"If there is one word to define Trump’s atmosphere, it is 'pagan.'"

"The pagan values of ancient Rome celebrated power, manliness, conquest, ego, fame, competitiveness and prowess, and it is those values that have always been at the core of Trump’s being — from his real estate grandiosity to his love of pro wrestling to his king-of-the-jungle version of American greatness. The pagan ethos has always appealed to grandiose male narcissists because it gives them permission to grab whatever they want. This ethos encourages egotists to puff themselves up and boast in a way they find urgently satisfying; self-love is the only form of love they know...."

That's David Brooks, tending to your soul, in "How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact" (NYT)(free-access link).

I hadn't encountered that men-thinking-about-the-Roman-Empire meme in quite a while. Okay. Nice to see its return. Helps us understand what the men are doing these days.

Anyway, I wonder, is this analysis unfair to pagans?

If paganism is a grand but dehumanizing value system, I’ve found it necessary, in this increasingly pagan age, to root myself in anything that feels rehumanizing, whether it’s art or literature or learning. I’ve found it incredibly replenishing to be spending time around selfless, humble people....

Anything that feels rehumanizing?

Well, read the whole thing to be fair to Brooks, not that he's being fair to Trump... or to pagans. 

Looking into this blog's archive to see what I might have said about pagans over the years, I encountered this May 29, 2017 post, which focuses on a quote from Andrew Sullivan calling Trump "a pagan":

"The question swirling around all the new believers was: Were they true believers? Or was their conversion mostly or entirely utilitarian..."

"... driven by a desire to push back against the forces of technology and secularism and wokeness and an increasingly militant Islam? Did they actually believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and that he had died for our sins and was resurrected? Or did they think that was a nice story that we should tell ourselves because it encouraged people to treat each other better—because it was a kind of cultural bulwark? And did it really matter in the end? Andrew Sullivan, the writer and podcaster, suggested this might not be easy to answer. 'The feeling'—of believing—'will vary,' Sullivan, a Catholic, told me. 'Sometimes, there’s no feeling. Sometimes, you’re overwhelmed. The point really is to escape feeling as such—our emotions are not what prove anything. The genius of ritual is that it allows us not to articulate our feelings... It allows us to express our faith through an act.'"

From "How Intellectuals Found God/Almost 150 years after Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’ some of our most important thinkers are getting religion. Peter Savodnik meets the new theists" (Free Press).

"Some historians who follow the presidency say Biden has always shown flashes of anger when he feels underestimated."

"While they are far more fleeting than Trump’s brandishing of grievances, they have at times been unmistakable. 'There has always been this issue of resentment with Biden. He resented [former president Barack] Obama and crew for supplanting him in 2008 and for telling him not to run in [2016], and he has many other resentments,' said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian who recently published a book on the relationship between presidents and CEOs. 'But can you imagine how resentful he is of the shifting narratives and the way he’s been pushed aside and manipulated and not treated fairly. So yeah, I can see him being resentful.'"

From "Biden touts his legacy, but frustration seeps through/The president is observing the traditions of a peaceful transfer of power, but his regrets and misgivings are evident" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Lots to talk about there, but I want to focus on "brandishing" — Trump’s brandishing of grievances. This is an article about Biden, his resentfulness, but Trump must be inserted, and he must be worse. Biden has  fleeting flashes of well-founded anger, but Trump has grievances, and he brandishes them. So Biden briefly displays resentment but Trump waves his resentment around like a weapon. 

Just yesterday, I was talking about the journalistic deployment of the word "brandish." Discussing a NYT article — "In Display of Fealty, Tech Industry Curries Favor With Trump/It was a week of frenzied activity as Silicon Valley billionaires and their companies brandished checks and compliments for President-elect Trump"  — I wrote:

Bill Maher asks about the "fact" that 84% of "gays" "stuck with the Democrats," and Andrew Sullivan doesn't agree with the assertion of fact.

Sullivan: "We don't really know how gays vote.... That's how GLBTQIA+ people vote.... The vast majority — 40% of that — are bisexual women, many of whom are in relationships with straight guys. So we don't know. I'm sure it was a big majority. I'm not sure including a big bunch of of of young women in that will distort it somewhat. I wish we could have polling of gay men and lesbians. Why can't we? Why are we now forced into this bleh?"

I'm using the letters b-l-e-h to represent a Sullivan vocalization that seemed to express the opinion that the GLBTQIA+ grouping is annoyingly large and indistinct. He seems to think gay men and lesbians should be polled as a distinct group and that their opinion is more meaningful than the amorphous grouping that sweeps in the many young woman who call themselves bisexual and may very well be living the most privileged sort of life. Of course these women tend to vote Democratic, but did gay men continue to vote Democratic? Sullivan groups gay men and lesbians together, but why not demand separate polling there too. There is an important difference in the voting of men and women, and why wouldn't that difference also show up among gay people?

ADDED: Tim Dillon says that trans people ought to identify as Republicans:

"Dylan Mulvaney is exemplary of the new queer order: a femme gay man who had to take female hormones to stay relevant."

"(Compare and contrast with disco icon Sylvester’s view of gay liberation: 'I could be the queen that I really was without having a sex change or being on hormones.' We are going backward, not forward.)... If a Christianist hospital was busy changing the sexes of overwhelmingly gay kids, so that they became straight, what do you think the gay rights establishment would say? But when a queer facility does exactly that, all the worriers are bigots.... So many potentially gay children were being sent down the pathway to change gender, two of the clinicians said there was a dark joke among staff that 'there would be no gay people left.' 'It feels like conversion therapy for gay children,' one male clinician said. 'I frequently had cases where people started identifying as trans after months of horrendous bullying for being gay.... Young lesbians considered at the bottom of the heap suddenly found they were really popular when they said they were trans.'..."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "The Queers Versus The Homosexuals/We are in a new era. And the erasure of gay men and lesbians is intensifying" (Substack).

In London, for "grossly offensive" speech — about "pride" flags — a man is required to "arrange a voluntary interview" — whatever that means.

Here's the letter (via Andrew Sullivan):

Note the language: "I therefore require you to contact me to arrange a voluntary interview so this matter can be further investigated."

Either it's not voluntary or it's not required. I find that speech grossly offensive.

Sullivan's comment is: "This is not a document that can be found in anything close to a free country. Every day, I'm grateful for the First Amendment."

Don't count on the First Amendment, standing alone. We need people who understand and care about its fundamental principles, or it will be gone, interpreted out of existence.

Fear not, Andrew Sullivan. This must be satire, because some students have allergies, some are vegetarian, some have religious restrictions, etc.

I'm afraid this isn't fake. But it's the most honest explanation of "equity" I've yet heard. Redistribution pudding followed by a topping of racial revenge. https://t.co/ElhxYQ08py

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) February 15, 2023

No teacher concerned with "equity" would just risk allergic reactions, feeding pork to Muslims and Jews, and meat to vegans.

ADDED: The Sullivan tweet has disappeared, so let me embed the video he was commenting on, because it is an amusing satire and Sullivan's mistake is interesting evidence of the blurring of real life and satire:

I started a COMMUNIST style lunch distribution in my 4th GRADE CLASS! It’s going great! #Communism #capitalismsucks pic.twitter.com/nQIyRw29Ch

— Kali Fontanilla (@KaliFontanilla) February 15, 2023

"How dare you!"

When I hear the phrase "How dare you!" I think of Greta Thunberg — at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit— famously orating: 

"This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!"

How dare you steal from the future lives of the children. But now "How dare you!" has been deployed in the abortion debate, by the pro-abortion rights side:

 

"Some Republican leaders are trying to weaponize the use of the law against women. How dare they? How dare they tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her own body? How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future? How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms?" 

Politico — the publisher of the leaked Supreme Court draft — calls that Kamala Harris speech "the Biden administration’s most forceful defense of reproductive rights." 

Technically, to say that is not to call the speech forceful. The "most forceful" thing could be quite weak. What was the competition? But I think praise was intended.

What an opening for critics! All they have to do is answer the question: "How dare they?" Look back at the iconic Thunberg speech. Greta demanded that the adults of today make sacrifices for the children of the future. The anti-abortion rhetoric springs quickly to mind.

Mike Pence stepped up: 

“I say with the lives of 62 million unborn boys and girls ended in abortion since 1973, generations of mothers enduring heartbreaking and loss that can last a lifetime: Madame Vice President, how dare you?”

ADDED: Andrew Sullivan's new column is titled "How Dare They?" Subtitle: "The left's attitude problem when it comes to democracy." 

"'Literal grooming.' You can make your points without such anti-gay bigotry."

“Literal grooming.” You can make your points without such anti-gay bigotry.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) March 22, 2022

Accusing teachers of being gay sexual predators has a long vile history. Reagan stood up against it. It’s rank homophobic bigotry - and I don’t accuse people of that often. Attack the ideology. Don’t smear teachers.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) March 22, 2022

"In her 1998 book, 'How Jews Became White Folks,' Karen Brodkin argued that, as America diversified racially, a form of Jewish whiteness emerged..."

"... 'by contrasting Jews as a model minority with African Americans as culturally deficient.'... In this worldview, Jewish success, like immigrant success, is never earned by merit, but won by attaching itself to 'whiteness.'... In a 2018 piece on anti-Semitic attacks in Crown Heights, the Forward’s Ari Feldman noted that 'black people identify Judaism as "a form of almost hyper-whiteness"...'... In California’s proposed mandatory class in critical race theory, for example, one original curriculum question was 'How did the Holocaust shift Jewish Americans’ position in American society?' The correct answer was: 'gained conditional whiteness.' Yes, this is the upshot of the mass murder of millions of Jews, according to CRT: it gave them a leg-up in America!... [A] recent paper in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association [argues that]... Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has — a malignant, parasitic-like condition... [that] renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse...  [T]his kind of demonizing rhetoric could be straight from a Nazi textbook. It identifies a racial group, it attaches evil characteristics to it, it ascribes those characteristics to individuals within that group, and it sees their success as won at the direct expense of others...."

Writes Andrew Sullivan, in "The Anti-Semitism In Anti-Whiteness/Whoopi Goldberg just brought it out into the open" (Substack).

"Figures on political TV shows say stupid and historically illiterate things every day — including about the Nazis — and nothing much happens to them as a result."

"What, exactly, was different about this one? Is warmed-over critical theory prohibited now? And why does anyone care?... The View is a talk show, and a particularly stupid one to boot.... I simply do not understand the mechanism by which viewers are supposed to be damaged in some way by watching an actress make mistakes on live TV.... In its statement, ABC insisted that 'the culture at ABC News is one that is driven, kind, inclusive, respectful, and transparent.' Okay... [but] Goldberg’s only crime was 'being wrong in public' — an eventuality that is all-but guaranteed to arise when we televise spontaneous political debate. Why have such productions if we intend to police them like this? Bit by bit, and mob by mob, we are destroying our open culture and the organizations that we have constructed to serve it."

Writes Charles C.W. Cooke, in "Whoopi Goldberg’s Suspension from The View Is Illiberal and Irrational" (National Review).

The link on "critical theory" goes to an Andrew Sullivan tweet: "Goldberg's basic point is classic CRT: if it's 'white people' vs 'white people,' i.e. Jews, it cannot be racism." 

The link on "particularly stupid one" goes to Cooke's own article, "Whoopi Goldberg’s Nonsensical Abortion Rant." In response to Justice Alito's statement that "the fetus has an interest in having a life and that doesn’t change... from the point before viability to the point after viability," Goldberg had said: "How dare you talk about what a fetus wants? You have no idea." Sample comment from Cooke: "Is she arguing that, as a rule, unborn children might be suicidal, and that abortion is doing them a favor?"

"[State voting] laws — like that recently passed in Georgia — are far from the nightmares that Dems have described, and contain some expansion of access to voting."

"Georgians, and Americans in general, overwhelmingly support voter ID laws, for example. Such laws poll strongly even among allegedly disenfranchised African-Americans — whose turnout in 2012, following a wave of ID laws, actually exceeded whites’ in the re-election of a black president. In fact, the normalization of ID in everyday life has only increased during the past year of vax-card requirements — a policy pushed by Democrats. And Biden did something truly dumb this week: he cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election in November now that his proposal for a federal overhaul has failed: 'I’m not going to say it’s going to be legit.' No sitting president should do this, ever. But when one party is still insisting that the entire election system was rigged last time in a massive conspiracy to overturn a landslide victory for Trump, the other party absolutely needs to draw a sharp line. Biden fatefully blurred that distinction, and took the public focus off the real danger: not voter suppression but election subversion, of the kind we are now discovering Trump, Giuliani and many others plotted during the transition period.... And why have they wildly inflated the threat to election security and engaged in the disgusting demagoguery of calling this 'Jim Crow 2.0'? The WSJ this week tracked down various unsavory GOP bills to suppress or subvert voting in three states — three states Obama singled out for criticism — and found that they had already died in committee. To argue as Biden did last week in Georgia that the goal of Republicans is 'to turn the will of the voters into a mere suggestion — something states can respect or ignore,' is to add hyperbole to distortion...."

Writes Andrew Sullivan, in "How Biden Lost The Plot/Listening to interest groups and activists is no way to get re-elected" (Substack).

"An unusual thing happened in the conversation about transgender identity in America this week."

"The New York Times conceded that there is, indeed, a debate among medical professionals, transgender people, gays and lesbians and others about medical intervention for pre-pubescent minors who have gender dysphoria. The story pulled some factual punches, but any mildly-fair airing of this debate in the US MSM is a breakthrough of a kind. Here’s the truth that the NYT was finally forced to acknowledge: 'Clinicians are divided' over the role of mental health counseling before making irreversible changes to a child’s body. Among those who are urging more counseling and caution for kids are ground-breaking transgender surgeons. This very public divide was first aired by Abigail Shrier a few months ago on Bari’s Substack, of course, where a trans pioneer in sex-change surgery opined: 'It is my considered opinion that due to some of the … I’ll call it just 'sloppy,' sloppy healthcare work, that we’re going to have more young adults who will regret having gone through this process.' Oof."

Writes Andrew Sullivan, in "The Trans Movement Is Not About Rights Anymore/It's about a cultural revolution and the abolition of biological sex."

Also: "What the trans movement is now doing, after this comprehensive victory, is not about rights at all. It is about cultural revolution. It’s a much broader movement to dismantle the sex binary, to see biology as a function of power and not science, and thereby to deconstruct the family and even a fixed category such as homosexuality. You can support trans rights and oppose all of this. But they want you to believe you can’t. That’s the bait-and-switch. Don’t take it."

ADDED: I just want to print out the top 3 highest-rated comments at the NYT article (linked in Sullivan's piece):

"Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys."

"They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin—and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty 'white supremacy' narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of 'hate,' even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill."

So wrote Andrew Sullivan (Substack) in a passage quoted by Jonathan V. Last in "Andrew Sullivan and the Narrative of the 'MSM Narrative'/The narrative on MSM narratives is false" (Bulwark).

Last calls Sullivan's attack "nonsense," his point being that "the MSM universe is so large that you’re always going to be able to cherry-pick examples to support the notion that 'they' are feeding 'us' false narratives." 

And it's easy for Last to dish up the false narratives Sullivan himself has served up: He called "people skeptical of the Iraq War as the 'Hate-America-First crowd,' he asserted "that Barack Obama would put an end to America’s culture wars," he pushed the notion "that Sarah Palin had faked a pregnancy and that 'the media' was complicit in this coverup."

Last writes:

The MSM is like a giant peer-review system, but where the peer-reviewing takes place after publication. Jonathan Rauch talks about this at length in The Constitution of Knowledge—that the scientific enterprise and the journalistic enterprise have similar modes of operation. Is the journalistic mode great? No. Like democracy, it is the worst system there is—except for all the others.

"TikTok is full of young actors playing with characters. Maybe slow down and listen. Consider the possibilities."

I advised, yesterday, in a post about a young woman on TikTok whom Joe Rogan seemed to assume was sincere but I thought could very well be a comic actor. 

I've encountered a similar case today, this time with Andrew Sullivan possibly not picking up the humor:

 

Good God. https://t.co/smp0CjFh03

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) August 17, 2021

Sincerity is difficult! But I assure you that I'm being sincere when I say that I genuinely do not know whether this is a kindergarten teacher who is thoroughly pleased with herself or whether this is a young comic actor — I originally wrote "comedienne" and then de-gendered my terminology — who's embodying the role of a kindergarten teacher who is thoroughly pleased with herself.

Notice that her name is Koe Creation. That suggests a comic persona, but it could also be a name adopted by a real person who wants to express the feeling of creativity or of being a self-creation. 

I see that she has a book, "This Heart Holds Many: My Life as the Nonbinary Millennial Child of a Polyamorous Family," and that Amazon lists it in the categories LGBTQ+ Biographies & Memoirs, Gender Studies, and LGBTQ+ Biographies. Not humor. 

I really don't know! I won't assume. Maybe it's possible for a person to be nonbinary when it comes to seriousness and humor!

"Living with a virus — rather than defeating it — is not emotionally satisfying. It does not, in our minds, remove the threat."

"But the truth is: humans have no choice but to live with viruses. We always have. I’ve lived with a potentially fatal one buried in my bone marrow for almost 30 years. I still test HIV-positive. Almost certainly, I will die HIV-positive. But I will not die of HIV. And that’s ok. As long as I can prevent it wreaking havoc on my immune system, and ruining and ending my life, I’m content to live with it. We’re almost friends at this point. These viruses challenge the psyche, and the trick, it seems to me, is not to deny their power and danger, but to see past them to the real goal: the living of your life. If you are not careful, this one viral threat can crowd out all other perspectives, distort your judgment of risk, and cause you to be paralyzed by excessive caution and fear. But defeating a virus often does mean living with it. We already do this with the flu. There’s no reason we can’t do it with Covid as well."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "Let It Rip/How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Live With The Virus" (Substack).

"[T]he sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites... has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation."

"It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of 'white supremacy,' which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.... The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a 'social justice reckoning' these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences. Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that 'the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.' She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism.... The reason 'critical race theory' is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity ('intersectionality'). A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable 'systems' and 'structures' and 'internal biases' arrived to hover over the world...."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "What Happened To You?/The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism" (Substack).

"Pure left-stereotyping of gay people."

Pure left-stereotyping of gay people. It’s from the left so this kind of homophobia is fine. https://t.co/0PHYPn42r1

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) June 24, 2021

"What matters, both conservatives and liberals agree, is not the end result, but the liberal democratic, open-ended means."

"That shift — from specifying a single end to insisting only on playing by the rules — is the key origin of modern freedom. My central problem with critical theory is that it takes precise aim at these very core principles and rejects them. By rejecting them, in the otherwise noble cause of helping the marginalized, it is a very seductive and potent threat to liberal civilization.... The West’s idea of individual freedom — the very foundation of the American experiment — is, in their view, a way merely to ensure the permanent slavery of the non-white.... Our world is just a set of interlocking forms of oppressive structures, and has been since the West’s emergence.... When it began, critical theory was one school of thought among many. But the logic of it — it denies the core liberal premises of all the other schools and renders them all forms of oppression — means that it cannot long tolerate those other schools. It must always attack them. Critical theory is therefore always the cuckoo in the academic nest. Over time, it throws out its competitors — and not in open free debate. It does so by ending that debate, by insisting that the liberal 'reasonable person' standard of debate is, in fact, rigged in favor of the oppressors, that speech is a form of harm, even violent harm, rather than a way to seek the truth.... This debate is not about whether you are a racist or an antiracist. The debate is about whether, in your deepest heart and soul, you are a liberal or an anti-liberal."

From "Removing The Bedrock Of Liberalism/What the 'Critical Race Theory' debate is really about" by Andrew Sullivan (Substack).

Is transparent propaganda not even propaganda?

Amazing but not surprising: no mention at all of the anti-police BLM marches and riots last year. Not even as one contributing factor. https://t.co/mmK7915raZ

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) May 14, 2021