Category: Political Matters

Feast of St. Stephen …

… in the Christian East, that is. The West commemorated him yesterday.

A profitable political pairing

Two Right-coded voices, Glenn Loury and Ilya Somin, take up recent events, emblemized by Tucker Carlson’s softball interview of Nick Fuentes, and reach similar conclusions: a fundamental rift in the Right is between universalists and particularists/nationalists.

For figures such as Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and perhaps the single most influential moral philosopher within conservative intellectual circles, conservatism begins with the claims of natural law. Its founding premise is the inherent dignity of every human being—an anthropology that descends from classical philosophy, Christian theology, and the Enlightenment. For George, conservatism is first a moral project: It safeguards life, liberty, marriage, family, and religious freedom because these institutions reflect universal truths about the human person. George has spent his career articulating these principles in philosophy, public policy, and constitutional thought. His is an approach to conservatism that emphasizes the primacy of the permanent things, the universals that transcend time and place.

Opposing this universalist strand is the ascendant nationalist wing of the right—a coalition influenced by the populist energies that surged after 2016 and represented by Tucker Carlson, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, and polemicists such as John Zmirak. This faction sees conservatism less as an expression of moral philosophy than as a defense of Western civilization: a concrete culture, a historical inheritance, with its own people, faith, memories, and vulnerabilities. This conservatism is particularist rather than universalist. It begins not with abstract principles but with cultural loyalties. Whereas George begins with human dignity, Carlson begins with civilizational survival. Whereas George sees imperatives and violations of the moral law, Carlson sees a beleaguered West beset by global elites, porous borders, and cultural disintegration.

Glenn C. Loury, Tucker and the Right

[T]he root of the problem is the Trump-era shift of most of the American right towards ethno-nationalism. For reasons outlined in detail in my recent UnPopulist essay on this topic, nationalist movements are inherently prone to anti-Semitism and other forms of racial and ethnic bigotry. It is not surprising that anti-Semitism among MAGA conservatives has risen alongside nativism and bigotry towards other minority groups, such as Indian-Americans.

As I explained in the UnPopulist article, the only sure way to avoid this problem is to reject ethnic nationalism and instead recommit to the universalist principles of the American Founding, which the Heritage Foundation once claimed to stand for, but has more recently betrayed ….

Ilya Somin, Lessons of the Heritage Foundation’s Implosion

As I skimmed Lourie’s article (which I’m pleased to see in First Things, which under R.R. Reno has been leaning increasingly toward particularist nationalism), I felt a flush of shame (or was it the shiver of a near-miss?) as I looked back on my admiration of “paleoconservative” thinkers and commentators — guys who now appear to be the ancestors of today’s ethno-nationalist types.

Even now, I sense the fortress America appeal of the nationalist appeal. But when I watch ICE trying to evict putative undesirables from the fortress before we pull up the drawbridge, and see antisemitism rising among the nationalists as well, I can’t help coming down on the side of human dignity: Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

Slouching Toward Something Worse

[Ben] Shapiro originally hired [Candace] Owens at The Daily Wire, thereby helping to launch her career into the stratosphere. The fact that he now feels the need to try and drive a stake through her heart “contains the entire story of the conservative movement within it,” in the words of Substacker John Ganz.

…

[Rod] Dreher longs for Vance to take a firm stand against Fuentes and his followers. But will he?

So far, there’s no sign of it. And yes, that includes in the recent UnHerd interview, where Vance told Fuentes (in the debased public rhetoric favored by populists) to “eat shit.” The vice president made clear that his rightward volley was provoked, not by any of Fuentes’ political views, but by him insulting Vance’s (South Asian) wife. “Anyone who attacks my wife,” Vance declared, will be attacked in turn, “whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes.”

That’s right: the sitting vice president of the United States made clear he was equally inclined to rise up in defensive anger against a former White House Press Secretary from the mainstream opposition party and a man who regularly proclaims his admiration for Adolf Hitler and loathing for Jews.

I’m afraid anyone placing their hopes in Vance serving in the role of gatekeeper or force for moderation is going to be sorely disappointed.

…

It’s not clear a right-populist political movement needs policy intellectuals at all. After all, intellectuals are elites who think they sometimes know better than the elected Leader of the People. That is unacceptable. What a right-populist political movement needs, instead, is propagandists to justify what the Leader already intends to do.

Damon Linker

In case you’ve forgotten, do not trust any high-generality assessment of JD Vance by Rod Dreher. Dreher “discovered” Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, and his discovery elevated mediocre sales to stratospheric sales. He and Vance are now friends, Rod feels a personal investment in him, and Vance probably feels a debt of gratitude to Rod for launching his explosive political rise.

So Dreher is just not capable of objectivity about his friend, and that’s probably to his credit; dissecting friends is kinda reptilian — and certainly is a deviation from the conservative tendency on Jonathan Haidt’s Loyalty/betrayal moral foundations axis.

Too ad hoc to be fascist

Take the word fascism, properly applied to Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy, and to some extent beyond. The fasces were the bundles of rods carried by Roman lictors: symbols of punishment and magisterial authority, but in modern times also of a tightly unified society controlled from above, and organized in corporate form. The desire of totalitarians everywhere is to achieve harmonization, with all of society marching in military cadence under the guidance of an omnipresent government.

But the Trump administration is more interested in blowing up the state than in extending its power.

…

He is, to be sure, cruel and malicious, but unlike the others, has no real governing vision.

…

Trump himself is not Mussolini, or Hitler, or Orbán ….

Eliot A. Cohen, America Needs a Mirror, Not a Window

French Integrity

The headline read, “What It’s Like to Experience the 2016 Election as Both a Conservative and a Sex Abuse Survivor.”

Nancy French, Ghosted. As the book blurb has it, “when she was unwilling to endorse an unsuitable president, her allies turned on her and she found herself spiritually adrift, politically confused, and occupationally unemployable.”

Part of the reason for David French and Nancy French becoming personae non grata in much of the North American white Evangelical world was candor, like in the cited article Nancy wrote, and their various relatively unflinching looks at topics like sexual abuse at a very popular Evangelical summer camp for kids. I learned recently that they fairly quietly have moved out of their deep red part of Tennessee to the Chicago area (I was aware that Tennessee Evangelicalism exhibited pretty unrelenting and vocal antipaty to Frenches). That move won’t do much for Nancy’s work as a ghost-writer in Evangelical and Conservative circles, but they should at least be able to find a Church whose Christianity matches theirs (Reformed-tinged Evangelical) without the political tribalism. (That’s my read on it.)

(I have speculated that David might be on the road to Rome, too.)

The differences between their Evangelical/Reformed piety and my Orthodoxy manifests in my ill-ease with some of their takes on things (I will never again trust a David French endorsement of a movie or television series, for instance), but I’ll give them high marks for trying to act with integrity (which endears them to me despite reservations).

Quantum physics

Quantum entanglement blows my mind. How do they even find the entangled needles in the cosmic haystack to study entanglement?

That they manage to find and study them makes me sympathetic to the predictions that we’re going to figure out everything — predictions I nonetheless think are ultimately delusional.

Trying to deal with things like this has sent me back to Iain McGilchrist for a second round of mind-bending, this time via The Matter with Things.

I’m outvoted

A few days ago, I objected to the emerging cult of Charlie Kirk.

For what it’s worth, one of America’s top religious news experts, Terry Mattingly, thinks Kirk’s assassination was the top (American) religion story of the year, even higher than the selection of an American Pope (because, if I understood Mattingly, Kirk’s death liberates sinister tendencies on the political Right, like antisemitism and political violence, that Kirk was restraining).

The mixture of politics and religion in this theory makes my head hurt, and my eyes avert, but I suspect that Mattingly knows more about Kirk, and about the consequences of his assassination, than I do.

Jingoists and Patriots

The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England. If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even if the Hindoos ruled us.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Shorts

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Christmas Eve

Religion and secularity

The religious/secular distinction is not a neutral set of descriptive categories, and the idea that religion has a greater tendency than the secular to promote violence is not a commonsense observation about the world. Both are ideological constructs that privilege certain Western secularist arrangements.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idoloatry

Don’t try to titrate poison

This French reactionary antisemitism came to a head in 1940, when the Nazis invaded, France surrendered, and Philippe Pétain became the dictator. Right-wing reactionaries, (including the vast majority of French bishops) were all too happy for the regime to enact laws that limited the civil rights of Jews. Many of those same bishops would later regret this when the cruelty of the anti-Jewish legislation became too blatant to ignore. In the end, around 70,000 Jews who had been under the jurisdiction of Vichy France would perish in concentration camps.

Thomas D. Howes, The Catholic Church Has Faced Antisemitism Before

I sometimes worry that populist rabble-rousers, with the roused rabble SWATting and making death threats against recalcitrant authorities, were the inevitable result of the “conservative” politics I long favored.

I don’t think that’s true, but once stung, twice cautious: these days, when I see an opinion piece that seems to make sense, but with comment boxes full of cheering conspiracy theorists and antisemites, I reflexively drop (or at least loosen my grip on) the opinion.

If you’re looking for rigorous logic in that, you’ll not find it. It’s just one geezer’s heuristic.

Primarying faithful legislators

The first time I recall hearing of Charlie Kirk was in connection with “The Falkirk Center,” the name being a portmanteau of “Falwell” and “Kirk.” Yeah, that Falwell. The Junior one. The sleazy one driven out of Liberty University eventually.

So I had a bias against Kirk from the start. No, he didn’t deserve to be murdered. Nowhere near. But 3+ months is long enough. I’m not going to bite my tongue any longer about the him and his Turning-Point-this-and-Turning-Point-that constellation of Christianish MAGA adjuncts.

He wasn’t my cup of tea. His Christianity was substantially alien to any traditional Christianity. I object to him being lionized as a Christian martyr and to the erection of a sort of cult around him. The more I learn about Turning Point shamelesslessly subordinating its version of Christianity to the will of über-pagan narcissist Donald Trump, the more it nauseates me.

All that to introduce much less:

[A]s early as August 18, Charlie Kirk said in an X post: “We will support primary opponents for Republicans in the Indiana State Legislature who refuse to support the team and redraw the maps.” Months later, on the eve of the vote, Trump ratcheted up the warnings to Indiana Republicans, saying as part of a lengthy post on Truth Social: “Indiana Senate ‘Leader’ Rod Bray enjoys being the only person in the United States of America who is against Republicans picking up extra seats. … He’s either a bad guy, or a very stupid one!”

David M. Drucker, Why Trump’s Redistricting Push Failed in Indiana.

The way primary elections tend to turn out the most extreme members of the party base, it’s possible that primarying Indiana Legislators who voted for the will expressed by the people of Indiana, rather than for the imperious wills of Donald Trump and Turning Point Action, will succeed. But I think not. I think the spell is broken. I’m looking forward to three years of quacking.(Yeah, that’s got a bit of wishcasting in it.)

Turning Point just concluded its conference

I suppose if Turning Point USA wanted its conference to make a big splash, it accomplished its mission. But a movement led by a president who made regular appearances in the world of professional wrestling now has rallies that resemble WrestleMania with podcasters, complete with boasts and threats and chest-thumping.

When you book a bunch of clowns, don’t be surprised if you end up with a circus.

Jim Geraghty, Turning Point USA conference was WrestleMania with podcasters

Wherein I register a rare disagreement with Kevin D. Williamson

A person who evacuates is emptying his bowels. A person removed from a place of danger is a person being evacuated. If you have 100,000 people evacuating all at once … well, maybe they won’t notice it too much in Seattle.

Those 100,000 were not ordered to evacuate; they were ordered to leave, to seek safety, to head for the hills, to make for higher ground, etc.

Kevin D. Williamson.

I love Williamson, but he’s lost me on this one. From the Department of Usage Makes Proper, evacuate has become broader than he insists. Even I, a card-carrying curmudgeon, would not use “evacuate” as he does; I’d add “evacuates his bowel” if that’s what I meant.

Having driven my stake in the ground, I confirmed my righteousness: the primary meaning of “evacuate” is to remove or empty.

I completely agree with Williamson on something else, though. After alluding to things like “messaging” in the upcoming election, he simplifies things:

I would like to suggest a relatively simple approach: Democrats should run on a platform of what it is they actually intend to do in office, and that platform should be what they believe to be the right thing. I would offer the same advice to Republicans if they had not made it so perfectly clear that they cannot and will not do any such thing, that their party and their movement is incapable of candor and good faith.

Thoughts at 3 am

That’s a metaphor. I rarely if ever fret about things at 3 am, and it I fret, it’s likelier to be about family or things closer to me than politics.

My current “political” concerns, though, seem to be antisemitism and the quest for certainty — even false certainty preferred to uncertainty.

  • According to the Manhattan Institute’s recent survey of registered Republicans and others who voted for Donald Trump last fall, no less than 25 percent of those under 50 admit—admit—to expressing antisemitic views. Among those over 50, just 4 percent do.

The Nazis gave antisemitism a bad name. The memory of that is fading.

On the quest for certainty, see Gary Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty, Then and Now. This is from Public Discourse, which I formerly visited daily. They seem to be on a bit of a roll, so I’m going to resume that.

The journalistic enterprise

[Bari] Weiss has an impossible dilemma [in running CBS]. She’s in charge of a first-world news organization that aims to hold government accountable (especially when it’s run by Republicans) but was appointed to the position to satisfy a third-world regime led by a demagogic boor who believes “news” should look like … this.

…

“The Failing New York Times, and their lies and purposeful misrepresentations, is a serious threat to the National Security of our Nation,” the president declared this morning. “Their Radical Left, Unhinged Behavior, writing FAKE Articles and Opinions in a never ending way, must be dealt with and stopped. THEY ARE A TRUE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” He didn’t specify the supposed “national security” threat that prompted that, but earlier this month he accused the Times of “seditious, perhaps even treasonous” behavior for reporting on his obviously declining health.

That’s the kind of media Trump wants. Not one where Stephen Miller does more interviews but one where you go to prison if you acknowledge the plainly observable fact that the president sounds addled.

Nick Catoggio

This particularly cursed holiday week kicked off in earnest last night when my father turned his iPad in my direction. On its screen was a terribly disturbing post on X containing two images. In the first, Jeffrey Epstein was hugging and kissing a little girl. In the second, that girl was bound and gagged on a bed.

Dad was rightly outraged and disgusted. He asked me if I’d seen the photos in my time going through the Epstein files. I immediately recognized the first image of Epstein and deduced that it had been Photoshopped from a widely distributed photo of Epstein hugging Ghislaine Maxwell. The second image seemed to be an AI rendering. (To add to the confusion, images reportedly do exist of Epstein cuddling children.) I let him know that the imagery was fake, and a distinctly non-yuletidy conversation ensued. Yes, Epstein was a heinous pedophile and convicted sex offender. Also, the internet is awash in fake, traumatizing slop that’s being used to score points in an ongoing information war. Happy holidays!

Charlie Warzel

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer, Via Peggy Noonan

Shorts

  • In such an ugly time, the true protest is beauty. (Phil Ochs)
  • He is like a strange general who can’t quietly establish camp or dig new fortifications. He shoots his cannon for no reason, just for the sound. (Peggy Noonan describing you-know-who)
  • He just can’t do intimacy. He can’t do reassurance. His fireside manner has always been gasoline. (Andrew Sullivan)
  • Prediction markets may promise clarity, but what they really offer is another way to feel excitement in a world that feels rigged. (Charlie Warzel)
  • Having elevated her in large part for her willingness to say outrageous things about her opponents, people on the right are now surprised by her willingness to say outrageous things about them. (Michelle Goldberg about the rise of toxic influencer Candace Owens)
  • In The Times, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer … mused about Trump’s troubles prosecuting his perceived enemies: “Revenge, it turns out, is a dish best served with evidence.” (Via Frank Bruni)
  • In her newsletter, Stacey Patton recognized the humiliation of the Trump administration’s repeated failures to convince a grand jury of its case against Letitia James: “In federal court, a prosecutor not getting an indictment is like a chef burning cereal.” (Via Frank Bruni)
  • A fundamentalist can see every person who’s wrong as a kind of Patient Zero in a potential pandemic of paganism. (David French)
  • AI Sends School Into Lockdown After It Mistook a Student’s Clarinet for a Gun. (Futurism – H/T TMD)
  • We take the state’s monopoly of violence for granted, but when that monopoly is challenged, people turn to gangsters to keep the peace. Eli Lake, A History of Tough Jews (podcast episode)
  • Why these people are coming our way is that Heritage and some other voices and commentators have embraced big-government populism and have been willing to tolerate antisemitism. (Former Vice President Mike Pence on the (ahem!) evacuation of the Heritage Foundation, with refugees fleeing to a Pence-founded, more traditionally conservative, alternative.)

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Thursday, 12/18/25

Quietly grassing up the neighbor

Of the Bondi Beach terrorist shootings by Muslim men Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram (unconfirmed by police at this writing) and the heroic intervention of one Ahmed al-Ahmed:

Let it be said, and said with firmness and gratitude, that a Muslim fruit seller named Ahmed al-Ahmed rushed one of the gunmen and disarmed him, saving Jewish lives and taking a couple of bullets himself for his trouble. May God bless that brave man. Here is video of him courageously tackling the gunman. This brings to mind something I was told back in 2002 by a Jewish friend who worked in counterterrorism. Be careful not to accuse every Muslim, she said. Some of our best sources are Muslims within Muslim communities who hate what they’re seeing, but know that if they speak out publicly against it, they will be killed. So they come to us quietly.

Rod Dreher

I wish we could figure out what makes many Muslims exemplary citizens, others murderous fanatics. Though I reject Islam as a false religion, I don’t want to think it’s simply that the former don’t take it seriously.

I have a theory, but it’s at a high enough level of generality that it’s not much use, I fear: that Islam, like Evangelicalism, has no authority beyond a sacred text, so Imams/Preachers can twist the text as they wish, limited only by what their congregants will tolerate.

The Other Terrorists

“Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years,” the Center for Strategic & International Studies concluded after examining terror plots in the United States from 1994 to May of this year. “Right-wing extremists perpetrated two-thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.”

Nicholas Kristof, The Lawbreakers Trump Loves (August 29, 2020)

AI moves fast, breaks things

A woman in a service industry, an immigrant to America from Eastern Europe who’s been here about 20 years, took me aside recently. Her eldest child, a senior in high school, is looking around at local colleges. She was worried about AI and asked for advice on what her son might study so that in four years he could get a job. We asked ChatGPT, which advised “embodied in-person work” such as heating and air conditioning technician, pool cleaner. She wasn’t happy with that. She’d worked herself to the bone to get her son higher in the world than she is. She wants him to own the pool.

Peggy Noonan, Trump may be losing his touch

Grievance Memoirs

Political memoirs tend to fall into recognizable categories.

There is the sanitized precampaign memoir, gauzy life stories mixed with vague policy projects and odes to American goodness. There is the postcampaign memoir, usually by the losers, assessing the strategy and sifting through the wreckage. There are memoirs by up and comers who dream of joining the arena and by aging politicos rewriting their careers once more before the obits start to land. There are memoirs by former staff members who realize that proximity to power gives them a good story and memoirs by journalists who chronicle power so closely that they imagine themselves its protagonists.

But a recent spate of books highlights the presence of a new category, one well suited to our time: the grievance memoir. In their books, Eric Trump (“Under Siege”), Karine Jean-Pierre (“Independent”) and Olivia Nuzzi (“American Canto”) are all outraged by affronts real and imagined, fixated on nefarious, often unspecified enemies, obsessed with “the narrative” over the facts and oblivious to their complicity in the conditions they decry.

The authors (a third child embracing on to his father’s legal and political grudges, a former White House press secretary groping for a new brand, a boutique political journalist enmeshed in a self-made scandal) are animated, above all, by a certainty that they’ve been wronged not just by people or institutions but also by broader forces. They are ancillary characters inflating themselves into victims, heroes, even symbols. It is the inevitable memoir style for a moment when everyone feels resentful, oppressed, overlooked — in a word, aggrieved.

Carlos Lozado (who’s famous among his New York Times colleagues as a voracious book-reader).

Add to Lozado’s list a longish article by Jacob Savage in Compact magazine, which Rod Dreher found “one of the most powerful essays I’ve read all year.” Its gist seems to be that straight, white, young men can’t catch a break any more – for reasons predating AI.

Ross Douthat thinks Savage has a point; that Douthat has an opinion suggests that Dreher isn’t just playing Chicken Little again.

I’m fortunate to be chronologically beyond gathering personal straight white male grievance anecdotes (and that my grandson is thrilled at, not resigned to, the prospect of a sort of Shop Class As Soulcraft career).

Are we the baddies?

Remizov and other conservative democrats complain that modern Western liberalism is in fact anti-democratic, as it tramples on national traditions and subordinates national authorities to international ones and to the impersonal forces of globalization.

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism. This book is pretty good at giving the gift to see ourselves as others see us.

When your only tool is anger, every little problem looks infuriating

Trump has never shined in moments that call for dignity and restraint … This is what makes Trump’s post about the Reiners not just despicable and cruel but also bad for the country. In moments of national mourning or trauma, a president can seek to bring people together … But not Trump. He finds the most divisive way to insert himself … His choices … take moments that could be unifying—surely Americans of all political views can agree on the greatness of When Harry Met Sally and The Princess Bride—and turn them into opportunities for anger.

Which is, in effect, Trump’s political project.

David Graham, Trump Blames Rob Reiner for His Own Murder

Shorts

  • I like ebooks because nobody can tell that I’m performative reading. (@restlesslens on micro.blog)
  • Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. (Gustave Flaubert)
  • Insofar is not the same as inasmuch, and I don’t know why the current style is to break the former into three words.
  • I remember mocking people for thinking the Covid vaccine was Bill Gates’ way of getting microchips into us. Hmmm.
  • This is the paradox of politics: Every time you solve a major problem, you’re removing a weapon from your political arsenal. (Peggy Noonan, Trump may be losing his touch)
  • If “TDS” is the tendency to become irrationally obsessed with Donald Trump and project that obsession onto everyone else, then somebody is indeed deranged, and it wasn’t Rob Reiner. (David Graham, Trump Blames Rob Reiner for His Own Murder.
  • A tool always implies at least one small story[:] There is a situation; something needs doing. (L.M. Sacasas)
  • Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it. (L.M. Sacasas)
  • After this awful weekend, Trump has once again lowered the bar for what we can expect from the president. (The Free Press, Mr. President, Don’t Mock the Dead)
  • The odds are good, but the goods are odd. (Advice given to incoming women at Georgia Tech).

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Special Political edition

I’ve mostly been relegating my political points to the “Elsewhere in Tipsyworld” section I’ve been putting in most posts. Today, in honor of the Indiana Senate doing the right thing (and the will of Hoosiers) against the wishes of the President, I bring them back for a cameo appearance.

Backlash

The Indiana Senate did us proud Thursday by rejecting a MAGA redistricting scheme to boost, they thought, the Republican majority from 7-2 to unanimity at 9 Republicans.

There’s much to hate about a norm-breaking mid-decade gerrymander, but the news and commentary coverage tends to omit (a) that norm-breaking is prima facie un-conservative; (b) that the gerrymander would have split up communities that share common concerns, such as splitting my county between two congressional districts and splitting Indianapolis into quarters; and (c) that in a “backlash year” (as 2026 looks likely to be) those 7 current “safe seats” for the GOP would be less safe because Republican voters would be spread thinner across the state.

Indeed, it was (is) my hope that if the legislature did (does) redistrict, heeding POTUS threats over Hoosier preferences, “Backlash 2026” would produce a loss of one or two Republicans in our delegation.

Pareto

  • Pareto improvement: Change benefiting at least one party without harming others.
  • Pareto punishment: Change harming at least one party without benefiting others.

The guy who had The Art of the Deal ghost-written for him knows only the second option.

(H/T Kevin D. Williamson)

I’ve long thought Trump doesn’t know anything about win-win solutions — that making the other guy lose is the only way he can feel he’s won. Williamson puts a more scholarly name on it.

A new personal best (or, likelier, worst)

11 months as president is long enough to get on everyone’s nerves—to disappoint your fans and infuriate your foes. But he’s in a fix, surrounded by mood shifts, challenges and bad signs.

His Capitol Hill base for once and famously began to kick away this summer, with loyalists breaking with him on the Jeffrey Epstein files and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on other issues as well. She’s leaving Congress but not looking like someone who lost her battles with Mr. Trump. His problem: Once someone makes a successful jailbreak, all the other prisoners know a jailbreak is possible. This changes the conversation in the prison yard. Guards are eyed differently, the warden’s mystique is diminished.

Outside Washington Mr. Trump’s base is fighting with itself. America first is saying “I’m not MAGA.” Conspiracists all over: “Israel killed Charlie.” The assassination of Charlie Kirk looks increasingly like an epochal event. Did he understand how much he was holding together the Trumpian right? Without the force of his mediating presence they are cracking up.

I think the world of Peggy Noonan (shared link). She’s both articulate and wise. I’m forever reading her Friday WSJ column and feeling affirmed in what I’d been feeling but hadn’t slowed down to articulate.

But this!? Charlie Kirk was the glue holding America together!? Even just holding the Trumpian right together? It seems impossible.

But a lot of people can’t stop talking about Kirk.

And after this went to press, Indiana’s Senate (40 Republicans and 10 Democrats) rejected the redistricting Trump was demanding (and in support of which his hoodlum minions were terrorizing legislators) by a vote of 31-19.

It lost even before you count the ten Democrats!

(Oddly, Turning Point Action, one of Kirk’s affiliate organizations, was among those pronouncing primary doom on Republicans who rejected the new maps.)

This may set a new personal record for me not grokking what’s going on. And I can’t even say it’s an epiphany because my mind and my gut both reject the idea. I’m a guy with a fork in a soup world, I guess.

But then she turns back into articulate, wise Peggy:

Percolating below, unseen, is the price you pay in time for success. The president’s border triumph will likely weaken his and MAGA’s political position. He shut down illegal immigration on the southern border, which had been more or less open for decades. But it was anger at illegal immigration that kept his base cleaved to him and allied with each other. Remove the issue that made you, and you can no longer use it to gain votes or maintain unity.

This is the paradox of politics: Every time you solve a major problem, you’re removing a weapon from your political arsenal.

What happens when you lose your great issue? What happens when all that remains of that issue is its least popular aspect? Immigration remains in the news only because of brutal deportation practices. It isn’t “build the wall” anymore; it’s “Don’t arrest the poor guy working the line in a second job at the chicken-processing plant.” Americans don’t want that guy thrown out. The longer the deportations continue, the more unpopular and damaging to the administration they will become.

Shorts

  • The Indiana redistricting vote strikes me as a sort of political gag reflex. (Nick Catoggio)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Promotion

I usually put these in my footers at the end of blogs, but they seem worth elevating today:

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan. Hoosiers let their State Senators know that they didn’t want a redistricting. They had many good reasons, whether or not they articulated them. They served as gatekeepers, Trump as a gate crasher.

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. “Demonic Democrats” was the vibe of the push for redistricting.

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.

Barbarian versus conservative

TPUSA

I spent time Thursday listening to Ross Douthat interview Andrew Kolvet, Turning Point USA spokesperson, filling in for Charlie Kirk who was scheduled for the Douthat interview before he was murdered. I registered nothing truly outrageous from Kolvet, but there was inordinate reverence toward Kirk, who literally was styled by Kolvet a “Christian martyr.”

My errands finished, I settled into my chair to finish up my print media reading. Of the Indiana Senate, less than fully enthusiastic about norm-shattering mid-decade redistricting:

Brett Galaszewski, national enterprise director at Turning Point Action, said during a rally at the Statehouse on Dec. 5. “Complacency has set in in this state and has allowed this sequence of events to take place.” … [Lieutenant Governor Micah] Beckwith said then: “I’m on a mission now. … I’m going after senators. I’m going to help anyone who wants to primary these weak senators. (Turning Point) USA is on board.

Based in Lafayette.

I am old and out of touch. I am, for long enough that it has notably remade my mind, an Orthodox Christian; the tropes of Evangelical piety now leave me cold. That, too, puts me out of touch with much in America. And I’m conservative — not Libertarian or populist or MAGA or “religious right” or even, since 2005, Republican.

But be it noted that resistance to rapid, radical change is part of the meaning of conservatism as traditionally understood and as I understand it. By that criterion, Turning Point and MAGA are more barbarian than conservative.

At posting, we’re awaiting the Indiana Senate’s vote. Those who stand fast for conservatism may make me break my record of not giving to major-party candidates.

Not in America, no

It is unconscionable that in a free society, those with the power to arrest and detain are not clearly identifiable as such, with their full faces and names and identity visible. Protestors who wear masks are just as anathema to a liberal democracy, and wearing a mask in such a context should be grounds for arrest. But for the state to be anonymous and lethal is a mark of totalitarian societies, not democracies.

Andrew Sullivan, The American Caudillo

Indeterminate negation

Early on in the Trump era, I treated the Orange Man as an anomaly. Sure, I recognized some prefigurements of the MAGA movement—in George Wallace’s populist presidential campaign in 1968, in Pat Buchanan’s potent paleoconservative challenge to George H.W. Bush’s bid for re-election in 1992. Yet I still tended to view the form of conservatism that dominated the scene from Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 as setting some kind of American standard from which Trump and his supporters diverged.

I no longer look at it that way. As I argued in a New York Times op-ed published last month, taking a longer view enables us to see that Trump marks a return to an older form of conservatism with deep roots in the American past from which Reaganite conservatism can be viewed as an anomaly—one inspired and made possible by the contingencies of the Cold War.

Damon Linker (public post – not paywalled). More:

I’ve had several occasions down through the years to make reference to a little book I brought out at Penn Press in 2014 by the brilliant Bulgarian writer and intellectual Ivan Krastev. The book was called Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest. It’s important for several reasons, but in retrospect mostly because it shows that Krastev noticed a distinctive trend very early, more than two years before the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s first successful presidential campaign—namely, that democratic publics in a wide range of countries around the world had become deeply discontented with those running the show but had little sense of what they wanted as an alternative. To invoke Hegel, this was an expression of an indeterminate negation.

The problem with an indeterminate negation is that it undermines the possibility of dialectical progress. Rather than identifying a problem or mistake committed by the people in positions of authority, kicking them out, and elevating an alternative set of elites to course correct, we end up with, instead, one spasm of disgusted rejectionism followed by another, and then another, as if the very fact of being ruled by anyone at all who must make choices and trade-offs under conditions of constraint is itself a fatal flaw or defect demanding punishment.

If that ‘indeterminate negation” stuff had been a sermon, I’d have thought I was being targeted by the preacher.

I’m very unhappy with the GOP, my political home for most of my life, but not for the last twenty years. I cannot support the Democrat party if only because of its long and deeply-ingrained support for permissive abortion, but its other liberal groin pieties put me off, too. I cling without real hope of rescue to the loosely Christian Democrat ideas of the American Solidarity Party, aware that they’ve been no panacea in Europe when tried.

Maybe the Psalmist was right. I cling to that, too.

Seven (more) Deadly Sins

Here are the seven deadly sins according to Gandhi (often called the Seven Social Sins):
1. Wealth without work — gaining riches without contributing or earning them.
2. Pleasure without conscience — seeking enjoyment without moral awareness or concern for others.
3. Knowledge without character (or education without character) — learning or information unaccompanied by ethical strength.
4. Commerce (business) without morality — doing business without ethical principles.
5. Science without humanity — scientific progress that ignores compassion or human welfare.
6. Religion (or worship) without sacrifice — religious practice that lacks self-sacrifice or genuine commitment.
7. Politics without principle — political action divorced from ethical standards.

These aren’t sins in the theological sense but rather social and ethical pitfalls Gandhi warned could undermine individuals and society if not addressed with conscience, character, and principle.

(ChatGPT on a prompt from my brother, who couldn’t remember Ghandi’s list.)

“Christian Nationalism”

Of the concept of Christian Nationalism as it plays out these days:

This is a term that can be understood in two ways. The first understanding emphasizes the “Christian” part and imagines nationalism as the vehicle through which conservative believers impose their doctrines on a pluralist society. This is the vision that inspires the strongest liberal paranoia, with images of inquisitions, witch trials, the Republic of Gilead.

But there’s a second understanding, in which “nationalism” is the controlling word and the religious modifier is the pinch of incense that makes believers comfortable with worldly deeds and choices.

Ross Douthat

The first understanding of the term, I think, has fewer adherents than the second, but it’s not just liberals who fear it.

Douthat himself has described us as “a nation of heretics”:

America has indeed become less traditionally Christian across the last half century, just as religious conservatives insist, with unhappy consequences for our national life. But certain kinds of religious faith are as influential as ever, just as secular critics and the new atheists contend—and they’re right, as well, that to the extent that there’s an ongoing crisis in American culture, the excesses of the faithful probably matter more than the sins of unbelievers.

In heretic America, any semi-plausible future Christian Nationalism is going to be the Christianity of heretics or secularist pseudo-Christians. Though their current thought is vexing liberals and progressives, they would soon enough turn their attention to traditional Christians.

Attention

Attention is not neutral … It is the act by which we confer meaning on things and by which we discover that they are meaningful, the act through which we bind facts into cares.

Antón Barba-Kay, a philosopher at University of California, San Diego, in A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (via Ezra Klein). Klein continues:

When we cede control of our attention, we cede more than what we are looking at now. We cede, to some degree, control over what we will care about tomorrow.

He closes with another quote from Barba-Kay:

If the present technological age has a lasting gift for us, it is to urge as decisive the question of what human beings are for.

I will be flagging this to be read again in a few months (which I’ve never done for an Ezra Klein piece before), and so I’ve used my first NYT share like this month so you can wrestle with it, too.

Hate-watch of the week

In The Washington Post, Monica Hesse provided context for her analysis of Meghan Markle’s holiday special on Netflix: “I did not review the first two seasons of ‘With Love, Meghan,’ and to start now seems unsporting, like showing up to a deer hunt after the animal is already dead and butchered just so you can point to the plates of venison and say, LOL, Bambi, sucks to be you.” (Karen J Andrade, Merchantville, N.J., and Virginia Matish, Chesapeake, Va.)

Via Frank Bruni

Shorts

  • [I]f the most fundamental social institution (marriage) is one that has nothing to do with the sex of those taking part in it, it’s difficult to maintain that male-female distinctions matter anywhere else. (Rod Dreher)
  • “I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.” (Tom Stoppard, RIP, via Andrew Sullivan).
  • When scholars in Europe sought to justify the Spanish conquest of the New World, they reached not for the Church Fathers, but for Aristotle. ‘As the Philosopher says, it is clear that some men are slaves by nature and others free by nature.’ (Tom Holland, Dominion)
  • Amid the hyperpluralism of divergent truth claims, metaphysical beliefs, moral values, and life priorities, ubiquitous practices of consumerism are more than anything else the cultural glue that holds Western societies together. (Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation)
  • If every society has a spiritual substructure, then every society will need its priests. Scientists have taken holy orders in the age of the Machine. (Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Saturday, 11/29/25

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

Right Relativism

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

Just one little snip:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rant over.

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

The American Right

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

Damon Linker made that point, outlining the multiple factions:

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

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

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

On avoiding information bubbles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Open Note to My Congressmen

To: Jim Baird, Todd Young, Jim Banks

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

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Thanksgiving 2025

Sportsball

Surely you don’t read me for sports tips! I’m not even a journeyman sports fan—more like “notional”, as in “I love Premier League soccer” but watching it is always a lower priority than something else.

My only “drop everything” sport is Purdue men’s basketball, and “drop everything” even there is notional in a way. I had a conflicting church service last week and I didn’t even sneak a peak at the ESPN app during the service to see how the game was going.

That said, I have a prediction. Purdue’s consensus All-American point guard, Braden Smith, is not going to continue his scorching pace on assists and will not break the national record. I’m seeing it already.

He’s every bit as good as ever, but he’s surrounded by a deeper team, and they are getting a lot of the assists he might have gotten earlier, most notably when Purdue was the Braden Smith/Zach Edey show.

Big men Trey Kauffman-Renn, Oscar Cluff and Daniel Jacobsen, for instance, are assisting each other (Smith gets it to one of them but he in turn immediately gives it up to another as the defense collapses on him and his teammate moves into the alley-oop zone — for instance). It’s reflected (in its most boring form) in the box scores, where the scoring and assists are both better distributed.

Add to that Omer Mayer, who played some pro ball in Israel before coming to Purdue, and who is getting a lot of playing time as Smith’s designated successor. Sometimes they’re on the court together, but Smith’s getting more mini-rests on the bench this year.

This bodes to take Purdue to a fantastic season and deep into March Madness in part because it will be harder to beat Purdue by keying off Smith or Smith and Kauffman-Renn.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Suppressing the urge

Having established my guy bona fides by rhapsodizing about sportball, I trust I can share a softer story:

[M]y dad was a near model of classic masculinity. He was a superb athlete who had competed for England as a middle-distance runner; he had been captain first of his high school rugby team and then of our town’s. He was taciturn and bloody-minded, threw his weight around in our house, fished in the North Sea, raised rabbits and chickens, and drove fast. He routinely knocked down parts of our little house whenever he felt bored to add extensions, which he rarely finished. His mates drank lots of beer, and it was clear he was much happier among them than with his own family. He even had a mid-life crisis, and bought a racy car and a leather jacket. It was as if he felt the need to act out a near-parody of “toxic masculinity.”

He wasn’t cruel to me, but he never came to any of the school plays I was in, or any of my debating contests. Too girly, I suppose. And of course I felt as if I had let him down. I remember with more than a little poignancy how he once gamely tried to teach me how to kick a soccer ball. And how utterly useless I was.

What he didn’t let himself experience to its fullest for a long time was another side of himself. He loved to draw and to paint. After his death a year ago, we found a letter that showed he had once been admitted to the Slade School of Fine Art in London, perhaps the finest such institution in the country, and a great honor. He never told us of this, and I don’t know why he turned down the place. Probably his need to earn money, but maybe also the price of gender-conformity. But as soon as he retired, and especially after he got divorced, he started painting again — and the results were spectacular. I cannot help but wonder what kind of life he might have had, if he had had the courage of his own, non-conforming desire, what great paintings he might have produced over time.

Andrew Sullivan, Two Sexes, Infinite Genders

SWATting update

As threats escalate against Indiana lawmakers, Braun says his family also targeted • Indiana Capital Chronicle.

As of Friday, the acknowledged count was up to seven incidents.

I’m going to apologize for and retreat from something I wrote earlier, when I attributed this to “Hoosier MAGA ghouls.” I still think MAGA is likely and ghoul is a sure thing, but Hoosier ain’t necessarily so. We don’t yet (I fervently hope we find out and prosecute) know, and I should not have voiced my speculation.

(There’s a long backstory about a time when I was closely adjacent to a group falsely accused by lazy and biased press.)

Think tanks

[A] think tank should be … about ideas. As soon as the purpose becomes advocacy alone, or some other purpose related to gaining money or power, the “think” part is lost. The organization becomes a mere propaganda machine. There is nothing inherently wrong with policy advocacy for its own sake. But an organization that does only that should not be described as a think tank. Nor should its word on policy be trusted. Any policy research organization worth its salt will respect the rules of evidence and argumentation and avoid sensationalist rhetoric and ad hominem attacks. And it should certainly avoid besmirching the think tank’s reputation by flirting with toxic and vile media personalities.

…

For many years, the Heritage approach was to apply the principles of economic freedom, limited constitutional government, and strong national defense to the task of formulating policies. Today that is no longer the case. The doctrines driving Heritage’s output, as determined by the foundation’s president and the board of trustees, are a combination of Pat Buchanan-esque populism, nationalism, Trumpism, and various strains of what is called postliberalism.

Kim Holmes, To Be or Not to Be a Think Tank

Vaccine update

Bewilderment and doubt are among the anti-vaccine movement’s most powerful weapons. It’s true that doctors cannot say with absolute certainty that some ingredient in some vaccine, or combination of vaccines, does not contribute in some way, however small or large, to the rise in autism diagnoses. We also can’t rule out the possibility that infant vaccines cause tornadoes or bad movies. Uncertainty is inseparable from science.

Benjamin Mazer

Why Tucker is so tragic

I met a Christian friend in London for a pint a few hours before the event. He told me that his American in-laws are normie Boomer conservative Christians who had no idea who Nick Fuentes was, until he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s softball interview. They are big fans of Tucker, and came away from that interview convinced that this Fuentes boy makes a lot of sense. My friend had to try to convince them otherwise. See, this is why Tucker’s normalization of Fuentes through that mushy interview is so dangerous. Had Tucker done a proper interview, it might have been otherwise, but he didn’t, so here we are. Lots and lots of normal conservatives trust Tucker, who was great on Fox. This is why what has happened to him is so tragic — and so potentially dangerous.

Rod Dreher

Bitcoin

Proponents have told me for years that bitcoin is money (it’s not, really), that it’s an inflation hedge (come on, now), or that it’s a haven asset for times of stress (LOL), but it turns out that its most useful function is to serve as an early warning system that markets are unwell. On several occasions of late, it has been a lurch lower in bitcoin that has led a decline in global stocks. It sinks, stocks follow. And it has sunk a lot, down by a third since early October to $84,000 or so. Only another $84,000 to go before it reaches fair value. (Source: ft.com)

Katie Martin via John Ellis News Items

Random Thoughts

  • For what it’s worth, I seem to be thinking more clearly, and I certainly am happier, now that I’ve more-or-less completely resigned myself to living with the consequences of my fellow-citizens’ quadrennial electoral folly.
  • If you don’t predict when the bubble’s bursting, you’re not really a prophet but merely a Eeyore. I’m not a cryptocurrency prophet.

Shorts

  • “More drag queens, sure, but fewer slaves—the moral trajectory of Western civilization is not entirely in the direction of failure, you know.” Kevin D. Williamson, Against Nostalgia
  • “There is no insurrection or sedition without the use of force. Disobeying a lawful order is insubordination, not insurrection or sedition. Disobeying an unlawful order is required. That is all,” – Andy McCarthy, conservative lawyer, via Andrew Sullivan.
  • “[I]t’s a movie about how Glinda and Elphaba need to be allowed to feel good about themselves no matter how much harm they do to everyone around them.” Sonny Bunch on Wicked: For Good.
  • “Here’s the brutal truth: no immigrant wants to be here. He’s only here because it’s better than being “there.” That’s the thing about immigration that makes it both sad and scary. Those poor slobs didn’t want to uproot and come here, but things suck so bad back home, they felt like they had to.”(Shocker, Shocker: Foreigners Steal from the United States)
  • “So my poll numbers just went down, but with smart people they’ve gone way up,” – Donald Trump via Andrew Sullivan.
  • “Suspicion of metanarratives, then, means thinking that no one ever gets the Big Story right. But then postmodernists too have a Big Story: that no one ever gets it right.” (J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know)
  • “My new all-girl punk band is called Quiet Piggy,” – Anka Radakovich via Andrew Sullivan.
  • “Namibian politician Adolf Hitler Uunona is expected to win reelection tomorrow, proving that name recognition really is everything in politics.” (The Morning Dispatch)

Elsewhere in the Tipsysphere

A corollary of not loading this blog up with anti-Trump stuff is that steam must be let off elsewhere:

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Saturday, 11/22/25

Postliberalism

Post-liberalism usefully refers to two distinct but overlapping tendencies: First, the rejection of the liberal consensus of the post-Cold War era, usually described as “neoliberalism” (another highly contested term), in favor of a more right-wing or left-wing politics that still probably belongs inside the liberal tradition. Second, a more root-and-branch rejection of the entire liberal order — often reaching back for inspiration to liberalism’s religious and reactionary critics, sometimes repurposing Marxist thought, sometimes looking ahead to a future that’s post-liberal because it’s post-human as well.

It makes sense to group these different ideas together under the rubric of post-liberalism for two reasons. First, they have gained ground collectively as a response to liberalism’s perceived crisis and amid a shared experience of destabilizing technological and cultural change. Second, thinkers and writers often move back and forth between “soft” and “hard” forms of post-liberalism, making definitions slippery even in individual cases.

…

Political post-liberalism, however, does not begin with post-liberal ideas. It begins with the inchoate populist revolts of the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, which precious few intellectuals anticipated, and it has taken various ad hoc and unstable forms since then.

Ross Douthat, What Is Post-Liberalism, Anyway? (shared link)

Of the travails at the Heritage Foundation

For those of you who don’t live your lives online, I perhaps should set this stage. Marcionite heretic Tucker Carlson a few weeks ago conducted a “softball interview” with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Then

the Heritage Foundation’s (of Project 2025 fame) president, Kevin Roberts, defended Carlson and took a swipe at Carlson’s “globalist” critics.

Cathy Young, The Alt-Right to Heritage Foundation Pipeline: a 10-Year Journey. Controversy ensued, and members of Heritage’s Board have resigned.

Stage now is set.

Sadly, the problem here goes beyond the bigotry of a few “influencers” or the flaws of specific leaders at Heritage and some other conservative institutions. Rather, as Kim Holmes put it, this is the predictable consequence of “replacing conservatism with nationalism.” A conservative movement that increasingly defines itself in ethno-nationalist terms as a protector of the supposed interests of America’s white Christian majority against immigrants and minority groups cannot readily avoid descending into anti-Semitism, as well.

Ilya Somin

I ❤️ Becket Fund

Colorado has repeatedly been rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court for its religious hostility …

Colorado officials have taken the position that Catholic preschools cannot ask families who want to enroll to support the Catholic Church’s teachings, including on issues related to sexuality and marriage. … But secular schools require similar alignment all the time: Many Montessori schools, for example, require parents who enroll to sign a statement agreeing to the school’s fundamental principles …

With the help of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the archdiocese and its parish preschools have been fighting against this religious bigotry in court.

Nicholas Reaves, Colorado Needs Another Schooling on Religious Freedom.

I’d give Becket a 90% chance of winning this. The key is that Colorado apparently has no problem with the cited practice of Montessori schools—a toleration that destroys it’s claim of neutrality when it forbids Catholic Preschools to do the same.

(The 10% chance of a loss comes from the possibility of courts reversing course.)

I didn’t intend to write about Jeffrey Epstein …

… but Peggy Noonan has brought a whiff of clarity into the miasma:

What the Epstein story is really about is unloved girls. It’s about the children in this country who aren’t taken care of, who are left to the mercy of the world. It’s about teenagers who come from a place where no one cared enough, was capable enough, was responsible and watched out for them. That’s how most of those girls wound up in a room with Jeffrey Epstein.

Here is what sexual abusers of children know: Nobody has this kid’s back. Mom’s distracted or does drugs, dad isn’t on the scene or doesn’t care. The kids are on their own. Predators can smell this, the undefended nature of their prey.

It’s what the Epstein indictment meant when it called the children “particularly vulnerable.”

It’s what Virginia Giuffre reports in her posthumously published memoir, “Nobody’s Girl.” She says she was sexually abused by her father starting at age 7, that she was later molested by a friend of her parents. She was a runaway at 14, lived on the streets and with foster families.

I think the Jeffrey Epstein obsession long ago ceased being good for anything and now has descended into something conspiratorial and a bit kinky. If I never see anything more about it, that would be good.

Somali thumb on the scale

Great news about autism: Looks like that spike in autism might just be Somali fraudsters gaming the system to siphon money to the al-Shabaab terrorist group back home.

At this point, I thought the author was insane, but then this:

Yes, today I bring you a City Journal article headlined: “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer.” A ton of Somali immigrants to Minnesota are gaming the autism diagnosis system and setting up fake treatment centers to get taxpayer cash. And a lot of it. From the article: “Autism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota have skyrocketed in recent years—from $3 million in 2018 to. . . $399 million in 2023.” Honestly, I’m not a taxpayer in Minnesota so this seems like a them problem. But I’m a worried mom, and I love hearing that autism rates are being inflated by scammers. We’re healthier than we thought. That’s great news.

Nellie Bowles

Faith and politics

[A] naked public square is a morally ignorant public square. American public debate was healthier and the conversation more profound when religious leaders like Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fulton Sheen brought their faith to bear on public questions. Today morality has been privatized and left up to the individual. The shared moral order is shredded, and many people, morally alone, have come to feel that their lives are meaningless.

…

My problem with the Kirk memorial service and all the conversation about his assassination generally is that many people seem to have no coherent idea about the proper relationship between faith and politics. In their minds, the two spheres seem all mixed together higgledy-piggledy.

One faith leader told my Times colleague Elizabeth Dias about a conversation she had had with Charlie Kirk, who told her, “I want to talk about spiritual things, and in order to do that, I have to enter the political arena.”

Why on earth would Kirk believe that?

As people eulogized Kirk, it was rarely clear if they were talking about the man who was trying to evangelize for Jesus or the one trying to elect Republicans. A spokesperson at Turning Point declared, “He confronted evil and proclaimed the truth and called us to repent and be saved.” Is that what Kirk was doing when arguing with college kids about tariffs?

…

What happens when people operate without any coherent theory of how religion should relate to politics?

First, people treat electoral politics as if it were a form of spiritual warfare …

Second, the process of moral formation is perverted …

Third, people develop an addiction to rapture …

The problem is that politics is prosaic. Deliberation and negotiation work best in a mood of moderation and equipoise. If you want to practice politics in the mood best suited for the altar call, you’re going to practice politics in a way that sends prudence out the window.

Fourth, a destructive kind of syncretism prevails. Syncretism is an ancient religious problem. It occurs when believers try to merge different kinds of faith. These days, it’s faith in Jesus and the faith in MAGA all cocktailed together. Syncretism politicizes and degrades faith and totalizes politics.

Fifth, it kicks up a lot of hypocrisy …

Finally, it causes people to underestimate the power of sin. The civil rights movement had a well-crafted theory of the relationship between religion and politics. The movement’s theology taught its members that they were themselves sinful and that they had to put restraints on their political action in order to guard against the sins of hatred, self-righteousness and the love of power. Without any such theory, MAGA imposes no restraints, and sin roams free.

David Brooks (gift link)

Shorts

  • “When you select for ‘fighters’ in your leadership, you’ll get leaders who treat politics as performance art.” Nick Catoggio
  • “Like ‘cancel culture’ not so long ago, post-liberalism has become a crucial signifier in our debates without anyone agreeing on what it actually describes.” Ross Douthat
  • “A solid gold toilet sold at Sotheby’s last night for $12.1 million—the winner narrowly outbidding the decorators at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” The Morning Dispatch
  • “[A] decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes ….” (If you don’t know the source of this, you might not be able to pass the current citizenship test.) Is it just me, or does our nation no longer have any respect for the opinions of mankind?
  • “The revolution always winds up eating its own, as Robespierre and Trotsky found out. Trump was the guy who let the lunatics out of the conservative asylum, Greene foremost among them. And now, no surprise, she’s turned on him.” (Bret Stephens)
  • “[I]t is now quite possible that the Republican Party could lose control of the House in part because the Trump administration was too incompetent to rig the [Texas] districts properly.” David French
  • The Guardian: January 6 Rioter Who Was Pardoned by Trump Arrested for Child Sexual Abuse

Elsewhere in the Tipsysphere

Monday, 11/17/25

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

Heritage Foundation

Is the wind shifting?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forfeiting influence for clicks

Kevin D. Williamson was on fire Monday:

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

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

…

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

…

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

Immigration/Emigration

ICE

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

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

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

Nick Miroff, Why They Mask

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

Seamless web redux

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

David French

Greasing the Wheels

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

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

Other

Porn

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

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

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

Adrift at sea with no populist panacea

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

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

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

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

Nick Catoggio

Last Chopper out of Nam

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

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

Infinite length, zero depth

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

J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know.

Losing focus

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

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

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

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

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

What’s missing?

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

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

I have posted these TDS-related items elsewhere:

  1. The Broken Windows Presidency
  2. Imagining Trump’s Brain
  3. I hadn’t heard this before

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Saturday, 11/8/25

Public affairs

Give me that old, boring gummint

An aspect of the modern conservative disposition is that we like the arts, culture and technology to be interesting and exciting, but we prefer government be boring, a stabilizing force while we act up in other areas. But it’s never boring now and likely won’t be in this century. Too bad.

Peggy Noonan

Nancy Pelosi

[F]or the anti-Trump right (insofar as such a thing exists outside the Dispatch break room), Pelosi’s departure is a grim symbol of the Duma-fication of Congress. It’s fitting that the most formidable Democratic legislator in modern U.S. history will leave office in 2027 on the same day as the most formidable Republican legislator in modern U.S. history. Serious institutionalists like Pelosi and Mitch McConnell have no business in a branch of government that no longer exists as a serious institution.

Nick Catoggio

Sorry, Senator Young

Sorry, Senator, but I won’t answer.

I could probably rank this list, but I fear I’d see it misrepresented as “my constituents’ most important issue is …”, whereas my real most important issue is the impeachment and conviction of Donald J. Trump, who defiles everything he touches.

Remember: the theory behind Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution was “that’s what impeachment is for.” Well, put on your big-boy pants and take out the trash.

(I was reminded yesterday that my sanctimony toward sleazy politicians is a persistent feature. I voted for McGovern because Nixon was a crook, McGovern an honorable guy I disagreed with on just about everything. I don’t vote for Democrats often, but I’ve found creative ways not to vote for Trump’s corruption and rapacity nonetheless.)

Clueless

A driver smashed into pedestrians and bikers on the beautiful French island of Île d’Oléron.

I’m so excited for the investigation to reveal the motive behind someone driving their car into random French cyclists and screaming “Allahu Akbar.” I don’t know about you, but he sounds like a Christian nationalist to me. Anyone else smell a fresh pine and cinnamon Bath & Body Works candle? This guy is all in on Replacement Theory, I just know it.

Nellie Bowles

Culture

Grief

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.

This is the first Joan Didion I’ve read. I’m told that it’s not her best, but it was plenty good enough for me.

Me, too

(Yes, I know it’s more than a little absurd that I’m writing a post about a TV show that ended its run eight years in the past. The thing is, I almost never watch series when they first appear. I usually turn to them, instead, years later, after I’ve heard enough praise that I feel like their quality has been adequately verified to justify my time and attention. This way of proceeding has never let me down. And anyway, in an era of streaming, there’s nothing to keep a decade-old show from becoming someone’s big new discovery years after it drops.)

Damon Linker, winding up for a glowing post about an HBO Series, The Leftovers.

I’m with him on not rushing to watch a new series. Most of them are trash – precisely as most of all art, music and literature are trash. It was ever so. What’s good will endure.

Words of the Day

The words of the day are pareidolia and apophenia.

Well, I didn’t know them, and much as I love big words this may be the last time I ever use them.

Snippets

  • Mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind. (Flannery O’Connor)
  • Foul is fair and fair is foul. (Shakespeare, though I was thinking of John Maynard Keynes’ distillation of his case for temporary rapacity.)
  • What Stephen A. Smith is to sports talk, Tucker Carlson is to obsessive anti-Zionism. Rich Lowry
  • All civilizations are as transitory as the people now in cemeteries. And just as we must die, so too must we accept that there is no return to a civilization whose time has come and gone. (Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar via Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul)
  • The people [Trump] picks tend to be a grab bag of personality disorders who squabble and fight for power, he tends to screw them over when they annoy him, and they’re all quite annoying. (Ken White, Refuge in Kakistocracy, Popehat)
  • The problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of a person, but that it shows far too little. Pope John Paul II via Isabel Hogben
  • Populism is fundamentally a form of suspicion. Yuval Levin on the Remnant podcast.
  • We need to be a big tent so as to include neo-Nazi and Nazi-adjacent people, [and] if you have a problem with that, you need to get out of the tent. Jonah Golberg on the Remnant podcast criticizing the “popular front mind” on the Right.
  • Dick Cheney couldn’t get over Jan. 6. Ramesh Ponnuru (That’s got to be among the most understated things I’ve seen this week.)

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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