Nietzsche And The Islamo-Christian Right

Every now and then, Real Clear Politics links to a piece that's exceptionally egregious, beyond even its usual level of mediocrity. This one has no title, which is only the first of its problems. but it appears in a Washington Post section called Awakenings. It's by Matthew Schmitz, the religion editor for The Washington Post's Opinions section. If you're a religion editor for the Washington Post, this is hinky on its face. AI tells me, "Before joining the Post, he was a senior editor at First Things, a prominent ecumenical religious journal." Well, I've submitted to First Things and never gotten past the intern who returns manuscripts unread, so I stopped bothering. Mr Schmitz begins here:

In 2015, Michel Houellebecq published “Submission,” a novel describing (among other things) how members of the radical right might come to admire, even embrace, Islam. Now we are seeing exactly that happen, as I describe in today’s column on the rise of the Islamo-Christian right.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, commentators on the American right have tended to cast Islam as a menace to Western liberties. But in the freewheeling world of antiestablishment podcasts, something new is happening. Recent months have seen Candace Owens reading from the Quran, Nick Fuentes decrying anti-Muslim sentiment and Tucker Carlson praising sharia law. What was once regarded as a threat is increasingly considered an ally.

For some of these figures, admiration leads to conversion. Andrew Tate, the masculinist influencer, and Sneako, the right-wing streamer, have recited the words of the shahada and thus taken up a faith they see as an antidote to Western decadence. Others look to Islam as a model of what Christians might achieve if they cast off the yoke of liberalism. Say goodbye to Judeo-Christian civilization — and hello to the Islamo-Christian right.

OK, one thing we're beginning to see here is a hallmark of sloppy writing, hypostatization, a logical fallacy and conceptual error where an abstract concept, idea, or property is treated as a concrete, physical substance or real entity, in this case, the "Islamo-Christian right". One might imagine this as a movement, perhaps with a journal that serves the same purpose as Reason to the libertarians, with a manifesto, and perhaps a public intellectual who serves as de facto spokesman.

There's no such thing. The people he mentions are Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Tucker Carlson. Donald Trump, whose characterizations often go to the heart of the matter, has repeatedly called both Owens and Carlson "low IQ" individuals. Fuentes's views are incongruous and inconsistent, especially over Islam; Wikipedia reports that in 2019, he said "the First Amendment was not written for Muslims or immigrants". If he's expressed admiration for Islam, he's also expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler. All these people will say anything that gets them attention; they simply aren't serious enough to constitute a movement.

Schmitz contrasts "Islamo-Christians", a vague neologism apparently referring to a loose collection of attention-seeking crazies, with Judeo-Christians, and thereby he commits a historical error:

The term “Judeo-Christianity” gained currency in the 1930s as a way to describe a pluralist vision of Western society. A Judeo-Christian America was one in which the contributions of Catholics and Jews could matter as much as those of Protestants. It would also be the global champion of freedom and democracy.

According to Wikipedia,

The term "Judæo Christian" appears in a letter by Alexander McCaul which is dated October 17, 1821. The term in this case referred to Jewish converts to Christianity. The term was similarly used by Joseph Wolff in 1829, in reference to a type of church that would observe some Jewish traditions in order to convert Jews. Mark Silk states in the early 19th century the term was "most widely used (in French as well as English) to refer to the early followers of Jesus who opposed" the wishes of Paul the Apostle and wanted "to restrict the message of Jesus to Jews and who insisted on maintaining Jewish law and ritual".

Friedrich Nietzsche used the German term "Judenchristlich" ("Jewish-Christian") to describe and emphasize what he believed were neglected aspects of the continuity which exists between the Jewish and Christian worldviews. The expression appears in The Antichrist, published in 1895 but written several years earlier; a fuller development of Nietzsche's argument can be found in the prior work, On the Genealogy of Morality.

The problem here is that Mr Schmitz's whole subtext is basically Nietzschean, and I don't think he knows it. Let me digress. Here's a summary of Nietzsche on morality:

The story begins with the two types of human: the noble, the powerful, on the one hand, and the slave, the weak, on the other hand. It was the nobles who created morality.

. . . What is the difference between noble and slave morality? Noble morality found a notion of “good” simply by looking at themselves — whatever is associated them is good — and then the notion of “bad” emerged as the opposite of the good, themselves. In contrast, slave morality is created by ressentiment, meaning that they first found a notion of “evil” by looking at the noble — whatever is associated them is evil — and then the notion of “good” emerged as the opposite of it.

Put differently, the slaves reversed noble morality to feel better about themselves. Before, they were “bad” people according to noble morality. But now they were “good,” based on their own morality, a new valuation of good and evil. In this slave morality, things like consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride and friendship are considered to be “good.” In fact, Nietzsche argues that our contemporary moral values are these, the slave morality.

Let's get back to Schmitz on Judeo-Christians, or at least those he thinks are the right sort of Judeo-Christians: they're tolerant of Catholics and Jews, the champions of freedom and democracy. In other words, they represent slave morality, consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride and friendship. But all of a sudden, we have the Islamo-Christians!

The Islamo-Christian right, by contrast, is skeptical of pluralism and critical of U.S. foreign policy. It’s scornful of liberal attempts to promote interreligious understanding and therefore happy to criticize Islam on certain points even as it praises the faith on others.

. . . Islam is also praised on the right as a socially conservative counterweight to exploitative capitalism and the follies of U.S. foreign policy. Aleksandr Dugin, the anti-liberal Russian thinker, has declared that “shariah has to overcome the capitalism.” He hopes that Muslims will join a worldwide battle against the “globalist elite.”

In other words, the "Islamo-Christians" are actually rebelling against the "slave morality". Nietzsche is actually on their side. From the summary:

I mean, who could deny the goodness of friendship? Well, Nietzsche is not on our side. He deplores this redefinition of morality. What Nietzsche supports is rather the nobles, who do not care about existing social constraints, and are strong enough to decide their own morality by themselves.

Schmitz basically understands Nietzsche's point:

Whether the Islamo-Christian right’s vision of Islam is actually accurate is, for its adherents, beside the point. They are not engaging in a careful study of comparative religion; they’re imagining an alternative to liberal modernity.

But let's keep in mind that to Schmitz, the "Islamo-Christian right" is a castle in the air. He's attributing intellectual consistency to a small gaggle of mentally disadvantaged narcissists whose views are inchoate, immature, and always subject to change. But he's inconsistent as well. He holds up Owens, Carlson, Fuentes, and a few others as Nietzschean subversives who stand for all the wrong things, but then he claims they don't understand Islam.

Still, it’s worth subjecting their claims to scrutiny. Arab countries might be filled with the self-confidence Carlson describes, but their birth rates are declining just as badly as Europe’s. (In Saudi Arabia, births have fallen by more than 10 percent in six years.) Perhaps Islam is a beacon of social conservatism, but Muslims in the United States tend to be more liberal than evangelicals on abortion, transgenderism and homosexuality.

. . . Take the trajectory of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the president of Syria. As the former leader of the al-Nusra front, an Islamic State offshoot and al-Qaeda affiliate, he would seem to be a perfect example of Islamic intransigence. But as head of state, he has cultivated good relations with the U.S. In April, he was filmed in a basketball arena in Damascus watching performers dance to Missy Elliott’s “Work It.”

So don't lose heart. Islam is just another version of Nietzsche's slave morality, give it time. But even this misunderstands Islam's role in Western liberal democracy as it now manifests. Via another Real Clear Politics link from the last few days, this from The Wall Street Journal:

The past six weeks have seen the attempted arson of two synagogues and the former offices of a Jewish charity in the U.K., an apparent plot to dump hazardous chemicals onto the Israeli embassy with drones, and the burning of community-run ambulances in Golders Green, the heart of Britain’s small Jewish community. British police believe that Iranian intelligence are recruiting locals via the Telegram app, under the name of a front group called Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia.

. . . The Yookay isn’t lawless, but it has a “two-tier” justice system. Complain too vociferously online, and you risk prosecution. March through London chanting to “Globalize the Intifada,” and the police do nothing.

. . . The Jews of Golders Green have declared for England. It isn’t clear whether England will declare for them. The liberal, tolerant and “antiracist” middle classes are fashionably “anti-Zionist.” The bluer the collar, the greater the likelihood that its wearer likes Israeli pluck and Jewish ingenuity.

First, the "Islamo-Christian right" aren't the ones allied with Islam; it's the "liberal, tolerant and 'antiracist' middle classes". They're the ones who want Islamic immigration, all over the West, primarily because the immigrants will torment the Jews and the working class.

In other words, even if some Muslims are tolerant and follow a version of conventional morality, this isn't why the nobles like them, and if a few nut job podcasters think they're OK, they misunderstand Muslims just as much as Mr Schmitz does. I think Mr Schmitz of the Washington Post and First Things is naive and deeply confused.

James Comey Is His Own Worst Enemy

At 3:07 in the video embedded above, Mark Halperin comes about as close to the truth as the Overton window will allow when he says of James Comey, "I've never seen somebody so unpopular act in public like he's so popular". On the other hand, Real Clear Politics has been unwilling even to touch the subject of the DOJ "8647" indictment over the past few days: that Comey is innocent is apparently not even a matter for civilized debate. Freedom of speech! Anyhow, "86" just means the the kitchen is out of soup!

But I'm a contrarian, not even a recovering contrarian. This all seems a little too cut-and-dried to me. First, a quick web search shows that people are convicted by juries, or plead guilty, for threatening the president all the time. For instance,

According to court documents, between Feb. 15, 2025, and May 15, 2025, Valeriy Kouznetsov, 41, made multiple threats toward the President of the United States, his family, and other government officials. Kouznetsov posted these threats on X (formerly Twitter), some of which he sent directly to the X accounts belonging to the President and other officials. For example, on March 28, 2025, Kouznetsov posted a message threatening the President with a “7/13 secret service repeat Philadelphia,” a reference to the July 13, 2024, attempted assassination of President Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Just last month, he was sentenced to two years and four months in prison. Or this:

Troy Kelly, age 20, of Crown Point, NY, plead guilty today to one count of a three-count indictment charging threats against the President of the United States.

. . . In pleading guilty, Kelly admitted that in May 2024 he posted a threat to kill President Biden on a social media website and that he intended it to be understood as a threat. Responding to a post of President Biden, Kelly told the then-President that he was “[g]onna put a bullet in your head if I ever catch you.”

At sentencing, the judge ordered him to have mental health treatment. In other words, people can be convicted of threatening the president of the US under what still seems to be a wide variety of specific statements and circumstances. According to Wikipedia,

The true threat doctrine was established in the 1969 Supreme Court case Watts v. United States. In that case, an eighteen-year-old male was convicted in a Washington, D.C. District Court for violating a statute prohibiting persons from knowingly and willfully making threats to harm or kill the President of the United States.

The conviction was based on a statement made by Watts, in which he said, "[i]f they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J." Watts appealed, leading to the Supreme Court finding the statute constitutional on its face, but reversing the conviction of Watts.

. . . the Court established that there is a "true threat" exception to protected speech, but also that the statement must be viewed in its context and distinguished from protected hyperbole. The opinion, however, stopped short of defining precisely what constituted a "true threat."

Traditionally, the standard for whether a true threat could be punished was based its effect on a "reasonable person" in the shoes of the person who received the threat. In 2023, Counterman v. Colorado abolished that "objective" test. Counterman established a "subjective" test that required a state to show evidence that the accused subjectively understood the nature of their threat and consciously, recklessly disregarded that nature.

A few people have argued, as I did Wednesday, that on one hand, Comey is both a former Deputy Attorney General and a former FBI Director, whose agencies had investigated and prosecuted at minimum dozens of threat cases, and he had to have been aware of what he was doing. Comey made the "8647" post on May 15, 2025, we must presume fully aware of the July 13, 2024 Butler, PA assassination attempt on Trump and the September 15, 2024 assassination attempt at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, while Trump was golfing.

Comey is a major public figure whose statements consistently attract attemtion. In fact, although he deleted the post shortly after he made it, it attracted immediate attention and was widely re-posted.

Comey deleted the photo shortly after it was made, writing: “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence” and “I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”

In an interview with MSNBC, Comey said he assumed the numbers reflected a political message in reference to Trump because of the number "47," but not a call to violence against the Republican president. He called the allegations "crazy."

At least to me, this is Comey being a little too cute. He posts something that just barely crosses the line, but then he deletes it after it nevertheless attracts major attention -- but he wants credit for deleting it, because he claims he opposers violence, and he didn't understand "86" could mean wipe somebody out, he thought it just meant the kitchen was out of soup. (In my younger, single days, I spent some time in bars, where "Manager, 86" was a frequent call on the PA, referring to the need to eject an obnoxious customer. In fact, I dated a lady bartender who routinely used the term in that context -- she'd jokingly threaten to "86" me from our date.)

And this is the Comey who got a little too cute over Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server:

In July [2016], FBI director James Comey announced that the FBI investigation had concluded that Clinton had been "extremely careless" but recommended that no charges be filed because Clinton did not act with criminal intent, the historical standard for pursuing prosecution.

On October 28, 2016, eleven days before the election, Comey notified Congress that the FBI had started looking into newly discovered emails. On November 6, Comey notified Congress that the FBI had not changed its conclusion. Comey's timing was contentious, with critics saying that he had violated Department of Justice guidelines and precedent, and prejudiced the public against Clinton. The controversy received more media coverage than any other topic during the presidential campaign.

The result, as we see in the Mark Halperin clip above, where his liberal guest remarks, "You're never going to catch me defending Jim Comey. You guys know how I feel about him from 2016", is that nobody, left or right, much likes the guy -- he's just a little too cute. That cuteness even comes out in the latest context for his "8647" indictment:

BREAKING: The DOJ is now pushing to SEIZE James Comey’s profits from his crime book, as prosecutors believe part of the reason he posted a threat on President Trump’s life was to DRUM UP book sales

DOJ is going HARD after this guy 🔥

The “forfeiture action” included in Comey’s… pic.twitter.com/aW1At0bRAk

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) April 29, 2026

He knew full well what the public reaction to the "8647" post would be, even if he took it down a few hours later, which goes to his recklessness in posting it. Victor Davis Hansen makes a good point at 2:30 below:

There's a little bit of wrinkle to this, because people were kinda startled when the attorney general announced his investigation into this, but then he said this was a long investigation, and we investigated a lot of messaging. So what I'm getting at is if there's something more, what would that more be? If he said something in a private e-mail that didn't come under attorney-client privilege, and it said maybe to his friend or his daughter, this is cool, or this is neat, or this is a good way to threaten the president. . . let's withhold judgment until we find out.

In other words, Comey just plays things a little too close to the line, he's always just a little too cute, and as a consequence of that, he has enemies. I don't think it's going to be as simple for him as getting his case dismissed over freedom-of-speech. The standard in Watts v. United States was abolished in 2023; nobody mentions that, and I betcha Comey doesn't know that, either. Heck, I wonder if his lawyers do. The law is no longer as clear as that, and Comey seems to be skating on the idea that he's a lot more popular than he really is.

UFOs

There are no UFOs. The whole planet has cell phones the last ten years and all these supposed sightings disappeared.

— Tim Dalton (@thor988835) April 29, 2026

So Trump has confirmed that UFO files are soon to be released, while a guy named Tim Dalton posts trenchant remarks saying no such thing as UFOs. A more extended version of Dalton's reasoning appeared in The New Yorker a couple of years ago:

In February, 2023, photographs of a Chinese spy balloon over Billings, Montana, prompted speculation about aliens. The Air Force eventually shot it down, but first the pilot of an American U-2 spy plane flew past and took a selfie that showed the balloon out the window. “You can see it in exquisite detail,” [University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam] Frank told me. “Where are all those pictures? Every U.F.O. picture is a fuzzy blob. Everybody carries a high-resolution camera in their pocket now, and it’s always fuzzy blobs.”

I've noted here in the past that since the age of systematic scientific observation began in the 1600s, there's been zero tangible evidence of any sort of extraterrestrial gadget constructed by intelligent life, which has created such a speculative gap that believers have been forced to impute such things to ancient hieroglyphics, deciding a Mayan so-and-so looks like he's actually wearing a space helmet or riding a rocket.

One problem is that the Darwinian paradigm has so thoroughly infected logical thinking that people conclude space aliens must be so. The chain of reasoning, according to Wikipedia, goes like this:

• There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun.
• With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets orbiting in the habitable zone.
• Many of these stars, and hence their planets, are much older than the Sun. If Earth-like planets are typical, some may have developed intelligent life long ago.
• Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel, a step that humans are investigating.
• Even at the slow pace of envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years.
• Since many of the Sun-like stars are billions of years older than the Sun, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes.

There are several fallacies in this chain. One is that so far, nobody has been able to prove that, even given the putatively necessary chemicals and environmental conditions, life spontaneously appears. And even if some sort of life were somehow to appear from exactly the right primeval ooze, how long would it take to develop the ability to reproduce itself, via DNA or some equivalent mechanism? And isn't it far more likely that, during the eons-long process of random selection necessary for this to happen, Murphy's Law would intervene and terminate the process before it could perfect itself?

It's like the joke about how billions of monkeys pounding on typewriters could generate the works of Shakespeare. And one day, one of them types out, "To be, or not to be: that is ?6ttdbgoendtgo". How many billions of times would this have to take place before you got through just one act of one play?

But let's grant that given the right conditions, life can evolve from primeval sludge. You have a whole separate problem of reason, which is necessary to develop gadgets that can travel between stars, and this is a problem of philosophy. For instance, according to Wikipedia,

Intentionality is the capacity of mental states to be directed towards (about) or be in relation with something in the external world. This property of mental states entails that they have contents and semantic referents and can therefore be assigned truth values. When one tries to reduce these states to natural processes there arises a problem: natural processes are not true or false, they simply happen. It would not make any sense to say that a natural process is true or false. But mental ideas or judgments are true or false, so how then can mental states (ideas or judgments) be natural processes? The possibility of assigning semantic value to ideas must mean that such ideas are about facts. Thus, for example, the idea that Herodotus was a historian refers to Herodotus and to the fact that he was a historian. If the fact is true, then the idea is true; otherwise, it is false. But where does this relation come from? In the brain, there are only electrochemical processes and these seem not to have anything to do with Herodotus.

The process of building a rocket, or any other sort of interstellar gadget, requires a series of mental judgments based on a mental understanding of physical laws, on which plan might work and which might not -- in other words, a series of judgments that is tested against experimental results. So far, nobody has been able to demonsrate how this mental process relates to the physical brain; there is always a separation between the two. So where does reason come from? It almost certainly doesn't "evolve", and Darwinian natural selection is a shaky paradigm in any case.

So to imagine UFOs requires that we imagine space aliens capable of building them, which in turn requires that we first accept a very shaky hypothesis of how life appears anywhere, but then we have to accept the idea that reason, a non-physical process, somehow arises as a consequence of a physical process that creates a brain or equivalent organ that allows a space alien to think and build a gadget.

This makes my head hurt. It's much easier to recognize that space aliens and UFOs are creatures of fantasy, and there are very good reasons why we've never seen either.

Assassinations And Decorum

Once I began to read reactions to Comey's new indictment for posting his "8647" shot, it occurred to me once again that everyone's missing the point -- the same point they missed after Charlie Kirk's assassination. I said here at that time, regarding the people who were fired for indecorous remarks celebrating that incident:

Merriam-Webster defines "decoerum" as "agreement with accepted standards of conduct". In light of the remarkable rash of suspensions and terminations being visited on people who publicly celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination, some people like intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds are saying, "I mave doubts about these firings. . . . The courts can sort it out later, just like they did (sometimes) when so many people on the right were being cancelled."

He concludes maybe the courts will sort it out -- well, he's a law professor. But this isn't really a legal issue. What's happening is that ordinary standards of decorum are being reestablished. If you think about it, before anything else, Bud Light's Dylan Mulvaney campaign, in which a leading national brand endorsed transsexualism, was a violation of decorum. You don't talk about people's plumbing in a national media environment; even if children can't drink beer, they see the ads.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "In past times, how did the Secret Service handle threats against the president?" It answered,

The Secret Service's approach to handling presidential threats has evolved from primarily reactive "bodyguarding" in the early 20th century to a modern, proactive system of layered security and threat intelligence.

. . . By 1917, it became a federal crime to threaten the president by mail or other means, allowing the Service to pursue individuals before they could act.

. . . The agency conducts thousands of risk assessments annually. When a threat is identified—whether online, via mail, or in person—agents track the individual, conduct background checks (criminal and mental health), and perform voluntary interviews to determine intent and capability.

Last July, the Secret Service took Comey's post seriously, as it seems to me it should have.

Former FBI Director James Comey and his wife, Patrice, were tailed by law enforcement officials following Comey’s Trump assassination post.

Comey was under investigation for calling for Trump to be killed in a cryptic Instagram post in May.

“Cool shell formation on my beach walk,” Comey said in his caption.

. . . Secret Service agents interviewed Comey and his wife and nothing came of it. Comey is freely walking around attacking Trump and Kash Patel because he knows he will never be held accountable.

Kash Patel recently told Bret Baier that copycats are popping up across the country because of James Comey’s “8647” Instagram post.

If Comey was actually put in prison, the copycats would likely stop.

But the investigation apparently went beyond tailing:

The former FBI director sat for an hours-long interview with agents in Washington, DC — an uncommon step by the agency over a non-specific threat — and investigators he [sic] saw the shells on a beach in North Carolina.

In fact, the investigation now looks like it was even more substantial than that. FBI Director Patel said,

“As the former Director of the FBI, he knew full well the attention and consequences of making such a post. This FBI and our DOJ partners pursued a rigorous investigation that followed the facts - and now Mr. Comey will be held fully accountable for his actions. Thank you to our investigators, Acting AG Todd Blanche, and the Eastern District of NC for their diligent and professional work.”

The general reaction appears to be that this is actually a freedom-of-speech case, but I have my doubts. A quick web search shows that people can be convicted for making ambiguous posts on social media, for instance:

A San Antonio man pleaded guilty Wednesday to threatening President Donald Trump on Facebook before the president visited the Texas Hill Country, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

According to an arrest affidavit, Robert Herrera, 52, commented on a KSAT article posted to Facebook on July 10 about the president’s upcoming visit to the Hill Country.

Trump and First Lady Melania Trump visited the Hill Country on July 11.

“I won’t miss,” Herrera wrote, along with a picture of President Trump surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents after the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, according to a DOJ news release.

. . . Herrera was arrested on July 11 and booked into the Bexar County Adult Detention Center on two charges, according to jail records: making a terroristic threat against a public figure, a federal charge, and possession of a controlled substance.

Regarding the terroristic threat charge, Herrera faces up to five years in prison along with a maximum $250,000 fine.

I assume Mr Herrera's counsel convinced him that claiming this was just fantasy, or just a joke, or it was being misinterpreted, wouldn't fly with a jury. Added to that problem is the fact that Comey has served both as Deputy Attorney General and FBI Director and may be assumed to have been familiar with both the laws and significant cases, like the one above, where violations were prosecuted. But the question keeps circling back to the problem of decorum:

“Threatening the life of the President of the United States is a grave violation of our nation’s laws,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “The grand jury returned an indictment alleging James Comey did just that, at a time when this country has witnessed violent incitement followed by deadly actions against President Trump and other elected officials. The temperature needs to be turned down, and anyone who dials it up and threatens the life of the President will be held accountable.”

Estimates of Comey's net worth differ wildly, from $350,000 to $14 million. Whatever the outcome of this and the other federal cases against him, his legal bills are likely to be substantial, win or lose. Attorneys have already scoped out Comey's exposure:

I spoke with three other veteran criminal lawyers who said for these kinds of high-profile cases, it could cost a million to $5 million at a small firm, and much more at a big law firm, where some partners charge $2,500 an hour. Those kind of bills could reach $25 million or more.

. . . The former FBI director, Jim Comey, is being represented by his old friend, a former prosecutor called Patrick Fitzgerald at his old law firm, Skadden. Fitzgerald might have commanded more than $2,000 an hour, but he's retired now, working for himself and can set his own rates or even donate his time.

The problem is that even if Fitzgerald donates his own time to Comey, other attorneys will have to do grunt work that Fitzgerald himself is unwilling to do, and even for someone like Fitzgerald, work is work.

But the basic problem is decorum: no matter how many cute remarks you may be able to get away with, making light of assassination lowers the threshold. How many weirdos feel all the more emboldened by how the atmosphere fills up with loose talk? We seem to be getting more and more weirdos lately, that's the bottom line. There needs to be a penalty of some sort for lowering the threshold.

And think about it: Comey makes cute remarks that a standup comic can probably get away with. But Comey is supposed to be a serious public figure. He shouldn't be posting cute remarks at all. Something's out of whack down deep there.

King Charles's Visit

STOP IT!!!🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/XbW9BYbIKJ

— il Donaldo Trumpo (@PapiTrumpo) April 27, 2026

Here's what The Mew York Times thinks important about the King's visit:

One meeting that appears to be absent from King Charles III’s carefully planned schedule in the United States this week is any reunion with Prince Harry.

On a four-day state visit intended in part to repair bruised U.S.-British relations, Charles’s itinerary currently includes no plans to see Harry, his 41-year-old son, who lives in California with his wife, Meghan, and their two children.

Buckingham Palace officials declined to comment when asked whether the king and his younger son would meet. Charles and Queen Camilla are scheduled to be in Washington on Tuesday and New York on Wednesday before departing on Thursday.

Fox News sees things more clearly:

Trump has expressed frustration with Britain’s refusal to fully join the U.S. campaign against Iran, and has urged U.S. allies to get involved militarily or operationally, particularly around protecting oil shipments in the Strait of Hormuz.

"This is not Winston Churchill we are dealing with," Trump said on March 3, referring to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. "By the way, I’m not happy with the U.K. either," the president continued, referring to Starmer blocking the United States’ use of U.K. bases to launch attacks on Iran.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "How much discretion does the UK monarch have to negotiate policy on a state visit?" It replied,

The UK monarch has no personal discretion to negotiate policy during a state visit. As a constitutional monarch, the King is bound by convention to act only on the "advice" of his ministers, meaning the government retains full control over the political and policy-related aspects of these visits.

No Policy-Making Power: The King cannot negotiate treaties, set government policy, or speak freely on partisan political matters.

Government-Driven Agenda: State visits are tools of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) to serve UK strategic, economic, or security interests.

So we have the problem that Trump is unhappy with the Prime Minister, at least the one who's barely holding onto his office now:

MPs are to vote on Tuesday over whether Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer should be investigated in Parliament for allegedly misleading the House of Commons.

It relates to several comments he made about the process of appointing Lord Mandelson as the UK's ambassador to the US in December 2024. Lord Mandelson was sacked the following September over his links to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

On Monday night Sir Keir told Labour MPs the accusation he had misled the House was "totally baseless" and accused the Conservatives of a "political stunt".

So as far as I can parse this out, if the King utters a single word to Trump that could be interpreted as relating to the current uncertainty for Starmer, it could be interpreted as causing a constitutional crisis. Conversely, he is duty bound to support his current Government in all matters. I asked Chrome AI mode, "What in the UK would be interpreted as a 'constitutional crisis' as it applies to the king, and how would it be resolved?" It replied,

In the United Kingdom, a "constitutional crisis" involving the King typically refers to a situation where the monarch's reserve powers (legally held but conventionally unused) clash with modern democratic practices. Because the UK has an uncodified constitution based largely on convention, a crisis arises when these unwritten rules are broken or come into direct conflict with the will of Parliament.

. . . Public Political Interference: King Charles is constitutionally required to remain politically impartial. Any attempt to publicly lobby or campaign on political issues could destabilize the monarchy’s role.

Resolution usually depends on the severity of the standoff and historical precedents:

Abdication: If the King’s personal choices or actions make his continued reign [un]tenable, he may be pressured to abdicate, as seen with Edward VIII in 1936.

. . . General Election: In extreme cases, a snap election can be called to let the public decide on a mandate, effectively forcing the monarch’s hand if the returned government maintains its position.

But Charles's visit to the US comes at a time of increasing conflict, when the UK is forced to rely on its membership in NATO for defense, since it has depleted its own armed forces, while Trump is less willing to allow free rides on defense by NATO members. If Charles is expected to achieve some purpose in his visit, for instance to make up in some way for the bad feelings between Trump and Starmer, he is going to have to sail very close to the wind vis-a-vis his constitutional position.

• I don't see how he can make any sort of remark, however humorous, informal, or off-the-record, apologizing in even the vaguest way for Starmer or the Government
• I don't see how he can make any sort of remark, however humorous, informal, or off-the-record, suggesting the bipartisan policy of successive Governments to deplete the UK's armed forces is in any way counterproductive or ought to be changed
• I don't see how he can make any sort of remark, however humorous, informal, or off-the-record, commenting in any way on the UK immigration crisis
• I don't see how he can make any sort of remark, however humorous, informal, or off-the-record, commenting on either the US or UK political scene.

In other words, there's very little he can say, and aboslutely nothing he can do, to accomplish anything positive for UK-US relations. He can be charrming, and he can probably observe that having met Pope Leo, he seems quite a good chap.

But if anything remotely interesting comes out of the vistt, it will provoke a constitutional crisis.

Puzzling Similarities Between Cole Allen And Thomas Crooks

I'm intrigued about what's coming out on the "Hinckley Hilton" shooter, Cole Tomas Allen, and the Butler, PA shoter, Thomas Crooks. Both seem to have been quiet and unassuming, both were good students, but their families had been worried about them and their apparent relationship with firearms. Nevertheless, that both would wind up attempted presidential assassins came as a surprise to friends and employers. Regarding Crooks, according to Wikipedia,

One investigation only found a "lunch detention in middle school for chewing gum" as bad behavior growing up. He joined the National Technical Honor Society in 2021 while a junior in high school. In 2022, he graduated Bethel Park High School with high honors and won a $500 "star award" from the National Math and Science Initiative. Crooks earned a score of 1530 out of 1600 on the SAT, as well as perfect grades on three Advanced Placement exams. Classmates and school officials characterized him as being quiet{.}

. . . During his freshman year of high school, Crooks anonymously posted threats online, warning students at Bethel Park High School to not come to school the next day. Here, Crooks had claimed to have placed bombs inside the bathrooms in the school's cafeteria. Many students stayed home the following day. The threats were dismissed by the school's administration, and no legal actions were taken.

. . . He was employed as a dietary aide in a nursing home at the time of the shooting. According to the nursing home, which is less than a mile away from where he lived, he had passed a background check and "performed his job without concern". He had been accepted into both the University of Pittsburgh and Robert Morris University in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, northwest of Pittsburgh, and planned to attend the latter. He had been a member of a local shooting club for at least a year.

. . . Crooks' father noticed his mental health declining in the year before the shooting, and particularly in the months after graduation. He later told investigators that he had seen his son talking to himself and dancing around his bedroom late at night, and that his family had a history of mental health and addiction issues. Crooks was also making depression-related queries online, investigators found. Interviews with his teachers, friends, and co-workers suggest that many people who interacted with him regularly did not know he was troubled.

Allen's background is pretty similar; he was also quiet and a good student who seemed promising:

Allen's academic record is striking. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology — Caltech — in 2017 with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. Caltech confirmed his graduation to multiple news outlets. He went on to earn a master's degree in computer science at California State University, Dominguez Hills, in 2025. According to a Caltech graduation announcement still online from 2017, he was active in a Christian student fellowship and a campus club for Nerf gun enthusiasts during his undergraduate years. In the summer of 2014, his online resume says, he completed a competitive summer research fellowship at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

. . . For the last six years, Allen had worked at C2 Education, a Torrance-based test prep and college counseling company. In December 2024, the company's Facebook page named him Teacher of the Month. According to the Los Angeles Times, Allen tutored several high school students who were members of the Asian American Civic Trust, a Torrance-based nonprofit. Its president, Dylan Wakayama, told the Times the students "thought he was very intelligent, proficient in biology, mathematics and science. They thought he was on the nicer, quiet side."

According to WBALTV,

Bin Tang, a computer science professor at California State University-Dominguez Hills, told The Associated Press that Allen took a few of his classes before graduating.

“He was a very good student indeed, always sitting in the first row of my class, paying attention, and frequently emailing me with coursework questions. Soft spoken, very polite, a good fellow. I am very shocked to see the news,” Tang wrote in an email.

But at the same link,

Secret Service and Montgomery County Police interviewed Allen's sister at their residence in Rockville, Maryland. She said that her brother had a tendency to make radical statements and his rhetoric constantly referenced a plan to do “something” to fix the issues with today’s world.

She also confirmed Allen purchased two handguns and a shotgun from Cap Tactical Firearms and kept them stored at their parent’s home, and that their parents were unaware that Allen was keeping the firearms in the home. He would regularly go to the shooting range to train with his firearms.

His brother also doesn't appear to have been surprised to receive a copy of his manifesto just before the shooting:

He had written about targeting Trump administration officials, and his family raised concerns with law enforcement before the event, President Donald Trump said Sunday in an interview on Fox News Channel.

. . . White House officials told our Washington Bureau and Investigative Unit that Allen's brother had notified the New London Police Department in Connecticut of Allen's alleged manifesto, which he had sent to his family members minutes prior to the incident.

Another similarity between Crooks and Allen is that despite their high academic performance, they worked in low-level jobs unrelated to their career aspirations, Crooks as a dietary aide in a nursing home, Allen as a part-time tutor at a tutoring and test cramming company. Both lived with their parents.

The knee-jerk reaction to Cole Allen so far on the right has been to blame the education system, while on the left, it's to blame guns. I think both miss the point; I get the impression that Crooks and Allen concentrated in technical fields, where they both did well, and not in fields where they might have been exposed to leftist propaganda. The guns, of course, are a symptom, not a cause.

I'm inclined to note that in males, the typical age for the onset of schizophrenia is between late teens and early 30s, and the circumstances we're learning about Allen and Crooks seem to be pointing in that direction. The most productive thing we can do is get the quackery out of the mental health profession and get much more serious about studying subjects like schizophrenia.

More From The Country That Gave Us Fabian Socialism

Here's what Rowan Williams said about the "grooming gangs," in a recent piece for The Guardian. You'll note, first of all, that he put the phrase in scare quotes, because, of course, he doesn't really believe there actually are organised groups of Muslim men deliberately… https://t.co/6CXZhMfa4K pic.twitter.com/W8h9O03Q1A

— RAW EGG NATIONALIST (@Babygravy9) April 17, 2026

Now and then, most recently here and here, I've reviewed the late 19th century idea that the best strategy to counter the threat of world proletarian revolution was to temporize with working-class demands, but nevertheless gradually capitulate to them. This was a product almost exclusively of the UK bourgeoisie. According to Wikipedia,

As one of the founding organisations of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, and as an important influence upon the Labour Party which grew from it, the Fabian Society has strongly influenced British politics.

A few figures closely associated with the movement were working class, like Ben Tillett, or titled nobility, like Bertrand Russell, but their overall social alignments were more consistent with what Marx and Engels called the bourgeoisie, which most in the movement authentically were. It's always puzzled me that working-class members of the Labour party seem never to have been remotely suspicious that members of the bourgeoisie were making policy putatively intended to benefit the working class.

I've argued here that once the classic threat of world proletarian revolution a la the Soviet Union in 1917 dissipated with the collapse of the same Soviet Union in the late 20th century, Fabian socialism became a solution in search of a problem. In addition, the outcome of the 1926 General Strike in the UK was an indication that the traditional tools of the working class short of revolution, strikes, were ineffective and alienated the bourgeoisie.

But also, the bourgeoisie effectively co-opted the Labour Party from the start; The UK writer Peter Hitchens has come to recognize this strain of opinon. According to Wikipedia,

Previously a Marxist-Trotskyist and supporter of the Labour Party, Hitchens became more conservative during the 1990s. He joined the Conservative Party in 1997 and left in 2003, and has since been deeply critical of the party, which he views as the foremost obstacle to true conservatism in Britain.

At the same time he made these moves, the focus of the class struggle moved from the traditional conflict between the working class and capital to the damage government policy on immigration is doing to the working class. Peter Hitchens is certainly aware of this:

Straight from the horse's mouth

“When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible. It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain.”

—Peter Hitchens pic.twitter.com/KG41rDWVKl

— The Knowledge Archivist (@KnowledgeArchiv) April 19, 2026

But I'm not sure if even here, he understood the problem: it wasn't that the bourgeois wannabe "revolutionaries" in the universities didn't really like Britain, it was that they didn't like the UK working class. This was, after all, the real subtext of the 1926 General Strike, and it still seems to be an underpinning of UK bourgeois attitudes.

Take, for instance, the opinion of Rowan Williams, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, and whose views seem utterly typical of UK bourgeois leftists. The X post embedded at the top of my post here calls out Williams's position on "grooming gangs", an outcome of bipartisan UK immigration policy since the immediate postwar period:

Here's what Rowan Williams said about the "grooming gangs," in a recent piece for The Guardian. You'll note, first of all, that he put the phrase in scare quotes, because, of course, he doesn't really believe there actually are organised groups of Muslim men deliberately targeting white working-class girls for abuse and even murder because they're white and not Muslim.

What he believes, rather, is that there have been "events," mere brute facts, like the interaction of particles at the atomic level; something for which, ultimately, there can be no human blame. There were "institutional failures," which might as well be a description of a sewage overflow caused by mismanagement of a local drainage system.

Curious, I asked Chrome AI mode, "Are the girl victims of UK grooming gangs working class?" It answered,

Yes, research and official inquiries consistently show that a large majority of the girl victims in UK grooming gang scandals come from working-class or impoverished backgrounds.

Reports from high-profile cases in towns like Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford identify several common socioeconomic factors among victims:

Working-Class Backgrounds: Victims were predominantly from working-class families, often characterized by reviewers as coming from "marginalized" or "deprived" areas.

. . . Institutional Classism: Inquiries, such as the Casey Review, found that "classist attitudes" among police and social workers often led to victims being dismissed as having made "life choices" or leading "risky lifestyles" rather than being recognized as children under threat.

Targeting of Vulnerability: Perpetrators frequently targeted girls they perceived as being from less stable or supported backgrounds, using gifts of alcohol, drugs, or mock affection to groom them.

Experts and commentators on platforms like Al Jazeera and LSE Blogs argue that the intersection of class and race played a critical role in why these crimes went undetected for so long.

In other words, while I've already pointed out that a largely unmentioned consequence of UK high immigration policy was to keep working-class wages down, another consequence was more directly to oppress the working class by setting up conditions whereby its daughters would be raped by the immigrants, while both media and police agencies minimized the problem. And national bien pensant spokespeople like the Archbishop of Canterbury seem to endorse this whole strategy.

I'm beginning to think that the problems of class conflict as asddressed by Trump and the MAGA movement are substantively different from how they're addressed in the UK. The US bourgeoisie simply doesn't hate its working class; bourgeois media figures like Mike Rowe respect its work and support its interests, while the UK bourgeoisie doesn't just want to keep them down, it actively oppresses them. And this simply isn't new, it's been there at least since the 19th century. The UK has problems that a Trump, or a Trump-like figure, can't solve.