Tag: Politics

Impeach Trump

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

Missing a functioning democracy

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

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

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

Seems like another planet, doesn’t it?

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

Today, we have precisely none of the above.

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

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

Andrew Sullivan

Not reassuring

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politics as Ritual Humiliation

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

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

Kevin D. Williamson

The bellicose through-line from neocons to Trump

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

…

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

…

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

Ross Douthat

Barbarism nukes nihilism

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

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

His own morality

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

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

Jack Goldsmith, Trump, Iran, Nuclear Weapons.

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

Funnies

The “targeted strike” in Iran

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

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

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

(Alan Jacobs, political Mottramism)

Obituaries

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

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

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

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

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

David Frum

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Thursday, March 5

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

Truth and Facticity

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

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

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

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

Iran war

My spirit animal writes on Iran

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

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

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

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

An explanation of the war

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

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

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

The Free Press and The Dispatch

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

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

Sissy boys

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s right, I’m not from Texas

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

Thumbnail Geek autobiography

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

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

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

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

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

(Wonder, Stevie, Superstition, 1972)

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

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

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

Unitary Executives

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

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

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

Routed

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

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

And this from the New York Times Editorial Board:

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

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

Pre-publication “update”: maybe not.

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Monday March 2

A keeper

Damon Linker discusses (shared link) the debates among Right illiberals, not nut-picking but citing scholars and a Notre Dame Republican student group.

Then he puts his finger on the key question they disagree about:

The question is whether the country today is actually facing a threat dire enough to justify or excuse otherwise unjustifiable or inexcusable acts. Are we facing a genuine threat to our continued existence as a country? Determining the answer boils down to judgment.

Starting at least with Michael Anton’s 2016 “Flight 93 Election” essay, there are plenty on the right excusing unjustifiable or inexcusable acts on the premise that the Democrats are an “existential threat.” I don’t believe them, and if I did it’s no longer clear to me that I would take the illiberal Right’s side in the fight. There’s a lot of evidence that they’re a bigger threat than the Democrats.

I plan to revisit Linker’s essay at least once; I’m not sure I’ve sucked all the juice from it yet.

The first thing the communists do when they take over is to systematize snitching

When I was living, fairly briefly, in Oklahoma 50 years ago, we heard not only the usual “first thing the communists do when they take over is,” but an interesting variant.

The usual, of course, was “outlaw guns.” The variant was “outlaw cock-fighting.” I’m not kidding. I do not claim that the variant was common or held by a substantial number of Okies, but it was there.

The marks of authoritarianism and totalitarianism are debated, but I suggest that one of them is recruiting people to snitch on each other even about trivial deviations from the government’s line. Kids reporting to teachers naughty things their parents or siblings said, for instance.

Making due allowance for his youth at the time and signs of subsequent growth, it nevertheless is an authoritarian blot on the late Charlie Kirk’s legacy that one of his early Turning Point USA initiatives was Professor Watch, a website for student to snitch on their professors.

If I were more obsessive about the dangers from MAGAworld, I would keep a list of the dubious stuff TPUSA has done since Kirk’s death, like the All-American Halftime Show in 2026. (That, at least, was not clearly authoritarian, but it was petty as hell.)

For now, suffice that one of TPUSA’s earliest initiatives was a tool of authoritarian wannabes.

Beating a dead(ish) horse

Wokeness is often thought to be a form of virtue signalling.  This is subtly wrong, for it is more often a kind of status signalling.  The wokist wants to be seen as belonging to “the right kind of people.”  He drapes himself with wokeness the same way that in another day and age people paraded their memberships in prestigious clubs, or that today they flaunt the brands and styles of shoes and clothing that they wear.  If ethics comes into the matter at all, it comes in not via the thought “I would never do that,” but via the thought “I’m not the kind of person who would do that.”  You know, the deplorables.

I am not suggesting that such a person is aware of his craving for status.  Very few people are fully aware of their own motives.  In a society which professes to believe in equality, and pretends to despise snobbery, it is hard for a snob who knows he is a snob to think well of himself; therefore he has to convince himself that he isn’t a snob.  With its faux concern for The People (most of whom have no interest whatsoever in the cause of woke), wokeness is a convenient way to do that.  My very expensive jeans must have holes in them.

J Budziszewski

Budziszewski’s not wrong, but a parallel takedown of MAGA vice-signallers couldn’t be all that hard. I’m not a pas d’ennemis á droite kind of guy, but I’m not going to take the time to write it — only to point out that the Right has unclean hands of its own. Do you have eyes to see that or are you blinkered?

We need to “get out” more

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

C.S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time, from Weight of Glory

Incommensurable

[O]ne is compelled to admire a man of such verbal agility as not only to conceal from his readers and audiences the shallowness of his own thought, but to persuade them that in admiring his work they were giving evidence of their own intelligence as well. I do not say that Shaw could have succeeded alone, without the more plodding and laborious minds with which he associated himself; but by persuading lowbrows that they were high-brows and that high-brows must be Socialist, he contributed greatly to the prestige of Socialism. But between the influence of a Bernard Shaw or an H.G. Wells, and the influence of a Coleridge or a Newman, I can conceive no common scale of measurement.

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 on George Bernard Shaw, inter alia.

Manipulation in a good cause

Ten years in, and Democrats still don’t know how to handle Donald Trump. He used them as foils and they allowed it, sitting there snarling, at points screaming. Part of how to handle him is if he tries to manipulate you into doing the right thing—if, for instance, he challenges you to stand in respect for a mother mourning the murder of her daughter—you put aside that you’re being manipulated and stand. Because it is right to show human sympathy and regard. The thing to do is look better than Mr. Trump, not worse. You say: My base demands coldness. Then get a new base. If you can’t, leave before you are reduced to a soulless husk of the eager, happy person who walked into that chamber a decade ago.

Peggy Noonan, The Oprah State of the Union.

The same advice could and should be given to Republicans when their one-man “base” in the White House demands dishonor of them.

Regime Change

As Americans, we do not need regime change abroad; we need it at home. We must escape the ghastly bloodlust and other demonic impulses of the Democratic and Republican parties. Men and women of goodwill must unite in solidarity to build an alternative to evil.

Jack Ternan, Chair of the National Committee of the American Solidarity Party

Shorts

  • Two tongue-in-cheek descriptions of The Bulwark: “Pro market, anti-polio”; “The capitalist wing of Antifa.”
  • “…preposterously self-satisfied, preternaturally nasty and profoundly delusional …” (Frank Bruni’s top-line characterization of Trump’s 2026 SOTU)
  • I don’t know who coined the expression “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining,” but it fits the overall tone of the speech. (Bret Stephens’ top-line characterization of Trump’s 2026 SOTU)
  • That’s what’s nice about politics, Yevgeny: anything that makes people believe in power actually increases that power. (Giuliano da Empoli and Willard Wood, The Wizard of the Kremlin.)
  • No, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s much worse—it’s a consensus. (R.R. Reno on “the progressive takeover of higher education … or DEI’s reign over corporate America”)

I had another few items, but after the USA and Israel attached Iran, they could have been too easily misunderstood.

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.

February 23, 2026

The Continuing Battle of Minneapolis

Many of the people abducted by the government [in Minneapolis/St. Paul] are taken without cause. When the government runs out of excuses to hold them, or is forced to release them by the courts, they send them out the front door of the Whipple Building, often in the dead of night. Alone. No cell phone. No jacket. In the freezing cold and snow.

A civic group called Haven Watch now stands guard at Whipple around the clock so that former prisoners of the regime do not freeze to death after release. While we were at Whipple talking to observers, a mother and two small children emerged from the building. They had nothing with them other than the clothes on their backs. It was about 15 degrees, the day after an unexpected snow. The three small humans haltingly made their way across the ice and slush in the road. Someone from Haven Watch met them and ushered them into a warm car.

I ask you: What do you think would have happened to this woman and her children had the United States government sent them into the cold and snow, far from taxis or transport, with no way of contacting anyone for help?

What do you think would have become of these three vulnerable human beings at the hands of our government had the people of Minnesota not stepped in to care for them?

This is Anne Frank territory; the stuff of the Stasi and East Germany, or Kosovo and Sarajevo. And the only way it ends is with victory for the regime or a reckoning for all those who waged this war against America.

However alarmed you are, it’s not enough.

Jonathan V. Last, What I Saw at the Battle of Minneapolis

The Tariff Decision

The Tariff decision in wider context

Put on your thinking cap for this one; it’s fairly heavy going for someone who doesn’t follow the Supreme Court’s doings:

3. A very significant aspect of the Chief Justice’s MQD [Major Questions Doctrine] analysis is that three conservative justices embraced it to rule against President Trump’s signature policy. And they did so in the most difficult possible context, with an issue involving national security and foreign affairs. This is a rebuttal to those who have claimed that the Court, or at least those three justices, invoke the doctrine opportunistically and politically to hurt Democratic presidents. And I think it signals more clearly than ever that, going forward, this Court is going to view broad delegations of statutory authority to a president to act, and/or extravagant presidential interpretations of authorizations to act, with skepticism. The three justices firmly committed here to the MQD can (if they wish) ensure that outcome in a case of just about any political configuration.

To the extent this is true, it is a hugely important complement to the Court’s emerging broad view of the unitary executive. Put another way, it is a vindication of Sarah Isgur’s view that the tradeoff on the Court for enhancing vertical unitary presidential control is “for the court to rein in Congress’s bad habit of delegating vast and vague powers to the executive branch,” including through MQD. It also puts in a better light the Court’s interim orders [the so-called “shadow docket”] to date in Trump 2.0, a large number of which, due to the application strategy of the Solicitor General, involved issues of vertical control. The tariff opinion gives the lie to the notion that the Court is in the bag for the president and also makes its approach to issues of presidential power in Trump 2.0 both clearer and more nuanced.

Jack Goldsmith

Let’s see if I can make clearer (and broader) sense of that; Goldsmith, after all, is writing mostly for lawyerly types:

  1. As a preliminary matter, don’t worry about what the Major Question Doctrine is; it really didn’t control the outcome here as three of six justices voted to strike down the tariffs without it. (I don’t think they were wrong.)
  2. SCOTUS here signaled that Congress is going to have to clearly delegate sweeping powers to the Executive Branch for the court to uphold the Executive’s use of those powers.
  3. Combine that with the “vertical unitary executive” and you’ve got the President (including future Presidents) in almost absolute control of the Executive Branch but, importantly, an Executive Branch that has been slimmed down in the powers it lawfully wields. That’s Sarah Isgur’s take anyway.
  4. The administration has a very strong record in the Court because the Solicitor General has made sure that the adverse lower-court decisions (there are hundreds) they appeal are very likely winners, often under the “Unified Executive” theory. (i.e, If you don’t appeal losers, you’re likely to have a good appellate win record.)
  5. Contrary to almost every snot-nosed Democrat and crypto-Democrat in the commentariat, this Supreme Court is not in Trump’s pocket, dammit!

Trump’s tariff tantrum

Note that no one is even pretending that Trump’s new 15 percent tariffs for the entire world are being imposed for anything resembling legitimate economic reason. The president is angry about the Supreme Court defeat, and he wants to show members of the court’s majority that they can’t constrain him for long—and show the rest of the country and the world that he’s still The Boss. That’s it. That’s the entirety of the justification.

Trump wants to wield absolute, arbitrary power, because doing so allows him to project strength that he can deploy at will to reward friends, harm enemies, and exact monetary concessions (in the form of bribes and kickbacks from domestic and foreign companies and governments around the world). That is what all of this tariff nonsense has always been about. Tariffs in the abstract can play a role in helping to shape a country’s trade policy—but not when they are imposed in a capricious way and without even an elementary understanding of international economics. I, for one, would love to see the courts internalize the presumption of Trumpian bad will in their assessment of future cases involving tariffs—and hopefully in other areas of policymaking as well.

Damon Linker

I’m with Linker up to that last sentence, and I might even go along with it if by “internalize” he means “assume but do not say it out loud.” It’s as if Linker is not just abandoning the “presumption of regularity” but reversing it to a “presumption of irregularity.”

More Linker:

Learning Resources dealt the Trump administration a blow. But within hours, the president had pivoted to a different way of justifying its efforts to impose tariffs, requiring another round of slow-ball court review. This shows, I think, that when a president is determined to assert power, the judiciary has very limited powers at its disposal even if the president refrains from openly defying its decisions. The best it can do is fight the executive to a draw that requires the president to change tactics and try again by other means.

In order to truly check the power of a wayward executive, the courts need to be joined in the fight by Congress. Our system presumes each branch will fight jealously in defense of its institutional prerogatives. When that ceases to happen, the system is hobbled. Today, it only happens when Congress and the presidency are held by different parties. That’s bad. And until it changes, stopping the right by any means other than beating it in an election may prove impossible.

This is especially true because Trump has no desire whatsoever to seek congressional approval for specific tariffs. That’s what a president would do if his trade policies were motivated primarily by economic considerations. But as I noted above, Trump’s trade policies are motivated by the desire to use tariffs to boss countries and conglomerates around with an eye to winning concessions along with monetary rewards for himself and his family. Involving Congress in the process would make this kind of personalized imposition of rewards and punishments for friends and enemies much more cumbersome and therefore ineffective. So Trump simply won’t do it.

What the Supreme Court does

The justices did not determine whether or how to issue refunds for the duties.

(TMD).

It reflects civic ignorance that media have to write things like that.

SCOTUS is not an omniscient über-government. It’s not a second legislature setting up detailed mechanisms.

It decides issues. The issue decided Friday was whether IEPPA authorized tariffs. Yeah, this only kicks the ball down the road, but it wouldn’t be right or prudent for SCOTUS to try to negate all tariffs under all imaginable statutory or constitutional authorities.

If you want to avoid chaos, do not elect chaos agents – and don’t expect the courts to bail you out if you do.

They may well succeed

The America I love is not a stretch of soil or a place where the people of my blood lived and died. It’s a set of impudent and improbable goals: the rule of law and equality before it, liberty, freedom of speech and conscience, decency. We have always fallen short of them and always will, but we wrote them down and decided to dedicate ourselves to pursuing them. That’s worth something.

The people I despise, and who despise me, believe America’s values and goals are blood, soil, swagger, and an insipid and arrogant conformity. They are the values of bullies and their sycophants. They may prevail. There’s no promise they will not.

Ken White (Popehat), The Fourth of July, Rethought

Cozy Girls

Now for something cozier

There is a certain kind of person, usually self-styled as clear-eyed, hard-headed, and immune to trends, who regards the cozy girl lifestyle with undisguised contempt. She sees cozy culture as unserious, quiescent, and politically regressive. She insists that the things celebrated by cozy girls are so celebrated because they replicate the preferences of the wealthy, of the bourgieosie. … Some of these criticism have a little merit, but I find myself entirely unable to join in that contempt. In a winner-take-all society where ordinary life has been systematically stripped of dignity, the turn toward “cozy” is less a retreat from reality into the past and more a rational adaptation to the unhappy present.

…

You’ve heard this song from me before many times: we live in an era in which the range of lives publicly regarded as worthy of living has contracted almost to nothing. Our culture confers esteem on a vanishingly small number of roles, and those roles are largely defined by being visible – that is to say, by attracting public attention, of which there is a necessarily finite supply. … Everything else – teacher! paralegal! office manager! dental hygienist! retail supervisor! random white collar office email job that’s basically fine! – is flattened into an undifferentiated gray. These are necessary roles, some of them pay well, but they certainly aren’t glamorous ones, and young Americans seem increasingly convinced that a life that doesn’t inspire envy among others – when broadcast online, naturally – isn’t one worth living.

… [A]lmost everyone who tries to get rich quick will fail, but everyone can choose to be cozy.

The genius of the cozy aesthetic is that it identifies sources of pleasure that are widely accessible and modest and treats them as inherently worthy of serious cultivation: a soft sweater, a well-made cup of tea, a public library card, a crockpot recipe that reliably produces something warm and nourishing, a Saturday morning with nowhere to be. You may find any one or all of these more or less attractive based on your own preferences, but whatever they are, they’re not signifiers of elite achievement, they’re all available in low-cost forms, and they’re all reliable and attainable. They’re not blue-check credentials, they don’t require venture capital or viral reach, and you don’t need to chew your fingernails waiting for the wheel to spin to see if you’ve won them. These simple pleasures are, instead, elements of an ordinary life lived with intention.

Freddie DeBoer, Cozy Girl Lifestyle is a Rational Response to a Winner-Take-All Culture (Shared link)

Shorts

  • When people think you can’t tell the difference between a man and woman, they’re not going to buy anything else you say. (Andrew Sullivan, who doggedly keeps pointing out that L, G and B have very little in common with T, let alone with QIA2S+++.)
  • [T]his Congress is for Trump what the Duma is for Putin: an echo-chamber of irrelevance and submission. (Andrew Sullivan)
  • Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. (W.H. Auden)
  • We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand. (Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire) So much for Chesterton’s Fence.
  • Alan Jacobs contrasts modern and classic political invective.

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

February 16, 2026

Corriging the incorrigible

For some years now, I’ve been tearing my hair out over the faddish dogmas of adolescent gender dysphoria — the dogmas that treated as axiomatic the appropriateness of medical and surgical interventions for kids claiming gender dysphoria, and opposition as genocidal. Let’s try that again: dogmas that insisted on allowing sexual mutilation of kids experiencing some discomfort about their biological sex and that hated and defamed anyone urging caution.

The dogmas seemed incorrigible. And then, just like that, they seem to gotten corriged, or whatever the participle is for corrigible. The turning point appears to have been the Cass Report, which was officially rejected by the U.S. medical establishment but appears to have been tacitly adopted in public discourse and acquiesced in even among the medical establishment.

It doesn’t hurt that there’s been a malpractice verdict against some medical butchers with a $2 million dollar damage award to the breastless female plaintiff.

So, my inner Eeyore sometimes gets stymied by something, somewhere, getting better. Gloria in excelsis deo.

A southern stoic gets religion

In the mid-1950s, Walker Percy’s southern gentry stoicism pointed one way, his new Catholicism another:

“Faith had led him away from the plantation. Philosophy had given faith an intellectual basis and a practical rationale. Far from turning him abstract, as Shelby Foote had warned him it would do, philosophy had coaxed him down off the magic mountain and onto level ground to consider the mortal struggle of everydayness. It emancipated him from his Uncle Will and the scheme of Stoic noblesse oblige. It helped him to solve his own problems and ponder the affairs of the day. It made him, finally, an ordinary man.”

Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own. I can’t put my finger on just why, but I think the short section including this quote was worth the price of the book (and the hours I’ve already spent reading it).

Maybe I just don’t know what time it is

Dreher’s writing is a useful indication of just how angry and pessimistic even the most thoughtful conservatives have become in recent years. He seems to see America as a hellscape, drained of religion and hope, drugged and distracted by the false gods of the internet. The renewal he imagines is not the sunlit, future-oriented conservatism of the Reagan era, and he doesn’t look to the Founding Fathers for inspiration. If anything, Dreher’s compass points in the opposite direction. He wants his country to turn back toward Europe—not the homogenized, secular continent of today but premodern Christian Europe, before the Enlightenment and the disenchantment set in.

…

His greatest admiration is reserved for people who commit themselves to “a fixed place and way of life,” as he wrote about Saint Benedict.

Yet Dreher seems resigned to living as a rootless exile, shorn of his family and condemned to wander a landscape of what the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman—one of Dreher’s favorite thinkers—called “liquid modernity.”

Robert F. Worth, Rod Dreher Thinks the Enlightenment Was a Mistake.

One additional, and very disheartening, item from this story:

But lately Dreher’s insights have come with an ominous political corollary. He believes our institutions are so rotten that they need a good slap from people like Trump and Orbán, even if it means losing some of them. “Maybe what’s being born now will be worse, I dunno,” he wrote as Trump and Elon Musk were using DOGE to dismantle the federal bureaucracy in early 2025. “We’ll see. But bring it on. I’ve had it.”

I quote this to observe that “bring it on” equals “burn it down,” and that glee about burning down institutions because something better might rise from the ashes is the paradigmatic marker of a revolutionary, not a conservative.

Maybe I just don’t know “what time it is.”

Political

I’ve generally been relegating political commentary to “Elsewhere in Tipsyworld,” below. But these are too important.

America’s concentration camps

“A concentration camp exists wherever a government holds groups of civilians outside the normal legal process — sometimes to segregate people considered foreigners or outsiders, sometimes to punish,” Andrea Pitzer writes in “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.” Conditions within the administration’s detention facilities certainly meet the bill.

Here’s how a Russian family described its four-month ordeal at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in an interview with NBC News:

“Worms in their food. Guards shouting orders and snatching toys from small hands. Restless nights under fluorescent lights that never fully go dark. Hours in line for a single pill. “We left one tyranny and came to another kind of tyranny,” Nikita said in Russian. “Even in Russia, they don’t treat children like this.”

Or consider this ProPublica exposé of the same facility, focused on the children who have been caught in the administration’s immigration dragnet.

Kheilin Valero from Venezuela, who was being held with her 18-month-old, Amalia Arrieta, said shortly after they were detained following an ICE appointment on Dec. 11 in El Paso, Texas, the baby fell ill. For two weeks, she said, medical staff gave her ibuprofen and eventually antibiotics, but Amalia’s breathing worsened to the point that she was hospitalized in San Antonio for 10 days. She was diagnosed with Covid-19 and RSV. “Because she went so many days without treatment, and because it’s so cold here, she developed pneumonia and bronchitis,” Kheilin said. “She was malnourished, too, because she was vomiting everything.”

…

During the 2024 presidential campaign, I asked readers to think seriously about Trump’s plan to remove millions of people from the United States:

Now, imagine the conditions that might prevail for hundreds of thousands of people crammed into hastily constructed camps, the targets of a vicious campaign of demonization meant to build support for their detention and deportation. If undocumented immigrants really are, as Trump says, “poisoning the blood of our country,” then how do we respond? What do we do about poison? Well, we neutralize it.

What we see now, with the immigration dragnets in American cities and the horrific conditions in the administration’s detention facilities, is what the president promised in his campaign. He said he was going to punish immigrants for being immigrants, and here he is, punishing immigrants for being immigrants, with every tool he has at his disposal.

Jamelle Bouie (gift link)

Are you cool with the concentration camps, Rod?

History Rhymes

With his contempt for elections he did not win, Lenin put an end to all semblance of democratic procedure. He made it clear that he would insist on ruling whether he had popular support or not. The legitimacy of Bolshevik rule was to be based on Marxist theory, not on the sovereignty of the people, and that made a police state ruled by force inevitable.

Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire.

“Why haven’t you killed anyone?”

Several decades ago I realised I had a temper, and I went to see a specialist about this. I didn’t want anger slouching into my approaching parenting. How do you feel the second before you erupt? they asked.

Vulnerable.

That was the gold, that two minute conversation. I’m generally wired now to recognise the state and stay there as long as necessary.

But the red mist comes down and I can’t control it, I said. The specialist looked me right in the eye:

Then why haven’t you killed anyone?

Learnt behaviour. I would go far, but not that far. They showed me I could create a new boundary, and through repetition, walk it into my psyche.

Martin Shaw, storyteller and author of the New York Times bestseller Liturgies of the Wild.

Anti-Zionism versus Antisemitism

There is a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I just know there is.

Surely it’s theoretically possible to oppose the state of Israel’s behavior without animus toward Jews per se, right?

Oddly, in the realm of thought experiments, it’s even possible to hate Jews and be pro-Zionist, on the theory that Zion is where all the hated Jews should be sent. (I don’t think I’ve seen this kind of jackalope in the wild.)

But whatever the difference is, I cannot say that the line is “clear” because people keep insisting they (or their ideological allies) are merely anti-Zionist, not anti-Semite when it seems reasonably clear to me that they’re anti-Semites.

With the caveat that I hurt especially for the plight of Palestinian Christians (especially the Orthodox) at the hands of the Israeli government, I’m staying away from either label.

The AI Revolution

Damon Linker is in fairly close alignment with my hunches on AI:

What do you think is likely to follow from tens of millions of white-collar, college-educated workers finding over the coming years that their entire sector of the economy has been fed into a woodchipper? That they are becoming unemployed, are being forced to undertake a job search at roughly the same time as just about everyone else who held similar positions, and must face the reality that their practical, on-the-job experience and skills have become worthless in a workplace transformed by AI?

What will they have to do to make a living? How will they need to reinvent themselves? Will corporate middle managers need to repurpose themselves as nurse’s aides or orderlies, cleaning bedpans and changing soiled sheets? Or go back to school, taking on a second pile of student loans at midlife, to learn a new, more marketable skill? Or will AI be taking over so many jobs that require specialized education that they will be forced to downgrade their expectations still further, to seek out work in the service sector, for dramatically lower pay and status? Or scramble to learn how to use AI and then attempt to make a go of it as some kind of entrepreneur in a marketplace flooded with such self-starters, each trying to devise and market the Next Big Thing that might catapult them into a more comfortable income bracket? A few will do well at this; most will not.

Then this killer footnote:

For those inclined to discount the likelihood of such destabilizing events by predicting the adoption of a Universal Basic Income in the wake of widespread AI-induced job losses, I tend to think this gets the lines of causality wrong. There is no way the rich in this country would tolerate the imposition of tax rates necessary to pay for a UBI unless proverbial or literal guns were pointed at their heads. What I’m describing at the end of this post is the scenario that puts the guns there. Whether a UBI follows from it is another matter ….

Freddie DeBoer, on the other hand, isn’t buying all the revolution talk.

Shorts

  • The Bad Bunny dancing was too sexy, apparently, and also, it was almost entirely in Spanish, so TPUSA planned ahead to make a separate show with nothing sexy at all and everything in the Queen’s English. Which is why they tapped Kid Rock, conservative America’s greatest living artist. (Nellie Bowles)
  • “The ‘woke’ halftime show features a wedding, people dancing joyously and smiling. The conservative alternative was a grayscale grievance fest,” – Corey Walker.
  • Life involves divisions of labor, and conservative values just don’t make for groundbreaking art or incredible sourdough loaves, I don’t know why but it’s just the truth and we all know it. Like how the new conservative-run Kennedy Center is shutting down for two years, since too many artists were flaking. All the people with conservative values are busy at home or the office not doing art. (Nellie Bowles)
  • “Trump is delusional, okay? You need to know this. Trump is sick. He’s a delusional person … I know first-hand from people talking to the president,” – Nick Fuentes via Andrew Sullivan
  • “Small reminder: if you took conservative positions on the Constitution, the economy, foreign policy, or basic morality and then radically changed them solely because a Republican was elected president who changed the party’s positions, you were never really a conservative, you were just a Republican,” – Jonah Goldberg.
  • “My PhD student is being advised left and right to let Claude do her lit review, write her qualifying presentation, summarize the books she needs to read to prepare. She is holding fast to the conviction that this slow, frictionful work is the work she signed on for. Immensely proud of her.” (Sara Hendren on micro.blog) I guess (1) that’s the way of the world today, but (2) there are conscientious objectors.
  • “… a deliriously verbose writer on Substack.” Robert F. Worth, of Rod Dreher, in Worth’s Atlantic article Rod Dreher Thinks the Enlightenment Was a Mistake.

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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.

Retire These Words!

I never, ever want to hear the phrase “Trump derangement syndrome” again.

There is no derangement among those of us horrified by Trump. There never was. There was simply honest recognition of a spectacularly dishonest and disgraceful bully who showed his colors from the start, before his first election to the presidency, when he mocked John McCain’s years of confinement and torture as a prisoner of war, when he mused about some gun enthusiast taking a shot at Hillary Clinton … He was as ready then to lay waste to democratic traditions and institutions as he is now. He was the same aspiring autocrat, just with less practice and power.

“Derangement syndrome” itself should go away. It’s a glib, hyperbolic dismissal of substantive concerns. People on the right who repeatedly raised alarms about Biden’s cognition and health were accused of “Biden derangement syndrome,” but beneath the exaggerations and gracelessness in which some of them indulged were rational observations. “Derangement syndrome,” like so much else these days, shuts down meaningful debate, turning it into so much mud slinging.

With Trump, language has been challenging. There was the period of respectful, reflexive disinclination to use “lies” or “lying,” until the growing tower of euphemisms and synonyms toppled under its own absurdity. “Fascist” was a red line that’s now receiving something of a green light.

“Until recently, I resisted using the F-word to describe President Trump,” Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Atlantic about a week ago, later adding: “Reluctance to use the term has now become perverse. That is not because of any one or two things he and his administration have done but because of the totality. Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.”

How I wish I could label that assessment deranged.

Frank Bruni

Often I post things just because they’re interesting. Other times I post things to amplify them because I believe them. This post is one of those times.

I don’t expect ever to need to retract this. I can only hope that some day I can write “… but the American people finally got fed up and drove him from office.”

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher

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.

Thursday, 1/22/26

Political Theory

The next two items, though illustrated by our present political circumstances, are intended to make points that will continue to be important in new circumstances.

Integrity matters

The health of the American experiment rests far more on the integrity of any given American president than we realized.

We trusted that presidents would impose accountability on the executive branch. We trusted that presidents wouldn’t abuse their pardon power — or, if they did, then Congress could impeach and convict any offenders. And so we manufactured doctrine after doctrine, year after year, that insulated the executive branch from legal accountability.

It’s hard to overstate how much this web of immunities — combined with the failure of Congress to step up and fulfill its powerful constitutional role — has made the United States vulnerable to authoritarian abuse.

In Federalist No. 51, James Madison wrote some of the most famous words of the American founding. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” Madison wrote. “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

David French (shared link)

The Prerogative State

The David French column continues. I broke it in two because I thought it was important, once again, to warn against ever again electing high officials of such low character.

But there’s a specific ramification I hadn’t identified:

[Y]ou can see the emerging dual state in action in Minneapolis right now. In much of the city, life is routine. People create new businesses, enter into contracts, file litigation and make deals as if life were completely normal and the rule of law exists, untainted by our deep political divide.

But if you interact with ICE, suddenly you risk coming up against the full force of the prerogative state. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the ICE agent’s video of the fatal encounter between Renee Good and ICE is that it’s plain that Good thinks she’s still in the normative state. She has no idea of the peril she’s in.

She seems relaxed. She even seems to have told the agent that she’s not mad at him. In the normative state, your life almost never depends on immediate and unconditional compliance with police commands.

But she wasn’t in the normative state. She had crossed over the border to the prerogative state, and in that state you can be shot dead recklessly, irresponsibly and perhaps even illegally, and no one will pay the price. You might even be rewarded with more than $1 million in donations from friends and allies.

David French (shared link)

Competing, revealing, metaphors

In February … I spoke at a gathering of conservatives in London called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship …

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

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

The warriors tend to think people like me are soft and naive. I tend to think they are catastrophizing narcissists. When I look at Trump acolytes, I see a swarm of Neville Chamberlains who think they’re Winston Churchill.

David Brooks, I Should Have Seen This Coming, April, 2025.

Occasionally, I achieve a complete mind-meld with Brooks. This was one of those times, at least for the first third of his article; after that, he notes some things that I hadn’t noticed until he pointed them out.

Sanctuary City primer

So-called “sanctuary cities” and “sanctuary states” choose not to assist the federal government in finding or deporting illegal aliens, and they have a constitutional right to make that choice.

What does noncooperation look like on the ground? A flash point involves immigration detainer orders, which call on state and local law enforcement agents to transfer into ICE custody illegal aliens who are about to be released from state custody.

…

The administration says that Minnesota is refusing to honor ICE detainers and has released hundreds of illegal aliens “onto the streets” instead of turning them over to ICE. Minnesota denies this accusation and insists that it’s honoring all immigration detainers.

Whichever side is correct, federal courts have held that ICE detainers issued to state agencies are “requests,” not “orders.” …

…

The federal government does have a mechanism for getting states and cities to voluntarily do what they can’t be forced to do. It’s called money. Congress could deny states or cities certain funds unless they abolish their sanctuary policies. There are limits to this strategy: Washington can’t shut off unrelated funds that states or cities need to keep functioning. But immigrant-related federal funding—for example, money devoted to sheltering new, legal immigrants—could presumably be denied to states and cities that maintain sanctuary policies.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump declared that after February 1, “We are not making any payments to sanctuary cities or states having sanctuary cities.” But while Congress could condition state and local funding on cooperation with ICE, the president’s powers are more limited. Trump has tried this strategy before. Both in his first term and second, he issued executive orders calling for sanctuary states and cities to be denied federal monies. Except in narrow circumstances, courts have not been receptive, holding that without congressional approval, the president could not unilaterally deny states money that Congress had already appropriated for them.

Jed Rubenfeld

The name “Sanctuary City” has always struck me as a bit preening, but the principle that that cities and states are not (normally, though if there are exceptions, I can’t think of one) obliged to assist in enforcement of federal law or in advancement of federal priorities. A non-immigration example is marijuana legalization by the states, whereas marijuana remains illegal in national law. If and when the DEA comes to bust up a dispensary, local officials presumably won’t help, but the principle doesn’t allow them to interfere, either.

Of being a conservative radio talk-show host back in the day

So for years, when someone sent me something that was a conspiracy theory, or false, or just misleading or unfair, I would be able to push back and say “this is not true; there are not bodies stacked up in the Clinton warehouses; no this is not happening over here,” and people would say “thank you, Charlie for setting me straight” …

[I]n 2015 and 2016, what I found, very gradually but very forcefully, was that it became harder and harder to push back; it became harder and harder to give them any information that would change their mind.

And that’s when I realized that we had been too successful, that we had destroyed all the immune system to false information, to this kind of propaganda. And this was kind of an “Oh, shit!” moment for me.

Charlie Sykes, interviewed by Andrew Sullivan.

Morality, Law and Religion

The public should be absolutely concerned about whether a nominee for judicial office will be willing and able to set aside personal preferences. That’s not a challenge just for religious people. That’s a challenge for everyone.

Amy Coney Barrett (italics added)

Pet peeve: The idea that “separation of church and state” requires religious public officials and employees to set aside their religious beliefs when conducting public business. The tacit message in that is either that (1) morality and law are completely separate or (2) that religion is inherently irrational whereas other moral beliefs are not. In truth, there is no neutral, preference‑free judicial standpoint, and the available standpoints all are larded with moral intuitions that either can be accused of irrationality.

Yes, I have advocated in public meetings where I wished that others on “my side” would shut up if all they had to contribute was dubiously-applicable Bible proof-texts. But those kinds of folks never get nominated for any federal bench, and they’d be eaten alive if they were.

Consequences

The yield spread between three-month Treasury bills and 10-year bonds has widened by some 0.6 percentage points since early November. “The Fed may want lower interest rates, but the market ain’t buying it,” said Willian Adler, an Elliott Wave technical analyst.

He warns that the conditions are in place for a serious sell-off across risk assets. It could be similar to the bond rout that spooked Trump after the “liberation day” tariffs.

This rising spread may simply reflect fears of resurgent inflation as front-loaded stimulus from the “one big beautiful bill” juices the economy over the coming months, with the risk of full-blown overheating if Trump hands out $2,000 a head as a pre-electoral bribe.

But it may also be the first sign that America is starting to pay a price for the collapse of political credibility.

(Telegraph UK via John Ellis)

Unpopular opinions

I keep a private list of my truly unpopular opinions – opinions so far outside the Overton Window that I could lose friends if I voiced them.

I review and supplement the list occasionally, but never before have I decided that something doesn’t belong on the list any more (or maybe never belonged on it in the first place). This one probably never belonged on the list:

1. Subsidies for pro sports, including stadium construction, are damnable boondoggles. I would vote against every one of them until the franchise-owning billionaires ran me out of office.

While I’m at it, these too can come off the list:

2. Abolitions I supported that may well have hurt America:

  • The military draft Politicians who have anything to do with war policy should have skin in the game, even if it’s the skin of their descendants.
  • The Fairness Doctrine. We opened Pandora’s box before cable TV and the internet obliterated it. I don’t see a way back to sanity through reinstating the policy.

While I’m on a roll, here’s one that’s never been on the list:

3. The states should stop running primary elections. Neither major party is worth the powder to blow it up. Let them run their own elections or go back to “smoke-filled rooms” (which incidentally yielded better candidates than crackpot “base voters” have been yielding).

Logic mincing

Q: Which is better: a ham sandwich or complete happiness in life?
A: A ham sandwich, of course! Nothing is better than complete happiness in life and a ham sandwich is better than nothing.

  1. Something must be done!
  2. This is something.
  3. This must be done!

Shorts

  • No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom. The assertion that “foul is useful and fair is not“ is the antithesis of wisdom. (E.F. Shumacher) Small Is Beautiful is a classic for good reason.
  • The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency. (Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, citing the president’s authority to impose tariffs in an economic emergency, arguing that America’s supposed need to control Greenland is a national emergency.)
  • The health of the American experiment rests far more on the integrity of any given American president than we realized. (David French)
  • The pervasiveness of legal sports gambling can make an undefeated season and a 6-point victory in the national championship game feel like a loss if “the margin” was 7.5. (Moi)
  • At some point, we’ll reach the bottom of this dystopian populist abomination, but no one thinks we’re there yet, do they? (Nick Catoggio)
  • “The Trump Denmark letter is his Biden debate moment,” one Twitter user claimed.
  • Donald Trump is a peacock among the dull buzzards of American politics. (Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium).
  • A clown with a flame thrower still has a flamethrower. (Charlie Sykes to Andrew Sullivan)
  • When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
  • TikTok is still a danger. America no longer cares.
  • The souvenir is a fetish object that substitutes for the finite experience of the destination. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher

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.