"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:

"Only the National Rally appears in a position to secure enough seats for an absolute majority. If it does, Mr. Macron will have no other choice..."

"... than to appoint [28-year-old Jordan] Bardella prime minister. He would then form a cabinet and control domestic policy. Presidents have traditionally retained control over foreign policy and defense matters in such scenarios, but the Constitution does not always offer clear guidelines. That would put an anti-immigrant, Euroskeptic far-right party governing a country that has been at the heart of the European project. Mr. Bardella could clash with Mr. Macron over issues like France’s contribution to the European Union budget or support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.... If the National Rally fails to secure an absolute majority — Mr. Bardella has said he would not govern without one — Mr. Macron could be facing an unmanageable lower house, with two big blocs on the right and left opposed to him. His much-reduced centrist coalition, squeezed between the extremes, would be reduced to relative powerlessness...."

From "Four Takeaways From France’s Snap Election/It was a big day for the far-right National Rally. Just how big will not be clear until a second round of voting is over" (NYT).

"There was one really good thing about 'Hillbilly Elegy,' meaning the response to it: People were actually genuinely trying to understand something about a part of the country they didn’t understand."

"But there was something that wasn’t so good, which is that people were looking for some interpretive lens for Trump’s voters that never really asked them to challenge their priors or to rethink what they felt about those people. And I realized that I was being used as this whisperer of a phenomenon that some people really did want to understand, but some people didn’t. And the more that I felt like, not an explainer and a defender, but part of what I thought was wrong about the liberal establishment, the more that I felt this need to go very strongly away from it...."

Said J.D. Vance in an interview with Ross Douthat, "What J.D. Vance Believes" (NYT). This is a long interview, and that is a free-access link.

ADDED: This interview made me want to go back and read the reviews of "Hillbilly Elegy," which became a best-seller in the summer of 2016, before the shock of Donald Trump actually winning the election. I bought the book then myself, and I had the sense that it was written for liberals... who were pretty much exactly like what Vance describes in his new interview. 

"On one side or the other — one side or the other is going to win. I don’t know. I mean, there can be a way of working — a way of living together peacefully..."

"... but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So it’s not like you are going to split the difference."

Said Justice Alito, quoted in "Justice Alito Caught on Tape Discussing How Battle for America 'Can’t Be Compromised'" (Rolling Stone). 

Alito made these remarks in conversation at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner on June 3.... His comments were recorded by Lauren Windsor, a liberal documentary filmmaker.... She asked questions of the justice as though she were a religious conservative.... 

The recording... captures Windsor approaching Alito at the event and reminding him that they spoke at the same function the year before, when she asked him a question about political polarization. In the intervening year, she tells the justice, her views on the matter had changed. “I don’t know that we can negotiate with the left in the way that needs to happen for the polarization to end,” Windsor says. “I think that it’s a matter of, like, winning.”

Alito responded "I think you're probably right" and then said the lines quoted above. I consider his remarks anodyne. When people are ideologically polarized, they don't go in for compromises. They keep fighting. Just like Rolling Stone is keeping fighting with this article and its inflammatory headline. Alito doesn't use the word "battle" or say anything about a "Battle for America." He just responds to the instigator Windsor by observing that ideologues are not compromisers.

Alito talks about sides without putting himself on one of the sides. He doesn't join Windsor in the use of the pronoun "we." His words are neutral: "one side or the other," "there can be a way," "it’s difficult," "there are differences," "They" (meaning the "differences"). It must have been frustrating to Windsor. And yet, here's Rolling Stone serving them up as if Alito had declared himself a bitter ender battling for Christian Nationalism. Ludicrous!

"For progressives, waiting to have children has also become a kind of ethical imperative."

"Gender equality and female empowerment demand that women’s self-advancement not be sacrificed on the altar of motherhood.... Unreserved enthusiasm for having children can come across as essentially reactionary.... Yet it wasn’t that long ago that Republicans and Democrats fought over who could rightfully claim to be the party of 'family values.'... After [Bill] Clinton was impeached in the wake of his own family-values hypocrisy and George W. Bush was elected with the help of energized evangelical voters, family-friendly rhetoric became anathema to liberals — perceived as phony, intrusive and toxic...."

From "The Success Narratives of Liberal Life Leave Little Room for Having Children" (NYT).

The essay — by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, authors of  “What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice” — has to end with hope for progressives. They're given this admonition:

[P]rogressives must not let partisan loyalties stop them from thinking about the ways in which having children does or does not express their values, and what shape they really want their lives to take. Children are too important to allow them to fall victim to the culture wars.

How do you read that and not jump back to that line I put in boldface above: "Gender equality and female empowerment demand that women’s self-advancement not be sacrificed on the altar of motherhood." Of course, children are extremely important, but — watch out — it will be too late if you release one into your life and it doesn't "express [your] values" or fit the "shape [you] really want [your life] to take." You will have "sacrificed" your "self-advancement... on the altar of motherhood."

How do you get out of that bind without drinking the “phony, intrusive,” right-wing toxin? I thought of the answer: You fall in love....

I rushed to search the essay for the word "love." It's not there. Maybe it's "essentially reactionary."

"'There’s just one question on voting day. Do you want an Islamized Europe or a European Europe?'"

"This stark choice was posed by Marion Maréchal, a rising star of the French far right, at the launch of her party’s campaign for the European elections in June.... While Ms. Maréchal’s Reconquest party sulfurously accuses elites of orchestrating a Great Replacement of Christians by Muslims, it seeks its own place in the corridors of power. Across the continent, the aim of far-right parties like hers is not to exit the bloc but, increasingly, to take it over. In this project, they have a model: Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy....  Ms. Meloni’s group, dominated by her Brothers of Italy party and Poland’s Law and Justice, isn’t the only European home for far-right forces. There’s also the Identity and Democracy group, which houses France’s National Rally and Italy’s League party.... Far from seeking to break up the European Union, these far-right groups are now bidding to put their own stamp on it — to create what Ms. Maréchal calls a 'civilizational Europe' rather than the technocratic 'commission’s version of Europe.' Ms. Meloni, for her part, seems convinced the two can go together."

Writes David Broder, in "The Far Right Wants to Take Over Europe, and She’s Leading the Way" (NYT).

This David Broder is the author of a 2023 book titled "Mussolini’s Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy." Don't confuse him with David S. Broder, the Washington Post journalist, who died in 2011 at the age of 81. I accidentally used my David Broder tag for this post, but have removed it.

"Why is the political right so hostile to Ukraine?"

"It seems like the kind of freedom-fighting, Western-tilting country they’re supposed to adore."

Asks Gail Collins, in "The Conversation" at the NYT.

Her interlocutor, Bret Stephens, answers:

Our colleague David French offered what I think is the smartest answer to your question in a recent column. It comes down to this: general nuttiness connected to sundry Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden conspiracy theories, plus a belief that Putin (a former K.G.B. agent) somehow represents manly Christian values in the face of effeminate wokeness, plus a kind of George Costanza 'do the opposite' mentality in which whatever Biden is for, they must be against."

"The extreme left may be morally no better than the extreme right. But in America the extreme left has almost no political power..."

"... while the extreme right controls one house of Congress and a number of states.... So, yes, let’s hold college presidents’ feet to the fire when they bungle on a major issue. And let’s denounce calls for violence wherever they come from. But let’s also focus on the biggest threat to our system of higher education, which is coming not from left-wing student activists but instead from right-wing politicians."

Writes Paul Krugman, in "The Biggest Threat to America’s Universities" (NYT).

Key word: "extreme."

The extremes on either side are perceived from the point where the observer is situated. Thus, to Krugman, "the extreme left has almost no political power."

"Musk appears to have learned the lesson that ardent Zionism can function as an alibi for antisemitism."

"As advertisers fled X last week, he suddenly announced that he was going to ban the pro-Palestinian slogan 'From the river to the sea,' as well as 'decolonization,' a buzzword on the anti-Zionist left. The move made a mockery of the ostensible free speech absolutism that was Musk’s excuse for allowing so much antisemitism on X in the first place. It did nothing to curb overt white nationalists on the site, many of whom had celebrated Musk’s 'actual truth' post. But it was enough to earn him plaudits from some Jewish and Israeli spokespeople...."

 
Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "Why on Earth Are Jewish Leaders Praising Elon Musk?" (NYT).

"[Javier] Milei has pledged to slash spending and taxes, close Argentina’s central bank and replace the nation’s currency with the U.S. dollar."

"He has also proposed banning abortion, loosening regulations on guns and considering only countries that want to 'fight against socialism' as Argentina’s allies, often naming the United States and Israel as examples. In his victory speech, he attacked the political 'caste' that he says has enriched themselves at the expense of average Argentines, saying 'today is the end to Argentine decadence.'...

From "Argentina Elects Javier Milei in Victory for Far Right/Argentina’s next president is a libertarian economist whose brash style and embrace of conspiracy theories has parallels with those of Donald J. Trump" (NYT).

Is he like Trump? We're told "his strong adherence to a libertarian ideology... has led him to support, in theory, policies like open immigration and drug decriminalization." The similarities? "He harshly attacks his critics and the news media, he calls the scientific consensus on climate change a socialist plot, he argues that a shadowy cabal controls the country and he even has an unruly hairdo that has become an online meme."

An example of his rhetoric: "The state is a pedophile in a kindergarten... with the children chained up and bathed in Vaseline."

Key fact: Inflation in Argentina is over 140%.

"Progressive belief isn’t purely an elite phenomenon, but the Great Awokening has largely wielded influence through what Nate Silver calls the 'indigo blob'..."

"... a center-left network of schools and foundations and media enterprises and human resources departments. It has not really sought power through elections — in part, I would argue, because its project is fundamentally therapeutic and educational, placing soulcraft before statecraft. But also because when it’s been tested at the ballot box, it’s been a loser.... On the right-wing populist side, you have a rather different phenomenon, a political revolution — the earthquake of Trumpism, the similar shocks in Europe — that far outruns any theory of what it’s about or what it’s doing and leaves the intelligentsia rushing to catch up...."

 
Writes Ross Douthat, in "Conservative Thinkers Didn’t Create Trumpism" (NYT).

Here's Nate Silver's piece from last July, "Twitter, Elon and the Indigo Blob/The line between expertise and politics has become increasingly blurry. The demise of 'Old Twitter' could help to reverse that." ("Left-progressives, liberals, centrists, and moderate or non-MAGA conservatives all share a common argumentative space. I call this space the Indigo Blob, because it’s somewhere between left-wing (blue) and centrist (purple). The space largely excludes MAGA/right-wing conservatives — around 30 percent of the country....")

"Once a thinker begins to conceive of politics as a pitched battle between the righteous and those who seek the country’s outright annihilation, extraordinary possibilities open up."

Writes Damon Linker, in "Get to Know the Influential Conservative Intellectuals Who Help Explain G.O.P. Extremism" (NYT).

A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is trying to convince people... that the country is on the verge of collapse. Some catastrophists take it a step further and suggest that officials might contemplate overthrowing liberal democracy in favor of revolutionary regime change or even imposing a right-wing dictatorship on the country.... If Mr. Trump manages to win the presidency again in 2024, many of these intellectual catastrophists could be ready and willing to justify deeds that could well bring American liberal democracy to its knees.

Who's the catastrophist here? The writer of this article or the people he's writing about? 

Who is he writing about?