Family in town this weekend, a pre-Thanksgiving get-together to avoid busier plans next weekend. Michael and Honey and baby here; trips to Alameda and Foster City and Berkeley; I put 100 miles on my car in three days, driving back and forth across the bay. I am grateful for being part of an extended family, on my partner’s side.
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Mostly long-form pieces today. Saving fringe bits for tomorrow.
- Peter Wehner on the intellectual and moral decline of the American right;
- Joshua Rothman on whether MAGA has any ideas, and my two big problems with the book he discusses (about “Great Books” and the source of morality);
- How Marjorie Taylor Greene didn’t get the “joke” — that all of DC’s “talk of ideas and principles was flimflam to conceal self-enrichment at the public’s expense”;
- Contrasting Trump’s posts with what “treason” and “sedition” actually mean;
- Why Trump got along so well with Mamdani;
- Tom Nichols on Trump’s recent outbursts;
- Short items about how “MAGA” is being replaced by “America First”; how Musk and DOGE have withdrawn and left only wreckage, and no documented savings in their wake; and how Trump eliminates bad news by deleting it.
- And, listening again to Beck.
The big picture: as I said last time, the political ideals of the Enlightenment, such as those in the US Constitution, may forever remain aspirational, always undermined by rank tribalism and greed.
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The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, 22 Nov 2025: The Intellectual and Moral Decline of the American Right, subtitled “The conservative backlash against Nick Fuentes has yet to challenge the president who had him over for dinner.”
