Safe Haven

 On the one hand, he actively dislikes and is confused by social expectations that others don’t seem to mind. His wealth and position insulate him from the repercussions of his social discomfort and people put off by his lack of conformity. He is very blunt with his close friend Charles Bingley. Bingley definitely moves in social situations easily, and speaks positively about others, both by natural disposition, and by the mores of that culture. In his interactions with Elizabeth Bennet, it’s not hard to imagine that Elizabeth views their interactions as “witty banter,” whilst an autistic Darcy views his replies as explaining her mistaken perceptions of his motivations thoroughly. There are a lot of situations where Darcy clearly indicates that he feels he has to pretend, to “pass” when he clearly doesn’t understand why people expect him to do or to feel certain ways. And if Darcy actually were autistic, he wouldn’t be bothered per se by negative perceptions about him, but he would...

 What people are doing with the heterosexual/homosexual binary is (whether intentionally or not) suggesting that both sides of it are morally the same. One is not better, just different. That’s exactly what the activists were doing. They do it with even stupider words like “cishet” and “fem-presenting.” Activism and jargon, all the way down. And left-Christians rush in to apologize for slights or even violence that—if it happened—don’t happen to the degree that the activists need it to. The streets need to be stained with gay/whatever else blood. Of course, leaving people alone and not being the language police are barely an option. Pete’s sake, Sophie Cunningham is getting called “MAGA Barbie” for being conventionally attractive and daring to suggest that biological men shouldn’t compete in women’s and girls’ sports. Here’s the bad news: I’ll bet you a million dollars that she’s more Left than I am. Not that it matters. Someone white and male will get blamed for the incest between...

I’m tired of seeing “by suicide.” Frankly, I would rather see,  “X committed suicide.” Maybe enough of us know Latin, and that the word literally means killing oneself, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s an effort to deflect responsibility and agency from people. Important people want to do that so they can justify telling us how to live. If we’re all just feeling beasts with no decisional capacity, some class of betters can tell us where to go, what to eat, where to live, and when to die. We can still have context in these tragic cases when someone takes his or her own life. Far be it for me to tell the God of mercy and justice what to do. But it doesn’t just happen; it’s not a disease process, in the strict sense. What do you tell people who are angry in the aftermath? They don’t want to hear that some anthropomorphic Depression took down their loved one. They didn’t contract Ebola or COVID or tuberculosis. They decided—under duress perhaps—that dying was preferable to liv...

 She’s the four-time and reigning MVP, having gone into this season with the all-time leading points per game average of 21.82. She’s above 26 points per game this year. The equivalent of this would be if Michael Jordan bumped his points per game average to 35 in 1997, just because the Bulls needed him to. She’s also an elite rebounder, recovering 9.5 missed shots every game. A’ja Wilson is making over 53 percent of her shots; Caitlin Clark is making 43 percent of hers. Caitlin Clark is now the all time leader in assists per game average, at only 24 years old. She’s also the fastest to make 200 3-point shots in history. She’s basically good for 20 points every game, even if she’s playing poorly, and maybe double that, if she’s playing well. She’s the face of the league, in terms of fans, revenue, merchandise, attention, and all of it. She’s my favorite player, on my favorite team. She’s not the best player. Anything to the contrary is just agitprop. All the above takes into conside...

 Sometimes the mask will slip, and history gives a clean look at an ugly thing, like when Alexander Stephens proclaimed that the Confederacy was fighting for white supremacy. It’s unavoidable; you see it, you can’t unsee it, and how everything shakes out will set a new pattern for how everything will go. When certainty and consensus is achieved, everyone will say that they always agreed with what we’re saying now, though that’s not even close to true. Most people prefer euphemisms in times like these. They’ll literally invent things that never happened, because a hero on the wrong side of a crossroads like this is intolerable. Abortion is like this. It’s ugly, it’s tragic, and it’s actually indefensible. But ordinary people who don’t want to face it will talk about “choice” and “bodily autonomy” and literally anything else, because the nature of the thing is too ugly to face directly.  What is the thing in itself? We’re not saying that choice or bodily autonomy don’t matter in...

 That’s me. [Jesus would be Michael Corleone. Also, he’s definitely not going to kill you whilst you fish.—ed.] It’s an analogy, OK? Plus, if he did happen to say, “He’s got a good heart, but he’s stupid and weak,” I couldn’t possibly argue with that characterization. Puzo and Coppola wrote brilliant screenplays for both films, and I am reading the book now. These two films are among the greatest ever produced, and I think it’s 100 percent true to say that authentic Christianity is in the background. If it weren’t, the famous baptism scene where Michael is taking baptismal vows for Michael Rizzi while the Corleone henchmen kill the other heads of the Five Families on his orders wouldn’t work. It relies on our moral intuition that this is the absolute height of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is also in view at the beginning of the second film, when Senator Cleary, played by regarded character actor G. D. Spradlin, delivers a slur-infused invective against Michael Corleone after playing the ki...

 Taylor Swift is suitably liberal, so she’s probably safe from being cancelled by our “betters.” But I remember when they used Kanye’s little protest on behalf of Beyoncé to try to argue that Beyoncé was being overlooked because of her race. Yeah, that lady, who’s won every award known to humanity (basically) and has more money in her couch cushions than I will ever make. And I am not saying that she’s never faced anything heinous. I wouldn’t even try to say that. What I will say is that progressive white women especially will make a cause out of anything or anyone, even if it’s dumb. Kanye West is a mentally unwell Nazi-loving Trump supporter, so they’ll send that little incident down the memory hole, since it’s not useful anymore. But I remember, and I don’t plan on letting certain people forget it conveniently.

 The comedian Neal Brennan has a bit about how Republicans welcome anyone who says they want to be a Republican. Liberals? Not so much. “Hey, I’m liberal, too!” “Really? We’ll see.” Josh Johnson has a similar bit. Both audiences laughed, because they know it’s true.

 When I was about 20, I used to read him on occasion. I was Reformed, and a Federal Vision sympathizer. Of course I was; I didn’t know it, but I was a writer. And if you’re a little bit artsy-fartsy like that, you’re a crypto-Catholic, even if you’re not ready to submit to Rome. It’s legit a kind of Oxford Movement within Reformed theology; that’s what it was; that’s what it is. I was smart enough to know that Western civilization is Catholic civilization. America is a bit anomalous, but let’s be real: the Anglican Communion at the time of the death of St. Thomas More was just the SSPX of its day: Catholics separated from their visible Head on Earth. Anyway, I laughed at a lot at the Wilson snark, because even a lot of liberal Christians at the time acted like President Bush was a Christian Ayatollah. C’mon, man. This dude from Old Money, whose relatives seemingly own a third of New England? Other than the Calvinist Congregationalists, the region is not known for its excess of reli...

 With due respect to Lichtman, external factors are just background most years. If a substantial portion of people think you hate them, criticism of the candidate who sits back and says, “They hate you, see that?” goes precisely nowhere. I could even grant you that the sitting president is like an internet comment section, like Cliff from Cheers without the sneaky smarts.  I would even grant you that staffing a ton of the executive branch with right-wing radio hosts is highly questionable. It’s the exact thing a TV president who is out of his depth would do. But the Democratic Party’s counterpart to Cliff Clavin was…Tim Walz? An alleged football coach who doesn’t know what a “pick six” is? Not to mention that a guy who is father to a Downs Syndrome son sounds foolish defending unfettered abortion rights. If it’s really true that you believe Republican efforts to restrict abortion access have unanticipated bad effects, handle it legislatively. Trump/Vance on abortion are first-...

 “Kamala Harris cares about they/them. Donald Trump cares about you.” A couple things: I won’t cynically say that a politician doesn’t care about anyone; I don’t know that. Heck, I called George W. Bush the “Comforter-In-Chief” (before some jackwagon at USA Today stole it) and I wasn’t kidding. That second sentence I don’t personally believe. I have to work hard to praise the man. But anyway. This was the crowning moment. Whoever wrote this deserves a place teaching in the Obama-Atwater School of Effective Political Destruction. Harris could recite “The New Colossus” whilst weaning a flock of baby bald eagles with Lee Greenwood singing “God Bless The USA” to no effect. It was over. And it was perfectly emblematic. Normal people don’t spend time worrying about being transphobic. It’s essentially a meaningless word, coined yet again by people who talk exclusively to each other. If I promise not to say “progressive academics,” will you send me money? This is distinct, by the way, from...

 22 years ago in an essay, I said that I preferred Bush 43 to be re-elected president, for lots of policy reasons. But on a personal note, the Democrats acted like our country itself was a gulag, and we were all allegedly locked in it. Happy warriors usually win; dour people embarrassed for the very country they intend to govern usually don’t. In the interest of principled criticism, I definitely know that “enhanced interrogation” and the abuse of terrorist militants violates longstanding human rights commitments. In the present day, ICE detentions that ignore judicial orders to obey habeas corpus have a gulag-adjacent quality. Any lawyer advocating for basic human rights can say anything they want. I didn’t vote for Donald Trump; I didn’t appoint Stephen Miller. This is quite apart from illegal immigration, and the probable likelihood that any such people also are violent criminals. In other words, when ICE agents are protecting Americans and guests from monsters along with other ...

 There was a lot of social science in my electives then. Political science and economics were a blast, but I filled it all out with enough sociology and religious studies that I nearly had minors in both. Sociology was explicitly Marxist. In fact, a lot of those were taught by European immigrants. The only people more self-righteous than American leftists are European leftists. As you may know, religious studies became essentially religious sociology or cultural anthropology after the rise of the New Left in the late 1960s. Studying dogma and religious texts was left to the benighted believers in their churches and seminaries. I still liked a lot of it, but I was often angry and arrogant then. I got saved in 1997. “Deconstruction” meant Marxist dismissal of white and male certitudes from the modern era, and an assertion that some need for power completely explains every contention. But philosophically, if every truth claim is a grasp for power, that’s emotivism: personal gain or de...

 The Democratic Party isn’t winning the presidency lately. I’m going to put a language warning right here. Sometimes, a vulgar word or words is the clearest way to say something. Donald Trump has been described as a carnival barker. I happen to think that is an insult to carnival barkers. He’s a self-involved amoral beast who was born leading off of third base. The only real difference between Bernie Madoff and Donald Trump is that Madoff went broke. If you have money—even if you borrowed it—you don’t have to be bound by anything, and this man isn’t. That said, I don’t believe a whole bunch of left-wing garbage, and most people don’t. Trump is a bullshitter, when he’s not doing something awful or illegal. But if you think about who votes in America, it’s probably a guy about 55, white, named Steve or Ron or Jim. That’s your median voter. I am not him; Tom Darrow and I are too throughly Christian to be the median voter. Most Americans identify as Christian, but Jim’s not a disciple,...