Screed-free!

Comparative Free Speech Law

While every liberal democracy in the world claims to guarantee free expression in some form, the United States is essentially the only country where the government may not “take sides” on contentious issues by censoring expression based on the speaker’s viewpoint. As the post-October 7 examples show, many European countries have indeed taken a side in the public discourse over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—in a way that might surprise many American observers: calls for a ceasefire and an end to what they see as an Israel-perpetrated genocide are criminally prohibited hate speech, while support for continued attacks is constitutionally protected. This strange result illustrates the unintended consequences of allowing governments to pick and choose which beliefs are unlawful “hate speech” and which are fair criticism.

The notion—dominant the in most of the world—that hateful speech is not “free speech” dates at least to the global post-World War II reckoning with Nazism …

[H]ate speech is notoriously hard to define, and these systems often give wide latitude to officials to decide what these terms even mean and who should be prosecuted, discretion which officials often use in inconsistent and unpredictable ways.

…

How governments are responding to Israel-Gaza protests illustrates these radically diverging constitutional commitments to viewpoint neutrality. European national officials defended some of these pro-Palestinian restrictions primarily on public-order grounds more than stifling hate. But even so, the double standard implies that they view much of anti-Israeli speech as inherently anti-Semitic, and therefore, beyond the pale. This leads to a paradox, in which criticizing Muslims or Arabs as a group can constitute unlawful hate speech, but many expressions of support for Islamic-Arab groups are also prohibited, because of the threat that the government thinks those groups pose.

…

These examples offer a cautionary tale: When empowering the government to decide which beliefs are illegitimate, future policymakers may not use that power in ways you like or anticipate. They may even decide that your own viewpoints are the illegitimate ones—as with the song of South African anti-apartheid activists, “Shoot the Boer (i.e., white farmer)”; gender-critical feminists’ insistence that natal sex is critical to sexual orientation; and more recently, Palestinian advocates’ calls for a ceasefire and a “free Palestine.”

Scholars and activists celebrating new and stronger hate-speech laws might therefore consider Justice Hugo Black’s 1952 reaction to a (now largely discredited) decision upholding a conviction for disparaging Black Americans: “If there be minority groups who hail this [development] as their victory,” he wrote, they should contemplate Pyrrhus of Epirus’s observation: “Another such victory and I am undone.”

Kevin Cope, The Global Hate-Speech Conundrum via Eugene Volokh (bold added)

Too rich

We live in comforts that the richest of aristocrats not very long ago could never have dreamed of, and yet we claim that we are too poor to have more than a child or two. The truth is the reverse: we are too rich to have more than a child or two, too committed to work for work’s sake and to the purchase of prestige, mansions, the “best” schools, and toys for grown-ups.

Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Out with the old, in with … ummmm …indifference

In 1963, JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act. Its order to close the state psychiatric hospitals was followed, and hundreds were shuttered; the community mental health centers that were meant to replace them were never built …

In 1975, the Supreme Court’s O’Connor v. Donaldson decision established a national standard that the mentally ill could only be involuntarily treated if they represented an immediate threat to themselves or others. This completely removed actual medical necessity from the equation, and the standard directly incentivized hospitals to discharge very ill patients, many of whom leave these useless emergency room visits and immediately abuse drugs, self-harm, commit crimes, attack others, or commit suicide …

There are desperately ill, utterly impoverished, terribly vulnerable people living on the street right now. They are exactly the kind of people the left should fight for. But because we have become such a caricature of ourselves, we are incapable of acknowledging that some people really are fucked up, that some people really are dangerous, that some people really aren’t just different but are sick, ugly sick, violent sick, no-silver-lining sick. Not beautiful and poetic madness but drug addicted, horrifically paranoid, caked-in-shit sick. And what people like that need is to be forced into treatment to save their lives. But sunny, false notions that everyone muttering to themselves on the subway hides a sweet little self-actualized busy bee inside of them, and an impossibly myopic fixation on the abstract rights of people whose brains have hijacked their minds, has left us unable to provide the actual help the severely mentally ill need. I have found no way to penetrate the liberal consciousness on this issue. Because it’s conservatives, I guess, who complain about violence and disorder on the streets.

Freddie deBoer, We Closed the Institutions That Housed the Severely Mentally Ill and We Made It Dramatically Harder to Compel Them to Receive Car

Abortion politics

Even if I were still a single-issue (abortion) voter (I’m not; I’ve seen too many insane and/or phoney “pro-life” candidates), the GOP no longer make a compelling case on that issue.

Hamas Hyperbole, Media Credulity

In a May 6 report, the UN stated the death toll was 34,735, including 9,500 women and 14,500 children, or at least 24,000 civilians.

But two days later, the UN quietly revised its figures, stating that 50 percent fewer civilians had died. The total number of deaths is about the same at 34,844, but that number includes 4,959 women and 7,797 children—a total of 12,756 civilians. (And this from the United Nations, whose General Assembly adopted 15 resolutions on Israel in 2023, compared to seven for the rest of the world combined.)

This revision is the clearest sign yet that Hamas’s statistics cannot be trusted. As David Adesnik, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, says: “The UN should state clearly that it has lost confidence in sources whose credibility it has affirmed for months.”

…

Spencer says that even the revised UN figures probably overstate the death toll, because the numbers aren’t limited to people who were killed in the war. “The UN numbers include every death in Palestine no matter what the cause was,” Spencer told The Free Press. “Every natural death, missing person, anyone killed by Hamas.”

And yet, so far not a single major media platform, save Fox News, has reported on the new UN numbers.

Oliver Wiseman, Truth Should Not Be a Casualty of War

China bogeyman

On a Newsweek article skewering Viktor Orbán for his friendliness toward China:

China doesn’t give a damn what Hungary does with its borders, or with LGBT policy. That’s not to say that China doesn’t have and pursue its own interests. The Chinese are not altruists. It’s just that dealing with them, countries can preserve sovereignty in ways the West makes harder and harder to do.

Talk to African diplomats and lawmakers, and you’ll hear from them deep exasperation with the way Western countries constantly push feminist and LGBT ideology on them, as a condition of foreign aid. I invite you to spend just a little bit of time googling “LGBT”, “feminist” and “foreign policy”. Western institutions are as militantly evangelical about these ideologies as the Church was about religion in the Age of Discovery.

If your country wants and needs development aid, but wants to maintain cultural sovereignty, you’re going to look to China. To be very clear, Chinese support also has strings attached! But they are different strings. My point is simply that mindless cheerleaders for the Western establishment, like the Newsweek essayist, should make the effort to see what things look like to people outside the Greater American Empire.

Rod Dreher, ’4 Legs Good! 2 Legs Bad!’ Conservatism

Pre-emptive strike

Ron DeSantis bans cultivated meat in Florida because … reasons:

I’m not making this up. He Tweeted this graphic.

Strong People

Whenever I watch a Netflix show these days, it seems as if there are several themes that are yawningly predictable. One of them is the motif of the “strong woman.” (I’m not referring to the South Park “strong woman.” That is a subject for another day.)

I mean the way in which female characters must now almost always be shown to be people of unbelievable strength—including rather unbelievable physical strength. One reason the recent Amazon adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (called The Rings of Power) flopped is that it tried to push this motif at every turn. In one especially implausible scene, a “strong woman” fights off a whole horde of armor-clad men with her bare fists. We were meant to marvel at her strength. Most people reached for the off switch.

Douglas Murray

I didn’t make it past the first 15 minutes or so of The Rings of Power, but it took me 6 episodes to reach my limit on Apple TV’s Sugar, which ended with a similarly absurd show of superhuman strength.

Zero-sum

Maybe the prospective [wedding service] customers, like many Americans, do not see transcendent meaning in the ceremonial commencement of matrimony, because they associate a wedding as admittance to an institutional legal fiction that allows one access to nothing more than a cluster of political and social privileges not available to other friendships. So, given this understanding, it is not surprising that the customers see the provider’s refusal as a negative judgment on the public legitimacy of their union. Thus, it’s easy to see why the customers would be offended by the provider’s refusal and subsequently seek legal redress. But what the customers fail to see is that their demand that the courts force the providers to rescind their denial and be punished for it is really a demand that the state force the providers not to exercise their freedom of worship, the liberty not to participate in, or not provide assistance to, ceremonies that one believes have sacramental significance.

Robert P. George Amicus Brief in 303 Creative, quoted by Francis J. Beckwith in Taking Rites Seriously.

Anti-Trump screeds moved to my personal Journal

There were two screeds here. They’re gone now. You’re welcome.

Here’s the gist of the first.

The second is from his own mouth via The Guardian and the Morning Dispatch.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Midweek dump (3/28/24)

Culture

The most gruesome conversion therapy

Discussing the new free documentary Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood, about boys who apparently were pressured toward “transitioning”:

The irony hasn’t gone unnoted that while trans activists position themselves in the same stream as gay and lesbian activists, this gruesome “treatment” functions as the most extreme form of “conversion therapy,” more nightmarish by far than the silliest South Park caricature of a “pray the gay away” evangelical …

For Alex, insight has gradually dawned that his more sensitive interests in poetry and music simply made him “a romantic type.” They didn’t make him “effeminate” per se. Nor, he adds, did they make him “gay.”

Bethel McGrew, The Island of Lost Boys

The insight behind that second paragraph has haunted me ever since “gender confirmation surgery” became a public phenomenon.

“Is there no room left for tomboys and sissies?”, asks the old cisgendered white guy (who isn’t exactly an exemplar of all manly stereotypes)? Who decided that tomboys are really boys and that sissies are really girls?

Not my kind of guy

The Journalism Herd seems to have decided it’s time for a reprise of Christine Blasey Ford, which reminds me that my lightly-held position at the time of the Ford-Kavanaugh face-off was that Brett Kavanaugh might have done what she said (tried to remove her swimsuit, as I recall) because he was drunk on beer as was so usual for him and his pals at the time. (I also read a high-level hatchet-job on Ford that made a decent case that she was lying.)

I didn’t consider a drunken adolescent mistake reason enough to disqualify him for SCOTUS after many years of responsible adulthood. But I made a mental note that he’s not my kind of guy.

(Side note: Parents winking at teen boozing is a major reason we didn’t send our son to a Catholic High School, and why he won’t send our grandchildren there, either.)

American multiculturalists

The American multiculturalists similarly reject their country’s cultural heritage. Instead of attempting to identify the United States with another civilization, however, they wish to create a country of many civilizations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society. A multicivilizational United States will not be the United States; it will be the United Nations.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Restlessness

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.

Flannery O’Connor, born on the Feast of Annunciation in 1925. Garrison Keillor has anecdotes.

Abroad

It’s barbaric — and it’s working

Before the war, Israelis estimated Hamas had dug around 100 miles of tunnels. Hamas leaders claimed they had a much more expansive network, and it turns out they were telling the truth. The current Israeli estimates range from 350 to about 500 miles of tunnels. The tunnel network, according to Israel, is where Hamas lives, holds hostages, stores weapons, builds missiles and moves from place to place … in this war, Hamas is often underground, the Israelis are often aboveground, and Hamas seeks to position civilians directly between them. As Barry Posen, a professor at the security studies program at M.I.T., has written, Hamas’s strategy could be “described as ‘human camouflage’ and more ruthlessly as ‘human ammunition.’” Hamas’s goal is to maximize the number of Palestinians who die and in that way build international pressure until Israel is forced to end the war before Hamas is wiped out. Hamas’s survival depends on support in the court of international opinion and on making this war as bloody as possible for civilians, until Israel relents.

David Brooks

Hate

When people say they want to ban hate speech, what they really mean is that they want to ban hate. And you may as well say that we should ban jealousy, or anger, or greed, or fear. Hate is an endemic part of the human experience and so hate speech always will be too, even after they implant behavior-modification chips in our brains. Ban all the words you like; people will find new ways to express hate.

Freddie deBoer, ‌You Can’t Censor Away Extremism. Scotland replies: Hold my beer.

Domestic Politics

Be it remembered …

In a court filing Tuesday, failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake chose not to contest allegations that she defamed Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer when she accused him of committing election fraud during the state’s 2022 elections. She had failed to file a response to Richer’s June lawsuit, which accused her of baselessly claiming Richer stuffed ballot boxes with fake ballots and intentionally made the ballot confusing for voters in an effort to “rig” the election. Lake has asked the court to convene a jury to decide the damages she owes Richer in the case.

The Morning Dispatch

Two from Thomas

Ban the Bland!

Newt Gingrich believed that the brand of politics Bob Michel practiced had contributed to House Republicans’ 40-year sojourn in the political desert. Gingrich decided to change this, starting with Republicans’ vocabulary and tactics. This proved effective, but at the cost of rising incivility and declining cooperation between the political parties. Once the use of terms such as “corruption,” “disgrace” and “traitor” becomes routine in Congress, the intense personal antipathy these words express is bound to trickle down to rank-and-file party identifiers.

Thomas B. Edsall, Lean Into It. Lean Into the Culture War

What’s the point of electing Republicans if they’re not barbarians?

On Nov. 5, North Carolina will determine whether a slate of Republican candidates who believe that the 2020 election was stolen, who dismiss Trump’s 91 felony charges and who are eager to be led by the most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency, can win in a battleground state.

Pope McCorkle, a Democratic consultant and professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, argued in an email that the results of this year’s Republican primary election on March 5 demonstrate that “the North Carolina G.O.P. is now a MAGA party. With the gubernatorial nomination of Mark Robinson, the N.C. G.O.P. is clearly in the running for the most MAGA party in the nation.”

As they are elsewhere, MAGA leaders in North Carolina are confrontational.

In February 2018, Robinson, the first Black lieutenant governor of the state, described on Facebook his view of survivors of school shootings who then publicly call for gun control. They are “media prosti-tots” who suffer from “the liberal syndrome of rectal cranial inversion mixed with a healthy dose of just plain evil and stupid permeating your hallways.”

In a March 2018 posting on Facebook, Robinson declared: “This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash.”

In an October 2021 sermon in a North Carolina church, Robinson told parishioners, “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth. And yes, I called it filth.”

There are many ways to express MAGA extremism.

On May 13, 2020, Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee for North Carolina Superintendent of Public Schools, responded on X (formerly Twitter) to a suggestion that Barack Obama be sent to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp on charges of treason. Morrow’s counterproposal?

I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad. I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.

In Morrow’s world, Obama would be unlikely to die alone. Morrow’s treason execution list, according to a report on CNN, includes North Carolina’s current governor, Roy Cooper, former New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, Representative Ilhan Omar, Hillary Clinton, Senator Chuck Schumer, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates — and President Biden.

Thomas B. Edsall, One Purple State Is ‘Testing the Outer Limits of MAGAism’

[ ] Vulgar attacks? Check (“prosti-tots” and “rectal cranial inversion”)
[ ] Holocaust denial? Check
[ ] Crazed charges of “treason” with proposed mass public executions? Check

You know what North Carolina needs. It needs “bloodbath” of MAGA jackasses on November 5.

But truth told, I’m not sure that these freshly-minted MAGA/populist “Republicans” will care about a massive voter repudiation so long as meanwhile they performatively own the libs.

Explain this one away

Fuggedabout “bloodbath” blather:

“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Those are Trump’s words, verbatim. He wasn’t talking about Chinese automotive imports.

Kevin D. Williamson, Giving Permission to Political Violence

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Theodore Saturday 2024

NOT POLITICS (at least not American)

Defining Deviancy Down (and up)

In his classic 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down”, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered a semantic explanation. He concluded that, as the amount of deviant behaviour increased beyond the levels the community can “afford to recognise”, we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt conduct we used to stigmatise, while also quietly raising the “normal” level in categories where behaviour is now abnormal by any earlier standard. The reasons behind this, he said, were altruism, opportunism and denial — but the result was the same: an acceptance of mental pathology, broken families and crime as a fact of life.

In that same summer, Charles Krauthammer responded to Senator Moynihan with a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He acknowledged Senator Moynihan’s point but said it was only one side of the story. Deviancy was defined down for one category of society: the lower classes and black communities. For the middle classes, who are overwhelmingly white and Christian, the opposite was true. Deviancy was in fact defined up, stigmatising and criminalising behaviour that was previously regarded as normal. In other words, there was a double standard at work.

… [T]he application of progressive moral double-standards is now seen at the level of geopolitics, most specifically over the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. We have produced a discourse in which deviancy is defined up for Jews and Israel, and down for Arabs and Muslims.

…

[E]very lowering of standards to appease extremist Arabs and Muslims is racism dressed up as compassion and disdain masquerading as kindness. It is moral confusion and it is dangerous — suicidally so.

Ayan Hirsi Ali

Motivated blindness

The problem for the Times is that many of its own staffers do not want to investigate the sexual violence that occurred on October 7. They see it as a vulnerability to their own side in the information war about Gaza.

“There are a huge number of people at the Times who are activists, and it is their job to tell a particular story,” one Times reporter told The Free Press. “The precedent was set that this works. If it doesn’t work through one means, they will find another.”

Oliver Wiseman

BORDERLINE

Demoralizing the troops

No Victorian-era missionary could ever match the moralistic certainty displayed by left-wing Americans and Europeans, when it comes to instructing the savage Other about its failings. At least the missionaries understand that they have to behave with a modicum of intercultural respect to the natives …

Three years ago, the American ambassador to Niger raised the Pride flag at the embassy, in the heart of the conservative Islamic nation, and issued a public statement affirming the U.S. government’s dedication to LGBT rights. Why? How did that advance American interests in this strategically critical central African nation?

…

On Monday, Gallup released a poll showing that fewer Americans these days consider China and Russia to be their nation’s enemies. What’s more:

Additionally, 5 percent of Americans now say the U.S. was its own worst enemy, which is up 4 points from last year. Pollsters noted this is the highest percentage of Americans who said the U.S. is its own worst enemy since 2005. Eleven percent of independents said the U.S. was its top enemy, according to the new poll.

They have a point. Long gone are the days when America was the uncontested global hyperpower. Washington has squandered its material power on wars that made the world more dangerous, and also exposed the U.S. to accusations of hypocrisy. To many outside the U.S., American claims to defend democracy and advance human rights are little more than moralization justifying American cultural, economic, and military hegemony.

…

A retired U.S. military source close to the data confirmed recently what I had only been told anecdotally by armed forces veterans: that military families, long a main source of recruits for the all-volunteer army, have been so alienated by the Pentagon’s woke contempt for traditional American values that they have discouraged their sons and daughters from serving.

…

You can’t wage culture war on conservatives at home and in foreign lands, and expect those same people to show up for you when the shooting starts.

Rod Dreher, When Culture War Affects Real War

From Frum’s Mouth to God’s Ear

[W]hen it came time to make his final appeal to voters, candidate [Ronald] Reagan deflected attention away from himself. Instead, he targeted the spotlight directly at the incumbent president and the president’s record.

When Reagan spoke of himself, it was to present himself as a plausible replacement … Reagan understood that Reagan was not the issue in 1980. Jimmy Carter was the issue. Reagan’s job was to not scare anybody away.

…

But Trump won’t accept the classic approach to running a challenger’s campaign. He should want to make 2024 a simple referendum on the incumbent. But psychically, he needs to make the election a referendum on himself.

That need is self-sabotaging.

In two consecutive elections, 2016 and 2020, more Americans voted against Trump than for him. The only hope he has of changing that verdict in 2024 is by directing Americans’ attention away from himself and convincing them to like Biden even less than they like Trump. But that strategy would involve Trump mainly keeping his mouth shut and his face off television—and that, Trump cannot abide.

Trump cannot control himself. He cannot accept that the more Americans hear from Trump, the more they will prefer Biden.

…

In Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye, the private eye Philip Marlowe breaks off a friendship with a searing farewell: “You talk too damn much and too damn much of it is about you.” When historians write their epitaphs for Trump’s 2024 campaign, that could well be their verdict.

David Frum

Sin quickly, repent next January

People love people who have good stories and there is no good story without trouble so get into trouble while you’re still young and have time to climb out of the ditch. Don’t do things that can really hurt you like drugs you buy from strangers on the street, just fall in with lowlifes, fall for an obvious scam, say crazy things you know aren’t true, and the simplest way to accomplish that is to endorse the Florida Orange. Now.

Starting in January 2025, there’s going to be a market for Republican confessionals — a yuge market — the lecture circuit will have room for upright people admitting that they were hornswoggled by the most obvious conman to come down the pike since the guy who sold the mimeograph that prints fifties. Even Scientologists can see through him.

Garrison Keillor

Three from Nellie

Google tendentiously rewrites the dictionary

Last note on this: as America’s reporters were pretending they’d never used the term bloodbath to indicate a financial situation, Google’s activist engineers were working to back them up. Search “bloodbath definition” and the search giant once included the informal usage: Informal. A period of disastrous loss or reversal: A few mutual funds performed well in the general bloodbath of the stock market. But by Thursday, Google dropped that, and the only definition offered: an event or situation in which many people are killed in a violent manner. Weird!

Nellie Bowles

How liberals changed their minds on guns

Also, interestingly, in America, illegal migrants (undocumented, under-papered, citizen-questioning, whatever you want) can now legally own guns thanks to Obama-appointed Illinois federal judge Sharon Johnson Coleman, who just ruled as such. The extent to which gun control has fallen out of fashion cannot be overstated. As soon as people realized that gun control would have to be enforced by cops and not special gun fairies, everyone turned to policies that would make the old NRA blush.

Nellie Bowles

Jaw-dropper

[T]he ADL filed a federal complaint about Berkeley schools after allegations of, among other things, elementary school students being told by their teachers to write “stop bombing babies” on note cards and then to attach those cards to the door of the only Jewish teacher at the school.

Nellie Bowles

Whatchamacallit surgery

Someone wrote to Andrew Sullivan objecting to his use of “changing sex” as a description of what some people so notoriously are having done to their bodies. Sullivan replied that “Sex reassignment is the most accurate term. No man will ever function as a woman and vice-versa.”

Sullivan’s solution is tempting in a go-along-to-get-along sort of way, but it tacitly concedes the “sex assigned at birth” Orwellianism.

I don’t like it. You may slip it by me, but I don’t believe it’s accurate.

What to call it, then? Since “gender” appears to be subjective (if not meaningless), “gender confirmation” seems the least bad option I know.

Surgery may be the least bad option in a few cases of an adult’s intractable gender dysphoria, but don’t ever ask me to affirm that there actually exists such a thing as a woman trapped in a man’s body or a man trapped in a woman’s body — or that surgery can actually change sex.

YEAH, PROBABLY POLITICS

Will this, finally, make him a kamikaze candidate?

Trump has added a much more disturbing project to his list of campaign promises: He intends to pardon all the people jailed for the attack on the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection.

Trump once held a maybe-sorta position on pardoning the insurrectionists. He is now, however, issuing full-throated vows to get them out of prison. On March 11, Trump declared on his Truth Social account: “My first acts as your next President will be to Close the Border, DRILL, BABY, DRILL, and Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!”

…

Trump is no longer flirting with this idea. The man whose constitutional duty as president would be to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” is now promising to let hundreds of rioters and insurrectionists out of prison with full pardons. And eventually, he will make clear what he expects in return.

Tom Nichols

On “Bloodbaths”

Donald Trump predicted a bloodbath if Joe Biden is re-elected. Conveniently lost in that description is that the “bloodbath” was a flooding of America’s auto market with Chinese cars, which he pledged to keep out with a 100% tariff.

But his defenders weren’t entirely up front, either:

What Trump defenders elide is that the former president has forfeited any presumption of good intentions. Trump winks at and even celebrates violence all the time. He fawns over authoritarians and insists that presidents, like rogue cops, should have complete immunity to commit crimes. When the Capitol was under siege by a mob acting on his behalf, he declined to intervene for hours. He even defended the mob’s chants of “Hang Mike Pence!”

Heck, Trump once again celebrated those “great patriots” of January 6 during the same rally Saturday, declaring those convicted of assault and other crimes “hostages.” If these convicted criminals are hostages, where are the ransom demands?

In short, Trump, who routinely distorts others’ statements and plays footsie with violence, doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt when he uses terms like “bloodbath.”

Jonah Goldberg, Stop Making a Martyr of Donald Trump

High Crimes or Misdemeanors

It’s an unusual leader who’s capable of committing high crimes or misdemeanors in two distinct genres of corruption. But Donald Trump is an unusual man.

His first impeachment was a case of extortion. Congress approved military aid for Ukraine, but instead of sending the funds overseas expeditiously, Trump withheld them while leaning on President Volodymyr Zelensky for a “favor” in the form of dirt on his likely opponent in the next presidential election.

His second impeachment was a case of fanaticism. Trump couldn’t cope with losing the election so he began howling that he had been a victim of fraud. He spun up his supporters about it so relentlessly that they ended up breaking into the Capitol on January 6 to try to halt the transfer of power.

His first high crime was a product of transactional logic, ice cold in nature. His second was a product of passionate radicalism, red hot by comparison. There may have been more corrupt public figures than him in America’s distant past but no one matches him for versatility.

Nick Catoggio, The Transactional Radical

The story of the conservative movement since 2016

Finding dignity in politics is like finding jewelry in a sewer system. There’s some there, rest assured; all you need to do is search.

But, good lord, the foulness you’ll endure while looking for it is unspeakable.

I’ve gotten used to it to a degree, as any sewer worker does. But on Friday I nearly choked on the fumes of cynical grifting putridity:

Ben Shapiro, who once called Trump a “spoiled brat” and refused to vote for him in 2016, is now co-hosting a fundraiser for Donald Trump:

“I’d walk over broken glass to vote for him [Trump].”

This is what selling your soul for power and money looks like. pic.twitter.com/If5gh4duM3

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) March 15, 2024

Anyone who once vowed never to vote for Donald Trump and now finds himself willing to walk over broken glass for him after a coup attempt and assorted impeachments and indictments has either cashed in his soul or been brain-poisoned by his own populist propaganda.

That’s the story of the conservative movement since 2016, by and large. Unspeakable.

Nick Catoggio again.

Putin is in control

Even amid a difficult and costly war that he initiated, Putin remains firmly in control of Russia, despite a series of Western sanctions and wishful thinking in Washington that its military expertise, weapons, and enthusiasm for the war would loosen his grip on power. Blindfolded by ideology, Biden wants the candy of regime change, but Putin has proven to be an iron-clad piñata.

Seymour Hersh

Not even a nod of acknowledgement

Like those who opposed the lockdowns, the masking of children, vaccine mandates, our southern border and immigration policy, or Woke racial intolerance, those of us who applied reasonable skepticism to pediatric gender transition were treated shabbily. The coercive tools of social ostracism and censorship were wielded against us with smug pride. Then, in 2023, our positions became conventional wisdom, but we were still unacceptable. It was all so obvious, suddenly, even to members of the MSM. They’d arrived where we’d long been, but seemed to think they’d discovered the land by dint of their own wisdom, preferring to ignore the grotesque inhabitants.

…

Were we supposed to wait patiently until the New York Times and The Atlantic lazily gathered the gumption to do their jobs? Or were we to speak up and stoically accept our due stigma? And now, after the foreseeable catastrophes have been laid bare, must conservatives pretend that no one could have seen it coming? Or worse, play cheerleader to liberals for finally—finally—waking up to a disaster that should have been easy for them to prevent?

…

Here is a humbling truth, which all conservatives must face: If you have been shouting anything from the rooftops for years, it is not to your credit that no one listened. That you did not change minds. That you did not form a winning alliance. That you instead earned attaboys online from the same crew who pledged you loyalty from the start. Bitterness is deeply unattractive; that may have been one reason the more rational side sometimes fails to win enough support.

Abigail Shrier

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Wednesday, 3/20/24

I grew up on “March 21 is the start of Spring,” but we’re not there yet and it nevertheless has been Spring for going on a day.

A trained physicist of my social media acquaintance explains:

Sunrise and sunset are defined as the time when the sun’s upper edge crosses the horizon; if you timed them from the crossing of the sun’s center, day and night should be equal today. Astronomical calculations equinoxes go by the center. Also, in practical terms, the atmosphere refracts light, so you can see the sun when it’s actually a little bit below the horizon. I believe most posted sunrise/sunset times take refraction into account? though refraction angle varies with air pressure. Anyhow, enjoy your extra 6 or 7 minutes!

So now you know until we both forget again.

Political

Too political

Justice Sonia Sotomayor will turn 70 in June. If she retires this year, President Joe Biden will nominate a young and reliably liberal judge to replace her. Republicans do not control the Senate floor and cannot force the seat to be held open like they did when Scalia died. Confirmation of the new justice will be a slam dunk, and liberals will have successfully shored up one of their seats on the Court—playing the kind of defense that is smart and prudent when your only hope of controlling the Court again relies on both the timing of the death or retirement of conservative judges and not losing your grip on the three seats you already hold.

Josh Barro in the Atlantic

I generally like Josh Barro, and this misguided piece won’t make me hate him. But it’s fraught with problems, starting with how it encourages a starkly partisan politicization of the Supreme Court — a politicization that Barro regularly exhibits on his Serious Trouble podcast with his snotty and unjustified treatment of Trump appointees as servile to Trump.

The “Trump Court” isn’t all that Trumpy? They’re conservatives, but not partisan Republican hacks. For that matter, the three “liberals” are not partisan Democrat hacks, witness the 14th Amendment Section 3 decision of a few weeks ago. A Biden “reliably liberal” Justice will disappoint the Democrats periodically because the Justices are, first of all, Judges, with a weighty sense of their importance at the top of that co-equal branch. Republicans learned that for decades under Eisenhower’s appointments.

But you wouldn’t know that from press coverage. The press feeds an unrealistic narrative of slavish partisanship on the bench, especially about Republican nominees. A Sotomayor resignation in the next few months, after public calls like Barro’s, will justify this heretofore largely unjustified narrative. (Maybe that’s why actual politicians, who Barro calls “gutless,” are importuning Sotomayor privately, not loudly and openly.)

And, of course, it invites tit-for-tat response. If Donald Trump wins the election, there would be calls for Clarence Thomas to retire. Never mind that Donald Trump will not be working off a Federalist Society-type* list because his first-term nominees have not been servile, as he expects everyone to be. I suspect that Thomas would resist such calls, but since he seems to enjoy real life, he might succumb.

I used to say “If you don’t like the Religious Right, wait ’till you see the Irreligious Right.” I think I’ve been largely vindicated in that, but it’s hard to prove my vindication because Irreligious Right barbarians these days often adopt an “evangelical” label, so their lack of Christian bona fides is harder to demonstrate than I care to undertake. (If you deny that someone who calls himself “Christian” really is Christian, you’re being mean in today’s muddled minds.)

But I’d now add, fully aware that it fuels calls like Barro’s, “If you don’t like FedSoc-type* justices, just wait ‘till you see who Trump nominates if he gets a second term.”

(* Re: “FedSoc-type”: The 2016-2020 list, which Trump campaigned on, was from John Leo, a FedSoc Founder, but not from FedSoc itself, as it doesn’t do that sort of thing institutionally.)

The hidden costs

I wrote here recently to the effect that the dollar amounts of our military aid the Ukraine should be deeply discounted, since Ukraine turns around and buys from us (insofar as the aid is not “in kind” weaponry). I fear I was too superficial, and the all-in cost is potentially greater than the nominal amount:

When the Pentagon decided to send weapons to Kyiv, these were mostly taken from already existing stocks. This was unavoidable, for at least two reasons. First, US munitions production was wildly inadequate to cover wartime demands. Second, the lead time for new production was simply too long: many of the weapons ordered for Ukraine in 2022 would realistically only be ready for use after the war had concluded. And so, the United States stripped its own warehouses of equipment — and it didn’t stop there. In some cases, it looted ammunition and weapons from its own combat formations. In others, it stripped many of its allies, such as South Korea, of a large amount of their equipment, too.

Malcom Kyeyune, The deception behind America’s support for Ukraine

I guess focusing on dollars misses the full picture, huh?

GOP’s conscientious objectors to Trump

A lot of my Never Trump allies on the center-right feel sure that Pence refusing to endorse the man he served for four years points the way (or “creates a permission structure”) for Republican voters to abandon the former president. By joining Nikki Haley, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, William Barr, Mark Esper, John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney, John Coats, John Bolton, H.R. McMaster, Liz Cheney, and a long list of additional Cabinet members, present and former GOP members of Congress, and state officials in opposing Trump’s bid to become president again, Pence supposedly helps to guarantee his loss in November.

…

But it’s also possible that the refusal to endorse hastens the GOP’s transformation into the party Trump and Bannon originally hoped to build eight years ago—a “workers party” that’s actually (or more precisely described as) a cross-racial coalition of voters who haven’t graduated from college.

… The policies favored by those old-line Reagan-Bush Republicans are no longer especially popular with less-educated voters, and the highly ideological and inauthentic way in which the old-guard talks and thinks also diverges from what Trump is teaching many of these voters to look for in a political tribune: unapologetic brashness, braggadocio, and bullshit.

Damon Linker

I have a blog category for “Zombie Reaganism.” If you think about it for a moment, you’ll be unsurprised that it has fallen into disuse.

TikTok

I have zero firsthand experience with TikTok, but you may have noticed that it’s in the news.

[I]n one of the more astonishing public relations blunders in modern memory, TikTok made its critics’ case for them when it urged users to contact Congress to save the app. The resulting flood of angry calls demonstrated exactly how TikTok can trigger a public response and gave the lie to the idea that the app did not have clear (and essentially instantaneous) political influence.

…

Trump’s flip-flop demonstrates once again the futility of ascribing any kind of coherent ideology to the former president. Before Trump’s change of heart, one could argue that being “tough on China” was one of the fixed stars of his MAGA policy constellation …

Second, the flip-flop indicates that Trump’s positions may well be for sale, even when they threaten national security …

Finally, Trump’s reversal reveals that his real enemy is always the domestic enemy. As The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio wrote last Thursday: “Populist-nationalism is about asserting tribal preeminence over other domestic tribes. And so it prioritizes fighting the enemy within.” In this context, the “enemy within” is Mark Zuckerberg and the “deep state.”

…

Catoggio correctly observed, “It speaks volumes” that “Trump felt safe politically allying himself with China on a pressing issue in an election year so long as he framed his position in terms of greater antipathy to one of the right’s domestic enemies, Big Tech.”

…

Last week, I wrote a column urging Reagan conservatives and Haley Republicans to vote for Joe Biden. The withering reaction from some on the right demonstrated the extent to which many Republicans still possess the mistaken belief that Trump possesses conservative convictions. How many times does he have to demonstrate that his personal grievances and perceived self-interest will always override ideology or policy?

David French

As I’ve written before, I think I’ll again be spared the indignity of having to vote for either of the major-party candidates, but French has made a fairly good case for Republicans and conservatives holding their noses and crossing over this year.

Conservatism

Dreher proposed the best way forward for the Republican Party when he wrote Crunchy Cons. In case anyone has forgotten the manifesto, here it is again in brief: Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government. Culture is more important than politics and economics. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative. Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract. Beauty is more important than efficiency. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom. The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.

Arthur Hunt III, Live Not by Lies from Neither the Left nor Right – Front Porch Republic

I doubt that the GOP could have more completely rejected this advice than it has since, say, 2005.

The biggest threat to traditional values

Last night I was having drinks with a Catholic friend visiting the city from western Europe. He is pretty demoralized about politics and everything else. He told me how pathetic the institutional church is in his country, as well as the political parties his side usually votes for. He complained that it is so difficult to rouse the conservatives in his country to recognize how insane the situation is. They want desperately to pretend that everything’s fine, that if they just keep voting for the mainstream conservative party, it’s all going to work out in the end.

He told me that one of the most difficult things for him to come to terms with is how his view on America has changed. He said he has no love for Russia or China, but it was a bitter red pill for him to swallow to realize that as bad as those countries’ governments are, they aren’t the biggest threat to him. No, he said, the forces that are destroying the things I cherish most in the world — faith, family, nation, tradition — all originate in the United States.

Rod Dreher, Revolution & The Call To Bravery

I initially found the second paragraph more arresting; now I’m not so sure that the first isn’t just as salient.

(Note: I’m unsubscribed from Rod Dreher’s Substack in the sense that I no longer pay. I believe I wrote about why I unsubscribed at the time of the decision. But he still has many public posts that get mailed to me.)

Cultural

Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber Hothouse

In August 2017, James Damore, then a twentysomething Google software engineer, sent a memo to all employees called “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” Damore argued that the company’s political bias toward the left “has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.” Damore suggested, among other things, that “discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech” was “misguided and biased.” Within a month, Google fired him for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes.”

Google has long been a progressive company—in 2020, for example, 88 percent of donations by Google employees went to Democrats (almost $5.5 million) while only 12 percent (some $766,000) went to Republicans. But after Damore was ousted, Google’s corporate culture became even more radical, according to Maguire. “Damore’s firing emboldened them to push a more open ideological agenda,” he said.

Francesca Block, Olivia Reingold, Google’s Woke AI Wasn’t a Mistake. We Know. We Were There.

Ban the “book banning” grift!

The ALA releases its annual report every April (which is common enough) in which it releases figures on how many challenges to library holdings were made the preceding year. But it runs its “Banned Books Week” every October, which gives it two instances every year to issue a press release lamenting the grave danger to democracy that these challenges pose. Almost every major media outlet—and I do mean almost every single one—follows suit, wondering how long American democracy will last if elementary students can’t continue to check out Gender Queer.

What’s the problem with the ALA’s report on “challenges”? As I argued here last year, the numbers are misleading …

This year, the ALA is highlighting the total number of books challenged whereas last year they were highlighting the total number of unique challenges. Why? Because the number of single challenges has actually gone down from 1269 in 2022 to 1247 in 2023. (The ALA notes that several challenges contained as many as a hundred books.) That doesn’t help advance the narrative that right-wing parents are a serious threat to democracy, so the ALA is touting the 4,240 figure.

At root, my problem with the ALA is the lack of transparency. They leave out important contextual information in order to raise money by fear-mongering (there is always a link to give to the ALA’s supposed defense of free speech with every press release). How many libraries reported challenges? How many books were actually removed from shelves? Were these at city libraries or school libraries (the ALA doesn’t distinguish between the two)?

Micah Mattix

Andrea Long Chu’s says the quiet part out loud

Spending even one minute responding to Andrea Long Chu’s recent provocation feels like a defeat. It is such an ill-conceived, careless piece of writing, and one that exhibits so little genuine concern for the group it is supposedly written on behalf of — trans kids — that its own thesis statement is basically self-debunking: “We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history,” argues Chu.

Alas, this argument wasn’t printed on some random blog, but as a cover story in New York magazine, where I worked as an online editor and writer-at-large from 2014 to 2017. Chu is given almost 8,000 words to defend her radical argument, but she just. . . doesn’t. I don’t quite understand why this article was printed, in this form, in the pages of a great magazine staffed by some of the best editors in the country. The counterarguments to her position are so blazingly obvious to anyone who has ever interacted with a child or a teenager that it’s an act of willful editorial neglect to simply ignore them entirely. The whole thing comes across much more as an act of high-profile trolling than a meaningful contribution to the discourse about trans kids. Along the way, as is Chu’s habit, she smears the work of a bunch of journalists, myself included, by cherry-picking quotes, sleazily writing that things we have written could be seen as arguing X, where X is something offensive we never would endorse, and so on.

Andrea Long Chu won a Pulitzer for her literary criticism. Maybe she’s brilliant at it. But her attempts at actual real-world policy arguments are remarkably lazy. Her editors let her down here.

Jesse Singal.

I’m nearing the end of a one-month paid subscription to New York. Even apart from Chu’s piece (which I skipped when I saw how insane his/her thesis was), I’ve been too unimpressed to continue.

Impervious to the Evidence

Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

On proper love of country

Love of country or “nationalism”?

Most of what is written about Christian nationalism is silly. Critics and analysts sweepingly deride conventional Christian conservatives as Christian nationalists. By some counts, there are, by this definition, tens of millions of Christian nationalists. Sometimes even civil religion, with its homage to a vague deity, is labeled Christian nationalism. If so, all presidents from George Washington to Joe Biden are Christian nationalists. Sometimes the target is folk religionists who conflate God and country. They sometimes sport paraphernalia with American flags draped around the cross. These folk religionists typically aren’t aware they are Christian nationalists. They don’t publish articles, much less books. And they typically don’t have policy agendas, just an attitude that God and country should be interchangeably honored.

…

Christian nationalism is distinct from conventional Christian conservatism. The former are typically post-liberals who want some level of explicit state established Christianity. The latter have been and largely still are classical liberals who affirm traditional American concepts of full religious liberty for all. Both groups want a “Christian America.” But the former want it by statute. The latter see it as mainly a demographic, historical and cultural reality.

Mark Tooley, Christian Conservatism vs Christian Nationalism

This looks like a solid and helpful piece from a more religiously-sophisticated source than the Politico piece it’s responding to. But it seems to me superficial insofar as it’s credulous about “nations.”

Not this:

The patriotic mythologies that came into existence together with modernity’s nationalisms are siren songs that seek to create loyalties that are essentially religious in nature. World War I, in the early 20th century, was deeply revealing of the 19th century’s false ideologies. There, in the fields of France, European Christians killed one another by the millions in the name of entities that, in some cases, had existed for less than 50 years (Germany was born, more or less, in 1871). The end of that war did nothing, apparently, to awaken Christians to the madness that had been born in their midst.

…

These passions are worth careful examination, particularly as they have long been married to America’s many denominational Christianities. I think it is noteworthy that one of the most prominent 19th century American inventions was Mormonism. There, we have the case of a religious inventor (Joseph Smith) literally writing America into the Scriptures and creating an alternative, specifically American, account of Christ and salvation. It was not an accident. He was, in fact, drawing on the spirit of the Age, only more blatantly and heretically. But there are many Christians whose Christianity is no less suffused with the same sentiments.

Asking questions of these things quickly sends some heads spinning. They wonder, “Are we not supposed to love our country?” As an abstraction, no. We love people; we love the land. We owe honor to honorable things and persons. The Church prays for persons: the President, civil authorities, the armed forces. We are commanded to pray and to obey the laws as we are able in good conscience. Nothing more.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

The conveniently unknown God

For fifty years I worshipped at the shrine of an Unknown God. It’s better than nothing. This tells us something of the intrinsic nature of humans. That we are wired to adore. It’s been a deception that we can get along without bending our heads, or ‘think’ our way out of our essential religiosity …

I lit candles for the Unknown God, coaxed exotic incense, sought out quiet places, wrapped myself in antelope skins and read ancient texts, hundreds of them. I got myself out into the bush, I abandoned work without real substance, I became a scholar and a seeker. I lived in a circle for four years, no screens anywhere near me. I blew my lantern out early and woke to birdsong. I was devoted, and I was led.

But I would tell by the camp fire every story but the story. The vast, glorious, uneasy elephant in the room.

I loved the Unknown God because it seemed beautiful, ancient, intensely mysterious, but didn’t infringe on how I actually lived. Not if I didn’t want it to. Had no bearing on my ethics or morality – what there was left of them. I dwelt in a world of strong emotion, intuitions and elaborate ceremonies. I learnt an awful lot about being human. I learnt an awful lot about the value of beauty.

And yet, I remained absolutely unaccountable. At the flick of a switch I could be the same old degenerate I’d always been …

Those fifty years got me an awfully long way. They’ve enabled me languages and experiences that gird me well in middle age. They haven’t required abandoning, or disowning, or shamefully chucking on a bonfire. I was a Romantic, that was what I was. But if you’ve really committed to a quest, a day will come when everything you think you know gets rocked, challenged, shaken. That happened to me four years ago up in the forest at the end of a 101-day vigil. When the unthinkable happened.

My unknown God decided to make himself visible to me.

Known to me.

Martin Shaw.

A bit of lay history

Clause not yet adopted at Rome … omitted from manuscripts of the Creed … inclusion perhaps a copyist’s mistake! H’m … Upheld by Paulinus of Aquileia at the Synod of Friuli, 800, yes, yes, yes … but only adopted among the Franks … Here we are! Frankish monks intoning the Filioque clause at Jerusalem! Outrage and uproar of Eastern monks!’ He paused and rubbed his hands. ‘I wish I’d been there!’ He pushed back his spectacles for a moment and then resumed. ‘Pope Leo III tries to suppress the addition, in spite of the insistence of Charlemagne – a Frank, of course! – but approves of the doctrine.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water. Patrick Leigh Fermor is not where I expected to find a saucy account of where the filioque came from.

Untenable but appealing

To read [Elaine] Pagels and [Bart]Ehrman, the Jesus Seminarians, and many others, the reader would think that orthodox interpretation of the Christian story has no claim to greater antiquity, and no stronger connection to the first followers of Christ, than the many and various heretical interpretations. In their view, the New Testament reflects only the theological-ideological biases of the “proto-orthodox” party, and the canon as we know it was imposed retrospectively, rather than developing organically in the early Church. These claims are enormously appealing to the modern religious mind, but they aren’t particularly tenable.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

Iconodules

A key turning point in my life, during my thesis (“The Icon as Theology”) defense, came with the question, “Do you believe the veneration of icons to be necessary to salvation?” I hesitated (I was an Anglican priest at the time), and responded, “I believe that their veneration is necessary to its fullness.” I have lived with that answer for many years and pondered it and the question as well. Christ, according to the Scriptures, is the “icon of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). I cannot imagine a salvation that is somehow separate from the veneration, indeed, the worship of that Icon.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

On “calling”

Florida’s most notorious abortion clinic is located at 1103 Lucerne Terrace in downtown Orlando. On the sidewalk directly in front of this clinic, the Orlando Women’s Center, there are two prominent marks in the concrete. They are signs of an extraordinary story.

The concrete was worn away by the feet of John Barros, who for nearly two decades stood outside this clinic as a sidewalk counselor …

I asked him, once, how he’d felt called to the pro-life movement. “I wasn’t called to the pro-life movement,” he replied. “God called me to forty feet of sidewalk.”

Farewell to a Pro-Life Hero

The new Christendom’s penitential system was often experienced as external to the needs of the penitent. It was based on new patterns of canon law that codified sin and the penances that negated it. The system could be overwhelmingly legalistic and for some authorities was centered not on the penitent but on his clerical confessor. It was concerned more with divine satisfaction than with human transformation.

John Strickland, The Age of Utopia. The “new Christendom” Strickland is referring to is Western Christendom after the Great Schism of roughly 1,000 years ago. Human transformation remains the focus of confession, absolution and penance in the Christian East (and in American Orthodoxy).

Anecdote contra data

Writing on X, a priest reports: “A bit of good news . . . I’ve had more confessions of the ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned, it’s been 20, 25, 30, 40, 50 years since my last confession . . .’ sort this year than I ever remember. I’m seeing more people at Mass than I ever remember.”

R.R. Reno

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

Tuesday, 12/19/23

Why I write curate others’ writing

I write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens. I write because I think I have learned a few things in my teaching life that are relevant to our common life. You will see what those are if you read on.

My approach here is anything but systematic. Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind … certain images in advance and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.”

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

For the most part, my essay-writing days are over (you’ll find much more of my own musings in earlier blog posts), but my curation of attributed quotes and their frequent juxtaposition of quotes that seem kindred express, I think, the same spirit Jacobs articulates here.

Mea culpae

Harvard polls versus polls of Harvard

Last Saturday, I gently mocked the idea that a poll at Harvard University could be a reliable indicator of the leanings of 18-24 year-olds nationwide.

Well, it turns out that it was a Harvard-Harris poll, not a poll of Harvard students.

In my defense, the writer I was gently mocking very specifically said that it was “a representative survey at Harvard University.”

On the shocking substance of the poll, see the questions raised by Ilya Somin.

Absolutely immune

I confess that I too quickly dismissed Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity — a claim that was rebuffed by the trial court, which decision Special Prosecutor Jack Smith now asks the U.S. Supreme Court to affirm. (I don’t think I scoffed here, but I did scoff.)

There are reasons why some officials enjoy absolute immunity for certain kinds of acts. Michael Warren and Sarah Isgur explain:

How would the Supreme Court decide it?

This is the big question and it goes to the very heart of why we give immunity to some public officials. Judges, for example, enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for their judicial acts—even if they acted corruptly or maliciously—because we don’t want every judicial act subject to meta-litigation. (We should note this doesn’t apply to actions outside legal decisions they make on the bench, which is why we see some judges prosecuted on bribery charges, for instance.) Legislators and prosecutors also enjoy absolute immunity for most of their official acts too. Why? Because we want these people to do their jobs without fear or favor. So how should we think about a president?

On one end of the spectrum, not many people would argue that a former president can’t be charged with murder for, let’s say, shooting someone on Fifth Avenue just because he was president at the time he pulled the trigger. On the other end, it would seem like a bad idea to allow a current president to bring fraud charges against his predecessor for overpromising and underdelivering on a policy proposal, such as “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

And to make this discussion more concrete, one of the things that Trump is charged with is “attempt[ing] to use the power and authority of the Justice Department to conduct sham election crime investigations.” Where does that fall on our spectrum?

It’s hard to guess where each justice will fall on this question because it involves questions about executive power, separation of powers, and all the future hypotheticals about how someone might abuse their power. In one outcome, presidents could be afraid to perform basic parts of their job because they might be charged with a crime down the road. In the other, current presidents could break the law with impunity for four years without fear of any future consequences.

I’d expect the Supreme Court to decide whether to take the case just before the New Year.

Hard cases make bad law, and Donald Trump’s odious persona makes every case hard. Tread carefully — as I trust SCOTUS will if it takes the case.

Political follies

West Coast Big Mouths

Meanwhile on the West Coast it’s now looking nearly impossible to fund what would have been the country’s most expensive and unjust experiment in civic wokeness. Jose Martinez reports for CBS News in San Francisco:

The future of African-American reparations in San Francisco is facing an uncertain future after Mayor London Breed announced that a proposed office won’t be funded due to budget cuts.

The office would have been a precursor to attempting to redistribute money from people who never owned slaves to people who were never enslaved. It wasn’t just the principle of such a plan that was troubling, or the difficulty of trying to precisely define the level of ancestral guilt or victimhood within the great American melting pot. It was also the money. In March this column noted the work of a city-appointed reparations committee and asked:

How massive would this new race-based spending scheme end up being? “The committee hasn’t done an analysis of the cost of the proposals,” reported the AP at the time.

But Lee Ohanian, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, examined the work of the committee and wrote in January:

I have analyzed some parts of this proposal and estimate that its cost, presented on a per-household basis, will be nearly $600,000 per non–African American San Francisco household.

He warned that “this estimate may be too low” but provided a ballpark number of recipients set to receive the proposed payouts:

Paying $5 million to 35,455 individuals totals about $175 billion. To put this in perspective, the city’s budget for the current fiscal year is $14 billion, while this proposed sum exceeds the current state budgets of all US states except for California, New York, and Texas.

Speaking of Texas, it would surely become the new home for much of San Francisco’s current population if this proposal is ever enacted.

James Freeman, Wall Street Journal

I wouldn’t be too hasty about moving to Texas, though I’d surely move somewhere if my household was going to get hit so heavily for something nobody in it ever did. Texas has an Attorney General who should have been convicted on his impeachment plus a legislature that seemingly cannot pass intelligible and reasonable laws plus a vendetta against public education.

I think one could do better.

Book-burning

This week, I watched videos of people literally burning Harry Potter books, like latter-day Nazis, in the cause of transgender liberation. It’s safe to say, I think, that many of these people have lost their minds — just by staying online. And they not only think they’re perfectly sane; they think they’re heroes.

Andrew Sullivan, We Are All Algorithms Now (September 2020)

If you are skeptical about the transgender social contagion, you should read The secret life of gender clinicians (UnHerd) and bear in mind that most of “trans” kids, if not “transitioned,” turn out gay or lesbian, but recovered from dysphoria; in other words, they are no longer uncomfortable with their sexed bodies. That’s why there’s dark humor that the gender clinicians are killing off a generation of gay kids, and this perverse aspect is a perennial source of concern for Andrew Sullivan.

For my money, insofar as a physician refuses to exercise a “paternalistic” or “gatekeeper” function, he or she has ceased being a professional and might as well be taking orders at a burger joint (where it really is no concern whether the customer’s burger-craving conceals something deeper).

Giuliani, a genuinely tragic figure

The first thing you need to know about a MAGA Man like Giuliani is that he’s dishonest. Truthfulness is incompatible with Trumpism. Trump is a liar, and he demands fealty to his lies. So Giuliani’s task, as Trump’s lawyer, was to lie on his behalf, and lie he did. He even repeated his lies about Freeman and Moss — the same lies to which he’d already confessed — outside the courthouse during his trial.

A MAGA Man such as Giuliani supplements his lies with rage. To watch him pushing Trump’s election lies was to watch a man become unglued with anger. The rage merged with the lie. The rage helped make the lie stick. Why would a man like Giuliani, former prosecutor and hero mayor, be so angry if he hadn’t discovered true injustice? MAGA Men and Women are very good at using their credibility from the past to cover their lies in the present.

Amid the lies and rage, however, a MAGA Man like Giuliani also finds religion. But not in the way you might expect. No, MAGA Man is not sorry for what he’s done. Instead, he feels biblically persecuted. Freeman and Moss aren’t the real victims; he is. Moreover, he also knows that the base is religious and likes to hear its politicians talk about God.

Giuliani learned that lesson well. So during the trial, he compared himself to Christians in the Colosseum, battling the lions like the martyrs of old. He’s not alone in this, of course. Trump shared an image of Jesus sitting by his side as he stood trial. Stone got so religious that he claimed to see supernatural sights, including, he said, a “demonic portal” that’s “swirling like a cauldron” about the Biden White House.

David French

We weren’t hallucinating when we admired Rudy’s mayoralty, were we? But some horrible flaw attached him to Donald J. Trump in a way that, as other Trump sycophants have learned, ruined him.

Crunchy Left Populist Conservatism

Dreher proposed the best way forward for the Republican Party when he wrote Crunchy Cons. In case anyone has forgotten the manifesto, here it is again in brief:

Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism.

Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

Culture is more important than politics and economics.

A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.

Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract.

Beauty is more important than efficiency.

The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.

Arthur Hunt III, Live Not by Lies From Neither the Left Nor Right How much is today’s “conservative” party, the GOP, interested in such values? If I hold my head just right and squint, I think they might be inchoately interested in several of them, but the way they express it is pretty off-putting.

(See also Ashley Colby, The Case for Left Conservatism and Fr. Stephen Freeman, A Day Off Versus The Day Of)

Culture

El Rushbo revisited

His obituaries in the mainstream press were mostly judgment, no mercy. It’s not nice when malice gets a final, unanswered shot. On the conservative side, TV commentaries were cloying to the point of cultish. It gives a sense of horror to see people who are essentially cold enact warmth of feeling.

Peggy Noonan, on the “complicated legacy” of Rush Limbaugh

What made Rush Limbaugh’s show possible was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which, starting in 1949, mandated that holders of broadcast licenses must both give airtime to important issues and include opposing views. It asserted a real public-interest obligation from broadcasters.

By the 1980s it was being argued that the doctrine itself was hurting free speech: It was a governmental intrusion on the freedom of broadcasters, and, perversely, it inhibited the presentation of controversial issues. There were so many voices in the marketplace, and more were coming; fairness and balance would sort themselves out.

In 1987 the doctrine was abolished, a significant Reagan-era reform. But I don’t know. Let me be apostate again. Has anything in our political culture gotten better since it was removed? Aren’t things more polarized, more bitter, less stable?

I’m not sure it was good for America.

War and poetry

It has been said that the Second World War did not produce great poets like the First War did. The Second War did not produce a Wilfred Owen or even a Siegfried Sassoon.

But that is because the great poems of the Second World War were not written in English. They were written in German and in Russian.

Douglas Murray, Things Worth Remembering: A Grave You Will Have in the Clouds, introducing Paul Celan.

Rod Dreher

Sometimes, it feels as if one of my roles in the world is to read Rod Dreher so others don’t have to. His hair is frequently on fire (or he’s gotten good at pretending it is; for the sake of his soul, it’s probably better that it be authentic, not feigned).

Why do I follow him? Well, I became a fan with his book Crunchy Cons (and see above, too), lo these seventeen years past. I’ve bought every book since, though some didn’t touch me and one made me cringe. I followed him at American Conservative, where his cultural catastrophizing enabled him to blog prolifically. I followed his departure from the Roman Catholic Church, gutted, and his prompt discovery of the Orthodox Church. I’ve attended a conference where he was a keynoter and chatted one-on-one. Now I’ve followed him through his divorce, the causes of which he has concealed beyond the generalities that both were at fault in some measure but neither was unfaithful, and which has left him, once again, gutted.

I’d call it “friendship” were it not that he almost certainly doesn’t remember me (he might say he’s met me before if he saw a picture). That, plus he so frequently puts his finger on something with pretty articulate analysis.

So it was twice this week. First (though second chronologically):

So: in the Church of Pope Francis, a priest can bless a gay couple who are engaged in sodomy, but that priest cannot say the Tridentine mass. This is where Catholicism in in 2023. When I became a Catholic, and after I left the Catholic Church, I have always believed that the health and stability of Christianity in the West depends on the health and stability of the Catholic Church, as the mother church of the West. This is not a day for any Protestant or Orthodox Christian living in the West to feel smug and superior. The loss of Rome to the Great Queering — and if you think Rome will stop here, you need to talk to some people who have lived through the queering of their Protestant communions — is going to be a massive blow to all Biblically faithful Christians living in Western civilization.

The next papal conclave — one of the most important in Church history — will determine if Francis was an aberration, or if his liberalizing is the new normal. And if the next pope reverses some or all of this, what kind of fight will he have on his hands?

(See section III of this for background; it’s very fresh news)

And as if anticipating this development:

It is worth thinking about, though, why homosexuality has become the pre-eminent wedge issue across Christian churches. Church progressives have this dishonest strategy of pretending that it’s a minor issue, except for the fact that they won’t give it up and reach a compromise with conservatives. I suppose if I believed what progressives do about homosexuality and transgenderism, I would be bound to think that this is an issue on which compromise is impossible, for the same reason I would find it impossible to compromise with Christians inside my ecclesial body who believed that (say) black people were living in a state of sin by being black.

I do not believe what progressives do on the point, however. I do not believe that homosexuality and/or transgenderism is a characteristic like race. I won’t argue the point here and now, but I simply want to highlight the profundity of the disagreement with Christian progressives here. If you believe that LGBT status is in the same moral category as race, then everything else follows. It becomes incomprehensible, outside of raw bigotry, why conservatives within the church object.

The reason why homosexuality, and human sexuality in general, is the pre-eminent wedge issue is because of Christian anthropology. That is to say, the Bible gives us a clear idea of what it means to be a being made in the image of God. We know from direct Scriptural teaching, as well as from reasoning from revealed first principles, that homosexuality runs contrary to bedrock Christian teaching. That homosexuality is, to use the language of the Roman catechism, “intrinsically disordered” — meaning that by its very nature it cannot be reconciled to the Logos. I am unaware that the Bible has anything to say about transgenderism, but if that’s not intrinsically disordered, nothing is.

In contemporary times, many, perhaps most, people do not see either homosexuality or, increasingly, transgenderism as disordered, in part because they do not recognize an intrinsic order, at least not one that excludes either phenomenon.

That “homosexuality runs contrary to bedrock Christian teaching” is a hard teaching in this age, and obviously there are progressives in the Church of England (and elsewhere) that think otherwise. But when one sees Christianity as a way of life suited to the salvation of human persons rather than a checklist of doctrines to affirm, anthropology because pretty central.

I’m increasingly inclined to renew ~~Dreher’s~~ Rod’s Substack at annual renewal time in a few months, despite how I felt a few months ago.

This is water

As they say, something can be so obvious that it becomes invisible.

The old saw that “courts decide cases” is not accurate when the subject is the United States Supreme Court. It decides issues that it thinks important.

That said, I think Ben Johnson, The Supreme Court Doesn’t Just Decide Cases, gets a lot wrong (I don’t see, and Johnson doesn’t try to show, how picking issues turns the court into a legislature), though I’m (we’re?) indebted to him for pointing out the novelty (a mere 80 years) of abstracting issues from the case context, and the shaky legal basis for doing so.

Shorts

Donald Trump dishonors America in so many ways that it isn’t possible to keep them all in mind and still remember to brush your teeth.

George Packer

* * *

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

Fredrik Pohl

* * *

… an age which advances progressively backwards …

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

* * *

Over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheelers are displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present.

Dense Discovery #269

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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.

Halloween Candies

Middle East

Jihad

It’s impossible to make a moral error when you’re a jihadist. If you die, it’s good; if your family dies, it’s good; if the infidel dies, it’s good. [Hamas] is a death cult.

Sam Harris via Andrew Sullivan.

Ceasefire = Hamas Victory

[P]rogressives calling for a cease-fire in Gaza threaten to hand Hamas the greatest victory of its existence. If Hamas can wound Israel so deeply and yet live to fight again, it will have accomplished what ISIS could not — commit acts of the most brutal terror and then survive as an intact organization against a military that possesses the power to crush it outright. I agree with Dennis Ross, a former U.S. envoy to the Middle East: Any outcome that leaves Hamas in control in Gaza “will doom not just Gaza but also much of the rest of the Middle East.”

…

it is hard to watch a large-scale bombing campaign in Gaza that kills civilians, no matter the precision of each individual strike. Much like ISIS in Mosul, Hamas has embedded itself in the civilian population. It is impossible to defeat Hamas without harming civilians, and each new civilian death is a profound tragedy, one that unfolds in front of a watching world. It’s a testament to our shared humanity that one of our first instincts when we see such violence is to say, “Please, just stop.”

This instinct is magnified when the combination of the fog of war and Hamas disinformation can cause exaggerated or even outright false claims of Israeli atrocities to race across the nation and the world before the full truth is known. The sheer scale of the Israeli response is difficult to grasp, and there is no way for decent people to see the death and destruction and not feel anguish for the plight of the innocent.

David French

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally rejected calls for a ceasefire. “Calls for a ceasefire are a call for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terror, to surrender to barbarism,” Netanyahu wrote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. “Just as the U.S. wouldn’t have agreed to a cease-fire after the bombing of Pearl Harbor or after the terrorist attack on 9/11, Israel will not agree to a cessation of hostilities with Hamas after the horrific attacks of Oct. 7.”

TMD

Order versus the Jungle

Order is a garden to be tended, but the jungle is the norm … The jungle is growing back. And we naive civilized folks, we couldn’t even start a fire without matches, much less feed or defend ourselves in the wilderness.

Damir Marusic at Wisdom of Crowds, quoting Robert Kagan.

A tacit elite bargain’s tacit limits

This item is from an October 12 column that I saved and only recently read:

The First Amendment, in its majesty, unambiguously protects the right of the best and brightest fringe-left Nazis on American college campuses to fantasize about Final Solution 2.0.

…

Nothing says “banality of evil” like having your enthusiasm for Jewish bloodletting cost you a cushy job at a white-shoe law firm.

…

Most graduates of schools like Swarthmore, UVA, NYU Law, and especially Harvard have a tacit bargain with corporate America. They get to be radically chic during their stay in the university playpen, and their future employers agree not to hold it against them provided that they leave it behind upon ascending to the very comfortable precincts of America’s professional elite. Screeching about the dispossessed can be forgiven as just another form of campus “experimentation,” but once you put on a tie and cash your paycheck, your priorities are expected to shift accordingly.

So imagine the surprise of the students who signed this week’s statements upon finding out that their bargain has an outer moral bound after all and that overt enthusiasm for war crimes crosses it. And imagine their outright shock upon realizing that “cancellation” isn’t a punishment American businesses reserve exclusively for right-wing thought criminals. Big Law, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and the media industry may lean left on cultural issues, it turns out, but beheading infants is where they’re apt to get squeamish.

Which leads us to a possible bright-line rule on canceling Hamas apologists. If you’re cheering on mass murder, you’re fair game for cancellation.

…

So why do I find myself preferring—God forgive me—a balancing test instead?

Nick Cattogio, who actually has some good reasons for not categorically damning to hell every snot-nosed idiot who raises stupid and obnoxious to the N^th power.

Culture & Economics

Shrewd question

I read a NYT profile on Mike Johnson, which described the ADF as an “anti-gay rights organization.” Does the NYT refer to David French as a former employee of an “anti-gay rights organization” or would they refer to him as a former religious liberty attorney?

Hunter Baker on whatever-the-heck they’re calling it these days.

Blue checks

And whatever-the-heck they’re calling it these days, the poo-bahs with blue checks are not covering themselves in glory:

According to a NewsGuard analysis, Twitter’s ‘verified’ users, who now pay to have a blue check, pushed 74% of the platform’s most viral false Israel-Hamas war-related claims.

(Via Dense Discovery)

Where’s my zero-hour work week?!

If we were to believe all the clichéd marketing lingo about time-saving, our lives would now consist largely of uninterrupted leisure time.

In a recent post, Brett Scott argues persuasively that, far from making our lives easier, technology is making them faster and more discombobulated. To understand how this shift happens, Scott tells us to look at the issue from a systemic perspective:

We don’t just live in any economy. We live in a mega-scale corporate capitalist economy, and in such a setting technology is never used to save time. It’s used to speed up production and consumption in order to expand the system. The basic rule is this: technology doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster and more crammed with stuff.

Dense Discovery

Trade-offs, people. No free lunches.

Shamelessly stealing?

Masimo argues that Apple’s reputation for innovation is undeserved and that the company has made a practice of “efficient infringement” — using other companies’ technologies without permission and dealing with the legal fallout as necessary. The company points to something that Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, said in 1996: “Picasso had a saying. He said, ‘Good artists copy; great artists steal.’ And we have, you know, always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

Peter Coy, on the successful patent infringement (Masimo’s pulse oximeter technology) case against Apple — a lawsuit that could take all but one (old) Apple Watch off the market come December 26.

Political

The antics of the contemporary GOP

Jonah Goldberg has spelled out a useful heuristic for getting one’s head around the antics of the contemporary GOP. To understand modern Republicans, he says, ask yourself: What would they do if they were trying to be a minority party? Nine times out of 10, that’s what they will do. It is as though they are trying to force moderates, “normies,” ordinary sensible people, and—if it comes to it—more or less up-and-down-the-line conservatives who just happen to have an aversion to coups to either stay on the sidelines or support Democrats.

Kevin D. Williamson

Prophetic

And so, goodbye, Donald J. Trump, the man who wanted to be Conrad Hilton but turned out to be Paris Hilton. Au revoir, Ivanka and Jared, Uday and Qusay — there’s a table for four reserved for you at Dorsia. So long, Melania — it’s still not entirely clear what you got out of this, but I hope it was worth it. A fond farewell to Ted Cruz’s reputation and Mike Pence’s self-respect, Lindsey Graham’s manhood and Fox News’s business model. In with “Dr.” Jill Biden, out with “Dr.” Sebastian Gorka.

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

I’m sure we’ll all meet again. But I’d really rather we didn’t.

Kevin D. Williamson, Witless Ape Rides Helicopter, January 20, 2021 (emphasis added)

GOP Spam

Words cannot express how — ummmm — impressed I am at the ingenuity of the GOP (or someone pretending to be the GOP, but I doubt that, based on long experience) in coming up with a seemingly endless waves of spam email addresses to inundate me with praises of Speaker Mike Johnson, so that they can “honor” each of my reflexive unsubscribe requests without ever actually ceasing to flood my zone with shit.

Shorts

America is proof that populations can continue to “be religious” long after they have lost all conception of the sacred.

Matthew Dal Santo

Trump Says Pence Should Endorse Him After Former VP Suspends 2024 Campaign

Axios. Of course he does.

Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.

Joe Biden in 2012 making the case for re-electing Barack Obama (via David French)

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.

David French

Monday, 8/7/23

Trump

Stopping Trump

[A]s has been the case since Mr Trump’s political rise began, the surest protection against his return to the White House would be for other Republican leaders to tell the truth, as [key GOP] state officials did after the 2020 election.

The Economist, Only politics, not the law, can stop Donald Trump

The more I think about it, the more I view Mitch McConnel’s wimping out on the second Trump impeachment as a terrible, terrible chapter in a distinguished political life. We could have avoided this narcissistic madman running for office again had the GOP any real balls.

Scienter and Trump’s deranged mind

In criminal law, “scienter” involves knowledge and intention. Premeditated murder is more serious than involuntary homicide, for instance.

Against that background, I think Peggy Noonan put her finger on something that could become important in the prosecution of last Tuesday’s indictment of Donald Trump”

It is argued that the indictment goes, uncomfortably, at Mr. Trump’s thinking: Did he believe what he said about the stolen election, or was he lying? This speaks to intent. His defenders argue that he believed it, and that even if he didn’t, he’d still be operating under First Amendment protections …

The question of what Mr. Trump believed strikes me as beside the point. Based on long observation, he doesn’t “believe”; he’s not by nature a believer. His longtime method of operation is to deploy concepts and approaches strategically to see what works. Put another way, he makes something up, sticks with it if it flies, drops it if it doesn’t, and goes on to “believe” something else.

Peggy Noonan

I’m not sure how that will play out in the hands of prosecutors, but it strikes me as astute and potentially an achilles heel for Trump.

A somewhat different take, or perhaps a different approach to the same basic take, is that of Michael Wolf, who has written three books about Trump:

… Mr. Trump’s unmediated fire hose of verbiage, an unstoppable sequence of passing digressions, gambits and whims, more attuned to the rhythms of his voice than to any obligation to logic or, often, to any actual point or meaning at all and hardly worth taking notice of.

…

I’ve had my share of exposure to his fantastic math over the years — so did almost everyone around him at Mar-a-Lago after the election — and I don’t know anyone who didn’t walk away from those conversations at least a little shaken by his absolute certainty that the election really was stolen from him.

…

The chaos he creates is his crime; there is, however, no statute against upsetting the dependable order. Breaking the rules — often seemingly to no further purpose than just to break the rules as if he were a supreme nihilist or simply an obstreperous child — is not much of a grand criminal enterprise, even though for many, it’s infuriating coming from someone charged with upholding the rules.

…

[T]he larger pattern, clear to anyone who has had firsthand experience with the former president, is that he will say almost anything that pops into his head at any given moment, often making a statement so confusing in its logic that to maintain one’s own mental balance, it’s necessary to dismiss its seriousness on the spot or to pretend you never heard it.

Politics

BoBos in Purgatory

The author of Bobos in Paradise takes a critical look at his own class:

[W]e’re the bad guys. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault—and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. He understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on. If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem like just another skirmish in the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them.

David Brooks

This is a recurring theme of Brooks:

Yet wokeness is not just a social philosophy, but an elite status marker, a strategy for personal advancement. You have to possess copious amounts of cultural capital to feel comfortable using words like intersectionality, heteronormativity, cisgender, problematize, triggering, and Latinx. By navigating a fluid progressive cultural frontier more skillfully than their hapless Boomer bosses and by calling out the privilege and moral failings of those above them, young, educated elites seek power within elite institutions. Wokeness becomes a way to intimidate Boomer administrators and wrest power from them.

How the Bobos Broke America (2021)

I can’t blame him for a bit of repetition or variations on a theme. Some things once seen can’t be unseen, and a sincere writer is apt to want others to really see them, too.

Of course, such sobriety can’t stand unchallenged, so at least one article I read opined that Brooks is wrong.

Late-stage democratic collapse

The 45-page indictment, in this respect, is simply sickening. But just as sickening has been the response from the right. National Review penned a disgraceful and error-ridden editorial, providing cover for behavior that no Constitutional conservative could ever defend. (At least they published an internal dissent from Noah Rothman.) The Wall Street Journal was mealy-mouthed. Right-Twitter was unhinged. Two desperate arguments were invoked: that the contrast with the prosecution of Hunter Biden by a Trump-appointed prosecutor proved a two-tier justice system (for all Hunter’s depravity and corruption, it does nothing of the kind); and that organizing an attempt to nullify a fair election was protected under the First Amendment (seriously?). Butters is even declaring that a jury is somehow invalid because of where it will be convened — another assault on the rule of law.

There is no rationality at work here; merely rationalization. But it is a rationalization powered by a tribalism so intense it now obliterates everything before it: truth, reality, civility, and every virtue, large and small, that keeps a liberal democracy intact. This is not a democratic debate or discussion anymore. It is not a fight within our existing system. It is the effective delegitimization of the entire system — because its procedures and norms cannot validate one deranged man’s sick psyche.

…

We are entering late-stage democratic collapse, where tribalism overwhelms reason, common trust evaporates, debate is gone, norms destroyed, and all that matters is the purity of the extremes, and who can win power by any means. The latest indictment of Trump — and more specifically, the reaction to it — is proof that the “extinction-level event” of liberal democracy is here. Future historians may look back and conclude, in fact, that it has already happened.

Andrew Sullivan

I wish I thought Sullivan was wrong. I’m too old and too married to emigrate, though, so I’ll just keep riding this out, remembering that the end of America as we’ve known it isn’t the end of the world.

I read a few Pollyannas, but find declinism more compelling.

American Postliberal says the silent part out loud

When the late-stage democratic collapse is over, there are new authoritarians waiting in the wings: McCarthyism 2.0 Through a new McCarthyism, we will enforce the standards our culture has so egregiously ignored.

When the US started the new cold war

I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies … I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever … Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then (the NATO expanders) will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong. This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end.

George Kennan on NATO expansion, 1998 (via Andrew Sullivan)

Promoting democracy versus Promoting Democracy®

I agree that Donald Trump is a “threat to democracy,” in the sense that one generally means. But you know, I live now in a Western democracy — Hungary — in which the people have voted in four consecutive elections for Viktor Orban and his party, much to the chagrin of Washington. So, the media and the Washington ruling class condemns Orban as an enemy of democracy because he keeps winning free and fair elections. In fact, the head of USAid came over in February to deliver $20 million to anti-government NGOs in the name of defending democracy (that is, to foment a Color Revolution). Whenever I hear people from the transatlantic ruling class talk about their commitment to democracy, in the same breath that they condemn Hungary and Poland for supposedly being its enemies, I have exactly the same confidence as I do when I hear these same people talking about how we need to go to war again to defend democracy: None.

Rod Dreher

Culture

History echoes

It is extremely difficult to maintain the freedom of the press, when that is used by different parties to advocate the assassination of each other’s leaders. It is extremely difficult not to throw people into prison without trial if disorder is so great that the law courts dare not convict the most guilty disturbers of the peace. And the King could not discuss his difficulties with his liberal subjects, because he was incapable of understanding intellectuals.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, writing about early 20th-century in the Balkans.

Moral equivalence?

Okay, last crazy headline: Apparently ISIS is anti-gay the same way as America’s conservative Christians are.

As Seth Mandel summarized it: “Iran hangs gays from construction cranes because America still has separate sports leagues for men and women.” I think a lot of the young newspaper writers who argue America is just as bad as Al-Qaeda and that our conservatives are literally ISIS should simply go visit Syria. Frolic in Egypt. Rock out in Yemen. When an American soldier saves you, I doubt you’ll be worrying about whether he’s a Southern Baptist.

(Nellie Bowles)

The fundamental flaw that wasn’t

Amazon’s Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets was a documentary waiting to happen ever since the Josh Duggar scandal broke eight years ago. In many ways, it is a documentary that needed to be made. It discusses real problems within the homeschooling movement that many homeschoolers would prefer to ignore. It tells the stories of women and men whose upbringing ranged from deeply flawed to abusive; and it helps to illustrate how one of the most religiously conservative elements in American society, the homeschooling community, might actually contribute to the rise of the Nones. For all this, however, the documentary suffers from a fundamental flaw: it fails to say anything about the millions of ordinary homeschoolers who are raising children in perfectly healthy (and sometimes quite secular) ways.

Sophia M. Feingold, Shiny, Happy Propaganda (italics added)

There is no “fundamental flaw” in failing to balance a story to the satisfaction of every possible critic with an obsession. It’s perfectly legitimate to tell a story about failure without telling a parallel story about success.

I did not view Shiny Happy People as a screed against home schooling, and I think you’d need to be pretty prickly and ideological to view it so. Sadly, many homeschoolers do seem to be prickly and ideological.

Christopher Rufo’s America

Graeme Wood reviews Christopher Rufo’s new book, a detour from Rufo’s usual route, America’s Cultural Revolution.

Winding up for his pitch, he describes my attitude toward Rufo (emphasis added):

Christopher F. Rufo is what is sometimes known as a shit-stirrer—a particular type of troublemaker whose game is to find something stinky, then waft its fumes toward the noses of those mostly likely to be outraged by it … Even those who find their behavior outrageous often find Rufo’s tactics distasteful as well.

Soon comes the key paragraph:

Your appreciation of this book will depend in part on whether you prefer Rufo the carnival barker, luring in members of the public to see the lefty freakshow he curates, or Rufo the intellectual historian. The first is more fun but the second is just as biased. His description of the careers of these intellectual figures is meant for readers who know nothing of their work, and do not care to learn about it from a sympathetic source. The narrative is meant to build them up only to villainize them—and this is not difficult. Like Rufo’s TikTok freaks, his woke progenitors often said and did things that need no additional commentary to make them into villains.

I’ll take a pass. It has been, I think, more than a decade now since I stopped reading stuff with the tacit goal of winding myself up.

Hippie collectives and corporations

Why did the Dutch publishing outfit need a receptionist? Because a company has to have three levels of command in order to be considered a “real” company. At the very least, there must be a boss, and editors, and those editors have to have some sort of underlings or assistants—at the very minimum, the one receptionist who is a kind of collective underling to all of them. Otherwise you wouldn’t be a corporation but just some kind of hippie collective.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Property

‘C‘est un bon pays; personne n’est riche là-bas mais tout le monde a des biens.‘

Via Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. This could be the Distributist Vision Statement: This is a good land; nobody’s rich but everyone has property.

A great modern factory is a waste from the point of view of the need of property; for it is unable to provide either the workers, or the manager who is paid his salary by the board of directors, or the members of the board who never visit it, or the shareholders who are unaware of its existence, with the least satisfaction in connexion with this need.

Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (italics added)

Shorts

Dianne Feinstein, 90, Cedes Power of Attorney to Daughter—But Still Serves in Congress

New York Post:

DeSantis Vows to ‘Start Slitting Throats’ of Federal Workers on Day One of Presidency

Government Executive

Capital punishment is indifferent to redemption.

Elizabeth Breunig

We keep looking at the prosecutors as the problem rather than Donald Trump. He did these things.

Chris Christie

… the West has achieved a more fully realized atheism than the Soviet Union ever did.

Rod Dreher’s characterization of an Augusto Del Noce observation.

You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.

William Wilberforce

The role of the community is to torture the mystic to death.

Joseph Campbell (Source)

Sunday, 7/16/23

Imagine there’s no Rapture …

Orthodox Holy Tradition says clearly that the Second Coming, the General Resurrection, and the Last Judgment are three facets of one single, overwhelming event. There is no divide (which is the meaning of the heresy of chiliasm, which was rejected in the Second Ecumenical Council, and the reason why we say “and His Kingdom shall have no end” in the Creed). There is no Rapture. There is no Seven Year Tribulation. There is no single human individual who is the Antichrist or the Beast — the Antichrist is not a Jew, not a Muslim, not a Communist, nor is he the Pope or any one of the many theories that have been published over the centuries.

There is no literal thousand-year-long Millennium. There is no reappearance of Satan setting off the last Armageddon.

There will indeed come the Great Universal Transfiguration that overwhelms time and space and all Creation.

This is the Kingdom if its infinite, almost terrifying fullness and glory.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias, the last judgment and the problem of goathood

This I believe.

I will not say that the Orthodox Church is the only church that rejects all the rapture crap, because I don’t believe it is. But it’s also true that not every church that rejects all the rapture crap still believes in the Second Coming, the General Resurrection, and the Last Judgment. That kind of narrows things down a lot.

A periodic reminder

I’ve no doubt posted this quote before:

The shift from church power to state power is not the victory of peaceable reason over irrational religious violence. The more we tell ourselves it is, the more we are capable of ignoring the violence we do in the name of reason and freedom.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence

Liturgy

In a culture that values spontaneity, liturgy grounds us in something enduring. In a culture that assumes truth is a product of the mind, liturgy helps us experience truth in mind, body, and spirit.

Book blurb for Mark Galli’s Beyond Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy

Modern worship

On a related note:

[A]ny attempt to “modernise” liturgy in terms of making it more acceptable to modern society (i.e. “pastoral respectability”) should be undertaken with extreme caution; the warning of Charles Davis is paramount here:

My thesis is that there is no modern form of worship, because worship itself is outdated in the modern world and Christian Faith a state of deviancy from contemporary culture.

Bryan D. Spinks, “Christian Worship or Cultural Incantations?”, Studia Liturgical, vol. 12 (1977), 1, 12-13 (quoting Charles Davis, “Ghetto or Desert: Liturgy in a Cultural Dilemma” in Worship and Secularization (1970), pp. 10-27, p. 12).

Thanks to @letters on micro.blog who appears to read such things voraciously.

The teleological void

My college students have worked hard getting impressive credentials since at least middle school and will continue to do so long after college. When I ask them where this is all going, they are befuddled. “This is just what you do,” they often answer. Anything else is impractical, unrealistic, and useless. They have been going their whole lives without asking or being asked “where to?” Asking such a question means stopping, thinking, and perhaps changing direction, all things that religion and humanities have us do. But our society has no interest in silence or pausing.

Terence Sweeney, Why Religion and the Humanities Are in Decline

The evangelical soul

This baffling essay proves that although Mere Orthodoxy is consistently good, it’s not unvaryingly good. The author lost me at the construct “the evangelical soul.”

(Mere Orthodoxy, by the way and once again, is not a Orthodox website; it is a Reformed-leaning Protestant website that considers itself orthodox and “leans young.” It’s usually pretty good; I don’t subscribe to anything for the sole purpose of dissing it.)

What if?

Our professor asked a hypothetical question: “If the bones of Jesus were discovered, and if there were some way to absolutely confirm that they were the bones of Jesus, would you still be a Christian?”
Every other member of the class confirmed that he or she would remain a Christian, making statements such as “I would not lose my faith,” or “Jesus was a great teacher and philosopher.”

I was dumbfounded and utterly dismayed. How was it possible that such intelligent, committed, and educated Catholics could give such responses? Did they not realize the fundamental importance of the Resurrection of Christ? If not, why not? My response was, “If the bones of Jesus were discovered, I would be outta here! I would no longer be a Christian!” I explained that the Resurrection is an absolute necessity to the Christian faith. The class listened politely, but no one seemed at all impressed or influenced by my answer.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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.

Traditional Vernal Equinox 2023

Some gaslighters are claiming that Spring began yesterday, but I distinctly remember that it starts March 21. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

Culture

The World Beyond Your Head

Matthew Crawford, who does not know me nor I him, nonetheless describes a very strong tendency in my life:

I can take a virtual tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, or of the deepest underwater caverns, nearly as easily as I glance across the room. Every foreign wonder, hidden place, and obscure subculture is immediately available to my idle curiosity; they are lumped together into a uniform distancelessness that revolves around me. But where am I? There doesn’t seem to be any nonarbitrary basis on which I can draw a horizon around myself—a zone of relevance—by which I might take my bearings and get oriented. When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

I suspect that this is why I like to travel: it forces on me that particularity of places.

My Man Mitch

Mitch Daniels, former Purdue president, didn’t hold back about the state of today’s athlete in his latest Washington Post column. The headline was about women’s sports, but Daniels really laid into what he considered “sports figures who embody self-absorption over collective commitment, who cultivate their personal ‘brands’ at the expense of collective success.” An example: “A top athlete can consort with criminals, brandish guns in public and litter the landscape with illegitimate children in whose lives he has no intention of playing a father’s role, seldom with career consequences.” Read the rest here: “In a me-first era, my appreciation of women’s sports just keeps growing.”

Dave Bangert

Shame on the Met

The Metropolitan Opera has been ordered by an arbitrator to pay the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko more than $200,000 for performances it canceled last year after she declined to denounce President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.

New York Times

I wish the Met had been hit harder than that, but as a private company, it has some latitude to indulge its oppressive impulses. (Netrebko lost claims for performances where she and the Met had not yet inked the deal.)

Colonialism

“We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.” (Cecil Rhodes)
In general terms aid cannot be of use to the poor of the Third World for the critical reason that they necessarily depend on the local economy for their sustenance, and the local economy does not require the extensive highways, big dams, or for that matter hybrid seeds, fertilisers and pesticides of the Green Revolution, any more than it does the fleet of helicopters that the British government imposed on India. These are only of use to the global economy, which can only expand at the expense of the local economy, whose environment it degrades, whose communities it destroys and whose resources (land, forest, water and labour) it systematically appropriates for its own use.

Edward Goldsmith, Development As Colonialism

March Madness

[D]espite having NCAA eligibility remaining, the Ivy League hasn’t budged from its position to limit its athletes a four-year window to compete. It’s something that Princeton, as an institution, also believes in, according to coach Mitch Henderson.

"We have [two] other seniors that have eligibility. Each one of these guys has an extra year," Henderson said. "It doesn’t change anything for us. We’re very much about the four-year process.

"Princeton, we’re about the growth of the student-athlete over the four-year process. I hope that’s not saying we’re a stick in the mud. It’s very much who we are. We expect them after senior year to be able to kind of go out and make pretty serious contributions in their communities."

ESPN story on Princeton men making the Sweet 16.

Princeton just became my emotional favorite in the tournament. Much as I like college basketball, I love colleges and universities that are about education.

Academic theology (and apologetics)

It has been roughly 25 years since it dawned on me that a secular person can never do truly Christian theology, which is more than an academic pursuit.

There’s no one more dangerous than the man who knows the steps but hasn’t walked them.

Steven Christoforou, Why Christian Apologetics Miss the Mark

Despite that epigram, Christoforou was not writing about Ravi Zacharias. He wrote something better than that would have been.

The pornified campus

1-in-3 collegiate women report being choked during most recent sex.

Brad Wilcox on Twitter via Aaron Renn

My presumption — rebuttable but strong — is that their sexual partners learned this frightening twist on love-making from watching hardcore porn (of a sort I never encountered).

Men are not guarding their imaginations. Women, too, are setting themselves up for divorce, with all its ramifications:

Calling a spade a spade

“Conversion therapy” bans pressure therapists to never help any patient try to feel comfortable in her body. That’s not some unintended consequence; it’s the essence of these bans. As Jack Turban has put it, it’s "unethical" to try to make a child "cisgender."

Leor Sapir on the 20 states and DC with such bans, via Andrew Sullivan

On Wokeness

Diversity and inclusion today

The thinking class, meanwhile, squanders its waking hours on a quixotic campaign to destroy every remnant of an American common culture and, by extension, a reviled Western civilization they blame for the failure to establish a heaven on earth of rainbows and unicorns. By the logic of the day, “inclusion” and “diversity” are achieved by forbidding the transmission of ideas, shutting down debate, and creating new racially segregated college dorms.

James Howard Kunstler, Living in the Long Emergency

The vice that dare not assume a name

Damon Linker again weighs in on wokeness:

The activists … appear deliberately to avoid giving their efforts a name, and they will likely object to anything that might be more descriptively accurate—like my preferred “antiliberal progressivism”—on the grounds that it carries negative connotations … I do think there’s a good reason to opt for “antiliberal progressivism” instead of “woke” or “wokeness”: doing so connects current trends to historical antecedents that, it’s now possible to see, were earlier chapters in a single, episodic story of intrafactional conflict on the left.

[T]here’s [a] reason [besides fearful capitulation] why liberals, especially over the last few years, have been so quick to fold in the face of antiliberal demands by militant progressives. It’s because liberals get caught in the either/or dynamics of polarized politics, thinking that any expression of criticism about their ostensible allies on the left invariably amounts to an in-kind contribution to advancing the political aims of their enemies on the right. This thinking runs something like this:

Yes, some of what the left-wing activists want is bad, defies liberal norms, and pushes pretty far into radical territory when it comes to race and gender. But the right is responding to this stuff by doing even worse things (including banning books, gutting academic freedom, and restricting free speech and other liberties). For that reason, it’s important we not criticize the left—because doing so empowers the right. Just look at what’s happened to Freddie deBoer this past week: He wrote a powerful Substack post criticizing the activists in the name of the left, and now he’s being quoted by right-wingers. We need to choose sides, and it’s not a hard call. We must stand with our somewhat wayward allies on the left for fear of empowering the fascism that’s making inroads all the time in the Republican Party.

I think the truth is pretty close to the opposite of this view: If the liberal center-left doesn’t stand up to antiliberal progressivism and refuse to capitulate to its demands within institutions, then those who disdain its influence will have nowhere to turn besides the right. That’s why liberals ought to do more to defend liberal ideals and norms where they hold power in civil society—because it will demonstrate that one needn’t embrace the right’s own antiliberalism in order to combat antiliberalism on the left.

I find this heartening, and I see Linker as an ally. I think “antiliberal progressivism” perfectly captures what is objectionable about wokeism. I reflexively recoil from progressive excesses, but have been unable to make peace with opportunistic and heavy-handed “conservative” responses — a sort of reverse mirror-image of what Linker is advocating for his side.

I can’t omit a bit more Linker, though:

Liberalism itself is more than capable of defending itself from opponents in either direction, as long as liberals summon the courage and rise to the challenge of doing so. It can do this most effectively by drawing crucial distinctions that comport more fully with the complex truth of things than the edifying homilies preferred by the right or the furious craving for moral purity that so often prevails on the left.

…
Yes, transgender adults should enjoy the same legal protections as other vulnerable minorities. But that doesn’t mean “gender-affirming care” (which can include radical pharmaceutical and surgical interventions) is the proper path forward for the rapidly growing numbers of teenagers who express discomfort with their sexuality and gender identity. Neither does it imply that the rest of us need to embrace the philosophically and biologically dubious assertions of many transgender activists about the thoroughgoing fluidity of sex and gender.

Linker is very much on the same wavelength as leftist philosopher Susan Neiman, (The true Left is not woke):

[T]he fact that politicians ranging from Ron DeSantis to Rishi Sunak deploy “woke” as a battle cry should not prevent us from examining its assumptions. For not only liberals, but many Leftists and socialists like me are increasingly uneasy with the form it has taken.

…

What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be progressive have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any liberal or Left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress.

A preemptive barrier to productive disagreement

Before you can attempt to define what “wokeness” is, you should acknowledge this basic fact. Going further, you should acknowledge that as with cancel culture, critical race theory, and even structural racism, the contested nature of the term imposes a preemptive barrier to productive disagreement.

…

The constellation of social-justice concerns and discursive lenses that have powerfully influenced institutional decision making does work to sort individuals into abstract identity groups arranged on spectrums of privilege and marginalization. To paraphrase James Baldwin, it proceeds from the insistence that one’s categorization alone is real and cannot be transcended. The idea that patriarchy, white supremacy, transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, and other ills inexorably saturate our lived realities and that the highest good is to uncover and oppose them is, I think, a central component of “wokeness” as both its proponents and critics understand it.

…

[P]erhaps we can all agree, at bare minimum, to set ourselves the task of limiting our reliance on in-group shorthand, and embracing clear, honest, precise, and original thought and communication. If we want to persuade anyone not already convinced of what we believe, we are going to have to figure out how to say what we really mean.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

I try to avoid “you should have written about X instead of about Y” critiques, but how in heaven’s name could Williams note the wokesters’ obsessive use of “patriarchy, white supremacy, transphobia, homophobia, [and] Islamophobia” without commenting on how ill-defined those slurs are? His only hint at “both sides” is his last paragraph.

To the list of ill-defined or undefined put-downs of people not on the Left, I would certainly add “white Christian nationalism.”

A substitute religion?

[M]embership in houses of worship sank to 47% – below the 50% mark for the first time. In 1999, that number was 70%.

It’s possible, said [former Congressman Daniel] Lipinski, that many citizens are now searching for "for meaning, or a mission, or truth, somewhere else," which only raises the stakes in public life.

"Partisanship has become not just a social identity, but a primary identity considered to be more important than any other," he said. "We all identify ourselves as belonging to different groups – our families, our religions, our favorite sports teams, our professions. But more and more Americans are defining who they are by the political parties that they choose."

…

At this point, said Lipinksi, political dogmas have become so powerful that they now appear to be shaping the religious, class and sexual identities of many Americans – instead of the other way around. The teachings of competing politicos. preachers and pundits define the boundary lines in this war zone.

The bottom line: The "partisan virtue-signaling" that became so obvious in the Donald Trump era now dominates political discourse and news coverage about America’s most divisive religious and moral issues.

Politics

Reality candidates

In case you were wondering: He’s in.

I mean, of course, newly announced 2024 presidential contender Joseph Allen Maldonado, a.k.a. Joe Exotic, a.k.a. the Tiger King, a.k.a. the reality-television grotesque who actually had the No. 1 show in the nation, with truly unbelievable ratings: Tiger King had more than 34 million viewers in its first 10 days, nearly five times the average viewership of Celebrity Apprentice in its 2014-15 season. If ratings are what matters, then Joe Exotic is surely the best-qualified presidential candidate since Dwight Eisenhower: D-Day got great ratings.

No? Okay, then.

Why not Joe Exotic?

Isn’t being a reality-television star a presidential qualification? There are enough Americans who believe that to elect a president, are there not? Are we doing the democracy thing or aren’t we?

Let’s not be snobs about it. Sure, he looks like a guy you’d see walking south alongside the northbound lanes of I-35 just past the Lake Murray State Park exit in skull-print hoodie pushing a baby stroller with a missing wheel—but we are done, done, done with those fancy elites condescending to Real Americans™ from behind the safety of their Audi windshields as they speed down the road to the Harvard Club or Trader Joe’s or a job or wherever. If having a ridiculous mullet means you can’t be president, then the current guy is disqualified; if a ridiculous bleach-and-dye job means you can’t be president, then somebody explain the last guy.

(Really. Somebody explain the last guy. I tried my best.)

Kevin D. Williamson

Just can’t shake these DTs.

On the supposed impending arrest of Florida Man:

There are two things we know for certain about Donald Trump: The first is that he is the sort of irritating New York neurotic who believes that he ceases to exist when attention is not being paid to him, and the second is that he is constitutionally incapable of producing three consecutive sentences without a lie in one of them. A lie that brings him attention must be as irresistible as a well-seasoned hunk of porn-star jerky who pays him postcoital hush money rather than his usual arrangement, which goes the other way around. If you cannot see the hand of divine judgment at work in the prospect of this ailing republic being convulsed over an episode that, by the account of one of the intimately involved parties, had all of the impact of a Vienna sausage landing in a catcher’s mitt, then you have no religious imagination at all.

…

A federal prison is not the only kind of facility one can imagine Donald Trump locked up in. I don’t know whether he is mentally ill in a medical sense any more than I know whether Joe Biden is cognitively impaired in a medical sense, but I do know that, in the colloquial sense of the word crazy, he is as crazy as a sack of ferrets.

…

What is remarkable to me is that, all these years after the fact, the Trump admirers are still complaining that Hillary Rodham Clinton called them “deplorables.” The Clintons are awful and embarrassing and gross—Roger Stone has been known to plagiarize my line about the Clintons’ being “the penicillin-resistant syphilis of American politics”—but, if all this isn’t deplorable, what is?

Kevin D. Williamson. Williamson closes with delicious irony:

If you really want entitlement reform, don’t send an American conservative to do the job—what you want is a slightly rehabilitated French socialist.

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