JD Vance, it seems, is responsible for the death of Pope Francis. In this case, I believe that to the victor should go the spoils, and Vance should be the next Roman pontiff. The circumstantial evidence is beyond doubt: Vance and Pope Francis had a public disagreement over the concept of ordo amoris, and then the pope died shortly after they met for the first time. There are no coincidences. This isn’t even without precedent: Pope Sergius III (allegedly) killed his two predecessors Pope Leo V and Antipope Christopher. Don’t we want a return to tradition? The tradcath convert Vance could take the name Sergius, and then even have one of his sons installed after him, just like his namesake. Besides, there’s nothing in the Constitution that says the vice president can’t also be the pope. Maybe in a few years Pope JD can also be President JD. This would also be very traditional and return secular power to the papacy, and I look forward to a return of Renaissance-era political intrigue in the Vatican. (Virginia Aabram)
…
David Bentley Hart’s election as pope would give the Church a leader who is sure of his own infallibility. As a dogmatic Catholic, I would welcome such a development. I would also be glad to have a pope with a first-class theological mind, a due appreciation for Robert Louis Stevenson, and a desire to heal the schism between East and West. There is of course a risk that Hart would seek to suppress people with my conservative theological views. But I believe that his doctrinal chief, Roland, would help to ensure a just and liberal policy. If Hart concludes that he must refuse the burdens of the papal office, I could reconcile myself to the election of Cardinal Sarah. (Matthew Schmitz)
I was doing some computer housekeeping Thursday and came across this. It reminded me of one of the weirdest things I ever heard a fringe Christian say: “It would have been perverted if Mary and Joseph didn’t have sex after Jesus was born!”
For those who think it’s obvious that Joseph and Mary had normal marital relations, and younger brothers and sisters of Jesus, because the scriptures refer to his “brothers”:
When you say that they were his brothers, do you mean that they had the same parents?
If so, are you saying that Joseph was Jesus’ father?
If Joseph was not Jesus father, then wouldn’t any brothers spoken of in scripture be half-brothers?
Have you ever considered the possibility that Joseph and Mary were not teenagers in love, but that Joseph was an older man, a widower, with children by a prior marriage?
Did you know that this is the tradition of the orthodox church? (I believe it is the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church that the brothers and sisters were more like cousins.)
If the Orthodox church is right, then the brothers referred to are older stepbrothers, right?
Is it any stranger calling stepbrothers “brothers” then it is calling half-brothers “brothers”?
If not, and since Christians believe that Joseph was not Jesus father, but rather that Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, why not just accept that they were stepbrothers?
Considering the times when Jesus brothers tried to stage a sort of intervention, wouldn’t it make sense that they were older stepbrothers, rather than younger siblings?
Does it bother you at all that all of the protestant reformers believe that Mary remain a virgin, the rest of her life, after giving birth to Jesus as a virgin?
Transhumanism: Christianity without all those God parts
The Silicon Valley agenda, the transhumanist agenda, is extremely utopian, and actually very religious. I think it’s like if you took the Christian religion — which they’re all sort of steeped in because they’re in America — and you take out the actual bits about God and Jesus and things, you’re left with a desire for transcendence and utopia and life after death, living forever and universal justice — all of which are sort of Christian notions — and so they’ve decided they’re going to build those themselves.
We seem to be entering a pagan century. It’s not only Trump. It’s the whole phalanx of authoritarians, all those greatness-obsessed macho men like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. It’s the tech bros. It’s Christian nationalism, which is paganism with worship music. (If you ever doubt the seductive power of paganism, remember it has conquered many of the churches that were explicitly founded to reject it.)
… Christianity is built on a series of inversions that make paganism look pompous and soulless: Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the poor in spirit. The last shall be first. The poor are closer to God than the rich. Jesus was perpetually performing outrageous acts of radical generosity, without calculating the cost.
Brooks’ impression will be hard to vindicate if we continue with our “religious revival,” so very much of which is crypto-pagan.
Ordinary
You have permission to be ordinary. To live a quiet life. To go for a walk without turning it into content. To do good work without chasing viral. To be present with your people instead of always ‘building something.’ Your life doesn’t have to be optimized to be meaningful. The Ordinary creates space for what truly matters.
Weep If you can, Weep, But do not complain. The way chose you – And you must be thankful.
(Dag Hammarskjold)
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Okay, that title is cheap pandering. I don’t believe in the Hallmark Holidays. This is the second Sunday after Pentecost in the Eastern Church. Speaking of cheap pandering …
Gothardist Evangelicalism
David French had a fresher experience than I of Bill Gothard (the main villain of Amazon Prime’s Shiny Happy People) by a large margin: I encountered him in 1966-67, French in 1993. Further, French was an adult, attending a Gothard seminar motivated to believe to “get the girl” he was dating, who with her family were Gothard acolytes. Finally, as an evangelical-adjacent Reformed Protestant, French has more current insight than I into Gothardism’s reach, including into the scandal-ridden Kanakuk Kamps.
Considering all that, it’s no surprise that his ‘Shiny Happy People,’ Fundamentalism and the Toxic Quest for Certainty does a markedly better job than I did at sketching the key problems with Bill Gothard’s teachings (through the Institute on Basic Life Principles), its reach deep into evangelicalism, and how the fundamental decency of most of Gothard’s followers makes “cult” an uncomfortable label. It’s good enough that I used one of my ten monthly sharable links.
But wait! There’s more!
Former Gothard follower Sara Roberts Jones tells her experience of Gothard’s “cult” in a seven-part series. While French and I have used IBLP as shorthand, Jones refers to ATI, the “Advanced Training Institute” where they get into much greater detail through a series of “Wisdom Booklets.” A few excerpts suggest her project and one teaching that tortured her particularly:
Recently I gained access to nearly all of the original Wisdom Booklets (plus several of the updated second editions). I thought I would summarize each one to show exactly what Gothard taught us. Halfway through the first few pages of Wisdom Booklet #1 (out of 54), I realized I couldn’t do it.
Gothard defies easy summarizing. He uses hundreds of words to prove a single point. His explanations and logic are twisty, working around the obvious message of Scripture to support his own claims.
So, instead of trying to summarize, I’m going to take highlights from the Basic Seminar Textbook and several Wisdom Booklets …
My purpose is to show how so many well-meaning Christians came to Gothard thinking, “I am excited to know God better,” and ended up nodding as he said, “God holds a woman guilty if she doesn’t scream when a man rapes her.”
“God holds a woman guilty if she doesn’t scream when a man rapes her” is not, so far as I can tell, the endpoint of all the Gothardist teaching, but it’s certainly got to rank as one of the most toxic ideas drummed in along the way, followed in close second by the fetish about “eye-traps” in women’s clothing that is already extremely modest. This really is double-barrelled blaming of women for men’s unbridled lust.
I count myself fortunate that my brush with Gothard was early in his career and relatively superficial. I can’t help but imagine what might have happened if I had fallen into the deep end, but I don’t think that I should dwell on “what-ifs” like that, let alone further inflict them on you.
I will note, however, that:
If you want to know about the Gothard cult (not about the Duggars), you’ll learn more that’s meaningful, and learn it in less time, by reading David French and Sara Roberts Jones instead of watching Shiny Happy People
An explanation of God’s will that requires 54 copyrighted booklets with restricted circulation sounds more like a commercial racket or an early-stage cult than like anything one could plausibly call “Bible-only Christianity.”
I’d be shocked that evangelicalism tolerates Gothardism except that evangelicalism has no even minimally effective means for excommunication.
What’s “water”?
We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.
As Deneen tells it, what happened when the wall fell was not the triumph of freedom over oppression so much as the defeat of one Western ideology by another. The one that came through was the oldest, subtlest and longest-lasting, one which disguised itself so well that we didn’t know it was an ideology at all: liberalism.
The Silicon Valley agenda, the transhumanist agenda, is extremely utopian, and actually very religious. I think it’s like if you took the Christian religion — which they’re all sort of steeped in because they’re in America — and you take out the actual bits about God and Jesus and things, you’re left with a desire for transcendence and utopia and life after death, living forever and universal justice — all of which are sort of Christian notions — and so they’ve decided they’re going to build those themselves.
And here I thought I had been too hard on Evangelicals. Jake Meador — a Reformed Protestant and therefore Evangelical-adjacent (as I was in an analogous denomination) — doesn’t “give it both barrels” but pronounces it dead and lays out the particulars. It’s really quite devastating. The End of Evangelicalism and the Possibility of Reformed Catholicism.
Kind of self-evident, when you stop and think for a second
The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.
(I know, I know: the original Reformers didn’t mean by sola scriptura what modern Evangelicals mean by it — if they even know the term.)
We need a little Auden now
One of the appeals of Christian orthodoxy for Auden, as for T. S. Eliot in the 1920s, was that it offered a more humane alternative to the ferocious ideologies of the twentieth century. Instead of blaming a class or race for the world’s evils, it insisted that we are all individually responsible and that redemption must begin by acknowledging our weakness rather than vaunting our strength.
Sadly, in the U.S. of the 2020s at least, a substantial number of Christians think it their duty to vaunt their putative strength. I used to say, “If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait for the irreligious Right,” but I overlooked the specter of the pseudo-religious Right.
(Yeah, yeah, I know: “No true Scotsman fallacy.” Whatever.)
Canon and Tradition
The New Testament is a written form of the tradition, the gospel, the preaching, the declaration, the communion given by the Apostles to the Church, the living communion of the one gospel of Christ. But the context of that writing was the living tradition (gospel, preaching, declaration, communion) of the Church.
…
Ultimately the acceptance of writings as authoritative rests entirely on tradition (particularly tradition as context). The Church recognized the authentic voice of the Church in the writings – i.e. the writings agreed with the gospel as it had already been received. St. Paul specifically describes this manner of recognition:
But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed. (Gal 1:8-9 NKJ)
What then? Ought we not to blame those who sin? Paul also says this selfsame thing: ’Why do you judge your brother? And you, why do you put your brother down? …How then does he say elsewhere ‘Reprove, rebuke, exhort,’ and ‘Those who sin rebuke before all?’ And Christ too to Peter, ‘Go and tell him his fault between you and him alone’… (Matt. 18:15-17). And how has He set over us so many to reprove, and not only to reprove, but also to punish? …And how did He also give them the keys, since if they are not to judge, they will be without authority in any matter and in vain have they received the power to bind or to loose? …For unless the master judge the servant, and the mistress the maid, and the father the son, and friends one another, there will be an increase of all wickedness ..In this place then, as it seems to me at least, He does not simply command us not to judge any of men’s sins; neither does He simply forbid the doing of such a thing. But to those who are full of innumerable ills, and are trampling upon other men for trifles .. He says also in another place, You who strain at the gnat, and swallow the camel …And the Corinthians, too, Paul did not absolutely command not to judge, but not to judge their superiors (I Cor. 4:5) … You see, we ought not to upbraid nor trample upon them, but to admonish, not to revile, but to advise, not to assail with pride, but to correct with tenderness… If you neglect yourself, it is quite evident that neither do you judge your brother with concern for him, but in hatred instead: wishing to expose him. For what if he ought to be judged? It should be by one who commits no such sin, not by you.
St. John Chrysostom. Homily XXIII on Matthew
We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Whenever I read about someone who sees a technological route to immortality I think about this “ravenous desire for personal immortality” combined with “a total indifference to all that could, on a sane view, make immortality desirable.” So you want a digital imitation of yourself to live on after you die. But why?
A few people have asked me to write more about recent AI endeavors, but here’s the problem: I can’t summon the interest to become sufficiently well-informed. I wrote a bit about the responses of some writers to the opportunity (as they see it) to outsource their work, but I haven’t used ChatGPT or LaMDA or DALL·E or Stable Diffusion or any other recent AI project — and I haven’t used them because the very idea bores me stiff. It’s as simple as that. I just can’t think of a reason to be interested. So instead I’ll do the things that I am interested in. It’s a good policy, I find.
Is Jeff Bezos trying to sellThe Washington Post? It sure looks like the Bezos team is planting stories that the Post is for sale, because his favored publications are saying, well, it’s for sale. Bezos denies these reports. But when I see something inThe Daily Mail, I know someone, somewhere, is scheming. (The Daily Mail also seems like the go-to publication for Bezos’ girlfriend Lauren Sanchez, who it frequently describes as stylish and rocking.) If you owned _The Washington Post—_a place with a few great reporters, and then hundreds of screaming activists who hate journalism, hate each other, and hate you—wouldn’t you want to get the hell out? Meanwhile this week, the Postannounced layoffs.
I am determined to retire in order to spend what little remains of my life, now more than half run out … consecrated to my freedom, tranquillity, and leisure.
“I’m very skeptical of books,” he expands. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you f***ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
I have read books that (slight hyperbole) could and should have been 6-paragraph blogs. The authors, however, were paid quite well. Those books make me feel cheated.
I have read books that (slight hyperbole) could have been 6-paragraph blogs, but would have been opaque or misunderstood without unpacking those six tight paragraphs. Once that was worthwhile, usually not.
I have read books that never could have been 6-paragraph blogs because they just keep on delivering good stuff and they trust the reader think through most of the ramifications. Those books are hardest to read, but the most rewarding.
Civilizational conflicts, Ideological conflicts
European governments and publics have largely supported and rarely criticized actions the United States has taken against its Muslim opponents, in striking contrast to the strenuous opposition they often expressed to American actions against the Soviet Union and communism during the Cold War. In civilizational conflicts, unlike ideological ones, kin stand by their kin.
As [Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed] tells it, what happened when the wall fell was not the triumph of freedom over oppression so much as the defeat of one Western ideology by another. The one that came through was the oldest, subtlest and longest-lasting, one which disguised itself so well that we didn’t know it was an ideology at all: liberalism.
To be resolutely ‘anti-modern’ is not to be in any way ‘anti-Western’; on the contrary, it only means making an effort to save the West from its own confusion.
René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World
Politics
Bermuda Triangle Party
The G.O.P. should be renamed B.T.P., for Bermuda Triangle Party. Enter it, weird stuff happens, and you go straight to the bottom … George Santos is what you inevitably get once you’ve already normalized Donald Trump, Roy Moore, Lauren Boebert and “Space Laser” Greene.
We’re in a dark place if Donald J. Trump is no longer crazy enough to win a Republican primary without help from someone crazier, but, well, we are in a dark place. The Dispatch wouldn’t exist if we weren’t.
…
The core of hardcore partisanship is the belief that the worst member of your party is preferable to whatever the other party is offering. Trump/Greene would test that faith like few other things could. If you can tolerate helping those two to power, you can tolerate anything in the name of brainless Team Red loyalty.
When Everything Is Classified, Nothing is Classified
“Everything’s secret,” Michael Hayden, former CIA and NSA director, once said. “I mean, I got an email saying, ‘Merry Christmas.’ It carried a Top Secret NSA classification marking.”
Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
I find transhumanism repugnant, and I believe in the wisdom of repugnance because I believe that some truths are not susceptible of distillation to catchy slogans for the ADHD World we live in, and perhaps not possible to articulate directly at all.
But I was unaware that there was more to it than billionaire nerds asking “wouldn’t it be cool if we could upload our brains and live forever?” No, there’s another case, superficially more plausible:
If humanity’s technological progress can be compared to climbing a mountain, then the Anthropocene finds us perched on a crumbling ledge, uncertain how long we have until it collapses. The most obvious way out is to turn back and retrace our steps to an earlier stage of civilization, with fewer people using fewer resources. This would mean acknowledging that humanity is unequal to the task of shaping the world, that we can thrive only by living within the limits set by nature.
But this kind of voluntary turning back might be so contrary to our nature that it can never happen. It is far more plausible that the human journey was fated to end up in this dangerous spot ever since we first began to change the ecosystem with farming and fire. Such a view forms the basis of antihumanism, a system of thought that removes humans from their pedestal and contends that, given our penchant for destruction—not only of ourselves but also all other species—we are less deserving of existence than are animals, plants, rocks, water, or air. For antihumanists, the only way off the precipice is a fall, with the survivors left to pick up the pieces. And if there are no survivors, that wouldn’t be a tragedy; there will always be beings in the world, even if there are no human beings.
Australian philosopher Toby Ord uses the image of the crumbling ledge in his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (2020). “Fueled by technological progress, our power has grown so great that for the first time in humanity’s long history, we have the capacity to destroy ourselves,” Ord writes. He believes that the odds of this happening in the next 100 years are about one in six, the same as in a game of Russian roulette. “Humanity lacks the maturity, coordination and foresight necessary to avoid making mistakes from which we could never recover,” he concludes.
Ord is not an antihumanist but rather a transhumanist, a research fellow at the world’s leading center for transhumanist thought, Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, which looks to scientific and technological advances as the only path forward. Transhumanists agree with antihumanists that human nature is morally and physically circumscribed in ways that make it impossible for us to get past the precipice. They likewise agree that Homo sapiens is doomed to disappear. But for transhumanists, this is a wonderful prospect because we will disappear by climbing instead of falling. As Ord writes, “Rising to our full potential for flourishing would likely involve us being transformed into something beyond the humanity of today.” That something will no longer be “us” in the strictest sense, but our posthuman successors will preserve what is best and most important about us. “I love humanity, not because we are Homo sapiens, but because of our capacity to flourish,” Ord writes.
The appeal of that comes from its familiarity: We’ve been making problems with technology, then solving them with more technology, for a fairly long time now. Unless you stop to think about it, that seems normal.
(H/T Alan Jacobs)
Humanity without limits seems at best inhumane to me. Nonetheless, I recommend the American Scholar article, which pairs well with C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
White nationalism
The constant accusations of “white nationalism” remind me of preachers and other polemicists calling Playboy “hard-core pornography” 50 years or so ago. People are going to catch on fairly quickly when they see something white nationalist/hard-core and there’s no term left on the rhetorical spectrum to describe it.
Haute Couture
I don’t recall ever seeing a piece of haute couture that so vividly captures the intersection of aburdity and misogyny:
Perhaps because of some new movie or something, Justice Brett Kavanaugh seems to be back in the news, and it set me thinking about his confirmation hearings again.
When I was becoming a lawyer, I had to sit for a personal interview with another lawyer (or two). One of the questions was “Have you ever broken the law?” My answer was that, starting around age 19, I had two alcoholic beverages, one on each of two occasions, contrary to law. He/They were amused at my candor.
Back to Justice Kavanaugh: the thing that bothered me most about his nomination was his long history of drinking to drunkenness, beginning in high school and continuing, apparently, nonstop to present. I supported him before I knew of this, waffling afterward (I’m a bad member of any tribe).
I expect greater respect for the law from highly-placed Judges. I am obviously not squeaky-clean in the underage drinking department, but I’m close, I admit that I broke the law, and I admit that I was wrong. Kavanaugh lied and tap-danced about his drinking.
“But are you serious that ‘the thing that bothered me most about his nomination was his long history of drinking to drunkenness’? Two women accused him of sexual assaults!”
Yes, I am serious. I was not convinced by those two female accusers. But the history of drinking made both charges more plausible than they would have been without that history. Drunken sexual encounters, voluntary, involuntary and borderline, are the bane of every major university, and both accusations fit fairly well into the “drunken frat boy/drink until you’re irresistible” pattern.
Had I been a Senator, I think I’d have voted to reject the nomination, not because I found those accusations likelier true than not, but because I don’t want an unrepentant, somewhat sanctimonious, drunk on the Supreme Court — a man against whom the accusations had some sting.
Politics
Red-pilling for power
Damon Linker does a pretty good job in The Red-Pill Pusher of explaining and rebutting Curtis Yarvin, a “neo-reactionary” (Linker’s term, but I doubt Yarvin would reject it), of whom I had heard, and probably could have placed as Right rather than Left figure. Beyond that, I was essentially ignorant of Yarvin’s particular spin on things — or how much influence it has built in formerly-reputable conservative circles like Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, whose Hillbilly Elegy marked him as someone with a background and a mind possibly suited to high office.
Yarvin gets a lot of facts right, a few more plausible. Yet my reaction against his conclusions is different than what Linker articulated (which probably was less than what he could have articulated).
Here’s my problem with Yarvin. He is hungry for power, and his obsession with power has already corrupted him. He has made it clear that among his first exercises of power would be sweeping, radical firings that would cripple government (and cause much misery to the newly-unemployed). Then he and his mostly-unnamed pals would amateurishly assume most or all of the vacated offices and try to impose their will on a country that’s about 50% of a different mind. It would make the Trump years a model of decorum and competence in comparison. I think it highly likely that there would be much bloodshed.
I have no reason to trust that their program would make the country better or make its citizens freer.
No thanks.
Signs of hope
I recently (like within the past half hour as I type) heard a preacher say that he has only seen one encouraging sign in public so far this year: a bunch of NFL players kneeling and praying around a teammate felled on the field by a heart attack.
It’s a tempting narrative: world; hell; handbasket. You can fill in the blanks.
Yet I see other signs — contemporaneous if not distinctly 2023.
I found it encouraging that a high proportion of the worst emerging Republican jackasses were handed their heads by voters last November.
I find it encouraging that honest liberals, and even one Marxist, keep saying things that get them labeled — oh, I don’t know; “white nationalists,” probably. Examples here and here.
I find it almost as encouraging that most honest conservatives have no use for Donald Trump and say to in terms that gives aid and comfort to liberals. (A bold claim I know, but I can always fall back on the No True Scotsman fallacy if you find a counter-example.)
Indeed, I find it encouraging to be reminded that center-left and center-right have an awful lot in common when compared to the alternatives.
The Quaker’s Mule Who Wouldn’t Plow
One of my favorite stories is about the Quaker whose mule refused to plow.
The Quaker tried to coax him every way he knew. Finally, he stepped around in front of the mule, took him gently by the ears, and stared into his eyes.
“Brother mule, thou knowest that I am a Quaker. Thou knowest I cannot beat thee. Thou knowest I cannot curse thee.
“With thou knowest not is is that I can sell thee to the Baptist down the road, and he can beat the living daylights out of thee.” 
Mitch Daniels, though Presbyterian rather than Quaker, ran no negative ads in his two successful runs for governor of Indiana, yet he won re-election in a year when Barack Obama memorably took Indiana’s electors in the presidential race. As President of Purdue (recently retired), he froze tuition for ten years.
It does my soul goodcheers my sinful heart, then, to see that Mitch has supporters who are willing to respond to barbarians who are trying to keep him from running for the Senate seat Mike Braun will vacate next year to run for governor:
Then with a toxic blast of political rectal gas, [Representative Jim] Banks signaled he would enter the brewing 2024 U.S. Senate race. Teaming up with Club for Growth President David McIntosh, the pair did something we’ve never seen before: Running a preemptive TV ad designed to keep a rival — Mitch Daniels — out of the race.
… [I]n the eyes of Club for Growth, a PAC of billionaires, it said in the TV ad, “After 50 years in big government, big pharma and big academia, Mitch Daniels forgot how to fight. An old guard Republican clinging to the old ways of the bad old days.”
Long-time GOP operative Mark Lubbers responded to the Club for Growth TV ad, telling me, “These are the same people who cost us Republican control of the Senate. Sad to see that Banks has thrown in with them.”
…
Donald J. Trump Jr. then tweeted on Jan. 13: “The establishment is trying to recruit weak RINO Mitch Daniels to run for U.S. Senate in Indiana. The same Mitch Daniels who agreed with Joe Biden that millions of MAGA Republicans are supposedly a danger to the country & trying to ‘subvert democracy.’ He would be Mitt Romney 2.0.”
This was the first time anyone had described Daniels as a “weak RINO.”
Lubbers responded to Trump the younger: “You think the progressive left needs to be fought; we think it needs to be BEATEN. That requires optimistic positive conservatism that builds majorities, wins elections & makes policy. Not just foaming at the mouth, counting tweets, and grifting contributions. Hit the road.”
When you think politically, … think of the most privileged person you have ever seen, and ask if your next act will be of any threat to him. I call this the Rich Uncle Pennybags test, after the guy from Monopoly. The question is, does your next proposed political action hurt Rich Uncle Pennybags? … I am saying that a left-wing movement that devotes most of its time, effort, and attention to actions that fail the test risks no longer being a left-wing movement at all. I’m saying that a left wing that constantly fails the Rich Uncle Pennybags test is precisely the kind of left-wing movement that establishment power would prefer to face – a movement about symbolism over substance, about the individual rather than the masses, about elevating minorities in the ranks of a corrupt system rather than ending that corruption, about personal antipathy rather than structural reality.
…
[P]olitics is about mass action at scale, and the ability of politics properly understood to address interpersonal bigotries is limited. What’s not limited is our ability to reduce economic and social inequalities between identity groups, if we engage in politics in the right spirit and with a healthy understanding of the need to achieve structural change instead of personal critique – the kind of structural change that Rich Uncle Pennybags can’t ignore.
That’s a really good understanding of politics, even if you’re on Uncle Pennybag’s side. But the best parts were (1) examples of pseudo-progressive obsessions that fail the test and may even strengthen Uncle Moneybags, and (2) things I read between the lines.
F’rinstance, Uncle Moneybags doesn’t mind DEI training. It may even help him. He probably doesn’t mind the rich kids of Antifa.
And just as the Right is full of people whose whole purpose in public life seems to be trolling and triggering the Left, so the Left is full of people whose whole purpose in public life, objectively, seems to be trolling and triggering the Right. They fail the Uncle Moneybags test and, along with their equally self-indulgent Right-wing co-conspirators, debase our visible political discourse and waste time that could be spent on consequential, not clickworthy, things.
A Pleasant Surprise
The Justice Department announced Tuesday two Florida residents had been indicted for allegedly vandalizing at least three pro-life pregnancy centers in Florida, spray-painting threats like “if abortions aren’t safe than niether [sic] are you,” “WE’RE COMING for U,” and “YOUR TIME IS UP!!” on the sides of the buildings. If convicted of the charges—which also included violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act—each defendant could face a maximum of 12 years in prison and fines up to $350,000. A number of crisis pregnancy centers around the country faced threats or violent attacks in the months leading up to and following last year’s Dobbs decision.
If forced to wager, I’d have wagered that Biden’s DOJ would never ferret out and prosecute the perpetrators of any attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers. Since I didn’t wager, I’m pleased to have my mild bias disproven.
Nonconformists
Transgender woman with Mike Tyson face tattoo GUILTY of raping two vulnerable mums with “her penis”
Most of the press went along with the defendant’s post-arrest change from man to woman, as did the judge, calling him “she” throughout the trial.” The Sun, god bless ‘em, did not.
Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 