Sophie’s Choice

Sanity returns from exile

[Indiana Fever’s Sophie] Cunningham doesn’t hate trans people, she said, but “I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

Kat Rosenfield.

There was a half-hearted effort to cancel Cunningham over this. It seems to have flopped, though perhaps it still has a spasm or two left. But not only did she get away with this commonsensical opinion, she got away with the truth of “biological men” instead of the shibboleth “trans women.”

And when two girls showed up at the Fever-Storm game in Seattle Tuesday, sporting “Thank you Sophie” signs, and the Storm’ co-owner called them “f*****g insane,” the co-owner got fined and banned from the next five Storm games!

I wouldn’t mention all this but for one thing that I can only reluctantly acknowledge: a lot of stupid taboos have fallen, a lot of euphemisms are barely murmured any more, since Donald Trump took occupancy in the White House. I guess there’s too little energy left for fussing about shibboleths when there’s a genuine menace reigning in the Oval Office.

I’m nowhere near prepared to excuse Trump for his transgressions because of that, but I’m prepared to recognize a correlation that feels even to hostile, never-Trump me, like causation.

Read the whole Rosenfield piece if you want to see how things have turned right-side-up again.

[UPDATE: This was first published calling the Seattle team the “Aces.” I think that’s the Las Vegas franchise. I’m enjoying the WNBA, but I don’t have all the franchise names down pat.]

Oh, damn! We were hoping the maniac was a white Christian!

An Islamist terrorist drives a van into a Berlin Pride parade, killing one person and injuring dozens more. And how is it reported? Much of the media went with the usual formulation: that the attacker might as well have been a self-automated vehicle. The white van “didn’t exactly hit the parade,” one typical report went, but as it drove through the parade it “attacked the people who were going away from the parade.”

As I have had cause to say too many times, this is something which, from Stockholm to Nice, is best understood as the “naughty van” phenomenon. If a van or car is driven into a crowd by an Islamist, you can swiftly tell who the culprit is because the vehicle will be talked about as though it suddenly took on a life of its own and began a rampage.

…

The organizers of the Pride parade gave a press conference in which they admitted that they had hoped the perpetrator had been a white Christian man ….

Douglas Murray.

I read the other day that something like 58% of Muslims in America disapprove of Islamoterrorism. That was supposed to reassure me, but I wondered why it wasn’t 98%. And it didn’t help that the 58% is inert because they are threatened by the terrorists.

I just don’t want to hang around people like that

In February, a Pew Research Center poll found that white evangelical Protestants were the only large religious group in America in which a clear majority still supported all or most of Trump’s plans and policies.

And this brings me to perhaps the least shocking statistic in America. The Billy Graham Center Research Institute at Wheaton College in Illinois recently released polling data showing that almost half — 48 percent — of Gen Z adults surveyed said that Christians’ support for Trump made them less likely to want to attend church, at least to some degree.

David French

Stupid laws make stupid problems

Local news, mid-north Indiana: Recount Commission rejects Copenhaver’s demand to subpoena voters

I am pleased. District 23 is, I believe, pretty solidly “red.” If I were a Democrat (and lived in that District), I likely would have reasoned:

No way is a Democrat getting elected in my district. The best I can do is pull a Republican primary ballot and vote for the less objectionable Republican, the one not backed by Trump because he stood up to Trump.

I’m given to understand that such a vote is against Indiana law. A stupid law: “Don’t register by party but don’t you dare pull the ballot of the party we don’t think you really in your heart-of-hearts belong to.”

The Indiana GOP, however, appears prepared to require registration by party instead of sensibly abolishing the ban on crossover voting.

What Team Copenaver should have done was deploy poll-watchers to challenge those wicked, wicked Democrats who want to be represented by the less bad Republican if they can’t have a Democrat. Then the voters could have pulled a Democrat primary ballot. But no, Team Copenhaver assumed that Trump would carry their gal over the finish line first, and decided only after a narrow loss that the VAR refs shouldn’t count the only vote those wicked Democrat cross-overs cast, disenfranchising them utterly.

The campaign was dirty on both sides, and Deery’s ads were dirtier than Copenhaver’s by my lights.

I hate politics.

Spear Phishing

An AI model doesn’t need to breach a hardened network to do catastrophic damage. It only needs to talk an employee into opening the door. And the victims won’t be only governments and businesses. They will be ordinary people — the elderly, yes, but also anyone busy enough to answer an email or a message on Slack or WhatsApp on autopilot. Many have learned to spot the tells of a mass-produced scam. Few are ready to spot an attack written for an audience of one.

Jeremy Philip Galen, Richard Whaling, AI is gaining ability to personalize cyberattacks, enabling phishing at scale – Washington Post

Data Center Defamation

Some billionaire named Kevin O’Leary (I guess if you watched Shark Tank you may know of him) announced his plan to build a 40,000 acre data center in a remote part of Utah. Opposition predictably arose:

With the controversy heating up, O’Leary and Palandjian had a choice. They could have offered to meet with the project’s opponents and laid out for them the various ways their data center would mitigate their fears. They could have stated publicly something Palandjian told me when I spoke to him—that the permitting process was just in its beginning stages. “Our permit applications will all be a matter of public record, and in some instances, we’ll have hearings that will be open to the public, where the public will have a voice. We welcome a healthy dialogue and a healthy debate,” he added.

But they didn’t do that. Instead, O’Leary went on Fox News and Tucker Carlson’s podcast and accused Kanter and Finlayson, both of whom have deep roots in Utah, of working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. O’Leary is convinced—and he’s hardly alone—that China is funding data center opponents, hoping to slow down the U.S. while it tries to catch up in the race for AI supremacy. There was no publicly available evidence, however, that Kanter and Finlayson were doing China’s bidding. That didn’t stop O’Leary. During one of his appearances on Fox, he said, “They should rename this thing ‘Alliance for a Better China in Utah’ after you look at how much money is coming out of China pouring into this organization.” It wasn’t until Kanter and Finlayson threatened to sue for defamation (which they ultimately did) that O’Leary and Fox acknowledged that they had no proof for this allegation, and issued an apology.

…

Is it any wonder that people are up in arms about all the data centers that are proliferating around the country? Big Tech has never been known for its transparency and accountability, and that is especially true as they rush to build multibillion-dollar data centers to satisfy the voracious needs of AI. Data center developers have bought up land in secret, forced local politicians to sign nondisclosure agreements, and then steamrolled their way to permits and zoning changes ….

Joe Nocera in the Free Press.

(The idea of public officials entering into nondisclosure agreements with billionaire developers gives me a major case of the willies, by the way. Leave it to a retired lawyer to pick that out for highlighting.)

Memento Vivere

The most obvious threat of further confusion about what it means to be alive is posed by artificial intelligence. We often describe AI tools as “thinking.” Some of the advocates and enthusiasts of AI suggest that it is conscious. And we know that people can easily become convinced that it is “alive” in some meaningful way. The famously skeptical atheist Richard Dawkins believes that AI is conscious, capable of complex thought, and alive enough to experience death. What it means to be alive is clearly less obvious to people than it used to be.

…

If a machine is better at “caring” than we are, we are bad at caring. If robots can cure our loneliness, we have more problems than loneliness. If we think AI will improve aspects of our humanity, we do not understand humanity very well. In this context, memento mori is not useless, but it would be more useful to bring memento vivere into the conversation.

…

It’s very possible that if we cannot distinguish between what is alive and what is not, or understand why someone would want to use the good silver, we are not doing much better than unlimited pancakes.

Elizabeth Stice, Memento Vivere – Front Porch Republic

Having been drawn in by the title and that gorgeous illustration at the top, I almost didn’t read this. Shift your mental gears, or suspend incredulity, and savor it.

Shorts

[D]octrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief …. (Marilynne Robinson in one of the Gilead novels)
[John Williamson] Nevin … depicted Winebrenner as a religious entrepreneur, daring to invent a new and competing church: “It is felt to be as easy to start a new Church, as it is to get up a new moral or political association under any other (Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity)
All power tends to coopt and absolute power coopts absolutely. (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue)
River Page, Welcome to Secular Sharia (The Free Press)
Tact is to lie about others as you would have them lie about you. (Oliver Herford)
[T]he last thing Americans need right now is another reason not to make out. (Faith Hill, The Horrible Rise of the Makeout Police. For the record, I don’t think she made her case.)
I’m telling you, most Protestants or Catholics today, if they were to time-travel back to [western Europe, 1450-1650], would be tempted to run into the arms of Voltaire. (Rod Dreher, singing the praises of Carlos Eire, Reformations)
“We spent $3,000 or $4,000 an acre on the Old Vineyard,” Mr. Hirsch recalled in 2005. “That wouldn’t get you through the paperwork today.” (Quoting David Hirsch, vineyard pioneer of California’s Sonoma coast, who died Tuesday at 81)
He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring. (Katie Kingsbury, NYT opinion editor, of Ross Douthat, who’s leaving the Times after 17 years to join CBS 60 Minutes)
The problem today is we value what’s countable rather than what’s important. (David Brooks)
Americans of all political stripes are sick and tired of pretending they can’t see the emperor’s whole entire ass. (Kat Rosenfield)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

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

July 10, 2026

Trump

Election tampering

It seems to me that the most sinister and calculated thing Trump is doing this time around is trying to override the constitutional control of elections by the states. I have little doubt that he’s trying to wring out more wins for MAGA candidates, starting this Fall and continuing to 2028.

But I hadn’t seen much evidence that there were court challenges or any other opposition to such dubious efforts.

Now I’ve see that there is opposition and it’s largely successful.

Because he’s a stupid and impetuous man 99% of the time, Trump is getting some pushback from Republicans, especially in the Senate, at least partly on grounds that Trump’s shenanigans might actually suppress Republican voters as much or more than Democrats. The SAVE Act just may not make it across the finish line (the “prediction markets” say it won’t) despite Trump flogging Congress to get it there.
I don’t know where the FBI got authority to impound anyone’s voting records, but the federal courts are (now?) virtually unanimous in knocking down such efforts — including federal courts presided over by Trump appointees.

I’m troubled by legal whores in the administration (e.g., John Eastman), but the larger story has been one of the legal profession’s steadfastness:

Heavy downpours, not just scattered showers, of principled resignations from the Department of Justice and U.S. Attorneys’ offices, whenever Trump demanded something unethical. Trump has has to staff up with unprincipled Chuds who make fools of themselves — and of him — in court.
Judges insisting on being impartial and following the law despite appointment by Trump.

It makes me proud of my former profession and delighted that we have a judiciary, unlike Congress, that’s still functioning.

“Sports Diplomacy”

The American government is giving its imprimatur — perhaps I should say lending its muscle — to the international expansion of human cockfighting. An earlier generation had the Marshall Plan. Ours has mixed martial arts.

The administration is calling the arrangement “sports diplomacy,” and there are images of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Dana White, U.F.C.’s chief executive officer, holding up a memorandum of understanding at the State Department on June 11. They’re smiling, as if they accomplished something important. As if there were a global barbarism deficit and the United States is nobly stepping up to fill the void. As if an important emblem of human civilization and expression of human culture will finally get the recognition it deserves. As if the torch of liberty can now shine brighter than ever, because it will be carried by warriors of such vision and valor that one of them, upon winning his South Lawn brawl, used his moment at the mic to crow a cuckoo credo: “Michelle Obama is a man!”

…

I cringe at our government’s advancement of such savagery while we’re retreating from the kinds of engagements that lessen hardship and relieve misery.

Frank Bruni. I cringe, too.

The Crypto President

Our Crypto President is fighting for the right of Americans to piss their retirement accounts away on stuff like, well, crypto:

Most Americans don’t look to their 401(k) plans for excitement or experimentation, instead relying on the promise that steady saving and sober planning will guarantee security in their golden years. The Trump administration wants to transform the well-worn patterns of retirement investing. To do so, it is moving to weaken the main protection workers have over their retirement money. The man in charge of the regulatory rollback is an industry insider whose former clients are among the large companies likely to benefit from his plan. Since taking office last year, President Donald Trump has loudly called for plans to include less-regulated — and often risky — investments like private equity and cryptocurrency. To achieve that goal, the administration is softening one of the strongest legal protections American workers have: the right to hold an employer accountable when retirement savings are mishandled. The change is designed to give employers cover if their workers’ 401(k)s are deflated by expensive, opaque or unproven investments. Backing this push are Wall Street firms, which want a bigger piece of the $10 trillion in America’s 401(k) plans, and America’s largest employers, who want to avoid class-action lawsuits from their employees. They have a powerful ally in Trump’s pick to lead the effort at the Department of Labor: Daniel Aronowitz, who previously ran a firm that helped large companies protect themselves against worker lawsuits. Now Aronowitz is the one driving changes to the rules those same companies play by. (Source: propublica.org)

John Ellis News Items. I’m glad to see this mentioned, but I wish that it was more prominent than ProPublica and the world’s greatest newsletter. This is the risk I immediately saw when Trump touted allowing private equity and cryptocurrency in retirement plans, though it gets a little further into the weeds than I did since I’m no expert on retirement plan law.

Mustafa Mond knew the score

I’m a little bit surprised that I haven’t heard people talking about how artificial intelligence will give us a four day work week. That’s the kind of prattle that usually accompanies labor-saving innovations.

But it’s just as well that people haven’t been saying that, because it isn’t going to happen this time just like it hasn’t happened the other times. Not in the USA anyway. Maybe in Europe, where they tend to see living as worthier than ever-rising “standard of living.”

The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes. Thousands of them.” Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. “And why don’t we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

Cicero Society

The occasion was the monthly meeting of the Cicero Society, a parliamentary debating club committed, according to its terse website, to “developing excellence, preserving the Western intellectual tradition, and forming young leaders” — which in Washington is usually code for conservative job placement.

…

The evening’s debate was “Is Christianity Conservative?” I assumed the answer would be “Of course it is.” Conservatism is the political instinct that guards “permanent things” against the progressive urge to remake the world from scratch, to paraphrase one debater. But after several hours, the opposition carried the night with a different argument: Until Christian beliefs are fully enshrined in public policy, Christians will need to be radicals. One of the speakers on the winning side put the matter pithily: “Christian ends sometimes require progressive means.” If the existing order is decadent, corrupt, or hostile to Christian life, then conserving it is no virtue.

…

According to the Catholic writer and Vance-whisperer Sohrab Ahmari, Evangelical Protestantism may be more powerful as a mass political force, but Catholicism has “a deep theory of the world.”

Nate Weisberg, The Young Catholic Elite Poised to Take Over MAGA

I have never heard of the Cicero Society before. Although I care for the irreligious right even less, I’ll pass on Catholic Integralism’s right as well. I’m not yet to the point of choosing lesser evils with enthusiasm.

Genealogy by Bill of Sale

Carolyn Haliburton Carter, a descendant of slaves and a professional genealogist, tells of meeting with descendants of the people who had owned her ancestors, still living on the plantation where her family was enslaved:

What was clear is that absence exists on both sides of enslavement. My family inherited silence where records should have been. Their family inherited stories shaped by omission. Neither lineage was whole.

Scripture tells us that truth sets people free – but it does not promise comfort in the telling. Witness, too, is costly. But it remains the only ground on which reconciliation can stand.

I wanted them to know that I had no animosity towards them. I was grateful for the opportunity, and felt compelled to say aloud what seemed necessary: “We cannot change the past, and neither you nor I were there, but we can tell the truth about it – for the future.”

Carolyn Haliburton Carter,The Price of a Name. That’s the kind of article I really value at Plough.

Shorts

Sonofagun! It’s true. I configured a 16” MacBook Pro with everything, and everything super-sized, and it priced out at $10,149.00! AI farms are buying so many processors and memory chips (terminology may be outdated) that the price is soaring and Apple has raised prices accordingly.
[A] nation united in pabulum is better than one divided into two tribal camps waging an “uncivil war” against each other about everything. (Andrew Sullivan, Biden’s Culture War Aggression)
A rule of good manners, perhaps good morals: those with options should not criticize those without them. (@jabel on micro.blog)
In 1534, papal authority was formally repudiated by act of parliament. Henry was declared ‘the only supreme head on Earth of the Church of England’. Anyone who disputed his right to this title was guilty of capital treason. (Tom Holland, Dominion)
In a policy analysis on the Brookings Institution’s website, Fiona Hill contrasted two world leaders: “Putin believes that things will go wrong in military and other operations — based on his own experience in the security services — but he also believes he will always find a way to fix them. Trump believes nothing will go wrong, and if it does, someone else is to blame.” (Via Frank Bruni)
[I]n The Atlantic, Alexandra Petri sought a final word on those iconically foul waters, which may bear some blame for a fowl fatality: “The Reflecting Pool is a metaphor so perfect, it feels almost valedictory, as though symbolism as a whole gave up and decided to sign off. On its way out, it killed a duck.” (Via Frank Bruni)
Block that metaphor! Of Graham Platner: “The red flag that led to his implosion was hiding in plain sight.” (Emma Tucker at the Wall Street Journal)
“Synergies is Latin for layoffs.” (Scott Galloway H/T John Ellis)
Communism is a system of government in which the ruling party controls major investment decisions while hoarding wealth for itself and suppressing all opposition. / Nevertheless, Donald Trump professes to dislike it. (Jonathan Chait)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

June 23, 2026

Hypocrisy pandemic

[W]e find that Republicans who question the integrity of elections may not be doing so sincerely. In public, only 40 percent of Republicans and 37 percent of conservatives agree that U.S. elections are free and fair. Yet in private, the share rises to 61 percent among Republicans and 57 percent for conservatives.

What Do Americans Think When No One Is Watching?

This paradox keeps popping up in my reading

We did not downsize as a gesture of protest against consumer society. We simply found ourselves with a reduced income and set about discovering the things we could do without. We were helped by situating ourselves in a place where it is quite difficult to spend money in the ways we spent it before. Patmos did not have available the range of goods that eat up income at an expanding rate so that you never feel you have quite enough. And doing without them has the therapeutic effect of slowing you down. It takes time to hand-wash clothes or to jump up and down on sheets, rinse them, wring them out and hang them on a line between trees in the garden; to top and tail the beans; to mix, whip and grate by hand; to haul up buckets from a well. A life without gadgets develops a different, slower rhythm. And, oddly, more time seems to be available in a life without labor-saving devices.

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul. See also The Abundance of Less and stories about AI like the one I referred to recently.

Free to say “no”

[I]f the future is inevitable, then there’s nothing for you or me to do about it. Writing in the 1940s, C. S. Lewis observed a similar dynamic in communist writers. He noted that “they tend, when all else fails, to tell me that I ought to forward the revolution because ‘it is bound to come.’ One dissuaded me from my own position on the shockingly irrelevant ground that if I continued to hold it I should, in good time, be ‘mown down’ — argued, as a cancer might argue if it could talk, that he must be right because he could kill me.”

The true believers in the AI gospel make a mistake eerily similar to that of the mid-century communists: Because they suppose themselves on the right side of history — because they imagine history has sides at all — they cannot abide even mild dissent.

But you remain free to say no.

Brad East, You Don’t Have to Use AI.

I haven’t hidden that I use AI and rather enjoy it. But a lot of serious people are raising questions, not about complicity in a possible doomsday but about how AI shapes its users.

Learning from the Plain Folk

When the Amish see an interesting new technology, they discuss where to ban or allow it in terms of its effects, particularly on the community.

We’re doing something like that with AI. Mercifully, most of the voices are sober, respectful, even a bit tentative, because the potential benefits are widely appreciated among the chattering class. I don’t expect the conversation to end soon, by which point habit may carry the day.

Meanwhile, Anton Barba-Kay is calling for caution, in the context of comments about Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical:

The document takes issue with “the technocratic paradigm” as one of its main foils. It defines that paradigm as “the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control, and profit alone shape personal, social, and economic decisions.”

…

The issue is not that these are evil thoughts to think; it is that we collectively don’t think and can’t agree on anything besides. The technocratic paradigm emerges as a background consensus for lack of other commitments held across institutions, markets, platforms, and nations. And yet this just is the transhumanist lingua franca of Babel: the very terms we all use to describe what we’re up to as we construct yonder tower.

For some reason, I find this formulation unusually clarifying, more helpful than most of what I’ve read on the subject.

Nailing Jello to the Wall

On imposing spurious rationality

At the beginning of the second Trump administration, I wrote that I wasn’t enjoying my job anymore, because it was at once too easy and too awful: the people in charge are evil, stupid, or both, and those who support them are either evil, stupid, or both. That’s all there is to say — over and over. Anything else strains the truth. Now, I find that the illogic and stupidity actually make it more difficult to provide a commentary. Analysis must necessarily impose some rational pattern on the world, but it feels like a fool’s errand or even potentially misleading to seek the whys and wherefores of how this regime makes its decisions. The “4D chess” approach to Trump punditry once imposed a spurious rationality on what was self-evidently chaos; now it feels like any attempt to understand what’s going on risks the same.

…

There is actually one predictable pattern in Trump’s behavior, and that’s that he’s completely unreliable and terrible to do business with. This looks like one of his business deals: a lot of noise, brutal recriminations, hair-raising threats, grandiose plans and promises, and then he walks away, leaving behind a mess, usually a much crappier version of what he claimed he was gonna do, and, of course, leaving his partners and creditors in the lurch.

John Ganz

And he doesn’t even kick enemies in the teeth very well

Commenting on this John Ganz post, which I partially quote, above, Damon Linker writes:

It’s good stuff—not least because Ganz is gesturing toward something I’ve been trying to wrap my head around and write about since at least May 2023. That’s when I wrote a two-part post titled “The Rise of the Anti-Ideological Right.” This was during the brief period when it looked like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis might successfully challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for president in 2024. In that context, I pointed out the primary thing that separated these GOP rivals: DeSantis was a candidate of a harder-edged post-Reaganite ideology, while Trump was a post-ideological figure who promised little beyond serving as a vehicle for the enactment of a revenge fantasy. DeSantis would pursue a muscular policy agenda, but Trump would kick the right’s enemies in the teeth.

…

Trump decided he wanted to try kicking the shit out of Iran. He made the decision for no coherent strategic reason. It was all about optics and the possibility of repeating his great “victory” in Venezuela on a larger stage. But it didn’t work out as he wanted, so, as Ganz put it, Trump wants to walk away. He can always lie and say he achieved victory knowing his most credulously cultish supporters will believe the moronic deception. So that’s what he’s going to try to do.

It then falls to journalists and intellectuals to make sense of it—and we seek to do so in rational terms. Trump did X because he wanted to achieve A, but that didn’t work out, so he shifted to Y, which entailed B, etc. But this isn’t a description of what actually happened, of the actual decision-making in Trump’s head and within the administration. It’s a description by baffled observers trying to discern something coherent in what is actually just some know-nothing doofus impulsively ordering this and then that and then some other thing, based on his own mercurial sense in the moment of what’s best for him and him alone.

J.D. Vance

Robert P. George and Caitlin Flanagan, both writing at the Free Press on Monday, strike me as complementary:

George: J.D. Vance had himself a conversion.
Flanagan: It may have been a Christian conversion, but it wasn’t a full conversion to Catholicism.

Russian Conservatism

Tsymbursky rejected the aggressive geopolitical ideas of the Eurasianists, and instead proposed the idea of “Island Russia.” In Tsymbursky’s view, Russia would not benefit from challenging the US-dominated world order, as the disintegration of that order would bring chaos in its wake. Instead Russia should focus on being a regional power, and ensure peace with the West by means of a buffer zone in the form of “limitrophe states,” such as Ukraine.

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism

The honored few

The Kennedy Center’s name reminds Americans that honors are bestowed on those whom the nation believes especially worth remembering. By elevating an honored few, this egalitarian nation reminds itself that excellence is both real and rare. By slathering the building with the stench of self-praise, Trump proclaimed that honor is a mere bauble, a prerogative of power.

George Will

Shorts

“Second Circuit: FTX CEO SBF SOL.” That is an entire case summary from (Short Circuits). When it hit me, I couldn’t stop giggling.
He is willing to sacrifice national security in order to get a voting-security law that is intended to prevent a repeat of what did not happen in 2020. (George Will)
I feel obliged to point out that after several references to spiders in my homily I came home after Mass to find several spiders in our bathroom. My next homily will be featuring big piles of money. (James Quinby)
The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. (Mashall McLuhan via L.M. Sacasas)
I have been playing with the idea that one way of framing AI is as a denial-of-service attack on the human psyche. (L.M. Sacasas)
We’ve turned Congress into a green room for Fox News and MSNBC. (Rep. Mike Gallagher in 2024, resigning from the House)
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. (Thomas Sowell)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

Midweek, 6/10/26

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

Nth Thoughts on Charlie Kirk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I appreciate stumbling onto this observation by Dreher.

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

60 Minutes

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

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

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

…

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

…

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

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

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

Gerard Baker

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

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

War crimes in our name

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

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

Dominic Preziosi, ‘Simply Murder’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

Me, too

Williamson keeps posting daily:

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

My feelings almost exactly.

For the record

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

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

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

Indiana Election Update

I previously wrote:

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

…

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

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

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

The good news:

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

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

Primary Eve

I’m publishing today because some states have primary elections tomorrow and I’ve got some thoughts on elections.

Making modernity

One of the key moments in the creation of modernity occurs when production moves outside the household. So long as productive work occurs within the structure of households, it is easy and right to understand that work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of those wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains. As, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue. (That requires a bit more chewing that we may be accustomed to doing.)

Insatiable

The question with which to start my investigation is obviously this: Is there enough to go round? Immediately we encounter a serious difficulty: What is “enough”? Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues “economic growth” as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of “enough.” There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: “Halt! We have enough”? There is none.

E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful. We’re going to need to update Proverbs 30:15–16.

Book Criticism on the decline

Dwight Garner counted the surviving full-time American book critics — and they fit on one hand. “The thin crust of American intellectual life, long flaking, has begun to show bald patches,” he wrote. He expressed envy of England, which has many more newspapers that routinely publish book reviews: “The literary debate over there is more like a boisterous dinner party and less like a Morse code dispatch between distant frigates passing in the night.” Still, America has its scrappy freelancers and part-timers. “I’m cheered by the young critics out there, swimming in this sea without drowning in it, trying not to be cast into gaol by their creditors, and working to make certain that the last snatch of book criticism isn’t three fire emojis, two jazz-hands, a crying face and a facepalm.”

Via Frank Bruni

Flat-out politics

What Democratic elites would prefer to do

The continuing appeal of Harris is a useful indicator of … stasis. Yes, she is unlikely to be the 2028 nominee, and part of her support is name recognition; … many Democrats who find her renomination unthinkable are nonetheless incapable of acknowledging the real reasons that she lost.

I’ll list some of those reasons. First, her party was seen as too beholden to progressive activists on a range of issues, including immigration, crime, education, energy and the transgender debate. Second, Harris’s vice presidency was itself a creation of the 2020 identity politics moment, without which Joe Biden never would have picked her, and she succeeded him without a fight in part because no one wanted to acknowledge her painful limits as a politician. Finally, she tried to solve both the policy problem and the identity politics problem through evasion and distraction and yet more identity politics, with empty rhetoric of “joy” and circumlocution about her past positions and a mediocre Midwestern white guy running mate.

Despite being on the record taking radical positions, Harris was never a radical politician. Rather, she was a perfectly hapless embodiment of a Democratic establishment that aspired to manage its base without ever strongly resisting its demands and that aspired to win moderate voters not by moderating on the issues but through a change of affect or a change of subject.

That’s still clearly what Democratic elites would prefer to do ….

Ross Douthat, Slouching Toward Kamala Harris

America needs a better Democrat party than that!

Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered

Graham Platner isn’t my ideal Senate candidate. Not even close. I’m deeply troubled by the thinness of his political experience, by the primacy of raw anger in his appeal to voters and by the oddities and ugliness, from a Nazi tattoo to a fondness for “gay” and “gayest” as put-downs, in his not-so-distant past. It’s a lot to overlook.

But if I lived in Maine, I’d vote for him in November. I’d do it without any joy and without any hesitation, because he’s a Democrat running against a Republican and I haven’t been kidding around when I’ve said that President Trump has no respect for democracy, no regard for the truth, no patience for Americans who don’t bow to him and no limits to his desire to exploit the presidency for his and his minions’ glorification and enrichment. I can’t recognize the profound moral offense and extreme danger of Trump and then sit out the election or cast a vote that potentially helps his party, which has abetted or ignored his authoritarian designs, win either chamber of Congress. That would be irresponsible, nonsensical and perilous.

But do other voters think the same way? Is their frequently articulated disdain for Trump just a bunch of colorful and cathartic words or a genuine cause for action, for uncomfortable choices ….

Frank Bruni, Are Democrats Scared Enough of Trump to Defeat Him? (my first NYT gift link this month).

I hope that 2026 will be such a wave election — nay, a Tsunami election — that the Republicans’ norm-shattering mid-decade gerrymanders will backfire. The press keeps reporting as if the gerrymanders will, if not stricken down by courts, accomplish exactly what the Republicans want, and I can’t rule that out.

But it ain’t necessarily so: if you take your pool of usually-Republican voters and spread them over more (redrawn) congressional districts, maintaining a theoretical but slimmer Republican majority in more districts, an election fueled by revulsion toward the GOP could see usually-Republican voters staying home or (horrors!) voting for Democrats, and with thinner margins more seats could flip.

That would be a lovely result in 2026 because:

It might frustrate and slow Trump in his last two years.
It would rebuke Trump for his obnoxious effort to steal 2026 by shattering democratic norms. (His 2020 meddling in Georgia, in the form of complaining of vote fraud so persistently that it depressed Republican turnout, got Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock elected to the Senate. Nice job, Mr. Genius!)
It would be a rebuke to those who kiss Trump’s … ummmm, ring … for going along with his obnoxious attempted theft.

In Tuesday’s Indiana primary May 5, I plan to take a Republican ballot (nothing new there) and vote against every candidate endorse by Trump — even the one running against a guy with a non-trivial but remote criminal record who had hoped for Trump’s endorsement over the RINO incumbent. I wish I could vote for Spencer Deery, who put a target on his back by putting Hoosier interests over Washington’s interests when Trump called for redistricting, but he’s in the next Senate district to my west.

War crimes

It has now become routine for U.S. Southern Command to post grainy videos online of boats being blown up, along with claims that “male narco-terrorists were killed,” even though the administration has not offered any evidence that even one of the people incinerated by U.S. firepower was engaged in drug trafficking, much less in terrorism. The administration is so averse to trying to prove wrongdoing in court that, when suspects survive a strike, they are released rather than arrested. Apparently, there is a secret Justice Department opinion justifying the strikes based on the fanciful premise that drug cartels are waging war on the United States.

Max Boot.

In a Wall Street Journal editorial today, James Freeman beclowns himself by pointing out that Barack Obama did sorta kinda the same thing. Now I would have no problem accusing Obama of war crimes if he did the same thing, but even Freeman’s account notes that Obama attacked those “believed to be terrorists,” whereas the Trump administration is labeling narcotics traffickers ipso facto “terrorists” without so much as making a plausible case that they really are narcotics traffickers in the first place.

The fallacy of Boromir

When people justify their voting choice by its outcome, I always think of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes repeatedly that we cannot make decisions based on the hoped-for result. We can only control the means. If we validate our choice of voting for someone that may not be a good person in the hopes that he or she will use his power to our advantage, we succumb to the fallacy of Boromir, who assumed he too would use the Ring of Power for good. Power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, What ‘The Lord of the Rings’ can teach us about U.S. politics, Christianity and power.

I’m not voting against all things Trumpy to seize power, by the way; it’s to destroy Sauron’s power.

Shorts

It was lovely to hear the King’s English, devoid of the vengeance, blasphemy and vulgarity common in our leader’s language. (Maureen Dowd on King Charles’ address to a state dinner during his recent trip to America)
We need stories – sometimes subtle, gentle things – that restore in us a sense of goodness. Not just jagged bitterness frothing at the mouth or bonkers political hijacking of deep religious themes. (Marin Shaw)
Our economically RINO administration is tariffing globalization to death. Democrats are writing the eulogy. (Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal)

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

T.S. Eliot

Thursday, 12/29/22

The $1.7 Trillion Electoral Count Act Reform

Then there’s the fortifying fact that Congress passed greatly needed reforms of the Electoral Count Act as part of the omnibus bill that currently awaits Biden’s signature. Those changes clarify the procedures Congress and the Vice President must follow in the event that a future president and/or state legislatures attempt to overturn the will of the voters in the way that President Trump encouraged them to do as part of his self-coup attempt in the days and weeks leading up to January 6, 2021.

Damon Linker.

We knew for 2 years that reforming that poorly-written law was extremely important. Was paying a $1.7 trillion boondoggle-enriched ransom the only way to get it done?

Seeing what we expect to see

Since what we select to attend to is guided by our expectations of what it is we are going to see, there is a circularity involved which means we experience more and more only what we already know.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Hope breaks through

The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer stops doom-scrolling Twitter and locking his eyes on cable news, and now sees some hopeful signs:

Back in March, Francis Fukuyama, a prophet of optimism, suggested that Ukraine’s example of resistance might help spiritually rally liberal democracies to defend themselves against internal threats. He called it a revival of the “spirit of 1989.”

That prediction, which I doubted when he issued it, has come to pass. Even if I can’t prove that the causation tracks with Fukuyama’s argument, the results are palpable. Since the start of the Ukraine war, Western democracies have voted to cast aside populist goons. Emmanuel Macron held off Marine Le Pen. In October, Brazilians disposed of Jair Bolsonaro. In the midterm elections, the United States roundly repudiated election-denying Republicans, evidence of Donald Trump’s waning influence.

Franklin Foer, The Cynic’s Dilemma

Is their increasing marginalization by saner spirits why paladins of the new Right raged so absurdly against Zelensky’s visit?

Another sign of hope: Is 2022 the Year We All Finally Got Over Narcissists?.

Popehat pontificates on fires in crowded theaters

Ken White, a/k/a Popehat, pontificates on the exceptions to first amendment free speech rights.

I’ve been interested in this sort of thing for maybe 55 years. In law school, I got the top grade, in a class of 100-or-so, on Introductory Constitutional Law.

Yet I still found Ken’s post illuminating and a wonderful distillation of why “the first amendment isn’t absolute” is analytically useless. I hope it’s one of his Substack posts that you can read in full even if you’re not a subscriber.

A reliable contrarian

I have affirmation from a pretty good source that Bari Weiss’s Substack publication, recently rebranded as The Free Press, is a reliable way to get news that mainstream press aren’t covering, such as the poor science behind government Covid policy (or science that even contradicts it), problems in the world of gender transitioning, and such.

Yeah, you can get contrarian stuff lots of other places, but is it journalism or is it lazy-ass opinionating? Bari has a business plan and some actual, serious journalists writing for her, and that’s consistent with her plan to be a real journal with real news.

Election2026 and Election2028

I can’t believe I’ve already created tags Election2026 and Election2028 for my Obsidian database!

Here’s what prompted it:

Republicans face a favorable Senate map in 2024, when Democrats will defend seats in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia. Neither party appears to have any comparably strong pickup opportunities in 2026 or 2028, so the odds favor a Republican majority in each of the three Congresses starting in 2025.

The source, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, was analyzing the partisan merits of a call in Vox for SCOTUS Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to retire now so Joe Biden can fill their seats: “Sotomayor and Kagan are only in their 60s, but the actuaries at Vox say it’s time for them to go” the subheadline summarizes.

I will be surprised if either of the Justices heeds the call, and I’ll be particularly disappointed if Kagan does, since she has an especially powerful combination of intelligence and personability that reportedly moderates the tendencies of her conservative colleagues.

(Sigh!) George Santos

Is there anything worse than worrying about future elections? Probably.

I tried to avoid even reading beneath the surface of the George Santos story, but it is such a parable that I finally relented:

At this point you might be thinking, “Are we sure he’s even gay?” A man willing to lie about anything and everything to spruce up his political appeal might reasonably conclude that identifying as gay is more of an asset than a liability in a state like New York, especially for a party that’s keen to be seen as more diverse. As chance would have it, it turns out that George Santos was married to a woman as recently as 2019 …

Trump proved that the modern right is willing to vest power in someone who’s comprehensively obnoxious. The defense of Santos is apt to prove that the right is willing to vest power in a total cipher. Who he really is, what’s true and what’s false, may be unclear even to him at this point. He’s barely discernible as a persona, just a series of lies stitched together. And so he’s a test case in how little character matters so long as one mouths the right talking points about being a fighter rather than a sucker. Can sheer pugnacity excuse anything? Will hardcore partisan right-wingers shill for a grotesque Tom-Ripley-style scam artist just to spite the left, because his seat is important and because he confounds Democrats’ expectations of identity politics?

I’m thinking yes.

…

I hope the House expels him anyway …

But they won’t do it. And if they don’t, I won’t complain. So much of this party’s elected leadership since 2015 has stooped to pretending to be things they’re not in order to gain power that it seems unjust to hold George Santos singularly culpable. By what right do reptiles like McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, who traded traditional Republicanism for Trumpism because that’s what it took to get ahead, sit in judgment of Santos for constructing his own identity to move up in the world? They’re all grifters. They deserve each other.

Nick Cattogio

Bah! Humbug!

The wishful public has been fed a diet of misinformation from a wishful news media that won’t tolerate anything but positive thinking about maintaining our current arrangements because imagining a different outcome is too depressing. This is not a malicious conspiracy by evil authorities so much as a neurotic defense mechanism in the face of the disturbing reality that the comforts and conveniences of recent decades may be drawing to a close.

James Howard Kunstler, Living in the Long Emergency

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

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