Politics, 7/21/25

Sanctimony sans self-awareness at Glastonbury

Last point, about how crazy these people are. Jeremy Corbyn, in his remarks from the stage, sent a “message” to Donald Trump, citing this poster seen outside the perimeter fence at the festival. “Build bridges, not walls,” said Corbyn, to Trump:

This poster literally hung on a five-mile fence surrounding the festival! They had to build it so only the people who had paid to come in could enjoy the music. They even had an onsite jail for wall-breachers. But these UK leftists have zero self-awareness. They want the Third World to keep coming by hundreds daily across the Channel, and to be subsidized by British taxpayers. But if any of those illegal migrants wanted to get into the Glasto festival, well, NOOOOO! To jail with you!

Rod Dreher

Why Trump won’t fire him (but may not need to)

Terminating the Fed chair would place him on thin legal ice and bring down an avalanche of criticism that he has destabilized U.S. monetary policy by politicizing the central bank. While hounding Powell out of office wouldn’t solve the second problem, it would solve the first, which is probably why the daily demagoguery is ramping up.

Do we really think Jerome Powell is prepared to endure 10 more months of it, given the sort of threats he and his family are likely receiving from hardcore MAGA cranks as a result? Even if he is, do we think Donald Trump has the patience to endure 10 more months of Powell ignoring his demands to cut rates if and when the economy slides into a tariff-driven slowdown?

There’s no way. We’re talking about a guy who once dashed off an out-of-the-blue memo giving the Pentagon two months’ notice to pull everyone out of Afghanistan.

Nick Catoggio

It is hideous that one must factor hardcore MAGA goons into these calculations.

Demagoguery whiplash

Show us all the Epstein client list now!!! Why would anyone protect those scum bags? Ask yourselves this question daily and the answer becomes very apparent!! (Donald Trump Jr in July 2023)

Quotes via Andrew Sullivan

Lonesome Rhodes

Trump always reminded me of Lonesome Rhodes, the charismatic, populist entertainer whose “candid” patter with plain folks garners him enormous power in Elia Kazan’s 1957 movie “A Face in the Crowd.”

At the finale, Andy Griffith’s Rhodes — engorged by flattery and riches — has a narcissistic explosion. Not realizing the woman he betrayed flipped on his microphone, he calls his loyal fans “morons,” “miserable slobs” and “trained seals.”

“I can take chicken fertilizer and sell it to ’em for caviar,” he crows, grinning.

Trump’s Truth Social posts backing up Pam Bondi’s claim that the Epstein files were much ado about nothing showed that same brutal disregard for his devout fans. They had taken him seriously? What fools!

Maureen Dowd

I heard an interesting anecdote and a conjecture about Trump from Michael Smerconish, interviewed by Jamie Weinstein on the Dispatch Podcast.

The anecdote: Trump was flying back to NYC from Florida, on a private jet of course. A model on the flight said “why don’t we stop at Atlantic City?” Someone replied “it’s full of white trash.” The first said “What’s white trash?” Trump jumped in: “It’s what I am only I have money.” (I find the anecdote plausible except for the premise that someone on a private jet with Trump didn’t know what “white trash” was.)

Conclusion: Donald Trump trades on being just a regular guy from Queens with lots and lots of money. People like regular guys.

The conjecture: The reason MAGA won’t let go of the Epstein story is that Trump clearly was connected to him and enjoyed his hospitality (to whatever extent, social or venereal), and that kind of hospitality was not extended to normal guys. The whole Epstein nexus (apart from any anti-semitic animus) marks Trump as not-so-normal after all.

Oh, the futility!

Is this really what I’ve chosen to do with my life? Provide running commentary on a conman-charlatan’s attempt to hock his bullshit to millions of morons? Hope that the country can be saved from authoritarianism by equally dishonest right-wing “influencers” stirring up indignation among the moronic masses against the man who more than anyone else taught them how demagoguery is done? Pretend that the Democrats trying their best to sound earnest as they barely contain their glee over Trump’s troubles really care about anything except making the president look as terrible as possible?

The thing that might be worst about trying to focus my attention on political life during the second Trump administration is the continual temptation to respond by a deranged embrace of misanthropy.

Damon Linker, feelin’ a little down.

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

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

Thursday, 7/17/25

The Main Event

Culture

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

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

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

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

Frank Bruni

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

Correctionist history

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

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

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

Pronouns

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

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

Faith Hill, Andrea Gibson Refused to ‘Battle’ Cancer

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

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

Politics

GOP: You Are Dead to Me

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

…

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

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

Wall Street Journal

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

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

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

Legalia – of my former profession and its practitioners

Thinking of the children

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

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

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

Josh Blackman

Integrity

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

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

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

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

Reuters report via Lafayette Journal & Courier.

Adiaphora

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

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

The high cost of low trust

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

…

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

…

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

Kevin D. Williamson, The High Cost of Low Trust

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

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

The Epstein Conspiracy Theory

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

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

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

Freddie DeBoer

Cui bono?

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

Independence Day

We hold these truths to be … awfully inconvenient.

We are coming up on Independence Day, when those of us dumb enough to be innocently going around in public places across these fruited plains are going to be treated to the ghastly spectacle of a great many Donald Trump sycophants in dopey red caps reading aloud from the Declaration of Independence.

And I am going to throw up in my mouth a little bit.

The founding generation more or less ignored the Declaration, for reasons that are easy to understand (no sense waving around a manifesto for revolution while you’re trying to set up a new state), but the Trump cultists approach that inspired document the way certain superstitious ignoramuses treat the Bible, i.e., venerating the object itself as a kind of magical totem while ignoring, inverting, or perverting what the text actually has to say. As they do with the Constitution, they treat the Declaration of Independence the way the German composer Max Reger treated hostile assessments of his musical works: “I am sitting in the smallest room of my house,” he wrote to one unimpressed critic. “I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.”

The people who most loudly proclaim themselves “patriots” are, in point of fact, adherents of a politics that is fundamentally opposed to the principles spelled out in the Declaration, hewing to a vaguely articulated ideology that is not only illiberal but anti-liberal, autocratically personalist to a degree that would have made poor old King George puke from anxiety, and entirely hostile to the revolutionary document’s universalism. Above all, they reject its theology, operating from the assumption that liberty is not an endowment from the Creator but the gift from patron to client, from the powerful man to his abject petitioners.

It is a Caesarist politics, not an American politics. It is gross, low, and atavistic.

Whom do I mean? There is in our politics at the moment something that calls itself the “new right” or MAGA or “national conservatism,” and one name is as good as another for a movement that does not quite exist: In practice, there is only Donald Trump and his concentric circles of sycophancy, and everything else is intellectual pretense.

But even pretense can be revealing: The Trump world’s leading intellectual (“tallest building in Wichita”) is probably Patrick Deneen, author of Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future, and the school of thought (“thought”) associated with him is sometimes called “postliberalism.” Deneen castigates the pantheon of classical liberal thinkers from Adam Smith to John Locke, whose prose Thomas Jefferson freely plagiarized when writing the Declaration: “Long train of abuses”? “More disposed to suffer … than right themselves”? All that jazz? Quotations from Locke, the grand poohbah of Anglo-American liberalism. Locke’s famous list of basic rights—“life, liberty, and property” became “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” under the editorial quill of Thomas Jefferson, relying on George Mason’s earlier adaptation. But the mark of Lockean liberalism cannot be missed.

It is not only a few phrases here and there that marks the Declaration as a quintessentially liberal document. Mike Huckabee and the other Elmer Gantry-type figures of the Evangelical world talk of Trump as divinely appointed in approximately the same way European kings understood themselves to be selected by God with His favor; the Declaration rejects that monarchical pretense: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Trump treats the powers of the presidency as a kind of personal fief, handing out financial favors and pardons to friends and donors while using the awesome powers of the national state to target political enemies ranging from Harvard to the City of Los Angeles, a personalist and might-makes-right approach that cannot be squared with the notions that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” American liberalism, as attested to by the Declaration of Independence, is founded on the notion that rights reside in the individual—not in the nation as a whole, in the race, in a class, or in a caste or a guild—and that these rights are both inherent and non-negotiable rather than subject to ad hoc revision as demanded by the vagaries of political reality or the national situation. Trumpism is all ad–hoc-ism all the time.

The thing that calls itself the “new right” rejects liberalism partly out of illiterate linguistic habit (in U.S. political jargon, liberal long meant the left wing of the Democratic Party rather than the British liberty tradition, George McGovern rather than Adam Smith) but also, in its more intelligent (and, hence, more blameworthy) quarters in full knowledge of what is being rejected—which is the American proposition itself as expressed most famously in the Declaration of Independence. Free trade, a liberal immigration policy, due process—these are not mere policy preferences appended to some Völkisch ethno-nationalist uprising in New England, but the foundation of the thing itself.

Everybody knows the preamble. But have you dug lately into the specific complaints the Founders catalogued? If Mark Twain was correct that history doesn’t repeat but rhymes, then there’s a whole sonnet lurking in the text of the Declaration for anybody who will bother to read it.

“To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

King George was faulted for setting aside duly enacted laws and frustrating their intents; Donald Trump simply refuses to enforce the law when it doesn’t suit him, as in the matter of the TikTok ban, laws that remain effectively “suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained.” Trump may not have “called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository,” but who can deny that he has usurped congressional power at every turn, from unilaterally enacting tariffs with no legal authorization to creating new executive “departments” such as DOGE ex nihilo (“he has erected a multitude of new offices”) with no legal power to do so, gutting legally authorized programs, abusing “acting” appointments to avoid confirmation hearings, etc.? The colonists condemned King George for going to great lengths to prevent immigration and for seeking to make “judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices,” etc. The Founders blamed the English king “for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world, for imposing taxes on us without our consent,” which is Trump’s go-to economic policy. For now, it is mostly only immigrants that Trump is engaged in “transporting … beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offenses,” but give him time.

What else did the Founders say about rotten, batty old George? “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” Well, there’s that, sure. And they proclaimed that a national leader “whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

Indeed—well said.

With the Declaration of Independence, the American Founders elevated themselves from a lower state—that of subjects—to a higher state: that of citizens. Americans in our time—too many Americans—have devolved from citizens to subjects and then all the way down to beggars: “Please, Mr. President, may we have your permission to buy some lumber from the Canadians to build our houses? Without incurring ruinous taxes that have no legal basis? Pretty please?”

When they write the history of the Trump years, it will be “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States.” The tyrannical project will fail, not because we are such firm and unwavering patriots but because Donald Trump is too lazy and stupid to make himself into a Napoleon, and the worst of those around him mainly care about making a little easy money and playing big shots on social media rather than becoming a proper junta.

Our hope is not in our virtues but in their vices.

The Founders set down their objections to the king in writing out of a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Never mind the whole of mankind: We cannot even muster the self-respect to tell ourselves the truth about our situation.

Kevin D. Williamson

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

Howl

My goodness, these people talk like cretins

Imagine being Pete Hegseth … a Princeton- and Harvard-educated … idiot—standing there insisting that the recent attack on Iranian nuclear facilities was “the most complex and secretive military operation in history.”

… “Midnight Hammer” … wasn’t the most complex or secretive military operation of the past ten months—surely that laurel goes to the Israelis and the “Grim Beeper” caper—much less the whole of human history.

… my goodness, these people talk like cretins. Trump himself is, of course, all superlatives all the time, the sort of man who was born to sell fake Rolexes out of the trunk of a Nissan Altima and would be a tedious barstool blowhard if only he had the decency to drink. When a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst suggested that the Iran mission may have amounted to less than we all hoped, Karoline Leavitt—who is the White House press secretary in large part because she lacks the intellectual sophistication to turn the letters around on “Wheel of Fortune”—raged that the report was the work of a “loser.” Nobody bothered to ask her why it is that Donald Trump, supposedly an executive for the ages, has had so many losers working under him, often in senior security and intelligence roles: John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, Gen. John Kelly, Gen. Mark Milley, Gen. James Mattis, Gen. H.R. McMaster, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, etc.

…

Trump is out there insisting that he is the greatest president since George Washington—and maybe greater than Washington, too. Eisenhower, who at the apex of his military career outranked George Washington (Washington died a three-star general; his posthumous promotion to his current statutorily unsurpassable rank came in 1976), knew that he would lie in state after his death and insisted that he did so in his regular army uniform, in an $80 standard-issue soldier’s coffin, with a minimum of decoration … (Specifically, only his Army and Navy distinguished-service medals and the Legion of Merit.) Who doubts that Donald Trump will be entombed in whatever Tutankhamun would have dreamed up if he’d had Liberace to consult?

Kevin D. Williamson, at the top of his game.

Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime

The Trump administration found yesterday that Harvard University’s failure to address antisemitism on campus violated civil rights law. In a letter to Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, officials from four government agencies said the university’s “commitment to racial hierarchies” had “enabled antisemitism to fester.”

The Free Press

Does anybody doubt that if Harvard had suppressed anti-Zionist, anti-Israel or antisemitic sentiments, the Trump administration would have found that Harvard violated free speech rights?

This isn’t about antisemitism; Trump just wants to wound or destroy Harvard for the perverse pleasure of the sans-culottes.

Hocus-Pocus

Republicans are waving a $3.8 trillion magic wand over their tax-and-spending megabill, declaring that their extensions of expiring tax cuts have no effect on the federal budget. The unprecedented maneuver is a crucial part of the GOP plan to squeeze permanent tax cuts through Congress on a simple-majority vote in the coming days. Republicans are expected to endorse the accounting move in a procedural vote early Monday. (Source: wsj.com)

John Ellis News Items

Deporting those nasty Christians

Christianity Today reports that the Trump Administration is targeting Iranian Christian migrants for deportation:

…

If deported back to their country of origin, Iranian Christians face severe persecution at the hands of Iran’s radical Islamist theocracy. That persecution has actually intensified in recent years, and includes criminalization of the promotion Christianity, and severe punishments for Christians considered to be “apostates” from Islam. This persecution makes Iranian Christians obvious candidates for asylum or refugee status (for which applicants are eligible based on persecution on the basis of religion, among other possible criteria). At the very least, those who have filed such applications must not be deported until those applications have gotten proper consideration.

I’m old enough to remember a time when conservative Republicans saw themselves as defending Christians against radical Islamism. Today, a GOP administration wants to deport Christians to persecution by a radical Islamist regime. The only people Trump considers worthy of refugee status seem to be white Afrikaner South Africans. While they may have a plausible case (and I don’t oppose admitting them), that of Iranian Christians – and many other severely oppressed groups – is much stronger.

…

People who genuinely oppose socialism and radical Islamism would not close the doors against those regime’s victims. Doing so is both unjust and harmful to the US economy (to which these immigrants contribute) and to America’s struggle in the international war of ideas against these regimes. It’s hard to credibly tell people we are better than these brutal despots when we callously deport their victims back to them, thereby facilitating the very oppression we claim to oppose.

Ilya Somin (hyperlink added).

The entrepreneur’s new clothes

These days, Donald Trump (the man who “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program) and Jeff Bezos (the man whose second nuptials raised the bar for vulgar displays of wealth and celebrity connection) are kindred spirits:

Bezos is a man of extraordinary, awe-inspiring accomplishment. He has changed the way many of us live. But what he seems to be after these days isn’t so much respect as its quicker, lesser cousin — envy. That’s the braggart’s quarry. That’s what Trump wants, too. And it’s pursued not through substantive works but through superficial theater (military parade, anyone?), which is another of the braggart’s tells.

Boasts aren’t deeds. They’re often TikTok-friendly, Instagram-ready substitutes. Somehow, we’ve cultivated a culture that invites such camouflage and elevates the people who don it most shamelessly, even if the less impressionable among us can see it as a sign that the emperor — or entrepreneur — has no clothes.

Frank Bruni

Well, when you put it that way …

“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who authored the majority opinion, wrote, “the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

The Morning Dispatch

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

Saturday, 6/28/25

The Blind Men and the Iranian Elephant

Source	Assessment
Leaked DIA Report	Strikes delayed Iran’s bomb development only “a few months”; facilities not fully destroyed; 400 kg of highly enriched uranium still intact.
President Trump & Officials	Insist on “total obliteration” of targets; intelligence from Israeli operatives on the ground confirms destruction.
CIA Statement	Confirms “severe damage” to Iran’s nuclear program, requiring years to rebuild.
David Albright (Independent)	Satellite images show ventilation shafts and tunnels hit; centrifuge enrichment effectively destroyed; rebuilding will take a long time.
IAEA Director General	“Very significant damage” expected; key question remains about location of enriched uranium.
Olli Heinonen (IAEA former chief inspector)	Possibility remains for a small secret enrichment facility; threat persists.

(Summary of Was Iran’s Nuclear Program ‘Obliterated’—or Just Set Back a Few Months?).

To some extent, this feels like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Some of the experts are describing impediments to Iran’s bomb development, others how long it would take to rebuild the damaged facilities. Those are not the same question.

Pete Hegseth on the Iran Mission

Everyone with eyes knows this mission was a success! And if you doubt, here are a number of quotes from people brave enough to see what was REALLY there and not just what so-called INTELLIGENCE shows. This is also what I’m like when my loved ones come out of surgery. I don’t need to see the patient. I just want to hear statements from True Patriots about how he’s probably doing. That’s enough for me. If you weren’t FAKE NEWS, it would be enough for you.

Now, thanks to Donald Trump, we are on the historic, unprecedented verge of a thing that we used to have before he tore up the treaty! Where’s the praise? Where’s the adulation?

Alexandra Petri’s Fake News satire of Pete Hegseth’s presser with the fake news after the Iran bombing (bold and hyperlink added).

It seems to me that there’s been too little coverage of (a) the efficacy of the 2015 JCPOA until (b) Trump pulled us out of it in 2018 and the Iran nuclear program shot back up again. Kudos to Petri for alluding to it.

What Bibi got right

Especially over the past 10 months, Netanyahu has impressively followed through on his aim to remake the face of the Middle East. He’s degraded Hamas and Hezbollah, two of the vilest terror regimes on the planet. He has made the Iranian theocracy look pathetic and decrepit. Israel has demonstrated its vast military and intelligence supremacy over its enemies, establishing total freedom of the skies over much of Iran. It has shown that its agents can penetrate enemy organizations and find and kill their militant leaders. Netanyahu’s actions have contributed to the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria and have helped the legitimate Lebanese government regain control of its own territory. The Axis of Terror is in shambles.

This includes the Israeli-U.S. assault on Iran’ s nuclear program. We don’t yet know how much damage that assault has done. An early Pentagon report found that the attacks set the Iranian project back only a few months, which was picked up big-time on one side of the internet. But several other reports, including one from the Institute for Science and International Security, found that the attack “effectively destroyed” Iran’s enrichment program.

We may know in time what the bombings accomplished. In the meantime, we do know that Israel and the United States have the will and capacity to attack Iran anytime and anyplace. We do know that if Iran reconstitutes its nuclear program, Israel and America have the capacity to deliver a much more devastating and regime-threatening blow. We also know that Iran and its proxies have made some insanely self-destructive miscalculations since Oct. 7, 2023, and they must know that, too. These are ominous omens for the theocrats in Tehran.

…

For decades, both Israel and the United States were willing to tolerate the noose [i.e., the growing threat from Iran]. Dismantling it seemed too hard and risky. That changed on Oct. 7. Israel learned, to its shock and dismay, that it lacked the capacity to anticipate and prevent murderous attacks. Suddenly the looming noose began to appear intolerable. Netanyahu, and the Israeli public generally, decided to respond to Oct. 7 not with the limited retribution campaign that many of us outside observers were supporting, but by attempting to dismantle the whole noose, including Hezbollah and the future possibility of Iranian nukes, and that now looks like the right call.

David Brooks, not a Netanyahu fan. (bold added, shared link)

The Trump Doctrine

The closest I ever came to a clear understanding of his contradictory and sometimes incoherent policies was in 2018, at a lunch in the White House with one of his closest aides. We were discussing an article I had published a few years earlier in this magazine, about Obama’s foreign policy, and I said that I thought it might be premature to discern a Trump equivalent. The official responded, “There’s definitely a Trump Doctrine.”

I asked him to describe it. He said, “The Trump Doctrine is ‘We’re America, Bitch.’ That’s the Trump Doctrine.”

The official continued, “Obama apologized to everyone for everything. He felt bad about everything.” Trump, he said, “doesn’t feel like he has to apologize for anything America does.” Another White House official explained it this way: “The president believes that we’re America, and people can take it or leave it.”

Jeffrey Goldberg

This comes as no surprise to me

I have a theory of why Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. I had it even before he bombed them. I even wrote a very brief description of the theory.

But Carlos Lozada scooped me:

There’s a question President Trump likes to ask people around him when he’s facing a major challenge or considering a big decision. It’s not “Why did this happen?” or “What are my options?” or anything so straightforward as “How does this affect American interests?” It’s a more impressionistic question; any answer might sound equally authoritative, even if only one answer is preferred.

“How’s it playing?”

Trump posed it soon after Israel launched its first attacks against Iran. The president “asked an ally how the Israeli strikes were ‘playing,’” The Times reported. “He said that ‘everyone’ was telling him he needed to get more involved.”

Carlos Lozada

Good populism, vicious populism

The Republican Party, rather than embracing the best aspects of populism, has taken on its vices: anti-intellectualism, anti-institutionalism and anti-elitism; feeding off negative emotions like anger, grievances and vengeance; and a propensity to believe and to spread conspiracy theories. Populism often looks for scapegoats, frequently blaming immigrants and those who are ethnically and culturally different. Populists are also historically attracted to demagogues and authoritarian personalities.

Peter Wehner, What Has Happened to My Party Haunts Me

We seem to have turned a corner

Dishheads know I’ve been trying to get a grip on the queer and trans extremists who have run amok with the remnants of the gay rights movement these past few years. But as I watched the transqueers respond to the resounding election defeat with unreconstructed defiance, doubling down on gender extremism, and hurting acceptance of gay men, lesbians, and sane trans people, I felt I had no choice but to try to make a noise that could reach further than Substack, and get through the wall of disinformation that the MSM and queer and trans groups have been perpetrating.

I sent the essay to the NYT as a formality, never expecting it to be accepted. But they did. I expected the editing process to be like the woke-checking at New York Magazine, and I’d have to fight for every sentence. But the process, while it certainly wasn’t without its moments (they did try to water it down a lot), and took a good while to get into the paper, was fine. Even better: they allowed me to say my piece and write at length.

So I spent yesterday in a defensive crouch expecting an avalanche of hate and outrage.

Surprise! I’ve been inundated with thanks and encouragement from my fellow gays and lesbians. NYT readers’ comments were overwhelmingly positive — especially the reader-selected ones. I was stopped in the street in Ptown and congratulated, not yelled at. Old friends, major gay donors, mere acquaintances clogged my mailbox to say things along the lines of: THANK GOD SOMEONE SAID THIS AT LAST. Here’s a text I got from a friend:

I’ve had conversations with a dozen friends today about the trans movement and our unquestioning obedience to it, many of whom had never really considered it before at all and were various degrees of horrified. Thank you for helping make this a conversation we can have, it’s helping.

And that is really the goal: to get a conversation started that should have been happening years ago; to tell gay men and lesbians that something truly dangerous is going on they may not know about; to encourage them to look at it more deeply; and to distinguish clearly between these gender extremists and the gay and lesbian rights movement — so we don’t all get tarnished with the intolerance and incoherence of the gender nutters.

It’s a start. All of which is to say: please speak up if you are hesitating. There is far less support for these crazy experiments on kids and ideological extremism than might appear. Face down the bullies. And face up to the facts. And rescue our cause from those who will otherwise destroy it with overreach.

Andrew Sullivan on Substack

Nobody is above the law

No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law. But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation—in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so. . . . Observing the limits on judicial authority . . . is required by a judge’s oath to follow the law.

Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson [in dissent] skips over that part. Because analyzing the governing statute involves boring “legalese,” she seeks to answer “a far more basic question of enormous practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?” In other words, it is unnecessary to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. Justice Jackson would do well to heed her own admonition: “[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.” That goes for judges too.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

Birth of John the Baptist

So far as I know, we have little or no evidence for when John the Forerunner/Baptist was born, but both Orthodox and Roman Catholics commemorate it on June 24. It’s a big enough deal that my parish had a liturgy for it.

The rest of this post has nothing to do with that.

At Stake in Harvard Grants

Harvard is unique both in the volume of its research output and the extent of these cuts — the government has threatened to end every research dollar to the university. The canceled grants accounted for here add up to about $2.6 billion in awarded federal funds, nearly half of which has already been spent according to government data.

“Even ‘grant’ is a problematic word, because people think they’re just sort of handing this money out for us to do what we want with,” said Marc Weisskopf, who directs a center for environmental health at Harvard that lost its funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

On the contrary, the government is much more explicit in competitive research applications and grant reviews: It wants more neuroscientists. It wants better opioid treatment. It wants to know how lightweight origami-inspired shelters and antennas can be unfurled in war zones.

The money the government sends to Harvard is, in effect, not a subsidy to advance the university’s mission. It’s a payment for the role Harvard plays in advancing the research mission of the United States.

This is the science model the U.S. has developed over 80 years: The government sets the agenda and funds the work; university scientists design the studies and find the answers. The president’s willingness to upend that model has revealed its fragility. There is no alternative in the U.S. to produce the kind of scientific advancements represented by these grants.

Emily Badger, Aatish Bhatia and Ethan Singer, Here Is All the Science at Risk in Trump’s Clash With Harvard

GOP 2012 redux

Many have made the point, but it’s nonetheless true: Presidents can now do pretty anything they want in foreign policy without seeking congressional authorization, provided it involves dropping bombs on other countries.

Five months into the second Trump administration, isn’t it astonishing that we have a Republican president: pushing for passage of a budget bill that cuts Medicaid and Medicare; pursuing an immigration policy focused on workplace enforcement, deportation of non-criminals, and the encouragement of “self-deportation”; and a happy John Bolton cheering the bombing of Iran? After a decade of debates about What Trump Means for the Right, we’ve ended up governed by the GOP circa 2012, as if the Trump administration were just the asshole version of the Romney/Ryan administration we were spared by Obama’s successful bid for re-election that year.

Damon Linker

Received financial wisdom

The longer I live, the more I appreciate that we can’t know everything, and that we live our lives mostly on the basis of trust. What we trust depends largely on our milieu (the polite term for “tribe” for present purposes), despite trying to avoid echo chambers.

Several of my social media cyberfriends (see footer) are living quite counterculturally, and one of them introduced me to the Dense Discovery newsletter. I probably give it awfully short shrift most weeks, but today caught my attention and led to something pretty thought-provoking, starting with a graph:

Okay, but let’s talk about the prescribed wealth hoarding model in the United States, otherwise known as prudent financial planning (supposedly). The conventional advice from financial planners is that people of my age are supposed to accumulate something like $1 million in order to retire. Or maybe $1.5 million.1 In case you’re not hip to the logic here – I wasn’t until I married a very specific kind of nerd – we’re supposed to amass so much wealth that we can live off the interest and dividends until we die. It’s not enough to save what we’ll need to make it to the end of our life; we need (ostensibly) way more than that. We need to accumulate so much wealth that we can live off the wealth that our wealth earns. We need – we are told – enough that we never have to touch the principal, and we can pass our wealth along to our next of kin, whoever they may be.2

Interdependence is My New Retirement Plan – by Lisa Sibbett

My father, a professional, seemed to live fairly consistently with the values Lisa Sibbett suggests. My widowed mother had enough and to spare, but their church saw a lot of money over the years, too, and his kids occasionally got gifts at the end of a bountiful year.

My father-in-law, a tradesman, lived the “conventional advice from financial planners,” and we are now benefitting from his success at that model.

I’ve lived somewhere in between those two models. Though I (credulously?) aspired to the “conventional advice” model, I just couldn’t resist living life along the way, and not waiting until I was properly fixed for life. Unlike my parents’ generation, I did not live through any Great Depression and didn’t feel that possibility in my bones. I don’t regret it.

One caveat with Sibbett’s approach is that it requires long-enduring personal bonds. You’ll need to sink roots somewhere, and that somewhere will need to be where others are sinking roots as well. It requires long-enduring personal bonds. It’s not for individualist nomads.

The unmentionable elephant in the room

I confess that I struggled with the reasoning of the Supreme Court in Skrmetti although I reluctantly welcomed the outcome.

I was not alone. Josh Blackman and Hadley Arkes (not a lawyer, but an Amherst professor of Jurisprudence) were in the same position as me, but Arkes in particular pointed to the root problem:

The truth that dares not speak its name here is that this wide array of gender-affirming therapies and surgeries is simply predicated on a falsehood. And yet those are the words that the conservative justices apparently see themselves as barred from speaking. Something in conservative jurisprudence holds them back from appealing to the inescapable and objective truth that lies at the heart of these cases. But without it, what were these accomplished jurists able to explain here? What was their ground of justification in overriding the judgments of those parents who were absorbed in the grief and confusion that seized their children? . . . .

The only “instruction” that would be relevant, Justice Thomas, is the unyielding fact that the child is in a state of confusion: he is not occupying some body apart from his own; his sex was not “assigned” at birth but marked inescapably in the organs of reproduction, in the arrangement of his body. His sex is immutable and printed plainly upon him.

Those were the words that Chief Justice Roberts and five colleagues could not move themselves to speak. Or they thought they were constrained from speaking by a jurisprudence that bars them from invoking truths beyond the text of the Constitution—even on the question of what is a human being, the bearer of rights, and when does that “human person” begin? . . .

Without those points in place, the judgment of the Court simply dissolves into a chain of ipse dixits. Why was it not legitimate for the parents of stricken youngsters to order the procedures that might relieve their “gender dysphoria?” Answer: The legislature of Tennessee did not think it a legitimate medical remedy to choose—even though the children and the parents did not share that judgment and were willing to take their risks. One judgment had to prevail, and it was the judgment backed by the power of the State. To put a high finish on it, that “power” represented the authority of a people to govern itself through elected representatives. But when the people speak through their representatives, and override the judgments of parents about their children, they are still obliged to say something more than “we have brute the power to impose this judgment through brute enactment of the law.”

Arkes singles out Justice Thomas, I suspect, because he said “so-called experts have no license to countermand the ‘wisdom, fairness, or logic of legislative choices.’” (Justice Thomas, concurring in U.S. v. Skrmetti, via Eugene Volokh.) Arkes’ re-formulation, I guess, is that the legislature can tell the experts “your elaborations are predicated on the falsehood that a person can be inhabiting a body of the wrong sex.”

That’s not the end of the story, but it’s a starting point for re-writing a story written up to now by activists hiding something only a few clicks less deranged than the whack-a-doodle Chase Strangio ideology:

Strangio disputed that a trans woman could be “born with a male body” or “born male”; in his view, a trans woman was born a woman just like any other woman. There was no such thing as a “male body,” Strangio told his colleagues: “A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.” Before the advertisement aired, Strangio elaborated on his critique in an article in Slate. “Many advocates defend the use of the ‘born male’ or ‘born with a male body’ narrative as being easier for nontransgender people to understand,” Strangio wrote. “Of course it is easier to understand, since it reinforces deeply entrenched views about what makes a man and what makes a woman. But it is precisely these views that we must change.”

My own position hasn’t changed in 39 months. I think we’re still seeing a cultural contagion of trans claims in adolescents and must be very cautious – which is a bit easier now that even Strangio has given up on the “live son or dead daughter” emotional blackmail.

Patience, Mercy, Tolerance

For defenders of political liberalism there is perhaps no more pressing problem than this: How do you make a compelling case for liberalism in an era of ascendant [illiberalism or] strong gods? The idea of “strong gods” comes from the book Return of the Strong Gods by R. R. Reno, editor of the conservative ecumenical journal First Things.

By “strong gods” Reno means the kind of visceral or agonistic forces that can compel political or social action through deeper existential or even guttural appeals. The strong gods work not by chiefly targeting the intellect, but the appetites.

Michael Reneau, Evan Spear, and Jake Meador, A Virtue-Centric Argument for Political Liberalism (shared link). This article was welcome in light of the ascendance of various illiberalisms.

With a little help from AI, I got this summary table:

Virtue	Role Against Postliberalism & Strong Gods	Root/Source
Patience	Provides long-term perspective, allowing growth and change	Christian theology & history
Mercy	Breaks cycles of retribution, fosters trust and forgiveness	Scripture, Shakespeare
Tolerance	Intellectual humility; suspends harsh judgment; enables coexistence	Liberal philosophy & Scripture (e.g., parable of wheat and tares)

Wordplay

I know every one of these carries political freight, but that’s the burden of many writers these days:

Glenn Thrush, Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman remarked on the right-wing ire confronting Patel and Pam Bondi, the attorney general, as they fail to substantiate the accusations that they hurled in their bid for power: “They are running what amounts to a conspiracy theory fulfillment center with unstocked shelves.” (Jeff Lebsack, Buffalo, and Marianne Painter, Tacoma, Wash., among others)
In The Financial Times, Edward Luce worried that certain scenes from the Los Angeles protests played into the president’s hands: “Every rock hurled lands like a penny in Trump’s wishing well.” (Todd Lowe, Simpsonville, Ky., and Al Gallo, Huntersville, N.C., among others)
In The Washington Post, Philip Bump expressed skepticism about the government’s claim that immigration officers must wear masks for self-protection: “We should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value.” (Patrick Bell, Carmichael, Calif.)
Also in The Post, Dana Milbank took in Trump’s pleasure at some sycophantic Republicans’ suggestion that the D.C. Metro be renamed the “Trump Train”: “It’s a great idea. Qatar will donate the subway cars, which will be powered by coal. Passengers will pay for fares with cryptocurrency after first showing proof of citizenship. And the trains will reverse themselves regularly and without warning — never quite reaching their original destination.” (Mary Ellen Maher-Harkins, Orwigsburg, Pa., and Stan Shatenstein, Montreal)

Via Frank Bruni

Ceci n’est pas un phone

Methaphone. Like Methadone. Get it?

In case you’ve been wondering …

No, you’re not imagining it. The main source of political violence in the USA in this century has been right-wing, not left. Jamelle Bouie, Right-Wing Violence Is Not a Fringe Issue:

It is simply a fact that the far right has been responsible for most of the political violence committed in the United States since the start of the 21st century.

I had been wondering, because there has been some leftwing violence against persons, and much against property.

Poor fit

If it seems that America’s colleges and universities are poorly suited to the average American eighteen-year-old, perhaps that’s because they were never designed to serve him.

Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

Summer Solstice

Israeli ingenuity

As news circulated about the stupendous success of Israel’s attack on Iran, my first thought was that if you told me Mossad had figured out a way to part the Red Sea, at this point I’d believe you. The feats of intelligence and ingenuity that Israel has managed over the past year at the expense of Iran and its proxies would seem far-fetched as fiction, but here we are. It’s reassuring to see a Western nation demonstrate such competence as the United States descends into malevolent dark-age populist anarchy.

Nick Catoggio

Speed-reading

60 or so years ago, I took “Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics” (a current version here) to increase my reading speed. After teaching us a technique for dragging our eyes down a page via a hand movement, they said “Resolve that from now on you’ll never read without this.”

I said to myself “The day I speed-read the Psalms that way would be a very sad day.”

I recently installed a browser extension to generate AI summaries of the current browser tab. It is saving me quite a bit of time on humdrum news and opinion.

But the day I settle for a structured outline of Nick Catoggio (or Kevin D. Williamson) instead of reading their own sprightly writing will be pretty sad, too.

Skrmetti

Experts

The Court rightly rejects efforts by the United States and the private plaintiffs to accord outsized credit to claims about medical consensus and expertise. The United States asserted that “the medical community and the nation’s leading hospitals overwhelmingly agree” with the Government’s position that the treatments outlawed by SB1 can be medically necessary. … The implication of these arguments is that courts should defer to so-called expert consensus.

There are several problems with appealing and deferring to the authority of the expert class. First, so-called experts have no license to countermand the “wisdom, fairness, or logic of legislative choices.” … Second, contrary to the representations of the United States and the private plaintiffs, there is no medical consensus on how best to treat gender dysphoria in children. Third, notwithstanding the alleged experts’ view that young children can provide informed consent to irreversible sex-transition treatments, whether such consent is possible is a question of medical ethics that States must decide for themselves. Fourth, there are particularly good reasons to question the expert class here, as recent revelations suggest that leading voices in this area have relied on questionable evidence, and have allowed ideology to influence their medical guidance.

Taken together, this case serves as a useful reminder that the American people and their representatives are entitled to disagree with those who hold themselves out as experts, and that courts may not “sit as a super-legislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.” … By correctly concluding that SB1 warrants the “paradigm of judicial restraint,” … the Court reserves to the people of Tennessee the right to decide for themselves.

Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring in U.S. v. Skrmetti, via Eugene Volokh (citations omitted).

Strategic error

Representative Sarah (formerly Tim) McBride (D., Del.), the first transgender member of Congress, has admitted that the Democratic Party moved too quickly on pushing transgender issues. The lawmaker believes the left “went to Trans 201, Trans 301, when people were still at a very much Trans 101 stage.” Yet the representative still fails to understand the root of the problem: The left’s strategy on transgenderism failed because the left is wrong on transgenderism. Men cannot become women. Pretending like accepting the most outré claims of transgenderism is achievable through taking higher-level classes won’t change that. Besides, Americans are increasingly uninterested in enrolling in such courses. Polls show that support for so-called gender-transition procedures for children has declined, and Americans believe that trans people should use the bathroom that matches their sex, not their “gender identity.” The activists’ problem isn’t that they have failed to finesse their message; it’s that they have failed biology.

National Review Weekly email

The Barbarian Right

For many of the conservatives who embraced it—myself included—the Trumpian moment promised a more populist, pro-worker GOP. Yet the latest iteration of Donald Trump has dashed these hopes, playing down the themes that propelled his 2016 campaign, and sounding more and more like a conventional Republican nominee—only more erratic.

In the realm of right-wing ideas, meanwhile, something far grimmer is afoot: the rise of a cohort of writers, pseudo-scholars, and shitposters dedicated to reviving some of the darkest tendencies in the history of thought, including the idolatry of strength (as cartoonishly personified by the likes of Andrew Tate); the notion of supposedly “natural” hierarchies; IQ-based eugenics; overt racism and antisemitism.

Call them the Barbarian Right: The master subject of this worldview is the Nietzschean barbarian or “aristocrat of the spirit” who overthrows the egalitarian—and essentially feminine—structures that have long shackled him, restraining his yearning for adventure and excellence. Nazi apologia is par for the course.

Sohrab Ahmari

Christian Nationalist crackup

“Political idolatry,” he observes, “assumes worship, and worship assumes some kind of confidence in the thing being worshiped,” but few of the people obsessively following politics have much real faith in it anymore. It has become for many a kind of spectator sport, or live-action role-playing, far easier to participate through digital media, yet harder to take seriously. There is a performativity to our culture wars now that I suspect was not there in the 90s.

…

Over the past six months, I have observed two communities of discourse. One, which I’ve observed as a bemused spectator, is the increasingly inane conversation of Very Online Christian Nationalism. Much of this discourse had long since descended into self-parody, but the loss of a clear and present common enemy after Trump’s victory swiftly accelerated the splintering of the movement. At time of writing, many of the movements principles were publicly devouring one another over whether, and to what extent, one should blame the Jews for the moral rot of modernity.

Brad Littlejohn, The Resilience of America’s Hybrid-Enlightenment, Mere Orthodoxy (magazine) Winter 2025.

I’m reminded of how the New Atheists, having gathered around the non-existence of God, found that they had nothing else in common and dispersed again. I suspect the MAGA Right has nothing in common beyond worship of our Orange Sun King.

Golden Age

Kevin Roberts (Heritage Foundation, Project 2025) and Kellyanne Conway went north to Canada to take the affirmative on the debate question “Is this America’s Golden Age?.” It was shared with permission on the Ezra Klein show because Ezra was one of the debaters taking the negative.

Roberts and Conway beclowned themselves and offended the audience (e.g., mentioning Canada’s possible status as a 51st state) and then complained that the debate was rigged when they drew audible disapproval and contempt.

In my estimation, the negative side “chewed them up and spit them out,” but I grew too impatient and mortified at our national debasement to wait for the audience’s verdict.

Whence innovation?

Musical innovation tends to happen at crossroads and port cities. It’s spurred by outsiders not insiders. It rises from centers of multiculturalism and diversity—where different ideas come together.

The ruling class recognizes this, but it takes about 40 or 50 years. So fifty years elapse from Bob Dylan emerging as a rebel critic of the system, to becoming a Nobel Prize laureate. Almost fifty years elapse between Mick Jagger getting censored and becoming Sir Mick Jagger, an honored knight.

You eventually have this process of legitimization but the new style always starts on the outskirts—in the port cities and border cities.

…

Because of the internet, every place is now a port city.

Ted Gioia. So Ted thinks the venture capitalists in entertainment are at a dead end with sequels, prequels, and every other “do-it-again-and-again” strategy.

The slippery euthanasia slope

[A] justification for suicide that emphasizes the cry for help that medicine can’t answer, the need for control over the uncontrollable, the desire to cure suffering that doctors can’t relieve, will struggle to maintain terminal illness as a special category. There are just too many people in this exceptional position but with no endpoint to their pain.

Ross Douthat, Why the Euthanasia Slope is Slippery

Nellie snippets

Meanwhile, in the U.S. of A., Whoopi Goldberg says that being black in America is worse than being a woman in Iran. Here was The View co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin: “I think it’s very different to live in the United States in 2025 than it is to live in Iran.” Whoopi retorted: “Not if you’re black.” Alyssa, have you possibly considered sitting your ass down and letting Whoopi speak her truth? The only place worse than Iran to be a woman might well be the panel on The View. I’ll take the veil over fighting with Joy Behar about DEI any day of the week.
Asked about Tulsi’s earlier testimony on Iran, Trump said simply: “I don’t care what she said.” All jobs under Trump are fake. All titles are fake. He makes decisions alone, meditating in the comforting glow of Fox News, turned up to the highest volume. He gets vibes off Truth Social. He asks an empty Diet Coke can if she ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon. He throws a groundhog in the air and sees if it lands on the bunker buster button. He shakes Marco Rubio and turns him upside down, and if the coins that fall out of his pockets land on heads, we’re going in.
Fascinating new scams: The Trump Organization announced it plans to sell a $499 smartphone, with a gold-colored, T-engraved case, set to be released this year. Trump Mobile will also offer a phone plan for $47.45 per month. The 47 Plan. What will the Golden Trump phone do? How bad will reception be? Who will it call? Will it automatically block my lib friends (Bari)? When it comes out, we’ll do an unboxing just for TGIF. In some ways, the Trump family are artists, true creatives. Week after week they come up with scams I’ve never imagined.
Obsessed with this mysterious Trump aide: Sergio Gor, director of presidential personnel, is one of the most powerful figures in the White House, responsible for vetting all potential employees—around 4,000 executive branch staff. But a recent report found that he himself was never vetted. Gor has not submitted Standard Form 86, or SF-86, a set of questions required of all those government employees who, like him, need security clearances. The form inquires into foreign connections and birth countries—and Gor, who claims to be from Malta (though Maltese officials could not confirm this), has mysterious origins and declined to provide his birthplace when the New York Post asked, which is apparently something people working in government can do. He also advocated to end the use of the SF-86 when hiring government employees. The man in charge of vetting new Trump admin employees is not vetted (poetic, isn’t it?). And he’s in the job now, specifically campaigning against vetting government employees. I desperately need to know more about Sergio. I need a movie about Sergio (which is absolutely not his real name).

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

Miscellany

Prerequisite

In order for a boy to believe he is a girl, he must first be taught that there is a wrong way to be a boy.

Sam Morgan via Andrew Sullivan

Schooling

In a schooled world the road to happiness is paved with a consumer’s index.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Obsessives

Henry Longfellow, who made a return visit to Paris in 1836, loved the crowds as much as anything about the city. When a friend from home, accompanying him on a walk, showed no interest in the passing parade, but insisted on talking about predestination and the depravity of human nature, it was more than Longfellow could bear.

David McCullough, The Greater Journey

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

More Friday the 13th politics

We don’t do that

The president has called a big military parade this weekend in Washington to celebrate the Army’s 250th anniversary. It is also the president’s 79th birthday, and he enjoys parades.

Early plans speak of 6,600 soldiers across at least 11 divisions; 150 military vehicles, including 26 M1 Abrams tanks and 27 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. There will be aircraft and howitzers. It all sounds showy, militaristic and braggadocious, the kind of thing the Soviet Union did in its May Day parades, and North Korea still does.

We don’t do that. We don’t have big military parades with shining, gleaming weapons driven through the streets.

Sometimes I wonder of the people around the president: Do they know we don’t do this? Have they read any history? Are they like Silicon Valley tech bros who think history started with them?

Maybe they’re thinking that in a world full of danger it’s good to let Iran and China and the rest know what we’ve got, how our missiles gleam and our soldiers march. But that is just another form of never having read a book. If they had they’d know not only that this isn’t how we do it, but also that we don’t do it that way for a reason.

Peggy Noonan

(Yawn!) Another double-standard

If Joe Biden federalizes the National Guard [in Texas], that would be a direct attack on states’ rights. [W]e’ve seen Democrats try to take away our Freedoms of religion, assembly, and speech. We can’t let them take away our right to defend ourselves, too.

Kristi Noem, February 2024, via Andrew Sullivan, June 2025.

This was how the cabinet secretary who literally doesn’t know what habeas corpus is described sending Marines into Los Angeles:

We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.

She intends to liberate Los Angeles … from its duly elected officials.

Andrew Sullivan, quoting Kristi Noem June 2025.

(Yawn!) Another norm shattered

Of Trump’s speech to the troops assembled this week at Fort Bragg:

The soldiers were vetted so they were all Trump fans; Trump merchandise was openly sold at the military base (including faux credit cards labeled “White Privilege Card: Trumps Everything”); the speech was crudely partisan; and the president encouraged boos from the uniformed crowd as he lambasted his usual targets — behavior that violates Pentagon rules. If disgrace were a word Trump even understood, it wouldn’t adequately capture the despicably un-American spectacle. But this, in the president’s mind, is not America’s military, but his own.

Andrew Sullivan

Who are those masked men?

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.

And sending masked men — like Putin’s masked agents — to grab harmless foreign students and bundle them into vans, or to raid Home Depots and car washes, is not a serious attempt to deliver mass deportations. It’s designed to tell everyone — citizen or non-citizen — that this is a police state now, answerable to one man alone, and you better keep your head down.

Andrew Sullivan

Pure politics, 6/5/25

The Courts

Petulant Trump disavows his signature success (1)

Mr. Trump lashed out at the Federalist Society, blaming it for bad advice on whom to appoint to judgeships. He singled out Leonard Leo, a former longtime leader of the Federalist Society who helped recommend his first-term nominees and who exemplifies the conservative legal movement.

“I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use the Federalist Society as a recommending source on judges,” the president wrote. “I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.”

Mr. Leo and Mr. Trump had a falling out in 2020, but the personal attack was a sharp escalation. In a statement, Mr. Leo said, “I’m very grateful for President Trump transforming the federal courts, and it was a privilege being involved.”

Still, Mr. Trump’s tirade strained an already uneasy relationship with traditional legal conservatives.

Many share the president’s goals of strengthening border security, curbing the administrative state and ending “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs, said John Yoo, a conservative law professor. But, he added, they dislike some of Mr. Trump’s methods, whether that is prolifically invoking emergency powers or insulting judges who rule against his administration.

And Professor Yoo, who wrote memos advancing sweeping theories of presidential power as a Bush administration lawyer, said Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Leo were “outrageous.”

“Calling for the impeachment of judges, attacking Leonard Leo personally and basically calling him as traitor as far as I can tell — Trump is basically turning his back on one of his biggest achievements of his first term,” he added, referring to the reshaping of the federal judiciary.

Charlie Savage, Trump, Bashing the Federalist Society, Asserts Autonomy on Judge Picks

For what it’s worth, Trump’s pledge to appoint federal judges from a list compiled by Leonard Leo (not the Federalist Society, which doesn’t do endorsements) was pivotal to his 2016 Election victory, especially among abortion foes who understandably did not trust a twice-divorced narcissist playboy with gambling and porn connections. Charlie Savage hasn’t forgotten that, but I shouldn’t quote his whole article.

If the Senate has a couple of Republicans with integrity, hack appointees like Emil Bove will not be confirmed. C’mon, guys! Save him from himself!

Petulant Trump disavows his signature success (2)

There are many stories in literature about people making deals with the devil. Weirdly, in most of them the devil is a square dealer.

That is, he keeps up his end of the bargain. He offers the protagonist wealth or power in exchange for something ethereal, like their immortal soul, and when they agree he delivers. The Prince of Lies turns out not to be a swindler. Most of the drama happens after he makes good on his promise and comes to collect.

The moral of those stories isn’t that you’re a fool to trade with Beelzebub because you’ll be cheated. It’s that you’re a fool to sacrifice your noblest self for something as fleeting as worldly power.

Conservatives made a deal like that in 2016. Donald Trump offered to stock the federal judiciary with their favorite judges, beginning with the vacancy left by Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court; in return they would set aside their moral, civic, and ideological objections to him and support him in virtually anything he wanted to do, even if it affronted their conservative beliefs. Or basic decency.

The bargain was struck—and he delivered. Three eminent conservative jurists were added to the Supreme Court. Hundreds more were confirmed to federal appellate and district courts. The great white whale of social conservatism, Roe v. Wade, was harpooned in 2022 after a 50-year chase. Many other landmark legal victories for the American right have accumulated since Trump took office in 2017.

Conservatives weren’t cheated. The devil made good.

Fast-forward to last night …

[Leonard] Leo spent many years as the Federalist Society’s sherpa on judicial nominees, advising Republican presidents on whom to appoint and helping to shepherd candidates through the confirmation process. With the exception of Mitch McConnell, no one has done more this century to build a federal bench of originalist judges. But Trump didn’t want originalists—he wanted flunkies—and so Leo’s influence, and the influence of the organization he serves, have gone up in smoke …

Conservatives got the judiciary they wanted in exchange for supporting a man who radiates contempt for the constitutional order. In doing so, they empowered a postliberal movement that despises judges who do their jobs conscientiously instead of dutifully midwifing a Trumpist autocracy. As the Republican Party proceeds further down the path to fascism that those conservatives enabled, eventually the federal judiciary will consist entirely of believers in the “living Constitution,” half authoritarian and half progressive. In the long run, as Reaganites age out and are replaced by younger Trumpists, conservative judges as we’ve known them will go mostly extinct.

That’s what conservatives got for their bargain. The devil has come to collect.

Nick Catoggio

Pardons

The concept of a pardon, of course, is extremely hard for Trump to understand. Traditionally, a pardon is due to someone who has completed (or nearly completed) their sentence, expressed remorse, and turned their life around — and thereby been the recipient of mercy. But remorse is a concept unknown to a pathological narcissist. Mercy is even stranger. After all, who wins and who loses in an act of mercy? It’s one of those acts defined by grace — another literally meaningless concept for Trump. For him, all human conduct is built on a zero-sum, winner-vs-loser foundation. So a pardon is always instrumental — a way to reward allies, win credits, and enlarge his power by announcing to the world that he alone is the ultimate rule of law, and can intervene at any point to ensure his version of justice is the dispositive one. A monarch, in other words.

…

But Trump is the real outlier (and Biden, in his defense, used Trump’s abuse as a justification for his own self-dealing). In recent times he’s out in front in numbers: more than 1,700 full pardons so far, and we have three-and-a-half years to go. Nixon’s 863, Carter’s 574, Clinton’s 396, W’s 189, and Obama’s 212 put it in perspective. But these previous presidents abused the power occasionally — it’s an absolute power after all — while largely respecting the contours of the rule of law.

Trump has dispensed with any pretense of that. He is an instinctual tyrant — see his immigration overreach and his unilateral tariff mania — and the pardon power was almost made for him. The weakness of any constitution is the virtue — or, more often, the lack of it — in its office-holders. And Trump has the civic virtue of Jeffrey Epstein. The pardon power was always going to be a loaded gun in his tiny, careless hands.

… [H]e is using the pardon power all the time, rather than waiting till the end of his term. It replaces the rule of law with monarchical discretion. That’s why he could not tolerate Jeff Sessions all those years ago. Because Sessions, for all his passionate partisanship, still understood the system he was operating in and still believed that the appearance of impartial justice was integral to liberal democracy’s survival. Sessions was an American.

…

A majority of the American electorate, mind you, endorsed this lawlessness last November. It’s hard to pity them, as they absorb or ignore all the corruption they voted for and are still content to tolerate. They love crypto-monarchy as long as their king is on the throne. They do not seem to understand that this version of monarchy is still an elected one, and that another king from the other tribe may wear the crown some day. They may miss the benefits of liberal democracy once they have succeeded in killing it.

Andrew Sullivan, Pardon The Death Of Liberal Democracy

TACO

I’m not an active investor. I tend to buy and hold Mutual Funds and ETFs. (That’s just me; you do you.) But it did not escape my notice, even before the term was coined, that what’s now dubbed “TACO trades” could be profitable.

Wall Street is all over the “TACO trade,” another instance of people realizing they shouldn’t take the president at face value. “TACO” is short for “Trump always chickens out.” Markets have tended to go down when Trump announces new tariffs, but investors have recognized that a lot of this is bluffing, so they’re buying the dip and then profiting off the inevitable rally.

A reporter asked Trump about the expression on Wednesday, and he was furious. “I chicken out? I’ve never heard that,” he said. “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.” The reaction demonstrates that the traders are right, because—to mix zoological metaphors—a hit dog will holler. The White House keeps talking tough about levying new tariffs on friends and geopolitical rivals alike, but Trump has frequently gone on to lower the measures or delay them for weeks or months.

Foreign leaders had figured out that Trump was a pushover by May 2017, and a year later, I laid out in detail his pattern of nearly always folding. He’s a desirable negotiating foil, despite his unpredictable nature, because he doesn’t tend to know his material well, has a short attention span, and can be easily manipulated by flattery. The remarkable thing is that it’s taken this long for Wall Street to catch on.

David A. Graham, The TACO Presidency

Now that the cat’s out of the bag, the profitability will diminish and what’s left will mostly be the pleasure of annoying Velveeta Voldemort.

The most incompetent administration ever

A federal appeals panel ordered officials not to deport a 31-year-old to El Salvador. Minutes later, it happened anyway. The government blamed “administrative errors.”

Alan Feuer, NYT

Will Trump pay any price for this fishy string of “administrative errors”?

Among his voters, I doubt it. But with the courts, the toll is steep and rising. They just cannot believe anything Administration lawyers promise. And they shouldn’t.

DJT, the anti-conservative

[I]t’s hard to think of a more anti-conservative figure than President Donald Trump or a more anti-conservative movement than MAGA. Trump and his supporters evince a disdain for laws, procedures, and the Constitution. They want to empower the federal government in order to turn it into an instrument of brute force that can be used to reward allies and destroy opponents.

Trump and his administration have abolished agencies and imposed sweeping tariffs even when they don’t have the legal authority to do so. They are deporting people without due process. Top aides are floating the idea of suspending the writ of habeas corpus, one of the most important constitutional protections against unlawful detention. Judges, who are the target of threats from the president, fear for their safety. So do the very few Republicans who are willing to assert their independence from Trump.

In one of his first official acts, Trump granted clemency to more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those convicted of seditious conspiracy. The president and his family are engaging in a level of corruption that was previously unfathomable. And he and his administration have shown no qualms about using the federal government to target private companies, law firms, and universities; suing news organizations for baseless reasons; and ordering criminal probes into former administration officials who criticized Trump.

The Trump administration is a thugocracy, and the Republican Party he controls supports him each step of the way. Almost every principle to which Republicans once professed fealty has been jettisoned. The party is now devoted to the abuse of power and to vengeance.

…

The significance of this shift can hardly be overstated. A party that formerly proclaimed allegiance to the Constitution and the rule of law, warned about the concentration and abuse of power, and championed virtue, restraint, and moral formation has been transmogrified. The Republican Party now stands for everything it once loathed.

Peter Wehner

Thugocracy update

And she has been frank about the dilemma faced by Republicans like her who are dismayed about the president’s policies and pronouncements but worried that speaking out about them could bring death threats or worse.

“We are all afraid,” she told constituents in April, adding: “I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”

Catie Edmondson, Lisa Murkowski Isn’t Using ‘Nice Words’ About Life Under Trump

I do acknowledge threats against Trump’s life, too. Several isolated nuts have been arrested and charged. But it seems to me that a President and his supporters holding Congress hostage for fear of their lives is an order of magnitude worse.

No laughing matter

Next month will be the first anniversary of Tim Walz’s branding of Donald Trump, JD Vance and, by implication, some of their political associates as “weird,” and it’s obvious now that Walz spoke too soon, before Trump won in November and his administration turned weirdness into a credential and an operating principle, before weirdness started afflicting Trump allies who seemed a little less weird in the past, before episodes of Trump-adjacent weirdness proliferated.

… [T]his pageant of peculiarity isn’t a laughing matter. It reflects Trump’s confusion of nonconformity with boldness. It speaks to his love of performance, even if it’s the fruit of a loopy performer. It demonstrates his desire to rattle, no matter how infantile the rattling.

Frank Bruni

Same column, change of topic:

If I’m subjected to one more lamentation, one more rant, about how lost and pitiable and shameful the Democratic Party is, my head is going to explode. Not because the Democratic Party is in good shape — it isn’t. Not because it can make do with only minor adjustments — it can’t. It’s guilty of the arrogance and incompetence of which it’s accused. And the country’s future as a reasonably healthy and prosperous democracy depends on Democrats’ recognition and remedy of that.

But some of the extravagant lashing of the party carries the implicit suggestion that Republicans, by contrast, have their act together. Excuse me? If success at the polls is the only metric for that, then sure, yes, they’re in an enviable spot. But it’s a wretched (and, I have to believe, vulnerable) one. Republican lawmakers who rightly gaped in horror at the events of Jan. 6, 2021, later developed collective amnesia, putting power several light-years above principle. They then indulged or outright applauded Trump’s laughable cabinet picks and his adoration of Musk and his cockamamie tariffs and his abandonment of due process and his swag from Qatar and his sadistic humiliation of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and so many other cruelties and outrages that this sentence could go on forever. I struggle to admire Republicans’ political chops. I’m too distracted by their moral rot.

For love of sentences

In Esquire, Dave Holmes marveled at Senator Lindsey Graham’s suggestion, in a social media post before the conclave, that cardinals consider the idea of Trump as the next pope: “I guess he had not yet closed the day’s humiliation ring on his Apple Watch.” Holmes added that while Graham was probably joking, “You can’t be tongue-in-cheek when you are actively licking the boot. There is just not enough tongue for both jobs.” (Susan Fitzgerald, Las Cruces, N.M.)

Frank Bruni (a prior week)

Dissing the Dems

I confess that my laser-focus on Trump can sound like excusing the Democrats’ problems. It really isn’t. I’m just madder at my former party than at the I party whose Presidential nominee I voted for only once, 53 years ago.

An Andrew Sullivan podcast this week with the authors of Original Sin reminded me of just how screwed we are in the other of our major-party choices, the Dems, and how Joe Biden fooled me with his “nice guy” schtick. Though I didn’t vote for him, I would have done so if my fair state hadn’t been a lock for Trump.

Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is the tribute paid to virtue by vice.

I will give Trump 2.0 credit for not adding hypocrisy to its countless other sins.

On second thought, his attacks on Ivy League universities for suffering antisemites gladly may qualify.

The best jokes

It has been said that the best jokes are dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

On Wednesday, a dangerous joke was told in the Oval Office. The South African president turned to the American president and said: “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.”

NYT

FWIW

Trump lost 96% of federal court cases in May. Even GOP-appointed judges ruled against him 72% of the time,” – Jack Hopkins.
“The Washington Post has now confirmed that it was Trump who asked the Qataris to gift him the plane for free (rather than the Qataris offering it), and that Qatar is demanding a written memo from the White House to this effect before the deal is finalized,” – Tom Malinowski.

Andrew Sullivan, Pardon The Death Of Liberal Democracy

PBS

… and by the numbers 86 and 47.

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks)

Saturday, 5/31/25

AI doomsday?

[Jaron] Lanier agreed that it’s up to humans to protect the truth in the age of AI, but was less optimistic that we will do so: “The issue with AI is not the AI. It’s not the large language model. It’s the concentration of power and wealth around who owns it,” he said. “You have to look at the big system, including the people, the money, the business, the society, the psychology, the mythmaking, the politics.”

A Free Press Debate on Artificial Intelligence in San Francisco

Jaron Lanier had fallen off my radar for a few years. I’ll forever be interested in his take on anything regarding computers and humanity (together, not separately).

Bon mots

Codgers and technology go together like peanut butter and sardines.

Frank Bruni. Then this, merely via Frank Bruni, not from him:

In the quarterly journal Sapir, Bret Stephens made a kind of peace with the heavily partisan slant of so much cable television news: “To demand scrupulous impartiality on their broadcasts is like expecting fancy linens at a Motel 6.” (Naomi Lerner, West Orange, N.J.)

A non-tribal Democrat

Some of my subscribers dislike when I throw elbows to my left. They share my disdain for Donald Trump and his party, and my commitment to understanding them in light of political theory and history, but they are also devoted Democrats who have warm feelings for Joe Biden, were thrilled by the campaign of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and still seethe about Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016.

That isn’t me. I vote for Democrats. I directionally agree with them on most issues. And I consider the Republican alternative thoroughly unacceptable. Yet I am not a devoted Democrat. A big part of the reason is that I’m not a joiner—of anything. I value my own independence too much and temperamentally resist deploying my talents to advance a cause—any cause, even a worthy one, and even one wrapped up, at this moment, with the fate of liberal democratic self-government in the United States.

But this way of thinking presumes that working to help the Democrats should take the form of deferring to and falling in line behind party leadership and elected officials, taking marching orders, rallying around candidates and nominees endorsed by the party bigwigs, and then maintaining message discipline to get them elected. That’s what I resist. But there’s another kind of devotion—one that expresses itself as tough love and a willingness to speak candidly, and even harshly, about faults.

…

… a Democratic researcher is quoted as saying that when she asks swing voters to liken the two parties to animals, they consistently describe Republicans as lions, tigers, and sharks—“apex predators” that “take what they want when they want”—but Democrats as tortoises, slugs, or sloths, creatures typically considered “slow, plodding, [and] passive.”

Damon Linker, A Party of Sloths

Substance, process

One of this crazy-making aspects of life in Trump 2.0 is that the media coverage of the administration’s antics focuses, mostly on the substance of what they are doing, ignoring the process, and the question of whether they have the authority to do it at all.

Such, I feared, was the infirmity of NPR and PBS Aren’t Entitled to Your Tax Dollars, a Free Press article by a serious Ivy league constitutional law professor. I slogged my way through it, agreeing with the author again and again, but frustrated that he was ignoring the elephant in the room. Finally, in literally the last paragraph, he mentioned the elephant almost as a throwaway line:

NPR also alleges in its complaint that the federal statute creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting prohibits Trump from making this defunding decision. That’s a very different argument, which I’m not addressing here ….

I would venture a guess that nine out of ten people who read this column will come away with the impression that NPR and PBS are suffering from a liberal sense of entitlement to tax dollars, and miss the point about there being some limits to executive power.

In the end, it may not matter because this Congress is sufficiently servile that if Trump asks Congress to defund CPB, PBS and NPR (a longtime GOP talking point), it almost certainly will oblige him.

But process does matter, tremendously. Where the power to do something resides also matters.

Dissing Adoption

The New York Times … has never found a basic human good it couldn’t ponderously criticize with the shuffling-foot smarm of the ideas festival class. There’s “I Was Adopted From China as a Baby. I’m Still Coming to Terms With That.” There’s “World’s Largest ‘Baby Exporter’ Admits to Adoption Fraud.” There’s “Given Away: Korean Adoptees Share Their Stories.” (In easily-digestible video format!) There’s “I Was Adopted. I Know the Trauma It Can Inflict.” (Subtle.) The New Yorker, a $12,000 espresso machine transformed into a magazine by a mischievous wizard, has “How an Adoption Broker Cashed In on Prospective Parents’ Dreams,” “Living in Adoption’s Emotional Aftermath,” and “Where is your Mother?” (The answer is that she has been separated from her child by a cruel and fickle child welfare system despite being perfectly fit, which I’m sure is how it usually goes.) The Atlantic has “No One’s Children: America’s long history of secret adoption.” (Would you be shocked to learn that said history isn’t a good one?) They’ve got “The New Question Haunting Adoption,” the question being whether adoption is really a secretly selfish act, you know, the selfish act of taking a severely-disabled toddler into your home to provide them with support and love after their birth parents smoked meth throughout pregnancy. They also have, incredibly, “What Adoption ‘Salvation’ Narratives Get Wrong,” “Adoption Is Not a Fairy-Tale Ending,” “The Dark, Sad Side of Domestic Adoption”…. I could go on, and that’s just three prestigious publications. There’s a whole world out of this out there.

This is all, for the record, a really excellent example of what we used to mean when we used the word ideology. Once upon a time, one wouldn’t say “My ideology is…” because ideology referred to the hidden, unexplored, unconscious politics that lay beneath the public, open, explicit politics. An ideology was those pre-political assumptions and beliefs which conditioned and limited political thought, which made the conscious political philosophy of any individual what it was. Ideology is the skeleton that hides unseen within the animal of politics but nevertheless determines the structure of that which is seen. Ideology exists in both the macro and the micro; this bizarre upper-caste antipathy towards ideology is a good example. If you asked leadership at these publications if they had any particular interest in leading a charge against the practice of adoption, they’d say no, of course not, what a weird question! If you were to show them just how repetitively this particular set of critiques and questions and hrm hrm hrm noises gets published in their pages, they’d swear to you that it reflects no underlying party line. And yet there it is, the evidence, in black and white. Something about the current constitution of the anxious educated urbanite liberal soul cries out inside of them: the real problem is adoption.

Freddie deBoer, Adoption is Good

If the shoe fits

A well-regarded Evangelical pastor published this weeks before the 2020 Election.

[T]his is a long-overdue article attempting to explain why I remain baffled that so many Christians consider the sins of unrepentant sexual immorality (porneia), unrepentant boastfulness (alazoneia), unrepentant vulgarity (aischrologia), unrepentant factiousness (dichostasiai), and the like, to be only toxic for our nation, while policies that endorse baby-killing, sex-switching, freedom-limiting, and socialistic overreach are viewed as deadly.

…

I think it is a drastic mistake to think that the deadly influences of a leader come only through his policies and not also through his person.

This is true not only because flagrant boastfulness, vulgarity, immorality, and factiousness are self-incriminating, but also because they are nation-corrupting. They move out from centers of influence to infect whole cultures. The last five years bear vivid witness to this infection at almost every level of society.

…

Christians communicate a falsehood to unbelievers (who are also baffled!) when we act as if policies and laws that protect life and freedom are more precious than being a certain kind of person. The church is paying dearly, and will continue to pay, for our communicating this falsehood year after year.

The justifications for ranking the destructive effects of persons below the destructive effects of policies ring hollow.

I find it bewildering that Christians can be so sure that greater damage will be done by bad judges, bad laws, and bad policies than is being done by the culture-infecting spread of the gangrene of sinful self-exaltation, and boasting, and strife-stirring (eristikos).

…

I think it is baffling and presumptuous to assume that pro-abortion policies kill more people than a culture-saturating, pro-self pride.

When a leader models self-absorbed, self-exalting boastfulness, he models the most deadly behavior in the world. He points his nation to destruction. Destruction of more kinds than we can imagine.

It is naive to think that a man can be effectively pro-life and manifest consistently the character traits that lead to death — temporal and eternal.

John Piper, Policies, Persons, and Paths to Ruin: Pondering the Implications of the 2020 Election

Piper did not say who he was voting for. He did not name names. For that reason, I’m blogging this separately from pointed political material.

But I’m not going to deny that my heart soared to see that our current President had not captured and reduced to servility the entirety of one of America’s most prominent Christian traditions.

The right to know isn’t the whole story

To further clarify our situation, consider W. H. Auden’s discussion, which I’ve cited before, of the idea that, as he put it, “the right to know is absolute and unlimited.” “We are quite prepared,” Auden wrote,

“to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, ‘What can I know?’ we ask, ‘What, at this moment, am I meant to know?’ — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.”

L.M. Sacasas, Structurally Induced Acedia (The Convivial Society)

Harvard and the Trump administration

Harvard and the Trump administration have each finally met an adversary too big to push around. America’s richest university never really considered how much it depends on government policy, including lavish federal research funding, federal student aid, and a permissive immigration regime for the foreign students—who make up a third of the university’s student body and often subsidize the rest by paying more. Progressives also never thought through how the many tools they devised for using government leverage against private institutions—including threatening tax exemptions, as the Supreme Court allowed on dubious grounds in Bob Jones University v. United States (1983)—could be used against universities that engage in race discrimination for the “right” reasons, cultivate a political monoculture among the faculty, and permit campus mobs to terrorize minority groups who are out of progressive favor (Jews). Now, Trump is trying to strip Harvard of everything—tax exemption, federal funding, and visas for foreign students already enrolled. While the comeuppance for Harvard is admittedly delicious, the president is abusing powers he ought not to have, and Harvard has deep enough pockets to fight him in court.

National Review Weekly email.

Some cases don’t have valid arguments on both sides. That I find nothing “delicious” about Harvard’s “comeuppance” is an example of why I ignore National Review’s regular email invitations to resubscribe.

Can a car have a “catfish smile”?

“Behind that catfish smile, the company’s twin-turbo 4.0-liter DOHC V8 now discharges a drama-drenched 656 hp and 590 lb-ft—153 hp and 85 lb-ft more than the previous Vantage Roadster—thanks to larger turbochargers, revised camshaft profiles, optimized compression ratio and upgraded fueling and cooling.”

Kudos to Dan Neil for the spot-on “catfish smile.”

The car, by the way, is a 2025 Aston Martin Vantage Roadster, which will set you back $300,000 as equipped (this week’s ephemeral tariffs not included).

Credentials, good times, and genuine learning

Most young people today feel, with considerable justification, that they live in an economically precarious time. They therefore want the credential that will open doors that lead to a good job, either directly or (by getting them into good graduate programs) indirectly …

But those same young people also want to have a good time in college, a period of social experience and experimentation that they (rightly) think will be harder to come by when they enter that working world …

… Yes, students understand — they understand quite well, and vocally regret — that when they use chatbots they are not learning much, if anything. But the acquisition of knowledge is a third competing good, and if they pursue that one seriously they may well have to sacrifice one of the other two, or even both. Right now they can have two out of three, and as Meat Loaf taught us all long ago, two out of three ain’t bad.

Alan Jacobs, responding to Ted Gioia on the topic of ending AI cheating.

Potpourri

After Trump held a crypto dinner last Thursday night, crypto moguls who paid to be there felt scammed that the president didn’t even stick around at the event they’d hoped to do their own scams at. I saw someone describe him as the apex scammer. Our Scammander in Chief.
In other Russia news, a new statue of Joseph Stalin in a Moscow metro station was unveiled this month. President Putin has called Stalin an “effective manager,” and has said that enemies of Russia use the “excessive demonization” of Stalin to attack “the Soviet Union and Russia.” Stalin is back, big time. Interesting that “effective manager” is being used here to describe a man who facilitated the death of millions—and not efficiently. But I’m not a businessman.
The continued reckoning: A postmortem on Kamala Harris’s campaign cited a “perception gap” as one of the reasons she lost, saying voters believed she held positions that she didn’t. “Over 80% of swing voters who chose Trump believed Harris held positions she didn’t campaign on in 2024, including supporting taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants (83%), mandatory electric vehicles by 2035 (82%), decriminalizing border crossings (77%), and defunding the police (72%).” But Harris had, in fact, supported all of these positions. Like, she is on record supporting each of those positions (here, here, here, and here). So it’s not really a perception problem so much as a reception problem, like these ideas are not popular even though I support them. There’s a sense among Dems that people should simply ignore the things that are unpopular and that referencing them is fake news. Like, how dare you talk about the surge of migrants coming through our new open borders thanks to swift changes from the Biden admin. Yes, it’s technically true, but it’s disinformation-coded.
Leave Bruce alone: A bar in New Jersey canceled a performance by a Bruce Springsteen tribute band after the real Springsteen called Trump “corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous” while on tour in England. Citing the bar’s MAGA clientele, the bar owner said that a Springsteen cover band would be “too risky at the moment.” And: “Whenever the national anthem plays, my bar stands and is in total silence, that’s our clientele. Toms River is red and won’t stand for his bull—.” [But MAGA doesn’t have a violent streak. No way. That’s fake news.]
Things that are not antisemitism: The Democratic Socialists of America “Liberation Caucus” has announced its support for Elias Rodriguez, the suspect arrested for slaughtering two Israeli Embassy staffers outside D.C.’s Capital Jewish Museum last week. Here’s the statement signed by the DSA Liberation folks and a bunch of others: “As imperialism has made the entire world its battlefield, it is justified to fight it, by any means necessary, without regard for geography.” And: “[T]here must be consequences for genocidal [Z]ionist imperialism, and those consequences are righteous.”

Nellie Bowles

Fake my …

The latest fitness craze is surely going to be Fake My Run. It fits perfectly with the national ethos whereby university students are already doing Fake My Education.

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks)