Tag: Trump

Tuesday April 7

Rapacity

Just another widget

“You want to leave a place better than you found it,” he told me. And for a long time, he felt like he had.

But that was before LifePoint Health, one of the biggest rural-hospital chains in the country, saw his hospital as a distressed asset in need of saving through a ruthless search for efficiencies, and before executives at Apollo Global Management, a private-equity firm whose headquarters looms above the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, began calling the shots. That was before Gose realized that, in the private-equity world, hospitals were just another widget, a tool to make money and nothing more.

Megan Greenwell, The Wyoming Hospital Upending the Logic of Private Equity

Digital robber barons

These claims to lawless space are remarkably similar to those of the robber barons of an earlier century. Like the men at Google, the late-nineteenth-century titans claimed undefended territory for their own interests, declared the righteousness of their self-authorizing prerogatives, and defended their new capitalism from democracy at any cost. At least in the US case, we have been here before. Economic historians describe the dedication to lawlessness among the Gilded Age “robber barons” for whom Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism played the same role that Hayek, Jensen, and even Ayn Rand play for today’s digital barons.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Legalia

The hills worth dying on

Like any of its predecessors, the Trump administration appeals only a small number of losses in the lower courts and then takes an even smaller share—the cases it thinks it is most likely to win—to the Supreme Court. And how is that going? The Supreme Court has rejected Trump on tariffs and on domestic deployment of the National Guard, and it seems almost certain to reject the administration on birthright citizenship. The court has stymied the president’s efforts to purge the Federal Reserve and to deport people without due process under the Alien Enemies Act. Where the Trump administration’s top policy preferences have been in conflict with the law—as they often will be in a lawless administration—the Supreme Court has reliably sided with the law.

…

The court has, indeed, emerged as the federal government’s preeminent conservative institution. That is not to say conservative in the sense of politically right-wing—the American right, currently in revolutionist mode, has ceased to be conservative in any meaningful sense, and the high court’s conservatism can be seen in its limiting of Donald Trump’s abuses and pretenses as clearly as anywhere. The Supreme Court, rather, is conservative in the sense of defending and fortifying the American constitutional order, which is what it is there to do. In anno Domini 2026, a branch of government that is content to simply try its best to do its job is as great a display of conservatism as a realistic American could hope to see.

Kevin D. Williamson (bold added).

The ramifications of the boldface observation above seems lost on the nihilists who want to tear down the courts as no more than political hacks in robes.

But I’m starting to think that “the cases it thinks it is most likely to win” misses something. Unless Trump has no competent legal advisers, I’m inclined to modify that to “the cases it thinks it is most likely to win or the hills it’s willing to die on.”

The stupid ideas that Trump is willing to defend all the way to SCOTUS probably have some kind of coherent common impulse behind them. If you connected the dots, I don’t think the picture would look much like the American I grew up in. We owe more to SCOTUS than the nihilists are willing to acknowledge.

An Aha! moment

I just learned, in the Advisory Opinions podcast’s discussion about the Supreme Court’s Chiles v. Salazar decision, that the legislative and other advocates of banning “conversion therapy” do not really have categorical “mounting evidence that conversion therapy is associated with increased depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts.” Rather, “the lawyer for the state had to acknowledge that all of the studies that they were basing this on were aversive therapy, you know, electroshock therapy or other types of behavioral therapy, um, that were quite different.”

There was no evidence that mere counseling (“talk therapy”) about sexual orientation was harmful, and it likely contributed to Ms. Chiles’ SCOTUS victory that talk therapy was all she did.

As the ACLU’s Chase Strangio had to admit to SCOTUS in an earlier case, the narrative that denying “gender-affirming care” leads to suicidality in adolescents is not supported by evidence. Now another progressive narrative about adolescent gender dysphoria bites the dust.

I’m starting to get the feeling that someone with an agenda is just making this stuff up.

Legal abuse

Though vexing in this situation, it probably is for the best that we do not have a law under which the prosecution of Pam Bondi would be convenient—if Bondi’s career as attorney general shows us anything at all, it is that in our current debased political environment the DOJ could not be entrusted with a statute containing provisions flexible enough to treat as a criminal matter such abuses of power as Bondi’s. A law meant to curtail such abuses of power would, ironically, almost certainly facilitate new ones.

Kevin D. Williamson

Politics

Losing trust

Delta Airlines, you might have noticed, does not run negative TV ads about USAir. It does not show pictures of the crash of USAir Flight 427, with a voice-over saying: “USAir, airline of death. Going to Pittsburgh? Fly Delta instead.”

And McDonald’s, you might also have noticed, does not run ads reminding viewers that Jack in the Box hamburgers once killed two customers. Why? Because Delta and McDonald’s know that if the airline and fast-food industries put on that kind of advertising, America would soon be riding trains and eating box-lunch tuna sandwiches.

Yet every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.

Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter.

Trump Needs Smarter Sycophants

The former secretary of homeland security, the jettisoned attorney general and the embattled secretary of defense have often seemed like President Trump’s ideal cabinet officials: selected for televisual looks and energy, lacking any political constituency apart from Trump himself, serving without qualm as pure conduits of his will. So their struggles offer a lesson for Republicans contemplating service in this administration’s 33 (but who’s counting?) remaining months: What Trump appears to want and what he actually wants are not exactly the same thing.

The seeming desire of the president is for loyalty, sycophancy and TV-ready swagger. He wants to turn on Fox News and see his top officials performing like reality-show characters in the drama of his administration. He wants to sit in a cabinet meeting and listen to a litany of his accomplishments. He wants the decisions made in the West Wing or at Mar-a-Lago to be simply rubber-stamped in his departmental fiefs.

He wants all that, but at the same time he also wants victory rather than defeat, and he definitely doesn’t want embarrassment. His metrics for success are unusual by normal presidential standards: He has a high tolerance for unpopularity, to put it mildly, and a remarkable shamelessness around corruption. But there is a point at which, even inside his cocoon, Trump senses that things aren’t going well for him. And then sycophancy doesn’t work, and it doesn’t matter if you were acting on his orders; you will be punished for that unsuccessful service just as surely as if you’d tried to thwart his aims.

Ross Douthat

No Kings

I’m all for protests, it’s our right as Americans. But nailing down the reason for No Kings is more like spinning the Wheel of Defeatists Complaints. Signs noted fascism, wars, school funding, billionaires, LGBT issues, allowing illegal immigration, even the Epstein files. And really, the rallies are mostly about Donald Trump’s winning the election. Forget protests, they’re more of a massive primal scream therapy session.

Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal

This jumped out as a bit of sanity amid a column that otherwise made me want to cancel my WSJ subscription.

I haven’t gone to a No Kings March for this reason. The soup lacks a worthy theme.

Miscellany

Gay versus Queer

I was gay, I had faced discrimination, and I had fought for my rights. But now that gay rights had become “LGBTQ” rights, I found myself force-teamed with a lot of people whose values were nothing like mine. I didn’t experience my life as a rebellion against reality. I didn’t want to be an identity insurgent. I wanted to participate in the world as a normal person.

The most important thing I learned at Columbia was this: I am gay, but I am not queer. My sexuality doesn’t obligate me to embrace a particular ideology or to reject the moral inheritance of the society that made my life possible. Progress happens by acknowledging shared human values and working within our reality rather than declaring war on it.

Ben Apel, I’m Gay, but That Doesn’t Make Me ‘Queer’ (gift link).

(Andrew Sullivan has often made the same point, with less emphasis on the “critical theory” aspect.)

So what’s the new “learn to program”?

I’ve been on the faculty at Duke University for five years now, and this past one has been the most challenging and the strangest by far.

That’s not about Duke. It’s about higher education. It’s about America. It’s about dynamics — chiefly, this country’s tilt toward authoritarianism and the rapidly accelerating advances of A.I. — that render our tomorrows even hazier than usual. None of us knows what we’re in for and up against, and that confusion crystallizes on college campuses, which are by definition gateways to the future. They’re supposed to leave students with maps, routes, a destination. Not with compasses whose needles gyrate this way and that.

For much of the past decade, college students flocked to computer science, wagering that few majors were surer on-ramps to employment. A.I. has exploded that roadway. I teach in Duke’s school of public policy, where many students point themselves toward jobs in government or nonprofit groups. The ax that fell in the first months of Trump’s present term deforested that landscape.

Those are just examples, and this is hardly the first generation of young people to face disruption and major economic shifts. I can’t say just how unusual, in a historic sense, the unease that I feel around me is.

But I can tell you that my previous nine semesters at Duke are no rival for this one when it comes to the number of students who initiate conversations about what they should do next, what they should expect after that, where the country is headed, whether they’ll have any real say in that.

Frank Bruni, Teaching in an American University Feels Very Strange Right Now

Don’t forget: luxury beliefs

There are all kinds of ideas and policies that would have bad effects if implemented. But there is a special class of bad ideas and policies that proliferate in good part because those who hold them, being insulated from their effects, have never seriously thought about the consequences that would ensue from their implementation. The reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves.

Yasha Mounk

Regular features

Shorts

  • I was thinking this week that Mr. Trump’s vision of himself as primarily a dealmaker is unsuited to a necessity of presidential leadership, which involves laying out the logic of a difficult case. Deal makers gain advantage through strategies that don’t necessarily involve transparency and forthrightness. (Peggy Noonan)
  • Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth uses language the way an adolescent boy uses Axe body spray — subtlety’s for wimps. (John McWhorter)
  • If four out of ten Americans cannot see how truly awful this is, how vast and long-lasting the domestic and global damage this president is inflicting on this country is, our 250 years really are up. (Andrew Sullivan).
  • In The Times, Yonatan Touval stressed the limits of the spycraft and technology behind Israel’s development of strike coordinates in Iran: “That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting. Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation.” (via Frank Bruni)
  • The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
  • What is a TikTok video if not a digital Dorito? (Cal Newport; H/T Frank Bruni)
  • Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. (Isaac Asimov via the Economist)

Elsewhere is 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.

Saturday March 28, 2026

Universities

There is a difference between an understandable overreaction to a real problem and derangement, pure and simple. The Manhattan Institute’s statement, with the incendiary, idiotic, and dangerous suggestion that “the universities” have “declared war” on Americans is the latter, not the former. And there is no arguing with derangement. There are plenty of conservative thinkers out there, in places like Compact magazine, who have made serious and sensible and often deservedly harsh critiques of tendencies within the American university system. With them, I’m happy to talk. With a ranting deranged person (and I’m a New Yorker—I have plenty of experience in this department), you need just to walk away.

David A. Bell, Derangement. I quote this not because I think all is well, or even that the Manhattan Institute got this all wrong, but because I appreciate that there’s just no arguing with some people over their obsessions.

Fairness

I and my colleagues at YourMorals.org had done a poor job of capturing conservative notions of fairness, which focused on proportionality, not equality. People should get what they deserve, based on what they have done. We had assumed that equality and proportionality were both part of the Fairness foundation, but the questions we used to measure this foundation were mostly about equality and equal rights. We therefore found that liberals cared more about fairness, and that’s what had made these economic conservatives so angry at me. They believed that liberals don’t give a damn about fairness (as proportionality).

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind

The exaggerated Rule of Law

Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes based, I would say, one the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in interpreting and manipulating law. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required. Nobody will mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk. It would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn: Harvard Commencement Address (A World Split Apart)

Traditional Catholics versus tradCaths

Matthew Schmitz suggests in the Washington Post (The unreligious religiosity of Christian identity politics), among other things, that a new Religious Right (e.g., Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, Florida Gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback) are “tradCaths,” “drawn to the traditional Latin mass and alienated from the church hierarchy.”

  1. Sometimes, it helps for someone to point out the obvious. This helpfully fits part of my picture of the current Religious Right.
  2. At least two of Schmitz’s three examples lean heavily antisemitic, unlike the dispensational premillenialists in a big chunk of the Protestant Religious Right; that could play out weirdly.
  3. As an Orthodox Christian, I’ve generally felt closer to Catholics than to Protestants these past few decades, and I have much sympathy for traditional Catholics pushing back against their Church becoming crypto-Protestant.*** But I’m not sure that these “tradCaths” are the same as traditional Catholics or that they’re an improvement over a dispensational premillenialist Religious Right.

That’s all I have to say for now, since I haven’t fully digested this new “data.”

SAVE Act

By itself, the SAVE Act seems likely to hurt Republicans more than Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. (The Republicans seem not to have grasped the demographic shifts that have made them the party of the less-than-fully-diligent.) Because it’s likely to backfire, I’m disinclined to lose much sleep over the fate of that devious law.

But the SAVE Act doesn’t stand alone. It’s part of a multifront Republican plan to corrupt future elections.

In a February podcast with Dan Bongino, former deputy director of the FBI, Trump urged that “Republicans should say … we should take over the voting … nationalize the voting,” because of what he claimed were “crooked” state-run elections. Trump has suggested the federal restrictions he wants can guarantee victory for his party. “For 50 years, we won’t lose a race,” he said in a Feb. 19 speech in Rome, Georgia.

David Ignatius

So because I think SAVE is a bad law, constitutionally dubious even if the supposed problem it addresses were real instead of a Trump invention,** I’m opposing it.

Coincidence?

The Wall Street Journal investigates The Well-Timed Trades Made Moments Before Trump’s Policy Surprises. This table is synthesized from that article.

DateEvent DescriptionMarket Activity DetailsOutcome / Reaction
March 23, 2026Trump postponed strikes on Iranian power plants via Truth Social post (~7:05 a.m. ET)$760M+ oil futures traded in a 2-minute window (6:49–6:51 a.m. ET); similar spike in S&P 500 futures; no clear catalyst.Oil prices dipped during volume spike; fell sharply after post; stocks rallied. Critics allege insider trading but no evidence found.
Feb. 28, 2026U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran beginCrypto prediction market Polymarket saw “suspected insiders” make $1.2M betting on U.S. strike date.Polymarket tightened rules against insider trading.
Jan. 2, 2026Trump ordered military operation against Venezuelan leader Maduro late at nightMystery trader placed ~$34K on Maduro losing power bets; final wager under an hour before order; earned $400K+ profit.Identity unknown; led to congressional bill proposal banning federal officials from trading on nonpublic info.
Oct. 10, 2025Trump threatened 100% tariffs on China after rare-earth export restrictionsTwo accounts made large bets on bitcoin and ether falling just before Trump’s tariff post; closed positions for $160M profit.Could be reaction to China’s restrictions; one account later lost $128M on a bad bet; suspicion but alternative explanations exist.
April 9, 2025Trump paused “Liberation Day” tariffs, reversing a stock selloffBullish call options on S&P 500 ETF (SPY) surged just after 1 p.m. ET, right before Trump’s post; bets paid off if index rose sharply.Some see insider trading signs; others attribute to positive Treasury auction results; Democratic calls for investigation dismissed by allies.

Make of it what you will. My Hypothesis: All the crazy stuff Donald Trump does, especially reversing course repeatedly, is to allow his friends collectively (possibly including family, though probably not directly because of the risk) to make billions of dollars on this kind of “insider trading.”

Shorts

  • Our culture’s true religion is the Second World War, a faith centered not on the positive moral example of Jesus Christ but the negative one of Adolf Hitler. Perhaps we still believe that Jesus is good, but not with the same fervour and conviction that we believe Nazism is evil.* (Alec Ryrie via Christopher Gehrz)
  • Trump in a nutshell (even if it is fake)
  • In order to conduct fair elections, the county elections board must have members who are willing to accept the basic proposition of any democracy: that in a given election, their party can lose. (Dana Barrett and Mo Ivory, of Fulton County Georgia, How We Stopped a Bid to Seat Election Deniers in Fulton County)
  • Self-driving cars must be understood as one more escalation in the war to claim and monetize every moment of life that might otherwise offer a bit of private head space. (Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive)
  • NOMINEE, n. A modest gentleman shrinking from the distinction of private life and diligently seeking the honorable obscurity of public office. (Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary,” via George Will)
  • Liberals are people who would like to see things improved, and conservatives are people who would like to see things not worsened. (Daniel Patrick Moynihan via George Will)
  • “This is like the horrible, lame-dad cover band version of the worst of American foreign policy,” said Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy. (Of the Iran war via Michelle Goldberg)
  • The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it. (Jonathan V. Last)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld (the real spicy stuff)

Notes

  • * In case you’re unaware, there are heretics who think Winston Churchill was the baddie in World War II, and they may be multiplying in internet petri dishes.
  • ** “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof ….” But there’s a second clause that casts shade on the absoluteness of state power. See this annotation from Cornell Law School.
  • *** I probably should note that my closest traditional Catholic acquaintance turned out to be a pretty sick puppy, and we’re estranged now. Maybe my admiration-in-theory should take a closer look at how traditional Catholics trend in practice.

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

T.S. Eliot

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

March 19

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

Iran

Karl Rove’s vindication

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

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

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

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

Karl Rove

Too late now?

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

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

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

Trumpiana

Purge and Binge

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

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

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

Nick Catoggio, Purge and Binge, March 12, 2024

Oopsie!

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

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

The Morning Dispatch for March 18.

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

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

Revealed preferences

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

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

Education

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

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

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Education too narrow

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

David V. Hicks, Norms and Nobility

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

Shorts

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

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

February 25, 2026

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

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

Civics lessons

“What the Roberts Court Is Actually Trying to Accomplish”

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

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

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

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

Losing Patience with POTUS

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

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

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

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

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

Bravo! Bravissimo!

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Pulling out all the stops

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

Are careful legal arguments irrelevant?

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

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

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

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

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

Are we the baddies?

On a note not unrelated to the prior item:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack Goldsmith

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

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

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

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

Kinsley gaffes

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin D. Williamson

U.S. humanitarian aid

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 16, 2026

Corriging the incorrigible

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

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

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

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

A southern stoic gets religion

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

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

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

Maybe I just don’t know what time it is

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Political

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

America’s concentration camps

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

Jamelle Bouie (gift link)

Are you cool with the concentration camps, Rod?

History Rhymes

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

Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire.

“Why haven’t you killed anyone?”

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

Vulnerable.

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

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

Then why haven’t you killed anyone?

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

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

Anti-Zionism versus Antisemitism

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

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

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

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

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

The AI Revolution

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

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

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

Then this killer footnote:

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

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Retire These Words!

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

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

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

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

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

How I wish I could label that assessment deranged.

Frank Bruni

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

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

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

Rod Dreher

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

Thursday, 1/22/26

Political Theory

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

Integrity matters

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

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

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

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

David French (shared link)

The Prerogative State

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

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

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

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

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

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

David French (shared link)

Competing, revealing, metaphors

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sanctuary City primer

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

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

…

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

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

…

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

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

Jed Rubenfeld

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

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

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

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

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

Charlie Sykes, interviewed by Andrew Sullivan.

Morality, Law and Religion

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

Amy Coney Barrett (italics added)

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

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

Consequences

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

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

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

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

(Telegraph UK via John Ellis)

Unpopular opinions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Logic mincing

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

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Rod Dreher

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

Autogulpe Day

I’m fully aware that today is Epiphany in Western Christianity, Theophany in Orthodox Christianity. But it’s also the 5th anniversary of one of the darkest days in American history, the attempted autogulpe of 2021.

In some ways, I think 1-6-21 is worse than 9-11: we did this to ourselves, and to this day there are tens of millions of Americans who will insist that it was a great patriotic outpouring of love rather than an attempt to overturn a Presidential election that ousted the incumbent.

Baloney!, say I to keep this post as family fare.

With friends like this …

What I remember very well about that day was my own failure of imagination. I did not, to my knowledge, see Dempsey—he had positioned himself at the vanguard of the assault, and I had stayed near the White House to listen to Trump—but I did come across at least a dozen or more protesters dressed in similar tactical gear or wearing body armor, many of them carrying flex-cuffs. I particularly remember those plastic cuffs, but I understood them only as a performance of zealous commitment. Later we would learn that these men—some of whom were Proud Boys—believed that they would actually be arresting members of Congress in defense of the Constitution. I interviewed one of them. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible.” Grifters could not exist, of course, without a population primed to be grifted.

After the riot, Dempsey returned to California, where he was eventually arrested. In early 2024, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Six months later, in the summer of 2024, Trump, who would come to describe the January 6 insurrection as a “day of love,” said that, if reelected, he would pardon rioters, but only “if they’re innocent.” Dempsey was not innocent, but on January 20, 2025, shortly after being inaugurated, Trump pardoned him and roughly 1,500 others charged with or convicted of offenses related to the Capitol insurrection ….

Jeffrey Goldberg, MAGA’s Foundational Lie. Subtitle: “The movement claims to stand with the police. Trump’s decision to pardon the cop-beaters of January 6 exposed his movement for what it is.”

And what have we gotten from the incorrigible electorate’s insistence on re-electing Trump four years after his defeat?

Defining “sedition” down

One indicator of a polity’s health is whether a citizen can be punished merely for telling the truth about the law. The signs for American democracy are not good.

This morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that he has begun the process to demote Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain and NASA astronaut, and reduce his pension pay. The operative facts here, naturally, are not Kelly’s past service but his current rank and service: a Democrat serving in the U.S. Senate and a political adversary of President Donald Trump.

“Six weeks ago, Senator Mark Kelly—and five other members of Congress—released a reckless and seditious video that was clearly intended to undermine good order and military discipline,” Hegseth wrote on X this morning. He cited two articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice; Kelly, unlike the other five, holds retired military status, which makes him subject to sanctions from the Defense Department.

What Hegseth did not cite was what Kelly and his colleagues actually said in the video, and for good reason. Doing so would expose the absurdity of the charge and the abuse of power involved in the attempt to demote him. “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders,” Kelly said. No one in the Trump administration has disputed that this is true. A more agile or even-keeled administration would have smoothly dismissed the video as irrelevant: This is true, but of course we would never issue an illegal order. (As Kelly and his lawyers have noted, Hegseth has cited the same law about disobeying illegal orders in the past.) Instead, Trump and his aides threw a fit, dubbing the Democrats the “Seditious Six.”

…

Members of the armed forces, and retirees like Kelly, are particularly susceptible to Hegseth’s abuse of power, because they can be punished by the Defense Department internally. But the chilling effect does not end with those who are serving or have served, or with the particular question of illegal orders. The administration has told the other five Democrats that it is investigating them as well. The core belief underlying all of this is as plain as it is dangerous: Criticizing Donald Trump and defending the rule of law is sedition.

David A. Graham, Hegseth’s Appalling Vengeance Campaign

Kelly responds tartly:

“My rank and retirement are things that I earned through my service and sacrifice for this country. I got shot at. I missed holidays and birthdays. I commanded a space shuttle mission while my wife,” former Representative Gabby Giffords, “recovered from a gunshot wound to the head—all while proudly wearing the American flag on my shoulder,” he said in a statement on X. “If Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in our country’s history, thinks he can intimidate me with a censure or threats to demote me or prosecute me, he still doesn’t get it.”

Remember that Hegseth purports to be a devout Christian. He should bear in mind that “taking the name of the Lord in vain” has a deeper meaning than “don’t cuss.”

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

Nick Catoggio

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

November 1

MAGA nihilists

Sometime in 1985 I had lunch with Sam Francis in the cafeteria of The Washington Times, where we both worked. You may never have heard of Sam Francis, but MAGA people (at least the more intellectual ones) know him as one of the seminal thinkers of their movement.

The lunch was awkward because I found him dark and creepy (and he probably found me naïve). Back then I didn’t understand that his way of thinking would triumph in conservative circles and my way of thinking would be vanquished. I don’t think he won because he was a flat-out racist, though he was. (He was later fired for writing a column arguing that “neither ‘slavery’ nor ‘racism’ as an institution is a sin.”) I think he won because he was a revolutionary, while I was a conservative. I wanted to reform things; he wanted to burn it all down.

…

Sam Francis (who died in 2005) explicitly cited Gramsci as his role model as he waged his culture war struggles. Christopher Rufo does the same today. This is why Trump is going after the universities, public broadcasting and the Kennedy Center. Francis once wrote, “The main focus should be the reclamation of cultural power, the patient elaboration of an alternative culture within but against the regime — within the belly of the beast but indigestible by it.”

David Brooks, Hey, Lefties! Trump Has Stolen Your Game (Gift link)

I was reading Sam Francis at roughly the time Brooks had lunch with him and for some years thereafter. He was brilliant (which is little assurance of a sound mind). He also was purged by more respectable conservatives—my kind of conservatives—for his increasingly explicit antisemitism.

Joseph Sobran followed a similar trajectory. He, too, was brilliant, but less radical than Francis (and thus less consequential). He was a devout Catholic, and his antisemitism was never explicit, but William F. Buckley wouldn’t tolerate even a whiff of it.

I viscerally detested Christopher Rufo almost from my first notice of him, which involved his gloating over making the term “Critical Race Theory” toxic while leaving it vague enough that it could beslime anyone he cared to beslime. I doubt that Rufo will be as consequential as Francis or even Sobran in the long run, but we’re in an era of pas d’ennemis á Droite, and there’s no magisterial authority trying to purge him.

Sentient and respectable conservatives like me necessarily ask ourselves if MAGA was always the eventuality of our political preferences, if we were all embryonic Sam Fracises and Joe Sobrans all along.

I don’t think so, but I’m increasingly appreciating that some truths simply need not be uttered—because of how very, very foreseeably they can be abused. To deny them would be sin, to utter them, imprudent. I save them for my private journal now when I recognize that.

Pardon me?

On Tuesday morning, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee released a report on former President Joe Biden’s use of autopen signatures on the many pardons and commutations he handed out during his term, and particularly near its end. Many of these were scandalous enough taken on their own terms, but what made them particularly outrageous was the suspicion that the bulk of these acts were the work of Biden’s staff, not the senescent president himself. One might reasonably understand how Biden found the time to preemptively pardon his family members, breaking frequent promises never to do so, but it was harder to believe that he was setting aside personal time to commute the sentences of people like Maryland’s thrice-murdering “Black Widow” killer. The House report confirms what voters long suspected: Biden’s inner circle hid the extent of his mental decline from the American people and, after he dropped out of the race, used his autopen as part of their campaign to set a new record for presidential clemency.

The GOP argument that Biden abused his pardon power in an unacceptable way is undermined, however, by Trump’s nonchalant, even gleeful pardoning of absolute sleazeballs who have ties to his own family business. There aren’t a lot of large financial institutions that are willing to simultaneously do work with al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, ransomware hackers, and kiddie-porn enthusiasts, but the crypto firm Binance did so. Back in November 2023, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program. In a court filing, U.S. Attorney Tessa Gorman said Zhao caused “significant harm to U.S national security” through his criminal acts and “violated U.S. law on an unprecedented scale.” But not only did Trump pardon him earlier this month, he claimed Zhao was in fact persecuted by the Biden administration. It gets worse. The Wall Street Journal reported in August: “The Trump family’s crypto venture has generated more wealth since the election—some $4.5 billion—than any other part of the president’s business empire.” Trump’s crypto fortune is of course facilitated by a partnership with “an under-the-radar trading platform quietly administered by Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.” It’s an egregious decision that is unlikely to generate more than a peep of objection from congressional Republicans.

National Review email.

Who damaged the nation more: Biden with his autopen pardons or Trump with his blanket pardon of the January 6 rioters and targeted pardons of lucrative cronies? (That’s a rhetorical question, of course.)

Indictment

Let us not belabor the obvious truth that what the Western world calls an “energy” crisis ineptly disguises what happens when you can no longer control markets, are chained to your colonies (instead of vice versa), are running out of slaves (and can’t trust those you think you still have), can’t, upon rigorously sober reflection, really send the Marines, or the Royal Navy, anywhere, or risk a global war, have no allies only business partners, or “satellites” and have broken every promise you ever made, anywhere, to anyone. I know what I am talking about: my grandfather never got the promised “forty acres, and a mule,” the Indians who survived that holocaust are either on reservations or dying in the streets, and not a single treaty between the United States and the Indian was ever honored. That is quite a record.

James Baldwin, Open Letter to the Born Again, p. 785.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings

The problem is that Trump, perhaps owing to his nouveau riche background and the carefully wrought deformity of his soul, has a taste for the trappings of aristocracy—a princely estate as imagined by a trust-fund dork from Queens. You can see it in his enthusiasm for ghastly imperial furnishings, in his love of monarchical pomp, and even in his sometimes evident desire to pass something of his political position along to the sons he obviously despises. … But what is most objectionably kingly about Trump is not his Caligula-by-way-of-Liberace bad taste but his personalist posture, e.g., treating the White House as though it were his personal property, to be knocked down and rebuilt at his whim, treating the Department of Justice as though it were his personal goon squad, treating judges as though they were his personal servants and factota, etc. Trump talks about “my generals” and unilaterally raised tariffs on Canadian goods because someone in Ontario hurt his personal feelings.

L’État, c’est moi—it is not only gilt moldings that Trump has taken from Louis XIV.

The king spoke, and said, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honor of my majesty?”

While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, Oh, king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee.

Nebuchadnezzar had to learn things the hard way. Julius Caesar, too. Why should Americans be any different?

Kevin D. Williamson

Pas d’ennemis à Droite, Heritage Foundation Edition

[A] video of Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, went viral. “There has been speculation that Heritage is distancing itself from Tucker Carlson over the past 24 hours,” Roberts tweeted, reacting to the uproar over Carlson’s notorious interview with head groyper Nick Fuentes. “I want to put that to rest right now.”

And that’s what he did. “We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” he said in the clip, declining to explain why criticism of Carlson is “slander” and who that “someone else” whose agenda is being served might be. “That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains—and, as I have said before, always will be—a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail.”

Nick Catoggio

Stagnation

Today’s suburbs are different. Highways and zoning have broken the feedback loop between location and value. These developments are typically built to a fixed, finished state and then locked down through zoning codes that discourage or prohibit change. There’s no natural process of maturing or intensification. No organic evolution. Just a one-time buildout, followed by stagnation and decline.

America Should Sprawl? Not if We Want Strong Towns

Snippets

  • “Quantity is a quality of its own.” (Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, on the United States advantage in WW II. German stuff was engineered better, but we made up for it with more stuff, much more stuff. Via Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast (Gift link))
  • “[E]very good earnings report further entrenches Nvidia as a precariously placed, load-bearing piece of the global economy … What if AI’s promise for American business proves to be a mirage? What happens then?” (Matteo Wong, Charlie Warzel, Here’s How the AI Crash Happens)

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.