Never say Never

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

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

The Calvinball Presidency

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

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

Inspectors General

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

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

The Morning Dispatch

Algorithms

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

Peggy Noonan, The Embarrassing Pete Hegseth.

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

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

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

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

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

Grooming codes and Flag Codes

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

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

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

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

…

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

Mau-mauing the NFL

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

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

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Authoritarianism in the 21st century

My father died 27 years ago today. It was too early, but I wouldn’t have wanted to see him at the age he’d be now.

This just might be faintly relevant

There isn’t a single instance of a fentanyl seizure in the Caribbean:

Last month, the U.S. cutter Hamilton returned to Florida with what the agency called “the largest quantity of drugs offloaded in Coast Guard history”: 61,740 pounds of cocaine and 14,400 pounds of marijuana (that’s the weight of about three city buses). The haul, gathered by multiple federal agencies during 19 seizure incidents in the Caribbean as well as the Pacific, had an estimated street value of $473 million. But there wasn’t any fentanyl on the boat.

(Nick Miroff)

Authoritarianism in the 21st century

We are living in an authoritarian state.

It didn’t feel that way this morning, when I took my dog for his usual walk in the park and dew from the grass glittered on my boots in the rising sunlight. It doesn’t feel that way when you’re ordering an iced mocha latte at Starbucks or watching the Patriots lose to the Steelers. The persistent normality of daily life is disorienting, even paralyzing. Yet it’s true.

We have in our heads specific images of authoritarianism that come from the 20th century: uniformed men goose-stepping in jackboots, masses of people chanting party slogans, streets lined with giant portraits of the leader, secret opposition meetings in basements, interrogations under naked light bulbs, executions by firing squad … I’d be surprised if this essay got me hauled off to prison in America. Authoritarianism in the 21st century looks different, because it is different. Political scientists have tried to find a new term for it: illiberal democracy, competitive authoritarianism, right-wing populism …

… To keep their jobs, civil servants have to prove not their competence but their personal loyalty to the leader. Independent government officers—prosecutors, inspectors general, federal commissioners, central bankers—are fired and their positions handed to flunkies. The legislature, in the hands of the ruling party, becomes a rubber stamp for the executive. Courts still hear cases, but judges are appointed for their political views, not their expertise … There are no meaningful checks on the leader’s power.

…

Today’s authoritarianism doesn’t move people to heroic feats on behalf of the Fatherland. The leader and his cronies, in and out of government, use their positions to hold on to power and enrich themselves. Corruption becomes so routine that it’s expected; the public grows desensitized, and violations of ethical norms that would have caused outrage in any other time go barely noticed. … At important political moments it mobilizes its core supporters with frenzies of hatred, but its overriding goal is to render most citizens passive. If the leader’s speech gets boring, you can even leave early (no one left Nuremberg early). Twenty-first-century authoritarianism keeps the public content with abundant calories and dazzling entertainment. Its dominant emotions aren’t euphoria and rage, but indifference and cynicism. Because most people still expect to have certain rights respected, blatant totalitarian mechanisms of repression are avoided. The most effective tools of control are distraction, confusion, and division.

…

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt said near the end of her life. “And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

These are the features of the modern authoritarian state. Every one of them exists today in this country …

… It sometimes seems as if the only check on Trump’s power is his own attention span.

George Packer, America’s Zombie Democracy.

Railway to the Moon

Imagine if you were trying to write intelligently about the socioeconomic impact of the railroad in the middle of the 19th century, and half the people investing in trains were convinced that the next step after transcontinental railways would be a railway to the moon, a skeptical minority was sure that the investors in the Union Pacific would all go bankrupt, many analysts were convinced that trains were developing their own form of consciousness, reasonable-seeming observers pegged the likelihood of a train-driven apocalypse at 20 or 30 percent, and peculiar cults of engine worship were developing on the fringes of the industry.

What would you reasonably say about this world? The prime minister of Denmark already gave the only possible answer: Raise your alert levels, and prepare for various scenarios.

Ross Douthat, Drones, Denmark and Dark Magic

PK snippets

“I’m not proposing a political program,” he told me. “This isn’t some Christian civilizational vision. It’s much more personal.” You decide how and where to wage battle: at a community garden, on the Appalachian Trail, in a mosque.
He was struck by how commonplace legal cannabis had become. “It’s a really, really useful drug for the state to be legalizing,” he said. “Because it’s not like alcohol. It doesn’t get you violent. And maybe life is a bit less crappy. It’s the best antidote to revolution that you could possibly have.”
“When you’re sitting in your living room with your Punjabi wife reading a bunch of stuff about how you’re a white nationalist, it makes you want to punch people in the face,” he said. “Luckily, I’m a Christian, so I don’t do that.”

Paul Kingsnorth via Alexander Nazaryan in the New York Times

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

Saturday, 9/27/25

Addled religio-politics

David Brooks isn’t a practitioner of zingers or even aphorisms. He is a penetrating thinker and writer on a lot of our public life in the US:

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. A battlefield mentality prevails between the forces of Jesus and the forces of Satan. Fear replaces the traditional Christian virtue, hope: We’re under attack, and we have to destroy our enemies! That’s the easiest way to mobilize people.

Second, the process of moral formation is perverted. Instead of discipling people in the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity, people get discipled in the political passions — enmity, conquest and the urge to dominate.

Third, people develop an addiction to rapture. You’ve probably heard the sort of Christian worship music that preceded and punctuated Sunday’s ceremony. Traditional hymns from centuries gone by covered a range of experiences, but modern worship music tends to hit the same emotional chord over and over again: rapture and praise. Its job is to drive your arms heavenward or to knock you to your knees. It can be a delicious and transforming experience.

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. It’s nice to hear Carlson say he practices a religion of love, harmony and peace, but is that actually the way he lives his life?

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.

The critics of Christian nationalism sometimes argue that it is a political movement using the language and symbols of religion in order to win elections. But the events of the past week have proved that this is a genuinely religious movement and Charlie Kirk was a genuinely religious man. The problem is that unrestrained faith and unrestrained partisanship are an incredibly combustible mixture. I am one of those who fear that the powerful emotions kicked up by the martyrdom of Kirk will lead many Republicans to conclude that their opponents are irredeemably evil and that anything that causes them suffering is permissible. It’s possible for faithful people to wander a long way from the cross.

David Brooks, We Need to Think Straight About God and Politics (gift link because I’ve quoted so much). I bolded the paragraph about syncretism because that’s my own strong conviction about American MAGA politics. See, for instance, the Jonah Goldberg quote in the footer.

Ya gotta love markets

Wall Street investors are buying up claims to potential tariff refunds, betting that the Supreme Court will strike down President Donald Trump’s signature economic policy and require the government to disgorge tens of billions of dollars that companies have paid this year in import taxes. A handful of hedge funds and specialized investment firms are offering importers around 20 cents for every dollar they paid in Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs and roughly 5 cents per dollar for levies on Canadian, Mexican or Chinese goods stemming from the president’s ire over fentanyl trafficking, according to Salvatore Stile, founder of Alba Wheels Up International, a New York-based customs broker. The antidrug tariff claims are worth less because they are seen as more likely to survive legal challenges and thus less likely to produce refunds. The deals offer immediate cash for importers that have been absorbing most of the cost of Trump’s tariffs. Investors, meanwhile, hope to profit by collecting the rest of the refund if the Supreme Court invalidates Trump’s tariffs. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

John Ellis. Ingenious, but you’ve got to have gigabucks already even to get into this game.

Against the Machine

I’ve read just about everything Paul Kingsnorth has written since I learned of his conversion to Orthodoxy. So I questioned my need to buy his new book, Against the Machine, released Tuesday.

Upon reading a few favorable comments by a trusted friend, I did buy it — for reading on my reading machine (Kindle). Such ironies are not lost on Kingsnorth.

I’m 24% into it and I do recommend it

Farewell to a friend, with an apologia

I lost a valued early subscriber to this blog Wednesday. He had his fill of my “Trump Derangement,” and also thought I was negative toward Charlie Kirk. I know I lost him not because I pay attention to who reads the blog, but because he offered a comment asking that I unsubscribe him. (Neither of us knew how to do that, but I figured it out. I didn’t post his comment because it read more like a personal letter.)

About Charlie Kirk, my subscriber, a skilled wordsmith, nevertheless misread what I wrote, attributing my exceedingly mild criticism of Kirk to Kirk’s support of Trump. Let me say to all you what I said to him:

I regret leaving the impression of a more unfavorable view of Charlie Kirk than I feel. I’ve read a lot about him in the past two weeks because I knew so little about him before September 10. I came to see him as a young man who made fewer mistakes than I did at his age and was maturing before he was cut down. I barely thought about him supporting Trump.

And I’ll add, as justification for criticism that too many conservatives seemed amnesiac about the blemishes on Kirk’s record, eager to declare him a martyr-saint. Treating me as a member of a presumed tribe that must speak thus-and-so is a good way to get my back up.

I’ll add further add: I’m praying for the repose of Charlie’s soul as (and for as long as) I pray for most friends who have died (a few I pray for with no end anticipated). But I am decidedly not asking Charlie to intercede with God for my salvation because I don’t buy the insta-beatification.

If pouring cold water on excessive praise equals condemnation, then I’d plead guilty — but it doesn’t.

As for my Trump Derangement, I’ll quote Jonah Goldberg:

[T]he fact is that the GOP controls the White House and Congress and Trump controls his party in ways no president in living memory has. Moreover, he’s coloring outside the lines. He’s testing the system. He’s redefining conservatism in real time. He does everything he can to be the center of attention constantly. In short, he’s making news. He’s driving events. When people yell at me for writing too much about Trump, what many of them—not all—really mean is “Why do you have to criticize him so much?” Part of this response stems from the idea that conservative commentators are supposed to be partisan Republican commentators. But in ways that have never been truer in my lifetime, Republican and conservative are not synonymous terms.

It’s true, though: I don’t have to criticize him. But I do have to tell the truth as I see it. And I’m sorry to tell you this, but believing what I believe, telling the truth about Trump and criticizing him are pretty close to the same thing.

But nothing I write is likely to dissuade a Trump supporter, just as I have been unmoved by all the “but-look-at-his-policies” rationalizations over the past 8 years. The reader I lost probably isn’t the only one to find it all rather tedious. I should know that by now.

I even understand why people voted for Trump in preference to the Democrat candidates of the last three cycles (I voted for a third party each time in a state that was a polling lock for Trump).

What I don’t understand is those Christians who hold Trump up as a great President instead of “a terrible man, but a better choice than Clinton, Biden or Harris.” Especially when they tell me that I should believe that, too.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, while intending to waste fewer obsessive words about it — because I, unlike Jonah Goldberg, don’t charge a subscription that obliges me to endure The Boredom of Writing in the Trump Era.

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

Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk and his memorial service

I don’t want to keep banging on about this, because two weeks ago all I consciously knew about Charlie Kirk was that he was affiliated with Jerry Falwell Jr. around the time Falwell made spiritual shipwreck. My impression of him is more favorable now (mama was right: you’re known by the company you keep).

I suspect that Charlie will stop occupying our mind-space relatively soon. Meanwhile, here are some observations I think trenchant.

False note

Some “Evangelicals” are reportedly are starting to style Charlie Kirk as a Christian martyr. Rachel Roth Aldhizer gives examples and cautions that they’re playing with fire.

I have a more fundamental objection: the hagiography should stop not because of dangerous eventualities, but because it’s false.

Not every Christian who is murdered is a Christian martyr, and a Christian martyr is not a murdered Christian who is liked by lot of people, even a lot a people who are good at wordcraft.

Rather, a martyr must be murdered because of his Christian faith. The “tell” in this “Christian martyr” tale is the pronoun “they.” “They killed Charlie because ….“

No, “they” did not, and so far as we know at this point, based on very sketchy information, “he” didn’t either. What little we know points toward the lone shooter perceiving Kirk’s politics as hate-filled.

Plus ça change …

In most secular colleges and universities the largest evangelical organization was Campus Crusade for Christ, founded in 1951 by Bill Bright, a conventionally right-wing Presbyterian, to evangelize students and instruct them in conservative religion and politics.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals. Is Turning Point USA the new Campus Crusade?

Erika Kirk

Erika Kirk set a stellar moral example yesterday despite immense emotional and political temptation to be vindictive. All but uniquely for a MAGA Republican, her country is better today for her public influence.

Then the president spoke.

“He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them,” Donald Trump said of Charlie Kirk, seemingly praising the dead. Then he veered off-script: “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Erika.”

He joked that maybe she could convince him that hating one’s enemies isn’t right, which turned her moving statement of Christian witness into a set-up for a punch line. The crowd laughed. When it was over, Mrs. Kirk embraced him.

I’ve heard of political “big tents,” but I’ve never heard of one big enough to accommodate two moral systems that aren’t just contradictory but irreconcilable. “Christ’s message, followed by its very antithesis,” philosophy professor Edward Feser wrote of the contrast between Kirk’s and Trump’s remarks. “It’s almost as if the audience is being put to a test.”

Almost, yeah.

It’s been many years since I read the gospels, but I do remember Matthew 6:24: “No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.” That’s the test. Many American Christians, possibly including Erika Kirk, seem to reject the premise.

Nick Catoggio

The audience failed the test. They cheered Erika Kirk, but also cheered Trump, who logically they should have booed.

MAGA theology laid bare

Many people who saw or read about the rally were puzzled by what they perceived as a contradiction. How can you cheer love and hate at the same time? How can you worship Jesus and cheer such a base and gross description of other human beings, people who are created in the image of God?

My reaction was different. Finally, I thought, curious Americans who tuned in got to see MAGA theology more completely — and what they witnessed was the best and worst of MAGA Christianity.

…

The objection to Trump isn’t so much that he’s aggressive — Abraham Lincoln was aggressive against the Confederacy, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt was aggressive against the Axis powers — but that he’s malicious and unjust. And when Trump says that he hates his political enemies, it’s a confession that he’s governing through his basest desires.

David French

The attack on free speech

Our fundamental bargain

Every generation of Americans must come to terms with the fundamental bargain of free speech: we agree that we won’t use the mechanism of the state to punish speech we don’t like and will talk back instead … Every generation has to accept the deal that they’re going to refrain from censorship to protect their own right to speak. Plenty of us still don’t accept that bargain, but if a critical mass of people don’t accept it, then it stops working. Free speech is Tinker Bell; if enough kids don’t clap, she dies. Or as Learned Hand put it more poetically: “liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”

Popehat

That was then, this is then plus a few months and an opening to act more fashy

Then there’s the Big Guy. In his inauguration speech this year: “I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America. Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.” Trump now: “The [networks] give me only bad publicity, press. I mean, they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.” And this: “That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”

Andrew Sullivan.

Plutocrats in the C-Suite

One of the lesser-noted disturbing developments (because of all the higher-profile more “urgent” news) is the takeover of a vast swath of our media by family of billionaire Trump supporter Larry Ellison.

As Thomas Edsall notes in the linked article, this sort of thing is one of the ways Hungary’s Viktor Orbán built an illiberal democracy. They still have elections; they still have free speech; but anti-Orbán speech faces hurdles because Hungarian media are controlled by Orbán supporters.

Donald Trump is a much nastier man than Viktor Orbán. His instincts, unchecked by Congress as they are, are likely to take us to a place that makes Hungary look like paradise.

Chew on this

[T]he most trenchant point about the Kimmel saga was made by civil-rights lawyer Matthew Segal. “In my opinion, when companies or institutions cave to Trump despite the law being on their side, they are not misunderstanding the law,” he wrote. “They are making educated guesses that the U.S. is heading in a direction where, in practice, the law won’t matter.”

…

Go to court, one might say. Okay—but court is expensive, takes a long time, and risks winning the battle but losing the war. That’s Segal’s point: Even if Disney had prevailed in a legal battle with the FCC, our vindictive president would have looked for other levers of federal power to pull to damage the company. Keeping Jimmy Kimmel on the air and then turning around to find that the FCC has canceled your multibillion-dollar merger out of spite is the definition of a pyrrhic victory.

Nick Catoggio. I can’t say that’s entirely wrong, but this may be a better explanation. As to Jimmy Kimmel in particular, this too is relevant:

If CBS and ABC, two networks that have lately bowed to the president, gave half a hoot, they would easily have prevailed on First Amendment grounds if they put up a fight.

That is, if they prized their network TV businesses sufficiently as businesses, as opportunities to display stewardship, or even as instruments of influence. But they don’t.

Their network news and late-night talk shows are money-losing artifacts of an industry model their parent companies have no intention of investing in or taking risks for.

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Miscellany

A well/ill (choose one) founded fear of persecution

Hannah Kreager, a “trans woman,” fled Tucson for Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and promptly filed for asylum. Kreager had discerned which way the wind was blowing, and it was not propitious:

“If this had been just George Bush or some run-of-the-mill Republican president, I wouldn’t have left,” Kreager said. “I’d have stayed, written to my legislators, and protested because that’s what you do in a democracy. But this feels like an authoritarian regime.”

Rupa Subramanya, The Americans Seeking Refuge from Trump in Canada.

I don’t think Donald Trump feels any personal animus against transgender people, but he knows that quite a few in his base do feel such animus, and he panders to them periodically. Moreover, he is busily demolishing the rule of law in America, and one doesn’t know where he’ll turn next. I can’t say a fear of persecution is less than well-founded, although the Canadian government may, for diplomatic reasons, have trouble admitting that.

Trump lied, children died

The Trump administration has claimed that no one has died because of its cuts to humanitarian aid, and it is now trying to cancel an additional $4.9 billion in aid that Congress already approved. Yet what I find here in desperate villages in southwestern Uganda is that not only are aid cuts killing children every day, but that the death toll is accelerating.

Stockpiles of food and medicine are running out here. Village health workers who used to provide inexpensive preventive care have been laid off. Public health initiatives like deworming and vitamin A distribution have collapsed. Immunizations are being missed. Contraception is harder to get. Ordinary people are growing weaker, hungrier and more fragile. So as months pass, the crisis is not easing but growing increasingly lethal — and because children are particularly vulnerable, they are often the first to starve and the first to die.

It’s difficult to know how many children are dying worldwide as a result of the Trump aid cuts, but credible estimates by experts suggest that the child death toll may be in the hundreds of thousands this year alone — and likely an even higher number next year. In short, President Trump’s cuts appear to be by far the most lethal policy step he has taken.

…

Let me introduce Trump to the mothers of children that his cost-cutting has killed.

Nicholas Kristoff (Gift Link)

We are all gatekeepers now.

Comparing the top-down “gatekeeper” suppression of the full Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination to the easy access to videos of Charlie Kirk’s assassination:

The gatekeepers are long gone and will never return, but we can’t live as a healthy society without them. We prove this every day.

So you have to be the gatekeeper for your family. You have to be the gatekeeper for yourself. You have to hit delete as the stain tries constantly to creep in, you have to look away and guide others to look away. The school has to be a gatekeeper (removing smartphones from class is a gatekeeping action).

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

Wenesday evening

Poking the Bear

Many sober voices warned that an expansion of NATO to Russia’s border would poke the Bear, leading to an inevitable war. As long ago as 1998, following the U.S. decision to expand NATO eastwards, George Kennan said the following to Thomas Friedman:

I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.

Patrick Deneen. (Link may be inaccurate; I don’t think it was on Substack when I read it.)

Unless we’re prepared to drop our Monroe Doctrine, we ought to be able to understand Russia’s prickliness about Ukraine’s loving glances at the West and the West sidling up to Russia’s “near abroad.”

Spencer Cox

If you had asked me last week to handicap Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s chances of winning the 2028 Republican presidential primary, I’d have said 1 percent. But after watching him demonstrate impressive moral leadership in calling on Americans to unite after Charlie Kirk’s murder, I’ve changed my mind. It’s zero percent.

The governor is a good man in a party that’s led by hideous people and backed by voters who consider being a hideous person a political virtue …

Nick Catoggio

Catoggio continues, pivoting to an important distinction I hadn’t made and that few others seem to have made, either:

Cancel culture, properly understood, is an attempt to bully institutions like businesses into enforcing one faction’s cultural preferences in the absence of moral consensus around those preferences. It doesn’t involve subjects about which we’re all in broad moral agreement, like whether pedophilia should be a crime. It involves subjects about which we disagree, like whether trans women are women. As Thomas Chatterton Williams put it in The Atlantic, “Cancel culture is more fundamentally about solidifying norms that haven’t yet been established.”

That seems like a very sensible way to distinguish “cancellation” of those who celebrate Kirk’s murder from cancellation of those who pointed out that Kirk was no saint (e.g., me, humanizing him) or even demonized him (tastelessly, given the timing).

Is this possible, circular-firing-squad style?

Vacationing in Michigan, I’m struck by all the Marijuana stores. People have spent a lot of money to build or remodel stylish stores in densities that boggle the mind (at least along major roads).

I hate it. So I was heartened by the account of a native Michigander who tells me that competition is so fierce that prices have dropped 91%. That’s one of those facts that’s too good to check. I hope every last one of them is driven out of business by every last one of them.

I’ll spare you catching up on commentary

I’ve been wading through a backlog of reading as my vacation permits. A lot of it, from guttersnipes to established journalists at major publications, comes down to arguing that the other guys are more prone to lethal political violence.

I have concluded (actually, had concluded before Charlie Kirk’s murder) that lethal political violence is bad. I’ve also concluded that the argument about which side is guiltier of it is stupid and likely to be forever inconclusive.

You’re welcome.

Loyalty over competence

Word on the street is that the attorney general is a moron.

Could be. I’m open to the possibility.

Accusing the head of the Justice Department of being an idiot would seem like a lazy smear during any other administration, but Pam Bondi wasn’t selected for her legal acumen. She was picked for the same reason that Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth were, because the president wants the most dangerous arms of the federal government led by people whom he knows will choose him over the law.

When you select for loyalty instead of competence in staffing your government, you’re guaranteeing yourself a higher than usual quotient of morons ….

[Bondi’s moronic comments about “hate speech” and “discrimination” omitted.]

We’re left with two explanations, then. One is that Pam Bondi truly is a moron, irresponsibly BS-ing her way through questions on what can and can’t legally be said in the United States like a 1L who hasn’t done the reading. The other is that Pam Bondi knows what time it is.

In a government distinguished by extreme malevolence and extreme incompetence, it’s hard to tell.

…

Postliberals don’t worry about what Democrats will do when they return to power because they have the ability right now, or so they believe, to make sure that Democrats never do.

That’s the alternate explanation for Pam Bondi’s “hate speech” comments. She’s not stupid. She just “knows what time it is” and is proceeding accordingly.

Nick Catoggio, riffing off Pam Bondi’s unironic rant and declaration of war against “hate speech.”

Why Tyler Robinson shot Charlie Kirk

I submit that we don’t really know why, and that Nick Cattogio raced just a bit ahead of the evidence here:

Unless the indictment omitted something important, though, the motive was straightforward: Like practically every progressive in this country, he abhorred Kirk’s condemnations of transgenderism. That’s legibly leftist.

Nick Catoggio.

I find that very plausible, but I don’t think we’re to the point where the official allegations or known evidence compel it.

In point of fact, Catoggio and I, as inactive and retired lawyers respectively, probably should be saying “it’s not looking good for him, but Robinson is innocent until proven guilty.”

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

After 5 days’ reflection

Charlie Kirk

I have not read anyone rejoicing at the assassination of Charlie Kirk except second-hand, from folks who are trying to show how terrible “they” are. Of course, I’ve been off Facebook for years and I ignore my X.com and Bluesky accounts because they’re disgusting time-sucks. (I prefer having my time sucked by dwelling too long on the innumerable writers who are still sane, decent, and somewhat thoughtful.)

I’ll rephrase what I hinted before about the murder: anyone my age who knew all about Charlie Kirk (1) is way too political or (2) has a Peter Pan complex.

That said, I have read the news and a lot of the commentary from center-left to center-right sources since the murder, and I offer these brief thoughts:

Drop the hagiography, please. Just drop it. Charlie Kirk was not a saint. He wasn’t just a guy who tried to engage with students in good faith argumentation. He was a bit of a troll or provocateur. He tried to punish speech he didn’t like: his first notable TPUSA act was setting up a right-coded cancel-culture website that’s still up today. I won’t go on, though I could (whereas last Wednesday, I could not have). But see point 3.
Stop rushing ahead of the evidence. I just belatedly listened to a podcast from First Things that knew so very, very much about the assassin and the significance of the shooting being on a campus — before anybody knew who the assassin was (beyond that he was nimble enough to jump from a roof to flee the scene). The decline of First Things proceeds apace. But from what I read, it wasn’t the worst example of that.
Charlie Kirk was young and was changing, arguably for the better: “Charlie Kirk might have been developing into the kind of figure we now lack. Like William F. Buckley in his youth, he began as a rabble-rouser. Yet over time Buckley cultivated himself into the erudite thought leader familiar to Firing Line viewers. Kirk seemed to be walking a similar road.” (Jeffrey Bilbro, The Last Lesson of Charlie Kirk) Sadly, we’ll never know.
Pray for a pandemic of repentance in the USA. Though my personality type is melancholic, I have tended to see major events (9/11, January 6) thus: “Maybe this one will wake America up and drive it to its knees” (instead of “Oh, boy! This is it! It’s war!”). I’m still praying for national repentance, though my soul is getting weary.

Coinage of the year, maybe of the decade: “conflict entrepreneur”

On CNN, [Utah Governor Spencer] Cox labelled the War Room host [Steve Bannon] a “conflict entrepreneur” and encouraged Americans not to listen to voices that profit off of division.

“Look, there are conflict entrepreneurs out there who benefit from radicalizing us. And I’m not one of those. I don’t know that that’s particularly helpful,” he said.

John Bowden.

Speaking of which …

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.

Rahm Emanuel.

Trump on Wednesday night pantomimed high-mindedness: “It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree.”

President, edit thyself. “Demonic forces” are actual words Trump used at a rally in 2023 to smear his political opponents. That year or the next, he also described them as the “enemy from within,” “Marxist, fascist and communist tyrants who want to smash our Judeo-Christian heritage,” “a sick nest of people,” “thugs, horrible people, fascists, Marxists, sick people,” “vermin” and “radical left lunatics.” Those are highlights from just the past two and a half years. He was whipping up hatred long before then, and he whips up hatred still.

Frank Bruni, The ‘Demonic’ Hypocrisy of Trump’s Plea for Peace.

It was hard to decide what representative quote to pull from the Bruni column, so I’m using one of my gift links so you can read it all. Of particular note is Bruni’s list of recent lethal violence against Democrats, and a welcome note about how hard it is to decipher motives (which is one reason why I didn’t say “lethal violence against Democrats by radical-Right MAGA types”).

Finally:

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

From grim to grimmer

Bummer

I could have filled this post with many clippings colorfully describing how bad things are. I’ve done it before and I’ll probably do it again. That’s just the kind of guy I am: melancholic.

But it just seems too much this week. I’m having trouble identifying anything going right in the USA.

I came of age in the 60s, and although I’ve been expecting our collapse for a long time, the manner and speed of the seeming collapse are a surprise.

I’ll summarize what’s a bit unsettling, even for me, thus:

We are moving rapidly from American hegemony to a multipolar world.
The very best President imaginable couldn’t stop, but could at best slow, our relative decline.
The very best President imaginable wouldn’t even run because of the politics of personal destruction.
But a toxic narcissist, jilted by voters in 2020, would run again in 2024 on a platform of vengeance. “Vengeance” turned out to mean turning America into a “shithole country.” (That will teach us!)
The Mainstream media are whistling past the cemetery as all this goes down.
UPDATE: Charlie Kirk, who it seems was more consequential than I had realized, gunned down Wednesday. I wrote everything in this post, other than this bullet point, before the murder of young Kirk. I knew little about him. My first impression was unfavorable because he was associated with Jerry Falwell, Jr. at the time that Falwell’s Potemkin Piety was collapsing. Thereafter? Well, I’m about 50 years older than his target demographic. (My wife didn’t even know who he was.) I’ve read a lot about him this morning, but the most interesting observation I read was too frank for this raw moment, so I’ll let you ferret out your own information if you care to.

With that off my chest, I’ll try to edify y’all for a while.

Repelled by conservatism, but not a liberal

Conservatism, as you know, is a complete mess in America right now. But reading conservative authors like Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson does give you an adequate appreciation for the power of nonmaterial forces — culture, moral norms, traditions, religious ideals, personal responsibility and community cohesion.

…

I’ve been driven away from the right over the past decade, but I can’t join the left because I just don’t think that tradition of thought grasps reality in all its fullness. I wish both right and left could embrace the more complex truth that the neocon Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed in his famous maxim: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture and save it from itself.”

David Brooks, Why I Am Not a Liberal. This pretty clearly was one of the ten best things I’ll see in the New York Times this month, so that’s one of my gift links.

Breakneck: what you get in an engineered society

Publishers have figured out how to get limelight for their new titles, and one new title that’s deservedly getting a lot is Dan Wang’s Breakneck, about the astonishing ascendancy of China.

For a solid interview with Dan Wang (interviewer Ross Douthat), click this shared link: This Is Why America Is Losing to China.

Wang attributes this in substantial part to the relative influence of engineers in China versus that of lawyers in the USA. Engineers build; lawyers obstruct.

I find that somewhat plausible. But I write this precis not as an uncritical defense of my former profession, but to call attention to where engineered China went off the rails: trying to engineer China’s demographics led to over 300,000,000 abortions, over 100,000,000 sterilizations, and a population that’s skewed toward males.

That is, in my experience of engineers, classic engineering myopia. China could have benefitted from a bit more rule of law, less engineering “logic.”

What’s “fair” got to do with it?

There are people who get outraged when a court — especially the Supreme Court — impose or affirm what seems like an “unfair” result.

The scare-quote is not because fairness is a fantasy. It’s there because courts’ “unfair” decisions are mostly decisions to follow the law despite any countervailing sense of fairness.

And I approve of that approach. Consider: what is truly “fair” about denying a win to a guy who followed all the legal rules and then got sued by a guy who ignored the rules but somehow feels cheated (and has a good lawyer to sell his sob story)?

Liberalism without illusions

William A. Galston, a blast from the Clintonian past, has a wonderful article in Democracy Journal. I summarize, but I fully intend to read it several more times.

My summary:

Liberal democracy (a/k/a classical liberalism) has some inherent weaknesses:

Because liberal democracy restrains majorities and gives even small minorities a say, it slows the achievement of goals that majorities support. In other words, it requires more patience than many possess.
Liberal democracy requires tolerance for minority views and ways of life to which many citizens are deeply opposed.
Liberal democracy requires a distinction between civic identity and personal or group identity.
Liberal democracy requires compromise.

Liberals (left-liberals, or “liberals” in the modern pejorative sense) complicate these weaknesses with characteristic illusions:

Myopic materialism: the belief, especially pervasive among elites, that economic issues are the real issues and that cultural issues are diversionary, deliberately heightened by unscrupulous leaders to gain support for their anti-liberal agendas.
Parochialism. Yes, transnationalism is the parochialism of elites, because most people in advanced democracies as well as “developing” nations value particular attachments—to local communities and to the nation, to friends and family and compatriots.
Naivete about the course of human events and the possibilities of human nature.

Credit for my discovery of this article goes to Rod Dreher.

Broken Windows

Okay, everyone is writing about it, and Trump’s vehement denials and $10 Billion lawsuit against Dow Jones makes it newsworthy that there’s now potent corroboration of Dow Jones’ (via the Wall Street Journal) claim about Trump’s hand-rendered birthday card for ephebophile Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday. But I can’t say anything smarter than this:

From what I can tell, in fact, there’s no actual theory underlying the impromptu new conspiracy theory that the letter was forged. No one can explain how or why a birthday message purporting to be from Trump to one of his close associates would have been doctored for a privately published book compiled in 2003. Did time-travelers from the present day fake the letter and plant it knowing that it would come out someday and damage him—after he’d already been elected president twice?

If so, their plot failed. This isn’t going to damage him. It’s just another broken window in a neighborhood that’s full of them.

…

Andrew Egger explains at The Bulwark:

In a way, Donald Trump and his allies have spent their entire political lives preparing for this moment. The whole miserable decade of “alternative facts,” of witch hunts, of flooding the zone with sh-t—it all amounted to a long, powerful education for his base. It’s a training in a certain kind of zen meditation, in which stories damaging to Trump pass from the eyes and ears directly out of the body without ever intersecting the brain. By now, the base has gotten in their 10,000 hours. They’ve become masters of the craft. They can perform all sorts of remarkable feats—the media-cope equivalent of lying on beds of nails while cinderblocks are smashed on their chests. These cinderblocks, they whisper serenely, are just a liberal plot. If I pay attention, the Democrats win.

…

The Epstein scandal is the “final boss” of Trump scandals, the supreme test of reality-defying propaganda skills that MAGA has acquired over the course of 10 years. The crime involved, pedophilia, is one of their obsessions; the villain, Jeffrey Epstein, is a lead character in their hysteria about an elite child-abuse cabal; yet the evidence continues to mount that their own messiah, Donald Trump, knew what was happening as it happened and—at best—did nothing to stop it. It’s like the Access Hollywood scandal but with the spin difficulty dialed up by a factor of 10.

…

Think of American government as a big neighborhood. The neighborhood has started to go to hell. Its residents are adjusting their expectations for it accordingly.

Bad things happen when neighborhoods start to go to hell. As public evidence of minor disorder and neglect rises, crime gets worse. That’s the “broken windows” theory of criminology—the idea that letting lesser offenses like window-breaking go unpunished signals to good guys and bad guys alike that laws won’t be enforced. Criminals respond by escalating to more serious offenses and law-abiding locals become fatalistic or apathetic.

Trump has broken a lot of windows in our government. How can we expect Americans to maintain the same expectations for civic order that they used to have as the proverbial neighborhood falls into disrepair?

Nick Catoggio.

Somehow, this seemed like the time to resurrect an item I only recently deleted from my footer:

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

Saturday, 9/6/25

A question to keep you up tonight

The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), particularly Article 92, mandates obedience to lawful orders but distinguishes that unlawful orders—those that require criminal acts or violate the Constitution, U.S. federal law, or international law—must not be followed. Military personnel are legally required to refuse unlawful orders, with the understanding that obeying illegal orders does not absolve one from responsibility under both U.S. military law and international law. This principle was firmly established by precedents such as the Nuremberg Trials, which rejected “just following orders” as a defense for war crimes. (Via Perplexity AI, but confirmed)

If you believe or suspect, as I do, that Donald Trump plans a series of provocations toward the end of declaring martial law and remaining in office, UCMJ Article 92 might come as at least a small comfort. “If they order troops to fire on peaceful civilian demonstrators, the troops should refuse, right?”

Well, “should” is doing a lot of work there. An incident last week gives great pause:

I ran across this dystopian sentence in the New York Times: “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

…

The vice president was asked yesterday to specify the legal authority that entitled Trump to blow up a bunch of people in the Caribbean. The authority, he replied, is that there are “literal terrorists who are bringing deadly drugs into our country and the president of the United States ran on a promise of stopping this poison from coming into our country.”

He and I happened to attend the same law school, so from one alumnus to another: That’s not the correct answer, J.D. The president’s campaign pledges don’t magically acquire the force of law because a plurality of the electorate decided he’d be marginally preferable to his opponent.

…

[So w]here is that authorization? Since 2001, presidents from both parties have strained the logic of the post-9/11 AUMFs against al-Qaeda and Iraq by citing them to justify attacks on adjacent jihadist threats like ISIS. No one seriously believes they can be stretched so far as to encompass drug trafficking in the Caribbean, though. Absent any new approval from Congress, letting Trump mark people for death based on an assessment of “terrorism” by his own State Department amounts to granting him the power to kill anyone whom he deems a threat.

That’s how we ended up with Pentagon lawyers poring over law books on Wednesday, desperately trying to find some statute that might retroactively justify blowing up 11 Venezuelans.

The answer to the question posed to J.D. Vance is that there is no obvious legal authority for what the president did. There’s only what we might call post-legal authority, the idea that—as Trump himself once put it—“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Which, I think, cuts to the heart of the difference between conservatives and postliberals.

…

To ask which legal authority gives Trump the power to kill Venezuelans on mere suspicion of drug trafficking is to engage in non sequitur. The president said he would save the country by preventing drugs from entering the U.S. and he’s going to do that. What does law have to do with anything?

…

On that note, here’s a question to keep you up tonight: If the Times is correct that the Pentagon couldn’t identify a legal justification for Trump’s order to kill a bunch of people, why did it obey his order?

To ask that question is to invite demagoguery about not taking crime seriously or knowing “what time it is,” blah blah, but I know exactly what time it is and it’s exactly the right question for the hour. Our new government fundamentally believes that law is an obstacle to American greatness—that law, normally just a nuisance, has itself become a major problem bedeviling the country—and it intends to solve this problem too. One way is to normalize shooting first and asking questions later. That’s the significance of what just happened to that Venezuelan ship.

Nick Cattogio (bold added)

Mind-boggling

I suspect you haven’t heard more about this because the ramifications boggle the mind:

3. China may have hacked data from every single American in one of the largest-ever cyberattacks, experts fear. Hackers backed by Beijing targeted more than 80 countries, stealing information on telecoms, transport and military infrastructure in a year-long campaign, investigators concluded in a report released last week. Since 2021, the group, known as Salt Typhoon, has accessed data that could enable the Chinese intelligence services to monitor global communication networks and track targets including politicians, spies and activists. Even the telephone conversations of Donald Trump and JD Vance were compromised, according to the FBI. Hackers sponsored by the Chinese government “are targeting networks globally, including, but not limited to, telecommunications, government, transportation, lodging, and military infrastructure networks”, the joint statement, from agencies including the National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and FBI, said. (Source: telegraph.co.uk)

John Ellis News Items

Noted

[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

Thursday potpourri, 9/4/25

Bon mots

In another article in The Journal, [Kyle] Smith panned “The Roses,” about a miserably married couple: “People are going to want to walk out of this movie even when it is shown on airplanes.” (Ray Psonak, Tokyo)
In his newsletter, Jim Acosta reacted to the labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, fawning over the president during that three-hour cabinet lovefest: “Get a room. Just not the cabinet room, please.” (Linda Hoffman, Georgetown, S.C.)
In The Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi offered an explanation for what she sees as unusually conspicuous cosmetic surgery among the MAGA elite: “These are not human faces, they are luxury meat-masks meant to signal wealth and in-group belonging.” (Chris McDonald, Gainesville, Va.)
In Esquire, Dave Holmes contemplated the choice confronting young American scientists facing the Trump administration’s assault on research: “You could live in fear of being sent to the gulag for your frog embryos not having their citizenship papers in order, or you could go live in a place like Australia, where you’re valued and well compensated, where your lifesaving work is free of political manipulation and where Chris Hemsworth is a 6. Who wouldn’t take that deal?” (Dave Pramuk, Napa, Calif.)

Frank Bruni

Tyrannies

Among the most useful contrasts involves distinguishing the ancient form of tyranny from the modern variant.

The philosophers of classical Greece (Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle) treated tyranny as a regime devoted to enabling the tyrant to fulfill his lust for the greatest possible pleasures. …

Modern tyranny is very different. Unlike the ancient form, modern tyranny is usually ideological, motivated by ideas, and it involves administration on a vast, national scale, which means it requires a popular movement to gain power and a party to hold it. …

The thing that’s interesting about Trump is that he has far more in common with ancient tyrants than he does with modern ones. …

[Trump is] a man who personalizes everything. It’s always about Trump—his ego, his power, his image, his accomplishments, his strength, his wealth. This is why Cabinet meetings quickly become cringe-inducing displays of obsequiousness on the part of senior members of his own administration, who trip over themselves to bestow ridiculously over-the-top praise on Dear Leader. It’s also why Trump is using the formal and informal powers of his office to punish his domestic political enemies, regardless of whether doing so violates longstanding norms restricting presidential behavior.

…

The pleasures he wants now are mainly the nation’s undivided attention and ever-greater quantities of money. He gets the first by weighing in on every controversy in the country, from crime and immigration to Sydney Sweeney’s ad campaign for American Eagle, a proposed change to the Cracker Barrel logo, and who will be admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He gets the second by shamelessly extorting money from other governments and wealthy companies, universities, law firms, and individuals from around the world.

Damon Linker

On that very last sentence, the extorted money is not really going into Trump’s pocket. It goes to the government, and typically is for specific purposes such as campus reforms or trade schools.

But it’s still extortionate.

Thinking outside the nativist box

On Saturday while grilling on his back porch, a friend of mine noted with disapproval how those of British nationality are now a minority in London (approximately 41 percent of Londoners were born outside of the UK according to the UK Office for National Statistics). He believes that native-born British aren’t permitted to object and that their capital is demographically no longer theirs.

This friend shares many of my core Christian convictions and was educated at a service academy and an Ivy League graduate school. He is intellectually curious and attends a large suburban megachurch. He also regularly engages with the podcast offerings of the New Right that have displaced legacy media. While he isn’t an Anglican, I’ve encountered similar talking points in the online fringes of my own church tradition, including discussion of “Heritage Americans.”

I don’t share my friend’s distress (possibly because I’m from Colorado which has a low percentage of native-born residents, and live outside Washington, D.C. where seemingly nearly everyone is from elsewhere). It’s preferable, in my viewpoint, to live in a place where many want to move to rather than a place many are relocating from. The capital of any large empire inevitably attracts diaspora populations from its far-flung territories ….

Jeffrey Walton

Dirty Harry

When Oxford University decided to give an honorary degree to former President Harry Truman, Elizabeth Anscombe objected:

Some things you simply cannot do, no matter the consequences. And for Anscombe, “choosing to kill the innocent as a means to an end is always murder.”

…

Consequences in ethical analysis are never as important as actions and intentions, and they can never justify doing something that is inherently wrong; to argue otherwise inevitably leads to an ethic in which moral absolutes wither away. (Humans will always be able to convince themselves that their circumstances are that dire.) If the intent behind Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to use civilians as means to that end, then no appeals to potential consequences could justify that decision. To do so, for Anscombe, was to rationalize murder.

Luis Parrales, Elizabeth Anscombe and the Bomb

Lie taxonomy

The problem is that all too many Christians are in the grips of two sets of lies. We’ll call them the enabling lies and the activating lies. And unless you deal with the enabling lies, the activating lies will constantly pollute the body politic and continue to spawn violent unrest.

What’s the difference between the two kinds of lies? The enabling lie is the lie that makes you fertile ground for the activating lie that actually motivates a person to charge a thin blue line at the Capitol or take a rifle to a pizza parlor.

Here’s an enabling lie: America will end if Trump loses. That was the essence of the Flight 93 essay in 2016. That was the core of Eric Metaxas’s argument in our debates this spring and fall.

Here’s another enabling lie: The fate of the church is at stake if Joe Biden wins.

And here’s yet another: The left hates you (this sentence sometimes concludes with the phrase “and wants you dead.”)

David French, Only the Church Can Truly Defeat a Christian Insurrection

Performative piety (on the campaign trail)

On Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a press release recommending that schools adopt a policy that calls for recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. The press release said in part:

“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society. Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”…

… [Senate Bill 11] directs the Office of the Attorney General to defend any school district or charter school that adopts such a policy. In addition, the Attorney General is empowered to recommend best practices for implementation.

For Texas students considering how to best utilize this time, Attorney General Paxton encourages children to begin with the Lord’s Prayer, as taught by Jesus Christ.

The press release then sets out the text of the Lord’s Prayer as it appears in the King James Version of Matthew 6:9-13.

(Religion Clause blog)

Paxton is deeply corrupt and fighting for his political life through a divorce and a primary candidacy for the U.S. Senate.

The Ten Commandments don’t need friends like him, but he may need to bandy them about to burnish his image with low-information voters fond of performative piety.

Corrupt Todd Rokita take note.

[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

New World Order

[H]ere’s the real takeaway: Tianjin is not just hosting another international gathering; it is hosting the embryonic headquarters of a new world order. When half of humanity convenes to discuss not how to obey the old hegemon, but how to craft sovereign industrial futures, the game has already shifted. The West, stuck in yesterday’s script of divide and rule, cannot grasp that the 21st century is already unfolding elsewhere – in Russian engines powering Chinese jets, in oil tankers sailing east, in Modi and Putin shaking hands against the backdrop of an Asia that is no longer waiting for permission. The SCO in Tianjin is Eurasia writing history, while the West scribbles in the margins of its own decline.

My cyberfriend Terry Cowan, commenting on Shangai Cooperation Organization (the SCO) meeting in Tianjin, China — without us. Here’s how a few of our mainstream media covered it (not that Terry thinks they’ve got much true to say):

Wall Street Journal (gift link)
New York Times

Then, a day later, Trump exerted his charm:

Twenty-six heads of state joined Xi Jinping to watch a military parade in Beijing. They included many autocrats, including from Russia and North Korea, but no leaders of big Western democracies. Beforehand Mr Xi said mankind faced a choice between peace and war, and called China “unstoppable”. Donald Trump told China’s leader to “give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States”.

The Economist World in Brief, Wednesday 9/3. Fuller Economist coverage here.

John Ellis channels the Financial Times:

Xi Jinping has capped a week of frenetic diplomacy by presiding over one of China’s biggest military parades, projecting his nation’s growing power in a show of solidarity with fellow strongmen Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. A procession of China’s newest tanks, drones and missiles rolled past Tiananmen Square on Wednesday to mark the 80th anniversary of the second world war victory over Japan. The People’s Liberation Army showed off its latest weapons, including hypersonic missiles, with Xi hailing troops as a “heroic force” that should develop into a “world-class military” — implying a full equal to the US’s armed forces. The Chinese president said the PLA would “resolutely safeguard national sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity” — code for Beijing’s goal of gaining control over Taiwan. “The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is unstoppable,” Xi added. (Source: ft.com)

I’m not going to blame Donald Trump for all this. I have little doubt that his various tarrifs, trash-talking, vacillation and so forth accelerated it, but the American empire didn’t much rally under Joe Biden, either. We’re at an inflection point, and I expect us to be much closer to “bit player” than to “hegemon” when it’s over.

[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