Just to add something to the previous post. I occasionally tune in to John Podhoretz and the folks on the Commentary Magazine Podcast. I can’t really recommend the practice unless you a) are pretty centrist, and b) read or listen pretty broadly, and c) maintain a pretty strong moral and political compass, and then, and only then, d) you do it for science. To put that differently, if you find it even a little bit difficult to put down your side or to genuinely understand the other side, I will not recommend them. From my perspective — I can’t speak to Commentary magazine itself, but in terms of political content from the podcast — they are basically what Fox News would probably be if Trump never happened, or at any rate if “conservatives” had simply stayed on their pre-Trump, anti-Left trajectory regardless. That is not a compliment. And while I have zero compliments to give them, I will say that they can genuinely surprise me, in both good and bad ways. 

Yesterday’s podcast was bad. Very bad. I’m still thoroughly baffled as to where the hell these guys are coming from. I can’t say for sure if any of them are card carrying libertarians, but I’d be surprised if they don’t all have a decent amount of libertarian blood in their veins. Regardless, to listen to these so-called constitutional conservatives lambaste Renee Good was absolutely grotesque. 

This is something Nick Catoggio touched on earlier in that same newsletter yesterday. “The hard truth,” he wrote, “is that, apart from its negligible libertarian faction, the right has always had a blind spot about police brutality.” I’m definitely not as confident about the libertarian faction being excluded here, but his point sticks:

GOP Rep. Wesley Hunt wasn’t announcing some creepy new Trump-era strain of thought on Thursday when he sneered that “The bottom line is this: When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life.” That’s been the de facto position of many rank-and-file Republicans for decades, one that resurfaces whenever a cop kills someone dubiously. They’ll tell you that it derives from their sympathy for police in having to make impossible split-second life-and-death decisions, but “obey or die” comes straight from the darkest part of the dark authoritarian id.

If you’ve ever wanted to know how the president became so fantastically popular in what was supposedly a small-government movement, start there.

In other words, for many, this issue was settled long before it started. More importantly, it is representative (and reminds us — whoever the ‘us’ I have in mind even is anymore) of a political orientation that very much preceded Trump, a house made ready and a seat kept nice and warm for a long time for someone just like him.

Catoggio:

Once Good partially blocked that street, the officers who needlessly confronted her and then even more needlessly fired a few rounds as she fled were destined to receive every benefit of the doubt and then some from the Republican base. She knew the traffic rules. They told her to get out of the car. She chose to be an outlaw. Obey or die.

To their credit, the folks at Comment have resisted the Trump movement. But not infrequently I listen to them and think, The daylight between you and them is negligible. And yesterday, the space between them and “obey or die” was a black hole.

When the boots are stomping on your face — John, Abe, Christine, Eliana — just remember, you didn’t care when they stomped on (or shot) theirs.

Nick Catoggio:

Republicans straining to absolve Good’s shooter are overlooking all of this political context, deliberately and dishonestly. Your main reaction to a fascist president going full Orwell to absolve his secret police force after it has killed a protester should not be, “I dunno, maybe the first shot was justified?”

That’s why I said earlier that you can get a sense of someone’s politics from where they land here. Zeroing in narrowly on the legality of the shooting will be how anti-anti-Trumpers spin it, having it both ways as usual by declining to forthrightly defend the president while aligning themselves with him anyway by parrying left-wing criticism of what happened. Whereas celebrating the shooting, overtly or obliquely, with variations of “that’s one less lib we need to worry about” will be the province of true-blue MAGA psychopaths.

Last night entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand drew a provocative picture of Trump’s recent moves on foreign policy by connecting a few dots. The president, he noted, has just called for a massive increase in the Pentagon’s budget, is threatening to annex neighbors’ territories, has proclaimed his very own imperial doctrine, and is withdrawing from international organizations. When the New York Timesasked him in an interview if he sees any limit on his global powers, he answered, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

“Any student of history would tell you: All the lights are blinking scarlet red,” Bertrand observed of that pattern. “At this stage we’re not even watching warning signs anymore. We’re watching the thing itself, in motion.”

That’s how I feel about the White House’s response to the Minneapolis shooting. We’ve reached the point already, still not quite one full year into this nightmare, where everyone understood instantly yesterday that there’s no chance the agent who killed Renee Good will face federal justice even if the facts clearly show what he did was unlawful. It’s not even a matter of Trump pardoning him; it’s unthinkable at this point that Pam Bondi’s rotten, servile Justice Department would prosecute him for killing an undesirable. The main role of the DOJ in this incident, per the FBI kicking state police off the case, will be to shield the agent from accountability under Minnesota law rather than ensure it.

The thing itself is in motion. Wake up.

William E Pannell, writing in 1968, reflecting on the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963 that killed Carol Denise McNair, age 11, Carole Robertson, age 14, Addie Mae Collins, age 14, and Cynthia Wesley, age 14:

I now knew that I could no longer be a standard evangelical Christian, content merely to preach a typical evangelical Gospel. This ghastly event—to be followed by so many like it—happened in the “Bible belt.” The time had come to reevaluate the Gospel in terms of its meaning and application for our times. For me, the illusion was over.

This attitude may well surprise some of my friends. But then, I must confess to disappointment when they register disappointment at my concern. “But surely,” they like to say, “you are not sympathetic to all this rioting, are you?” There seems to be a hope expressed here that at least one Negro—a friend—can be counted upon to resist this civil rights insanity, and bring some assurance that the establishment has been right all along. There was a time when some of us could do that, when some of us could understand and support the Negro whose ad appeared in a Southern newspaper declaring, “This is to inform my white friends I am not now and never have been a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” But those times are over.

“But surely,” they still like to say, “you are not sympathetic to all this rioting, are you?”

Well? Are you?

William E Pannell:

Gradually, and without any conscious realization, the world got smaller too. We were taught to shun the world, to be separate from it, and while I am sure the interest was right, the result of such instruction developed a negative and defensive mentality. I found myself viewing people as the enemy, especially if they smoked or cursed. They were to be saved, of course, but not necessarily to be loved as they were. Imperceptibly, I came to be more doctrine and program-centered than people-centered. Our negative world-view was further compounded by the constant stimulation we received to live a holy life. I fought the struggle and became progressively more self-centered. We wanted to become sanctified in order to serve, but for many of us the kind of sanctification we sought served only to separate us further from the world we professed to love.

I became a fundamentalist. Not that I understood what that meant, but I became one. I was, of course, anti-modernist, anti-RSV, anti-World or National Council and anti-Roman Catholic. Men became guilty by association with any of these issues or movements. I now know that we were not really trained to think. I could not have given you a good reason for many of my views. But no matter, since “orthodoxy” was all-important and at that time even love for those who differed was considered compromise, betrayal or apostasy. The same could be said, of course, for my contemporaries in liberal schools. From our “deep wells” we fought our verbal battles, never caring that we were strangers to the love of God.

But we did have zeal. There was a job to be done, a world to be saved, and time was running out.

The smaller the man

The quicker the plan

Goes to somebody gettin’ shot

[…]

Now they’ll circle the wagons

Drape the man in a flag

And say don’t trust what your eyes can see

They’ll say it’s her fault instead

For gettin’ shot in the head

When we all watched the same damn thing

A sobering downright depressing summary of 2025, The Year of Technoligarchy, from Molly White. 

“In 2025, Trump brought tech executives into power to dismantle regulators and write their own rules. But the instabilities they’re creating may be their downfall.”

With that subheading, I expected a hopeful uplift at the end — one that I would of course cast doubt upon. I was… incorrect. She ends thusly:

“We’re not all gonna make it. But neither, necessarily, are they.”

Oof. 

Peco Gaskovski:

The deeper danger is that we become little gods, generating life in our own image and on our own terms, yet with neither the wisdom nor understanding of an actual Creator.

(For further reading, confer with very old-and-ignored literature that most people scoff or roll their eyes at.)

Ruth Gaskovski:

This mechanistic view is a kind of rupture with God. It erases the spiritual dimension of a child growing within a mother’s womb. This mutual participation in creation breaks you open and brings you into contact with helpless love, and also with suffering that produces life.

Notice that the mechanistic is tied to the non-material. It is the mechanistic, non-physical, non-participatory non-things that erase the spiritual. While physical, participatory things break open both material and spiritual reality.

Researchers from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences report that by the age of two to four months, babies eyes can focus on the eyes of adults, creating what they call a “joint-networked state” during which their brain waves sync with those of the parent, bringing them into “mutual alignment”. When this state is activated by a parent’s gaze, babies try to vocalize and communicate more. If a mother’s eyes are locked onto a screen during nursing, rather than meeting the infant’s eyes, the earliest social connection is interrupted. […]

But who needs instincts, intuition, and patience when you can ask Emily Oster’s Al chatbot for parenting advice?

I’ve quoted Mary Oliver before:

Said the poet Robert Frost, “We begin in infancy by establishing correspondence of eyes with eyes.” It is deeply true. It is where the confidence comes from; the child whose gaze is met learns that the world is real and desirable — that the child himself is real, and cherished.

Also from Ruth:

The stories we tell ourselves about having children can be a major factor in whether people have kids.

If we encourage the idea, as some do, that motherhood is awful, that fathers are bad, that family is doomed to be dysfunctional, then, naturally, we will avoid children or else anxiously armor ourselves with every possible technology to shield us from the challenges.

But it we take the risk to become the parents that kids actually need, if we safeguard the sacred space where our most fundamental connections are formed, then—even if we aren’t perfect—and we won’t be—we might instill in those children a faith that it is possible for them to replicate the goodness that they themselves experienced.

Carolyn Locke:

I heard how the starfish learns the world
through touch, how its chemical sense
leads it to the mussel bed, how it feels
its way around crevices sucking soft bodies
from their shells. You can’t kill a starfish
in any usual way—chop one up
and it multiplies, filling the waters
with quintuples of spiny legs
reaching out from humped backs, and curling
around the deep purple shells on the rocky
bottom. Sometimes I think I know
what it is to know the world
through only the body. If I close my eyes,
I no longer feel where my body ends
and yours begins—
and I can believe your hands are mine
reaching for muscle,
a strange body becoming my own,
and in my ear an unfamiliar heartbeat
pumps new blood, breath no longer mine
doubles the lungs, my need
growing larger than what my body can hold
until there is only this way of knowing, this touch
that leads me, blind as the starfish,
to become what I cannot see.

Jack Goldsmith:

In sum, it would not be terribly hard for the Justice Department to write an opinion in support of the Venezuela invasion even if the military action violates the U.N. Charter.

To repeat, that does not mean that the action is in fact lawful—and it pretty clearly isn’t under the U.N. Charter. It only means that the long line of unilateral executive branch actions, supported by promiscuously generous executive branch precedents, support it. As I wrote in connection with the Soleimani strike: “our country has—through presidential aggrandizement accompanied by congressional authorization, delegation, and acquiescence—given one person, the president, a sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war. That is our system: One person decides.”

This is not the system the framers had in mind, and it is a dangerous system for all the reasons the framers worried about. But that is where we are—and indeed, it is where we have been for a while.