As I’ve been saying. They’re all hypocrites — they’re primitive, racist tribalists who openly flout the ideals they claim to venerate, the ideals that people better than them have established in recent centuries.
NY Times, guest essay by Leighton Woodhouse, 11 Feb 2026: Donald Trump, Pagan King [gift link]
Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada recently described the world that President Trump is dragging us into with this aphorism: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
The quote comes from Thucydides’ fictionalized account of a negotiation between Athens and the rulers of the island of Melos, in the Peloponnesian War. The Melians, who were no match for the Athenians, wished to remain neutral. They complained that Athens’s demand that they submit to its rule was unjust. The Athenians responded that matters of justice exist only between equals. Between those who are strong and those who are weak there is only force.
The dialogue is famous for its stark portrayal of the dictates of political realism. The world is not guided by ideals and values, it demonstrates. It is brokered only by power.
Which exactly what Trump folks are saying.
The Trump administration has adopted this philosophy as its own. In a recent interview with Jake Tapper, Stephen Miller said, “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
Away with the rule-based order, away with Constitutional principles, away with Christian virtues. Might makes right.
To sympathetic ears, Mr. Miller sounded refreshingly unsentimental and cleareyed. But the “niceties” he disparaged aren’t just some naïve fantasy. They are the values of Christianity, the faith the Trump administration purports to defend and uphold.
After defeating Melos in a siege, Athens slaughtered the island’s men and enslaved its women and children. Such was the nature of the ancient world, a world that was, to borrow Mr. Miller’s words, devoid of “niceties” and “governed by power.”
The Trump administration hasn’t gone this far, but they’re on their way: entirely unconcerned with the collateral deaths of two US citizens in Minneapolis while in pursuit of deporting brown-skinned people. (Though just yesterday those troops have been withdrawn, as if the entire problem has been solved.) (It’s not about crime. If so Trump wouldn’t still be in office.)
The writer goes on to give Christianity credit for treating all people fairly and with dignity, even the poor.
In his book “Dominion,” the historian Tom Holland describes how it wasn’t until Christianity came along that Western civilization derived the popular conception that the weak and the vanquished had any inherent moral value at all. Telling ancient Greeks or pre-Christian Romans that their treatment of slaves was morally wrong would have inspired not argument but bewilderment, as if you had told them they were evil for the way they treated their kitchen utensils. These pagans generally believed that their gods favored the strong and were indifferent to the weak.
Christianity upended these assumptions. Christianity took the Jewish God, who cared for the weak and knew the difference between good and evil, and made his message universal. It taught that all humans are God’s creation. To oppress any person, even a slave, is an offense before him. Even more than that: The weak are closer to God than the rich and the powerful.
And about here my thoughts pause…
This moral instinct is so ubiquitous today that we barely recognize it as Judeo-Christian, or even as religious. Adherents of the world’s other great religions have largely integrated it into their ethical frameworks even if this tenet is not central to their faith. It is the basis for the American Declaration of Independence and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As Mr. Holland noted, even anti-Christian revolutionaries, from the Jacobins to the Communists, owe their secular claims of human equality to Christianity; indeed, they are the most radical expressions of it.
…because this implies that Christian *theology* is somehow responsible. But the OT God isn’t about these ethical frameworks; he’s about the Ten Commandments and, by the way, exterminating rival tribes. Maybe Jesus, then? But Jesus said lots of nasty things too, like renouncing one’s family to follow him, and the idea of hell. Paul, who established the religion? No.
Rather, I would speculate, there was a gradual recognition that some sort of non-zero-sum way of managing society worked out better for everyone involved, rather a zero-sum structure with the powerful at the top and the weak at the bottom left to suffer. This was a radical idea, and it’s what became codified in those declarations. But it’s always been a minority opinion, and today’s hypocrites are happy to abandon those ideas in favor of putting themselves in charge and disappearing everyone else unlike themselves.
The writer goes on with examples of current events and politicians. And ends with the central irony.
Vice President JD Vance never tires of pointing out that America is a philosophically Christian nation, and that Christianity is under attack from his political enemies. Such statements get big applause from the Trump-loving crowds he panders to. But the administration he serves in is doing more than any antifa foot soldier to dismantle that philosophy as the fundamental basis of our government’s political legitimacy. To the people leading this administration, Thucydides’ famous aphorism isn’t just an acknowledgment of reality. It is the image of the world they wish to make.
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Along similar lines.
The Atlantic, Robert F. Worth, 13 Feb 2026: Rod Dreher Thinks the Enlightenment Was a Mistake, subtitled “The influential author derides secularism and the modern world. Conservatives—including the vice president—are joining him on a march back to the Middle Ages.”
Long essay. There’s a JD Vance connection. The writer has spent some time interviewing and traveling with Dreher. It’s remarkable how often Dreher has changed his mind, his religion, and his thinking. Based on what? Whatever makes him feel secure. He’s primarily concerned with rescuing the faith of his childhood against secularism and Enlightenment values. Let me quote a bit:
Dreher emerged from the conservative blogosphere in the 2000s and won fans with his daily stream of testy opinions and unguarded anecdotal writing. He seems almost allergic to ideological consistency, has long had readers on the left as well as the right, and sometimes changes his mind over the course of a single paragraph. He can be mean-spirited at times, but is quick with a heartfelt apology when he thinks he has made a mistake. His columns are often a collage of quotes from the day’s news and from an eclectic cast of literary and philosophical idols: Dante, perhaps, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.
When Dreher became a prominent figure a decade ago, he seemed resigned to the idea that religious conservatives like him had lost the political battle. In The Benedict Option—the 2017 book that put him on the map—he counseled a patiently monastic approach to Christians who felt that their faith was endangered in a relentlessly secularizing era. Drawing inspiration from Saint Benedict of Nursia, who founded thriving monasteries in the sixth century as Rome decayed, he wrote of a future in which committed Christians “will have to be somewhat cut off from mainstream society for the sake of holding on to the truth.”
“The truth.” Meaning, what he was taught as a child?
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Once again. Trump and MAGA: no rules; might makes right. It’s all about racism and greed.
BBC, Jaroslav Lukiv, 13 Feb 2026: World’s rules-based order ‘no longer exists’, Germany’s Merz warns
The rules-based world order “no longer exists”, the German Chancellor has warned at a major security summit.
Opening the annual Munich Security Conference, Friedrich Merz told other world leaders that “our freedom is not guaranteed” in an era of big power politics, and that Europeans must be ready to make “sacrifice”.
He also admitted that “a deep divide has opened between Europe and the United States”.
The conference is taking place on the backdrop of US President Donald Trump threatening Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland by pledging to annex the Arctic territory and his tariffs on imports from European nations.
It will be a long time before Europe trusts the US again.
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More.
The Guardian, 13 Feb 2026: These charts show how Trump is isolating the US on the world stage, subtitled “Analysis shows that the world is moving closer to China, as Trump’s isolationism rears its head at the United Nations”
Lots of charts. Showing the alignment with China, and how former allies are moving away from the US. Congratulations MAGA! Soon the US will become a third-world backwater! That’s what you want, right?
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Brief items.
- Trump doubles down on racism.
- CNN, today: Trump privately lashes out at GOP lawmakers over racist video blowback, sources say
- He’s threatening Republicans who objected to that racist video of the Obamas.
- Several stories recently about white nationalist Jeremy Carl.
- JMG, today: Senate Likely Won’t Confirm Avowed White Nationalist (from Washington Post
- He needs everything to be only about white people, all the time. (Or was that Laura Loomer?)
- CNN, today: Trump promised RFK Jr. would ‘restore faith in American health care.’ A year in, trust has plummeted
- It’s as if these people are saboteurs. Actually, they’re just incompetent, but play to the biases and superstitions of MAGA.
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Music. Working my way through early Philip Glass. Akhnaten was the third in the so-called “portrait” trilogy of operas that began with Einstein on the Beach and continued with Satyagraha and concluded with this. Each opera gradually expanded Glass’s compositional repertoire, supplemented the repetitive arpeggios that characterized his early music (and which still characterize his music) with gorgeous, extended lyrical songs. Here’s one the best, which features a countertenor, and many moments of exquisite beauty, especially once the horns and the choir chime in. And those flute filigrees. (And though I call it a song, it’s 13 minutes long.)
I’ve listened to my 1987 CBS Masterworks CD box many times, where the countertenor is a bit wobbly. This performance from 2019 with Anthony Roth Constanzo is better.
