I personally find that when there’s a confrontation between everything I love – scientific inquiry, reason, cosmopolitanism, secularism, the emancipation of women … and everything I hate – stone-age fascism – it’s a no-brainer.

I felt exhilaration on the eleventh of September. I feel slightly ashamed to say that, in the view of the fact that so many people lost their lives that day, but when the day was over and I’d been through the gamut of rage and disgust and nausea … when I went into it with myself, I was pleased to find I was exuberant: Okay. Right. I’ll never get bored fighting against these people, and their defeat will be absolute. It will be complete.

Turns out we have quite a few, so we have to up the physical protection of the Capitol, authorize commissions, etc., etc. Latest thing is that a bunch of them want to blow up the Capitol during Biden’s State of the Union address.

So okay, Trump-radicalized home-grown terror cells pose a terrible threat to the nation and we need to act on this.

Non-citizen terrorists are a whole nother thing. Most people I think would agree that a country doesn’t troll for foreign terrorists held in Syrian camps just to add more spice to the stew. Yet this is one way of thinking about what England has been faced with in the long court case of Shamima Begum, who, having left England to join ISIS, lost her citizenship.

ISIS futures don’t look very robust at the moment, and Begum wants back in; and plenty of well-intentioned people argue that she was young and stupid and groomed when she did what she did, and that she should at least be allowed back in to argue her case for renewal of British citizenship.

Yet there’s a pretty solid bottom line here: British intelligence services have determined that Begum remains a really dangerous person who should not under any circumstances be allowed back to England. They’d rather not go into detail, since that would compromise all sorts of people and things, but intelligence assures us that Begum remains a significant threat to national security.

An appeals court did rule that she should indeed be allowed back in Britain to plead her case; but now the Supreme Court has unanimously rejected that appeal, noting that the court of appeal “mistakenly believed that, when an individual’s right to have a fair hearing… came into conflict with the requirements of national security, her right to a fair hearing must prevail.”

UD, who has followed Begum’s case closely [scroll down], has long shared with her readers her confidence that Begum will never be allowed back into the country she betrayed and attacked. The decision of the court does not surprise UD, and neither does its unanimity. The way forward for Begum is to attempt Bangladeshi citizenship (her parents are from Bangladesh); and, if that fails, she should try to gather funds from supporters to buy citizenship in a country that offers that possibility. Vanuatu is hot at the moment.

Here’s an excellent, brief, 2018 essay about the trend – especially among a group of Catholic scholars in America – to dump liberal democracy for theocracy. Shadi Hamid’s focus is fundamentalist Islam, but his argument applies as well to the emergence, here, of intellectual briefs for what UD calls a Cathophate.

Ol’ UD remains truly shocked right down to the ground that respectable American academics openly argue for a future of religious tyranny in this country, of “Christian authoritarianism — muscular paternalism, with government enforcing social solidarity for religious reasons.” I mean to say that the moment I grasped what Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen and company were about, I was fucking gobsmacked, and I still am. I’m still all of a mucksweat about it. I’m like in permanent Margaret Dumont shock.

Chalk it up to UD‘s naivete + emotional instability if you like, but I actually don’t get why all sentient Americans aren’t shitting themselves over being told by Mariolatric Madoffs that they need only invest in the Edmund Waldstein Radiant Future Fund to realize Total Happiness Now and Forever. God does not want you for an Individual Liberty friend! In Bondage and Submission lies Salvation!

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Whew. Hold on. Getting a little hot here…

… Margaret Dumont only pretended to be scandalized by the twisted Marx Brothers; similarly, maybe UD‘s sublimating her actual erotic attraction to The Story of O, Saved by Flagellants… ? To the idea of a total male total priesthood running their switches over her bum… ?

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Yet. As Hamid asks, “Is a lack of meaning really worse than a lack of freedom? … What liberalism’s critics appear unable, or unwilling, to address is whether a lack of meaning is a worse problem to have than a lack of freedom.” Maybe liberalism – “the political order that privileges non-negotiable rights, personal freedoms, and individual autonomy” – issues in some degree of conceptual confusion, and maybe even in a difficulty or refusal to commit oneself to clear philosophical/theological convictions – but is this really so unbearable a position to be in that one’s only option is rule by monks who think burning heretics at the stake is key to good governance?

“Endless free choice,” as Deneen disparagingly calls it, is a dead end. Choice needs to be a means to something else, but to what? Legally based religious systems—which only Islam among the largest religions potentially offers—quite consciously seek to restrict choice in the name of virtue and salvation…

And that’s the thing. Deneen can argue all he likes about the disabling side effects of individual liberty, but what he’s really about is damnation or salvation. The Medieval Church wafts you upward; free thought’s an express train to the abyss.

As the doorbell ringers at the beginning of The Book of Mormon put it: Have fun in hell.

The right. Note the last word in that sentence. Of course the ultraorthodox have long since alienated the political left in Israel; now, Haviv Rettig Gur observes, they’ve lost much of the right. And forget the center.

That leaves… that leaves nothing at all. That leaves the haredim where – in principle – they’ve always wanted to be. More or less where a lot of don’t mess with Texans wanted to be before the lights and the water went out. On their own. Snug as a bug in their own little rug. Dreaming of secession. Stop the world I want to get off.

And if checking out of civilization means that a Jew living in a first world country in the twenty-first century conducts his wretched existence at a seventeenth-century level… if it means that a contemporary, proto-cultic Texan enthusiastically endorses for her entire political leadership degenerates who detest government in any form and respond to state-wide crises by leaving the country…

If it means that, okay. Most people think basic solidarity with your fellow creatures improves life; but if you disagree, go for it. Ride ’em cowboy. Choose cult over culture.

Just don’t expect people to agree with you when you complain to the Knesset that

“It’s not our fault! You, who sent us to live in such crowded conditions, it’s your fault!”

It’s not Israel’s fault that, like all cults, the ultraorthodox cannot change. Cannot improve themselves or conform even a tad to any mainstream or reform any aspect of their practices. Cults become desiccated; they cannot grow – except, of course, in sheer numbers. They cannot thrive. Everyone knows that except cultists.

Over here, it’s not our fault Texans are literally as well as figuratively off the grid. We didn’t elect Ted Cruz. Just like the haredim, you make your bed, you lie in it.

Freedom ain’t free, huh?

[J]ustice failed, [but] democratic self-preservation is working. Trump lost the presidency, and that loss held despite all his attacks on the vote and the counting of the vote. His party split against him on this second round of impeachable offenses. He has lost his immunity to civil suit and his impunity against federal indictment. The world is crashing down upon his head.

The impeachment did not prevail. But Trump still lost. And as the power of that loss reverberates, so should the honors to the day’s heroes of day: the brilliant and eloquent House managers, led by Representative Jamie Raskin—and the eight senators who wrote their own profiles in courage.

Get a load of that picture. Bless you. Bless you.

It was the first non-peaceful transfer of power in American history. In over two centuries, it remains unprecedented, the most grotesque assault on democratic processes by a single president in history… That Trump clearly put the lives of cops, Senators and his own vice-president in danger was, of course, of no concern for him. No lives apart from his own have ever mattered to him…

There has never been a president who has done any of this: express contempt for the democracy he leads, refuse to accept the legitimate results of an election, and attempt to stay in power by marshaling violence in the streets. There are no parallels among any first-world modern democracies for this kind of behavior by a head of state or prime minister. No Western leader, after losing an election, has ever insisted he actually won it in a landslide — and refused to grant any legitimacy to his successor. It is such a grotesque violation of a president’s oath of office that, only a few years ago, it would have been deemed an impossibly far-fetched scenario.

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Non-degenerate political observers search and search for words accurate and strong enough to convey the moral depravity of this person. All feel (I dare say) the same sense of linguistic inadequacy. No one — not Mencken, not Murdoch, not Hitchens, not Arendt, not Didion, not Orwell, not even James Baldwin, whose writing so astonished wee UD when she encountered it in high school and has never stopped astonishing her — no one had or has the political and writerly chops to really express the disgust and shock attendant upon realizing that the leader of your country is not only vile, but arguably one of the vilest people in the world.

All of us who were more or less properly raised were taught (I dare say) to ignore, to socially annihilate, the worst of the worst, the vilest of the vile, especially those among the vile who held positions of power and were therefore able to marshal their vileness to produce real destruction. They had to be so radically isolated as to be without scope for action. Indeed many of us have dealt with the sometimes close-to-unmanageable emotions the cruelty of this man has inspired by altogether shifting our attention away from him, somehow in some sort of sad magic trick trying to make him go poof. Almost as many people, though, revel in his viciousness and want to keep him front and center.

Among rockhard reactionaries and erstwhile idolators it’s largely women so far – Lynn Cheney, Nikki Haley – who have finally, for cynical or authentic reasons, cracked.

Anyway Andrew Sullivan, up there, found the word “grotesque” and ran with it.

comically or repulsively ugly or distorted

incongruous or inappropriate to a shocking degree

It’s a good choice, a promising direction, grotesque. It captures the continued disbelief many of us harbor in regard to the full sharp slap of a president who seems to have tried to kill his vice-president and other political leaders in order to establish a tyranny. Comically and repulsively ugly and distorted in the feathered and tattooed bodies of the insurrectionists who tried to kill in the name of their beloved. Inappropriate to such a shocking degree that we still refuse to let ourselves be slapped that hard. As my congressional representative, Jamie Raskin, smacks my face again and again with it, I still – even now – try to dodge the blows.

Keep your mind in hell and do not despair.

Let’s face the music and dance.

These are UD‘s mantras; she recites them to herself all the time. Only she lacks the courage to live by them.

Some argue we should go to proportional representation. But that would arguably be worse.

[It would] give the far ends of the political spectrum continuous formal representation in the political system. The Trumps could more easily realize their goal of becoming the Le Pens of America.

Joe Biden Makes Shocking Announcement: None of His Children or Grandchildren Will Be Named Senior Advisers to the President

The Capitol-Trasher cult; the ultraorthodox cult; the integralist Catholic cult. Their leaders: Marjorie Taylor Greene; primitive authoritarian rabbis; Pater Edmund Waldstein. These groups are violent; they don’t recognize laws and institutions; they are irrational; they are primitive.

Everyone is so surprised that it turns out a significant minority of the Cap-Trash cult didn’t even vote in a presidential election whose result caused them to try to overthrow the government of the United States. They didn’t vote for Trump.

Why are you surprised? Cultists don’t vote. Or if they vote, it’s in robotic blocks, obeying commands from the cult leader.

Get with the program and perceive their world long enough to defend yourself.

They are trying to kill you and kill your world, and you totally need to defend yourself against them.

They’re not cute. Okay? Waldstein thinks burning non-cultists at the stake is a good idea. Greene wants to put a bullet through the head of Nancy Pelosi. Israeli haredim teach fifteen year old boys to burn down city buses and attack police. Why do you cling to the idea that because these people present themselves as god-fearing they deserve your respect?

Read Don DeLillo’s Mao II, his novel about cults, if you’d like to pause and understand the deep reasons people join cults. Or don’t bother learning the deep reasons. The imperative is to fight them with all you’ve got. With all we’ve got.

Only a small handful of states report voter registration data on a weekly basis. Others report monthly activity, and many states do not report granular details about those who leave one party or the other. Once more states report party registration data, the true number of Republicans who have [switched to Democrats] in recent weeks may prove to be much higher.

“I resent my own humanity and don’t feel anything real anymore,” one “starter pack” meme reads above a collage of White Claw, Xanax, vapes, succulents and streaming-platform logos.

DGMW: It’s a wonderful article (I’m not finished yet, but it’s a really good take on Oblomovism-in-America) which thinks hard, from a lot of angles, about the tendency (the author claims it’s a tendency – I’m not so sure), under the unrelenting stimulation of consumer capitalism, to pull away into no sensation, few possessions, the thinnest sort of personhood, nothingness… But when I got to this sentence, which rolled up into a little ball all the latest ennui products PLUS a Dostoevskian Girl Scout pledge (I promise to do my best to resent my humanity and feel nothing, so help me God.), I sorta lost it.

But let’s see… Let’s see what else this essay, which appears in the fat glossy New York Times Sunday Magazine, awash in splashy double-page ads for gigantic apartments in gated waterfront communities, has to say.

It says that a pandemicky insurrectiony landscape has driven us inward, escapeward, and we are using the free time to meditate on the meaninglessness of all things.

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Me, I see it as a much simpler panic-response to L’Age du Trump — Trump, who embodies the apotheosis of grasping, grandiose consumer capitalism.

Grotesquely fat, grotesquely tall, and obsessed with tallness, hebephrenically acquisitive, a vapid psychotic braggart with a tall vapid clotheshorse cantering alongside him, the Late Builder (let’s call him) assortatively mated with a skyscraper in order to produce a super-skyscraper. In the ironic way of well-laid plans, he made an almost seven foot tall teenager. Similarly, Trump wanted world-historical power and got slow hours on golf courses in the blinding sun, followed by regal waves to gatherings of the insane and stupid at Florida intersections. Anyone would be horrified by this fate, and much of America, as the NYT essay rightly notes, is sprinting, horrified, in the opposite direction.

Even the Mar-a-Lago membership is skedaddling from Ma and Pa Ubu’s palace.

Trump neatly, fully, in a chilling, cautionary way, conveys that wanting shit is stupid (our mad loathed Trumps du jour, Cruz and Hawley, want shit), so people don’t want shit. Even Trump’s exemplar and bromantic partner, Putin, might be beginning to understand this, as photos of his palace complex on the Black Sea appear in the Russian press and rouse the populace (see 1917).

One reason I doubt the whole NYT thesis has to do with something the author doesn’t mention – all them dogs everyone’s getting. In the last year, rates of dog ownership have gone through the woof. And unlike no-maintenance succulents, dogs are way-high maintenance, and I mean emotional as well as logistical. It’s only one trend, to be sure, but you can probably think of others equally at odds with existential/affective minimalism.

Anyway. My faith in my country’s earnest godly greed – the very foundation of the America dream – remains strong. You don’t want to get Americans too close to philosophy, because with all the drugs available here, plus our brittle naive Gatsby idealism, we take one glance at philosophy and collapse into a heap of accidental overdose. You don’t resent your own humanity; you resent the clownish/tyrannical non-humanity of the Late Builder. Do not panic; you are nothing like him. He has been shat out (with great groaning effort) from the body politic, and we’re going to be okay.

They’re always shocked – shocked – when strong majorities favor burqa/niqab bans; and they always say the same thing when warning their populace not to vote for them: So few fully veiled women walk the streets of our cities that it’s silly to legislate against them; only rabid reactionaries favor the bans; most fully veiled women are tourists…

So Switzerland, which has a national referendum on fully veiling coming up in early March, is yet another boringly repetitive example: Almost 65% of Swiss favor the ban; the government is madly lecturing them on how backward they are to support it; the population clearly intends to ignore the lecture. Only hard-right politicians favor it! … Well, okay, some left-wing parties favor it…

And why? For the obvious reason that it oppresses and erases women and by the way can certainly demoralize young girls who go out and see this embodiment of womanhood in their neighborhoods…

And who cares if they’re tourists? The fully veiled woman – a visitor from Saudi Arabia — who took a front row seat at the Opéra Bastille a few years back inspired an instant strike on the part of the performers: They would not sing until she unveiled or left. She left. (France has had a burqa ban for years.)

As to there being only a few full-veilers: Are you kidding me? Rates of full veiling appear to be going up in England, as you might expect when countries normalize the practice.

The main problem the Swiss government will face once the ban happens is the loss of a certain number of incredibly rich tourists. Boohoo. Otherwise, note that burqa bans all over Europe (and other parts of the world) have been imposed with virtually no difficulty.

When did the English language decide that the OO sound meant stoopid and/or crazy? Why is it so easy to think of words designating dumb/nuts that feature OO? Rube, yahoo, boob, booboisie, stooge, goon, loon, moonbeam, buffoon, doo-doo, woo-woo, zoo (as in “the zoo at the Capitol building”).

UD wondered about this as she read a wonderful opinion piece from Alabama, where the author, seeking an organizing principle, a leit motif, around which to discuss “our political class in Alabama, … folks too dumb to understand how dumb they are, made that way through self-inflicted repetitive brain injuries,” lights on The Three Stooges (plus Shemp).

Kyle Whitmire works his way down the list of Alabama’s highest-profile idiots, comparing each of them to his Stooge-equivalent:

Mo Brooks “believes sea-level rise is due to rocks falling in the water; he’s called mitigation measures put in place by Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey ‘nanny state’ politics and last year, he bragged on the effectiveness of the American healthcare system against the coronavirus… [S]poke to insurrectionists before they stormed the capitol, [and] now faces censure by Congress.”

Rep. Barry Moore: “[T]old Alabamians that, if Trump could get the coronavirus, everybody would wind up getting it, so there was little point to protective measures… [S]upported overturning a lawful election and declared that he was leaving Twitter after the platform had already suspended his account… [S]hared a meme on Facebook defending Kenosha, Wisc., shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, saying he’s ‘fought back.'”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville is “too dangerous to trust around kitchen appliances, much less the power of a United States senator. And he’s prone to slap people he’s mad at and no one assumes he knows what he’s doing.”

[Attorney General] Steve Marshall’s organization “helped organize the pro-Trump march in Washington, but after that march turned into an assault on the capitol, Marshall said he didn’t know anything about the organization’s role in it. Marshall promised to investigate, but when asked whether Trump bore any responsibility, Marshall played dumb. ‘I didn’t see anything about the rally,’ he told the Montgomery Advertiser. ‘I don’t know anything about his remarks.'”

As the massive Trump tide recedes (or, as one observer memorably put it, as “witless ape rides helicopter” out of DC), it leaves in its wake schools of minnows that we hadn’t been able to see before, drowning as we were in the tide.

But now is the time to zoom in – on the fools, the nincompoops, the kooks, the googly-eyed, the stooges – before they try for another insurrection against the republic.

This blog will chronicle their movements.

“Making our institutions a joke is exactly what helps authoritarians like Mr Putin survive. If there’s no example of things going better, it makes their life much much easier. A big sad thing which is happening is that there is no longer an American example … that dissidents in China or [the] opposition in Hong Kong or journalists in Russia or Poland or Hungary or whatever can point to — thanks to Mr Trump.”