Tag: Iran

In tempore belli

A vast bureaucracy in the service of appetite

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

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

SPLC

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

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

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

Trolls and bootlickers — of the Left!

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

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

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

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

Trump

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

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

Time’s up on your stupid war, sir

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

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

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

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

Nick Catoggio

World Historical

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

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

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

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

Conservatives versus power-seekers

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

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

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

March 19

I hear rumors that The Big Dance, a/k/a March Madness, has begun, but inasmuch as Purdue versus Queens isn’t until tomorrow night, I don’t really care.

Iran

Karl Rove’s vindication

Whatever misgivings Democrats had about attacking Iran, the deed’s been done. In launching this war, Trump has committed not only himself and his administration but also the United States, its regional allies, and the Iranian people. If the war goes wrong, all will suffer.

Some Democrats want to use the power of the purse to end the war “immediately,” but that is like parking a jet in midair. What does “stopping” mean now? Shrug off the danger Gulf states face from retaliatory fire in a fight the U.S. started? End the U.S. air campaign and let Israel fight alone in its own way to achieve its own goals? Leave the mullah regime intact to plot its revenge? “Stopping” is a formula that blinks away every real-world question that Americans now face.

David Frum, in the Atlantic (H/T John Ellis news items.

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Karl Rove

Too late now?

We have become a country that demonstratively tramples on international laws. Our military bombs a different nation every few weeks, commits murder on the high seas and removes foreign political leaders by force. Our government threatens the world, including our allies, with its imperial ambitions.

We are a country ruled by a megalomaniac whose views are openly hateful and proudly ignorant, whose avarice knows no bounds and whose claim to power is absolute. Foreign leaders try to appease him with flattery and curry his favor with gifts. It rarely works to temper his appetite or even catch his attention, but it’s seemingly all they can do.

M. Gessen, One Year of Trump. The Time to Act Is Now, While We Still Can., January 18, 2026.

Trumpiana

Purge and Binge

Any successful revolutionary populist movement will eventually purge its political enemies. And after it does, the new establishment it creates will be more corrupt and more ruthless than the one it replaced.

Those historical rules aren’t hard and fast but the exceptions are rare. When a populist insurgency takes charge, expect total consolidation of power—and chaos, of course—to follow.

The purge of the Republican Party by Donald Trump and his Jacobin base took longer than it had to, nearly 10 years from start to finish. That’s because Trump himself isn’t a revolutionary or even much of an ideologue. He’s a narcissist, so he would have happily kept the pre-Trump establishment intact forever as long as it agreed to blindly serve his needs.

Nick Catoggio, Purge and Binge, March 12, 2024

Oopsie!

Attorneys representing the 30-year-old Virginia resident accused of planting pipe bombs outside the Washington, D.C., headquarters of both the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee on the night of January 5, 2021, requested in a legal filing that the federal judge overseeing his case dismiss the charges because he was protected by the presidential pardon Trump granted for January 6 offenders. Trump’s pardon applied to those charged with “offenses related to events that occurred at or near” the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and the suspected would-be pipe bomber’s legal team argued that such a description “unequivocally applies” to him, because his alleged actions are “in no manner … wholly independent of events at the Capitol on January 6.”

– A White House official said in a statement that the pardon “clearly does not cover this scenario,” noting that the pipe bombs were allegedly placed on January 5, not January 6.
– Trump issued the sweeping pardon on January 20, his first day back in office, fulfilling a 2024 campaign promise.

The Morning Dispatch for March 18.

The “White House official” is irrelevant. Trump said what he said, and the courts aren’t going to worry about what he meant.

The schadenfreude of seeing Trump’s reckless pardons bite him on the backside would almost be worth the added terrorist threat of springing this bomber from prison.

Revealed preferences

I had a not-insubstantial financial windfall within the past few weeks, but I cannot bring myself to invest any of it in stocks or bonds. Instead, for the first time in my life, I put surplus funds into a money market fund, not for a few days or weeks while I pick a few investments, but rather with no intention of investing it elsewhere until, say, January 20, 2029.

I wrote that paragraph before reading the latest missive from my cyberfriend Terry Cowan (I believe we once narrowly missed meeting in real life), who almost always out-Eeyores me.

Education

The tacit message: Just choose. Toss a coin if necessary.

These incompatible assumptions and claims are taught to undergraduates, who might be told in a biology class that universal moral norms such as (survival-minded) cooperation or (gene-perpetuating) altruism are the product of evolutionary natural selection, only to hear in an anthropology or philosophy class the next hour, based on the empirical heterogeneity of moral practices across space and time or the obvious inconclusiveness of arguments among moral philosophers, that there are no universal moral norms. What are they to infer? No undergraduate courses teach students how they might even begin to evaluate contrary claims in disparate disciplines.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Education too narrow

Science’s analytical methods and positivist presuppositions restrict the questions we ask in education and about education, and we begin mouthing a catechism of questions for which our techniques can provide answers, whether the answers are significant or not. In education, this preoccupation with false or trivial questions makes the student adept at “faking it,“ that is, at finding the right answers to the wrong questions, questions he has never really asked himself, questions without normative consequence or implication.

David V. Hicks, Norms and Nobility

If you didn’t gasp, read it again. If you still didn’t, read Iain McGillchrist.

Shorts

  • … a culture which makes “living standards” the final norm of the good life and which regards the perfection of techniques as the guarantor of every cultural as well as of every social-moral value. (Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History) I think you can guess what culture he meant.
  • Trump still has the dumbest hair in America, which is a hell of a thing to write about a man standing next to Pete Hegseth, the Brylcreem-addicted grandstanding dipsomaniac peacock … (Kevin D. Williamson, Take your @#$%&! hat off)
  • We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. (John Adams’ 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia)
  • I will die on this hill: For all his faults, the president hasn’t made anyone’s character worse. He simply removed the few remaining moral checkpoints to mainstream political success and left it to individuals to decide for themselves what they’re willing to condone to gain power. Nothing in my lifetime has illuminated the American character as starkly as how right-wingers reacted to that invitation. Trump is the Great Revealer. (Nick Catoggio)
  • Murphy’s Armageddon Observation: Those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to write end-times books. Corollary: God doesn’t read prophecy books. (Quoted by Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind)
  • Recommended: David French, Can Military Excellence Save Us From Trump’s Incompetence? (shared link)
  • The Metastate subsists upon family breakdown. (Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes)
  • Education turns out competitive consumers; medicine keeps them alive in the engineered environment they have come to require; bureaucracy reflects the necessity of exercising social control over people to do meaningless work. (Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality)
  • We no longer need the devil because we had Hitler. We no longer needed hell because we had Auschwitz. (Historian Tom Holland, quoted by Glen Scrivener, The Air We Breathe)

(I hope you’re enjoying these “shorts” as much as I’m enjoying gathering them for us. I’m pretty sure I was inspired by Frank Bruni’s “For Love of Sentences,” which appears in most of his columns.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Impeach Trump

As I reviewed my latest draft weekday blog, I found it full of politics and war. So I decided to hold back everything else for another post and to put a trigger warning on this one: I give Donald J. Trump and his minions no quarter.

Missing a functioning democracy

[I]n those tense, polarized months of 2002 and 2003, we had hashed out the case for war thoroughly beforehand, as democracies do. A thousand op-eds bloomed; critical votes were taken in the Congress; political careers were weighed in the balance; and Colin Powell went to the UN to present the “evidence.”

Seems like a wholly different world, doesn’t it?

Come with me a little further back in time to the Persian Gulf War of 1991. That was a war started by Saddam Hussein, not us. How did we go about a new war in the Middle East back then? Well, we had another big public debate, another trip to the UN, and then another vote in the Congress. It was closer than we remember: just 52-47 in the Senate (with one abstention). We then went to war with a very precise aim — ending the occupation of Kuwait — after amassing a coalition of 35 countries, and did so to cement the status of international law in the post-Cold War world.

Seems like another planet, doesn’t it?

And there’s a reason for that. We had a functioning liberal democracy then, a constitutional system that was imperfectly but actually followed, a responsible president, and international law on our side.

Today, we have precisely none of the above.

We’ve had no debate; we’ve had no search for international support or allies; we’ve ignored the UN entirely; the Congress didn’t debate, let alone vote, in advance; and the American people were told about the war after it had already begun. All of this renders this war illegal and unconstitutional and outrageous, and the fact that most people have just accepted it is proof, if we still needed it, that the extinction-level event I predicted in 2016 is now well in the rearview mirror.

In plain English, this is what is in front of our nose: a corrupt, deranged monarch pursuing an illegal and immoral war primarily to benefit a foreign country. This war makes us a textbook case of how democracies stagger into tyranny and endless war.

Andrew Sullivan

Not reassuring

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy organization dedicated to assuring church-state separation in the armed forces, reported yesterday that it has received numerous complaints from military personnel that, in briefings, their commanders are describing the military operations against Iran in Christian eschatological terms. According to a report on Substack by journalist Jonathan Larsen:

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.

From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).

The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.

Religion Clause: Advocacy Group Says Military Commanders Are Describing Iran Operations in Christian Biblical Terms.

I thought dispensationalist bullcrap was dying, but I guess the self-styled Secretary of War didn’t get the message.

Politics as Ritual Humiliation

Republicans … continue to practice politics as a form of ritual humiliation for the remains of the old guard, compelling Sen. John Cornyn to stand as an equal to Ken Paxton, the morally depraved and intellectually vacant grotesque who currently serves as attorney general of Texas. Sen. Cornyn barely topped Paxton in the three-man primary and now must face him again in a runoff.

Some Democrats have in mind the success Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and his allies had—and continue to have—meddling in Republican primary elections to elevate extremists and kooks (more extreme and kookier than the Republican average, I mean) on the grounds that such nut-cutlets are easier to beat in general elections, and quietly are talking up the idea of working to help secure the GOP nomination for Paxton.

Kevin D. Williamson

The bellicose through-line from neocons to Trump

The best essay for understanding right-wing support for Donald Trump’s war against Iran was published in National Review in 2023, at the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion. Written by Tanner Greer, a conservative writer and China analyst, it argued that the official populist repudiation of George W. Bush and neoconservatism masked a deep continuity between the Iraq-era conservative mainstream and the Trump-era new right.

…

The famous quote from a Bush official about how “when we act, we create our own reality” directly anticipated the Trump-era belief that “you can just do things.”

…

[T]he idea that America can go into a rough neighborhood, hit our enemies hard, kill some of their leaders and force them to RESPECT OUR HEGEMONY is not some brilliant innovation of the based Trump era. It was the dominant right-wing perspective on the Iraq war (and, indeed, sometimes a centrist perspective as well), especially in the run-up to the invasion, with democracy promotion very much a minor theme.

Ross Douthat

Barbarism nukes nihilism

In liberating Western Europe and Asia, the United States military for its part firebombed German cities into virtual nonexistence. Then, on the feast of Christ’s Holy Transfiguration (August 6) in 1945, it annihilated a hundred thousand unarmed Japanese civilians at Hiroshima with the dropping of a single atom bomb. Unperturbed by the unprecedented carnage, America dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later. Defeating the most nihilistic powers to threaten Christendom since the Mongol invasions provoked, in turn, acts of barbarity.

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

His own morality

When asked in January by the New York Times “if there were any limits on his global powers,” President Trump responded: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

I’m afraid those are the only constraints on Trump’s use of nuclear weapons in Iran.

Jack Goldsmith, Trump, Iran, Nuclear Weapons.

Would it be rude to say I’ve been unimpressed with Trump’s personal morality?

Funnies

The “targeted strike” in Iran

When I hear people saying that the U.S. is not fighting a war against Iran I find myself remembering Rex Mottram and the priest charged with catechizing him: 

“Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He said: ‘Just as many as you say, Father.’ Then again I asked him: ‘Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said ‘It’s going to rain’, would that be bound to happen?’ ‘Oh, yes, Father.’ ‘But supposing it didn’t?’ He thought a moment and said, “I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.’” 

I suppose what’s happening now in Iran is merely a targeted strike, only we’re too sinful to see it.

(Alan Jacobs, political Mottramism)

Obituaries

Every day, a shabbily dressed man pauses at the same newsstand to scan the front pages. He then moves on without buying anything. At last the news seller confronts him.

“I know times are tough, but you must be able to afford at least one single newspaper.”

“I don’t need to buy the whole paper. I only care about the obituaries.”

“You do need to buy the paper, because the obituaries are in the back pages.”

“Not the one I’m looking for. That one will be right up front.”

David Frum

Shorts

  • Pete Hegseth is “something between an excitable morning TV anchor and the rooster who thought he brought the dawn. ‘We’re playing for keeps.’ ‘We’re punching them while they’re down.’ He brags about our ‘lethality.’ Stop talking like that! Don’t feed the stereotypes, don’t tempt the gods.” (Peggy Noonan)
  • Trump’s Department of Justice tacitly admits that it is too corrupted to withstand ethical inquiry.
  • Cheering for epistemic humility gets you no television interviews, no requests for op-eds, and no invitations to conferences. … But in the early phase of a war, above all, it should be the prudent observer’s battle cry. (Eliot Abrams)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Thursday, March 5

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

Truth and Facticity

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

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

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

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

Iran war

My spirit animal writes on Iran

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

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

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

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

An explanation of the war

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

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

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

The Free Press and The Dispatch

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

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

Sissy boys

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s right, I’m not from Texas

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

Thumbnail Geek autobiography

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

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

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

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

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

(Wonder, Stevie, Superstition, 1972)

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

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

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

Unitary Executives

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

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

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

Routed

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

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

And this from the New York Times Editorial Board:

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

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

Pre-publication “update”: maybe not.

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Howl

My goodness, these people talk like cretins

Imagine being Pete Hegseth … a Princeton- and Harvard-educated … idiot—standing there insisting that the recent attack on Iranian nuclear facilities was “the most complex and secretive military operation in history.”

… “Midnight Hammer” … wasn’t the most complex or secretive military operation of the past ten months—surely that laurel goes to the Israelis and the “Grim Beeper” caper—much less the whole of human history. 

… my goodness, these people talk like cretins. Trump himself is, of course, all superlatives all the time, the sort of man who was born to sell fake Rolexes out of the trunk of a Nissan Altima and would be a tedious barstool blowhard if only he had the decency to drink. When a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst suggested that the Iran mission may have amounted to less than we all hoped, Karoline Leavitt—who is the White House press secretary in large part because she lacks the intellectual sophistication to turn the letters around on “Wheel of Fortune”—raged that the report was the work of a “loser.” Nobody bothered to ask her why it is that Donald Trump, supposedly an executive for the ages, has had so many losers working under him, often in senior security and intelligence roles: John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, Gen. John Kelly, Gen. Mark Milley, Gen. James Mattis, Gen. H.R. McMaster, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, etc. 

…

Trump is out there insisting that he is the greatest president since George Washington—and maybe greater than Washington, too. Eisenhower, who at the apex of his military career outranked George Washington (Washington died a three-star general; his posthumous promotion to his current statutorily unsurpassable rank came in 1976), knew that he would lie in state after his death and insisted that he did so in his regular army uniform, in an $80 standard-issue soldier’s coffin, with a minimum of decoration … (Specifically, only his Army and Navy distinguished-service medals and the Legion of Merit.) Who doubts that Donald Trump will be entombed in whatever Tutankhamun would have dreamed up if he’d had Liberace to consult? 

Kevin D. Williamson, at the top of his game.

Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime

The Trump administration found yesterday that Harvard University’s failure to address antisemitism on campus violated civil rights law. In a letter to Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, officials from four government agencies said the university’s “commitment to racial hierarchies” had “enabled antisemitism to fester.”

The Free Press

Does anybody doubt that if Harvard had suppressed anti-Zionist, anti-Israel or antisemitic sentiments, the Trump administration would have found that Harvard violated free speech rights?

This isn’t about antisemitism; Trump just wants to wound or destroy Harvard for the perverse pleasure of the sans-culottes.

Hocus-Pocus

Republicans are waving a $3.8 trillion magic wand over their tax-and-spending megabill, declaring that their extensions of expiring tax cuts have no effect on the federal budget. The unprecedented maneuver is a crucial part of the GOP plan to squeeze permanent tax cuts through Congress on a simple-majority vote in the coming days. Republicans are expected to endorse the accounting move in a procedural vote early Monday. (Source: wsj.com)

John Ellis News Items

Deporting those nasty Christians

Christianity Today reports that the Trump Administration is targeting Iranian Christian migrants for deportation:

…

If deported back to  their country of origin, Iranian Christians face severe persecution at the hands of Iran’s radical Islamist theocracy. That persecution has actually intensified in recent years, and includes criminalization of the promotion Christianity, and severe punishments for Christians considered to be “apostates” from Islam. This persecution makes Iranian Christians obvious candidates for asylum or refugee status (for which applicants are eligible based on persecution on the basis of religion, among other possible criteria). At the very least, those who have filed such applications must not be deported until those applications have gotten proper consideration.

I’m old enough to remember a time when conservative Republicans saw themselves as defending Christians against radical Islamism. Today, a GOP administration wants to deport Christians to persecution by a radical Islamist regime. The only people Trump considers worthy of refugee status  seem to be white Afrikaner South Africans. While they may have a plausible case (and I don’t oppose admitting them), that of Iranian Christians – and many other severely oppressed groups – is much stronger.

…

People who genuinely oppose socialism and radical Islamism would not close the doors against those regime’s victims. Doing so is both unjust and harmful to the US economy (to which these immigrants contribute) and to America’s struggle in the international war of ideas against these regimes. It’s hard to credibly tell people we are better than these brutal despots when we callously deport their victims back to them, thereby facilitating the very oppression we claim to oppose.

Ilya Somin (hyperlink added).

The entrepreneur’s new clothes

These days, Donald Trump (the man who “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program) and Jeff Bezos (the man whose second nuptials raised the bar for vulgar displays of wealth and celebrity connection) are kindred spirits:

Bezos is a man of extraordinary, awe-inspiring accomplishment. He has changed the way many of us live. But what he seems to be after these days isn’t so much respect as its quicker, lesser cousin — envy. That’s the braggart’s quarry. That’s what Trump wants, too. And it’s pursued not through substantive works but through superficial theater (military parade, anyone?), which is another of the braggart’s tells.

Boasts aren’t deeds. They’re often TikTok-friendly, Instagram-ready substitutes. Somehow, we’ve cultivated a culture that invites such camouflage and elevates the people who don it most shamelessly, even if the less impressionable among us can see it as a sign that the emperor — or entrepreneur — has no clothes.

Frank Bruni

Well, when you put it that way …

“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who authored the majority opinion, wrote, “the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

The Morning Dispatch

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

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.

Saturday, 6/28/25

The Blind Men and the Iranian Elephant

SourceAssessment
Leaked DIA ReportStrikes delayed Iran’s bomb development only “a few months”; facilities not fully destroyed; 400 kg of highly enriched uranium still intact.
President Trump & OfficialsInsist on “total obliteration” of targets; intelligence from Israeli operatives on the ground confirms destruction.
CIA StatementConfirms “severe damage” to Iran’s nuclear program, requiring years to rebuild.
David Albright (Independent)Satellite images show ventilation shafts and tunnels hit; centrifuge enrichment effectively destroyed; rebuilding will take a long time.
IAEA Director General“Very significant damage” expected; key question remains about location of enriched uranium.
Olli Heinonen (IAEA former chief inspector)Possibility remains for a small secret enrichment facility; threat persists.

(Summary of Was Iran’s Nuclear Program ‘Obliterated’—or Just Set Back a Few Months?).

To some extent, this feels like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Some of the experts are describing impediments to Iran’s bomb development, others how long it would take to rebuild the damaged facilities. Those are not the same question.

Pete Hegseth on the Iran Mission

Everyone with eyes knows this mission was a success! And if you doubt, here are a number of quotes from people brave enough to see what was REALLY there and not just what so-called INTELLIGENCE shows. This is also what I’m like when my loved ones come out of surgery. I don’t need to see the patient. I just want to hear statements from True Patriots about how he’s probably doing. That’s enough for me. If you weren’t FAKE NEWS, it would be enough for you.

Now, thanks to Donald Trump, we are on the historic, unprecedented verge of a thing that we used to have before he tore up the treaty! Where’s the praise? Where’s the adulation?

Alexandra Petri’s Fake News satire of Pete Hegseth’s presser with the fake news after the Iran bombing (bold and hyperlink added).

It seems to me that there’s been too little coverage of (a) the efficacy of the 2015 JCPOA until (b) Trump pulled us out of it in 2018 and the Iran nuclear program shot back up again. Kudos to Petri for alluding to it.

What Bibi got right

Especially over the past 10 months, Netanyahu has impressively followed through on his aim to remake the face of the Middle East. He’s degraded Hamas and Hezbollah, two of the vilest terror regimes on the planet. He has made the Iranian theocracy look pathetic and decrepit. Israel has demonstrated its vast military and intelligence supremacy over its enemies, establishing total freedom of the skies over much of Iran. It has shown that its agents can penetrate enemy organizations and find and kill their militant leaders. Netanyahu’s actions have contributed to the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria and have helped the legitimate Lebanese government regain control of its own territory. The Axis of Terror is in shambles.

This includes the Israeli-U.S. assault on Iran’ s nuclear program. We don’t yet know how much damage that assault has done. An early Pentagon report found that the attacks set the Iranian project back only a few months, which was picked up big-time on one side of the internet. But several other reports, including one from the Institute for Science and International Security, found that the attack “effectively destroyed” Iran’s enrichment program.

We may know in time what the bombings accomplished. In the meantime, we do know that Israel and the United States have the will and capacity to attack Iran anytime and anyplace. We do know that if Iran reconstitutes its nuclear program, Israel and America have the capacity to deliver a much more devastating and regime-threatening blow. We also know that Iran and its proxies have made some insanely self-destructive miscalculations since Oct. 7, 2023, and they must know that, too. These are ominous omens for the theocrats in Tehran.

…

For decades, both Israel and the United States were willing to tolerate the noose [i.e., the growing threat from Iran]. Dismantling it seemed too hard and risky. That changed on Oct. 7. Israel learned, to its shock and dismay, that it lacked the capacity to anticipate and prevent murderous attacks. Suddenly the looming noose began to appear intolerable. Netanyahu, and the Israeli public generally, decided to respond to Oct. 7 not with the limited retribution campaign that many of us outside observers were supporting, but by attempting to dismantle the whole noose, including Hezbollah and the future possibility of Iranian nukes, and that now looks like the right call.

David Brooks, not a Netanyahu fan. (bold added, shared link)

The Trump Doctrine

The closest I ever came to a clear understanding of his contradictory and sometimes incoherent policies was in 2018, at a lunch in the White House with one of his closest aides. We were discussing an article I had published a few years earlier in this magazine, about Obama’s foreign policy, and I said that I thought it might be premature to discern a Trump equivalent. The official responded, “There’s definitely a Trump Doctrine.”

I asked him to describe it. He said, “The Trump Doctrine is ‘We’re America, Bitch.’ That’s the Trump Doctrine.”

The official continued, “Obama apologized to everyone for everything. He felt bad about everything.” Trump, he said, “doesn’t feel like he has to apologize for anything America does.” Another White House official explained it this way: “The president believes that we’re America, and people can take it or leave it.”

Jeffrey Goldberg

This comes as no surprise to me

I have a theory of why Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. I had it even before he bombed them. I even wrote a very brief description of the theory.

But Carlos Lozada scooped me:

There’s a question President Trump likes to ask people around him when he’s facing a major challenge or considering a big decision. It’s not “Why did this happen?” or “What are my options?” or anything so straightforward as “How does this affect American interests?” It’s a more impressionistic question; any answer might sound equally authoritative, even if only one answer is preferred.

“How’s it playing?”

Trump posed it soon after Israel launched its first attacks against Iran. The president “asked an ally how the Israeli strikes were ‘playing,’” The Times reported. “He said that ‘everyone’ was telling him he needed to get more involved.”

Carlos Lozada

Good populism, vicious populism

The Republican Party, rather than embracing the best aspects of populism, has taken on its vices: anti-intellectualism, anti-institutionalism and anti-elitism; feeding off negative emotions like anger, grievances and vengeance; and a propensity to believe and to spread conspiracy theories. Populism often looks for scapegoats, frequently blaming immigrants and those who are ethnically and culturally different. Populists are also historically attracted to demagogues and authoritarian personalities.

Peter Wehner, What Has Happened to My Party Haunts Me

We seem to have turned a corner

Dishheads know I’ve been trying to get a grip on the queer and trans extremists who have run amok with the remnants of the gay rights movement these past few years. But as I watched the transqueers respond to the resounding election defeat with unreconstructed defiance, doubling down on gender extremism, and hurting acceptance of gay men, lesbians, and sane trans people, I felt I had no choice but to try to make a noise that could reach further than Substack, and get through the wall of disinformation that the MSM and queer and trans groups have been perpetrating.

I sent the essay to the NYT as a formality, never expecting it to be accepted. But they did. I expected the editing process to be like the woke-checking at New York Magazine, and I’d have to fight for every sentence. But the process, while it certainly wasn’t without its moments (they did try to water it down a lot), and took a good while to get into the paper, was fine. Even better: they allowed me to say my piece and write at length.

So I spent yesterday in a defensive crouch expecting an avalanche of hate and outrage.

Surprise! I’ve been inundated with thanks and encouragement from my fellow gays and lesbians. NYT readers’ comments were overwhelmingly positive — especially the reader-selected ones. I was stopped in the street in Ptown and congratulated, not yelled at. Old friends, major gay donors, mere acquaintances clogged my mailbox to say things along the lines of: THANK GOD SOMEONE SAID THIS AT LAST. Here’s a text I got from a friend:

I’ve had conversations with a dozen friends today about the trans movement and our unquestioning obedience to it, many of whom had never really considered it before at all and were various degrees of horrified. Thank you for helping make this a conversation we can have, it’s helping.

And that is really the goal: to get a conversation started that should have been happening years ago; to tell gay men and lesbians that something truly dangerous is going on they may not know about; to encourage them to look at it more deeply; and to distinguish clearly between these gender extremists and the gay and lesbian rights movement — so we don’t all get tarnished with the intolerance and incoherence of the gender nutters.

It’s a start. All of which is to say: please speak up if you are hesitating. There is far less support for these crazy experiments on kids and ideological extremism than might appear. Face down the bullies. And face up to the facts. And rescue our cause from those who will otherwise destroy it with overreach.

Andrew Sullivan on Substack

Nobody is above the law

No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law. But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation—in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so. . . . Observing the limits on judicial authority . . . is required by a judge’s oath to follow the law.

Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson [in dissent] skips over that part. Because analyzing the governing statute involves boring “legalese,” she seeks to answer “a far more basic question of enormous practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?” In other words, it is unnecessary to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. Justice Jackson would do well to heed her own admonition: “[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.” That goes for judges too.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett

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

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.

Saints of North America

Today, many American Orthodox Churches will commemorate the Saints of North America. It’s an annual joy to sing:

Rejoice, O mountains of Pennsylvania;
leap for joy, O waters of the Great Lakes;
rise up, O fertile plains of Canada;
for the elect of Christ who dwelt in you are glorified,
men and women who left their homes for a new land!
With faith, hope, and patience as their armor,
they courageously fought the good fight.
Comforted by the beauty of the Orthodox Faith,
they labored in mines and mills, they tilled the land,
they braved the challenges of the great cities,
enduring many hardships and sufferings.
Never failing to worship God in spirit and truth
and unyielding in devotion to His most pure Mother,
they erected many temples to His glory.
Come, O assembly of the Orthodox,
and with love let us praise the holy men, women, and children,
those known to us and those known only to God,
and let us cry out to them:
“Rejoice, all Saints of North America and pray to God for us.

Although she’s too newly-glorified to have made it into the services, Righteous Olga of Kwethluk is now in their number.

And I awoke to the news that we’re (unofficially?) at war with Iran, about which I can only feel ambivalent, knowing the arguments pro and con and with a personal history of formal conscientious objection during the Vietnam era. Pray in accordance with your deepest convictions about this conflict, but do pray, and add “Thy will be done.”

No creed but the Bible

By the 1840s one analyst of American Protestantism concluded, after surveying fifty-three American sects, that the principle “No creed but the Bible” was the distinctive feature of American religion. John W. Nevin surmised that this emphasis grew out of a popular demand for “private judgment” and was “tacitly if not openly conditioned always by the assumption that every man is authorized and bound to get at this authority in a direct way for himself, through the medium simply of his own single mind.” Many felt the exhilarating hope that democracy had opened an immediate access to biblical truth for all persons of good will.

Americans found it difficult to realize, however, that a commitment to private judgment could drive people apart, even as it raised beyond measure their hopes for unity.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity.

Enamored with power

“I’ve lived in SE Michigan my entire life, and have always been a Republican—part of the Evangelical-Republican alliance, back when it was, I believe, honorable. But Evangelicals as a whole lost their way many years ago when the alliance became a religious cause in itself, a cause larger than our former convictions,” Brown told me earlier this year. “We became so enamored with power, it should have been no surprise to me (though it was) that evangelicals were and are willing to sacrifice our moral reputations for the sake of ‘winning.’ … I’ve hated every moment of Trump’s presidency, because of what I fear it’s done to the Gospel, and the reputations of those who claim to believe it.”

Tim Alberta, 20 Americans Who Explain the 2020 Election – POLITICO

Ken Brown is not wrong, I think, about what Trump has done to the reputations of “Christians” writ broadly.

But on the chance that someone reading this thinks that Christians suck because they support Trump (or for any other reason), be it remembered that Evangelicals (whatever and whoever they are) are merely a prominent public face of Christianity in the USA. They are not the only Christians. They are not uniquely “real Christians.” They are not consistent adherents of historic Christianity. And historic, Orthodox Christianity is deeply, deeply different than its thrice-removed cousins.

(And not all Christians support Trump, though it would seem more than a bit fishy to me if one could consistently predict another’s political preferences merely be the church they attend.)

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Saturday, 9/7/24

Revisionist History

Tucker Carlson’s interview with some doofus named Darryl Cooper has gone viral in the world of Carlson-skepticism, which world I now whole-heartedly join, no looking back:

Some on the right found Carlson’s turn toward Holocaust skepticism surprising. “Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host, wrote on X. But Carlson’s trajectory was entirely predictable. Nazi sympathy is the natural endpoint of a politics based on glib contrarianism, right-wing transgression and ethnic grievance.

There are few better trolls, after all, than Holocaust deniers, who love to pose as heterodox truth-seekers oppressed by Orwellian elites …

Obviously, not every red-pilled conservative ends up arguing, as Owens did, that Hitler gets a bad rap. But the weakening of the intellectual quarantine around Nazism — and the MAGA right’s fetish for ideas their enemies see as dangerous — makes it easier for influential conservatives to surrender to fascist impulses …

Ultimately, Holocaust denial isn’t really about history at all, but about what’s permissible in the present and imaginable in the future. If Hitler is no longer widely understood as the negation of our deepest values, America will be softened up for Donald Trump’s most authoritarian plans, including imprisoning masses of undocumented immigrants in vast detention camps.

Toward the end of their conversation, Carlson and Cooper discussed how the “postwar European order” has enabled mass immigration, which has, in Carlson’s telling, destroyed Western Europe. “So why not have a Nuremberg trial for the people who did that?” asked Carlson. “I don’t understand. I mean, that’s such a crime.”

“Well,” Cooper responded, “we have to win first.”

Michelle Goldberg, who rarely writes things I want to pass along.

Tucker Carlson—who spoke prominently at the Republican National Convention, advises Trump’s campaign, and is scheduled to appear on stage with J. D. Vance later this month—has made himself famous in recent years for “just asking questions.” Carlson hosted revisionist-history podcaster Darryl Cooper on his interview show on Twitter/X, saying he “may be the best and most honest popular historian” in America. Cooper went on to expound his view that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of the Second World War, primarily on the basis of the fact that Churchill rejected Adolf Hitler’s peace feelers and kept Britain fighting the Nazi tyranny even after the fall of France. And Churchill, wouldn’t you know, was motivated to fight Germany not to protect British liberty but because he was a “psychopath” and perhaps even bought off by Zionist financiers. After an uproar, Cooper doubled down in a long, rambling tweet storm in which he insisted that Hitler had only wanted peace with Britain and “an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” The interview has rocketed Cooper’s formerly obscure podcast to the top of the charts. Is Carlson off his rocker, seeking the viewership of those who are, or both? Just asking.

National Review’s weekly news summary email

Free speech update

→ Iranian writer sentenced to prison over dot: Hossein Shanbehzadeh, an Iranian writer and activist, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison by the Tehran Revolutionary Court after he tweeted a period at the Supreme Leader. Officially, NPR reports, “Shanbehzadeh was sentenced to five years for alleged pro-Israel propaganda activity, four years for insulting Islamic sanctities, two years for spreading lies online and an additional year for anti-regime propaganda.” Suspicious. . . this was my exact penalty in college for attending Shabbat services. 

Shanbehzadeh’s one-character tweet, which was in response to a photo posted by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of himself with the national volleyball team, received more likes than the Ayatollah’s post. He basically got 12 years for ratioing. Which, if that’s a crime, I guess I’ll be going in for twenty to life any day now. 

→ Now, maybe you’re telling yourself: This could never happen in the U.S. Thank Allah and the Founding Fathers for the First Amendment! And you’re probably right: Tweeting a period at President Harris and/or Trump is unlikely to get you thrown in jail, and American citizens enjoy more speech protections than probably any other people on Earth. But don’t let your Bill of Rights throw pillow woo you into complacency. I mean, we’re not some tyrannical shit hole like the UK, where people are being charged for mean tweets, but government censorship does exist here. The last few years has seen huge surges in book banning and protest crackdowns, and just last week, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Meta caved to Biden administration pressure to censor content posted by users on Facebook. 

This week, Reason reported on the case of a “citizen journalist” who goes by the name Lagordiloca, or “the fat, crazy lady” (catchy), who was arrested by police in Laredo, Texas, after she broke stories obtained by a confidential source from within that same department. And vice presidential hopeful Tim Walz said in a recently resurfaced interview that misinformation and hate speech aren’t protected by the First Amendment. Now, he’s wrong about that, which you’d think a former high school social studies teacher would know (you actually are allowed to be a prick and a liar in America, thank God), but it’s a troubling statement from someone who could soon occupy the little closet down the hall from the Oval Office where they stow the VP.

Katie Herzog, filling in for Nellie Bowles.

Oh, Texas!

Speaking of things that could never happen here, in the US of A, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton keeps making a liar of me for my “calm down, that will never happen” assurances about what conservatives want.

Possibilities, two of which carry the “No True Scotsman” gene:

  1. He’s not really a conservative.
  2. I’m not really a conservative.
  3. Conservatives are frightfully heterogenous.

Mike Gallagher …

… is the kind of politician the Republican Party, or any party, should prize: bright, earnest, conscientious, etc. For seven years, he served as an intelligence officer in the Marine Corps. He was twice deployed to Iraq. A conservative Republican from Wisconsin, he served four terms in the U.S. House, or just short of that. He resigned in April. He had been the chairman of the Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, a committee devoted to an extremely important subject. He stayed in Congress just long enough to vote for aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. He bowed out at age 39. Why? Gallagher has talked to David Ignatius of the Washington Post, in a series of interviews. The long and the short of it: the threat of violence—against him and his family—from people angered at his deviations from a Trump line. There is a sickness in our politics, one that the decisions to depart of Gallagher and his like will only worsen.

National Review’s weekly news summary email.

That MAGA is shading into extortion is yet another reason to vote against Trump.

Oh, Russia!

A humorous flow chart

(Charlie Warzel)

Holding two adverse opinions at once

As I continue to parse Kamala Harris’ contradictions, and rhetorical blather, and refusal to explain all her sudden alleged policy switches from four years ago, I don’t mean to elide the fact that her opponent is out of his mind.

…

Some are incensed that after (much delayed) scrutiny of Biden’s mental deterioration, Trump still gets a pass for what in anyone else would be regarded as utter derangement. The trouble with this argument — see Jim Fallows’ Twitter feed for the full huff-and-puff — is that Biden was clearly declining fast because of incipient dementia and physical frailty, which is a story; and Trump has always been nuts, is not appreciably nuttier than he ever was, and, in stark contrast with Biden, seems physically robust.

…

This deranged con-man was president for four years — with of all this plain to see — and is still the likeliest winner of this election. Half the country takes him seriously, and they think — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — that he is mentally fit to perform the most powerful job in the world.

It’s merely our job, as citizens and voters, to note that we have one mentally ill candidate in this race and one mediocre but sane one. And to vote accordingly.

Andrew Sullivan, The Sane-Washing of Donald Trump

Sullivan also shared (embedded, but I won’t) a video of some impressive and even baffling ping-pong.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Accumulated clippings, 2/3/19

1

Must every London gentrified street have a Starbucks, a Pret A Manger, a Caffè Nero, a Costa Coffee, a Wagamama, an Itsu, a Tesco Express, an Eat, a Hotel Chocolat, a Foxtons and a Boots? Is that all that’s left?

Emptiness is what people feel. At the end of all the myriad diversions offered up by technology-at-the-service-of-efficiency lies a great hollowness. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” wrote Leonard Cohen. Modernity is a crack eliminator. The only cracks it allows in its polished, glistening, purring, scented spaces are fake ones.

…

I think the emptiness produced by watching a rigged globalized system deliver homogenization on a massive scale — one way to think, one way to work, one way to conceive of profit, one way to impose a brand, one way to (not) drink at lunch, one way to eat at your desk, one way to be healthy, one way to deliver a gentrified urban neighborhood — has been underestimated as a source of disruptive fury.

Roger Cohen, The Harm in Hustle Culture

2

Only Democrats can save this president. They can do so by nominating someone loopy enough to panic voters who are asking only for someone cheerful, intelligent and tethered to reality.

George Will

3

With the help of the Chapter “The Emperor’s New Literature” in John Senior’s The Death of Christian Culture, the coin dropped that part of what classical education accomplishes is that classically educated people in various countries are all reading in the Great Tradition, none in provincial or nationalistic ephemera.

That’s not nothing.

4

For a solid month Americans again focused on illegal immigration. In a country that’s never thinking about only one thing, that was a bit of a feat. Also, Mr. Trump in his statements and meetings with the press came across, for perhaps the first time, as sincere and informed. Previously he’d looked like a guy who’d intuited a powerful issue and turned it into a line.

…

The vast majority of the American people want order and the rule of law returned to the border. How it is done is up to the experts. They just want it done. The word “wall” has been symbolic to many of them too—it means taking the issue seriously.

Peggy Noonan

5

He’s fiscally to the right and on social issues to the left. There’s some market for that, but is it really where America is going?

No, it is not.

America is headed left economically. Two thousand eight changed everything, deeply undermining faith in free-market capitalism. One of the great sins of that time—and all the years after—was that the capitalists themselves, in their vast carelessness, couldn’t even rouse themselves to defend the reputation of the system that made them rich and their country great. In any case, the most significant sound in 2016 was Trump audiences cheering his vows not to cut entitlements. They would have cheered if he’d promised increases, too.

As for what are called the social issues, moderation is the future, maybe even a new conservatism, not leftism. The left has demanded too much the past few years, been maximalist in its approach, got in America’s face and space. Its social activism is a daily harassment in ways that don’t show up in the polls. The new abortion regime in the states, bake my cake, the farther edges of #MeToo, demands for changes to our very language. Liberation becomes propaganda and filters up through the media and down to the schools. America once had a lot of “live and let live” in it. Not anymore, and its giving way is causing barely articulable grief, and more broadly than the left imagines.

Wise Democrats are developing reservations. Young conservatives are perhaps about to come alive.

I think Mr. Schultz has it backward.

Peggy Noonan.

I can only hope.

6

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear: There is no national security crisis on the southern border.

President Trump claimed otherwise in his nine-minute Oval Office address to the nation … But he was lying.

How do we know this? Because if there were a genuine national security crisis on the southern border, Republicans in the House and Senate would be tripping over themselves to fund — and take credit for funding — Trump’s border wall. There is no political downside whatsoever to taking a strong stand in defense of the country in the midst of a national security crisis.

And yet, what have we seen over the past two years during which Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and could have appropriated funds for Trump’s beloved wall at any time? Zip. Nada. Nothing.

…

[P]ublic opinion has shifted in favor of immigration since the president was elected, no doubt in large part because of the above-mentioned ineptitude and malice the administration has displayed toward immigrants over the past two years. That has, if anything, put the cause of immigration restrictionism in a weaker position politically than it was when he was running for president.

Like King Midas in reverse, every policy Trump touches turns to excrement.

Damon Linker

7

Iranian political culture is deeply authoritarian, and, therefore, whatever political order follows the mullahs is unlikely to be liberal. And that’s okay. We don’t need to replicate liberalism everywhere. Iranians can have a decent, benign regime that is nevertheless responsive to the deep longings in the Persian soul for order, continuity, and visible authority — kingship, in a word. That’s how the political culture is wired. My friends at Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the rest will, of course, find it repellent that I’d say so. But what can I say? I’ve lost a lot of my spread-freedom-everywhere idealism.

Sohrab Ahmari, emphasis added.

I should note that the interview is about Ahmari’s conversion from Shiite Islam to Roman Catholicism.

8

[A]t great cost I bought the first volume of the Works of St. John of the Cross and sat in the room on Perry Street and turned over the first pages, underlining places here and there with a pencil. But it turned out that it would take more than that to make me a saint: because these words I underlined, although they amazed and dazzled me with their import, were all too simple for me to understand.

They were too naked, too stripped of all duplicity and compromise for my complexity, perverted by many appetites. However, I am glad that I was at least able to recognize them, obscurely, as worthy of the greatest respect.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain.

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Clippings, 11/24/18

1

This first item is more than just a clipping. So sue me.

  • The U.S. Government’s own list of terrorist attacks since 2001 shows a dramatic drop in the violence carried out by Iran and an accompanying surge in horrific acts by radical Sunni Muslims who are not aligned with Iran.
  • The last major terrorist attack causing casualties that is linked to Iran was the July 2012 bombing of a bus with Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, retaliation for what Iran perceived to be Israel’s role in assassinating five Iranian scientists involved with Iran’s Nuclear program, between January 2010 and January 2012.
  • The U.S.-led 2003 war in Iraq played a critical role in Iran’s resurgence as a regional power.

Intel Vets Tell Trump Iran Is Not Top Terror Sponsor.

[A]s I have observed before, the red hazard light that continues to be blinking most brightly relates to Washington’s relationship with Iran, which has unnecessarily deteriorated dramatically over the past year and which brings with it collateral problems with Russia and Turkey that could trigger a much wider conflict. I say unnecessarily because all the steps taken to poison the relationship have come out of Washington, not Tehran. The Trump administration refused to certify that the Iranians had been in compliance with the nuclear agreement negotiated in 2015 and has since escalated its verbal attacks, mostly at the United Nations, claiming that the regime in Tehran is the major source of terrorism in the world and that it is seeking hegemony over a broad arc of countries running westward from its borders to the Mediterranean Sea.

Philip Giraldi, Who Are the Leading State Sponsors of Terrorism?

John Bolton is bound and determined to wage war on Iran. I’d bet a bundle on it happening.

2

To secular and leftist Europeans, Hungary’s Fundamental Law came as a shock. The preamble set the tone—it is the opening line of the Hungarian National Hymn (anthem): “God, bless the Hungarians.” That was already too much for The Guardian. A writer for that left-wing British newspaper noted that the new constitution’s “preamble is heavily influenced by the Christian faith and commits Hungary to a whole new set of values, such as family, nation, fidelity, faith, love and labour.” It was enough to point this out: further criticism would apparently have been superfluous.

…

Equally against the European grain were provisions of the Fundamental Law such as these: “We avow that the family and the nation constitute the most important framework of our coexistence”; “The life of the offspring shall be protected from the moment of conception”; “Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of a man and a woman.” This last, in particular, was subjected to almost universal condemnation, expressed in the language of hatred and rage.

Lee Congdon, Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian Resistance (Modern Age, Fall 2018)

I am mindful of this every time I read the New York Times writing of Orban being “far-right.”

3

[W]riting off an ocean of rural and Rust Belt red is a terrible strategy in the long term. If the Democrats want to win and keep winning, with a mandate to put their policies into effect, they need to face four hard truths.

1 Demography Is Not Destiny
“Why not just wait for the white working class to die off?” asked an audience member at last year’s Berkeley Festival of Ideas. I get this question a lot, and I always reply: “Do you understand now why they voted for Trump? Your attitude is offensive, and Trump is their middle finger.”

Joan C. Williams, The Democrats’ White-People Problem (Atlantic, December 2018) (Italics added).

4

We may be witnessing another voter realignment. When I was young, the Republicans were the party of the elite, and the Democrats were the party of the working class. It seems that now the Republicans are the party of the white working class, and the Democrats are the party of the wealthy and educated. Democrats have decided to go after those elite voters and have done so in ways that have made them less attractive to working class whites. It remains to be seen if this realignment is temporary, or whether we are at the beginning of a larger migration of elite whites to the Democrats and working class whites to the Republicans. But the recent midterm elections seem to have strengthened this switch.

… [M]oney is not everything. After all how would you feel about a political party that offers you higher wages but talks about you as a “deplorable?” You probably would not see that party as looking out for your best interest. But this sort of attitude plays well among the educated elite. So to become palatable to white elites Democrats have acted in ways that have made their party more alienating to the white middle class.

… I remember watching a Beto/Cruz debate a few weeks ago. The debate moved to the topic of gun control. And right on cue, Beto whipped out one of the favorite talking points of highly educated whites that we need to do more than give gun victims “thoughts and prayers.” At that point I knew that Beto did not have what it took to cut into the hold Cruz had on the lower class white voter and in a state with a lot of small towns filled with such voters that Cruz was likely to win.

… The real irony of that was Beto was trying to run a campaign of inclusiveness across racial, economic and even political lines. Yet, he could not quite leave out this little bit of snark.

George Yancey

5

Washington think tanks are undergoing a fundamental evolution. A lot of them, like the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, were built to advise parties that no longer exist. They were built for a style of public debate — based on social science evidence and congressional hearings that are more than just show trials — that no longer exists. Many people at these places have discovered that they have more in common with one another than they do with the extremists on their own sides.

So suddenly there is a flurry of working together across ideological lines. Next week, for example, the group Opportunity America, with Brookings and A.E.I., will release a bipartisan agenda called “Work, Skills, Community: Restoring Opportunity for the Working Class.”

…

One of the core questions before us is this: Who is going to lead this country? Is it perpetual outsiders like Trump, with no governing or policy competence, who say the establishments have forfeited all credibility? Or are there enough chastened members of establishments, who have governing experience, who acknowledge past mistakes, who take the time to reconnect with the country and apply their expertise in new ways?

I don’t know about you, I’ll take a chastened establishment any day.

David Brooks, The Return of the Chastened Establishment (The Opportunity America link is a 136-page PDF download.)

6

But politics isn’t just a seething cauldron of unmanageable and frightening shifts and realignments. There’s also the tacit requirement that politicians prattle on demand about anything and everything. F’rinstance:

“He shot from the hip with a sledgehammer instead of using a scalpel.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill, on … oh, what does it matter anyway? She was prattling about something. (via George Will).

7

My periodic reminder that “more conservative than other major newspapers” does not mean that it gets religion:

Deep down, however, beneath the trappings of food, family and often-forgettable football games, Thanksgiving is really a management story. It’s a case study in how extraordinary leaders build happy, productive teams.

Sam Walker, Wall Street Journal

8

Wealth, she said in a 1983 interview with Parade magazine, was “sort of like having good looks: It’s not something you’ve earned, but you don’t go out and scar your face, either.”

Carolyn Rose Hunt via the Wall Street Journal (which does more or less “get” money).

* * * * *

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