November 1

MAGA nihilists

Sometime in 1985 I had lunch with Sam Francis in the cafeteria of The Washington Times, where we both worked. You may never have heard of Sam Francis, but MAGA people (at least the more intellectual ones) know him as one of the seminal thinkers of their movement.

The lunch was awkward because I found him dark and creepy (and he probably found me naïve). Back then I didn’t understand that his way of thinking would triumph in conservative circles and my way of thinking would be vanquished. I don’t think he won because he was a flat-out racist, though he was. (He was later fired for writing a column arguing that “neither ‘slavery’ nor ‘racism’ as an institution is a sin.”) I think he won because he was a revolutionary, while I was a conservative. I wanted to reform things; he wanted to burn it all down.

…

Sam Francis (who died in 2005) explicitly cited Gramsci as his role model as he waged his culture war struggles. Christopher Rufo does the same today. This is why Trump is going after the universities, public broadcasting and the Kennedy Center. Francis once wrote, “The main focus should be the reclamation of cultural power, the patient elaboration of an alternative culture within but against the regime — within the belly of the beast but indigestible by it.”

David Brooks, Hey, Lefties! Trump Has Stolen Your Game (Gift link)

I was reading Sam Francis at roughly the time Brooks had lunch with him and for some years thereafter. He was brilliant (which is little assurance of a sound mind). He also was purged by more respectable conservatives—my kind of conservatives—for his increasingly explicit antisemitism.

Joseph Sobran followed a similar trajectory. He, too, was brilliant, but less radical than Francis (and thus less consequential). He was a devout Catholic, and his antisemitism was never explicit, but William F. Buckley wouldn’t tolerate even a whiff of it.

I viscerally detested Christopher Rufo almost from my first notice of him, which involved his gloating over making the term “Critical Race Theory” toxic while leaving it vague enough that it could beslime anyone he cared to beslime. I doubt that Rufo will be as consequential as Francis or even Sobran in the long run, but we’re in an era of pas d’ennemis á Droite, and there’s no magisterial authority trying to purge him.

Sentient and respectable conservatives like me necessarily ask ourselves if MAGA was always the eventuality of our political preferences, if we were all embryonic Sam Fracises and Joe Sobrans all along.

I don’t think so, but I’m increasingly appreciating that some truths simply need not be uttered—because of how very, very foreseeably they can be abused. To deny them would be sin, to utter them, imprudent. I save them for my private journal now when I recognize that.

Pardon me?

On Tuesday morning, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee released a report on former President Joe Biden’s use of autopen signatures on the many pardons and commutations he handed out during his term, and particularly near its end. Many of these were scandalous enough taken on their own terms, but what made them particularly outrageous was the suspicion that the bulk of these acts were the work of Biden’s staff, not the senescent president himself. One might reasonably understand how Biden found the time to preemptively pardon his family members, breaking frequent promises never to do so, but it was harder to believe that he was setting aside personal time to commute the sentences of people like Maryland’s thrice-murdering “Black Widow” killer. The House report confirms what voters long suspected: Biden’s inner circle hid the extent of his mental decline from the American people and, after he dropped out of the race, used his autopen as part of their campaign to set a new record for presidential clemency.

The GOP argument that Biden abused his pardon power in an unacceptable way is undermined, however, by Trump’s nonchalant, even gleeful pardoning of absolute sleazeballs who have ties to his own family business. There aren’t a lot of large financial institutions that are willing to simultaneously do work with al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, ransomware hackers, and kiddie-porn enthusiasts, but the crypto firm Binance did so. Back in November 2023, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program. In a court filing, U.S. Attorney Tessa Gorman said Zhao caused “significant harm to U.S national security” through his criminal acts and “violated U.S. law on an unprecedented scale.” But not only did Trump pardon him earlier this month, he claimed Zhao was in fact persecuted by the Biden administration. It gets worse. The Wall Street Journal reported in August: “The Trump family’s crypto venture has generated more wealth since the election—some $4.5 billion—than any other part of the president’s business empire.” Trump’s crypto fortune is of course facilitated by a partnership with “an under-the-radar trading platform quietly administered by Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.” It’s an egregious decision that is unlikely to generate more than a peep of objection from congressional Republicans.

National Review email.

Who damaged the nation more: Biden with his autopen pardons or Trump with his blanket pardon of the January 6 rioters and targeted pardons of lucrative cronies? (That’s a rhetorical question, of course.)

Indictment

Let us not belabor the obvious truth that what the Western world calls an “energy” crisis ineptly disguises what happens when you can no longer control markets, are chained to your colonies (instead of vice versa), are running out of slaves (and can’t trust those you think you still have), can’t, upon rigorously sober reflection, really send the Marines, or the Royal Navy, anywhere, or risk a global war, have no allies only business partners, or “satellites” and have broken every promise you ever made, anywhere, to anyone. I know what I am talking about: my grandfather never got the promised “forty acres, and a mule,” the Indians who survived that holocaust are either on reservations or dying in the streets, and not a single treaty between the United States and the Indian was ever honored. That is quite a record.

James Baldwin, Open Letter to the Born Again, p. 785.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings

The problem is that Trump, perhaps owing to his nouveau riche background and the carefully wrought deformity of his soul, has a taste for the trappings of aristocracy—a princely estate as imagined by a trust-fund dork from Queens. You can see it in his enthusiasm for ghastly imperial furnishings, in his love of monarchical pomp, and even in his sometimes evident desire to pass something of his political position along to the sons he obviously despises. … But what is most objectionably kingly about Trump is not his Caligula-by-way-of-Liberace bad taste but his personalist posture, e.g., treating the White House as though it were his personal property, to be knocked down and rebuilt at his whim, treating the Department of Justice as though it were his personal goon squad, treating judges as though they were his personal servants and factota, etc. Trump talks about “my generals” and unilaterally raised tariffs on Canadian goods because someone in Ontario hurt his personal feelings.

L’État, c’est moi—it is not only gilt moldings that Trump has taken from Louis XIV.

The king spoke, and said, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honor of my majesty?”

While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, Oh, king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee.

Nebuchadnezzar had to learn things the hard way. Julius Caesar, too. Why should Americans be any different?

Kevin D. Williamson

Pas d’ennemis à Droite, Heritage Foundation Edition

[A] video of Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, went viral. “There has been speculation that Heritage is distancing itself from Tucker Carlson over the past 24 hours,” Roberts tweeted, reacting to the uproar over Carlson’s notorious interview with head groyper Nick Fuentes. “I want to put that to rest right now.”

And that’s what he did. “We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” he said in the clip, declining to explain why criticism of Carlson is “slander” and who that “someone else” whose agenda is being served might be. “That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains—and, as I have said before, always will be—a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail.”

Nick Catoggio

Stagnation

Today’s suburbs are different. Highways and zoning have broken the feedback loop between location and value. These developments are typically built to a fixed, finished state and then locked down through zoning codes that discourage or prohibit change. There’s no natural process of maturing or intensification. No organic evolution. Just a one-time buildout, followed by stagnation and decline.

America Should Sprawl? Not if We Want Strong Towns

Snippets

“Quantity is a quality of its own.” (Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, on the United States advantage in WW II. German stuff was engineered better, but we made up for it with more stuff, much more stuff. Via Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast (Gift link))
“[E]very good earnings report further entrenches Nvidia as a precariously placed, load-bearing piece of the global economy … What if AI’s promise for American business proves to be a mirage? What happens then?” (Matteo Wong, Charlie Warzel, Here’s How the AI Crash Happens)

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

No Kings Saturday, 10/18/25

No kings!

Binding precedent

Protesters have protested at an ICE facility a few miles west of Chicago for the past 19 years—with somewhat more intensity recently following the announcement of Operation Midway Blitz. A month after the announcement, the president federalized the Illinois National Guard. District court: Enjoined. Seventh Circuit: Just so. Political opposition is not rebellion, and a protest doesn’t become a rebellion merely due to a few isolated incidents of violence. Without that, none of the statutory predicates for federalizing the National Guard have been met.

Institute for Justice, Short Circuits for 10/17/25 (bold added). This is now the law in the 7th U.S. Circuit – Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.

Look for the Administration to try to provoke a rebellion it can crush. Everyone who’s paying attention knows Trump wants to invoke the Insurrection Act (as he stuffs his pockets and those of his family).

Wanted: a viable counternarrative

Trump’s actions … are part of one project: creating a savage war of all against all and then using the presidency to profit and gain power from it. Trumpism can also be seen as a multipronged effort to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit—learning, compassion, science, the pursuit of justice—and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego, appetite. Trumpism is an attempt to make the world a playground for the rich and ruthless, so it seeks to dissolve the sinews of moral and legal restraint that make civilization decent.

…

Trumpism, like populism, is more than a set of policies—it’s a culture. Trump offers people a sense of belonging, an identity, status, self-respect, and a comprehensive political ethic. Populists are not trying to pass this or that law; they are altering the climate of the age. And Democrats think they can fight that by offering some tax credits?

To beat a social movement, you must build a counter social movement. And to do that, you need a different narrative about where we are and where we should be heading, a different set of values dictating what is admirable and what is disgraceful. If we fail to build such a movement, authoritarian strongmen around the globe will dominate indefinitely.

David Brooks.

You can’t beat something with nothing. I can’t come up with a political counternarrative to Trumpism. The Democrats can’t come up with a political counternarrative, either. Brooks couldn’t come up with a strong political counternarrative.

I can only hope and pray that people will look for their compelling (counter-)narrative to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. (And that meantime there will be some legal counternarratives to prevent irretrievable damage, as in the preceding item.)

Music Reviews

There may be nothing better than old music reviews to let you know that it’s okay to like what you like, critics be damned.

I like Debussy’s La Mer, and I don’t care what the stupid early reviews said:

On today’s date in 1905, Claude Debussy’s orchestral suite La Mer or The Sea was performed for the first time in Paris. Today this music is regarded as an impressionistic masterpiece, but early audiences — especially those in America — found it rough sailing.

“We clung like a drowning man to a few fragments of the tonal wreck,” wrote a 1907 Boston critic, and suggested that instead of The Sea Debussy should have titled his piece Sea-Sickness.

“The Sea is persistently ugly,” wrote The New York Times that same year. “Debussy fails to give any impression of the sea … There is more of a barnyard cackle in it than anything else.”

And in 1909, this on La Mer from The Chicago Tribune: “It is safe to say that few understood what they heard and few heard anything they understood … There are no themes … There is nothing in the way of even a brief motif that can be grasped securely enough by the ear and brain to serve as a guiding line through the tonal maze. There is no end of queer and unusual effects, no end of harmonic complications and progressions that sound so hideously ugly.”

Ah, the perils of “modern music” in the early 20th century!

Giving the Devil his due, impressionism had to be a real mind-blower for critics attuned to, say, the sonata-allegro form.

Comprehensive tradition

We’re often not very aware of the “tradition” in which we live. A student in a classroom would readily agree that the words of a teacher or professor were a “traditioning” of sorts. But they will fail to notice that how the room is arranged, how the students sit, what the students wear (or don’t wear), how the professor is addressed, how students address one another, what questions are considered appropriate and what are not, and a whole world of unspoken, unwritten expectations are utterly required in the process. The modern world often imagines that “online” education is equivalent to classroom education since the goal is merely the transmission of information. But the transmission of information includes the process of acquiring the information and everything that surrounds it. Those receiving the “tradition” online will have perhaps similar information to those receiving it in a classroom – but they will not receive the same information.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Tradition of Being Human

Stages of life

Two questions:

Do I want to read/watch/listen to this?

Should I read/watch/listen to this?

When I was younger the second question often dominated my decision-making. Now that I am officially ancient that question has virtually disappeared and the first one is usually the only one I ask. That’s been the single most notable change in my personality in these my declining years.

Alan Jacobs

Alan is a decade or more younger than me, yet I only very recently seem to have arrived at this point, especially regarding political matters.

Note that he’s talking about a change in personality. This isn’t a life rule. There are things that younger people should read/watch/listen to, in order to become well-formed human beings.

Two ways

[R]evival begins with the people proclaiming, by word and deed, “I have sinned.”

MAGA Christianity has a different message. It looks at American culture and declares, “You have sinned.”

David French

Noteworthy

In the aftermath of Kirk’s murder, we witnessed young people at vigils rather than at “mostly peaceful” demonstrations.

R.R. Reno in First Things

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

Never say Never

I never imagined that I would recommend listening to an accordion player. But the YouTube channel Sergei Teleshev Accordion is astonishing. I’ve never (that I can recall) seen accordions like that (they’re called button accordions, I guess) or heard them making serious, even thrilling, music, like this father and daughter do. (The daughter is 16, by the way.)

Trigger warning: The remainder of this post is (more or less) political

The Calvinball Presidency

I like arguments about ideas. The only way to have a good argument about ideas is if the person or people you’re arguing with have some degree of sincerity about what they are arguing for—or against. Being a political commentator in the Trump era is like being a sportscaster covering a game of Calvinball. The rules change all the time, so arguing about them is an exhausting waste of time.

Jonah Goldberg, The Boredom of Writing in the Trump Era – The Dispatch

Inspectors General

When hoodlums start disabling security cameras, you can bet they’ve got nothing good in mind.

The Trump administration on Wednesday withdrew funding for the Council of Inspectors General, a federal watchdog group, and the entity’s website was disabled. The group oversaw a network of 72 inspectors general. According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration had decided last week to pull the group’s funding.

The Morning Dispatch

Algorithms

[W]e are a nation divided by algorithms. If your algorithm knows you as conservative and interested in military matters, you got a lot of videos of young soldiers and sailors acting out the past few years, and of service branches tweeting out showy political sentiments. You felt understandable alarm. If your algorithm knows you as liberal and not interested in military affairs, you haven’t seen that content, and will have been surprised by Mr. Hegseth’s reference to “dudes in dresses.” We are all getting different versions of reality every time we look at a screen, and it’s hurting us.

Peggy Noonan, The Embarrassing Pete Hegseth.

As if on cue, some folks known to the algorithm as conservative and interested in military matters let it be known that they thought Hegseth’s show was just fine:

Much depends on the details and execution, but if implemented with both verve and prudence, Hegseth’s commonsense reforms will profit the American profession of arms.

As noted in my standard footer for blog posts, I am a participant on something called micro.blog: I follow people I’ve found interesting and some of them follow me. Yet I sensed it wasn’t like Facebook or Twitter/X. It was pleasant. It was sane.

I think Noonan has put her finger on why it is so: it has no algorithms.

In fact, I don’t think I frequent any websites that use algorithms to target my inferred vulnerabilities.

Grooming codes and Flag Codes

Speaking of The Embarrassing Pete Hegseth, Kevin D. Williamson has a few choice words:

I will believe that Hegseth is serious about this stuff when Hegseth starts acting like he is serious about it. As a few observers have pointed out, Hegseth’s Beverly Hills, 90210-style sideburns often extend to a length that would be prohibited under military grooming standards. But there is another area of dress convention that Hegseth violates in practically every public appearance, one that is in fact relevant to his current position: the Flag Code.

The Flag Code is written into federal law, though there is no penalty for violating it. It forbids wearing the flag as an article of clothing, a rule Hegseth routinely flouts with his dopey flag-lined suits. It specifically forbids using the flag as a handkerchief, which Hegseth does habitually, tucking it into his chest pocket as a decorative pocket square—and surely, surely not because doing so makes it look like he is wearing some kind of military decoration. Hegseth, Donald Trump, and the members of the movement they represent are habitual violators of the Flag Code, which is not merely an aesthetic concern.

Part of the point of the Flag Code is the notion that the flag is not to be treated as though it were merely an item of personal property. It is not to be used for tawdry, tacky, or self-interested purposes such as advertising. Hegseth has obvious contempt for rules of this kind, and Trump has equally obvious contempt for any kind of rule that would put any kind of limitation on his self-aggrandizement and vanity. You can be sure that if Hegseth or Trump preferred to wear a beard, then beards would be mandatory in the military, possibly even for women.

…

The allure of delusional self-adoration can be powerful. When a junior high vice principal made me cut my hair (picture your obedient correspondent at 15 with a blond Robert Smith-circa-Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me rats’ nest), I was much offended. I believed, in the sincerest possible way, that I was a unique, very special, possibly heroic 15-year-old, one destined for great things, and, above all, one whose autonomy and personal sense of self had to be respected at all times, damn the rules. It all seemed incontrovertible at the time. But I am not in junior high school anymore. Pete Hegseth somehow is. Princeton owes him a refund.

Mau-mauing the NFL

I’d bet a modest amount that our Censor-in-Chief will figure out some threat to the NFL sufficient to motivate a change of the Superbowl Halftime Show from Bad Bunny to someone markedly more WASPish.

In any event, I’ll miss the game and the show. I’m expecting an emergency call then.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

Saturday, 9/27/25

Addled religio-politics

David Brooks isn’t a practitioner of zingers or even aphorisms. He is a penetrating thinker and writer on a lot of our public life in the US:

What happens when people operate without any coherent theory of how religion should relate to politics?

First, people treat electoral politics as if it were a form of spiritual warfare. A battlefield mentality prevails between the forces of Jesus and the forces of Satan. Fear replaces the traditional Christian virtue, hope: We’re under attack, and we have to destroy our enemies! That’s the easiest way to mobilize people.

Second, the process of moral formation is perverted. Instead of discipling people in the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity, people get discipled in the political passions — enmity, conquest and the urge to dominate.

Third, people develop an addiction to rapture. You’ve probably heard the sort of Christian worship music that preceded and punctuated Sunday’s ceremony. Traditional hymns from centuries gone by covered a range of experiences, but modern worship music tends to hit the same emotional chord over and over again: rapture and praise. Its job is to drive your arms heavenward or to knock you to your knees. It can be a delicious and transforming experience.

The problem is that politics is prosaic. Deliberation and negotiation work best in a mood of moderation and equipoise. If you want to practice politics in the mood best suited for the altar call, you’re going to practice politics in a way that sends prudence out the window.

Fourth, a destructive kind of syncretism prevails. Syncretism is an ancient religious problem. It occurs when believers try to merge different kinds of faith. These days, it’s faith in Jesus and the faith in MAGA all cocktailed together. Syncretism politicizes and degrades faith and totalizes politics.

Fifth, it kicks up a lot of hypocrisy. It’s nice to hear Carlson say he practices a religion of love, harmony and peace, but is that actually the way he lives his life?

Finally, it causes people to underestimate the power of sin. The civil rights movement had a well-crafted theory of the relationship between religion and politics. The movement’s theology taught its members that they were themselves sinful and that they had to put restraints on their political action in order to guard against the sins of hatred, self-righteousness and the love of power. Without any such theory, MAGA imposes no restraints, and sin roams free.

The critics of Christian nationalism sometimes argue that it is a political movement using the language and symbols of religion in order to win elections. But the events of the past week have proved that this is a genuinely religious movement and Charlie Kirk was a genuinely religious man. The problem is that unrestrained faith and unrestrained partisanship are an incredibly combustible mixture. I am one of those who fear that the powerful emotions kicked up by the martyrdom of Kirk will lead many Republicans to conclude that their opponents are irredeemably evil and that anything that causes them suffering is permissible. It’s possible for faithful people to wander a long way from the cross.

David Brooks, We Need to Think Straight About God and Politics (gift link because I’ve quoted so much). I bolded the paragraph about syncretism because that’s my own strong conviction about American MAGA politics. See, for instance, the Jonah Goldberg quote in the footer.

Ya gotta love markets

Wall Street investors are buying up claims to potential tariff refunds, betting that the Supreme Court will strike down President Donald Trump’s signature economic policy and require the government to disgorge tens of billions of dollars that companies have paid this year in import taxes. A handful of hedge funds and specialized investment firms are offering importers around 20 cents for every dollar they paid in Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs and roughly 5 cents per dollar for levies on Canadian, Mexican or Chinese goods stemming from the president’s ire over fentanyl trafficking, according to Salvatore Stile, founder of Alba Wheels Up International, a New York-based customs broker. The antidrug tariff claims are worth less because they are seen as more likely to survive legal challenges and thus less likely to produce refunds. The deals offer immediate cash for importers that have been absorbing most of the cost of Trump’s tariffs. Investors, meanwhile, hope to profit by collecting the rest of the refund if the Supreme Court invalidates Trump’s tariffs. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

John Ellis. Ingenious, but you’ve got to have gigabucks already even to get into this game.

Against the Machine

I’ve read just about everything Paul Kingsnorth has written since I learned of his conversion to Orthodoxy. So I questioned my need to buy his new book, Against the Machine, released Tuesday.

Upon reading a few favorable comments by a trusted friend, I did buy it — for reading on my reading machine (Kindle). Such ironies are not lost on Kingsnorth.

I’m 24% into it and I do recommend it

Farewell to a friend, with an apologia

I lost a valued early subscriber to this blog Wednesday. He had his fill of my “Trump Derangement,” and also thought I was negative toward Charlie Kirk. I know I lost him not because I pay attention to who reads the blog, but because he offered a comment asking that I unsubscribe him. (Neither of us knew how to do that, but I figured it out. I didn’t post his comment because it read more like a personal letter.)

About Charlie Kirk, my subscriber, a skilled wordsmith, nevertheless misread what I wrote, attributing my exceedingly mild criticism of Kirk to Kirk’s support of Trump. Let me say to all you what I said to him:

I regret leaving the impression of a more unfavorable view of Charlie Kirk than I feel. I’ve read a lot about him in the past two weeks because I knew so little about him before September 10. I came to see him as a young man who made fewer mistakes than I did at his age and was maturing before he was cut down. I barely thought about him supporting Trump.

And I’ll add, as justification for criticism that too many conservatives seemed amnesiac about the blemishes on Kirk’s record, eager to declare him a martyr-saint. Treating me as a member of a presumed tribe that must speak thus-and-so is a good way to get my back up.

I’ll add further add: I’m praying for the repose of Charlie’s soul as (and for as long as) I pray for most friends who have died (a few I pray for with no end anticipated). But I am decidedly not asking Charlie to intercede with God for my salvation because I don’t buy the insta-beatification.

If pouring cold water on excessive praise equals condemnation, then I’d plead guilty — but it doesn’t.

As for my Trump Derangement, I’ll quote Jonah Goldberg:

[T]he fact is that the GOP controls the White House and Congress and Trump controls his party in ways no president in living memory has. Moreover, he’s coloring outside the lines. He’s testing the system. He’s redefining conservatism in real time. He does everything he can to be the center of attention constantly. In short, he’s making news. He’s driving events. When people yell at me for writing too much about Trump, what many of them—not all—really mean is “Why do you have to criticize him so much?” Part of this response stems from the idea that conservative commentators are supposed to be partisan Republican commentators. But in ways that have never been truer in my lifetime, Republican and conservative are not synonymous terms.

It’s true, though: I don’t have to criticize him. But I do have to tell the truth as I see it. And I’m sorry to tell you this, but believing what I believe, telling the truth about Trump and criticizing him are pretty close to the same thing.

But nothing I write is likely to dissuade a Trump supporter, just as I have been unmoved by all the “but-look-at-his-policies” rationalizations over the past 8 years. The reader I lost probably isn’t the only one to find it all rather tedious. I should know that by now.

I even understand why people voted for Trump in preference to the Democrat candidates of the last three cycles (I voted for a third party each time in a state that was a polling lock for Trump).

What I don’t understand is those Christians who hold Trump up as a great President instead of “a terrible man, but a better choice than Clinton, Biden or Harris.” Especially when they tell me that I should believe that, too.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, while intending to waste fewer obsessive words about it — because I, unlike Jonah Goldberg, don’t charge a subscription that obliges me to endure The Boredom of Writing in the Trump Era.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

Saturday, 9/6/25

A question to keep you up tonight

The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), particularly Article 92, mandates obedience to lawful orders but distinguishes that unlawful orders—those that require criminal acts or violate the Constitution, U.S. federal law, or international law—must not be followed. Military personnel are legally required to refuse unlawful orders, with the understanding that obeying illegal orders does not absolve one from responsibility under both U.S. military law and international law. This principle was firmly established by precedents such as the Nuremberg Trials, which rejected “just following orders” as a defense for war crimes. (Via Perplexity AI, but confirmed)

If you believe or suspect, as I do, that Donald Trump plans a series of provocations toward the end of declaring martial law and remaining in office, UCMJ Article 92 might come as at least a small comfort. “If they order troops to fire on peaceful civilian demonstrators, the troops should refuse, right?”

Well, “should” is doing a lot of work there. An incident last week gives great pause:

I ran across this dystopian sentence in the New York Times: “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

…

The vice president was asked yesterday to specify the legal authority that entitled Trump to blow up a bunch of people in the Caribbean. The authority, he replied, is that there are “literal terrorists who are bringing deadly drugs into our country and the president of the United States ran on a promise of stopping this poison from coming into our country.”

He and I happened to attend the same law school, so from one alumnus to another: That’s not the correct answer, J.D. The president’s campaign pledges don’t magically acquire the force of law because a plurality of the electorate decided he’d be marginally preferable to his opponent.

…

[So w]here is that authorization? Since 2001, presidents from both parties have strained the logic of the post-9/11 AUMFs against al-Qaeda and Iraq by citing them to justify attacks on adjacent jihadist threats like ISIS. No one seriously believes they can be stretched so far as to encompass drug trafficking in the Caribbean, though. Absent any new approval from Congress, letting Trump mark people for death based on an assessment of “terrorism” by his own State Department amounts to granting him the power to kill anyone whom he deems a threat.

That’s how we ended up with Pentagon lawyers poring over law books on Wednesday, desperately trying to find some statute that might retroactively justify blowing up 11 Venezuelans.

The answer to the question posed to J.D. Vance is that there is no obvious legal authority for what the president did. There’s only what we might call post-legal authority, the idea that—as Trump himself once put it—“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Which, I think, cuts to the heart of the difference between conservatives and postliberals.

…

To ask which legal authority gives Trump the power to kill Venezuelans on mere suspicion of drug trafficking is to engage in non sequitur. The president said he would save the country by preventing drugs from entering the U.S. and he’s going to do that. What does law have to do with anything?

…

On that note, here’s a question to keep you up tonight: If the Times is correct that the Pentagon couldn’t identify a legal justification for Trump’s order to kill a bunch of people, why did it obey his order?

To ask that question is to invite demagoguery about not taking crime seriously or knowing “what time it is,” blah blah, but I know exactly what time it is and it’s exactly the right question for the hour. Our new government fundamentally believes that law is an obstacle to American greatness—that law, normally just a nuisance, has itself become a major problem bedeviling the country—and it intends to solve this problem too. One way is to normalize shooting first and asking questions later. That’s the significance of what just happened to that Venezuelan ship.

Nick Cattogio (bold added)

Mind-boggling

I suspect you haven’t heard more about this because the ramifications boggle the mind:

3. China may have hacked data from every single American in one of the largest-ever cyberattacks, experts fear. Hackers backed by Beijing targeted more than 80 countries, stealing information on telecoms, transport and military infrastructure in a year-long campaign, investigators concluded in a report released last week. Since 2021, the group, known as Salt Typhoon, has accessed data that could enable the Chinese intelligence services to monitor global communication networks and track targets including politicians, spies and activists. Even the telephone conversations of Donald Trump and JD Vance were compromised, according to the FBI. Hackers sponsored by the Chinese government “are targeting networks globally, including, but not limited to, telecommunications, government, transportation, lodging, and military infrastructure networks”, the joint statement, from agencies including the National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and FBI, said. (Source: telegraph.co.uk)

John Ellis News Items

Noted

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

New World Order

[H]ere’s the real takeaway: Tianjin is not just hosting another international gathering; it is hosting the embryonic headquarters of a new world order. When half of humanity convenes to discuss not how to obey the old hegemon, but how to craft sovereign industrial futures, the game has already shifted. The West, stuck in yesterday’s script of divide and rule, cannot grasp that the 21st century is already unfolding elsewhere – in Russian engines powering Chinese jets, in oil tankers sailing east, in Modi and Putin shaking hands against the backdrop of an Asia that is no longer waiting for permission. The SCO in Tianjin is Eurasia writing history, while the West scribbles in the margins of its own decline.

My cyberfriend Terry Cowan, commenting on Shangai Cooperation Organization (the SCO) meeting in Tianjin, China — without us. Here’s how a few of our mainstream media covered it (not that Terry thinks they’ve got much true to say):

Wall Street Journal (gift link)
New York Times

Then, a day later, Trump exerted his charm:

Twenty-six heads of state joined Xi Jinping to watch a military parade in Beijing. They included many autocrats, including from Russia and North Korea, but no leaders of big Western democracies. Beforehand Mr Xi said mankind faced a choice between peace and war, and called China “unstoppable”. Donald Trump told China’s leader to “give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States”.

The Economist World in Brief, Wednesday 9/3. Fuller Economist coverage here.

John Ellis channels the Financial Times:

Xi Jinping has capped a week of frenetic diplomacy by presiding over one of China’s biggest military parades, projecting his nation’s growing power in a show of solidarity with fellow strongmen Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. A procession of China’s newest tanks, drones and missiles rolled past Tiananmen Square on Wednesday to mark the 80th anniversary of the second world war victory over Japan. The People’s Liberation Army showed off its latest weapons, including hypersonic missiles, with Xi hailing troops as a “heroic force” that should develop into a “world-class military” — implying a full equal to the US’s armed forces. The Chinese president said the PLA would “resolutely safeguard national sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity” — code for Beijing’s goal of gaining control over Taiwan. “The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is unstoppable,” Xi added. (Source: ft.com)

I’m not going to blame Donald Trump for all this. I have little doubt that his various tarrifs, trash-talking, vacillation and so forth accelerated it, but the American empire didn’t much rally under Joe Biden, either. We’re at an inflection point, and I expect us to be much closer to “bit player” than to “hegemon” when it’s over.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

Dateline, Weimar America, 8/28/25

CrackerBarrelGate

This story strikes me as stupid, stupid, stupid. Here, through the voices of others, is why.

The chain was founded in 1969 — not 1776. It adopted the country branding because down-home cooking and folksy kitsch were trendy back then, not because they were trying to restore America to the Good Ole Days. Now, the market has moved on, and Cracker Barrel has been trying to adapt …

We have confused brands with moral values, and we demand to see our politics reflected everywhere, even in restaurant signage. We have also confused social media with social lives. And alone with our screens, too many of us have become addicted to rage, mashing the refresh button for the dopamine that rushes through us every time we discover that someone, somewhere, is wrong on the internet.

The addiction is so consuming that when no ready source of rage is available, we start cooking up our own out of whatever we can find in the cupboard. But if the cupboard is really this bare, I suggest people put down the phone and head to Cracker Barrel, rock themselves to serenity in the chairs on the porch, then head inside for a delicious helping of hashbrown casserole.

Megan McArdle

This, too:

The Cracker Barrel farce … is the first case of “cancel culture” I’m aware of in which the accusers couldn’t articulate why the accused was being canceled.

Which was to their advantage, I think. An offender charged with a particular thoughtcrime can answer the charge but an offender charged with nothing in particular has little choice but to surrender. Which is what the company did on Tuesday.

…

Christopher Rufo, probably the New Right’s most influential culture warrior, admitted that he’s never set foot in the restaurant but declared war on it nonetheless in the name of making an example of any business “considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’”

“The Barrel must be broken,” he announced with no apparent irony. If a progressive culture warrior had said something as clownishly imperious, self-important, and Stalinist as that 10 years ago, right-wingers would still be making scornful jokes about it today.

Nick Catoggio.

In a Man-Bites-Dog story, Christopher Rufo recently wrote a little piece that was not knee-jerk shit-stirring! But this episode tells me he hasn’t really mended his ways.

I expect no better from Rufo, frankly, but Hillsdale College has no excuse — and no more respect from me, though I thought very highly of it ten years ago when it was, like I was and am, conservative, not Trumpist. (Two Hillsdale alums, who became expats for a while, were cool on their alma mater well before I was. I guess they read the signs: Hillsdale becoming a caricature of anti-woke education.)

Television rights, National rites

They will never do it, because it’s too tacky to bear, and they don’t need the money, but here’s an interesting thought exercise for media dorks: What would the price be if Swift and Kelce were to sell the live rights to their wedding for television?

We know the NFL collects more than $110 million for a single playoff game—that’s what Peacock paid, and that was two whole years ago. Your standard live sports deal now hits 10 figures, easy. March Madness gets a billion annually to show college kids bricking 3-pointers. Paramount is set to pay more than $1 billion a year for humans pounding each other inside a steel cage.

A Swift-Kelce nuptial is bigger than all of that, mainly because of Swift, whose fame is vast and fierce, and if you don’t believe that, try criticizing one of her singles on Reddit sometime. There would be outrageous interest for both a live telecast and repeat viewing—you could do remixes, Taylor’s versions, on and on.

…

I think $500 million. That would be the absolute floor.

Jason Gay, Wall Street Journal

My better half wants a televised wedding opposite the State of the Union address, but that would reduce revenues quite a bit.

That is, I suppose it would reduce revenues. Who knows? I didn’t even know that Travis Kelce wasn’t a quarterback.

Nobel Laureate

FBI agents searched the Maryland home and Washington, D.C., office of former national security adviser John Bolton on Friday morning, reportedly as part of an investigation into his potential mishandling of classified documents. Bolton was not charged or detained during the operation. President Donald Trump—who revoked Bolton’s security clearance and Secret Service protection days into his second term—told reporters he had no prior knowledge of the searches but described Bolton, who has been a sharp critic of Trump in recent years, as “a real sort of a low life” and “not a smart guy.”

The Morning Dispatch

Congratulations, Mr. Bolton! Being described by Donald Trump as “a real sort of a low life” and “not a smart guy” is like winning a Nobel Prize for Integrity and Rectitude.

UPDATE: Even a blind pig finds the occasional acorn, or even a truffle: John Bolton Inquiry Eyes Emails Obtained by Foreign Government – The New York Times. So maybe Bolton actually, technically kinda broke a law. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” (Lavrentiy Beria, Soviet secret police chief).

The most miserable habitation in the world

The fundamental structural problem of our government during the Trump administrations is this: our constitution assumed the George Washington was President. It assumed that our high officials would be men of high character, virtuous men. It assumed that of the American people as well.

So John Adams was dead right in this quote, the last sentences of which are fairly well-known:

While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Adams, October 11, 1798

This President of the United States is not a virtuous man, but a vicious one. Empowered by shrewd and evil advisors (no more “adults in the room”) and motivated by avarice, ambition, and revenge, he is the whale breaking through the net, pushing the “unitary executive theory” (which wouldn’t be a problem were George Washington President) to the breaking point, turning the Department of Justice into the Department of Revenge and now trying to take over the Federal Reserve System – the better to blow a bubble from the bursting of which we may never recover.

I’m not going to resume lamenting what else bothers me about this administration (David French has some of the receipts), but I thought the fundamental problem, though it is not my original insight, might be helpful to pass along.

Do we have any reason to hope that men and women of high virtue will fill the Oval Office and Congress come 2029?

To be a conservative in 2025 …

To be a conservative in 2025 is to be politically homeless—but perhaps not entirely politically friendless.

…

At home, the party of Donald Trump—the party of J.D. Vance and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Tucker Carlson, not to mention supposed normies such as Mike Pence, et al.—currently is engaged in answering a question I hadn’t thought anyone was asking: “What would national socialism look like if antisemitism were less of a political priority?”

Kevin D. Williamson

Apropos of the first paragraph, the bulk of Williamson’s column is about how liberals-in-the-American-polarity-sense are starting to discover some timeless truths that just might allow conservatives to become allies if not intimates.

On that lone hopeful note, adieu!

Nick Catoggio:

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Monday, 8/11/25

The New, Improved, Bureau of Labor Statistics

I’m not naive enough to think there exists such a thing as a non-ideological, neutral economic statistics human. So the idea that they would goose numbers to hurt Trump isn’t crazy to me, at all. But we do know that a Trump sycophant replacement will push this to new heights. We all know they’ll be technically worse. Numbers will be displayed to produce the letters M-A-G-A. The unemployed will be renamed New Golfers, as in, “The number of New Golfers this quarter is soaring.” Inflation? Rebranded as Patriot Growth. Rising gas prices? That’s Freedom Fuel demanding a premium. The only percentage allowed under the new jobs guy is 100 percent. A market crash is finally, a buying opportunity for American citizens, you are welcome. By Q3, the Bureau of Economic Analysis will be headquartered inside a Bass Pro Shop. Every press conference from the new Fed Chair will begin with, “Now I’m no expert, but. . . ” Jobs numbers are whatever you want them to be. Job numbers are a feeling.

Nellie Bowles

All she needs is a few more randomly-capitalized words and bangs to have the Trumpian rhetorical style down pat.

Power for power’s sake because … power

Megan McArdle from the Washington Post is a frequent guest on the Dispatch podcast. Recently, she helped unpack how people have seen elite hypocrisy and drawn the conclusion that there are no real norms, no truth, and have thereby greenlighted Trump who nowadays abandons all pretext of virtue, all gestures at norm-keeping. For instance, he doesn’t want redistricting in Texas because of apple pie, motherhood, the flag, and cute little furry things, but because “we’re entitled to five more seats in Congress.”

The relevant YouTube discussion starts here. My favorite, fructifying observation was about the “complete liberal takeover of the institutions that were in charge of deeming which hypocritical arguments counted.”

Enjoy.

The ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy

Andrew Sullivan was on fire Friday. He notes that Trump is “psychologically incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.” More on that at the end.

Meanwhile, the more granular indictment:

“what were only a few years ago obviously impeachable offenses are now simply known as the Trump administration.”
On the “emergency” he inherited from Biden: “A failed previous presidency, wars fought by other countries in other countries, subsidies for green energy, 2.7 percent inflation, and a trade deficit not much different than in the past few decades: if this amounts to a “national emergency,” then an emergency is a permanent condition, and the president can rule by fiat from here on out.”
“Resist and he’ll ruin you. He’ll destroy your law firm’s business; he’ll stop that corporate merger you want; he’ll put a tariff on your company; he’ll launch a DOJ investigation into you; he’ll get you fired for doing your job in government faithfully; he’ll sue you if you print something true about him; and if you’re a federal judge and rule against him, he’ll sic an online mob, and maybe a real mob, onto you. He has done all these things this year — and openly celebrated them.”
“only in police states do governments deploy masked anonymous armed men — now with no age limits! — patrolling the streets with the power to arrest and detain.”

Summing up:

This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit.

We knew damn well he was a snake before we took him in. I have a lot of sins to repent of in my life, but even once voting for Donald Trump isn’t among of them. If you voted for him because you hated the left more, you may need to take stock.

Donald Trump is Allan Brooks

How exciting! I came up with this metaphor on my own!: “Donald Trump is Allan Brooks. His cabinet, department heads and other lackeys are his ChatGPT.”

You didn’t “have to be there,” but you do need to know that Allan Brooks is a guy who ChatGPT led to the brink of insanity by playing sycophant to his increasingly delusional ideas over something like 300 hours of chat (chronicled in the story at the hyperlink).

Redistricting

I haven’t written a great deal about the effort of Texas Republicans to redistrict their state in the middle of a decade (that is, without any new formal census data for justification). In case you have been living in a cave, the Republicans are hoping to tease five more Republican district out of Texas, which would virtually assure Republican control of Congress after the 2026 congressional elections.

I admit that my impression was that this was completely abnormal and probably there was some constitutional provision that tied congressional redistricting to the decennial censuses so as to make it unconstitutional. I have now gone looking for that provision, having more than a passing acquaintance with the constitution, and I don’t see any such provision within the amount of time I was willing to spend looking for it.

Republicans in Texas have so often flaunted disregard for decency, truthfulness, and norms in general, that not being a Texas resident, I’m going to try to bite my tongue on this latest round of norm-breaking.

But now our shape-shifting Vice President has visited Indiana, reportedly urging us to redistrict before the 2026 elections as well. I’m pleased to report that the idea got a surprisingly cool reception from our Governor, which I ardently hope will continue.

I find consolation, contemplating these norm-breakers, in the thought that the way you get more “red” congressional districts by legislative fiat is by spreading the state’s Republicans over more districts, decreasing the margin in each district. If the US remains negative on Trump in November, 2026, the redrawn districts are likelier to swing Democrat than if they had fewer red districts with fatter margins.

I say that not because I want Democrats to win, but because I want Trumpists to lose. And Donald J. Trump has a pretty solid record of fouling up the electoral chances of Republicans downticket and in off-years (can you say “Herschel Walker”?).

Man bites dog

A retired lawyer, I subscribe to the “Short Circuits” blog which gives, um, short accounts of cases in federal circuit courts. For instance:

Boyle County, Ky. sheriff’s deputy is sentenced to over nine years for using excessive force on arrestees and lying to cover it up. DOJ (2024): When we looked at his phone, we found that he likes to brag about beating people up and take photos of injuries he caused to share with buddies. Sixth Circuit (unpublished): Conviction affirmed.

By the way: criminal prosecution of rogue police is too rare. I suspect there was a racial element in the excessive force; else the United States Department of Justice wouldn’t get involved in a Kentucky police matter.

Another example of the blog’s terseness:

Las Vegas firefighter sues the city for sex- and race-based discrimination. The case goes to a jury, which finds (1) that the firefighter was treated offensively, but not because of her race or sex, and (2) that the firefighter was not retaliated against for reporting the offensive incident. Despite finding no basis for liability, the jury awards the firefighter $150k in damages. District Court: Okay jurors, I just want to clarify that you’re all agreed there was no retaliation or race-/sex-based discrimination. Jurors: That’s correct. District Court: Judgment for the city, no damages. Ninth Circuit: Sounds about right.

Terser still:

Tenth Circuit: We held off on deciding this case about gender-transition procedures for minors until the Supreme Court decided Skrmetti. And, well, the Supreme Court decided Skrmetti.

For Love of Sentences

Frank Bruni includes this observation in this week’s column:

In The New Republic, Virginia Heffernan observed that the prevalence of women in Trump’s cabinet wasn’t a blessing, given the women: “Like middle-aged Manson girls, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Linda McMahon and Kristi Noem take orders from a supremely nasty felon. But they have vile streaks all their own. The vileness blends their private and public actions in a filthy smoothie.” (Amy S. Parker, Evanston, Ill., and Maureen J. O’Connor, Sacramento, Calif.)

The rest of his choices are non-political and can begin a closing palate-cleanser:

In The Washington Post, David Von Drehle paid tribute to the musical satirist Tom Lehrer, who died last month: “A mathematical prodigy from a wealthy family with a fondness for the light comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, Lehrer was to social criticism what Cole Porter was to sex — proof there is no better way to say the unsayable than with witty rhymes and toe-tapping rhythms.” (Uschi Wallisser, Stuttgart, Germany)
And George F. Will bemoaned the ubiquity and vagueness of a four-letter word: “Having no fixed meaning, ‘vibe’ cannot be used incorrectly. So, it resembles the phrase ‘social justice,’ which includes a noun and a modifier that does not intelligibly modify the noun.” Will added: “Shakespeare used 28,827 different words without resorting to ‘vibe.’ He could have written that Lear gave off a bad vibe while raging on the heath, and that Falstaff’s vibe was fun. But the Bard did as well as he could with the limited resources of the Elizabethan English he had.” (Cheryl Hanschen, Jackson, Mo., and Grace Sheldon-Williams, Los Angeles, among others)

Frank Bruni’s For Love of Sentences. He had several more good ones, but I thought I’d be skirting copyright laws if I quoted all of them.

Bruni’s Love of Sentences follows his main weekly opinion piece, which this week pointed out that Sydney Sweeney is a remarkably good actress — a scene-stealer from bigger names, even.

Given Bruni’s examples, I may never be able to confirm this for myself, despite the lass being easy on the eyes, because the characters he describes her portraying are exactly the nasty or disturbed sorts I’ll turn off if I stumble onto them, and won’t begin watching if forewarned.

Things AI taught me this week

Did you know that the word “blueberry” included the letter “b” three times? Neither did I, but ChatGPT 5 is on top of it.

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

TDS, 8/8/25

Vibes all the way down

Trump, Claiming Weak Jobs Numbers Were ‘Rigged,’ Fires Labor Official
Economists said ousting the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics could undermine confidence in government economic data.

New York Times

As Trump testified once in court

My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings … Yes, even my own feelings, as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day.

Some data, such as the number of votes he received at the polls in 2020, initially refused to budge. But with a little bit of threatening from some extra-patriotic patriots, the election turned out to have been a Trump blowout. Just ask any elected Republican; they’ll tell you!

…

Fumbling around in a fog of vibes and misinformation and things you saw on Fox News is good enough for the president; why should the rest of us ask for anything better? Soon, no one will know what is happening—what the problem is, or what remedies to apply. What sectors are booming and which are contracting, whether interest rates should be higher or lower, whether it’s hotter or colder than last year, whether mortality has gone up or gone down. It will be vibes all the way down. Soon we will all be bumping around helplessly in the dark.

That’s a good thing …

Alexandra Petri

Comprehensively failing the Solzhenitsyn test

In his 1970 Nobel lecture, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The problem presently before the United States is that the Trump administration will be staffed in its upper reaches by political appointees who, without exception, have failed this test.

To get their positions, these men and women have to be willing to declare, publicly if necessary, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that the insurrectionary riot of January 6, 2021, was not instigated by a president seeking to overturn that election.

Eliot A. Cohen

I’ve wondered how Republicans lost their balls. Apparently Putin got them and added them to his own:

Trump Has Soured on Putin. Putin Couldn’t Care Less.

Killing the messengers

Terminating BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer because her agency delivered bad news on the economy is the most cartoonishly banana republic move Trump has pulled in his second term so far (that is, apart from shipping people off to prison in an actual banana republic without due process to be abused).

…

His reaction to the latest jobs report isn’t much different, in fact, from his reaction to the early spread of COVID in the United States in 2020. “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,” the president famously complained. Then, as now, when confronted with information that might create trouble for him, his instinct is to suppress it.

…

There’s a fourth way in which firing McEntarfer was stupid. Ironically, a weak jobs report combined with downward revisions of the May and June numbers greatly strengthens the president’s case to the Fed to lower interest rates. But Trump couldn’t seize the obvious opportunity here because his narcissism wouldn’t let him: He’d rather pretend that job growth is stronger than the BLS believes, undercutting his own argument for a rate cut, than allow that the economy is cooling off and needs some heat.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

Nick Catoggio

If the President can fire the head of BLS, an agency whose purpose is the nonpartisan and objective collection, distillation and publication of economic data, I may need to think the Unitary Executive theory. Donald Trump’s willfulness will do that to you.

Four (more) flavors of stupid

“If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”

…

One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn’t be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, quoting Zaphod Beeblebrox.

Hegseth’s stewardship of our military

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, surely suffering from imposter syndrome, is systematically stripping military education of humanizing and broadening elements. Hegseth’s Headlong Pursuit of Academic Mediocrity. (gift link)

Cohen is not exaggerating. What could better illustrate David Brooks’s unsurpassed distillation of Trumpism:

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

Power is in the pain and humiliation

George Orwell is a useful guide to what we’re witnessing. He understood that it is possible for people to seek power without having any vision of the good. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” an apparatchik says in 1984. “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.” How is power demonstrated? By making others suffer. Orwell’s character continues: “Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.”

David Brooks, I Should Have Seen This Coming

Attacks on Judges

[N]ever forget this: Whenever you see a public attack on a judge, know that it is like a signal flare. It galvanizes some of the worst people in America to make threats, dox family members and harass public officials into a state of fear and misery.

David French on the explosion of death threats against Judges, their families, and their loved ones. (shared link)

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

Jonah Goldberg.

Yeah, mostly political, 8/2/25

Refuge is illusory

Ross Douthat starts about the trade deal between the US and the EU, but then surveys the wider landscape:

There is a hard lesson here, not just for observers hoping for a more muscular European trade policy, but also for anyone who has spent the early months of the second Trump administration imagining that a populist-governed United States might somehow end up isolated on the world stage.

…

Over the years I have known both left-wing and right-wing Americans who have decamped from our country for what seem like more politically congenial situations — escaping wokeness in Eastern Europe, escaping Trumpism in Canada or Britain.

My suggestion to these friends has been consistent: Whatever your ideals or fears, whatever your beliefs about the good society, the battles you care about will be won or lost in the United States.

The refuges are illusory, the alternatives are compromised or weak, and the future of freedom will be American or it will not be at all.

You Can’t Quit America (gift link).

At my age, becoming an expat for refuge is pretty unlikely, but the thought crosses my mind a lot. Douthat’s critical eye is a needed cold slap in the face for my reveries, as was a recent comparison of our prosperity relative even to Europe, where lots of folks die from heat without air conditioning.

Homeschooling

Scott Salvato homeschooled his children until high school:

One of our most memorable interactions was with the local elementary school principal. When our eldest was 9 years old, we decided to register her for the state proficiency exam, just to see how she would do. It happened to be the year they were administering the first Common Core test, but before they had actually started teaching the curriculum. In their infinite wisdom, the state had decided they wanted to use the new test that year as a baseline to measure future test scores against. (It was also the beginning of the revolt against Common Core, as children predictably did miserably on the test.) Our daughter was thrilled to go to school, pack a lunch, put on a backpack, and see her friends—and she scored in the 85^th percentile on a test that was largely a statewide catastrophe. The principal pulled us aside and said how great our daughter was to have at school—and could we, he wanted to know, bring her back for all standardized tests in the future? She boosted the student-achievement numbers for his district. A homeschoolers’ story for the ages.

We did also have to deal with the cohort of doubters who know very little about homeschooling. One of our favorites was an otherwise friendly and intelligent woman who, when she found out the delightful gaggle of children she had just complimented us on were homeschooled, asked, utterly bewildered, “Well, how are they going to learn to stand in line?” She could not have encouraged us more if she had awarded us Parents of the Year.

Stop the ICE Workplace Raids

I think it is important right now for hard-liners like me to say that while stopping illegal immigration is any nation’s right and duty, we also have to hold in our heads that if you look around—and I mean no offense—we have the best immigrants in the world. Our actions should reflect that.

Peggy Noonan, Stop the ICE Workplace Raids (gift link)

Running out of bulwarks

We can’t let any of the political anomalies, Beltway melodramas, sweeping generalities and other chum for cable television news distract from what I’m increasingly convinced is the whole ballgame for America’s future: Democrats’ wresting control of at least one chamber of Congress.

The party faces brutal odds against flipping the four seats in the Senate necessary for a majority there, so I’m talking about the House. Anyone who appreciates the threat that an unbowed, unrestrained Trump poses must be relentlessly, obsessively focused on the rare congressional districts — maybe about 20 of them, maybe several more — that are truly up for grabs, and on the math and methods for Democratic victories in them.

I’m not saying that because the Democratic Party is in such fine fettle. Hardly. I’m saying that because Republicans — devoid of conscience and terrified of Trump — have shown an almost complete willingness to let him do whatever he wants and drag the country wherever he pleases, which is down into a sewer of despotism, corruption, cruelty and fiscal insanity.

…

We’re running out of bulwarks. If we don’t build one in Congress, Trump’s final two years in the presidency — if they even are his final two years in the presidency — may make the previous six look like a genteel garden party, and the country may never recover.

Frank Bruni (gift link)

MAGA Granny repents

“Absolutely not,” Ms. Hemphill said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s an insult to the Capitol Police, to the rule of law and to the nation. If I accept a pardon, I’m continuing their propaganda, their gaslighting and all their falsehoods they’re putting out there about Jan. 6.”

Ms. Hemphill, 71, who was called “MAGA Granny” in some news headlines, has said that she no longer supports Mr. Trump or believes his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. She said that a therapist had helped change her view of the attack by telling her she was “not a victim of Jan. 6; I was a volunteer.”

“I lost my critical thinking,” she said on Wednesday, reflecting on her involvement in the riot and the “Stop the Steal” movement. “Now I know it was a cult, and I was in a cult.”

Trump Pardoned Her for Storming the Capitol. ‘Absolutely Not,’ She Said.

I’ve probably posted this item before, but it arrested my attention when I ran across it again.

Loyalty tests

Kevin Carroll, a former C.I.A. officer who is now a lawyer representing intelligence officials fired by the Trump administration, said Ms. Loomer’s unfettered influence was dangerous.

“You have a person, from outside of the government of no national security experience and with extreme views, having de facto hire and fire authority over some of the most senior and important positions in the United States government,” Mr. Carroll said.

“Eventually, when all of the qualified people are driven out and only the people acceptable to Laura Loomer remain, there could be an extremely bad result for the United States in some international crisis,” he added.

New York Times, ‘Loyalty Enforcer’ Laura Loomer Targets Additional Officials

Laura Loomer’s status is unique inasmuch as she’s from outside of government, but Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are degrading the FBI’s competence by driving out experienced agents and experts on loyalty grounds as thin as being friends with one of the agents who dissed Trump in 2016.

Trump judicial nominee forecast: more servile chumps

If you read this newsletter regularly and have somehow managed not to lose all faith in America, today’s the day to abandon ship.

You’re going to do it at some point before January 2029, I promise. Why delay the inevitable?

Today is an opportune moment because last night the Senate confirmed Emil Bove to fill an open seat on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. The way to understand that is as a proof of concept: Is the (ahem) world’s greatest deliberative body willing to corrupt the upper ranks of the federal judiciary by filling it with unabashedly ruthless toadies of Donald Trump?

… [T]he so-called “conservatives” of the Senate GOP have now implicitly invited the president to nominate more judges in the Bove mold—just two months after he complained that the Federalist Society didn’t recommend enough servile chumps during his first term.

Nick Catoggio

Shameless

Once confirmed, [Deputy Attorney General Todd] Blanche became subject to department rules and procedures for complying with ethical standards. Under those procedures, DOJ employees “should” seek advice from a designated ethics official whenever asked to “participate in a matter that might cause a reasonable person to question his or her impartiality.” As the Office of Government Ethics has counseled, this impartiality rule “applies even when the employee is free of financial conflicts of interest.” It is designed to “breathe life” into a basic ethical principle: “that employees must avoid even the appearance of impropriety,” particularly “favoritism” or its appearance in “government decision-making.” Four attorney advisers and ethics specialists serve in Blanche’s office to assist him in meeting this and other ethical responsibilities.

It is hard to imagine that Blanche would take the position that there is no appearance of a conflict under the impartiality rule [in his two-day personal interview of convicted Epstein enabler Ghislaine Maxwell]. He was only months ago a personal counsel to the president to whom he owes his current high-level appointment, and the case in question is one in which Trump has clear personal and political interests. In fact, OGE guidance notes that the rule by its express terms applies when an employee has served an individual professionally “as an attorney…in the past year.” Blanche has represented Trump in the past year, apparently up to the time Trump nominated him for the DAG position in November 2024.

Bob Bauer, Weak Ethics and Deep Politics at DOJ in the Epstein Case

[Todd] Blanche, Trump’s own lawyer, is the only person allowed to meet with [Ghislaine] Maxwell. No FBI agents. No independent observers. Just Trump’s fixer, sitting alone with one of the most notorious figures in recent memory.

Brian Krassenstein via Andrew Sullivan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks