Tag: Donald Trump

In tempore belli

A vast bureaucracy in the service of appetite

In order to ameliorate the resulting clash of commitments to divergent, incompatible preferences and pursuits, political leaders and other elites rely heavily and increasingly on platitudinous rhetoric and consumerism, the latter involving citizens’ widespread conformity to a seemingly insatiable acquisitiveness regardless of their income level. Were the flow of prosperity’s spigot seriously to wane, however, citizens’ clashes would likely intensify, reversing the dominant trajectory through which Westerners have willingly permitted their self-colonization by capitalism since the seventeenth century. Hence the necessary ideological commitment of modern Western states to unending economic growth, which perpetuates “the notion of the state as a vast bureaucracy in the service of appetite, aimed above all at the promotion of economic life and comfort.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

SPLC

Even more than two things can be true at the same time:

  1. Southern Poverty Law Center did good work on civil rights decades ago;
  2. Instead of declaring victory and closing up shop, SPLC became a grifting media darling with lazy leftwing slop like its “Hatewatch”;
  3. Had you asked me if SPLC used moles to infiltrate right-wing groups, I probably would have paused for a few seconds and then answered “Why, yes; I suppose they do.” Were I an SPLC donor, I don’t think that would have deterred me.
  4. To all appearances, the criminal indictment of SPLC is, if not garbage, at least garbage-adjacent. It looks like a typical Trump DoJ stunt.
  5. The criminal indictment will cost SPLC not just defense costs, but lost revenue: This week, Fidelity Charitable and Vanguard Charitable said they had paused grants from Donor-Advised Funds to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
  6. Karma is real. OR “paybacks are hell” if you prefer.

I encourage you to contemn SPLC2026 and stop filling its ample coffers, but don’t expect that a criminal conviction is very likely.

Trolls and bootlickers — of the Left!

How quickly the winds have shifted! Yesterday’s elites promulgated ideas that I scorned, but it never occurred to me that the Successor Ideology was foreshadowing the populist trollery of today’s MAGA Right, albeit to opposite tribal effect. James Howard Kunstler distills some of it:

Are you against reason itself? For all your talk about the primacy of science, your agenda militates furiously against it: Math is “racist,” there’s no biological basis for understanding sex, all science is a “white colonial way-of-knowing,” masculinity is “toxic,” women can have penises and men can menstruate. Do you really believe these absurd fantasies manufactured in the graduate schools in the service of academic careerism at all costs — or do you just go along with them for the sake of protecting your own careers and perquisites?

James Howard Kunstler, Round-up at the Wokester Corral.

(Pointless aside: I sing in a quite good choir and I use voice recognition a lot for writing in short bursts. Voice recognition has never gotten “chorale” right, always rendering it “corral,” regardless of context.)

Trump

I apologize for so much focus on Donald Trump. His unlawful and idiotic war against Iran (as I understand it, military war gamers always knew Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz in a war with the U.S.) makes it urgent to push back.

We’ve probably already lost “America as we knew it,” but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t get worse.

Time’s up on your stupid war, sir

For years, America’s cowardly political leadership class has pretended that the War Powers Act entitles the president to bomb whoever the hell he wants for 60 days without approval from Congress. Only after those 60 days have run does he have an obligation to seek authorization from the legislature.

Three seconds of thought about why the law was written will reveal why that’s stupid.

The War Powers Act was passed in 1973 to rein in Richard Nixon after he expanded the war in Vietnam by secretly bombing neighboring Cambodia. The point of the law, obviously, wasn’t to justify that bombing retroactively by granting Nixon a 60-day free pass. The point was to affirm that, with very limited exceptions, the president can’t engage in hostilities with a country unless Congress says so.

Nixon vetoed the bill when it reached his desk, but lawmakers felt so strongly about it that they overrode his veto by bipartisan supermajority margins. It was a bold play by the legislature to claw back its rightful war-making authority under Article I—not to create a massive two-month exception to it for the executive branch.

Nick Catoggio

World Historical

Publicly, Trump compares himself to Washington and Lincoln. Privately, it’s Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte.

I always recognized the narcissism, but I pretty much missed the delusions of grandeur.

And they are “delusions,” considering the eulogistic connotations of “grandeur.”

But I think I’ve already acknowledged that Trump is an extremely consequential President, and “consequential” carries no eulogistic connotations. Under that rubric, he may indeed prove world historic. How could a chaos agent who has seized semi-dictatorial power over the world’s hegemon not have a shot at “world historic” if he’s willing to stoop low enough?

Conservatives versus power-seekers

As the conference went on, I noticed a contest of metaphors. The true conservatives used metaphors of growth or spiritual recovery. Society is an organism that needs healing, or it is a social fabric that needs to be rewoven. A poet named Joshua Luke Smith said we needed to be the seeds of regrowth, to plant the trees for future generations. His incantation was beatitudinal: “Remember the poor. Remember the poor.”

But others relied on military metaphors. We are in the midst of civilizational war. “They”—the wokesters, the radical Muslims, the left—are destroying our culture. There were allusions to the final epochal battles in The Lord of the Rings. The implication was that Sauron is leading his Orc hordes to destroy us. We are the heroic remnant. We must crush or be crushed.

David Brooks, I Should Have Seen This Coming. I don’t know that there’s a single real conservative in Trump’s administration. I once thought J.D. Vance was conservative, but Trump’s reverse Midas Touch hexed him.

Shorts

  • Pete Hegseth didn’t appreciate one congressman’s questions about the Iran war last Wednesday, so he accused him of “false equivolation.” (My own ears from CBS news)
  • [I]n Washington this past week, Charles came into his own. Forty years after Diana’s Cinderella turn, Charles got to be Cinderfella … In a country rife with No Kings protests, this king was a tonic. He presented himself with elegance, intelligence and wit — everything that has been wanting in Washington during the Trump era. Maureen Dowd

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

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.

Wednesday, April 29

White House Corresponents Dinner

  • Security at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner performed as well as one would expect any American institution to perform in 2026. That is, it was competent enough to accomplish its basic task yet incompetent enough to leave everyone wondering whether the country survives mostly on luck.
  • Treating Saturday’s assassination plot as cause to ignore the legal niceties and plunge ahead with construction [of the White House ballroom] anyway felt like absurdist satire of the “emergency” rationales authoritarians are forever concocting to rationalize their power grabs and lawbreaking. The president’s life is in danger! Only a fabulously luxe gilded ballroom built to his exact specifications without any oversight whatsoever stands between America and catastrophe!

Nick Catoggio.

The luxe gilded ballroom Trump is building summarily like, I dunno, a dictator or something, wouldn’t come anywhere close to accommodating the White House Correspondents Dinner (2000+ guests versus ~900 capacity of the WH ballroom), apart from any other symbolic or logistical issues.

Royalty meets Pretender

[T]he trick of the royal family is to make everyone feel special, however brief their acquaintance. Some presidents realize that this is a necessary illusion …

…

In “The Godfather, Part II,” Michael Corleone tells his treacherous brother Fredo that he no longer means anything to him. “You’re not a brother, you’re not a friend,” he says. “I don’t want to know you or what you do. I don’t want to see you at the hotels, I don’t want you near my house. When you see our mother, I want to know a day in advance, so I won’t be there. You understand?” Michael issues strict instructions to his aides that nothing should happen to his brother while his mother is alive.

It’s a story that might ring a bell. Just a few years after the queen’s death, Charles stripped his brother, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, of his title and evicted him from his home. The image handed down to posterity will be of Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor slumped in the back of a police car, desperately trying not to be seen.

This week Charles will be smiling benignly and nodding politely, but it’s worth remembering that beneath that good humor and politesse there is a layer of steel. Courtesy can be tactical as well as virtuous.

Craig Brown, Beneath the British Monarchy’s Polite Smiles Is a Layer of Steel

I hope that the King won’t allow any meeting with Trump to be recorded. I guess Trump is kind of star-struck by the British Royals and might actually behave himself, but I wouldn’t risk it.

Life among the North American Banana Republicans

All items from a Wall Street Journal newsletter

The Justice Department secured an indictment against James Comey in connection with a photo showing seashells arranged in a way that prosecutors said could be interpreted as a threat to kill President Trump.

The case is the Trump administration’s second attempt to prosecute the former FBI director, a prominent Trump critic. He was charged in September with lying to Congress, but a judge dismissed that case. The latest indictment centers on a 2025 Instagram post. At the time, Comey said it didn’t occur to him that the post would be read as a threat, and that he opposed such violence. Comey and his lawyers didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Nobody believes this was a threat. Trump’s DOJ is indicting one of Trump’s enemies for publishing on Instagram a wry, cryptic and mild criticism of him because a deranged person (like the President, a toxic narcissist) might interpret as a threat.

This is what they do in authoritarian regimes. I only once did a piece of a Federal Criminal Law matter and have no opinion on how the courts will deal with this. I can only hope that they will deal with it summarily and with a stern rebuke to the government.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr is launching an early review of Disney’s broadcast TV licenses, the regulatory agency said.

Trump yesterday called for late-night host Jimmy Kimmel to be fired for joking that first lady Melania Trump had “a glow like an expectant widow.” His show is broadcast by Disney’s ABC network. Kimmel made the remark days before an alleged gunman opened fire outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that Trump attended on Saturday. Yesterday, Kimmel called his prior remarks a “very light roast.”

A crypto venture linked to men sanctioned in a scam-ring probe partnered with the Trump family’s crypto company.

Last fall, the Trump administration announced criminal charges against what it said was a transnational criminal syndicate that had stolen billions of dollars through online scams. Less than a month later, World Liberty Financial announced that it had partnered with a virtual-currency venture, one of whose projects had been led by two men sanctioned in the U.S. crackdown. A lawyer for World Liberty said it has never had any association or relationship with the sanctioned individuals. “WLF takes its compliance obligations very seriously,” he said. The lawyer said his client first became aware of allegations that the venture was connected to a project that had involved sanctioned individuals in January this year.

Shorts

  • In The Toronto Star, Rosie DiManno pondered piety and pooches: “Sitting at the right hand of God-Trump is Vice President JD Vance, a converted Catholic all of seven years. That’s 49 in lapdog years.” (Via Frank Bruni)
  • In his newsletter, I Might Be Wrong, Jeff Maurer responded to commentary about overlong movies — including in my newsletter last week — by observing that the huge piles of money spent on key sequences all but guarantee those blockbusters’ bloat. “This isn’t just sunk cost fallacy — this is sunk cost fallacy plus the knowledge that if you go to your boss and say, ‘We wasted $10 million of your money,’ your boss will say, ‘I understand, I respect your honesty, now step into this rocket: I’m going to fill it with scorpions and fire it into a volcano’,” Maurer wrote. (Via Frank Bruni)
  • Wishful thinking is the alchemy that turns fools’ gold into silver linings. (Kevin D. Williamson)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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.

Saturday, 4/25/26

The Right Way to Talk About War

What are we doing here? We’re reminding how it’s done. We’re putting forward what it should look like when a president brings his nation to armed military action. He explains the history, offers the evidence, interprets its meaning, outlines the plan.

You can’t take a nation to war without this rhetorical predicate.

Mr. Trump has failed to provide it. Now and then he announces things behind a podium, and there are regular responses to questions in press gaggles, where he reacts off the cuff. But nothing thought-through, no serious document making the case. And the public is never reassured.

We don’t even know, a month into Iran, why now. Iran has been the world’s fanatic irritant for almost 50 years. What is the plan?

This absence of formal seriousness is part of why the president’s popularity is falling.

If Donald Trump can’t do this, and his vice president can’t do it sincerely, maybe the secretary of state should step in?

While we’re giving advice, one imagines the Vatican has many excitable monsignors running the pontiff’s social-media accounts, and one suspects they are hyped to show the pope is giving rizz. But homilies, speeches, papers and encyclicals are better suited to great statements at great moments than buzzy posts on X.

Don’t do it the cheap way. You are the throne of Peter. Do it the serious way.

Peggy Noonan (shared link).

Why left-hemisphere dominance?

With apologies to Emerson, why is the left hemisphere in the saddle, riding mankind?

I think [the left hemisphere’s] success can be attributed to several things. First, it makes you powerful, and power is very seductive. Second, it offers very simple explanations, that are in their own terms convincing, because what doesn’t fit the plan is simply declared to be meaningless. … Third, the left hemisphere is also … the Berlusconi of the brain – the political heavyweight that controls the media. It does the speaking, constructs the arguments in its own favour. And finally, since the Industrial Revolution, we have constructed a world around us externally that is the image of the world the left hemisphere has made internally.

Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning.

Every of those four points distills hundreds of pages from McGilchrist’s very much larger works. But because of some other things I read recently that haunt me, the final one has created one of my exciting moments where I (silently) exult “Oh! That meshes with these other points! I’ve almost got it now: the grand unified theory of how everything works!”

Here’s one of the other thing I read:

We are discovering, for example, 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.

L.M. Sacasas.

I read this less than a week ago, but it haunts me and keeps popping up in my head as I read things like, say, McGilchrist’s final point about “the image of the world the left hemisphere has made internally,”

The other thing I read (actually, heard and transcribed) was this:

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.

My frustration with headstrong Protestants briefly led me off into thinking that, the Reformation having been midwifed by the left hemisphere, Protestants today remain too left-hemispheric.

I still think so, but then I realized that Protestantism never sits still — that the charismatic renewal of the 60s and 70s, and the happy-clappy guitar-and-drum assemblies of today, just might be human beings wittingly or unwittingly trying to counter-balance their left hemispheres.

I have learned to prefer icons, incense, fasting, feasting, eucharist and apophaticism generally to such ersatz, but à chacûn son gout.

More reasons to discipline yourself to spend more time attending to your world in a right-hemispheric way.

Learning to attend in an LLM world

Rules produce compliance. Distinctions produce discernment. Digital platforms are engineered to collapse that discernment. They optimize for engagement, for seamlessness, and for frictionless fulfillment. The tech arrives dressed as toys.

In an operating room, no one bans scalpels. Nor does a surgeon treat them casually. Instead, there’s a ritual: scrubbing in. The scrub-in isn’t merely about hygiene. It’s a cognitive threshold. It marks a passage from ordinary space to consequential space by establishing the sterile field: a bounded space of deliberate intervention where carelessness is as much the enemy as contamination. It means recognizing that environments carry risks and risks require care ….

…

[S]tudents don’t need prohibitions enforced by administrations, but disciplined practices modeled by adults; they need to learn to “scrub in” for the classroom. That means leaving things behind as well as bringing things in, not only in terms of the materials students bring to class but also the attitudes and sense of purpose as well.

In my own classes, this can be as simple as examining the threshold. At the start of a session, I might pull a trick from my meditation or yoga practice and say, as we’re opening our computers, that I know how tempting it is to check our carts, our socials, our text messages. I feel the pull, too. But for the next ninety minutes, we’re scrubbing in. Laptops are for notes and the text. Phones are face down. If your attention drifts, notice it. Bring yourself back. The drift isn’t failure. Noticing it is the lesson, and it’s what experts do. 

My opening comments matter because they reframe distraction not as transgression but as training. Students begin to understand that governing their own attention is part of their education, not a prerequisite for it.

Justin Neuman, Scrubbing In.

Neuman’s students are lucky to have such a thoughtful teacher, and he’s lucky to have students with the seriousness not to take governing their attention as a total joke.

If that’s actually happening, that is. Alan Jacobs doubts that it is, and focuses on pen-and-paper instruction.

Trump

Hereditary power

Nick Catoggio suspects that Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance will both get straight-armed in 2028:

From monarchies to the mafia, outfits that follow preliberal norms place special value on familial relationships. For one thing, family members are (somewhat) less likely to betray each other than non-relations are, a valuable trait for those operating in cutthroat kill-or-be-killed cultures. And because preliberalism is all about leveraging power for one’s personal advantage, it stands to reason that those who rise to the top would want that power to be hereditary. If you can’t rule forever, the next best thing is ensuring that your gene pool does.

…

You don’t need a complicated triple-bank-shot theory to explain why the president’s son has the inside track. It’s this simple: Because the Republican Party is a moronic personality cult, Donald Trump effectively has the power to pick his own successor. Whomever he endorses will be a prohibitive favorite among his slavishly loyal supporters.

Such is the power of the Trump name on the right, as Last notes, that Junior is already polling in second place in early 2028 primary polls, slightly ahead of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It’s a distant second behind Vance, sure, but so what? The vice president is coasting on his high profile and the widespread assumption that he’s Donald Trump’s choice for heir apparent. If that were to change—if Junior were to take a more visible political role after the midterms and his father were to begin sounding iffy on Vance—the polling would change as well. Dramatically.

Nick Catoggio, The Son Also Rises, speculating about Donald Jr. in 2028.

Why would a smart young conservative work for Trump?

After January 6, after Trump’s endless threats of “retribution” during the campaign, after multiple federal indictments, there are only two reasons a smart young conservative should want to work for him.

One: Said conservative is a sociopath who will, in the name of getting ahead, light the Constitution on fire if Donald Trump tells him or her to. Two: Said conservative is a patriot who fears that others will light the Constitution on fire if Trump tells him or her to and they want to be in the room to stop it when it happens. Ethical Republicans must fill vacant positions if only to block unethical ones from filling them instead.

Nick Catoggio, However Much You Admire Danielle Sassoon, It’s Not Enough (February 14, 2025)

Why I’d like for the GOP to lose the Senate this Fall

In my first draft of this sub-post, I indulged in some political wool-gathering about my current personal political proclivities. I decided to spare the world from slop that doubtless is more fascinating to me than it’s likely to be to anyone else.

But one thing stood out as worthy of publication:

Of course, the Supreme Court poses the highest stakes of all. The two oldest justices are Trump’s most reliable stalwarts, Clarence Thomas, 77, and Samuel Alito, 76. CBS News reports that neither plans to retire in 2026, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from cajoling them to step aside.

Elie Honig, Trump Seems to Be Planning Ahead for Losing the Senate. I don’t necessarily agree that the Court is “the highest stakes of all,” but it’s pretty important.

I hope neither Alito nor Thomas succumbs to Trump’s cajoling. Next, I don’t want either justice to die between this Fall’s election and Inauguration Day 2028, but if that should happen, I’d want Democrats in control of the Senate to force Trump into nominating someone well-enough qualified to gain a few Democrat votes for confirmation.

I don’t think we have any political hacks on the Court currently — neither Republican nor Democrat — but with Republicans in control of the Senate, Trump could nominate Emil Bove or John Eastman or the winner of the Kentucky Derby (the equine, not the jockey) and the Senate would confirm him (the filibuster for SCOTUS justices having been abolished). Having already trashed the Department of Justice with political hacks, putting political hacks on SCOTUS would set us back years further in the steps to post-Trump recovery.

Will Trump shoot himself in the foot again?

[I]t was strange to watch a man of Musk’s capacities burn political capital and the energy of his apprentices just to discover that the real money is in big popular entitlements that can’t be cut by presidential fiat.

Then, in a different key, Musk decided to do it again with the SAVE America Act, embracing (and hyping, with a strong dose of paranoia) the conceit that elections are rigged against Republicans because some vast number of noncitizens are casting illegal votes.

We have years of investigations by Republican administrations and years of evidence from voter ID laws to indicate that this is not the case. There are sound reasons to think that ID requirements don’t have the dramatic vote-suppressing effects alleged by left-wing critics. But neither do they have the election-protecting effects promised by their conservative champions. Voter fraud is just not an important reason that Republicans lose elections. (Moreover, now that the Republican coalition includes more low-propensity and downscale voters, any effect of ID requirements might actually cut against conservative turnout.)

Ross Douthat (emphasis added)

Breaking the trolling cycle

Be honest. Do not say anything about yourself or others that you know is false. Absolutely refuse to let your mind be colonized. The first crazy thing someone asks you to believe or to profess, refuse. If you can, do so out loud. There is a good chance it will inspire others to speak up, too.

Bari Weiss

Shorts

  • We’re totally trying to call the bluff on the great divorce between the head and the hands. (Jacob Imam, founder of the College of St. Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, OH, where students get a liberal arts degree and trade training, graduating debt-free.)
  • Jonathan Dupiton, host of the Rich and Unemployed podcast, was sentenced to seven years in federal prison for a $3.8 million unemployment fraud scheme. Turns out the secret to being rich and unemployed is crime. (TMD)
  • All material culture is an instantiation of ideas. But it’s easier to see ideas-in-things with a knowing, irony-laden look at the past. Putting babies on display in incubators, especially because they were ones unlikely to survive, now strikes us as abhorrent. We feel confident in seeing its errors and therefore reassured by our good judgment. It’s much harder to see what’s unfolding right in front of us. (Sara Hendren, Pattern Recognition)
  • Be it noted, please!, that NATO nations pledge to help defend countries attacked from outside NATO. It does not oblige anyone to help Donald Trump prosecute an offensive war against Iran.
  • No need to spend any money on a hot water heater, as hot water doesn’t need heating. Now, if we’re talking a water heater, different story (yes, I’m THAT GUY). (Social media poster, name withheld by me.)
  • A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. (Edward Murrow)

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

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.

Tuesday April 7

Rapacity

Just another widget

“You want to leave a place better than you found it,” he told me. And for a long time, he felt like he had.

But that was before LifePoint Health, one of the biggest rural-hospital chains in the country, saw his hospital as a distressed asset in need of saving through a ruthless search for efficiencies, and before executives at Apollo Global Management, a private-equity firm whose headquarters looms above the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, began calling the shots. That was before Gose realized that, in the private-equity world, hospitals were just another widget, a tool to make money and nothing more.

Megan Greenwell, The Wyoming Hospital Upending the Logic of Private Equity

Digital robber barons

These claims to lawless space are remarkably similar to those of the robber barons of an earlier century. Like the men at Google, the late-nineteenth-century titans claimed undefended territory for their own interests, declared the righteousness of their self-authorizing prerogatives, and defended their new capitalism from democracy at any cost. At least in the US case, we have been here before. Economic historians describe the dedication to lawlessness among the Gilded Age “robber barons” for whom Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism played the same role that Hayek, Jensen, and even Ayn Rand play for today’s digital barons.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Legalia

The hills worth dying on

Like any of its predecessors, the Trump administration appeals only a small number of losses in the lower courts and then takes an even smaller share—the cases it thinks it is most likely to win—to the Supreme Court. And how is that going? The Supreme Court has rejected Trump on tariffs and on domestic deployment of the National Guard, and it seems almost certain to reject the administration on birthright citizenship. The court has stymied the president’s efforts to purge the Federal Reserve and to deport people without due process under the Alien Enemies Act. Where the Trump administration’s top policy preferences have been in conflict with the law—as they often will be in a lawless administration—the Supreme Court has reliably sided with the law.

…

The court has, indeed, emerged as the federal government’s preeminent conservative institution. That is not to say conservative in the sense of politically right-wing—the American right, currently in revolutionist mode, has ceased to be conservative in any meaningful sense, and the high court’s conservatism can be seen in its limiting of Donald Trump’s abuses and pretenses as clearly as anywhere. The Supreme Court, rather, is conservative in the sense of defending and fortifying the American constitutional order, which is what it is there to do. In anno Domini 2026, a branch of government that is content to simply try its best to do its job is as great a display of conservatism as a realistic American could hope to see.

Kevin D. Williamson (bold added).

The ramifications of the boldface observation above seems lost on the nihilists who want to tear down the courts as no more than political hacks in robes.

But I’m starting to think that “the cases it thinks it is most likely to win” misses something. Unless Trump has no competent legal advisers, I’m inclined to modify that to “the cases it thinks it is most likely to win or the hills it’s willing to die on.”

The stupid ideas that Trump is willing to defend all the way to SCOTUS probably have some kind of coherent common impulse behind them. If you connected the dots, I don’t think the picture would look much like the American I grew up in. We owe more to SCOTUS than the nihilists are willing to acknowledge.

An Aha! moment

I just learned, in the Advisory Opinions podcast’s discussion about the Supreme Court’s Chiles v. Salazar decision, that the legislative and other advocates of banning “conversion therapy” do not really have categorical “mounting evidence that conversion therapy is associated with increased depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts.” Rather, “the lawyer for the state had to acknowledge that all of the studies that they were basing this on were aversive therapy, you know, electroshock therapy or other types of behavioral therapy, um, that were quite different.”

There was no evidence that mere counseling (“talk therapy”) about sexual orientation was harmful, and it likely contributed to Ms. Chiles’ SCOTUS victory that talk therapy was all she did.

As the ACLU’s Chase Strangio had to admit to SCOTUS in an earlier case, the narrative that denying “gender-affirming care” leads to suicidality in adolescents is not supported by evidence. Now another progressive narrative about adolescent gender dysphoria bites the dust.

I’m starting to get the feeling that someone with an agenda is just making this stuff up.

Legal abuse

Though vexing in this situation, it probably is for the best that we do not have a law under which the prosecution of Pam Bondi would be convenient—if Bondi’s career as attorney general shows us anything at all, it is that in our current debased political environment the DOJ could not be entrusted with a statute containing provisions flexible enough to treat as a criminal matter such abuses of power as Bondi’s. A law meant to curtail such abuses of power would, ironically, almost certainly facilitate new ones.

Kevin D. Williamson

Politics

Losing trust

Delta Airlines, you might have noticed, does not run negative TV ads about USAir. It does not show pictures of the crash of USAir Flight 427, with a voice-over saying: “USAir, airline of death. Going to Pittsburgh? Fly Delta instead.”

And McDonald’s, you might also have noticed, does not run ads reminding viewers that Jack in the Box hamburgers once killed two customers. Why? Because Delta and McDonald’s know that if the airline and fast-food industries put on that kind of advertising, America would soon be riding trains and eating box-lunch tuna sandwiches.

Yet every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.

Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter.

Trump Needs Smarter Sycophants

The former secretary of homeland security, the jettisoned attorney general and the embattled secretary of defense have often seemed like President Trump’s ideal cabinet officials: selected for televisual looks and energy, lacking any political constituency apart from Trump himself, serving without qualm as pure conduits of his will. So their struggles offer a lesson for Republicans contemplating service in this administration’s 33 (but who’s counting?) remaining months: What Trump appears to want and what he actually wants are not exactly the same thing.

The seeming desire of the president is for loyalty, sycophancy and TV-ready swagger. He wants to turn on Fox News and see his top officials performing like reality-show characters in the drama of his administration. He wants to sit in a cabinet meeting and listen to a litany of his accomplishments. He wants the decisions made in the West Wing or at Mar-a-Lago to be simply rubber-stamped in his departmental fiefs.

He wants all that, but at the same time he also wants victory rather than defeat, and he definitely doesn’t want embarrassment. His metrics for success are unusual by normal presidential standards: He has a high tolerance for unpopularity, to put it mildly, and a remarkable shamelessness around corruption. But there is a point at which, even inside his cocoon, Trump senses that things aren’t going well for him. And then sycophancy doesn’t work, and it doesn’t matter if you were acting on his orders; you will be punished for that unsuccessful service just as surely as if you’d tried to thwart his aims.

Ross Douthat

No Kings

I’m all for protests, it’s our right as Americans. But nailing down the reason for No Kings is more like spinning the Wheel of Defeatists Complaints. Signs noted fascism, wars, school funding, billionaires, LGBT issues, allowing illegal immigration, even the Epstein files. And really, the rallies are mostly about Donald Trump’s winning the election. Forget protests, they’re more of a massive primal scream therapy session.

Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal

This jumped out as a bit of sanity amid a column that otherwise made me want to cancel my WSJ subscription.

I haven’t gone to a No Kings March for this reason. The soup lacks a worthy theme.

Miscellany

Gay versus Queer

I was gay, I had faced discrimination, and I had fought for my rights. But now that gay rights had become “LGBTQ” rights, I found myself force-teamed with a lot of people whose values were nothing like mine. I didn’t experience my life as a rebellion against reality. I didn’t want to be an identity insurgent. I wanted to participate in the world as a normal person.

The most important thing I learned at Columbia was this: I am gay, but I am not queer. My sexuality doesn’t obligate me to embrace a particular ideology or to reject the moral inheritance of the society that made my life possible. Progress happens by acknowledging shared human values and working within our reality rather than declaring war on it.

Ben Apel, I’m Gay, but That Doesn’t Make Me ‘Queer’ (gift link).

(Andrew Sullivan has often made the same point, with less emphasis on the “critical theory” aspect.)

So what’s the new “learn to program”?

I’ve been on the faculty at Duke University for five years now, and this past one has been the most challenging and the strangest by far.

That’s not about Duke. It’s about higher education. It’s about America. It’s about dynamics — chiefly, this country’s tilt toward authoritarianism and the rapidly accelerating advances of A.I. — that render our tomorrows even hazier than usual. None of us knows what we’re in for and up against, and that confusion crystallizes on college campuses, which are by definition gateways to the future. They’re supposed to leave students with maps, routes, a destination. Not with compasses whose needles gyrate this way and that.

For much of the past decade, college students flocked to computer science, wagering that few majors were surer on-ramps to employment. A.I. has exploded that roadway. I teach in Duke’s school of public policy, where many students point themselves toward jobs in government or nonprofit groups. The ax that fell in the first months of Trump’s present term deforested that landscape.

Those are just examples, and this is hardly the first generation of young people to face disruption and major economic shifts. I can’t say just how unusual, in a historic sense, the unease that I feel around me is.

But I can tell you that my previous nine semesters at Duke are no rival for this one when it comes to the number of students who initiate conversations about what they should do next, what they should expect after that, where the country is headed, whether they’ll have any real say in that.

Frank Bruni, Teaching in an American University Feels Very Strange Right Now

Don’t forget: luxury beliefs

There are all kinds of ideas and policies that would have bad effects if implemented. But there is a special class of bad ideas and policies that proliferate in good part because those who hold them, being insulated from their effects, have never seriously thought about the consequences that would ensue from their implementation. The reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves.

Yasha Mounk

Regular features

Shorts

  • I was thinking this week that Mr. Trump’s vision of himself as primarily a dealmaker is unsuited to a necessity of presidential leadership, which involves laying out the logic of a difficult case. Deal makers gain advantage through strategies that don’t necessarily involve transparency and forthrightness. (Peggy Noonan)
  • Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth uses language the way an adolescent boy uses Axe body spray — subtlety’s for wimps. (John McWhorter)
  • If four out of ten Americans cannot see how truly awful this is, how vast and long-lasting the domestic and global damage this president is inflicting on this country is, our 250 years really are up. (Andrew Sullivan).
  • In The Times, Yonatan Touval stressed the limits of the spycraft and technology behind Israel’s development of strike coordinates in Iran: “That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting. Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation.” (via Frank Bruni)
  • The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
  • What is a TikTok video if not a digital Dorito? (Cal Newport; H/T Frank Bruni)
  • Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. (Isaac Asimov via the Economist)

Elsewhere is 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

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.

Thursday, March 5

I seem to be publishing more frequently. That’s at least partly because I hate to write something and then have it obsoleted by, say, a 2 am Truth Social Administration reversal. Better obsoleted after I publish.

Truth and Facticity

I recall, as a High School Senior, giving a metaphorical side-eye to our English teacher, fresh out of college, barely 3 years older than us (because he flew through college), somehow distinguishing truth from fact.

I was having none of it, and began to suspect that he was unsound (this was, for those who don’t recall my life story, an evangelical Christian school). Squishy non-factual “truths” clearly were an oxymoronic slippery slope (though “slippery slope” wasn’t yet in common coinage so far as I can recall).

These days, it feels as if I’m mostly interested in supra-factual truths: myths, poetry, tall tales generally. Before there was Iain McGillchrist, there was Michael Polanyi, and then, if not earlier but undetected, the spell of fact had been broken.

I’ve joked that my gravestone should read “Darn! Just when I almost had it all figured out!” I’m still reading as if I’ll figure it all out some day, but “it” is now rarely popularized treatments of science, or political polemics, or even “theology” in a cataphatic key.

Iran war

My spirit animal writes on Iran

Meanwhile, the best thing I’ve seen on our war on Iran so far is from center-left Damon Linker: Zero Cheers for Trump’s Regime Change War. That was true when I wrote it Monday or Tuesday and it’s still true.

Linker and I had similar breaks with the GOP, but he wised up 22 months or so before I did:

  1. He broke with the GOP over the Iraq war, which he opposed from before the onset and ended center-left. I thought that Bush was under a regrettable political necessity, wrought by 9/11, to do something big and hostile in the Middle East.
  2. I didn’t break until Dubya pledged in his second inaugural address to eradicate tyranny from the world. I ended on the center-right, if only because I’m very concerned about the insanity I’d be associated with if I were further right.

I find an awful lot of wisdom in what Linker has to say.

An explanation of the war

President Metamucillini can’t give a consistent account of our objectives in Iran, but our co-belligerent did:

A senior Israeli military official said Israel’s objective was to “dismantle the regime’s military infrastructure, including the IRGC” as well as Iranian nuclear sites, military production facilities and space and cyber capabilities. “We’re preparing for several long weeks,” the official said. They said the “third phase” of the war was under way. That followed a first phase that consisted of deadly opening strikes in Tehran on Saturday targeting the Iranian leadership, followed by a second phase of “100 hours” focused on destroying ballistic missile, drone and air-defence capabilities. A former senior Israeli official who is familiar with the current war plans warned that “this will take time . . . There is a lot of work to be done. Iran is huge.”

Financial Times via John Ellis News Items for March 5. Note that the Israeli official does not mention regime change, though dismantling the IRGC would come pretty close to that.

The Free Press and The Dispatch

I am a charter subscriber to both the Free Press and the Dispatch. I’m not giving up on either of them, but it seems to me, at least this morning after a weekend flurry of Free Press articles on our Israel-aligned attack on Iran, that the Free Press has a stableful of clever contributors with prominent names while the less prominent folks at the Dispatch not too infrequently achieve something wise or at least wisdom-adjacent.

We’ll see if that impression sticks. It may just be a side-effect of the Free Press covering so many things that do not interest me. It seems almost flighty, nerve-wracking. Maybe that’s because I’m trying to cut back on news consumption.

Sissy boys

As an adult, I vowed to help create a world where sissy boys like me could find space in society to be themselves, without any pressure to change—a goal that still feels urgent today. What I know now is that gender nonconformity didn’t disqualify me from being male. Effeminate boys, however atypical, are a natural variation of their own sex. The notion that they are really girls is anything but progressive.

My childhood experiences make me skeptical about pediatric gender medicine today. In many kids who grow up to be gay, gender nonconformity manifests long before overt same-sex attraction does. Yet from peers, from social media, and even from some school districts’ teaching material, kids learn simplistic lessons that equate gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria—in essence, If you act and dress like a girl, you are one. In recent years, many doctors and hospitals have been willing to provide puberty blockers and gender-related hormone treatments to minors after only the briefest evaluation of each patient’s circumstances, and LGBTQ activists have cheered the lack of gatekeeping.

Ben Appel. I highly recommend this article if you’re unsettled about “LGBT” issues. Appel has been through, and thought through, a lot, with a personal authority I lack. (That doesn’t mean I agree with everything he, a clever writer, says.)

Some of those gender nonconforming kids grow up to be gender nonconforming straight adults, too. Tomboys aren’t all lesbians; sissy boys aren’t all gay. It’s the flip side of the macho guy hidden in the closet.

The assumption that they are all LGBs of some sort is a subset of stereotyping. Stereotypes arise for a reason, but they’re not infallible guides. We probably can’t function without them, but they can do a lot of harm, too. Being a sometimes-thoughtful American, I’m thinking foremost of racial stereotypes in the harmful category, but sexual stereotypes are in the frame, too.

I haven’t sorted through that beyond musing that (1) we must resist unjust stereotypes and (2) our inevitable failures are part of why we need grace — from God and between one another.

That’s right, I’m not from Texas

I lived in Texas briefly, and I liked it. My inlaws lived in Texas briefly. I have a brother and some of his descendants settled in Texas, not briefly.

But I’m glad I don’t live in Texas now:

“The correct strategy for any candidate is to tie yourself as closely to President Trump as possible,”Rice University political science professor Mark Jones told TMD. “We can expect the Paxton campaign to really hit him [Cornyn] hard on this … that he’s insufficiently conservative, and that his track record has not always been nearly as supportive of President Trump as Ken Paxton’s record.”

Jones told TMD that while “Paxton has been a die-hard Trump supporter from the very beginning, Cornyn has ebbed and flowed” in his support for Trump. The Cornyn campaign has taken steps to address this, such as flagging that he votes in line with the White House 99 percent of the time. But Paxton—who appealed the 2020 election results to the Supreme Court, seeking to throw out electoral votes from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, based on Trump’s spurious claims of voter fraud—has worked to position himself as the authentic MAGA option.

…

“Republican primary voters are very much aware of his legal baggage,” but they “discount it pretty heavily as partisan,” Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillison told TMD. “They know that he has ethical and legal baggage, but they see him as a knife fighter, and that’s what they want.”

Peter Gattuso, James P. Sutton, Ross Anderson, The Texas Primaries.

So why does this make me glad I don’t live in Texas?

  1. It sounds like Texans don’t know there’s a difference between following Trump and being a conservative.
  2. Although Paxton and Cornyn will have a runoff election in May, in a sane state a corrupt knife-fighting Trumpist would not have come close enough to a proven conservative to force a runoff.

But what do I know? I’m not from Texas.

Thumbnail Geek autobiography

For a guy of my advance years, I’m a bit of a geek. Oh, I long ago gave us being my lawfirm’s tech guy, and left the Microsoft cosmos at the office when I retired to my cozy Appleworld.

But as I typed a Markdown file recently, I had a flashback to my former bafflement with the idea of hyperlinks, and trying to figure out what they’d be useful for (versus a cute useless parlor trick).

I remember, earlier, standing slack-jawed at the Novell booth at the ABA’s Technology in the Practice of Law show/conference in Boston, in 1988, wondering why in the world anyone would need to connect computers to one another. (I went to Boston that year with a TRS0-80 Model 100 for daytime note-taking and a 16-pound NEC Multispeed HD luggable for evening processing — which ironically required a primitive connection between computers).

Now it’s AI I don’t understand, only this time I’m reassured that nobody understands it, and bummed that everybody’s fearful about it.

When you believe in things
You don’t understand
Then you suffer
Superstition ain’t the way

(Wonder, Stevie, Superstition, 1972)

What ultimately made me back off may have been that questions arose faster than I could find answers and I decided to leave it to guys who figured out those things for a living, focusing on what I did for a living.

I still have impulses, like glancing longingly at Linux, but I’ve learned to stop at loving glances most of the time.

Now, I’ve got to go figure out some more of the settings on my new Android-based e-reader. It’s not like iOS you know.

Unitary Executives

Listening to the March 3 Advisory Opinions podcast, I agree with Sarah and David that the current occupant of the White House doesn’t justify altering “Unitary Executive Theory,” but the occupant being Donald J. Trump instead of George Washington (the president when Article II Section 1 was adopted) does focus the mind on a question:

  1. Was and is the strong Unitary Executive Theory wrong?; or
  2. Is the strong Unitary Executive Theory right, and we must simply rely on impeachment if we continue electing, ummmm, less than optimally stable and conscientious Presidents?

I’m increasingly leaning toward strong Unitary Executive Theory being wrong, neat and tidy though it be. I also confess that if someone sane were in the White House exercising strong Unitary Executive Theory, fewer articles would have been written revisiting it (here, for instance) and I would have been less eager to read them.

Routed

Speaking of unstable and unfaithful Presidents, Team Trump has fled the federal courts, tail between its legs, on one of its earliest and most egregious outrages: the effort to intimidate the entire legal profession by punishing firms who employ lawyers who sometime or other were adverse to Donald J. Trump (shared link).

The judge overseeing Perkins Coie’s case, Beryl Howell, said the executive order “sends little chills down my spine,” later writing that the administration had sent a clear message, “Lawyers must stick to the party line, or else.” The orders, she wrote, were “an unprecedented attack” on foundational constitutional principles.

And this from the New York Times Editorial Board:

The larger goal of the executive orders was chilling. The president attacked a bedrock principle of the law, which is that everybody deserves legal representation. He sought to frighten lawyers from representing people who had the temerity to criticize him. By extension, he sought to frighten any Americans who might criticize him.

Fighting the executive orders took courage, and the four firms deserve praise and gratitude for standing up to the president. They all risked losing clients and even having their firms collapse. Nine other firms folded and struck deals intended to mollify the president.

Pre-publication “update”: maybe not.

Shorts

  • Peace means the ascent from simple coexistence to co-operation and common creativity among countries and nations. (Mikhail Gorbachev via Economist World in Brief)
  • SOTU
    • Most of the people I know declined to watch Trump’s State of the Union remarks. They’re not living in denial. They’re preserving their sanity for better days. (Frank Bruni)
    • I agreed wholeheartedly with a few of Trump’s [SOTU]comments. “What a difference a president makes.” Truest words he has ever spoken. “Nobody can believe what they’re watching.” I nodded so hard I’m pretty sure I fractured one of my cervical vertebrae. (Frank Bruni)
  • I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly. (Marilynne Robinson)
  • The tide has so turned on adolescent “gender confirmation” hormones and surgeries, a madness and abdication of adult responsibility that long horrified me, that I don’t even read all the latest news items and commentary about the return to sanity.
  • There is no great performance — not even a theatrical one whose surface is, by design, artifice — that doesn’t have truthfulness at its core. The search for truth is an artist’s life’s work. (Jonathan Biss, Music, at Least, Doesn’t Lie)
  • There were planning Ghosts who implored them to dam the river, cut down the trees, kill the animals, build a mountain railway, smooth out the horrible grass and moss and heather with asphalt. (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce. The “Ghosts” were hell-dwellers on a day trip to heaven.)
  • They took paradise and put up a parking lot. (Joni Mitchell)
  • Beauty will save the world. (Dostoevsky)

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

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 March 2

A keeper

Damon Linker discusses (shared link) the debates among Right illiberals, not nut-picking but citing scholars and a Notre Dame Republican student group.

Then he puts his finger on the key question they disagree about:

The question is whether the country today is actually facing a threat dire enough to justify or excuse otherwise unjustifiable or inexcusable acts. Are we facing a genuine threat to our continued existence as a country? Determining the answer boils down to judgment.

Starting at least with Michael Anton’s 2016 “Flight 93 Election” essay, there are plenty on the right excusing unjustifiable or inexcusable acts on the premise that the Democrats are an “existential threat.” I don’t believe them, and if I did it’s no longer clear to me that I would take the illiberal Right’s side in the fight. There’s a lot of evidence that they’re a bigger threat than the Democrats.

I plan to revisit Linker’s essay at least once; I’m not sure I’ve sucked all the juice from it yet.

The first thing the communists do when they take over is to systematize snitching

When I was living, fairly briefly, in Oklahoma 50 years ago, we heard not only the usual “first thing the communists do when they take over is,” but an interesting variant.

The usual, of course, was “outlaw guns.” The variant was “outlaw cock-fighting.” I’m not kidding. I do not claim that the variant was common or held by a substantial number of Okies, but it was there.

The marks of authoritarianism and totalitarianism are debated, but I suggest that one of them is recruiting people to snitch on each other even about trivial deviations from the government’s line. Kids reporting to teachers naughty things their parents or siblings said, for instance.

Making due allowance for his youth at the time and signs of subsequent growth, it nevertheless is an authoritarian blot on the late Charlie Kirk’s legacy that one of his early Turning Point USA initiatives was Professor Watch, a website for student to snitch on their professors.

If I were more obsessive about the dangers from MAGAworld, I would keep a list of the dubious stuff TPUSA has done since Kirk’s death, like the All-American Halftime Show in 2026. (That, at least, was not clearly authoritarian, but it was petty as hell.)

For now, suffice that one of TPUSA’s earliest initiatives was a tool of authoritarian wannabes.

Beating a dead(ish) horse

Wokeness is often thought to be a form of virtue signalling.  This is subtly wrong, for it is more often a kind of status signalling.  The wokist wants to be seen as belonging to “the right kind of people.”  He drapes himself with wokeness the same way that in another day and age people paraded their memberships in prestigious clubs, or that today they flaunt the brands and styles of shoes and clothing that they wear.  If ethics comes into the matter at all, it comes in not via the thought “I would never do that,” but via the thought “I’m not the kind of person who would do that.”  You know, the deplorables.

I am not suggesting that such a person is aware of his craving for status.  Very few people are fully aware of their own motives.  In a society which professes to believe in equality, and pretends to despise snobbery, it is hard for a snob who knows he is a snob to think well of himself; therefore he has to convince himself that he isn’t a snob.  With its faux concern for The People (most of whom have no interest whatsoever in the cause of woke), wokeness is a convenient way to do that.  My very expensive jeans must have holes in them.

J Budziszewski

Budziszewski’s not wrong, but a parallel takedown of MAGA vice-signallers couldn’t be all that hard. I’m not a pas d’ennemis á droite kind of guy, but I’m not going to take the time to write it — only to point out that the Right has unclean hands of its own. Do you have eyes to see that or are you blinkered?

We need to “get out” more

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

C.S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time, from Weight of Glory

Incommensurable

[O]ne is compelled to admire a man of such verbal agility as not only to conceal from his readers and audiences the shallowness of his own thought, but to persuade them that in admiring his work they were giving evidence of their own intelligence as well. I do not say that Shaw could have succeeded alone, without the more plodding and laborious minds with which he associated himself; but by persuading lowbrows that they were high-brows and that high-brows must be Socialist, he contributed greatly to the prestige of Socialism. But between the influence of a Bernard Shaw or an H.G. Wells, and the influence of a Coleridge or a Newman, I can conceive no common scale of measurement.

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 on George Bernard Shaw, inter alia.

Manipulation in a good cause

Ten years in, and Democrats still don’t know how to handle Donald Trump. He used them as foils and they allowed it, sitting there snarling, at points screaming. Part of how to handle him is if he tries to manipulate you into doing the right thing—if, for instance, he challenges you to stand in respect for a mother mourning the murder of her daughter—you put aside that you’re being manipulated and stand. Because it is right to show human sympathy and regard. The thing to do is look better than Mr. Trump, not worse. You say: My base demands coldness. Then get a new base. If you can’t, leave before you are reduced to a soulless husk of the eager, happy person who walked into that chamber a decade ago.

Peggy Noonan, The Oprah State of the Union.

The same advice could and should be given to Republicans when their one-man “base” in the White House demands dishonor of them.

Regime Change

As Americans, we do not need regime change abroad; we need it at home. We must escape the ghastly bloodlust and other demonic impulses of the Democratic and Republican parties. Men and women of goodwill must unite in solidarity to build an alternative to evil.

Jack Ternan, Chair of the National Committee of the American Solidarity Party

Shorts

  • Two tongue-in-cheek descriptions of The Bulwark: “Pro market, anti-polio”; “The capitalist wing of Antifa.”
  • “…preposterously self-satisfied, preternaturally nasty and profoundly delusional …” (Frank Bruni’s top-line characterization of Trump’s 2026 SOTU)
  • I don’t know who coined the expression “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining,” but it fits the overall tone of the speech. (Bret Stephens’ top-line characterization of Trump’s 2026 SOTU)
  • That’s what’s nice about politics, Yevgeny: anything that makes people believe in power actually increases that power. (Giuliano da Empoli and Willard Wood, The Wizard of the Kremlin.)
  • No, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s much worse—it’s a consensus. (R.R. Reno on “the progressive takeover of higher education … or DEI’s reign over corporate America”)

I had another few items, but after the USA and Israel attached Iran, they could have been too easily misunderstood.

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.

Pulling out all the stops

Trigger warning: Although I have taken to posting my criticisms of Trump 2.0 elsewhere (and then offering links to those interested), this post is all criticism of Trump 2.0.

Are careful legal arguments irrelevant?

This past Friday afternoon, President Trump openly attacked the Supreme Court majority for failing to side with him in Learning Resources and praised the three dissenting conservatives by name for doing exactly that. … Vice President JD Vance also accused the SCOTUS majority of “lawlessness.”

It should be obvious to everyone, but just in case it isn’t: This is a purely nihilistic way to treat a branch of the federal government that justifies its decision in lengthy, reasoned opinions. It presumes that good-faith arguments and competing forms of legal interpretation are irrelevant in the work of the courts—and that justices picked by a given president are expected to serve as loyal supporters of anything that president (or another of the same party) might do in office, regardless of what the Constitution and/or the statutory record might say. There are six conservatives on the high court; therefore Trump should have won Learning Resources by a vote of 6-3. It’s that simple, and anything that diverges from a thoughtless display of partisan fealty is supposed to stand as transparent evidence of corruption.

In a world where most voters view the judiciary this way, there really is no place for a judicial branch at all ….

Damon Linker, Seven Observations About the Supreme Court’s Tariff Decision.

Linker’s first observation (what the court holds) is inaccurate, but I thought this excerpt from his fifth observation was pretty sharp, and as a “courts man” I wanted to pass it along.

Are we the baddies?

On a note not unrelated to the prior item:

[W]ith fleeting exceptions, every one before Trump 2.0 accepted two core principles: There is space between the president’s every wish and what the law permits. And, relatedly, executive branch lawyers should not merely rubber stamp presidential initiatives.

The system has always been imperfect because the law is often unclear and government lawyers face pressure to approve presidential action. But the basic arrangement has been that government lawyers interpret law with some independence from the president, and that some policies are blocked or modified when lawyers identify clear legal problems. Presidents embraced this arrangement because legal compliance demands it and because systemic inattention to law leads to bad policy or undesirable political or legal risk.

Until Trump 2.0, that is. The Trump administration since January 2025 has rejected this system root and branch.

First, it has sought to ensure that the senior ranks of lawyers are filled with loyalists. I don’t mean loyalists in the sense in which past administrations typically hired people supportive of the president’s program and in line with the president’s outlook and politics. I mean lawyers who are willing to do whatever the president (or a senior proxy) asks, including in legal decision making, despite what law and professional norms say.

Second, the administration has issued formal directives to eliminate lawyers’ independence judgment. The most important one says:

No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General.

Since the president is indifferent or hostile to law, and since the attorney general is a sieve for the president, this directive makes the president’s policy whims—which he thinks by definition are lawful (“I . . . have the right to do anything I want to do”)—the governing rule.

Third, the administration has fired, threatened, or sidelined lawyers in the government who express disagreement with the party line established in the White House (or who were connected to past legal actions against Trump). Every lawyer not directly subject to this regime gets the message.

Jack Goldsmith

How does this cash out in Pete Hegseth’s “Department of War”?

TopicSummary
Military Legal CultureTraditionally strong post-Vietnam; lawyers integral to lawful military conduct.
Hegseth’s ApproachSeeks to reduce lawyers’ independence; prioritizes loyalty; hostile to existing legal culture.
Trump 2.0 Legal ModelPresidential interpretations override traditional legal checks; lawyers must follow party line.
Boat StrikesLegally questionable strikes justified by dubious administration definitions of “armed conflict.”
CongressLargely inactive in oversight; failed to challenge changes weakening DOD’s legal integrity.
OutlookPossible future exposure of legal violations; need for Congressional accountability.

This is a scandal, but if it lies, as I think it does, at the intersection of Absolute Presidential Immunity and the Unitary Executive, I don’t readily see a legal remedy. Trump is immune because SCOTUS says so. His minions are immune because Unitary Executive.

So suck it up, America, and get used to us being the baddies.

Kinsley gaffes

Chief Justice John Roberts does Thomas the courtesy of a very thoughtful response to his dissent in the recent tariffs case, a response that contains what I think we might consider a “Kinsley gaffe,” i.e., stating a truth that is more than one meant to say. The chief justice writes:

Suppose for argument’s sake that Congress can delegate its tariff powers to the President as completely as Justice Thomas suggests. Even then, the question remains whether Congress has given the President the tariff authority he claims in this case—or whether the President is seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.

Chief Justice Roberts is a very careful writer, and his words here, while couched in the form of a question, are plainer than I am accustomed to reading from him or from any other member of the court: “the President is seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.” One need not be an esoteric Straussian to assume that the word whether should be omitted to access the sentence’s true meaning. 

Of course “the President is seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.” He also seeks to exploit imaginary statutory language to aggrandize his own power, and seeks to exploit phony emergencies to aggrandize his own power, to exploit imaginary Venezuelan fentanyl to aggrandize his own power, to exploit imaginary Haitian cat-eaters in Ohio to aggrandize his own power, to exploit an absolutely ignorant misunderstanding of trade deficits to aggrandize his own power, etc. The president of these United States is not an aspiring autocrat but an actual autocrat acting outside of the constitutional powers of his office in matters ranging from imposing illegal taxes on Americans to carrying out massacres of civilians in the Caribbean. Speaking with his trademark stroke victim’s diction, Trump insisted: 

I am allowed to cut off any and all trade or business with that same country. In other words, I can destroy the trade. I can destroy the country! I’m even allowed to impose a foreign country-destroying embargo. I can embargo. I can do anything I want, but I can’t charge $1. Because that’s not what it says, and that’s the way it even reads. I can do anything I wanted to do to them but can’t charge any money. So I’m allowed to destroy the country, but it can’t be a little fee.

Kevin D. Williamson

U.S. humanitarian aid

A year after the Trump administration began the dismantlement of USAID, it is initiating a new round of significant cuts to foreign assistance. This time, programs that survived the initial purge precisely because they were judged to be lifesaving are slated for cancellation.

… Each of them is classified as lifesaving according to the Trump administration’s standards.

The administration had already canceled the entire aid packages of two nations, Afghanistan and Yemen, where the State Department said terrorists were diverting resources. The new email, sent on February 12 to officials in the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, makes no such claims about the seven countries now losing all U.S. humanitarian aid: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Somalia, and Zimbabwe. Instead, according to the email, these projects are being canceled because “there is no strong nexus between the humanitarian response and U.S. national interests.”

Hana Kiros, The Trump Administration Is Ending Aid That It Says Saves Lives

Like I said, get used to us being the baddies.

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.

February 23, 2026

The Continuing Battle of Minneapolis

Many of the people abducted by the government [in Minneapolis/St. Paul] are taken without cause. When the government runs out of excuses to hold them, or is forced to release them by the courts, they send them out the front door of the Whipple Building, often in the dead of night. Alone. No cell phone. No jacket. In the freezing cold and snow.

A civic group called Haven Watch now stands guard at Whipple around the clock so that former prisoners of the regime do not freeze to death after release. While we were at Whipple talking to observers, a mother and two small children emerged from the building. They had nothing with them other than the clothes on their backs. It was about 15 degrees, the day after an unexpected snow. The three small humans haltingly made their way across the ice and slush in the road. Someone from Haven Watch met them and ushered them into a warm car.

I ask you: What do you think would have happened to this woman and her children had the United States government sent them into the cold and snow, far from taxis or transport, with no way of contacting anyone for help?

What do you think would have become of these three vulnerable human beings at the hands of our government had the people of Minnesota not stepped in to care for them?

This is Anne Frank territory; the stuff of the Stasi and East Germany, or Kosovo and Sarajevo. And the only way it ends is with victory for the regime or a reckoning for all those who waged this war against America.

However alarmed you are, it’s not enough.

Jonathan V. Last, What I Saw at the Battle of Minneapolis

The Tariff Decision

The Tariff decision in wider context

Put on your thinking cap for this one; it’s fairly heavy going for someone who doesn’t follow the Supreme Court’s doings:

3. A very significant aspect of the Chief Justice’s MQD [Major Questions Doctrine] analysis is that three conservative justices embraced it to rule against President Trump’s signature policy. And they did so in the most difficult possible context, with an issue involving national security and foreign affairs. This is a rebuttal to those who have claimed that the Court, or at least those three justices, invoke the doctrine opportunistically and politically to hurt Democratic presidents. And I think it signals more clearly than ever that, going forward, this Court is going to view broad delegations of statutory authority to a president to act, and/or extravagant presidential interpretations of authorizations to act, with skepticism. The three justices firmly committed here to the MQD can (if they wish) ensure that outcome in a case of just about any political configuration.

To the extent this is true, it is a hugely important complement to the Court’s emerging broad view of the unitary executive. Put another way, it is a vindication of Sarah Isgur’s view that the tradeoff on the Court for enhancing vertical unitary presidential control is “for the court to rein in Congress’s bad habit of delegating vast and vague powers to the executive branch,” including through MQD. It also puts in a better light the Court’s interim orders [the so-called “shadow docket”] to date in Trump 2.0, a large number of which, due to the application strategy of the Solicitor General, involved issues of vertical control. The tariff opinion gives the lie to the notion that the Court is in the bag for the president and also makes its approach to issues of presidential power in Trump 2.0 both clearer and more nuanced.

Jack Goldsmith

Let’s see if I can make clearer (and broader) sense of that; Goldsmith, after all, is writing mostly for lawyerly types:

  1. As a preliminary matter, don’t worry about what the Major Question Doctrine is; it really didn’t control the outcome here as three of six justices voted to strike down the tariffs without it. (I don’t think they were wrong.)
  2. SCOTUS here signaled that Congress is going to have to clearly delegate sweeping powers to the Executive Branch for the court to uphold the Executive’s use of those powers.
  3. Combine that with the “vertical unitary executive” and you’ve got the President (including future Presidents) in almost absolute control of the Executive Branch but, importantly, an Executive Branch that has been slimmed down in the powers it lawfully wields. That’s Sarah Isgur’s take anyway.
  4. The administration has a very strong record in the Court because the Solicitor General has made sure that the adverse lower-court decisions (there are hundreds) they appeal are very likely winners, often under the “Unified Executive” theory. (i.e, If you don’t appeal losers, you’re likely to have a good appellate win record.)
  5. Contrary to almost every snot-nosed Democrat and crypto-Democrat in the commentariat, this Supreme Court is not in Trump’s pocket, dammit!

Trump’s tariff tantrum

Note that no one is even pretending that Trump’s new 15 percent tariffs for the entire world are being imposed for anything resembling legitimate economic reason. The president is angry about the Supreme Court defeat, and he wants to show members of the court’s majority that they can’t constrain him for long—and show the rest of the country and the world that he’s still The Boss. That’s it. That’s the entirety of the justification.

Trump wants to wield absolute, arbitrary power, because doing so allows him to project strength that he can deploy at will to reward friends, harm enemies, and exact monetary concessions (in the form of bribes and kickbacks from domestic and foreign companies and governments around the world). That is what all of this tariff nonsense has always been about. Tariffs in the abstract can play a role in helping to shape a country’s trade policy—but not when they are imposed in a capricious way and without even an elementary understanding of international economics. I, for one, would love to see the courts internalize the presumption of Trumpian bad will in their assessment of future cases involving tariffs—and hopefully in other areas of policymaking as well.

Damon Linker

I’m with Linker up to that last sentence, and I might even go along with it if by “internalize” he means “assume but do not say it out loud.” It’s as if Linker is not just abandoning the “presumption of regularity” but reversing it to a “presumption of irregularity.”

More Linker:

Learning Resources dealt the Trump administration a blow. But within hours, the president had pivoted to a different way of justifying its efforts to impose tariffs, requiring another round of slow-ball court review. This shows, I think, that when a president is determined to assert power, the judiciary has very limited powers at its disposal even if the president refrains from openly defying its decisions. The best it can do is fight the executive to a draw that requires the president to change tactics and try again by other means.

In order to truly check the power of a wayward executive, the courts need to be joined in the fight by Congress. Our system presumes each branch will fight jealously in defense of its institutional prerogatives. When that ceases to happen, the system is hobbled. Today, it only happens when Congress and the presidency are held by different parties. That’s bad. And until it changes, stopping the right by any means other than beating it in an election may prove impossible.

This is especially true because Trump has no desire whatsoever to seek congressional approval for specific tariffs. That’s what a president would do if his trade policies were motivated primarily by economic considerations. But as I noted above, Trump’s trade policies are motivated by the desire to use tariffs to boss countries and conglomerates around with an eye to winning concessions along with monetary rewards for himself and his family. Involving Congress in the process would make this kind of personalized imposition of rewards and punishments for friends and enemies much more cumbersome and therefore ineffective. So Trump simply won’t do it.

What the Supreme Court does

The justices did not determine whether or how to issue refunds for the duties.

(TMD).

It reflects civic ignorance that media have to write things like that.

SCOTUS is not an omniscient über-government. It’s not a second legislature setting up detailed mechanisms.

It decides issues. The issue decided Friday was whether IEPPA authorized tariffs. Yeah, this only kicks the ball down the road, but it wouldn’t be right or prudent for SCOTUS to try to negate all tariffs under all imaginable statutory or constitutional authorities.

If you want to avoid chaos, do not elect chaos agents – and don’t expect the courts to bail you out if you do.

They may well succeed

The America I love is not a stretch of soil or a place where the people of my blood lived and died. It’s a set of impudent and improbable goals: the rule of law and equality before it, liberty, freedom of speech and conscience, decency. We have always fallen short of them and always will, but we wrote them down and decided to dedicate ourselves to pursuing them. That’s worth something.

The people I despise, and who despise me, believe America’s values and goals are blood, soil, swagger, and an insipid and arrogant conformity. They are the values of bullies and their sycophants. They may prevail. There’s no promise they will not.

Ken White (Popehat), The Fourth of July, Rethought

Cozy Girls

Now for something cozier

There is a certain kind of person, usually self-styled as clear-eyed, hard-headed, and immune to trends, who regards the cozy girl lifestyle with undisguised contempt. She sees cozy culture as unserious, quiescent, and politically regressive. She insists that the things celebrated by cozy girls are so celebrated because they replicate the preferences of the wealthy, of the bourgieosie. … Some of these criticism have a little merit, but I find myself entirely unable to join in that contempt. In a winner-take-all society where ordinary life has been systematically stripped of dignity, the turn toward “cozy” is less a retreat from reality into the past and more a rational adaptation to the unhappy present.

…

You’ve heard this song from me before many times: we live in an era in which the range of lives publicly regarded as worthy of living has contracted almost to nothing. Our culture confers esteem on a vanishingly small number of roles, and those roles are largely defined by being visible – that is to say, by attracting public attention, of which there is a necessarily finite supply. … Everything else – teacher! paralegal! office manager! dental hygienist! retail supervisor! random white collar office email job that’s basically fine! – is flattened into an undifferentiated gray. These are necessary roles, some of them pay well, but they certainly aren’t glamorous ones, and young Americans seem increasingly convinced that a life that doesn’t inspire envy among others – when broadcast online, naturally – isn’t one worth living.

… [A]lmost everyone who tries to get rich quick will fail, but everyone can choose to be cozy.

The genius of the cozy aesthetic is that it identifies sources of pleasure that are widely accessible and modest and treats them as inherently worthy of serious cultivation: a soft sweater, a well-made cup of tea, a public library card, a crockpot recipe that reliably produces something warm and nourishing, a Saturday morning with nowhere to be. You may find any one or all of these more or less attractive based on your own preferences, but whatever they are, they’re not signifiers of elite achievement, they’re all available in low-cost forms, and they’re all reliable and attainable. They’re not blue-check credentials, they don’t require venture capital or viral reach, and you don’t need to chew your fingernails waiting for the wheel to spin to see if you’ve won them. These simple pleasures are, instead, elements of an ordinary life lived with intention.

Freddie DeBoer, Cozy Girl Lifestyle is a Rational Response to a Winner-Take-All Culture (Shared link)

Shorts

  • When people think you can’t tell the difference between a man and woman, they’re not going to buy anything else you say. (Andrew Sullivan, who doggedly keeps pointing out that L, G and B have very little in common with T, let alone with QIA2S+++.)
  • [T]his Congress is for Trump what the Duma is for Putin: an echo-chamber of irrelevance and submission. (Andrew Sullivan)
  • Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. (W.H. Auden)
  • We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand. (Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire) So much for Chesterton’s Fence.
  • Alan Jacobs contrasts modern and classic political invective.

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Retire These Words!

I never, ever want to hear the phrase “Trump derangement syndrome” again.

There is no derangement among those of us horrified by Trump. There never was. There was simply honest recognition of a spectacularly dishonest and disgraceful bully who showed his colors from the start, before his first election to the presidency, when he mocked John McCain’s years of confinement and torture as a prisoner of war, when he mused about some gun enthusiast taking a shot at Hillary Clinton … He was as ready then to lay waste to democratic traditions and institutions as he is now. He was the same aspiring autocrat, just with less practice and power.

“Derangement syndrome” itself should go away. It’s a glib, hyperbolic dismissal of substantive concerns. People on the right who repeatedly raised alarms about Biden’s cognition and health were accused of “Biden derangement syndrome,” but beneath the exaggerations and gracelessness in which some of them indulged were rational observations. “Derangement syndrome,” like so much else these days, shuts down meaningful debate, turning it into so much mud slinging.

With Trump, language has been challenging. There was the period of respectful, reflexive disinclination to use “lies” or “lying,” until the growing tower of euphemisms and synonyms toppled under its own absurdity. “Fascist” was a red line that’s now receiving something of a green light.

“Until recently, I resisted using the F-word to describe President Trump,” Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Atlantic about a week ago, later adding: “Reluctance to use the term has now become perverse. That is not because of any one or two things he and his administration have done but because of the totality. Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.”

How I wish I could label that assessment deranged.

Frank Bruni

Often I post things just because they’re interesting. Other times I post things to amplify them because I believe them. This post is one of those times.

I don’t expect ever to need to retract this. I can only hope that some day I can write “… but the American people finally got fed up and drove him from office.”

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher

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.

Thursday, 1/22/26

Political Theory

The next two items, though illustrated by our present political circumstances, are intended to make points that will continue to be important in new circumstances.

Integrity matters

The health of the American experiment rests far more on the integrity of any given American president than we realized.

We trusted that presidents would impose accountability on the executive branch. We trusted that presidents wouldn’t abuse their pardon power — or, if they did, then Congress could impeach and convict any offenders. And so we manufactured doctrine after doctrine, year after year, that insulated the executive branch from legal accountability.

It’s hard to overstate how much this web of immunities — combined with the failure of Congress to step up and fulfill its powerful constitutional role — has made the United States vulnerable to authoritarian abuse.

In Federalist No. 51, James Madison wrote some of the most famous words of the American founding. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” Madison wrote. “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

David French (shared link)

The Prerogative State

The David French column continues. I broke it in two because I thought it was important, once again, to warn against ever again electing high officials of such low character.

But there’s a specific ramification I hadn’t identified:

[Y]ou can see the emerging dual state in action in Minneapolis right now. In much of the city, life is routine. People create new businesses, enter into contracts, file litigation and make deals as if life were completely normal and the rule of law exists, untainted by our deep political divide.

But if you interact with ICE, suddenly you risk coming up against the full force of the prerogative state. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the ICE agent’s video of the fatal encounter between Renee Good and ICE is that it’s plain that Good thinks she’s still in the normative state. She has no idea of the peril she’s in.

She seems relaxed. She even seems to have told the agent that she’s not mad at him. In the normative state, your life almost never depends on immediate and unconditional compliance with police commands.

But she wasn’t in the normative state. She had crossed over the border to the prerogative state, and in that state you can be shot dead recklessly, irresponsibly and perhaps even illegally, and no one will pay the price. You might even be rewarded with more than $1 million in donations from friends and allies.

David French (shared link)

Competing, revealing, metaphors

In February … I spoke at a gathering of conservatives in London called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship …

As the conference went on, I noticed a contest of metaphors. The true conservatives used metaphors of growth or spiritual recovery. Society is an organism that needs healing, or it is a social fabric that needs to be rewoven. A poet named Joshua Luke Smith said we needed to be the seeds of regrowth, to plant the trees for future generations. His incantation was beatitudinal: “Remember the poor. Remember the poor.”

But others relied on military metaphors. We are in the midst of civilizational war. “They”—the wokesters, the radical Muslims, the left—are destroying our culture. There were allusions to the final epochal battles in The Lord of the Rings. The implication was that Sauron is leading his Orc hordes to destroy us. We are the heroic remnant. We must crush or be crushed.

The warriors tend to think people like me are soft and naive. I tend to think they are catastrophizing narcissists. When I look at Trump acolytes, I see a swarm of Neville Chamberlains who think they’re Winston Churchill.

David Brooks, I Should Have Seen This Coming, April, 2025.

Occasionally, I achieve a complete mind-meld with Brooks. This was one of those times, at least for the first third of his article; after that, he notes some things that I hadn’t noticed until he pointed them out.

Sanctuary City primer

So-called “sanctuary cities” and “sanctuary states” choose not to assist the federal government in finding or deporting illegal aliens, and they have a constitutional right to make that choice.

What does noncooperation look like on the ground? A flash point involves immigration detainer orders, which call on state and local law enforcement agents to transfer into ICE custody illegal aliens who are about to be released from state custody.

…

The administration says that Minnesota is refusing to honor ICE detainers and has released hundreds of illegal aliens “onto the streets” instead of turning them over to ICE. Minnesota denies this accusation and insists that it’s honoring all immigration detainers.

Whichever side is correct, federal courts have held that ICE detainers issued to state agencies are “requests,” not “orders.” …

…

The federal government does have a mechanism for getting states and cities to voluntarily do what they can’t be forced to do. It’s called money. Congress could deny states or cities certain funds unless they abolish their sanctuary policies. There are limits to this strategy: Washington can’t shut off unrelated funds that states or cities need to keep functioning. But immigrant-related federal funding—for example, money devoted to sheltering new, legal immigrants—could presumably be denied to states and cities that maintain sanctuary policies.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump declared that after February 1, “We are not making any payments to sanctuary cities or states having sanctuary cities.” But while Congress could condition state and local funding on cooperation with ICE, the president’s powers are more limited. Trump has tried this strategy before. Both in his first term and second, he issued executive orders calling for sanctuary states and cities to be denied federal monies. Except in narrow circumstances, courts have not been receptive, holding that without congressional approval, the president could not unilaterally deny states money that Congress had already appropriated for them.

Jed Rubenfeld

The name “Sanctuary City” has always struck me as a bit preening, but the principle that that cities and states are not (normally, though if there are exceptions, I can’t think of one) obliged to assist in enforcement of federal law or in advancement of federal priorities. A non-immigration example is marijuana legalization by the states, whereas marijuana remains illegal in national law. If and when the DEA comes to bust up a dispensary, local officials presumably won’t help, but the principle doesn’t allow them to interfere, either.

Of being a conservative radio talk-show host back in the day

So for years, when someone sent me something that was a conspiracy theory, or false, or just misleading or unfair, I would be able to push back and say “this is not true; there are not bodies stacked up in the Clinton warehouses; no this is not happening over here,” and people would say “thank you, Charlie for setting me straight” …

[I]n 2015 and 2016, what I found, very gradually but very forcefully, was that it became harder and harder to push back; it became harder and harder to give them any information that would change their mind.

And that’s when I realized that we had been too successful, that we had destroyed all the immune system to false information, to this kind of propaganda. And this was kind of an “Oh, shit!” moment for me.

Charlie Sykes, interviewed by Andrew Sullivan.

Morality, Law and Religion

The public should be absolutely concerned about whether a nominee for judicial office will be willing and able to set aside personal preferences. That’s not a challenge just for religious people. That’s a challenge for everyone.

Amy Coney Barrett (italics added)

Pet peeve: The idea that “separation of church and state” requires religious public officials and employees to set aside their religious beliefs when conducting public business. The tacit message in that is either that (1) morality and law are completely separate or (2) that religion is inherently irrational whereas other moral beliefs are not. In truth, there is no neutral, preference‑free judicial standpoint, and the available standpoints all are larded with moral intuitions that either can be accused of irrationality.

Yes, I have advocated in public meetings where I wished that others on “my side” would shut up if all they had to contribute was dubiously-applicable Bible proof-texts. But those kinds of folks never get nominated for any federal bench, and they’d be eaten alive if they were.

Consequences

The yield spread between three-month Treasury bills and 10-year bonds has widened by some 0.6 percentage points since early November. “The Fed may want lower interest rates, but the market ain’t buying it,” said Willian Adler, an Elliott Wave technical analyst.

He warns that the conditions are in place for a serious sell-off across risk assets. It could be similar to the bond rout that spooked Trump after the “liberation day” tariffs.

This rising spread may simply reflect fears of resurgent inflation as front-loaded stimulus from the “one big beautiful bill” juices the economy over the coming months, with the risk of full-blown overheating if Trump hands out $2,000 a head as a pre-electoral bribe.

But it may also be the first sign that America is starting to pay a price for the collapse of political credibility.

(Telegraph UK via John Ellis)

Unpopular opinions

I keep a private list of my truly unpopular opinions – opinions so far outside the Overton Window that I could lose friends if I voiced them.

I review and supplement the list occasionally, but never before have I decided that something doesn’t belong on the list any more (or maybe never belonged on it in the first place). This one probably never belonged on the list:

1. Subsidies for pro sports, including stadium construction, are damnable boondoggles. I would vote against every one of them until the franchise-owning billionaires ran me out of office.

While I’m at it, these too can come off the list:

2. Abolitions I supported that may well have hurt America:

  • The military draft Politicians who have anything to do with war policy should have skin in the game, even if it’s the skin of their descendants.
  • The Fairness Doctrine. We opened Pandora’s box before cable TV and the internet obliterated it. I don’t see a way back to sanity through reinstating the policy.

While I’m on a roll, here’s one that’s never been on the list:

3. The states should stop running primary elections. Neither major party is worth the powder to blow it up. Let them run their own elections or go back to “smoke-filled rooms” (which incidentally yielded better candidates than crackpot “base voters” have been yielding).

Logic mincing

Q: Which is better: a ham sandwich or complete happiness in life?
A: A ham sandwich, of course! Nothing is better than complete happiness in life and a ham sandwich is better than nothing.

  1. Something must be done!
  2. This is something.
  3. This must be done!

Shorts

  • No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom. The assertion that “foul is useful and fair is not“ is the antithesis of wisdom. (E.F. Shumacher) Small Is Beautiful is a classic for good reason.
  • The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency. (Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, citing the president’s authority to impose tariffs in an economic emergency, arguing that America’s supposed need to control Greenland is a national emergency.)
  • The health of the American experiment rests far more on the integrity of any given American president than we realized. (David French)
  • The pervasiveness of legal sports gambling can make an undefeated season and a 6-point victory in the national championship game feel like a loss if “the margin” was 7.5. (Moi)
  • At some point, we’ll reach the bottom of this dystopian populist abomination, but no one thinks we’re there yet, do they? (Nick Catoggio)
  • “The Trump Denmark letter is his Biden debate moment,” one Twitter user claimed.
  • Donald Trump is a peacock among the dull buzzards of American politics. (Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium).
  • A clown with a flame thrower still has a flamethrower. (Charlie Sykes to Andrew Sullivan)
  • When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
  • TikTok is still a danger. America no longer cares.
  • The souvenir is a fetish object that substitutes for the finite experience of the destination. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher

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.