"[A]nti-queer' crimes more than tripled in [Berlin] between 2016 and 2025. Violent anti-queer crimes rose by half."

"Both violent and nonviolent offenses peaked in 2023 and have fallen since the city began its strategy, but both types of crimes remain historically elevated.  Much of that effort has focused on countering growing hostility from Germany’s far right; in Berlin, far-right ideology was the most frequently cited specific motivation for homophobic attacks in the city in 2025. But on Sunday, after the authorities said the perpetrator had attempted to join the Islamist terrorist group ISIS, community leaders said they were increasingly worried about threats from a wider range of political and religious motivations...."

From "Even Before Attack, Berlin’s Gay Community Felt ‘More and More Unsafe’/The killing of a woman in what officials called an act of Islamist terrorism rattled a community that has seen a surge in threats, including from the far right" (NYT gift link).

"Some people at the memorial on Sunday said German leaders had contributed to a sense of insecurity. They singled out the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which has climbed in national polls with a platform that defines a family as a man and a woman with children. Others criticized Friedrich Merz, the chancellor, who defended a decision not to fly a Pride flag over the federal parliament building last year by saying Parliament was 'not a circus tent.'..."

"If the bare-chested, muscled mixed martial arts fighters of the U.F.C. match that President Trump hosted on Flag Day were the poster guys for MAGA’s image of masculinity..."

"... then the pregnant women of Trump world are one half of their feminine counterparts. Along with the sheath-clad, lip-filled, pageant-haired Mar-a-Lago set, they offer an image of idealized womanhood that gives literal shape to the pronatalist movement. 'It almost feels like a memo went out,' said Jill Filipovic, the host of the 'Week in Women' podcast. 'They have quite intentionally opted to present themselves as, "I am really pregnant, and this is what women were chosen to do," and they are happy to say that both with their looks and their mouths.' If in doubt, simply consider posts on X and Instagram last month from [Katie] Miller, who was then some nine months pregnant. 'In honor of Mother’s Day,' she wrote, 'a reminder that peak feminism is having babies. The most radical thing a woman can do is embrace her biological destiny.' Along with her words came a portrait taken from the side, in which Miller is shown wearing low-slung, unbuttoned jeans and a black sports bra, her dark hair cascading in waves down her back. Like the stretchy and black knit Milly dress with a tulip on the front worn by Usha Vance for a military mothers celebration at the White House, and the form-fitting gowns worn by Leavitt and Miller to the White House Correspondents’ dinner in April, the photograph placed Miller’s rounded stomach front and center, enshrining her pregnancy for all to see...."

The NYT fashion writer Vanessa Friedman inspects the fecund right-wing bodies in "The Politics and Power of the Pregnancy Image/Usha Vance, along with Katie Miller and Karoline Leavitt, shows how much is said by an expectant silhouette, without anyone saying a word" (NYT).

Here's how Katie induced Vanessa to propagate adjectives:

"Wordle’s Hard Mode Is Actually Easier, 730 Million Games Show."

The NYT reports, and here's a gift link. I've always played in hard mode. I don't know if that's because my intuition told me it was easier or because I could see it would be more fun, but it certainly wasn't in order to make it harder on myself.

Players in hard mode solve in fewer turns on average.... Those in hard mode have a lower rate of failing to solve in six turns.... Hard mode seems to help players avoid poor choices.... Standard-mode players have more freedom but often don’t know how to use it. Not needing to use revealed letters, they have many more choices on their second and third turns.

David Epstein, author of “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better,” said in an interview that in any area of life, “when options are really large” there’s a tendency to “back out of a decision or make a poor one.” Citing the cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, he said the brain is mostly not for thinking, but for preventing you from thinking. “It’s wired for convenience, the easy thing, the first thing to pop to mind,” he said, while constraints can paradoxically lead to creativity and productivity....

I get it. We're supposed to think: The choice of hard mode or easy mode in Wordle is like a choice we make in how to live our life. And that's why you might want to stick to tradition (if you are conservative) or have government experts eliminate most of the choices (if you are progressive).

If you had to argue that birds are right wing or left wing, what side would you take and how would you support your position?

That's a prompt I used on Grok this morning after seeing the typo — speako, really — I'd made in a prompt earlier this morning when I used AI to identify a bird. It was a Rose-breasted Grosbeak. I'd said: 

"It's got black and white on top and white on the bottom and there's some right orange patches."

"right" = bright, of course.

Meade said, "Yeah, 'right' orange patches sounds nazi." Hence, my new prompt.

Do not click for more if you don't want to read AI-written material, but I do think this one is at least worth scanning. It's a crisp outline. Grok takes the position that birds are right wing:

"I'm reading this crazy article in The New Yorker...."

I wrote, in June 2025. 

I can't believe I need to take this guy seriously enough to worry about him, but The New Yorker wants me to feel that I do. ... I see I've written about Yarvin before. Did I take him seriously or was he even funnier last time?... The one old post... is about a NYT interview with him. So his visibility to me has solely been a consequence of elite liberal media telling me to worry about him.... It was liberal media asserting that he's important to conservatives. Is he?!

This morning, I'm seeing that "crazy article" won an award: "The New Yorker’s Ava Kofman Wins a 2026 National Magazine Award/The prize, for a Profile of the far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin...."

To report the winning Profile, Kofman delved deeply into the writings of Yarvin, who popularized the concept of being “red-pilled”—a riff on a scene in “The Matrix”—and turned it into a rallying cry among conservatives. A former tech designer, Yarvin has advocated for “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and called for the establishment of an American monarchy, arguing in 2011 that Donald Trump is “biologically suited” to reign as king....

I still can't believe I need to take this guy seriously enough to worry about him, so please nudge me if I'm languishing in blissful complacency.

"He wants to use his presidency not only to slash the country’s budget but to wage an ideological war and rewire the country’s mentality."

"He wants to dismantle what he calls the 'aberrant' concepts of social justice and economic equality and make the nation’s core principles capitalism, the free market, a limited state and individualism. 'We are at war,' Mr. Milei said at a right-wing festival last year, and added: 'We are fighting a cultural struggle, an ideological battle, a war for the survival of our freedom.' At political rallies and international summits, in public policies and a deluge of social media posts, Mr. Milei has relentlessly sought to infuse Argentina with his libertarian ideals. And turn it into a model for the world. A nation where people are loath to eat alone or drink a cup of mate, the national infusion, without sharing with the person next to them is embracing a leader whose fundamental message is that people should fend for themselves. 'He is trying to break our DNA,' Juan Grabois, an opposition lawmaker, said of Mr. Milei. 'To destroy the communal identity of our people.'... Laziness to Mr. Milei is a vice stemming from years of left-leaning governments that turned society to indolence by giving citizens generous benefits...."

From "Javier Milei Wants to Rewire the Argentine Mind/Argentina’s right-wing president has tamed the country’s runaway inflation. Now he wants to transform its values" (NYT)(gift link, because there's a lot going on over there).

And here he is in his superhero costume:

"I want you to imagine a guy today, if R. Crumb never existed, but he emerged as R. Crumb today and put that work out. He would 100% be labeled in the Andrew Tate camp, right?"

 

Duncan Trussell had sent Joe Rogan an R. Crumb drawing, and it sets Joe off:

Least NEW! thing promoted as "NEW!"

As is my wont, I'm scanning headlines at Memeorandum this morning, and I came across this:

I'm not clicking on that. I'm just blogging to say that I graduated from law school in 1981, before the Federalist Society was created to deal with the problem that law schools only presented what the NYT would now like to repackage as an alternative. This "alternative" was mind-crushingly pervasive back then, and those who made that so are responsible for the reaction they caused. I went to law school believing I'd have the opportunity to participate in a rich debate. That didn't happen.

I see the author here is Jeffrey Toobin. I know you must say the Toobin-specific things that you always say. That's already an entry in my Dictionary of Received Idea. 

"... Clavicular said he would vote for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, over Vice President JD Vance because he preferred Mr. Newsom’s looks to Mr. Vance’s. "

"'It wasn’t, like, a political statement at all,' Clavicular said later of his criticism of Mr. Vance. 'I was just saying he’s fat.' Of late, Clavicular has begun to refer to all politics as 'jester' — an insult in the looksmaxxing community that refers to a foolish waste of time.... Back in the van, [his female admirer] asked Clavicular if he thought looksmaxxing was 'inherently right-wing.' 'No,” he said. 'At the end of the day, I have such an influence over the movement that I could bring it in any direction I want.'"

From "Handsome at Any Cost Braden Peters, known as Clavicular, has emerged as a beacon for a group of narcissistic, status-obsessed young men. He wants to take his fixation with 'looksmaxxing' mainstream" (NYT).

"I've got people in my family that are to the right of Attila the Hun. And when people tell me, like, 'How can you platform that person on your show?'..."

"I go, I platform my uncle every Thanksgiving. And by the way, I love him. He's a three-dimensional human being who has qualities that I really admire, things about him. And we've lost that. We've lost the ability to love people, because we litmus test at every point."

Said John Stewart.

For a contrasting opinion, here's Ben Shapiro savaging Tucker Carlson for platforming Nick Fuentes:

The New York Times embeds Erika Kirk in the tradition of Right Wing Women.

I'm reading "Erika Kirk Takes a Leadership Role in Turning Point USA/After years spent emphasizing family life in the public eye, she will now run the group her husband built."

She is one of a raft of conservative female leaders right now who are building prominent careers and public-facing lives while emphasizing a particular message: telling young women to focus on getting married and starting a family, rather than having a public-facing life....

Oh, the contradiction! You advocated prioritizing home life, so what are you doing here? It feels so rude to confront the new widow like that. But perhaps the NYT feels it doesn't really count because it's talking about a whole "raft" of women.

"Unfortunately, when you have a society where you do have ubiquitous crime, you do need some kind of an authoritarian leadership."

"Not saying you need tyranny, not saying you need a dictator, but you need fucking laws and you need rule of law. And sometimes those people come off very harsh and very uncaring and unloving and you know, the total opposite for, like, the reason why people voted for Jimmy Carter, I think, 'cause Jimmy Carter represented like a, like, a genuinely sweet good guy. Right. But, like, look how that presidency was a disaster 'cause they were all working against him for sure. And on top of that, it's, like, hard to, like, you gotta gotta be a bit of a hard ass if you wanna run the world...."

 Said Joe Rogan, on his #2370 podcast, transcript and audio, here, at Podscribe.

"Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that in a time of hyper-visible conflict... the self-help message of the day tells its readers that it’s perfectly OK to turn inward..."

"... even if that means ignoring the apparent travails of others. It’s a message retrofitted for appeal in a moment when every glance at a phone screen surfaces wrenching images of catastrophe.... 'The Courage to Be Disliked' has sold more than 10 million copies. 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck' has been on the New York Times best-seller list for more than 300 weeks since it came out in 2016. In September comes the much-anticipated 'Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves — and How to Find Our Way Back.'... 'Sometimes we need to say, 'Is this my problem to solve?' said Dr. Ingrid Clayton, the 'Fawning' author, in an interview. 'Can I sit on my hands?'..."

From "Is Today’s Self-Help Teaching Everyone to Be a Jerk? Draw boundaries. Protect your peace. Worry less about pleasing others. The prevailing (and best-selling) wisdom of the day encourages an inward turn" (NYT).

And by "to Be a Jerk," the NYT might mean to be right wing (where "right wing" means an individual centered in one's own life and trusting that other people can be self-centered too):

"Wow. Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women. I’m sure that will poll well…."

Tweeted Ted Cruz, quoted in "Ted Cruz is latest to defend Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle ad ripped as 'Nazi Propaganda'" (NY Post).

I already blogged Sweeneygate yesterday, and I wouldn't bring it up again — certainly not just because Cruz weighed in — but it resonates with this New York Times "Opinions" podcast I'm in the middle of listening to this morning:

"Thin, White and Right: The Ideal Christian Woman/How skinny became a conservative calling card."

That's a gift link that goes to the NYT page with the audio and a transcript. Keep in mind that there's an idea that there's something right wing/Nazi about beautiful white women. The NYT isn't quite saying that. The columnist Jessica Grose, interviewed at the link, is working on something (presumably) more sophisticated):

"... Yarvin proposes that nations should eventually be broken up into a 'patchwork' of statelets, like Singapore or Dubai, each with its own sovereign ruler."

"The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp. (How the board itself would be selected is unclear, but Yarvin has suggested that airline pilots—'a fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others. What’s not to like?'—could manage the transition between regimes.) To prevent a C.E.O. from staging a military coup, the board members would have access to cryptographic keys that would allow them to disarm all government weapons, from nuclear missiles down to small arms, with the push of a button.

I'm reading this crazy article in The New Yorker, "Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America/The reactionary blogger’s call for a monarch to rule the country once seemed like a joke. Now the right is ready to bend the knee" by Ava Kofman.

I can't believe I need to take this guy seriously enough to worry about him, but The New Yorker wants me to feel that I do. The part about the pilots cracked me up. It's a joke, right?!

Adding tags to this post, I see I've written about Yarvin before. Did I take him seriously or was he even funnier last time? I'll publish this post, click on the tag, then update.

ADDED: The one old post — here, last January — is about a NYT interview with him. So his visibility to me has solely been a consequence of elite liberal media telling me to worry about him. The NYT interview is "Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening." But it wasn't the conservatives who elevated him to the point where I noticed him. It was liberal media asserting that he's important to conservatives. Is he?! 

"The TV show 'Girls' is a right-wing show.... [That's] some labeling we’re grafting onto this thing after the fact."

"But what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences.... about [what]... society wishes were true about these people. So my thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right wing art..."

I'm listening to Jonathan Keeperman on Ross Douthat's podcast in an episode called "The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Offensive":

 

The quote above is Keeperman's. Douthat responds: "Then you’re saying all great art is somehow right wing." He thinks there can be some great art that is "left coded," but he agrees about "Girls," because "it’s a scabrous satire of a particular kind of upper middle class lifestyle in a liberal city."

Keeperman denies that he's saying "if I like it, therefore it’s right wing art, or if it tells the truth [it's right wing art]." Click on the embedded video if you want to hear Keeperman clarify or hear Douthat wedge in the concept of "vitalism" ("a celebration of individuality, strength, excellence, and an anxiety about equality and democracy as... enemies of human greatness").

That reminds me of the time — back in 2005 — I incurred the wrath of lefties by saying "To be a great artist is inherently right wing."

But back to "Girls." Why talk about "Girls" now? The reason for me is that Lena Dunham has a new essay in The New Yorker: "Why I Broke Up with New York/Most people accept the city’s chaos as a toll for an expansive life. It took me several decades to realize that I could go my own way."

"See, one, one of the weirdest things is if you are on the wrong side of their ideology, like if you are aligned with Trump, like RFK Jr is now all of a sudden."

"I've seen like people on the left that are trying to dismiss a lot of the things that he says about additives in food, about atrazine, fluoride in the water, all these different things. Because now they're connecting not having toxins in your food with a right wing idea.... It's so bananas. Like even being healthy fitness, fitness, they're connecting fitness with a right wing idea."

Said Joe Rogan, 48 minutes into his 3+ hour podcast with JD Vance. It's an excellent conversation, and I was particularly interested in what Joe said, because he's been cagey about which side he's on. You can hear that he's concerned that he's getting classified as right-wing.

Later, 2 hours and 7 minutes in, Joe says this about Kamala Harris:

"Attacks without clear motivation aren’t unusual and have increased, researchers say, in part as a reflection of the ideologies that swirl together on social media..."

"... and gaming platforms, creating a toxic soup of grievances with no cohesive political agenda. Authorities have cited unclear or overlapping beliefs in recent plots or violence where, for example, white nationalism melded with misogynistic 'incel' subcultures, or when a member of a satanic neo-Nazi group invoked Islamist militancy in what the Justice Department called a 'a diabolical cocktail of ideologies.'"

From "Lack of motive in Trump attack frustrates public, but fits a pattern/Terrorism analysts say Trump’s would-be assassin is among a string of high-profile assailants with unknown or murky reasons for turning violent" (WaPo).

I thought at least you could say that shooting multiple bullets at Trump's head was anti-Trump, but apparently not.

We're supposed to stand back while the officials mull it all over, perhaps to tell us years from now that one can never really know the inside of anyone else's head. But until that modern-day equivalent of the Warren Report issues from the earnest authorities, please note that the Justice Department has bellied up to the bar of your mind and ordered a diabolical cocktail of white nationalism melded with misogynistic incel subculture and garnished with satanic neo-Nazism. Drink deeply and ideate about the right-wing morsels that might have swirled in the toxic soup of young Mr. Crooks's mind.

"... Vance offers what right-wing politicians have always peddled to downwardly mobile Americans: the quasi-spiritual saga of family-bred individual uplift..."

"... which serves to neatly underwrite the broader political fable of great-leader salvation.... As 'our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods, cheap foreign labor, and in years to come with cheap Chines fentanyl,' Vance announced with relief, 'I had a guardian angel'—his Ohio grandmother, immortalized as 'Meemaw' in Hillbilly Elegy. The rapt convention crowd took up the chant of 'MEEMAW' in jubilant recognition, and thrilled to Vance’s later parable of Meemaw’s cache of handguns. After she had died in 2005, he related in folksy relish, 'we went through her things [and] we found 19 loaded handguns,' strewn throughout various corners of her house. The convention crowd hooted and applauded in recognition, and then Vance delivered another redemptive moral: As Meemaw contended with the challenges of aging and illness, she made sure that 'she was within arm’s length of whatever she needed to protect her family.' Here the crowd plunged into a reflexive chant of 'USA!'.... What does the domestic arsenal of an aging relative have to do with the glories of our Republic?... A bellicose citizenry must rally to save and bolster its imperiled birthright by any means necessary—under a great leader’s tutelage, of course."

Writes Chris Lehmann, in "J.D. Vance’s Phony Populism Thrilled the RNC. The Rest of Us Shouldn’t Be Fooled. The vice presidential nominee pitched himself as an avatar of the working class. Don’t believe the hype" (The Nation).

Hey, at least cover your tracks if you're writing about a book you haven't read. It's not "Meemaw." Its Mamaw.

"I’m not a journalist. I’m not in the media. This is a military headquarters for a populist revolt."

This is how we motivate people. This show is an activist show. If you watch this show, you’re a foot soldier. We call it the Army of the Awakened.... Immigration, spending — it’s the lack of confidence and self-loathing of their own civilization and their own culture. That’s the spiritual part that’s at the base. Immigration is just the manifestation of a loss of self-confidence. And it’s shocking...."

Said Steve Bannon, quoted in "My Unsettling Interview With Steve Bannon" (NYT) (free access link). 

The "me" is David Brooks, who says: