… Planned Parenthood is synonymous with abortion …

Katie Benner. A telling segué into a story about financial woes at PP.

February 15, 2025

Nellie Bowles

February 14, 2025

The Myth of Unending Consumption now takes the place of belief in life everlasting.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

February 14, 2025

Trump really seems not to give a crap about the working class. Trump is not a populist. He campaigns as a populist, but once he has power, he is the betrayer of populism.

What’s going on here is not a working-class revolt against the elites. All I see is one section of the educated elite going after another section of the educated elite. This is like a civil war in a fancy prep school in which the sleazy kids are going after the pretentious kids.

Conservatives believe in constant and incremental change. Nihilists believe in sudden and chaotic disruption. Conservatism came into being opposing the arrogant radicalism of the French Revolution. The Trump people are basically the French revolutionaries in red hats — there are the same crude distinctions between good and evil, the same contempt for existing arrangements, the same descent into fanaticism, the same tendency to let the revolution devour its own.

David Brooks (unlocked)

February 14, 2025

Presented Without Comment

New York Times: State Dept. Plans $400 Million Order for Armored Trucks From Musk’s Tesla

Also Presented Without Comment

Axios: GOP Bill Would Rename Greenland To Red, White and Blueland”

Also Also Presented Without Comment

Associated Press: A Joke Petition Seeks To Help Denmark Buy California as Donald Trump Eyes Greenland

(TMD)

February 13, 2025

I spent much of last week screaming into the internet void, trying—with limited results—to correct this obvious misinformation. I got so impassioned that one follower asked me earnestly why this issue mattered so much to me.

My answer: It epitomizes everything that’s wrong with our current media environment. Unreliable or phony information, and the internet mobs they feed, spreads fast. But it feels impossible to keep up or correct the record—even when the black-letter facts are on your side.

If you correct the record that the millions spent came from all federal agencies, not one, the goalposts immediately move to the government funneling” money to a news organization for favorable coverage. If you can explain that the money was used to pay for valuable subscriptions to a valuable tool, not to influence coverage at a news organization, you might be able to have a reasonable debate about whether this is the way the government should spend their money. And then, just as you’re getting somewhere, a new absurd lie like USAID sending money to the deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein will pop up. And the whole process begins anew.

Isaac Saul, Beware the Internet Mob—on USAID and Everything Else

February 11, 2025

When Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) posted that Musk was exposing [Politicos] grift,” the post was amended with a Community Note: Boebert’s own office had several Politico Pro subscriptions.)

Isaac Saul, Beware the Internet Mob—on USAID and Everything Else

February 11, 2025

If you are waiting for the media to stop calling surgical mutilation of young people gender-affirming care,” don’t hold your breath.

The reasons why these lunacies persist have to do less with politics than with profound shifts in how we think about right and wrong, life and death, truth and falsehood — about God and man, men and women, adults and children — and about the nature of our bonds with each other.

These shifts have been going on for a long, long time, and the dirty secret is this: Milder versions of the lunacies of which progressives are so fond are widely accepted among conservatives too. They want to embrace lunatic premises, without coming to lunatic conclusions. They want the poison apple, without the worm.

J Budziszewski

February 9, 2025

My cyberfriend John Brady has been reading and offers these thoughts.

February 7, 2025

Chaos Monkey floods California

Trump ordered the Army Corps of Engineers in California’s Tulare County to begin releasing vast amounts of water from two dams, apparently to show Americans how boldly he’s moving to cut through progressive red tape and address the local wildfires. Problem one: None of the water released is flowing to affected areas. Problem two: Locals were unprepared, risking flooding. Problem three: Farmers rely on that water during the dry summer months to irrigate their crops. Trump did get a nice Twitter post out of the episode, though.

Nick Catoggio

February 6, 2025

[T]his Jurassic Park has room for only one T-Rex (Frank Bruni)

February 6, 2025

If the president or his donor-factotum can simply ignore the law—including the programs and spending Congress has approved—then we have literally swapped out the rule of law for something else: the rule of the last person to expertly blow smoke up the presidential bum. While we are debating whether Elon Musk is Donald Trump’s monkey-butler or it is the other way around (which is the way it is, if you’re wondering), we are very quickly losing sight of the fact that Donald Trump has no legal or constitutional power to do half the things he currently proposes to do. You may get some trivial satisfaction if a few GS-8 nobodies fall behind on their rent, but what’s being built is the infrastructure of dictatorship.

Kevin D. Williamson

February 5, 2025

Take it from a Never Trumper: If you’re holding your breath waiting for Congress to reassert itself” against an immensely powerful right-wing demagogue, you’ll suffocate a thousand times over.

… Is this a coup? It’s certainly not violent. The constitutional framework remains formally intact. It’s just that no one with the authority to do so seems terribly interested in enforcing that framework to constrain Elon Musk.

… Per the Times, Elon’s team has prioritized secrecy, sharing little outside the roughly 40 people” involved, and staffers have even gone as far as to refuse to give their surnames when interviewing federal workers on the job.

We haven’t yet reached the point of Trump-Musk goons barging into agencies in balaclavas and tactical gear to secure the premises. But when you’re weighing the legitimacy of a government action, whether relevant personnel feel obliged to conceal their identities in carrying out their tasks is a point worth considering.

Before you knock down a fence, Chesterton wrote, make sure you understand why it was put there in the first place. Musk’s approach to management is the opposite, TechDirt’s Mike Masnick explained last week. His oversight of DOGE resembles his oversight of Twitter in that both demonstrate his authoritarian impulse to (sometimes literally) demolish systems without understanding them, and his tendency to replace existing, nuanced solutions with far worse alternatives (even when those older systems probably did require some level of reform).”

Moving fast and breaking things in the federal bureaucracy could actually lead to less efficiency in some cases, not more. A Biden administration veteran warned The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel that even simple-sounding procedures—allocating government funds in a crisis like, say, a pandemic—require coordination among teams of civil servants across multiple government offices.” If you’re pulling Jenga pieces carefully and deliberately out of a teetering tower, you might successfully streamline the structure while keeping it upright. If you’re pulling them out willy nilly to show how bold and alpha you are (“Regulations, basically, should be default gone”), uh oh.

Before you knock down a fence, make sure you understand why it was put there in the first place. Elon’s response to that, in so many words, is no fences.”

Nick Catoggio

February 5, 2025

Some of Musk’s lead aides, according to Wired, are 19 to 24 years old. (When a user on X later posted the names of those aides, Musk replied, You have committed a crime,” and suspended the account.)

Jonathan Lemire

February 4, 2025

Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

Ezra Klein

February 3, 2025

Every Republican senator who votes for [Kash] Patel is abdicating his or her constitutional responsibility. And for what? To please a lame-duck bully? To protect their right flank in a primary? It took immense courage to create our constitutional republic, and now immense cowardice is placing our system of justice under threat.

David French

February 3, 2025

If I called this the understatement of the century,” it would be an overstatement. But this is culpably evasive:

To be fair, Trump is no moral exemplar and has not always been promising as a champion for socially conservative values: He and Melania publicly supported abortion access and IVF during the campaign; he supports gay marriage; he invited a porn star to speak at the RNC; he has had high-profile affairs and been divorced multiple times; and his mocking rhetoric can often verge on the cruel and un-Christian.

James R. Wood in the increasingly-Trumpy First Things.

February 2, 2025

Insofar as I thought Trump marked mostly a populist realignment of partisan political boundaries, I think I was wrong — or at least that Trump 2.0 is a bigger deal than Trump 1.0. I think he’s now leading us into a post-liberal/illiberal world (that may be inevitable).

Nick Catoggio nails my feelings:

2015 me would have gazed around at the first nine days of Trump’s term, taking each policy in isolation, and concluded that the individual trees look pretty good. 2025 me stares around at the forest Trump is planting and shudders.

Many are freaking out about this.

The post-liberal/illiberal world is ominous for a lot of reasons:

  1. Liberal democracy has been very good materially to me, and mine, and most of the U.S. (But some have been left behind relatively because they didn’t register as Important People.)
  2. There’s a decent case to be made that liberal democracy represents our best chance to live together peacefully despite deep differences. Trump’s mind requires winners, losers and chaos, not co-existence.
  3. Postliberalism/Illiberalism in America feels alien, and how tolerably it’s implemented will depend on those implementing it.
  4. Trump, a toxic narcissist with authoritarian impulses and a taste for lethal retribution, is a terrible person to implement it. I’d be more comfortable with an Orbán than with Trump, but I cannot identify any American Orbán.
  5. Donald Trump has millions or tens of millions of supporters for who lethal retribution is a feature, not a bug, and they’ll turn on anyone he turns on. He’s an antichrist heading a new toxic religious cult, and since the failed assassination attempt, he may actually believe that he’s anointed (in contrast to his former cynicism toward his Christian enthusiasts).

Bottom line: it’s probably the end of a world, but not the end of the world. And I can’t do much about it except, possibly, take personal and familial protective measures. Some of those are in place; others we’ve ruled out as a matter of principle.

February 2, 2025

Of Republican lawmakers in the early weeks of Trump 2.0:

[F]or all the talk of the new professionalism in the Trump operation, they have to get used to the chaos again and ride it, tempting the gods of order and steadiness. After one week they concluded the first administration wasn’t a nervous breakdown and the second isn’t a recovery; instead, again they’re on a ship with a captain in an extended manic phase who never settles into soothing depression.

I saw a broad and growing sense in Washington that American domestic politics, or at least that part of its politics that comes from Washington, is at a similar inflection point. That the second rise of Donald Trump is a total break with the past—that stable order, healthy expectations, the honoring of a certain old moderation, and strict adherence to form and the law aren’t being traduced”; they are ending. That something new has begun. People aren’t sure they’re right about this and no one has a name for the big break, but they know we have entered something different—something more emotional, more tribal and visceral.

There’s a sense we’re living through times we’ll understand only in retrospect. But the collapse of the old international order and the break in America’s old domestic order are shaping this young century.

Peggy Noonan

January 31, 2025

Lying Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita is in disciplinary trouble again.

He told a whopper the first time he ran for anything. I’ve never voted for him for anything. He’s a dishonorable man.

January 31, 2025

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