Friday, 6/7/24

Legalia

Musical rackets

Copyright law is just a big steaming mess. Whenever you think it can’t get crazier, it always does.

YouTube is the ultimate battlefield for copyright claims gone wild. Even when I do a short YouTube video about music, I can never play examples from actual recordings. (That’s why I’ve never given an online course on music history. Corporate lawyers would shut me down in a New York minute.)

Consider the case of the YouTuber whose video got demonetized because his “Samsung washing machine randomly chimed to signal a laundry cycle had finished while he was streaming.”

How is that even possible? But it gets even stranger.

Ashley Belanger reports in Ars Technica:

Apparently, YouTube had automatically scanned Albino’s video and detected the washing machine chime as a song called “Done”…[but it] actually comes from the song “Die Forelle” (“The Trout”) from Austrian composer Franz Schubert.

The song was composed in 1817 and is in the public domain. Samsung has used it to signal the end of a wash cycle for years.

I’m not sure what Schubert would make of all this. But I can assure you that none of his heirs will get a penny from this. That’s not the purpose of song copyrights anymore.

Ted Gioia, in a thoroughly disheartening chronicle of where AI appears to be taking us.

See also James O’Malley, Music Just Changed Forever

One crime with 34 cooties

I have added a P.S. to my recent post “34 Counts!”:

I don’t think I’ll dwell on the 34 counts any more, and regret having done so. The 34 counts were 34 bookkeeping entries. In most courts — and in best practice — this would have been charged as one crime, or so I’m told.

Politics

Sheep

Most Church leaders—conscious that to condemn Nazis for blasphemous kitsch might prove risky—opted to bite their tongues. Some, though, actively lent it their imprimatur. In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle hymn. In Berlin Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.

Tom Holland, Dominion

I heard David French tell a story about masculinity today that was very David Frenchy in that it was based on a movie, American Assassin:

This is the story of Chris Kyle. And it was — I remember seeing it here in Tennessee. And you couldn’t find a parking spot in our theater. That movie was an absolute sensation.

And one of the most memorable parts of that movie is when Chris Kyle is involved in a playground fight, and his father goes through this sheepdog, sheep, wolf analogy. And that is there’s three kinds of people in this world. There’s the sheep, there are the wolves who prey on the sheep, and the sheepdogs who protect the sheep from the wolf.

And he says, I’m not raising any sheep in this household. So what are you? And at that point, Chris Kyle identifies himself as a sheep dog, as somebody who protects the weak against the wolf. OK? And so it’s a very anti-bullying sort of vision of male courage.

And then here comes Donald Trump, who fits to a T the definition of a wolf, of a bully. The story the right told about itself was that they would be inoculated against the wolf, against the bully, because they have this ethos of the sheepdog.

But then when the wolf arose and the bully arose, they went with the bully, the very person that a generation of young right-wing men were warned about. And so that’s what makes this, in many ways, so much more deeply disturbing even than it otherwise been (sic), because it called into question kind of the cultural enterprise that was happening before Trump.

On that same podcast, Jamelle Bouie, riffing on Trump’s first post-conviction public appearance being UFC (Universal Fight Club), quipped that “Professional wrestling is camp for straight men..”

Not a referendum on Trump?!

I believe I recently passed on an opinion that both Trump and Biden want this election to be a referendum on Trump. Now I pass along the opinion that it’s a referendum on Biden:

[Y]ou can just look at the polls in the US: 51 percent of Americans now support mass deportations of the kind Trump is proposing; including 42 percent of Democrats, and 45 percent of Hispanics. That was unthinkable four years ago — and it’s entirely on Biden. The revolt against this basic failure of governance is now strong even in big cities, run by Democrats, and among non-whites, who are moving toward Trump.

Joe Biden’s main campaign theme seems to be that he alone can defend liberal democracy from Donald Trump. What Biden has never understood is that restricting immigration is absolutely critical to defending liberal democracy. Everything else is just words, condescending words. If Trump triumphs in November, Biden will be responsible for simply ignoring basic political reality, alienating the very people he needs.

…

One person was responsible for Trump’s first term: Hillary Clinton. And one will be responsible for his second: Joe Biden.

I guess it’s worth reiterating at this point that I’m not anti-immigration. It remains the lifeblood of America, and immigration is vital for our future fiscal balance. I’m a proud immigrant myself — and America will always be able to integrate newcomers in ways European countries simply cannot. But, like a huge majority of Americans, I’m in favor of legal, orderly, controlled immigration — and not the chaos we now see everywhere in the West. This is not racism or xenophobia; it’s a recognition that borders and the rule of law matter; and that without secure borders, we risk losing the core reality of a nation-state; and without a better-paced influx, we risk delegitimizing immigration altogether, and balkanizing our societies.

Andrew Sullivan

Loser Trump

Trump’s base does not win elections outside of party primaries. It did not win the midterms for the Republican Party in 2018, it did not win re-election for the Trump in 2020, and it did not win a red wave for Republicans in 2022. The signature Republican victory of the last four years, the election of Glenn Youngkin over Terry McAuliffe in the 2021 Virginia race for governor, rested on an effort to marginalize the Trump base so that party leaders could engineer a nominee with the ability to distance himself from the former president and his movement.

Jamelle Bouie.

And true to form, the RNC’s Lara Trump has issued a fatwa against Larry Hogan, Republican candidate from U.S. Senate from Maryland, for saying the public should respect the process and the verdict in the Trump felony trial. Kiss that seat goodbye, GOP.

Chicken Littles of the Left

Some people reportedly (I haven’t met one outside of click-bait stories) are worked up that some Trump supporters want to ban IVF, contraception, and recreational sex. Though I know some arguments against each of those sacred cows, this strikes me as a reverse mirror-image of QAnon.

I would welcome more careful thought about IVF, but I’m an outlier. Anyone who thinks that a lame duck Donald Trump is going to pander to a very small group of ideologues who are seriously out of step with 90%+ of their countrymen needs to take a deep breath. Anyone who thinks that Donald Trump (who probably has frequent sperm donor perks at the fertility clinics of Manhattan) is personally opposed to IVF, contraception and recreational sex (“I never did anything that needed forgiveness” or something like that, he said) needs inpatient psych care.

Culture

Defining deviancy down … and up

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

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

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Presented without express comment

A new poll from Ipsos has found that support for same-sex marriage among Americans has fallen to just 51% approval.

…

Following a years-long rise in support for gay marriage, a groundswell of anti-woke sentiment emerged around 2021, much of it directed at LGBT activism as parents gained a new window into their children’s curriculum when schooling went remote during the Covid-19 pandemic …

Gay rights have since been lumped in with trans rights in the popular imagination, which may have chipped away some public support for gay marriage at the margins. …

Bev Jackson, co-founder of the LGB Alliance, said the decline in support for same-sex marriage had causes on both the Left and the Right. “Blame for the fall in US support for gay marriage lies partly with the homophobic religious Right. But equally to blame are treacherous organisations like GLAAD and the ACLU which promote insane, deeply unpopular concepts such as gender self-ID and child ‘transition’,” she said. “Gender identity ideologues have been riding on LGB’s coattails for too long, and they’re helping to destroy support for the rights we fought for decades to win.”

Laurel Duggan

Junk info

Junk info is often false info, but it isn’t junk because it’s false. It’s junk because it has no practical use; it doesn’t make your life better, and it doesn’t improve your understanding. Even lies can be nourishing; the works of Dostoevsky are fiction, yet can teach you more about humans than any psychology textbook. Meanwhile, most verified facts do nothing to improve your life or understanding, and are, to paraphrase Nietzsche, as useful as knowledge of the chemical composition of water to someone who is drowning.

Gurwinder

Privileging victims, real and imagined

The intuitive moral structure of our modern social imaginary prioritizes victimhood, sees selfhood in psychological terms, regards traditional sexual codes as oppressive and life denying, and places a premium on the individual’s right to define his or her own existence.

Carl R. Trueman and Rod Dreher, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Safetyism today

They want revolutionary ends, but they want to hide behind establishment credibility.

Jonah Goldberg, describing the successor ideology, which has famously “march[ed] through the institutions.”

Tipsy the squish

I finally had to replace the color toner cartridges on my laser printer. I opened the red-and-white Canon box I’d ordered months ago. I found unfamiliar packaging of the cartridges and unfamiliar cartridge configuration. I figured out how to install them and then looked for the instructions on recycling them (back to Canon). It was nowhere to be found.

Having seen the word “compatible” a few times, I looked more closely at the box. Where the word Canon should have been, the word “Cartridge” appeared.

I remembered when I purchased them my shock at the low price, but I double- and triple-checked. I thought I was getting an inexplicable price on Canon goods. They still conned me with the Canon-looking box.

Now I’ve got three laser cartridges I can’t recycle, and it bothers me more than such a thing is supposed to bother a conservative.

Which reminds me again of how close “conservative” today is to “barbarian.” My gut-identification today remains “conservative,” but my considered identification is center-right.

Progress

Progress should be about improving the quality of life and human flourishing. We make a grave error when we assume this is the same as new tech and economic cost-squeezing.

Ted Gioia, I Ask Seven Heretical Questions About Progress

GD Misinformation

Mainstream coverage of this issue is a buffet of sanctimonious overclaiming. It says authoritatively that kids in the US can’t go on blockers or hormones prior to lengthy, in-depth assessment (false). That no one under 18 is getting surgery (false). That the worldwide rise in referrals to youth GD clinics is almost entirely the result of reduced stigmatization (no one knows). That GD, or the perception that one has GD, can’t spread through adolescent social networks (almost certainly false on the basis of anecdotal evidence and any familiarity with developmental psychology). That it’s a ‘myth’ that significant number of kids who believe themselves to be trans will later feel differently (false, according to all the existing data). That only a tiny percentage of people detransition (we have no data at all on this in the context of youth gender care in the States).

What the Media Gets Wrong on Gender Reassignment. This is from 2021 when the elites were uniformly purveying lies about Covid, gender dysphoria and who knows what all else. Things have gotten markedly better in recent months on adolescent gender dysphoria.

Capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball

For many of our applicants—and this, of course, is what the program is about, what the humanities are about—learning has, or ought to have, an existential weight. Beneath their talk of education, of unplugging from technology, of having time for creativity and solitude, I detected a desire to be free of forces and agendas: the university’s agenda of ‘relevance,’ the professoriate’s agenda of political mobilization, the market’s agenda of productivity, the internet’s agenda of surveillance and addiction. In short, the whole capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball of coerced homogeneity. The desire is to not be recruited, to not be instrumentalized, to remain (or become) an individual, to resist regression toward the mean, or meme.

William Deresiewicz, Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul H/T Frank Bruni (who led me to actually read a piece I’d only skimmed). Ted Gioia, My Lifetime Reading Plan, practiced it before Deresiewicz preached it.

Losers

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality-without exploiting them for fun and profit.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

All 34 Counts!

Here, with minimal personal commentary, are some of the smarter or snappier takes on Donald Trump’s felony convictions Thursday:

The jury, obviously, is asked only to evaluate the evidence before it, and yet, it is asking a lot of anyone to sit and ignore the fact that the defendant has, publicly, turned you into an enemy.

Jamelle Bouie

Bragg didn’t defeat Trumpism. He revived it.

Matthew Continetti

I was struck by the insistence of Trump’s lawyers on pursuing arguments or lines of questioning that seemed unhelpful to their case. Todd Blanche, for example, insisted repeatedly that Trump had never slept with Stormy Daniels, even though this denial boxed Trump into a weaker argument. These tactics by the defense seemed designed to placate Trump’s own vanity and sense of grievance — but even if they made the client happy, it’s hard to imagine they helped his case with the jury.

Quinta Jurecic

The defense lost a winnable case by adopting an ill-advised strategy that was right out of Mr. Trump’s playbook. For years, he denied everything and attacked anyone who dared to take him on. It worked — until this case.

I have practiced criminal law for over 20 years, and I have tried and won cases as both a federal prosecutor and criminal defense attorney. I’ve almost never seen the defense win without a compelling counternarrative. Jurors often want to side with prosecutors, who have the advantage of writing the indictment, marshaling the witnesses and telling the story.

The defense needs its own story, and in my experience, the side that tells the simpler story at trial usually wins.

Instead of telling a simple story, Mr. Trump’s defense was a haphazard cacophony of denials and personal attacks … Perhaps Mr. Trump’s team was also pursuing a political or press strategy, but it certainly wasn’t a good legal strategy. The powerful defense available to Mr. Trump’s attorneys was lost amid all the clutter.

Renato Mariotti

The verdict should come as a surprise to precisely nobody. Those who protest the verdict most fiercely know better than anyone how justified it is. The would-be Trump running mate Marco Rubio shared a video this afternoon on X, comparing American justice to a Castro show trial. The slur is all the more shameful because Rubio has himself forcefully condemned Trump. “He is a con artist,” Rubio said during the 2016 nomination contest. “He runs on this idea he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy—his entire career.” Rubio specifically cited the Trump University scheme as one of Trump’s cons. In 2018, Trump reached a $25 million settlement with people who had enrolled in the courses it offered.

Eight years later, Rubio has attacked a court, a jury, and the whole U.S. system of justice for proving the truth of his words.

…

What has been served here is not the justice that America required after Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election first by fraud, then by violence. It’s justice instead of an especially ironic sort, driving home to the voting public that before Trump was a constitutional criminal, he got his start as a squalid hush-money-paying, document-tampering, tabloid sleazeball.

If Trump does somehow return to the presidency, his highest priority will be smashing up the American legal system to punish it for holding him to some kind of account—and to prevent it from holding him to higher account for the yet-more-terrible charges pending before state and federal courts. The United States can have a second Trump presidency, or it can retain the rule of law, but not both.

David Frum, Wrong Case, Right Verdict

It was the first time a sitting or former US president has been convicted of a crime. It was also the first time that the allies of a president of one party have successfully weaponised the American judicial system in an attempt to destroy the presidential candidate of another.

In both of these cases, the partisan motives of the Democratic prosecutors and judges were evident …

The partisanship of the Democratic officials in the hush-money case has been just as blatant. Charges like those brought against Trump were rejected as too weak by Cyrus Vance, the previous Manhattan district Attorney, and they were also rejected as too flimsy by Vance’s successor, Manhattan’s current DA, Alvin Bragg. Bragg only changed his mind and brought charges against Trump after two things happened. The first was the publication of a book — People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account — by Mark Pomerantz, a member of Bragg’s team who resigned in protest in 2022, claiming that Bragg was not doing enough to prosecute Trump. The second was the fact that, by 2023, it was becoming clear that Trump would be the Republican nominee for the presidency.

…

In the short run, the corruption of the American legal system by Democrats has sundered the reputation of New York state. Yet far worse is the damage to America’s global reputation. Thanks to these Soviet-style show trials, the US can no longer plausibly claim to be a global example of the nonpartisan rule of law and constitutional government. That reputation was already damaged by Trump’s clumsy attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Today, however, thanks to his enemies’ willingness to play a similar game, that perception has been cemented.

For in the future, by weaponising state law to try to destroy federal candidates and officeholders of the rival party, Democrats have opened a Pandora’s box. It is probably only a matter of time before Republican attorney generals start prosecuting present or former Democratic politicians on their own trumped-up charges. And why not? The use of lawfare against Trump has put a target on the back of Democratic politicians. Already some Republicans are calling for prosecutions of James and Bragg under an obscure federal statute against electoral interference. After all, such prosecutions, ruinous as they would be, are more plausible than the cases that those prosecutors have brought against Trump.

In Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons, Sir Thomas More responds to William Roper’s statement that he would “cut down every law in England” to go after the Devil: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” The Democrats are about to learn a similar lesson: that even the Devil deserves the benefit of the law.

Michael Lind

Note: Lind wrote some other things I’m pretty sure I disagree with, but after he closed with the classic line from A Man For All Seasons, I couldn’t not quote his better stuff.

Trump would be an unlikely candidate for prison even if he weren’t also a candidate for president. For one thing, he will be 78 at the time of sentencing, making him potentially vulnerable in a prison setting. “[Prison time] would really surprise me,” David said on the special edition of Advisory Opinions. “He’s a first-time, nonviolent felony offender.”

Nevertheless, David added, “There are circumstances where you have 34 convictions, you have zero expression of remorse, you have multiple contempt citations in the trial, all of those things are not optimal defendant behavior in the face of these convictions.”

The Morning Dispatch

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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 cathartic venting, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

The real verdict, is going to be November 5 by the people.

Donald Trump who, opening his mouth after the verdict, actually said something true for once.

***

P.S. I don’t think I’ll dwell on the 34 counts any more, and regret having done so. The 34 counts were 34 bookkeeping entries. In most courts — and in best practice — this would have been charged as one crime, or so I’m told.

Friday, 5-17-24

Pearl-clutchers

“I have heard from a good number of people in the S.D.N.Y. who have said, ‘Why the heck would Todd [Blanche] do this — why would he ever take this case?’” Elie Honig, a CNN senior legal analyst who worked with Mr. Blanche at the Southern District of New York, said in a recent profile. “My response is, generally, when did we become pearl-clutchers about defense lawyers defending defendants?”

Michael Wilson, Todd Blanche, Trump’s Lawyer in Hush-Money Trial, Cross-Examines Cohen

Just so.

The Culture Generally

Seeing whole people

[W]e have to stop just seeing these [gender dysphoric] young people through the lens of their gender and see them as whole people, and address the much broader range of challenges that they have, sometimes with their mental health, sometimes with undiagnosed neurodiversity. It’s really about helping them to thrive, not just saying “How do we address the gender?” in isolation.

Dr. Hilary Cass to the New York Times

Thinking small

Ted Gioia, Why Creatives Will Win by Thinking Small pulls together a convincing case that “Even the gatekeepers are sick of dealing with gatekeepers” and are going independent and/or small to evade them. Taylor Swift and Substack are two examples, evading the gatekeepers of the sclerotic music and publishing industries respectively.

Maybe we could say that small is getting pretty big.

Ted Gioia’s got one of the best culture-analyzing Substacks going.

Living off inherited moral capital

“I wouldn’t call it a change of mind,” Will said of his transition from classical liberalism to traditionalist conservatism. “I would say that I had become much more sensitive to the problem that Gertrude Himmelfarb, her husband, Irving Kristol, and others were to cite. And that is: Does classic liberalism provide for its own continuation, or does it live off the moral capital of a different age?”

Guy Denton, George Will Stands Against Vehemence

Presented without comment

A female friend expressed outrage that Caitlin Clark would be paid a piddling $76,000 in her first year in the WNBA. (By comparison, the first pick in the 2023 NBA draft signed a four-year contract for $55 million.) I asked her what team drafted Clark. She did not know. I asked her whether she knew the name of New York’s WNBA team. She did not. The name of any team in the WNBA? Nope. A famous player in the WNBA? Again, no answer.

R. R. Reno

Ready, fire, aim

Staff at The New York Times are circulating a draft of a letter to their boss, executive editor Joe Kahn, criticizing him for saying that some young reporters are not fully committed to independent journalism. Pro tip: if you’re worried your boss thinks you’re all whiny activists, campaigning against him from within the newsroom is only proving his point. (Semafor)

Oliver Wiseman

Politics

Boondogglia, USA

[A]rena subsidies are a terrible use of finite government resources and a ridiculously egregious redistribution of wealth from regular Americans—fans and haters alike—to some of the wealthiest people and organizations on the planet. And, to top it all off, they’re a classic case of political malpractice—local officials delivering massive rents to various cronies by promising unwitting voters the world yet delivering far fewer—but still “seen”—economic and social benefits to their communities.

…

Maybe all this government support might be worth the costs if the subsidized facilities at issue produced even a fraction of the benefits that supporters promise, but they don’t. Instead, there are few positions on which more economists agree than the terribleness of sports arena subsidies.

Scott Lincicome, Sports Are Great, but Stadium Subsidies Stink

Election 2024

The default position of American conservative Christians in this Fall’s Presidential Election should be to abstain or to vote for a Third-Party Candidate. Neither major party candidate is acceptable, so we should avoid complicity with both. It’s a painful situation, but not complicated.

My unspoken premise is that America is, and long has been, off course, and like all empires is waning, slowly, then all at once. (I could be wrong about the all-at-once part; that may come from the part of Evangelical apocalypticism that I did not avoid and have not fully recovered from. “Babylon the Great is fallen, is fallen” and all that.)

Neither major party has what it takes to fix that. Maybe no party does. Still, I intend to vote for Peter Sonski for President. That’s not just a protest vote. My values line up better with the American Solidarity Party than with either the Republicans or the Democrats.

Am I throwing my vote away? No. I’m telling both parties that they’re unacceptable. That’s a message well worth sending, not a waste. If enough people tell them that, they’ll change or fade into irrelevance. The first step toward changing our unsatisfactory two-party system, if it’s not entirely incorrigible, is to stop voting for lesser evils.

Am I voting for the other guy by not voting for your guy? No. I know how my home state is going to vote; my vote won’t be decisive — not in 2024, anyway. If polling was close enough that I thought it might make a difference, my correct decision would admittedly be harder emotionally. (I last voted for a “lesser evil” in, I believe, 2008.)

That’s it.

POTUS 2024

It was like he made you feel everything’s gonna be OK. The economy’s gonna get better; everybody’s freaking out about the border, but he’ll get it stopped.

Dee, a friend of Peggy Noonan, explaining why she’s voting for Trump.

Polls suggest that a felony conviction would lose him some votes ….

David Graham. What kind of world are we living in that a felony conviction wouldn’t be the death of a campaign?

Liberalism versus authoritarianism

I’ve tried to understand the appeal of Donald Trump. David Brooks gives it an oblique stab, and I thought there was a lot to like in his analysis, which is about liberalism versus authoritarianism, and the draw of the latter.

Now I understand how we keep electing bozos

As it happens, a new survey of registered voters was released last week from Navigator Research showing that a sizable number of Americans, incredibly enough, held Biden responsible for “the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the elimination of the federal right to an abortion.” That opinion was held by 34 percent of self-identified independents, 32 percent of Black voters, and 42 percent of Hispanic voters. It helps explain why the Biden campaign is devoting so much energy to connecting the dots between Trump’s Supreme Court appointments and the Dobbs decision. But it also suggests public perceptions of Trump are very hard to change, and that’s a big problem for Democrats.

Wall Street Journal.

Might there be, among those misinformed folks, people who give Biden credit for Dobbs as well as those who blame him? Or is ignorance a “pro-choice” exclusive?

Female success in Trumplandia

In The Los Angeles Times, Robin Abcarian noted that Noem, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sarah Palin, among others, conform to a certain MAGA model for women leaders: “First, they want to prove how tough they are by shooting guns, preferably at animals, though occasionally at cars that Democrats drive. And second, they aspire to beauty standards set by Fox News anchors. Dental veneers. Cheek and lip fillers. Botox. Hair extensions. Performative cruelty and pouty lips are what it takes to succeed as a woman in the party of Trump.” (Judy Moise, Seattle)
In The Arizona Republic, Ed Masley appraised a recent Rolling Stones concert and wrote that Mick Jagger’s physicality “invites you to imagine Mikhail Baryshnikov raised by a family of overcaffeinated roosters.” (Paul Welch, Phoenix, and Dan Olson, Spokane, Wash., among others)

Frank Bruni

How MAGAworld grew

Of all passions the passion for the Inner [Circle] is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

I have watched this play out powerfully since 2016.

De-polarizing maxims to live by

The people you think of as your enemies aren’t as wicked as you believe them to be.
If you believe that your ordinary political opponents are not merely mistaken, but are evil, you have ceased to do politics and begun to do heretical religion.

Putting things in perspective

In a gloomy mood about the state of the world, I was reminded that the big actors of today, Trump, Biden, Putin, etc. etc. will mostly be dead, and very soon. Thinking in terms of living so that our communities outlast the current commotions is important.
Leonard Woolf: “One of the most horrible things … was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler — the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. … One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers. … Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: ‘Hitler is making a speech.’ I shouted back, ‘I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.’”

John Brady and Jim Rain, respectively, on the best social medium in the cosmos.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Saturday Notebook Dump 5-11-24

Culture

Mind your own business

I have mixed feelings about Aaron Renn, of whom you may not even have heard. But he has a provocative suggestion, which I’ll paraphrase.

Why should conservatives, and especially Christian conservatives, oppose jackassery like the Columbia University occupation? Columbia doesn’t love conservatives, or Christians.

Columbia itself produced the brats who now threaten it. Do we even have a horse in this race? Would it be bad for us if Columbia paid the price for what it has become?

Such is liberal hegemony in the cultural institutions (arts, education, media) that we lament it constantly. Why then should we leap to defend these leftist institutions when they’re under threat from folks even further to the left?

There’s something to be said for sitting back and enjoying the show.

AR-15 as totem

In 2023, the Washington Post published a series of articles about AR-15-style rifles. The series was scientifically illiterate, error-ridden, propagandistic, and willfully misleading.

Naturally, it has just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Kevin D. Williamson. Williamson then really gets into the weeds. Though I’m not a huge gun enthusiast, I enjoy reading columns like this because of what they say about the sloppy journalism they’re critiquing and because I often learn things I didn’t know, like:

It is probably worth noting here that AR-style rifles are used in a very, very small share of shootings in the United States: All rifles together typically account for something less than 3 percent of the firearms homicides in the United States in a given year. Rifles are more commonly used in mass shootings, but, even in those high-profile crimes, they are used in a minority of cases, about 28 percent. The most common firearm used in a violent crime in the United States is the 9mm semiautomatic handgun—which is the most common handgun found in the United States.

Mass shooters often choose AR-style rifles for obvious reasons—because they are common, relatively easy to operate, and the rifle that most Americans are most familiar with—and for reasons that are best described as totemic. … Gun-control advocates who want to prohibit only AR-style rifles are seeking a merely symbolic victory—those other semiautomatic rifles would remain on the market and presumably would be used for the common legitimate and rare criminal purposes AR-style rifles are used for.

…

We could—and probably should—be more aggressive in prosecuting the crime of simple illegal firearm possession absent some additional violent offense, and we probably should hand down stiffer sentences more consistently for that crime rather than doing what we do now—which is dismissing the great majority of those cases or pleading them down to some trivial misdemeanor.

But rigorously enforcing the laws regarding firearm possession with prison sentences is going to mean a lot more young men becoming incarcerated felons earlier in life, and it is nearly certain that those young men will be disproportionately black and poor. … We should probably arrest and prosecute a lot more straw-buyers than we do, but we should be clear-eyed about who those straw-buyers are going to be—people with otherwise clean criminal records, often girlfriends or family members of convicted felons—before we start locking them up.

…

And they wonder why demagogues get so much mileage out of claims about “fake news.” It’s shameful stuff.

Whew! That’s a relief!

Even the most challenging writer will not always want to read works that constantly challenge or repudiate his or her expectations. Auden used to say that great masterpieces demand so much of their readers that you simply can’t take one on every day, not without either trivializing the experience or exhausting yourself.

Alan Jacobs, back to the brows

I know the internet has dumbed us down, and I’m not exempt from that. But I try to keep challenging books in my book list. My need to read other things, too, is hereby vindicated!

Jacobs throws out another thesis about “the brows” (low-, middle-, and high-):

For a long time now there has been no genuine lowbrow reading. Those who insist on all their expectations being fulfilled can get that hit much more efficiently through movies, TV, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

Intrinsic values

When people say that something is “valuable in and of itself,” I think what they mean is simply that it has no economic or social value — note Kirsch’s contrast between intrinsic value and something valued because it “makes us more virtuous citizens or more employable technicians of reading and writing.” Someone might say that when we say some artifact or experience is intrinsically valuable we’re saying that it does not have any instrumental value — but isn’t a song that delights me instrumental to that delight? And isn’t that okay?

So I think that when we describe something as having intrinsic value, what we really mean is that the value it provides is higher than or nobler than any furthering of crassly economic or social ambitions. We’re indirectly and somewhat sloppily appealing to a hierarchy of goods. And maybe — especially in the context of debates about liberal education, which is at least partly the context of Kirsch’s essay — we should be more explicit about that, and conscious of what our hierarchy is and why we affirm it.

We are blessed that Alan Jacobs, (intrinsic values) uses this blog as a digital notebook, tagging his entries for future retrieval.

AI gonna sell us stuff

[W]hen the hysterical claims about the coming of “the Singularity” and quickly-approaching AI doom/utopia subside, what we’ll find is that most of what AI is doing is a more complex and sophisticated version of what Silicon Valley already does: giving us increasingly-aggressive recommendations for how to sate our various needs.

…

The longstanding battle between the individual and the state will come to look quaint in comparison to the battle of the human against the profit-maximizing AI, an entity that is distributed and depersonalized and so can have no personal accountability. And it will all be happening with a populace that has grown used to seeing digital systems as permanent authorities that they have no ability to defy.

Freddie deBoer

Peak Woke?

Both wokeness and anti-wokeness have lost their transgressive edge. Now they’re both kind of “cringe,” as the kids say.

And that is a sign of healing.

One of the worst annoyances of polarized politics is the way the fringes symbiotically feed off each other. Like bootleggers and Baptists both benefiting from blue laws, the extreme left and extreme right need each other to justify their catastrophizing. The worst thing that could happen for Republican House fundraising efforts would be for the “Squad” of far-left members of Congress to be replaced by sensible Democrats. And the last thing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wants is for Marjorie Taylor Greene to be primaried by an intelligent Republican who doesn’t talk about Jewish space lasers.

Jonah Goldberg

News-Be-Gone

The news industry is Society’s appendix – permanently inflamed and completely pointless. You’re better off simply having it removed.

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

This is advice I’ve been unable to follow very far.

Legalia

Picking dead pigeons in the Park

Jonathan Alter has a better idea than putting Trump in jail for further contempt, with all the Secret Service and other complications. Jail for the Chief? There’s a Better Punishment.

Education

The beginning of the end … of this particular miserable chapter

MIT sours on DEI: MIT has done away with mandatory diversity statements in their hiring process. The president of the school, Sally Kornbluth, told John Sailer: “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.” This is a watershed moment: MIT is the first elite school to reverse course on this policy. Let’s see what schools follow suit.

Oliver Wiseman, The Free Press

DEI was the latest chapter in the effort to purge wrongthinking conservatives from our institutions. Its end will be the beginning of a re-branded effort.

Campus

As university administrators nationwide grapple with how to deal with anti-Israel encampments, former Nebraska senator and current University of Florida President Ben Sasse wrote in the Wall Street Journal of a model to follow. “At the University of Florida, we have repeatedly, patiently explained two things to protesters: We will always defend your rights to free speech and free assembly—but if you cross the line on clearly prohibited activities, you will be thrown off campus and suspended,” he wrote. “We said it. We meant it. We enforced it. We wish we didn’t have to, but the students weighed the costs, made their decisions, and will own the consequences as adults. We’re a university, not a daycare. We don’t coddle emotions, we wrestle with ideas. … For a lonely subset of the anxious generation, these protest camps can become a place to find a rare taste of community. This is their stage to role-play revolution. … Universities have an obligation to combat this ignorance with rigorous teaching. Life-changing education explores alternatives, teaches the messiness of history, and questions every truth claim. Knowledge depends on healthy self-doubt and a humble willingness to question self-certainties.”

The Morning Dispatch

The World

Israel, Hamas, Gaza

A Palestinian man living in the U.S. offers both grief for his family who have died in Israel’s war against Hamas and condemnation for the terrorist organization that sacrificed his homeland. “Thirty-one,” Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib wrote for The Times of London. “That’s how many of my extended family members have died in Gaza since October 7. … The past seven months have entailed endless sleepless nights, close calls, false alarms and frantic attempts to help locate missing family members.” But the pro-Palestianian, anti-Israel narrative in the West misses a key truth, he argued. “Many believe Gaza was this unbelievably awful place before October 7, an unrelenting prison with nothing in it worth living for. They then conclude that Hamas’s horrendous attack was a legitimate reaction to Israeli policies that made Gaza a concentration camp. But this perspective misses an important truth. It fails to recognise that even with Israel’s multifaceted blockade, which has been in place since 2007, Gaza was a beautiful place that meant so much to its residents and people. … Hamas needlessly and criminally threw all of this away as part of nefarious calculations by violent and homicidal leaders who have utter disregard and contempt for the average Palestinian citizen.”

The Morning Dispatch

Politics

On not doubling down

Glenn Loury thought maybe the world — maybe he — had been wrong about Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020. Loury had watched a documentary, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” that had circulated largely on right-wing social media, arguing that Chauvin had been wrongly convicted, and found himself persuaded. Was it possible, he wondered, that Floyd had actually died of a drug overdose?

… Then Radley Balko, an independent journalist, published a lengthy and meticulous critique of the film, calling it “all nonsense.”

…

“I pride myself on remaining open to evidence and reason, even if they disconfirm something I had formerly thought to be true,” Loury wrote in a mea culpa for his Substack, calling his error egregious. …

How had he made such a mistake?

“The real story is I hated what happened in the summer of 2020,” he told me. “I think these moral panics we have around these police killings are over the top and it’s bad for the country.” He had supported the filmmakers, he confessed, because they were attacking people he opposed. “I let that cloud my judgment.”

Pamela Paul, One Black Conservative Continues to Stand Apart (emphasis added)

Forming alliances on the basis of shared hatreds is soul-scarring.

Of course he said the quiet part out loud

That brings us to a Washington Post article this morning. At a Mar-a-Lago meeting in April, oil executives complained that despite pouring hundreds of millions into lobbying the government, the Biden administration had pursued stronger environmental regulations. “Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House,” the Post reports. In exchange, Trump vowed to roll back current regulations and freeze future ones. He told them that, given the savings, a billion bucks would be a “deal” for them.

What Trump was offering is entirely legal and absolutely corrupt. (Or to borrow a phrase: very legal and very uncool.) Thanks to Trump’s bluntness, there can be no hair-splitting about what’s going on here, and that’s good for public understanding. Trump asked special interests for an eye-popping fee in exchange explicit favors. Trump and the oil companies might argue (dubiously) that their preferred regime would actually be better for consumers, but they are cutting “the people” out of the discussion entirely, subverting democracy. The deal is getting done between Trump and the suits, behind closed doors. It’s a good reminder that Trump’s claim to being an outsider is a sham.

David A. Graham, Trump’s Legal, Corrupt Offer to Oil Executives

Bipartisanship today

Who’s responsible for the illegal immigration problem?

When it comes to immigration, it’s true that the Biden administration belatedly worked with legislators to settle on a compromise bill that would stem the flow of migrants (including refugees) to the southern border. But it’s also true that Republicans, led by Trump, decided they’d prefer to keep the border a festering problem through an election year in order to hurt the president.

That’s cynical, hardball politics. But that’s just another way of saying it’s politics well played. (It ain’t beanbag, after all.)

Damon Linker. The key words are belated, prefer, fester and cynic.

Momala

[2020] was the year when friendships were shattered and livelihoods ruined because someone didn’t post a black square on Instagram; when every suburban wine mom was frantically reading White Fragility for her anti-racist book club; when members of Congress posed for an absurdly self-serious photo shoot draped in kente cloth. It was the year when representation mattered—to the exclusion of basically everything else.

This miasma of liberal white guilt and frantic, performative virtue-signaling was the birthplace of many a bizarre cultural artifact, like the anti-racism research center for which Ibram X. Kendi received (and squandered) $43 million, or the $250,000 “Woke Kindergarten” program that taught five-year-olds in San Francisco to “disrupt whiteness.” But its most lasting legacy, arguably, is Kamala Harris, who ended up a skipped heartbeat away from the top job for reasons that were primarily aesthetic: once Biden promised to pick a woman of color as his running mate, her selection was all but guaranteed.

…

[H]er social justice credentials are thoroughly undermined by her actual record: one of a career prosecutor with a penchant for authoritarian overreach and a hostility to civil liberties.

As an attorney, she—or people working on her behalf—routinely fought to keep innocent people in prison, to avoid compensating the wrongfully convicted, and to protect corrupt cops and prosecutors. In her capacity as California’s district attorney, she stood in the way of advanced DNA testing that could have proved the innocence of a man who had spent four decades on death row—until a 2018 story about the case created bad press for her presidential campaign, at which point she hastily (and uselessly) declared that she now supported the test.

==And then there’s her legal war against the founders of Backpage.com, a classified ads site with a robust “Adult Services” section. Harris charged Michael Lacey and James Larkin with conspiracy to commit pimping back in 2016. This eight-year effort is the clearest manifestation I have ever seen of the phrase “the process is the punishment.” In August 2023, on the eve of yet another court battle, James Larkin committed suicide. In reaction to this news, Reason’s Matt Welch noted: “You will see 100 times more ink spilled this year on chimerical right-wing book bans than you will on the vice president’s scapegoat blowing his brains out.” He was right, sort of; the actual ratio of book ban coverage as compared to Larkin’s suicide was more like 10,000 to one.

I’ve commented little on Kamala Harris because she has been nearly invisible as Vice President in these tumultuous times. But I’m grateful to Kat Rosenfield (America Doesn’t Need Momala Harris) for this reminder of why I detested her conduct in California government and rued Joe Biden selecting her for VP.

Misogyny

Last year, my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote that a second Trump presidency would produce four more years of unchecked misogyny. “I don’t believe Donald Trump hates women. Not by default, anyway,” she wrote. “The misogyny that Trump embodies and champions is less about loathing than enforcement: underscoring his requirement that women look and behave a certain way, that we comply with his desires and submit to our required social function.” Daniels’s account of her encounter with him showed exactly how that can work. It’s not that Trump bore any malice toward Daniels (that came later); it’s that she mattered to him only as a vehicle to sex.

By now, Trump has gotten a great deal more than he expected or wanted that day in his Tahoe penthouse. Following a lunch break today, his attorneys argued for a mistrial on the basis of Daniels’s answers. Merchan refused but said several times that some things that came up would have been “better left unsaid.” The newly demure defendant would surely agree.

David A. Graham, Trump’s Misogyny and Stormy Daniels

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

April 27, 2024

Legalia

Non-competes

I’m glad the FTC banned non-competes. (The preceding sentence assumes that it had authority to ban them.)

My main beef with non-competetion clauses is summarized at the Dispatch:

In practice, the agreements are often sprung on workers after they’ve accepted a job and turned down other offers …

Here’s how that works (or, I hope, worked) in my fair state:

All employment is “at will” unless otherwise specified. That means your employer can fire you any time for almost any reason or no reason.
If your employer hires you and then springs a non-compete clause on you, your choice is to sign or, in all likelihood, be fired as an at will employee.
Aha! says the reader who remembers from a business law class that an enforceable contract must be supported by consideration on both sides. But your employer’s contractual “consideration” that makes the non-comp enforceable is forebearing from firing you, you miserable “at will” employee, on the spot. Gotcha!
Oh, yeah: Your employment is still “at will” after you sign.

I’d call that an “unfair or deceptive act or practice” of the sort the FTC is empowered to regulate.

There’s a Latin maxim: abusus non tollit usum. I have no little or problem with the usum of non-competition clauses freely bargained over up-front rather than sprung after the employee has burnt bridges. But I never saw a single one of those in my law practice, perhaps because employees who freely bargained for them were honorable enough not to complain about them later, when they pinched. It was the employees who got them sprung on them after hiring on who had legitimate beefs, but beefs that my fair state almost never recognized as legitimate despite ritual professions that non-competition clauses were “disfavored.”

So vastly do the abuses outweigh legitimate uses that I’m viscerally in the “burn them all down” camp. So kudos to the FTC, and may the Chamber of Commerce challenge crash and burn, too.

Presidential Immunity

Via the Wapo:

No lower court has determined whether the allegations in Trump’s indictment amount to official acts that could be shielded from liability or private conduct. But when the Supreme Court agreed to take the case, it rephrased the question it would consider as: “whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

That means the high court’s ruling is likely to require lower courts to separate out Trump’s official acts from his private ones, as alleged in the indictment, before proceedings can restart in the election obstruction case. If the D.C. trial is stalled until after the election, and Trump returns to office, he could pressure his attorney general to drop the federal charges against him.

…

Here’s Judge Michael Luttig’s commentary on Thursday’s arguments (I’ve unrolled his Xitter thread):

As with the three-hour argument in Trump v. Anderson, a disconcertingly precious little of the two-hour argument today was even devoted to the specific and only question presented for decision.

The Court and the parties discussed everything but the specific question presented.

That question is simply whether a former President of the United States may be prosecuted for attempting to remain in power notwithstanding the election of his successor by the American People, thereby also depriving his lawfully elected successor of the powers of the presidency to which that successor became entitled upon his rightful election by the American People — and preventing the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history.

Charlie Sykes (Emphasis in Original)

Now don’t go cross-eyed on me. You can understand this: the court decided to consider “whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.” I’m baffled that Judge Luttig could call his lurid-if-accurate paragraph as “the specific question presented.” I could accept “the question behind the question presented” or “the ultimate question,” but “question presented” is a term of art in Supreme Court practice, one that advocates abbreviate as “QP.” Woe to the advocate who bops in saying “Why ya’ kidding here? We all know that the “QP” isn’t the real question,” because the “real question” is what the Court says it is.

That said, Judge Luttig proceeds to lay out an interesting case against Trump on his tendentious version of the question presented. (You might want to get a prophylactic antibiotic shot before reading the comments to the Judge’s thread.)

Food for Thought

Earlier this month, the actor Jonathan Majors was sentenced to a year of domestic violence counseling after being found guilty of assaulting his ex-girlfriend. The response to the sentencing was muted. While there was plenty of social media chatter, some of it anguished, there were few thinkpieces to be found …

In general I didn’t hear much outrage. And I think that might be a sign of progress. Because while I certainly understand having mixed feelings about the sentence, it’s exactly the kind of alternative to prison that we need to solve mass incarceration. Prosecutors didn’t ask for jail time, the judge didn’t hand down any, and a first-time Black offender was diverted out of the penal system. That’s exactly what those of us who support comprehensive criminal justice reform have been calling for, these past years. Isn’t it?

When I spoke at MIT recently, I pulled a rhetorical move that I admit is a little cheap, but which does help to clarify things. I asked students if they thought that, from a social justice standpoint, a man should go to jail for punching someone in the face, once, as a first-time offender. They all seemed to feel that, no, such a person should not go to jail, that such a punishment is too extreme for the crime. That’s more or less how I feel, too. But then I asked them “What if that person is his wife?,” and watched the confusion spread. Their certainty about what was just suddenly deserted them. The anti-carceral instincts of many progressives are often complicated by “identity crimes,” in this way. There’s a generic sense that our justice system should be more lenient and more forgiving, except when it comes to crimes like domestic violence or sexual assault or hate crimes, in which case the punishments are immediately assumed to be too lenient and too forgiving.

Freddie deBoer

Pedantic point: What Jonathan Majors did presumably was battery, not assault.

Culture

You never enter the same stream twice

“We can’t ever go back to the old things or try to get ‘the old kick’ out of something or find things the way we remember them,” wrote Hemingway. “We have them as we remember them and they are fine and wonderful and we have to go on and have other things because the old things are nowhere except in our minds now.”

…

“Every time I came back to somewhere, I was disappointed, and I loved Michigan so much I didn’t want to be disappointed.”

John J. Miller, quoting Hemingway in Hemingway’s Michigan

This reminded me that I need to get some Hemingway books and (sigh!) get them into the queue of books that I’ll never finish reading before I die — hundreds of them, many on my shelves, or Kindle, or Apple Books.

I don’t know Petoskey as well as I know Traverse City, Glen Arbor, Leland, Suttons Bay, and Northport, but what I know, I love. And I have fond memories of lunches and dinners at City Park Grill.

But I don’t have a lot of photographs of these places. Somewhere along the line, I intuited that I experience most places more intensely if I don’t try to capture it on film (or film’s digital equivalents). Is this in the Hemingway spirit?

(But I seem to have made an exception for photos from the turnoffs along the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive.)

Filtering out monoculture banality

Literary fiction in America has become a monoculture in which the writers and the editors are overwhelmingly products of the same few top-ranked universities and the same few top-ranked MFA programs … Such people tend also to live in the same tiny handful of places. And it is virtually impossible for anything really interesting, surprising, or provocative to emerge from an intellectual monoculture.

With these facts in mind I have developed a three-strike system to help me decide whether to read contemporary fiction, with the following features:

The book is set in Brooklyn: Three strikes, you’re out.

The author lives in Brooklyn: Three strikes, you’re out.

The book is set anywhere else in New York City: Two strikes.

The book is set in San Francisco: Two strikes.

The book’s protagonist is a writer or artist or would-be writer or would-be artist: Two strikes.

The author attended an Ivy League or Ivy-adjacent university or college: Two strikes.

The book is set in Los Angeles: One strike.

The author lives in San Francisco: _One strik_e.

The author has an MFA: One strike.

The book is set in the present day: One strike.

… It is vanishingly unlikely that a book that gets three strikes in my system will be worth reading, because any such book is overwhelmingly likely to reaffirm the views of its monoculture — to be a kind of comfort food for its readers.

Alan Jacobs

The coastals don’t get the heartlanders

[F]or me, the travel (specifically the travel into small towns) was the best part of the [documentary film] exercise. I always felt a lot wiser every time I returned to my Brooklyn coffee shop or neighborhood bookstore; I always felt like I wanted to start getting into arguments with everyone around me. It wasn’t that my politics were so different from my coastal brethren, but after even a few days in Decatur or Lubbock or Clovis or wherever I was, it would be clear to me that there was a great deal about the country that liberals and progressives—however well-intentioned they might be—were just missing.

Sam Kahn, A Reckoning Is Coming for the Democrats

Is Cultural Christianity a non-starter?

‘When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.’ Nietzsche’s loathing for those who imagined otherwise was intense. Philosophers he scorned as secret priests. Socialists, communists, democrats: all were equally deluded. ‘Naiveté: as if morality could survive when the God who sanctions it is missing!’

Tom Holland, Dominion. I’ve come, probably only within the last five years or so, to appreciate Nietzsche. He hated Christianity, but he hated it for the right reasons.

Machiavelli made points similar to Nietzsche’s, centuries earlier.

The roots of trans ideology

If you, like me, have wondered how society ever came to accept ideas like “a woman trapped in a man’s body,” you, like I, may find this UnHerd article helpful: Sarah Ditum, Who is to blame for gender theory?. Feminism of certain sorts played a role. From the introduction:

At some point in the Noughties, the idea that men and women were fundamentally alike in character and aptitude (if not in body) became the only acceptable thing to believe; and at some point shortly after that, the doctrine of transgenderism swept in and swept away every claim feminism had ever made. It’s a classic of the monkey’s paw genre: be careful what you wish for.

The burning of the Ivies is an inside job

The mounting chaos on Ivy League campuses in recent days is only the latest chapter in a longer story of America’s elite colleges sabotaging their hard-earned reputations. And now, some prospective students and parents are wondering: Are these really the best places to spend four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Some are taking Nate Silver’s advice.“Just go to a state school,” he tweeted Sunday. “The premium you’re paying for elite private colleges vs. the better public schools is for social clout and not the quality of the education. And that’s worth a lot less now that people have figured out that elite higher ed is cringe.”

Other prospective students are heading south to colleges like the University of Miami, Clemson, Elon, and Georgia Tech, where the weather is nicer and campus life is more relaxed.

The Free Press

Subjective, but real

If we have a sense that there is something higher than our reason can explain to be found in the woods and the fields, and if this is the real reason our hearts break when the woods and the fields are bulldozed in the name of economics, then this sense, like our ability to love or to experience beauty or ugliness, is entirely ‘subjective’. But it is also entirely real.

Our culture stands in awe of science, and is repeatedly thrilled by what it can do, and understandably. But it is far less keen to talk about what it can’t do. We tend to allow the excitement generated by men in lab coats rebuilding frogs to blind us to the reality of what science is: simply a method of finding out how things work. This is hardly a small thing, but it is not as a great a thing as some of its public advocates would have us believe either. And neither is it, as some are very keen for us to believe, the basis of a new ethic.

Paul Kingsnorth, In the Black Chamber

Only the wild attracts

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilised free and wild thinking in “Hamlet” and the “Iliad”, in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us.

Henry David Thoreau via Martin Shaw

Unfree and humiliated

To be subject to the sort of authority that asserts itself through a claim to knowledge is to risk being duped, and this is offensive not merely to one’s freedom but to one’s pride.

Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

Not too Swift

I am too unfamiliar with her oeuvre to have an opinion worth sharing on Taylor Swift. I don’t mean to be dismissive; I’m a 75-year-old guy who feels cold breath on his neck and doesn’t have time to master the ins and outs of a young lady who (reportedly) sings a lot about bad relationships and break-ups.

Damon Linker says a little about her newest releases, but then turns to the subject of editing, which includes curation. If you’re interested in the arts or in writing, it’s worth your time — assuming, that is, that the cold on your neck is no colder than that on mine.

For Love of Sentences

In Esquire, Charles P. Pierce reflected on an emblematic American newspaper: “Ever since USA Today first darkened the doors of our rooms in various Marriott properties, we’ve all had fun mocking the way it served up the news in easily digestible nuggets (and also pie charts!). Of course, given the aerosolized way we get our news these days, the old USA Today looks like The Paris Review.” (Stephen Wertheimer, Boca Raton, Fla.)
Robin Givhan considered Donald Trump’s appearances in a Manhattan courtroom last week: “This is a trial that reminds us of the smallness of Trump even as the idea of him, the myth of him has become outsize.” (Betsy Snider, Acworth, N.H.)
And Karen Tumulty chronicled the Kennedy clan’s effort to quash the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “In an election fueled by fear and resentment, there is no torch to be passed — except for the one that the Kennedys fear would be used to set fire to what’s left of the family’s name.” (Greg Howard, Vancouver, Wash.)

Frank Bruni

Politics

Mike Johnson

I strongly support the aid package while understanding the qualms about it, but its merits aren’t my focus here. Johnson’s principled course is. He made common cause with political adversaries. He potentially put his speakership in greater jeopardy than if he’d taken a different tack (though these matters are tricky and time will tell).

What impresses and encourages me most, though, are accounts of how he arrived at his backing of the bill: He educated himself. As Catie Edmondson reported in an article in The Times on Sunday, Johnson “attributed his turnabout in part to the intelligence briefings he received, a striking assertion from a leader of a party that has embraced former President Donald J. Trump’s deep mistrust of the intelligence community.”

Seeking more information. Not dismissing it out of hand because of its provenance. Humbly conceding that your prior understanding was faulty or incomplete. Encouraging others to look beyond their stubbornness to the possibility of enlightenment.

None of that should be exceptional. All of it is. May it be a model for the lawmakers around him, for all politicians, for the rest of us.

Frank Bruni

Don’t forget the RFKJr wild card

Kennedy hurting Trump more than Biden: Poor RFK Jr. First his family clubbed together to shoot an ad for his presidential opponent Joe Biden. Now a group of his former colleagues in the environmental movement have written to him urging him to drop out of the race. “In nothing more than a vanity candidacy, RFK Jr. has chosen to play the role of election spoiler to the benefit of Donald Trump—the single worst environmental president our country has ever had,” write his (former?) buddies.

But while the left turns the screws on Camelot’s wayward son, a new poll shows that it’s Trump, not Biden, suffering more from Kennedy’s presence in the race. A survey published by Marist yesterday showed Biden (51 percent) three points ahead of Trump (48 percent) in a two-way contest, but that extends to a five-point lead when other candidates are included. In a five-way contest, Biden is at 43 percent, Trump is at 38 percent, RFK Jr. is at 15 percent, and Cornel West and Jill Stein both register 2 percent.

The Free Press

I am mildly surprised. Before JFKJr. picked a billionaire far-lefty for his running mate, I thought he would hurt Trump more than Biden. Then I thought the VP choice flipped that.

Shows how much I know. Why are you even reading this?

The GOP division

Amid threats to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson for allowing a vote on aid to Ukraine, Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas captured the party’s own divide between the good and the rest in colorful terms on CNN Sunday. “It’s my absolute honor to be in Congress,” he said, “but I serve with some real scumbags.”

Jonah Goldberg

You can’t make this stuff up

18 defendants in a nine-count indictment unsealed in Arizona on Wednesday that alleges they conspired “to prevent the lawful transfer of the presidency to keep Unindicted Coconspirator 1 in office against the will of Arizona’s voters.” … Two newbies to the indictment circuit are Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn and Christina Bobb, another former Trump campaign lawyer who was recently tapped to lead the Republican National Committee’s “election integrity” department.

The Morning Dispatch (bold added).

This, boys and girls, is why every morning since early 2020 I’ve prayed that God would “Thwart those who conspire to commit political fraud, intimidation, or otherwise to corrupt or overthrow our elections.” It was obvious early on that they intended to become the election officials who could, if anyone could, overthrow the will of the voters.

Mistaken identity

Pardon me: Your patience is wearing thin!? From my text app last night:

Maybe she mistook me for someone who cares about the thing that used to be the Republican Party.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

420 2024

I have to be reminded every year that “420” is a winky feast for weed afficianados.

Trans in the news

MSM largely ignores the voice of sanity on teen trans

A short note on the MSM coverage of last week’s publication of the Cass Report — the most comprehensive review of all the scientific evidence around the sex reassignment of children. There was barely any. Nada at CNN. Zippo by the Washington Post. NPR — surprise! — ignored it. So did NBC, which covers trans issues obsessively, and CBS.

The transqueer groups who’ve backed transing children with gender dysphoria — primarily HRC and GLAAD — have also said nothing on their websites. GLAAD was the group that brought a van with the words “The Science Is Settled” to intimidate the NYT into not covering the issue. You might think they’d say something, now that a definitive study has shown the science is anything but settled. But nah.

The New York Times ran a real story; so did the WSJ; David Brooks has a piece today praising the fairness and compassion of the Cass Repot; and the Washington Post, despite its news division, published a remarkable op-ed by a gay detransitioner, reflecting on how his own internalized homophobia had led him astray under the guidance of the trans industry. That’s the first time I’ve read in the MSM how transing children is putting countless gay kids at terrible risk — a vital point, deliberately obscured by formerly gay rights groups that have now gone fully trans. So there’s hope in the wilderness. But not much.

Andrew Sullivan (bold added)

“Protecting trans kids”

Being in favour of the sterilisation of autistic and gay children — or “protecting trans kids”, as it’s been known — has long been a way to advertise one’s right-side-of-history credentials.

Victoria Smith, Puberty blocker ruling won’t cure Scotland’s gender problem

If that quote makes no sense to you, have you considered

the prevalence of autism in gender dysphoric kids (a “co-morbidity”) and
the prevalence of homosexuality among kids who, once gender dysphoric, grow out of it?

(Surely you know that sterility is a side-effect of medical interventions via surgery or even just hormones.)

Culture

René Girard, call your office

Pierre Valentin … who authored the first French study of the woke phenomenon, described wokeness as “a spirit of sheer negation.” He insightfully observed that wokeness is an inversion of the traditional scapegoat mechanism. The scapegoat mechanism sacrifices the exception, the outsider, for the sake of preserving the whole. But in the woke paradigm, you sacrifice the whole to coddle the exception.

Rod Dreher, reporting from the National Conservatism Conference that Brussels’ mayor tried to cancel three times. A midnight court hearing turned back those efforts.

Liberalism’s trajectory

I’m kind of with those who say there’s a trajectory within classical liberalism toward where we are now because, you’ve got to just keep finding new groups to liberate, and new forms of oppression, and then the ever-increasing focus on the self and the sovereignty of choice. But that’s such a desert landscape.

… [W]e’re beginning to see some really frightening instances: people are so tired of wokeism and the exaggerated forms of liberalism that they want the absolute contrary as you take solace or consolation in something that’s a violent overthrow of that.

Catholic Bishop Robert Barron via Juicy Ecumenism

Meatspace

The greater the social value produced by a job, the less one is likely to be paid to do it.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

These are the jobs done in meatspace, which jobs manifested their importance during the Covid pandemic.

Sleepwalking despite it all

Even after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that collapsed the twin towers of the World Trade Center and sliced through the Pentagon, America is are still sleepwalking into the future.

James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency

NPR

Wokeness is illiberal

The point I have been trying to make for years now is that wokeness is not some racier version of liberalism, merely seeking to be kinder and more inclusive. It is, in fact, directly hostile to liberal values; it subordinates truth to ideology; it judges people not by their ability but by their identity; and it regards ideological diversity as a mere dog-whistle for bigotry. [NPR CEO Katherine] Maher has publicly and repeatedly avowed support for this very illiberalism. If people with these views run liberal institutions, the institutions will not — cannot — remain liberal for very long. And they haven’t. Elite universities are turning into madrassas, and media is turning into propaganda.

Yes, Fox News is worse. The right-leaning media, apart from the WSJ, is woefully lacking in solid reporting and sober argument. But that’s why it matters that the big fish remain liberal. And it’s one thing when propaganda pervades private institutions, but at NPR, you and I are also subsidizing it with our tax dollars. I fail to see how that is in any way fair or sustainable — for its listeners or donors.

NPR’s biggest staff cuts since the Great Recession and its rapid decline in listenership — while radio and podcasts are booming everywhere else — are telling us something. It’s just something that the smug fanatics now running the place don’t want to hear.

Andrew Sullivan, Katherine Maher is not a Liberal

Relativist on facts, absolutist on morals

For [NPR CEO Katherine] Maher, authoritative platforms have a duty to control knowledge production and police the boundaries of speech, imposing formal relativism while writing the Good People’s moral precepts into the parameters of what is sayable and knowable. Meanwhile, the counter-melody of NPR’s staffers contesting [Uri] Berliner’s article reminds us that while we may not like Maher’s moral framework, she’s right about the politicisation of truth.

Maher would never put it so bluntly, but the difference between the free circulation of information in the print and the digital eras is gatekeeping, effectively on the basis of intelligence and wealth (via the proxies of reading ability and leisure to write).

Mary Harrington

Politics

Why Biden shouldn’t debate Trump

A consortium of television networks yesterday released a joint statement inviting President Joe Biden and his presumptive opponent, Donald Trump, to debate on their platforms: “There is simply no substitute for the candidates debating with each other, and before the American people, their visions for the future of our nation.”

President Biden’s spokesperson should answer like this: “The Constitution is not debatable. The president does not participate in forums with a person under criminal indictment for his attempt to overthrow the Constitution.”

…

Until tried and convicted, Trump must be regarded as innocent in the eyes of the law.

But the political system has eyes of its own. No doubt exists about what Trump did, or why, or what his actions meant. Trump lost an election, then incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol. He hoped that the insurrectionists would terrorize, kidnap, or even kill his own vice president in order to stop the ceremony to formalize the victory of Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris. By disrupting the ceremony, Trump schemed to cast the election’s result to the House of Representatives, where Republican voting strength might proclaim him president in place of the lawful winner. Many people were badly injured by Trump’s violent plan, and some died as a result.

…

Imagine watching the debate with the sound off—what would you see? Two men, both identified as “president,” standing side by side, receiving equal deference from some of the most famous hosts and anchors on American television. The message: Violence to overthrow an election is not such a big deal. Some Americans disapprove of it; others have different opinions—that’s why we have debates. Coup d’état: tip of the hat? Or wag of the finger?

For Biden to refuse to rub elbows with Trump won’t make Trump go away, of course. The Confederacy did not go away when Abraham Lincoln refused to concede the title of president to Jefferson Davis. That’s not why Lincoln consistently denied Davis that title. Lincoln understood how demoralizing it would be to Union-loyal Americans if he accepted the claim that Davis was a president rather than a rebel and an insurrectionist. Biden should understand how demoralizing it would be to democracy-loyal Americans if he accepted the claim that Trump is more than a January 6 defendant.

David Frum

Ornamenting Orange Man

[H]is life with his family — his feelings about his family — are something we can’t see. And that blind spot is a significant part of what can make him seem so inhuman.

His predecessors in the White House had their own family dramas. Can we talk about Bill and Hill? But in President Clinton’s voice and eyes — when he spoke of Hillary, when he looked at Chelsea — there were genuine sorrow for the screw-ups and a whole riot of raw emotions. His lack of discipline wasn’t a lack of heart.

George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s interactions with their wives and daughters were suffused with a palpable tenderness.

But when Trump talks about Melania, Ivanka, Donald Jr.? Even as he praises them, he seems really to be complimenting himself. And he uses the same stock phrases, the same braggart’s diction, the same isn’t-my-life-enviable boilerplate with which he discusses his foreign policy, his economic record, his golf resorts, his crowds. It could be A.I.-generated: ChatDJT.

Are his family members’ meanings to him more ornamental than sentimental? … And Melania? How much does she matter to him, and vice versa?

Frank Bruni

Is this the understatement of the decade?

After Jan. 6, 2021, any future election involving Donald Trump was going to make a sizable bloc of Americans anxious about the state of U.S. democracy.

Thomas Shull

Erick’s got some ‘splainin’ to do

“There was no insurrection. That is a left/media talking point. It was a riot, yes. It was not an insurrection. Those who believe this don’t actually care about the truth though,” – Erick Erickson this week.

“This was insurrectionist, and it was inspired by the President of the United States — I don’t care about your damn feelings this morning. … [Trump] encouraged people to storm the United States Capitol to stop a democratic election after lying [about it] for two months” – Erickson on January 7, 2021.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Neville Chamberlain

Irritated by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s tireless dedication to serving Moscow’s interests, Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz offered an amendment to the Ukraine aid bill that would have renamed her office the “Neville Chamberlain Room.” It was an ugly, stupid, juvenile insult.

Say what you will about Marjorie Taylor Greene, she is no Neville Chamberlain.

Neville Chamberlain was an honorable and decent man …

…

What was Winston Churchill’s judgment? He eulogized his former rival in Parliament:

It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.

Neville Chamberlain made the wrong decision at the most important juncture of his public life. But he was an authentic statesman who put service over self, even at the cost of his reputation, personal fortune, and health. For most of the world—and particularly for Americans, who care so little for history—all that remains of Neville Chamberlain is his worst mistake. But he did what he thought was right, received very little thanks for it in the end, and never stopped working for his country until the last few weeks of his life, when he was physically unable to continue. He died, as he wished, plain Mr. Chamberlain.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is no Neville Chamberlain. Not on her best day.

Kevin D. Williamson.

I share this in equal parts to contemn MJT and to marvel at the rhetorical gifts of Winston Churchill, of whom and of which gifts I stand in awe.

Tell us what you really think, Kevin

The winner of the Democratic primary on April 23 will have the honor of almost certainly losing the R+8 district to House Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry, the sycophantic cretin and half-assed QAnon cultist who helped to execute the legislative leg of Donald Trump’s failed coup d’état in early 2021. There must be something in the water down in Dillsburg.

Kevin D. Williamson

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

My cup overflowed

Unnoticed, I had filled my cup to overflowing. Pour yourself a cup and enjoy the (mostly) curation.

Trans turning point?

Keeping score

“Males have stolen over 879 trophies, medals, and titles from women and girls across 423 different competitions in over 28 different sports,” – Reilly Gaines.

Via Andrew Sullivan

The Cass Report

In Great Britain, the Cass Report, a comprehensive four-year study of transgender medicine for pre-adults, has case deep shade on past practices — practices Europe is backing away from frantically but which the US Medical establishment still supports. Andrew Sullivan gives them both barrels:

Big Pharma created lucrative “customers for life” by putting kids on irreversible drugs for a condition that could not be measured or identified by doctors and entirely self-diagnosed by … children.

And what if over 80 percent of the children subject to this experiment were of a marginalized group — gay kids? And the result of these procedures was to cure them of same-sex attraction by converting them to the opposite sex? I simply cannot imagine that any liberal or progressive would hand over gender-nonconforming children, let alone their own children, to the pharmaceutical and medical-industrial complex to be experimented on in this way.

…

Accountability? Good luck with that. Will any of the Twitter mobs who hounded the skeptics take stock? Will the ACLU’s Chase Strangio feel any regret for trying to censor the first major book raising the alarm? Will groups like GLAAD and HRC confess to their grotesque lies — “The Science Is Settled” — and ugly bullying tactics to suppress reporting on the question? Will they cop to having supported gay conversion therapy in which many gay kids were “fixed” by being turned physically into the opposite sex?

Will HRC and countless educators temper the curriculum that tells small children that their bodies are irrelevant to whether they are a boy or girl, and that they can change their sex at will? Will these ideologues ever concede the foul homophobia behind questioning the maleness of a girly boy or the femaleness of the tomboy? Will they ever admit that their ideological extremism, and their “queer” conflation of trans and gay experiences, has led to one of the greatest medical abuses of gay kids in history? Of course they won’t. As I write, HRC and GLAAD have not uttered a peep about the report’s findings. They are intellectually and morally bankrupt institutions, desperate for money, and using the scarred bodies of gender-dysphoric children to fundraise.

In a sane world, the doctors who pushed these lucrative treatments and the leaders of the transqueer groups responsible for the wreckage of so many young gay and lesbian lives should resign in shame. So should the MSM journalists who were stenographers for these fanatics, acting to suppress the truth rather than expose it. So should the gay doctors who supported this insanity. This was — and remains — a horrifying case of gays betraying our own — and the most vulnerable and helpless among us.

History will be brutal to those responsible. But almost certainly not brutal enough.

For me, it has always been sufficient that “woman in a man’s body” or vice-verse isn’t a real thing. The sexual binary is real. We are “assigned” names at birth, not sex, which is discovered then (if not previously). We do nobody any favors by saying “Sure, sweetie; you are whatever sex you say you are.”

Gender dysphoria is a real thing, too — a form of mental illness that should be treated with all due skill and compassion. I cannot imagine non-surgical approaches having been exhausted before a minor becomes an adult.

Transgender madness

Nothing that so captures the essence of the Cass Report as this:

Instead of taking narrow claims of dysphoria at face value, Cass adopts a holistic approach, arguing that such statements must be considered “within the context of poor mental health and emotional distress among the broader adolescent population.”

Nina Power, The Trans Reckoning is Here. Considering the context doesn’t mean ignoring, but exploring all possibilities before doing something radical.

No longer, in the sentient world, will doctors be valorized for taking narrow claim of dysphoria at face value — what has come to be called “affirming,” and beginning the process that leads to sexual mutilation in the name of sex-change.

Some U.S. legislatures had already arrived at the unfashionable conclusion that “affirming” kids with gender dysphoria through “social transitioning,” puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and such was bad medicine, and some, including my own, went so far as to ban the medical transitioning as to legal minors. I have my doubts about legislatures practicing medicine, but the provocation was great, and I have little doubt that legislative bans will protect more kids than they hurt.

So I was feeling pretty good about the turning of the tide on trans when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a front-page, above-the-fold story in my local Gannett rag about the woes of Hoosier kids with gender dysphoria who no longer can get their desired trendy treatments in-State. The story included all the groin pieties about puberty blockers being safe and reversible — some of the very claims debunked by the Cass Report. Had they intended that story as a provocation, it could not have been better timed.

The Cass Report is fairly fresh off the press, and is the work of but one researcher, although she was very well-credentialed and took four years on the project. It probably will be critiqued — carefully, one hopes, although there may instead be an effort to mob-cancel it for want of rational criticisms.

Meanwhile, it is as if the Report gave permission for common sense to speak what it has been intimidated from saying for too long.

In my home, the local Gannett rag will be cancelled.

This is a huge step emotionally. I grew up on newspapers. My older brother had a huge paper route. Reading the daily newspaper was one of the things responsible adults did. But smaller-market newspapers have been killed by the internet. Our local rag has descended into a collection of celebrity gossip, feature stories, and a smattering of news stories from other Gannett rags in the state. It doesn’t even include enough advertising and coupons to justify hanging on any longer. That trans propaganda was just the last straw.

I’ll try to replace it with a combination of:

A retired newsman’s substack. He’s been scooping the newspaper frequently already — and his stuff is timelier, not delayed by 48 hours.
Local television websites.
Two local funeral home websites for obituaries.

We’re in a strange new world.

Culture

Billy Joel

I vividly remember the first time I heard Billy Joel on the radio. Mainstream pop/rock radio was not part of my childhood listening diet, so I was already in my early teens. I was having lunch in a university roadhouse with my father and a visiting scholar, a young neo-classical composer. We took turns poking fun at the songs on the roadhouse channel, until “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” struck up. Then the composer paused to listen, raised a finger and said, dead serious, “This is a great song.”

Bethel McGrew

Eclipse

This, too, via Bethel McGrew:

As [Annie Dillard] put it so memorably, the difference between a partial and a total solar eclipse is like the difference between kissing a man and marrying him.

Virtues

I’m reminded of my colleague David Brooks’s distinction between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.” As David described it, résumé virtues “are those skills you bring to the marketplace.” Eulogy virtues, by contrast, “are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?” Most of the “manosphere” influencers look at men’s existential despair and respond with a mainly material cure. Yes, some nod at classical values (and even cite the Stoics, for example), but it’s in service of the will to win. Success — with money, with women — becomes your best revenge.

The problems with this approach are obvious to anyone with an ounce of wisdom or experience, but I’m reminded of a memorable line from “The Big Lebowski”: “I mean, say what you want about the tenets of national socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” It’s hard to counter something with nothing, and when it comes to the crisis confronting men and boys, there is no competing, holistic vision for our sons.

David French, The Atmosphere of the ‘Manosphere’ Is Toxic – The New York Times

Preppers

When I attended prepper conventions as research for my book, I found their visions of a collapsed American Republic suspiciously attractive: It’s a world where everybody grows his own food, gathers with family by candlelight, defends his property against various unpredictable threats and relies on his wits. Their preferred scenario resembled, more than anything, a sort of postapocalyptic “Little House on the Prairie.”

Stephen Marche, author of “The Next Civil War.”

Turning the tables

There was a dramatic jump upward in divorce rates at the beginning of the 1970s. Women whose husbands walked out were faced with the prospect of raising large families on the minimum wage. I remember that time well. Divorce laws were not particularly favorable to women in many places. One reaction was for mothers to teach their daughters never to put themselves in such a vulnerable position. This kicked off the spiral of demands for more pay and more opportunities in education and the workplace. Arguably, the pendulum has now swung too far, and men are disadvantaged by divorce laws. Why work to become a marriageable man if marriage is now such a risky proposition, especially in an era of relaxed sexual norms?

Stacie Beck in a letter to First Things

Putting our money where our hearts are

… (in most US states, the highest-paid public servant is a football or basketball coach at a state university)

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

NPR

“NPR is why I got into journalism. But it’s also partially why I left legacy media. By 2018, Trump voters wouldn’t talk to me, and I didn’t blame them — we often painted them as racists. And if I ever booked a white man, I’d better have a reason why,” – Olivia Reingold.

Via Andrew Sullivan

The Open Internet

I really do think that the internet, in its original open form, is an amazing thing and a genuine contributor to human flourishing — but the occlusion of the open web by the big social media companies has been a disaster for our common life and for the life of the mind. My plan, and my hope, is to keep going here long after I have lost the ability to publish anywhere else. This is my home on the web and also the place where I can most fully be myself as a writer. And that’s worth a lot.

Alan Jacobs

Wordplay

Via Frank Bruni:

In The Financial Times, Anjana Ahuja questioned the potential of a new meat: “With half the U.K. population reporting anxiety about snakes and about one in 50 harboring a phobia, the idea of snakes as the new livestock of choice might not have legs.” (Lois Russell, Somerville, Mass.)
Ezra Dyer paid tribute to an automotive throwback, the Dodge Challenger Black Ghost: “It’s a stupid car, really, peak mouth-breather, screaming of wretched excess. But its analog mechanical brutality activates some primal lobe deep in our brains, the one that catalyzes noise into adrenaline. The final V-8 Challenger rolled off the line on Dec. 22 last year, another dinosaur obliterated by the E.V. asteroid.” (Gerry O’Brien, Goderich, Ontario)
In The London Review of Books, Michael Hofmann took pointed issue with some right-wing warriors: “It seems there is only one model for today’s ‘man of action,’ and that is shock and awe. Overwhelming force deployed suddenly and overwhelmingly. A theatrical performance with no audience as such, only a houseful of victims. The lions eat the circus and then tweet about it.” (William Wood, Edmonton, Alberta)

Mercy

The mercy of the world is you don’t know what’s going to happen.

Mat, in Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow

Abortion

Donald Albatross Trump

The problem for pro-lifers is that … efforts at persuasion have become markedly less effective over a timeline that overlaps closely with Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party

…

[O]ne does not need to be a monocausalist to see how the identification of the anti-abortion cause with his particular persona, his personal history and public style, might have persuaded previously wavering and ambivalent Americans to see the pro-life movement differently than they did before.

…

With that kind of standard-bearer, the accusations of your opponents — that your cause is organized more around repression than protection, more around hypocrisy than high ideals — are going to carry more weight. And some people who might have been your allies, who share your general moral worldview, are going to find reasons to disassociate themselves from your political project.

… [T]he form of conservatism that he embodies is entirely misaligned with the pro-life movement as it wants and needs to be perceived.

That’s the price of the bargain abortion opponents made. The deal worked on its own terms: Roe is gone. But now they’re trapped in a world where their image is defined more by the dealmaker’s values than by their own.

Ross Douthat

Abortion Politics

Kevin D. Williamson comes out swinging on abortion politics:

The conservative legal view of Roe v. Wade—which is not necessarily an anti-abortion view—is that the Supreme Court exnihilated a federal right to abortion straight out of the penumbras of Justice Harry Blackmun’s posterior based on very little more than pure political will, and that Dobbs rightly reversed this act of judicial superlegislation, returning the matter to the democratic process and, mainly, to state legislatures. A person who generally supports abortion rights could easily hold that position—and, indeed, many do. By no means is it the case, however, that, as Trump stated, vacating Roe was something “that all legal scholars [on] both sides wanted.” (Even on the most serious of moral issues, Trump cannot help but lie, stupidly, blatantly, and to no purpose. He lies out of habit and because he enjoys it.) The argument about Roe was an argument about law, not an argument about abortion.

Now comes the argument about abortion.

Overturning Roe provided only the opportunity to have that argument, and, for the moment, the anti-abortion side is not having a lot of luck advancing its case. Possibly this is because the anti-abortion movement has chosen a leader who so transparently does not give a fig about abortion or any other moral or political question except to the extent that it serves his interests …

…

Consensus-building in this matter is not something undertaken in order to accommodate abortion enthusiasm in the interest of advancing a broader political agenda but rather the opposite: Consensus-building is the only way to build a stable, long-term policy that actually protects the lives of the unborn and reduces—in fact, not in theory—the practice of abortion. Consensus-building is the way toward anti-abortion goals, not a detour from them. As I have written before: The pro-life movement doesn’t win when nobody can get an abortion—it wins when nobody wants one.

Trump’s Toxic Touch (Boldface added)

Election 2024

100% wrong

This is what an interactive Economist article thinks about my Presidential vote in November:

Here’s what the Economist thinks of my likely vote this Fall

Switch me to California and it flips strongly. I’m told the paywall is down, so size up yourself.

FWIW

The Democratic National Committee paid President Joe Biden’s legal bills while he was under investigation by special counsel Robert Hur over whether the president mishandled classified documents, Axios reported Friday. While the Biden campaign has attacked former President Donald Trump for using campaign funds to pay his compounding legal bills, the committee paid $1.5 million—mostly between July 2023 and February 2024—to attorneys and firms representing Biden during Hur’s probe. While Trump has spent funds from his Save America political action committee on legal fees, it is unlikely that his campaign is using money from the Republican National Committee for that purpose.

David M. Drucker, Charles Hilu and Michael Warren

Presidential Debates 2024

Trump has repeatedly challenged Biden to debate him even though he skipped all of the debates in the Republican presidential primary.

David M. Drucker, Charles Hilu and Michael Warren Camp Biden is hinting that he won’t debate. I don’t blame them: Trump doesn’t really debate; he slings insults and one-liners (last item) that demean any “debate” he’s in. Add to that a Democrat candidate who has lost a step or two, and the opening Trump gave him by not deigning to debate his inferiors, and I’m in Camp Biden on debating.

P.S. David Frum says it better than I:

President Biden’s spokesperson should answer like this: “The Constitution is not debatable. The president does not participate in forums with a person under criminal indictment for his attempt to overthrow the Constitution.”

Hoist with his own petard

New York Judge Juan Merchan—who is overseeing former President Donald Trump’s hush money criminal trial—on Friday rejected one of Trump’s final efforts to delay the proceedings set to begin later today. Trump and his team asked for the trial to be pushed “indefinitely” on the grounds that the media attention surrounding it would make it impossible for Trump to receive a fair trial. Merchan, however, held that Trump intentionally generates much of the media attention. “The situation Defendant finds himself in now is not new to him and at least in part, of his own doing,” the judge wrote.

The Morning Dispatch

Politics generally

Cui bono?

In Dallas, Texas, last Thursday night, four people walked onto a stage: a libertarian, a recent dropout from the Democratic race for president, an economic populist, and Ann Coulter, who needs no introduction.

They were all asked a single question, which is also the No. 1 issue that will affect the 2024 election: Should the United States close its borders?

It’s the kind of topic that’s become impossible to talk about out loud and in public. One side accuses the other of xenophobia and racism; the other of lawlessness and cheating the electoral system.

But at The Free Press, we believe that the issues that matter most to Americans are worth talking about in public, without fear. That’s why we partnered with FIRE to launch our new series, the America Debates, moderated by our founder, Bari Weiss.

So on Thursday at the Majestic Theatre in downtown Dallas, we welcomed a crowd of 700 from states all over the nation including Utah, Indiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. We even met a few readers who flew in from London.

There were best friends from high school, women in cowboy boots, and married couples on either side of the issue—including Dr. Nina Niu Sanford, who immigrated to the U.S. from China at age three, and her husband, a native Texan born to a Mexican immigrant. (She voted in favor of America shutting its borders; he voted against.)

“If you want to hear an exchange of ideas it’s basically relegated to AM radio,” a pregnant woman from Rhode Island who flew 1,700 miles to the event told me. “But you never get people like this, just sitting on a stage together, hashing out ideas.”

Jake Billings, a 34-year-old from Utah, said he arrived believing in an open border. But when he heard Ahmari list the ways Americans without college degrees get the short end of the stick because of illegal migration, he felt swayed in a different direction.

“He just laid out how it hurts the working class, which is where I come from,” said Billings, who shared that his mother was one of 13 kids. “What can I say? I’m a facts person.”

The Free Press

This summary was preceded by “The full video of the event will be available soon to paid subscribers of The Free Press. So if you’re not already a paid subscriber, become one today.” The Free Press has become Substack’s subscription champion for good reason.

If you’re not a Free Press subscriber, you’re missing some awfully good stuff. Same for the Dispatch. If I had budget woes, those would be among the last to go.

Pro-Ukraine without playing the Hitler card

Dan Coats, Why Aid for Ukraine’s Fight Against Russia Matters pushes just about all the buttons I needed pushed to unenthusiastically support continued aid.

I try to avoid a Manichean outlook on the world, but even without White Knight delusions, there’s a case to made, and Coats makes it well without a facile Putin = Hitler narrative.

Why the new Christian right keeps losing

For the most part, the new Christian right is almost entirely lacking in the discipline, self-control, and judgment required to secure real political victories in a democratic system. Small wonder many of them want a totalitarian dictator, then. Maybe that’s the only way they’ll ever actually accomplish anything legislatively.

Jake Meador, who has some Nebraska receipts to prove his point, in Vibe Emission Is Not a Political Strategy

“The props of official Christianity”

“I don’t think the fixes that most conservatives propose would fix anything,” he said. “I don’t think bringing back in the props of official Christianity is going to get at the darkness at the center of all this.” To him the Christian worldview had become just too remote in America, and worse, millions of Americans denied the very notion of the objective truth. Like many other conservative evangelicals at the end of the century, Mohler spoke of “postmodernism” rather than “secular humanism” as the condition of godless modern America.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals. I occasionally agree with Albert Mohler, and this is one of those occasions.

Maxine Waters changes her tune

In the young and fun days of 2018, Maxine Waters encouraged protesters to confront politicians in restaurants. In those Olden Times, she said: “If you see anybody from that cabinet [Trump’s] in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” (H/t Dan O’Donnell for tracking this video down.)

Fast-forward a few years and here is Maxine Waters, after facing mild protest from a single person at a single restaurant: “As a member of Congress, where people—you know—who evidently had a racist attitude, and recently even one confronted me in a restaurant—and they don’t say racist things but what they say is they don’t like something I said. They don’t like a position that I took. But you know that—you know—if you were not black, you would not be approached that way.” Exactly. A dissatisfied constituent has never approached a white politician.

…

Meanwhile, everyone at Harvard is upset that conservative activist and writer Chris Rufo keeps finding egregious plagiarism in this or that beloved professor’s work. And The Harvard Crimson this week has a proposal: “We can’t let outsiders control the plagiarism narrative. Harvard and other universities must stay ahead of the game, surfacing instances of plagiarism and addressing them before malicious actors can hurt the University’s credibility.” I do believe Chris Rufo will accept those terms.

Nellie Bowles

The post-religious right

In February 2016, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote: “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” His words captured a widely shared assumption that the rise of Donald Trump signaled not only the death of the religious right, but the birth of an irreligious right animated by white racial grievance.

It is clear now that this assumption was wrong …

Matthew Schmitz, JD Vance, Religious Populist

No, I don’t think that’s clear at all. As Schmitz notes, there is a surprising move of many Hispanics and Blacks toward the GOP, and that puts a caveat on the “white racial grievance” part of Douthat’s assumption. But I don’t think it clearly disproves it.

This is but a quibble about Schmitz’s article, which I was prepared to dislike (perhaps even hate), but which I found interesting and helpful in several ways.

No, Trump’s Presidency Wasn’t Worth It

The price tag of the Trump presidency exceeds its value exponentially. The tax cuts, deregulation, judicial appointments, executive orders, and cultural counter-offensives (“he fights”) are trinkets compared to the way he has undermined the values and norms required to sustain the rule of law and the constitutional order.

No, Trump’s Presidency Wasn’t Worth It

Politics makes me want to p***!

I just heard the story of a candidate who was furious with his estranged wife for not posing for a family photo with the kids. I can’t say more for fear of too precisely identifying the situation, in which wife and children are quite innocent and don’t need the hassle.

Our six primary candidates for governor aren’t much better, although their badness differs from his.

Politics is so phony it makes me want to puke. Well, actually, it makes me want to post.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Thursday, 4/11/24

Permanence

“How has it come about,” C. S. Lewis once asked, “that we use the highly emotive word ‘stagnation,’ with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called ‘permanence’?” It is, Lewis suggests, because the dominance of the machine in our culture altered our imagination. It gave us a “new archetypal image.”

Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes

Considering how excellent an interviewer Ken Myers is, I’m surprised I don’t have more highlights from this oldish book by him. But this one surfaces just often enough to seem ever green. It’s especially dear to me because one of the common lazy criticisms of Orthodox Christianity is that it’s “stagnant.”

Feckless Diktator

Tens of thousands of people marched in Budapest, Hungary, on Saturday to protest Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government. Péter Magyar, a former diplomat who was once a senior member of Orbán’s Fidesz party, organized the demonstration and has presented himself as a changemaker with plans to challenge Orbán in upcoming European parliament elections this summer. The rising opposition figure has promised to root out corruption and repair ties with the European Union—of which Hungary is a member—if elected.

The Morning Dispatch

What kind of authoritarian would allow such a thing? Could it be that our press has giving him a bum rap? Surely not!

NCAA wrap-up: Defense always travels

“We’ve played against athletes, played against some really good defensive guys this year in the tournament,” Painter said. “But not the collection of defensive players like UConn has. We play against somebody, they would have a lock-down defender. These guys are bringing lock-down defenders off the bench. Defense always travels. Tip of the hat to them. They were great.”

Kyle Neddenriep

I’ve said without embarrassment that I’m a “fair weather fan.” I think I’ve learned enough about basketball, and about Purdue Coach Matt Painter’s approach to coaching, to change that to “Purdue Men’s basketball fan.”

Caitlin Clark helped the generalized fandom, too.

Where’s a pro-lifer to go in 2024?

I am conflicted. It is tempting to join the pro-life chorus proclaiming that Donald Trump is not a pro-life candidate (because it’s true). But I don’t agree that his not-so-new abortion federalism is the proof that he’s not pro-life.

Abortion federalism is what the law should be. It’s what I said for darn near 50 years that the law would be after the reversal of Roe, and I’m not going to do a bait-and-switch.

So I guess I’m stuck with my fundamental objection that Donald Trump is a toxic narcissist, incapable of reckoning with facts that are inconvenient to him (like “You lost the election, sir”), yet capable of poisoning the culture.

For maybe a decade, from the earlyish eighties forward, I really was a single-issue anti-abortion voter (anti-abortion and pro-life aren’t the same thing, but seamless-garment-of-life candidates were rare). I became disenthralled of single-issue voting when NRLC and its affiliates endorsed nasty people who unconvincingly claimed they were pro-life — like maybe Trump in 2016 (I don’t recall whether they endorsed him; I wouldn’t have paid attention if they had.)

Trump’s pledge to appoint Supreme Court Justices from Leonard Leo’s list, which I only half believed, was not enough to gain my vote in 2016, and nothing he could say about “life issues” in 2024 would outweigh his baneful influence on everything he touches.

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, Something Demonic Is in the Air (2021)

Other disaffected seamless-garment pro-lifers should join me in voting for this party.

Gaining Perspective

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, The Weight of Glory

Can we afford the rich?

While we talk a lot about the private jet emissions of the rich, the biggest environmental impacts of inequality are actually ‘psychosocial’:

“The well-publicized lifestyles of the rich promote standards and ways of living that others seek to emulate, triggering cascades of expenditure for holiday homes, swimming pools, travel, clothes and expensive cars. Studies show that people who live in more-unequal societies spend more on status goods. … Inequality also makes it harder to implement environmental policies. Changes are resisted if people feel that the burden is not being shared fairly.”

Fierce competition for social status not only turbocharges consumerism, it also reduces social cohesion, worsens mental health and increases crime:

“By accentuating differences in status and social class – for example, through the type of car someone drives, their clothing or where they live – inequality increases feelings of superiority and of inferiority. … Even affluent people would enjoy a better quality of life if they lived in a country with a more equal distribution of wealth, similar to a Scandinavian nation. They might see improvements in their mental health and have a reduced chance of becoming victims of violence; their children might do better at school and be less likely to take dangerous drugs.”

Dense Discovery, quoting Why the world cannot afford the rich

Trump aims at the FBI, kills FISA; gee, thanks Mr. Revenge!

Donald Trump has a special talent for creating chaos that benefits no one except Donald Trump, and doesn’t even do that in the end. That’s the only way to understand his destructive intervention Wednesday on the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in Congress. “Kill FISA,” he wrote on Truth Social, and the House Republican dunce caucus obliged.

On Tuesday evening the House Rules Committee voted out a rule that would have allowed lawmakers to vote on renewing FISA along with substantive reforms. The proposed bill, a consensus project between the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, was written to improve safeguards for Americans in Section 702’s surveillance database, which lets intelligence agencies eavesdrop on the communications of foreigners overseas.

…

Mr. Trump instructed Republicans to kill FISA because “IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” Nice to know that the man who wants to become Commander in Chief again has his eye on his own revenge, rather than public safety.

Trump Blows Up Anti-Terror Surveillance – WSJ

Modernists losing copyright protection

For those of a certain age — who hear the word “modernist” as modern — it’s an astonishment that a good portion of William Carlos Williams’s poetry is out of copyright. After noticing how often the Internet routinely violates poetry copyrights (currently protecting works after 1928), we decided early on here at Poems Ancient and Modern that we would try to be vigilant about copyright, which prevents us (in our current poverty) from running anything from W.H. Auden, Silvia Plath, Delmore Schwartz, Philip Larkin, and many others. But not only is the first modernist generation, with the likes of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, coming into the public domain, but so increasingly is the second generation of such modernists as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. It’s been a hundred years since the high modernists were the cutting edge of the modern.

Poems Ancient and Modern

Back home in Indiana

The Indiana Court of Appeals rejects a demand that a third “gender” designation be available on drivers licenses:

BMV asserts its binary-only policy for state credentials is designed to accurately, consistently, and efficiently identify licensees. The agency indicates that recording an individual’s objective characteristic of sex better advances the state interest in accurate identification than would recording a person’s subjective non-binary identity. Additionally, identifying an individual’s sex on their state credentials promotes consistency within the system as other statutes require the licensee’s sex to be identified and recorded. Finally, BMV suggests that issuing credentials identifying an individual’s sex better serves to further administrative efficiency than reporting a subjective status with innumerable designations.

Indiana Court Rejects Claim That Driver’s Licenses Must Include Third Gender Option

I appreciate living in a state that isn’t “way out there” to either extreme.

Wordplay

1

… umbraphilia — the love of eclipses …

Where You Can See the Next Total Solar Eclipse, in 2026 – The New York Times

2

You cannot make a competitive selection process a tool for equality, as the entire point of competitive selection is to identify inequality.

Freddie deBoer

3

Quango: a Quasi-NGO; an organisation to which a government has devolved power, but which is still partly controlled and/or financed by government bodies.

4

Sodcasting: a term coined in Britain for playing music on your phone in public — after “sod” for “sodomite”, i.e. something that only a total ASSHOLE would do. H/T Andrew Sullivan, who adds:

It’s not as if there isn’t an obvious win-win solution for both those who want to listen to music and those who don’t. Let me explain something that seems completely unimaginable to the Bluetoothers: If you can afford an iPhone, you can afford AirPods, or a headset, or the like. Put them in your ears, and you will hear music of far, far higher quality than from a distant Bluetooth, and no one else will be forced to hear anything at all! What’s not to like? It follows, it seems to me, that those who continue to refuse to do so, who insist that they are still going to make you listen as well, just because fuck-you they can, are waging a meretricious assault on their fellow humans.

5

fundamentalist, n. Anyone who is more serious about religion than I am, especially if he owns a gun.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick], Una Sancta: Fundamentalism, Ecumenism and the One True Church

6

… the Netherlands, a country so flat it feels it’s been ironed into submission.

Chris Arnade

7

I look up from my book,
from the unreality of language,
and stare at the sea’s surface
that says nothing and means it.

R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Saturday, 4/6/24

Today is that day the Purdue Boilermaker Men advance to the NCAA Championship game by ending the fairy tale run of DJ Burns and NC State. Remember, you read it here first. (Caveat: I have no money riding on any games and you certainly shouldn’t put money on my prediction.)

Rackets

EVs

With their heavy weight and quick acceleration, EVs tend to burn through tires about 20% faster than internal combustion vehicles do, according to consultancy firm AlixPartners. And the tires cost about 50% more.

Via Dense Discovery Issue 282

Trump looting the GOP

One might assume that a presidential nominee who generates as much devotion as Mr. Trump would be a financial boon to his party. One would be wrong. With Mr. Trump, everything is about Mr. Trump … While the Republican base may be smitten with Mr. Trump, plenty of big-money donors are skittish about bankrolling his nonsense. The former president has been scrambling to close the gap, leering at potential funders as if they were contestants at the Miss Universe pageant.

Michelle Cottle, Trump Is Financially Ruining the Republican Party

I haven’t seen gullibility like today’s GOP since Harlem stood by its man Adam Clayton Powell.

Has Leonard Leo turned mercenary?

Formerly friendly, I’m now a little leery of Leonard Leo.

Leonard Leo (not the Federalist Society) provided Donald Trump with the list of outstanding conservative prospective Supreme Court Nominees that Trump ran on in 2016 and that probably made the difference in the Election. Kudos to him for that. I didn’t believe Trump would keep his promise to nominate from that list, and for that and other reasons, I didn’t vote for him.

But about the time Leo got on the Trump train, his life appears to have take a dramatic turn:

The Campaign for Accountability’s complaint alleges that “Leo-affiliated nonprofits” paid BH Group and CRC Advisors a total of $50.3 million between 2016 and 2020.

During this period, according to the complaint, Leo’s lifestyle changed:

In August 2018, he paid off the 30-year mortgage on the Mclean, Va. home, most of which was still outstanding on the payoff date. Later that same year, Leonard Leo bought a $3.3 million summer home with 11 bedrooms in Mount Desert, an affluent seaside village on the coast of Maine, using, in part, a 20-year mortgage of $2,310,000. Leonard Leo paid off the entire balance of that mortgage just one year later in July 2019. In September 2021, Leonard Leo bought a second home in Mount Desert for $1.65 million.

The complaint was based in part on a March 2023 Politico story by Heidi Przybyla. She wrote that her “investigation, based on dozens of financial, property and public records dating from 2000 to 2021, found that Leo’s lifestyle took a lavish turn beginning in 2016,” citing Leo’s purchases of the Maine properties along with “four new cars, private school tuition for his children, hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Catholic causes and a wine locker at Morton’s Steakhouse.”

Thomas B. Edsall, Trump’s Backers Are Determined Not to Blow It This Time Around

Part of my leeriness is probably because I’m smack dab in the middle of reading Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, which describes Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stevenson’s extremely profitable financial con in his promotion of the 1920s Klan. The story is full of MAGA-like personalities (right down to the rapes) and profiteering.

Trump’s second term, with Leonard Leo’s help, is shaping up to be a nightmare for true conservatism and a repudiation of much of the excellent work Leo’s judicial list did in the first Trump term. Truly Donald Trump has a reverse Midas touch.

Just asking questions

I’m no longer a Ben Shapiro fan, but when he’s right, he’s right.

Election 2024

Political Therapeutic Deism

Political Therapeutic Deism is a system of beliefs which invoke religious terms for the purposes of affirming one’s politics. It includes beliefs like:

God is on my political party’s side.

My views on political issues are a leading indicator that I am a true Christian.

My actions in politics are justified in light of God’s general approval of my politics.

I do not understand how other “Christians” could vote for my candidate’s opponent.

It is clear and obvious which political issues are most important to God.

Political Therapeutic Deism makes sense of why we’re seeing sorting in churches by politics, over and above theology or other factors. It makes sense of why we’ve seen steep declines of religious affiliation among Democrats over the last several decades, and why growing numbers of Trump supporters identify as evangelical, even if they don’t share evangelicals’ theological beliefs. …

Political Therapeutic Deism has the benefit of making clear what we are seeing is the misappropriation of religious language and symbols for political ends. It also harkens to a term (Moral Therapeutic Deism) which has been thoroughly rejected by some of the very kind of people “Christian nationalists” seek to persuade to their way of thinking. They want to equate opposition to their political proposals as opposition to Christianity itself. Why would we help them?

Michael Wear

Until a better term comes along, I expect to use political therapeutic deism for the faux-evangelical Trumpists that MSM calls “white Christian nationalist.”

“But the judges” no longer applies

For many legal conservatives, a two-word incantation—“but judges”—defined the Trump era. It began as an exhortation or, perhaps, a justification. Later it became a coping device, edging into gallows humor. As the shadows lengthened in the last days of a desperate and increasingly lawless presidency, it became a rueful question. A mob, incited by the president who refused to accept a lawful election, sacked the Capitol, assaulted police officers, interrupted the electoral count, and hunted down officeholders—“But … judges?”

Conservatives who had wagered the Trump gambit worth the risk got the upside of their bargain. Trump nominated many excellent men and women to the judiciary. A confident conservative majority, grounded in originalism and textualism, now controls the Supreme Court. The white whale of Roe v. Wade—long emblematic of lawless usurpation of policymaking by the Court—fell.

Contrary to the fears of liberals and the misplaced hopes of Trump, conservative judicial appointees upheld the principle of judicial independence. They refused to serve as reliable partisans and handed Trump and his administration important legal defeats. Crucially, Trump’s nominees rejected his baseless claims of a stolen election.

But these advances in jurisprudence came at a deep civic cost. The president with whom legal conservatives allied themselves used his office to denigrate the rule of law, mock the integrity of the justice system, attack American institutions, and undermine public faith in democracy. Beyond the rhetoric, he abused emergency powers, manipulated appropriated funds for personal political ends, and played fast and loose with the appointments clause, all at the cost of core congressional powers.

Republicans in Congress barely resisted these actions and increasingly behaved more like courtiers than members of a co-equal branch of government.

…

Partisans promise that Trump in a second term would nominate judges more loyal to the president while Trump-friendly, post-liberal thinkers develop theories like “common-good constitutionalism” in which conservative judges would abandon originalism in favor of promoting certain ends. Adrian Vermeule, the leading academic proponent of the latter view, has argued that “originalism has now outlived its utility, and has become an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.” It would be deeply ironic, and the ultimate failure of the movement, if the “but judges” bargain were to end with purportedly “conservative” judges legislating from the bench.

Gregg T. Nunziata, The Conservative Legal Movement Got Everything It Wanted. It Could Lose It All

Anyone who says “but the judges” to justify voting for Trump in 2024 is seriously misguided. He’s disappointed with his first-term SCOTUS nominees in particular, as they’ve not been the kinds of toadies he wants. Next time, he’ll nominate toadies, not excellent jurists, and since the Senate is going to flip (11 Republicans are up for re-election, 23 Democrats) he’ll get them confirmed.

Good advice, since abandoned

Listen to me. Listen. If the twentieth century tells us anything, it’s that whenever you hear anyone standing before a crowd, winding them up about the cause of creating utopia on earth, you had better run.

Rod Dreher, December 12, 2020. I’m sorry to say that he has since reconciled himself to a supposed necessity to vote for Trump.

Miscellany

Rowling throws down the gauntlet

Scotland has a new hate speech law that criminalizes “stirring up hatred” against a series of “protected characteristics,” including race, age, religion, disability, and “transgender identity.” J.K. Rowling threw down the gauntlet:

On Monday, the day the law came into effect, the Harry Potter author posted a dare on X. In it, she named 10 transgender women, called them all men, and said: “If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offense under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested.” … “If they go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I’ll repeat that woman’s words and they can charge us both at once.”

The Free Press

Bomb-thrower

Responding to an Emma Green New Yorker article on classical education:

I am a fan of almost anything that disrupts the hegemony of this fatuously self-righteous and profoundly anti-intellectual educational establishment, which exists not to lift up the marginalized and excluded but rather to soothe the consciences of the ruling class. May the forces of disruption flourish.

Alan Jacobs, against the factory of unreason

Nellie snippets

Trump Media lost $58 million and brought in $4 million in revenue last year. Yet, the market is valuing DJT at $6.4 billion. That there’s a meme stock. (I could have pulled this for “Rackets,” above.)
It is odd that Trump got the reputation of being The End of the American Press, when Biden is really the one who hates questions and shuns journalists. Remember Trump? How he would actually never stop talking? How he’d sit and antagonize reporters endlessly? But oh, he’d talk. It was alarming, often described as “rambling.” But at least we all knew exactly what was going through his mind (chaos, tangents, rage, pettiness, pretty good jokes, Rosie O’Donnell, more Rosie O’Donnell, why was it always Rosie O’Donnell).
[S]tudent loan relief is the wrong approach. Colleges should simply not cost this much. Solution: eliminate 90 percent of university administrator roles, since at least that many are fully fake. Offer incentives for kids to enroll in trade schools or community colleges. Boom, loan crisis solved, you’re welcome. Next topic.
From Reuters
America’s leading women’s rights group of yesteryear is still arguing that it’s white supremacy to maintain girls’ sports. Here’s NOW, the National Organization of Women: “Repeat after us: Weaponizing womanhood against other women is white supremacist patriarchy at work. Making people believe there isn’t enough space for trans women in sports is white supremacist patriarchy at work.” Yes, it’s white supremacist patriarchy to argue. . . that someone who’s gone through male puberty might have an unfair advantage in, let’s say, rugby. Interesting. Fascinating. I will repeat until I am clean.

Nellie Bowles

I’m that guy

When I think of the consciousness that generates the circular sorrow of “Ifs eternally,” or the one trying to find the one thing that will unify all the disparate experiences of one life, I think of a man—almost always a man, though there are notable exceptions—sitting alone in a room and doggedly trying to figure it all out.

Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone

St. John Climacus Saturday

Culture

Elite or not?

A 2023 account of these car dealers by Slate’s Alexander Sammon recounts the awesome scale of their collective wealth and influence on Republican politics: “Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1%” while making up “a majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year”; members of the industry association donate to Republicans “at a rate of 6-to-1”, through which they have worked “to write and rewrite laws to protect dealers and sponsor sympathetic politicians in all 50 states”. Such figures help to make sense of Moreno’s and his fellow car dealers’ status as the cream of the crop among America’s local elites.

Michael Cuenco, Car dealers will decide America’s future.

Cuenco seems to overlook the difference between wealth and prestige.

Sportsball

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.

Eugene McCarthy, via the Economist’s World in Brief

Dictator or not?

On the drive into Budapest from the airport, travelers can see billboards erected by the Hungarian political opposition, featuring a photo of Prime Minister Viktor Orban with the slogan “God? Homeland? Pedophilia!” It’s a reference to the recent scandal involving a presidential pardon of a politically connected man who had been convicted of aiding in a pedophilia cover-up. The scandal cost the ruling Fidesz party its top two female politicians: President Katalin Novak and former Justice Minister Judit Varga.

Associating the prime minister, who apparently did not know about the pardon until the media reported it, and who quickly called for resignations of these top allies, is a low blow. But that’s how it goes in Hungary. Fidesz is not above similar tactics. If you expect Magyar politics to be a tea party, you are going to be disappointed.

Still, bearing in mind how the U.S. president recently denounced Orban as a “dictator”—a slur widely repeated in Western media and public discourse—you have to wonder what kind of strongman would allow himself to be publicly criticized as a promoter of pedophilia. If Orban really were a dictator, wouldn’t these billboards have been banned? Wouldn’t those who paid for them be eating goulash in a gulag now?

… Hungary, which supposedly groans under the burden of the Orban dictatorship, enjoys far more freedom of expression than countries whose media and whose leaders condemn it as repressive. You have to wonder why.

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative (no paywall).

Eugenics for the age of The Machine

Servility

Will we reach the point where nobody thinks they could start their own little business?

Political

Meet the new boss, Trumpier than the old boss

Washington Post: Was the 2020 Election Stolen? Job Interviews at RNC Take an Unusual Turn.

Those seeking employment at the Republican National Committee after a Donald Trump-backed purge of the committee this month have been asked in job interviews if they believe the 2020 election was stolen, according to people familiar with the interviews, making the false claim a litmus test of sorts for hiring.

The Morning Dispatch

Trump’s faith

The closest I get to liking Donald Trump is when he evinces contempt for those who idolize him.

I feel guilty about that, as one shouldn’t sympathize with con artists. But you know how it is with scams: At a certain point of extreme gullibility, the mark starts to seem more contemptible than the person preying on them. If you’re still falling for “Nigerian prince” emails in 2024, the problem lies chiefly with you, not with the flimflam man responsible.

The sheer laziness with which Trump has courted evangelical voters since 2015 has always betrayed a degree of sincere disdain for them that’s unusual in a man not otherwise known for honesty. It would have been trivially easy for him to brush up on Christian dogma after he entered politics in the name of convincing the Republican base that he’d seen the light after a dissolute adulthood. But … he couldn’t be bothered to do so.

He’s never cared enough about the faith espoused by most of his supporters to even pretend to take it seriously.

That’s how we ended up with him once famously rendering “2 Corinthians” as “Two Corinthians” rather than “Second Corinthians.” And listing “an eye for an eye” as his favorite Bible verse instead of something from the Gospels. And admitting at an evangelical forum that he couldn’t recall ever having asked for God’s forgiveness.

A man who lies like he breathes somehow can’t get motivated to lie persuasively about being pious, even as a gesture of minimal respect for his own fans. That’s remarkable. And insofar as most evangelicals have shrugged it off and rolled over for him anyway, my sympathies lie more with him. He’s been sending them the political equivalent of “Nigerian prince” emails for nine years; if they haven’t wised up yet, that’s a problem with them more so than with Trump.

…

His first political priority, even above maximizing his chances of reelection, is purging the Republican Party of anyone who would question his right to rule. He doesn’t want independent-minded Christians in the GOP any more than he wants the traditional conservatives who preferred Nikki Haley in the primary. He’ll win without them—and if he can’t, he’ll at least have consolidated his power over one-half of America’s political establishment in the process.

In that context, whether by design or by happenstance, the “Trump Bible” operates as a sort of litmus test for evangelicals who have stuck with him this far through thick and thin. You won’t abandon me if I make a mockery of your faith, will you? No, of course you won’t.

…

The devolution of evangelicalism in the Trump era is itself an interesting mix of radicalism and transactionalism, mirroring Trump’s personality. Many Christians made a cynical bargain with him in 2016, suppressing their moral discomfort and offering him their votes in exchange for guarantees that he’d enact their agenda, starting with limits on abortion. Insofar as his poor character and irreligiosity troubled them, some may have idly hoped that their influence over him, and the influence of figures like Mike Pence, would turn his heart toward God in time. He might be remade in Christianity’s image.

That transaction didn’t pan out the way they’d hoped. For many, Christianity has been remade in his image.

Nick Catoggio, The True Faith

How to reach Republicans with the anti-Trump Gospel

Carville has been sounding an alarm about progressives getting too censorious since he advised Hillary Clinton in 2016. He disparaged liberals’ snooty, elitist “faculty lounge” attitudes long before he blew off the faculty lounge himself. He complained that “woke stuff is killing us,” that the left was talking in a language that ordinary Americans did not understand, using terms like “Latinx” and “communities of color,” and with a tone many Americans found sneering, as in Hillary’s infamous phrase “basket of deplorables.”

“There are a lot of people on the left that would rather lose and be pure because it makes them feel good, it makes them feel superior,” Carville said. And that, he said, is how you end up with Dobbs.

He thinks Donald Trump’s voters see him as akin to King Cyrus or King David in the Bible, a flawed messenger, so it’s best to use a biblical narrative about betrayal.

“If you say, ‘You dumb son of a bitch, how can you ever think that this fat, slimy, rapist, criminal, racist should be president?’ they’re going to recoil,” he said. “I think Democrats should say: ‘Look, you believed in him. You felt like you weren’t being seen, you were being culturally excluded. But he betrayed you. You thought he was going to be for you and helping you, but he was really for TikTok and tax cuts to the rich.’”

James Carville profile by Maureen Dowd

What’s behind “Lawfare”?

I submit that what changed when Trump entered the political arena on the highest levels isn’t that he gained powerful enemies who resolved to take him down by any means possible, nefarious or otherwise. What changed is that he was now a magnet for all kinds of scrutiny—journalistic as well legal …

Isn’t this the most obvious thing in the world? What is the first thing that anyone entertaining a run for the White House is asked by anyone who understands the process? Do you have any skeletons in the closet? Better get them out in the open now, because they will be discovered during the course of the campaign, and they will sink you, especially if you seek to cover it up.

Because Trump’s alleged crimes and misdeeds were extremely complex and deeply embedded in his sprawling business empire—and because the wheels of justice (rightly) grind extremely slowly—it’s taken many years for numerous lines of investigation to culminate in several trials all at roughly the same time, just as Trump is gearing up for a third attempt to win the White House. That’s not great. But as Jonathan Chait has argued quite cogently, the reason why it’s happening is that Donald Trump is a crook! If he wanted to continue getting away with being a crook, he could have decided not to run for president! Instead, he launched a campaign, won, lost, and is now running again. That’s nearly nine years (and counting) of ensuring the Klieg lights of public scrutiny are trained on every aspect of his life and business. What did he expect?

Since Trump trends toward imbecility, he may be surprised and outraged about this. But his defenders really should know better.

Damon Linker, Seven More Months of … This?

Ronna McDaniels’ excellent NBC adventure

Jonah Goldberg on NBC’s difficulty finding commentators to defend Trumpy positions:

I’ve said it a million times on here: When we were all growing up, […] the word “RINO” meant someone who was squishy on abortion, or taxes, or foreign policy, or something like that. It was about issues. Now, by Trump’s own admission, RINO only refers to people insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. And so you get this weird kind of thing where you have to find people who are supposedly intelligent conservatives who are also willing to talk about Donald Trump as if he’s comrade Stalin. And that’s a really tiny universe of people because it almost demands that you have no integrity or that you lie. And that’s how Ronna McDaniel starts to look attractive.

Wordplay

Tina Brown assessed King Charles: “Even with the best prognosis for his cancer, he has been left with a rueful rump of a reign.” (Ann Madonia Casey, Fairview, Texas)

Jesse Green reviewed a new Broadway production: “Romantic musicals are as personal as romance itself. What makes you sigh and weep may leave the person next to you bored and stony. At ‘The Notebook,’ I was the person next to you.” (Christopher Flores, San Antonio)

And Bret Stephens, conversing with Gail Collins, skewered the social media site affiliated with Donald Trump: “I take it you’re referring to Truth Social, which in an honest world would be renamed Lies Sociopathic.” (Ross Payne, Windermere, Fla.)

Clipped from Frank Bruni