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.
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.
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 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 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.)
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.
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?'"
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.
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.
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.*
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
