Amber Heard Redux

I mentioned Raymond Chandler in yesterday's post. and for whatever reason, I kept thinking about him all day. Then, late in the afternoon, the news broke that at minimum, it was physically impossible for Trump to have grabbed the steering wheel of the SUV (or whatever it was) in which he was riding on January 6, and by this morning, the headlines emerged that the Secret Service was prepared to testify under oath that Trump never assaulted the driver or the other agent as former aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified before the January 6 Committee.

Then I realized that a stock figure in Hollywood noir from The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown is the pretty woman who tells lies. This is part of the secret deliciousness of the genre; women are portrayed as dishonest schemers, and it takes a disreputable but world-weary detective to penetrate the conventional wisdom and winkle out the truth, though the woman's attractiveness remains. Look at Sam Spade's final confrontation with Brigid O'Shaughnessy at the end of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon:

"But--but, Sam, you can't! Not after what we've been to each other. You can't--"

"Like hell I can't."

She took a long trembling breath. "You've been playing with me? Only pretending you cared--to trap me like this? You didn't--care at all? You didn't--don't--l-love me?"

"I think I do," Spade said. "What of it?" The muscles holding his smile in place stood out like wales. "I'm not Thursby. I'm not Jacobi. I won't play the sap for you."

. . . "Wait till I'm through and then you can talk. Fourth, no matter what I wanted to do now it would be absolutely impossible for me to let you go without having myself dragged to the gallows with the others. Next, I've no reason in God's world to think I can trust you and if I did this and got away with it you'd have something on me that you could use whenever you happened to want to. That's five of them. The sixth would be that, since I've also got something on you, I couldn't be sure you wouldn't decide to shoot a hole in me some day. Seventh, I don't even like the idea of thinking that there might be one chance in a hundred that you'd played me for a sucker. And eighth--but that's enough. All those on one side. Maybe some of them are unimportant. I won't argue about that. But look at the number of them. Now on the other side we've got what? All we've got is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love you."

"You know," she whispered, "whether you do or not."

"I don't. It's easy enough to be nuts about you." He looked hungrily from her hair to her feet and up to her eyes again. "But I don't know what that amounts to. Does anybody ever? But suppose I do? What of it? Maybe next month I won't. I've been through it before--when it lasted that long. Then what? Then I'll think I played the sap. And if I did it and got sent over then I'd be sure I was the sap. Well, if I send you over I'll be sorry as hell--I'll have some rotten nights--but that'll pass. Listen." He took her by the shoulders and bent her back, leaning over her. "If that doesn't mean anything to you forget it and we'll make it this: I won't because all of me wants to--wants to say to hell with the consequences and do it--and because--God damn you--you've counted on that with me the same as you counted on that with the others." He took his hands from her shoulders and let them fall to his sides.

Isn't this something like the subtext of the Jonny Depp-Amber Heard trial? Pretty woman makes the disreputable but somehow authentic guy play the sap -- but in the end, she gets her comeuppance? Something in that story reverberates deeply within the American character. Now we have something oddly similar, pretty woman tries to make disreputable but somehow authentic ex-president play the sap, but she gets her comeuppance.

I think the conservative YouTube commentator Mark Dice has the best take:

At 4:10, he says, ". . . and it turns out that just two days ago, she got a brand new lawyer, which helps explain this 'surprise' testimony, but I think the real story here is that he's most likely negotiating a million-dollar book deal for her and needed this publicity to help lock it in." The lesson of the Depp-Heard trial is that the jury system relies on ordinary citizens with common sense to come to their own conclusion about the credibility of witnesses. I think the same eventually plays out in manufactured public scandals like the January 6 boondoggle -- enough ordinary citizens can have enough common sense to bring about just outcomes.

Nevertheless, the never Trumpers are still trying to rehabilitate Hutchinson. Take John Podhoretz:

[Trump] also wanted to drive to the Capitol in the lead and physically tussled with the Secret Service in his SUV when they weren’t going to do so because they could not guarantee his safety. She testified that Cippolone told her if Trump marched to the Capitol, “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable.” And she reported Meadows saying of the chant to hang Vice President Mike Pence that Trump “doesn’t want to do anything,” and that “he thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”

You’re going to hear people call this “hearsay.” It is not hearsay. It is direct testimony of contemporaneous things said in Hutchinson’s earshot about events that were taking place while she was listening.

. . . He has so far been protected by Meadows and Cippolone because they have refused to testify to the committee under claims of executive privilege. . . . But they can testify if they choose. If they do not, they will, in essence, be allowing Hutchinson’s testimony to stand. If they do, and they do not say everything she said was a lie, her testimony will stand and be bolstered by them. And if they testify and say their recollections of the days were different, they will have to report in what way they were different—and will not be able to refuse to answer questions they find uncomfortable.

But it isn't just hearsay; important parts of it are now in dispute by parties who were present, and that inevitably affects Hutchinson's overall credibilty. What puzzles me is that the political circumstances that will surrround the 2024 election are far distant and at this stage impossible to predict. Why is everyone so excited about this pretty 25-year-old who's quickly proven herself a bad liar?

Hunter's Dad Is The First Enabler

I've been building a detailed history file on the First Crackhead now that reporters like Andrew Kerr have been able to dig deeper into previously password-protected files on his abandoned laptop. But even before Kerr's revelations, I find that I missed this story in the New York Post from last April:

Hunter Biden — who’s admitted battling addictions to booze and crack cocaine for much of his life — is living across the street from a swank rehab center where Lindsay Lohan once spent a summer drying out, The Post has learned.

The scandal-scarred first son’s $20,000-a-month rental home in Southern California is located just steps from the Cliffside Malibu, one of four “residential homes” run by its namesake parent company.

The price for “luxury,” in-patient treatment there isn’t advertised, but reportedly ran $68,000 for a 30-day stay nearly a decade ago.

The map at the top of this post comes from that story (click on the image for a larger view). I first mentioned his Malibu rental in this post back in March, which linked to another story in the New York Post from July 27, 2021 that first refers to this Malibu rental:

Hunter Biden has a new Malibu rental with an art studio, according to reports.

. . . The rental was listed for $20,000 a month in April, and the listing was removed on May 10, two months ago, signaling that a rental agreement had been reached (though TMZ reported that the rental began four months ago when the property was first listed).

. . . Hunter recently left a $5.4 million Venice Beach house — which was guarded by the Secret Service — that cost an estimated $25,000 per month and which he found after living in Hollywood Hills, The Post reported. The new rental is also guarded by the Secret Service, TMZ has reported.

Only later has it emerged that the Secret Service rents an adjoining luxury home that serves as a detail headquarters for $30,000 per month. It subsequently came out that the $20,000 monthly rental and other unspecified expenses have been paid by a Hollywood attorney, Kevin Morris.

But now we have the news that this rental coincidentally adjoins a self-described luxury rehab facility. That program says to its prospective clients:

We understand that you have utilized your valuable resources to hire us to do a job for you, and also understand that you have hired us because it is a job that you now understand that you cannot do for yourself and as such, have agreed to let us do the work you have entrusted us to do.

When you enter the recovery program at Rise in Malibu you can expect your individualized treatment programming to include the following therapeutic work and associated therapies. . .

As best I can infer, this means that patients are submitting to a program that includes involuntary confinement, no matter how luxurious the surroundings may be. It's hard not to think that the rentals across the street, the one for Hunter and the adjoining one for his Secret Service minders, are effectively part of a more holistic treatment plan that basically keeps this guy under very, very close control, with lots of therapy to go with. And I assume there's a fee to be paid, and Kevin Morris is at least the front for it.

What does the tab amount to here? It's hard to avoid thinking Hunter is in some sort of adjunct program at Cliffside Malibu, presumably individualized for his oh-so-unique needs and closely coordinated with the Secret Service next door. Ten years ago, your run-of-the-mill addicted wastrel cost $68,000 to stay there for a month. At minimum, we must be talking a high five-figure monthly payment that's so far lasted more than a year and presumably will continue through January 2025, if not longer. I've got to assume Kevin Morris is picking this up as well. Again, who's he fronting for?

For a certain amount of context, let's look at a new Andrew Kerr investigative piece that came out just yesterday:

Hunter Biden spent over $30,000 on escorts, many of whom were linked to ".ru" Russian email addresses and worked with an “exclusive model agency" called UberGFE during a 3 1/2 month period between November 2018 and March 2019.

He managed to do so thanks in part to Joe Biden committing to wiring him a total of $100,000 to help pay his bills from December 2018 through January 2019.

In one instance, Joe Biden wired his son $5,000 while he was actively engaged with an UberGFE escort. In another, texts indicated Hunter Biden convinced his father to wire him $20,000 to finance his stay at a New York City drug rehabilitation program that he never checked into.

The most we can say for now is that Hunter's extended binge through much of 2018 and into 2019 was costing Joe tens of thousands each month, as well as representing both a security risk and a potential major scandal at a time when Joe was putting the wheels in motion to run for president in 2020. Indeed, in March of 2020, Hunter finally settled with the ex-stripper mother of his child born out of wedlock for an undisclosed amount, taking that issue off the radar. I wouldn't look too far to find Kevin Morris in this picture.

Something had to be done. In fact, I would guess that about the time of the settlement with the stripper, a plan had been formulated to keep Hunter out of the news, but it didn't come to full fruition until the whole Malibu program was set up about a year later. My guess is we won't learn a whole lot more until after the November election, but there's got to be an awful lot of money being spent here.

Didn't Raymond Chandler write about rich Hollywood types in secret luxury rehab? Where is Humphrey Bogart when we really need him? Heck, where's Jack Nicholson? There's a Hollywood classic waiting to be made here.

Trump And The Fallout From Dobbs

As the impact of the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision bgegins to sink in, after a few days, people are starting to recognize that for good or ill, this was Donald Trump's doing. For instance,

To the Never Trump people: Elections matter.

. . . Because Donald J. Trump was president and because he had the courage to stick with solidly conservative jurists and because he, unlike Never Trumpers, knows how to hold the line, abortion now goes back to the people to decide.

. . . And to those who sought a perfect vessel for perfect policy, remember, politics is about wielding power and creating policy to wield that power. Sitting on a perch waiting for the perfect politician to achieve policies is a fool’s errand. All politicians are flawed, some more than others, and yet, a flawed politician can achieve good outcomes with courage.

Breitbart News provided a partial transcript of Trump's remarks at an Illinois rally on Saturday:

We have very big news. Maybe the biggest, right from the United States Supreme Court. Yesterday the Court handed down a victory for the Constitution, a victory for the rule of law, and above all, a victory for life. This breakthrough is the answer to the prayers of millions and millions of people. And these prayers have gone on for decades and decades. They’ve been praying, and now those prayers have been answered.

. . . I promised to nominate judges and justices who would stand up for the original meaning of the Constitution and who would honestly and faithfully interpret the law as written. We got almost 300 federal judges, and three great Supreme Court justices confirmed to do exactly that.

It's worth noting that although, as Trump himself points out, this was the result of a 50-year campaign by generations of people, it was Trump's instinctive willingness to go for broke in 2016 that made the final difference. But Rolling Stone, of all sources, raises questions about Trump's private views:

Republicans spent Friday celebrating the end of Roe v. Wade and praising Donald Trump for making it happen. Trump himself, multiple sources tell Rolling Stone, is far less excited.

Publicly, the former president took credit for abrogating the rights of millions of American women, putting out a statement saying Roe’s repeal was “only made possible because I delivered everything as promised, including nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court.”

The rest of the story is behnd a paywall, but this site gives a summary:

However, the report quotes an associate of the former president who said he has been "sh*tting" on the decision since an early draft was leaked weeks ago.

. . . [P]rivately, the former president is anxious about what the end of Roe, and the flood of extreme Republican state-level anti-abortion laws it will unleash, will mean for the GOP’s electoral prospects — and for his own.

On that note, the Trump insider admitted, "He keeps sh*tting all over his greatest accomplishment. When you speak to him, it’s the response of someone fearing the backlash and fearing the politics of what happens when conservatives actually get what they want [on abortion]," before adding, "I do not think he’s enjoying the moment as much as many of his supporters are, to be honest with you.”

I think Trump's problem for his 2024 prospects is that new issues have come up, most importantly the economy, but also Ukraine, and now the question of what next on abortion. He's had little to say on Ukraine, except that it wouldn't have taken place if he'd been president. He needs to be more specific, and he needs to provide a realisic plan forward, especially how to deal with Russia's seriously reduced capabilities with or without Putin.

Now he also needs to provide a consistent stance on how to proceed with the abortion issue left to the states -- after all, wasn't that going to be the predictable outcome of any decision by his court overturning Roe all along? Some states were inevitably going to be stricter than others. How can that be making him anxious?

Rolling Stone, of course, has a history of fake stories, and its "insider" here is anonymous. But if Trump doesn't begin to articulate a fuller path forward in the runup to 2024, he's going to lose out.

Intersectionality Goes Only So Far

So far, opinon against the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade has been fairly predictable, centering on how Dobbs will impact poor women of color in states that limit their ability to get an abortion, since it will cost them money to travel to a state with more liberal policies. This, of course, inadvertently reveals the original purpose of Planned Parenthood, which was eugenic, aimed at increasing the rate of abortion among non-whites.

The assumption, or at least the hope, of the anti-Dobbs faction is that non-whites will recognize that reducing access to abortion in even this limited way is against their interests, when African-Americans in particular have come to understand that by limiting their birthrate through state-encouraged abortion, the ruling class also limits their numbers at the ballot box.

Another difficulty is that as a practical matter, the general population covered by the designation LGBTQ+ is much less affected by access to abortion, since pregnancies result exclusively from the male-female reproductive act, leaving aside IVF or artificial insemination, although even these in fact are intended to induce a pregnancy that is by implication desired. Thus even if drag queens, say, demonstrate against Dobbs, they're one step removed from the actual issue at hand.

And this leaves aside the subtext of a drag queen performance, which carries with it a certain cluster of feelings about women that include resentment and hatred, with an exaggerated male-oriented portrayal of female vanity and histrionics. I did a web search on "drag queen abortion" just for the heck of it, expecting to find nothing, but instead I found a sequence of images. The least disturbing is the one at the top of this post. Others, like those on the right, are more gruesome. They're anything but a sympathetic portrayal of a woman's right to choose. On the other hand, they're probably much closer to the actual intent of the whole drag queen performance, illustrating a fundamental distrust of women, particularly involving what's portrayed here as a deep suspicion of motherhood.

The elites fetishize drag queens at their peril. I've already noted here that Speaker Pelosi, vain, flamboyant, and histrionic, is just one step removed from a drag queen herself, and that's not good for women. I'm not at all sure if having drag queens in an anti-Dobbs parade would be a good idea.

But there's another issue. I've not been a Rod Dreher fan here, since I don't think his adoption of Orthodoxy or even before that Roman Catholicism was ever authentic, but he does get one thing right in this recent piece:

There is an obvious Luciferian connection between the twin sacred rites of abortion and sex change. Both assert human will over life and the generative order. Both refuse the givenness of Creation. Both insist that the autonomous choosing individual has ultimate power over life and death, male and female. Both rites are necessary to upholding the Sexual Revolution, which is the event that gives meaning to the lives of the American ruling class.

We are now seeing how much that ruling class hates those it rules.

A reader writes that he doesn’t expect mass violence over Dobbs — not an abortion-related repeat of the George Floyd riots. Those riots were carried out by black people and white antifa. The kind of demographic most upset over the fall of Roe — educated middle class women — will never risk their professional status to commit acts of criminal violence, he predicts.

There are other practical problems with protesting Dobbs. My wife notes that the biggest riots so far have been in places like California, which will always have permissive laws on abortion. Thus for women in such states, some other form of civil disobedience will be needed to make their point. The most obvious would be to get preganant, travel to a state with restrictive abortion laws like North Dakota, get a back alley abortion there, and die from it. After all, isn't that the equivalent of a sit-in?

The cartoon at left represents a return to a major pre-Roe argument for legalized abortion, that if it's not legal, it won't be safe, and women will be forced to use coat hangers to peform the procedure on themselves. Well, I was in college and graduate school pre-Roe, and friends and classmates from time to time found the need to find someone who'd do it. Being middle class or better, none needed a coat hanger, and none died, although their children of course always did.

The coat hanger argument was never sincere, it was always a way to hold someone else hostage, when the prosperous educated classes would always have an alternative, legal or not. Everyone drank underage back then, after all, and many smoked pot. The issue simply doesn't affect the educated classes no matter what law is passed in what state, but the other side of the coin is that the argument from the educated classes that the non-white poor need it is also racist: the assumption is that the non-white poor are too stupid and too promiscuous by nature to conduct their sexual activities prudently. This goes back to Margaret Sanger's eugenic purpose behind Planned Parenthood.

There's another problem with the intersectionality fallacy behind protesting Dobbs: it arises from the current movement for synthetic sexual identity. If men can have periods and get pregnant, men also can need abortions. I note that woke companies like Disney have announced they'll fund travel for women employees to get abortions in states that will permit it. But what if I'm a man who works for Disney in, say, Florida? Won't Disney say since I'm a man and can get pregnant, they'll pay for me to go to California for an abortion?

You might well answer sure, just show Disney your doctor's note or your pregnancy test. But not so fast -- the HIPAA Privacy Rule makes all medical records fully confidential. It's illegal for an employer to ask for any medical record, especially one that involves an abortion. I would have a cause of action against Disney if they refused to pay for my trip to California for an abortion on the basis that I'm a man and can't prove I'm pregnant.

This will work its way through, but it's going to take some time. But then it took time to override Roe.

More Trickles Out About The Paul Pelosi DUI

In terms of overall deliciousness, few recent events can match the DUI arrest of Paul Pelosi, the Speaker's husband, over the Memorial Day weekend in Napa, CA. My wife and I follow it with special interest, because we frequently visit there, and when we do, we regularly pass the site.

Information about the circumstances has been tightly controlled. Thanks to near-universal use of police body and dash cameras, we may assume footage exists of the arrest and Pelosi's field sobriety test, and given the popularity of TV shows that use such footage, it's not hard to imagine what it was like even if we can't see the actual episode. This is part of the deliciousness behind the whole story.

But if the political establishment ever thought they'd be able to keep a lid on things, they're of course mistaken. The arrest and subsequent court proceedings are public records, and eventually everything will come out. The district attorney issued charges this past week, which inevitably brought out more details of the incident:

He was charged with driving under the influence causing injury and driving with a blood-alcohol level of .08 percent or over.

The DA is charging those two as misdemeanors, even though in California they’re “wobblers” and can be charged as either misdemeanors or felonies, based on the evidence and the District Attorney’s discretion. They note that the decision was based on the injury and is consistent with the way they normally charge things. Yes, it’s normal that they judge by the seriousness of the injury. So either that’s an indication that a) there was an injury, but it wasn’t serious or b) there’s a more serious injury and he’s getting a break. Now, one of the problems in this case has been that they haven’t been releasing all the information. There hasn’t been a police report released of the accident and the arrest. Prior news reports had not indicated any injury; now we’re suddenly told that there was injury. So what’s the nature of the injury? We don’t know.

His blood-alcohol level wasn’t tested until more than two hours after the collision, at 12:32 a.m. The crash was at 10:17 p.m. So if it was .082 at that time, it was higher at the time of the accident.

Other accounts note that he wan't booked until 4:13 AM the following morning, which raises inevitable questions about the delay. It's hard not to think that once Paul came to his senses, he was on the phone to Nancy and her handlers, with a great deal of back-and-forth at the federal, state, and county level. In any case,

The Pelosis have hired some PR folk to handle this matter, including, apparently, SF politico Lee Houskeeper, and Napa-based "crisis manager" Larry Kamer. One of their first orders of business was refuting press reports that Paul Pelosi was arrested for a similar driving incident four years ago — that was apparently a different person named Paul Pelosi?

Along with the new information that the Jeep driver who hit Pelosi's Porsche was injured in the collision, there's the intriguing question of whether there was a witness to the crash. According to the RedState link above,

Fox’s Jesse Watters let loose on “Paulie P” (as he terms him) on his show after the charges were announced, including revelations from a new explosive New York Times story.

. . . As Watters says, where did the witness come from? On the side of the road in rural Napa County late at night? Watters speculates the person was in the car. We don’t know whether or not they were, though Watters has spoken to a member of the Fire Department who says they know the answer but they’re being pressured by the District Attorney’s office to keep quiet.

Several questions come up in my mind. Fire Department? That suggests that not only was there an injury, but paramedics must have been on scene. Just how many were injured if someone else was in Pelosi's car? And just who might that have been? I suspect it was an attractive female companion of the Speaker's husband. Lots to keep quiet here.

I would guess there's a great deal of baksheesh being handed around to all parties, Pelosi handlers promising it'll all be taken care of, don't worry about a thing. Well, that'd better be the case.

Biden And The Trans Agenda

One of the "incredible transitions" President Biden has sought most consistently to impose on US society is far-reaching accommodations for transgender people, an extremely tiny part of the population not even supported by much more numerous gays and lesbians, who insist they're attracted instead to same-sex people based on their existing sexual identity and don't want any sort of makeover, surgical, hormonal, or cosmetic.

Recent examples include implementing transgender-friendly airport screening procedures on the Transgender Day of Visibility last April, including unspecified "changes to scanners used for screening. . . . intended to make procedures less invasive". As far as I can tell, based on scanning images I see on media, they currently show very little flesh of any sort. but the concern appears to be that what minimal shadowy outlines the scanners now reveal could still establish that the frumpy middle-aged woman going through security is actually a frumpy middle-aged guy. So we block all that out, or something.

Yesterday, the Biden administration announced proposed changes to Title IX:

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the proposed changes would completely eliminate the concept of gender-specific sports and spaces, such as restrooms and locker rooms, and would allow students to freely use whichever facilities they feel like. The new regulations would also label any instances of someone not using proper “pronouns” as sexual harassment.

The proposed changes will effectively abolish sex-separate activities and spaces, including bathrooms and locker rooms. They would also define misuse of gender pronouns as a form of sexual harassment.

. . . "A shift from biological sex to gender identity means that girls and women will be forced to accept the presence of biological males in what have always been single-sex spaces." said Erika Sanzi, the director of outreach for Parents Defending Education.

The frumpy middle-aged woman at the top of this post is Jennifer Pritzer, a member of the wealthy and influential Pritzger family, the first transgender billionaire. A little-noticed article that came out recently in The Tablet provides disturbing insight into the well-financed and well-organized plan to impose the transgender agenda on everyone:

One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions.

The author says she has

stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”

The creation and normalization of SSI speaks much more directly to what is happening in American culture, and elsewhere, under an umbrella of human rights. With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans. . . is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism and resulting gender differences are foundational premises.

The piece goes on to detail the history and extent of Pritzker family philanthropy, in particular to introduce and normalize the entirely new concept of SSI into universities and medical schools. The programs involved can be truly bizarre:

[Jennifer} Pritzker’s philanthropy is also active in Canada, where Jennifer has helped fund the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, a teaching institution invested in the deconstruction of human sex. An instructor in the Bonham Centre and the curator of its Sexual Representation Collection—“Canada’s largest archival collection of pornography”—is transgender studies professor Nicholas Matte, who denies categorically that sexual dimorphism exists.

The conclusion to draw here is first, that the imposition of SSI is a well-organized and well-funded agenda; second, that it's top-down, driven by the Pritzgers and apparently other wealthy families. It's worth noting that other progressive developments since the 1800s have been at least nominally oriented toward the working and middle classes -- social insurance, collective bargaining, college financial aid, or civil rights. This, on the other hand, is supported by billionaires on behalf of perceived injustices toward a tiny and ill-defined group, and indeed, the implications -- ending sexual segregation in school restrooms and locker rooms, for instance -- are wildly unpopular with the working and middle classes.

Another detail worth noting is that the SSI agenda isn't completely separate from the new COVID-based public health agenda. The most prominent transsexual in the US government, of course, is Dr Rachel Levine, who prior to her appointment as Assistant Secretary for Health imposed some of the most restrictive lockdown measures in the US as Pennsylvania state secretary of health. Jennifer Pritzger's cousin, Illinois Gov J B Pritzker, also imposed extreme lockdown measures there, some of which were removed by the courts.

But here's the big question: why is Scranton Joe, the putative champion of the working class, so firmly attached to this agenda? He's managed to become most closely identified with transgenderism/SSI and the Green New Deal. SSI in particular isn't a vote-getter; it isn't even popular with the traditional gay and lesbian Democrat base. I can only assume there's money involved, big money, over and above the political process.

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Proof

Recently published remarks by Pope Francis to a group of Jesuit editors have drawn a lot of controversy from conservatives, including conservative Catholics. I discussed his remarks about Ukraine the other day, which as a conservative Catholic I find unobjectionable. Today I want to look at the problem of what he calls in his remarks "restorationism":

[T]he Council that some pastors remember best is that of Trent. What I’m saying is not nonsense.

Restorationism has come to gag the Council. The number of groups of “restorers” – for example, in the United States there are many – is significant. An Argentine bishop told me that he had been asked to administer a diocese that had fallen into the hands of these “restorers.” They had never accepted the Council. There are ideas, behaviors that arise from a restorationism that basically did not accept the Council. The problem is precisely this: in some contexts the Council has not yet been accepted. It is also true that it takes a century for a Council to take root. We still have forty years to make it take root, then!

So, of whom specifically does the Holy Father speak? Well, a prominent conservative Catholic has piped up and given us an example. Anthony Esolen on Monday published an essay, "I Am a Restorationist". As a Catholic convert, I've got to say this presents me with a dilemma in my understanding of Catholicism. In his remarks, Pope Francis makes it clear in so many words that "restorationists" have never accepted the Second Vatican Council. As the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church, his opinion on this matter should carry great weight.

The idea that there are Catholics who haven't accepted the Second Council isn't a figment of Francis's imagination. Prof Esolen has simply stood up and, apparently fully accepting Francis's terms, identified himself as one of them. That a conservative US Cathollic magazine would publish this essay simply confirms Francis's observation that there are many "restorers" in the US, i.e. people who do not accept the authority of an ecumenical council.

As Bp Barron has said, you don't get any higher authority in the Catholic Church than an ecumenical council. You don't find any clearer voice in the Church than a pope endorsing an ecumenical council. So for a prominent conservative Catholic to come out publicly to say by clear implication that he's against an ecumenical council and against the pope is, at minimum, problematic.

In fact, recognizing that Esolen is an Ivy Leaguer who has made his career as an academic, I would expect a closely reasoned, heavily footnoted case in support of his position, but this is precisely what we don't get. His argument, as far as I can piece it out, is that in the 1960s and 1970s, Catholics obeyed the Church's authority without question, but look where it got them:

When our pastor removed the marble communion rail with its mosaic inlays of Eucharistic symbols (a basket of five loaves, two fish, a bunch of grapes, the Lamb of God), we figured he knew what he was doing, and we submitted. When he whitewashed the church walls, eliminating stenciled patterns of the fleur-de-lis, so that what had been warm and shady was now bare, with no color connection between the stained-glass windows, the mural paintings of figures from the Old Testament, and the painted ceiling above, we figured he knew what he was doing, and we obeyed. When he covered the hexagonal floor tiles, white and dark green in cruciform patterns, with a bright-red carpet, we wiped our feet and obeyed.

So, er, does this mean Catholics no longer need to accept Church authority? Prof Esolen doesn't like vernacular mass or versus populum celebration. Speaker Pelosi wants abortion to be OK. Who's right? He's proven absolutely nothing.

But also, his argument is, first, emotional, and second, anecdotal. We may regret unjustifiable redecoration in specific cases, and reaction may be along the line of, "My parents were married in that church! I was baptized and confirmed there! Look what they've done!" But that isn't an argument against the Second Council. The Council documents -- I've read them in an edition Bp Barron sponsored with the aim of having them available to contemporary Catholics -- have nothing to say about carpet or whitewash.

Bp Barron in his commentary there himself cites examples like a priest who rode a motorcycle down the aisle to the altar and makes the point that there have been lots of misunderstandings, which are in the process of being corrected. But here Pope Francis suggests it takes a century for a Council to take root in any case.

In many ways, Esolen's argument is post hoc propter hoc.

Sexual morality was the obvious candidate for progress. I understood nothing of it when I was a schoolboy, but when we high school freshmen had a “values clarification” class instead of a real study of Scripture or the catechism, I figured the sister knew what she was doing. It was a feature of the new Church—the Church knew more and better about sex than she used to.

Though most of us in that high school bore an old residue of moral sense, by the time I went to college in 1977, the Church in her ordinary life—in her preaching and her obvious practice—offered us no guard rails, no direction. I never thought of myself as disobedient because the Church, in her practical life, did not think of me so, either. Love pastes over a multitude of sins.

But by 1992, the Church had published a new comprehensive Catechism that contained a full explanation of traditional Catholic moral theology, including sexuality. The priests in our parish often discuss the sacrament of reconciliation, including the need for examination of conscience with reference to Church teaching. Has Prof Esolen attended a diocesan mass at all lately? Has he gone to confession in a diocesan parish? Last I checked, if I confess to a sin, the priest will still give me advice on how to avoid it and prescribe a penance before he absolves me.

The problem with Esolen's argument is that it parades out the traditionalist cliches -- tasteless redecorations, bad architecture, pride flags in the sanctuary -- without addressing them as either outliers or aberrations that are largely in the process of being corrected by a current generation of mainstream priests and bishops like, for instance, Bp Barron. Barron, a fully qualified theologian, is attacked by conservatives who have no particular qualifications as somehow a popularizer or a Bp Feelgood. (Indeed, I've had e-mails from restorationists who say the same about Fulton Sheen.)

Nobody attacks the Council documents themselves. Beyond that, the implication in their resistance to Pope Francis is that he's in some way illegitimate; indeed, the most extreme version of this position is that Pius XII was the last legitimate pope.

The problem with all this is that if Francis isn't a legitimate pope, or the Second Council was illegitimate, these are extraordinary claims that require extraordinary proof. If these proofs can be made, an Ivy Leaguer like Prof Esolen ought to be able to make them. But he falls back on the same old chestnuts, the whitewashed walls or carpeted floors in specific parishes, the sister who bore a child out of wedlock, the divorces, the pedophiles. But how do any of these directly illegitimize, say, Sacrosanctum Concilium? Lumen Gentium? Gaudium et Spes? Does an illegitimate Council also delegitimize the 1992 Catechism?

I'd be curious to know if Prof Esolen has even read them, or if he's read the commentary on them by Bp Barron in his recent edition. Or do the documents somehow not matter, since although Prof Esolen identifies himself as someone who rejects the Second Council, he has nothing to say about them in this version of hier stehe ich? Wouldn't a serious, well-footnoted refutation of the Council documents and, just for starters, Bp Barron's interpretation of them in his edition, be a miniumum starting point?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.