Shaping the SPLC story.

I'm taking a position of cruel neutrality and see myself spending much of the day observing how the 2 sides are shaping the story.

Let's just start with the way things look at Elon's place:

Challenged on his statement about Rob Reiner, Trump explained, "Well, I wasn't a fan of his at all.... I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all, in any way, shape, or form."

Let’s be clear about something.

Trump wrote this morning that what happened to Rob Reiner and his wife Michele was a very sad thing and may they rest in peace.

He didn’t celebrate his death.

He did say how he felt about the man who hated him with every ounce of his being… pic.twitter.com/wdSuwjWDQr

— RealAF Patriot (@RealAF_Patriot) December 15, 2025

The full quote: "Well, I wasn't a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned. He said — he knew it was false, in fact it’s the exact opposite — that I was a friend of Russia, controlled by Russia. The Russia hoax — he was one of the people behind it. I think he hurt himself, career-wise. He became like a deranged person. Trump derangement syndrome. So I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all, in any way, shape, or form. I thought he was very bad for our country."

Compare that to his earlier statement, and you'll see that a big difference is the omission of a reverent acknowledgment of the profundity of death. The original statement begins and ends with what we would expect from a decent and conventional reaction: "A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood.... May Rob and Michele rest in peace!" It's the stuff in the middle that was the problem. Notice the multiple elements to this filling. I'll color code them:

"Facing down this digital firehose of – pardon the Silicon Valleyese – 'content,' how does Hollywood now decide what merits a cinema release?"

"Facing down this digital firehose of – pardon the Silicon Valleyese – 'content,' how does Hollywood now decide what merits a cinema release? What executives are looking for – at least at Sony, according to one of its partner producers I spoke with recently – is 'theatricality.' By that term, the company means films with 'the urgency to get people to leave the comfort of their homes, he says. Working out what urgency – or 'theatrical intent,' to use the marketing lingo – means is the current Hollywood obsession. Tom Cruise, for instance, interprets urgency literally – banking on personal peril in the form of old-fashioned, non-CGI stunt work to pack in the punters. It worked for 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick.... His proselytisation of real thrills in real cinemas is one way of defining theatricality – though the danger is the approach relies only on fading muscle memory of blockbusters past...."

I'm reading "All hail Avatar! How event movies are trying to bring back the box office blockbuster/Ahead of James Cameron’s latest Avatar sequel hitting the big screen, we look at how studios aim for ‘theatricality’ to get streaming film fans from sofa to cinema" (The Guardian). 

From the depth of my memory came a question that sounds like an entry for a new Dictionary of Received Ideas: Who was that French theorist who said theater must be spectacle? I believe he died putting on his shoes.

Such raw thoughts are — I think — good AI prompts. I immediately had the name: Antonin Artaud. Here's his Wikipedia article. He wrote a manifesto about what he called the Theatre of Cruelty. Here's a Grok-made chart to help you compare him to the Hollywood execs:

"The Russiagate scandal has long been one of the most convoluted, hard-to-follow news stories of all time...."

"Those of us who covered the story from the start had a difficult time explaining to audiences what it was, as we ourselves didn’t know. Now we do.... Finally, it seems, we can explain.... It wasn’t the start of a corruption story about Trump, but the cover-up of a still-unresolved Hillary Clinton scandal. This is purely a Clinton corruption story.... With the help of the declassified Durham material, we can explain the whole affair in three brushstrokes. One, Hillary Clinton and her team apparently hoped to deflect from her email scandal and other problems via a campaign tying Trump to Putin. Two, American security services learned of these plans. Three — and this is the most important part — instead of outing them, authorities used state resources to massively expand and amplify her scheme.... Hillary Clinton got in a jam, and the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White House got her out of it by setting Trump up. That’s it...."

Writes Matt Taibbi, in "No Doubt Left: Russiagate Was a Cover-Up/The most infuriatingly complex scandal of all time has just been reduced to a page or two, thanks to another declassified release" (Substack).

More from Taibbi at "The New York Times Can't Stop Sucking/How many times can one newspaper screw up a story?" (Substack).

ADDED: This post is really a place-holder. It marks my own nonfollowing of the story. Notice what I am quoting — Taibbi's acknowledgment that the story is too hard for people to follow. And it's not as though he's solving the problem for us. The quoted material is conclusory assertion. For someone who isn't already pro- or anti-Trump, you still have no way to sort out what's true. I also read The New York Times, and here's Taibbi telling me The New York Times is systematically screwing it up. Maybe. How am I supposed to know? 

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive...."

Wrote William Wordsworth, in "The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement."

The famous old line came to mind as I was listening to "The Joe Rogan Experience" and Joe, talking about the first days of the new Trump administration, exclaimed: "Wild times! Just wild! Like what a fun time to be alive!"

Bret Weinstein followed on:

"It just feels different. I have to tell you, I don't know what's coming, but it's at least, it's at least delightful not to know what to think."

He's got delight, as Wordsworth's French revolutionaries had bliss, but Weinstein professes to find his delight in not knowing what to think. He's distancing himself and enjoying his distance. I think of the spectators who lined the Place de la Révolution. Did they have reservations about the guillotine? Did they think I don't know what to think and find that unknowingness delightful? 

Weinstein's thoughtfulness continued:

"The cynicism that was required to understand what was going on two months ago is now no longer required. You actually have to think about what you're, what you're told is coming down the pike and think, well, I don't know. Is that a solution? Is it, is that, yeah. Is it a negotiating tactic or is it a solution that's actually being proposed and would it work?"

Withhold judgment. Meanwhile, 10 more heads will have rolled.

"The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve."

Writes Matthew J. Vaeth, Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget, in a memo titled "Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Programs."

I'm reading about this in a Washington Post piece, "White House pauses all federal grants, sparking confusion/Trillions of dollars could be on hold, according to an Office of Management and Budget memo" (free-access link). Excerpt:

Donald Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, said... [t]here will be widespread panic, Kettl said, as state and local governments as well as the people most reliant on federal-funded grants scramble to figure out if and when their cash flow will stop.

Re "people most reliant on federal-funded grants" — the memo is explicit that it does not apply to Medicare or Social Security and "does not include assistance provided directly to individuals." But clearly there are "people" who have reason to panic. These would be "people" overseeing matters entangled with left-wing ideology who must "complete a comprehensive analysis" of whether their activities align with Trump's "executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal."

Trump has gone big. It's the shock-and-awe approach. But do you remember "Obama's Big Bang" ("rapid, once-in-a-generation overhauls of energy, financial regulation and health care")?

I like getting a chance to use my "Trump is like Obama" tag. That's where the cruel neutrality really hurts.

"Imagine you are about to have a political argument with a close friend or family member. You are on opposing sides of the left-right rift...."

"Doesn’t it sometimes feel that it would be simpler if you each just brought over a small TV and left it running in the kitchen, tuned to your respective network, while the two of you went into the yard and talked about something about which you possess some original knowledge? Once you’re out there, talking like that, won’t it be nice to feel your pre-formed 'political' carapaces drop away? And won’t it be discouraging and alarming when, as soon as one of you slips up and utters a triggering word or phrase ('immigrant' or 'Trump' or 'politically correct' or 'eating cats and dogs,' for example), you veer back into your canned 'political' jargon, like actors suddenly aware that the scripts you’ve been given must, at all costs, be honored?"

Writes George Saunders, in "Five Thought Experiments Concerning the Underlying Disease/Our civic wells are poisoned. Why?" (The New Yorker).

Saunders is a fine writer, but I'll be cruelly neutral and give him the "civility bullshit" tag he deserves. If Kamala Harris had won, would he be urging us to abandon political speech and get back to the little life of the backyard about which we possess "original knowledge"?

An assessment of my cruel neutrality.

Yesterday, I asked "If Election Day were tomorrow, who would Althouse vote for? Who should she vote for?" I took a poll, with 9 combinations and 3 possible votes: Trump, Harris, and the ever-popular "no one."

What I really wanted to see was how I was perceived, that is, what level of neutrality or cover I'm pulling off. The second question gave me some ability to account for bias.

Here are the results:

Was I too quick to accept the pushback against calling Kamala "Kamala"?

I thought the antagonism to "Kamala" was a bad idea, and I said so here.

But I switched to the "Harris" approach, as you can see in the previous post.

Then somebody asked me where I got the idea that to use the first name alone would make me look as though I were declaring my opposition to her. My aim is neutrality, cruel neutrality.

So I googled and found "'Harris' or 'Kamala'? Inside the debate over calling women by their first or last name/The vice president has enough support from delegates to assure her the Democratic nomination, but what name does Kamala Harris want to go by?" (Yahoo). Excerpt:

There's that "brat" crap again, with the fuzzy font and the intentionally repulsive green color.

And we're given this from a person who, we're told, is "an expert," Melissa Baese-Berk, a professor of linguistics:

Why is Biden doing an Oval Office address? Does it suggest he plans to do more than explain why he withdrew from the campaign for reelection?

Does the ultra-solemn setting suggest he is going to resign? It feels strange, perhaps even wrong, to use the Oval Office to talk about the political campaign.

Looking for clues, I'm reading this CNN article about the upcoming speech, "Biden to deliver Oval Office address on decision not to seek reelection as Harris and Trump hit the trail":

"Like many other Americans struggling to find scraps of calm and slivers of hope in this anxious era..."

"... I resolved a while back not to get overly excited about Donald Trump’s overexcited utterances.... But I can’t shake a grandiose prophecy that he made repeatedly last year as he looked toward the 2024 presidential race. He took to calling it the 'final battle.'... [A]s he continued to rave biblically... my reaction changed, and it surprised me: He just may be right. Not in his cartoonish description of that conflict... but in terms of how profoundly meaningful the 2024 election could be...."

Writes Frank Bruni, in the NYT.

What I hear him saying in those opening lines to his column is: I'm not going to let Trump play me... and yet I just can't resist.

Bruni resolved not to get overly excited, so he's got his loophole. He's sticking with his resolve, but he still can get excited... whenever excitement is appropriate. He's not overly excited. Just the right amount of excited. 

Me, I am far more deeply resolved not to let Trump rhetoric excite me. I am a cool and distant observer. To me, the things he says are merely bloggable or not bloggable. I listen to Trump and to the people he plays — one way or another. I'm not one of the many Americans "struggling to find scraps of calm and slivers of hope in this anxious era." How can you struggle to find calm? To struggle is to be uncalm. How can calmness come in scraps?

Back to Bruni and skipping into the middle of things:

If the people on the losing side of an election believe that those on the winning side are digging the country’s graveyard, how do they accept and respect the results? The final battle we may be witnessing is between a governable and an ungovernable America, a faintly civil and a floridly uncivil one....

Ha ha, I skimmed over the context and, for an instant, I couldn't tell which side was which. Either side, losing, will go nuts looking for some way out, won't they? I lived through the Wisconsin uprising of 2011. 

But, of course, I know what I'm reading, what side Bruni is on, and that the general rule in politics is — as we say in Wisconsin — "All the assholes are over on the other side."

"A famous 1967 declaration by the University of Chicago called for institutions to remain neutral on political and social matters, saying..."

"... a university “is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.' But students over the years have frequently and successfully pressed their administrations to take positions on matters like police brutality, global warming and war. Dr. Summers said in an interview that he could understand the case for university neutrality in political disputes, but that Harvard had forfeited that prerogative by speaking out on many other issues. 'When you fly the Ukrainian flag over Harvard yard, when you issue clear, vivid and strong statements in response to the George Floyd killing,' he said, 'you have decided not to pursue a policy of neutrality.'...

From "At Harvard, a Battle Over What Should Be Said About the Hamas Attacks/After a student group blamed Israel for the violence, Lawrence Summers, a former university president, condemned the leadership for not speaking up" (NYT).

A policy of neutrality can be principled, but it's not principled at all it's applied on and off and as a matter of convenience. Once the university speaks out some of the time, the question becomes whether this is one of those occasions when the university should take a side. Does the fact that some students spoke out create such an occasion?

"Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will announce he is running for president during a discussion with Twitter CEO Elon Musk... "

NBC News reveals.

This is supposed to happen at 6 ET tomorrow.

Why Elon?

The launch will closely tie together the billionaire tech mogul with one of the Republican Party’s rising stars. Musk has been an admirer of DeSantis, who also regularly chides corporate media. Last year, Musk said he would support the governor if he were to run for president.... It’s not clear if Musk will formally endorse DeSantis on Wednesday....

You'd think Elon Musk would want to maintain a position of cruel neutrality. 

"Does the mere fact of his large following in an increasingly radicalized and extremist Republican Party require that news organizations broadcast his views to millions?"

Asks Susan B. Glasser in "Don’t Say You Haven’t Been Warned About Trump and 2024/CNN’s awful town hall with the former President heralds a disastrous election year to come" (The New Yorker).

Here's my radical idea: Give up on attacking Trump, the person, and engage with the substance of his policy arguments. Act as if he's a completely ordinary politician — pose as if you felt neutrality toward him personally — and engage with the ideas. 

You really do need to take him seriously. He's presumptively the Republican nominee, and he's got an even chance of getting re-elected to the presidency. You can freak out about that, but you've been freaking about about him for 8 years, and it hasn't fazed him. His supporters tune you out.

Reset. Be normal, and treat him as if he were normal. Give up on trying not to "normalize" him. Forefront the substantive issues, treat all the candidates equally, and let us see how each of them holds up to a thorough grilling. If you're neutral, you can be cruel. We'll watch.

I infer that Glasser would tell me that Trump doesn't do substance. She wrote:

Will the Wisconsin lawprof blogger — at long last — take a position in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election?

It's Election Day. 

The national media is leaning into this one. See, e.g., "Wisconsin’s High-Stakes Supreme Court Race: What to Watch/The election for a swing seat on the court is likely to determine whether abortion remains illegal in Wisconsin, as well as the future of the state’s heavily gerrymandered political maps" (NYT).

And here I am, based in Wisconsin, for 4 decades. And me, a law professor — a retired law professor who's been on the receiving end of the outburst "And, you! A law professor!" so many times.

Yes, me, a law professor, a Wisconsin law professor. Emerita. I am not taking any position other than my trademark position: Cruel neutrality.

It's real, and I hope it hurts.

I privately know who I'll vote for if I vote, but I will probably walk to the polling place this morning without knowing whether I will vote or abstain. I consider abstention a worthy option.

"71% of Democratic Voters Think Biden Should Be 2024 Nominee."

Says a new Emerson poll.

I said it 2 weeks ago:

"That's your candidate, Democrats. There's no getting around it. And it seems that America will spend the next 6 years in the arms of the gerontocracy. Snuggle up!"

I'd already factored in my belief that Trump will get the GOP nomination and go on to lose the election. I've decided I'm not getting cranked up about it. I have blogged the presidential campaigns for almost 2 decades, with day-by-day observations and insights throughout 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. What a hell of a thing to become so immersed in. This time will be different. And not because I'm tired of all the immersion. It's different because I can see it's different. We're in a ridiculous fix. But I'm not going to make it worse by struggling. The ancient grandfather will enfold us. 

"You might be getting tired of hearing about the Great Comments Decision of 2021 but here are my two cents after thinking about it for the past few days."

Writes a reader named Chris.

I’ve been following your blog for a long time having come over from Instapundit probably in the early 2000’s. I’m not a commenting kind of person but I do read a lot of them. I love it when people who are knowledgeable about the article or post weigh in and add value to the discussion. That is what a great comments section can do.

Lately I’ve been seeing both in your comment section and others something I came to recognize back in the 1990’s.

I used to watch the old PBS MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour show. They would do a 10 or 15 minute news summary and then dig deeper into three or four issues with experts or panel discussions. After many years of watching I got bored with the show and after thinking about it realized it was because they had the same cast of experts on the panels year after year. I now could predict almost perfectly what I was going to hear on any issue once I knew who was on the panel. I stopped watching after that happened.

Your comments section was in the same place. The same list of characters who repeated the same arguments. I found myself scrolling by many comments once I recognized the names because I knew what they were going to say. This dynamic, far more than any right/left political considerations, is what was greatly reducing the value of the comments for me.

The main value I was still seeing in the discussions was when people from across the country reported their experiences. I will miss that. It was a great way to understand a bit more about what was happening in other parts of America.

But it would be easy to make the case that the negatives in the comments vastly outweighed this particular positive. It is kind of sad that I see people who want to blame the closure of your comments on their political enemies on the “right” or the “left.” Not everything has to be political and not everything you dislike is caused by the other side.

I grew up in a time when people could disagree politically and still be friends and neighbors. We had better figure out how to do that again and remember we are all Americans or we are headed for some very dangerous places. I intend to keep reading your blog as long as you are interested in writing it. Not because I agree with everything you write, but because you offer something I don’t see in the media or other blogs. And rather than try to define what that is I’ll just call it cruel neutrality.

Thanks, Chris. 

If you have comments on this (or another post), you can email me here. I love the way the email approach is working, and I hope you like the many updates on today's posts: here, here, here, here, and here.

Chris says he loves the comments "when people who are knowledgeable about the article or post weigh in and add value to the discussion." That might be exactly the kind of thing that readers will submit by email. I have high hopes that this email approach will make everything better. I'm feeling very positive about the response in the email. I stop and read email when it's good for me, and the quality of what I'm receiving is very high.

"Now Ann has baited me into promiscuously spiking my anxiety stew with carnalized onions..."

Ha ha ha. My favorite kind of comment — taking an ingredient from an old post and adding it to the material in the post under discussion. It's fusion commenting, like fusion cooking... and the metaphor in the comment is cooking.

And I love that I've got a tag for "onions," though I see various posts with onions that did not get the tag, including posts with the tag "onion rings," onion rings being a special, niche topic here on the blog. Remember these carnalized onion rings? And of course, these ("I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the 'O' of an onion ring is a vagina symbol").

Speaking of comments, I can see some of you are saying I'm not giving you the kind of post you like anymore. There are at least 4 reasons for that:

1. The world is locked down, so things don't just happen anymore, not the kind of things that delight and intrigue. The usual places still have their articles, but they're filling space. They're doing what they have to do, and I can smell the fakeness, the ennui. I have my standard, and I'll read until something crosses the line for me. 

2. The standard on this blog is not big over small. I'm not here to repeat headlines about what the President just did. In fact, if the headline is big, I'd rather go small.

3. I'm not interested in throwing my weight onto one side or the other, and if I have nothing to add, there's no reason to write about these things. With Trump, I have distanced myself from the relentless haters, but I'm in no mood to encourage him either. I'm waiting for the next few weeks to pass, hunkering down. I could spring out and denounce him, but I don't join mobs. 

4. It's Christmas Eve. Talk about keeping a distance. What can you see from a distance? "When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. He shouted at the top of his voice, 'What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?'"

"I'll just say this once, Althouse. Abstaining from voting is neither courageous nor principled."

"You don't have to love a candidate or adhere a million percent to his political philosophy in order to vote for him. It is your duty, which you appear to wish to neglect, to decide which candidate is less bad than the other and cast your vote. Anything else is cowardly."

Writes Tyrone Slothrop in the comments to yesterday's post "Galumphing toward the apocalypse."

I saw that last night but did not respond. What's different about today? 

Maybe the fact that I'd just read this by Sarah Hoyt over at Instapundit: 

"Forget about his manners; stop stomping your foot about how crass he is; and for the love of heaven stop holding your nose up high and pretending you’re too good for this: a vote for Trump is a vote for the constitutional republic."

Both Hoyt and Slothrop are saying something about Us the People Who Abstain that might be true of some of us, but is not true of me. And this method of using insults to push people to vote is ugly. Are they doing it because they think it's effective? I don't yield to bullies. Are they doing it to display their own staunchness? Does it feel like humor from their side? It falls flat for me. 

Notice how Hoyt and Slothrop contradict each other. Slothrop appeals to my vanity as he insists that I be  a good person — not cowardly and neglectful of duty. Hoyt denounces vanity and insists that I not get involved in any sense of my personal goodness. Is this about me or isn't it? I can harmonize Slothrop and Hoyt by saying Hoyt is also appealing to my vanity because she portrays the abstainer as snooty — with her nose in the air, acting like she's "too good for this."

Slothrop is distinctly wrong when he says voting is a duty. No. It is not. Like speaking, like religion, like getting married, like having sexual relations, voting is a right, and a right entails the power to decline to exercise it. It is horrible to be forced to speak, forced to take on a religion, forced to get married, forced to have sex — these are loathsome impositions. 

Hoyt is wrong — in my case at least — to attribute a refusal to vote for Trump to taking offense at his personal style — his manners, his crassness. I happen to enjoy his personal style. You can see that if you've been reading my blog over the last 5 years. I love freedom of expression, and I feel that I get him. He's a New Yorker. He's a comedian. He's free and daring. I like all that.  I do have some concern about the wellbeing of my fellow citizens who hate him at some instinctual level, but I don't think they ought to be appeased for losing or threatening to lose their minds.

Trump has his style and I have mine. If it makes you want to stomp your foot, go ahead. You can keep "stomping your foot about" how cruelly neutral I am. You're free. You've got your right and I've got mine. 

How the NYT and the Washington Post have caught up on the New York Post Hunter Biden story.

The NYT has this story, which, it says, went up 11 hours ago: "Allegation on Biden Prompts Pushback From Social Media Companies/Joe Biden’s campaign rejected assertions made in a published report that were based on unverified material from Trump allies. Facebook and Twitter found the story dubious enough to limit access to it on their platform." 

The reaction of the social media companies — censorship — is most prominent, followed by Biden's reaction — rejection of the assertions and questioning of the material. The social media reaction is presented as reinforcing the Biden campaign rejection and — it is implied — justified by the "dubious" quality of the report. That the NY Post put the material in a news article isn't mentioned in the headline.

The Washington Post story, which went up at 10:45 CDT, has a much shorter headline, stressing the aggression of Trump supporters and the lateness of the attack: "Three weeks before Election Day, Trump allies go after Hunter — and Joe — Biden." 

From the NYT article: