Barbarian versus conservative

TPUSA

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

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

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

Based in Lafayette.

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

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

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

Not in America, no

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

Andrew Sullivan, The American Caudillo

Indeterminate negation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven (more) Deadly Sins

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

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

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

“Christian Nationalism”

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

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

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

Ross Douthat

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

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

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

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

Attention

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

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

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

He closes with another quote from Barba-Kay:

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

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

Hate-watch of the week

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

Via Frank Bruni

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

Monday, 11/17/25

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

Heritage Foundation

Is the wind shifting?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forfeiting influence for clicks

Kevin D. Williamson was on fire Monday:

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

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

…

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

…

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

Immigration/Emigration

ICE

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

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

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

Nick Miroff, Why They Mask

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

Seamless web redux

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

David French

Greasing the Wheels

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

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

Other

Porn

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

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

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

Adrift at sea with no populist panacea

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

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

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

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

Nick Catoggio

Last Chopper out of Nam

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

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

Infinite length, zero depth

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

J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know.

Losing focus

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

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

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

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

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

What’s missing?

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

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

I have posted these TDS-related items elsewhere:

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

Saturday, 11/8/25

Public affairs

Give me that old, boring gummint

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

Peggy Noonan

Nancy Pelosi

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

Nick Catoggio

Sorry, Senator Young

Sorry, Senator, but I won’t answer.

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

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

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

Clueless

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

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

Nellie Bowles

Culture

Grief

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

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.

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

Me, too

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

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

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

Words of the Day

The words of the day are pareidolia and apophenia.

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

Snippets

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

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

Lil’ Nicky & The Groypers

Much ink has been spilled on the softball interview of Groyper-in-Chief Nick Fuentes by what-the-hell-do-you-call-him-these-days Tucker Carlson.

This post is entirely about that from various perspectives. If you’ve had enough of that, wait for my next post, coming soon.

Grifter?

I find it impossible to defend [him] against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclastic temperament.

William F. Buckley, said or written about Pat Buchanan.

Buckley was perhaps the foremost foe of antisemitism in conservative ranks from the 60s until his death.

There’s unfortunately a fresh need today for some policing of the ranks, but by whom, and how? Kevin D. Williamson sees the problem:

The times being what they are—and what they are is poisoned by social media, which has taken down all of the fences that once stood around mass imbecility—there is now another kind of antisemitism to take into account: digital, entrepreneurial antisemitism. There is a market for antisemitism, and there are careers to be had servicing that market. Nick Fuentes, who has recently been in the news, is an entrepreneurial antisemite. Tucker Carlson is another.

(Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation is a fool and a coward who wants to bank the profits of that antisemitism without taking any moral responsibility for it. With apologies to my friends who will be hurt by this: It is impossible for any self-respecting person to be associated with his Heritage Foundation.)

Kevin D. Williamson, The Antisemitism Grift.

“But isn’t that cancel culture?”, I seem to hear. Not according to a workable definition that I’m pretty sure comes from Williamson or his colleague Nick Catoggio. Paraphrasing, “Cancel culture” is an attempt to enforce a not-yet-existent consensus, to narrow the Overton Window; enforcing an existing consensus, like those against the Nazis and, yes, antisemitism, doesn’t qualify.

Charlie Kirk’s Successor?

I was disinclined to believe that Fuentes Is Becoming Charlie Kirk’s Successor, the explicit thesis of Michelle Goldberg’s Wednesday opinion piece at the New York Times.

Goldberg got my attention. As I suggested, it’s uncertain that anyone on the Right today has the stature and the will to decree a cordon sanitaire against the likes of Fuentes. This is no substitute for reading her whole piece, but I thought it framed the problem well:

Kirk, who came of age in the pre-Trump conservative movement, was still sometimes willing to police boundaries. But in the wake of his killing, there’s surprisingly little sense on the right that that part of his legacy should be upheld. Rather, prominent voices insist that Kirk’s murder necessitates the final loosening of all remaining restraints. “I cannot ‘unite’ with the left because they want me dead,” the influential podcaster Matt Walsh posted after Kirk’s death. “But I will unite with anyone on the right.”

Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard law professor who has helped create the intellectual foundation for the post-liberal right, put it more elegantly this weekend, as the fight over Carlson, Fuentes and Roberts roiled conservatives. “History records many cases in which cities fell to siege because, even with the enemy at the very gates, factions within the city could not put aside their mutual struggle for domination,” he wrote on social media. Lest there be any doubt about which factions he was scolding, he made it clear in a subsequent post: “I’ll be resolutely ignoring the views of those who profess a certain ‘conservatism’ but who have never actually challenged the liberal consensus on anything that might endanger their careers.”

Vermeule is a cultivated man who, as Field writes, is part of a movement that “thinks it has a monopoly on things like ‘the true, the good and the beautiful.’” Yet however lofty his rhetoric, its moral logic leads inexorably to Groyperism, and the elevation of Fuentes, Kirk’s foe, into his successor.

(Italics added)

Elsewhere in the Times, Ross Douthat chimes in on how to gatekeep against antisemitism in a digital age, with the case of Fuentes front and center. That’s an important question, but it feels to me as if Ross is a little more than a helpful start. For now, I can only heartily endorse two partial solutions:

Whatever share of Capitol Hill interns or think tank employees are actually Fuentes sympathizers, the institutional right must not permit radicalized junior staffers to steamroll or puppeteer their nominal superiors.
Create a zone where normal criticism of Israeli strategy is possible but clearly distinguish those normal debates from paranoid and antisemitic criticism.

Heritage Foundation (and the “intellectual energy” on the Right)

As for Kevin Roberts, can you guess how eager he’s been to have a hard conversation about January 6? I bet you can.

His tenure at Heritage mirrors the wider right’s hostility to dissent. A few days ago, Jonah Goldberg reminded us that Roberts’ organization is unusual among think tanks in insisting on a “one voice” policy that requires staff to “always publicly advocate for a single, unified position.” That is, not coincidentally, also how Donald Trump runs the GOP, ruthlessly “canceling” any party official who challenges his policies by threatening to fire them or primary them out of their job. But message discipline in a political party, particularly a highly authoritarian one, is to be expected.

In a think tank, whose experts should be having all sorts of interesting disagreements over law and policy, it’s downright weird. It should welcome illuminating “hard conversations” among its employees, and usually think tanks do—except for the Heritage Foundation, whose highest purpose under Roberts appears to be supplying ideological cover for Republicans’ drift toward Peronism.

Nick Catoggio.

Catoggio continues on the Right more generally:

[I]t’s no longer the Buckleyites who supply the right’s intellectual energy, such as it is. It’s postliberals like Adrian Vermeule, Curtis Yarvin, and Patrick Deneen. Carl Schmitt, not Antonin Scalia, is in vogue among new right legal thinkers. That’s what I meant when I said that Roberts’ quote is preposterous for more than one reason: When he calls on the conservative movement to have hard conversations about its direction, he’s implying that a “conservative” movement still meaningfully exists and that it retains the power to cancel postliberals if it so chooses.

It doesn’t. Rather the opposite: As Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Jeff Flake, and a gajillion other Reaganites might tell you, all of the canceling being done in the modern GOP is of conservatives by ascendant postliberals.

Finally, the “one voice” of Heritage Foundation checks in at the Wall Street Journal:

Your editorial “The New Right’s New Antisemites” (Nov. 3) gives the impression that the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, is an apologist for anti-Jewish hate or, worse, a promoter of it. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

In the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Heritage hosted one of the first public events to condemn the terrorism and the blatant antisemitism it unleashed. Shortly thereafter we created the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism to help coordinate the efforts of like-minded organizations.

In October 2024, we launched Project Esther, an initiative to combat antisemitism in the U.S. through legal and legislative remedies. This effort has found allies across the political spectrum and raised awareness among the general public and the Trump administration of the immediate threat that left-wing antisemitism poses to America’s Jews and the U.S.

Months later I published my book, “The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel and America Can Win,” a large portion of which is dedicated to this issue. Our three nonresident fellows live in Israel. The Davis Institute for National Security, which I lead, focuses on defeating antisemitism, as do our colleagues in the domestic-policy and legal departments.

Your editorial ignores this record, none of which would have been possible without the direct and enthusiastic support of Mr. Roberts. Many who have criticized him in recent days, moreover, have ignored his admission that his video supporting Tucker Carlson was a mistake that didn’t clearly articulate the institution’s rebuke of Holocaust deniers and antisemitism. Mr. Roberts has always given us the necessary resources to fulfil our mission and has participated in the work himself.

He isn’t antisemitic; nor does he tolerate anyone who is. Mr. Roberts is instead leading the conservative charge against this ancient bigotry: an insidious cancer that has degraded once-great societies and can’t be allowed to spread in America. All of us at Heritage look forward to continuing this fight under his direction.

Victoria Coates
Heritage Foundation

(Bold added)

UPDATE: The National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism has severed its ties to Heritage Foundation.

My thoughts

The absence of anyone with the stature to read Fuentes and/or Carlson out of the “conservative movement” suggests that Catoggio is right: the intellectual energy on the Right is now (currently?) postliberal, and if anyone is cancelled, it’s the “conservative movement” itself. Adrian Vermeule, for instance, has contemned any “conservative” who isn’t sufficiently bloody-minded:

History records many cases in which cities fell to siege because, even with the enemy at the very gates, factions within the city could not put aside their mutual struggle for domination,” he wrote on social media. Lest there be any doubt about which factions he was scolding, he made it clear in a subsequent post: “I’ll be resolutely ignoring the views of those who profess a certain ‘conservatism’ but who have never actually challenged the liberal consensus on anything that might endanger their careers.

That is very grim. I remain with the true conservatives, though I’ve finally, I think, gotten a handle on the grievances that gave rise to Trump and MAGA. Grievances generally don’t build anything worthwhile.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

No Kings Saturday, 10/18/25

No kings!

Binding precedent

Protesters have protested at an ICE facility a few miles west of Chicago for the past 19 years—with somewhat more intensity recently following the announcement of Operation Midway Blitz. A month after the announcement, the president federalized the Illinois National Guard. District court: Enjoined. Seventh Circuit: Just so. Political opposition is not rebellion, and a protest doesn’t become a rebellion merely due to a few isolated incidents of violence. Without that, none of the statutory predicates for federalizing the National Guard have been met.

Institute for Justice, Short Circuits for 10/17/25 (bold added). This is now the law in the 7th U.S. Circuit – Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.

Look for the Administration to try to provoke a rebellion it can crush. Everyone who’s paying attention knows Trump wants to invoke the Insurrection Act (as he stuffs his pockets and those of his family).

Wanted: a viable counternarrative

Trump’s actions … are part of one project: creating a savage war of all against all and then using the presidency to profit and gain power from it. Trumpism can also be seen as a multipronged effort to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit—learning, compassion, science, the pursuit of justice—and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego, appetite. Trumpism is an attempt to make the world a playground for the rich and ruthless, so it seeks to dissolve the sinews of moral and legal restraint that make civilization decent.

…

Trumpism, like populism, is more than a set of policies—it’s a culture. Trump offers people a sense of belonging, an identity, status, self-respect, and a comprehensive political ethic. Populists are not trying to pass this or that law; they are altering the climate of the age. And Democrats think they can fight that by offering some tax credits?

To beat a social movement, you must build a counter social movement. And to do that, you need a different narrative about where we are and where we should be heading, a different set of values dictating what is admirable and what is disgraceful. If we fail to build such a movement, authoritarian strongmen around the globe will dominate indefinitely.

David Brooks.

You can’t beat something with nothing. I can’t come up with a political counternarrative to Trumpism. The Democrats can’t come up with a political counternarrative, either. Brooks couldn’t come up with a strong political counternarrative.

I can only hope and pray that people will look for their compelling (counter-)narrative to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. (And that meantime there will be some legal counternarratives to prevent irretrievable damage, as in the preceding item.)

Music Reviews

There may be nothing better than old music reviews to let you know that it’s okay to like what you like, critics be damned.

I like Debussy’s La Mer, and I don’t care what the stupid early reviews said:

On today’s date in 1905, Claude Debussy’s orchestral suite La Mer or The Sea was performed for the first time in Paris. Today this music is regarded as an impressionistic masterpiece, but early audiences — especially those in America — found it rough sailing.

“We clung like a drowning man to a few fragments of the tonal wreck,” wrote a 1907 Boston critic, and suggested that instead of The Sea Debussy should have titled his piece Sea-Sickness.

“The Sea is persistently ugly,” wrote The New York Times that same year. “Debussy fails to give any impression of the sea … There is more of a barnyard cackle in it than anything else.”

And in 1909, this on La Mer from The Chicago Tribune: “It is safe to say that few understood what they heard and few heard anything they understood … There are no themes … There is nothing in the way of even a brief motif that can be grasped securely enough by the ear and brain to serve as a guiding line through the tonal maze. There is no end of queer and unusual effects, no end of harmonic complications and progressions that sound so hideously ugly.”

Ah, the perils of “modern music” in the early 20th century!

Giving the Devil his due, impressionism had to be a real mind-blower for critics attuned to, say, the sonata-allegro form.

Comprehensive tradition

We’re often not very aware of the “tradition” in which we live. A student in a classroom would readily agree that the words of a teacher or professor were a “traditioning” of sorts. But they will fail to notice that how the room is arranged, how the students sit, what the students wear (or don’t wear), how the professor is addressed, how students address one another, what questions are considered appropriate and what are not, and a whole world of unspoken, unwritten expectations are utterly required in the process. The modern world often imagines that “online” education is equivalent to classroom education since the goal is merely the transmission of information. But the transmission of information includes the process of acquiring the information and everything that surrounds it. Those receiving the “tradition” online will have perhaps similar information to those receiving it in a classroom – but they will not receive the same information.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Tradition of Being Human

Stages of life

Two questions:

Do I want to read/watch/listen to this?

Should I read/watch/listen to this?

When I was younger the second question often dominated my decision-making. Now that I am officially ancient that question has virtually disappeared and the first one is usually the only one I ask. That’s been the single most notable change in my personality in these my declining years.

Alan Jacobs

Alan is a decade or more younger than me, yet I only very recently seem to have arrived at this point, especially regarding political matters.

Note that he’s talking about a change in personality. This isn’t a life rule. There are things that younger people should read/watch/listen to, in order to become well-formed human beings.

Two ways

[R]evival begins with the people proclaiming, by word and deed, “I have sinned.”

MAGA Christianity has a different message. It looks at American culture and declares, “You have sinned.”

David French

Noteworthy

In the aftermath of Kirk’s murder, we witnessed young people at vigils rather than at “mostly peaceful” demonstrations.

R.R. Reno in First Things

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, 10/7/25

Epigrams

Dig in obituaries long enough and you may hit pay-dirt. Ashleigh Brilliant, Prolific ‘Pot-Shots’ Phrasemaker, Dies at 91. (Gift link)

Brilliant wrote such gems as “I may not be perfect, but parts of me are excellent.”

He wrote epigrams full-time. The most his business ever made was $100,000 per year.

We owe him.

Legal unethics

The strike suit is a pernicious business practice: It is deployed to extract cash, not to resolve a dispute. Its target must decide whether to pay the costs of legal defense or the costs of settlement. Essentially, the defendant must play a hand of poker against an opponent who pushes out a large and menacing raise: The options are to match the bet—and face the prospect of even more raises in the future—or fold. The settlements produced by strike suits are of little social value—they’re just one of the costs of doing business.

Such a tactic is even more pernicious when the litigant is the president of the United States, because its target now faces even weightier reasons to settle: presidential control over federal bureaucracies with immense regulatory power. This new business model is lawfare on steroids.

Earlier this year, Paramount Global agreed to cut a settlement check for roughly $16 million to Trump’s future presidential library and his lawyers. That payment was the culmination of Trump’s suit last year accusing CBS News, a Paramount subsidiary, of broadcasting a deceptively edited interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump’s complaint alleged that the edits were designed to “tip the scales in favor of the Democratic Party” in last year’s election. The theory was questionable: Trump argued that the broadcast edits had violated a Texas consumer protection statute and had caused him personal financial harm.

The ultimate settlement was also questionable, and not just because of the cramped view of the First Amendment that Trump’s argument implied. Paramount’s sale to Skydance Media was on the horizon—a sale that the Federal Communications Commission (dominated by Trump-friendly Republicans) could either approve or scuttle. The pending merger made the specter of litigation significantly more costly for Paramount; a $16 million payoff is a small price to ensure an $8 billion sale.

Dan Greenburg.

I quote this not, for a change, to berate the President directly, but to ask a different question: Why has no lawyer been disbarred (or merely sanctioned) for filing these frivolous lawsuits?

There is a rule being breached:

(b) Representations to the Court. By presenting to the court a pleading, written motion, or other paper—whether by signing, filing, submitting, or later advocating it—an attorney or unrepresented party certifies that to the best of the person’s knowledge, information, and belief, formed after an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances:

(1) it is not being presented for any improper purpose, such as to harass, cause unnecessary delay, or needlessly increase the cost of litigation;

(2) the claims, defenses, and other legal contentions are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or for establishing new law;

(3) the factual contentions have evidentiary support or, if specifically so identified, will likely have evidentiary support after a reasonable opportunity for further investigation or discovery; and

(4) the denials of factual contentions are warranted on the evidence or, if specifically so identified, are reasonably based on belief or a lack of information.

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11(b). Most state court rules mirror this Federal rule.

Trump’s strike suits are designed to harass and impose cost of litigation. They are frequently unwarranted by law or good faith arguments for changing the law.

So again: Why has no lawyer been punished for filing them? Why are the rules so toothless?

Please don’t tell my I’m majoring in minors. I’ve had plenty about the majors, and I’m a retired lawyer, son of a lawyer, and father of a lawyer, who oddly enough cares about the devolution of the legal profession. So ~~sue~~ humor me.

Progressive illiberalism, populist illiberalism

Progressivism in the last 10 years has pursued increasingly radical measures through complex, indirect and bureaucratic means, using state power subtly to reshape private institutions and creating systems that feel repressive without necessarily having an identifiable repressor in chief — McCarthyisms without McCarthy, you might say.

Over the same period, populism has consistently rallied around charismatic outsider politicians who attack the existing political class as hopelessly compromised and claim to have a mandate to sweep away any rule or norm that impedes their agenda.

There are exceptions to this pattern, but it’s pretty consistent across Western countries. Whether with Trump or Nigel Farage in Britain or Marine Le Pen in France or Viktor Orban in Hungary or Giorgia Meloni in Italy, the drama of postliberal populism is intensely personal, serving up figures who become the focus of profound loyalty and intense opposition, who present themselves as champions of the forgotten man while they’re attacked as strongmen in the making.

The drama of postliberal progressivism, in contrast, is a drama of ideological influence and institutional power, in which activists and elites effect dramatic change outside the democratic process and then try to survive or sidestep backlash from the voters. It’s a drama where sudden changes seem to just happen — unprecedented waves of immigration on both continents, a radical shift in official American norms around race or sex, a new regime of euthanasia in Canada — without having a singular progressive leader who claims responsibility and provides the policy with a charismatic face.

Ross Douthat, Can Left and Right Understand the Other Side’s Fears?. This is not an adequate summary, so I’m providing a gift link for you to get the rest.

Birthright citizenship

[Friday], the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit issued a decision that Donald Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants and non-citizens present on temporary visas is unconstitutional. It also ruled that it violates a 1952 law granting naturalization to children born in the United States, and upheld a nationwide injunction against implementation of the order. This is the second appellate court decision ruling against Trump’s order, following an earlier Ninth Circuit decision. Multiple district court judges (including both Democratic and Republican appointees) have also ruled that the order is illegal, and so far not a single judge has voted to uphold it.

Judge David Barron’s opinion for the First Circuit runs to 100 pages. But he emphasizes that this length is the product of the large number of issues (including several procedural ones) that had to be considered, and does not mean the case is a close one:

The analysis that follows is necessarily lengthy, as we must address the parties’ numerous arguments in each of the cases involved. But the length of our analysis should not be mistaken for a sign that the fundamental question that these cases raise about the scope of birthright citizenship is a difficult one. It is not, which may explain why it has been more than a century since a branch of our government has made as concerted an effort as the Executive Branch now makes to deny Americans their birthright.

I won’t try go to through all the points in the decision in detail. But I think Judge Barron’s reasoning is compelling and persuasive, particularly when it comes to explaining why this result is required under the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case, and why the 1952 naturalization statute provides an independent ground for rejecting Trump’s order.

Ilya Somin, First Circuit Rules Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Executive Order is Unconstitutional

Giving the Devil his due

If I keep my perspective through this Administration’s deliberate sowing of chaos, its flooding of my zone with B.S., I will from time to time acknowledge something they’ve gotten more or less right. I’ll especially look for things that don’t require a parenthetical caveat along the lines of “but of course they should have done it this other way.”

Entry Number 1, not because it’s necessarily the most important: The purpose of our Armed Forces is to defend us through an obvious ability to win wars. It is not to conduct sociological experiments or to redress internal structural injustices.

I could indeed elaborate on that or insert caveats, but I’ll let it stand.

Oh, heck, I do need one caveat: I was (and believe I remain) a conscientious objector, so I don’t like it that nations keep stocks of sabers and rattle them menacingly at each other. But it’s futile to tell them to stop, and we’re still at a place where I’m not waiting for the barbarians.

Prediction

There is no serious doubt in my mind that Donald J. Trump fully intends to make his deportation efforts so odious that they will provoke mass protests (which probably will include some violence by the protestors – and there will be undercover provocateurs to assure that they do), to give himself an excuse for imposing martial law in many blue cities.

I’m not sure of his endgame, but utter corruption of the 2026 Election (a signature of authoritarianism) and suspension of 2028 no longer seems like a leftist fever-dream.

Deadening the creative spark

Loathing is hard to make interesting or readable. It’s one of the flattest emotions, and it deadens the creative spark.

Gareth Roberts. Fortunately for me, I’m generally satisfied with letting others express our shared loathing.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

Dateline, Weimar America, 8/28/25

CrackerBarrelGate

This story strikes me as stupid, stupid, stupid. Here, through the voices of others, is why.

The chain was founded in 1969 — not 1776. It adopted the country branding because down-home cooking and folksy kitsch were trendy back then, not because they were trying to restore America to the Good Ole Days. Now, the market has moved on, and Cracker Barrel has been trying to adapt …

We have confused brands with moral values, and we demand to see our politics reflected everywhere, even in restaurant signage. We have also confused social media with social lives. And alone with our screens, too many of us have become addicted to rage, mashing the refresh button for the dopamine that rushes through us every time we discover that someone, somewhere, is wrong on the internet.

The addiction is so consuming that when no ready source of rage is available, we start cooking up our own out of whatever we can find in the cupboard. But if the cupboard is really this bare, I suggest people put down the phone and head to Cracker Barrel, rock themselves to serenity in the chairs on the porch, then head inside for a delicious helping of hashbrown casserole.

Megan McArdle

This, too:

The Cracker Barrel farce … is the first case of “cancel culture” I’m aware of in which the accusers couldn’t articulate why the accused was being canceled.

Which was to their advantage, I think. An offender charged with a particular thoughtcrime can answer the charge but an offender charged with nothing in particular has little choice but to surrender. Which is what the company did on Tuesday.

…

Christopher Rufo, probably the New Right’s most influential culture warrior, admitted that he’s never set foot in the restaurant but declared war on it nonetheless in the name of making an example of any business “considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’”

“The Barrel must be broken,” he announced with no apparent irony. If a progressive culture warrior had said something as clownishly imperious, self-important, and Stalinist as that 10 years ago, right-wingers would still be making scornful jokes about it today.

Nick Catoggio.

In a Man-Bites-Dog story, Christopher Rufo recently wrote a little piece that was not knee-jerk shit-stirring! But this episode tells me he hasn’t really mended his ways.

I expect no better from Rufo, frankly, but Hillsdale College has no excuse — and no more respect from me, though I thought very highly of it ten years ago when it was, like I was and am, conservative, not Trumpist. (Two Hillsdale alums, who became expats for a while, were cool on their alma mater well before I was. I guess they read the signs: Hillsdale becoming a caricature of anti-woke education.)

Television rights, National rites

They will never do it, because it’s too tacky to bear, and they don’t need the money, but here’s an interesting thought exercise for media dorks: What would the price be if Swift and Kelce were to sell the live rights to their wedding for television?

We know the NFL collects more than $110 million for a single playoff game—that’s what Peacock paid, and that was two whole years ago. Your standard live sports deal now hits 10 figures, easy. March Madness gets a billion annually to show college kids bricking 3-pointers. Paramount is set to pay more than $1 billion a year for humans pounding each other inside a steel cage.

A Swift-Kelce nuptial is bigger than all of that, mainly because of Swift, whose fame is vast and fierce, and if you don’t believe that, try criticizing one of her singles on Reddit sometime. There would be outrageous interest for both a live telecast and repeat viewing—you could do remixes, Taylor’s versions, on and on.

…

I think $500 million. That would be the absolute floor.

Jason Gay, Wall Street Journal

My better half wants a televised wedding opposite the State of the Union address, but that would reduce revenues quite a bit.

That is, I suppose it would reduce revenues. Who knows? I didn’t even know that Travis Kelce wasn’t a quarterback.

Nobel Laureate

FBI agents searched the Maryland home and Washington, D.C., office of former national security adviser John Bolton on Friday morning, reportedly as part of an investigation into his potential mishandling of classified documents. Bolton was not charged or detained during the operation. President Donald Trump—who revoked Bolton’s security clearance and Secret Service protection days into his second term—told reporters he had no prior knowledge of the searches but described Bolton, who has been a sharp critic of Trump in recent years, as “a real sort of a low life” and “not a smart guy.”

The Morning Dispatch

Congratulations, Mr. Bolton! Being described by Donald Trump as “a real sort of a low life” and “not a smart guy” is like winning a Nobel Prize for Integrity and Rectitude.

UPDATE: Even a blind pig finds the occasional acorn, or even a truffle: John Bolton Inquiry Eyes Emails Obtained by Foreign Government – The New York Times. So maybe Bolton actually, technically kinda broke a law. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” (Lavrentiy Beria, Soviet secret police chief).

The most miserable habitation in the world

The fundamental structural problem of our government during the Trump administrations is this: our constitution assumed the George Washington was President. It assumed that our high officials would be men of high character, virtuous men. It assumed that of the American people as well.

So John Adams was dead right in this quote, the last sentences of which are fairly well-known:

While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Adams, October 11, 1798

This President of the United States is not a virtuous man, but a vicious one. Empowered by shrewd and evil advisors (no more “adults in the room”) and motivated by avarice, ambition, and revenge, he is the whale breaking through the net, pushing the “unitary executive theory” (which wouldn’t be a problem were George Washington President) to the breaking point, turning the Department of Justice into the Department of Revenge and now trying to take over the Federal Reserve System – the better to blow a bubble from the bursting of which we may never recover.

I’m not going to resume lamenting what else bothers me about this administration (David French has some of the receipts), but I thought the fundamental problem, though it is not my original insight, might be helpful to pass along.

Do we have any reason to hope that men and women of high virtue will fill the Oval Office and Congress come 2029?

To be a conservative in 2025 …

To be a conservative in 2025 is to be politically homeless—but perhaps not entirely politically friendless.

…

At home, the party of Donald Trump—the party of J.D. Vance and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Tucker Carlson, not to mention supposed normies such as Mike Pence, et al.—currently is engaged in answering a question I hadn’t thought anyone was asking: “What would national socialism look like if antisemitism were less of a political priority?”

Kevin D. Williamson

Apropos of the first paragraph, the bulk of Williamson’s column is about how liberals-in-the-American-polarity-sense are starting to discover some timeless truths that just might allow conservatives to become allies if not intimates.

On that lone hopeful note, adieu!

Nick Catoggio:

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

New, chill Tipsy

Rules, Codes

The modern sexual marketplace

Half a century on from the contraceptive technology transition, and Greer’s call for women to emancipate desire from family formation, some 40 percent of Americans now meet their partners via the frictionless, boundary-less, disembodied free-for-all of online dating. And what this delivered wasn’t the blossoming of sexuality Firestone imagined: it was the modern ‘sexual marketplace’. In this ‘marketplace’, age-old sexed asymmetries have returned in cartoon form – without social codes to govern their action.

Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress

Weird, democratic, recognizable rules

Of HBO’s series The Gilded Age:

I think we like its picture of a society that had brute but recognizable rules that, in some weird way, were democratic. Make a whole pot of money, be generous with it to gain notice but enact modesty when thanked, learn to imitate personal dignity and a little refinement, and you’re in. It wasn’t much tighter than that. Now it’s more just the money, no one has to bow to some phony old value system, and the money spurts in all directions, creating a themeless chaos, and tech billionaires in sweatshirts give us moral lectures from Jeffrey Epstein’s plane.

Peggy Noonan

How are things holding up?

Can anything good come out of DOGE?!

My provisional verdict on the Trump administration is written and published and I do not intend to dwell on it anymore. But when DOGE started on its rampage, I wondered if the lads might, incidentally, do some good with their techie tools.

It appears that they have, and the tool was an AI thingamajig called SweetREX Deregulation AI. Who can object in principle to identifying regulations that are not required by statute and to flagging them for possible repeal? I cannot.

Hey, Mussolini reportedly made the trains run on time.

The judicial system still stands

I’m happy to say that the judicial system is serving as a fairly effective check on some of Trump’s worst impulses. And I say this, despite the sloppy narrative in the progressive press that the Supreme Court has become a rubberstamp for Trump. (One suspects that they’ve been written for months, just waiting for a few “statistics” to plug in before running them.)

Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith methodically demolishes much of the nonsense channeled from Adam Bonica through Thomas Edsall at the New York Times. Goldsmith’s is a substack and likely is paywalled.

Suffice for now that the most dramatic claim, which involves federal District Court ruling against Trump more than 93% of the time and the Supreme Court upholding Trump more than 93% of the time is really preposterous. Goldsmith:

This analysis points the most fundamental problem with Bonica’s efforts to draw inferences from the Court’s Trump-related interim orders. The Court reviews only applications filed by parties. The Solicitor General seeks interim relief when he thinks the chances of success are relatively high. As Steve Vladeck explained in June, there are “literally dozens of adverse rulings by district courts that the Trump administration has been willing to leave intact—either by not appealing them in the first place, or by not pushing further after being rejected by courts of appeals.” (By my count that number is around four dozen right now.)==

… When Bonica says that the Supreme Court “reverses almost automatically,” he is ignoring the crucial fact that the Court sees only a fraction of lower court rulings, and then only ones that are skewed for likely government success.

Bonica and the New York Times are committing a variant of the political science sin of “testing on the dependent variable”: they draw sweeping conclusions from a subset of cases that is small, highly unrepresentative, and unexplained. Other critical claims in the Edsall piece ignore this fundamental point.

Goldsmith (bold added)

Jonathan Adler’s subsequent comments on Edsall and Goldsmith are not paywalled. Adler largely agrees with Goldsmith.

My point is not that Trump is exactly “right” about anything. It’s more that some of the wrongness is not illegal or unconstitutional.

Ailments and symptoms

[R]esistance is treating the symptom, not the ailment. The ailment is the tide of global populism that has been rising across the developed world for years, if not decades. And the cause is that our societies have segregated into caste systems, in which almost all the opportunity, respect and power is concentrated within the educated caste and a large portion of the working class understandably wants to burn it all down.

David Brooks, America’s New Segregation (gift link)

Authority

Following

Let’s begin by considering the sentence “We must follow the science.” It is one we have heard, in various forms, repeatedly since about the middle of March 2020 via the various propaganda platforms that saturate our lives: the electronic billboards, the websites, the TV ads, the Tweets and Instagram posts. No sentence better captures the core convictions and commitments of our well-educated, well-heeled, and well-regarded.

Think of the parallel commands never heard. No one who is today in a position of cultural authority ever says, “We must follow our guts.” No one says, “We must follow tradition.” No one says, “We must follow our religious leaders.” No one says, “We must follow the poets.” No one says, “We must follow what the majority decides.” No one says, “We must follow those who have displayed wisdom.”

Importantly, no one in a position of cultural authority even says, “We must follow no one but ourselves. No one can legitimately set limits on our behavior!”

No, the widely held, seemingly unchallengeable cultural belief is: We must follow the science.

Jeremy Beer, Limits, Risk Aversion, and Technocracy

Xenogender: just one question, but it’s kind of tough

If you read the UNESCO documents on childhood sexuality education …, you will find pages and pages about protecting children from sexual abuse. Sprinkled through them are much briefer passages which let the cat out of the bag — but you have to look for them. It’s true that the activists who run these agencies don’t want children to be raped. But they do want to sexualize them, and they want it very much.

They explain that “comprehensive sexuality education” “equips” young people including children to develop sexual relationships. Among its many goals are that five-to-eight year olds are to be taught that they can masturbate and it will give them pleasure; nine-to-twelve year olds, that abortion is safe; and twelve-to-fifteen year olds, that there are various and sundry “gender identities” which deserve equal respect.

Speaking of so called gender identities: The UNESCO documents don’t list them, but did you know that activists now claim that some people are “xenogender”? That’s a gender “that cannot be contained by human understandings of gender.”

I wonder: If it can’t be contained by human understandings of gender, then how do the activists know that it is one?

J Budziszewski (bold added)

Saturday, 7/26/25

Cultural

The cost of convenience

The Sleep Number bed is typical of smart home devices, as Harvard business school professor Shoshana Zuboff describes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It comes with an app, of course, which you’ll need to install to get the full benefits. Benefits for whom? Well, to know that you would need to spend some time with the sixteen-page privacy policy that comes with the bed. There you’ll read about third-party sharing, analytics partners, targeted advertising, and much else. Meanwhile, the user agreement specifies that the company can share or exploit your personal information even “after you deactivate or cancel” your Sleep Number account. You are unilaterally informed that the firm does not honor “Do Not Track” notifications. By the way, its privacy policy once stated that the bed would also transmit “audio in your room.” (I am not making this up.)

Matthew B. Crawford, Defying the Data Priests

The source of some of our sickness

The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal, to use living things as if they were machines, to impose scientific (that is, laboratory) exactitude upon living complexities that are ultimately mysterious.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

Touching politics

What’s remotely “risible” here?

Cyril Hovorun, a Ukrainian theologian … believes the Russian [Orthodox] church waded into Africa to spread propaganda and stoke hostility towards the West. The idea is less risible than it may at first seem. The Russian church’s favourite subject—“traditional values” and how the decadent West wants to pervert them—aligns with conservative religious views in Africa, where clerics tend to oppose homosexuality.

The Economist, January 25, 2024.

The idea did not at first seem risible to me, and it still does not.

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. had Ambassadors giving the middle finger to traditional lands by flying Pride flags at embassies and marching in gay rights parades (see here and here). Are we so clueless that we don’t recognize that putting lightning-rod sexuality issues front-and-center in our foreign policy makes us vulnerable to adversary countries who aren’t yet out of their minds?

Money Quotes For The Week (excerpted from Andrew Sullivan)

“You know that scene in an action movie when the bad guy runs through the kitchen of a restaurant and pulls down all the pots and pans behind him to slow down his pursuers? We’re in that part of the Trump presidency,” – Jason Kander.

“So lemme get this straight: The Biden Admin (2021-2025) fabricated the Epstein Files before 2019 but did NOT release them before the 2024 election — instead expecting that Trump would demand their release only to do an about-face because Biden in fact made it all up. Got it,” – Daniel Goldman.

…

“People are mocking [Speaker Mike Johnson] but it’s important to realize the moral progress it represents for the GOP: less than 20 years ago the Republicans chose an actual pedophile, Denny Hastert, to be Speaker, whereas Johnson merely is running interference for pedophiles,” – Matt Sitman.

How it ends

The uproar over Jeffrey Epstein increasingly feels more like a simulacrum of a political scandal than an actual scandal.

…

[W]e all, and I do mean all, know how this will end.

Donald Trump is going to let Ghislaine Maxwell out of prison early in exchange for absolving him of wrongdoing related to Epstein.

What will his fans say when he does?

Nick Catoggio

For the record, I did not “know” that. I didn’t even suspect it. I’ve apparently been paying too little attention to the simulacrum.

But now that he mentions it, that denouement seems consistent with Trump’s overall shamelessness and abuse of the pardon power.

I myself theorized four days ago that Team Maxwell had leaked the “bawdy” 2003 letter (allegedly) from Trump to the Wall Street Journal in the hopes of pressuring the president to make a deal with her. Lo and behold, today we find that the deputy attorney general wants to meet her. After six months of watching how postliberals operate, we’re all conspiracy theorists now. Take one look at this and try to imagine trusting this administration to behave on the up-and-up.

Events since Catoggio published this have swung me toward thinking he’s right about what’s it the works.

Despite it all, including my contempt for Trump, I would wager a moderate amount that Trump will not be shown to have partaken of Jeffrey Epstein’s adolescent delights. Do you really think the Biden DOJ wouldn’t have at least leaked it if he had (leaks could avoid unmasking Democrat ephebophiles)? (See Andrew Sullivan’s second quote of the week, above.)

I would not wager, though, that Trump didn’t know roughly what Epstein was up to.

Lest you think I’m being pedantic, by the way, I generally make it a point to distinguish ephebophilia from pedophilia because the latter always strikes me as more perverted, less understandable. Dennis Hastert, for instance, was an ephebophile, not a pedophile.

Apology accepted, sir.

I am writing to offer an apology. The short version is this: I severely underestimated the threat posed by a Donald Trump presidency. The never-Trumpers—who never seemed to stop issuing their warnings and critiques—struck me as psychologically and emotionally weak people with porcelain-fragile sensibilities. It turns out their instincts were significantly better attuned than my own.

… I, like many, took a transactional view of Trump. In the middle of a debate, he suddenly announced he had become pro-life (something Rudy Giuliani refused to do in 2008, which derailed his campaign). He also adopted a list of potential judicial nominees that accorded with constitutional conservatism. The author of The Art of the Deal drove the bargain that would take him to an unlikely presidency.

While some conservatives remained never-Trumpers, the rest, including me, made peace with Trump as the alternative to Hillary Clinton in a binary political system. Had we lived in a country with a multiparty system, we would have voted for the Christian Democrats and hoped for a part in a governing coalition, but that option didn’t exist.

Hunter Baker at Public Discourse, 1/21/21 (bold added)

I want to use this occasion to reiterate that I, a never-Trumper, have voted for America’s Christian Democrat party three quadrennia in a row. It is an option.

Unserious people governing an unserious people

Mediaite: Tulsi Gabbard Argues Obama Is Guilty of Treason Because ‘There Has to Be Peaceful Transition of Power’

On The Charlie Kirk Show, Kirk asked Gabbard to back up her “fighting words.”

“Can you make the case– can you present the arguments– the best bill you can with unclassified information and public information what makes you believe that this reaches that sort of threshold?” he asked.

Gabbard’s smoking gun? Obama — she claimed — disrupted the peaceful transfer of power.

“When we look at our Democratic Republic, Charlie, our system is built on the foundation of the American people casting their votes for who they want to be in office, to be our president and commander-in-chief.” said Gabbard. “In this system, there has to be a peaceful transfer of power.”

The Morning Dispatch

I’m pleasantly surprised that Charlie Kirk, himself something of a MAGA grifter, would challenge Gabbard on accusing Obama of treason.

I’m not surprised that Mediaite had to state the obvious because Kirk apparently didn’t pursue it:

Neither the Obama administration nor Obama himself ever claimed that Trump did not legitimately win the election. The former president never attempted to obstruct the certification of the election, he never told a news outlet that Clinton was the real winner, and he never encouraged supports to take matters into their own hands and attempt to stop the transition of power.

Gabbard’s boss, however, engaged in all of these actions repeatedly. President Trump claims, to this day, that he won the 2020 election. He actively fought against the certification of election results, and he was impeached for inciting an insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Kirk, Gabbard and Mediaite all leave it to me, though, to point out that Trump “treasonously” interfered with Obama for eight freakin’ years through his birtherism BS. And that Obama has an airtight defense against treason.

And as long as I’m free-associating, what brainworm makes wing-nuts insist that the wives of politicians they don’t like are really men (not that the Macron marriage isn’t a little odd, mind you)?

A unified theory of Trump

Early the evening of the assassination attempt on candidate Trump, Peggy Noonan got a call from:

a friend … from California … He had been very close with Mr. Trump once, and was no longer. He asked my thoughts and I said wow, that was some kind of moment. He said that wasn’t spirit, it’s rage. I quote from memory: “He said ‘fight fight fight’ because he wants everyone fighting, because the game of dominance and defeat is everything to him.” That is him, my friend said, and the fight isn’t for something, it’s just what he likes.

…

In just the past week Mr. Trump accused one of his predecessors, Barack Obama, of treason. Not of a dereliction or mistake but actual treason—betraying his country and giving aid and comfort to its enemies. He told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday that, in National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard’s recent report on Mr. Obama’s actions regarding Russia-gate, “It’s there, he’s guilty. This was treason.” “Obama was trying to lead a coup . . . This is the biggest scandal in the history of our country.”

You can say, “He’s just trying to distract from his Jeffrey Epstein problem” and yes, of course he is. But it’s also fight for the fight’s sake, and unthinkingly destructive. Is it good for young people, for instance, to hear one president accuse another of an act so wicked the penalty of conviction is death? It is not good for them.

Before the Journal last week broke the story of the Jeffrey Epstein bawdy birthday book with its letter bearing Mr. Trump’s signature, Mr. Trump threatened “I’m gonna sue the Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else.” He filed suit last Friday against the Journal and reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo.

An ardent Trump supporter might say, “Good, never let up.” Maybe Mr. Trump says that to himself. But it’s no good for the country for its president to attempt to muscle the press in this way, and it’s no good even for him. If and when the suit goes forward Mr. Trump will be forced to testify under oath on his history with Epstein. There is no way on earth that will be a net positive for him. Which surely he knows. He fights even when he will hurt himself, because the fight is all.

… He is like a strange general who can’t quietly establish camp or dig new fortifications. He shoots his cannon for no reason, just for the sound.

…

Of all his weaknesses that is one of his greatest, that he’d rather hurt himself than not fight. He’d rather hurt the country than not fight. The fight is all.

Peggy Noonan (gift link to one of her gems).

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

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