Tag: Trump

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

SPLC

SPLC backgrounder (from a skeptical position I share)

The [Southern Poverty Law Center] was founded in 1971 to fight genuine white-supremacist terror in the American South. For almost two decades, it did necessary and often courageous work: bankrupting Klan chapters through civil litigation, winning judgments that shuttered paramilitary training camps, forcing accountability where local prosecutors had refused to. By the late 1980s, most of its original mission had been accomplished. The Klan was largely irrelevant. The overt neo-Nazi movement had been driven to the margins.

A healthy institution would have declared victory and wound itself down. Instead, roughly coinciding with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the SPLC began its transformation from a vessel of emancipation into a vessel of subversion. The legal work shrank. The direct-mail operation grew. The enemy was no longer the Klansman in the hood but the dissenter at the lectern—the Muslim reformer, the border-enforcement advocate, the Catholic theologian, the parents’ group. The SPLC became an institution that retained its old license while pivoting toward new, softer targets.

…

Consider allegations that “F-37,” an SPLC informant, helped plan the Charlottesville rally that killed Heather Heyer and traumatized a nation. According to the indictment, this individual actively coordinated transportation, participated in planning meetings, and posted racist content to maintain credibility within white supremacist circles. Moreover, it charges, the SPLC paid F-37 $270,000 over eight years to embed within the very movements it publicly condemned. When Americans witnessed the horror of torch-bearing neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us,” they were watching a performance partly choreographed by someone on a civil rights organization’s payroll, according to the indictment.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The SPLC Targeted Me. Now Its Reckoning Has Come.

The SPLC thought, while there was a fatwa against her life, that Ayaan Hirsi Ali had an Islamophobia problem. I don’t have much sympathy for SPLC’s legal problems now even if the prosecution’s motives are suspect (as is everything the Trump DOJ does; but “suspect” doesn’t mean “guilty.”)

SPLC Legal Update

A few months ago, I expressed some ambivalence about the Trump administration charging the Southern Poverty Law Center criminally:

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

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

Last week, Team Trump followed up with charges against a fairly high-ranking individual within the SPLC, and the Dispatch has weighed in with some analysis:

Approaching Beirich’s arraignment—which is scheduled for this Wednesday—and the jury selection and criminal trial set to take place in October, the Trump administration’s charge that the SPLC defrauded banks looks stronger than its claim that the organization defrauded its own donors….

[Analysis of the weak charges for “fraud” from paying informants to infiltrate groups omitted.]

The government’s allegations of bank fraud may prove stronger. After Beirich’s arrest, Blanche said that Beirich had helped open bank accounts in the names of fictitious companies. Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told TMD that most lawyers he speaks to consider the bank counts “more likely to cause real trouble for the SPLC in court.”

“One of the reasons for that is that the laws on false statements to banks are drawn in a very pro-prosecution way,” he said. And the SPLC has few defenses on these counts, Olson explained, because the laws on bank fraud mean that “it doesn’t matter what the bank thinks of this—for example, it doesn’t matter if the bank doesn’t want you prosecuted.”

“If you have misstated things to a bank, and … if it passes a threshold of somehow being material or important, then tough penalties apply,” Olson said.

…

But even if the case is ultimately dismissed, the controversy is also drawing attention to larger questions about the SPLC’s use of its funds. CharityWatch, a nonpartisan nonprofit that rates charities, gives the organization an “F” rating for continuing to raise money while already holding large reserves—$787 million in net assets, according to the center’s most recent financial filing.

“They’re doing okay from a financial efficiency perspective, but we analyzed their assets, and what we determined is that this organization could continue to operate at 2024 spending levels for six years without raising another penny of revenue,” Laurie Styron, CharityWatch’s CEO and executive director, told TMD “So our criticism is, ‘Why are you continuing to fundraise when you have six years’ worth of money available to operate your organization that you haven’t spent?’”

Blowback from the Congress Hegseth holds in contempt

There is, in short, good reason Congress isn’t rushing to rubber-stamp the staggering defense budget. The House, by a narrow margin, passed a $1.15 trillion defense budget and a $73 billion supplemental to fund the Iran war. In addition to the money in the House bills, the White House wants another $350 billion via a reconciliation bill that can’t be filibustered by Democrats. But that measure appears to be DOA in the Senate. With time running out, the armed forces are likely to begin the new fiscal year on Oct. 1 under a “continuing resolution” that provides “only” $838 billion. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has no one but himself to blame. He has been contemptuous of Congress, so it’s hardly surprising that its members are not rushing to hand him a massive pot of cash. If Hegseth wants to win bipartisan support for the defense budget — something that was taken for granted in years past — he needs to start briefing Senate Democrats, not just Republicans. And he needs to do a much better job of addressing lawmakers’ concerns about controversies such as the unexplained firings of general officers, the lawless attacks on alleged drug boats, the deteriorating conditions aboard an aircraft carrier deployed to the Middle East and the failed war with Iran.

…

Under Hegseth’s weak and woeful leadership, the defense budget has become a piggy bank not just for Trump’s impractical flights of fancy but also for Trump family members. The Washington Post reported that companies in which the president’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. have invested have received at least $3.2 billion in defense contracts since the start of Trump’s second term.

Perhaps there’s a case for a $1.5 trillion defense budget, but, so far, Hegseth hasn’t made it, at least not convincingly. Indeed, The Post reported earlier this year that military officers were scrambling to figure out how to spend an extra $500 billion. Hegseth seems to have picked $1.5 trillion as the “top line” arbitrarily, rather than conducting a rigorous bottom-up analysis of what the military needs.

Trump, for his part, hasn’t given a single speech providing a detailed justification for the defense budget. His argument for it remains at the bumper-sticker level, claiming that all that extra spending will produce a “Dream Military.” But at what cost?

A far greater Republican president — Dwight D. Eisenhower — recognized that the nation must provide for its defense today without “plundering … the precious resources of tomorrow.”

Max Boot

I take every opportunity to say “I told you so,” but this is not a fair opportunity. It never occurred to me that we could attack Iran and not beat them. It never occurred to me that we could frightfully deplete vital munitions in a foolish war on Iran, imperiling our ability to honor other commitments around the world. I never thought about how Iran would strike back if we attacked.

But I think I can say that if I sat in the Oval Office, I’d have listened carefully to top military officials who could and probably would have told me those things – and that I consequently would not have started this stupid war.

No bail

The Tate brothers want bail pending their extradition proceedings to the United Kingdom. Unfortunately for them, it’s very hard to get bail when you’re pending extradition, and also their social media is full of statements about how they are flight risks. “You can’t ban me from driving, I have nine drivers licenses. You can’t freeze my passport, I have four.” Yeah… they’re not going to be getting out anytime soon.

Josh Barro and Ken White

Postliberalism

Liberalism is the system of government most Americans recognize as legitimate: The rule of law, constitutionalism (written or unwritten), democratic accountability (i.e., politicians are accountable to voters), individual rights variously defined, and to one extent or another, commitment to the free market.

A postliberal is someone who believes that liberalism was either a mistake from the beginning (they heap a lot of scorn on poor John Locke), or—like Marx—argues as an objective observation that it is a spent force in need of replacement. The specifics of what that new replacement order should look like are often hard to find, and even when some give it a shot, I haven’t seen any that aren’t exceedingly vague, aspirational, platitudinous, or too narrow to be the basis of a consensus (I am open to correction).

Jonah Goldberg, Thank God the Constitution is Liberal

Legal Miscellany from the Short Circuits newsletter

  • Plaintiff: My gov’t employer cooked up baseless allegations to fire me in retaliation for my whistleblowing. State court (round one): Sounds like a claim that requires discovery, which means you should file a plenary proceeding. State court (round two): Whoops! Turns out that round-one decision precludes all your state-law claims in this here plenary proceeding. Federal district court: And that all looks like res judicata for your constitutional claims, too! Second Circuit: Guys. Guys. Calm down. Nothing has been judicataed, and somebody needs to listen to this lady’s claims. Case undismissed!
  • If a Fifth Circuit opinion considering a challenge to gas stove regulations begins, “The Biden Administration proposed numerous regulations to make home appliances more expensive and less useful,” you probably know how it’s gonna turn out.
  • Sixth Circuit: Forcing a compliant suspect to pee in his front yard when there were plenty of officers on hand to supervise a trip to the toilet is an obvious Fourth Amendment violation. No qualified immunity. Case undismissed. Dissent: At the Founding, public urination was probably not a crime in these circumstances.
  • Minnesota Jane Doe, who was sexually assaulted at age 14, provides evidence for a rape kit. Anoka County police do not test the kit for over 16 years, then find it contains DNA implicating the assailant she identified. She sues the police for failure to investigate. Eighth Circuit: Crime victims have no standing for that sort of thing.
  • Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are sold as a targeted tool to catch dangerous criminals and find missing persons. And we like both of those things. But the frequency with which officers use ALPRs for non-law-enforcement purposes (chiefly stalking) or wind up tracking and detaining the wrong people (sometimes at gunpoint) is downright alarming. Officers rarely record specific reasons for ALPR searches, and even where they are supposed to, as we learned in litigation against Norfolk, Va., officers ignore those internal department requirements without consequence. (One officer repeatedly wrote “la la la la,” and no one noticed.) Which is all to say that constitutional safeguards are desperately needed, and we have a sensible proposal that we’re bringing to a courthouse near you: If the police want to track someone, they have to get a warrant. Click here to learn more.

Right hand, meet left hand

Religio-Legal from WaPo:

Virginia requires chaplains serving in the Virginia National Guard to obtain a theology-related master’s degree. Yet despite providing tuition assistance for other types of degrees, it recently denied tuition assistance to Trace Stevens, a National Guard member enrolled in a master’s program at Liberty University to pursue the type of theology degree necessary to become a chaplain. The state claimed that such degrees are too religious to receive state support.

Things I’d rather not talk about

Surrogacy is one of those issues that conservatives simply don’t want to talk about. It is often heart-wrenching when couples are not able to have children, and IVF and surrogacy are viewed as miracles to let these couples have children. To raise any moral or legal objections to this practice is sometimes seen as a third-rail, even in Republican pro-life circles …

Yes, this is true.

… And on the left, how many of the women who wore bonnets from the Handmaid’s Tale to protest Justice Barrett hired poor women in Eastern Europe to carry their children? This is an issue that needs to be discussed more on both sides of the spectrum.

Josh Blackman

I’m one of those muzzled conservatives. “I think IVF is dodgy” was the shorthand for IVF and for surrogacy that I put in my running list of unpopular opinions.

But I’m friends with people who have children via assisted reproductive technologies that I find “dodgy.” To discuss it risks the friendship. And their children are precious however conceived.

“Woke” (properly speaking)

“Woke” has come to be used as shorthand for anything that feels like an extremist position on the left: defunding the police, favoring open borders, supporting medically invasive “gender affirming care” for teens over the wishes of their parents, etc. But, rightly understood, none of those are woke. They are public policies favored by left-wing activists. Wokeness was (and is) something distinct: a method of leveraging cultural power to reshape public opinion, thereby creating an electorate more likely to embrace those and other progressive views in the future.

That reshaping takes place outside of the political sphere—in cultural institutions in the private sphere. It can be driven by grassroots agitation (from below) or by elite agenda-setting (from above).

Conservative pundit Kevin Williamson getting hired by The Atlantic and then fired two weeks later because junior staffers at the magazine demanded it was an example (one of many) of the first. Applicants and recent hires for teaching positions at universities across the country being forced to sign documents promising to teach a specific narrative about race and gender in all of their classes, regardless of their specialized fields or research and teaching interests, was (and is) an example of the second.

A mob of progressives on Twitter circa 2019 attempting to get a conservative or “reactionary centrist” fired for staking out the “wrong” position on this or that issue of the day is an example of the first. Millions of employees being forced to sit through DEI training sessions run by their employer’s department of human resources, which is in charge of hiring, firing, and promotion for the company, is an example of the second.

The problem with and novelty of these developments is not that they involve crowds and institutions imposing or enforcing certain norms. The problem and novelty is entirely a function of the fact that the norms they seek to impose or enforce are expressions of a moral vanguard.

Damon Linker, “looking left” as his Substack regularly and explicitly does.

But note that there are right-leaning versions of something very like “woke,” too. Does Linker’s definition of woke excludes them unnecessarily, or is there something distinctive about, say, Laura Loomer (right-coded grassroots agitator, whose McCarthyite lists got a whole lotta people fired in Trump 2.0) or Ron DeSantis (an elite right-wing agenda-setter for the state of Florida)?

Shorts

  • ‌If God wanted us to have unlimited free energy He would have put a giant fusion reactor in the sky.
  • The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born. (J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know)
  • Religion has declined in the West, but Taylor thinks the more interesting story is the explosion of different forms of religion in modernity, its fragmentation. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry
  • If sex is just a social construct, or even if gender is just a social construct, why is there any need for medical “transitioning” starting with hormone injections? (Tipsy, H/T Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)
  • How much would you pay for a smarter baby? — I can imagine the lawsuits later: “We paid for a smarter baby but instead we got a child who’s compassionate and generous! We’ve been screwed!” (Alan Jacobs)
  • Joe Biden’s political appointees had left the week before, and I was now the senior intelligence official in the White House. For the incoming Trump administration, the trans woman would man the gates. (Julia Curlee, The Wrong Kind of American)
  • If this is Making America Great Again, I wish he’d stop. (Rod Dreher, who voted for Trump in 2024)
  • Anywhere there was power to protect, doublespeak was, sooner or later, right there in the midst of it. As the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing put it, one realizes that “they are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.” (Russell Moore)
  • While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar. (Sen. Jon Ossoff, in a remark that seems to have gotten under Trump’s skin)
  • Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics. Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country. It’s because he’s a radical, extremist Dumocrat. (Steven Cheung, White House Communications Director)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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.

Farewell, Golden Rule; G’bye, Beatitudes

To hell with the Golden Rule (and the Beatitudes, too)

I don’t look to Ezra Klein for spiritual insight. He delivered anyway. Christopher Nolan Stared Into Elon Musk’s Soul.

We’re not just teetering on postliberal; the GOP is emphatically post-Christian (or is it pre-Christian?), glorifying power and humiliation of foes. Paraphrasing the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, to hell with the Golden Rule:

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time. … [W]e are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce.

…

The United States is the power of NATO, for the United States to secure the Arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests. Obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States.

…

We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our own backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries, but not to us, to hoard weapons from our adversaries, to be able to be positioned as an asset against the United States rather than on behalf of the United States.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen “Wormtongue” Miller to Jake Tapper

Sacrilege

I also began to understand why the American culture wars involved so many battles over sacrilege. Is a flag just a piece of cloth, which can be burned as a form of protest? Or does each flag contain within it something nonmaterial such that when protesters burn it, they have done something bad (even if nobody were to see them do it)? When an artist submerges a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, or smears elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, do these works belong in art museums? Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, “If you don’t want to see it, don’t go to the museum”? Or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane, and more degraded?

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.

The book has been around for a while. Do our culture wars still fit this pattern? I’m not sure we consider the same things sacred or sacred-adjacent.

Dare I suggest that the progressives today consider the feelings of certified victim groups (e.g., “sexual minorities”) sacred while that MAGA right increasingly considers “heritage America” so sacred that it’s sullied by the wrong sort of immigrant?

Trump Targets ‘Birth Tourism’ …

Speaking of “the wrong kind of immigrants”:

After the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at limiting access to birthright citizenship, the Trump administration and Republican allies have focused their attention on ending “birth tourism” – that is, when “foreign nationals [travel] to the US with the purpose of giving birth.” “The Justice Department has told US attorneys’ offices and the Criminal Division to prioritize the prosecution of birth tourism schemes,” according to Bloomberg Law. “Stepped up enforcement could result in intense scrutiny of visa applicants and travelers to the US and charges for people facilitating birth tourism, former consular officials and federal prosecutors said.”

This push may reflect misplaced priorities (see below), but I have no principled problem with enforcing the law.

I just don’t think we’ve got a serious “birthright tourism” problem.

Let’s try a definition of birthright tourism: women traveling to the U.S. in order to give birth so that their child will be a U.S. citizen. Is that fair? Note that it excludes births to women who give birth while here on business, or as students, or for some other reason other than to have a citizen-child.

But Penn State researchers using comprehensive national birth data (2014-2024) calculated 5,000 to just under 10,000 births per year to women on tourist visas—which is 0.3% of all U.S. births, and surely not all women who gave birth while on tourist visas came here in order to give birth and secure birthright citizenship for their child — i.e., they weren’t “birth tourists.” Team Trump can counter with a figure of 33,000 per year, but not surprisingly, it’s a less credible figure.

Delegitimizing “legitimate politics”?

Illinois Democrat appeals corruption conviction to Supreme Court
Zach Schonfeld, The Hill

Former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, a Democrat, “ask[ed] the Supreme Court to review his corruption conviction,” according to The Hill. “The longest-serving legislative leader in U.S. history was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for using his position to financially reward himself and political associates.” “Madigan raised several arguments in his appeal, including that he didn’t act ‘corruptly,’ as is required by the federal program bribery statute.” “The novel bribery theories the government zealously pursued against Speaker Madigan stretch federal bribery law in ways that threaten to criminalize and chill lawful interactions between state and local officials and their constituents,” his lawyers wrote. The Hill noted that Madigan is “the latest in a line of elected leaders ensnared in corruption scandals who’ve taken claims to the nation’s highest court that they’re being criminally prosecuted over legitimate politics.”

Tough luck, kid

The . . . English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past . . . He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

Flannery O’Connor

Shorts

  • The great benefit to be derived from reading pre-modern authors is to come to realise that after all we [moderns] might have been mistaken. (Edward Feser, Aquinas)
  • Early in the war, the zoo had killed its poisonous snakes and spiders, anticipating that if their enclosures were destroyed, these creatures would pose a significantly greater hazard than, say, a fugitive koala bear. (Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile)
  • “It is a nasty game,” Mr. Smith said of politics. “But I figured out a long time ago that you’re either in the game or you’re out of the game, and I needed access for some of the industry issues.” (Sell the Company for $400 Million? He’s Giving It Away Instead. – The New York Times)
  • [T]here is an irony in folks who do not hesitate to call the [New York] Times “fake news” simultaneously demanding that one of their own be granted the prestige and recognition of writing for the paper [as a successor to Ross Douthat]. It’s a bit like demanding the Catholic Church appoint a Baptist bishop. (Jonah Goldberg)
  • [I]f you want to claim “The Odyssey” for your own worldview, to insist that the dominant movie of the summer is speaking directly to your concerns, the banal didacticism of Nolan’s script is unusually amenable to personalized interpretations. (Ross Douthat)
  • Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. (James Baldwin)
  • Secularism was not a neutral concept. The very word came trailing incense clouds of meaning that were irrevocably and venerably Christian. (Tom Holland, Dominion)
  • As far as the official version of events is concerned, Islamist terrorism is a response to a continuous crime against the Muslim community – a crime committed by everyone who notices that Muslim customs are in friction with the traditional social order of France. (Roger Scruton, Conservatism)
  • AI is a Swiss Army knife. It does everything and excels at nothing. / That’s exactly why it wins. The best tool is not the sharpest one, it’s the one already in your pocket. (Joroen Sangers)
  • He is the dirtiest man I have ever liked. (Igor Stravinsky of W.H. Auden)
  • “Socialism just means you’re for garbage collection.” (Ruy Teixeira describing DSA “sanewashing.”)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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.

A little whataboutism (and more)

Whataboutism

The truths that must not be named

I’m not sure there’s anybody in the second Trump administration, save Marco Rubio, to which I would extend a defense on almost anything. But whataboutism isn’t a defense.

So long as Democrat nominees to high office cannot affirm that men do not become pregnant (a stock Republican gotcha question), they lack standing to criticize Trump nominees’ refusal to affirm that Joe Biden won the 2020 election (a stock Democrat gotcha question).

(Heck, in one sense, the Democrats are worse. I’m not sure I, who detest Trump, could affirm Biden’s victory in terms stronger than “I believe he won because it has been reported so, and certified so, and I know no credible evidence to the contrary.”)

Who’s the more partisan Justice?

Who’s more partisan:

  • Justice Samuel Alito, who on questions of central importance to Trump, votes with him 87% of the time? Or maybe it’s …
  • Ketanji Brown Jackson, who on questions of central importance to Trump, votes against him 98% of the time?

Somehow, the press just isn’t interested in the KBJ side of that. (H/T Sara Isgur)

Trump doesn’t give a rip about the GOP

The only thing good things to say about Trump’s speech Thursday night were that he reportedly kept it down to 25 minutes and didn’t harp on the supposed theft of the 2020 Election. Other than that, his party was almost certainly damaged badly:

In early 2021, Republicans were poised to win a majority in the U.S. Senate … All they had to do was win the two Senate seats in Georgia headed to a runoff in January.

Then Donald Trump opened his yap. He had just lost the presidency. To assuage his own ego injury, Trump attacked the election as fake and rigged. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the effect of this talk in Georgia … Trump had discouraged his own voters and energized his foes. His party lost both seats and any hope of retaining the Senate.

Tonight, Trump repeated …

If … you are pro-Trump, you heard a message of despair. Your president, in whom you trust, described a hopelessly compromised voting system, so broken that it fooled even Trump himself in his first presidency. Between the Chinese, the illegal aliens, and the hated liberal media, your vote will probably count for nothing. Plus, it’s crooked and unpatriotic to vote by mail. It’s all hopeless. Why bother?

… Trump’s message was one of futility, as if to say: It doesn’t matter how many of us show up, because of all the sinister plots against us. We’re doomed almost no matter what we do.

That message makes psychic sense for Trump. He’s probably going to lose at least one congressional chamber in November, perhaps two, and he desperately needs an explanation as to why it’s not his fault.

… among those who watched for sure—the hard-pressed Republican candidates begging for Trump to throw them a frickin’ bone on some issue of concern to voters—how mad are they tonight?

Trump is always about Trump first. Tonight was about Trump alone. He’s abandoned his allies because it’s his nature; he cannot help it. Soon he’ll discover what it’s like to be even more isolated and embattled than he needed to be, because he could not speak for—or about—anything other than himself.

David Frum, Trump Dooms His Own Party. See also Tom Nichols, Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China.

Someone wrote about this recently.

To every thing there is a season

If there is a season to everything, and a time to every purpose under heaven (Eccles. 3:1), then there are right and wrong ways to observe the landmarks of life. It simply does not make sense for secular authorities to use this extraordinary national birthday as the vehicle for eliciting waves of national guilt and launching a search for means of atonement. Compare this to, say, the way we characteristically observe a human birthday. When someone turns one hundred years old, do we see it as the opportunity for a struggle session, in which we browbeat that person into confessing the many misdeeds that have accumulated over the course of a long life? Or do we instead use it as an opportunity for the expression of love, and of our gratitude for the remarkable fact that this person is still among us? To what season does this occasion belong?

Wilfred M. McClay, A Nation’s Birthday

The End of Reading

My avoidance of reading The End of Reading is Here despite repeated recommendations (it’s so looooong!) reflected that even geezers can fall prey to the malady. Excerpts:

  • Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.
  • [A]s writing eroded individuals’ memories, the media theorist Andrey Mir has observed, it improved society’s collective memory.
  • Trump is our first postliterate president. It is difficult to imagine him being elected leader of a country where information is primarily spread through text. Ahead of the 2024 election, an NBC News poll of 1,000 voters found that Joe Biden had a 49-point lead among respondents who read newspapers. Trump has pioneered a style of communication that exploits our distracted, disputatious age.
  • Politicians on the right and the left have figured out how to exploit these new platforms. Reihan Salam, the president of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, described to me how this plays out. “You name an enemy and you polarize the public,” he said. “You don’t allow for nuance, because nuance is just a confusion when you’re in a struggle for power.” (Ironically, Salam is the boss of Christopher Rufo, who calculatedly used exactly this strategy to attack “critical race theory”.)

Don’t be like me. Read it. Reading something that long by itself begins the cure.

A linguistic curiosity

In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense.

Orhan Pamuk and Ara Guler, Istanbul

AI detection

Freddie de Boer has an interesting piece on the brittleness of AI-detector Pangram (which I hadn’t heard of by name, though I knew the concept).

I’m fortunate to be able to subscribe to many interesting things. But I still have only 24 hours in my day, like everyone else. I’m just not that interested in whether a human or a machine wrote a logical, even persuasive, argument; what matters is the truth, falsity, or fruitfulness of it in my situation. Only if I’m trying to decide whether the putative author is trustworthy would the AI question come up.

This is not to indict as foolish those who are interested in things like Pangram. I’m only saying that given my situation in life and reading habits, it’s not of interest to me — and that some of my readers might similarly be in a situation where the human or cyber source of a writing is irrelevant.

Luigi: The Musical

The hard part of selling liberalism or American conservatism (which seeks to conserve the liberal principles of the American founding) is not how we talk about the philosophy—the trouble is with the philosophy itself. Restraint is (barring some kink) unsexy. There is nothing thrilling about acknowledging the necessity of trade-offs, the role of prudence applied ad hoc to individual cases, or that the best-case scenario we are offering is a series of good-enough second-best settlements and accommodations. (Kevin D. Williamson)

I recently reviewed Luigi: The Musical, which closes with the titular antihero (Luigi Mangione is being tried for the murder of health insurance executive Brian Thompson) singing a song in which he proposes to keep murdering people until there is peace and justice upon the land while the chorus behind him sings about policy trade-offs, the complexity of health care as a social issue, and the necessities of compromise and negotiation. Of course, Luigi drowns out the chorus. That is how it goes. 

Kevin D. Williamson

How I use AI

AI is controversial in many ways, and I know a few people who consciously shun it completely. I, in contrast, use it while continuing to read about the dangers, horror stories, and other things to hone discernment.

I came across a list of recommendations for AI use that I agree with completely:

  • Avoid using AI chatbots for personal, spiritual, or emotional matters.
  • Restrict use strictly to non-personal tasks (e.g., recipes, summaries).
  • Do not seek consciousness, spiritual counsel, or relationship advice from AI.
  • Those with mental health issues or in vulnerable states should be warned against AI chatbot use.
  • Recognize that while most chatbot interactions are neutral, there is an elevated risk for spiritual deception.

(H/T Jordan, The AI Chatbot as Digital Oujia Board)

In addition, I just haven’t been comfortable with the thought of speaking directly to a chatbot. I’ll dictate questions, then cut-and-paste into it instead. I think I’m trying to avoid any faux-personal relationship.

So how does this cash out? Of what use is AI if those things are out of bounds?

Maybe this will help. Here are some questions I’ve posed to it or some requests I’ve made over about 14 months:

  • Why do so many organizations I give to send me membership cards? Is that supposed to create some special bond?
  • Is there any evidence that any of the Minneapolis protesters of ICE immigration enforcement were “paid agitators”?
  • Please compare English translations of The Brothers Karamazov, ranking them if there is a critical consensus.
  • Can you please summarize, in 1000 words or less, the change from Second-Temple Judaism to Rabbinic Judaism?
  • I’m trying first to recall and then to flesh out an assertion I heard or read in podcast, print or another “public-like” forum./The assertion was something along the lines that whether extraterrestrial intelligent life exists will never be definitively answered because it is impossible (as a matter of physics?) for such life to travel inter-galactically (or was it impossible from one solar system to another?)/Can you help me pin it down, and give a simplified not-too-scientifically-sophisticated explanation, not just the conclusion some have reached?
  • How prevalent is “birth tourism” in the United States?
  • How is the post-flood restoration of Asheville, NC coming along?

Then there were a couple of dialogs to get things done. Omitting those related to my work with some Boards of Directors, these include:

  • I used Claude AI to help me dress up my micro.blog posts with a custom CSS (since I don’t understand CSS it’s not worth the time it would take to learn).
  • My most ambitious use of an AI agent was to migrate a couple of years of Common Place Book entries from a run-on Markdown file, with date and time metadata for each separate entry, to DayOne, a Mac journaling app that just looks way nicer. I did the same with a run-on Markdown file of Diary entries.

My commonest AI use by far is a separate service, a browser plug-in called Voilá. I think it’s built on Chat GPT, and it has capabilities beyond my humble but time-saving use: Unless I know a writer as someone I read for the writing skill, not just for the opinion or other content, I repeatedly, multiple times per day, have Voilá summarize webpages for me to see if they’re worth reading. If I save the article, I typically prepend the Voilá summary to orient me if and when I come back to it.

Shorts on the Department of Justice

  • In 2019 Bill Barr, then Mr Trump’s pick for attorney-general, said that Americans “have to know that there are places in the government where the rule of law—not politics—holds sway” and that the Department of Justice “must be such a place”. Mr Trump has no time for that. Less than halfway through his second term, he has turned the DoJ from an arm of the law into a muscular limb of the presidency.(The Economist)
  • With warrants and subpoenas, the DoJ is pursuing Mr Trump’s critics and his hobby-horses, from political adversaries to election fraud to leaks in the press. The number of lawyers has dwindled by 20%; former prosecutors point to an incompatibility between the president’s agenda and the fair application of law. The DoJ is retreating from certain types of criminal enforcement. And, increasingly, judges are telling government lawyers that they cannot be taken at their word. (The Economist again)

Shorts

  • “It’s sad for Senator Lindsey Graham that the last person he spoke to on this earth was the president who stole his soul,” – Tina Brown. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
  • “14,000 Europeans died due to heat in June. This is the same continent that doesn’t believe in installing air-conditioning. For context, [14,000] is over 10 times the number of people who get murdered in America with a gun,” – Steve Guest. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
  • In The Atlantic, Helen Lewis processed Vice President JD Vance’s recent three-hour chat with Joe Rogan: “Watching Vance’s media appearances is uniquely painful. He lacks the authentic berserk of Kash Patel, or the pageant-queen polish of Karoline Leavitt, or his boss’s unique corkscrew approach to conversation. Like Stephen Miller, Vance desperately wants to be funny and cool. Like Stephen Miller, he is neither.” (Alex Gontscharow, Ashburn, Va., and Mike Marquard, Portland, Ore.) (Via Frank Bruni)
  • … “It’s not that nothing happens. It’s that the same thing almost happens, over and over, for two hours. A promising run, broken up. A cross to no one. A shot into the third row. Soccer isn’t really about scoring. It’s about the threat of scoring, endlessly deferred. It’s all foreplay, no sex.” (Sam Downing, Houston ) (Via Frank Bruni)
  • And in his newsletter, Ron Charles captured the vertical charms — and challenges — of Portugal’s capital: “We walked 24,000 steps, and somehow 23,000 of them were uphill. Lisbon, we’ve discovered, is basically an antique StairMaster tiled blue.” (Donna Peremes, Hyattsville, Md.) (Via Frank Bruni)
  • These are just horrible people, doing horrible things, on purpose. (David French regarding the Trump administration siccing their attack dogs on federal judges, and even on their law clerks).

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

Jonah Goldberg

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.

July 10, 2026

Trump

Election tampering

It seems to me that the most sinister and calculated thing Trump is doing this time around is trying to override the constitutional control of elections by the states. I have little doubt that he’s trying to wring out more wins for MAGA candidates, starting this Fall and continuing to 2028.

But I hadn’t seen much evidence that there were court challenges or any other opposition to such dubious efforts.

Now I’ve see that there is opposition and it’s largely successful.

  1. Because he’s a stupid and impetuous man 99% of the time, Trump is getting some pushback from Republicans, especially in the Senate, at least partly on grounds that Trump’s shenanigans might actually suppress Republican voters as much or more than Democrats. The SAVE Act just may not make it across the finish line (the “prediction markets” say it won’t) despite Trump flogging Congress to get it there.
  2. I don’t know where the FBI got authority to impound anyone’s voting records, but the federal courts are (now?) virtually unanimous in knocking down such efforts — including federal courts presided over by Trump appointees.

I’m troubled by legal whores in the administration (e.g., John Eastman), but the larger story has been one of the legal profession’s steadfastness:

  1. Heavy downpours, not just scattered showers, of principled resignations from the Department of Justice and U.S. Attorneys’ offices, whenever Trump demanded something unethical. Trump has has to staff up with unprincipled Chuds who make fools of themselves — and of him — in court.
  2. Judges insisting on being impartial and following the law despite appointment by Trump.

It makes me proud of my former profession and delighted that we have a judiciary, unlike Congress, that’s still functioning.

“Sports Diplomacy”

The American government is giving its imprimatur — perhaps I should say lending its muscle — to the international expansion of human cockfighting. An earlier generation had the Marshall Plan. Ours has mixed martial arts.

The administration is calling the arrangement “sports diplomacy,” and there are images of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Dana White, U.F.C.’s chief executive officer, holding up a memorandum of understanding at the State Department on June 11. They’re smiling, as if they accomplished something important. As if there were a global barbarism deficit and the United States is nobly stepping up to fill the void. As if an important emblem of human civilization and expression of human culture will finally get the recognition it deserves. As if the torch of liberty can now shine brighter than ever, because it will be carried by warriors of such vision and valor that one of them, upon winning his South Lawn brawl, used his moment at the mic to crow a cuckoo credo: “Michelle Obama is a man!”

…

I cringe at our government’s advancement of such savagery while we’re retreating from the kinds of engagements that lessen hardship and relieve misery.

Frank Bruni. I cringe, too.

The Crypto President

Our Crypto President is fighting for the right of Americans to piss their retirement accounts away on stuff like, well, crypto:

Most Americans don’t look to their 401(k) plans for excitement or experimentation, instead relying on the promise that steady saving and sober planning will guarantee security in their golden years. The Trump administration wants to transform the well-worn patterns of retirement investing. To do so, it is moving to weaken the main protection workers have over their retirement money. The man in charge of the regulatory rollback is an industry insider whose former clients are among the large companies likely to benefit from his plan. Since taking office last year, President Donald Trump has loudly called for plans to include less-regulated — and often risky — investments like private equity and cryptocurrency. To achieve that goal, the administration is softening one of the strongest legal protections American workers have: the right to hold an employer accountable when retirement savings are mishandled. The change is designed to give employers cover if their workers’ 401(k)s are deflated by expensive, opaque or unproven investments. Backing this push are Wall Street firms, which want a bigger piece of the $10 trillion in America’s 401(k) plans, and America’s largest employers, who want to avoid class-action lawsuits from their employees. They have a powerful ally in Trump’s pick to lead the effort at the Department of Labor: Daniel Aronowitz, who previously ran a firm that helped large companies protect themselves against worker lawsuits. Now Aronowitz is the one driving changes to the rules those same companies play by. (Source: propublica.org)

John Ellis News Items. I’m glad to see this mentioned, but I wish that it was more prominent than ProPublica and the world’s greatest newsletter. This is the risk I immediately saw when Trump touted allowing private equity and cryptocurrency in retirement plans, though it gets a little further into the weeds than I did since I’m no expert on retirement plan law.

Mustafa Mond knew the score

I’m a little bit surprised that I haven’t heard people talking about how artificial intelligence will give us a four day work week. That’s the kind of prattle that usually accompanies labor-saving innovations.

But it’s just as well that people haven’t been saying that, because it isn’t going to happen this time just like it hasn’t happened the other times. Not in the USA anyway. Maybe in Europe, where they tend to see living as worthier than ever-rising “standard of living.”

The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes. Thousands of them.” Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. “And why don’t we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

Cicero Society

The occasion was the monthly meeting of the Cicero Society, a parliamentary debating club committed, according to its terse website, to “developing excellence, preserving the Western intellectual tradition, and forming young leaders” — which in Washington is usually code for conservative job placement.

…

The evening’s debate was “Is Christianity Conservative?” I assumed the answer would be “Of course it is.” Conservatism is the political instinct that guards “permanent things” against the progressive urge to remake the world from scratch, to paraphrase one debater. But after several hours, the opposition carried the night with a different argument: Until Christian beliefs are fully enshrined in public policy, Christians will need to be radicals. One of the speakers on the winning side put the matter pithily: “Christian ends sometimes require progressive means.” If the existing order is decadent, corrupt, or hostile to Christian life, then conserving it is no virtue.

…

According to the Catholic writer and Vance-whisperer Sohrab Ahmari, Evangelical Protestantism may be more powerful as a mass political force, but Catholicism has “a deep theory of the world.”

Nate Weisberg, The Young Catholic Elite Poised to Take Over MAGA

I have never heard of the Cicero Society before. Although I care for the irreligious right even less, I’ll pass on Catholic Integralism’s right as well. I’m not yet to the point of choosing lesser evils with enthusiasm.

Genealogy by Bill of Sale

Carolyn Haliburton Carter, a descendant of slaves and a professional genealogist, tells of meeting with descendants of the people who had owned her ancestors, still living on the plantation where her family was enslaved:

What was clear is that absence exists on both sides of enslavement. My family inherited silence where records should have been. Their family inherited stories shaped by omission. Neither lineage was whole.

Scripture tells us that truth sets people free –  but it does not promise comfort in the telling. Witness, too, is costly. But it remains the only ground on which reconciliation can stand.

I wanted them to know that I had no animosity towards them. I was grateful for the opportunity, and felt compelled to say aloud what seemed necessary: “We cannot change the past, and neither you nor I were there, but we can tell the truth about it – for the future.”

Carolyn Haliburton Carter,The Price of a Name. That’s the kind of article I really value at Plough.

Shorts

  • Sonofagun! It’s true. I configured a 16” MacBook Pro with everything, and everything super-sized, and it priced out at $10,149.00! AI farms are buying so many processors and memory chips (terminology may be outdated) that the price is soaring and Apple has raised prices accordingly.
  • [A] nation united in pabulum is better than one divided into two tribal camps waging an “uncivil war” against each other about everything. (Andrew Sullivan, Biden’s Culture War Aggression)
  • A rule of good manners, perhaps good morals: those with options should not criticize those without them. (@jabel on micro.blog)
  • In 1534, papal authority was formally repudiated by act of parliament. Henry was declared ‘the only supreme head on Earth of the Church of England’. Anyone who disputed his right to this title was guilty of capital treason. (Tom Holland, Dominion)
  • In a policy analysis on the Brookings Institution’s website, Fiona Hill contrasted two world leaders: “Putin believes that things will go wrong in military and other operations — based on his own experience in the security services — but he also believes he will always find a way to fix them. Trump believes nothing will go wrong, and if it does, someone else is to blame.” (Via Frank Bruni)
  • [I]n The Atlantic, Alexandra Petri sought a final word on those iconically foul waters, which may bear some blame for a fowl fatality: “The Reflecting Pool is a metaphor so perfect, it feels almost valedictory, as though symbolism as a whole gave up and decided to sign off. On its way out, it killed a duck.” (Via Frank Bruni)
  • Block that metaphor! Of Graham Platner: “The red flag that led to his implosion was hiding in plain sight.” (Emma Tucker at the Wall Street Journal)
  • “Synergies is Latin for layoffs.” (Scott Galloway H/T John Ellis)
  • Communism is a system of government in which the ruling party controls major investment decisions while hoarding wealth for itself and suppressing all opposition. / Nevertheless, Donald Trump professes to dislike it. (Jonathan Chait)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

June 23, 2026

Hypocrisy pandemic

[W]e find that Republicans who question the integrity of elections may not be doing so sincerely. In public, only 40 percent of Republicans and 37 percent of conservatives agree that U.S. elections are free and fair. Yet in private, the share rises to 61 percent among Republicans and 57 percent for conservatives.

What Do Americans Think When No One Is Watching?

This paradox keeps popping up in my reading

We did not downsize as a gesture of protest against consumer society. We simply found ourselves with a reduced income and set about discovering the things we could do without. We were helped by situating ourselves in a place where it is quite difficult to spend money in the ways we spent it before. Patmos did not have available the range of goods that eat up income at an expanding rate so that you never feel you have quite enough. And doing without them has the therapeutic effect of slowing you down. It takes time to hand-wash clothes or to jump up and down on sheets, rinse them, wring them out and hang them on a line between trees in the garden; to top and tail the beans; to mix, whip and grate by hand; to haul up buckets from a well. A life without gadgets develops a different, slower rhythm. And, oddly, more time seems to be available in a life without labor-saving devices.

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul. See also The Abundance of Less and stories about AI like the one I referred to recently.

Free to say “no”

[I]f the future is inevitable, then there’s nothing for you or me to do about it. Writing in the 1940s, C. S. Lewis observed a similar dynamic in communist writers. He noted that “they tend, when all else fails, to tell me that I ought to forward the revolution because ‘it is bound to come.’ One dissuaded me from my own position on the shockingly irrelevant ground that if I continued to hold it I should, in good time, be ‘mown down’ — argued, as a cancer might argue if it could talk, that he must be right because he could kill me.”

The true believers in the AI gospel make a mistake eerily similar to that of the mid-century communists: Because they suppose themselves on the right side of history — because they imagine history has sides at all — they cannot abide even mild dissent.

But you remain free to say no.

Brad East, You Don’t Have to Use AI.

I haven’t hidden that I use AI and rather enjoy it. But a lot of serious people are raising questions, not about complicity in a possible doomsday but about how AI shapes its users.

Learning from the Plain Folk

When the Amish see an interesting new technology, they discuss where to ban or allow it in terms of its effects, particularly on the community.

We’re doing something like that with AI. Mercifully, most of the voices are sober, respectful, even a bit tentative, because the potential benefits are widely appreciated among the chattering class. I don’t expect the conversation to end soon, by which point habit may carry the day.

Meanwhile, Anton Barba-Kay is calling for caution, in the context of comments about Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical:

The document takes issue with “the technocratic paradigm” as one of its main foils. It defines that paradigm as “the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control, and profit alone shape personal, social, and economic decisions.”

…

The issue is not that these are evil thoughts to think; it is that we collectively don’t think and can’t agree on anything besides. The technocratic paradigm emerges as a background consensus for lack of other commitments held across institutions, markets, platforms, and nations. And yet this just is the transhumanist lingua franca of Babel: the very terms we all use to describe what we’re up to as we construct yonder tower.

For some reason, I find this formulation unusually clarifying, more helpful than most of what I’ve read on the subject.

Nailing Jello to the Wall

On imposing spurious rationality

At the beginning of the second Trump administration, I wrote that I wasn’t enjoying my job anymore, because it was at once too easy and too awful: the people in charge are evil, stupid, or both, and those who support them are either evil, stupid, or both. That’s all there is to say — over and over. Anything else strains the truth. Now, I find that the illogic and stupidity actually make it more difficult to provide a commentary. Analysis must necessarily impose some rational pattern on the world, but it feels like a fool’s errand or even potentially misleading to seek the whys and wherefores of how this regime makes its decisions. The “4D chess” approach to Trump punditry once imposed a spurious rationality on what was self-evidently chaos; now it feels like any attempt to understand what’s going on risks the same.

…

There is actually one predictable pattern in Trump’s behavior, and that’s that he’s completely unreliable and terrible to do business with. This looks like one of his business deals: a lot of noise, brutal recriminations, hair-raising threats, grandiose plans and promises, and then he walks away, leaving behind a mess, usually a much crappier version of what he claimed he was gonna do, and, of course, leaving his partners and creditors in the lurch.

John Ganz

And he doesn’t even kick enemies in the teeth very well

Commenting on this John Ganz post, which I partially quote, above, Damon Linker writes:

It’s good stuff—not least because Ganz is gesturing toward something I’ve been trying to wrap my head around and write about since at least May 2023. That’s when I wrote a two-part post titled “The Rise of the Anti-Ideological Right.” This was during the brief period when it looked like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis might successfully challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for president in 2024. In that context, I pointed out the primary thing that separated these GOP rivals: DeSantis was a candidate of a harder-edged post-Reaganite ideology, while Trump was a post-ideological figure who promised little beyond serving as a vehicle for the enactment of a revenge fantasy. DeSantis would pursue a muscular policy agenda, but Trump would kick the right’s enemies in the teeth.

…

Trump decided he wanted to try kicking the shit out of Iran. He made the decision for no coherent strategic reason. It was all about optics and the possibility of repeating his great “victory” in Venezuela on a larger stage. But it didn’t work out as he wanted, so, as Ganz put it, Trump wants to walk away. He can always lie and say he achieved victory knowing his most credulously cultish supporters will believe the moronic deception. So that’s what he’s going to try to do.

It then falls to journalists and intellectuals to make sense of it—and we seek to do so in rational terms. Trump did X because he wanted to achieve A, but that didn’t work out, so he shifted to Y, which entailed B, etc. But this isn’t a description of what actually happened, of the actual decision-making in Trump’s head and within the administration. It’s a description by baffled observers trying to discern something coherent in what is actually just some know-nothing doofus impulsively ordering this and then that and then some other thing, based on his own mercurial sense in the moment of what’s best for him and him alone.

J.D. Vance

Robert P. George and Caitlin Flanagan, both writing at the Free Press on Monday, strike me as complementary:

  • George: J.D. Vance had himself a conversion.
  • Flanagan: It may have been a Christian conversion, but it wasn’t a full conversion to Catholicism.

Russian Conservatism

Tsymbursky rejected the aggressive geopolitical ideas of the Eurasianists, and instead proposed the idea of “Island Russia.” In Tsymbursky’s view, Russia would not benefit from challenging the US-dominated world order, as the disintegration of that order would bring chaos in its wake. Instead Russia should focus on being a regional power, and ensure peace with the West by means of a buffer zone in the form of “limitrophe states,” such as Ukraine.

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism

The honored few

The Kennedy Center’s name reminds Americans that honors are bestowed on those whom the nation believes especially worth remembering. By elevating an honored few, this egalitarian nation reminds itself that excellence is both real and rare. By slathering the building with the stench of self-praise, Trump proclaimed that honor is a mere bauble, a prerogative of power.

George Will

Shorts

  • “Second Circuit: FTX CEO SBF SOL.” That is an entire case summary from (Short Circuits). When it hit me, I couldn’t stop giggling.
  • He is willing to sacrifice national security in order to get a voting-security law that is intended to prevent a repeat of what did not happen in 2020. (George Will)
  • I feel obliged to point out that after several references to spiders in my homily I came home after Mass to find several spiders in our bathroom. My next homily will be featuring big piles of money. (James Quinby)
  • The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. (Mashall McLuhan via L.M. Sacasas)
  • I have been playing with the idea that one way of framing AI is as a denial-of-service attack on the human psyche. (L.M. Sacasas)
  • We’ve turned Congress into a green room for Fox News and MSNBC. (Rep. Mike Gallagher in 2024, resigning from the House)
  • When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. (Thomas Sowell)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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.

Solstice Eve

The University As We Know It Is Finished

Nils Gilman, The University As We Know It Is Finished strikes me as a pretty good overview of what AI means to “the University as we know it.” I’ve been a bit disappointed with my subscription to Persuasion, but this makes up for a lot of boring articles.

I’ve long (always?) been ambivalent about the University as we know it. I’ve been under the impression that the “Oxbridge” way of educating surpasses even our most exclusive and competitive universities. I’ve lamented the tentacles of the military-industrial complex extending into our science and engineering colleges. I cynically am tempted to think of universities as nothing more than credential factories (except for the bit that’s drunken whorehouse).

The new reality surely will be different. I hope it will be better. If it is, I don’t see how it will avoid shrinking down to fit the relatively few young citizens who can actually knuckle down and grapple with the great and perennial issues of mankind. I’m kind of worried about the value of my fractional ownerships of student housing apartments.

But I’m kind of excited, despite my inner Eeyore, about what may emerge after what promises to be tumultuous and probably rapid change. Although I’m too conservative temperamentally to tear things down from any instinct that the replacement couldn’t be worse (see Damon Linker on that, in Shorts below), I can watch events beyond my control tear things down with equanimity if I catch a whiff of a better replacement.

A golden-handcuffs commitment to making a living via clicks

From Sara Hendren, writing about selective abortion — or is it about a “golden-handcuffs commitment to making a living via clicks”? You decide.

The occasion of Sara’s story is the pregnancy of an influencer couple, followed by selective abortion for Down syndrome, chronicled in real time as influencers are wont to do.

It has been said that the line between “influencer” and other people making money by writing on the internet is that the influencer is hawking brands.

I had internalized “influencer” as a pejorative for certain shallow content. But that just pushes the distinction question back another step — what kind of shallow content typifies the “influencer”? Maybe it really is brand-hawking.

“Turtles all the way down,” as they say.

Anyway, Sara is a smart lady, one of several super-smart cyberfriends on my cherished social medium, micro.blog. She writes frequently many places, but one of them is Comment, to which I subscribe but which I’ve been neglecting if favor of ephemera. I’m going to try to change that – and if I spend more time there, less in ephemera, that will change the tone of this blog as well.

A philosopher muses on his life thus far

Another regular at Comment is James K.A. Smith, a well-regarded philosopher about whom I’ve been somewhat ambivalent for reasons I needn’t go into. Suffice that it’s pretty stale, I’ve only heard the other side, he’s changed, and he may have outgrown my little beef with him, because he’s trying mightily to change:

Philosophy and the sort of faith that captivated my twentysomething self felt mutually reinforcing. Both were about knowing. Both were about winning—arguments and souls, hearts and minds. And both promised me security. I thought that security was protecting me from all sorts of things: ignorance, error, deception, but also temptation, seduction, hell. It would take me twenty-five years before I realized that the security they offered was its own sort of prison.

…

I organized my life around something like this vision. Coinciding with a religious conversion, my path to philosophy was paved with polemic and fuelled by brash confidence in the power of logic. When I answered the call to be a philosopher twenty-five years ago, I imagined the world’s problems amounted to a failure of analysis. If only we could think more carefully, the truth would come out. Good arguments would save us. Grasping the world’s puzzles and problems with conceptual clarity would yield enlightenment, even a kind of salvation.

…

The goal of graduate study in philosophy is to carve out a niche of debate like a territory to be conquered—and to be the last one standing in a field littered with the vanquished arguments and the misbegotten fallacies of your opponents. Pair this formation with the ardour of the religious apologist and you get a carefully honed polemical sword wielded with the confidence of having the Truth on one’s side. I’m a philosopher and I’m here to help. Stand back: I know things. We can think our way out of this mess. Now here I am, in the middle of this profession, in the middle of a career as a philosopher, in the (late) middle of a life, with second thoughts. I’ve had a change of heart about how to change someone’s mind. Or whether that’s even the point. As a philosopher, I’m learning how to wonder again. But before I could imagine another way to be a philosopher, I had to recognize that, first, a lot of change needed to take place in me.

James K.A. Smith, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark

Some unexpected reality of working with AI

I recognize a lot of what Lila Shroff, America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek is talking about:

In theory, handing tasks off to coding agents should free up time, allowing larger blocks for deep work and rest. But some developers are having the opposite experience. Instead of allowing for greater focus, the latest AI tools are overwhelming workers, frazzling minds and shredding attention spans. Although agents can do plenty more work now than they could a year ago, they still need human oversight. Like toddlers, AI agents ask endless follow-up questions, require detailed instructions—and, if you leave them unsupervised, are liable to make a huge mess. Once you get several running simultaneously, there’s no time for breaks. As Yegge puts it on LinkedIn, his job is to be an “AI babysitter.”

…

Respondents described a “buzzing” and “fog”-like feeling, sometimes accompanied by headaches, slower decision making, and trouble focusing. One engineering manager told the researchers that managing multiple bots at once was like having “a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention.”

…

The bot promised that the research would be easy. “Nothing for you to do,” it wrote. “Sit tight.” But the agents were needy from the start. Almost immediately, Claude Code began asking for all kinds of permissions to take actions on my behalf. Because I didn’t understand some of its questions, I started going down different rabbit holes trying to make sense of its requests. I could feel my shoulders tensing. Even once my research swarm finally got going, I kept checking in on the bots to make sure that they were on the right track. The fog was setting in. In the end, the memo that my 17 agents produced wasn’t very good, but neither was the paragraph I’d spent that time writing, because I’d been distracted by my omnipresent agent blob the entire time. (In line with The Atlantic’s policies on AI use, I didn’t use the tools to do any actual writing.)

This all felt like multitasking on steroids. In my quest to maximize my own productivity, I was wasting time and producing lower-quality work.

The difference between my experience and these coders is that I was working on just a single project, in a chat, with no agents deployed to work in parallel (and nag me with questions). Nevertheless, I needed frequent breaks. That’s probably in part because of my age entering this strange new world.

And I’ve gotten the yellow flag, too – a reminder of AI’s limits. Not hallucinations, but “wasted” time.

The project that wore me down with Claude’s followup was some preliminary legal work for a nonprofit corporation that needs to reorganize because of exponentially increased assets. Because I relinquished my law license in 2018, and because corporate law was never my focus, I eventually called a CPA and a Lawyer about advising me (I was hoping my Claude work product might just need review), and basically learned that Claude and I collectively had missed some key distinctions, mostly on the accounting and tax status side (there are many different nonprofit tax statuses, all “tax exempt,” many “tax deductible,” but with differences that we need to nail down to do it the right way). Now maybe Claude asked questions about that, but I don’t think so.

I don’t really view my useless work product as wasted time: I’ve learned a fair amount about what AI is good for — and some of its limits.

Presidents

Overestimating the Boss

Last June, when Vice President JD Vance was defending Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump’s single-day strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, Vance said, “I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East.”

“I understand the concern,” he continued, “but the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.”

Is that so?

The evidence of unreasonable pride is everywhere. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had too much confidence in his ability to persuade Trump. For his part, Trump had too much confidence in his ability to bully Iran.

And so it turned out that the “dumb presidents” understood reality far better than Trump. There are no shortcuts. If you’re going to destroy your opponent, you’re going to have to use immense force. If you’re going to compromise with your opponent, it’s best not to lose a war (or blink in the face of adversity) as a prelude.

But Vance’s pride reveals a deeper problem. By scorning their predecessors, Vance and Trump are far too ready to reject their achievements. Trump was eager to withdraw troops from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and risk squandering victories against Al Qaeda and ISIS, and by tearing up the Iran deal without a viable replacement (and then launching an ineffective war), he may end up helping create a more radical, more powerful and more dangerous Iran.

In their arrogance, Trump and Netanyahu defied their predecessors in all the worst ways, and now they court a profound defeat when, not long ago, a meaningful victory, however partial, was well within their grasp.

David French

He thought he’d seen the ne plus ultra of demagoguery

After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry used the word plan 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a plan for everything except curing psoriasis. I should have known there is no parodying Kerry’s pandering. It turned out days later that the Kerry campaign has a plan—nay, a promise-to cure paralysis. What is the plan? Vote for Kerry.

This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: “If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”

In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery.

Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter.

Of course, this book was published two years before Trump rode down that escalator, and the columns collected there were earlier than that.

Re-evaluating 44

I never voted for him (his political record was far further left than his smooth speechifying would make you think), but I thought the election of Barack Obama said something good about America, and I appreciated the dignity he maintained in office (especially in retrospect).

But his execrable, brutalist Presidential Center makes me think he’s worse than I thought. The only thing that could make it worse would be gold leaf.

The Tell

9. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth berated NATO allies as “shameful” for their reluctance to assist in American strikes against Iran, suggesting on Thursday that the Pentagon would reduce the number of troops it keeps in Europe as a result. He repeated President Trump’s previous description of the military alliance as a “paper tiger” and warned that U.S. support to NATO would not be “a one-way street.” Mr. Hegseth’s 12-minute lecture cast a chill over a meeting that had been designed to set a collaborative agenda for a summit of NATO leaders next month. He scolded allies whom he described as having failed to step up their defense spending, as the alliance agreed to do last summer, under pressure from Mr. Trump. But Mr. Hegseth reserved his harshest remarks for countries that had resisted letting American jets or ships use bases in Europe on their way to attack Iran during the war that the United States and Israel initiated Feb. 28. (Source: nytimes.com)

John Ellis News Items for June 19

Be it remembered that when we want to poo-poo Russian concerns about Ukraine getting too thick with Western Europe, and maybe even joining NATO, we insist that NATO is “purely defensive.” But under Trump, we’re treating NATO as our ally, obliged to aid us in the prosecution of a war he started without asking Congress, let alone our NATO partners, before commencing our attack.

Hungary under Orbán

Viktor Orban was not against liberal democracy; the Fidesz-drafted postcommunist constitution was and is a liberal democratic document. What Orban opposed was the post-national, post-Christian version of liberal democracy. Orban was able to do things politically that would not be constitutionally permitted in the US, in terms of promoting Christian values explicitly in law and policy. But he was able to do other things too, like offering super-generous subsidies to encourage Hungarians to have bigger families.

…

Hungary under Orban was an important experiment. Now Hungary is just one more small, godless European country.

Rod Dreher

Caveat: Dreher’s column starts with a different story than Orban and Hungary — the kind of story I wish he wouldn’t write since I really cannot do anything about Pakistani Muslim rape gangs in Great Britain.

Shorts

  • [Trump] has now crested 80, and as our news-side colleague Katie Rogers wrote this week, that bothers him intensely. He may soon get a midterm comeuppance. Then the clock on his presidency starts ticking more and more loudly. Imagine the self-tributes he’ll need as medicine for all of that. We can file them under octogenarian onanism. (Frank Bruni)
  • “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?” (Huck Finn via Bret Stephens)
  • Put it this way: Vance’s book is about how he finally decided that Catholicism met his exacting standards. (Alexandra Petri)
  • Even Jimmy Carter didn’t agree to be taken hostage. (National Review Weekly Summary)
  • State Department official John Negroponte drolly observed after Richard Nixon’s 1972 Christmas bombing campaign in North Vietnam that “we bombed them into accepting our concessions.” A similar verdict seems appropriate for President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. (National Review Weekly Summary)
  • Normally one would have to pay a lot of money to a discreet professional to be humiliated this badly. (Graeme Wood on the Iran MOU)
  • It is simply not a reasonable thing to respond to disliking the government of Country A by proposing that we attempt to remove the government of Country A in the hopes that whatever government that follows will be more to our liking. (Damon Linker)
  • “It’s very funny that ten years ago beltway chickenhawks adopted an unachievable phony demand to justify opposing the JCPOA, Trump didn’t realize it was fake and fought a war to get it, discovered it was unachievable, and is now giving the chickenhawks the worst day of their lives,” – Max Fisher. Karma. (Via Andrew Sullivan
  • “FFS… please stop forcing professional athletes to wear rainbow hats and jerseys in June. It’s not helping,” – Dan Savage (via Andrew Sullivan. Bravo!
  • Tehran took the measure of Trump’s courage. What it found was a bone spur. (Bret Stephens)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I’m doing the best I can here. If I could literally rub Trump voters’ noses in it while beating them with a rolled-up newspaper, I’d, ummmmm, consider it.

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

Jonah Goldberg

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 June 15

Dreher’s back (and the sky isn’t always falling)

I can’t remember how it happened. I think maybe I asked for a one-week trial so I could read a piece someone else had linked to. But anyhoo, I ended up with a subscription to Rod Dreher’s Diary, his Substack.

He’s back stateside, and although he hasn’t turned into a cockeyed optimist, his writing features a lot of human interest. You’ll probably encounter him here fairly often (I write, after noting that I’ve clipped excerpts from more than one of his posts this time).

Karma?

As we drove back out to the highway, my mother looked to the side at the end of our blacktop road, and exclaimed with horror, “Look at that! They put a trailer there! On top of a cemetery!”

“No, it’s next to the cemetery,” I said, referring to the Starhill Cemetery.

“No, that’s a cemetery. A black cemetery,” she said. “How could they put a trailer there?!”

She told me a story I didn’t know. Back in the 1970s, she said, that site had been a black graveyard. Whoever owned the land ordered the tombstones torn down so it could be developed.

“I was at Miss Lorena’s one day,” Mama said, referring to my dad’s mom, “when this elderly black couple showed up in tears. They asked for her help. They said a man with a bulldozer was over there knocking down the tombstones of their ancestors. Nobody could stop it, it turned out, but Miss Lorena did find a map of who was buried where, and shared it with them. Turns out at least some of those people were able to have their ancestors dug up and reburied elsewhere, even though the tombstones were gone. It wasn’t right, what they did to those poor people.”

Beat.

“Course Mr. ____, who was driving the bulldozer, drowned later up in Lake Mary, in his truck. They found him in the back cab. He was trying to get out.” She said it in a tone conveying the message: don’t mess with the dead.

I doubt the Bulldozer Man died because he disturbed the dead, but me being me, I don’t rule it out. Anyway, I had not known the story of the black cemetery, the memory of which will leave this world after my mom’s generation dies (though I’d guess that the black people around here won’t so quickly forget). It was a painful reminder of what black folks in this part of the world had to suffer, and within my lifetime. I hate DEI as much as any conservative, and believe it makes race relations worse. But you know, it came from somewhere.

Rod Dreher, Wednesday in the Country with Mama

Writing and gardening

A Substacker I follow (you’d recognize the name) has been pretty quiet lately. Some of the best writers are like that. He explains:

I deeply appreciate all those of you who continue as paid subscribers despite my lack of ‘content’ here at present. A writer can’t be on output all the time, which is a drawback of this kind of ‘platform’ for which readers pay a monthly fee. Quite rightly, a lot of people don’t want to pay for nothing, and yet if a writer just pumps out ‘content’ for the sake of it, he or she will soon be dead from the neck up. These days, in any case, an AI can do this job much better than we ever can, and it will provide all the accompanying pictures and films too.

I’ve long thought of writing in the same way I think of gardening. It’s a seasonal process. You need to manure the soil and prepare it in order to have a flourishing, fecund summer of words. Then you need a fallow period. Plants don’t grow in the winter. I’ve been wintering for the last six months or so. Ticking over. Keeping an eye on the green manure. You can’t do anything creative without rest.

For years, I blogged original content pretty regularly and frequently. Then I ran out of things to write like that without repeating myself unduly. Now I mostly curate. But I’m fortunate that I don’t do this to put food on the family table. I don’t have it in me to write interesting things on deadline.

Where I’ll lay my bet

AI is not just another tool (there is no such thing as “just a tool,” as [Anton Barba-Kay] points out, but let that pass). The problem is that AI — like the rest of the digital world, but most especially — changes how we think and who we are as humans. Remember Jonathan Haidt a few weeks ago warning that AI is going to “hack our attachments”? This is the kind of thing Barba-Kay is talking about. We are being merged with the Machine, and don’t even realize it.

…

We need schools, families, fraternal organizations, reading groups, secret societies, oratories, shared houses of civility — a thousand cells as diffuse and decentralized as all those compounding micro-engagements by which the image of a boot stomping on a human face forever is now being replaced with that of a human face slack-jawed and dribbling on itself. These cells of resistance will be different from one another. They may involve a semi-annual meeting, and they may involve the whole of life. They can be organized around reading Boethius or reciting limericks, sharing meals or shooting guns. Some will correspond only by letter. Some will employ Claude to manage their mailing lists. What all will have in common is: an insistence that we, and only we, will decide how we live; an explicit prohibition on new technologies in the spaces and activities where they gently and slowly degrade us; and a pledge to hold each other to the path we have jointly chosen.

Rod Dreher, Sorry, Pope Leo, You Missed What AI Is (bold in original); block quote from Clare Coffey, The Future Belongs to Those Who Resist It.

I wouldn’t bet that Anton Barba-Kay and Rod Dreher have a better grasp of AI than the collective wisdom of the Pope and his advisers, but I appreciate their contribution to the back-and-forth that can’t happen too fast considering how fast the technology is coming on in the part of the population can influence the culture’s direction at a macro scale.

“Do you feel smart?”

For the partisan, inconvenient facts necessitate a kind of rhetorical two-step. 

There are proud Trump cultists and there are embarrassed Trump cultists, and, if you press one of the latter on Trump’s viciousness—his dishonesty, his infidelity, his venality, his susceptibility to flattery, his inconstancy—he often will retreat into comfortable pragmatism: “He isn’t running for pope”—well!—“and I like his policies.” Further pressed, “policies” mainly indicates the economic conditions coincident with Trump’s first term in office, pre-COVID, which were only to a very minor degree the result of any Trump policy. 

Turn around and press the embarrassed Trump cultist on the pragmatic questions—like that $270 fill-up—and he often will retreat into moralism, albeit a negative kind of moralism based in the perceived deficiencies of the Democrats rather than in any of Trump’s particular moral virtues, which, it is plain, simply do not exist. 

The “woke” phenomenon, by attaching a kind of quasi-religious energy and rhetoric to ordinary progressive clichés, was a great boon to Trump and to Trumpism, providing a spiritualized target of opportunity: the infidel, or, in the case of anti-Trump conservatives such as myself, the heretic. The Democratic embrace (in some quarters) of socialism, in name and in fact, has been similarly fortifying for Trump-era Republicans: To be against is simpler than to be for, and socialism is a simple (and proper) thing to be against.

And so when We the People cough up a corrupt imbecile such as Ken Paxton, whom Republicans mean to put into the Senate, or when proximity to Trump debases and degrades such infinitely plastic men as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, the rationalization is: “Well, think of the policies!” But I wonder what those beneficial policies are. The illegally initiated and incompetently executed war in Iran that is the proximate cause of that $270 diesel bill? The obviously criminal massacres of civilians on the high seas? The gross self-dealing and corruption? The elevation of wildly unqualified yes-men such as Bill Pulte to high office? The deepening debt? The rising inflation? Steve Guest, a servile hack of the sort that gives servility and hackery a bad name, believes it is very important to appreciate the … refinishing of the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument. Failure to be impressed by this titanic achievement represents an “incurable case of TDS,” he writes, providing yet another (superfluous) example of the fact that writing about “TDS” is a nearly foolproof indicator of brain death.

Kevin D. Williamson

The even more corrupt return of “Sue and Settle”

Remember sue-and-settle? It’s coming soon to a dirtbag near you:

It will not surprise you to learn that Blanche lied by omission to senators when he said the slush fund wouldn’t move forward. That might be technically true, according to The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick, in the sense that the original mechanism for paying out money to criminals will change. But have no doubt: The Trump administration still intends to see to it that those criminals get rich.

I spoke with eight people familiar with the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund—including current and former Justice Department officials, current and former members of Congress, a defense attorney, and political operatives close to the administration. All said that Justice Department officials and people close to the White House have indicated that the payout idea has not actually been scrapped. Rather, they say, officials are exploring whether elements of the fund can be reactivated while also examining alternative arrangements to make sure loyalists get compensated.

…

Officials told me that those who believe they were victims of a weaponized government may ultimately need to file lawsuits so they can then receive settlements from a previously established Justice Department fund. Suing the government is not a new idea. But typically the government looks for ways to defend itself; in this case, officials are exploring proposals to facilitate litigation and to expedite payments without requiring an expensive and lengthy process that might draw attention. One former DOJ official told me that discussions are happening about how to provide legal support at scale to those who want to file lawsuits. “They’ll sue, and they’ll settle,” the former official said of the plan.

Instead of a dedicated “anti-weaponization fund” handing out millions to January 6 degenerates like candy on Halloween, there’ll be a pseudo-adversarial process in which each degenerate will need to file a formal legal complaint to receive his candy. (Assuming it survives a court challenge, of course.) Thank Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, who did nothing to prevent this heist when they had the chance.

…

I’ve always thought Trump was lucky in one sense to be an American and unlucky in another. He had the good fortune to live his life in a country that worships wealth, celebrity, showmanship, and crude machismo, and he took full advantage. But he had the bad fortune to be born an authoritarian demagogue within a constitutional system that still somewhat limits his ability to rule as he’d like.

Nick Catoggio, Black Marks.

“Sue and settle” was a disreputable practice whereby the Obama administration made end-runs around Congress by settling lawsuits brought, almost collusively, be ideologically compatible “adversaries.” Apparently, if Catoggio’s right, Trump will wink and nod and settle when, say, January 6 rioters sue for getting their feelings hurt.

Mergers and acquisitions

I’m not breaking any new ground here, but just in case you’d overlooked this sort of pressure, let me be explicit:

  1. Newspapers and television networks increasingly are becoming part of multi-billionaire’s portfolios.
  2. Those billionaires do a lot of business with government, either as contractors or as suppliants.
  3. To an unprecedented extent, Donald Trump is openly transactional in his governance. People who aren’t nice to him don’t get any favors.
  4. Corporations whose media subsidiaries aren’t nice to Trump don’t get favors.
  5. Billionaires and corporations who depend on government for many of their billions therefore are careful to be (as) nice (as possible) to Trump.
  6. Therefore, many newspapers and television networks are relatively toothless.

This is one reason I read the New York Times: it has not been rolled into a larger portfolio, and is not obliged to be nice or even to pull punches. Yes, the owner’s are very rich, but their riches come from the newspaper.

And, of course, I selectively read in the wild, wild west of the internet, where investigative depth may be rare but great fortunes rarely compromise coverage.

Shorts

  • Trump said something deranged, and Republicans rallied to his side. In other words, it was a day ending in y. (David French)
  • There is, of course, no one that Silicon Valley loves more than a “builder” and nothing, ever since the word first escaped containment in its cramped wet market of ideas, that it loves more than the builder’s agency. (Clare Coffey, italics added)
  • Incredulous at a “ceasefire” where the sides keep firing at each other, a New York Times writer (Scott Anderson, I think) referred to it as a “postmodern ceasefire.”
  • No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. (Fernando Pessoa)
  • [F]aith in progress is just as basic to modernity as the Second Coming was to Christianity. (Rod Dreher, Live Not By Lies)
  • The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.” (Carl R. Truman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Primary Eve

I’m publishing today because some states have primary elections tomorrow and I’ve got some thoughts on elections.

Making modernity

One of the key moments in the creation of modernity occurs when production moves outside the household. So long as productive work occurs within the structure of households, it is easy and right to understand that work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of those wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains. As, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue. (That requires a bit more chewing that we may be accustomed to doing.)

Insatiable

The question with which to start my investigation is obviously this: Is there enough to go round? Immediately we encounter a serious difficulty: What is “enough”? Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues “economic growth” as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of “enough.” There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: “Halt! We have enough”? There is none.

E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful. We’re going to need to update Proverbs 30:15–16.

Book Criticism on the decline

Dwight Garner counted the surviving full-time American book critics — and they fit on one hand. “The thin crust of American intellectual life, long flaking, has begun to show bald patches,” he wrote. He expressed envy of England, which has many more newspapers that routinely publish book reviews: “The literary debate over there is more like a boisterous dinner party and less like a Morse code dispatch between distant frigates passing in the night.” Still, America has its scrappy freelancers and part-timers. “I’m cheered by the young critics out there, swimming in this sea without drowning in it, trying not to be cast into gaol by their creditors, and working to make certain that the last snatch of book criticism isn’t three fire emojis, two jazz-hands, a crying face and a facepalm.”

Via Frank Bruni

Flat-out politics

What Democratic elites would prefer to do

The continuing appeal of Harris is a useful indicator of … stasis. Yes, she is unlikely to be the 2028 nominee, and part of her support is name recognition; … many Democrats who find her renomination unthinkable are nonetheless incapable of acknowledging the real reasons that she lost.

I’ll list some of those reasons. First, her party was seen as too beholden to progressive activists on a range of issues, including immigration, crime, education, energy and the transgender debate. Second, Harris’s vice presidency was itself a creation of the 2020 identity politics moment, without which Joe Biden never would have picked her, and she succeeded him without a fight in part because no one wanted to acknowledge her painful limits as a politician. Finally, she tried to solve both the policy problem and the identity politics problem through evasion and distraction and yet more identity politics, with empty rhetoric of “joy” and circumlocution about her past positions and a mediocre Midwestern white guy running mate.

Despite being on the record taking radical positions, Harris was never a radical politician. Rather, she was a perfectly hapless embodiment of a Democratic establishment that aspired to manage its base without ever strongly resisting its demands and that aspired to win moderate voters not by moderating on the issues but through a change of affect or a change of subject.

That’s still clearly what Democratic elites would prefer to do ….

Ross Douthat, Slouching Toward Kamala Harris

America needs a better Democrat party than that!

Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered

Graham Platner isn’t my ideal Senate candidate. Not even close. I’m deeply troubled by the thinness of his political experience, by the primacy of raw anger in his appeal to voters and by the oddities and ugliness, from a Nazi tattoo to a fondness for “gay” and “gayest” as put-downs, in his not-so-distant past. It’s a lot to overlook.

But if I lived in Maine, I’d vote for him in November. I’d do it without any joy and without any hesitation, because he’s a Democrat running against a Republican and I haven’t been kidding around when I’ve said that President Trump has no respect for democracy, no regard for the truth, no patience for Americans who don’t bow to him and no limits to his desire to exploit the presidency for his and his minions’ glorification and enrichment. I can’t recognize the profound moral offense and extreme danger of Trump and then sit out the election or cast a vote that potentially helps his party, which has abetted or ignored his authoritarian designs, win either chamber of Congress. That would be irresponsible, nonsensical and perilous.

But do other voters think the same way? Is their frequently articulated disdain for Trump just a bunch of colorful and cathartic words or a genuine cause for action, for uncomfortable choices ….

Frank Bruni, Are Democrats Scared Enough of Trump to Defeat Him? (my first NYT gift link this month).

I hope that 2026 will be such a wave election — nay, a Tsunami election — that the Republicans’ norm-shattering mid-decade gerrymanders will backfire. The press keeps reporting as if the gerrymanders will, if not stricken down by courts, accomplish exactly what the Republicans want, and I can’t rule that out.

But it ain’t necessarily so: if you take your pool of usually-Republican voters and spread them over more (redrawn) congressional districts, maintaining a theoretical but slimmer Republican majority in more districts, an election fueled by revulsion toward the GOP could see usually-Republican voters staying home or (horrors!) voting for Democrats, and with thinner margins more seats could flip.

That would be a lovely result in 2026 because:

  1. It might frustrate and slow Trump in his last two years.
  2. It would rebuke Trump for his obnoxious effort to steal 2026 by shattering democratic norms. (His 2020 meddling in Georgia, in the form of complaining of vote fraud so persistently that it depressed Republican turnout, got Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock elected to the Senate. Nice job, Mr. Genius!)
  3. It would be a rebuke to those who kiss Trump’s … ummmm, ring … for going along with his obnoxious attempted theft.

In Tuesday’s Indiana primary May 5, I plan to take a Republican ballot (nothing new there) and vote against every candidate endorse by Trump — even the one running against a guy with a non-trivial but remote criminal record who had hoped for Trump’s endorsement over the RINO incumbent. I wish I could vote for Spencer Deery, who put a target on his back by putting Hoosier interests over Washington’s interests when Trump called for redistricting, but he’s in the next Senate district to my west.

War crimes

It has now become routine for U.S. Southern Command to post grainy videos online of boats being blown up, along with claims that “male narco-terrorists were killed,” even though the administration has not offered any evidence that even one of the people incinerated by U.S. firepower was engaged in drug trafficking, much less in terrorism. The administration is so averse to trying to prove wrongdoing in court that, when suspects survive a strike, they are released rather than arrested. Apparently, there is a secret Justice Department opinion justifying the strikes based on the fanciful premise that drug cartels are waging war on the United States.

Max Boot.

In a Wall Street Journal editorial today, James Freeman beclowns himself by pointing out that Barack Obama did sorta kinda the same thing. Now I would have no problem accusing Obama of war crimes if he did the same thing, but even Freeman’s account notes that Obama attacked those “believed to be terrorists,” whereas the Trump administration is labeling narcotics traffickers ipso facto “terrorists” without so much as making a plausible case that they really are narcotics traffickers in the first place.

The fallacy of Boromir

When people justify their voting choice by its outcome, I always think of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes repeatedly that we cannot make decisions based on the hoped-for result. We can only control the means. If we validate our choice of voting for someone that may not be a good person in the hopes that he or she will use his power to our advantage, we succumb to the fallacy of Boromir, who assumed he too would use the Ring of Power for good. Power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, What ‘The Lord of the Rings’ can teach us about U.S. politics, Christianity and power.

I’m not voting against all things Trumpy to seize power, by the way; it’s to destroy Sauron’s power.

Shorts

  • It was lovely to hear the King’s English, devoid of the vengeance, blasphemy and vulgarity common in our leader’s language. (Maureen Dowd on King Charles’ address to a state dinner during his recent trip to America)
  • We need stories – sometimes subtle, gentle things – that restore in us a sense of goodness. Not just jagged bitterness frothing at the mouth or bonkers political hijacking of deep religious themes. (Marin Shaw)
  • Our economically RINO administration is tariffing globalization to death. Democrats are writing the eulogy. (Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal)

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.

In tempore belli

A vast bureaucracy in the service of appetite

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

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

SPLC

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

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

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

Trolls and bootlickers — of the Left!

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

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

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

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

Trump

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

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

Time’s up on your stupid war, sir

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

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

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

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

Nick Catoggio

World Historical

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

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

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

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

Conservatives versus power-seekers

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

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

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Wednesday, April 29

White House Corresponents Dinner

  • Security at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner performed as well as one would expect any American institution to perform in 2026. That is, it was competent enough to accomplish its basic task yet incompetent enough to leave everyone wondering whether the country survives mostly on luck.
  • Treating Saturday’s assassination plot as cause to ignore the legal niceties and plunge ahead with construction [of the White House ballroom] anyway felt like absurdist satire of the “emergency” rationales authoritarians are forever concocting to rationalize their power grabs and lawbreaking. The president’s life is in danger! Only a fabulously luxe gilded ballroom built to his exact specifications without any oversight whatsoever stands between America and catastrophe!

Nick Catoggio.

The luxe gilded ballroom Trump is building summarily like, I dunno, a dictator or something, wouldn’t come anywhere close to accommodating the White House Correspondents Dinner (2000+ guests versus ~900 capacity of the WH ballroom), apart from any other symbolic or logistical issues.

Royalty meets Pretender

[T]he trick of the royal family is to make everyone feel special, however brief their acquaintance. Some presidents realize that this is a necessary illusion …

…

In “The Godfather, Part II,” Michael Corleone tells his treacherous brother Fredo that he no longer means anything to him. “You’re not a brother, you’re not a friend,” he says. “I don’t want to know you or what you do. I don’t want to see you at the hotels, I don’t want you near my house. When you see our mother, I want to know a day in advance, so I won’t be there. You understand?” Michael issues strict instructions to his aides that nothing should happen to his brother while his mother is alive.

It’s a story that might ring a bell. Just a few years after the queen’s death, Charles stripped his brother, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, of his title and evicted him from his home. The image handed down to posterity will be of Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor slumped in the back of a police car, desperately trying not to be seen.

This week Charles will be smiling benignly and nodding politely, but it’s worth remembering that beneath that good humor and politesse there is a layer of steel. Courtesy can be tactical as well as virtuous.

Craig Brown, Beneath the British Monarchy’s Polite Smiles Is a Layer of Steel

I hope that the King won’t allow any meeting with Trump to be recorded. I guess Trump is kind of star-struck by the British Royals and might actually behave himself, but I wouldn’t risk it.

Life among the North American Banana Republicans

All items from a Wall Street Journal newsletter

The Justice Department secured an indictment against James Comey in connection with a photo showing seashells arranged in a way that prosecutors said could be interpreted as a threat to kill President Trump.

The case is the Trump administration’s second attempt to prosecute the former FBI director, a prominent Trump critic. He was charged in September with lying to Congress, but a judge dismissed that case. The latest indictment centers on a 2025 Instagram post. At the time, Comey said it didn’t occur to him that the post would be read as a threat, and that he opposed such violence. Comey and his lawyers didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Nobody believes this was a threat. Trump’s DOJ is indicting one of Trump’s enemies for publishing on Instagram a wry, cryptic and mild criticism of him because a deranged person (like the President, a toxic narcissist) might interpret as a threat.

This is what they do in authoritarian regimes. I only once did a piece of a Federal Criminal Law matter and have no opinion on how the courts will deal with this. I can only hope that they will deal with it summarily and with a stern rebuke to the government.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr is launching an early review of Disney’s broadcast TV licenses, the regulatory agency said.

Trump yesterday called for late-night host Jimmy Kimmel to be fired for joking that first lady Melania Trump had “a glow like an expectant widow.” His show is broadcast by Disney’s ABC network. Kimmel made the remark days before an alleged gunman opened fire outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that Trump attended on Saturday. Yesterday, Kimmel called his prior remarks a “very light roast.”

A crypto venture linked to men sanctioned in a scam-ring probe partnered with the Trump family’s crypto company.

Last fall, the Trump administration announced criminal charges against what it said was a transnational criminal syndicate that had stolen billions of dollars through online scams. Less than a month later, World Liberty Financial announced that it had partnered with a virtual-currency venture, one of whose projects had been led by two men sanctioned in the U.S. crackdown. A lawyer for World Liberty said it has never had any association or relationship with the sanctioned individuals. “WLF takes its compliance obligations very seriously,” he said. The lawyer said his client first became aware of allegations that the venture was connected to a project that had involved sanctioned individuals in January this year.

Shorts

  • In The Toronto Star, Rosie DiManno pondered piety and pooches: “Sitting at the right hand of God-Trump is Vice President JD Vance, a converted Catholic all of seven years. That’s 49 in lapdog years.” (Via Frank Bruni)
  • In his newsletter, I Might Be Wrong, Jeff Maurer responded to commentary about overlong movies — including in my newsletter last week — by observing that the huge piles of money spent on key sequences all but guarantee those blockbusters’ bloat. “This isn’t just sunk cost fallacy — this is sunk cost fallacy plus the knowledge that if you go to your boss and say, ‘We wasted $10 million of your money,’ your boss will say, ‘I understand, I respect your honesty, now step into this rocket: I’m going to fill it with scorpions and fire it into a volcano’,” Maurer wrote. (Via Frank Bruni)
  • Wishful thinking is the alchemy that turns fools’ gold into silver linings. (Kevin D. Williamson)

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.