Substack Notes 13.2 - Battle Lines
Feb. 25th - Mar. 5th, 2025
The battle lines are drawn. The efforts of certain groups to portray their causes and values as centered around ‘compassion,’ or against ‘misinformation,’ are less successful every day. Eventually the flaws and miscalculations and excesses of the newly constituted Trumpian movement will congeal and give his opponents ammunition, of course. Right now, the left cannot find purchase. There’s nothing to grab ahold of to push the movement back. All they can do is use the increasingly impotent institutions they control (which further discredits those institutions) and make lame announcements and social media posts about veterans and Medicaid. They’re not fooling anyone. This is about money and power. The daily catastrophe which has been the wave of veteran suicides was barely acknowledged and never addressed by these people. I don’t think a few thousand unemployed POGs are going to lose them any sleep.
It is fairly clear by now that there are reformers, who are dissatisfied with the status quo (for various reasons) and are working for radical change, and there are protectors of that status quo. The protecters have convictions and values of their own, but their main priority at this time is to preserve their funding, their sinecures, their kickbacks, and their privileges. As the Wu-Tang Clan said, long ago, “cash rules everything around me.”
Feb. 20th, 2025
Freddie DeBoer:
B: Won’t that lead to a lot of crime and much lower living standards?
A: Not if we address need. Poverty is the ultimate cause of all crime.
B: Of all crime?
A: Yes.
B: But the vast majority of poor people aren’t committing crimes.
A: Crime is complex and multivariate.
B: If poverty is the ultimate cause of all crime, how is crime complex or multivariate?
A: … because.
When I helped create the United States Digital Service (USDS), it was not on my bingo board that it would become the U.S. DOGE Service a mere decade later. As a lifelong libertarian, the years I spent trying to make government more efficient at the Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.) and USDS required a lot of patience. Now I'm fresh out.
We have been making tiny, barely perceptible "improvements," paid for with years of compromise and hand-holding in endless pointless meetings, and then celebrating this as success. I can't get Alana Newhouse's description out of my head: "Half the time our institutions feel like molasses, and the other half like concrete." I'm fed up with a government that can't implement its way out of a paper bag.
-Marina Nitze
Feb. 21st, 2025
“The Washington State Department of Corrections strongly emphasizes the importance of inclusion and representation by recognizing the unique challenges faced by non-binary and transgender incarcerated people… It is the DOC’s position that an individual’s right to safe and humane treatment does not change based on their gender identity”.
Feb. 24th, 2025
The strange and frightening thing about modern European politics (covered by Konstantin Kisin and eugyppius and Max K) is that the electoral system seems to be completely detached from policymaking on important issues. When it comes to immigration, elections have been indicating for years that they want secure and restrictive borders… and have been almost completely ignored by the managerial class.
It seems that there are more important priorities and more potent sources of power than the will of the voters (USAID? intelligence? global capital? progressive nonprofits?) in these countries.
I predict that the CDU-led German government will try to make a big show out of closing some crossings and deporting a few hundred malefactors… and the problem will continue to fester.
What do you think?
Feb. 27th, 2025
‘Church’ Organizations Sue to Keep Federal Migrant Money Flowing Through and to Them:
U.S. bishops sue Trump administration over refugee funding freeze By Daniel Payne, CNA Staff, Feb 19, 2025 The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is suing the Trump administration over what the bishops say is an unlawful suspension of funding for refugee programs in the United States. Upon taking office last month, President Donald Trump issued sweeping executive orders that, among other measures, directed a freeze on foreign assistance funds and grants, with the White House seeking to uproot left-wing initiatives in federally funded programs. … The refugee bureau has committed ìaround $65 million in federal fundingî to the USCCB and its affiliates for refugee services, the bishops say in their suit. Yet on Jan. 24 the State Department suspended funding ìwithout prior notice,î with the bishops receiving a ìcursory, two-page letterî informing them of the suspension. …
The USCCB is apparently a QUANGO, a quasi non governmental organization, that contractually performs a paid service for taxpayers. They’re on the dole, in the pipeline, at the trough, doing what might be termed “charity” with OPM (other people’s money).
…
With righteous indignation the USCCB went so far as to order the placement in weekly church bulletins of a precept from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2243:
2243 Armed resistance to oppression by political authority is not legitimate, unless all the following conditions are met: 1) there is certain, grave, and prolonged violation of fundamental rights; 2) all other means of redress have been exhausted; 3) such resistance will not provoke worse disorders; 4) there is well-founded hope of success; and 5) it is impossible reasonably to foresee any better solution.
Lorenzo Warby writes:
@Lorenzo Warby writes:
DOGE is an aggressive structure of auditing the Executive Branch. They are the tech-bro version of the Chinese Imperial Censors, of the Censorate.
The lesson from Confucian China is that a merit-based bureaucracy can be effective at first, but over time it decays as the elites learn to game the system and exploit it. We seem to have reached that stage in the U.S.
…
The independent agencies are a product of the Progressive era. Progressives wanted to increase the power of voters (direct election of Senators, initiative, recall) while at the same time bringing expertise into government. You can think of this as trying to take power away from politicians and give it to a combination of experts and the people.
The intentions of the Progressives might have been good. But the populist side of the Progressive movement has evaporated. Today’s Progressives fear the voters, who they regard as a threat to “our democracy.”
The expert-management side of Progressivism is working no better. The “independent agencies” have evolved into a self-licking ice cream cone, meaning that their main goal is self-perpetuation, not service.
Feb. 28th, 2025
Freddie DeBoer:
…the more that accommodations are specific, limited, and (most importantly) material, the more effective and socially useful they are. And a core problem is that contemporary disability rhetoric is so often general, boundless, and immaterial. It’s a move away from ramps and grab bars and closed captions and towards vibes. It’s not that the only necessary or important accommodations are for physical limitations; as someone who suffered through several years in an office job while on medications that damage focus and short-term memory, I certainly understand the need for accommodations that are more behavioral in nature. The point, though, is that the more immaterial we get, the harder the conceptual questions are and the less and less likely it becomes that accommodations are actually going to do what the ADA is intended to do.
…many of us live in spaces that have adopted a fundamentally emotional approach to disability, an approach that has metastasized in the past several decades. It’s a broad, vague sense among progressive people that a person speaking about their disability must be “honored,” in some strangled way, and certainly not disagreed with on the topic of disability. None of this is restricted to just disability issues, obviously. American progressives have fallen into this maze of good vibes and meaningless positivity for all manner of issues; show me a room full of white liberals and I’ll show you a lot of people who are inordinately concerned with demonstrating that they think Black people are groovy.
Feb. 28th, 2025
Feb. 28th, 2025
How many ridiculous articles have you seen (like this one) mentioning race with a starkly progressive message and framing.
How many articles have you seen about: race hustlers? Issues and losses associated with DEI? Popularity of merit-based criteria among working class black people? Hoaxes and corruption tied to ‘anti-racist’ activism?
There are several issues about which the legacy media is especially sensitive, and they’re not financial or foreign policy issues. They’re cultural issues, because the left conceptualizes these as moral battles, and sees themselves on the ‘right’ side. Except… the right side is supposed to win, and they are beginning to lose, badly. This will continue to cause a great deal of psychological distress.
Feb. 28th, 2025
From Arctotherium’s new post on Aporia:
Democracies naturally tend towards vote-buying, and paying off current voters with the earnings of future generations who cannot vote is a winning strategy. This creates a Ponzi scheme in which huge fractions of state budgets are redistributed from current workers to retirees in ways that require an ever-growing number of workers to be sustainable. Productivity gains don’t usually help, because the expected living standards of retirees, often enforced by law, rise with productivity.
(figure: Change in real purchasing power by age group in Spain since 2008. Every group under 65 has gotten poorer; only pensioners’ living standards are improving.)
The Democrats’ moral warfare has become its primary business model. We’ve all seen the self-righteousness, catastrophizing, my-way-or-the-highway attitudes, and emotional outbursts that shut down discussion and suck the oxygen out of the room. That’s toxic femininity.
Misinformation is certainly an issue, but I would caution Democrats against assuming people voted for Trump because they lack education and are misinformed. Republicans and Trump voters make up over half of the electorate, and dismissive attitudes are themselves a form of toxic femininity. To them, these attitudes come across as gaslighting and finger-wagging, and only fuel more resentment and polarization.
It’s like an emotional law of thermodynamics: suppression breeds backlash. Democrats would be wise to tone down the tenor of toxic femininity and be more deliberate about directing their outrage. Focus on safeguarding democratic norms and institutions, but pick battles carefully.
Feb. 28th, 2025
This deference to identity politics is an example of Hoffer’s observation that the true believer “subordinates creative work to the advancement of the movement”:
The true-believing artist does not create to express himself, or to save his soul, or to discover the true and the beautiful. His task, as he sees it, is to warn, to advise, to urge, to glorify and to denounce.
The idea that politics must have a mandate over art seems self-evident to many contemporary art students—including many young hopefuls destined to shrivel into Hoffer’s “incurably frustrated.”
Feb. 28th, 2025
The public is emerging from the false assumptions, pathological empathy, and mass delusion of gender ideology.
Our institutions will be the last to reform, relying as they do on status and bureaucracy and social hierarchy.
The people who fought to trans kids will want to forget or distort the past, for their reputation and for their psychological ease. This cannot happen. We were gripped by madness for years-next time we should strive to be more discerning.
The captive, the mentally ill, and the parents who were complicit in this awful wave will never concede their error. This is a reservoir of illness which will never be truly emptied.
Mar. 1st, 2025
What’s bad about borrowing money? Two immediate costs:
Interest: The annual interest payments on the debt have just topped $1.1 trillion. To put that in perspective, if you spent a million dollars every day, it would take you over 3,000 years to spend the amount of interest that we’re paying every year.
Crowding out: Government bonds compete with other investments. There is a certain supply of people with savings who want to put their money somewhere to earn some return. Because there are all these government Treasury bonds out there, a huge amount of money is diverted away from private investment in things that would grow the economy, and into the politicians’ project of trying to buy votes.
Mar. 2nd, 2025
The ‘defending democracy’ narrative is really about defending a certain progressive, globalist, corporate agenda. Ask the believers if ANY recent acts by equity advocates or feminists or anti-Trump partisans are anti-democratic… then ask if any actions by the populist right are pro-democratic. You’ll quickly realize that democracy, to these people, just means ‘an agenda and set of institutions that I prefer.’
More news is coming out about foreign political interference (Brazil) and USAID, COC, CIA links to domestic activism.
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Mar. 2nd, 2025
From the Twitter Files to the USAID revelations, the takeaway is simple: governmental agencies control and painstakingly shape the narratives that many believe to be an organic, grassroots phenomenon.
If, at any point in recent years, you sensed something was off—that Big Tech might be orchestrating a deep-rooted censorship program against dissidents, that psychological warfare was being waged against observable truths, biology, and religion, and that an ideological and cultural revolution was spreading like wildfire across society—the revelations from the Department of Government Efficiency about USAID’s true functions make it clear how these events have been unfolding.
The whole system is corrupted all the way to the bone. The pendulum must swing in the other direction if any of this is to be corrected. But this is politics—one bad system will only be replaced with an even more odious one.
Political systems always represent a series of compromises, with reality and with others.
They’re threatened by revolution when enough people become more determined to achieve some other end (equity, funding nonprofits, wealth redistribution, protecting the Church) than they desire to preserve the system.
Systems which work for the broadest range of people tend to be more stable, and that means that the system should only rarely include controversial political values (defunding police, trans rights, evangelical Christianity, etc).
Mar. 3rd, 2025
With the dark money funding violent Antifa and BLM protests appearing to have dried up, and Democrat brass distancing themselves from trans command, lone wolf gender extremists are turning homicidal, a worrying trend that is largely ignored, and tacitly encouraged, by leftist media.
“America will regret Trump’s attacks on transgender citizens,” the New York Times editorial board forewarned darkly in a headline this month.
Telling people (without evidence) that they’re persecuted, embattled, or threatened is the BEST way to incite violence.
Mar. 3rd, 2025
Mar. 3rd, 2025
Over and over again, in a constant stream of hysterical diaper-soiling, the absurd anti-Trump “resistance” sounds desperate alarms that are stupid and pointless. Alex Berenson published a message from a reader in Finland, this week, in which the reader expressed alarm that Donald Trump is “singlehandedly rewriting the US foreign policy.” At the same time, the entire midwit chorus is singing in unison that Trump is seizing control of the military, which is literally fascism. And the most predictably useless cabal of idiots is warning that Trump is being dangerously masculine, which is very bad and also extremely adolescent.
Mar. 3rd, 2025
AOC isn’t a political innovator, or even an early adopter. But I think she’s instinctively in the ‘early majority’ category, and – by virtue of being a hot woman – her influence over the fashion cascade is particularly powerful. If she is sensing a change in the political winds, that means that a lot of other people are about to sense the same thing. Not – crucially! – because transgenderism is true or false, harmful or benign, but because it is a political trend that is now reaching the end of its lifecycle. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It has never mattered if it’s true. Expressing allegiance to this bizarre ideology has always been about social status, which is why it will be disastrous when the hot women abandon it once and for all.
:
In The New York Times, a 16-year-old girl, Naomi Beinart, charted her tumultuous emotions, which included a sense of betrayal because her male classmates had carried on with their lives on the day after the election, seemingly immune to the girls’ all-pervasive gloom and outrage. “Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. We don’t even share the same future,” Beinart opined melodramatically.
No one with even a minimal acquaintance with social media can have missed the many similar, raging reactions: the heads being shaved, the death threats, the promised sex strikes, the fantasies of revenge against Trump-voting husbands. We are to understand that the re-election of a man rumored to lack sufficient pro-abortion commitment justifies thousands of self-recorded screams, imprecations, and poisoning plots.
Like so many feminist pundits telling us of women’s “horror” and “fury,” the emphasis is squarely on feeling and the female body, as if to bypass the intellect and the will altogether. The idea some feminists once scorned—that women are less reasonable and self-controlled than men—seems to have become a feminist axiom.
Simply thinking over the unfairness of being female can apparently set off apoplexy: college student Alicia Alvarez wrote for her campus newspaper that “I become cold and detached as I explain all of the injustices done to me personally, and to those who identify as women.” She defined “feminine rage” as “an ancestral and inherited response to the struggles, oppressions, and wrongdoings that women have been subjected to,” and encouraged her generation of young women to give it voice.
The once-common recognition that rage is destructive, a sign of immaturity or irrationality, seems to have been thoroughly rejected.
Mar. 3rd, 2025
As West Marin becomes more affluent, the politics become more insistent and more performative. Affluence is “left,” loudly. You don’t want to be seen being a Trump person in the place where a one-week vacation rental is $10,572.
The overwhelming majority of the economic benefit of immigration goes to the migrants themselves. The overwhelming majority of the remaining fraction of economic benefit goes to the holders of capital—including the (credentialed) human capital and networked social capital of the professional-managerial class.
Workers get so little of any economic benefit from immigration that it takes very little for local providers of labour to lose from immigration. There are so many ways local providers of labour lose from immigration as it actually operates—particularly from low-skill immigration, especially Greater Middle Eastern immigration—that such immigration can only be supported as a form of economic, cultural and social warfare against local workers.
…Economists are, however, responsible for the view that to question the value of the immigration that folk were actually experiencing was a form of economic illiteracy. They are responsible for over-emphasizing efficiency and under-considering resilience. They are responsible for theories of human action and decision that pay little or no attention to the evolved structure of human cognition. They are responsible for not sufficiently considering cultural transaction costs. They are responsible for poorly considering the issues of managing each country’s institutional commons.
In my opinion, economics ought to be a branch of what sociology ought to be. Sociology ought to be the study of human interdependence. Actually-existing sociology is not that. It is the interpretation of all human behavior as oppressors vs. oppressed. And economics is on the road to becoming actually-existing sociology.
Mar. 3rd, 2025
:
The globalists pursued soft power—and mineral wealth—through stealth: NGOs, green agendas, funding LGBTQ uprisings, and fueling race conflict all to subvert norms and upset the balance of power from within.
The old progressive US regime via USAID & countless NGO’s have pursued soft progressive power by throwing taxpayers’ money after old rope—funding trans pantomimes, horrific experiments on animals, modern art appreciation classes in Somalia, and playing geopolitical terrorist bingo with a spinning globe, where one mans terrorist is also their freedom fighter, depending on which country their finger lands. This was an experiment that went too far, crashing into a free-for-all of corruption.
It’s a timely reminder about human nature. To many—even most—people, saving face is more important than saving lives.
Mar. 4th, 2025
:“The research also found that funding from NGOs was a significant predictor of studies reporting a positive association between climate change and hurricane behavior.”
No kidding.
How is it scientists claim purity, innocence, and disinterestedness when it is they themselves who hop on the Acela to DC and sit on the government committees that decide who gets the grant money from Beneficence? Of course the government has interest in the outcomes of research! How could they not? They asked for the research done specifically. They culled from consideration all proposals that were deemed hostile, inadequate, or politically incorrect. They, in cooperation with the gift getters, chose who lived and who died by the grant. Then Beneficence paid out! The government also asked for regular updates on the work which they asked and paid for.
I become exasperated every time I discuss this topic because I can’t see how this is not obvious. But it isn’t! We saw last week the (now) 3,400+ scientists who rage-signed a petition purportedly against Musk, but really to signal the scientists’ waning respect and fear over loss of all that free money they felt they so richly deserved.
Mar. 5th, 2025
:
“If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”
— Montesquieu
Thanks for reading! I’m finishing up my review of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, posting a fiction piece next week, and posting the next (last?) Job Search essay very soon. I started reading of demographic decline and our gerontocratic government, which basically bleeds society to provide for the health, wealth, and comfort of the old. I’m working on an essay about feminism in literature/publishing and about the slippery and self-righteous slope of soft totalitarianism, which we seemed to be inching down until recently. Perhaps we still are.
Until then, take care of yourself.
Thank you for sharing my work James!