Thursday Potpourri

We continue murdering furriners

Acting on orders from President Donald Trump, the U.S. military has murdered Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, popularly known as Niño Guerrero, a Venezuelan drug trafficker and leader of the Tren de Aragua crime syndicate.

This was—and ought to be treated as—a straightforwardly criminal act on the part of the American president and those who have carried out his illegal orders … Guerrero Flores may very well be everything the Trump administration says he is and more—though under the Trump administration the word of the White House is no more reliable than the word of a South American drug dealer—but, even if that were the case, there is no legal authorization for the preemptive extrajudicial killing of crime suspects. …

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was known by his childhood nickname, “Caligula,” meaning “little boot,” because as a child he liked to play dress-up and pretend to be a soldier. Trump has a similar puerile fondness for military pomp and martial posturing—and, more to the point, his pretensions include both the divine and the monarchical. And, deepening the unfortunate trend originating with earlier presidents, he has leaned into the constitutionally undefined notion of the president as “commander in chief,” or, as the Romans would have put it, imperator.

Which is to say: This is not really about Niño Guerrero. This is about the United States of America, what kind of government we mean to have, and what kind of nation we mean to be. The question is not: “What would we do if faced with a lawless president who is willing to carry out crimes up to and including murder and who attempts to stay in office when voted out?” The question is: “Now that we have a lawless president who is willing to carry out crimes up to and including murder and who already has once attempted to stay in office when voted out, what are we going to do?”

I suppose we could sit around and wait for the great patriots and constitutionalists such as Sen. Ted Cruz to rediscover their manhood, but that is a long wait for a train that ain’t coming.

Kevin D. Williamson, We Should Probably Stop Murdering People (bold added)

Behind the scenes of the Iran deal

Kushner and Witkoff have worked through an extraordinary mediator, Ali Al Thawadi, minister of strategic affairs in the office of Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, the widely respected prime minister of Qatar. Al Thawadi has brought a rare understanding of the Middle East and its culture. He has traveled to Tehran, by one count, four times in the past 10 days to nail down the peace framework. Al Thawadi, though almost unknown to the general public, was a key emissary in the Gaza peace talks, on Venezuela, and a half-dozen other projects of the Trump White House. He also worked on mediation efforts with the Biden administration.

“The main message we need to keep in mind is that we have a country that has been isolated from the world for the past 47 years, and individuals that literally don’t have any communication outside of their circle,” a source close to the mediation team explained. “We need to show them that there is a much bigger world, and they could be accepted in it.”

David Ignatius, Inside the Iran deal: Zigzag bargaining and a final framework.

This makes me more hopeful that there’s a real, meaningful deal, though I still say Trump left us weaker, Iran stronger, in the long run. I should always read Ignatius.

“Demotic spirit”?

The conservative writer Marc Thiessen tried to depict Trump’s lurid festival [the UFC fights for his birthday] as a sign of his demotic spirit, opening the White House to the sort of people who go to motocross rallies and monster truck shows. “If you’re offended by that, you may be an elitist snob,” he wrote. Put aside, for a moment, the fact that Thiessen once clucked that Barack Obama was failing to maintain “presidential dignity.” By this standard — that U.F.C. brawls, which John McCain once called “human cockfighting,” belong in the White House because lots of Americans like them — there can be no standards. Like Ultimate Fighting, porn is extremely popular, but I somehow doubt Thiessen would defend a Democratic president who invited a bunch of OnlyFans creators to the Oval Office while he was losing a war.

Michelle Goldberg

Today’s Tocqueville

Quotidian American life has suddenly been made fresh when seen through a visitor’s eyes.

Sometimes it takes a foreign observer to remind Americans of the bounties and blessings they too often take for granted. The gold standard for such observations came nearly two centuries ago, in the 1830s, when the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville toured the young republic and located its genius in ordinary institutions: township meetings, jury duty and local newspapers.

As the nation’s semiquincentennial approaches, Tocqueville’s reflections on America’s frontier spirit are particularly resonant: “America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement … No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and in his eyes what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do.”

Now America has Freddy from Germany [a visitor drawn by the World Cup], and while his prose can’t keep up with Alexis’s, his marveling at what he finds is no less heartening. For the better part of a decade, Americans have been instructed by their politics and their social media feeds that their country is something to apologize for, that it is a nation in decline. It doesn’t feel like decline when you readily encounter free refills and ice at fast-food restaurants, travel on a 46,876-mile interstate highway system with no border checks, visit the birthplaces of the blues, jazz, country and hip-hop, and patronize a diner chain so reliable that the federal government monitors natural disasters by whether its restaurants are still open (yes, Freddy does love a Waffle House).

Danielle Shapiro, Freddy the viral German soccer fan is bringing what America needed (gift link)

America’s Industrial Might

By the end of the first year of American involvement in the war, American arms production had risen to the same level as that of Germany, Italy, and Japan put together. By 1944, it was double that amount. By the end of the war, the United States had turned out two-thirds of all the military equipment used by the Allies combined: a staggering 280,000 warplanes, 100,000 armored cars, 86,000 tanks, 8,800 naval ships, 2.6 million machine guns, 650,000 artillery pieces, millions of tons of ordnance, and 41 billion rounds of ammunition. Accomplishing all this, while putting into uniform 11 million soldiers, 4 million sailors, 700,000 marines, and 240,000 coast guardsmen, meant drawing into the industrial workforce a great many women and minorities, on an even greater scale than occurred in World War I. Depression-era unemployment rates were now a distant memory, as the factories of the nation whirred with activity.

Wilfred McClay, Land of Hope.

All of this may well be true, but I can’t let pass any hint that the U.S. uniquely defeated the Nazis — not after reading Anthony Beever, Stalingrad, I can’t.

Shorts

In The Times, Nitsuh Abebe marveled at the marketing behind “PepsiCo’s denuded ‘Simply NKD’ Cheetos and Doritos, ‘now reimagined without any colors or artificial flavors’ — as if freshly picked from the Dorito bush and crisped in an elderly doritero’s brick oven.” (Via Frank Bruni)
It makes me ill that the Mavs had Jalen Brunson AND Luke. (An anonymous Dallas-area resident, to whom I’m related by blood and a shared bedroom with for much of our childhood.)
Andrew Jackson’s tyrannical instincts threatened the wholesome freedom of the American experiment. (Mark A. Noll, America’s God). (And to which former President is Trump oftenest linked?)
Only the hackiest screenwriter imaginable would script America’s decline this way.(Michelle Goldberg on the White House’s human cockfight in celebration of Trump’s 80th birthday.)
Ortega was right when he said that in the old societies people had customs, proverbs, stories, and sayings; today they have opinions, which they quite sincerely believe to be their own. What they do not know, however, is that they owe these opinions to the ideology that surrounds them, not to their independent intellectual efforts. (Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy)
[T]he outcome of war rarely rests on a tally of relative strength. War is a contest of wills. And in that contest, the hard men of Tehran appear to have scored a decisive victory over the vain man of Washington … Tehran took the measure of Trump’s courage. What it found was a bone spur. (Bret Stephens)
Anthropic sees itself as the A.I. company that’s most attuned to safety issues and eager for democratic oversight, but each move from the Trump administration has prompted the company to shout, “No, not like that!” (Ross Douthat)
If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your vocation, then at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell. (L.M. Sacasas)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

Monday June 15

Dreher’s back (and the sky isn’t always falling)

I can’t remember how it happened. I think maybe I asked for a one-week trial so I could read a piece someone else had linked to. But anyhoo, I ended up with a subscription to Rod Dreher’s Diary, his Substack.

He’s back stateside, and although he hasn’t turned into a cockeyed optimist, his writing features a lot of human interest. You’ll probably encounter him here fairly often (I write, after noting that I’ve clipped excerpts from more than one of his posts this time).

Karma?

As we drove back out to the highway, my mother looked to the side at the end of our blacktop road, and exclaimed with horror, “Look at that! They put a trailer there! On top of a cemetery!”

“No, it’s next to the cemetery,” I said, referring to the Starhill Cemetery.

“No, that’s a cemetery. A black cemetery,” she said. “How could they put a trailer there?!”

She told me a story I didn’t know. Back in the 1970s, she said, that site had been a black graveyard. Whoever owned the land ordered the tombstones torn down so it could be developed.

“I was at Miss Lorena’s one day,” Mama said, referring to my dad’s mom, “when this elderly black couple showed up in tears. They asked for her help. They said a man with a bulldozer was over there knocking down the tombstones of their ancestors. Nobody could stop it, it turned out, but Miss Lorena did find a map of who was buried where, and shared it with them. Turns out at least some of those people were able to have their ancestors dug up and reburied elsewhere, even though the tombstones were gone. It wasn’t right, what they did to those poor people.”

Beat.

“Course Mr. ____, who was driving the bulldozer, drowned later up in Lake Mary, in his truck. They found him in the back cab. He was trying to get out.” She said it in a tone conveying the message: don’t mess with the dead.

I doubt the Bulldozer Man died because he disturbed the dead, but me being me, I don’t rule it out. Anyway, I had not known the story of the black cemetery, the memory of which will leave this world after my mom’s generation dies (though I’d guess that the black people around here won’t so quickly forget). It was a painful reminder of what black folks in this part of the world had to suffer, and within my lifetime. I hate DEI as much as any conservative, and believe it makes race relations worse. But you know, it came from somewhere.

Rod Dreher, Wednesday in the Country with Mama

Writing and gardening

A Substacker I follow (you’d recognize the name) has been pretty quiet lately. Some of the best writers are like that. He explains:

I deeply appreciate all those of you who continue as paid subscribers despite my lack of ‘content’ here at present. A writer can’t be on output all the time, which is a drawback of this kind of ‘platform’ for which readers pay a monthly fee. Quite rightly, a lot of people don’t want to pay for nothing, and yet if a writer just pumps out ‘content’ for the sake of it, he or she will soon be dead from the neck up. These days, in any case, an AI can do this job much better than we ever can, and it will provide all the accompanying pictures and films too.

I’ve long thought of writing in the same way I think of gardening. It’s a seasonal process. You need to manure the soil and prepare it in order to have a flourishing, fecund summer of words. Then you need a fallow period. Plants don’t grow in the winter. I’ve been wintering for the last six months or so. Ticking over. Keeping an eye on the green manure. You can’t do anything creative without rest.

For years, I blogged original content pretty regularly and frequently. Then I ran out of things to write like that without repeating myself unduly. Now I mostly curate. But I’m fortunate that I don’t do this to put food on the family table. I don’t have it in me to write interesting things on deadline.

Where I’ll lay my bet

AI is not just another tool (there is no such thing as “just a tool,” as [Anton Barba-Kay] points out, but let that pass). The problem is that AI — like the rest of the digital world, but most especially — changes how we think and who we are as humans. Remember Jonathan Haidt a few weeks ago warning that AI is going to “hack our attachments”? This is the kind of thing Barba-Kay is talking about. We are being merged with the Machine, and don’t even realize it.

…

We need schools, families, fraternal organizations, reading groups, secret societies, oratories, shared houses of civility — a thousand cells as diffuse and decentralized as all those compounding micro-engagements by which the image of a boot stomping on a human face forever is now being replaced with that of a human face slack-jawed and dribbling on itself. These cells of resistance will be different from one another. They may involve a semi-annual meeting, and they may involve the whole of life. They can be organized around reading Boethius or reciting limericks, sharing meals or shooting guns. Some will correspond only by letter. Some will employ Claude to manage their mailing lists. What all will have in common is: an insistence that we, and only we, will decide how we live; an explicit prohibition on new technologies in the spaces and activities where they gently and slowly degrade us; and a pledge to hold each other to the path we have jointly chosen.

Rod Dreher, Sorry, Pope Leo, You Missed What AI Is (bold in original); block quote from Clare Coffey, The Future Belongs to Those Who Resist It.

I wouldn’t bet that Anton Barba-Kay and Rod Dreher have a better grasp of AI than the collective wisdom of the Pope and his advisers, but I appreciate their contribution to the back-and-forth that can’t happen too fast considering how fast the technology is coming on in the part of the population can influence the culture’s direction at a macro scale.

“Do you feel smart?”

For the partisan, inconvenient facts necessitate a kind of rhetorical two-step.

There are proud Trump cultists and there are embarrassed Trump cultists, and, if you press one of the latter on Trump’s viciousness—his dishonesty, his infidelity, his venality, his susceptibility to flattery, his inconstancy—he often will retreat into comfortable pragmatism: “He isn’t running for pope”—well!—“and I like his policies.” Further pressed, “policies” mainly indicates the economic conditions coincident with Trump’s first term in office, pre-COVID, which were only to a very minor degree the result of any Trump policy.

Turn around and press the embarrassed Trump cultist on the pragmatic questions—like that $270 fill-up—and he often will retreat into moralism, albeit a negative kind of moralism based in the perceived deficiencies of the Democrats rather than in any of Trump’s particular moral virtues, which, it is plain, simply do not exist.

The “woke” phenomenon, by attaching a kind of quasi-religious energy and rhetoric to ordinary progressive clichés, was a great boon to Trump and to Trumpism, providing a spiritualized target of opportunity: the infidel, or, in the case of anti-Trump conservatives such as myself, the heretic. The Democratic embrace (in some quarters) of socialism, in name and in fact, has been similarly fortifying for Trump-era Republicans: To be against is simpler than to be for, and socialism is a simple (and proper) thing to be against.

And so when We the People cough up a corrupt imbecile such as Ken Paxton, whom Republicans mean to put into the Senate, or when proximity to Trump debases and degrades such infinitely plastic men as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, the rationalization is: “Well, think of the policies!” But I wonder what those beneficial policies are. The illegally initiated and incompetently executed war in Iran that is the proximate cause of that $270 diesel bill? The obviously criminal massacres of civilians on the high seas? The gross self-dealing and corruption? The elevation of wildly unqualified yes-men such as Bill Pulte to high office? The deepening debt? The rising inflation? Steve Guest, a servile hack of the sort that gives servility and hackery a bad name, believes it is very important to appreciate the … refinishing of the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument. Failure to be impressed by this titanic achievement represents an “incurable case of TDS,” he writes, providing yet another (superfluous) example of the fact that writing about “TDS” is a nearly foolproof indicator of brain death.

Kevin D. Williamson

The even more corrupt return of “Sue and Settle”

Remember sue-and-settle? It’s coming soon to a dirtbag near you:

It will not surprise you to learn that Blanche lied by omission to senators when he said the slush fund wouldn’t move forward. That might be technically true, according to The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick, in the sense that the original mechanism for paying out money to criminals will change. But have no doubt: The Trump administration still intends to see to it that those criminals get rich.

I spoke with eight people familiar with the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund—including current and former Justice Department officials, current and former members of Congress, a defense attorney, and political operatives close to the administration. All said that Justice Department officials and people close to the White House have indicated that the payout idea has not actually been scrapped. Rather, they say, officials are exploring whether elements of the fund can be reactivated while also examining alternative arrangements to make sure loyalists get compensated.

…

Officials told me that those who believe they were victims of a weaponized government may ultimately need to file lawsuits so they can then receive settlements from a previously established Justice Department fund. Suing the government is not a new idea. But typically the government looks for ways to defend itself; in this case, officials are exploring proposals to facilitate litigation and to expedite payments without requiring an expensive and lengthy process that might draw attention. One former DOJ official told me that discussions are happening about how to provide legal support at scale to those who want to file lawsuits. “They’ll sue, and they’ll settle,” the former official said of the plan.

Instead of a dedicated “anti-weaponization fund” handing out millions to January 6 degenerates like candy on Halloween, there’ll be a pseudo-adversarial process in which each degenerate will need to file a formal legal complaint to receive his candy. (Assuming it survives a court challenge, of course.) Thank Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, who did nothing to prevent this heist when they had the chance.

…

I’ve always thought Trump was lucky in one sense to be an American and unlucky in another. He had the good fortune to live his life in a country that worships wealth, celebrity, showmanship, and crude machismo, and he took full advantage. But he had the bad fortune to be born an authoritarian demagogue within a constitutional system that still somewhat limits his ability to rule as he’d like.

Nick Catoggio, Black Marks.

“Sue and settle” was a disreputable practice whereby the Obama administration made end-runs around Congress by settling lawsuits brought, almost collusively, be ideologically compatible “adversaries.” Apparently, if Catoggio’s right, Trump will wink and nod and settle when, say, January 6 rioters sue for getting their feelings hurt.

Mergers and acquisitions

I’m not breaking any new ground here, but just in case you’d overlooked this sort of pressure, let me be explicit:

Newspapers and television networks increasingly are becoming part of multi-billionaire’s portfolios.
Those billionaires do a lot of business with government, either as contractors or as suppliants.
To an unprecedented extent, Donald Trump is openly transactional in his governance. People who aren’t nice to him don’t get any favors.
Corporations whose media subsidiaries aren’t nice to Trump don’t get favors.
Billionaires and corporations who depend on government for many of their billions therefore are careful to be (as) nice (as possible) to Trump.
Therefore, many newspapers and television networks are relatively toothless.

This is one reason I read the New York Times: it has not been rolled into a larger portfolio, and is not obliged to be nice or even to pull punches. Yes, the owner’s are very rich, but their riches come from the newspaper.

And, of course, I selectively read in the wild, wild west of the internet, where investigative depth may be rare but great fortunes rarely compromise coverage.

Shorts

Trump said something deranged, and Republicans rallied to his side. In other words, it was a day ending in y. (David French)
There is, of course, no one that Silicon Valley loves more than a “builder” and nothing, ever since the word first escaped containment in its cramped wet market of ideas, that it loves more than the builder’s agency. (Clare Coffey, italics added)
Incredulous at a “ceasefire” where the sides keep firing at each other, a New York Times writer (Scott Anderson, I think) referred to it as a “postmodern ceasefire.”
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. (Fernando Pessoa)
[F]aith in progress is just as basic to modernity as the Second Coming was to Christianity. (Rod Dreher, Live Not By Lies)
The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.” (Carl R. Truman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Midweek, 6/10/26

It’s the 59th anniversary of my high school graduation. Maybe if you went off to boarding school at 14, you’d remember the date of your graduation, too. After that warmup, I was the most grounded college freshman you ever saw.

Nth Thoughts on Charlie Kirk

I didn’t really know much about Charlie Kirk, but since his death, the more I’ve gotten to know about him, … the more it has become clear to me that Charlie’s personality, and especially his Christianity, was what held back the tide of darkness that is now rolling across the young Right like a tsunami. My general thesis — subject to change once I go even deeper into my investigation — is that active, serious Christianity is the only barrier that will keep this from happening to the Right, and the country.

Rod Dreher, Kirk Killing: The Radical Right’s Reichstag Fire.

Charlie Kirk was way too Trumpy/MAGA for my pure (Pharisaic?) tastes. For instance, he was complicit in some of the 2020 Election subversion:

Several people affiliated with the Falkirk Center [Namesakes: Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Charlie Kirk] were among the most prominent supporters of the Trump team’s efforts to overturn the election, including Falkirk fellows Jenna Ellis, a central member of Trump’s “elite strike force” legal team, and Eric Metaxas, who literally called for “fight[ing] to the death, to the last drop of blood” over the election.

Calum Best, The Falkirk Center: Liberty University’s Slime Factory

But I’ve got to admit that I had forgotten one of my own frequent barbs: If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait till you see the irreligious Right.

If Charlie Kirk helped hold back the tide of that darkness, bless him. I increasingly am persuaded in my pessimistic gut that there is no “that” that “can’t happen here.” We’re well down some treacherous paths already. Co-belligerent bringers-of-light-to-darkness may have to bracket some disagreements.

I appreciate stumbling onto this observation by Dreher.

(FWIW, TPUSA carries on or stumbles on or … we shall see: At TPUSA’s women’s summit, Christian influencers say feminism threatens motherhood.)

60 Minutes

First they came for the preening, powdered popinjays of television news, but I did not speak out because I am not a popinjay.

Forgive the sarcasm. Perhaps Mr. Pelley and his long career deserve more respect. But can we at least be proportionate and, unlike much of what he and his colleagues have been for so long, objective for a moment?

Mr. Pelley’s hysterical reaction—and that of many of his friends in the media—came in response to some editorial changes made by a new team at CBS News led by Bari Weiss, its president, whose sin is to want a different sort of journalism from that practiced at CBS and almost all other traditional media organizations for decades.

…

[I]f you think the traditional news networks have anything like the role they had 50 years ago, you’re living in a fantasy. The reasons for that decline are the whole point that the media people themselves miss. (Gerard Baker)

…

I’m not crazy about corporate bosses cringing before political power to advance their own interests, as may be happening with CBS. It is a further sign of America’s rapid slide into banana-republic territory, as a creeping crony capitalism favors those who can get closest to the government. But again, have a sense of proportion about the reality of our media landscape. You may not like the method, but any obeisance to President Trump is producing only incremental shifts in the wider media picture. The American news environment is vast and expanding. If viewers think they can no longer trust CBS News, they can read, watch or listen to literally thousands of other TV shows, podcasts, newspapers, social-media influencers and more. It is vanity in every sense of the term to think they are somehow less trustworthy than a superannuated news organization dominated by one political viewpoint.

Mr. Pelley was still at it this weekend, expanding his weird homicide analogy. In an interview with the New York Times, he described the firing of some of his colleagues as being like the murder of close family members. It was another example of the solipsistic specialness these media panjandrums possess. Millions of Americans lose their jobs every year because of corporate decisions, and most of them don’t provoke it by criticizing their employer. When it’s a TV personality, it’s a crime scene.

There was something unconsciously fitting about it all: the spectacle of one old media company offering a platform to an icon of another to say something unhinged, self-obsessed and divorced from reality.

Gerard Baker

I was a big fan of The Free Press when Bari Weiss left the New York Times and started it. I’m less enamored today, and I certainly assume no infallibility about Bari’s decisions at CBS.

But Baker is right that CBS has lost much relevance in today’s chaotic internet media environment, when even a distractible autodidact can put his opinions out there for anyone in the world to see. Heck, I don’t even write letters to the editor of our local Gannet rag any more, and they don’t really publish them.

War crimes in our name

In none of the [Caribbean and eastern Pacific] boat strikes has the military seized drugs or produced evidence that those it killed were involved in the drug trade. Many of the victims appear to have been fishermen or other laborers. This hasn’t stopped Trump from demonizing those killed or members of his administration from releasing celebratory video clips of vessels being destroyed from high above. Vice President J. D. Vance has cracked that he “wouldn’t go fishing right now in that part of the world.” In defending the campaign, called “Operation Southern Spear,” Hegseth uses bizarre theocratic rhetoric, warning that “Christian nations, under God” cannot be led astray by “radical narco-communists.”

Trump, meanwhile, spouts nonsense about the targeting program’s effectiveness. He has claimed that the strikes have prevented twenty-five thousand cocaine-related deaths in one year, though experts say that there have not been that many such deaths over the past fifty years in total.

Dominic Preziosi, ‘Simply Murder’.

A jilted lover’s wish for the sweet bluebird of happiness to crap all over the GOP’s birthday cake

Every once in a while, Kevin D. Williamson lets it all hang out:

Do you hear that? Skitter. Scuffle. Scurry … splash!

… As the SS Trump founders and careens, it is impossible to miss the sound of rat bellies hitting the water, with the rats snug in their little rat life-preservers and praying for a ratty little lifeboat to come along and pick them up.

And you know what that means: It is time to strafe the lifeboats.

How bad are things for Donald Trump? His overall approval rating is down to 38 percent, according to the New York Times poll, a reminder that half of any population has below-average intelligence and that 38 percent evidently couldn’t beat a chicken at tic-tac-toe.

…

Celebrity-wise, Trump is down to his hardcore groupies: Kid Rock, a 55-year-old white rapper who cannot figure out which is the front end of a fedora, and Lee Greenwood, a guy older than Joe Biden (really!) who is known for one treacly anthem so deeply impregnated with artificial sweetener that it’ll probably give listeners cancer through their hearing aids.

…

Even congressional Republicans are making squeaky little verminous noises vaguely suggestive of independence.

…

If Congress wants to stop the corruption, the illegal war, the trade anarchy, the massacres at sea, and the rest of it, then Congress can—and should—do what Congress has failed to do twice in Trump’s sorry career, which is to use the power of impeachment to remove him from office and to bar him from serving in any other office. Of course, Republicans will give no thought to doing that—it is, after all, the right thing, the patriotic thing, and the honorable thing.

… Mike Pence, who was Trump’s most fervid and po-faced apologist for years until by means of some bizarre moral parthenogenesis he produced a conscience at the very moment Trump’s star seemed to be setting in 2021, is out there trying to rally Republicans to the banner of Reaganism when what he should really do, if he had an ounce of self-respect, is don ashes and sackcloth, or maybe set himself on fire on the National Mall like one of those Vietnamese monks protesting the Ngô Đình Diệm regime way back when, while those of us who were willing to pay the price to be on the right side of this question from the beginning (and it was not inexpensive) roast a few s’mores over the hot embers of his smoldering sanctimony.

Which is basically what we should be doing to the Republican Party as a whole, because the Republican Party is still going to be what it is—dangerous and depraved—even when Trump has left the scene. Republicans from Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Mike Johnson to their media cheerleaders, allies, and apologists should go down with the Trump ship—and, if necessary, they should be made to go down with it. The Republican Party has, in this past decade and some, shown itself to be willing to embrace anything, to tolerate anything, and to justify anything, no matter how fundamentally opposed to the values and virtues Republicans once claimed to cherish and champion, no matter how grotesque or unpatriotic or un-Christian, as long as it helps them stay in office—not even in power, which would be an almost understandable thing, but simply in office, sinecure-ensconced castrati who offer nothing to Congress and who cling to their seats only for the sake of their modest salaries and some staff and an air-conditioned place to hang out on Capitol Hill between Fox News hits.

In anno Domini 2026, there simply is no honorable way to be associated with the Republican Party.

After such lascivious quotation, I think I owe y’all a gift link.

Me, too

Williamson keeps posting daily:

[M]y preferred electoral outcome for the immediate future is seeing Republicans “stomped into goo.” I know what that means in practical terms. I don’t know that we have a word for negative polarization that is bipartisan, but, if there is one, that is approximately what I am feeling right now. If there were a way to get Republicans stomped without the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez getting more power, then I’d be all for that. But there isn’t.

My feelings almost exactly.

For the record

I have noted the re-emergence of preventable diseases like measles due to vaccine opposition.

I have nothing to say except What is wrong with you people?!

Although I have never understood generalized objections to vaccines (sometimes justified by “religion” of some vague sort), I tolerated a very low level of it. But the higher levels of vaccine objection are leading to systemic stresses. This may be a case, like motorcycle helmets, where we’re just going to have to say “sorry about your baffling conscience, mate” and make something mandatory. (But then my religious freedom lawyer instincts kick in, and I see some legal timebombs if they try to forbid religious objections while exempting for medical contraindications. It’s complicated.)

Indiana Election Update

I previously wrote:

Indiana does not register voters by political party, but it has some arcane rules intended to avoid mischievous crossover voting: basically, you are not entitled to vote in a party’s primary unless you voted for a majority of its candidates in the last election or intend to vote for a majority of its candidates in the upcoming election.

…

But let’s take the obnoxious system for what it is. Mischievous crossover voting is supposed to be eliminable by the arcane rules alluded to. But the way to enforce those arcane rules, normally, is to have partisan poll-watchers to challenge voters they think are not qualified to vote in the parties’ primaries.

Copenhaver and her supporters did not recruit such poll-watchers, but waited confidently for the election results and then, shocked by the results, went combing desperately through social media for people who boasted (truthfully or falsely — you know how social media roll) that they took crossover ballots to vote for Spencer Deery but intend to vote for the Democrat in the General Election.

Now they have filed, under seal, a list of 14 such people whose depositions they apparently intend to take in order to reduce Deery’s vote count, after the fact, instead of the normal course of challenging those voters upfront. So much for ballot secrecy and norms.

The good news:

The MAGA list of 14 is now down to 11 because 3 of the people they listed didn’t live or vote in the district.
There are reports that something like 7 of the 11 remaining challenged crossover voters have been crossing over (and back) repeatedly over many election cycles.
It appears to me clearer than before that there is no Indiana legal precedent for challenging crossover votes after the election; as I wrote, “the way to enforce those arcane rules, normally, is to have partisan poll-watchers [on election day] to challenge voters they think are not qualified.”
A lot of conscientious local Democrats are reporting that they regularly cross over because this is a sufficiently Red part of the state that the GOP primary is, for practical purposes, the election.
It doesn’t appear to me that public outrage over this stunt is waning any when the topic comes up.
Finally, the Recount Commission is going to finish the recount before they officially consider the MAGA ploy.

Finally, on that 4th point, I’m going to retreat a bit from my opposition to the state conducting partisan primaries. I’ve learned, quite coincidentally, that deeming party primaries purely “private” was one of the Jim Crow-related ploys to deprive black voters of an effective voice in heavily-partisan areas where the primary election effectively was the real election. Perhaps a deep dive into history (or a focused dive into an AI chatbot) would have told me that, but I think I got it from a reliable person on a podcast.

Shorts

Universities have started to treat education like a designer handbag: you claim it is valuable because it is scarce, not because a lot of really meaningful stuff happens in the eight semesters you’re there. (Walter Russell Meade on Ben Sasse’s Not Dead Yet podcast)
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, formally known as the Secretary of Defense, warned on June 6 that Europe faced what he called an invasion of dangerous ideologies arriving by sea, linking immigration to the legacy of the D-Day landings in remarks in Normandy. (Ummmm. Like, Normandy is in Europe, right? But I suppose Hegseth arrived by air, so it’s okay.)
Mindless optimism is the only antidote I know to rational despair. (Bret Stephens via Frank Bruni)
Mary Geddry rolled her eyes at one of the president’s favorite boasts: “Trump has been posting and ranting about the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the MoCA … In his telling, passing a basic cognitive screening is proof of ‘extreme intelligence,’ because nothing says genius like repeatedly announcing that you successfully identified a camel and drew a clock.” (Frank Bruni)
Grace Dent appraised the diners at the exclusive, expensive restaurant Skof in Manchester, England: “The crowd, during this particular service, at least, was older, possibly retired, and wantonly spending their children’s inheritance on compressed malwina strawberries with jasmine cream and amasake sorbet with milk oolong tea. The more I travel, the more I’m convinced that millennials stand to inherit nothing more than a pile of Michelin-starred restaurant receipts and gout medication.”(Frank Bruni)
I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city. (Frank Lloyd Wright)
He wrote poems and threw them away the moment they were finished, because to keep them would have been to take them seriously, and to take them seriously would have been to betray them. The one thing he feared was the doctor who wanted to cure him of being himself. (Idle News Pantheon)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

Belated Sunday post

Somehow, Thomas Sunday got away from me.

Headstrong and mis-shapen

It seems odd to open a Sunday post with a quote from a neuroscientist philosopher who has not yet found himself able to profess forthrightly any active Christian faith. If and when he does, it almost certainly will be Orthodox, as I believe he himself once acknowledged.

I open with it nonetheless because it … well, I hope you’ll see:

Unfortunately, reason on its own will lead you astray very, very quickly …

People detect from what I wrote in The Master and His Emissary that I am not a huge admirer of the [left-hemisphere inspired] Reformation … Unfortunately, it brought with it a kind of headstrong view that ‘now we’re in the clear. Everything must be made explicit. The word triumphs over the image’ and so on. …

The trouble with the left hemisphere is … it tends to be headstrong. It tends to think it knows far more than it does.

Iain McGilchrist in a YouTube video with Freddy Sayers of Unherd.

I expect to chew on this for a long while, hoping to digest it and build some new intellectual tissue with it, so that I think by it rather than about it.

If you’re unfamiliar with Iain McGilchrist, this book blurb for one of his smallest books may help:

Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. And nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focussed, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.

Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. It is not what each hemisphere does – they are both involved in everything – but how it does it, that matters. And the prime difference between the brain hemispheres is the manner in which they attend. For reasons of survival we need one hemisphere (in humans and many animals, the left) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we need, while the other, the right, keeps an eye out for everything else. The result is that one hemisphere is good at utilising the world, the other better at understanding it.

Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, attention has the power to alter whatever it meets. The play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. How you attend to something – or don’t attend to it – matters a very great deal. This book helps you to see what it is you may have been trained by our very unusual culture not to see.

The extent to which Protestantism neglects to “attend” to the Christian Gospel with the right hemisphere not only makes it “headstrong,” as McGilchrist has it, but oblivious to much that is precious and edifying.

Reductionism

Weber clearly thought that modern people are disenchanted because they believe that, in principle, a scientific explanation can be given for natural phenomena, with no need for recourse to magical means to invoke spirits or gods. As an explanation of the natural world, Weber thought that science was replacing religion, and empirical fact was replacing belief.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry.

(Note that “scientific explanation” is fundamentally a left-hemisphere explanation.)

Anti-Institutional

The American evangelical tradition may not be as “liberal,” in the nineteenth-century or classical meaning of the term, as it sounds, but the focus on individual action — sans church, sans family, sans social structures of whatever sort — has predominated since the days of Whitefield. The enduring contribution to evangelicalism of the republicanism of the Revolutionary era was the undermining of hereditary trust in institutions. The enduring contribution of the Great Awakenings in the colonial and early national periods was to substitute the voluntary society for the church.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

Many Americans would read this and say “Damn right! Institutions just get between me-and-Jesus!”

I intend it as an indictment. One might define the offense as Headstrongness.

Institutional failures in my mind are outweighed by personal failures. An institutional Church (at least one of them, anyway) is a near-infinitely safer guide to spiritual health than oneself is.

Barmen Declaration

Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.

Karl Barth, The Barmen Declaration (Germany, 1934), quoted by Stanley Hauerwas in Resident Aliens.

Somehow the Barmen Declaration seemed especially timely when I stumbled across it again. If I’m not careful, I’ll become “WEAK on Crime and terrible on foreign policy.”

Great Schism

The centuries succeeding that day in 1054 have yielded two very different visions of what it means to be truly Christian, what it means to be the Church. These differences are not only in terms of mindset and vision, but also in core doctrines that are regarded as central to salvation itself.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, (“that day in 1054” being the conventional dating of the Great Schism, the separation of the Patriarch of Rome (i.e., now the modern Pope) from the rest of the Church).

Step in the right direction?

I am not at all convinced that a move from, say, atheism to Wicca is necessarily “a step in the right direction” — i.e., once you’ve entered the genus-town of “religion,” you’re closer to the species-house of Christianity than you were before. Indeed, I wonder whether many people might be less interested in Christianity as a result of such a move, since they might plausibly think that as long as they’re operating within the genus, does it really matter what species they prefer? (The “We all get to God in our own way” line has had a very long run and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.)

Alan Jacobs

Angry and vengeful

It is sinful to ascribe to God the characteristic features of fallen man by alleging, for example, that God is angry and vengeful, and therefore He must be propitiated and appeased. Such an attitude wants to make it appear that it is God Who needs curing, and not man. But this is sacrilegious. The sinful man, who is characterized by egoism and arrogance, is offended. We cannot say that God is offended. . . . Consequently, sin is not an insult to God, Who must be cured, but our own illness, and therefore we need to be cured

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Everybody’s got their schtick

Today’s leading Christian personalities podcast, YouTube, Tweet/X, TikTok, Instagram and exert their presence through every form of social media. The audience is less national. There may never be another Billy Graham about whom everybody knows. Today’s influencers may have millions following them but are typically unknown outside their niche.

Everybody, Christian or not, is increasingly siloed. We self-collate, listen to and watch those who entertain us and typically tell us what we want to hear. Of course, the most popular influencers are usually provocative, outrageous, extremist, often hateful. The cerebral, thoughtful, reflective and courteous are less captivating.

[Megan] Basham, like all successful influencers, has her schtick. Her Shepherds for Sale targets evangelicals who supposedly have betrayed conservative Christianity in favor of leftist dollars or secular approval. Her tweets continue this theme and offer a robust MAGA Christian perspective, hammering non-MAGA Christians as weak sisters or worse. Every day is a new cosmic drama. In this regard, she is very talented.

Mark Tooley, America’s Most Influential Baptists?.

Basham has obsessively targeted so many evangelicals for literally selling out, mostly implausibly, that I suspect projection of her own financial motivations.

Nominalism, Realism, Human Rights

Most menacing of all was the United Nations. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War, its delegates had proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To be a Muslim, though, was to know that humans did not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

Preliminary research suggests that the absoluteness of Holland’s indictment is unwarranted — that things are a little more complicated than “humans [do] not have rights.” There’s also more than a grain of truth to it.

There are, sadly, sectarian Christianities who come close to this. You can get to that position from Christianish premises filtered through philosophical nominalism.

An hypothesis

I quoted a few days ago: Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. (Francis Bacon via Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

Hypothesis: the works in the spiritual realm, too. Thus I, a Calvinist, was more open to Orthodoxy than some “spiritual-but-not-religious” addlepate.

IVF

One of my unpopular opinions is that there’s something dodgy about IVF. Thoughtful Protestant Matthew Lee Anderson makes The Biblical Case Against IVF.

I’m not going to try to anticipate and rebut any reaction that my position is cruel. I just wanted to drive a stake in the ground as a memorial against the Technological Imperative. Not all of us have decided that if something is inevitable, we should relax and enjoy it.

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

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 and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Whole lotta AI goin’ on

This oughta go in Frank Bruni’s “Love of Sentences”

“I Feel So Sorry for My A.I. Sunglasses.” Sam Anderson writes a wonderful little review of his fancy Meta glasses: “Look, it would be easy to dunk on my very expensive, staggeringly incompetent sunglasses. Critiquing A.I. these days is like shooting fish in a barrel — and I mean poorly animated fish that keep sprouting human fingers inside a barrel that, as soon as you ask it a question or two, reveals itself to be a Nazi. Meta is investing heavily to promote its new product (a Super Bowl ad starring Spike Lee, a brick-and-mortar store on Fifth Avenue), which made me curious to take a peek through the eyes of the future. Yet A.I. glasses also feel so clearly unnecessary, so easily adaptable for malevolent ends. I was perfectly ready to hate them. Instead, very quickly, I started to feel sorry for my sunglasses. They were like a kid who hasn’t done any of the reading but keeps being called on in class — and who also can’t make friends, because all of his classmates think he’s a spy.”

Front Porch Republic

It’s not so much that I’m obsessed with AI as it is that the people I read with pleasure currently are obsessed with it.

How very, very ABA

The Wall Street Journal reveals/reminds that the American Bar Association has a DEI requirement for accreditation (and that ABA Accreditation is all but mandatory for a law school’s success).

It wasn’t this issue that caused me to drop ABA membership early in my law practice, but another where the bien pensants “think” one way, I another. The power levers in the ABA are, and long have been, controlled by people who feel like space aliens to me, and who probably think I’m a troglodyte.

Populist lessons

The lesson, as I see it, is that populism can never deliver on its fantastic promises: to insulate a national economy from the global one, while maintaining prosperity; to represent the will of the people, while persecuting a large share of the people who oppose populist policies; to champion “democracy” through illiberal means; to pretend you’re speaking for the forgotten man as you grow fat, rich, and arrogant in power. By the way, that’s as true of left-wing populism as it is of the populism of the right. As someone with some family ties to Hungary, I’m just glad to see Orban gone.

Bret Stephens

Pope versus an illiterate degenerate

Pope Leo is not likely to have the honor of going the way of my patron saint, Thomas Becket, that “turbulent priest” …

No, these are not those kinds of times. Pope Leo only has the American president, an illiterate and a degenerate, to snipe at him on social media. Trump is what you’d get if you’d given Benito Mussolini a frontal lobotomy and a double orchiectomy. He will order and exult in the mass murder of seagoing South Americans whose names nobody knows, but whatever else he may have in common with late-life King Henry VIII, the American president is not likely to make any martyrs in the classical sense.

…

One here recalls the famous words of Francis Cardinal George:

I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.

Prophetic? I think so–properly understood.

The role of the prophet is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Christianity. A prophet may or may not foretell future events, but making predictions is not the prophet’s main business—his business very often is the here and now. The prophet is a kind of public prosecutor, speaking in an inspired way to the shortcomings of the people, of the state, and, especially, of government and religious leaders ….

Kevin D. Williamson, The Pope Against the Idolators

“Shorts” on AI as Christian Heresy

I stumbled onto a piece by L.M. Sacasas (I think his intimates call him Michael; I’m not his intimate) that warrants many “shorts” of its own:

[T]he narrative of technological inevitability … frames the development of technology as a deterministic process to which human beings have no choice but to adapt, and to do so on the terms dictated by the emerging technological apparatus.
[T]he victors write the history, in technology as in war, and the technological “paths not taken” are often suppressed or ignored.
The narrative is useful precisely to the degree that it is the rhetorical equivalent of washing one’s hands in the face of events you have the power to sway but would rather not.
Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it.
We must at least entertain the possibility that the appropriate response to certain technologies at certain times is simply outright refusal. We do not need to water down our conviction with a myriad of qualifiers about how there are undoubtedly good and proper uses.
AI in its present mode can be understood as a fundamentally conservative rather than radically disruptive force to the degree that its function is to preserve modernity’s core commitments to scale, efficiency, rationality, control, and prediction.
[W]e continue to reap the consequences of a failure to address the problems of growth and complexity in a manner that would serve the human person and human communities.
We are discovering … that AI is especially adept at displacing or, from the techno-optimist’s perspective, liberating us from human labour in contexts wherein humans had already conformed, willfully or otherwise, to the pattern of a machine. Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease. (That last, bolded, sentence was a pull-quote and very apt.)
[W]e are operating with a “human of the gaps” model when we try to locate the essence of the human creature by pointing to what cannot yet be accomplished by a machine, whether these be matters of physical prowess, cognitive ability, or creativity. Such an approach to the human is misguided, just as it was when it was applied to God.
Without suggesting that this is an exhaustive and definitive account of the human person, I would invite us to consider the possibility that what is distinctive about the human should be sought in the quality of our capacity to respond to our Creator, the Alpha and Omega of our existence.
[O]ur flourishing is conditioned not so much on the accomplishment of certain feats or tasks, many of which, in any case, exclude the youngest and oldest and most vulnerable among us. Rather, it is conditioned on our capacity to respond to the call of God on us as unique individuals made in his image and thus made to resonate with his presence as it is manifest to us throughout creation.
“[S]tillness … is not mere soundlessness or a dead muteness; it means, rather, that the soul’s power, as real, of responding to the real … has not yet descended into words.” (Quoting Josef Pieper, Leisure As the Basis of Culture)

L.M. Sacasas, AI as Christian Heresy.

This is one to return to periodically until I’ve modified my DNA with it or found a fallacy and dumped it. I want to make sure I’m not acting like a machine.

Shorts (more generally)

Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
It was once the useful role of conservatives to stand athwart declining moral standards, yelling “Stop”. They lost whatever right they had to play that role when they got behind Trump. (Bret Stephens)
She says she has critiqued Trump for ten years so she should be trusted when she “defends” him thus: He is too stupid to realize that the même was sacrilegious.
The messianic iconography of Mr. Trump’s AI-generated image was more lavish than that which the North Korean regime uses to promote the cult of Kim Jong Un. (J Budziszewski)

Elsewhere in Tipsyland

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

Easter/Palm Sunday

A blessed Easter to readers in Western Christian traditions like the wife sitting four feet from me as I type (who, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t read this blog). Blessed is He that comes in the Name of the Lord to readers in Eastern Christian traditions.

Mystical pilgrimage

There is a deeper pilgrimage that the Church encourages and is available to all. It has no commercialism, nor is it fraught with temptation. It is quite simple:

The whole world is Passover in Jerusalem in 33 A.D. Everywhere we go, we are there. In the liturgical life of the Church, the details of that city, at that time, are drawn out in careful detail in the services of Holy Week. Every celebration of the Divine Liturgy is a making-present of that time and that place.

…

This pilgrimage is not an act of imagination. That which is truly “mystical” is not imaginary – it is real and true.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

The Orthodox Church is entering Holy Week, and I feared that this post was too oblivious to that. Then Fr. Stephen came through for me. If you read nothing else, click the link to read his thoughts on pilgrimage.

On the construct of “religion”

To ask a census-taker how many Chinese are Buddhist is rather like asking one how many Westerners are Aristotelian or pragmatist.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence

Why might a doctrinal conservative be an Episcopalian?

The reader will reasonably ask why I became an Episcopalian when I don’t like progressive theology. One reason is, of course, family. Another is my longstanding love of Anglican choral music and of the cadences in the Book of Common Prayer (even in most post-1662 versions), neither of which can, in my view, be matched by any other Christian tradition in English.

Joshua T. Katz.

I, self-confessed homo adorans, cannot despise that position. I wonder how many Episcopalians quietly reject the progressive theology, staying for the worship. I have even seen retired conservative protestant pastor who moved to the Episcopal Church.

Religion and Politics

Q: So how would you respond to one of those editors responsible for hiring and firing who says “Look: the big story here is obviously the big decline of Christianity in terms of participation. Why do I spend money on a Religion Beat desk when it’s a subject that’s declining in relevance?

A: Well, see, the problem is that relevance then is defined primarily in terms of politics. “Name me some big headlines out of this.” Well, by definition a big headline is something related to Donald Trump. Politics. The mid-term elections. “Will Latino Evangelicals help Republicans again?” If your religion is politics, you’re not going to be able to justify a reporter spending six months digging deep, diving into, the statistics on confession, marriages, baptisms … what congregations are producing priests, nuns, pastors, clergy, etc. …?” That’s not going to get you big headline about American politics.

Todd Wilkins and Terry Mattingly, The story that will not die: REVIVAL in America! (GetReligion podcast)

This touches a recurring theme of their podcast series (named after the admission by a New York Times editor that his paper “just doesn’t get religion”): religion is a guise for politics according to essentially every newsroom in America. Politics is real, religion not so much.

But I have a complementary theory: religion is a guise for politics according to the revealed preferences of hundreds of thousands of churches, too. This feels like one of those things I just can’t un-see, having seen it once.

The Orthodox Church has people with strong political preferences — but not remotely homogenous, in my limited experience, and their obsessions are not the Church’s devotions.

None of this undermines the truth of the Christian Gospel, but corruptio optima pessima.

Another thing I cannot un-see

Because of the way Reformed and literal interpretations of the Bible had empowered ordinary people and their leaders in creating a Christian civilization, that hermeneutic enjoyed immense implicit authority. An obvious problem by the late 1850s, however, was that this wonderfully energizing use of Scripture had created multiple, conflicting Christian civilizations. … The Reformed, literal hermeneutic had helped build a biblical civilization—actually, two biblical civilizations. But the hermeneutic itself could not reconcile the divergent interpretations it had produced.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

Fifth Sunday of Great Lent

Christian America

One of the reasons I have long been hostile toward the idea of Christianizing America is that the variety of Christianity that would be in instantiated would be what Ross Douthat has called “Bad Religion” in a book subtitled “How We Became a Nation of Heretics.” I don’t trust power-hungry American heretics to treat Orthodox Christian better than secularist progressives would.

That concern has only grown

the more deeply I am shaped as an Orthodox Christian (and see how that differs from mainstream American Christianities), and
the more particularly sinister figures like Lance Wallnau appear to be leading Christian Nationalism.

These are not C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christians.” They are ideologues with plans for how to get power and how to (mis)use it once they have it.

Of course they’re not alone. Other groups seek power for illiberal ends, too. (To the best of my knowledge, none are Orthodox Christian and I would be surprised if they were.)

I don’t toss and turn in agony over these groups, but it leaves me in the camp of liberal democrats, and if you think “liberal democrats” means I’m a crazy lefty, you’re part of the problem. (Relative to today’s political spectrum, I think I’m positioned center-right because of deal-killer differences with those to my left.)

Alas, the hopes for liberal democracy do seem dim, and I pray daily “If this is the end of liberal democracy in America, guide us into a beneficial different path ….” I also thank God for my “living in a civilization where beliefs, texts, symbols, and ethical standards of Christianity are still woven into our common life.”^* All it takes to assure that continues, I think, is for people to live as Christians — no political program required.

^* Many, including even notorious atheist Richard Dawkins, looking soberly at the cultural alternatives, now call themselves “cultural Christians.”

Something for rumination

Both Dostoevski and Tolstoi made me cling to a faith in God, and yet I could not endure feeling an alien in it. I felt that my faith had nothing in common with that of Christians around me.

Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness.

[Here I typed my pedantic gloss, but then deleted it to let readers ruminate on their own.]

What a well-formed Catholic believes about Jews and Irael

The Catholic position on matters of ‘Zionism,’ to which I fully subscribe, is as follows: all forms of antisemitism are to be unequivocally condemned; the state of Israel has a right to exist; but the modern nation of Israel does not represent the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies and hence does not stand beyond criticism.

Bishop Robert Barron, admonishing antisemitic “Catholic Mean Girl” Carrie Prejean Boller who was delusionally claiming that her ouster from the White House Religious Liberty Commission was anti-Catholic.

Stirring things up at Yale

A few years after I left Calvinist Protestantism for Eastern Orthodoxy, the great Yale historian of religion, Jaroslav Pelikan, left Lutheranism for Orthodoxy. I mentioned it to a friend who had attended Yale in Grad School.

“Well, that will stir things up,” he opined.

Me: “Why? I had no idea that Yale still had some strong religious tradition to offend.”

Him: “It will stir things up because people won’t understand taking religion seriously enough to change it.”

I thought of that as a read sociologist Ryan Burge’s recent post Inertia Still Rules American Religion.

“Inertia” has bad connotations. I encourage everyone to take a good hard look at Orthodox Christianity, but I also tend to cast at least a little bit of side-eye at people who switch Churches. I cannot entirely reconcile that except for the possibility that I’m a censorious ass. But try as a might, somehow, there seems to me to be something not entirely unhealthy about not looking at the grass on the other side of the fence if you’re being nourished on your side. (Have I equivocated enough?) Anyway, if your teeth are on edge where you are, come take a look at us.

(My experience pre-Orthodoxy clashes a bit with Burge’s definitional “If someone moves from one type of Protestant to another type of Protestant, that’s not a switch.” When I left generic Evangelicalism for Calvinism, it felt like a switch. The change from Calvinist to Orthodox, of course, was orders of magnitude “switchier.”)

The Ark of Salvation

[I]t’s worth thinking about the Church (Orthodox) as an ark of salvation and safety. It is an ancient image of the Church, a place where God gathers those who are being rescued. The ark is not an instrument of flood management, however. It is a raft. Modernity imagines itself as the manager of the world and its historical processes. It is an idea that is itself part of the destructive flood of our time.

…

From onboard the ark, we view things a bit differently. First, we trust that God is the Lord of the tsunami just as surely as He is Lord of the sparrow and the lillies in the field. The mystery of how He works all things for our salvation is summarized in His crucifixion. Most of that mystery is simply opaque. It is a confession of faith that the Cross represents the interpretation of all things. It is what I learned on board the ark.

That being the case, it is for us to give thanks for all things, try to stay dry, and wait for the waters to recede.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Riding the Tsunami of History

Gratuitous

Having adopted a method of investigation which in its nature precludes the perception of spiritual qualities, it is gratuitous, to say the least, to pronounce that the object one investigates is to be explained in non-spiritual categories alone.

Yet it is the conclusions achieved by this kind of [circular] reasoning which for the last 300 years or more have been regarded as constituting knowledge in a virtually exclusive sense and which moreover have been termed scientific.

Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature

“I don’t believe in anything,” answered Pendragon very briskly, with a bright eye cocked at a red tropical bird. “I’m a man of science.”

G.K. Chesterton, The Absence of Mr. Glass, a Father Brown mystery.

Fleeing the world

As St. Paisios (1924–1994) put it, “The monk flees far from the world, not because he detests the world, but because he loves the world and in this way he is better able to help the world through his prayer, in things that don’t happen humanly but only through divine intervention. In this way God saves the world.”

Robin Phillips and Stephen De Young, Redicovering the Goodness of Creation

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

Pi Day

Subtle subversion

I went to a High School Show Choir show the other day. The highlight was a top Show Choir doing a star-spangled show with red, white and blue, flouncy red and white skirts, high energy, a made-in-America ballad (Aaron Copland, The Promise of Living), and other familiar pieces like Can’t tell a book by looking at the cover and America (from West Side Story)

The even had a Tejano-looking horn line, complete with black cowboy hats, adding a Mariachi flavor to one interlude in the singing.

All in all, it was a show that celebrated diverse America, subtly pushing back against … oh, just about anyone who fancies that Real America is white and European.

That’s the kind of resistance that’s hard for tyrants to crush.

Attacking the First Amendment

The bleeding-heart RINO communists at the Wall Street Journal investigated one particular aspect of immigration enforcement: the handling of peaceful protesters:

Out of 279 people accused of attacking federal officers on social media over the past year, 181 were U.S. citizens.
Nearly half of these Americans were never formally charged, and none have been convicted at trial.
Many faced public doxxing—release of personal information such as addresses and photos—leading to death threats.
Some bore financial burdens from bail, legal fees, and lost workdays defending themselves.

It’s impossible to keep up with all the outrages. Kudos to Brenna T. Smith, Hannah Critchfield, Brian Whitton, Belle Cushing and Emma Scott of the WSJ for trying.

Writing

Writing is a precarious profession. We are broke, for the most part. We work jobs we often don’t enjoy to keep the lights on: Faulkner at the post office, Vonnegut and his disastrous car dealership, every writer you know and their faculty gig. The average author doesn’t make enough from their royalties to clear the poverty line. Most books don’t even make back their advance, meaning they earn no royalties for the author at all. When Anna Burns won the Booker Prize, she thanked her food bank. Our work is stolen to train the software of multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence companies run by people who believe art is a problem to be solved.

Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Shorts

Against the “flood the zone” strategy of misinformation that the current administration seems to favor, lawyers and judges, bound by legal, professional and social obligations to work in a reality-based world, can function as a critical levee. (Deborah Pearlstein, The Justice Department Wants to Make It Safe for Government Lawyers to Lie – shared link.)
[Self-identified Secretary of War Pete] Hegseth says that in order to win wars like the one now being waged in Iran, “our warriors deserve legal teams as lethal and focused as they are,” though he does not elaborate on what a lethal legal team might look like. (Sarah Fitzpatrick and Missy Ryan, The Pentagon’s Lawyers Are Now Under Review)
“The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits (sic) right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that.” (Mr. Obvious nominee Pete “Big Hair” Hegseth)
“I’m not worried. I do whatever the f**k I want. DJT will pardon me,” – Corey Lewandowski.
We know not through our intellect, but through our experience. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty via Economist)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

Moral Luck (formerly “Putative Virtue”)

For whatever reason, I’ve been doing a bit more reflection than usual. Piling several of those reflections into a single, long post didn’t feel right, so this likely will be followed by other stand-alone posts, each with my fingerprints all over it:

Our human moral agency is not so strong that it can overcome every conceivable shock and influence thrown at us. Sometimes, human character turns bad owing to things beyond our control. “Moral luck” is thus a way to raise the question of whether we truly possess a meaningful freedom and true moral self-determination. If the right temptation could bring any of us down, in what sense is one person truly “good” and another “bad”?

Timothy Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty. The first time I read this, it really resonated with me.

Is a man virtuous who avoids adultery only by being so homely and mediocre that beautiful women don’t come on to him? Is he more virtuous than the handsome, powerful adulterer he accuses satyriasis?

Or again:

“Lucy,” said the trader, “your child’s gone; you may as well know it first as last. You see, I know’d you couldn’t take him down south; and I got a chance to sell him to a first-rate family, that’ll raise him better than you can.” The trader had arrived at that stage of Christian and political perfection which has been recommended by some preachers and politicians of the north, lately, in which he had completely overcome every humane weakness and prejudice. His heart was exactly where yours, sir, and mine could be brought, with proper effort and cultivation.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

“Grant me to see my own transgressions and not to judge my brother.”

We don’t do that

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

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

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

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

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

Peggy Noonan

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

David Brooks