, and that Congress ought to be able to play a role in protecting that delegated authority.

Francis Fukuyama. See also George Will, Lawrence Lessig & Cass R. Sunstein, and Federalist Papers 51 (James Madison) (not all of which I’ve read as I write)

Donald Trump has demonstrated that he doesn’t really care about running our complex modern state so long as he’s serviced by Cabinet members and agency heads who will tongue-shine his shoes and he can line his pockets with impunity. Even if SCOTUS is right about this, the timing could hardly be worse.

Why the carve-out for the Fed?

For my money, one of the worst decisions of the term came (fittingly) on the same day as Slaughter, and it nicely illustrates the difference between ad hoc, bad-faith reasoning and its opposite. That was Trump v. Cook, the 5-4 decision in which Roberts, along with Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberals, held that Lisa Cook of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors could remain in her position while she fights Trump’s attempt to fire her. This, in effect, creates a carve out for the Federal Reserve from the presidential firing power enhanced by Slaughter. Why does the Fed alone receive such special protection? Because, Roberts argued, “the appearance of independence is key to the Federal Reserve’s design.” That’s true. But then how is an independent Fed compatible with the Constitution when the ostensible independence of other agencies is supposedly incompatible with the Constitution?

The argument appears to be that the consequences of undermining the appearance of Fed independence would be bad for American monetary policy and stability. No doubt it would be. But if it’s legitimate to think in terms of the consequences in the case of denying Fed independence, why not when it comes to denying the independence of other federal agencies? The distinction sounds arbitrary to me—unless one grants the Marxist premise that it’s perfectly “normal” for capital to warp the rules of the capitalist system around itself. (I hate granting Marxist premises, but when reality vindicates them, what else am I supposed to do?)

Damon Linker, Two Cheers for the SCOTUS Term.

It’s hard to argue with Linker on this. “Just an eensy-weensy fourth branch to protect money” has a foul odor to it.

Wooden Ships

(Song of my youth that I love)

If you smile at me, I will understand  
'Cause that is something everybody everywhere does  
In the same language  
   
I can see by your coat, my friend  
You're from the other side  
There's just one thing I got to know  
Can you tell me please, who won?  
   
Say, can I have some of your purple berries?  
Yes, I've been eating them for six or seven weeks now  
Haven't got sick once  
Probably keep us both alive  
  
Wooden ships on the water, very free and easy  
Easy, you know the way it's supposed to be  
Silver people on the shoreline, let us be  
Talkin' 'bout very free and easy  
   
Horror grips us as we watch you die  
All we can do is echo your anguished cries  
Stare as all human feelings die  
We are leaving, you don't need us  
  
Go, take your sister then, by the hand  
Lead her away from this foreign land  
Far away, where we might laugh again  
We are leaving, you don't need us  
  
And it's a fair wind blowin' warm  
Out of the south over my shoulder  
Guess I'll set a course and go

Crosby, Stills & Nash, or one of its reshufflings, Wooden Ships. Sorry that my stylesheet renders the lyrics monospaced, like a typewriter.

Buy Me a Coffee or Substack? Well, it depends.

I have never quite brought myself to the point of saying I will never move to Substack. The reason? Because I know I could make a lot more money on Substack than I make by using Buy Me a Coffee. Indeed, people remind me of this! My friend Freddie deBoer wrote to me recently to say that a post of mine would have done gangbusters on Substack — which would have meant a lot of people impulse-buying subscriptions. That’s the thing about being in that platform ecosystem: thanks to network effects, you get the impulse buyers. That does not happen on Buy Me a Coffee. You all have had to be really intentional about supporting me, which is a great thing. 

Why is it a great thing? Because by writing on the open web and merely asking for support, I have wholly escaped the pressures that come when people have paid money to see your writing and therefore have certain expectations for what you say and how you say it. Also escaped: that other kind of pressure that comes when people really like one particular post and show their liking with money — which plants the idea in the back of your head that you need to write more posts like that … whether you really want to or not. By contrast, y’all have supported me because you see what the whole package is, and know what you’re getting and are likely to continue to get. That’s really wonderful. So I have every reason to keep writing for the open web and merely requesting/hoping for your contributions.

Well, every reason but one, anyway. Why haven’t I forsworn Substack? Simple: I’m afraid that when I retire next year and take a big financial hit, I’ll be poor, or significantly poorer anyway, unless I hawk my wares on that platform. Which is pathetic. That attitude is unworthy of a mature Christian man.

So — taking a deep breath here — I solemnly affirm before God and my fellow humans that I will never write on Substack. There, I said it. If no one supports my writing I’ll work as a greeter at Walmart — but as for my personal online writing, I pledge my troth to the open web! You heard it here first.

Alan Jacobs. I’m glad I can write as I wish, not as readers might wish, and not for money.

Secularization ——> Anxious Religiosity

Whatever you heard in the early 2000s, reports of the death of transcendence have been greatly exaggerated. Secularization seems instead to provoke anxious religiosity, like a bird with no place to land. The hallowing of the sacred flame at Gettysburg is matched by an equally intense desacralizing instinct, yet even that zealous iconoclasm has a mystic quality of its own.

When I visited the Hudson Valley School painter Thomas Cole’s house in upstate New York, I noticed a tag informing me that an object had been “owned by an enslaver” (or words to that effect). I was struck by the implication that the object was stained somehow. We might not use the word “sin” anymore, but the concept is still there. The extreme scrupulosity, combined – naturally – with an Indigenous land acknowledgment, wasn’t even for Thomas Cole, but for the people who had owned the house before him. My goodness, I thought, how stressful it must be to live in a constant state of confession of an ancestor’s sins. The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Hannah Long, Hallowed and Haunted

Shorts

  • The Republican Party worshiped the god of political expediency. Once political power became their idol, they lost control. (Nancy French, Ghosted)
  • I got a head start because my ancestors started practicing miscegenation before it was fashionable … In my symbolic family tree there’s a place for Mahatma Gandhi, Anna Akhmatova, Duke Ellington, Mister Rogers, Sappho, Anthony Bourdain, Julian of Norwich, Virginia Woolf, Miguel de Unamuno, Rainer Maria Rilke, Audrey Hepburn, Willa Cather, Cary Grant, Søren Kierkegaard, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Arendt, and many others. (Ted Gioia, reflecting on his identity as an American both in terms of physical inheritance and of chosen influences.)
  • Was Jeannie Gates right about America?
  • “If you invested $10,000 in Trump coin on January 20th, 2025, it would be worth $415 today. You lost everything. He made half a billion,” – Chris Mowrey via Andrew Sullivan.
  • “[Trump has] made more money in one year than his entire life combined. That’s not business, it’s corruption,” – Fred Wellman via Andrew Sullivan.
  • “Intel came in. They had a problem. I said, ‘I can solve your problem, but I want 10% of the company,’” – Donald Trump via Andrew Sullivan.
  • Facebook, Fox and MSNBC have done to our parents what they warned computer gaming would do to us. (Jonah Goldberg)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

UPDATE: Boy, that’s kind of embarrassing. I thought I had finally figured out what this big birthday was called, and I published this using the term “semisesquicentennial.” That was so wrong that I couldn’t bear leaving it – or pretending it never happened.