White House – Tipsy Teetotaler ن

Le mot juste

“Fascist” slightly misses the mark. M. Gessen hits a bulls-eye:

Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.

The 4chan White House Communications Office

Beyond the fact that this kind of shitposting is so obviously beneath the office, the posts are genuinely sinister. By adding a photo of an ICE arrest to a light-hearted viral trend, for instance, the White House account manages to perfectly capture the sociopathic, fascistic tone of ironic detachment and glee of the internet’s darkest corners and most malignant trolls. The official X account of the White House isn’t just full of low-rent 4chan musings, it’s an alarming signal of an administration that’s fluent in internet extremism and seemingly dedicated to pursuing its casual cruelty as a chief political export.

…

And the posters have goals. The first is to engage and supply their loyal audiences with constant memes and content. The second is perhaps more strategic. The account’s blatant humiliation of immigrants who it alleges have heinous criminal records is intentional. The goal is to goad their opponents into defending people accused of indefensible crimes. The primary accusation from the MAGA faithful toward people who are outraged about the White House’s Studio Ghibli post or the ASMR video is that the left is more concerned with defending fentanyl dealers and immigrants accused of rape and robbery than they are about the safety of the country. “Disappointing that folks are more upset about this meme than they are about the fentanyl crisis,” Dorr said in the same post that the White House pointed me to. But this is a false binary; in all cases, the chief objections are to the dehumanization and glee on display and the worrying lack of due process.

Charlie Warzel

Aspiring Dominatrix-in-Chief Kristi Noem added a $50,000 Rolex to the dehumanization.

Feeling like Abraham

The America I’ve known for all my life is gone. I don’t think it will be back in my lifetime.

I’m not going to complain about God allowing this to happen; I suspect that something like it needed to happen and I trust that my morning prayer for the nation, “Let your judgment be merciful,” is somehow being answered.

But it may be that the merciful thing in the long-term feels very harsh in the moment (and that’s the perception of a citizen who’s relatively safe; imagine the immigrants among us!).

And part of the background thrum that makes the moment unnerving is my concern that the Democrats might do no better.

It feels like an Abraham moment: “Get thee up into a land I will show thee.” No map.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Culture

A wholly artificial human being

Liberalism is so unlikely and fantastic, John Milbank observes, because it proceeds by inventing a wholly artificial human being that has never actually existed, conceived in abstraction from his gender, birth, associations, beliefs, and equally indifferent as to whether he is a creature of God, a rational animal, an accident of evolution, or a puddle of genes. And then it imagines that we are all instances of such species.

Jake Meador, Liberalism and the Sexual Revolution

What militancy proves

Progressive students have absorbed the idea it’s good to be militant in your views, it shows you’re authentic. No, it shows you got the talking points.

Peggy Noonan, Israel Tries to Part the Fog of War

From Nellie’s TGIF

Sensing the vibes weren’t right, Columbia postponed its annual Giving Day, which usually raises tens of millions for the school. It’s really hard to shake down Jewish alumni when your faculty and students are also trying to do a pogrom. The list of donors who are pulling their gifts keeps growing: the latest is billionaire Leon Cooperman, who declared on television: “I think these kids at the colleges have shit for brains.”

…

State suicide is now a top cause of death in Canada: New statistics have come out that show a shocking 4 percent of all deaths in Canada are now thanks to the country’s assisted suicide scheme, the fifth leading cause of death.

Nellie Bowles.

Politics

Disproportion

So a couple of things: we have not seen any credible threats. I know there’s been all these questions about credible threats, and so I want to be sure that that’s out there. But look, Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, pooh-poohing rising antisemitism, via Nellie Bowles.

According to FBI data, Muslims make up about 1 percent of the population and are the target of 9.6 percent of hate crimes. Jews make up about 2 percent of the population and are the target of 51.4 percent of hate crimes.

Bari Weiss, Oliver Wiseman, The Hatred on Our Doorsteps

Latecomer to sanity

In [disgraced attorney Jenna] Ellis’s case, she complained that Trump wasn’t doing much to help her raise funds for her legal defense, even though she was being targeted for working on his behalf. “I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said on her podcast last month. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”

David A. Graham, Trump’s Loyalty Only Goes One Way

Elsewhere, Nick Cattogio muses about Forgiving Jenna Ellis and concludes that he’s not ready yet — partly because her remorse follows a lot of high dudgeon after and about her indictment, and partly because he can’t believe that Trump’s toxic narcissism only now registered with her.

He has a point, doesn’t he?

Education in Oregon

Students don’t need to learn things: You don’t need another rant about the logic behind letting teachers stop measuring whether their teaching is working. So I’ll just leave this here, from the Oregon-based Observer:

Oregon high school students won’t have to prove basic mastery of reading, writing, or math to graduate from high school until at least 2029, the state Board of Education decided unanimously on Thursday, Oct. 19, extending the pause on the controversial graduation requirement that began in 2020.

Pair that with this chart of American ACT scores:

At this point I’m convinced American public school teachers have been captured as foreign agents bent on weakening the population. There is no other explanation. Moon landing was fake and teachers are all CCP assets.

Nellie Bowles

Conquest’s Third Law: “The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”

Via Rod Dreher

A swarm of MAGA lawyers

There is no question that a swarm of MAGA lawyers surrounded Trump at each step of the process, much like a cloud of dirt surrounds the character Pigpen in the “Peanuts” cartoons, but if the lawyers themselves have admitted to engaging in criminal conduct, then that weakens his legal defense. This was no normal legal team, and their conduct was far outside the bounds of normal legal representation.

David French

Our new Speaker

If not for sinister nebbish Jeffrey Clark, he’d have the strongest “banality of evil” vibes of any participant in the 2020 plot.

Nick Catoggio on House Speaker Mike Johnson

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.