Labor Day 2025

HHS

America at last has its own Trofim Lysenko, a crank whose screwy ideas about science gained influence over policy not because of their methodological rigor but because their contrarianism reflected the prejudices of a feral populist revolutionary movement. … You tell me: Is a country that’s transitioning from relying on vaccines to prevent disease—including brain cancer, perhaps—to relying on Ivermectin and beef tallow more or less of a sh-thole than it used to be?

The only good news is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is unlikely to rack up a body count as large as his Soviet predecessor. But he’s sure gonna try.

…

[A] first-world public health agency, the most well-known of its kind on Earth, is about to become a third-world soapbox for voodoo and superstition.

…

The best-case scenario for public health until 2029 is that no one except the populists pays the slightest bit of attention to the federal government’s medical recommendations. Mass resignations would encourage that.

But if that’s not enough, I think resigning is also compelled by basic dignity. Refusing to participate in a corrupt enterprise is a mark of good character and an act of moral hygiene. What Trump and Kennedy are doing is indecent, and decent people being involved in it both obscures that fact and subjects those people to temptations to behave indecently themselves.

Nick Catoggio, Our Own Lysenko

TGIF

Here’s a pet theory of mine: The Democrats’ struggle to cobble together a winning message is at least partly a result of Democratic strategists and spokespeople sucking at their jobs. They expect favorable coverage from the legacy press and have an irksome habit of talking to reporters as though they’re essentially lower-rung party employees.

For example, a guy named TJ Ducklo—a truly fantastic name for a party hack—was briefly a deputy White House press secretary under Biden until he reportedly accused a female reporter of “jealousy” and threatened to “destroy” her. He presumably expected he’d get away with it, because he thought the press worked for him …

Or take Ian Sams, a top Democratic spokesman who was tasked with reassuring reporters that Biden, despite his visible decline, was sharp as a tack. He was in the news recently after he admitted that he met Biden face-to-face only twice. But I’ll always think of him as the guy who, while working for Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign, became furious when a BuzzFeed journalist tweeted something mildly critical of one of Harris’s debate performances.

As reported by The Washington Free Beacon, he went whining to BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief at the time, Ben Smith, that the critical tweet was “whiteness manifest,” whatever that means, and a “really bad look” for the publication. Smith’s reply was spot on: “Do you seriously not have real problems? This text makes me think you are totally, totally unready for an actual presidential campaign.”

Will Rahn, filling in for Nellie Bowles at TGIF. Rahn contrasts Republican press relations, where the GOPsters don’t expect fawning coverage, but I don’t want to borrow too much.

Rahn then pivots to this:

A shooting in Minneapolis: The biggest news of the week is a mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minnesota called Annunciation, and there are no jokes to be made about it. It horrifies me. It’s demonic. And, for the life of me, I cannot understand the Democratic impulse to diminish the power of praying for the victims, children who were shot while praying. It’s like a preprogrammed, knee-jerk reaction that, especially in this instance, is just bizarre and offensive.

Those who seek solace in prayer pray in these situations. We pray for the dead and wounded. We pray for the families. We pray for ourselves. Some might even pray for the soul of the shooter.

I get that you want to make this about gun control. My suggestion is that you shut up about the prayer stuff and just make it about gun control.

Amen! He’s not as funny as Nellie, but I wouldn’t mind too much if Nellie took more time away, leaving him in charge.

He can’t unsee it; I’m trying to bring it into focus

The reason I feel such a tinge of discomfort by the Center Gai scene is not because I care what travelers do, but because I can’t unsee: the forces driving mass hyper-consumptive tourism are the same ones fomenting fascism, science skepticism, kleptocracy, billionaire veneration, labubus, and entertaining ourselves with little colored bubbles until the very second before we die.

Craig Mod via John Brady.

That’s a big claim that I need to chew on a bit. I thought you might want to as well.

Lone-wolf violence in America

In recent years, certain supporters of transgender rights have developed a public language of militancy and conflict, in which familiar habits of left-wing activism — attempts to shut down controversial speech, claims that contrary opinions are fascist or genocidal — are supplemented by an armed-and-dangerous iconography that’s usually associated with the American right.

In the wake of the murders of Catholic school children in Minnesota, the second attack in three years carried out by a transgender shooter against children at a Christian school, it would be relatively easy to write a column holding such militancy responsible for the carnage. All I would have to do is adapt the scripts so often used to blame conservatives for violence, from the J.F.K. assassination (which the scribes of Camelot quickly attributed to the angry rhetoric of Dallas right-wingers) down through the Tea Party and the Trump eras.

If I were making that argument, I would insist that words have consequences: If you tell people that they’re facing “trans genocide,” and that religious conservatives especially are agents of their fascist subjugation, why wouldn’t you expect some troubled souls to opt for vigilante action?

Likewise, if I were laying blame this way, I would insist that violent images inspire violent action: If you sport a shirt with the slogan “Protect Trans Kids” underneath a hunting knife (as the lieutenant governor of Minnesota did in 2023), or if you put a transgender writer toting an AR-15 on your magazine cover (as an alternative weekly in the Pacific Northwest did just two months ago) with a headline asking “Are You Triggered?” you bear some responsibility when the trigger actually gets pulled. Especially when the Minneapolis killer’s own manifesto reportedly trafficked in the same imagery, featuring a “Defend Equality” sticker overlaid with an image of a machine gun.

But I’m not making that case, because it would betray a consistent theme of this column, going all the way back to the attempted assassination of Representative Gabby Giffords in 2011: namely, that all attempts to blame extreme political rhetoric for mass shootings should be treated extremely skeptically, because the phenomenon of lone-wolf violence in America rarely attaches easily to either left-wing or right-wing ideology.

…

“Diabolos” in Greek means accuser, and in that sense the dark spirit that inspires these crimes suffers a defeat when we react with unity and solidarity rather than immediate recriminations.

Whereas it gains a victory every time we respond by immediately blaming our political rivals, and trying to prove over the bodies of the dead that, yes, our ideological opponents are even more evil than we thought.

Ross Douthat, Politics Rarely Explains Mass Shootings (gift link)

Grand Jury Nullification

A federal magistrate found that there was probable cause to support the charge. Yet, on three occasions, a grand jury in the District of Columbia declined to indict. Instead, the U.S. Attorney filed an information for a misdemeanor violation of Section 111. A writer at MSNBC suggests that the grand jury’s refusal to indict may be due to a weak cases being brought by the U.S. Attorney.

Since the failed indictment for Reid, there have been two more grand juries that failed to return a true bill.

It is possible that these juries are carefully attuned to the gradation between felonies and misdemeanors. May I suggest another possibility? Federal grand juries in the District of Columbia, made up (almost) entirely of critics of President Trump, are engaging in nullification of the Trump Administration’s law federal enforcement efforts. I imagine this sort of active resistance will increase as more federal officers are fanned throughout the District of Columbia. …

Historically, at least, the concept of jury nullification was viewed as a popular check against tyrannical governments. I imagine an average D.C. resident who can take time off from work to serve extended periods of federal grand jury duty may see himself in that fashion.

Josh Blackman. This is all the more remarkable because the received wisdom is that prosecutors can get grand juries to indict anyone for anything.

Occam’s Razor

Whenever the White House announces a new criminal investigation into one of Donald Trump’s enemies—an event that occurs with Stalinesque frequency—the administration and its allies have a go-to line: “No one is above the law.” FBI Director Kash Patel, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, and others have gleefully deployed the tagline. It’s a smirking, knowing stand-in for the claim that Joe Biden did the same thing to Trump while insisting that Trump was not above the law, and so turnabout is merely fair play.

[Account of why that dog don’t hunt omitted.]

The Occam’s-razor account of how it is that Trump became the first ex-president to face criminal investigation is that Trump is the first professional crook to be elected president. This would also neatly explain why he invented the idea of locking up the president’s enemies. Crooks are generally cynics who think that everybody in power is a criminal, and the only difference is that some people are hypocrites about it. (“My father’s no different than any other powerful man,” Michael Corleone says in The Godfather.)

Barack Obama did not threaten to lock up John McCain or Mitt Romney. The idea that the law is a weapon the president uses to protect his friends and harass his enemies was brought into American politics by one man. He now happens to be the one man who is very definitively above the law.

Jonathan Chait, MAGA Has a New Favorite Slogan

Summing up

[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

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

The Real HHS Issues: A Personal Account

I’m quite frustrated at the public discussion of the HHS mandate: that all employers, with a few narrow exceptions, if they offer health insurance to employees at all, provide coverage for abortifacients Plan B and Ella (and, yes, contraceptives and sterilization), with no deductible or copay.

I’m frustrated in part because of the avoidance not only of what I consider the “real issue,” but of anything close to the real issue. Today’s newspaper, for crying out loud, was full of reactions to Rush Limbaugh’s latest, and possible most-odious-ever, remarks. What does that have to do with anything? We’re distracting ourselves to death.

I’m frustrated, too, because the simple facts of the mandate are so little covered that I can only hope that my understanding, described above, is accurate. (Yes, you might want to put “contraception” first, but I acknowledge that it’s there.)

So I’m going to take a shot at discussing the real issues. I don’t claim this is comprehensive. An integrated law that revolutionizes one-sixth of the national economy is much bigger than this blogger.

1. Abortion

First, the top issue, for me as an employer, is the coverage of abortifacients without deductible or copay. I’d never qualify for any likely religious exemption. So I’m going to find myself, soon, in a position where I must drop employee health insurance or prepay quite directly for something that I strongly object to – not as a violation of cultic spiritual taboos by employees who aren’t part of the cultus, but as public policy for the common good. (There’s a glimmer of hope, though, for me as an employer: “The requirements to cover recommended preventive services without any cost-sharing do not apply to grandfathered health plans.” I’m not sure if our plan qualifies as “grandfathered,” and what tweaks might end that qualification.)

Group insurance plans without that coverage will not be available (save possibly through some guerilla “insurers” running scams through church bulletins).

I don’t even think I’d balk so much if all FDA-approved prescriptions were covered subject to a deductible. We have provided a high-deductible plan to our employees, and they can fund Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) for a tax-deductible pot from which to pay routine medical expenses. I’m a couple of steps removed from approval of abortifacients under this plan. But that’s coming to an end.

This is a very big deal for me. In Catholic Social Thought (by which I am consciously informed although I’m not Roman Catholic), HHS seems to be requiring “material cooperation” from me in an intrinsic evil. I’m still working through the moral ramifications, with help from essays like this.

2. Restricting “Religion”

Second, I’m sympathetic to the argument that any law that requires a religious exemption for political viability is too intrusive almost by definition. Obviously, from what precedes, I’m feeling that intrusion.

But putting that aside, what reliable meaning does “religious freedom” have, for purposes of a religious exemption, if the government arbitrarily decides what qualifies as “religious”?

[F]or purposes of this policy, a religious employer is one that:

(1) Has the inculcation of religious values as its purpose;
(2) primarily employs persons who share its religious tenets;
(3) primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets; and
(4) is a non-profit organization under section 6033(a)(1) and section 6033(a)(3)(A)(i) or (iii) of the Code.

Section 6033(a)(3)(A)(i) and (iii) refer to churches, their integrated auxiliaries, and conventions or associations of churches, as well as to the exclusively religious activities of any religious order.

So much for Catholic Charities, which

(1) Has service to the poor as its purpose;
(2) employs people who share its purpose, regardless of their religious tenets;
(3) serves anyone who’s poor and probably serves anyone plausibly pretending to be poor.

The Catholic Church, though, is merely the most prominent. Many other Churches have a similar capacious view of their mission.

In a regime of strict separation of Church and state, or anything close to it, Church gets smaller as state gets bigger, all else being equal. HHS’s stingy definition of religion could serve as Exhibit A.

On the mandate’s application to Catholic Charities and similar entities, I think the Obama administration is going to get another 9-0 Supreme Court smackdown, just as it did in its statist position in the Hosanna Tabor case.

Even if they don’t get smacked down, it’s hard for me to avoid the feeling that the Administration consciously set out to bring religious individuals and institutions to heel, as part of an odious statist scheme. I think Obama may consciously be playing a “long game,” driving the result toward single payer/socialized medicine/national health insurance.

I have the precedents of Eleazar and St. Polycarp to inspire not coming to heel.

3. The Mandate Isn’t About Insurance

I alluded to the high-deductible plan my employees get. It took the extreme inflation in health insurance costs to wake us up that we had in effect been providing not insurance, but prepayment of routine expenses subject to a pretty nominal deductible – maybe $500 per year (a figure sensible people routinely exceed for preventive maintenance of the human body). We got out close to the cutting edge of health care reform by putting our employees back in touch with the costs of both their insurance and the routine care they get.

John H. Cochrane in The Real Problem With The Birth-Control Mandate spells out many of the levels on which the mandate is perverse as a supposed part of an Affordable Care Act, since it will fuel inflation in health costs.

I put “insurance” in quotes for a reason. Insurance is supposed to mean a contract, by which a company pays for large, unanticipated expenses in return for a premium: expenses like your house burning down, your car getting stolen or a big medical bill.
Insurance is a bad idea for small, regular and predictable expenses. There are good reasons that your car insurance company doesn’t add $100 per year to your premium and then cover oil changes, and that your health insurance doesn’t charge $50 more per year and cover toothpaste. You’d have to fill out mountains of paperwork, the oil-change and toothpaste markets would become much less competitive, and you’d end up spending more.

It’s well worth reading if you’d like to start thinking outside the box of employer-provided health insurance.

But we lost that battle politically. HHS didn’t invent no-deductible, no copay preventive care. That’s in the law.

Section 2713 of the PHS Act, as added by the Affordable Care Act and incorporated under section 715(a)(1) of ERISA and section 9815(a)(1) of the Code, specifies that a group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage provide benefits for and prohibit the imposition of cost-sharing with respect to:

Evidence-based items or services that have in effect arating of A or B in the current recommendations of the United States Preventive Services Task Force (Task Force) with respect to the individual involved.

…

With respect to women, preventive care and screening provided for in comprehensive guidelines supported by HRSA (not otherwise addressed by the recommendations of the Task Force), which will be commonly known as HRSA’s Women’s Preventive Services: Required Health Plan Coverage Guidelines.

4. Gratuitous Coverage of Controversial Items

What Obama’s team seems to have added to the law, though, is a stacked-deck process to ensure inclusion of contraception, early chemical abortions and self-mutilating sterilization as “preventive health services.”

The law obviously left some details up to a “task force” and to “HRSA” (Health Resources and Services Administration). And those entities, presumably with the connivance of the Administration, were arguably quite biased.

So what? Elections have consequences, right? Councils and Task Forces and bureaucracies under Republicans aren’t straight up the middle either, right?

Yeah, but much of the controversy over the Affordable Care Act involved “life issues” (remember the “Death Panel” même?), and Obama essentially promised us that the ACA wasn’t going to push an abortion or euthanasia agenda.

HHS could have passed on inclusion of “contraceptives” whose operation prevents, or disrupts, implantation of a nascent human life.

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On Items 2 and 4 especially, I have to fault the Obama Administration, toward which I have been pretty restrained in my criticisms over the past 3 years. But as in the Hosanna Tabor case, Obama has shown himself to be a statist, glad to let the state try to usher in the eschaton and to shove the Church aside in the process. He may be a Christian of sorts – of that I have no real doubt – but he’s a Caesaropapist. That is an automatic disqualifier for me. It is hard to imagine a field of opponents to Obama whose shortcomings would be worse that that, and so, once again, I can’t imagine voting for re-election of our historic first “African-American” President.

On Item 3, I can only say it’s obvious that we’re not yet serious about actual reform that will contain costs, as we’re deeply unserious about almost every other aspect of our unnatural and doomed economy.

And on that happy note, I’m through.

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Standing advice on enduring themes.