Political 5/30/25

What it takes to tick off David Brooks

Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”

This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth.

In fact, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, JD Vance used his precious time to make a point similar to Deneen’s. Vance said, “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”

Elite snobbery has a tendency to set me off, and here are two guys with advanced degrees telling us that regular soldiers never fight partly out of some sense of moral purpose, some commitment to a larger cause — the men who froze at Valley Forge, the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy and Guadalcanal.

But that’s not what really made me angry. It was that these little statements point to the moral rot at the core of Trumpism, which every day disgraces our country, which we are proud of and love. 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.

Mild-mannered David Brooks, popping a vein (shared link, bold added).

The rest of the column was quite good, but the idea that a primitive, atavistic President would deploy his “throne-sniffing sycophants” (H/T Kevin D. Williamson, below) to reduce the nation to primitive atavism struck me as (a) too sophisticated conceptually, but perfect temperamentally, for Trump (a “stupid, lazy and angry” man — Kevin D. Williamson again); (b) exactly what his smart and unprincipled intimates would realize is necessary for their success; and (c) the kind of radical moral rot that Brooks sniffs out and exposes to us all.

And for his ability to distill evils to their essence, I am grateful.

Stupid, lazy and angry

We’ve been here before, of course. Donald Trump and his team have been three weeks away from announcing a groundbreaking new health care plan for … what, just about a decade now? Donald Trump’s confidence in addressing a complex subject has a linear relationship to his ignorance regarding that subject, and so we have got gems like this presidential declaration of ineptitude: “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” It isn’t the case that nobody knew—lots of people knew. Some of those people had good ideas, some had terrible ideas, but they knew it was complicated. The guy who didn’t know? The one who spent most of his life as a Manhattan gadfly, a game-show host with side hustles in pro wrestling and porn. That guy didn’t know.

…

There are no conspiracies. There are no secrets. Everything is more or less what it seems. … [T]he obvious explanation for Trump’s eccentricity (or most anything else) is almost always the correct explanation. Which is why I have been writing for all these years that the key to understanding the Trump administration is that its central figure, Donald Trump, is stupid, lazy, and angry …

There are people around Trump, such as Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, who are not stupid or lazy (though both are distinctly angry men) but are functionally indistinguishable from the stupid and the lazy because they are throne-sniffing sycophants who dread a return to the private sector more than almost anything else in this life.

…

It’s all right there to see: Trump, the supposed master negotiator, is as a matter of practical fact able to effectively negotiate exclusively in situations in which no substantial negotiation is required: with people he can fire, for example, or with utterly dependent parties. He calls this “negotiating from a position of strength” instead of “bossing around your cowering flunkies.”

Kevin D. Williamson

It didn’t take long for the courts to figure this out

The Abrego Garcia ruling and the Alien Enemies Act litigation have left legal scholars warning of a constitutional crisis. But a more tangible effect, attorneys told me, has been the erosion of the “presumption of regularity”—the benefit of the doubt given to the government in court proceedings. It’s based on the idea that federal officers and attorneys are operating in good faith, and not trying to achieve political goals through acts of subterfuge.

As judges see the administration saying one thing in public and another in court, they have started to treat the government’s claims with more skepticism and, sometimes, with outright suspicion of criminal contempt. A recent Bloomberg analysis found that the Trump administration has been losing the majority of its immigration-related motions and claims, regardless of whether the judges overseeing their cases were appointed by Democrats or Republicans.

Nick Miroff, In Trump Immigration Cases, It’s One Thing in Public, Another in Court

I’m not by any means certain that it will all be alright, i.e., that the courts can protect us from Trump’s lawlessness. But denying his administration the presumption of regularity is an important and needed step.

Note well that when a government lawyer tried to address the court honestly, the Attorney General fired and defamed him:

When a senior ICE official said in sworn testimony in March that Abrego Garcia had been deported to El Salvador because of an “administrative error,” the Justice Department attorney who initially represented the Trump administration, Erez Reuveni, relayed that characterization to the court. When asked why the administration hadn’t taken steps to correct the error and bring Abrego Garcia back, Reuveni said his client—the Trump administration—hadn’t provided him with answers.

The top Trump aide Stephen Miller soon began insisting publicly that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was not, in fact, an error—the opposite of what the government admitted in court. Vice President J. D. Vance claimed that Abrego Garcia is a “convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here,” even though he has no criminal convictions in the United States or El Salvador. Attorney General Pam Bondi cast the error as missing “an extra step in paperwork” and said that Abrego Garcia should not be returned.

Reuveni was fired. Bondi said he had failed to “zealously advocate” for the government. “Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences,” she told reporters.

Nick Miroff

It’s a good time to be a retired attorney or, failing that, to practice outside a Department of Justice that requires you to lie (the normal term for Bondi’s “zealously advocate”) in court.

Marks of dystopia

Speaking of lying to court and losing in court:

I offer you the most dystopian thing I’ve read about the state of the federal government this year—so far:

Amid rising tensions between the Trump administration and the judiciary, some federal judges are beginning to discuss the idea of managing their own armed security force.

…

The Supreme Court has its own dedicated police force, but other federal judges are protected by the U.S. Marshals Service, which reports to Attorney General Pam Bondi. Security committee members worried that Trump could order the marshals to stand down in retaliation for a decision that didn’t go his way.

A country where judges need their own bodyguards because they no longer trust the president to guarantee their safety if they rule against him (and understandably so) is a country waaaaay too far down the slope of banana republicanism to chastise anyone else about failing to live up to Western “virtue ethics.”

…

[Trump named Ed Martin acting U.S. attorney in Washington] earlier this year despite the fact that he hadn’t worked a day in his life as a prosecutor. The president later nominated him to fill the position permanently, but that required Senate confirmation. And although Senate Republicans have set the bar for confirming Trump cronies on the floor, somehow Martin still failed to clear it. You need to be awfully sketchy—like, Matt Gaetz levels of sketchy—for John Thune’s conference to bork you.

…

From time to time I think back to what Sen. Susan Collins said when she was asked during Trump’s first impeachment trial whether she’d vote to convict him for demanding a quid pro quo of Ukraine. No, she answered, there’s no need. “I believe that the president has learned from this case,” she told CBS News. “The president has been impeached. That’s a pretty big lesson.”

He did learn a lesson. What he learned was that Senate Republicans would never hold him accountable for blatantly abusing his power.

Nick Catoggio

Whole-of-Government Gaslighting

[W]hy is the Justice Department not only settling the lawsuit that [Ashli] Babbitt’s relatives filed but also mulling an apology in the millions? Because Trump’s alternate reality demands it. Because that is how you turn truth entirely on its head.

You don’t simply challenge what really happened at the Capitol, which is that lawless hooligans in thrall to Trump’s delusions attempted a kind of coup. You chip-chip-chip away at it in so many ways over so much time and with such unflagging frequency that many people who thought they understood what they were seeing aren’t wholly sure anymore — or give up trying to make sense of it.

Trump recast a day of shame as a “day of love.” The rioters became “patriots” and Babbitt a martyr. As soon as Trump returned to the Oval Office, he pardoned nearly all of the roughly 1,600 people criminally charged in connection with the rioting. He even floated the idea of a compensation fund for them. Everybody gets a prize!

To live in fiction, commit to it. That’s the moral not merely of Trump and Jan. 6 but of Trump, period. Yesteryear’s hand-wringing about whether to label his individual falsehoods “lies” and those periodic tallies of his misstatements now seem quaint; they don’t do justice to the scope and audacity of what he’s up to. Nor does the occasional current chatter about “propaganda.” Trump is engaged in a multifront, multipronged attack on any and every version of events that impedes his goals and impugns his glory. It makes the spin control of presidents past look like child’s play.

Frank Bruni (shared link) This is so good I probably would have shared one of my ten monthly links even if it weren’t the end of the month.

86ing the important stuff

Kash Patel Says He’s Prioritizing Social Media Mocking Trump Over ‘Child Sex Predators, Fentanyl Traffickers, Terrorists’ – Above the Law

He didn’t say that in so many words, but his meaning was clear:

FBI Director Kash Patel took a break from his busy schedule of hanging out in Las Vegas instead of actually running the FBI, to go on Fox News last night to rant a bit about James Comey. After Comey posted his beachside “8647” insta, Patel quickly took to social media — where all professional law enforcement vents about its investigation priorities — to pretend that “86,” a century old term for bouncing unruly customers or canceling food orders, actually amounted to an assassination threat directed at Donald Trump.

This was, to use the technical term, f ****** stupid. Though against all odds, it was not nearly as stupid as Patel’s next move. Per the Daily Beast:

“Do you know how many copycats we’ve had to investigate as a result of that beachside venture from a former director?” he asked Baier. “Do you know how many agents I’ve had to take offline from chasing down child sex predators, fentanyl traffickers, terrorists?”

Hopefully some career law enforcement professional within the FBI intervened to make sure the answer to both questions is close to zero.

First of all, since threats to the president are the jurisdiction of the Secret Service — something Patel publicly acknowledged at the time — why the hell is he pulling agents off ANYTHING to run down a soccer mom who took a picture of her bottomless mimosa brunch bill having tipped to make sure the total was 8647?

So our President’s ego is more important protecting us from child sex predators, fentanyl traffickers, and terrorists. Keep that in mind. It’s barely 19 months to Retribution Day 2026.

That’s assuming the Democrats can serve up something palatable. But they’re convened in luxury hotels to do some

soul-searching after November’s defeat. “Democratic donors and strategists,” Goldmacher writes, “have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.”

One of those proposals is a $20 million effort “to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online.” The goal is to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.”

David French.

This is a reprise of this era’s Democrat delusion: “We just aren’t communicating our message right.” Au contraire, mon frere: your message is your problem.

86 both major parties.

Woke Right

Richard Hanania is a longtime critic of DEI, but has a few bones to pick with Trump 2.0 fake demolition of it:

Unfortunately, it is now clear that, rather than sticking to the principles of colour blindness, merit and individual liberty that I believe in, the Trump administration seeks to implement its own version of thought control and federal-government overreach.

This can be seen most clearly in the letter of demands the administration sent to Harvard on April 11th and its announcement that it was cutting off research funds to the university. The letter stated that Harvard must cease all DEI and affirmative-action policies in hiring, promotions and admissions.

So far, so good …

… [T]here is a direct contradiction between the goal of viewpoint diversity and the principle of merit, which the administration is claiming to defend. We all have an interest in our top institutions selecting students and faculty based on intelligence, competence and their fit within a programme. Having ideological litmus tests for professors and scientists would do more damage to the principle of merit than race and sex preferences ever have, given how few individuals with advanced degrees identify as conservatives …

… Harvard may never be an institution where MAGA has a large constituency. Accepting that is necessary for being at peace with the idea of America as a pluralistic society.

An influential voice from the right laments Trump’s attack on universities

When the rhetoric comes home to roost

“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” said Vanessa Cowart, a friend of Ms. Hui from church. “But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.”

She paused. “This is Carol.”

A Missouri Town Was Solidly Behind Trump. Then Carol Was Detained. – The New York Times (shared link)

Prelude to a pissing contest

Elon Musk said he would step down as a “special government employee” with the Trump administration. The billionaire has led a radical effort to overhaul the American state through the Department of Government Efficiency. He has been critical of Mr Trump’s budget bill, which would add trillions to debt. He recently said he wanted to spend more time on his businesses—which have themselves suffered a backlash.

The Economist

Neither Trump nor Musk can keep his mouth shut. The Bromance is over. The divorce oughta be good — “good television” as Trump likes to say.

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.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my rusty credentials without thinking it through.

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

Political (5/27/25)

Shooting us in the foot

Defunding Science

I don’t think I elevate science unduly, and I even try to burst the bubbles of those who do. I think we’ve neglected the humanities in worshiping the almight STEM.

But Steven Pincker has a long and passionate defense of Harvard in the New York Times opinion section. Remembering that Trump’s attack is largely based on alleged antisemitism at Harvard, this in particular struck me as key:

Just as clear is what won’t work: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.

Mr. Trump’s strangling of this support will harm Jews more than any president in my lifetime. Many practicing and aspiring scientists are Jewish, and his funding embargo has them watching in horror as they are laid off, their labs are shut down or their dreams of a career in science go up in smoke. This is immensely more harmful than walking past a “Globalize the Intifada” sign. Worse still is the effect on the far larger number of gentiles in science, who are being told that their labs and careers are being snuffed out to advance Jewish interests. Likewise for the current patients whose experimental treatments will be halted, and the future patients who may be deprived of cures. None of this is good for the Jews.

The concern for Jews is patently disingenuous, given Mr. Trump’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers and Hitler fans. The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch. As JD Vance put it in the title of a 2021 speech: “The Universities Are the Enemy.”

Steven Pinker, Harvard Derangement Syndrome (shared link)

Leave them all alone

A German concept used to validate the society-saturating politics infecting Europe 90 years ago was Gleichschaltung. It denoted totalistic government: the “coordinating” or “harmonizing” of all important social institutions. A foreign word, but no longer a foreign practice.

As a candidate in 2023, Donald Trump vowed to “choke off the money” to schools assaulting “Western civilization itself.” As he defines this, and as he defines “assaulting” it. What could go wrong?

America’s research universities are sources of U.S. economic dynamism and vital to technology-dependent national security. It is folly (and unlawful) to punish entire institutions for the foolishness of a few departments. When English departments are “decolonized” — dead White men purged from the curriculum — the only victims are students deprived of Shakespeare. Ideological indoctrination is rarer in engineering departments, where knowing the right facts rather than having the right feelings matters, otherwise bridges crumble and skyscrapers tumble. Leave all departments alone, some because their silliness does not matter much, others because their excellence matters greatly. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

George Will via John Ellis

Keeping score

SCOTUS and the “Shadow Docket”

We have plenty of things to worry about in constitutional law today. But those worried about how the court will confront the unprecedented and sometimes unlawful actions of the Trump administration should save their outrage for other cases.

In the two cases here, the court held that the president was likely to prevail in his unitary executive claim, that the administration was unduly harmed by allowing the officials to keep their offices while the case was pending, and that this reasoning would not imperil the independence of the Federal Reserve. It did all of this in an emergency order, rather than waiting for the issues to arrive on the court’s regular docket.

…

The president’s ruinous tariffs, purported cancellation of birthright citizenship, renditions to foreign prisons and retaliations against his political opponents all raise far graver constitutional problems than the court’s ultimately unsurprising order in these cases. We should focus our concern there.

Will Baude in the New York Times.

I had Will’s father, Pat Baude, for several Constitutional Law classes, and he, too, was brilliant. I only wish he had lived long enough to bust his buttons at his son’s brilliance and esteem in the legal community.

The Big Picture: A Hostage Crisis

This newsletter concerns itself with the great patriotic project to turn America into a banana republic, but something gets lost by doing that episodically. Each day we study some crooked new tree that Donald Trump’s administration has planted; rarely do we step back and consider how large the forest has already become.

Here’s Andy Craig at The UnPopulist, stepping back:

Since Jan. 20, the United States has been in a state of rapid constitutional collapse. Congress’ power of the purse, its most fundamental prerogative, has been usurped; statutory laws have been suspended by claimed “emergency” powers; the requirement for Senate confirmation has been made irrelevant; a transparently political purge of both the civil service and the armed forces has been launched; the president has threatened aggressive military force against longtime allies; a decree was issued to strip constitutional citizenship rights; our treaty obligations have been blown up with a self-sabotaging trade war; mass pardons have been used to gleefully sanction political violence; courts have been defied to send innocent people to a Central American torture camp; the world’s richest man has deployed a gaggle of racist hackers to shut down government agencies on a whim; and, just as we were going to press, news broke that Harvard University has been barred from enrolling foreign students because of its refusal to hew to the president’s ideological demands.

What Craig is describing is essentially a hostage crisis.

An authoritarian state is a national hostage crisis … Most hostage crises aren’t orchestrated by coolly ingenious master-planners. They’re what happens when someone who’s ruthless, audacious, volatile, and cunning but not very bright makes a mess of his caper, like a bank robber whose hold-up takes longer than expected. He turns to leave and finds cop cars pulling up outside, causing him to panic and to start taking hostages instead.

There’s no “plan.” He just doesn’t know what else to do now that a wildly reckless, dangerous course of action like robbing a bank has suddenly gone sideways.

That was also the theme of yesterday’s newsletter, not coincidentally. The One Big Beautiful Bill that passed the House on Thursday is incomprehensible as a plan to strengthen America fiscally. It makes sense only as a desperate act in the midst of a dangerous caper gone bad: Having decided long ago that making Trump happy is more important than protecting the country, House Republicans acted accordingly when forced to choose.

Nick Catoggio

Amnesiac Nation

The background fact of this second Trump impeachment trial was how broadly popular it was. In January, a Monmouth survey found that 56 percent of Americans wanted Trump convicted. Quinnipiac reported that 59 percent regard him as responsible for inciting violence against the U.S. government. According to ABC/The Washington Post, 66 percent believe that Trump acted irresponsibly during the post-election period. According to polls, fewer than a quarter believed that Trump did “nothing wrong” on January 6.

Those are not the numbers on which to base a Grover Cleveland–style comeback tour—especially not when the majority of Americans also believe that Donald Trump did a bad job handling the COVID-19 pandemic and that President Joe Biden is doing a good job.

David Frum.

There came a time when “President Joe Biden” became a legal fiction, and that boosted Trump’s stock.

Abundance Agenda

Jonathan Chait writes about the civil war in the Democrat party over a proposed “abundance agenda” for the party.

Here are the pieces of that agenda, according to Chait:

[T]he canonical abundance agenda consists of three primary domains.

The first, and most familiar, is the need to expand the supply of housing by removing zoning rules and other legal barriers that prevent supply from meeting demand …

The second focus of abundance is to cut back the web of laws and regulations that turns any attempt to build public infrastructure into an expensive, agonizing nightmare …

The third domain, and the one that has received the least attention from commentators, is freeing up the government, especially the federal government, to be able to function. Policy wonks call this issue “state capacity.” The government itself is hamstrung by a thicket of rules that makes taking action difficult and makes tying up the government in lawsuits easy. The abundance agenda wants to deregulate the government itself, in order to enable it to do things.

The problem is that there’s a bloc of progressive special interests within the party (“the groups,” per the abundance agenda proponents), and the groups are large and unified (or at least in alliance):

The progressive movement seeks to maintain solidarity among its component groups, expecting each to endorse the positions taken by the others.

Much of the most vociferous opposition to the abundance agenda has zeroed in on its betrayal of this principle. The Roosevelt Institute’s Todd Tucker attacked Ezra Klein on X for his “survivor island approach to coalitions—first unions and Dems team up to vote enviros off the island, and then Dems turn on labor.” David Sirota, a left-wing journalist, complained, “Abundance Libs are insisting the big problem isn’t corporate power & oligarchs, it’s zoning laws & The Groups? Come on.” Austin Ahlman, a researcher at the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly advocacy organization, mused, “You have to wonder whether the Abundance faction stuff would have landed better if the proponents had not laid the groundwork for it by first broadsiding every other organized constituency in the democratic tent.”

This angry response is not merely a knee-jerk reaction to criticism, but the logical outgrowth of a well-developed belief system. Since the Obama era, many of the component groups in the progressive coalition have drifted further left on their core demands. (Single-issue lobbies are naturally incentivized to grow more extreme over time—what organization is going to decide its pet cause is too unpopular or costly to merit a strident defense?)

At the same time, they have grown more purposeful about their belief that each group must stand behind all the positions outlined by the others. That is why civil-rights groups will demand student-debt relief, abortion-rights groups endorse abolishing the police, or trans-rights groups insist that Palestine should be liberated. Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an heir to the Hunt oil fortune who became a full-time progressive organizer, and who has raised and donated millions to causes such as the Sunrise Movement, the Debt Collective, and Black Lives Matter, articulated the principle of cross-endorsements in her book, Solidarity. She argues for “the necessity of working in coalition with progressive social movements,” and of resisting the opposition’s efforts “to weaponize a movement’s fault lines.”

Such progressives are not wrong to see the abundance agenda as a broader attack on their movement.

The Coming Democratic Civil War – The Atlantic

I have long believed that “the groups” impede Democrat success by alienating Democrats in the cultural mainstream. And as I’ve long said, whatever else Trump’s triumph means, it means major political realignment. The Democrat party’s travails over the abundance agenda, and controlling the toxic “groups,” could further advance that realignment, but I’m not sure it will benefit the Democrats all that much.

But then what do I know? I’m almost completely alienated from a country that can elect Velveeta Voldemort.

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.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my rusty credentials without thinking it through.

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

Great and Holy Race Day

I’m situated geographically in a place so sports- and Indy500-obsessed that in my former Church, men would disappear en masse on “Race Day.” Granted, I lived away from here 20-ish years, but it’s still a point of sinful pride that I’ve never been. Not to the race, not to the trials, not to carburation day.

(I apologize for some funky formatting today. After all these years, I still have trouble dealing with numbered or bulleted lists within block quotes.)

Filioque

As a protestant, I had no idea that the filioque (the words “and from the Son” in the Nicean Creed concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit) was added to the Creed hundreds of years later, nor that it was rejected from the beginning by Christians outside the jurisdiction of the Roman Patriarch, nor even (very distinctly at least) that there were catholic Christians outside the jurisdiction of the Roman Patriarch.

Since becoming Orthodox, I have taken it as a matter of high importance to reject the filioque, but I don’t recall previously seeing all of these reasons for the rejection:

Eastern Europe was converted to Christianity by Byzantine missionaries, the most prominent of whom are Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius. These bonds of religion created a deep sympathy between Bulgar to Byzantine. The Franks attempted to sever these bonds by sending missionaries into Eastern Europe, claiming that the Byzantines had taught them a heterodox version of Christianity and encouraging them to use the filioque.

I know Catholics are tired of Orthodox apologists going on about the Franks. But this really is an important test-case, for the following reasons:

  1. The threat of Arianism was resolved 300 years before the Schism. So, adding the filioque served no pastoral function. On the contrary, it was deeply divisive.  
 2. The underlying theology of the filioque was hotly disputed, especially by the Eastern patriarchs. So, adding the filioque did not express the mind of the universal Church.  
 3. The original Creed had been drafted in Council for a reason: it was supposed to express the *consent* and *concensus* of the orthodox, catholic bishops. So, adding the filioque defeated the whole purpose of the Creed.  
 4. For about six hundred years, Popes had taught the dangers of inserting the filioque into the Creed. So, adding the filioque violated even Rome’s local customs.  
 5. The Ecumenical Councils had ruled that the Creed should not be modified. So, adding the filiioque violated the Holy Canons.  
 6. Rome was advancing the *filioque* for worldly reasons only. So, adding the filioque would have allowed a single bishop to advance his own political and economic interests at the whole Church’s expense.

The Eastern Patriarchs had every reason to reject the insertion of the filioque, and no reason to accept it—none except, “The pope said so, and we have to do whatever the pope says.”

Michael Warren Davis, ‘Papal Minimalism’ Is Eastern Orthodoxy

Worship

To anyone who has had, be it only once, the true experience of worship, all this is revealed immediately as the ersatz it is. He knows that the secularist’s worship of relevance is simply incompatible with the true relevance of worship. And it is here, in this miserable liturgical failure, whose appalling results we are only beginning to see, that secularism reveals its ultimate religious emptiness and, I will not hesitate to say, its utterly anti-Christian essence.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Protestant, Catholic, Non-Denom

As my readers know, I’ve been an Orthodox Christian ever since I began blogging. The more attentive readers may know that before that I was Reformed (i.e., Calvinist, and specifically Christian Reformed) and before that, I was a generic Wheaton-College type evangelical.

Or maybe I should say “a generic Wheaton-College type evangelical as evangelicalism was configured in the 1950s through the mid-1970s.” Because it has come to my attention more forcefully, and in a way that more painfully implicates and pronounces doom on the kinds of Christian I once was, that things are changing. The evangelicalism I knew is not as powerful as it once was; evangelical denominations are shrinking and dying. So are Calvinist denominations. The Protestantism I knew most closely is increasingly nondenominational, and doesn’t care much about doctrine or sacraments, and increasingly doesn’t even want to be called “evangelical” or even “Protestant.”

This affects me closely because my wife remains Christian Reformed, and I consider it a pretty good penultimate tradition for an Orthodox Christian. And there is a very strong trend toward those denominational Churches dying out in favor of non-denoms.

And it worries me because those nondenominational Churches tend far too much to be personality cults and hotbeds of rampant sexual and other clergy abuse. And God only knows what they’re teaching, insofar as they’re teaching anything other than a mooshy-gooshy relationship with Jesus and a firm commitment to the GOP as a way of gaining power.

Yeah, this means I’ve gained some fresh respect even for the progressive Protestant denominations (which are also dying, even faster than the conservatives). At least there’s some accountability to hierarchies less likely than local parishioners to be mesmerized by Mr. Charisma. And some of them retain a liturgy that will expose worshippers to more scripture and doctrine than Joel Osteen can even imagine.

In any event, I say all that to introduce you to four of the thought-provoking articles (presented in the order in which I encountered them) that brought to my attention how much things are changing in my former haunts. A common thread is that denominational Protestantism is in deep, deep trouble; one goes so far as to suggest that nondenominational Churches are not really Protestant, but a whole new tradition:

  1. Goldilocks Protestantism – First Things
  2. LONG FORM: Does Traditional Protestantism Have a Future?
  3. How ‘Christian’ Overtook the ‘Protestant’ Label – Christianity Today
  4. Low Church in High Places: The Fate and Future of American Protestantism – Public Discourse

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.

100% Political. Sorry.

“Lawfare” in a nutshell

What the federal courts are facing from the Trump administration is trolling, outright defiance, administration attorneys making representations to the court with the administration refusing to follow through, and in general, a double game:

(1) Trump 2.0 says “The establishment is broken. We need to come in and wreck the place. We need to up-end everything.. We need to start throwing tables. Everything’s got to change. We are an administration unlike any other.”
(2) The legal system responds as if Trump 2.0 is an administration unlike any other.
(3) Trump 2.0 complains that they are being treated differently.

David French on the Advisory Opinions podcast (lightly paraphrased).

I hesitate to distill it further, all the way down to “Trump is a hard case, and hard cases make bad law,” because I want to give fair-minded MAGA people (if any there be) a chance to see why he’s a hard case.

Another alternative is “this administration has forfeited the ‘presumption of regularity’ normally afforded the Executive branch,” but that’s a bit too in-the-weeds and also doesn’t explain the “why” of the forfeiture.

The One Big Beautiful Bill

As regular readers know, I try to keep things upbeat in this newsletter. So let me tell you what I like about The One Big Beautiful Bill that passed the House (barely) several hours ago.

I like the fact that it reflects the degree of seriousness with which Americans now govern themselves.

That’s satisfying. In a democracy, representatives are supposed to vote in accordance with the will of the people. If the people demand the policy equivalent of eating out of garbage cans, Congress should deliver. And it has.

The salient fact about this legislation isn’t that it’s “bad,” although it is, for reasons we’ll get into. Bad legislation isn’t noteworthy. We all expect it.

What’s striking about The One Big Beautiful Bill is that it makes no pretense of trying to grapple seriously with America’s problems, even though it’s the centerpiece of the president’s agenda.

…

House Republicans have given up on trying to improve the country. All they wanted was to pass the class, which they did this morning by a single vote on the House floor. The One Big Beautiful Bill is to legislation what an AI-generated essay is to education.

Meditate on this: When I call it “The One Big Beautiful Bill,” I’m not mocking the president by mimicking his habit of speaking in dopey Trump-ese. I’m using the official name given to the bill by House Republicans. American government has become so self-consciously unserious that it’s now advertising that unseriousness in how it refers to its own policies.

Nick Catoggio

Jeffrey Epstein

Say what you will about notorious sex trafficker and financier Jeffrey Epstein, at least he killed Jeffrey Epstein. That was the conclusion of the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice’s inspector general back in 2019, but many Americans—including more than a few in the ranks of the MAGA movement—insisted that some sinister conspiracy, likely connected to powerful Democratic officials, killed Epstein before he could destroy more reputations and implicate others in his sordid deeds. Now, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have weighed in after reviewing the evidence, concluding that Epstein committed suicide. The pair made the declaration in an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, and it’s hard to begrudge the handful of MAGA social-media types who reacted with surprise and a sense of betrayal. In fact, as recently as February 7, Bongino was talking up Epstein’s connections to the Clintons on his podcast and declaring, “It’s time to start overturning that rock, and seeing what’s underneath.” Apparently, sometimes when you turn over a rock, all you find is the bottom of a rock.

National Review Weekly email.

I’m shocked that Patel and Bongino passed up an opportunity to stir the pot. Will they be fired now for not following the game plan?

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.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my rusty legal credentials without thinking it through.

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

Two things I love

Why I need the NOAA

I don’t recall mentioning this before. There is a very interesting web page that compiles and fascinatingly presents weather data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). I won’t tell you how to use it, but merely point out:

  • the menu in the lower left for your exploration
  • the possibility of customizing the bookmark in your browser so the page comes up centered on your own latitude and longitude (I don’t recall how I figured that out).

I was worried that NOAA would become a victim of DOGE vandalism so that we couldn’t get this kind of information readily.

Becket

Fully 23 years ago, I jetted off to Maui, all expenses paid, stayed in a Ritz-Carlton hotel at Kapalua, and spent my days learning to be a religious freedom lawyer. Or so I thought.

ADF (then “Alliance Defense Fund”, now “Alliance Defending Freedom”) had wealthy friends that made the (literally) ritzy accommodations possible. (For what it’s worth, I preferred the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem — a separate trip on my own nickel — to Ritz Carlton Kapalua. Here endeth my luxury travel porn.)

I felt a bit out of place, surrounded mostly by evangelicals whereas I had been Orthodox for five years by then. And though I returned with a promise to ADF to do a lot of pro bono work, I never got a piece of a really juicy religious freedom case. This was, I think, because ADF was starting to realize that they needed a stable of specialist lawyers, almost all in-house, to do their work well, starting with strategic case selection. I could, but won’t, tell a story about poor case selection.

I have no dirt to deal on ADF. They were advancing an important mission and learning as they went on how best to advance it. But from early on, I cringed at their strident fundraising letters, with lots of culture-war red meat of the sort that opened wallets.* And I became uncomfortable at what I saw as mission creep, classifying more and more culture-war issues as part of their mission under their four rubrics of religious freedom, free speech, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.

Again: this isn’t dishing dirt; ADF’s changes were readily apparent to anyone with eyes, and I had and have no inside information (beyond that there were wealthy friends; it wasn’t all grass-roots).

I was reminded of this discomfiting evolution by a new lawsuit they’ve filed. I wish them well in this lawsuit, with the gist of which I agree. But for a long time I’ve been leery of “Christian” positions that map too readily onto GOP platforms (not that the GOP always bothers with platforms these days). “Christian” support for Trump has deepened my distrust. It would be very difficult to get me to send money if there were any alternative.

Fortunately, there is an alternative. I have now disregarded fundraising letters from ADF for long enough that they seem to have dried up. My commitment to religious freedom remains, but I now express it through support of Becket Fund, a remarkably quiet, self-effacing but successful advocate about which I have no qualms. I commend Becket to you if you share my concerns.

(* “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” Flannery O’Connor)

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.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Immigration

The firehose of commentary on last Thursday’s birthright citizenship/nationwide injunction Supreme Court argument is now more a squirt gun. But I’ve had two very smart takes clipped for days now, and I think it’s time to get them out to readers:

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson put it well in [last Thursday’s] argument:

[T]he real concern, I think, is that your argument [meaning that of the federal government] seems to turn our justice system, in my view at least, into a “catch me if you can” kind of regime from the standpoint of the executive, where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights.

Justice Kagan says let’s assume for the purpose of this that you’re wrong about the merits, that the government is not allowed to do this under the Constitution. And yet it seems to me that your argument says we get to keep on doing it until everyone who is potentially harmed by it figures out how to… file a lawsuit, hire a lawyer, et cetera. And I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law

This is especially true when, as in the birthright citizenship case, there are hundreds of thousands of victims of the government’s illegal policies, and many of them are poor or otherwise unable to readily file a lawsuit.

Ilya Somin, A Simple Defense of Nationwide Injunctions

Only the Supreme Court, the Administration asserts, can declare the policy unconstitutional as to persons who are not party to any lawsuit, and only the Supreme Court can enjoin the government from revoking the citizenship of persons similarly-situated to Able, Baker, and Charlie but located in other judicial districts.

It’s not a totally unreasonable position: only the Supreme Court has truly nationwide jurisdiction, and it alone should be permitted to decide “the law of the land,” not some district court in Texas or Massachusetts or Colorado.

But Justice Kagan identified the fatal flaw in the argument:

If [the government] wins this challenge and we say that there is no nationwide injunction and it all has to be through individual cases, then I can’t see how an individual who is not being treated equivalently to the individual who brought the case would have any ability to bring the substantive question to us…. In a case like this, the government has no incentive to bring this case to the Supreme Court because it’s not really losing anything. It’s losing a lot of individual cases, which still allow it to enforce its EO against the vast majority of people to whom it applies. . . . I’m suggesting that in a case in which the government is losing constantly, there’s nobody else who’s going to appeal; they’re all winning! It’s up to you, [the government], to decide whether to take this case to us. If I were in your shoes, there is no way I’d approach the Supreme Court with this case.

Which is exactly what happened here! …

… paradoxically enough, the more egregious the executive’s conduct – the more obviously and incontrovertibly unconstitutional it is – the more likely it is that it will lose every case, which will mean that the question of its constitutionality never gets to the Supreme Court for a conclusive ruling.

Clever, no? Another seam, or fault-line, in the web of constitutional protections and the separation of powers has been exposed.

I regard this as a fatal objection to a rule prohibiting non-party injunctions in all cases because it fails what we might call the Hitler Test: if we are ever so unfortunate as to have a president who wanted to do Hitler-ian things, would this rule help to prevent that from happening or not? It’s not a terribly high bar, but a rule prohibiting non-party injunctions in all cases doesn’t make it over.

David Post, Nationwide Injunctions and the Rule of Law

I have almost no doubt that the Trump administration will never bring the merits of its absurd birthright citizenship theories to the Supreme Court so long as it can continue acting on them against everyone who lacks the moxie or the wherewithal to file a lawsuit and get an injunction preventing enforcement against them personally. It will feel just fine if 10,000 successful plaintiffs can’t be deported so long as hundreds of thousands or millions can be plausibly threatened because they haven’t sued.

By the way: there are almost no honest politicians in the immigration fights. Everyone knows how to reduce illegal immigration to almost nothing: Congress must make e-Verify mandatory. They won’t do it because the economy relies on the mostly-menial labor of illegal immigrants, but they will bluff and bluster. And I’d give you pretty good odds that Donald J. Trump won’t deport them all for that reason, too. There will be just enough performative cruelty to keep MAGA happy.

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.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Sunday of the Samaritan Woman

Sorry to be so much later than usual with this. I had a very busy Saturday and Sunday.

Beauty First

Let me commend to any artistic sorts reading this the video embedded in Beauty First: Envisioning a Civilization Worth Restoring. Jonathan Pageau’s introduction should tell you whether it merits your further attention.

Live the life of the Church

Having largely lost our religion(s), modernity has seen fit to create new ones. If we wonder what constitutes a modern religion (or efforts to create one) we need look no further than our public liturgies. Various months of the year are now designated as holy seasons set-aside to honor various oppressed groups or causes. It is an effort to liturgize the nation as the bringer and guardian of justice in the world, an effort that seeks to renew our sense of mission and to portray our nation as something that we believe in. It must be noted that as a nation, we have not been content to be one among many. We have found it necessary to “believe” in our country. It is a symptom of religious bankruptcy. As often as not, major sports events (Super Bowls) are pressed into duty as bearers of significance and meaning. The pious liturgies that surround them have become pathetic as they try ever-harder to say things that simply are not true or do not matter. This game is not important – it’s just a game.

…

I am often asked, when writing on this topic, what response Christians should make. What do we do about the state? How do we respond to modernity? For the state – quit “believing” in it. We are commanded in Scripture to pray for those in authority. We are not commanded to make the state better or participate in its projects. We are commanded to serve our neighbors as we fulfill the law of God. However, I think it is important to work at “clearing the fog” of modern propaganda regarding the place of the nation state in the scheme of things. I would frame a response to modernity in this manner: we are not responsible for foreign religions. Though Christian language and carefully selected ideas are often employed in the selling of modernity’s many projects, it is a mistake to honor its false claims. Make no mistake, modernity will offer no credit, in the end, to Christ, the Church, or to people of faith. Its interests lie elsewhere.

The proper response to these things will seem modest. Live the life of the Church. The cure of modernity’s neurasthenia is found not in yet one more successful project, but in the long work of salvation set in our midst in Christ’s death and resurrection. Our faith is not a chaplaincy to the culture, or a mere artifact of an older world. The Church is the Body of Christ into which all things will be gathered, both in heaven and on earth. It is the Way of Life as well as a way of life. It is not given to us to control how we are seen by the world, or whether the world thinks us useful. It is for us to be swallowed up by Christ and to manifest His salvation to the world. We were told from the very beginning that we should be patient, just as we were promised from the beginning that we would suffer with Christ.

I think the sickness that haunts our culture is that we fail to know and see what is good and to give thanks for the grace that permeates all things. When that is forgotten, nothing will satisfy, nothing will transcend. There is no better world to be built, nor are there great wars to be won. There is today, and that is enough.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, When America Got Sick

Astronomical accuracy

I don’t think I’d ever read the tart Orthodox response (from one Patriarch at least) when Pope Gregory invite the Orthodox to adopt his new, more astronomically-accurate calendar:

By the 16th century, concerns about secular or humanistic trends in Catholic theology had become a major theme in Orthodox apologetics. For instance, the dating of Easter was fixed by the First Ecumenical Council imn A.D. 325. At the time, their calculation was made using the Julian Calendar. However, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued his new liturgical calendar—now known as the Gregorian Calendar, which he held to be more scientifically accurate. Gregory wrote to the Orthodox patriarchs inviting them to adopt his new calendar. Patriarch Joachim V of Antioch commissioned a reply from his disciple Metropolitan Athanasius al-Marmariti ibn-al Mujalla, who wrote to Pope Gregory:

Our community, our bishops, our kings and all our people, scattered in the four cardinal directions—Greeks, Russians, Georgians, Vlachs, Serbs, Moldovans, Turks, Arabs, and others . . . from the time of the Holy Apostles and God-bearing fathers of the Seven Ecumenical Councils down to this day recognize one faith, one confession, one Church, and one baptism . . . and all our nations agree in the four corners of the inhabited world with one word and one affair . . . and we did not receive the confession and the holy tradition which is in our hands . . . from unknown people, like other, foreign communities.

But we pray with the Holy Apostles and the 318 fathers [of the Council of Nicaea] whose signs and miracles shine forth from them manifestly. And so how can we change the tradition of such holy fathers and follow after unknown people who have no other trade but to observe the stars and examine the sky?

As with the filioque, we see that there are really two complaints here. (1) The dating of Easter—like the text of the Creed—had been established by an Ecumenical Council. How, then, could it be modified unilaterally by the Pope? (2) Why should the Church prefer “scientific accuracy” to the longstanding custom of the Apostolic Church?

Michael Warren Davis, The Primacy of God.

Eventually, many Orthodox Churches in the West — including my own — adopted the Gregorian Calendar — except for Pascha/Easter and the preceding Lent and following Pentecost. For those, we stuck with the dating from the Ecumenical Council.

Departure from tradition

…as Nathan Hatch, Mark Noll, and E. Brooks Holifield argue, departure from tradition explains much of the growth, influence, and shortcomings of American Christianity—including the failure of the nation’s theologians and churches to resolve the question of slavery.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation

Spontaneity is not authenticity

In our desire to be real we start thinking that authenticity is another word for spontaneity, as if everything we say at the spur of the moment is more true, more sincere than words we craft carefully. For many, the Freudian slip is considered more authentic than the measured reply. Indeed, sometimes what we blurt out thoughtlessly is actually what we mean and feel. But more often than not, what we blurt out is ill-considered and something we either need to qualify or apologize for.

Mark Galli, Beyond Smells and Bells. I have not read this book, but appreciate Readwise suggesting it.

Homo liturgicus

[I]n Augustine’s view; we are homo liturgicus, and the basic human need to worship God can be diverted and misdirected, but it cannot be eliminated.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Miscellany

Religion’s closest cousin is not rigid logic but art.

David Tracy, who died April 29. I like that, but from what I read in his obituary, there’s a lot I would dislike.

The biblical significance of the modern state of Israel is exactly the same as the biblical significance of Finland.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick

  • Really great art should have a secret in it that the artist knows nothing about.
  • In each experience of beauty, we’re being prepared for eternity.

Martin Shaw

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.

Special Emergency Edition

Emergencies seem to be all the rage these days, so I’m following suit by abandoning all my usual blogging practices and rushing this out with no second thoughts.

On Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey posted a picture on Instagram with the caption: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” The shells were arranged to spell out “8647.”  This became an outrage on social media because, obviously, Comey was calling for Donald Trump (the 47th president) to be murdered. 

Murdered? Yes. Murdered.

Donald Trump Jr. responded, “Just James Comey casually calling for my dad to be murdered.” Department of Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem leaped into action, tweeting, “Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey just called for the assassination of  @POTUS Trump. DHS and Secret Service is investigating this threat and will respond appropriately.” Current FBI Director Kash Patel, no doubt poolside in Vegas, said he was monitoring the situation closely, but the Secret Service was taking the lead. 

Not to be out done, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard scrambled to deal with this emergency the way leaders in national security and intelligence have since the old OSS days: She ran to a camera to talk to Fox News’ Jesse Watters and told him, “The danger of this [Instagram photo of some shell-numbers] cannot be underestimated.”

Watters got to the real crux of the issue quickly. “Do you believe Comey should be in jail?”

“I do,” Gabbard replied … 

I don’t want to belabor this, because you’re either embarrassed for the country by this unconstrained idiocy and asininity or you should probably be reading Gateway Pundit’s coverage of this very serious assassination plot. I don’t think Comey was calling for Trump’s assassination. Nor do I think there’s a person out there who would be motivated to assassinate the president by the numbers 8647, whether spelled in seashells, Cheetos, or the decapitated heads of Barbie dolls. But just for the record, even if the shells spelled out “Trump should be fed face first to bears,” Comey would be in no legal jeopardy.  

I do love that the same crowd that bragged about restoring the First Amendment and vowed to end the era of weaponizing the justice system went straight to the claim that Comey’s obvious incitement of violence demands that he be put behind bars.  

There’s no rule saying you have to be this dumb.

Jonah Goldberg

(All my email signature blocks now end with “86 47”)

In political circles there are four subjects much discussed: (1, 2 and 3) President Trump and (4) How does the Democratic Party get its mojo back?

John Ellis

The past 24 hours have been something of a Rorschach Test for the Supreme Court. In the birthright citizenship case, the Court made clear that in emergencies, the judiciary must retain the power to enter universal injunctions, even if Article III does not otherwise permit such injunctions. And in A.A.R.P. v. Trump, the Court made clear that in emergencies, the court should certify a class without going through Rule 23, and grant an ex parte tro without considering any of the usual TRO factors.

What lesson should lower court judges take away? In cases of perceived emergencies, forget all the rules and make stuff up. When the executive branch takes such actions we call it an autocracy. When the courts do it, they call it the “rule of law.”

I will have much more to say about this order in due course.

Josh Blackman

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Saturday, May 17, 2025

Education

Liberation from vulgarity

Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty, not to say of humility. It is at the same time a training in boldness: it demands from us a complete break with the noise, the rush, the thoughtlessness, the cheapness of the Vanity Fair of the intellectuals as well as of their enemies. It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions.

…

Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for “vulgarity”; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.

Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, via Damon Linker

Passport to privilege or sacred obligation?

I think it was the Chinese, before World War II, who calculated that it took the work of thirty peasants to keep one man or woman at a university. If that person at the university took a five-year course, by the time he had finished he would have consumed 150 peasant-work-years. How can this be justified? Who has the right to appropriate 150 years of peasant work to keep one person at university for five years, and what do the peasants get back for it? These questions lead us to the parting of the ways: is education to be a “passport to privilege” or is it something which people take upon themselves almost like a monastic vow, a sacred obligation to serve the people? The first road takes the educated young person into a fashionable district of Bombay, where a lot of other highly educated people have already gone and where he can join a mutual admiration society, a “trade union of the privileged,” to see to it that his privileges are not eroded by the great masses of his contemporaries who have not been educated. This is one way. The other way would be embarked upon in a different spirit and would lead to a different destination. It would take him back to the people who, after all, directly or indirectly, had paid for his education by 150 peasant-work-years; having consumed the fruits of their work, he would feel in honour bound to return something to them.

E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful

Don’t think for one moment that this is only an issue for India.

Stultification

I do wonder whether we spend too much time worrying about whether this moment is one characterized by creativity or stagnation. It is not as though the New is all that matters …

The proper worry, I think, is this: What if we’re making generations of people who can’t genuinely discover the Beatles or Dante? If they can’t read anything longer than a tweet, if they can’t grok music that doesn’t start with its chorus and last 90 seconds max? If we can form young people in such a way that they’re capable of apprehending the non-algorithmic, non-digital world of art and culture, then the problem of stagnation will eventually resolve itself. But if we can’t … well, then, we can focus on helping those adults who come to doubt the wisdom and good will of their algorithmic overlords. There will be plenty such; never a majority, of course, but plenty. As Larkin says, “someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.”

Alan Jacobs

Slavery

Compassion has its limits

“I sit on a man’s back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.”

E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, quoting Leo Tolstoy.

Quelle drôle

David French and Sarah Isgur of the Advisory Opinions podcast very recently went to Gettysburg with a group from the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals. They viewed and got lectures on battlegrounds. But the following really caught my attention.

Confederate apologists continue to claim that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about States’ Rights. But one of the presenters gave us a scholarly paper, comparing the US Constitution to the Confederate Constitution, and found that the federalism provisions of the Confederate Constitution — that is, the balance of powers between the national government and the seceding states — was identical to the United States constitution.

I think we should put a QED after that.

The culture generally

Well, duh!

Yasha Mounk, who I no longer confuse with Yuval Levin, brings a boatload of data that proves that “The average American,” having single-mindedly pursued financial wealth, “is now vastly more affluent than the average European.”

My breast does not swell with pride, especially since I just yesterday paid some virtual visits to Europe with Chris Arnade and some YouTube videos. Your mileage may vary, especially if you’re American. “What the hell is water?,” after all.

This is why:

  1. I love to travel in European cities.
  2. I seldom bother reading Yasha Mounk.

Mostly peaceful in Portlandia

In law, it’s long been established that the defense of property is not worth a human life. This notion has been twisted over the past year from valuing the sanctity of human life to justifying the destruction of property. It’s not big deal. It’s not “violence.” It’s just stuff. So what? The “so what” is that its destruction is being used to coerce political decision making.

Commissioner Dan Ryan said Wednesday that his home has been vandalized seven times since late October, when the North Portland dwelling he shares with his fiance was first targeted by protesters who wanted him to support cutting millions of dollars from the city’s police budget.

No, it’s not as bad as the insurrection of storming the Capitol, and it’s nearly impossible to avert one’s eyes from the most outrageous and significant car wreck in modern political history. And no, it’s not as if terrorists kidnapped a loved one and held him hostage, only to be released minus the cut-off ear for emphasis, upon a vote as the terrorists demand. It’s just vandalism, which is a nice way of saying that “mostly peaceful” protesters have gone to an elected Portland public officials home and committed acts of destruction. Seven times. Because they want to influence his official decision-making.

Should we be parsing the vandalism for the extent of destruction? The cost of repairs? Should we contrast it with the passion of that group of “reformers” who believe their cause so just, so important, that they get to engage in acts of destruction to force an elected official to bend to their will?

Anywhere else in the universe, these criminal acts of destruction might be seen as terrorism, the use of violence to influence politics. But this is Portlandia, and while Dan Ryan’s recalcitrance to sufficiently defund police is seen as right-wing heresy. Elsewhere, Ryan would likely be deemed far too radically progressive to be elected dog catcher.

Relativity In Portland: The Other Insurrection | Simple Justice

Illiberalism in unusual light

Seldom do I read a sympathetic defense of illiberalism. I suspect you seldom see one, either. So let’s cure that, if only to give the devil his due.

No man or woman is an island, and no one should aspire to be one, either. That, at the core, is the claim of illiberalism, post-liberalism, or any of the other names given to the movement that pushes back against individualism as an ideal. The liberalism of Locke, deeply woven into American culture and political philosophy, takes the individual as the basic unit of society, while an illiberal view looks to traditions, family, and other institutions whose demands define who we are.

It always confuses me that illiberalism is taken as a belligerent ideology – both by its detractors and some of its proponents – as though it were rooted in strength and prepared to wield that power against others. It is con­temporary liberalism that begins from an anthropology of independence, and presumes a strength and self-ownership we do not in fact possess.

Leah Libresco Sargeant, Dependence – Toward an Illiberalism of the Weak

Trump and cronies

Then why is Trump still “Trump”?

There’s a reason why the billionaires running X, Alphabet, and Meta all changed the names of their companies recently. That always happens when you’re ashamed of what you’re doing—you hope that a new name will wipe away the stain.

Ted Gioia, The New Romanticism Just Found an Unexpected Spokesperson. (The unexpected spokesperson is Pope Leo XIV.)

Vaporware

Musk came in claiming his people could cut $2 trillion out of the budget, or nearly a quarter of federal spending. He brushed off questions about just how that could be achieved with vague intimations of immense secret pots of corrupt and wasteful spending. At first, he could sustain this by pointing to various ridiculous uses of public dollars in assorted agencies, but none of it added up to anything like the savings he had promised.

By March 27, when Musk and several DOGE leaders sat down with Fox News’ Bret Baier to talk about their work, his ambition had been cut in half. “Our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars,” he told Baier,

So from a nominal deficit of $2 trillion to try to cut the deficit in half to $1 trillion, or looked at in total federal spending, to drop federal spending from $7 trillion to $6 trillion. We want to reduce the spending, by eliminating waste and fraud, to reduce spending by 15 percent, which seems really quite achievable. The government is not efficient, and there is a lot of waste and fraud, so we feel confident that a 15 percent reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services.

Just two weeks later, Musk had scaled down his expectations dramatically, announcing at a Cabinet meeting that he expected DOGE to reduce federal spending by $150 billion this year.

But even having reduced his projection of potential savings by more than 90 percent, Musk still appears to be exaggerating what DOGE has achieved. As of early May, about $70 billion in cuts have been itemized on DOGE’s website, and even some of those will not actually reduce federal spending unless Congress rescinds them from this year’s appropriations statutes. That figure also does not account for the costs involved in firing and rehiring workers, providing severance and paid leave, lost productivity, diminished tax enforcement, and other implications of DOGE’s personnel moves.

Yuval Levin, writing in the Dispatch.

It’s a deal! (Or is it?)

On CNN.com, Allison Morrow processed Trump’s announcement last week about progress in trade talks with Britain: “OK, so it’s more of a concept of a deal. If a trade deal is, like, Michelangelo’s David, this is more like a block of marble. Or really it’s like a receipt from the marble guy that says we’ve placed an order for a block of marble.” (Thanks to Daniel Levinson of Montreal for nominating this.)

Via Frank Bruni

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.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Sunday, May 11, 2025

Christians in politics

The lure of power

Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, who had been Falwell’s chief lieutenants in the Moral Majority, published a book questioning not just the efficacy of political action but the righteousness of the enterprise. In Blinded by Might they argued that in the process of trying to win elections conservative Christians had been seduced by the lure of power. What had begun as an effort to restore Christian values to the nation had degenerated into an unbridled partisan struggle, creating an atmosphere in which it was assumed that Democrats could not be Christians and that Bill and Hillary Clinton were the Antichrist.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals

So far as I can tell, this continues in full force except that the “Christian” bona fides of the Christian right are becoming ever more dubious.

The need for limits

Localism is modest … and in its modesty it is largely indifferent to the divisions that animate citizens who may hate each other but otherwise share the first premise of the modern age, which is that limits are there to be broken. When the success of the economy depends on perpetual growth fueled by boundless consumption, and the legitimacy of the state depends on a receding horizon of social progress fueled by an ever-expanding list of rights, “modest hopes” are obscene. Simply living as you should, without lending your energies to the machinery of progress, can be a mortal threat to the way things are.

… [I]f there is any such thing as an “ideal regime” it is the peasant village, “a gathering of human families for the sake of endurance across the harsh terrain of mortal life”. But many kinds of actually existing regimes have room for such gatherings, and our proper aim as citizens is not to transform the empires of progress into the Shire. Our business is not with ideals. We have a basic interest in existing institutions that support material life and in their competent management; beyond this realm of “normal politics,” we need not concern ourselves.

… Radner mentions the book of Ecclesiastes as the “scriptural ballast” for his political theory, and calls it “that most political book of the Bible.”

Adam Smith, reviewing Ephraim Radner, Mortal Goods. My copy of Mortal Goods was delivered yesterday and is near the top of the stack to read.

American Christianity

False binary

Christianity as we see it in eighteenth-century Britain or twenty-first-century America is not Christianity as it has always been, and the more fundamental changes may not be those that the received history of religion narrates. The cultural formations of western Christianity, growing as they do in good part from binary, Protestant-Catholic debates, can be thrown into stark relief, for instance, when studied in comparison to that much neglected third term in Christendom: the Eastern Orthodox churches from which Rome severed itself nearly half a millennium before the Reformation, charting a course for Western Christianity wed to rationalism and enamored of individual authority, whether papal or personal.

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity.

I don’t recall any other non-Orthodox (so far as I know) writer who doesn’t reflexively fall into the trap of treating the Eastern Orthodox as the schismatics, Rome as the orthodox continuation.

Cooties

“There never was a time when it was so much abused, when its simple narrations were so much perverted, and when its true and more important uses were so completely overlooked in following fanciful theories and false deductions; and such as seriously threaten the interests of Protestant Christianity.” [Professor David R. Kerr of the United Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Monmouth, Illinois] warned students to beware of two “fanciful theories”: the “Mercersburg theology” taught by Philip Schaff and John Williamson Nevin, which appeared to depart from traditional Reformed views of the sacraments and of church history, and the Oxford Movement, a group of High Church Anglicans whose writings in the 1830s and 1840s gave birth to Anglo-Catholicism. These errors could not be countered merely with scripture, Kerr argued, but required careful attention to church history, which alone could “correct the gross perversions and false glosses.”

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation

As a Protestant Calvinist, I loved the Mercerburg theologians, who translated the Church Fathers, and was fascinated by the Oxford Movement. Considering where I’ve ended up, I guess it is no surprise that my favorite 19th century protestants, those of catholic leanings, had cooties in the eyes of evangelical sectarians.

Secularizations

After he had twice visited the United States in the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a perceptive essay contrasting Christian development in America with parallel developments in the parts of Europe most directly shaped by the Protestant Reformation. His assessment included an observation that was as shrewd in its comparative wisdom as it is relevant for the themes of this book: “The secularization of the church on the continent of Europe arises from the misinterpretation of the reformers’ distinction of the two realms [of church and society]; American secularization derives precisely from the imperfect distinction of the kingdoms and offices of church and state, from the enthusiastic claim of the church to universal influence in the world.” What Bonhoeffer saw has been described with other terms here: The key moves in the creation of evangelical America were also the key moves that created secular America.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Why smart atheists admit they’re cultural Christians

At the same time, you hold all sorts of Christian assumptions about the world, even if you do not believe in God. It is clear to you that there are such things as human rights, such that a certain level of dignity belongs to all people simply because they are members of the human race, and laws and customs should reflect this in practice. You reject polygamy. You believe in limitations on the power of the state and that the rule of law is essential to a healthy society, whereby the rex (king) is always subject to the lex (law). You think those with much should provide for those with little, whether this is expressed through a redistributive state, charitable giving, or both. You affirm the fundamental equality of all people before the law. You abhor slavery. You do not seek to justify inequalities in wealth or status seek to reduce them.

You think the central unit in human relations is the self, the sovereign individual, rather than the group to which the self belongs. You think all people are equally endowed with free will, reason, and moral agency. Humility in others is more attractive to you than pride. Love is more appealing to you than honor. You think colonialism is morally problematic, and that those who have benefited from it have obligations (however defined) to those who did not. You think of time as an arrow rather than a wheel: you believe that we are gradually making progress toward a better world rather than declining from a previous Golden Age or recurring in an endless series of cycles, and as such you would think “behind the times” is an insult and “ahead of her time” is a compliment. You admire people who forgive their enemies. You long for transcendence and are likely to describe yourself as spiritual, open to the supernatural, and even as praying sometimes. Even if the God of Abraham is dead to you, your language, legal framework, moral imagination, and sense of self are all haunted by his ghost.

Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World.

Penitence

The prayer of penitence leads us to reflect critically on our own lives. If it is uttered sincerely, it leads us to repent in humility, not just of particular wrongs we have done, but of our whole shameful and degraded state of being. The paradox is that, far from leading to lethargy or despair, such penitence brings a new kind of strength. Sexual sin is never merely sexual, but always has motives that are rooted in the passions—whether the need to be loved, or the lust for domination, or the desire to prove oneself attractive, or any of a dozen other motives that come readily to mind.

Healing Humanity

What fundamentalists and higher critics share

I’ve quoted this before, probably multiple times, but it’s so very perceptive:

Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church. Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone’s being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens.

I’ve also echoed it when I’ve noted that people who don’t like Christianity cherry-pick hard passages, read them like fundamentalist literalists, and then object at how absurd the Scriptures are.

Cosmologies

The Copernican/Galilean worldview, that is the heliocentric worldview and its further development into our modern cosmology of galaxies and nebulas and black holes has two important aspects. It is an artificial vision and it is an alienating vision. It is artificial in the strictest sense of “art” or “techne”. It is a technical vision because we cannot experience this vision without technology, without telescopes and other apparatuses …

[T]he telescope and microscope are self-effacing artifices, they attempt to replace the eye, to convince us that they are not artificial but are more real than the eye. It is not only the physical gesture of looking at the world through a machine that demonstrates the radical change, though this is symbolic enough, but it is the very fact that people would do that and come to the conclusion that what they saw through these machines was truer than how they experienced the world without them. Yet the great revolution is not simply a technical rectification as it is presented by some today, it is not only that technically speaking we used to believe the earth to be a flat disk at the centre of the cosmos, and now we know the earth to be a big ball of water and dirt swirling around a giant nuclear reactor at the centre of our planetary system. The change happens in the very core of what Truth is, it is a change in the priority of knowledge, a change in what is important to us as human beings. That is the change. In a traditional world, all of reality is understood and expressed in an integrated manner. We describe phenomena in the manner we experience it because what is important is not so much the making of big mechanically precise machines that will increase our physical power, but rather the forming of human beings that have wisdom and virtue. The resistance to the heliocentric model was a desire to “save the phenomena”, the desire to express the world as we experience it because this expression must remain connected to how human beings live their lives and interact with God and their fellow men. So by projecting ourselves out through our machines into an physically augmented world, we “fall” into that materiality, we inevitably live in a more material and materialist world. And this is modern history itself.

What proceeds from this is my second point, which is that modern cosmology is not only artificial, but it is alienating, it moves Man away from himself. Once Man accepted that what he saw through his telescopes and microscopes is more real than his natural experience, he made inevitable the artificial world, he made inevitable as its end the plastic, synthetic, genetically modified, photoshopped, pornographic, social-networked reality we live in.

Jonathan Pageau, Most of The Time The Earth Is Flat.

I enjoyed re-reading this after eleven years and am enjoying (not quite as much) the three other articles Pageau wrote defending ancient cosmology (over “scientific” cosmology).

More:

In 1922 fr. Pavel Florensky wrote an article in his “Imaginary Values in Geometry” in which he attempted to use the general theory of relativity to show that considering the relativity of motion, one could develop a perfectly coherent mathematical model in which the Earth is the reference of motion. This model would in fact correspond to Ptolemy’s cosmological descriptions. This article was one of the reasons the Communist State gave for his trial and execution, a dark irony considering the usual “violent religion” vs. “enlightening science” rhetoric we are taught in primary school regarding Galileo’s censorship.

Jonathan Pageau, Where is Heaven?.

Ah! A kindred spirit! I long thought that Copernicus had the scientific advantage over Ptolemy because his scheme was more parsimonious, but that Ptolemy was coherent, too. The way it gets taught, though, is that Ptolemy was wrong and we know better now.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.