US women soccer players and the matter of who starts culture-war battles

 Real Clear Politics often usefully juxtaposes two opposing takes on an issue currently on the national radar. Today there was an example involving the US Women's Soccer Team.

There's Olivia Luppino's piece at Salon, which employs as what she sees as the most useful arrow in her quiver the fact that the Very Stable Genius and his drool-besotted leg-humpers chimed in. This, in her formulation, delegitimizes any aspersions that might be cast on the team.

This, boys and girls, is the kind of situation I've been trying to bring to the fore of your attention since 2015: Letting that opportunistic, rudderless, bombastic fool anywhere near the classic conservative argument sets conservatism up as a punching bag for progressives. And in the years following the establishment of his cult, its memes and slogans - and his social-media posts - have for all intents and purposes drowned out the reasoned and history-steeped arguments by which conservatives had always made their case.

Anyway, along with citing Trumpist examples of childish reactions to the team's World Cup loss, she trots out the equal-pay "issue." She also does mention instances in which women soccer players have explicitly dissed the United States on the playing field, as well as Megan Rapinoe's history of vocally wading into sociocultural matters - from the left, of course. Luppino just reports this with no commentary, as if anybody reading it would, of course, find that perfectly acceptable.

Listed immediately below Luppino's column is a piece about this at National Review by Noah Rothman entitled "No, Republicans Did Not Politicize Women's Soccer." He offers, shall we say, a different perspective:

For the better part of a decade now, the U.S. women’s soccer team has served — often willingly and with the direct participation of its members — as the avatars of a campaign to illustrate the supposed “pay gap” endured by women performing the exact same roles as men. President Barack Obama deployed the team’s members as human props in a campaign to popularize the injustice of the so-called pay gap — a claim so baseless Obama’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics and a handful of U.S. district courts disputed the pay gap’s very existence.

U.S. women’s national soccer team co-captain Megan Rapinoe has delighted in starting political feuds with Republican lawmakers and using her celebrity to advance divisive political causes. She is not shy about using the most incendiary language available to make her points, even at the risk of alienating would-be consumers of her sport. She has so deliberately inserted herself into the national political debate that Democratic pollsters tested her appeal in a hypothetical presidential election against Donald Trump. And Rapinoe isn’t alone. In 2019, the Associated Press celebrated the team’s “off-the-field activist role” as champions for a variety of “social-justice causes.”

Rapinoe and her teammates engaged in polarizing political debates, and that activism has had a polarizing effect. Republican lawmakers are not responsible for injecting politics into the apolitical conduct of professional athletics; they’ve merely noticed its injection and singled out those doing the injecting for criticism.

This inversion of cause and effect is the foundation upon which all “Republicans pounce” commentary rests. It is a bankrupt style of journalism that seeks to redirect a reader’s attention away from an event — usually, one Democrats find discomfiting — by highlighting the Republican reaction to the event. If the enterprise is successful, the public becomes conditioned to the idea the GOP’s response to a controversy is more newsworthy than the controversy itself.

BTW, let's look at the key paragraph of the district-courts link Rothman provides, just to be sure the record is set straight:

Klauser ruled May 1 the women could not prove discrimination over pay and granted in part the USSF’s motion for a partial summary judgment. He said the union for the women’s national team rejected an offer to be paid under the same pay-to-play structure as the men’s national team’s collective bargaining agreement and the women accepted guaranteed salaries and greater benefits along with a different bonus structure.

The team collectively, as an organization, chose to go a different route regarding pay.

But two groups need to understand truths each will find uncomfortable. MAGA needs to see -but won't, which is why the next year and three months is going to be such a political clusterf--- -  that it has precluded any possibility of persuasion or decisive prevalence with its schoolyard gloating. Progressives need to see that by no means is a majority okay with their intention to uproot norms, institutions and understandings about the way the universe is designed that have been distilled over millennia. 

 

 

 

Saturday roundup

 Gonna excerpt generously from this one.  "Ruler Over All: Notes Toward the Restoration of a Christian Culture" by Ken Myers at Touchstone is full of important insights that must be made available for contemplation and discussion. 

And I'll try not to - well, basically reprint the whole thing, but the way he unfolds his overall point is impressive.

He begins thusly:

One hundred years ago, in September 1923, the Hogarth Press published the first English book edition of T.  S. Eliot’s 434-line poem, The Waste Land. The type was set by hand by Eliot’s friend Virginia Woolf, who with her husband Leonard had founded the small publishing venture. The previous autumn, The Waste Land had appeared in the inaugural issue of Eliot’s own journal, The Criterion, and then in the U.S. in the prestigious literary magazine, The Dial. 

The Waste Land has been judged by many to be the most influential English-language poem of the twentieth century. Often analyzed as a depiction of the turmoil and fragmentation of Eliot’s own inner life, its continued power after a century is surely because of its account of public—not just private—dislocation. When the poem first appeared in 1922, the second volume of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West had just been published. Spengler predicted the twenty-first-century collapse of Western civilization following decades of decay and concomitant  tyranny.

Eliot’s poem was published in a time haunted by a sense of global chaos unleashed by the destruction of the First World War and the social and political uncertainties that were both its causes and effects. Writing in the 1950s, the French diplomat and critic Georges Cattaui described Eliot’s expression of “a shipwrecked world” and “a longing for order.” In biographer Alzina Stone Dale’s judgment, “The Waste Land portrays failed civilization, or St. Augustine’s ‘earthly city’ doomed by its sterility and loss of spiritual power.”

Social and literary critic Russell Kirk engaged Eliot’s ideas about society and spirituality in depth in his 1971 book, Eliot and His Age: T.  S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century. Commenting on the state of the West in the decade preceding The Waste Land, Kirk noted:

This decay of order and justice and freedom within the old European community was paralleled by the decadence of the old moral order, the Church falling into disrepute and the governing motive of many eminent men being merely ‘put money in thy purse.’ For the charlatan and the cheat, large opportunities were opened everywhere; while the old motives to integrity were fearfully shaken. Out of the War’s brutality had emerged gross appetites and violent ambitions, and everywhere egoism swaggered.

In one of the drafts of the poem, Eliot affixed a blunt epigraph from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “The Horror, the Horror.” Decades later, when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, the presentation address cited The Waste Land’s“melancholy and sombre rhapsody [which] aims at describing the aridity and impotence of modern civilization.”

Eliot himself commented, not long after The Waste Land’s publication, that

the present situation is radically different from any in which poetry has been produced in the past: namely, that now there is nothing in which to believe, that Belief itself is dead; and that therefore my poem is the first to respond properly to the modern situation and not call upon Make-Believe.

We can be grateful that, five years after writing The Waste Land, Eliot converted from the austere Unitarianism of his New England ancestors to Christianity, specifically the faith as practiced in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of the Church of England. With his newly acquired recognition of Christ as the still point of the turning world, he would go on to write some of the most profound Christian poetry of the twentieth century, including Four Quartets, written between 1936 and 1942 and published in book form in 1943, about the time Eliot began writing the chapters in the essay that would become Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.

He then brings Russell Kirk into the mix, via Richard Nixon:

President Richard Nixon once asked Russell Kirk to recommend one important book that he should read; Kirk named Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. In Kirk’s judgment, “Eliot might well have set upon his title page a sentence that James Fitzjames Stephen had written in 1873: ‘The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why, as we go with the stream, we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.’” Eliot’s title page did include a quotation, but in the spirit of his book’s title, it was from the Oxford English Dictionary:“definition: 1.  The setting of bounds; limitation (rare)—1483.”

---

A little later, he brings Philip Rieff into the proceedings:

In 1966, sociologist Philip Rieff presented in The Triumph of the Therapeutic both a description of how a culture typically functions—orienting the moral compasses of its members—and a diagnosis of how Western societies were going down a path toward what he called an anti-culture. For millennia, human beings within traditional cultures were given guidance about how to live, guidance that served like roadmaps and guardrails. The work of a culture was to sustain an “inherited organization of permissions and restraints.” A culture was a moral legacy, a received and communally shared way of life, not just a set of options for personalized lifestyles, to be adopted or discarded at whim.

But Rieff saw that modern societies were increasingly committed to abandoning the presentation of authoritative guidance, preferring that social institutions embrace the role of expanding the possibilities for free expression. During the 1960s, the structures of societies were being radically reordered to encourage and accommodate the radical individualism and subjectivity that defines the modern project.

“A culture survives principally,” Rieff wrote,

by the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood—with that understanding of which explicit belief and precise knowledge of externals would show outwardly like the tip of an iceberg.

A culture must, he argued, 

communicate ideals, setting as internalities those distinctions between right actions and wrong that unite men and permit them the fundamental pleasure of agreement. Culture is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.

Rieff affirmed the ancient (classical and Christian) belief that human persons can only be fully themselves within a society in which there are—in St. Augustine’s phrase—common objects of love.

But he saw how, in the first half of the twentieth century, there was a “reorganization of those dialectical expressions of Yes and No the interplay of which constitutes culture.” He saw that the rapid and radically changing standards of moral life in the twentieth century were creating conditions whereby “all communications of ideals [would] come under permanent and easy suspicion. The question is no longer as Dostoevski put it: ‘Can civilized men believe?’, but rather: Can unbelieving men be civilized?”

We moderns believe, he continued, “that we know something our predecessors did not: that we can live freely at last, enjoying all our senses—except that of the past—as unremembering, honest, and friendly barbarians all, in a technological Eden.” And so, “a new and dynamic acceptance of disorder, in love with life and destructive of it, has been loosed upon the world.”

A bit further into his train of thought, Myers insists that we have to get back to basic questions about what particular things are - in their essences - in order to have any way of evaluating them: 

D.  C. Schindler has pointed out that not only in public discourse but even in private conversation, we avoid asking fundamental ontological questions, basic questions that begin with the words, “What is . . .”:

At the highest intellectual level, we will discuss economic conditions, for example, and the focus will be on how to improve them, how to stimulate growth, how to make possible a more equitable distribution of wealth, and so forth. But we do not ask what an economy, after all, is, or what wealth is. We discuss education, its cost, its availability, its effectiveness, and so forth. But we do not ask: What is education? We discuss foreign policy, the question of immigration, of the just use of force, but we do not ask: What is a nation? What is a citizen? What does it mean to belong to a political community? What is justice? (Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, 2018, p.   27)

As a society, we not only do not agree about such things; we assume that achieving agreement on such things is unnecessary and undesirable. What “pluralism” means for us is that no one should ever feel obliged to change his mind about questions of value, since all judgments about value are, after all, not rational, but merely expressions of personal preference.

And so, most public speech about contested matters seems designed to denigrate and humiliate one’s opponents, not to persuade them. We no longer even seek to come to agreement about the principles that matter most. We assume that all values are personal and subjective, which means that we can’t talk about them publicly and rationally and hope to change anyone’s mind.

We further assume that our public institutions can nevertheless be run like value-free machines, serving everyone in the nation with mechanistic indifference to questions of what things really are. We assume that institutions of government and finance and education and journalism and manufacturing and healthcare can all be run without any reference to higher purposes or ultimate good, and still perform to everyone’s satisfaction, if only we could get clever and disinterested people running things. At least, this is what we profess to assume, as good modern heirs of Enlightenment liberalism. This is what our public institutions encourage us—and sometimes coerce us—to profess. 

Confused About Reality

This vision of pluralism and diversity, and its commitment to public institutions that somehow maintain absolute neutrality, is deeply mistaken. First of all, it ignores how substantive ideas about what is good or true are frequently—necessarily—smuggled into allegedly neutral policies and procedures.

Second, it misrepresents some fundamental facts about human nature. We are creatures made to pursue what is really good and really true, not made to invent our own personalized account of reality. Modern men and women are deeply confused about what things really are, not just about what is true and what is good, but about what is real, a confusion that is sustained by many of our cultural institutions. G. K. Chesterton once quipped that modern man has not only lost his way; he’s forgotten his address. Modern culture and its institutions sustain a view of the kinds of creatures we are and the kind of world we live in that is more misleading, more fundamentally false than the view of St. Paul’s contemporaries. Our contemporaries have a false understanding of the very nature of reality, not just a false set of assumptions about how they should live. The challenges we face have to do with metaphysics, not just morality.

Okay, hopefully that's enough of a taste to get you over there to read the whole thing.

In her essay "Filling Time Filling Minds" at Front Porch Republic, Nadya Williams cautions us not to ever-entertain ourselves:

. . .  I haven’t seen a movie in about a year. For several years now, in fact, I have been averaging about one movie per year, usually choosing materials I considered essential for teaching. Now that I have quit academia, I may never need to see a film again, which is a rather appealing thought. Of course, to be fair, I do spend a good two or three hours a day on my computer—writing, editing, responding to emails, and checking social media. My life is assuredly not screen-free. But it is free of on-screen entertainment, and the same largely applies to my children, who only get to watch a film once every few weeks as a special treat. Although, apparently, in the meanwhile, they get to enjoy the best that the rear-view cam in the van has to offer.

Second, relationships matter. Dan and I try to prioritize the things we can do for and with others, whether in the family or outside the home, over solitary activities. We were made to live in community, in relationship with family, friends, neighbors. One of the problems of a passive entertainment activity, like Netflix, is that it takes us away from interactions with others. Watching something can be done in company with others, but it will never be the same kind of togetherness as we have when we sit down for dinner with family and friends, play a board game, read a book out loud for each other, or go for a walk as a family. 

My point, ultimately, is not to wage a war on Netflix. I am merely using the most famous and most popular of the American streaming services as a representative of the larger problem of the desire to disengage. The idea of relaxing and enjoying one’s well-earned rest has biblical undertones—the Sabbath is a key theme; even God rested. But the Sabbath was never meant to be a time of selfish retirement from all relationships, nor was it made to be spent on diversion or amusement. At the same time, however, I want to be clear that I am not advocating here for the industrial-era idol of squeezing the utmost out of every minute. Rather, I want us to think about who we become, and (for parents) who we cause our children to become, through how we use our time.

 In "Augustine and the Order of Love: Debunking a Dumb Christian Nationalist Argument," Jake Meadors, writing at Mere Orthodoxy, looks at the question of how we should love everybody in a world where we only personally know, or even have some kind of categorical relation to, a small percentage of the entire human species. 

Good book reviews are works that make attention-deserving points all their own. Such is the case with Mark K. Spencer's review of Wendy Brown's Nihilistic Times at Law & Liberty:

“If you live today, you breathe in nihilism,” wrote Flannery O’Connor in 1955. “In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe.” What makes Wendy Brown’s Nihilistic Times worth reading is that she convincingly reminds us of this situation. The attitude that nothing has essential meaning or value is pervasive in our times, always in the background of other lines of thought. “Values” make things important, worthy of care and esteem, in various ways; justice, beauty, holiness, and pleasure are examples of values. Right and left, religious and secular alike speak the language of promoting and defending values. And yet, an underlying malaise of nihilism pervades our world. While most people fluently speak the language of values, there is also a ubiquitous suspicion or fear that all values have been reduced to mere instruments, used by individuals, corporations, and governments to achieve and maintain power and personal gratification.

Brown, a political theorist of the anti-liberal left, is, of course, not the first to make these claims; they’ve been made at least since the nineteenth century. But Brown’s book—a reworking of her 2019 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University—is a timely reminder of the nihilistic air we breathe. It’s easy to lose sight of this situation, especially if we’re caught up in defending some particular worldview or policy proposal. A well-crafted reminder of fundamental features of the contemporary human condition is always beneficial. While Brown frequently signals her adherence to left-wing orthodoxy on hot-button issues, she also repeatedly shows how all sides in current political and cultural debates have imbibed a nihilistic attitude. Politicians increasingly manipulate information to sway voters, “woke capitalists” use progressive values to sell products, and students are told to treat themselves as “human capital,” who should “invest” in their own future through education, reducing themselves to mere instruments for their own gratification. 

In our society’s quest to maximize utility and power, we have created systems that seem to act automatically for the perpetuation of their own power, without any real consideration of what is of fundamental importance in human life. Such systems include artificial intelligence, government and corporate bureaucracies, the surveillance state, and the global finance system. Brown’s main opponent is “neoliberalism,” the system built on a combination of market forces and “traditional morality” that she thinks drives the contemporary global order. But she is equally critical of any automated, self-propagating system that makes persons mere instruments of its pursuit of power. Nihilistic attitudes underlie ideologies from capitalist consumerism to social justice progressivism. What they have in common is that they reduce persons to being mere “cogs in economic machines and superficial individualists.” We live to serve these systems and to achieve purely “trivial, immediate, and personal” gratification. We tend to lack any sense of anything larger than our private selves, which we could love and esteem for its own sake, rather than for what we get out of it. 

In our fraught political environment, I often find myself wondering who is really allied with whom, as traditional partisan and ideological alliances are increasingly shaken up. On many political and moral issues, Brown and I are vastly divided. But her book nevertheless supported an intuition of mine: one fundamental divide in our political culture, which cuts across traditional left-right or religious-secular divides, is between two attitudes towards persons. 

A bit later, he brings in the go-to guy for pointing us toward a way out of our twilight moment:

 The thinker who best saw that values must be discovered, not invented, is Plato. In my view, we cannot overcome nihilism without rediscovering the truths that Plato saw. Both Weber and Brown are haunted by Plato, referring to him at key points in their arguments. Brown invokes Plato’s Socrates as an ideal for the political and academic vocations: he combines selfless charisma with a vocation to educate his students’ desires. But she fails to notice that Socrates has these characteristics because he has seen objective beauty, goodness, justice, and other values. He inculcates desire for these given values in his students. Weber invokes Plato’s idea of the experience of inspiration as the source of the two vocations. But he fails to note how the truly good politician doesn’t just have a feeling of being inspired or called, but sees the given value of political flourishing and seeks to bring it about. The one really called to be an academic perceives the given value of knowledge and responds by seeking it out. 

Brown, like Plato, points us toward a personalist vision of being called to respond to higher values, but she defects from this vision, refusing to submit to given values and instead seeking to invent them. She is right to caution us about how a religious vision of reality, like Plato’s, can succumb to cynical nihilism. But ultimately, if we want to avoid nihilism, there is no other route available than a “religious” view, in Plato’s and O’Connor’s sense of a life that presupposes that there is “something given and accepted before it is experienced.” One can be a personalist and live in such a way that one moves upward to higher values, or one can be a nihilist, stuck in one’s will to power and self-gratification, and in the self-perpetuating systems such attitudes engender. There are no other options.

Daniel Buck, writing at the Fordham Institute's website, brings to our attention a governor who is actually doing constructive things on the education front:

Not since former Governor Scott Walker bludgeoned the unions in my home state of Wisconsin has there been such national outrage over state-level education policies. Historically, state-scale education has been a secondary affair, rarely topping the list of people’s substantive or political priorities, and most decisions have been left to local decision-making. There, too, school board meetings had as much political intrigue as a local knitting group. Not so in recent years.

California recently adopted a contentious new mathematics framework that emphasizes a glorified choose-your-own-adventure approach to instruction. It has earned bipartisanopprobrium, including parental petitions and open letters with hundreds of scholarly signatories.

Far more controversially, Florida governor (and presidential contender) Ron DeSantis almost weekly kicks an education hornet’s nest—most recently with a revision of his state’s history curriculum that includes a line about the “personal benefit” some slaves drew from the “peculiar institution.” And while I’m sympathetic to previous DeSantis policies that banned the instruction of divisive concepts, they’re misdirected, too. Bans will accomplish little unless a robust curriculum takes its place.

Consider, instead, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who has achieved some productive, bipartisan education wins that could provide guidance for other conservative governors, as well as real victories for American students.

Most notably, his state board of education voted in spring to approve new K–12 history standards. While the rest of the country is clutched in a mutual chokehold argument over how to frame American history, Youngkin’s administration updated the standards of the Old Dominion in a way that balances competing pressures. Advancing neither a blinkered idealism about the nation’s past, nor unrelenting criticism of it, the standards open with a commitment that “students will know our nation’s exceptional strengths, including individual innovation, moral character, ingenuity and adventure, while learning from terrible periods and actions in direct conflict with these ideals.”

After that, the new standards detail both the specific content and skills that students ought to know, clearly listing historical figures, from Frederick Douglass to Teddy Roosevelt, and specific events, such as the war of 1812 and the Louisiana purchase. Over sixty-one pages, it details clear goals for every student—everything from identifying the key components of the Declaration of Independence to the most important events and leaders of the Cold War, including the Bay of Pigs, President John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, and much more. Any student graduating from Virginia's system with this knowledge would leave with a robust understanding of American history.

A comparison to flawed standards helps to explicate the strengths of this one. In place of concrete knowledge, Wisconsin lists wishy-washy skills and aptitudes. In place of events and figures, it names meaningless goals in inscrutable language: “[S]tudents will analyze, recognize, and evaluate patterns of continuity and change over time and contextualization of historical events.” That provides as much guidance to a teacher as map-less driving directions spoken in gibberish. Where it tries to identify concrete knowledge, it spends one page suggesting ambiguous concepts like “the modern era” or “the meeting of peoples and cultures” without any specifics or timing.

I've been getting  after it over at Precipice. Here are my most recent posts:

Thoughts on Principles

The Price of Our Frivolity

Defining Human Flourishing

Narcissism, Attitude, and the Smoldering Rubble of Post-America

Place

More Thoughts on Seriousness

Happy reading!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Biden administration's condescension toward African nations regarding human sexuality is palpable to those nations

 Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute starts his piece about this by reminding us just what a high priority the administration has ascribed to this:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has put LGBT issues at the forefront of United States diplomacy. Embassies fly pride flags alongside the American flag. Diplomats lecture their foreign counterparts not only to ensure basic human rights, but also to advocate that they embrace a gender ideology the Democrats’ progressive base embraces (and for which there is no consensus in American society).

Shortly after taking office, President Joe Biden declared , “It shall be the policy of the United States to pursue an end to violence and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics, and to lead by the power of our example in the cause of advancing the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons around the world.”

He directed the State Department to prioritize the issue. Blinken was enthusiastic. Speaking on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly last September, he declared , “Standing up for LGBTQI+ people is a top priority for our administration.”

“Transgender people are often denied access to legal identity documents that reflect their names and gender markers,” he noted. While two dozen U.S. embassies lack ambassadors, the Biden team managed to appoint a special envoy to advance human rights for LGBT people.

There's one continent on which this initiative is landing with a big thud:

Since Biden inaugurated his LGBT-first policy, I have visited the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Somaliland. Each country faces serious challenges involving security, Russian encroachment, corruption, education, the economy, terrorism, and/or external aggression. While China builds hospitals, railroads, or highways; Turkish firms build housing developments or operate airports; and Russia sends mercenaries, American diplomats lecture about issues most Africans see as tone-deaf if not cultural imperialism. Rather than further American influence, it makes the United States a subject of ridicule.

Nor do the gay communities in these countries believe the U.S. approach is wise. Conservative African societies historically ignored homosexuality. African gays might bring long-term partners to family events with the explanation that they were simply roommates. It was, as Bill Clinton might say, a policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” By prioritizing the positions of the most extreme LGBT activists, the United States now sparks a backlash that worsens the situation, especially in countries such as Uganda.

It is not just gay people who suffer. Without any sense of irony or self-awareness, Blinken observed in February “the International De unpray of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation.”

“The United States stands with the more than 200 million survivors of female genital mutilation and cutting (FGM/C) around the world in a posture of ‘zero tolerance’ for the practice,” he said . He declared female genital mutilation to be “a form of gender-based violence and a human rights abuse that threatens the lives and futures of girls and young women in nearly 30 countries around the world, including the United States.”

In this, he is right, but the policy he oversees now explicitly declares genital mutilation to be a human right if conducted for the right progressive reasons.

Talk about mixed signals.

I wanted to put this out there as an issue unto itself, but over at Precipice I intend to revisit a theme I frequently explore there: the consequences of the West's - and specifically America's  unseriousness - about  everything. 

While we're on the subject of the Biden administration, I'd like to momentarily draw you attention to the fact that admin officials are shocked, doncha know, that Fitch has downgraded the nation's credit rating. Seriously?

 

Just this morning, there are three WSJ stories that, taken together, paint a picture of an unraveling society:

• A trend that has become very discernible is the unpreparedness of people starting work in fields ranging from health care to the military to hospitality to do their jobs. 
• Gen X, the generation now raising children and adolescents, is dropping away from church attendance / affiliation / involvement, faster than any age group. 
• Behavior in movie theaters has deteriorated badly, with people flagrantly violating house rules about phones and generally acting ling they're at rowdy concerts. 

What do these subjects have to do with Biden-administration foreign policy focusing on unorthodox sexual behavior?

That's what I intend to explore in a Precipice post. 

In the meantime, if you can detect any threads of continuity, I'd like to see your observations in the comments here. 

 

Justice Alito has his head on straight

 There is an excellent account of the Wall Street Journal's sit-down with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in yesterday's edition.

LITD could go for a whole lot of justices in his mold.

This is actually the third time this year the Journal has focused on his role on the bench:

“I marvel at all the nonsense that has been written about me in the last year,” Justice Samuel Alito says during an early July interview at the Journal’s New York offices. In the face of a political onslaught, he observes, “the traditional idea about how judges and justices should behave is they should be mute” and leave it to others, especially “the organized bar,” to defend them. “But that’s just not happening. And so at a certain point I’ve said to myself, nobody else is going to do this, so I have to defend myself.”

He does so with a candor that is refreshing and can be startling. He spoke with us on the record for four hours in two wide-ranging sessions, the first in April in his chambers at the court. In the interim, he wrote an op-ed for these pages responding in detail to a hit piece from ProPublica, a self-styled “independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force.” Many of the court’s critics claim to want more “transparency.” Their hostile reactions to our April interview and his June op-ed suggest—no surprise—that they’re really after ideologically congenial rulings, not to mention conformist press coverage.

Even among his fellow originalists / textualists, he has a distinct approach:

Justice Alito, 73, was appointed in early 2006 and is now the second most senior associate justice. He has emerged as an important voice on the court with a distinctive interpretive method that is rooted in originalism and textualism—adherence to the text, respectively, of the Constitution and statutes—but in some ways more pragmatic than that of Justice Clarence Thomas or Neil Gorsuch.

“There are very serious differences” in how the six conservative justices approach cases, Justice Alito says. The simplest difference involves respect for precedent: Justice Thomas “gives less weight to stare decisis than a lot of other justices.” It is, “in its way, a virtue of his jurisprudence,” Justice Alito says. “He sticks to his guns.”

That’s why Justice Thomas writes many lone concurrences. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), he argued that “in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents,” including those involving same-sex marriage, contraception and consensual sodomy. Justice Alito’s majority opinion carefully distinguished those issues from abortion. Justice Thomas often disregards precedents with which he disagrees and follows his own route to the majority’s destination—to cite a recurring example, by relying on the 14th Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause rather than the Due Process Clause. The disadvantage of this approach, Justice Alito says, “is that you drop out of the conversation, and . . . lose your ability to help to shape what comes next in the application of that rule.”

Of Gorsuch, he says that he's "definitely not a consequentialist."  He says Chief Justice Roberts "puts a high premium on consensus."

But the exhilarating parts of what he had to say for me were his discussions of how he came about his own opinions.

Another prime example is National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, which upheld a California law banning the sale of meat from pigs that are “confined in a cruel manner”—almost all of which is produced in other states. The council argued that the law violated the Dormant Commerce Clause, a doctrine that limits states’ authority to enact policies that burden interstate commerce. 

Justice Alito, who agreed with that view, says “it’s no secret that Justice Thomas and Justice Gorsuch don’t think that there is such a thing as the Dormant Commerce Clause.” Justices Barrett, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan signed on to parts of Justice Gorsuch’s opinion, providing a majority that let the law stand.

“I have not joined Justice Thomas, Justice [Antonin] Scalia, Justice Gorsuch in saying we should get rid of the Dormant Commerce Clause,” Justice Alito says. “I’ve written this in the Tennessee wine case—that the Constitution surely was meant to contain some principle that prevents the balkanization of the economy. That was one of the main reasons for calling the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.”

He refers to his 7-2 ruling in Tennessee Wine and Spirits Retailers Assn. v. Thomas (2019). In dissent, Justices Gorsuch and Thomas cited the 21st Amendment, which repealed Prohibition and gave states broad authority to regulate alcohol. Justice Alito’s majority opinion treated that provision “as one part of a unified constitutional scheme,” within which the lawmakers who ratified the 21st Amendment understood that “the Commerce Clause did not permit the States to impose protectionist measures clothed as police-power regulations.”

And then he states the thunderous truth about abortion and same-sex marriage:

That demonstrates a central feature of Justice Alito’s jurisprudence: its emphasis on historical context. “I think history often tells us what the Constitution means,” he says, “or at least it can tell us what the Constitution doesn’t mean.” His dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) is a case in point. “It’s perfectly clear that nobody in 1868 thought that the 14th Amendment was going to protect the right to same-sex marriage,” he says. Before this century, “no society—even those that did not have a moral objection to same-sex conduct, like ancient Greece—had recognized same-sex marriage.” The first country to legalize it was the Netherlands, effective in 2001. 

The same attention to history informs Justice Alito’s textualism. “I reject the idea that a statute should be interpreted simply by looking up the words in the dictionary and applying that mechanically,” he says. Justice Gorsuch did something like that in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), in which the court held that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination “because of . . . sex,” covers “sexual orientation and gender identity.” 

Justice Gorsuch reasoned that because sex is essential to the definition of both categories, such discrimination is “because of” sex. But in 1964 homosexuality was subject to widespread disapprobation, and gender identity “hardly existed as a concept, even among professionals in the field,” as Justice Alito says. “When it’s very clear that the author of the text . . . cannot have meant something, then I don’t think we should adopt that interpretation, even if a purely semantic interpretation of the statute would lead you to a different result.”

Justice Alito’s respect for precedent has limits: “Some decisions—and I think that Roe and Casey fell in this category—are so egregiously wrong, so clearly wrong, that’s a very strong factor in support of overruling.” Those are the 1973 and 1992 abortion cases that Dobbs overturned, with Justice Alito writing for a majority of five. Chief Justice Roberts provided a sixth vote to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban but urged “a more measured course” that would narrow the precedents while deferring the question of whether to overturn them altogether.

This is a serious person. He understands that the document by which he and his colleagues are supposed to assess the legality of anything that comes before them has to be consulted on its own terms. It is the most visionary undertaking by human beings establishing a country anywhere, at any time in history. If we go playing fast and loose with so much as a word of it, all bets are off and we're in uncharted territory.

Justice Alito doesn't want that, and neither does LITD. 

 

 

One reason having Trump as the GOP standard bearer is harmful to conservatism: it taints the effort to show that transitioning to play-like energy forms is a lot of hooey

 Scott Waldman, who covers the climate beat for Politico, doesn't even try to conceal where he's coming from regarding the energy-policy component of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025.

Let 'er rip, Scott:

Conservative groups have crafted a plan for demolishing the federal government’s efforts to counter climate change — and it wouldn’t stop with President Joe Biden’s policies.

The 920-page blueprint, whose hundreds of authors include former Trump administration officials, would go far beyond past GOP efforts to slash environmental agencies’ budgets or oust “deep state” employees.

Called Project 2025, it would block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department’s renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California’s car pollution standards; and delegate more regulation of polluting industries to Republican state officials.

If enacted, it could decimate the federal government’s climate work, stymie the transition to clean energy and shift agencies toward nurturing the fossil fuel industry rather than regulating it. It’s designed to be implemented on the first day of a Republican presidency.

“Project 2025 is not a white paper. We are not tinkering at the edges. We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” said Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, which compiled the plan as a road map for the first 180 days of the next GOP administration. “Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power day one and deconstruct the administrative state.”

Now, yes, Heritage has undergone a Trumpward drift in the last few years, and a lot of the rest of Project 2025 reflects "deep state" paranoia - and would set the table for the Very Stable Genius to amass power unconstitutionally in the presidency, but the energy-policy aspect is good stuff. Waldman writes his article with a can-you-believe-how-awful-this-is tone, but anybody who actually understands why fossils fuels are a blessing and essential to human advancement will have a "sounds great to me" response.

More than 400 people participated in crafting Project 2025’s details. Former Trump administration officials played a key role in writing the chapters on dismantling EPA and DOE.

The plan to gut the Department of Energy was written by Bernard McNamee, a former DOE official whom Trump appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. McNamee, who did not have regulatory experience, was one of the most overtly political FERC appointees in decades. He was a director at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that fights climate regulations, and was a senior adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

McNamee outlines cutting key divisions at DOE, including the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Loan Programs Office. He has called climate change a “progressive policy.”

He also calls for cutting funding to DOE’s Grid Deployment Office, in part to stop “focusing on grid expansion for the benefit of renewable resources or supporting low/carbon generation.” Instead, he calls for strengthening grid reliability, which he describes as expanding the use of fossil fuels and slowing or stopping the addition of cleaner energy. Part of his plan includes a massive expansion of natural gas infrastructure.

“Prevent socializing costs for customers who do not benefit from the projects or justifying such cost shifts as advancing vague ‘societal benefits’ such as climate change,” McNamee wrote in the report.

McNamee did not respond to requests for comment.

Preventing the expansion of the electric grid would slow down renewable energy projects, threatening U.S. climate goals while cooling the sector’s economic growth, said Mike O’Boyle, a senior director at the nonpartisan policy firm Energy Innovation and head of its electricity program.

“If we totally step away from the role of the federal government, our economy is going to miss out in a big way because the rest of the world is moving on climate, so they’re poised to reap the benefits both for their energy consumers but also in terms of manufacturing,” he said.

Mandy Gunasekara, who was EPA’s chief of staff under Trump, wrote a chapter within the plan to move the agency away from its focus on climate policy and reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

It outlines eliminating or downsizing agency functions including the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assistance, and the Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education. It also would also relocate regional EPA offices and would “downsize by terminating the newest hires in low-value programs.”

The overarching theme in remaking federal agencies is to shift power away from the federal government and toward states, in an effort to diminish regulations.

“The challenge of creating a conservative EPA will be to balance justified skepticism toward an agency that has long been amenable to being coopted by the Left for political ends against the need to implement the agency’s true function: protecting public health and the environment in cooperation with states,” Gunasekara wrote.

Diminish regulations! Heaven forfend!

McNamee is exactly right when he speaks of justifying cost shifts. It's also known as redistribution backed by the unique coercive power of government. 

Wind and solar do not hold their own in the energy marketplace. They need a leg up in the form of subsidization. That's because they are intermittent, whereas fossil fuels are dense, readily available, and comparatively inexpensive.

But here's the problem with Project 2025: It's way too bound up with Trump. And that's unavoidable, because energy-policy experts with their heads on straight and free-market proponents who were understandably eager to serve in federal-government positions from 2017 to 2020 were going to have to serve in an administration with his name on it.

The Politico piece features a photograph of Trump announcing US withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.

Again, a great move, but let's not kid ourselves for a second that Trump actually gave a diddly about why. His handlers told him it would make him look great, and that's all he needed to know.

The overwhelming presence of Trump in the Republican Party provides the opportunity for "journalists" like Waldman to conflate sound and much-needed moves on the energy front with the most unfit president in the nation's history.

I saw all this coming when Trump's cult began forming in 2015. The uninformed masses were going to associate actual conservatism with Squirrel Hair's incoherent mishmash.

Clarity is called for regarding climate hooey, but the drool-besotted leg-humpers have made achieving it damn difficult. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The stench of rot at the DoJ and FBI must be unflinchingly faced

 An editorial at National Review lays out in comprehensible fashion the sum total of what daily news reports have been dribbling out with lots of arcane details but little in the way of a coherent narrative. I'll be excerpting generously from it here. 

The introductory paragraphs spell out the three conclusions we must unavoidably draw from what we know so far:

The compelling congressional testimony of two IRS whistleblower agents has established three things.

First, the investigation into Biden corruption — millions of dollars pouring into the family coffers from apparatchiks of corrupt and anti-American regimes seeking to buy Joe Biden’s political influence — is real and has been thwarted by the Biden Justice Department. Second, the president’s son Hunter Biden received preferential treatment, and, next week, a federal judge should reject the sweetheart plea deal he was given by the Justice Department. Third, Attorney General Merrick Garland owes the country an explanation for why the Biden investigation has been sabotaged from within, even as he maintains publicly that it was conducted with independence and integrity.

The whistleblowers' frustration was palpable to the House committee they've been working with:

The two whistleblowers — supervisory agent Gary Shapley and the Biden investigation’s main case agent, Joseph Ziegler — began cooperating with the House Ways and Means Committee several weeks back. While Shapley went public in June, Ziegler was not publicly identified until Wednesday’s hearing. Their revelations have been jaw-dropping.

The agents recounted being blocked at every turn by Justice Department prosecutors as they tried to go about the routine steps investigators would take in any case — or, at least, any case not involving politically connected suspects. The investigation was slow-walked by prosecutors from the office of Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss, to whom the case was assigned in 2018.

And let's head off at the pass any notion that Weiss being a Trump appointee bears any weight:

Garland and congressional Democrats never tire of branding Weiss a Trump-appointee — it’s Garland’s rationalization for not appointing a special counsel. Conveniently omitted from this story is the fact that Weiss could not have been confirmed absent the support of Delaware’s two Democratic senators, Biden allies Tom Carper and Chris Coons. More to the point, Weiss reports to Garland and, because the Hunter Biden matter is a tax case, DOJ rules dictate that any tax charges must be approved by the Tax Division at Main Justice — run by Biden appointees. Most obviously, Weiss’s appointment by Trump does nothing to eradicate the conflict of interest inherent in the Biden Justice Department’s investigation of the president’s son over conduct in which the president himself is implicated.

Weiss and his underlings used the pendency of the 2020 presidential campaign as an excuse to instruct the IRS and FBI agents on the case not to take measures that might call attention to the investigation and thus influence the election. Note that, simultaneously, according to tech executives and Republican senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, FBI agents were signaling that the pre-election emergence of derogatory information about the Bidens — e.g., the Hunter laptop and the influx of money from foreign sources — was likely the result of a Russian intelligence operation.

After Biden was elected, Shapley and Ziegler recalled being undermined in attempting to uncover evidence. The day before they planned to conduct interviews of Hunter Biden and other investigative subjects, the FBI alerted the Secret Service, which tipped off the Biden transition team. As a result, lawyers for Hunter and most other subjects refused to speak to the IRS. In connection with interviews that were later planned, the lead prosecutor from Weiss’s office, Lesley Wolf, forbade them from pursuing investigative leads that could potentially connect the president himself to the Biden family business — instructing them not to ask questions about Hunter’s “dad,” or about “the big guy” (as we now know several investigative subjects referred to the now-president).

Wolf told the agents that issuing a warrant based on the laptop evidence would be bad optics, doncha know:

In 2019, the FBI obtained Hunter’s laptop, teeming with data about the Bidens’ lucrative foreign transactions and Joe Biden’s potential connections to them; yet Weiss’s office denied the IRS agents access to this evidence. In early September 2020, Wolf agreed with the agents that there was more than enough probable cause to support a warrant to search a guest house at the Bidens’ Wilmington residence where Hunter was living; still, she is said to have declined to seek the warrant because “the optics” would be bad. After the election, the agents learned that Hunter had moved documents from his business office in Washington, D.C., to a commercial storage unit in northern Virginia. They convinced Weiss, over Wolf’s objection, to allow them to seek a search warrant if Hunter did not access the unit for 30 days. But, while the agents were preparing the warrant, Wolf precluded them by alerting Hunter’s defense lawyers about the existence of the storage unit, again putting the evidence out of the investigators’ reach.

Shapley and Ziegler are among the IRS’s most experienced and accomplished agents. Despite the strictures placed on them, they built a compelling tax case against Hunter Biden — even the limited evidence, according to Ziegler, showed that Hunter had evaded roughly $2.2 million in taxes on $8.3 million in foreign income between 2014 and 2019. The agents and the line lawyers in DOJ’s Tax Division and Weiss’s office all agreed that a felony prosecution was called for.

There was much evading about where charges could be filed, based on where the tax-evading occurred. Conveniently, it outlasted the statute of limitiations. 

And the money being hidden from the IRS came from bribes:

The 2014 and 2015 tax years included Hunter’s lavish, undeclared income from his sinecure at the allegedly corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. This period is crucial to the potential corruption scheme. According to information provided to the FBI by an informant with a reliable track record (and released yesterday by Senator Chuck Grassley), after speaking with then–Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky placed Hunter on the company’s board and paid him over $80,000 per month (a rate that, reportedly, was roughly halved once Joe Biden was no longer vice president). The informant added that Zlochevsky told him he’d paid then–Vice President Biden and his son a combined $10 million bribe to use Biden’s influence on Burisma’s behalf, and had made the payments through a byzantine array of companies and accounts that he bragged would take investigators a decade to trace to Joe Biden. This alleged scheme strongly resembles the pattern uncovered by House investigators showing foreign actors paying Biden family members (including grandchildren) millions of dollars through labyrinthine channels that included some 20 obscure business entities, most of which Hunter set up while Joe was vice president.

And consider the Attorney General's role in all this. I'd say this country dodged a bullet when Mitch McConnell took a pass on the Senate advising and consenting on this guy when Obama nominated him for the Supreme Court:

Garland’s story is a crock. He asserts that Weiss would have been given any necessary authority — he only needed to ask. But the U.S. attorneys for Washington and California work for Garland; they couldn’t have blocked Weiss without the attorney general’s support. And it’s not a district U.S. attorney’s job to ask the attorney general for special-counsel authority — which would be tantamount to asking to be fired since, by regulation, a special counsel must be a lawyer “from outside the United States Government.” Rather, it is the attorney general’s duty to appoint a special counsel if there is a conflict of interest that prevents the Justice Department from investigating in the normal course.

And funny business seems to follow Hunter Biden wherever he goes, even though he's supposed to be well along in his recovery and immersed in his painting activities. I still think it's damn odd that the Secret Service couldn't determine where the White House cocaine came from. 

And what kind of guy safeguarding his precarious recovery hires a lawyer like this?

Hunter Biden visited his 'sugar brother' Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris – who was photographed appearing to smoke from a bong.

The First Son took a trip from his Malibu pad to the Pacific Palisades on Thursday to visit his attorney, after agreeing to plead guilty to federal tax crimes last month.

While Hunter was at the house, Morris was snapped on a balcony in plain view of the public street appearing to huff from a white bong, in photos exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com.

And who is the babe in the yellow floral dress Hunter is photographed hugging as he arrives?

The 60-year-old Hollywood attorney is known for his hard-driving tactics and high-profile cases, but appeared relaxed on the sunny balcony in a purple short-sleeved shirt.

Hunter arrived in the afternoon in a black SUV, escorted by Secret Service bodyguards and dressed in a blue shirt, jeans and aviator sunglasses favored by both him and his father. He was greeted at the Los Angeles home by a woman in a yellow floral dress.

Now, as is always necessary in 2023 post-America, LITD must addresses any questions of a whataboutism. 

The Very Stable Genius has already been indicted twice and more indictments are coming, and they're all entirely justified. 

Now, does anybody still want to get behind the look-it's-going-to-be-one-or-the-other-of-them argument at this late date?

True, the law-enforcement apparatus has done itself no favors, given the obvious corruption outlined above. But Donald Trump's unfitness for office is now unavoidably clear. Even those who began to drool uncontrollably and quake with adulation when he descended the escalator in 2015 have not even the flimsiest of reasons why we should usher this charlatan back in.

So what's to be done?

The first step is to ask how we as a country became so spiritually sick as to give ourselves this choice.

This will be the subject of a Precipice post I intend to write today.