Retweets are not endorsements! I found these articles thought-provoking. There’s a good chance I agreed with something important in each, but maybe not, and, in any case, I absolutely do not endorse each and every claim made in each and every article.

“The kids are not alright – A look at US religious belief and practice,” by Brendan Hodge:

When you slice up the data in interesting ways, you get interesting results. It’s rare enough for surveys to go beyond mere religious self-identification (which is very close to statistically useless for detecting Catholics qua Catholics) to whether the subject actually attends Mass. It’s even rarer to see a survey approach the question generationally. These results are fascinating — and, very interestingly, they don’t show any significant decline in religious practice among young adults since the 1980s babies came of age.

In other words, Catholicism will bleed badly as the Silent Generation finishes dying and the Boomers start dying in earnest. The number of parishoners will shrink by… half? Three-quarters? Just eyeballing it there. But this graph suggests the decline won’t simply continue indefinitely until the Catholic Church vanishes from the United States; it will eventually hit a floor and stop.

Will this be the “smaller, purer Church… a Church that has lost much” that Fr. Ratzinger spoke of, long before he became pope? Or will it be a hellscape where the only Catholics left are the ones who argue angrily on the Internet — Mark Shea and Austin Ruse throat-punching each other in the corridor between universes for all eternity?

Dunno! We’ll find out. Speaking of which…

“Catholic Ideas and Catholic Realities,” by Ross Douthat:

…in a shrinking Church, the influence of its more committed members will wax, not wane. The diocesan ­fundraisers of the future will be hitting up populists and integralists, and perhaps even tradinistas, because the lukewarm cradle-Catholic donors of the present era won’t be available anymore. The parishes of the future will depend on benedictines for either renewal or survival. In a smaller, weaker Church, the influence of ideas that seem weird to the average Catholic today are likely to be magnified, as the Church becomes more an institution by, for, and of the weirdos.

I focus on the part about decline, but this article is better-known for the way it classifies the four current strains of Catholic intellectual thought: populists, integralists, BenOppers, and Tradinistas. (If these words are meaningless to you, you should probably read the article, if only to find out what Catholic intellectual discourse looks like these days.)

A columnist friend of mine (whom I leave anonymous, because she posted it on Facebook), points out that she doesn’t actually like any of the four camps, both because their loudest proponents are obnoxious (DENEEN MY OLD FRIEND) and because most of them seem to think the job of Catholic intellectuals is to Save Western Politics And Culture. In fact, our job is to save the few souls Christ gives us each a chance to help save, tho’ all Westernesse crumble into the sea.

I tend to agree, although I must make an exception for the BenOppers on both accounts. But maybe that’s just my BenOp sympathies showing. Let the reader decide!

Of course, all this somewhat depends on an assumption that the Catholic Church remains intact. On that, Douthat has a few other things to say…

“The Latin Mass in the Zero Sum Church,” by Ross Douthat:

Any sustainable decadence depends, by definition, on sustainability: A sense among the factions living with the stalemate that while they may not like each other, there will be enough to go around. Thus in Catholicism the muddling-through of the JPII era depended — for liberals who kept their heads down and stuck with the church as much as for conservatives who accepted the very partial restoration of authority — on the sense that things had somewhat stabilized after the shocks of the 1960s, that the condition of the faith was difficult but not exactly dire, and that every group had reasons to be patient, to live with one another and see what happened next. Whereas the pressures of the Francis era increasingly reflect a fear that stability is gone, that the bill is coming due, the money and numbers are drying up, and the only question is which faction will be left standing at the end. Intellectually this feeling can be a spur to creativity — the post-liberal arguments I try to limn in the First Things essay are definitely creative — but institutionally it’s how you end up with crises, breakage, schism.

This looks like another article about Catholicism, and… well, it is. But try reading it with my 2020 article about a new American Civil War in the front of your mind, and it takes on a much broader salience.

Hey, speaking of my 2020 article about a new American Civil War, remember when I said that Civil War was inevitable as long as we hated each other? Well, guess what!

We Hate Each Other: The Poll, by the University of Virginia Center for Politics (official title: “New Initiative Explores Deep, Persistent Divides Between Biden and Trump Voters”):

Overall, more than two-thirds support — and one-third strongly — emboldening and empowering strong leaders and taking the law into their own hands when it comes to dealing with people or groups they view as dangerous.

And their willingness to consider violating democratic tendencies and norms extends beyond the hypothetical and to a dangerous and alarming finding:

Roughly 2 in 10 Trump and Biden voters — or more than 31 million Americans — strongly agree it would be better if a “President could take needed actions without being constrained by Congress or courts” (as extrapolated from the results of this survey).

Roughly 4 in 10 (41%) of Biden and half (52%) of Trump voters at least somewhat agree that it’s time to split the country, favoring blue/red states seceding from the union.

Honestly, when I started telling friends in 2010 that thought it was very possible America could dissolve by 2040, they looked at me like I was a lunatic.

They don’t anymore! So ha!

“Human Dignity: A Puzzling and Possibly Dangerous Idea?” by Alasdair MacIntyre:

Incidentally, did it ever occur to you that the concept of “human dignity”–you know, the fundamental principle of law that most religious and non-religious people depend on in order to establish an agreed-upon foundation for a pluralist and humane society–was just kind of made up out of thin air less than a century ago, and that the content of this concept is an empty compromise at best, a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing at worst? Because now it can!

It has often crossed my mind that “human dignity” as used in most discourse is an empty phrase. Each religion and each ethical system has its own (usually incompatible) reasons for accepting human dignity. It’s fairly obvious that we settled on this phrase as a compromise in order to make the Universal Declaration of Human Rights work without having to agree on all the metaphysical details. When you refer to “human dignity” in a debate about (say) abortion or the death penalty or same-sex marriage, what you’re really doing is saying, “I know you believe human life and happiness is valuable, even though you believe that for completely different reasons. So, instead of debating those reasons, I am referring to that shared conclusion while you supply your own justifications for it.” It’s an empty phrase that each belief system invests with its own meaning. That much was not new to me.

But MacIntyre’s idea that this compromise might actually be misleading or in some ways dangerous… that was a new thought in my head.

MacIntyre offers “justice” as a replacement for “human dignity,” and I’m open to reading more about what he has to say on the topic in a space where brevity is less of a concern… but, based on what he says about it here, I think “justice” fails to have universal pluralist appeal for the same reasons “human dignity” does.

Now, getting back to the decline and fall of religion specifically…

The Pillar Survey on Religious Attitude and Practice, by The Pillar & Brendan Hodge… in five parts, sorry:

Part 1: Religion in America (Overview),

Part 2: Why Cradle Catholics Leave,

Part 3: A Close Look at the “Nones”/Atheists,

Part 4: Did Covid Have Long-Term Attendance Effects? (Yes.),

Part 5: Catholic “Hot Button” Issues

Instead of pulling a quote here, I’ll pull two particularly interesting charts. But this survey is swimming in fascinating charts. As you can see, a lot of it is Catholic-related… and a lot of it isn’t! So dig in, regardless of religious affiliation or sociological interest! The Pillar has collected data that answers specific, important questions that (to my knowledge) nobody has ever collected before… including the Pew Research Center, ordinarily the gold standard for religion surveys.

…demonstrating fairly conclusively that >80% of Catholics are either nuts or simply not paying the slightest bit of attention to their bishops. My Commonweal article (far and away the most financially successful writing I’ve ever done) lays out where I think the laity should be, and I really expected these numbers to be closer to my position. (“Never trust a bishop.”)

But perhaps it’s simply the case that the overwhelming majority of Catholics who stop trusting their bishops swiftly cease identifying as Catholic, thus cleansing themselves from the sample? Defecting from the Faith over untrustworthy bishops would be kinda weird in a historical sense. I can’t imagine medieval peasants trusted their incredibly corrupt bishops too much, but the peasants still radiated Catholicism. And yet, what happens if you combine Catholicism’s post-Council-of-Trent ultra-ultramontanist culture of “bishops = Catholicism” with the American “consumer choice” mindset? I guess you’d get a lot of people leaving the Faith as soon as they stopped trusting the bishops.

Maybe I should write an article about how to walk that tightrope, I dunno.

Hello Catholic parents! Your primary responsibility as a Catholic parent is to ensure that all of your children grow up to become Catholics in the dark green bar. Weekly Mass attendance is not ambitious; it is a bare minimum requirement for a practicing Catholic. And your mission as a Catholic parent is to raise a Catholic saint.

If one of your children is not inside the dark green bar, he or she is in a state of serious sin, will likely enter an invalid marriage, and is (but for the grace of God, in Whom we dare hope that all men are saved) on the direct path to Hell. (Even children who are inside the dark green bar may well be committing other serious sins; see, for example, the rest of the utterly terrifying Part 2 of The Pillar‘s survey!)

So, fellow Catholic parents, how many of these things are you doing monthly or more with your children? My number is one! And it looks like even you parents doing all 5 can still expect one out of every three of your kids to fall out of the Faith of Our Fathers!

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

“A Note to Me,” by Erick W. Erickson (an Evangelical layman) (and after that horrible last share I’m going to just quote this Worthy Read in its entirety):

I got back from the mountains yesterday. On my last night there, I let people ask me anything on Instagram. One of the questions was, “What would you tell your 21-year-old self?” I can’t remember what I said, but it was limited in the number of characters I could type anyway. I’ve been thinking about that question and think I have an answer. Here’s what I’d say to my twenty-one-year-old self.

Self,

A long time ago there was a guy named Irenaeus. He died in France. His body is there. We have a lot of his writings. We know he studied under a man named Polycarp. We know Polycarp existed, lived, and wrote. We have his writings. Irenaeus tells us Polycarp was a friend to a man named Ignatius, whose writings we have. Both men existed. Both men lived. Both men studied under a man named John.

We know from Ignatius, Polycarp, and Irenaeus that the man John wrote the Book of John in the Bible. He was not just an eyewitness to history, but a direct friend of Jesus. We know also from Polycarp and Ignatius that the other apostles lived. They knew Paul. They knew Peter. All of these men, except John, were executed for accepting Jesus as the risen Lord.

So Self, in church they teach that you believe by faith. But you don’t have blind faith. Your faith is built on eyewitness testimony. Ignatius was carried into the Circus Maximus, disemboweled, and set upon by wild animals because he refused to recant a faith in Christ he acquired through direct interaction with the apostles. Polycarp climbed onto a pyre and was burned alive for the same reason. Their friend Clement, who is mentioned in the Bible, who studied under Peter and Paul, and whose writings we have, was tied to an anchor and thrown into the sea for the same reason.

From the writings of Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, and Irenaeus, we can put together just about the entirety of the New Testament from their heavy quotations of the New Testament letters and that’s all less than two hundred years from the resurrection. They knew the men who wrote the letters and provide direct, eyewitness testimony of what happened and all save John refused to recant and were executed because of it.

Self, you believe without having known the apostles. They believed having known the apostles and provide a chain of collaboration and eyewitness testimony back to the resurrection itself. When they said they have the hope of the resurrection, what the Greek word really means is that they had profound certainty in the resurrection. Your hope is not a desire, a wish, or an expectation, but a profound certainty in the resurrection based on a faith that is not blind but comes with a chain of custody of truth that goes back two thousand years that kings and emperors and dictators tried to exterminate.

So self, act like you have that profound certainty that others die for. Act like God matters more than your paycheck. Act like God matters more than your luxuries. Act like God matters more than your job. Act like God matters more than your comfort. Act like God matters more than your politics. Act like God matters more than your favorite politicians. Act like God matters more than your life.

Self, the path you are on — law school and legal practice — will change in a few years. When it does, remember God has a plan and it has been running for a few thousand years so act like it matters more than what you’re about to be doing.

Can’t think of a more fitting way to end Decline & Religion week than that.

“Giving the Sickness A Name,” by Jeff Reimer:

A wily demon, acedia is difficult to pin down. It’s a trickster, a shapeshifter, a boggart. It goes out of focus when you try to look directly at it. The term itself defies translation: despondency, sloth, lassitude, ennui, melancholy—each displays an aspect, none the full image.

The desert monks who first wrestled the demon acedia to the ground did so by grinding through their prayers in the pitiless heat of the Egyptian wilderness. In doing so they became superbly intimate with their failures. Evagrius had a theoretical bent and began cataloging the modes and patterns of failure he and his fellow monks encountered. […]

Percy’s gaze turned outward in his subsequent work. In 1971, he said that Love in the Ruins “deals, not with the takeover of a society by tyrants or computers or whatever, but rather with the increasing malaise and finally the falling apart of a society which remains, on the surface at least, democratic and pluralistic.” By 1986, in fact, when asked by an interviewer, “Is there any concrete issue that engages your attention most in connection with what is going on in America at the moment?” he could answer, “Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom…gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated, not by the Communist movement, demonstrably a bankrupt system, but from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems.” The interviewer follows up: “In connection with what is going on in the world?” Percy’s response: “Ditto: the West losing by spiritual acedia.”

This is my sly way of recommending Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins. When I first read it, 15-odd years ago, I found it entertaining, but in some ways thought its parody-prediction of America had barked up the wrong tree; things Percy had predicted had not panned out. Unsurprising for a book written in 1968!

However, when I re-read the book last month, I was dumbfounded. Love in the Ruins is become more prescient over time… and proved itself, in 1968, a better interpreter of the American situation than I was in 2005.

Acedia, indeed.

“Was Ebola a Near-Miss?” by Lessons from the Crisis:

From 2021’s perspective, the advice given by UK public health authorities early in the covid outbreak reads like an attempt to sound confident and reassuring, full of what we now know to have been a lot of false assumptions built on almost very unreliable information.

We heard about the need to maintain open borders, that masks wouldn’t work, that the ‘world class’ NHS was well prepared to cope with plenty of PPE, that you couldn’t pass on the virus unless you had symptoms and above all that the most important thing to do was to wash your hands, all of which turned out to be disastrously misguided.

But imagine if covid had been contained in China and never took hold in the UK- would we have ever found out how wrong this all was? Or would we have been falsely reassured that everything was in order, and our health system stood ready to cope with disaster? Because I think this is what might have happened with Ebola. Almost every wrong ‘official’ belief of the early covid era was deployed with equal confidence against ebola six years previously.

“We say what? Answers to your questions about Catholic prayers,” by The Pillar:

Another interesting thing about the Our Father is that there’s a word that nobody knows what it means. ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ – that’s not really what the Greek says. The Greek word is “ἐπιούσιον” (epiousion) which doesn’t mean ‘daily’ at all, but the problem is that it’s a totally unique and untranslatable Greek term. It’s not used in any pagan Greek literature, it’s only used twice in Luke and Matthew. It’s used nowhere else. Even the Greek Fathers couldn’t agree on how to translate it. Literally, it means, ‘super-substantial.’ 

‘Give us this day our super-substantial bread.’

Now for some reason, everyone just kind of settled down with the term, ‘daily,’ but honestly, that’s not what the Greek says.

Fun stuff!

“The Central Bank Trap,” by Andrew Stuttaford (but really Nouriel Roubini):

Central banks have effectively lost their independence, because they have been given little choice but to monetize massive fiscal deficits to forestall a debt crisis. With both public and private debts having soared, they are in a debt trap. As inflation rises over the next few years, central banks will face a dilemma. If they start phasing out unconventional policies and raising policy rates to fight inflation, they will risk triggering a massive debt crisis and severe recession; but if they maintain a loose monetary policy, they will risk double-digit inflation – and deep stagflation when the next negative supply shocks emerge.

One of these days I’m going to write the blog post explaining, in layman’s terms, exactly how and why the national debt will destroy us. No one cares, of course, because we live in a democracy, and democracy is famously bad at long-term thinking. Democrats say, “We don’t need to worry about debt; sovereign nations aren’t the same as average families making a budget.” (The second half of that is true, but the first half absolutely does not follow.)

Republicans pretend to care about the debt to hurt the Democrats, then get in and vote for enormous, debt-financed tax cuts. This, in turn, really puts the lie to their claim that their problem with expanding Medicare/Medicaid is that we just can’t afford it. (I mean, it’s true, we absolutely can’t afford it, but if Republicans believed that, they wouldn’t have voted for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.)

But the debt doesn’t care. The debt will get us in the end, whether we admit it or not. It may take a first gouge out of our skin in the near future, if Stuttaford/Roubini is right about this.

“The Kids Were Safe the Whole Time,” by David Wallace-Wells:

It may sound strange, given a year of panic over school closures and reopenings, a year of masking toddlers and closing playgrounds and huddling in pandemic pods, that, according to the CDC, among children the mortality risk from COVID-19 is actually lower than from the flu. The risk of severe disease or hospitalization is about the same.

This is true for the much-worried-over Delta variant. It is also true for all the other variants, and for the original strain. Most remarkably, it has been known to be true since the very earliest days of the pandemic — indeed it was among the very first things we did know about the disease.

Useful not just for the obvious point it makes about kids, but the broader point it makes about risk assessment, intuitions, and how badly skewed they can become in the midst of a plague (especially once that plague becomes politicized).

There is, for example, no good reason to have K-12 kids mask this fall unless our new rule is that kids should always be masked and should always have been masked. Everyone who looks at this question and isn’t in politics, right or left, draws this conclusion soon enough. But it will probably be another eighteen months before this will be accepted as conventional wisdom, even though we already know it today. (Indeed, one of the most disappointing aspects of this pandemic is our discovery that the Centers for Disease Control, which we all once esteemed very highly, actually just follows conventional wisdom, not scientific data and cost-benefit analysis, in setting policy. Sadly true under both the Trump and the Biden Administrations.)

“Lockdown Bait and Switch,” by Matt Shapiro:

I am tired of people who are even now treating all things COVID as some kind of game or political football that needs to be moved 5 yards down the field. This whole “Actually, Lockdowns Not Only Save Lives, But They Have No Downsides” is transparent nonsense. It’s not that it is stupid, it is that it is a talking point from “smart” people that is meant to convince other “smart” people that all the “smart” people made the right decisions and are not only justified in their past decisions but fully vindicated in every possibly way by The Data, which is the great oracle that grants us the grace of life and the fullness of knowledge, praise be to The Data.

I watch as pundits still treat this like a game or, at best, a science experiment. The reality is that the efficacy of lockdowns is the single most important issue to human beings who operate and exist in the real world. People are making enormous life decisions about what to do next, where to live, how to educate their kids, and who to trust and much of it depends on how a state is going to approach this topic.

As Shapiro goes on to write, he is not anti-lockdown, when circumstances call for it. But he is anti-rewriting-history-in-ways-that-will-make-our-next-pandemic-response-worse, and there is an awful lot of that going around right now among the Noah Smiths of the world.

“Culture Wars are Long Wars,” by Taneer Greer:

American conservatives never waged a culture war. Conservatives certainly fought, there is no denying that. They fought with every bit of obstruction and scandal their operatives could muster. But this was not a culture war. Rather, America’s conservatives fought a political war over culture. Republicans used cultural issues to gain—or to try to gain—political power. Their brightest minds and greatest efforts went into securing control of judiciary, developing a judicial philosophy for their appointees, securing control of the Capitol, and developing laws that could be implemented in multiple state houses across the nation. No actual attempt to change the culture was attempted.

This was not thought necessary. Conservatives had the people. One decade they were called a “silent” majority; as the culture war heated up, that majority transitioned from “silent” to “moral,” but a majority they remained.

Yeah, I know, you already read this, just like everyone else, and it’s been a few weeks, so the conversation has moved on… but it was still a worthy read, especially if these ideas weren’t already familiar to you.

Incidentally, I think there is one and perhaps only one exception to this on the Right: the pro-life movement has genuinely waged a culture war, battling not just in the judiciary and the legislatures, but on the ground, in the streets, in front of abortion clinics, and in some of the largest charitable-aid networks in the country. Perhaps not coincidentally, abortion is one of the only issues where the “Moral Majority” of old has not lost the youth. The rising generation of secular, heteroflexible youth are roughly as supportive of abortion restrictions as their grandparents, and reflect a stable age gap that’s lasted several generations. That’s stalemate, but stalemate looks a heck of a lot like a win when all your other causes have gone the way the same-sex marriage debate has.

“I’m (kind of) changing my mind about CRT,” by Isaac Saul:

There are two things I want to dig my heels in on, even after reading all your feedback and continuing to look into these bills for the last week.

One, I do not think critical race theory is particularly dangerous on its own. On the contrary, it’s a really valuable and important piece of academia. Like any critical theory, it has its flaws, but in simple terms, it really is just an academic theory that explores the way race (and racism) are embedded in our society’s laws and structures. […]

Two, on the whole, I still believe these bills banning CRT are more dangerous than helpful. I haven’t seen one yet that I’d personally vote for. If K-12 students are being taught that they are inherently inferior, superior, or racist, based on their race — or otherwise being compelled to espouse those ideas — they are already protected by our country’s laws.

I liked this piece a great deal because, even though I think both those conclusions are completely wrong, even naive and shortsighted, Mr. Saul arrives at them through a process of very visible, reasoned thoughtfulness. Even though I disagreed with his conclusions, reading his piece softened my own attitudes toward Critical Race Theory* somewhat.

*I know we’re not supposed to call it that anymore, but, y’know, c’mon.

I am really proud of myself, because I resisted the temptation to anchor this week’s Worthy Reads around the little-noticed but pretty popcorn-worthy debate between Micah Meadowcroft and Curtis Yarvin. Their debate wasn’t really insightful enough (IMO) to earn a place here, but Meadowcroft scored some wonderful ripostes that I hope Yarvin himself appreciated.

(Yarvin then proceeded to miss Meadowcroft’s entire point… but he did so in a way that was so entirely at right angles to Meadowcroft that it was, itself, characteristically interesting. And look at me, I’m afraid to directly say a clearly nice thing about Yarvin in public! I’d much rather you think I was cheering uncomplicatedly for Meadowcroft, which itself provides evidence for a lot of Yarvin’s claims — claims I don’t think Meadowcroft would even dispute. Anyway.)

Briefly, without excerpts or commentary, here is that debate:

“We Are Going To Win,” by Meadowcroft

“You Are Going to Lose,” by Yarvin [was paywalled; isn’t now? huh]

“Roman Rhetoric and Florentine Politics,” by Meadowcroft

“The Real Great Reset,” by Yarvin

And that’s it for this week! See you later.

“Repudiating Roe,” Part 1 and Part 2, by Michael Stokes Paulsen:

Here is my proposition: The doctrine of stare decisis cannot properly be understood or applied in such fashion as to permit the justices deliberately to render a decision contrary to the correct reading of the Constitution. Whenever it can be said, with sufficient confidence, that a prior decision is seriously and meaningfully wrong—not just technically mistaken in some minor, immaterial, or inconsequential respect; not a matter of reasonable disagreement; but out-and-out wrong in a way that matters—the justices’ ultimate duty to the Constitution obliges them to overrule the error. Roe is not a close case. It is a flat-out indefensible misreading of the Constitution with enormous consequences.

Paulsen is always worth reading, and it’s nice to see him come out swinging after six months in apparent hibernation. My own analysis of the Dobbs grant is here, and I linked last time to Shirif Girgis’s incisive look at Dobbs.

Any readers who might be tempted to assume that Paulsen is some kind of right-wing firebrand with an axe to grind are reminded that Paulsen voted for Biden. (I thought that was ethically not defensible, my first serious disagreement with Paulsen since ever.)

Roe v. Wade remains the most pressing public policy disaster of our lifetimes, in ways that have shaped an entire generation’s worldview. Delenda est.

“The World that Twitter Made“:

This leads to the second big difference between the internet of the aughts and the internet of the 2010s: the standards for participation were different—in some ways the barrier to entry was both higher and lower than on twitter. In the old days people used to say “if you don’t like it, make your own blog!” That directive was easy to follow. It is near impossible for someone de-platformed from twitter to create some new twitter to replace it; in contrast, anybody really could create their own blog (and forums were not hard to stand up either). 

But if writers were to have people read their blogs, then their blogs had to be good. This was the price of participation. On twitter, anybody who can think up a snarky 140 characters retort can contribute to the “conversation.” In the blogosphere, you had to create your own blog and write up your thoughts in long-form. For this reason, blog debates were simply more intelligent than today’s twitter debates. Idiot bloggers were ignored and usually did not last. Idiot tweeters cannot be shunted to the side—especially if they have a blue check.

No substantive comment; I just dearly miss the heyday of blogging. I started blogging in the twilight of the blogs, but I was a reader, and, guys, it’s true: the Internet was better back then.

Maybe Substack will save us.

“Sex, Gender, and Submitting to the Reality of the Family,” by Rod Dreher:

I’m having a hard time picking a good tease quote out of this to show why it’s a worthy read and not just More Of The Usual Social Conservative Hand-Wringing. I guess I’ll go with the thesis statement:

The fundamental task of each generation is to produce the next generation, so that our people will continue. That’s not a religious belief; that’s a proposition that is, or ought to be, obvious to anyone who lifts his or her head up out of the trough long enough to see past their own appetites. If we, both individually and collectively, lose our ability to recognize that, and fail to create social structures and disciplines that make producing the next generation possible, then we will have committed suicide. A consistent theme in the fiction of Michel Houellebecq is that we in the West have done exactly that. Bourgeois individualism and materialism are and will be the death of us, he says.

“The Situation in Afghanistan Is Much Worse Than You Realize,” by Thomas Joscelyn:

Haqqani, a U.S.- and U.N.-designated terrorist, trumpeted his organization’s “continuous series of conquests,” instructing the Taliban’s “district and provincial governors” to “pay attention” to the orders coming down the chain of command. The Taliban leader told his fighters that they shouldn’t be “cruel” or “arrogant” in their moment of triumph. “Good governance is the need of the hour and must be taken into account by our colleagues. To compensate even a small mistake is a tall order.” 

Haqqani does not speak like the internationally wanted terrorist that he is. Instead, he speaks authoritatively—like the head of a nation—the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. This is yet another indication of the American failure. 

When I read this on June 25th, it was the first reporting I’d seen about the on-the-ground situation in Afghanistan, although I’ve been working for months on the assumption that something like it was true.

In the days since, this narrative has rapidly metastasized and is on the verge of becoming mainstream (although I suspect pro-Biden mainstream media will try to delay that as long as possible), but it’s still bracing to read this.

To be sure, I don’t see that the United States has a choice here. We cannot remain at war in Afghanistan forever. We can either lose the war now or lose it later, with more blood and treasure lost there. But we should be clear-eyed about what is happening there. A lot of people are going to suffer and die after we withdraw. We should do what we can to mitigate that, and we should be honest about it.

“When the State Comes for Your [Trans-Identifying] Kids,” by Abigail Shrier:

But unlike some other parents I would later speak with, Ahmed’s cool head prevailed. Believing he might be walking into a trap, Ahmed reached out to both a lawyer and a psychiatrist friend he trusted. The psychiatrist gave him advice that he believes saved his son, saying, in Ahmed’s words: “You have to be very, very careful, because if you come across as just even a little bit anti-trans or anything, they’re going to call the Child Protective Services on you and take custody of your kid.” The lawyer told Ahmed the same: “What you want to do is agree with them and take your kid home. When the gender counselors advise you to ‘affirm,’ go along with it. Just say ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay, let’s take him home, and we’ll go to the gender clinic.’”

Ahmed assured Seattle Children’s Hospital that he would take his son to a gender clinic and commence his son’s transition. Instead, he collected his son, quit his job, and moved his family of four out of Washington.

You will be pleased, though not especially surprised, to learn that the story later reports that Ahmed’s son (who is, by the way, autistic) is doing just fine in a new state, and no longer experiences gender dysphoria.

That’s the one with a happy ending.

The Lab Leak Media Bubble, by Zeynep Tufecki:

Here’s a few basic “did you look it up in Wikipedia level” facts about the Wuhan Institute of Virology that I wrote in my own article… Just writing this meant that I got surprised mail from people. Even such minor basic facts hadn’t made it out of the distorted media bubble of last year to the point that people were emailing me with astonishment to learn the basics about the location of the lab.

…[A]s far as I can tell, none of the key Chinese scientists who have published or given interviews have tried to wa[v]e away the location, ever. They admit they are surprised by the coincidence. They note that the guilty bats are far away. They say the ones in Hubei would be in hibernation, and are far from the city.

All this was just us, some of our media, scientists and journalists. With Chinese scientists and media, we can point at the repression, coercion and lack-of-freedoms that clearly restrict what they can say. (For more than a year, Chinese scientists have not been allowed to publish on the pandemic without centralized national security review. The media censorship barely requires explaining).

What’s our excuse?

Our mainstream media institutions are no longer intended primarily to inform the public. Their primary purpose is affirmation. The difference between a One America News politics reporter and a New York Times science reporter is not ethics or intentions. There are only two differences:

(1) Talent. The NYT draws from a genuinely more talented population than OANN. Talk about the virtues of America’s rural yeomanry all you like; that demographic simply does not produce the quantity and quality of persuasive writers and propagandists that the Sidwell–Smith–Times pipeline.

(2) Orientation. OANN is staffed by dissidents. The NYT is staffed by power. Power always has a number of advantages over dissidents in a propaganda war… especially when the dissidents refuse to hold themselves to a higher standard of conduct than power (as American dissidents, emulating the historically unusual dissidents of the late-’60s/early-’70s, usually don’t).

This does not mean you should trust OANN over NYT. It means you should not trust anyone. True information that creates an accurate picture of the world is increasingly hard to come by (see: that Afghanistan reporting above), and we may increasingly need to accept that we as news consumers are simply incapable of knowing the truth about a number of large and important topics. Pravda has not reported it and the samizdat that reaches us is incomplete and error-ridden. Covid and the bipartisan lying about it cast this dynamic into sharp relief.

I doubt Zeynep would make a media critique anywhere close to this strong. Even if she thought I was right (doubtful), she’d be unemployed and unemployable if she said so. But I am making this case because these media failings play a key role in my last two worthy reads for this week:

“Viktor Orban, Literal Authoritarian,” by Cockburn:

Blasting across Cockburn’s email feed recently was a new piece from Yasmeen Serhan for the Atlantic, titled ‘The Autocrat’s Legacy.’ The piece is about the unfathomable wickedness of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. He’s the autocrat.

…‘Orbán doesn’t follow the classic authoritarian playbook of jailing opposition politicians, arresting journalists, or violently cracking down on protesters, as is so often the case in places such as Russia or Belarus,’ Serhan writes. So, in other words, Orban is not an authoritarian. He’s just a guy who wins elections.

…More than ever before, Western elites simply equate democracy with their own power. In a time when Western power seems shakier than ever, they tell the public that democracy means they are the only acceptable choice to lead. So, who is really putting democracy in peril?

Honestly, you really gotta read the whole thing here. I keep trying to sympathize with both sides on the “is Viktor Orban an autocrat?” thing, but, really, I’ve read a lot about how Viktor Orban is supposedly destroying democracy, and it really does always come down to, “He’s just right-wing and it’s not fair when right-wingers win elections and implement their agenda!” Most every “dirty trick” Orban has ever pulled off has been endorsed by Brian Fallon and at least one Atlantic writer as something essential to “saving” democracy in America… because, in America, it would help the Left.

But the hypocrisy is invisible, never flagged outside far-right publications like the Spectator, because our mainstream media institutions are not intended primarily to inform the public

“The Stolen Election and the Right-Wing Epistemic Crisis,” by Darryl Cooper:

I think I’ve had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself. 

Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they’ll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they’re not particularly attached to them.

Here are the facts – actual, confirmed facts – that shape their perspective: 1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan’s July 2016 memo, etc).

…But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them.

The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they’d be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period. 

This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true.

I know a few people who think the election was stolen.

It wasn’t. I’ve looked into it very, very closely (and I did not trust either mainstream media or dissident media) and the evidence is simply overwhelming: Biden supporters in and out of government engaged in a couple of attempts to subvert the election, sometimes successfully, but their efforts were not enough to change the outcome of the election.

Virtually all claims of outright fraud were simply false on examination, and many others (presented in long, long, lonnnnnng press conferences) were so weak the Trump Campaign never even brought them to court where they could be examined. Sidney Powell made a lot of explosive (and insane) claims about Dominion voting machines, which many of my friends believed because she’d staked her reputation on it and had promised evidence soon… but she had no evidence, and her reputation is now destroyed, and she is being sued for defamation and will lose. There were no “late night vote dumps,” as you would well know if you — like me — stayed up until 4:30 AM on Election Night and watched the ballots escorted to the Milwaukee County Court House under police escort to be counted.

(Biden’s winning margin didn’t even come from the inner cities; he made his biggest gains in the suburbs, and that was what swung the election. So many examples of supposed fraud come from Milwaukee and Detroit, but, in fact, to win the election the way he did, Biden’s people would have had to commit massive voter fraud in Wauwatosa, and nobody alleges that.)

Tightening up ballot access laws, protecting future elections against the kinds of shenanigans Democrats attempted in 2020, that’s all justified. Something like Georgia’s voting reform bill is entirely appropriate. But even after you count every legitimate ballot, and throw out every remotely plausibly fraudulent ballot, Biden still wins the electoral college by a decent margin (and the popular vote by a large one). Joe Biden is the legitimate president of the United States.

But, with all that being said, I really can’t blame my election-outcome-doubting friends too hard, because… what the heck are they supposed to do?

Not everyone is blessed with the time and brainpower needed to sort through hours of court filings and mathematical models to demonstrate to themselves that Biden did in fact win. Most of these good Americans never even took college Statistics (essential to any kind of election-fraud analysis), and even most of those who did have forgotten all of it! But “doing the analysis yourself” is the only way to learn anything remotely true anymore. There is no doubt in my mind that, in the very slightly counterfactual world where Biden’s shenanigans did swing the election and the election therefore was stolen, I would have done the same analysis, objected to the steal… and been dismissed as a conspiracy theorist just as completely as my stolen-election-supporting friends have been in reality.

That’s because the mainstream media’s primary intention is not to inform the public.

And that’s why I really like this thread. It observes both that the mainstream media is a propaganda service, and notes that one effect of this is an epistemic crisis. Facts don’t matter on the Right because facts can’t matter because facts are not generally available and accessible. (Facts don’t matter to the Left, either. See Orban and Wuhan, above.)

Now, Ross Douthat and Megan McArdle both point out that this particular thread is pretty self-serving and forgiving of Trump supporters, many of whom (Trump included) really wouldn’t give a damn about a fact if it walked up and shook their hands. I agree with their critiques as well. Still, it gets at an important facet of our political reality in a way that makes it a worthy read.

Retweets are not endorsements! I found these articles thought-provoking. There’s a good chance I agreed with something important in each, but maybe not, and, in any case, I absolutely do not endorse each and every claim made in each and every article.

“My Chat With Commissioner Simington“, by James Heaney:

Yeah, I’m listing my own piece as a “Worthy Read.”

I honestly expected this interview to make more of a splash, simply because my hit count tends to go up when I write about Net Neutrality… but I forgot the lesson of Freddie deBoer’s Incentives Experiment.

A conservative explaining Net Neutrality and then calling for it (like my original article seven years ago) has a certain viral element to it. Me calling certain cable execs and Wall Street Journal writers liars has a nice polemic quality. A very friendly discussion of textualism and forbearance with an FCC commissioner, while vastly more interesting to me, lacks that viral je ne se quais.

(Plus, my original post was aided by some anonymous reader posting it to /r/technology. I tried posting the article to /r/technology myself this time, and I learned that /r/technology’s mods frown harder on self-promoting links than most parts of reddit I hang out in. Yikes.)

Still, that interview is the best thing I’ve done on this blog in ages, and I expect that people interested in learning more about the topic will find value in it for years to come.

So, yeah, worthy read. Read it if you haven’t. Now on to everybody else.

“Amazon Prime’s Free Shipping is an Economy-Distorting Lie“, by Matt Stoller:

The only thing to say to that is: Big if true!

“Obama Budget Cuts Visualization” by Matt Shapiro:

We are once again in Federal Budget Season, and having some basic Federal Budget Literacy is essential to understanding what in the world is going on in those big headlines about “$567 billion infrastructure packages” and so forth.

I liked this video because it was short, clear, accurate… and produced 12 years and 3 presidencies ago, which means everyone (from both parties) can now watch it without getting their backs up. (If you’re really still so defensive about 2009 Obama you can’t glean anything from this, let me assure you that, yes, 2008 George W. Bush did all the same gimmicks, so just pretend this video is about Bush.)

“The Problem with ‘Western’ Religions on Campus,” by Anna Keating:

My supervisor was echoing Ibram X. Kendi, who writes, “If discrimination is creating equity then it is antiracist.” Inequity, in this case, means any difference between ethnic groups that isn’t reflected in the racial demographics of the United States. How does this relate to religion? I didn’t think that it did. But here this administrator decided that because Jews, being a tiny percentage of the US population are overrepresented in higher education generally, and at the college where I worked in particular, antiracism in this instance required that the number of Jewish students be reduced. Moreover, because there were 60 students at Shabbat and only a handful of Muslim students on campus, the Jewish group should not exist.

In the hermetically sealed world of campus progressivism, the fact that all of this sounds more than a little anti-Semitic is mostly ignored. So is the idea that religion may have something to offer that wellness programs, for example, cannot. And that is precisely what the administration planned to replace the chaplaincy program with: wellness education aimed at stress management, substance abuse, and sexual safety.

Self-care is important, of course. But it’s not the same as communal worship, as blessing and breaking bread with people who pray for the repose of the soul of your abuela and call you to see if you’re okay after her funeral. Replacing religion with wellness is like replacing poetry and music with massages and journaling and working out. They all have value, but they are not the same.

Ms. Keating does not name the college in her piece, so I will not name it here, but it is not difficult to deduce from a glance at her LinkedIn page. Of course, the whole problem is that this could be a perfectly accurate description of nearly any small liberal-arts college in America today, due to the tight grip of the current moral panic.

“There are Two Obstacles to (Merely) Chipping Away at Roe in Dobbs“, by Sherif Girgis (mainly):

I think the conventional wisdom vastly underestimates how hard it would be for the Dobbs Court to (1) stake out a middle ground, or (2) position itself to fully reverse Roe down the line. 

On (1):  I see how the Court could use standard judicial reasoning (sound or not) to justify an all-or-nothing outcome.  At one end, it could invalidate the 15-week law based on Roe and its progeny.  At the other end, the Court could scrap those precedents and uphold the law based on textual or historical arguments.  (The objections to each path are familiar.)  It is much harder to imagine the opinion from this Court that upholds the Mississippi law (or remands) without fully reversing Roe.

On (2):  For reasons peculiar to Dobbs and given below, a “moderate” ruling couldn’t simply narrow the existing abortion right.  It would have to double down on any new version of the right it created, making it hard for the same Justices to then abolish that residual right later on.  If Dobbs was meant to advance a long game against Roe, it was an odd choice.  For better or worse, a moderate Dobbs might cut the game short.  The reasoning needed to go moderate here differs in kind from that used by the Roberts Court in cases that became stepping-stones to eliminating a disfavored doctrine.

He’s right, and for the reasons he says.

I have always been a proponent of the “steady erosion” theory of pro-life victories at the Supreme Court. I expected the U.S. abortion regime to die a slow death by a thousand cuts under Chief Justice Roberts. But Roberts scuttled that hope with his terrible decision in June Medical Services… and, for the reasons Girgis lays out in this article, Dobbs isn’t a good case to take up if that’s the Court’s strategy. That’s why I wrote a few weeks ago that Dobbs looks like a kill shot… although which side gets killed is not yet clear.

“China’s Taiwan Temptation“, by Oriana Skylar Mastro:

I’m paywalled now, so can’t get pull quotes, but it’s pretty terrifying. Basically, there’s a pretty good strategic case that, given China’s objectives and shrinking list of alternatives, they are going to invade Taiwan in the near future… and the U.S. may not be in a position to stop it. (Although I hope we would.)

“The Books are Already Burning“, by Abigail Shrier:

Within a day, Dr. Hall’s article was flooded with nearly 1,000 comments, mostly, she says, from activists demanding the article be stripped from the site, but also from some readers expressing their appreciation. Angry emails from activists swamped the blog’s editors. Within two days, those editors had given Dr. Hall an ultimatum: retract, rewrite, or allow them to add a disclaimer. 

“What surprised me was that my fellow editors attacked me, too. Basically what they said was that my article was not up to my usual standards as far as medicine, science and critical thinking went. And I didn’t feel that I did anything but what I always do. That surprised me,” she told me. Considering the editors’ ultimatum, she elected to have the editors who disagreed add a disclaimer to the website. “I told them I did not want it retracted. And the next thing I knew, they had retracted it.”

Let that sink in: a book review by a respected physician was bullied out of existence in America.

“If the Supreme Court Upholds Roe, Expect an Uprising“, by Willis L. Krumholz and Robert Delahunty:

If the Supreme Court fails them [conservative voters] one more time, do not expect them to turn out in big numbers for another candidate who promises to appoint pro-life justices to the court and leaves it at that. Upholding Roe could even crystallize the formation of a new political party or movement that is far more radical on judicial matters than the current GOP. If scorched-earth tactics worked for the Democrats, Republican voters will scorch some earth on their own.

Why expect the voters who make up the right to want to preserve an institution that has taken democratic power from states and Congress and mangled the Constitution — in the interests of the progressive elite — for almost 50 years? Republican political types need to hear it said directly: If conservative voters have reason to think GOP campaign promises about the Supreme Court were all a grift, they will begin to nominate politicians who make Trump look like Mahatma Gandhi.

This is why I wrote at the end of my piece on Dobbs that Dobbs is the ultimate test for the originalist-textualist project of the past 50 years. Textualism will always be correct and ideal… but if five decades of concentrated effort to implement textualism can’t secure a state’s constitutional right to ban the killing of a human child who is 15 weeks old, then textualism is, as a practical matter, impossible to actually implement.

You know that workers’ paradise communists are always dreaming of building, even though the thing they actually build is always a bloodthirsty nightmare? I, for one, am going to be smarter than the communists. If Dobbs fails, I will learn from my mistakes and change my judicial politics, as Sen. Josh Hawley and some of his followers are already doing. The judicial politics of this new movement would give Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh a heart attack, and cause hysterical left-wingers like Mark Joseph Stern (who thinks the current court is the Worst Thing Imaginable) to actually physically lose control of their bladders. I’ll only vote for candidates who vow to confirm John Finnis to the Supreme Court.

On the other hand, a textualist victory in Dobbs would prove that textualism actually has legs, and can bring about important social change in alignment with the Constitution of the United States. I would much prefer that, because I have spent twenty years believing in the originalist-textualist project and long to see it vindicated.

Ball’s in your court, Chief Justice Roberts.

“The Chernobyl Disaster Explained in Ten Minutes” by HBO’s Chernobyl: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Speaking of communists…

I adored HBO’s Chernobyl as a work of art, but this sequence from the finale (spoiler warning, I guess?) is just super-educational. Having this disaster explained so clearly, especially after four episodes of lies and censorship, is both a pleasure and, in this age of lies and censorship, a warning that can’t be repeated often enough. I can’t help rewatching it every few months, and if I ever do get an HBO MAX subscription, it will be partly so I can watch this sequence without YouTube edits.

As the saying goes: Retweets are not endorsements! I found these articles thought-provoking. There’s a good chance I agreed with something important in each, but maybe not, and, in any case, I absolutely do not endorse each and every claim made in each and every article. (I mean, gracious, Ian Milhiser’s on this week’s list!)

“Against Crippled Religion” by Steve Skojec:

I sometimes feel as though in my own work, all I’ve been doing, day after day, year after year, is staring into the abyss that is the Catholic Church in the 21st century and pulling out monsters to display in public: “See? Do you see this twisted, evil thing? This is what’s going on! We have to stop it!” But there is no stopping it; it is an absolute radioactive sinkhole of abuse, corruption, cronyism, perversion, and heterodoxy, much of it concentrated around the pope himself. We have no power to change it. It’s enough to make anyone despair, and some have broken under the pressure. There are any number of examples, but perhaps most obvious are those who invented bizarre conspiracy theories to explain things away, like the one about how none of the present papal crisis is really happening, because Pope Benedict hadn’t really resigned and was still in charge, and a handful of bloggers had decoded his secret signals telling us all would be revealed…

Nobody is coming to save us. Not even God.

That’s not the kind of thing you’re allowed to think, but I couldn’t stop thinking it.

“Fixing a Broken Antitrust Regime: A Review of Sen. Klobuchar’s Antitrust“ by Hal Singer:

The Chicago School of Thought, which was propagated chiefly by Judge (and Yale Law School professor) Robert Bork and other University of Chicago professors, stresses low prices in the final goods market as the sole criterion for assessing potentially anticompetitive conduct. When undertaken by a single firm, conduct that had been deemed exclusionary as recently as the 1960s (think predatory pricing, tying, exclusive dealing) was suddenly considered innocuous in the absence of higher prices or lower output. Under this “consumer welfare” framework, which Klobuchar rightly labels “Bork’s incredibly misleading misnomer,” the welfare of workers and other input providers was made subservient to the needs of end users. 

A student of modern antitrust law, steeped in the Chicago School orthodoxy, might be confused to hear Klobuchar’s origins story and to reconcile it with the consumer-welfare lens: A key animating thrust of antitrust law, per Klobuchar’s history, was the protection of workers and farmers in their dealings with monopsonists. If workers weren’t supreme, they were at least equal to consumers in the eyes of the law. Klobuchar’s origins story puts the lie to Bork’s history of antitrust. And if the Chicago School is built on a deliberate misreading of history, then it should be easier to unwind.

“You Aren’t Actually Mad At the SATs (You’re Mad At What They Reveal)” by Freddie deBoer (I heavily spliced this excerpt without ellipses):

Liberals repeat several types of myths about the SAT/ACT with such utter confidence and repetition that they’ve become a kind of holy writ. But myths they are:

1. SATs don’t predict college success. (They do, indeed. This one is clung to so desperately by liberals that you’d think there was some sort of compelling empirical basis to believe this. There isn’t. There never has been. They’re making it up. They want it to be true, and so they believe it to be true. )

2. The SATs only tell you how well a student takes the SAT. (No: they tell you how well a student is likely to perform in college.)

3. SATs just replicate the income distribution. (No. Again, asserted with utter confidence by liberals despite overwhelming evidence that this is not true.)

4. SATs are easily gamed with expensive tutoring. (They are not. This one is perhaps less empirically certain than the prior two.)

5. Going test optional increases racial diversity. (This one, I think, must be called scientifically unsettled.)

All of that is prologue to the bigger point: the controversy over college entrance examinations stems not from the examinations themselves, but from the fact that they reveal profound differences in human capital that make progressives uncomfortable. The SATs don’t create inequality. They reveal inequality.

DeBoer goes on to reply to criticisms in “Please Think Critically about the SATs”:

One of my great frustrations with this conversation is that it typically involves idealizing the college admissions process, which is in reality about the least idealistic process I can think of. This must be drilled into the heads of the liberals who think that eliminating the SAT is the key to getting more poor Black and Hispanic students into elite colleges: we have every reason to believe that colleges and universities are meeting their internal diversity goals by pursuing affluent first-generation and international Black and Hispanic students. Private colleges and universities jealously guard their internal admissions data, which is absurd for several reasons, the biggest of which is that we are handing them massive tax breaks in exchange for a complete lack of transparency in how they choose students. But both research and widespread industry perception tells us that, for many colleges, and particularly elite colleges, slots reserved for Black and Hispanic students are going to wealthy first generation children of affluent African and South American parents or to international students…

What’s the goal, here? If it’s to increase cardboard-cutout “diversity” by giving schools more leeway to recruit wealthy kids from Argentina and Nigeria, well, cool. It’ll probably work. But for the poor minority students, particularly the descendants of African slaves that most people think of when they think of affirmative action? No. Admissions departments at most colleges are revenue-generation units before they are anything else.

“The Self-Licking Napalm Ice Cream Cone: Is Science Having a Stroke?” by Curtis Yarvin:

When you’re debugging a broken system, the most interesting thing is when it works.

You are not trying to prove that it’s broken. You know it’s broken. The question is why it’s broken. This involves knowing how it’s supposed to work. When every once in a while the machine does work, reality flashes a light on why it much more often doesn’t.

In this case, our giant planetary brain is correcting an error. It is realizing that, despite its earlier statements, covid maybe probably did escape from a lab. Since the brain, like any brain, is supposed to be automatically self-correcting—this is the brain working.

This brain of course works very well in in many ways. But one thing it does not do well is proving itself wrong—especially if the error would cast it in a harsh light…. [So w]hen it suddenly—changes its mind—on something huge, it’s best to pay attention. This doesn’t happen often.

Probably the best example I know of happened 70 years ago. The details are different; but no one at all disputes them now, so—I hate to digress—

Most people have heard about Stalin’s murder of the Polish officers in 1940 at Katyn. Most people do not know that until 1952, the USSR’s narrative was our own American narrative—that the Poles were shot by the SS in 1941.

“Conservative Notes on Democracy: Are Republicans really anti-democratic? It’s complicated.” by Michael Brendan Dougherty:

Are we not democrats? John Ganz alleges that “it’s very difficult to seriously maintain that the modern GOP and Conservative movement, either in ideology or in practice, is substantially committed to majority rule” and that “the entire ideological edifice of Conservatism at this point is just a sustained attack on the principle of majority rule, either through open rejection of its legitimacy or a more subtle redefinition of democracy into something unrecognizable.”

Ganz’s short essay is probably among the strongest restatements of a case that is becoming the most common indictment of Republicans among the most voracious consumers of political media who are aligned with the Democratic Party. 

[…]

Ganz mentions that some anti-democratic rhetoric on the right is merely opportunistic. He could explore whether the arguments for decreasing checks on the majority are the same for liberals and progressives. Liberals and progressives in other nations have recently found themselves in the opposite position. After losing a referendum on Brexit, liberal and progressive Remainers launched a boldly anti-democratic campaign against it via institutions they still controlled, even executing a temporary legal coup on the British constitution via the Supreme Court. Conservative populists who won free and fair elections in Poland and Hungary have been chastised as “undemocratic” and “threats to democracy,” often when their reforms expand democratic control over more areas of the government or other institutions. Poland moved toward democratic checks on its judicial guild, bringing it closer to norms in the United States. Liberals in Poland and across the world balked at it. Hungary’s government has similarly used its democratic mandate to go after institutions run by a small number of elites.

“The Beatings Will Continue Until the Stupidity Ends” by the late lamented Thomas H. Crown (from 2019):

…As the late Justice Scalia also noted, “when the Court takes sides in the culture wars, it tends to be with the knights rather than the villains — and more specifically with the Templars.”

There is no liberal solution to this. The tools of liberalism are thwarted, capriciously or at least without much reflection to their nominal sources of authority, by the illiberal part of the system to which we agreed, and from which we cannot extricate ourselves without armed rebellion or exile; and by a culture that has the ear of that illiberal block. So even when we win liberally, not only do we lose, but we have agreed to the means of our defeat and exile from future competition. 

How do you fight this? French says he’s won using the tools of liberalism and he’s right, but he then points to victories we all know are etched in sand — every win to which he proudly (and rightfully!) points was made in court and is therefore subject to a later court pulling a Lawrence to his Bowers, or was accomplished legislatively and is therefore even more fragile. Ahmari says that the tide is coming, and he’s right, but he completely lacks any description or even general idea of how we get around this. 

“Justice Breyer’s New Warning for Democrats Couldn’t Have Come at a Worse Time” by Ian Milhiser.

In this article, someone on the judicial hard-left (Milhiser) attacks the quintessential judicial center-leftist (Justice Breyer). Although it’s always instructive to follow intramural debates on both sides of the aisle, I’m actually sharing this one for the cognitive dissonance Milhiser displays:

No serious person would claim that, say, Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett is the moral equivalent of a Nazi. But Breyer is either asking us to accept a Supreme Court that could entrench the Republican Party’s power, or denying we have such a Court right now.

If the former is true, he should explain why the “rule of law” is worth maintaining if the people have no control over who writes the laws. If he’s claiming the latter, well, I hope he’s correct. But, should he allow his seat on the Supreme Court to be filled by another Clarence Thomas or Neil Gorsuch, both of whom have called for extraordinary new constraints on voting rights, he may not remain correct for very long.

Breyer’s argument is that you can’t have a functioning republic without a legitimate Supreme Court, and that progressive proposals are going to gut that legitimacy). Milhiser’s counterargument is that we have no choice but to gut the legitimacy of the Supreme Court (he never resists the force of Breyer’s point here), because the conservative justices will otherwise make our republic non-functional by other means.

The evidence for his extraordinary claim that conservative justices will render the republic non-functional boil down to hypotheticals and this complaint that, in the 2020 election, Thomas and Gorsuch would have (correctly) thrown out a lot of ballots that were cast illegally with the blessing of local officials. Throwing those ballots out would not have changed the outcome of the 2020 election, which was razor-thin, and would certainly have had no effect in a “normal” election. He then gets into a stemwinder about Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die that cites 1/6 and Merrick Garland, but neither the BLM riots nor Estrada.

Milhiser’s still a cut above Mark Joseph Stern, though. And I did like the bit about the “two-front war” (read the article; I didn’t excerpt it). As a right-wing, anti-progressive liberal, I sympathize greatly. Liberalism does place heavier burdens on its supporters than its rival strongman ideologies. But guess what? That’s always been the price of civilization.

Created Equal: Clarence Thomas In His Own Words, free documentary on TubiTV.

I liked this for a lot of reasons, but the part that resonated with me most was his time in Catholic seminary… a seminary the future Justice Thomas left because he saw racism in the Catholic Church that the Church refused to stand up against. This sparked a moral crisis in Thomas’s life (many serious Catholics go through something similar at some point, especially ex-seminarians) that drove him out of the Church into the arms of radical Marxists. His road back from Black Nationalist Marxism to being the smartest, wisest, most consistent justice on the Supreme Court over the majority of his time serving there (and, yes, I do rank Thomas above Scalia) is a road worth walking with him.

I was, however, very non-plussed by the way the documentary brushed off Justice Thomas’s mid-1980s divorce as “one of those things.” We’re trying to understand Thomas as a man, and the collapse of a marriage is not something you can look away from — especially not for a Catholic. (Thomas was reconciled to the Church in the ’90s; his second wife later converted.)

In any event, worth watching, especially if you’re not someone who is already rather reflexively inclined to like and respect Justice Clarence Thomas.