Tag: news

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.

February 25, 2026

I need to post this one quickly because I feel as if Linda Greenhouse (second item) may have caught a nuance in the Supreme Court tariffs decision that nobody else (to my knowledge) has caught.

Sarah Isgur’s reading of the tea leaves on the current Supreme Court’s “agenda” (first item) is also good. Don’t worry: the “agenda” according to Isgur is restoring the structural balance that gives Congress the preeminent role in our constitutional system. But can this Congress, a bunch of sycophants and social media influencers, rise to the sober occasion?

Civics lessons

“What the Roberts Court Is Actually Trying to Accomplish”

One of my pet peeves—no, it’s bigger than a peeve; more like an exasperation—is people who get paid for written opinions insouciantly treating the Supreme Court as just another bunch of partisan political hacks serving the interests of whichever major party has more SCOTUS appointees.

Sarah Isgur demonstrates to the attentive reader that they do their readers a disservice and lazily bear false witness when they treat the present court that way.

In preventing presidents from both parties from digging up decades-old statutes with vague language as the basis to expand their own power, as Trump tried to do in the tariffs case, the Court is forcing Congress to assert itself. Democrats in the past have criticized these kinds of decisions, arguing that the experts in executive-branch agencies are better positioned to address emerging crises than Congress is. But in Trump’s second term, they might now be realizing the value in limiting the power of presidents. After all, this is the logic by which the Court has stopped Trump from implementing worldwide tariffs at a whim and deploying the National Guard into cities. I predict that the justices will rule against Trump for the same reason in the upcoming birthright-citizenship case.

Her version of what I take to be her top-level theme: “Trump will be a more powerful president over a weaker presidency.” If that sounds like double-talk, then you definitely need to follow that shared link and thus brush up what I hope you knew after your high school Civics class.

Losing Patience with POTUS

Linda Greenhouse, whose Supreme Court analysis I ofter disagree with or even detest, has a very interesting comment on Chief Justice Roberts’ concise opinion in the tariffs case:

There was, however, one exception to the opinion’s conciseness: a meaty paragraph describing the roller-coaster course of Mr. Trump’s tariff regime. Here, with citations to seven separate executive orders omitted for the sake of readability, is the chief justice’s account:

Since imposing each set of tariffs, the president has issued several increases, reductions and other modifications. One month after imposing the 10 percent drug trafficking tariffs on Chinese goods, he increased the rate to 20 percent. One month later, he removed a statutory exemption for Chinese goods under $800. Less than a week after imposing the reciprocal tariffs, the president increased the rate on Chinese goods from 34 percent to 84 percent. The very next day, he increased the rate further still, to 125 percent. This brought the total effective tariff rate on most Chinese goods to 145 percent. The president has also shifted sets of goods into and out of the reciprocal tariff framework ([e.g.,] exempting from reciprocal tariffs beef, fruits, coffee, tea, spices and some fertilizers). And he has issued a variety of other adjustments ([e.g.,] extending “the suspension of heightened reciprocal tariffs” on Chinese imports).

For all the attention the decision in this case, Learning Resources v. Trump, has received, this paragraph has gone largely unremarked. I understand why; it’s unnecessary to the opinion’s argument. If, as a matter of law, the tariffs are invalid, it doesn’t matter whether they were imposed sensibly or capriciously. The paragraph is, in a word, gratuitous, something that can rarely be said about a passage in a Roberts opinion. So what is it doing there?

The answer, I think, is that the chief justice is sending a message not necessarily or not only to Mr. Trump but also to the waiting world. Something along the lines of, “People, this is what we’re dealing with.”

Bravo! Bravissimo!

Linda Greenhouse, John Roberts Is Losing Patience With Trump (emphasis added).

Shorts

  • Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing “look over there.” Randall Munroe via Maarten Boudry.
  • Nothing has misled the American people to the warped belief that the president can act like a king more than this stupid, boring, performative after-dinner speech from hell. (Bill Maher on the State of the Union address)
  • He’s already given himself a grade—“A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” (Emma Tucker, Wall Street Journal, anticipating the State of the Union address)
  • If your child tells you they will kill themselves if you do not allow them to medically transition (perhaps following a script he or she is provided on Reddit or Tumblr), take them to the hospital so they can be treated for suicidal ideation. Suicidal ideation and seeking transition are separate issues, so separate them. (Scott Newgent, Forget What Gender Activists Tell You. Here’s What Medical Transition Looks Like)
  • Should we trust the science? Sure, in theory — but only when the science in question has earned our trust through transparency and rigor. (Jesse Singal)
  • We do not go to church to understand. Rather, we go to church to meet God, and there is probably a great deal of that meeting which will have nothing to do with understanding. (Fr. Meletios Webber, Bread & Water, Wine & Oil)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Pulling out all the stops

Trigger warning: Although I have taken to posting my criticisms of Trump 2.0 elsewhere (and then offering links to those interested), this post is all criticism of Trump 2.0.

Are careful legal arguments irrelevant?

This past Friday afternoon, President Trump openly attacked the Supreme Court majority for failing to side with him in Learning Resources and praised the three dissenting conservatives by name for doing exactly that. … Vice President JD Vance also accused the SCOTUS majority of “lawlessness.”

It should be obvious to everyone, but just in case it isn’t: This is a purely nihilistic way to treat a branch of the federal government that justifies its decision in lengthy, reasoned opinions. It presumes that good-faith arguments and competing forms of legal interpretation are irrelevant in the work of the courts—and that justices picked by a given president are expected to serve as loyal supporters of anything that president (or another of the same party) might do in office, regardless of what the Constitution and/or the statutory record might say. There are six conservatives on the high court; therefore Trump should have won Learning Resources by a vote of 6-3. It’s that simple, and anything that diverges from a thoughtless display of partisan fealty is supposed to stand as transparent evidence of corruption.

In a world where most voters view the judiciary this way, there really is no place for a judicial branch at all ….

Damon Linker, Seven Observations About the Supreme Court’s Tariff Decision.

Linker’s first observation (what the court holds) is inaccurate, but I thought this excerpt from his fifth observation was pretty sharp, and as a “courts man” I wanted to pass it along.

Are we the baddies?

On a note not unrelated to the prior item:

[W]ith fleeting exceptions, every one before Trump 2.0 accepted two core principles: There is space between the president’s every wish and what the law permits. And, relatedly, executive branch lawyers should not merely rubber stamp presidential initiatives.

The system has always been imperfect because the law is often unclear and government lawyers face pressure to approve presidential action. But the basic arrangement has been that government lawyers interpret law with some independence from the president, and that some policies are blocked or modified when lawyers identify clear legal problems. Presidents embraced this arrangement because legal compliance demands it and because systemic inattention to law leads to bad policy or undesirable political or legal risk.

Until Trump 2.0, that is. The Trump administration since January 2025 has rejected this system root and branch.

First, it has sought to ensure that the senior ranks of lawyers are filled with loyalists. I don’t mean loyalists in the sense in which past administrations typically hired people supportive of the president’s program and in line with the president’s outlook and politics. I mean lawyers who are willing to do whatever the president (or a senior proxy) asks, including in legal decision making, despite what law and professional norms say.

Second, the administration has issued formal directives to eliminate lawyers’ independence judgment. The most important one says:

No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General.

Since the president is indifferent or hostile to law, and since the attorney general is a sieve for the president, this directive makes the president’s policy whims—which he thinks by definition are lawful (“I . . . have the right to do anything I want to do”)—the governing rule.

Third, the administration has fired, threatened, or sidelined lawyers in the government who express disagreement with the party line established in the White House (or who were connected to past legal actions against Trump). Every lawyer not directly subject to this regime gets the message.

Jack Goldsmith

How does this cash out in Pete Hegseth’s “Department of War”?

TopicSummary
Military Legal CultureTraditionally strong post-Vietnam; lawyers integral to lawful military conduct.
Hegseth’s ApproachSeeks to reduce lawyers’ independence; prioritizes loyalty; hostile to existing legal culture.
Trump 2.0 Legal ModelPresidential interpretations override traditional legal checks; lawyers must follow party line.
Boat StrikesLegally questionable strikes justified by dubious administration definitions of “armed conflict.”
CongressLargely inactive in oversight; failed to challenge changes weakening DOD’s legal integrity.
OutlookPossible future exposure of legal violations; need for Congressional accountability.

This is a scandal, but if it lies, as I think it does, at the intersection of Absolute Presidential Immunity and the Unitary Executive, I don’t readily see a legal remedy. Trump is immune because SCOTUS says so. His minions are immune because Unitary Executive.

So suck it up, America, and get used to us being the baddies.

Kinsley gaffes

Chief Justice John Roberts does Thomas the courtesy of a very thoughtful response to his dissent in the recent tariffs case, a response that contains what I think we might consider a “Kinsley gaffe,” i.e., stating a truth that is more than one meant to say. The chief justice writes:

Suppose for argument’s sake that Congress can delegate its tariff powers to the President as completely as Justice Thomas suggests. Even then, the question remains whether Congress has given the President the tariff authority he claims in this case—or whether the President is seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.

Chief Justice Roberts is a very careful writer, and his words here, while couched in the form of a question, are plainer than I am accustomed to reading from him or from any other member of the court: “the President is seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.” One need not be an esoteric Straussian to assume that the word whether should be omitted to access the sentence’s true meaning. 

Of course “the President is seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.” He also seeks to exploit imaginary statutory language to aggrandize his own power, and seeks to exploit phony emergencies to aggrandize his own power, to exploit imaginary Venezuelan fentanyl to aggrandize his own power, to exploit imaginary Haitian cat-eaters in Ohio to aggrandize his own power, to exploit an absolutely ignorant misunderstanding of trade deficits to aggrandize his own power, etc. The president of these United States is not an aspiring autocrat but an actual autocrat acting outside of the constitutional powers of his office in matters ranging from imposing illegal taxes on Americans to carrying out massacres of civilians in the Caribbean. Speaking with his trademark stroke victim’s diction, Trump insisted: 

I am allowed to cut off any and all trade or business with that same country. In other words, I can destroy the trade. I can destroy the country! I’m even allowed to impose a foreign country-destroying embargo. I can embargo. I can do anything I want, but I can’t charge $1. Because that’s not what it says, and that’s the way it even reads. I can do anything I wanted to do to them but can’t charge any money. So I’m allowed to destroy the country, but it can’t be a little fee.

Kevin D. Williamson

U.S. humanitarian aid

A year after the Trump administration began the dismantlement of USAID, it is initiating a new round of significant cuts to foreign assistance. This time, programs that survived the initial purge precisely because they were judged to be lifesaving are slated for cancellation.

… Each of them is classified as lifesaving according to the Trump administration’s standards.

The administration had already canceled the entire aid packages of two nations, Afghanistan and Yemen, where the State Department said terrorists were diverting resources. The new email, sent on February 12 to officials in the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, makes no such claims about the seven countries now losing all U.S. humanitarian aid: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Somalia, and Zimbabwe. Instead, according to the email, these projects are being canceled because “there is no strong nexus between the humanitarian response and U.S. national interests.”

Hana Kiros, The Trump Administration Is Ending Aid That It Says Saves Lives

Like I said, get used to us being the baddies.

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.

Friday, 1/30/26

David Brooks bids the Gray Lady farewell

I’ve long believed that there is a weird market failure in American culture. There are a lot of shows on politics, business and technology, but there are not enough on the fundamental questions of life that get addressed as part of a great liberal arts education: How do you become a better person? How do you find meaning in retirement? Does America still have a unifying national narrative? How do great nations recover from tyranny?

…

We have become a sadder, meaner and more pessimistic country. One recent historical study of American newspapers finds that public discourse is more negative now than at any time since the 1850s. Large majorities say our country is in decline, that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular people. Only 13 percent of young adults believe America is heading in the right direction. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say they do not believe in the American dream.

Loss of faith produces a belief in nothing. …

Nihilism is the mind-set that says that whatever is lower is more real … Disillusioned by life, the cynic gives himself permission to embrace brutality, saying: We won’t get fooled again. It’s dog eat dog. If we’re going to survive, we need to elect bullies to high places …

Multiple generations of students and their parents fled from the humanities and the liberal arts, driven by the belief that the prime purpose of education is to learn how to make money.

We’re abandoning our humanistic core. … As a result of technological progress and humanistic decay, life has become objectively better but subjectively worse. We have widened personal freedom but utterly failed to help people answer the question of what that freedom is for.

The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values. This privatization of morality burdened people with a task they could not possibly do, leaving them morally inarticulate and unformed. It created a naked public square where there was no broad agreement about what was true, beautiful and good. Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle disputes; it’s impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred — sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals — and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results.

It shouldn’t surprise us that, according to one Harvard survey, 58 percent of college students say they experienced no sense of “purpose or meaning” in their life in the month before being polled. It shouldn’t surprise us that people are so distrusting and demoralized. I’m haunted by an observation that Albert Camus made about his own continent 75 years ago: The men of Europe “no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man; the secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life.”

David Brooks’ farewell column for the New York Times (gift link) reprises the concerns about which he has been writing of late, which writing made him my favorite at the Times. (See below for an example.) I hope he won’t just disappear into some Yale classroom, never again to share his wisdom with the wider world.

The idea that “the prime purpose of education is to learn how to make money” has outraged me for as long as I can remember — perhaps because I succumbed to it for what seemed like an adequate personal reason (an engagement to be married in a year when I was 19), but then never got back formally to the humanities when that reason vanished. I’ve been an autodidact ever since, envious of those who studied the humanities more formally, in the give-and-take of a well-run classroom.

Devouring “the news”

Something I still aspire to

One journalist I knew (who worked for a far bigger outlet as a political correspondent) once told me that the news was the first thing she read when she opened her eyes, and the last thing she saw before falling asleep.

Perhaps this is how some journalists need to live their lives. If reporting the daily news is their calling, they must be deeply aware of what is going on. Even if it means watching and reading all the time.

But it is not for you and me, friends. This sort of news consumption will reign your emotions: it will drive you to anger, terror, annoyance, and despair. It will make you feel helpless. It will divorce you from the daily, real things happening in your own home. Take it from someone who’s lived it: knowing absolutely everything that is happening right now—whether in Iran, or Ukraine, or Washington, D.C., or Minnesota—is not your calling. It can actually serve as a dangerous distraction from the vocations of your own life, neighborhood, and community.

…

Here are some boundaries I’ve set in place for my news consumption since 2020. They have been very helpful. I pray they are helpful to you.

  • Check one site, and check it once every couple days at most. If you can, check it once a week. That’s it. Find a reliable source that you trust—preferably a site that tries not to follow a party line. It is more likely to give you the nuance partisan news outlets neglect. If the events of the hour are truly and lastingly important, they will still be talked about a week later. If a credible news outlet, one you find trustworthy and careful, isn’t talking about it, there’s a good chance you should not worry about it. This filters out a lot of momentary “noise,” and allows you to attend to what truly matters.

Gracy Olmstead.

Olmstead is the second person who tacitly or explicitly recommends what strikes me, at the gut level, as excessive disengagement: once-weekly news exposure. Alan Jacobs, who only reads the Economist, and that only when it arrives at his home, is the other.

I was raised in such a way that, by precept or example (I don’t remember the precept being vocalized), I absorbed the message that “good citizens stay on top of the news.” I don’t know that it was ever right. Maybe it was in the 1950s. But “the news” is far vaster today than it was then, and more polarized, and frequently (especially if you get social media news) insane.

All that aside, I sense that I’m spending too much time on the news because, well, I sit down for morning devotions and news around 5:30 am and often am still sitting there at 10 am. Like today, for instance, he typed at 10:00 am.

I’m retired, so it’s not like I’m robbing from my employer. God, maybe, but not, god forbid, my employer.

I’m aware of this. I think I’m making progress.

Re-orientation

Alan Jacobs sympathizes with people who are tempted to give up reading the news because it’s too depressing. But that:

is an inadequate response; it has a tendency to leave you fretful and at loose ends. 

What helps is to read works from the past that deal with questions and challenges that are structurally similar to the ones we’re facing but that emerged in a wholly different context. Right now I am reading the Psalms, especially those that deal with questions of justice and injustice, and the Hebrew prophets. Though comparisons of the current moment to the rise of Nazism often strike me as overblown, they seem increasingly apt these days, so I am returning to Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. I am also reading, perhaps surprisingly but quite appropriately and illuminatingly, Machiavelli’s Discourses. Machiavelli himself was breaking bread with the dead: reading Roman history as a way of understanding the challenges of 16th-century Florentine politics. 

This practice offers a threefold reorientation: 

  • Emotional, because it gives you a break from people who are continually trying to stoke your feelings of anger and hatred; 
  • Intellectual, because in comparing past situations with ours you get an increasingly clear sense of what about our current situation is familiar (and therefore subject to familiar remedies) and what unusual or even unique (and therefore in need of new strategies); 
  • Moral, because, as Aragorn says to Éomer, “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”

Radicalization

Ambition versus lust for domination

The 18th-century English historian Edward Wortley Montagu distinguished between ambition and the lust for domination. Ambition can be a laudable trait, since it can drive people to serve the community in order to win public admiration. The lust for domination, he wrote, is a different passion, a form of selfishness that causes us to “draw every thing to center in ourselves, which we think will enable us to gratify every other passion.”

The insatiable lust for domination, he continues “banishes all the social virtues.” The selfish tyrant attaches himself only to those others who share his selfishness, who are eager to wear the mask of perpetual lying. “His friendship and his enmity will be alike unreal, and easily convertible, if the change will serve his interest.”

…

Tacitus was especially good at describing the effect the tyrant has on the people around him. When the tyrant first takes power, there is a “rush into servitude” as great swarms of sycophants suck up to the great man. The flattery must forever escalate and grow more fawning, until every follower’s dignity is shorn away. Then comes what you might call the disappearance of the good, as morally healthy people lie low in order to survive. Meanwhile, the whole society tends to be anesthetized. The relentless flow of appalling events eventually overloads the nervous system; the rising tide of brutality, which once seemed shocking, comes to seem unremarkable.

David Brooks

History based on reality

I have suspected that part of the reason for a rightward swing in young people [blood-and-soil nationalism,, though] may be that the holocaust is not seared into their worldview and identity as it is in my generation. I was born after the war, but was acutely aware of its horrors. I specifically recall Life’s Picture History of World War II in my childhood home. A child who viewed that repeatedly, as I did, isn’t likely to forget.

When I think about the distortion of history, I remember when I was updating my history of Jerusalem and a friend rang me and said she had an “indispensable history of the Jewish people that you have to read.” She sent it over, all wrapped up. When I opened it, I was surprised to find it was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the antisemitic forgery created by the czar’s secret police. History matters, but more than ever, we need to assert that it be based on real events.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, How Holocaust Denial Became Mainstream

No natural immunity

As Harvard professor Stephen Pinker once said:

A way in which I do agree with my fellow panelist that political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population whose affiliation might be up for grabs comes from the often highly literate, highly intelligent people that gravitate to the alt-right – internet savvy, media savvy – who often are radicalized in that way – who “swallow the red pill” as the saying goes from the Matrix – when they are exposed for the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or in the New York Times or in respectable media. It’s almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity, and they are immediately infected with both an outrage that these truths are unsayable, and no defense against taking them to what we might consider rather repellent conclusions.

Aaron Renn, The Manosphere and the Church (September 2020)

Presumption of Regularity Redux

Early in Trump’s second administration, handwriting appeared on the walls of the Department of Justice and the offices Federal District Attorneys:

Integrity will not be tolerated if it requires candor to the court about weaknesses in the Administration’s position.

If you’ve ever been even a mediocre lawyer, you know that intransigence toward a judge who has figured out your case’s weakness is not wise even in the short term. In the longer term, it tells the court you can’t be trusted to be honest.

In Federal Courts, there was a longstanding “presumption of regularity” in the doings of government lawyers. That has been lost so completely that it’s no longer even talked about in the news, especially when there are new Administration theatrics to talk about.

But I’m going to talk about something related. Minneapolis is a “sanctuary city” of a fairly rigorous sort. It won’t cooperate with DHS/ICE even so modestly as to let them know when they have illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes in their custody. That’s part of Trump’s rationale, at least after-the-fact, for sending in 3000 ICE agents ostensibly to deal with welfare fraud that didn’t involve illegal immigrants but US Citizens who were once immigrants. So something smells fishy.

Those ICE agents are wearing masks. They’re behaving provocatively. The news has stories about them grabbing brown kids as they leave school, then returning them hours later because they’re here legally, and about American citizens of foreign origin being snatched and sent to hellhole foreign prisons.

The new guy in charge of ICE in Minneapolis says he’ll draw down his troops if Minneapolis will start cooperating on the transfer of immigrant prisoners to ICE control.

Can you, Minneapolis official, entertain any presumption of regularity on the part of ICE? Can you presume that American Citizens won’t be manhandled, tortured, deported by these masked goons?

iPhone, the Kleenex for wiping up ICE

The iPhone [note iPhone standing in for all smartphones, like Kleenex=facial tissue] seems to be the only serious threat to ICE’s violence. We know they feel emboldened to do virtually anything to anybody and have been granted a rhetorical “absolute immunity.” We also know that the federal government will tell big, beautiful, massive lies to justify any and all ICE abuses — before any investigations.

So Renee Good was a “deranged lunatic,” Karoline Leavitt declared. Good didn’t just try to run over an ICE officer; she did run him over, and it was unclear if he would survive his injuries, said the president. She was engaged in “domestic terrorism,” according to Stephen Miller. Equally, Alex Pretti was another “would-be assassin” who walked up to ICE officers “brandishing” a gun, trying “to murder federal agents” who, fearing a “massacre,” fired solely in self-defense. He was an “insurrectionist” rightly “put down,” in the words of one MAGA congressman. Last night, Trump repeated his description of Pretti as an “insurrectionist” and “agitator.”

…

We’ve become worried — with very good reason — about the damage phones have done to our brains, our attention span, and our democracy. But without them, the Trump lies about Minneapolis might well have prevailed.

…

In a country with a fascistic government that disseminates massive lies — ours — iPhone videos become essential to keep democracy and objective truth on life support. There are dangers, of course. Lack of context can deceive; AI has made every video’s authenticity suspect; people can subjectively interpret things any way they want. But what happened this past week in America was that, even with all those caveats, a big majority of sane Americans emerged out of the woodwork, looked at the videos, rejected tribalism, and said: Nah, ICE is lying. And ICE had to retreat.

Andrew Sullivan, Can the iPhone Save Our Democracy?

Civic hygiene: another reason to hold onto my phone while many around me are (vocally) giving up theirs. I don’t struggle with compulsive smartphone use; if you do, your mileage may vary.

Really, the only qualms I have about my phone are about the Chinese factory workers who make them — and that’s always a tough call because some jobs just are hard or boring, and the line between that and metaphorical slavery is indistinct.

The death of the magazine

But a magazine I always thought of as a relatively small group of identifiable writers, connected with some broad themes. They could disagree with each other. They had some broad agreements, creating this little thing that would have a variety of their views.

The Atlantic is now just now a machine. I mean, it has hundreds of staffers. It has hundreds of writers. … The magazine itself, of course, was directly challenged by the internet in ways that probably impossible to recreate. The fact that you had to have these writers stapled together with paper really did create a particular cultural product that cannot be done anymore.

Kevin D. Williamson

It’s not easy being a lawyer in this DoJ

Throughout the extensive litigation over the [Alien Enemies Act], in this case and others, the Trump Administration has claimed the president deserves absolute deference when he claims that an “invasion” exists. The absurd implications of this position were highlighted in yesterday’s argument, when Fifth Circuit Chief Judge Jennifer Elrod (appointed by George W. Bush) asked whether the president could invoke the AEA in response to the “British Invasion” of rock stars, like the Beatles. “What if,” she asked “the [President’s] proclamation said ‘we’re having a British invasion.’ They’re sending all these musicians over to corrupt young minds…. They’re coming over and they’re taking over all kinds of establishments.” Could courts then rule the president’s invocation of the AEA was illegal? In response, Justice Department lawyer Drew Ensign admitted the government’s position would require courts to still defer to the president, and allow him to wield the extraordinary emergency powers that can only be triggered by an actual “invasion.”

Ilya Somin, Could the President Invoke the Alien Enemies Act in Response to the “British Invasion” of Rock Stars Like the Beatles?

Felicitous sentences

  • Rachel Louise Snyder appraised the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who killed Renee Good: “The man, with his face covering, his tactical vest, his handgun and his shorn hair, was kitted up to playact in a war against unarmed everybodies. He was frailty wrapped in fatigues.” (Karla Holomon, Cary, N.C., and Molly Gaffga, Sanatoga, Pa., among many others)
  • Maureen Dowd parsed this cursed second term of Trump’s: “Trump Redux is infatuated with drone strikes and airstrikes, tumescent with the power of the world’s greatest military, hungry to devour the hemisphere in one imperialistic gulp.” (Ellen Casey, Hope, R.I., and Kate Kavanagh, Concord, Mass.)

Via Frank Bruni.

Shorts

  • I’ve always been kind of anti-populist because I know people. And the more people you know, the less of a populist you are, I think. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • From the perspective of political theory, my argument falls within the category of “political indifferentism”–that is, the notion that politics is mostly a matter “indifferent” to core human interests. (Ephraim Radner, Mortal Goods)
  • [T]he world is controlled by forces against which reason can do nothing …. [from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in aid of the aforementioned re-orientation].
  • There are many who do not know they are Fascists, but will find it out when the time comes. (Ernest Hemingway via Kevin D. Williamson)
  • Of all his weaknesses that is one of his greatest, that he’d rather hurt himself than not fight. He’d rather hurt the country than not fight. The fight is all. (Peggy Noonan)
  • Creation is the gift that invents its recipient. (Andrew Davison, likely channeling Henri de Lubac)
  • “Today,” says de Lubac, “when the essential doctrine of the unity of the human race is attacked, mocked by racism,” we should feel anguish that it is so weakly defended by Christian leaders. (James R. Wood)
  • Nihilism is the mind-set that says that whatever is lower is more real. (David Brooks in his farewell NYT column)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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.

Feast of St. Stephen …

… in the Christian East, that is. The West commemorated him yesterday.

A profitable political pairing

Two Right-coded voices, Glenn Loury and Ilya Somin, take up recent events, emblemized by Tucker Carlson’s softball interview of Nick Fuentes, and reach similar conclusions: a fundamental rift in the Right is between universalists and particularists/nationalists.

For figures such as Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and perhaps the single most influential moral philosopher within conservative intellectual circles, conservatism begins with the claims of natural law. Its founding premise is the inherent dignity of every human being—an anthropology that descends from classical philosophy, Christian theology, and the Enlightenment. For George, conservatism is first a moral project: It safeguards life, liberty, marriage, family, and religious freedom because these institutions reflect universal truths about the human person. George has spent his career articulating these principles in philosophy, public policy, and constitutional thought. His is an approach to conservatism that emphasizes the primacy of the permanent things, the universals that transcend time and place.

Opposing this universalist strand is the ascendant nationalist wing of the right—a coalition influenced by the populist energies that surged after 2016 and represented by Tucker Carlson, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, and polemicists such as John Zmirak. This faction sees conservatism less as an expression of moral philosophy than as a defense of Western civilization: a concrete culture, a historical inheritance, with its own people, faith, memories, and vulnerabilities. This conservatism is particularist rather than universalist. It begins not with abstract principles but with cultural loyalties. Whereas George begins with human dignity, Carlson begins with civilizational survival. Whereas George sees imperatives and violations of the moral law, Carlson sees a beleaguered West beset by global elites, porous borders, and cultural disintegration.

Glenn C. Loury, Tucker and the Right

[T]he root of the problem is the Trump-era shift of most of the American right towards ethno-nationalism. For reasons outlined in detail in my recent UnPopulist essay on this topic, nationalist movements are inherently prone to anti-Semitism and other forms of racial and ethnic bigotry. It is not surprising that anti-Semitism among MAGA conservatives has risen alongside nativism and bigotry towards other minority groups, such as Indian-Americans.

As I explained in the UnPopulist article, the only sure way to avoid this problem is to reject ethnic nationalism and instead recommit to the universalist principles of the American Founding, which the Heritage Foundation once claimed to stand for, but has more recently betrayed ….

Ilya Somin, Lessons of the Heritage Foundation’s Implosion

As I skimmed Lourie’s article (which I’m pleased to see in First Things, which under R.R. Reno has been leaning increasingly toward particularist nationalism), I felt a flush of shame (or was it the shiver of a near-miss?) as I looked back on my admiration of “paleoconservative” thinkers and commentators — guys who now appear to be the ancestors of today’s ethno-nationalist types.

Even now, I sense the fortress America appeal of the nationalist appeal. But when I watch ICE trying to evict putative undesirables from the fortress before we pull up the drawbridge, and see antisemitism rising among the nationalists as well, I can’t help coming down on the side of human dignity: Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

Slouching Toward Something Worse

[Ben] Shapiro originally hired [Candace] Owens at The Daily Wire, thereby helping to launch her career into the stratosphere. The fact that he now feels the need to try and drive a stake through her heart “contains the entire story of the conservative movement within it,” in the words of Substacker John Ganz.

…

[Rod] Dreher longs for Vance to take a firm stand against Fuentes and his followers. But will he?

So far, there’s no sign of it. And yes, that includes in the recent UnHerd interview, where Vance told Fuentes (in the debased public rhetoric favored by populists) to “eat shit.” The vice president made clear that his rightward volley was provoked, not by any of Fuentes’ political views, but by him insulting Vance’s (South Asian) wife. “Anyone who attacks my wife,” Vance declared, will be attacked in turn, “whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes.”

That’s right: the sitting vice president of the United States made clear he was equally inclined to rise up in defensive anger against a former White House Press Secretary from the mainstream opposition party and a man who regularly proclaims his admiration for Adolf Hitler and loathing for Jews.

I’m afraid anyone placing their hopes in Vance serving in the role of gatekeeper or force for moderation is going to be sorely disappointed.

…

It’s not clear a right-populist political movement needs policy intellectuals at all. After all, intellectuals are elites who think they sometimes know better than the elected Leader of the People. That is unacceptable. What a right-populist political movement needs, instead, is propagandists to justify what the Leader already intends to do.

Damon Linker

In case you’ve forgotten, do not trust any high-generality assessment of JD Vance by Rod Dreher. Dreher “discovered” Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, and his discovery elevated mediocre sales to stratospheric sales. He and Vance are now friends, Rod feels a personal investment in him, and Vance probably feels a debt of gratitude to Rod for launching his explosive political rise.

So Dreher is just not capable of objectivity about his friend, and that’s probably to his credit; dissecting friends is kinda reptilian — and certainly is a deviation from the conservative tendency on Jonathan Haidt’s Loyalty/betrayal moral foundations axis.

Too ad hoc to be fascist

Take the word fascism, properly applied to Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy, and to some extent beyond. The fasces were the bundles of rods carried by Roman lictors: symbols of punishment and magisterial authority, but in modern times also of a tightly unified society controlled from above, and organized in corporate form. The desire of totalitarians everywhere is to achieve harmonization, with all of society marching in military cadence under the guidance of an omnipresent government.

But the Trump administration is more interested in blowing up the state than in extending its power.

…

He is, to be sure, cruel and malicious, but unlike the others, has no real governing vision.

…

Trump himself is not Mussolini, or Hitler, or Orbán ….

Eliot A. Cohen, America Needs a Mirror, Not a Window

French Integrity

The headline read, “What It’s Like to Experience the 2016 Election as Both a Conservative and a Sex Abuse Survivor.”

Nancy French, Ghosted. As the book blurb has it, “when she was unwilling to endorse an unsuitable president, her allies turned on her and she found herself spiritually adrift, politically confused, and occupationally unemployable.”

Part of the reason for David French and Nancy French becoming personae non grata in much of the North American white Evangelical world was candor, like in the cited article Nancy wrote, and their various relatively unflinching looks at topics like sexual abuse at a very popular Evangelical summer camp for kids. I learned recently that they fairly quietly have moved out of their deep red part of Tennessee to the Chicago area (I was aware that Tennessee Evangelicalism exhibited pretty unrelenting and vocal antipaty to Frenches). That move won’t do much for Nancy’s work as a ghost-writer in Evangelical and Conservative circles, but they should at least be able to find a Church whose Christianity matches theirs (Reformed-tinged Evangelical) without the political tribalism. (That’s my read on it.)

(I have speculated that David might be on the road to Rome, too.)

The differences between their Evangelical/Reformed piety and my Orthodoxy manifests in my ill-ease with some of their takes on things (I will never again trust a David French endorsement of a movie or television series, for instance), but I’ll give them high marks for trying to act with integrity (which endears them to me despite reservations).

Quantum physics

Quantum entanglement blows my mind. How do they even find the entangled needles in the cosmic haystack to study entanglement?

That they manage to find and study them makes me sympathetic to the predictions that we’re going to figure out everything — predictions I nonetheless think are ultimately delusional.

Trying to deal with things like this has sent me back to Iain McGilchrist for a second round of mind-bending, this time via The Matter with Things.

I’m outvoted

A few days ago, I objected to the emerging cult of Charlie Kirk.

For what it’s worth, one of America’s top religious news experts, Terry Mattingly, thinks Kirk’s assassination was the top (American) religion story of the year, even higher than the selection of an American Pope (because, if I understood Mattingly, Kirk’s death liberates sinister tendencies on the political Right, like antisemitism and political violence, that Kirk was restraining).

The mixture of politics and religion in this theory makes my head hurt, and my eyes avert, but I suspect that Mattingly knows more about Kirk, and about the consequences of his assassination, than I do.

Jingoists and Patriots

The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England. If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even if the Hindoos ruled us.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Shorts

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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.

Special Political edition

I’ve mostly been relegating my political points to the “Elsewhere in Tipsyworld” section I’ve been putting in most posts. Today, in honor of the Indiana Senate doing the right thing (and the will of Hoosiers) against the wishes of the President, I bring them back for a cameo appearance.

Backlash

The Indiana Senate did us proud Thursday by rejecting a MAGA redistricting scheme to boost, they thought, the Republican majority from 7-2 to unanimity at 9 Republicans.

There’s much to hate about a norm-breaking mid-decade gerrymander, but the news and commentary coverage tends to omit (a) that norm-breaking is prima facie un-conservative; (b) that the gerrymander would have split up communities that share common concerns, such as splitting my county between two congressional districts and splitting Indianapolis into quarters; and (c) that in a “backlash year” (as 2026 looks likely to be) those 7 current “safe seats” for the GOP would be less safe because Republican voters would be spread thinner across the state.

Indeed, it was (is) my hope that if the legislature did (does) redistrict, heeding POTUS threats over Hoosier preferences, “Backlash 2026” would produce a loss of one or two Republicans in our delegation.

Pareto

  • Pareto improvement: Change benefiting at least one party without harming others.
  • Pareto punishment: Change harming at least one party without benefiting others.

The guy who had The Art of the Deal ghost-written for him knows only the second option.

(H/T Kevin D. Williamson)

I’ve long thought Trump doesn’t know anything about win-win solutions — that making the other guy lose is the only way he can feel he’s won. Williamson puts a more scholarly name on it.

A new personal best (or, likelier, worst)

11 months as president is long enough to get on everyone’s nerves—to disappoint your fans and infuriate your foes. But he’s in a fix, surrounded by mood shifts, challenges and bad signs.

His Capitol Hill base for once and famously began to kick away this summer, with loyalists breaking with him on the Jeffrey Epstein files and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on other issues as well. She’s leaving Congress but not looking like someone who lost her battles with Mr. Trump. His problem: Once someone makes a successful jailbreak, all the other prisoners know a jailbreak is possible. This changes the conversation in the prison yard. Guards are eyed differently, the warden’s mystique is diminished.

Outside Washington Mr. Trump’s base is fighting with itself. America first is saying “I’m not MAGA.” Conspiracists all over: “Israel killed Charlie.” The assassination of Charlie Kirk looks increasingly like an epochal event. Did he understand how much he was holding together the Trumpian right? Without the force of his mediating presence they are cracking up.

I think the world of Peggy Noonan (shared link). She’s both articulate and wise. I’m forever reading her Friday WSJ column and feeling affirmed in what I’d been feeling but hadn’t slowed down to articulate.

But this!? Charlie Kirk was the glue holding America together!? Even just holding the Trumpian right together? It seems impossible.

But a lot of people can’t stop talking about Kirk.

And after this went to press, Indiana’s Senate (40 Republicans and 10 Democrats) rejected the redistricting Trump was demanding (and in support of which his hoodlum minions were terrorizing legislators) by a vote of 31-19.

It lost even before you count the ten Democrats!

(Oddly, Turning Point Action, one of Kirk’s affiliate organizations, was among those pronouncing primary doom on Republicans who rejected the new maps.)

This may set a new personal record for me not grokking what’s going on. And I can’t even say it’s an epiphany because my mind and my gut both reject the idea. I’m a guy with a fork in a soup world, I guess.

But then she turns back into articulate, wise Peggy:

Percolating below, unseen, is the price you pay in time for success. The president’s border triumph will likely weaken his and MAGA’s political position. He shut down illegal immigration on the southern border, which had been more or less open for decades. But it was anger at illegal immigration that kept his base cleaved to him and allied with each other. Remove the issue that made you, and you can no longer use it to gain votes or maintain unity.

This is the paradox of politics: Every time you solve a major problem, you’re removing a weapon from your political arsenal.

What happens when you lose your great issue? What happens when all that remains of that issue is its least popular aspect? Immigration remains in the news only because of brutal deportation practices. It isn’t “build the wall” anymore; it’s “Don’t arrest the poor guy working the line in a second job at the chicken-processing plant.” Americans don’t want that guy thrown out. The longer the deportations continue, the more unpopular and damaging to the administration they will become.

Shorts

  • The Indiana redistricting vote strikes me as a sort of political gag reflex. (Nick Catoggio)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Promotion

I usually put these in my footers at the end of blogs, but they seem worth elevating today:

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan. Hoosiers let their State Senators know that they didn’t want a redistricting. They had many good reasons, whether or not they articulated them. They served as gatekeepers, Trump as a gate crasher.

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. “Demonic Democrats” was the vibe of the push for redistricting.

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.

Lil’ Nicky & The Groypers

Much ink has been spilled on the softball interview of Groyper-in-Chief Nick Fuentes by what-the-hell-do-you-call-him-these-days Tucker Carlson.

This post is entirely about that from various perspectives. If you’ve had enough of that, wait for my next post, coming soon.

Grifter?

I find it impossible to defend [him] against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclastic temperament.

William F. Buckley, said or written about Pat Buchanan.

Buckley was perhaps the foremost foe of antisemitism in conservative ranks from the 60s until his death.

There’s unfortunately a fresh need today for some policing of the ranks, but by whom, and how? Kevin D. Williamson sees the problem:

The times being what they are—and what they are is poisoned by social media, which has taken down all of the fences that once stood around mass imbecility—there is now another kind of antisemitism to take into account: digital, entrepreneurial antisemitism. There is a market for antisemitism, and there are careers to be had servicing that market. Nick Fuentes, who has recently been in the news, is an entrepreneurial antisemite. Tucker Carlson is another.

(Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation is a fool and a coward who wants to bank the profits of that antisemitism without taking any moral responsibility for it. With apologies to my friends who will be hurt by this: It is impossible for any self-respecting person to be associated with his Heritage Foundation.)

Kevin D. Williamson, The Antisemitism Grift.

“But isn’t that cancel culture?”, I seem to hear. Not according to a workable definition that I’m pretty sure comes from Williamson or his colleague Nick Catoggio. Paraphrasing, “Cancel culture” is an attempt to enforce a not-yet-existent consensus, to narrow the Overton Window; enforcing an existing consensus, like those against the Nazis and, yes, antisemitism, doesn’t qualify.

Charlie Kirk’s Successor?

I was disinclined to believe that Fuentes Is Becoming Charlie Kirk’s Successor, the explicit thesis of Michelle Goldberg’s Wednesday opinion piece at the New York Times.

Goldberg got my attention. As I suggested, it’s uncertain that anyone on the Right today has the stature and the will to decree a cordon sanitaire against the likes of Fuentes. This is no substitute for reading her whole piece, but I thought it framed the problem well:

Kirk, who came of age in the pre-Trump conservative movement, was still sometimes willing to police boundaries. But in the wake of his killing, there’s surprisingly little sense on the right that that part of his legacy should be upheld. Rather, prominent voices insist that Kirk’s murder necessitates the final loosening of all remaining restraints. “I cannot ‘unite’ with the left because they want me dead,” the influential podcaster Matt Walsh posted after Kirk’s death. “But I will unite with anyone on the right.”

Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard law professor who has helped create the intellectual foundation for the post-liberal right, put it more elegantly this weekend, as the fight over Carlson, Fuentes and Roberts roiled conservatives. “History records many cases in which cities fell to siege because, even with the enemy at the very gates, factions within the city could not put aside their mutual struggle for domination,” he wrote on social media. Lest there be any doubt about which factions he was scolding, he made it clear in a subsequent post: “I’ll be resolutely ignoring the views of those who profess a certain ‘conservatism’ but who have never actually challenged the liberal consensus on anything that might endanger their careers.”

Vermeule is a cultivated man who, as Field writes, is part of a movement that “thinks it has a monopoly on things like ‘the true, the good and the beautiful.’” Yet however lofty his rhetoric, its moral logic leads inexorably to Groyperism, and the elevation of Fuentes, Kirk’s foe, into his successor.

(Italics added)

Elsewhere in the Times, Ross Douthat chimes in on how to gatekeep against antisemitism in a digital age, with the case of Fuentes front and center. That’s an important question, but it feels to me as if Ross is a little more than a helpful start. For now, I can only heartily endorse two partial solutions:

  • Whatever share of Capitol Hill interns or think tank employees are actually Fuentes sympathizers, the institutional right must not permit radicalized junior staffers to steamroll or puppeteer their nominal superiors.
  • Create a zone where normal criticism of Israeli strategy is possible but clearly distinguish those normal debates from paranoid and antisemitic criticism.

Heritage Foundation (and the “intellectual energy” on the Right)

As for Kevin Roberts, can you guess how eager he’s been to have a hard conversation about January 6? I bet you can.

His tenure at Heritage mirrors the wider right’s hostility to dissent. A few days ago, Jonah Goldberg reminded us that Roberts’ organization is unusual among think tanks in insisting on a “one voice” policy that requires staff to “always publicly advocate for a single, unified position.” That is, not coincidentally, also how Donald Trump runs the GOP, ruthlessly “canceling” any party official who challenges his policies by threatening to fire them or primary them out of their job. But message discipline in a political party, particularly a highly authoritarian one, is to be expected.

In a think tank, whose experts should be having all sorts of interesting disagreements over law and policy, it’s downright weird. It should welcome illuminating “hard conversations” among its employees, and usually think tanks do—except for the Heritage Foundation, whose highest purpose under Roberts appears to be supplying ideological cover for Republicans’ drift toward Peronism.

Nick Catoggio.

Catoggio continues on the Right more generally:

[I]t’s no longer the Buckleyites who supply the right’s intellectual energy, such as it is. It’s postliberals like Adrian Vermeule, Curtis Yarvin, and Patrick Deneen. Carl Schmitt, not Antonin Scalia, is in vogue among new right legal thinkers. That’s what I meant when I said that Roberts’ quote is preposterous for more than one reason: When he calls on the conservative movement to have hard conversations about its direction, he’s implying that a “conservative” movement still meaningfully exists and that it retains the power to cancel postliberals if it so chooses.

It doesn’t. Rather the opposite: As Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Jeff Flake, and a gajillion other Reaganites might tell you, all of the canceling being done in the modern GOP is of conservatives by ascendant postliberals.

Finally, the “one voice” of Heritage Foundation checks in at the Wall Street Journal:

Your editorial “The New Right’s New Antisemites” (Nov. 3) gives the impression that the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, is an apologist for anti-Jewish hate or, worse, a promoter of it. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

In the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Heritage hosted one of the first public events to condemn the terrorism and the blatant antisemitism it unleashed. Shortly thereafter we created the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism to help coordinate the efforts of like-minded organizations.

In October 2024, we launched Project Esther, an initiative to combat antisemitism in the U.S. through legal and legislative remedies. This effort has found allies across the political spectrum and raised awareness among the general public and the Trump administration of the immediate threat that left-wing antisemitism poses to America’s Jews and the U.S.

Months later I published my book, “The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel and America Can Win,” a large portion of which is dedicated to this issue. Our three nonresident fellows live in Israel. The Davis Institute for National Security, which I lead, focuses on defeating antisemitism, as do our colleagues in the domestic-policy and legal departments.

Your editorial ignores this record, none of which would have been possible without the direct and enthusiastic support of Mr. Roberts. Many who have criticized him in recent days, moreover, have ignored his admission that his video supporting Tucker Carlson was a mistake that didn’t clearly articulate the institution’s rebuke of Holocaust deniers and antisemitism. Mr. Roberts has always given us the necessary resources to fulfil our mission and has participated in the work himself.

He isn’t antisemitic; nor does he tolerate anyone who is. Mr. Roberts is instead leading the conservative charge against this ancient bigotry: an insidious cancer that has degraded once-great societies and can’t be allowed to spread in America. All of us at Heritage look forward to continuing this fight under his direction.

Victoria Coates
Heritage Foundation

(Bold added)

UPDATE: The National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism has severed its ties to Heritage Foundation.

My thoughts

The absence of anyone with the stature to read Fuentes and/or Carlson out of the “conservative movement” suggests that Catoggio is right: the intellectual energy on the Right is now (currently?) postliberal, and if anyone is cancelled, it’s the “conservative movement” itself. Adrian Vermeule, for instance, has contemned any “conservative” who isn’t sufficiently bloody-minded:

History records many cases in which cities fell to siege because, even with the enemy at the very gates, factions within the city could not put aside their mutual struggle for domination,” he wrote on social media. Lest there be any doubt about which factions he was scolding, he made it clear in a subsequent post: “I’ll be resolutely ignoring the views of those who profess a certain ‘conservatism’ but who have never actually challenged the liberal consensus on anything that might endanger their careers.

That is very grim. I remain with the true conservatives, though I’ve finally, I think, gotten a handle on the grievances that gave rise to Trump and MAGA. Grievances generally don’t build anything worthwhile.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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.

Never say Never

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

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

The Calvinball Presidency

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

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

Inspectors General

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

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

The Morning Dispatch

Algorithms

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

Peggy Noonan, The Embarrassing Pete Hegseth.

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

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

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

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

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

Grooming codes and Flag Codes

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

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

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

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

…

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

Mau-mauing the NFL

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

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

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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.

From grim to grimmer

Bummer

I could have filled this post with many clippings colorfully describing how bad things are. I’ve done it before and I’ll probably do it again. That’s just the kind of guy I am: melancholic.

But it just seems too much this week. I’m having trouble identifying anything going right in the USA.

I came of age in the 60s, and although I’ve been expecting our collapse for a long time, the manner and speed of the seeming collapse are a surprise.

I’ll summarize what’s a bit unsettling, even for me, thus:

  • We are moving rapidly from American hegemony to a multipolar world.
  • The very best President imaginable couldn’t stop, but could at best slow, our relative decline.
  • The very best President imaginable wouldn’t even run because of the politics of personal destruction.
  • But a toxic narcissist, jilted by voters in 2020, would run again in 2024 on a platform of vengeance. “Vengeance” turned out to mean turning America into a “shithole country.” (That will teach us!)
  • The Mainstream media are whistling past the cemetery as all this goes down.
  • UPDATE: Charlie Kirk, who it seems was more consequential than I had realized, gunned down Wednesday. I wrote everything in this post, other than this bullet point, before the murder of young Kirk. I knew little about him. My first impression was unfavorable because he was associated with Jerry Falwell, Jr. at the time that Falwell’s Potemkin Piety was collapsing. Thereafter? Well, I’m about 50 years older than his target demographic. (My wife didn’t even know who he was.) I’ve read a lot about him this morning, but the most interesting observation I read was too frank for this raw moment, so I’ll let you ferret out your own information if you care to.

With that off my chest, I’ll try to edify y’all for a while.

Repelled by conservatism, but not a liberal

Conservatism, as you know, is a complete mess in America right now. But reading conservative authors like Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson does give you an adequate appreciation for the power of nonmaterial forces — culture, moral norms, traditions, religious ideals, personal responsibility and community cohesion.

…

I’ve been driven away from the right over the past decade, but I can’t join the left because I just don’t think that tradition of thought grasps reality in all its fullness. I wish both right and left could embrace the more complex truth that the neocon Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed in his famous maxim: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture and save it from itself.”

David Brooks, Why I Am Not a Liberal. This pretty clearly was one of the ten best things I’ll see in the New York Times this month, so that’s one of my gift links.

Breakneck: what you get in an engineered society

Publishers have figured out how to get limelight for their new titles, and one new title that’s deservedly getting a lot is Dan Wang’s Breakneck, about the astonishing ascendancy of China.

For a solid interview with Dan Wang (interviewer Ross Douthat), click this shared link: This Is Why America Is Losing to China.

Wang attributes this in substantial part to the relative influence of engineers in China versus that of lawyers in the USA. Engineers build; lawyers obstruct.

I find that somewhat plausible. But I write this precis not as an uncritical defense of my former profession, but to call attention to where engineered China went off the rails: trying to engineer China’s demographics led to over 300,000,000 abortions, over 100,000,000 sterilizations, and a population that’s skewed toward males.

That is, in my experience of engineers, classic engineering myopia. China could have benefitted from a bit more rule of law, less engineering “logic.”

What’s “fair” got to do with it?

There are people who get outraged when a court — especially the Supreme Court — impose or affirm what seems like an “unfair” result.

The scare-quote is not because fairness is a fantasy. It’s there because courts’ “unfair” decisions are mostly decisions to follow the law despite any countervailing sense of fairness.

And I approve of that approach. Consider: what is truly “fair” about denying a win to a guy who followed all the legal rules and then got sued by a guy who ignored the rules but somehow feels cheated (and has a good lawyer to sell his sob story)?

Liberalism without illusions

William A. Galston, a blast from the Clintonian past, has a wonderful article in Democracy Journal. I summarize, but I fully intend to read it several more times.

My summary:

Liberal democracy (a/k/a classical liberalism) has some inherent weaknesses:

  1. Because liberal democracy restrains majorities and gives even small minorities a say, it slows the achievement of goals that majorities support. In other words, it requires more patience than many possess.
  2. Liberal democracy requires tolerance for minority views and ways of life to which many citizens are deeply opposed.
  3. Liberal democracy requires a distinction between civic identity and personal or group identity.
  4. Liberal democracy requires compromise.

Liberals (left-liberals, or “liberals” in the modern pejorative sense) complicate these weaknesses with characteristic illusions:

  1. Myopic materialism: the belief, especially pervasive among elites, that economic issues are the real issues and that cultural issues are diversionary, deliberately heightened by unscrupulous leaders to gain support for their anti-liberal agendas.
  2. Parochialism. Yes, transnationalism is the parochialism of elites, because most people in advanced democracies as well as “developing” nations value particular attachments—to local communities and to the nation, to friends and family and compatriots.
  3. Naivete about the course of human events and the possibilities of human nature.

Credit for my discovery of this article goes to Rod Dreher.

Broken Windows

Okay, everyone is writing about it, and Trump’s vehement denials and $10 Billion lawsuit against Dow Jones makes it newsworthy that there’s now potent corroboration of Dow Jones’ (via the Wall Street Journal) claim about Trump’s hand-rendered birthday card for ephebophile Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday. But I can’t say anything smarter than this:

From what I can tell, in fact, there’s no actual theory underlying the impromptu new conspiracy theory that the letter was forged. No one can explain how or why a birthday message purporting to be from Trump to one of his close associates would have been doctored for a privately published book compiled in 2003. Did time-travelers from the present day fake the letter and plant it knowing that it would come out someday and damage him—after he’d already been elected president twice?

If so, their plot failed. This isn’t going to damage him. It’s just another broken window in a neighborhood that’s full of them.

…

Andrew Egger explains at The Bulwark:

In a way, Donald Trump and his allies have spent their entire political lives preparing for this moment. The whole miserable decade of “alternative facts,” of witch hunts, of flooding the zone with sh-t—it all amounted to a long, powerful education for his base. It’s a training in a certain kind of zen meditation, in which stories damaging to Trump pass from the eyes and ears directly out of the body without ever intersecting the brain. By now, the base has gotten in their 10,000 hours. They’ve become masters of the craft. They can perform all sorts of remarkable feats—the media-cope equivalent of lying on beds of nails while cinderblocks are smashed on their chests. These cinderblocks, they whisper serenely, are just a liberal plot. If I pay attention, the Democrats win.

…

The Epstein scandal is the “final boss” of Trump scandals, the supreme test of reality-defying propaganda skills that MAGA has acquired over the course of 10 years. The crime involved, pedophilia, is one of their obsessions; the villain, Jeffrey Epstein, is a lead character in their hysteria about an elite child-abuse cabal; yet the evidence continues to mount that their own messiah, Donald Trump, knew what was happening as it happened and—at best—did nothing to stop it. It’s like the Access Hollywood scandal but with the spin difficulty dialed up by a factor of 10. 

…

Think of American government as a big neighborhood. The neighborhood has started to go to hell. Its residents are adjusting their expectations for it accordingly.

Bad things happen when neighborhoods start to go to hell. As public evidence of minor disorder and neglect rises, crime gets worse. That’s the “broken windows” theory of criminology—the idea that letting lesser offenses like window-breaking go unpunished signals to good guys and bad guys alike that laws won’t be enforced. Criminals respond by escalating to more serious offenses and law-abiding locals become fatalistic or apathetic.

Trump has broken a lot of windows in our government. How can we expect Americans to maintain the same expectations for civic order that they used to have as the proverbial neighborhood falls into disrepair?

Nick Catoggio.

Somehow, this seemed like the time to resurrect an item I only recently deleted from my footer:

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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 mediu

New World Order

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

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

Then, a day later, Trump exerted his charm:

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

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

John Ellis channels the Financial Times:

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

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

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

Nick Catoggio

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.