Category: POTUS

Relentlessly pessimistic

So Trump’s indicted again, on unprecedentedly serious charges, which will be harder to prove than the documents case. I hold two views simultaneously:

  1. This needed to be done.
  2. Any good from convicting Trump will be longer-term rather than soon.

In other words, our situation is dreadful.

Not the very best people

The people with whom Trump surrounds himself are … not the “best people,” as he promised. (But if you are surprised that Trump has failed to keep a promise, you should have asked Mrs. Trump, or Mrs. Trump, or Mrs. Trump, for that matter, or maybe Stormy Daniels.) The list is one that a novelist would blush to invent: Mike Pence, the pious fraud who did Trump’s bidding right up until the moment doing so stopped serving his interests and now presents himself as the second coming of St. Francis; Rudy Giuliani, the knee-walking grifter who still remembers enough law that he already has stipulated the falsehood of his stolen-election nonsense—that swill is fine for the slavering proles in the Fox News audience, but even Giuliani wouldn’t try to defend it in court; Roger Stone, literally the kind of cuckold he likes to accuse others of being metaphorically; etc. And now Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, is facing the prospect of time in a federal penitentiary after what reports describe as a truly clownish cloak-and-dagger affair involving “shush” emojis, sneaking through the hedges at Mar-a-Lago, and roping another minion into a scheme to destroy evidence when he did not have the technical chops to get the job done himself. These putzes make the White House Plumbers of Watergate infamy look like the Count of Monte Cristo crossed with Professor Moriarty. Criminal masterminds, they ain’t.

Kevin D. Williamson. Williamson suggests that Trump’s valets will prove the weakest of links that blow his criminal defenses away.

And yet, half of America prefers him

[O]ne thing is clear to me now: Donald Trump is a cretin who should never have risen so high in American public life. The fact that he has done so, and might take back the White House, is a giant flashing neon sign of our nation’s decadence.

And yet, the question that so many elites never seem to ask themselves: why is it that despite everything we know about Trump, half the country prefers him as president to Joe Biden?

Rod Dreher

“Cretin” is one way of putting it. “Incandescently stupid” is another:

Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at Homeland Security, recently told a podcast that part of his job was dumbing down security briefings for the “incandescently stupid” president. 

This fifty-page memo that we would normally give to any other president about what his options are is something Trump literally can’t read. … And so I had to write this incandescently stupid memo called something like, “Afghanistan, How to Put America First and Win.” And then bullet by bullet, I summed up this highly classified memo into Trump’s sort of bombastic language because it was the only way he was gonna understand. I mean, I literally said in there, “You know, if we leave Afghanistan too fast, the terrorists will call us losers. But if we wanna be seen as winners, we need to make sure the Afghan forces have the strength to push back against these criminals.” I mean, it was that dumb and that’s how you had to talk to him.

Some of you will know Taylor as “Anonymous,” author of a famous New York Times essay. He eventually quit the administration (when it was more convenient for him to do so), but do you know what he didn’t do? He didn’t say, “Mr. President, you are not smart enough to have this job, and you can’t even read a proper briefing. One of us has to go, and I imagine it will be me, but this needed to be said.”

Kevin D. Williamson

And yet half the country prefers him. It took me a long time to internalize how that could be, and I think the phrases “flyover country” and “deplorables” are evocative. David Brooks has some thoughts on that, too.

Mitch blew it

Trump could well be convicted in one or more of these trials before Election Day 2024. And he could well win the election, sending him to the White House instead of federal prison. Far from vindicating the rule of law, such an outcome would make a mockery of it.

…

[T]he last opportunity we had to contain and partially neutralize the civically pestilential influence of Donald Trump on our polity was February 13, 2021. That’s the day Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell voted to acquit Donald Trump for his actions on and leading up to the events of January 6. While describing Trump’s words and deeds in the run-up to the insurrectionary violence on Capitol Hill as “disgraceful,” McConnell nonetheless preferred to let the judicial branch of government solve his Trump problem for him, declaring, “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.” 

In the annals of shirked political responsibility, that has to deserve a special prize. It would have taken ten more votes in the Senate to convict Trump in his second impeachment. Had McConnell taken a public stand against the former president and whipped others in his party to do the same, Trump might have been barred from ever holding public office again. That would have been a political solution to what was and remains a fundamentally political problem.

Instead, we’re left with the legal solution McConnell preferred—and the considerable risk that politics may well overwhelm and devour it.

Damon Linker

I feel as if we’re in a tragedy, inexorably working itself out. The latest charges needed to be brought, whatever the political and social consequences, but those consequences could be very weird and ugly.

I pray for America every day. I carefully thought about what I think the country needs, and those are the things I wrote down to ask God for. But I cannot gin myself up to thinking that all we need is for the cup of a 2024 Presidential election between Biden and Trump to be taken from us (two men of their age dying of natural causes, perhaps?). Rather, I feel that “there’s no way out but through.” That doesn’t really lessen the dread.

What if … ?

My mother asked me recently what would happen if Donald Trump were convicted of a crime and then elected president. Would he command the military from inside a prison cell? Would his Secret Service detail be incarcerated with him? Could he pardon himself?

As the (ugh) lawyer in the family, I’m supposed to know. I didn’t, because no one does. The idea of American voters handing presidential power to an inmate is so darkly absurd that the Founders didn’t think to address it.

If we could travel through time and warn James Madison to provide some guidance in the Constitution about how a coup-plotting criminal might be expected to faithfully execute the laws, I imagine he’d stop work and tear up the document. There’d be no point in continuing. A people corrupt enough to force such a dilemma on themselves will abandon the Madisonian project in due course.

…

[One of the Trumpist responses to the indictment was that] Trump honestly believed the election was stolen. “Good luck proving that Trump knew he lost the election, when he—whether behind closed doors or in public, whether with one person or massive crowds—has consistently maintained that he won with an apparent passionate sincerity,” Rich Lowry tweeted. It’s a fair point. How might you prove specific intent to defraud if the defendant ended up talking himself into believing sincerely that he’s the one who’s been defrauded?

One thing you could do is show that Trump did seem to believe that he’d lost, at least at times. “You’re too honest,” he told Mike Pence when Pence claimed he had no authority to block the certification of electoral votes. “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” he urged acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. Allegedly he described some of his own lawyers’ conspiracy theories about vote-rigging as “crazy.”

Only God and Trump himself know to what extent his brain is capable of separating truth from fiction when the truth cuts against his interests. But there were, it seems, at least glimmers of awareness periodically that Biden had won. (“Can you believe I lost to that f—ing guy? That f—ing corpse?”) Smith might be able to prove that Trump knew the truth. Certainly he can prove that every trustworthy figure within a country mile of him knew it, and told him so.

But even if he can’t, pause here and reflect that the “Trump really believed this insanity” insanity defense is being offered on behalf of a person who’s 35 points ahead in the Republican presidential primary. Much of the right will soon be claiming simultaneously that he can’t be convicted because he can’t distinguish self-serving delusions from reality—and also that he should be president again, with America’s nuclear arsenal at his command.

Nick Cattogio

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.

Friday, 7/28/23

Legalia

Oh what a tangled web we weave

A federal judge in D.C. vacated the 2017 desertion conviction and dishonorable discharge of former Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who walked off of a base in Afghanistan in 2009. He was captured by the Taliban and held for five years before being freed in a prisoner exchange in 2014. The judge argued Bergdahl did not receive a fair trial because the [military] judge in the case failed to disclose he was concurrently applying for a job in former President Donald Trump’s Justice Department—Trump had called Bergdahl a traitor and suggested he should be executed. Bergdahl may now face a second trial before a different judge.

(TMD) What you think of Bergdahl shouldn’t blind you to the sleaziness of what the military judge did.

Political persecution

From the department of “Damned-if-you do, Damned-if-you-don’t,” a thought on Donald Trump’s legal difficulties:

  • If they prosecute him, “they’re politically persecuting him.”
  • If they don’t prosecute him, they’ve “got nothing on him.”

Heads Trump wins, tails Trump wins.

Such is my former party. Brain dead is the benign explanation; cynical is the likelier (and culpable) explanation.

Well, they’ve got something on him, so let the “persecution” continue.

Not a rubber stamp, but a punching bag

Just as Hunter Biden was on the verge of signing a very nice plea deal to settle up tax and gun charges, Judge Maryellen Noreika mucked it all up. “I cannot accept the plea agreement today,” said Judge Noreika, who is definitely getting audited this year and who should be very careful about going 0.5 miles above the speed limit from now on.

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

What could possibly go wrong?

The IRS announced Monday that it would stop making most unannounced, in-person visits to taxpayers—a practice that has long been one of the agency’s key tools to collect unpaid taxes—citing security concerns and taxpayer confusion as scam artists imitated the tactic. The change is part of a 10-year modernization plan focused on cracking down on tax evasion and improving customer service.

TMD

Culture

SAT levels the field

Shocking new study—the SAT is a progressive tool: There are a lot of good liberals who genuinely believe that the SAT is racist, but that teacher recommendation letters and extracurriculars aren’t. My friends: Please think about a teacher at a small private school versus one at a big public school. Who has more time to get to know a kid? Think about extracurriculars: what happens to the kid who needs to work at a deli and can’t launch a nonprofit in Gambia? The SAT is the least racist thing we have. The SAT is the closest to equity in admissions we can ever hope to achieve. Now we have stats from a new study out of Harvard and Brown showing how the ultra-rich can get a huge boost from everything except. . . the SAT.

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

Soon to be a hateful myth

Meantime, in the U.S., Democrats in Texas and Louisiana voted this week in favor of age restrictions on hormones and gender surgeries, explicitly breaking with the party. Shawn Thierry, a Democrat in Texas, said: “I have made a decision to place the safety and well-being of all young people over the comfort of political expediency.” Let’s not get ahead out ourselves—in Oregon, doctors can treat gender dysphoric adolescents 15 years or older without parental permission or even notification. But I’m pretty sure we’re seeing a shift here. I agree with Jesse Singal that pediatric transitions will very soon be memory-holed as a thing that Absolutely Never Happened.

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

Budapest, the putative hell-hole

In the two years I’ve lived in Hungary, I have seen many Americans and Western Europeans come to Budapest for the first time, visibly anxious about what they’ll find, as they only know the city and the country from their media, which routinely denounce the Orban government as ‘authoritarian’ and, yes, ‘far-right.’ It only takes a few days for them to realize that they have been lied to, and that Viktor Orbán is the kind of reasonable, effective conservative that most Americans on the Right hope for when they vote Republican, but rarely get.

As I tell Americans headed over, “Budapest feels like a major midwestern American city, circa 1998.” If Clinton-era Omaha, but with better architecture and food, is your idea of Nazitown, maybe the problem is you.

Rod Dreher in European Conservative.

People who matter

[Marty Peretz] writes honestly about the core fight around publishing a symposium on The Bell Curve:

Leon said: Publish a review of the book but don’t run the piece itself. We don’t run Marxists here; we shouldn’t run Social Darwinists. Andrew said: Our readers read Marxists and Marxist derivatives already. If we don’t run Murray they’ll never read him at all — and Murray is a person who matters.

I was speaking about my own ignorance as well: reading the draft of the book was the first time I’d ever even heard there were racial differences in the distribution of mean IQ. That forbidden knowledge — uncontested, uncontestable — was something we needed and need to know. Because it was and is real. That’s all. Why it was real and how to fix it were open questions. And the ongoing debates over the fraught issue are still necessary, which is why the woke left wants to render them entirely taboo — along with countless of their other stagnant little orthodoxies. Our job as writers, I believed, was to open up debate with epistemic humility, courage and precision; it was not to shut it down in a flurry of virtue-signaling.

Andrew Sullivan

I have always rebelled against taboos based on the idea that bad people will make bad uses of what appears to be truly true.

Living by faith

The irony is that we all—secular or religious people alike—make our biggest life-shaping decisions on faith. Life is too short to learn what you need to know to live well.

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God

The DEI Racket

Jesse Singal notes the reported abandonment of DEI programs in corporate America, and recounts the sad story of a school principal absurdly called racist and white supremacist during prolonged DEI training, and who eventually took his own life

[M]any contemporary DEI trainings “often seem geared more toward sparking a revolutionary reunderstanding of race relations than solving organizations’ specific problems.” There’s an intense, confrontational element to some of them … DiAngelo’s approach leans very heavily on the idea of calling out white employees, in front of their colleagues, for their alleged racial sins …

…

My argument, then and now, is that these sorts of DEI interventions are, very obviously, psychological interventions. What else do you call something that is designed to change the way people think and act? And if they’re psychological interventions, of course they should be subjected to certain standards; perhaps first and foremost, their advocates should be able to assure institutional decision-makers that whatever else they do or don’t accomplish, they won’t cause harm.

But we don’t have that data, because almost none of these programs are formally, rigorously evaluated. I may sound like I’m beating a dead horse here, and I understand that at a certain point I come across as a nerd, but until you have evidence a program works, you don’t have any evidence a program works. It doesn’t matter how glossy the brochure or how impressive the website is. I understand that CEOs were desperate to do something to respond to societal and employee demand in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. But this is a rather undercooked industry, and until it adopts better standards, it will be hard to shed all that many tears over its contraction.

I couldn’t help but think of Orwell’s Animal Farm when I read A Cruel Summer at Cornell, about a Telluride Association Summer Program that seemed to be, if tacitly, about the eventuality of DEI as currently treated.

Conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theorists have got at least two things right: that the truth can differ dramatically from what we’re officially told, and that it is usually unpleasant. There aren’t many conspiracy fantasists who claim that the world is run by a benevolent secret society which will one day deposit a fortune in all our bank accounts.

Terry Eagleton

Trigger warnings run amok

We may laugh at the university that appended a trigger warning to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, informing students that it contains scenes of “graphic fishing” ….

Andrew Doyle, Our culture war is not a distraction.

Indeed we may laugh.

Economics

Perverse economic incentives

The more the economy becomes a matter of the mere distribution of loot, the more inefficiency and unnecessary chains of command actually make sense, since these are the forms of organization best suited to soaking up as much of that loot as possible.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Efficiency versus humanity

Efficiency was the coldest metric for evaluating a merger. It reduced Americans into the stylized economic caricature known as the “consumer,” treating cheap goods as our highest and only aspiration. The new guidelines inject a bit of humanity back into the calculus. And they suggest that the ultimate question for government shouldn’t be whether something is efficient, but whether it’s right.

Franklin Foer, Biden Declares War on the Cult of Efficiency

I hope I’m not being sold a bill of goods, but if the new Biden antitrust guidelines are as Foer represents them, I approve — and that puts me at odds with The Thing That Used To Be Conservatism.

Politics

Isolationist fascism

Trump differed sharply from the European fascists of the interwar period.

They were ardent militarists and imperialists. War was the crucible in which the new fascist man was to be forged; territorial expansion was both the means and the end of fascist power and triumph. Trump has shown little ambition to pursue such aims.

…

Unlike previous fascist leaders with their cult of war, Trump still offers appeasement to dictators abroad, but he now promises something much closer to dictatorship at home. For me, what Trump is offering for his second presidency will meet the threshold, and the label I’d choose to describe it would be “isolationist fascism.” Until now, such a concept would have been an oxymoron, a historical phenomenon without precedent. Trump continues to break every mold.

Christopher R. Browning, How Trumpism Differs From Fascism

Poverty and hatred

Government has tools to fight Black poverty. It does not have tools to fight white hatred. Not in any real way. Poverty lives in the world. Hatred lives in the head.

Freddie DeBoer

A position that melts on closer inspection

Well, I think . . . they have nothing to do with being president of the United States. The 10th Amendment is very clear about what the federal government’s role is, and what’s not specifically for the federal government, that limited number of things is designated to the states or to the people. I mean, it’s a one-sentence amendment in the Constitution that I believe is basically overstepped all the time, all the time, all the time.

And I’ve seen it as, again, small business. medium business, governor, I’ve seen the federal overreach. So Dobbs? Support Dobbs—leave it up to the states. I was a candidate for not even 12 hours and the first question on CNN was how do you feel about signing a federal abortion amendment? I said I wouldn’t sign it. . . . We said, it’s up to the states, the states have to decide ….

North Dakota Governor and Presidential Candidate Doug Burgum.

I respect Burgum for saying that. For decades, I said that reversal of Roe v. Wade would return the issue to the states. Abortion has never really been a national issue (even if Roe pretended permissive abortion was enshrined in the constitution).

Granted that a federal abortion amendment would by definition make abortion a national issue, and granted that the Right to Life movement has wanted a Human Life Amendment for decades and decades, I’m unsure that the precedent of shifting the federal/state balance is one I can support.

Once upon a time, I called myself a single-issue pro-life voter. But then the GOP started running idiots who had nothing but a supposed pro-life stance to commend them — and often they betrayed in talking about it that they didn’t really get the issues. That put an end to my true single-issue voting. Now, promising a Human Life Amendment will not get me to vote for someone who otherwise is a toxic jack- or jenny-ass, like a Matt Gaetz or a Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The incredible shrinking candidate

There was a time, not that long ago, when I thought I might be able to get behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in his bid for the Presidency.

Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, ordered state officials to probe whether AB InBev, Bud Light’s parent company, breached its responsibility to shareholders by hiring a transgender social-media influencer. The partnership with Dylan Mulvaney fuelled a boycott by conservatives; AB InBev has shed about a tenth of its stockmarket value since April. Mr DeSantis has also picked fights with Disney for its “wokery”.

The Economist Daily Briefing.

I am not amused by DeSantis on this. I was amused, though, by this: The Real Mystery of Bud Light: How did it become so popular in the first place?

More trolling by Shrinking Man:

DeSantis suggests he could pick RFK Jr. to lead the FDA or CDC – POLITICO

And then there’s the mortifying mistake of the campaign video that ended with a Nazi symbol.

Nick Cattogio:

In 2022 DeSantis signed the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, a response to the panic on the right over critical race theory. Of course he did: For all the hype about the governor’s post-liberal “vision” for America, his legislative priorities are highly reactive to whatever the populist hobby horse du jour happens to be. It’s an endless game of fetch with Very Online MAGA activists tossing the ball and Ron DeSantis loyally bounding after it in whatever direction it happens to go.

(Emphasis added)

Government’s Covid response

I seem to be seeing articles every day that assume the absurdity of the government response to Covid.

This is a debate (if there be a debate) that I’m not going to enter or even to watch closely, for a couple of reasons:

  • I gladly isolated to a fairly great extent because I’m an introvert.
  • I painlessly isolated to a fairly great extent because I am (and was then) retired and financially comfortable.
  • I prudently isolated to a fairly great extent because I am obese and over age 70 — a demographic that everyone agrees would have been counseled to isolate even by epidemiological dissenters from Dr. Fauci’s approach.

What I will say was that we collectively were surprisingly uninterested in the fate of those mostly low-paid essential workers who had to show up in meatspace, thereby exposing themselves to (supposedly) mortal danger. Did the powers that be really believe they were all in mortal danger? Let’s not forget them.

For want of a Christian conservative, vote secular populist?

I used to say “If you don’t like The Religious Right, just wait ‘till you see the Irreligious Right.”

So how are you disliking it?

Snark aside, this review makes me want to buy yet another book I may not live long enough to read: Tobias Kremer, The Godless Crusade: Religion, Populism, and Right-Wing Identity Politics in the West. How this cashes out in the US, sadly, is that many religious voters are likely to vote for secular populist candidates again for lack of a more attractive alternative.

But there is a more attractive alternative! You just have to reject the idea that one of the two major parties must get your vote and that “anything else is wasted.”

That’s especially easy to do if your state is deep red or deep blue, as you can relax (knowing your vote won’t sway any race) and vote your conscience (not voting for a “lesser evil”) as a signal to the major parties that America is tired of shit sandwiches on the menu.

Dick Bionidi

Dick Bionidi has died. For a midwesterner of a certain age, he was a pretty big deal.

Anniversary

Tomorrow, Saturday July 29, 9:03 pm, is the 58th anniversary of my motorcycle accident. I was hurt memorably, but not grievously or maimingly (if that’s a word).

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.

Saturday, 7/15/23

I forewent a provocative headline and lead paragraph.

You’re welcome.

Culture

Peter Coy brings the receipts

I haven’t harped about this because I didn’t have facts and figures. But the New York Times’ Peter Coy has now provided them (and it’s important enough that I’m giving you a link that pierces the paywall):

  • The amount of lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, graphite and other lithium-ion battery materials needed for one long-range electric vehicle would be enough for either six plug-in hybrids or 90 of the type of hybrid that recharges from deceleration and braking.
  • The overall carbon reduction of those 90 hybrids over their lifetimes is 37 times as much as a single battery electric vehicle.
  • The production of electric vehicles produces more greenhouse gases than the production of cars with combustion engines. So E.V.s have to travel between 28,000 and 68,000 miles before they have an emissions advantage over similarly sized and equipped internal-combustion mobiles.

All-electric vehicles are presently a gigantic flim-flam, and considering that third point, they’re going to remain a flim-flam for quite a long time. (Does an EV even get 68,000+ miles before those big honkin’ batteries need replaced?)

The plug-in hybrids have appealed to me, but I’ve got to get over that and to stop feeling like a criminal for (currently) not even driving a conventional hybrid, but a full-blown internal-combustion vehicle. (I’d have bought my second hybrid if they offered one on this model.)

EVs are a kind of social contagion, heavily subsidized by the federal government, which really needs to cut it out.

This is one reason I have almost as little respect for Elon Musk as I do for He Who Shall Not Be Named (another guy who got more-or-less rich dishonorably).

From the July 15 Economist

Pangloss makes the case for AI

Mark Andreesen, giving the Panglossian version of AI, lost me early on at the patently bullshitty “infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful.” He reminds me of George Burns: “Sincerity – if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Because all those AI virtues are fakes.

I was hoping for something better, because I think there’s a better case available. In fact, I know there’s a better case to be made because I heard it made on a podcast Tuesday on the Ezra Klein show.

Freedom

Aunt Concetta told me that she didn’t like life in America because we had no freedom. That comment baffled me because, like everyone else my age, I believed that America was the land of the free and the home of the brave. But she pulled me up short. “Your grandmother,” she said, “is afraid to walk down the main street at night.”

…

… That little conversation, more than anything I have read about political life, has put an indelible mark on my thinking about freedom. I have long rejected any view that reduces liberty to the results of a constitutional mechanism, or that identifies liberty with suffrage, or that defines liberty as a negative, as what the government may not tell you that you may not do.

… I think I can venture a suggestion as to gauging the degree of real freedom that a nation, or perhaps your town or your street, enjoys. It is the degree and the character of spontaneous, unencumbered, and undirected action on the street.

Anthony Esolen

I kinda sorta feel for Tommy Tuberville

Terms like “white nationalist” mean something: White nationalism is a form of white supremacy that advocates white dominance and white control. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can look it up. (On Tuesday, Tuberville admitted that white nationalists are racists.)

I don’t normally read Charles Blow, but this time, I read a little bit, including the block-quote, because The Morning Dispatch had called out Tuberville teasingly the day before:

It took him about two months and several botched attempts, but a hearty congratulations to GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama for finally saying these words in this order: “White nationalists are racists.”

I remember in law school insisting that I was a creationist. I said that because I believed that this stuff all around us, out to the furthest reaches of our telescopes, were the result of a divine creation, not an accident or the outworking of eternally-existent matter and energy. Someone pointed out that what I meant, though, was not what creationism had come to mean as a term of art. Creationism had come to mean divine creation roughly 6000 to 10,000 years ago, fixed species, etc.

“White Nationalist” has never been a term I’d apply to myself; first, because race is truly (if not exclusively, in our vexed history) a pigment of the imagination; second, because nationalism holds little to no appeal for me. But it appeared to me to mean “nationalism professed by a pale person,” and its journalistic use to be more epithet than description.

Maybe Tommy Tuberville thought as I did, and that’s why he pushed back so. But Blow cites Merriam-Webster for a term-of-art meaning that implies racist white supremacy.

I still stand by the epithet point, and believe that the term is not yet univocally racist. But sensible people, aware of its equivocal meaning, will steer clear of it.

Paris

Many people who love Paris love it because the first time they came they ate something better than they had ever eaten before, and kept coming back to eat it again.

Adam Gopnik, [The Table Comes First(https://www.amazon.com/Table-Comes-First-Family-Meaning-ebook/dp/B004KPM1EY/ref=sr_1_1)

I find that very plausible.

Legalia

FINALLY someone else says it (and better than I)

The nature of expressive, creative work is also such that consumers would not ordinarily wish to risk the quality of the product or service by conscripting a reluctant vendor to create messages that contradict the vendor’s sincere personal beliefs.

Abram Pafford, “You Couldn’t Pay Me to Say That”: 303 Creative and Compelled Commercial Speech.

303 Creative was a well-warranted pre-enforcement challenge based on the proposition that Colorado’s public accommodations law was unconstitutional as applied to plaintiff’s refusal of website design for same-sex weddings. Colorado never challenged the owner’s standing, and even stipulated the facts that eventually blew a little hole in the hull of its law (which remains resolutely afloat).

Even today, pre-enforcement challenges are pending to, notably, some of the new restrictive abortion laws some states have passed, and to state bans on transgender care for minors. The Left is happy as can be with decades of pre-enforcement challenges like these — of which the Left has been the primary beneficiary. I don’t recall Right-leaning pre-enforcement challenges, other than against college speech codes, until the Obama years.

Not until after Colorado had lost did its Attorney General start joining the ignorant “fake case” chorus.

But in a sense, 303 Creative was a “fake case” — or at least an “engineered case”: the sense that in the real world, untainted by polarization and the insatiable desire of LGBTetc folks for universal affirmation, as if their sexuality were constitutional high trump, such cases would not be brought because — well, see the block quote. That’s why I put it there.

What should happen now is clear enough to me: states should disavow application of their public accommodation laws to creative professionals’ rare refusals to aid in expressing an objectionable message — with the creative professional being the sole judge of “objectionable.”

And I’ll reiterate that the key here is the right of the service provider to be free of compulsion to express sentiments they in fact disapprove. It would apply as much to, say, a Jewish graphic designer declining to work on BDS advocacy as to conservative Christians (and others) declining work on same-sex weddings. I sincerely doubt that Colorado would punish that Jewish graphic designer; this is about forcing Christians to bend the knee to the new sexual orthodoxies.

(It’s surprising how easy it is to mis-state what’s at stake here. This little item took far more time than I expected. I probably should cut some slack to those who make a living minting hot takes on complex topics for siloed readerships and who get sloppy in the process.)

Non-partisan politics

Smoke-filled rooms

I miss smoke-filled rooms.

Not the literal ones, but the ones that brought forth sane and competitive candidates back in the day.

Today, primary voters — often the most extreme members of a party — deliver us unpalatable candidates, with the only gesture toward electability being “will he be perceived as less bad than the other party’s guy?”

Yes, I’m thinking specifically of the likely nomination of Donald Trump by the GOP. But I’m not thinking exclusively of that. Hillary in 2016 is also an example.

Our Unaccountable TechLords

At almost every gathering artificial intelligence came up. I’d say people are approaching AI with a free floating dread leavened by a pragmatic commitment to make the best of it, see what it can do to make life better. It can’t be stopped any more than you can stop the tide. There’s a sense of, “It may break cancer’s deepest codes,” combined with, “It may turn on us and get us nuked.”

My offered thought: AI’s founders, funders and promoters made a big recent show of asking Congress to help them fashion moral guardrails, but to my mind there was little comfort in it. I think they had three motives. First, to be seen as humble and morally serious—aware of the complexities of this awesome new power and asking for help in thinking them through. Second, they are certain government is too incompetent and stupid to slow them down or impede them in any meaningful way, so why not. Third, when something goes wrong they can say, “But we pleaded for your help!”

That unfriendly read is based on 30 years of observing our tech leaders. They have a sense of responsibility to their vision and to their own genius, but not to people at large or the American people in particular. They always claim they’re looking for better communication and greater joy between peoples when in the end it turns out they’re looking for money and power. And they only see the sunny side of their inventions because they were raised in a sunny age, and can’t imagine what darkness looks like, or that it comes.

Peggy Noonan

My skewed perspective

There are too many sensible people writing critically and even bitterly about the government’s Covid pandemic (or is “epidemic” sufficient?) response for me to assume it just partisan politics. But I confess that something about having retired before Covidtide seems to make me largely insensible to the outrage many feel about the government response.

I even joked that “I’m an introvert; social distancing is almost my default.”

So pardon me for not joining the chorus. If I’m consistent, though, I won’t join government’s defenders, either.

But I will make this observation: during the putative lockdowns, our lowest-paid, lowest-status workers had to go ahead and work in “meatspace,” risking infection. They are our truly indispensable workers, and many of them should be paid far better than they are.

Gaming the fat-cat system

The Republican National Committee has set a threshold of 40,000 individual donors, including 200 each in 20 states or territories, to qualify for primary debates. This is supposed to assure broad support and (they say) block candidates with mostly fat-cat donors.

So, how long did it take for candidates to game that system?

So how about using fat-cat donations to buy $20 gift cards for anyone who gives $1? You can buy a lot of $1 gifts if you’re offering an instant 1900% ROI.

(David A. Graham, We’re Entering a New Era of Shady Campaign Finance)

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.

Friday, 5/12/23

Wordplay

(Let’s start with something pleasant.)

  • Murmur. An onomatopoeia that fascinates me because the Bible is chock-full of murmuring and murmurers.
  • Augur and inaugurate
  • Casserolades: concerts of banging pots and pans to signify political discontent. This seems to be a uniquely French thing. The demonstrators are called ‌casseroleurs.
  • Womb envy: [The envy that men may (or is it “allegedly”?) feel of the biological functions of the female. Contemporary womb-enviers are said to be prominent among those technicians making lavish claims of sentience for (misnamed) Artificial Intelligence. “It’s only natural that computer scientists long to create A.I. and realize a long-held dream.” (Jaron Lanier) (Side note: I guess it’s okay to recognize sexual dimorphism when the point it to belittle males.)
  • An ambient expectation of human subservience. The unarticulated requirement that humans do more and more common tasks in the manner required by digital designs. (Synthesized from the context of Jaron Lanier’s use of the term in There Is No A.I.)
  • A sensational scoop was tweeted last month by America’s National Public Radio: Elon Musk’s “massive space sex rocket” had exploded on launch. Alas, it turned out to be an automated mistranscription of SpaceX, the billionaire’s rocketry firm. (From the Economist, I believe.)

I’m glad a stuck around for Frank Bruni’s “For the Love of Sentences” after he commented on CNN’s Town Hall featuring DJT. Some gems through Bruni:

  • One peculiarity of European aristocrats is that their names pile up, like snowdrifts … It’s lunchtime in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and I am about to meet Leka Anwar Zog Reza Baudouin Msiziwe Zogu, crown prince of the Albanians. (Helen Lewis)
  • The red velvet robes trimmed in ermine, the five-pound crown, the gold robes on top of gold robes dragging over gold carpets — the regalia often made it feel like a Versace fashion show staged in an assisted-living facility. (Rachel Tashjian)
  • Watching a coronation is the constitutional equivalent of visiting a zoo, and finding a Triceratops in one of the enclosures. (Tom Holland)

Not Trump

(We now inch toward truly unpleasant truths, albeit colorfully expressed.)

The source of aesthetics, ethics (and folly)

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract. Everything good (aesthetics, ethics) and wrong (Fooled by Randomness) with us seems to flow from it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “core generator” of insights.

Garrison Keillor, scab?

I salute the Hollywood writers who went out on strike this past week but I can tell you that we essayists won’t be joining them. For one thing, the essay is deeply imbedded in our nation’s very identity (U.S.A.) but for another thing, a national essay strike would be like a National Husbands Day of Silence, most wives wouldn’t care and many wouldn’t notice.

Why I am not joining the strike | Garrison Keillor

Hell will be paid

The transgender movement now wields tremendous power, and many children are being transitioned long before they reach their teen years. They are being put on puberty blockers and going under the knife before they are old enough to vote, drink, or drive. Many will wake up one day and realize that their ability to conceive children and experience sexual pleasure was destroyed by the adult ideologues that they trusted.

Jonathon Van Maren, Life After Detransition.

I’d look forward to the malpractice judgments against the ideologues and profiteers were it not that every such judgment is inadequate redress for the kinds of harm they cause.

Professional Human Losers

I have a cyber-acquaintance (I was well aware of him even before cyberspace, though), Alan Jacobs, who’s something of a Christian Public Intellectual — a dying breed as he noted in a Harpers article a few years back. One of Jacobs’ muses in turn is Austin Kleon, whose postings he frequently shares, and at which I frequently yawn. That probably means I’m a shallow person — or that my brain and Jacobs feed on different things.

But this one caught my fancy as it catches our moment. I’ll just say it involves, and riffs off, Jeopardy Champ (now host) Ken Jennings losing to a supercomputer.

It’s short enough that I won’t risk, by quoting an excerpt, omitting something that might edify you, whose brain may also feed on different things than mine.

Analogy?

Mortician Bonasera/Don Corleone = Harlan Crow/Clarence Thomas
True or False?

If you answered “true”, you get an A+ from Brooke Harrington.

Because the publisher is the Atlantic (and the author isn’t Adam Serwer) the article is less than 100% meritless. But Harrington gives away her guttersnipe game when (a) she views any conservative justice’s friends as suspect and (b) she reports no similar friendships of liberal justices.

But wait! There’s more!

African Americans, migrants, and the children of migrants tend to reject anti-intellectual politics, and still see the educational system as the most likely means of social advancement for their children. This makes it easier for poor whites to see them as unfairly in alliance with rich white liberals.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Easier, yes, but the captivity of these groups to the Democratic party is independent evidence of alignment with rich white liberals.

Fomenting stochastic violence

(Getting closer to the nasties …)

The law in its majesty neutrality has decided that people on both the Left and the Right can spout incendiary lies so long as the threat of violent response is not imminent. But I think the coinage “stochastic violence” or “stochastic terrorism” is nevertheless useful, and that “random” violence is sometimes (often?) rooted in lying rhetoric (and, as in the case of the January 6 insurrection, calling it “random” is a cop-out).

Setting the stage, deploring the actors

But who, sir, makes the [slave] trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself? You make the public statement that calls for his trade, that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he?

Harriett Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Slavery aside, we still do this: we escalate our rhetoric and then damn the actual perpetrators of such stochastic terrorism as our rhetoric invited.

Or maybe, if we’re shameless enough, we’ll call the terrorism a …

Patriot Purge

Yeah! That’s the ticket!

If you infuse an issue or set of issues with religious intensity but drain a movement of religious virtue, then profound religious conflict — including violent conflict — is the inevitable result. Indeed, we saw religious violence on full display when a mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and it is no coincidence that one of Carlson’s most mendacious projects was his effort to recast the Jan. 6 insurrection and its aftermath as a “patriot purge.”

Maybe I should leave it at that, but the author has more:

The more the Christian right latches on to cruel men, the more difficult it becomes to argue that the cruelty is a bug, not a feature …

Many Christians fear that kindness doesn’t “work,” so they discard it. This is how even decency itself becomes a “secondary value.” Aggression, not virtue, becomes the touchstone of political engagement, and anything other than aggression is seen as a sign of weakness.

Both quotes from David French, Tucker Carlson’s Dark and Malign Influence Over the Christian Right

As someone who cannot remember ever watching Tucker Carlson’s segment in its entirety (who hasn’t encountered clips of him?), I can’t speak of his “cruelty” or “aggression” except to say that they were nowhere near my top-line impressions. Maybe that showed up when he singled out some random click-baity schmuck for ridicule?

Trump’s court loss

(Sigh! It’s time.)

We’ll all go down together

The first rule of the modern Republican Party, it’s said, is “You can’t criticize Trump.” But that’s not correct.

The actual rule is “You can’t take sides with the left against Trump.” It just so happens that every moral objection to Trump’s character and fitness is now “coded” as leftist …

In 2023, the question of Trump’s character has become a litmus test of right-wing authenticity. To deem him unfit for office is necessarily to have been corrupted by left-wing propaganda, even if the “propaganda” in question is Trump being accused of sexual misconduct by 20+ women and then being held liable for sexual abuse in court.

This explains why so many conservatives, elected and otherwise, resorted to grumbling about the “New York jury” after yesterday’s verdict. If the jurors were a bunch of partisan blue-state hacks, as their critics insinuate, it’s passing strange that they ended up finding Trump not liable on [raping] her. But since holding him accountable for any moral failing is behavior that’s now associated exclusively with Democrats, the belief on the right that the verdict could only have been tainted by politics will be inescapable.

That dynamic conveniently makes it impossible for Trump’s fitness for office to be challenged legitimately by someone on his own side, as challenging him on those grounds means you’re not on his side at all.

Reporter Benjy Sarlin captured the absurdity when he tweeted, “It’s hard to sum up the 2024 situation more succinctly than this: Trump is already calling DeSantis a groomer based 100% on innuendo with 0 penalty; and DeSantis cannot respond by citing an actual jury finding of sexual abuse.” It’s ludicrous. But it’s also completely rational for DeSantis and the rest of the field under the circumstances to overlook the Carroll trial, since to mention it would be to take sides with the left against Trump. And that would disqualify them, not him.

Nick Cattogio, Mostly Peaceful Sexual Abuse.

It is humiliating to live in a nation-state where Donald Trump could win the Presidential election not just once, but twice. But here is where my wife, friends, family and Church are, so I’ll stay and we’ll all go down together.

I’m quite confident that we’ll go down, but what do I know? I’m not a self-appointed “Apostle” or “Prophet” with power to declare that Donald Trump, right now, is our dulytruly-elected President.

Law or Donald Trump? Pick one.

[W]e watched as even Trump-nominated judges ruled time and again against Trump’s election challenges, yet a majority of Republicans still do not believe that Joe Biden legitimately won enough votes to carry the 2020 election. When the choice is between the law and the evidence or Donald Trump, Republicans have consistently picked Trump.

But is sexual abuse different? Can an actual jury verdict — after a trial featuring all the due process that American law requires — finally break the bond with Trump?

Here is the darkest possible outcome to the case, one that I fear is more likely than not. The Republican public will either shrug at the result or will simply choose to disbelieve the jury, assuming without evidence that it was biased against Trump. Indeed, when asked about the verdict, Senator Marco Rubio told a Bulwark reporter, “That jury’s a joke.” Senator Lindsey Graham said he questioned “the whole process” and told Punchbowl News, “I think you could convict Donald Trump of kidnapping Lindbergh’s baby.”

But would a jury so hopelessly biased against Trump jury reject Carroll’s rape claim? Or is that an indication that the jury actually weighed the evidence supporting each charge?

David French

More Trump derangement

It’s deja vu all over again

Back when Trump first burst on the scene in the summer and fall of 2015, conservative pundits assured us the Republican electorate would reject him and opt for someone/anyone else. That turned out to be wrong—yet here we are nearly eight years later and often the very same people now assure us the Republican electorate would be rejecting Trump and embracing DeSantis if only the media weren’t playing dirty.

I don’t buy it.

Hey, I get it: Being wrong’s a bitch. Yet error can still be worthwhile if it serves as an opportunity to learn and course-correct. Right-leaning writers recognized this when they made the point against Democrats who spent the better part of the Trump administration blaming Vladimir Putin, James Comey, the New York Times, CNN—really anyone but themselves—for Clinton’s loss. But now these same conservatives refuse to subject themselves to the same degree of scrutiny and soul-searching.

Which means they are depriving themselves of the chance to adjust their thinking in the light of a bracing and crucially important truth about the Republican Party: That when given the choice between a know-nothing narcissist and moral cretin who embodies their resentments and channels their anger and hatred but accomplishes little and a candidate who’s spent years proving himself a vastly more competent, woke-slaying enemy of liberalism, the voters still prefer the first guy.

Decrying the fact doesn’t make it any less true.

Damon Linker

Bad Omen

I never did much criminal law, but this strikes me as a bad omen if your name is Donald Trump:

A Friday court filing revealed that at least eight of the 16 false Georgia electors who planned to declare former President Donald Trump the winner of their state’s 2020 presidential contest have accepted immunity deals in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ investigation of attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The brief filed by the electors’ defense attorney shows the electors will be immune from prosecution if they testify truthfully in the probe.

The Morning Dispatch for May 8

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Wednesday, 8/24/22

Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces …?

On January 6, 2021, from a parking garage under the Capitol Visitor Center, then–Vice President Mike Pence ordered the military to defend the Capitol against a violent insurrection. According to a taped deposition of General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pence “issued very explicit, very direct, unambiguous orders” to him and Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller: “Get the military down here. Get the Guard here. Put down this situation.”

…

In ordinary circumstances, Pence’s actions would be unconstitutional. Indeed, a vice president who usurped the president’s constitutional authority, and the Cabinet and military officers who followed his orders, could be committing an impeachable offense. …

…

Jefferson also insisted, the officer who exercises emergency power must justify his actions to “his fellow citizens generally.” For Jefferson, “the good officer” must throw “himself on the justice of his country and the rectitude of his motives.”

From his title (Mike Pence Owes the Country an Explanation) and the first paragraph, I easily figured out where George Thomas was headed and why: he wants Pence to say he perceived an emergency if only because Donald Trump was failing to put down the rump insurrection.

What I didn’t expect was that he would bring Jefferson and Lincoln into it and would persuade me of his case — and by inference to repent of my former judgment on Lincoln for his ultra vires acts.

Yup, the world is messy sometimes. This once was one of my favorite quotes, in part because it challenged my purity fetish:

Purity … is not the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted.

William James, Varieties of Religious Experience Lectures 14 and 15, via here.

Sorting out a jumble

[W]e have no ideal path forward. We’re damned if Attorney General Merrick Garland goes forward with a Trump prosecution and damned if Garland holds off. But the latter path should nonetheless be treated as a viable Plan B because it permits the Democrats to continue beating Trump in the political arena by the widest possible margin. That involves all kinds of risks as well, but it’s less risky than the legal option.

Damon Linker, summarizing the case against prosecution that he’s been trying to make.

More:

  • To use the full powers of federal law enforcement during a Democratic administration to indict, try, convict, and punish this man would drive large numbers of Republicans even further into Trump’s arms …
  • The goal should be his political defeat—turning him into a loser in the court of public opinion—not using an extra-political workaround to try and exile him from political competition. If you think making Hitler and Chamberlain analogies clarifies these issues, good for you. I think it’s pretty idiotic.
  • For the sake of argument, I’ve been happy to concede the point and assume Trump is guilty of … something. But is it true? [] After reading a highly illuminating exchange between widely respected legal scholar Jack Goldsmith and journalist Josh Marshall, I’m honestly not sure.
  • Could it be that all of the sound and fury I’ve seen online from the left about the imperative of punishing Trump’s self-evident criminality is based on nothing more than a feeling, a conviction, a moral certainty that he simply must be guilty of something? If so, that would be a further sign that loathing for the former president is a fundamentally political impulse, not a legal one.

Maybe I’ll take a position on “prosecute or nolle prosequi” when someone convincingly shows that Trump committed an actual crime, and that prosecution will be a slam-dunk. Considering the proportion of Trumpists in the land, I’m not sure you’ll ever impanel a jury without one or with one that will vote to convict.

Why colleges are failing

The present model of colleges and universities is failing, for in the first place they have forgotten or even turned against their original mission; in the second, they have picked up a whole lot of unrelated sidelines, none of which they do very well, such as universal job certification; and in the third, the public is beginning to catch on that they cost far too much, and that other institutions can usually do each of these sidelines better.  Barring root and branch reform – for which we must never give up hope — it’s entirely possible that in the not-so-distant future, serious humanities teaching will have to migrate to other settings than colleges and universities.

J Budziszewski

Detritus

In a nutshell

Democracy disconnected from liberalism will not protect diversity, because majorities will use their power to repress minorities.

Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents

Be careful what you ask for …

History is a prankster. You order a Gray Champion, and cosmic room service sends up a casino developer and New York real estate mogul with a laughable hairdo…

James Howard Kunstler, Living in the Long Emergency

How low can we go?

Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump seemed like some kind of nadir, but the Florida panhandle is showing that we can go even lower: Matt Gaetz versus Rebekah Jones

Institutions trumping instinct

But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts.

Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order

One thing leads to another …

I was good at menial jobs like parking cars but went into radio because it was Minnesota and vacuum tubes give off heat. It was public radio where all the announcers sound like Methodist ministers except not as friendly and there is no Jesus, and I distinguished myself by telling jokes and stem-winding stories about a small town. People liked it; go figure.

Garrison Keillor

American exceptionalism plus

It’s American exceptionalism but goes beyond that. It says that we are the next version of Israel from the Old Testament, that we are God’s chosen nation, and that is a special covenant — a two-way agreement with God. We can’t break it, and if we do, what happened to Israel will happen to us: We will be overrun by whatever the next Babylon is, taken into captivity, and He will remove His blessing from us.

Zack Stanton, It’s Time to Talk About Violent Christian Extremism – POLITICO

Maybe a bit harsh

I would rather have gonorrhea than a record of passionate and convinced #MAGA tweeting.

Graeme Wood, What to Do With Trumpists – The Atlantic.

Maybe a bit harsh, but then it’s dated 1/19/21, the day before Joe Biden officially became President despite Trump’s lawless efforts to retain the Presidency.

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Thursday, 7/28/22

Polarized Politics

What would Archie say?

For all his faults, Archie [Bunker] loved his country and he loved his family, even when they called him out on his ignorance and bigotries. If Archie had been around 50 years later, he probably would have watched Fox News. He probably would have been a Trump voter. But I think that the sight of the American flag being used to attack Capitol Police would have sickened him. I hope that the resolve shown by Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and their commitment to exposing the truth, would have won his respect.

Norman Lear, in the New York Times on Wednesday, his hundredth birthday.

Perverse polarization

Republican presidential campaigns in 2024 are going to look a whole lot different than they did in 2016: They (think they) have no use for the mainstream press. “I just don’t even see what the point is anymore,’ an adviser to one likely GOP presidential aspirant told New York Magazine’s David Freedlander. “We know reporters always disagreed with the Republican Party, but it used to be you thought you could get a fair shake. Now every reporter, and every outlet, is just chasing resistance rage-clicks.” The result? “Sitting down with the mainstream press has come to be seen by Republican primary voters as consorting with the enemy, and approval by the enemy is the political kiss of death,” Freedlander writes. “Dave Carney, a longtime GOP strategist, said that, according to his team’s research, getting endorsed by a newspaper editorial board, even a local one, hurts Republicans in primaries rather than helps them. ‘No one gives a f— what the New York Times writes,’ he said. ‘In fact, it would be good if you criticize us so that we can say that even the liberal New York Times hates us.’”

The Morning Dispatch, 7/27/22

These are the kinds of Republicans who benefit from false-flag Democrat support attacking them as too extreme, too cozy with Orange Man, in order to boost them in the primaries.

Un-Disappearing Act

Adjust your picture of press corruption. It’s not so much the lies they tell as the truths they withhold. Let Mr. Biden threaten to become an albatross to progressive and Democratic hopes in 2024, and the Hunter story will un-disappear in a hurry.

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., Hunter and Joe Biden Need Trump

A bit cynical, but only a bit.

Felix culpa

Speaking of Hunter’s laptop and grifting, it sickens me to think that the electoral margin of Joe Biden over Donald Trump could have been lost if American intelligence authorities hadn’t lyingly called Hunter Biden’s laptop “Russian disinformation.”

According to one survey, one out of six Biden voters said that had they known about Hunter’s laptop in time, they wouldn’t have voted for his father.

Lee Smith, The National Tragedy of Hunter Biden’s Laptop.

45’s authoritarian tendencies

[T]he 45th president had numerous authoritarian tendencies and instincts. He believed in personal loyalty, not loyalty to the office he held or to the Constitution. He despised the free press and encouraged popular hatred toward journalists. He treated as a traitor any American who didn’t support him. And then, of course, there were his words and deeds after the 2020 election, which incited an insurrectionary assault on the national legislature in order to keep himself in power despite his failure to win the electoral contest. If that isn’t a tyrannical act, it’s hard to imagine what would be.

…

Both the frequency of Trump’s lies and exaggerations and the obviousness of their mendacity are what make them fasc-ish. There’s a reason why the term “gaslighting” came into regular usage during the Trump administration: Living in the United States through those years often felt like enduring a sadistic psychological experiment in which we were constantly challenged about whether we would believe our own eyes and minds or the would-be dictator in the Oval Office spouting transparent nonsense. The fascist playbook often involves using precisely this kind of epistemic confusion—a thoroughly polluted information space—as an occasion or opportunity to seize or secure power.

…

Then there was Trump’s enthusiasm for any extremist group that gave him support. This led him to express ambivalence about the neo-Nazis who marched through and provoked violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. And to offer periodic kind words for far-right groups and figures, including the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and various heavily armed militias.

Damon Linker, Thinking About Fascism—Part 2.

This is one of the best collections I can recall of the outward manifestations of Trump’s narcissism and worse.

Electoral Count Act Reform

Watch your Step!

“Somehow they’ve come out of the kitchen with something that actually looks as if it is correctly prepared in almost every respect,” said Walter Olsen, senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. “Now I’m just holding my breath that someone doesn’t trip and spill the tray.”

Morning Dispatch, Bipartisan Senate Group Unveils Electoral Count Act Reform. See also William A. Galston, Surprise: A Divided Congress Is Making Bipartisan Progress.

The bad news is that some Democrats want to turn this urgently-needed Bill into a Christmas Tree. The good news is that they seem to want it half-heartedly.

Stop Screwing Around

I want to begin with a question I’ve asked before. What if Mike Pence had said yes? What if the history of January 6 was very different, Pence had agreed with the John Eastman memos arguing that he enjoyed a tremendous amount of discretion in counting electoral college votes, and he either declared Trump the winner outright, throwing the election into the House of Representatives, or sent it back to the states for the state legislatures to decide which electors were valid?

America probably would have survived that moment, but the key word there is probably. Does Trump leave the White House? If the Supreme Court intervenes, does he care? Do we see a situation in which Chief Justice Roberts swears in Joe Biden while a MAGA judge swears in Trump for his “second term”? What do state governors do? Does federal law enforcement intervene? What about the military?

Mike Pence saved us from all this chaos, and he deserves our gratitude. But he never should have been put in that position, and we have an opportunity to fix the prime legal reason why he was. The primary blame, of course, rests with the depraved corruption of Donald Trump and his cadre of loyalists. The secondary blame, however, rests with the Electoral Count Act, an absolute mess of a statute.

David French, Stop Screwing Around and Pass the Electoral Count Reform Act

In my opinion, reforming the Electoral Count Act has been Job #1 since January 6, 2021. It’s quite a bit more important than the January 6 Committee, which has been more potent than I foresaw but clearly has not dissuade all Trump supporters.

But I was reminded very recently that we should be looking for, and closing, other loopholes that could be exploited to “elect” someone the voters (yes, allowing for the Electoral College’s “electoral majorities” that differ from the raw national vote majority) rejected. And I don’t think the Democrats’ absurd allegations that, for instance, requiring Voter ID is “worse than Jim Crow” comes anywhere close to meeting the need.

What do you call this?

Voters in Tunisia affirmed a new constitution for their country that would roll back many of the reforms that once made it look like the Arab Spring’s sole survivor. Some 95% of voters opted for the new constitution, but less than one-third of eligible voters turned out. The opposition, which boycotted the poll, said the results were “not credible”. Kais Saied, the president, had pressed for the referendum to transform the young democracy into another strongman system.

The world in brief | The Economist

It seems somehow facile or crypto-imperialist to suggest that a 95% vote for something is not democratic.

Other stuff

Martyrdom and Suicide

Drawing on G. K. Chesterton, we might say that martyrdom and suicide, however similar they might seem on the surface, are diametrically opposed to each other: martyrdom occurs in the recognition of a goodness that is greater than the self, a goodness that is at the source of all things, so that one gives up one’s self in the ecstasy of affirmation; suicide is the absolute negation of all things through the negation of the self: “A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something to begin: the other wants everything to end.”

D.C. Schindler, Social Media Is Hate Speech: A Platonic Reflection on Contemporary Misology

A little sensible perspective on CRT

The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so. And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign are well taken. Is this a wedge issue for the GOP? Of course it is. Are they using the term “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman? Of course they are. Are some dog whistles involved? A few. Are crude bans on public servants’ speech dangerous? Absolutely. Do many of the alarmists know who Derrick Bell was? Of course not.

But does that mean there isn’t a real issue here? Of course it doesn’t.

Andrew Sullivan, What Happened To You? The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism

It will be a long time, if ever, before I’ll trust Christopher Rufo precisely because of his cynical comment about “freezing the brand” of CRT and then loading it up with extraneous things conservatives don’t like.

Title IX Run Amok

The provisions of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 which bar sex discrimination apply to “any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance”. In Buettner-Hartsoe v. Baltimore Lutheran High School Association, (D MD, July 21, 2022), a Maryland federal district court held that a §501(c)(3) tax exemption for a religiously-affiliated high school constitutes federal financial assistance so that the school is subject to Title IX. The court added that also in its view, schools that discriminate on the basis of sex, just like those that discriminate on the basis of race, are not entitled to federal tax exemptions. The court’s opinion applies to cases brought by 5 women who are former students at the high school who allege sexual assault and verbal sexual harassment by male students at the school. JDSupra reports on the decision.

Religion Clause Blog (emphasis added).

I don’t have deep expertise on this, but I don’t think the District Court decision will (or should) survive appellate review. If tax exemption is federal financial assistance, things are going to get pretty ugly pretty fast.

We need an apocalypse

In modern terms, “apocalypse” has come to mean “the cataclysmic end of everything”. But this is a long way from the ancient Greek understanding: to uncover, to disclose or lay bare. From this perspective, apocalypse isn’t the end of the world. Or at least, not just the end of the world. Rather, it’s the end of a worldview: discoveries that mean a previous way of looking at things is no longer tenable.

In our case, it’s no longer just cranks and prophets coming to the reluctant realisation that our current way of life can’t continue. This suspicion is percolating into the mainstream — along with a raft of increasingly unhinged responses ….

Mary Harrington, Why we need the apocalypse

Unintended second-order effects

I jokingly asked my wife to go back to work.

It’s not the money. It’s that her retirement in May has left me, for the first time in my adult life, unable readily to identify what day of the week it is.

Written May 12, 1944

So Many Blood-Lakes
(written May 12, 1944)

We have now won two world-wars, neither of which concerned us, we were
slipped in. We have levelled the powers
Of Europe, that were the powers of the world, into rubble and
dependence. We have won two wars and a third is coming.

This one–will not be so easy. We were at ease while the powers of the
world were split into factions: we’ve changed that.
We have enjoyed fine dreams; we have dreamed of unifying the world; we
are unifying it–against us.

Two wars, and they breed a third. Now guard the beaches, watch the
north, trust not the dawns. Probe every cloud.
Build power. Fortress America may yet for a long time stand, between the
east and the west, like Byzantium.

–As for me: laugh at me. I agree with you. It is a foolish business to
see the future and screech at it.
One should watch and not speak. And patriotism has run the world through
so many blood-lakes: and we always fall in.

(Robinson Jeffers)

“The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness ….” (G.K. Chesterton)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Saturday, 7/9/22

Dobbs

Digesting Dobbs‘ legal fallout

Most of my favorite podcasters have annoying mannerisms, but substance too good to get hung up on it. For a ConLaw geek, Akhil Amar’s Amarica’s Constitution fits that to a "T".

Amar glories in saying "I told you so" (not in those words) over and over and over, but as they say, "it ain’t bragging if you can do it." He definitely is one of our nation’s top Constitutional Law scholars.

Amar is a "pro-choice" liberal who recognized that Roe was a real dog’s breakfast. So I took seriously his July 6 ruminations on the rationale of Dobbs, which he considers justified if flawed (for context, note that finding little flaws in justified opinions is roughly half of what legal teaching is about).

If the court takes the Dobbs reasoning elsewhere, it portends more reversals of precedent, though not necessarily contraception, miscegenation, sodomy or same-sex marriage. (For instance, in what state in 2022 would laws against them pass to create a test case? And if such a law were passed, there’s more to stare decisis analysis than "was this wrong when decided?" or even "was this egregiously wrong when decided?")

But the originalist approaches of the conservative majority are going to be less deferential to precedent than to the original meaning of the constitutional provision in question. And that’s as it should be because the constitution, not precedent, is the supreme law of the land, and to it Justices take an oath. (It’s understood, though, that lower courts are bound by precedent from higher courts.)

I’m not sure what precedents will be at most risk, but I think we’re going to find out.

Dobbs cultural fallout

“Men, it’s on us now,” someone said on Twitter just hours after Roe v. Wade was overturned on June 24. “Either start wearing contraceptives or get a vasectomy.” In the two weeks since, the suggestion that men can or should express solidarity with women by getting vasectomies to prevent unwanted pregnancies has proliferated online. The tone varies from flirty (“getting a vasectomy is the new 6-foot-4”) to pointed (“i don’t want to hear a peep out of anyone with a dick until the vasectomy appointment is scheduled”), but the overarching message is the same: “If you create sperm and can get someone pregnant, go get a vasectomy,” one viral tweet read. “We are tired.”

… Google Trends shows a small increase in vasectomy searches during the first week of May, when the draft decision first leaked, followed by a second, larger one starting in late June. Doctors have also reported higher interest in the procedure. “We have never seen a vasectomy spike like this in response to a single political or social event,” the Florida-based urologist Doug Stein told me.

Doctors like Stein, who has been dubbed “The Vasectomy King” by local press, have spent years evangelizing for the procedure. Now their cause is suddenly ascendant. The nation’s vasectomy influencers are in the spotlight.

The Vasectomy Influencers.

Well, I certainly didn’t see that coming, though I suppose it was unrealistic to expect an outbreak of chastity.

Remember, young Lothario: vasectomy is forever. Maybe you should just keep it in your pants until you’re ready to start adulting. Not that adulting is always easy.

Adulting in America

If you’re an adult in America today, you’ve learned how to speak furtively of what is happening, how to deploy discretion in repeating what you’ve heard, this secret grammar of mass murder. Time was that a horror like the 2006 slaying of five Amish schoolgirls by a deranged gunman would hold up daily affairs for at least a few moments; even little ones could detect a disruption in the normal order of things. By now we know that if the kids are young enough to miss the news, you might as well let them, because there will—not might, but will—come a day when the reality of their situation finds them.

Elizabeth Bruenig, Living in an Age of Mass Shootings

Too much more about Orange Man and Kindred Spirits

Trumpian "coincidences"

Among tax lawyers, the most invasive type of random audit carried out by the I.R.S. is known, only partly jokingly, as “an autopsy without the benefit of death.”

The odds of being selected for that audit in any given year are tiny — out of nearly 153 million individual returns filed for 2017, for example, the I.R.S. targeted about 5,000, or roughly one out of 30,600.

One of the few who received a bureaucratic letter with the news that his 2017 return would be under intensive scrutiny was James B. Comey, who had been fired as F.B.I. director that year by President Donald J. Trump. …

Among those who were chosen to have their 2019 returns scrutinized was the man who had been Mr. Comey’s deputy at the bureau: Andrew G. McCabe, who served several months as acting F.B.I. director after Mr. Comey’s firing.

Mr. McCabe was later dismissed by the Trump Justice Department after its watchdog accused him of misleading internal F.B.I. investigators ….

Michael S. Schmidt, Comey and McCabe, Who Infuriated Trump, Both Faced Intensive I.R.S. Audits

Weaponizing the IRS is neither unprecedented nor the exlusive mark of one of the two corrupt and feckless major parties. But this is unusually blatant.

The IRS Commissioner appointed by Trump has ordered an Inspector General investigation, but it’s a stretch for me to believe that a hit-job like this didn’t come through his own office.

Roped, broke and branded

Mr Trump prizes no supporters more than those who once rejected him but then roped, broke and branded themselves. He has endorsed [Harriet] Hageman and appeared last month at a rally in Casper with her. Ms Hageman, a lawyer, stoked the crowd by itemising things to revile, from illegal immigration to Anthony Fauci. But one bit of elaboration popped out when she said Mr Trump knew she would represent “your fallacies”, quickly amending that to “families”.

High noon for Liz Cheney | The Economist

Shambolic boyo

I see nothing sad in his leaving but that he was very entertaining and had one of the best political acts—shambolic upper-class boyo, utterly lost in his personal sphere, just like you and no better than you—in modern British history.

Peggy Noonan on the downfall of Boris Johnson

Boris and Donald

The actual law-breaking and lies about law-breaking were cast in even worse light by the news today that the opposition leader, Keir Starmer, has been cleared by the police from the charge that he too had violated the lockdown rules. Starmer, to heighten the contrast, had publicly stated that he’d resign his position if he were found guilty. The difference between Keir and Boris (and I’ve known both for decades) is pretty obvious: Keir is a somewhat dull, decent bloke and Boris is an entitled, colorful charlatan.

But the glee of the elites and the mainstream media at this likable rogue’s political demise obscures something important. They were wrong to conflate him with Trump. Boris is a liar the way Bill Clinton was a liar: he lied to get himself out of trouble he’d gotten himself into. And, like Clinton, Boris had some relationship to reality — even as he tried to bluff and bluster his way through it.

Trump’s lies were far, far graver and bolder: that he’d won an election in a landslide (when he lost), and that our entire electoral system is rigged. And Trump, unlike Boris, is truly pathological and psychologically broken — incapable of distinguishing his own egomaniac fantasies from the real world.

Andrew Sullivan (emphasis added)

Not that the emphasized sentence is not how Oxford-educated pundits say "poopy-head" or "full of cooties." It’s an actual opinion — which I fully share — of psychological incapacity, which if true leads inexorably to the conclusion that Trump’s unfit to occupy the White House. That was essentially my objection to Trump from the beginning (probably 2016, when it became harder to write him off as a joke), though through a combination of luck and some adults in the room, we didn’t see the lunacy on full display until after he lost in 2020.

I thought in 2016 that his nomination, and then his election, were raised middle-fingers to America’s competent governing class. I slowly came to appreciate why a lot of American’s left-behind might want to do that, and I hope that both parties will pay attention to their legitimate grievances (i.e., the economic ones, not any racial resentments).

But God deliver us from any more Trump!

Anyway, Sullivan’s Substack this week is far more about Boris Johnson than about Trump, and gives Johnson credit for his many accomplishments. Then he pivots back:

Which brings me, of course, to the obvious analogy to the American right. The Tories were thrilled to ride Boris’ coat-tails into office — he did deliver Brexit and a smashing election victory — but they did not turn into a cult. He had to face a feisty press and weekly grillings in parliament, in which his relationship to reality was constantly tested. His own Conservative MPs — many of whom owed him their seats and careers — enabled him to a point, but they never lost their minds or, ultimately, their consciences.

Trump and the GOP? A sadder, darker, weirder story. Trump’s lies are far, far worse. Boris never questioned the results of a referendum or an election — and neither did his opponents. He didn’t marshal an armed mob to ransack parliament when his own MPs turned on him. The final straw for Boris was when he lied that he hadn’t been briefed about a minor Tory sex scandal, and apologized.

Trump, meanwhile, has unrelentingly sustained the biggest, most dangerous lie of all: that our entire democracy is rigged, that he won in a landslide in 2020, and that the GOP should seek to win the next election by any means, fair or foul. His lies are proactive and corrosive to democracy for the future. They have to be huge to work. And they are.

Why We Did It

I don’t know if this is David French’s original thought or Tim Miller’s original thought or the result of French reflecting on Miller, but darn, it’s good!

Ask any person to describe themselves, and they’ll likely respond with a mix of characteristics and virtues. They’ll describe their profession (lawyer, banker, plumber), their relationships (husband, father, grandfather), and their politics (Republican, Democrat), and if asked they might even describe their perceived virtues (honesty, fidelity, fortitude).

But what if the virtues conflict with other core parts of a person’s identity? …

[D]uring the Trump years, honesty and independence directly and starkly clashed with status. Time and again, men and women in America’s political class found that they couldn’t possess both virtue and power. They had to make a choice.

…

During the Trump years, the collision between status and virtue was constant and relentless. Trump never gave anyone a breather. He was never chagrined or mollified by scandal. He never apologized. He never turned over a new leaf. He just charged from one lie to another, and his demands for absolute loyalty left his defenders and followers with little ability to separate themselves from his worst moments while still remaining in the Republican tent.

As we’ve seen from days of courageous testimony before the January 6 House Select Committee, it is quite possible to say “I’m a Republican, and I’m honest.” But with each passing week—and with each new revelation—it grows more difficult to say “I’m a Trump Republican, and I’m honest.” Status conflicts with virtue, and status wins.

David French at his best, reviewing (and highly recommending) Tim Miller’s Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell.

Thriving on toxicity

Somehow this seems to fit here, with the preceding two as preface:

There are species of bacteria that actually thrive in the toxic emissions from hydrothermal vents deep below the ocean. What would be killing sulphuric acid to most animals is food for them. We have created a similarly hostile climate in media and politics: high pressure, extreme temperature swings, and a toxic atmosphere. We should not be surprised, then, that unlovely creatures are the only ones who can thrive in this space.

Decent people with dignity are easy marks for outrage mobs, cancel culture, and the clickbait press. But fools with no shame are impervious to such a climate. Men and women of character tend to stay away, and if they don’t, are much more subject to the extortionate pressures of the political world. If your reputation is already poor, you can chase celebrity, frolicking among the deep-sea plumes, while your more delicate competitors are floating on the surface, poisoned.

Chris Stirewalt, H/T Alan Jacobs, commenting specifically on the improbable political victories of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.

Miscellany

  • Public health officials in Oregon announced they would be delaying a meeting because to rush and get everything done for it was a white trait. Here’s what a high ranking Oregon Health Authority official wrote to postpone the upcoming confab: "We recognize that urgency is a white supremacy value that can get in the way of more intentional and thoughtful work, and we want to attend to this dynamic. Therefore, we will reach out at a later date to reschedule." The KKK would unironically love this explanation.
  • Tucker and conservative media have a hammer and keep looking for nails … Carlson is right that there is social breakdown that contributed to this shooting: After police took away the boy’s knives amid his various threats of violence, the Highland Park shooter’s dad helped buy him a gun.
  • “Joy too can be an act of resistance. I want to talk about personal acts of reclamation because sometimes people will say, ‘There’s nothing I can do. I feel so powerless.’ There is no act too small that you can engage in. Even today, I have a personal errand, I need to redo my nails. And I’ve decided that I’m going to use my new manicure as almost like a personal act of reclamation for me and my story.” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Nellie Bowles

Nellie had many more (including side-eyes at Elon Musk’s non-marital fertility), but I started feeling guilty about sharing so much paid content.

Penultimately, just a bit more, now from Andrew Sullivan’s miscellany:

  • “From an empirical, non-woke perspective, the ‘Kill TERFs’ movement is pretty astonishing. It’s a bunch of biological males, threatening to brutalize biological females, for saying that female sex is real,” – Wilfred Reilly.
  • “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists,” a Yosemite Park ranger when asked why it was so tough to design a bear-proof trash bin.

Happy

Happy as something unimportant
and free as a thing unimportant.
As something no one prizes
and which does not prize itself.
As something mocked by all
and which mocks at their mockery.
As laughter without serious reason.
As a yell able to outyell itself.
Happy as no matter what,
as any no matter what.

Happy
as a dog’s tail.

Anna Swir via Poetry Foundation

If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Thursday, 6/30/22

Shamelessly ad hominem

Dave Portnoy can’t even deal right now. Shortly after the Dobbs news broke, the “barstool conservative” celebrity took to Twitter with an “Emergency Press Conference.” “I feel like I have to speak on this issue,” Portnoy announced. There followed 2.5 minutes of semi-coherent ranting, where he proposes that we are “literally going backwards in time,” that “maybe not everything is to a T in the Constitution,” considering it was written by “people who own slaves,” and that he’s pretty sure “95 percent of people in the country think like me — they’re socially liberal and financially conservative.”

…

Of course, it’s tempting to point out that this is the hot take we would expect from a guy who defended himself against charges of being a repulsive womanizing scumbag by countering that maybe he was, but he didn’t break the law. Portnoy would hardly be the first of his kind to wax vehemently eloquent on the sanctity of women’s reproductive autonomy. But his take also reflects the whole political oeuvre he represents—that areligious potpourri of sexual libertinism, anti-authoritarianism, anti-wokeness, and lots of f-bombs.

Bethel McGrew (emphasis added).

I don’t know much about Portnoy. I first paid attention to the phenomenon of “barstool conservatives” within the last month. But I like, and credit, the observation that keeping women “reproductively autonomous” is damned convenient for guys with Satyriasis.

Newly-salient

It is a crime, to take just one example, to aid and abet the forcible intimidation of government officials, including the vice president and members of Congress.

Andrew C. McCarthy, citing newly-salient Federal Criminal laws after Cassidy Hutchinson’s Tuesday testimony.

McCarthy continues:

In any event, Hutchinson explained that the speech, like all presidential speeches, was carefully vetted by staff. White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his staff pleaded for removal of the exhortations Trump was insistent on including — “fight for me,” “fight for the movement,” and so on. They were too close to the legal line of incitement. It was plainly foreseeable that the mob could take forcible action; if it did, White House lawyers feared that this rhetoric would place Trump squarely in legal jeopardy for whatever mayhem resulted — obstruction of congressional proceedings, intimidation of and assault on federal officials, and so on.

The rhetoric stayed in the speech.

So did Trump’s vow that he would be marching to the Capitol with the mob.

A mea culpa: I just assumed that Trump’s vow that he would be marching to the Capitol with the mob was just another of his (literally) innumerable lies to whip up mobs. But if you’re familiar with Hutchinson’s testimony, you now know that he was prevented from doing so by the Secret Service — and may have tried to wrest the steering wheel away from his Secret Service chauffeur.

On the observation that a lot of Hutchinson’s testimony was hearsay:

Still, a few things are worth bearing in mind. First, this isn’t just any hearsay — like idle chatter a witness might eavesdrop on. We’re talking here about a chain of command, where government officials are expected to report things to their superiors — in this instance, up to the president’s chief-of-staff. More to the point, Hutchinson learned these details just minutes after the encounter in the limo. Ornato came directly to Meadows’s office with Engel. As Engel looked on in apparent affirmation, Ornato relayed what had just happened to Hutchinson. Engel gave no indication that Ornato had gotten any of the details wrong. And if Hutchinson is lying or exaggerating, it’s strange that, under oath, she would voluntarily identify so many witnesses who could contradict her.

… [W]hen we say the committee lacks due-process legitimacy, that means it lacks legitimacy as an ultimate finder of fact. It does not mean that we can blithely dismiss any evidence the committee discloses. It does not mean that, because we’d prefer that the evidence not be true, we can dismiss it out of hand because we don’t like the Democrats or the committee process. These witnesses are testifying under oath. There is significant risk to them if they are found to have committed perjury.

For now, all we can responsibly do is ask ourselves whether the evidence presented under these deficient procedures seems coherent and credible ….

In that last assessment, confirmation bias is inevitable. To me, the evidence is coherent and credible.

Recommended: Damon Linker, After Roe: A Letter to My Teenage Daughter About the Dobbs Decision

Excerpt:

Many rejoiced at [Roe v. Wade], but it also angered lots of people—at first, mainly Catholics, who strongly opposed abortion, but they were soon joined by evangelical Christians and even some secular activists. These critics of Roe made two main arguments: first, that the decision was immoral because it declared that women had a constitutional right to murder their babies; second, that the decision was tyrannical because it negated democratically enacted laws.

Before long, those making these arguments came to be called the “pro-life movement.” For the past forty years, it has fought to influence public opinion and gain support in the legal community. That effort finally achieved its goal last Friday, after 49 years, when a Supreme Court majority took its side, declaring, in part, that enough Americans consider abortion to be murder that it should not be treated as a constitutional right; states should be free to permit or forbid the procedure based on the outcome of democratic debate.

I think Linker’s account is extraordinarily fair.

For whatever reason rooted in my emotional make-up, I have always been more in the “Roe was tyrannical” rather than “Roe was immoral” camp. Perhaps it’s because my pro-life awakening came when I was in Law School, already enrolled in a Constitutional Law class.

I believe I have written here that any state legislation on abortion would have a constitutional legitimacy that Roe and its progeny lacked. At least for now, that’s all I’m going to say about my position on what restrictions my state should enact, confident that it’s not going to declare a 40-week open season on the unborn, or even 20+ weeks. In a few weeks, when our legislature convenes, my attention will presumable sharpen.

If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Bloodlust and other diversions

Bloodlust over principle

One of the bewildering things about being a conservative in a populist age is the sheer speed at which populists will shift their opinions, including on allegedly bedrock constitutional values, to satisfy the popular bloodlust of the moment.

David French, Why Ron DeSantis’s Disney Attacks Threaten the First Amendment.

True, but I don’t imagine it feels a whole lot different than to a center-left figure watching the further-left. What is progressive cancel culture if not bloodlust?

Majority Minority?

Yascha Mounk, America Won’t Ever Be Majority Minority could be a good conversation topic:

Most developed democracies will never become “majority minority” in any meaningful sense. It is highly premature to assume that the politics of the future will neatly pit “whites” against “people of color.” And anybody who wants diverse democracies like the United States to succeed actually has reason to celebrate the fact that demography, despite the belief that so many parts of both left and right now share, is not destiny.

When the United States Census Bureau projected that the country would become majority minority sometime in the 2040s, its demographic model was presented as an exercise in science, giving the prediction an air of unassailable fact. But this conceals the extent to which the categories used by the Census Bureau to classify Americans as white or non-white rely on highly questionable assumptions about how they identify now—and even more questionable ones about how they will do so in future.

Does the child of two white immigrants from Spain count as white or Hispanic? (According to the United States Census Bureau, the answer is: Hispanic.) Will the child of a white father and a Chinese mother identify as white or Asian? (Asian.) And is someone who has seven white great-grandparents and one black great-grandparent white or black? (Black.) Seemingly scientific, the projections of the Census Bureau assume that all Americans who have either a drop of non-white blood or some distant cultural heritage connecting them to a Spanish-speaking country will be “people of color.”

Put it that way and the "majority minority" notion seems not only dubious but eccentrically race-essentialist, with white being normal and anything less than pure white being a mutation (with the mutants in solidarity agains the normies).

Maybe keeping us at odds among ourselves while the meritocrats carry on running things is the whole point.

Two+ of these things are not like the others

Nellie Bowles

This isn’t an idle observation:

  • LGB rights are pretty secure in the US now and for the foreseeable future.
  • Valorization of TQ+ identification has become a social contagion, leading a non-trivial number of young people to permanently mutilate or sterilize their bodies, only to find later that they really were fighting against admitting that they were L or G (mostly L; boys seem less susceptible to this contagion).
  • TQ+ ideology subverts the gender binary to where L, G, and B lose their meaning.

A common-sense probing of "common good" talk

The next time someone lectures you about the common good, try this experiment: Ask them to name four or five circumstances in which their own political positions are at odds with the public interest and explain how they would go about subordinating them to that public interest. What you will learn in practically every case is that everyone thinks the public interest is identical to his own desires and priorities, which is why discussions along those lines have gone nowhere for the past 200 years or so in any reasonably developed society with more cultural and religious diversity than Denmark.

Kevin D. Williamson, ‌Public School Debate: Value-Neutral Education Doesn’t Exist

World-weary crypto-provincials

Solzhenitsyn identified in Western intellectual circles the same smug narrow-mindedness that he had discovered in liberal Russian intellectuals before the revolution. The core moment in these volumes occurs when, as Solzhenitsyn writes,

a leading [Canadian] television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my own limited Soviet and prison-camp experience. Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited that is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!

Gary Saul Morson. H/T Alan Jacobs

Of President Biden

Here are some difficulties when he speaks.

> When he stands at a podium and reads from a teleprompter, his mind seems to wander quickly from the meaning of what he’s saying to the impression he’s making. You can sort of see this, that he’s always wondering how he’s coming across. When he catches himself he tends to compensate by enacting emotion.

But the emotion he seems most publicly comfortable with is indignation. An example is his answer to a reporter’s question in November about the administration’s plans to compensate illegal-immigrant parents who’d been separated from their children at the border. Suddenly he was angry-faced; he raised his voice, increased his tempo, and started jabbing the air. “You lost your child. It’s gone! You deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what the circumstances.” Then, catching himself, he added mildly, “What that will be, I have no idea.” He was trying to show presentness, engagement. But there’s often an “angry old man yelling at clouds” aspect to this.

Peggy Noonan

My concurrence with this is not partisan. To avoid Orange Man, we elected a rather pale one wraith. May God have mercy on us in our dilemmas.

Brain-hackers

[I]f there was no pornography on the internet, I think maybe 10%-15% of current internet porn addicts would have found some other outlet for their illicit desires, and the rest would have just kept it in their pants. The existence of a multibillion-dollar industry bent on cultivating the very worst desires in people used the free flow of information to create addicts out of otherwise non-addicted people by hacking the susceptible parts of our brains (and souls). Practically no one truly wants to spend hours of their time looking at soul-destroying trash, but the tidal wave of liquid modernity has exploited their freedom, saying “You’re always free to choose differently!” and laughing all the way to the bank.

Matthew Loftus, ‌the liberal order and its haters

I still spend too much time online, but I long ago, and fairly suddenly (as if it were an epiphany), realized the horrible spiritual damage of wallowing in porn. I’m more gradually realizing the the (lesser, I think) social and spiritual damage of wallowing in subtler brain-hacks.

Yes, Mama. Thank you, Mama. Please go away now, Mama.

This week in Silicon Valley bias: Google is planning to tell enterprise users of its word processor that words like "motherboard" and "landlord" are insufficiently inclusive for use in polite company. We won’t actually be forbidden to use those words. Yet. Though that future has apparently already arrived in Mountain View, where at least one source says that "mainboard" is the only acceptable term for the electronics that used to honor the women who raised us. In another blow for freedom, as it’s now defined in the Valley, Twitter will suppress all climate talk that contradicts the views a panel of government-appointed scientist-politicos. Apparently suppressing talk that contradicted CDC scientist-politicians worked so well that Twitter is rushing to double down ….

Teaser for Episode 404 of the Cyberlaw Podcast

Wordplay

A university that turns itself into an asylum from controversy has ceased to be a university; it has just become an asylum.

Eleventh Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.