Daddy Issues

 In his book Moses and Monotheism, Freud writes at one point that many people "have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats them." (Jones trans.) 

He goes on to argue that this desire comes down to us in adulthood from the ambivalence many people feel in childhood toward their fathers: at once idealized and feared, the father inspires in many children a mixture of dread—Freud's castration anxiety—as well as a desire to win his approval. And thus, in adulthood, the neurotic individual goes seeking in modern society for a substitute father who will embody these principles—cruel, authoritarian, yet capable of bestowing his mercies on those he deems suitable. 

Year of Blood and Madness

 Now that we have reached the last day of 2025, more than one person is commenting on what a truly awful year it was. And indeed, stepping back and beholding the entire thing in retrospect, it is plain just how rotten it was from the standpoint of the human spirit. We can see this most clearly by comparing how things stood a year ago with where they stand today. 

This time, a year ago, 150 innocent people had not yet been abducted from their homes and deported—in violation of a U.S. court order—to a secret torture prison in El Salvador. The man who masterminded this atrocity and willfully chose to breach court orders had not yet been rewarded for his efforts with a lifetime appointment as a federal circuit judge. 

The Weirdest Psychoanalyst

 Wilhelm Reich is surely one of the nuttiest figures ever to achieve a degree of mainstream respectability in psychiatry. I suspect the explanation lies in the fact that the entire field of Freudian psychoanalysis always lent itself to a certain degree of madness—particularly in the form of delusions of grandeur—with its arrogant reductionism—its conviction that it had found a single key to unlock all human mysteries. And so, a genuine monomaniac could easily find shelter in its ranks for decades before pushing his theories to such extremes that even his colleagues started to raise an eyebrow. 

Many of Reich's weirdest traits, after all, seem like mere amplifications and magnifications of the worst aspects of Freud. If you thought Freud had a one-track mind, after all—wait until you get a load of his wayward disciple Reich. The Viennese master may have reduced all of dream symbolism to sexuality. It was left to Reich to do him one better, and reduce all of matter and the universe to the same subject. 

The "Democratic" Opposition?

 The Nobel Committee chose this past year to honor the leader of Venezuela's opposition party, María Corina Machado, with its annual peace prize. And look, I share the world's hopes for an end to Maduro's brutal dictatorship and the restoration of free elections in Venezuela (although I reject the proposal of waging an illegal U.S. invasion or covert regime-change operation as legitimate means to get there). 

Still, it does not bode well to me that the leader of Venezuela's ostensible democratic opposition so far cannot bring herself to denounce Trump's murderous extrajudicial killings of Venezuelan citizens, his abduction of 150 innocent people to a torture prison in El Salvador, or his stripping of temporary protected legal status from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan refugees living in the United States. 

Christmas Day Massacre

 My mom pointed out early in the day yesterday that Trump was bound to do or say something outrageous on Christmas—because he wouldn't be able to stand that people would otherwise spend the day focusing on something other than him. 

I checked the news about 4 PM though, and didn't see much. "Guess not," I shrugged. I thought we might actually be spared Trump's lunatic bids for attention, for once. 

The Infamous Ritual

 A federal judge this week rejected the government's attempt to re-detain Kilmar Abrego Garcia. She found, among other things, that Abrego was willing to depart for Costa Rica immediately, and that this country—renowned for its clement environment, low crime rates, and stable, rights-respecting, democratic political institutions—had agreed to grant him refuge. 

Nonetheless, the government had repeatedly told this federal judge that the only country willing to accept Abrego was Liberia, and that they were going to insist on sending him to this African nation, even though he has no cultural ties there, and it would place him thousands of miles further away from his family and loved ones. 

The Big Bubble Debate

 In his Short History of Financial Euphoria, John Kenneth Galbraith offers a list of tell-tale signs of a speculative mania: 1) leverage—too much debt backed by too few solid assets; 2) reinventing the wheel—fundamentally old financial ideas (usually leverage again) repackaged as bold new innovations; and 3) a younger, "supremely self-confident" generation on the financial scene that is smitten with a new technology. 

This new technology is generally proclaimed  to be a game-changer that will reset all the rules of economic life. (Galbraith describes the mood as one in which "[s]omething seemingly exciting and innovative [has] captured the public imagination," creating a belief in "an investment opportunity rich in imagined prospects but negligible in any calm view of reality.")

Afraid of the Light

 Reportedly, Bari Weiss—she of the supposed "Free Press"—has used her newfound powers as head of CBS news to spike a story set to air on 60 Minutes about the torture prison in El Salvador, CECOT, to which Trump sent 250 innocent people without charge or trial earlier this year. She claimed the story needed further reporting. The journalists who worked on the segment (which had already cleared internal review) think there's another explanation. 

Indeed, it's not hard to imagine what might be in Weiss's mind here. She was brought on board specifically in order to reshape the ideological tenor of CBS News to make it more acceptable to Trump (her hiring came on the heels of a major settlement deal, after all, in which the CBS parent company Paramount agreed to pay Trump a massive cash settlement—and also conspicuously moved to take the Trump critic Colbert off the air shortly thereafter). 

Tocqueville and the Second Republic

 Alexis de Tocqueville's Recollections—his memoir of the 1848 revolution in France and its aftermath—is a fascinating book. But the portrait of the author that emerges from its pages is one very different from what one might expect, if we knew him only from Democracy in America. Gone is the intellectual humility and value pluralism that we know from Tocqueville's theoretical and sociological treatises. In its place, we find a certain moral arrogance, a snarky sense of humor (willing to mercilessly skewer his contemporaries on the point of an epigram), and a constant desire to justify himself. 

I suspect partly that Tocqueville's wish to portray himself as the hero of his own story—the man who knew all and foresaw all, and behaved at all times with superlative honor—stems from a subconscious awareness that, in reality, he played a fairly compromised role in the events he describes. He defends the temporary military dictatorship of Cavaignac, for instance—and the "state of siege" that suspended civil liberties in the wake of the June uprising of 1848—as necessary measures to save the nation. 

Blood for Oil

 Back during the Bush years, it was a stock criticism on the Left of George W. Bush's Iraq War to say that the whole thing was being fought for oil. The administration might talk a big game about democracy and freedom—we said—but really they just wanted to get their hands on a lucrative asset. 

Who knows now if this was true or not—or if it was even an important question in assessing the overall morality of the 2003 invasion—which, whatever its motive—ended up being absolutely catastrophic in its consequences. 

Malodorous Brain

 Trump's obscene statement last weekend about the death of Hollywood legend Rob Reiner was generally regarded as a new moral low—even for him. In his rambling social media remarks, Trump not only cruelly mocked the murder victims, he also insinuated (baselessly) that Reiner had been killed by an angry Trump supporter for daring to criticize the president. 

Usually—in the wake of a killing or act of mass violence—political leaders try to distance themselves and their supporters from the crime. They say: "oh no, our side is never violent; only the other side is violent."

Mr. MacLaurel

 FBI deputy director and right-wing provocateur Dan Bongino announced yesterday that he would shortly be stepping down from his role in the executive branch, seemingly to return to his previous life as a MAGA podcast host. 

During his time in the administration, Bongino was mostly known for a few conspicuous flip-flops on key investigations. As a right-wing podcaster, he had promoted conspiracy theories about the January 6 pipe-bombing case, for instance. But once he was actually serving in government, he had to defend the FBI's real investigation into the alleged attack—which ended up pointing in a totally different direction from the baseless theories Bongino had once amplified. 

Tocqueville and Predistributionism

 In my post yesterday, I portrayed Alexis de Tocqueville (not inaccurately) as a critic of universal basic income. And indeed, there's much in his first "Memoir on Pauperism" (1835) that would give aid and comfort to the critics of today's welfare state. Any "law which regularly, permanently, and uniformly gives assistance to indigents," he writes, will operate as a sort of "poisoned seed" in society (Henderson trans.). What is to be found in that sentence with which "FreedomWorks" or "Americans for Prosperity" would not agree? 

Still, though, I don't wish to leave the impression that Tocqueville was merely a proto-libertarian. It would be unjust to see him as a precursor to Hayek or Von Mises who rejected all forms of state intervention in the economy that might benefit the poor. Tocqueville was far too honest and clear-sighted a thinker for that. He was willing to see how a "good principle," like aiding the poor, could nonetheless sometimes yield a bad result; but he also wasn't one to throw up his hands in despair at that point and say oh, therefore, reform is always doomed; "as things are they remain" (Clough). 

Clownwashing

 Susie Wiles's unexpectedly revealing interview with Vanity Fair this week is being widely interpreted as an unforced error on the administration's part. In the course of the discussion, Wiles reportedly offered a shocking number of seemingly unvarnished opinions on her colleagues—most of which have been interpreted as damaging for the administration she serves. All of this has left many media observers baffled as to what Wiles was thinking. 

I wonder though—for my part—if there wasn't something more calculated behind this. Yes, Wiles in the interview did offer a lot of apparently damning verdicts on her boss and his friends: Trump has an "alcoholic's personality"; Vance is implied to be a cynical opportunist who made a heel-turn in his political convictions in order to advance his career; Musk is a weirdo who sleeps during the daytime; Vought is a right-wing extremist; etc. 

Distributing Dirt

 I only catch glimpses of it through the Substacks I follow, but much of the policy world has apparently been engaged in a cantankerous back-and-forth, over the past six months, about the benefits of cash aid. 

For years, pundits on both the left and the right had been drawn to universal basic income (UBI) as a potential solution to social inequity. Libertarian-leaning voices on the right applauded the idea, on the theory that it might be cheaper and easier to administer than the current bureaucratic welfare state. Meanwhile, leftists of the techno-utopian variety saw it as the only just way to share out the benefits of AI innovation and to compensate people for the inevitable job displacement that will occur from the coming wave of automation. 

The Innocent

 Of all the horrific reports to emerge from the terrorist attack this weekend at Bondi Beach in Australia, one image stands out to me: that of a mother trying to distract her toddler from the violence and mayhem unfolding around them by telling them a story. 

It brought to mind another image, from two years previously: a mother in Israel bent over her young son in October 2023, trying to distract him with a comic book in order to lessen his terror from the air raid siren that was blaring overhead. 

One Black Square

 Vladimir Putin's ongoing criminal invasion of Ukraine provoked a lot of misguided backlash against Russian people who had nothing to do with the Kremlin's actions. Suddenly, Russian opera stars were being subjected to new political tests that were not (to my knowledge) demanded of any non-Russian performers. Political actors around the world have called for measures that would collectively punish the Russian people for the crimes of their government—such as legally-questionable proposals to expropriate frozen Russian central bank assets for use in the reconstruction of Ukraine. 

But a story published in the New York Times yesterday illustrates just how wrong we are to tar all Russians with the same brush. It describes the fate of one of Russia's most popular entertainers—Ivan Urgant—who lost his job and livelihood merely because he dared to post a black square on Instagram alongside the message "No to War!" Immediately after he had issued this innocuous statement, the channel that ran his program canceled his show, citing "important sociopolitical events." 

The Invisible Future

 Those of us who mostly know about Alexander Herzen from the works of Isaiah Berlin—which is probably just about everyone in the English-speaking world who has heard of him at all—probably have a clear image in their mind of who he was, and what he stood for. Among the various Russian socialists and revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, we know, Herzen stood out as the proto-liberal; the anti-totalitarian. When others dreamed of sacrificing whole generations and civilizations on the altar of Revolution, Herzen stood apart and begged for reason, temperance, and empirical methods. 

It's the image of Herzen that found its way, for instance, into Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia—itself based on Berlin's works. Those of us who have read Berlin's Russian Thinkers will recognize this version of Herzen easily: it's the reason he became one of our liberal heroes and archetypes before we'd even read him. 

A Tale of Two Nativities

 Our ever-repulsive Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, has time and again sought to join her colleagues in the administration in a race to the bottom to see who can post the cruelest and most morally ugly meme on social media. 

Time and again, high-level figures in the government—plus the official social media accounts of U.S. executive departments—have attempted to make light of the human suffering caused by their own policies—rendering images of crying immigrants in handcuffs into the style of "Studio Ghibli" anime; crafting "jokey" names for immigration detention camps; bragging about locking people up in torturous conditions while riffing on Sabrina Carpenter lyrics, etc. 

A Complacent Gesture of Freedom

 There was some long-overdue good news yesterday in the Abrego Garcia case. A federal judge ordered him released from ICE detention, and the government now has no immediate prospect, at least, of following through on their attempts to deport him to Liberia, or Uganda, or any of the other improbable locations they have floated as ultimate destinations, purely in order to retaliate against him for daring to assert his legal and human rights. 

All of this is surely good news. And yet: he still has to check in periodically with ICE agents. The administration has vowed meanwhile to fight "tooth and nail" to appeal Judge Xinis's order and somehow re-deport him or separate him from his family.

An Afghanistan Picture Show

 In the wake of the recent attack on two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., there has been a depressingly predictable wave of anti-Afghan scapegoating and stigmatizing—much of it fanned directly, of course, by our scapegoater-in-chief, Donald Trump. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, he froze all asylum hearings and banned travel for Afghan refugees (many of whom were already subject to his earlier xenophobic travel restrictions anyway). 

When the Wall Street Journal op-ed page—of all people—condemned this (correctly) as an unfair form of "collective punishment," Trump's top lieutenant Stephen Miller fired back on social media to publicly promote the idea of collectively condemning whole societies—including future generations—on the basis of the actions of one individual. "At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands," he wrote.

Burn Me!

 Based on a leaked DOJ memo exclusively reported over on Ken Klippenstein's Substack, it sounds like the administration really is going to follow through on their threats to investigate political dissidents as alleged "domestic terrorists." 

To get the ball rolling, the FBI has reportedly been tasked with compiling a list of individuals and organizations with alleged ties to "Antifa" (a quasi-fictional entity)—and who are "engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism." Warning signs  supposedly include holding certain proscribed beliefs, such as "opposition to [...] immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; [...] radical gender ideology [;] anti-capitalism," etc. 

Slander the Murdered

 The scrutiny on Capitol Hill this week of the alleged "double-tap" drone strike on a boat in the Caribbean has revealed something profoundly disturbing: namely, the large number of our elected officials, both in Congress and the executive branch, who now just officially and publicly support the extrajudicial execution of anyone suspected of transporting drugs. 

Which—as a friend of mine pointed out the other week—places our government on the same moral level as former Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte—currently under arrest in the Hague for killing criminal suspects without charge or trial. That's what our supposedly democratic government has been reduced to in just eleven months of Trump's rule. 

Infernal Sadism

 So let me get this straight. In the past several months, the Trump administration has deliberately murdered more than 80 civilians in drone strikes at sea—because it claims these people were transporting drugs. 

Most of them appear to have been poor fishermen. If some of them were in fact transporting drugs (and we have nothing but the administration's say-so to believe it), they were likely trying to pick up a tempting pay-out for their families by moving a few kilos of cocaine alongside their usual catch. They were not traveling with the far deadlier fentanyl, which is trafficked over land routes—making a mockery of the administration's purported rationale for the attacks, even if it wasn't so patently spurious on its face already. 

Ruere in Servitium

 Almost a year into the second Trump administration, the mad rush of the nation's rich and powerful to demonstrate craven submission, self-degrading fealty, and "anticipatory obedience" to Trump continues apace. If we hear less about it now than we used to, it's not because it has become less common—but rather, that it has become so common as to be unremarkable. 

Any given week, the news headlines will furnish you with fresh examples. This or that major university just cut a deal with Trump and agreed to install a regime of MAGA censorship to ensure that its curriculum will henceforth be compatible with this administration's white nationalist priorities. This or that major corporation has turned another humiliating moral somersault in order to please its masters on the Potomac. 

The Teacher of Crime

 You can always count on Trump to exploit any tragedy as an excuse to smear and stigmatize a vulnerable group. In the wake of the shooting in D.C. of two national guard members, Trump of course wasted no time in blaming Afghani nationals collectively, and calling for a halt to all further migration from that war-torn nation (even though U.S. intervention over decades is a large part of what made it so war-torn). 

Now, on Thanksgiving weekend, Trump has broadened his attack to include immigrants of every nationality and legal status. Borrowing a term from European white nationalists, Trump called openly on social media for "reverse migration"—a term that in Europe is generally understood to refer to a call for the ethnic cleansing of non-white people from the continent, regardless of their citizenship status. 

Bloody Faith

 A decade or two ago, the values of liberal democracy seemed so securely entrenched in a hegemonic position in world thought, that many on the Left believed they could thumb their noses at them with impunity. Many of us thought that—in a world where seemingly every available shade of opinion in the mainstream parties fell somewhere within the liberal-democratic axis—the biggest threats to left-wing values could only come from "neoliberalism" and "neoconservatism." 

This led many of us to make common cause with post-liberal conservatives, "communitarians," and "trad cons"—since they seemed, for the moment, to share the same enemies. This was the era when you could see Norman Mailer getting interviewed in the pages of the American Conservative, say, and think nothing of it. They both opposed the Iraq War—right? So what was there for them to disagree about? 

The Tribute That Vice Pays to Virtue

 The most insufferable thing about neoconservatism—back in its heyday—was always its rank hypocrisy. The neoconservatives of the Bush era supported war; they supported militarism; they supported torture and surveillance and indefinite detention and other cruel abuses of executive power. But all the time, they dressed it up in sanctimony. They said: we are doing these things because we are more in favor of democracy and human rights than you are. We are doing it because we want to see liberal democracy triumph everywhere. 

In short—even when they were bombing civilians and sending people to CIA black sites—they still declared it was all in the name of universal values. (Which is why Harold Pinter ironically entitled his poem about the Bush administration's chauvinism and aggression "Democracy," for instance.)

The Spoon River Clarion

 In recent days, the Intercept reported on a federal case in Texas in which a young man has been indicted literally just for possessing and transporting anarchist zines. There is no question that the material in these magazines is First Amendment–protected. So, how could moving them around be a crime? 

The feds' theory of the case is that he was deliberately moving these magazines in order to hide evidence that could incriminate his girlfriend. But there is nothing at all incriminating about these materials. All they could reveal, if investigators found them, was that his girlfriend had an interest in anarchism as an ideology—or, at the very least, was reading about it. 

Which—again—is not a crime. 

A Menace Which Was Worse

 Trump's recent ultimatum to Ukraine to accept a Russia-friendly "peace" deal before Thanksgiving amounts to a pretty obvious case of appeasement. But people on both the left and the right have tried to muddy the moral clarity of the issue by portraying the Ukrainian government as just as flawed as Putin. 

Everyone knows that Putin is a dictator. But the "America First" brigade can also point to Ukraine's lack of wartime elections (permitted under the Ukrainian Constitution) to say: "but see, Zelensky is an unelected dictator too." 

Let's Not Invade Nigeria and Venezuela

 The timing of a major attack on a Catholic school this week in Nigeria is—I confess—a bit uncanny—and not at all helpful for those of us who oppose U.S. military intervention in the country (though this is, to state the obvious, hardly the worst or most important thing about it). 

For weeks, after all, Donald Trump has been catering to evangelical voters by railing against alleged anti-Christian persecution in the country. But when he first started talking about it—it wasn't all that clear exactly what he had in mind. 

Peacock vs. Southey

 Thomas Love Peacock is often regarded—perhaps due in part to his irresistible name—as a "light" novelist. He wrote short social satires, we are told—comedies ending in marriage—with alliterative titles—which all feature a group of pedants and eccentrics gathering in a country estate somewhere in order to debate various philosophical and political issues. 

Indeed, all of this is true; but only up to a point. The description I have just given you, of the default Peacock novel, accurately describes Headlong Hall (his first novelette); Nightmare Abbey (minus the usual alliteration); and Crotchet Castle—works that do indeed belong to the tradition of "learned comedy" (much like those of Swift, the elder Samuel Butler, or Laurence Sterne). 

The Projection of the Self

 The excellent newsletter Garbage Day had a piece out earlier this week about the latest Epstein revelations. They dwelled in particular on the fact that one thing we learned from the newly-released data trove of Epstein emails was just how close the pedophile financier was, in life, to Steve Bannon. 

This is—to say the least—richly ironic. Bannon, after all, has probably been more responsible than any other figure in politics for mainstreaming right-wing populist ideology. His whole ostensible worldview is a quasi-conspiratorial one, in which a corrupt and Machiavellian "globalist" elite exploits and abuses ordinary people for their own profit. 

De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum?

 Back in September, when a generation of progressives was being cancelled from the right for saying something negative about Charlie Kirk after his death—another group of liberals was being cancelled from the left for saying something positive about him. Ezra Klein was one of the people in the latter category. He landed in hot water with his fellow progressives, for daring to pen something approximating praise of the deceased right-wing podcaster. 

"Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way," read the title of Klein's piece, published the day after his assassination. And to be sure—the authors of op-eds in the New York Times rarely get to choose their own headlines. But in this case, the title was not inconsistent with the contents of the piece itself. 

Kings Must Murder Still

 In Trump's tirade yesterday—in which he laced into an ABC journalist for daring to question Trump's royal guest about his complicity in the 2018 murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi—one word particularly stood out to me: "insubordinate." That's what Trump called the woman who asked the question (among many other cruel things): "insubordinate." 

Insubordinate? To whom? Who exactly does she supposedly work for here? Trump? Or the crown prince of Saudi Arabia? 

Hide the Shame!

 The revelations that have emerged from the massive data trove of Jeffrey Epstein emails released last week have obviously been pretty distasteful. But—for the most part—I haven't found them particularly destabilizing to my worldview or to my understanding of human nature. 

After all: most of the people who have been further discredited—as we've learned the extent of their friendship with Epstein over the years—already seemed like jerks or creeps to start with: Woody Allen, Larry Summers, Alan Dershowitz, etc. And that's not even to mention Steve Bannon or Trump—about whom no revelation, however dark, could possibly surprise me at this point. 

Imperial Rhetoric

 I spend so many days of the week now basically agreeing with Bush-era neoconservatives on subjects like Trump, or Vladimir Putin, that I often forget what a chasm still separates our views. If I was in need of a reminder, though—Bret Stephens's column yesterday in the New York Times gave it to me. 

"The Case for Overthrowing Maduro," it was called. And yes, it amounted to a standard Bush-era argument for deploying U.S. military force to topple a Third World dictator. 

Democracy: Training Grounds for Virtue

 For weeks now, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has been launched on what seems to be the world's most improbable redemption arc. 

At first, she just broke with her party on the Epstein files and Israel. But I didn't think much of this at the time. Some observers theorized that these moves represented an emerging effort to distance herself from Trump—but I wasn't persuaded. I could think of a much darker through-line connecting these cases. 

Cobbett's Snuff

 The New Yorker ran a piece yesterday about the age of political assassination we seem to have entered—represented by the multiple attempts that have been made on Trump's life; the killing of Charlie Kirk; and the murder of the United Health CEO Brian Thompson just over a year ago. 

The author of the article rightly criticizes the "cult of personality" that has sprung up around the alleged Brian Thompson assassin, Luigi Mangione; but it appears that cult is here to stay regardless.

I Number Him in the Song

 When the news broke the other week that Dick Cheney had died, I didn't, at first, know what—if anything—I wanted to say about it. 

On the one hand, I could say—with Shelley—"I hated thee, fallen tyrant!" This man was, after all, one of the bete noires of my youth—a dark wizard of the Bush administration who was at least partially responsible for the torture program, extraordinary rendition, the invasion of Iraq that cost a hundred thousand civilian lives, the fact that there are still human beings pining in Gitmo to this day with no charge or trial or prospect of release, and more. 

Where Extremes Meet

 I never could quite bring myself to buy into the Wilhelm Reich theory that the psychic origin of fascism lies in sexual repression. After all—so much of the modern far-right seems grounded much more in a psychology of indulgence. The implicit promise of today's extremist movements often seems to be the release from all inhibitions—the relaxation of any moral norm or cultural taboo that could conceivably constrain one—rather than the repression of one's drives. 

But I had to give Reich's notion a second look yesterday, after listening to Ezra Klein's interview with John Ganz about the "groyperification" of the American right. Because one thing that their analysis of Nick Fuentes revealed is that the cult of sexual self-denial does indeed play a central—if rather paradoxical—role in the extreme right "Groyper" movement. 

Insolent Praise

 Recently, global human rights watchdogs completed a review of the U.S. air strike in April that killed more than 60 African asylum-seekers at a detention camp in Yemen, in the early months of this administration. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they concluded that, yes, the strike was indeed a war crime—an unjustifiable attack on a civilian target that served no discernible military objective. 

This was the same strike, let us recall, that senior administration officials were discussing over that notorious Signal chat that they accidentally leaked to a journalist. The chat shows Vance, Hegseth, and others crowing over the results of the strikes—even as we now know they were snuffing out the lives of more than 60 innocent civilians. 

Reprieve

 The Associated Press reported yesterday on a case from Oklahoma in which the governor's last minute clemency spared the life of a death row inmate, Tremane Wood, just hours before he was slated for execution. 

This last-minute act of clemency is surely to be applauded. But a gruesome twist in the story came when the inmate—shortly after learning that his life would be spared—reportedly collapsed in his cell due to "dehydration and stress." He had to be rushed to the medical unit, where the same state government that had been set to kill him mere hours before now strove (successfully, as it proved, for now) to save his life. 

The Empty Breadbasket

 Gordon Comstock—the (anti?)hero of George Orwell's excellent novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying—about the dilemmas of the would-be starving artist—suffers from a fate that many of us can relate to. 

On the one hand, Comstock's family perceives him as "clever." He is good in school. He reads books. He has intellectual aspirations. They therefore assume he will go far and "Make Good." Indeed, Comstock's sister trusts that he will be the one to redeem the family fortunes. 

Court Intrigue

 When the news broke yesterday about Trump's name showing up in the Epstein emails, I confess that I mostly just rubbed my palms together in typical Resistance lib glee. "Oohoo boy, looks like more bad news for Trump! Gimme gimme!" I said. 

A friend called me up shortly afterward, though, to say: "actually, I think we just lost the midterms." The latest round of Epstein headlines—in his view—were the best thing that could have happened to Trump; and the worst that could have happened to Democrats. 

Do tell, I said.

The Lesser-Known Orwell Novels

 This week, I've been reading some of those overlooked and often half-forgotten books from the middle of George Orwell's career: the realist novels of the 1930s, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air. They are deeply strange and surprising books. I don't say I dislike them. To the contrary, I found them both entertaining and highly readable. 

But what strikes one most about them is how different they are from the Orwell we know from the essays and the political writings. 

Whereas the Orwell I idolized in my youth was a democratic socialist, compelled to stake a clear moral position on every issue of the day—these two books from the middle of his career are fiercely, provocatively apolitical—with an almost philistine contempt for socialist do-gooders and anti-fascist democracy-defenders, and for many of the causes we now most associate with Orwell. 

The Ruin of the State

 It is morally abhorrent that Trump has been going out of his way to deny food stamps benefits to hungry families throughout this federal shutdown. I know this intellectually. But—for whatever perverse reason—it was only an Associated Press story that ran over the weekend—about the impact of this policy on people's pets, specifically—that really brought home its human impact to me. 

Trump's decision to fight a district court judge's order—mandating the disbursement of SNAP payments to the states—and to threaten various penalties against states if they proceeded with paying out full food stamps benefits anyway—has meant that many impoverished families faced food insecurity this week. And, as a consequence—the AP points out—this often means hunger for their animals as well. 

The Violence of Neurotic Guilt

 We know we've reached a low point in modern history when the "mainstream" conservative movement seems to be openly debating with itself whether to make common cause with Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. But that appears to be what's happening this week—in the wake of Tucker Carlson's interview with Nick Fuentes—and Kevin Roberts's bizarre decision to go out of his way to defend it.

In just the past week, seemingly—the main dividing line within the MAGA movement has become whether or not to join forces with Fuentes's extreme-right "Groyper" movement. Tucker Carlson, the ever-repulsive Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule, and the leadership of the Heritage Foundation seem to be on team Neo-Nazi.

Smoked into Spirit

 The New York Times ran a gut-wrenchingly sad story earlier this week about a Guatemalan woman who was shot to death in Indiana for mistakenly entering the wrong house. 

She was working an ordinary day on a cleaning job. But she accidentally tried to enter a house that was in front of the one she was supposed to clean. For her mistake, she received a bullet to the face. 

Torture Without a Memo

 The Bush administration's post-9/11 torture program (which was briefly back in the news this week due to the death of Dick Cheney, and the various obituaries that were published afterward to chronicle his career and try to assess his legacy) was surely among the low points of my lifetime, when it comes to U.S. human rights abuses. 

From the standpoint of the human rights campaigner, however, it at least had the advantage of being a specific policy. It therefore could be reversed. It could be seen as a temporary aberration. And one could measure progress against it. When the Obama administration took power and rescinded the torture memos (even though they kept up many other abuses of power under the War on Terror), one could notch a victory. At least we knew that one awful moral blot on our history was behind us. 

Après-moi

 For the last several days, Trump has been pressuring Senate Republicans to do away with the filibuster. In response, they have raised all the obvious objections to this plan from a GOP perspective: Democrats will eventually come to power again. Without the filibuster, they would be free to enact a far-reaching agenda. They might even use simple majority votes to enact DC statehood and thereby secure a permanent legislative majority in the chamber, etc. 

Trump's response to this was revealing. He said—in essence—that Republicans just need to use their post-filibuster powers to change so many election rules, before the midterms, that Democrats will never be able to win an election again. 

Pinkertons of Prey

 I think we're starting to notice a pattern here. First, we see a hospital report or cell-phone footage of ICE agents tackling a protester—or inflicting violence or tear gas on a random civilian who happened to be in the vicinity at the wrong time. There is a wholly justified outcry from the public. 

And so, ICE starts to blame the victim. They say: "Oh, they rammed our vehicle; oh, they were throwing stones; oh, they were impeding our activities; oh, we were afraid for our safety (even though we are heavily armed, and they are not)."

Bertrandism vs. Mamdani-ism

 Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City mayoral elections Tuesday elicited a number of high-handed, sneering remarks from centrist- to center-right commentators. Several of them even used a version of the same phrase. "There’s just not that much to be achieved through 'soak the rich' rhetoric"—Matt Yglesias wrote yesterday. Bret Stephens, writing in the New York Times, similarly dismissed Mamdani's DSA platform as nothing more than battle plans for "soaking the rich." 

I'm reminded of Bertrand's monologue to Jim Dixon, in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, about the political agenda of the postwar British Labour Party: 'But their home policy... soak the rich ... I mean ...’ He seemed to be hesitating. ‘Well, it is that, pure and simple, isn’t it? I’m just asking for information, that’s all. I mean that’s what it seems to be, don’t we all agree? I take it that it is just that and no more, isn’t it?" 

Blown to Smithereens

 Earlier this week—as you may have already forgotten—Donald Trump threatened to resume U.S. nuclear testing after a thirty-year hiatus. The reason, he said, was that the other side had done it first. 

This, however, was simply not true. No one had broken, or even threatened to break, the testing ban but Trump. 

What appears to have happened is that Trump misinterpreted a news headline from days earlier. What had happened—as the news media widely reported—is that Russia had tested nuclear-powered weapons. 

Mailer Marginalia

 In his great history of the footnote as a literary form, Anthony Grafton argues that the essential innovation of the footnote was to introduce a structure of parallel narrative to historical writing. Once footnotes became the default method of citation in historical scholarship, that is, works of history now came equipped with not one, but two ongoing narratives: first, the author's primary chronological narrative, and second—the sly, often more ironical, discursive editorial narrative that accompanies it through the footnotes. 

The reader of a work of history thus has two voices going in their head at the same time, as they work their way through the book: the main historical narrative, plus the editorial commentary. 

Complex and Simple

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is—it cannot be said too often—historically complicated. Too complicated to lend itself easily to being boiled down into signs or slogans—which makes the proliferation of signs and slogans in this conflict especially frustrating. 

But some things about this conflict are actually remarkably simple: such as that no one, on either side, can justify the killing or persecution of civilians. And we shouldn't let people invoke the complexity of the historical circumstances to disguise this truth—to cloak the indefensible. 

The Siege of Chicago

 My one-time home city of Chicago has been swarming for months now with Trump-deployed federal troops (ICE, National Guard, FBI, you name it). All of this is known only to me by hearsay—I haven't been back to the City of the Big Shoulders for years at this point—at least not for any purpose more substantial than a flight through Midway. 

But the images are inescapable for anyone following the news. ICE agents in military gear rappelling down the sides of apartment buildings; kicking down doors; searching people's homes without a warrant; ransacking people's private belongings and hauling them outside to wait in zip-ties in the backs of black vans. These are the dystopian nightmares of our news feeds. 

Heresy Hunting

 This morning, I woke up thinking of "men as innocent as I am / Bent in a cold unjust walk between steel bars." (MacDiarmid.) Because right now—Tennessee is holding a man in jail literally for doing nothing more than what you or I might have done on a typical day—namely, criticizing the far-right provocateur Charlie Kirk on social media. 

The Intercept this weekend had the story. There is not much more to it than what I said above. The case does not have some further legal wrinkle that could explain how a state government can get away with violating the First Amendment rights of one of its citizens so flagrantly. A county sheriff in Tennessee really did just take it upon himself to arrest a man for posting negatively about Charlie Kirk online. And he has been in jail ever since. He remains there to this day. 

"Predistribution" and the Democrats

 The most recent episode of the Ezra Klein podcast was interesting, in that it presented a number of ideas I would have whole-heartedly endorsed a couple years ago—and which I therefore wanted at first to leap to my feet to applaud; but which I find a bit hard to square with more recent political experience. 

Headlined "Can Economic Populism Save the Democratic Party?"—the episode sounds at first like it's going to be another warmed-over version of the stock Bernie Bro critique of the Democratic establishment. But Klein's guest ultimately makes a more sophisticated point. 

Butchery

 This week certainly did not lack for more hideous news. The Trump administration yesterday reportedly moved an aircraft carrier into position in the Caribbean—yet another show of military force, threatening a potential action against Venezuela—as well as a sign that the administration means to double down even further on its current drone war in the region—which has now, as of this week, killed more than 40 people. 

Meanwhile, human bodies are reportedly washing ashore in Trinidad. No one is quite positive where they come from—but they have all been hideously mangled and burned and chewed up like something out of Gottfried Benn's "Morgue" poems. The most likely explanation is that these are victims of the Trump administration's extrajudicial killings by drone. 

Gentrified Democrats?

 The New York Times opinion page ran a piece yesterday charting what it describes as the "gentrification" of the Democratic Party. 

Over the last few generations—the piece observes—the two major political parties in the U.S. have essentially swapped positions—at least when it comes to their class valence. 

"Americans who lived in wealthier areas used to have mostly Republican representatives," the author notes. Today, the opposite is the case. 

Soviet Antisemitism

 Every one-time communist has some cherished floor—some moral bottom line—below which they thought their disillusionment could never sink. In Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook—her floor is antisemitism. No matter what else she discovered the Soviet regime might be capable of—she thought—at least they would never do that. 

Even as it became harder and harder to avoid the reports of purges, hangings, deportations, and gulags, then—she still managed to persuade herself that Stalin's government would at least never stoop to outright antisemitic persecution. It would retain that one moral distinction. "[W]e all had some illusions," she writes: "mine was that anti-Semitism was 'impossible'."

It Had to Go Somewhere

 Yesterday, Jonathan Blitzer published an article in the New Yorker trying to answer the question of why the Trump administration has become so infatuated with its campaign of extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea. 

It seems, from Blitzer's explanation, that the administration's interest in this bloodshed is, if anything, overdetermined. Blowing up boats full of civilians checks a lot of boxes for different members of Trump's team. 

Unknown to Glory

 More than a month after Charlie Kirk's assassination, people are still getting canceled for saying the wrong thing about his death—even on the other side of the Atlantic. The Associated Press reported yesterday that the head of the Oxford debating society was forced out this week for reportedly celebrating the killing in a group chat. 

Meanwhile, right-wing activists across the country are continuing their campaign to turn Kirk into a martyr and a patriotic symbol. In my home state of Florida, Republican state legislators have proposed using state funds to coerce public universities into renaming college roadways in Kirk's honor. One county has already reportedly rechristened a highway in his memory (at least on one sign). 

A Ruthless Few

 As Trump continues his campaign of retaliation against perceived dissidents—including members of his own former administration—it's interesting to watch the steady moral deterioration along the way in the kinds of people he can find to do his bidding. They just get worse and worse. 

Trump's first attorney general, after all—back in his first term—was Jeff Sessions—and we thought at the time that he was as bad as they could come. But even he had enough integrity to recuse himself from an investigation in which he had a conflict of interest—and Trump never forgave him for it. 

Joyce's Exiles

 The scatological themes of the previous post reminded me of something I wanted to say at some point about Joyce's early play, Exiles. 

I grant that the psychoanalytic reading is perhaps the lowest form of literary criticism. But some authors simply cry out for it. Joyce etched his psycho-biography into every page. Not only does Exiles feature the same episode involving Joyce's mother than haunted the mature artist, and his fictional alter ego Stephen Dedalus—the one in which he refused to kneel by his mother's deathbed, because of his rebellion against the family religion—it also dwells in places on Joyce's other great Freudian obsessions: defecation and micturition. 

Merde

 Over the weekend—in response to nationwide protests against his rule—the president of the United States chose to post an AI-generated video on social media of himself spraying the American people with poop. 

We're so inured to this sort of thing by now it barely registered. I thought: "well that's perfectly typical of him" (In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire, to borrow a line from the poet Isaac Rosenberg). AI slop from our hog president. And I moved on.

Dead Bodies

 Trump's campaign of serial murder in the Caribbean Sea has now left upwards of thirty bodies in the ocean. And his fight over social media this weekend with Colombian president Gustavo Petro seemed to underscore what we all already suspected at this point: many of the people Trump is killing in these extrajudicial executions are not drug traffickers at all—but just ordinary and completely innocent fishermen. 

Petro on Saturday accused the U.S. government of murdering one of his country's citizens in these strikes—and he was no "narco-terrorist." In September, the Colombian president claimed, a fisherman by the name of Alejandro Carranza was adrift in a small craft that had lost power. He had sent out a distress signal. Instead of obeying the universal law of the sea and of humanity by rendering him aid—the U.S. government blasted him from the skies. He had no ties to drug traffickers whatsoever. 

Nothing Whatever to Say

 Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson—the third novel in the original "Zuckerman Bound" trilogy about Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman—is a book about a writer trying to escape the curse of writing. 

It's really not so unusual. Writing is not the sort of activity you enjoy. It's a compulsion, in which a small dose of reward chemicals that comes from having written is bookended by long periods of agony: first, there's the period in which you have an idea you want to express. It builds inside you until you can't tolerate the inward "pressure of clauses and sentences" (George Eliot) any longer. 

The Anger of the Gods

 So I guess Trump really is doing the whole authoritarian repression bit. 

Not only has he secured flagrantly baseless and politically-motivated indictments against two of his perceived political enemies in recent weeks—the Wall Street Journal also reports this morning that he is readying plans to turn the IRS into an arm of his repressive apparatus. 

Young Republicans

 Probably by now we've all seen the Politico story about the leaked group chat messages from the nation's Young Republicans—a sprawling network of Gen Z party activists that includes some staffers and other people in influential positions in the nationwide GOP. 

The reported messages are obviously racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, and everything else awful you can think of. The people who wrote these quips come across as simply dreadful—the worst you can imagine. (It's as if the made-up Stephen Glass story about CPAC from the '90s was reborn in living color.)

Other People

 Shelley once wrote (in his "Peter Bell the Third") that "Hell is a city much like London." (Bertolt Brecht replied that, with all respect, Hell must be even more like Los Angeles.)

It has also been said—most quotably of all—that Hell is other people. 

Martin Amis wrote a novel called Other People, set in the city of London. And its conclusion appears to be that Hell is not only a city like London, and other people, but also is life itself. 

Money

 Once or twice in my life, I've had a sudden influx of cash. I don't want to exaggerate—we're not talking about the lottery here. We're talking about the ordinary kinds of windfalls that can occur in an adult person's life: an insurance check after a car wreck, say. Or the sale of a home. But still—enough money that I felt like I should do something with it. 

Another one of these windfalls came my way the other day. And I found myself inwardly reminded of that poem by Philip Larkin. The one where he thinks about the money in his drawer at home, and how it always reproaches him for not spending it. Here I am—says money—ready to be put to use. I'm here to give you a good time. And yet, you just sit at home reading as always! From the way you live, you might as well not have me. Who would know the difference? 

The End, The Beginning

 In his novel Zuckerman Unbound—the second in the original "Zuckerman Bound" trilogy—Philip Roth portrays a typically tragicomic episode in which the eponymous author (and Roth alter ego) Nathan Zuckerman tries to find words of comfort for his dying father. 

Zuckerman is regarded as something of a traitor by his family—for depicting them in crude satirical terms in his scandalous bestseller Carnovsky (the fictional counterpart to Roth's own Portnoy's Complaint). 

Love Among the Ruins

 I continue to be baffled by how seriously everyone is taking Trump's vaunted peace plan for Gaza. I get that we had unambiguously good news yesterday—as the Israeli hostages were freed and humanitarian aid started flowing again to Gaza. It's easy to be swept up in the good feelings from that. 

But I keep reading articles that then pivot to Trump's plans to rehabilitate the Palestinian authority and transition to a period of peaceful coexistence in the Strip—without seriously questioning his motives or underlying agenda. 

Bought and Sold for English Gold

 The relief and joy are certainly palpable today, as we watch the long-overdue ceasefire in Gaza finally being implemented. My heart too swells to hear about hostages being released after years of captivity and desperately-needed food and medical supplies finally being allowed to flow unhindered into the Strip. 

Everything that's happening today is undoubtedly good news, compared to all that has gone before, the last two years. 

And yet, I can't help but feel a bit queasy about what comes next. 

A God-damned Lie

 If I have to read one more think piece—à la Ross Douthat's latest—praising Trump as a peacemaker for his ceasefire deal in Gaza, I will scream. 

Where was this man of peace when Netanyahu was starving Gaza's civilian population all through the last spring and summer? 

Where was this man of peace when Trump was bombing 21 innocent people from the sky, in a series of targeted killings in the Caribbean Sea without charge or trial? 

A Living Hell

 In his last days in office, Joe Biden commuted the capital sentences of 37 people on death row. It was an admirable act of mercy (though one that regrettably stopped short of halting all scheduled federal executions). 

Trump of course hated this decision. But when the president commutes your sentence for a federal crime, that's pretty much a done deal. Even Trump's team of lawless goons haven't found a way around it yet. 

Ham Sandwich

 The New York Times published a piece earlier this week documenting the almost surgical precision with which the Trump administration has fired Black officials in senior positions and replaced them overwhelmingly with white men. 

Could this pattern of discriminatory hiring and promotion be a mere coincidence? I would find that more plausible if the Pentagon right now wasn't run by a man who belongs to a church whose pastor has stated in the past that Black people were better off under slavery. 

What Are You Saying, Dean?

 Saul Bellow's 1982 novel The Dean's December is a plodding, humorless, self-righteous, and self-serious slog of a book. It's also—I'm sorry to say—a racist book. Which is exactly the kind of criticism that one hesitates to make against a recognized literary classic, under threat of being accused of PC Stalinism. But I read this whole thing through with an open mind—indeed, actively wanting to like it—and I really do not think the charge in this case is misplaced. 

At the novel's outset, we think it is going to be about a crime—a murder of a student, specifically, committed under ambiguous circumstances. But like much else in the novel, this never really goes anywhere. There is no mystery to be solved, and we never learn anything more about the crime—which, perhaps, is the point. There is no meaning to it. It's just another day in the whirlwind of the "moronic inferno," as Bellow calls it. 

Argentina: Cui Bono?

 So, I'm not opposed to "bail-outs" on principle. I have no wish to punish the innocent Argentine public for the sins and mismanagement of its leaders. Nor is it absurd to want to forestall chaos in one corner of the global financial market in order to prevent contagion elsewhere. 

What I am opposed to, though, is using taxpayer dollars for the sole purpose of saving the bacon of a handful of rich investors who happen to have a personal connection to the Treasury Secretary. 

Our Tempestuous Day

 For at least two months now, the conspiracy theories have circulated on the Left that Trump is suffering from some hidden disease. Maybe he's experienced a stroke, causing part of his face to sag. Maybe—the rumor went at one point—he's already died and been replaced with an AI avatar. 

There's obviously no actual evidence to support these rumors. But I will say, the man does not look well. And Trump himself has repeatedly felt the need to address speculation as to his health. As recently as yesterday, he was harping on his good health to a group of journalists. 

Permanent Underclass?

 The New Yorker yesterday informs me that a growing number of online commentators and Silicon Valley tech influencers believe the age of AI automation is finally at hand. Pretty much regardless of our field, they say, we are all about to be replaced by machines, and consigned to a permanently unemployable "underclass," like so many Silesian weavers. 

This wave of automation will come in inverted order from how it unfolded in the early nineteenth century. Instead of displacing hand work—this wave is going to start with brain work. 

Censored Broadcast

 The Trump administration——————————————————————————————————————————————— idiots ————————

(Homage to Heinrich Heine)

To Be An Editor

 Well, Bari Weiss played this well. 

Like many before her, she figured out how to leverage an elite-centered persecution complex about "wokeness" into a grand paranoid narrative, upon which others delighted to project their own inflated sense of victimization. 

She managed to recast a highly idiosyncratic set of sharp-elbowed opinions—founded in prejudice and self-interest—as evidence of her high-minded intellectual independence. 

The Political Id of Martin Amis

 Martin Amis was undoubtedly a hero of my young adulthood and literary apprenticeship. But unlike the other heroes of that time in my life—Orwell, Koestler, Hazlitt, say—it wasn't because I sensed any deep kinship with Amis in his moral and political sensibilities. To the contrary, I often felt far removed from him in those domains. The main reason he became a paragon to me was simply that he is such outrageous good fun to read. 

I couldn't explain the science behind it, but for some reason every page of prose Amis ever wrote sends reward chemicals directly into my brain. Which is partly why I haven't read every one of those pages yet—I have to save something to tide me over in my old age. 

Masters of Provocation

 Ever since Trump started deploying federal troops to U.S. cities, I've been calling this Trump's "Peterloo." I quoted the lines from Shelley in response to the 1819 massacre—when British troops open fired on protesting workers: 

I met Murder on the way

He had a mask like Castlereagh 

With all the controversy over the masks that Trump's agents wear—to disguise their identities as they go around tackling and manhandling people in courthouses and places of business—I thought the lines (indeed, the very title) of Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy" seemed eerily apt. 

Poor Petition

 Vice President J.D. Vance is very very sure that the—now 21, as of yesterday—people his administration has extrajudicially executed without charge or trial on the high seas in recent weeks are all "terrorists" and "criminals" who really really deserve it...

—except when he admits he isn't; and they might not be. I missed it at the time—but apparently, in the middle of last month, Vance "joked" before an audience of hundreds that the people the administration is murdering arbitrarily in the Caribbean might just be local fishermen. 

A Real Minority of One

 The Democrats' current shutdown strategy seems to me like a typically muddled product of committee thinking. What exactly is it supposed to achieve? 

By every conventional measure, it is bound to be a political failure. It will alienate many voters. The party making demands in shutdown negotiations almost never gets what they want, if history is any guide. By rejecting a clean continuing resolution—even for an admittedly worthy policy cause—Democrats will seem like the intransigent ones and will take the blame for the shutdown in the public eye. 

Plugson Redivivus

 Yesterday, Matt Yglesias published a piece on his Substack arguing that corporations ought to do good things rather than bad things. This may seem obvious—but it actually flies in the face of some conventional wisdom in the pro-market literature, which tends to see all economic activity as morally neutral. 

Indeed—for the true ideologues (Yglesias cites an article by Milton Friedman as an example)—profit-making transactions are good precisely to the extent that they make money. After all, if a company can realize a profit from a transaction in a free market, that means they have created something of value that people cannot obtain elsewhere. 

Kipling the Rebel and the Anti-Rebel

 Rudyard Kipling's first, heavily-autobiographical novel, The Light that Failed, does not stint on literary quotations. Throughout the text, there are allusions to or snatches of poetry lifted from Emerson, Andrew Marvell, the King James Bible, and the works of the 19th century Scottish poet James Thomson—among others.  

But the young Kipling—despite his evident urge to quote—somehow avoids making any allusion to the one piece of English poetry that one would most expect to find its way into a book on this subject: namely, John Milton's sonnet on his blindness ("When I consider how my light is spent"). 

Billy Budd, Former FBI Director

 James Comey has never been my favorite person. Like a lot of Americans, I was deeply annoyed by his decision in 2016 to drop an October surprise on the Clinton campaign, seeing it as unfair and unnecessary (which of course makes it ironic that Trump is now persecuting him so relentlessly—since Comey probably did more than any other single human to put Trump in the White House). 

But however annoying one may find him, Comey is—if nothing else—a Boy Scout. He follows the rules. 

On My Own

 Last month, I wrote a post on this blog sharing Samuel Butler's delightful, if pseudo-scientific, theory that each life-form comes into the world equipped with an unconscious memory of the accumulated experiences of all the beings that came before it—and that this vast heap of prior experience is what goes to make up the peculiar form of unconscious knowledge we call "instinct." 

One consequence of the theory (which Butler spells out) is that we can only inherit the memories that our parents possessed at the age they had us. Until we reach the age our parents were at our conception, then—we can safely depend upon the backstop of accumulated habit and experience to guide us safely through life. After we cross that invisible threshold, however (age 32, in my case)—then we are on our own. 

The Less Deceived

 I haven't ever really had much to say on this blog about the Jeffrey Epstein affair. It just struck me as the kind of horrible thing that happens, but about which there is not much to say. 

For a long time, I also thought people were probably exaggerating the importance of the scandal. Epstein seemed like a charismatic con artist who had sweet-talked his way into the inner circle of a number of rich and famous men; but that didn't mean the latter were involved in or knew about his crimes. 

The Burden of His Cash

 The Wall Street Journal ran a headline yesterday that I had to read multiple times through to even begin to understand. I had to rub my eyes and blink. Surely there had to be a mistake somewhere. I knew all the individual words. But I couldn't seem to fit them together into some rational meaning. The words couldn't be saying what they seemed to be saying. 

"Trump Plan Backs Tony Blair as Postwar Gaza Leader," the headline read. 

Wait... Tony Blair? That Tony Blair? Which Plan Backs Who as Postwar Gaza What? 

The Uncanny

 The other day, I was listening to a podcast revisiting the history of the "Slenderman" moral panic—from the earlier days of the internet. One of the hosts of the episode observed in passing that one of the reasons why this fictional character was so effectively creepy was that there was something instantly "familiar" about him, as soon as you saw him. 

This reminded me of a stray observation Freud makes in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego—namely, that the essence of the "uncanny" is always both to be at once strange—yet strangely familiar. "[T]he characteristic of uncanniness suggests something old and familiar that has undergone repression," as Freud puts it. (Strachey trans.)

Tucker's Latest Antisemitic Canard

 I didn't watch it—but reportedly, one of the most skin-crawling episodes from the Charlie Kirk memorial service last weekend came when Tucker Carlson decided to insinuate a Protocols-style antisemitic conspiracy theory about Kirk's death. (A theory that has proliferated on the right in recent weeks.)

Carlson—in the course of a speech in which he also giggled eerily—first likened Kirk to Jesus. He then imagined that in Jesus's case, a group of people "eating hummus" decided to kill him for daring "to tell the truth about them." And then he strongly implied the same thing happened in Kirk's case. 

Kelp Pickles

 The other evening over dinner, my sister was explaining to me some of the theories of the marriage counselor behind the hit show Couples Therapy. In my sister's telling, the doctor's core contention is that all friction in marriage (and other relationships) comes from encountering radical otherness. We get angry with other people when they do or say things—react to certain stimuli—in ways we cannot imagine responding ourselves. "Why are you doing that?" 

"Case in point," said my brother-in-law, picking up something from the counter. "Why do we suddenly have kelp pickles in our kitchen?" My sister commended him for reacting to this otherness more or less the way you are supposed to—that is, with curiosity. "See"—she said—"you at least asked a question about it. You didn't just respond with fear and hostility. You weren't instantly like 'how could you have wasted money on kelp pickles?'"

Slugs and Mire

 I couldn't bring myself to watch any of the Charlie Kirk memorial service last night—but it seems, from the reporting, that Trump hasn't lost his shock-comedian's instinct for grotesque bathos. 

It sounds like Erika Kirk—Charlie's widow—to her credit—actually tried to deliver a message that was generous and big-hearted—indeed, noble. She said that she forgave her husband's killer. She said that she tried to return love for hate, instead of more hate. 

Anxiety of Influence

 George Lucas in interviews—when he is asked what influenced him to create Star Wars—will always cite spaghetti westerns, Kurosawa samurai films, the scholarship of Joseph Campbell, Flash Gordon film serials, etc. All of which makes him come across as very humble and credible and self-disclosing. He is duly acknowledging the creators who inspired him. He is properly attributing his sources. He is giving credit where credit is due. 

But a knowledge of psychoanalysis tells us that people often reveal in order to conceal—they tell us everything they can possibly think to divulge about themselves—except for the one, big, hairy truth. 

The World's First Fan Fiction

 Samuel Butler—though he is mostly known now for the immortal, posthumously-published satirical bildungsroman The Way of All Flesh—spent much of his life as an author producing works of nonfiction—specifically, speculative scholarship (let us call it), on such diverse topics as evolutionary biology and the authorship of the Odyssey. 

I turned to these books initially for their entertainment value; rather than in the belief that they would carry scholarly conviction. After all—Butler's hypotheses—when stated baldly—have a way of sounding ludicrous and needlessly contrarian.* 

Refugee Blues

 Yesterday, the manic cruelty of Trump's war against immigrants reached a new climax, when he decided to revoke Temporary Protected Status for Syrian nationals. 

The way the administration justified the move was typical of their rhetoric. 

"Conditions in Syria no longer prevent their nationals from returning home," DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin first declared: a statement which—while absurdly untrue—at least gestures toward the statutory criteria for TPS; and so is less insane than it could be. 

Stylish Misquotation

 At one point in his The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism—in the course of making some point about modern alienation and anomie—the social theorist Daniel Bell quotes the line: "man stands 'alone and afraid in a world [he] never made.'" 

Bell does not cite a source for this observation—probably because it has long been held to be the preferred stylistic practice—whenever one is quoting a line of poetry specifically—not to name one's source; but rather to leave it to one's readers to either recognize the line instantly or feel embarrassed with themselves for not doing so. 

From Colbert to Kimmel

 It's no surprise that Trump has come for the comedians first. That, it would appear, is what dictators always do. 

Trump turned Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel into improbable martyrs for free speech because autocrats fear nothing so much as a joke. "His Majesty knew that a joke is a dangerous form of opposition," as the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski puts it in The Emperor—his classic study of the reign of Haile Selassie. And so—Kapuscinski shows—his Royal Highness would take elaborate precautions throughout the day to ensure no possible crack would emerge in his appearance through which irony or satire could enter.

Bitter Jesting

 Last week, I wrote about recent right-wing efforts to gin up racial hate and inter-communal violence in the United States, by relentlessly publicizing a freak incident of homicide, apparently committed by a mentally ill homeless man (who happened to be Black) against a young white woman on a train in North Carolina. 

The main right-wing move after the case was to draw attention—not only to the race of the suspect (shades of Willie Horton)—but also to the fact of his alleged criminal history (shades of Willie Horton again). If he had still been in prison—the argument runs—then he never would have knifed an innocent stranger on a train (as he is alleged to have done). 

Fire from then on...

 Early this week, Trump posted yet another snuff film online, showing what purports to be his extrajudicial execution of a boat-full of people traveling in the Caribbean sea. This video was—if anything—more ghastly than the first. The earlier video had been filmed in infrared. All one could see was the usual white blob of flame against a black background, as the ship exploded. 

This week's video—by contrast—was shot in color. The grainy quality of the images gives them the look of a found-footage horror film. This was a home-video type of snuff film. The short video shows a boat bobbing in the waves. Seconds later, it is suddenly overcome with flames. The three people on board were presumably reduced in those moments to charred corpses. 

Paper Hoarders vs. Tidiers

 My brother-in-law's family maintains a giant warehouse in New England where they keep a mountainous stockpile of consumer goods and household artifacts they have accumulated over the years. 

Every time I think of this hoard, I feel a glow of excitement and gratification. I like to think of so many things held onto and maintained, all in a big pile. I know of no way to explain this reaction on my part, other than by that "tendency to the heap" that William Hazlitt once deemed a universal feature of the human mind.

Most of the family on my side, though, feel differently. The thought of the pile—the heap of accumulated stuff—makes them shudder with horror. They itch and burn with the desire—restrained only by the laws of private property—to get in there and start throwing things away. 

The Boston Kidnapping

 The Wall Street Journal published an article today, collating more than a hundred videos of ICE arrests in the Boston area. Together, they provide a chilling glimpse into a series of DHS operations—codenamed "Patriot" and "Patriot 2"—that appear designed to target Massachusetts in retaliation for proclaiming itself a sanctuary jurisdiction. 

The parallels from history are hard to escape. In the nineteenth century, as today, Massachusetts tried to designate itself a "free state." This meant that people who reached its borders would be sheltered from being returned to slavery. But a pro-slavery federal government sought to punish the state for this stance and force their compliance with federal "fugitive slave" policy. 

Median Voter

 Ezra Klein in his most recent op-ed for the New York Times warns Democrats that they are at risk of losing their own base: "Democrats are this unpopular because their own side is losing faith in them."

He therefore calls on them to try something risky: dig in their heels on this year's spending bill. Demand real concessions—even at the risk of triggering a government shutdown. 

Sure—you might lose some of the "moderate" or "independent" voters by a show of party intransigence. But you would get your own team enthusiastic again. You would show you were willing to fight. 

Biden Day in the Committee Room

 When excerpts were released earlier this week from Kamala Harris's upcoming memoir—they added to a swelling chorus of criticism from Democratic pundits who blame the party's 2024 loss on Biden's supposed intransigence. The quotes we've seen so far from Harris's book maybe don't go quite as far as—say—the Jake Tapper book in laying all the blame on Biden; but they certainly align with the general emerging consensus that it was Biden's insistence on staying in the race so long that doomed the party. 

I continue to believe this take is entirely misguided. It relies on selective memory of the period to pretend that the Democrats had realistic alternatives at the time—merely because it's convenient for us in hindsight to find a scapegoat; and Biden will do as well as any, since his career is effectively over. And so the always-smug Pod Save America brigade—the insipid representatives of knee-jerk party orthodoxy—all join the pile-on. We have decided to sacrifice Biden because he is no longer of any use to us. 

Barbarisation

 Many explanations have been proposed over the years for the remarkable rise in violent crime and general breakdown of public order that occurred in the final third of the twentieth century. The potential culprits have ranged from lead fumes; to drugs; to the rise of liberal and permissive cultural mores; and more.  

One of the classical theories (distinguishable from but not entirely unrelated to the conservative theory that blames the breakdown on liberal cultural values) is Eric Hobsbawm's theory that traced the late twentieth century crime wave to the general breakdown of community that occurred with the accelerating trends of modernization and urbanization; the increase in anomie and social isolation that accompanied the worldwide movement from farms to cities; the replacement of Gemeinschaft with Gesellschaft. 

Daily Obloquy

 A recent post by Nate Silver about "Blueskyism" has renewed a years-old debate about "Cancel Culture" on the Left. 

Noah Smith weighed in this morning to offer a capsule history of the phenomenon. He offers a plausible account of why, for a time, it seemed so prevalent and inescapable in the progressive moment; and why it has since faded. 

He concludes that many of the same people who fomented cancel culture during its peak of 2018-21 or so are still trying to do the same thing—they are just doing so within the progressive echo chamber of Bluesky now; so the larger culture is not really paying attention anymore. 

Indirect Taxation

 In his Main Currents in American Thought, the historian V.L. Parrington treats it as axiomatic that the Left/liberal tradition hates tariffs. 

This is a valuable corrective to the confusions of our current ideological era—when many on the pro-labor Left seem unsure of whether they are supposed to be against Trump's tariffs or not. After all, the tariffs violate "free market" neoliberal orthodoxy—so shouldn't the Left like them? Besides, the Left spent decades railing against NAFTA; so doesn't that mean we support protectionism? 

Lyncherdom

 Sometimes, I realize I am somewhat sheltered within my New York Times–reading cocoon. You could keep up with that paper all week, after all—and I did—and come away with only the barest glimpse of the fact that the entire American right has spent the last few days foaming at the mouth and obsessively ginning up a lynching posse to inflict mob violence on a man accused in a North Carolina stabbing attack. 

The blatant racial overtones here would make the creative minds behind the Willie Horton ad blush. To be sure, the stabbing appears, from all we know publicly, to have been a horrific and unprovoked crime. But the right seized on this one incident—out of all the random acts of violence that occur in a nation of three hundred million people—for perfectly obvious and unsubtle reasons. 

Forced Confession

 Today marks another anniversary since the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States. Twenty-four years to the day have now passed since the tragedy. And still—almost a quarter-century later—there has never been a trial of the people responsible. Why? 

The U.S. government has no one but itself to blame for the delay. The Lawfare podcast today explains. With one eye on today's calendar date—they decided that now is a fitting time for an update on the Guantanamo 9/11 litigation, and why it has never resulted in an actual criminal trial.

Tock, Tock, Tock

 So—yesterday—we nudged a few minutes—if not hours—closer to nuclear midnight. And it didn't even make the day's top news. 

Remember how—briefly, yesterday—Russia invaded Poland's air space with drones, and a NATO member state shot down enemy aircraft over NATO territory for the first time in the treaty organization's history? 

This is, I hate to admit, a big deal. We just had a flash of a hot war for the first time between a NATO country and nuclear-armed Russia since the treaty organization was founded. 

Epitaphs

 Like the rest of the country, I was left reeling by the horrible news of the assassination in Utah yesterday. I never saw something like this coming; and I have to confess that the tragedy doesn't fit snugly into any of my preferred political narratives. 

After all—I tend to see people like Kirk as the extremists. Yet, I can't help but notice the fact that he was the one in that stadium who appears to have been willing to have a frank and open debate. Maybe it wasn't waged in entire good faith. But still—the premise of Kirk's appearance at the university was that he was open to arguing with anyone who wanted to come up and discuss his ideas.

The Moon's Reproach

 Well, here I was trying to let just one day pass without writing about Trump. I thought I would write about myself and my mood instead. But then comes the New York Times to tell me that now, even more information has come to light indicating the Trump administration really did murder outright 11 people at sea. 

These were the crew—or passengers—of a boat that the White House has insisted was carrying drugs. All the evidence they have given to substantiate their claim is a half-minute-long video of their own making, which shows the boat exploding in flames. 

No Worst There is None

 It usually comes to me at night, this melancholia. It appears "when we are caught without/ People or drink," as Larkin put it. Perhaps I have just had to urinate for the third time in an hour from having had too much tea, when all I want to do is lie still and sleep. 

I feel a kind of cosmic boredom in these moments. I think how little I enjoyed this evening. And how there will be another after it. And another. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. "And suppose tomorrow and tomorrow, and then nobody there"—as a character in Faulkner puts it. 

Judicial Supremacy

 Back when I was starting law school—during the middle-to-end of the Biden administration—the trendy heterodox left-wing take on the law was to oppose judicial review. 

This had all the appeal at the time of coming as a form of sacrilege to young liberal law students—and still more to people who went to law school in their thirties, like me—Millennials who had grown up associating the Court with vindications of individual rights and social progress, like the Obergefell decision. 

The Fortune of Emil Bove

 In the first volume of his Rougons-Macquart series, The Fortune of the Rougons, the novelist Émile Zola traced the roots of the French Second Empire to its bloody origins in an act of democide. He shows how the empire—born of Louis Napoleon's coup d'état—came to power through literally murdering everything that was young and innocent and idealistic in the French republican tradition. 

In order to symbolize this rise to power of murderers—Zola chose as the central images of his final passage of the novel two contrasting pieces of red. On the one hand—the red of the ribbon that is pinned on the breast of the Rougons—as a gift from the new emperor for helping him throttle French democracy. On the other—the red of the blood of innocents that was shed, in the massacre of French workers and protestors, through which the Second Empire claimed power. 

The Shandean System

 A while back, a friend introduced me to the semi-serious theory of "nominative determinism"—that is, the idea that people tend to take on, in adulthood, the traits or characteristics or profession that is most associated with their name. 

It's the sort of thing that—once you start thinking about—you can't help but spot everywhere. 

A Massacre in Korea

 The North Korean regime—as we all know—is one of the most bizarre, eccentric, paranoid, repressive, bloodthirsty, and totalitarian governments in the world. I don't deny any of those characterizations—not of a regime that has starved large parts of its population and continues to hold them in Stalinist gulags. 

But I will say this: it's certainly not going to make the regime less paranoid, repressive, and hermetic for the United States to periodically invade the country in secret, massacre its civilians, dump their bodies in the ocean, and then quietly ignore or deny before the world that any such thing ever occurred. 

Less Corn, More Hell

 America's farmers have generally been a highly conservative force in our politics—at least in the last couple decades. But that wasn't always the case in American history—and it might not be the case much longer, as they find themselves increasingly squeezed within the vise of Trump's trade policies. 

Trump's tariffs are the worst possible trap for people trying to make a living by farming crops for export. On the one hand—these taxes on imports drastically raise the cost of farm equipment; and on the other—they invite retaliatory trade barriers from other countries blocking U.S.-grown food staples. 

The Name of Murderer

 The Trump administration's strike this week on a Venezuelan vessel was a blatant violation of international law. Indeed, it was probably no less than murder—under the U.S. military's own formal definition of the concept. 

Even if we take the administration at their word that the vessel was carrying drugs—or that, at least, the U.S. forces that fired on it had probable cause to believe it was—there is still no indication that they needed to destroy the boat and its 11-member crew. 

Cinderella, My Hero

 This past week, a friend and I made use of our vacation in the Rocky Mountains to stay indoors and watch all the Disney Cinderellas ("Cinderellae?" my friend suggested) ever made. 

We watched the dreary and joyless and insipid live-action Cinderella remake from 2015. Barf. 

We watched the excruciating 1965 adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, in which the characters mouth the words and lyrics of the original—in an anachronistic medieval setting (how does a medieval peasant girl imagine herself on an "African safari," e.g.?)—seemingly without realizing that any of them were meant to be delivered with life or humor. 

Florida's Potent Quack

 Yesterday, the governor and surgeon general of my home state—Florida—decided to eliminate vaccination requirements in public schools for some of the most common childhood illnesses. 

As a result, ancient enemies of humankind—horrors we thought he had vanquished decades ago—may soon be stalking the halls of our public schools again. Think: measles, mumps, rubella. 

Polanski's Desolate Attic

 I haven't seen the new Roman Polanski movie about the Dreyfus affair (now finally available for the first time in the United States after being released internationally more than five years ago). But a recent review of the film in the New Yorker is not encouraging. In Richard Brody's telling—the movie pretty obviously and unsubtly wants to draw an analogy between the Dreyfus case and Polanski's own exile and criminal conviction. 

This is disappointing for at least two reasons. First of all, the comparison (if it's really what the filmmaker has in mind) is totally misplaced. Dreyfus was famously an innocent man—framed for antisemitic and political reasons by the French military hierarchy. Whereas Polanski to all appearances really did drug and rape a minor many years ago (though he only pleaded guilty to a lesser included offense). So... I'm not seeing the connection here. 

The Sleep of Conscience Breeds Monsters

 In his classic history of American liberal thought, V.L. Parrington notes at one point that many of the great advocates of the Abolitionist struggle in letters—James Russell Lowell, e.g.—settled into a comfortable Brahmin conservatism after the Civil War. Convinced that they had won the struggle—the beast of the Slave Power had been defeated, and human bondage was no more—they thought their work was done. In effect, they retired from political life. 

Only Wendell Phillips (in Parrington's telling) refused to believe that all social problems had been solved at a stroke. He alone moved on from struggle to struggle. Only Phillips realized that when one victory has been won—it merely creates an opening for the enemies of justice and freedom to regroup and concentrate their forces elsewhere; and so—eternal vigilance is required. There was no comfortable Brahmin retirement for him.

Scouring Every Main

 Trump is of course fond of describing himself as a "man of peace." He claims that his eerie affinity for Putin is a product of his desire merely to "stop the killing" in Ukraine. He has repeatedly floated himself as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize (a bit of bragging that appears to have played a role in his deteriorating relationship with the Indian prime minister). 

And, of course, he crows constantly about having ended six or seven different wars in his first eight months in office. (I guess when so many wars start on your watch—it's easy to rack up a lot of hasty ceasefires in this manner. And if the same conflicts flare up multiple times in as many months—do you get to double- or triple-count them?)

A Maryland Kidnapping

 Having first illegally renditioned Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a notorious prison in El Salvador, the Trump administration is now seeking to abduct him yet again—this time, reportedly, to Uganda—a country to which he has no prior connection—and where the administration itself seems to believe that his life and freedom will be in danger (and that's precisely why—in their infinite, gleeful sadism, they are trying to send him there). 

As you may recall, they first brought him back to the United States to face transparently bogus criminal charges. But now, even they seem to have lost confidence in their ability to railroad him on this basis. They don't seem to have any interest at this point in actually trying to convict him—probably because they know their charges against him are a sham. So—according to his lawyers—they have held the threat of deportation to Uganda over his head in order to coerce a plea deal.