The State of the Union should be an easy topic for a writer. It’s a televised event; you watch it; you react.
But it’s actually quite challenging to find anything non-obvious to say about it, especially in 2024. Suspense around the address used to derive from what the president might say. Now, given his age, it derives from whether he might expire before the speech ends.
Joe Biden did not expire last night. Read any analysis today and that’s the top-line takeaway.
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Then came Sen. Katie Britt to deliver the Republican rebuttal to Biden’s speech. Of her performance, the less said, the better. Watching it, I found myself wondering whether she had seized the opportunity to deliberately sabotage her chances of becoming Donald Trump’s running mate, mindful of how close the last guy who held that position came to being murdered.
There isn’t much else to say about Thursday night. Biden is plainly too old to serve competently for another four years, one “fiery and confident” address notwithstanding, and his agenda is too liberal to make any conservative happy.
I’ll be at the polls early on Election Day to vote for him.
Nick Catoggio, The State of Our Union
Eleventh Circuit Strikes Down Stop W.O.K.E. Act’s Restrictions on Private Employers
This was as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning. It’s one of the reasons I couldn’t warm to the thought of “President Ron DeSantis.” A Harvard Law grad who swore to uphold the constitution should never have signed, let alone pushed, a law like the Stop WOKE Act with provisions trying to mute private employers.
Give Trump what he’s asking for, Nikki!
Oh, how I wish [Nikki Haley] would take a different message from this result than the one she appears to be taking (at least publicly). The message she claims to have received is this: I may not be the Republican present, but I am its future. Trump may win the nomination this year, but he will lose to Joe Biden. And then the voters will come to their senses, realize that candidates like me are the key to victory at the national level, and make me a leading contender for the presidency in 2028. I’ll be back!
To which I can only reply: Seriously? You think the party positively thrilled by the prospect of renominating a hateful, moronic, demented, conspiracy-addled, coup-plotting, multiply indicted would-be dictator will turn on a dime to rally around a daughter of Sikh immigrants from India who espouses a policy agenda suited to a member of George W. Bush’s Cabinet? The same voters who are rewarding Kari Lake for losing her winnable race for Arizona governor in 2022 by nominating her for the US Senate in 2024? The same voters who sent to Congress the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election results? The same voters who on Tuesday made a Holocaust denier who mocks children killed in school shootings the party’s nominee for governor
in the state of North Carolina? Nikki Haley will be the leader of that party four years from now?
I’m sorry, but are you out of your f*cking mind?
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Trump and his personally installed nepo babies at the Republican National Committee … want the Haley voters out of the party, just as Lake explicitly asked supporters of the late Arizona Sen. John McCain not to vote for her two years ago. That led directly to Lake’s loss, just as the same move this year could help to ensure that Trump’s third bid for the presidency sinks.
Please, Nikki Haley: Give Trump his wish. Make it happen. Lead your supporters on a mass exodus out of the Republican Party. And not out into the nowheresland of the third-party wilderness, but into the Democratic Party. You need not love Joe Biden. You need only say what is true: That a party led by Donald Trump and the thugs he’s surrounded himself with have no business wielding power at the highest levels.
Damon Linker
[I]t was a perfectly defensible position to hold that Trump should be disqualified. What was indefensible was the air of swaggering certainty that permeated so many of those takes. … self-evident. Common sense. Obvious. Indisputable. Automatic.
Damon Linker
MTF trans lies
“Elite sport is over for me” is the headline ITV News has used for an interview with Bridges. “If we were allowed to compete, if I was allowed to compete, it would be a different conversation,” he claims, “but I can’t compete […] I can’t do something I used to love.’
Bridges is 6’2”, was born male and went through male puberty. Like Thomas, he towers over female athletes and his voice in interviews is that of a young man. He could go on racing for years if he were willing to compete in the male or “open” category, a point made by ITV’s sports editor, Steve Scott.
Scott’s challenge goes to the heart of the matter, exposing the fact that there is no ban on trans athletes. But they want validation of their claimed gender identity, and they won’t get that in the “open” category.
Unsurprisingly, Bridges has no answer to Scott’s question, appearing lost for words. “Would it be safe for me to compete in an open category?” he asks after a long pause. The answer is obviously yes, but trans athletes are not used to having their hyperbolic claims called out like this.
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Bridges is now making even more absurd statements, however, such as the notion that protecting the female category in sport “has normalised the exclusion of trans people from public life”.
Trans cyclist Emily Bridges: ‘elite sport is over for me’
Florida’s most notorious abortion clinic is located at 1103 Lucerne Terrace in downtown Orlando. On the sidewalk directly in front of this clinic, the Orlando Women’s Center, there are two prominent marks in the concrete. They are signs of an extraordinary story.
The concrete was worn away by the feet of John Barros, who for nearly two decades stood outside this clinic as a sidewalk counselor …
I asked him, once, how he’d felt called to the pro-life movement. “I wasn’t called to the pro-life movement,” he replied. “God called me to forty feet of sidewalk.”
Farewell to a Pro-Life Hero
Reproductive rights, gay rights—they’re the new White Man’s Burden.
R.R. Reno, Global Culture War (emphasis added)
New study: trans youth not at elevated risk of suicide - UnHerd
February 19, 2024 - 7:00am
A new study challenges the common assertion that gender-dysphoric youth are at elevated risk of suicide if not treated with “gender affirming” medical interventions. If it’s true, it ought to have a seismic impact on the accepted medical approach to gender-confused youth.
Reported in the BMJ, the study examines data on a Finnish cohort of gender-referred adolescents between 1996 and 2019, and compares their rates of all-cause and suicide mortality against a control group. While suicide rates in the gender-referred group studied were higher than in the control group, the difference was not large: 0.3% versus 0.1%. And — importantly — this difference disappeared when the two groups were controlled for mental health issues severe enough to require specialist psychiatric help.
In other words: ==while transgender identity does seem to be associated with elevated suicide risk, the link is not very strong. What’s more, the causality may not work the way activists claim.==
The association between gender dysphoria and mental illness is well-documented by both providers of “gender-affirming care” and trans advocacy groups and clinical psychology research. ==But one less well-evidenced claim, based on this association, is that these difficulties are caused not by being transgender, but by the political and social stigma associated with it. Gender dysphoria, we are to understand, is not in itself a mental health issue. What causes mental health issues in transgender youth — up to and including suicide — is the wider world’s rejection of their identity, and of the metaphysical
frame of “gender identity” as such.==
This is the root of the oft-repeated social media assertion that anyone who demurs about trans identity, however mildly, is complicit in “trans genocide”. The same assertion that invalidating trans youth makes them kill themselves is also behind the rhetorical question routinely used to browbeat parents into consenting to social and medical transition for their gender-confused offspring: “Would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?”
It’s behind the prohibition on “trans conversion therapy” already in force in several countries, and promised by the Labour Party in England too. Such measures forbid therapists from exploring with their clients whether there is any link between their gender dysphoria and — for example — life trauma or other mental health issues. For logically, if the cause of distress and suicidality in trans people is not being accepted for who they are, any therapist who seeks to explore links between gender dysphoria and other biographic or psychiatric issues is complicit in just this kind of non-acceptance, and is thus not helping but harming their client.
But as the study puts it: ==“Clinical gender dysphoria does not appear to be predictive of all-cause nor suicide mortality when psychiatric treatment history is accounted for.” Rather, what predicts risk in this population is “psychiatric morbidity”. And contra the activists, transitioning does nothing to reduce it: “medical gender reassignment does not have an impact on suicide risk.”==
Every suicide is a tragedy, and leaves grieving loved ones behind. No one wants to be complicit in pushing a young person down that path. So the suggestion that questioning someone’s gender beliefs may have this effect serves as a powerful emotional cudgel. But if the Finnish study is correct, this whole rhetorical, legislative, and medical edifice may be built on sand. If the elevated risk of suicidality in trans youth disappears when you control for other psychiatric difficulties, this suggests strongly that trans youth are not more at risk due to transphobia or invalidation, but due to the well-documented fact that gender dysphoria tends to occur in people who are disturbed and unhappy more generally.
It ought to follow from this that the way to manage suicide risk in trans-identified young people is not to affirm their gender identity and whisk them off for medical interventions, but to watch for and treat psychiatric comorbidities. Ultimately, though, the claims of gender ideology are less scientific than metaphysical. So don’t expect scientific evidence that contradicts its prescriptions to have much impact on trans advocates. Even if “following the science” would make a real difference to suicide risk in gender-dysphoric youth.
MAGA Menace
[A]re you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you aware of the price they might pay if they did?
David French, who “has the receipts”:
- Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis had trouble finding lawyers willing to help prosecute her case against Trump. Even a former Georgia governor turned her down, saying, “Hypothetically speaking, do you want to have a bodyguard follow you around for the rest of your life?”
- Willis received an assassination threat so specific that one evening she had to leave her office incognito while a body double wearing a bulletproof vest courageously pretended to be her and offered a target for any possible incoming fire.
- Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal Jan. 6 trial, has been swatted, as has the special counsel Jack Smith.
- The Colorado Supreme Court likewise endured terrible threats after it ruled that Trump was disqualified from the ballot.
- Mitt Romney faces so many threats that he spends $5,000 per day on security to protect his family.
- After Jan. 6, the former Republican congressman Peter Meijer said that at least one colleague voted not to certify the election out of fear for the safety of their family.
- In 2021, Reuters published a horrifying and comprehensive report detailing the persistent threats against local election workers.
- In my own Tennessee community, doctors and nurses who advocated wearing masks in schools were targets of screaming, threatening right-wing activists, who told one man, “We know who you are” and “We will find you.”
That’s a long list, but here’s the clincher for me:
The intimidation is systemic and ubiquitous, an acknowledged tactic in the playbook of the Trump right that flows all the way down from the violent fantasies of Donald Trump himself. It is rare to encounter a public-facing Trump critic who hasn’t faced threats and intimidation.
A vote for Trump is a vote for these jackboots.
You call that trivial trick a “hunger strike”!?
People send samples of colorful writing to Frank Bruni, who curates them for us. This week’s, further curated by me:
- And George Will lambasted lawmakers for their antics: “Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), the very model of the legislator-as-spouter, says: ‘If you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing.’ Actually, Congress governing would make news.” (Hank Durkin, Charlotte, N.C.)
- In The Toronto Star, Vinay Menon appraised the MAGA king’s hold on his subjects: “If Trump told his supporters Bigfoot just swiped his wallet outside a Burger King, millions of red hats would pile into jeeps and fan out across the Pacific Northwest with flashlights and shotguns. If Trump asked Marjorie Taylor Greene to surgically remove her arms and legs, her torso would be glued to a skateboard as she somehow still put her foot in her mouth.” (Lori Jamison, Vancouver B.C.)
- On the electoral-vote.com website, Christopher Bates asserted that Ronald Reagan, in contrast to Trump, had a “fundamental decency” reflected in a sense of humor: “Trump couldn’t make a joke if you spotted him a chicken and a road.” (Lee Semsen, Richland, Wash.)
I think I detest Donald Trump as much as the next guy, but Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach; the need to preserve social cohesion amid mass migration; the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.
The struggle against Trump the man is a good-versus-bad struggle between democracy and narcissistic authoritarianism, but the struggle between liberalism and Trumpian populism is a wrestling match over how to balance legitimate concerns.
David Brooks, The Cure for What Ails Our Democracy - The New York Times
I’m beginning to comprehend, I think, some of the reasons for Hitler’s astounding success. Borrowing a chapter from the Roman church, he is restoring pageantry and colour and mysticism to the drab lives of twentieth-century Germans.
William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary
Of the Evangelicals who attack their fellow-Evangelicals for not supporting Trump enough: Is it their position that nobody of sound mind and morals could support a senile Democrat over a toxic narcissist with a documented history of sexual assaults who has promised to upend our treaties and fill his administration with Certified Sycophants™?
[T]rying to disqualify Trump through a dubious, convoluted 14th Amendment process after discouraging the Senate from doing so via a quick, clean, legally sound conviction mirrors the eternal shortsightedness of the Republican establishment in dealing with Trump.
There’s always some other institution, and some other time, that’s better suited to hold him accountable.
Senate Republicans declined to end Trump’s political career after January 6 when they had the chance because they assumed the criminal courts would eventually do it for them. Now that the courts have taken up the matter, those same Republicans have been compelled by pressure from their voters to argue that Trump’s prosecutions are politicized and illegitimate. Only the voters themselves can properly issue a verdict on him, they insist.
But voters tried that in 2020 and you know how it ended. It’ll end the same way this year if Trump loses again, with the very same Republicans alleging that the American people couldn’t possibly have voted the way they appear to have voted.
Every opportunity to banish him from politics is a missed opportunity, by design.
Nick Catoggio
A 10-Word Epitaph for Democrats’ Hopes - The Dispatch
It was the week that Democrats had been waiting for.
Former President Donald Trump, on the precipice of locking down the Republican nomination, was causing chaos everywhere, while the members of his party in Congress were cutting each other’s throats.
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Then came these words: “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
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Biden says that the magnitude of the threat posed by Trump is why he had no choice but to seek a second term. He is, no doubt, “well-meaning,” and certainly a “sympathetic” figure. But what the president is not is a person with a true sense of himself and of his condition. And those things will not get any better in the 269 days until the election.
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If Trump is returned to power, there will be many who deserve blame—the voters, the craven Republicans who abetted him against their own judgment, the media hucksters who went along for the ride—but very near the top of the list will be Biden and his inner circle, particularly the first lady, who did not find the courage and humility to step aside.
Chris Stirewalt