As Long As We're On William Barr

Yesterday, Mr Barr continued to speak on interview shows on Trump's legal issues. On Fox News, he said,

In a Sunday interview with Fox News' Shannon Bream, Barr was asked whether Trump would personally defend himself in court if his indictment went to trial.

"I'm not his lawyer, generally I think it's a bad idea to go on the stand," Barr replied. "And I think it's a particularly bad idea for Trump because he lacks all self-control, and it would be very difficult to prepare him and keep him testifying in a prudent fashion."

Here I think Barr is seriously missing the point. Trump has a public persona to be sure, and part of it is his irrepressible naughty-boy image. But it's a persona, and it's part of his appeal to a broad swath of the public. Take the famous example of the Access Hollywood tape, which culminated in remarks he made about Arianne Zucker, whom he and Billy Bush were waiting to meet in a 2005 studio visit:

I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the [redacted]. You can do anything.

The great irony of the episode was that, despite the unaninous condemnation of Trump from all quarters, he went on to win the presidency in the 2016 election, while Billy Bush, his interlocutor and a prominent member of the Bush family, was the one who lost his job as Today show anchor in consequence. What was delicious was Trump's role as truth-teller, the Huckleberry Finn, the Holden Caulfield, the Caleb Trask or Jim Stark as played by James Dean. An executive coach describes the role of the truth-teller in leadership:

If you’re in a powerful position or leadership role in which people look up to you, you’re expected to lead in integrity and truth. If leaders lie, how can they ever be trusted?

In my leadership coaching, one of the most important things I teach my clients, is the remarkable power of being the truth teller and what it takes to speak with candor:

A truth teller will communicate and not hold back. Communicate, communicate, communicate. That’s the role of a leader. If you hold back, people will know something’s going on, and they’ll fill the gap with gossip, paranoia, and suspicion—wreaking havoc on the culture of your organization. Be the leader who tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

. . . Great leaders are remarkable truth tellers. They know that honest hearts produce honest actions.

Well, if you're a star, they'll let you do it. Isn't that the lesson Harvey Weinstein taught us?

But let's consider another factor: Trump is no dummy. Billy Bush, a mediocre member of the Bush extended family, began a television career at the same time his uncle Dubya rose to the presidency. Somewhere in that encounter, Trump recognized that Billy Bush wasn't playing in Trump's own league, and whatever the outcome of the confidences he exchanged, they would be at best harmless -- but in fact, after 11 years, they would actually help him be elected president. The Wikipedia link above covers the aftermath of the revelation:

The incident was condemned by numerous prominent Republicans. Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus said, "No woman should ever be described in these terms or talked about in this manner. Ever." The RNC suspended all support of Trump's campaign shortly thereafter. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, tweeted, "Hitting on married women? Condoning assault? Such vile degradations demean our wives and daughters and corrupt America's face to the world." Ohio governor John Kasich, a former primary rival to Trump, called the remarks "indefensible"; former Florida governor Jeb Bush, also a former primary rival, called them "reprehensible".

They, of course, would all be among those Trump might characterize as "losers", which they all literally were, but in their conventional mindsets, they were keen to get out of the way as Trump rode to inevitable defeat. I doubt if William Barr was prominent enough in 2016 to be asked for his reaction to the story, but his 2023 characterization of Trump as lacking all self-control could certainly be consistent with Romney, Priebus, Kasich, or indeed Billy's uncle Jeb.

But let's look at what I think is Trump's strategy. On March 18, he made a social media post claiming his indictment and arrest would take place the following Tuesday, but when that didn't happen, commentators began to suiggest that District Attorney Bragg was backing down, or that the grand jury had lost its will to indict. Trump was theoretically going to fade from the scene. But Trump has had a team, or actually teams, of lawyers working on his cases for months, certainly since the Mar-a-Lago raid. We've got to assume they've been planning contingencies and gaming outcomes for a Bragg indictment for a lot longer than just March 18.

So the indictment happened almost two weeks late, on March 31, but it happened. Let's be aware that Trump's lawyers have had an indictment and its outcomes in the script all along. Over the weekend, commentators began to say, "Oh, no! What if the judge, Juan Merchan, imposes a gag order on Trump?" as if this was going to be a big surprise. Right, Trump's lawyers sure will be surprised by that move, huh? What did Trump post this past Friday?

“The Judge ‘assigned’ to my Witch Hunt Case, a ‘Case’ that has NEVER BEEN CHARGED BEFORE, HATES ME. His name is Juan Manuel Marchan,” Trump wrote, alleging he’d been “hand-picked” for the case by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat.

Now, if I were William Barr, I'd be about to bust a blood vessel over Trump's irresponsibility and lack of self-control. What a terrible thing to do, assail the judge's integrity! How did his lawyers, who must be impotent in the face of this man's narcissistic rage, allow him to post such a thing? Now Judge Marchan will certainly impose a gag order! Indeed, Trump's subsequent announcement that he would make a statement after his arraignment will just provoke the judge further!

But Trump and his lawyers, who probably don't charge as much as Hunter and Joe's, have certainly gamed this whole sequence out weeks ago. The judge will impose his gag order, and there'll be more hand-wringing about an unprecedented crossing of the Rubicon -- and Trump will be the center of the news for a week and more, with his sympathy and support growing apace. And what's crazy is that Trump and his lawyers have taken a page from the Chicago Seven trial of 1969. Judge Marchan will become the next Judge Julius Hoffman:

Hoffman's most notable case was the trial from April 9, 1969, to February 20, 1970, that involved charges against protesters arrested during the 1968 Democratic Convention, originally known as the "Chicago Eight". During the course of the Chicago Eight trial, Hoffman refused to allow the defendant Bobby Seale to represent himself after Seale's original attorney became ill. This prompted conflicts with Seale that led to Hoffman ordering Seale to be gagged and shackled in the courtroom and eventually jailed for contempt. Finally, Hoffman removed Seale from the trial, leaving the case with only seven defendants, at which point the trial became known as the "Chicago Seven" trial. Because of this, and his non-objective attitude, Hoffman became the favorite courtroom target of the Chicago Seven defendants, who often openly insulted the judge. Abbie Hoffman (no direct relation) told Judge Hoffman "you are a shande far dee Goyim" ["a disgrace to the Jewish community in front of the Gentiles" in Yiddish] and that "[y]ou would have served Hitler better." He later added that "your idea of justice is the only obscenity in the room." Both Rennie Davis and Jerry Rubin told the judge, "This court is bullshit."

So far, Bragg and Judge Marchan are playing into Trump's hands. Small-time New York machine politicians are setting themselves up for a national loss, in the media and almost certainly in the courts, even if they temporarily prevail over a rinky-dink case.

Trump understands media. So did Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, and the rest of the Chicago Seven, along with their lawyers. William Barr does not.

William Barr Returns To The Debate

Willaim Barr, a never-Trumper who was Trump's second attorney general, has become the most visible proponent of the eight-dimensional chess interpretation of the Alvin Bragg Trump indictment:

“Politically, it’s gonna be damaging, I think, to the Republican Party simply because I think it’s a no-lose situation for the Democrats,” Barr continued. “I think the impetus is really to help Trump get the nomination, focus the attention on him for two years, have this thing swirling around, plus whatever else comes, which I think will be damaging to whoever gets the nomination.”

In other words, whatever prospers Trump hurts the Republicans, and this is prospering Trump (darn it!). My overall view continues to be that at this stage in 2015, Jeb Bush was the consensus favorite for the Republican nomination, while Hillary was likely to win the general. But the whole story of 2015 was that the elite consensus never factored Donald Trump into the equation, and as best I can tell from current reports,

New post-indictment polling data from former President Donald Trump’s campaign shows that not only does he hold a commanding lead in the GOP primary and a lead over Democrat President Joe Biden in a likely general election matchup but that more voters in both the primary and the general election say they are now going to vote for Trump because of it.

The one thing to keep in mind is that, as we learned in 2015 and 2016, politics is never a sure thing. But we also learned in those years that it's also a major error to discount or underrate Donald Trump. Wlliam Barr, an Ivy League white-shoe lawyer who worked for the CIA out of college, is a multimillionaire member of the one-percent elite that, Republican or Democrat, has been instinctively opposed to the populist movement Trump represents. Barr, possibly because he's a member of C Wright Mills's power elite himself, seems to view Trump's opposition on the left as something like his own comfortable environment, run by a concursus bonorum omnium. But this isn't the current actual state of the leftist coalition.

As I pointed out on Friday, the New Deal coalition has been gradually fraying at the edges since the 1972 election, and as Joel Kotkin points out in a recent interview, the Silicon Valley one-percent have become the main funders of the Democrat party, when previously it had been labor unions.

[T]he old industrial companies in Silicon Valley, such as Hewlett-Packard, were very cognisant of the importance of their workforce. Business management author Tom Peters wrote about this quite a bit. Executives were dependent on the people on the factory floor. The grunts were important. But if you’re a social-media company, there are no grunts. You will hire grunts to do your catering, but that’s about it. You don’t have a bunch of high-school graduates who may be very good at doing one particular thing – you don’t need those people anymore. So they don’t even have any contact with the vast majority of the population. Early 20th-century business magnates like Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford, bad as they were, at least had to think about the people on the line, because they made their products.

. . . At the same time, in their unbelievable arrogance, Silicon Valley elites decided to become the main funder of the Democratic Party and to identify with every ‘progressive’ cause.

This brings us back to the Starbucks dillemma, that the one-percent entrepreneurial elites and their allies in the broader gentry romanticize the Lumpenproletariat and the sexual special pleaders who make up other key members of the current leftist coalition without recognizing that neither of those factions is reliable, and indeed, as Kotkin also points out, they've lost touch with labor, which had previously been a reliable member of the New Deal coalition. We need look no farther than another aspect of the Starbucks saga, the growing movement to unionize its workforce.

I think Mr Barr is assuming there's still some Averell Harriman type quietly arranging things at the top of the Democrat coalition, and District Attorney Bragg has just as quietly squared the whole strategy with his office. But Bragg is not a quiet sort of guy, and if that were the case, we wouldn't have people seriously advancing these opinions on the Trump indictment:

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg thrust America into uncharted political and legal waters when he secured a grand jury indictment against Donald Trump. Soon his team will face withering scrutiny that will test three crucial elements of his case: the credibility of his witnesses, the clock known as the statute of limitations and the consistency of his application of fraud law.

. . . "It's the worst, weakest, most abusive case of prosecutorial indiscretion," Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, an unbashed liberal and self-described Joe Biden supporter, told the "Just the News, No Noise" television show. "In my 60 years of practicing law, I have never seen a weaker case."

If there were in fact some Averell Harriman, some Nelson Rockefeller, quietly guiding affairs via a Henry Kissinger or a George Shultz, there might be a sure thing behind something like a Trump indictment. The problem is that nobody has any sense that there's a sure thing here -- instead, it's uncharted territory, a crossing of a Rubicon, which an established elite simply does not envision. If an elite were running the show, everything would already be a done deal, Trump would be off to Lompoc or Lewisburg as we speak, having already entered his guilty plea a la, say, Martha Stewart, Michael Milkin, Ivan Boesky, Bernie Madoff, or Spiro Agnew.

That this hasn't happened is already an indication that there's no Averell Harriman type quietly guiding events, and Bragg is instead simply playing with fire. In this sort of uncertain atmosphere, the one mistake past experience suggests we shouldn't make is to underestimate Donald Trump, however events may ultimately play out.

Woke Vs Natural Law

I mentioned briefly in yesterday's post the contradiction that emerged in the US Left after the first phase of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. The general abolitionist argument dating from the 18th century was that Africans are fully human and can't, unlike animals, be treated as property. Lincoln's very similar arguments against slavery were always natural-law arguments concerning human rights:

That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

Or more succinctly, at the same link:

I have made it equally plain that I think the negro is included in the word "men" used in the Declaration of Independence.

A problem arises when other movements, seeing the tremendous success of the natural law argument behind first, abolitionism, and then its successor, the Civil Rights movement of the earlier 1960s, attempt to hitchhike on natural law to claim equivalent prestige. This happened beginning in the late 1960s with an assertion of equivalent natural rights for the same-sex attracted, but this fell into something of a gray zone from the start. Natural law theory would in fact suggest that same-sex acts are against nature, but there's a separate question of whether they should be criminal that is much more distant from just natural rights.

The current Roman Catholic pontiff just recently expressed a position that isn't really opposed to Catholic tradition, which itself is generally based on natural law:

“Being homosexual isn’t a crime,” Francis said during an exclusive interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.

Francis acknowledged that Catholic bishops in some parts of the world support laws that criminalize homosexuality or discriminate against LGBTQ people, and he himself referred to the issue in terms of “sin.”

But sin isn't always a crime -- it's a mortal sin to stay away from mass, and it's a mortal sin to cuss in the name of the Almighty, but nobody wants people arrested for those things. If you do stay away from mass or cuss in the name of the Almighty, I'm sure any pastor is delighted to welcome you back if you change your mind and want to stop, which I think is Francis's meaning here. And he's still perfectly clear on transsexualism:

“Gender ideology, today, is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations,” Francis said in the conversation.

The pope made the comments in a March 10 interview with Argentinian newspaper La Nación — the conversation was translated into English by the Catholic News Agency.

“Why is it dangerous?” he continued. “Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women.”

“All humanity is the tension of differences. It is to grow through the tension of differences,” the pope said. “The question of gender is diluting the differences and making the world the same, all dull, all alike, and that is contrary to the human vocation.”

This is a natural law argument. Transsexualism is against nature, especially if it involves changing our bodies to mimic the other sex via surgery or hormones. (In fact, I think it's a confirmation of natural law that, as some studies are beginning to show, almost nobody wants to have sex with a transgendered person -- they just don't appeal to our natural instincts.) Here's where President Biden's remarks from yesterday are especially sad:

On Transgender Day of Visibility, we want you to know that we see you just as you are: Made in the image of God and deserving of dignity, respect, and support.

We’ll never stop working to create a world where you won’t have to be brave just to be yourself.

In the natural law context, as articulated just weeks ago by the Holy Father, people who want to deny the differences between men and women are pretending both men and women weren't created individually in the image of God, specifically male and female, not as generic unisex beings. President Biden, a nominal Catholic but a man without insight or reflection, approved words written for him that contradict recent statements by the pope himself -- indeed by a pope who is thought in some quarters to be a heteodox liberal.

The overall problem is what happens to a country whose founding principles have been deliberately turned against natural law.

The Trump Indictment And The Starbucks Dilemma

A recent episode of the TV series The Food That Built America covered the rise of the upscale Starbucks brand, in contrast to the middle- and working-class Dunkin' Doughnuts. Howard Schultz, a marketing innovator, was inspired by the atmosphere of Italian coffee shops while he was traveling there and saw an opportunity: the episode didn't put it this way, but in effect, he could create a food experience that would remind his target demographic of their junior year abroad.

Through an indirect path, he took over a small boutique gourmet coffee retailer based in San Francisco and Seattle and turned it into a national brand that fed the narcissism of college-educated gentry and convinced them to pay extravagant prices for cups of coffee by giving everything fancy-schmancy names. But the show left out the rest of the story: the gentry has found itself in a precarious situation. Having once retired rich on the basis of one formula, he returned to find that formula was no longer working:

"We are beginning to close stores," because of safety issues, interim CEO Howard Schultz said in a video posted to Twitter [in July 2022]. "This is just the beginning. There are going to be many more."

Starbucks said last week that it is closing 16 stores over safety concerns. Around that time, Debbie Stroud and Denise Nelson, both senior vice presidents of US operations at the company, outlined the efforts that Starbucks is taking to make stores safer in an open letter.

Workers are "seeing firsthand the challenges facing our communities — personal safety, racism, lack of access to healthcare, a growing mental health crisis, rising drug use, and more," they wrote, adding that "with stores in thousands of communities across the country, we know these challenges can, at times, play out within our stores too."

The effort to make workers feel safer could result in more closings, according to Schultz's video, which was first reported by Insider.

This represented a change in policy over a 2018 controversy in which African-American customers complained that they were denied use of the store's tables and restrooms, although they didn't buy the overpriced products on sale there. So the chain responded by virtue signaling and making public an open-restroom policy -- except that public restrooms have increasingly become magnets for all sorts of undesirable activity, including shooting up and illicit sex. So Schultz is now closing stores where the problem is worst, and elsewhere allowing a return to a customers-only restroom policy.

This isn't a good solution, and Schultz seems to be fully aware of the dilemma: he's closing profitable stores on one hand, while he's losing his upscale do-gooder image on the other. This won't work in any long term, and Schultz retired again as CEO just a week ago. The dilemma remains -- how does the upscale gentry accommodate the Lumpenproletariat in an uneasy quasi-alliance while still wanting to feel like they're on junior year abroad?

This brings me back to a point I've been making about Karl Marx here for some time. Just to be clear, I'm a Roman Catholic convert generally aligned with Ven Fulton Sheen and Bp Barron. But as I said a year ago,

I don't disagree with Marx in my view that the objective of the gentry is to make life miserable for the workers. The question has always been precisely how to do this and how far to go. Under the worst despots, the explicit goal is to depopulate them, and this is effectively what's going on in Ukraine, although programs to encourage abortion, transsexualism, and disintegration of families in the more genteel west differ only in degree. As with other worldwide conflicts, each theater has unique conditions.

The particular problem in the US for two generations -- the 1972 election was the tipping point -- has been the disintegration of the New Deal coalition, whereby Franklin Roosevelt forestalled proletarian revolution via an alliance of the Ivy League upper class with the middle and working classes. A major element of the alliance was the alignment of northern wealth with southern segregationist Democrats. The 1960s changed this balance via the Civil Rights movement, with one unintended consequence being the false conflation of middle- and working-class African-American upward mobility with a perceived authenticity among the urban African-American criminal class. This conflation has maintained segregationist impulses favorable to the traditional Democrat agenda, something Scott Adams has most recently discovered.

This quickly led to the success of Nixon's southern strategy, in which the bourgeoisie of both races in the former Confederacy and border states aligned with the party of Reconstruction. The interests of neither the bourgeoisie nor the working class are aligned with Marx's Lumpenproletariat, something even African-American members of the Old Left acknowledged during the Civil Rights years. The 50-year trend since 1972 has been for the working and middle classes to abandon the Democrats, leaving them with a combination of college-educated gentry, the wealthy one-percenters, sexual special pleaders from radical feminists to transsexuals, and the urban criminal class, which now extends to the homeless, the drug addicted, and the mentally ill.

At this point, Democrats, in the process of losing Latins and Asians, can't afford to alienate anyone in the remaining coaltion: the deal seems to be that elderly Democrat stalwarts like President Biden and former Speaker Pelosi can stay in place as long as members of the remaining coalition, especially representatives of the Lumpenproletariat and the sexual special pleaders, have a place -- although the real payoff continues to be to the Ivy League upper class, the entrepreneurial one percent, and the gentry, who are the ones that actually continue to benefit from the alliance.

But here's the problem, which I think Howard Schultz understands in some inchoate way: as Marx understood, the Lumpenproletariat is not a reliable ally -- from his viewpoint, not with the workers, but in general, they're not a reliable ally with anyone, and that definitely includes the one-percenters and the gentry. If you let the street rabble into your restrooms, you get what you deserve.

But let's take a more recent problem, the Trump indictment. I noted over the course of the past week that just about everyone was starting to heave a sigh of relief that maybe the New York grand jury was going to adjourn for a month's vacation without taking any action on Trump -- after all, the case was shaky, and even the Alan Dershowitz gentry had lost faith in it. But at the last minute, just before they went out the door, they indicted.

Well, Alvin Bragg is a politican who identifies with the Lumpenproletariat. His agenda, financed by the one-percenter George Soros, is to treat members of the criminal class with extreme leniency by dropping felony charges and abolishing cash bail. This doesn't affect either the gentry or the one percent, since they live in gated communities or high-security buildings. But it does make their politicians, such as Mr Bragg, unreliable allies.

There seems to be a consensus that the Trump indictment will have unpredictable and likely unintended consequences. As far as we can tell for now, it's driven Trump back up in the polls. There are some people who think the Bragg faction is playing eight-dimensional chess, and giving Trump the nomination will make him an easy target for Biden. But I think it's far too early to make any sure prediction, except that I think the Republicans have learned something over the past few years, while the Democrats have learned nothing.

So far, for instance, Republicans have learned that if they resort to conventional rallies or demonstrations, they expose themselves to Antifa provocateurs and FBI informants, and they're likely not to use that strategy, even as Trump seems to want them to. On the other hand, Democrat allies -- especially the same Antifa types and sexual deviants -- are likely to continue both systematic riots and indivudual sorties like, for instance, the attack of a radical nudist on Paul Pelosi in his one-percent home, or the transsexual who murdered six at a Presbyterian school.

This will inevitably unite the solid citizens, but it won't have an equivalent effect on the remaining Democrat coalition, primarily because a major component of that coaltion is simply not reliable. As Howard Schultz discovered, you romanticize the Lumpenproletariat at your peril.

Wear A Mask

Amid all the hubbub over the Nashville shooter and the Trans Day of Vengeance, I'm wondering if I'm the only person who recognized that the instructions for those planning to avenge things include "Assemble at SCOTUS -- Wear a Mask -- Bring a Buddy". While there are several variations on this basic sign, and not all contain the "Wear a Mask" instruction, that at least one variation would say this is telling. "Wear a Mask" is so 2022. What message are they trying to send?

I'm sure there will be well-publicized scenes from the demonstration, and we'll just have to wait and see how many people actually turn up in masks. But during the COVID panic, not a few observers noted that ordinary cloth or paper masks had no efficacy in limiting the spread of an airborne virus, Dr Fauci famously reversed his own position on masking, and the refusal of airlines and key transit agencies to continue mask enforcement by the middle of last year marked the end of that particular charade.

Yet the organizers of the 2023 Trans Day of Vengeance are urging attendees to mask up. I can only see this as nostalgia for the atmosphere of the COVID moral panic. COVID skeptics said throughout that the masks were far less a legitimate public health measure than a compulsory visible sign of assent, and it's hard to avoid thinking this is part of the message here: trans activists are with the program, and you'd better be with it, too. Thus we had all the right people scrambling to correct their pronouns:

The mainstream media did an about-face after Nashville police said several hours after the attack that the assailant was transgender, with some outlets issuing statements explaining their initial use of female pronouns as gender-identity advocates blasted them for misgendering and deadnaming the shooter.

“5 times @cnn misgendered. No correction. A mass shooting is horrible. Misgendering does not make anything better,” said a much-retweeted post by the “Karen Lopez” account.

There's an odd inversion going on here. On one hand, the trans rights movement might be seen as yet another stage in the sexual liberation movements that began in the late 19th century and culminated, at least for a time, in the Stonewall riot or Ms Magazine. But that was part of a trend in the 1960s and 70s to let it all hang out -- grow your hair and beard, burn the bra.

Instead, we now have a new generation of the grammar police, rewriting pronoun rules on the fly. In fact, I saw one media outlet so terrified of the new (but as yet entirely uncodified) pronoun rules that it noted that Nashville shooter Audrey Hale went by Aiden, and her preferred pronouns were he/him -- except that the story kept referring to Hale as they/them.

This isn't in fact just one more progression in the march of sexual liberation. Trans activists can't let it all hang out like old-time hippies or bra burners, because, er, the vast majority stop short of the one surgery that matters, male-to-female. In fact, this topic is verboten:

DON'T: Ask "what's going on in your pants?"

It's natural to be curious, but that doesn't mean you should ask. After all, nobody is coming up to you and asking you about your genitalia. "As a common sense and common courtesy, we don't going around asking people about their private parts," Milan says. "You don't ask me, I don't ask you. Just because a person's trans doesn't mean that you can ask them. They're still a human being, they're still a person, they're still a person that lives by the same etiquette standards that we all do, you don't just ask a person about their genitals. It's just rude. Don't do it."

But of course, this allows trans people to finesse the whole question of just how much they believe they're a woman trapped in a man's body or vice versa. This is the opposite of Stonewall, the outcome of which Wikipedia characterizes as seeking

“to create new ‘social form and relations’ that would be based on ‘brotherhood, cooperation, human love, and uninhibited sexuality.”

Instead, we have a new radical trans movement that urges its members to Wear a Mask, while warning even its allies not to ask about genitals. This is not what you see at your typical gay pride parade, which if anything celebrates genitals. Instead, we have a new prudery, a concealment of genitals, an insistence that they don't matter, a new grammar police imposing a whole new unwritten set of pronoun rules, and an endorsement of masking, not under even a pretense of public health necessity, but just masking for its own sake.

As I noted yesterday, there's a growing body of scholarly literature that suggests transsexualism is an entirely separate form of kink from same-sex attraction, and transsexuals have an entirely different agenda. Just what that is is hard to define, but it's there. Here's a piece at the BBC:

I became aware of this particular issue after I wrote an article about sex, lies and legal consent.

Several people got in touch with me to say there was a "huge problem" for lesbians, who were being pressured to "accept the idea that a penis can be a female sex organ".

I knew this would be a hugely divisive subject, but I wanted to find out how widespread the issue was.

Ultimately, it has been difficult to determine the true scale of the problem because there has been little research on this topic - only one survey to my knowledge. However, those affected have told me the pressure comes from a minority of trans women, as well as activists who are not necessarily trans themselves.

They described being harassed and silenced if they tried to discuss the issue openly. I received online abuse myself when I tried to find interviewees using social media.

Nevertheless, as I discussed yesterday, there are in fact studies that indicate that nobody, male or female, straight or gay, wants to have sex with a trans person. All I can think for now is that this is, if anything, a strange inversion of the traditional idea of sexual liberation.

Natural Law And Trans Pathologies

Yesterday I brought up my struggle as I approached adulthood with the idea of "natural law", which I said, having been raised Protestant, was new to me around the time I went to college. I instinctively associated it with Catholic thought, and at least in a way, I was correct. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

If any moral theory is a theory of natural law, it is Aquinas’s. . . . For Aquinas, there are two key features of the natural law . . . . The first is that, when we focus on God’s role as the giver of the natural law, the natural law is just one aspect of divine providence; and so the theory of natural law is from that perspective just one part among others of the theory of divine providence. The second is that, when we focus on the human’s role as recipient of the natural law, the natural law constitutes the principles of practical rationality, those principles by which human action is to be judged as reasonable or unreasonable; and so the theory of natural law is from that perspective the preeminent part of the theory of practical rationality.

The school where Audrey Hale, the biological woman who is alleged to have identified as a man, shot her way into and murdered six children and adults on Monday, identifies as Presbyterian. I spent my entire childhood as a Presbyterian and was confirmed in that denomination, and neither Aquinas nor natural law theory was mentioned at all in my religious education, which led to my deep suspicion of both when I began to study philosophy. However, it's probably correct to say that whether Presbyterians formally endorse anything like natural law theory, something like Aquinas's view pervades most Christian belief. Tucker Carlson had a remarkably perceptive take on his show last night, March 28:

The trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity, and therefore its natural enemy.

In Christianity, the price of admission is admitting that you're not God. Christians openly concede that they have no real power over anything, and for that matter, very little personal virtue. They will tell you to your face that they are sinful and helpless and basically absurd. They're not embarrassed about any of this. They brag about it. "That saved a wretch like me" goes the most famous Christian hymn ever written in English.

The trans movement takes the opposite view. Trans ideology claims dominion over nature itself. We can change the identity we were born with, they will tell you with wild eyed certainty. Christians can never agree with the statement because these are powers they believe God alone possesses.

That unwillingness to agree, that failure to acknowledge a trans person's dominion over nature, incites and enrages some in the trans community. People who believe they are God can't stand to be reminded that they're not. Christianity and transgender orthodoxy are wholly incompatible theologies. They can never be reconciled. They are on a collision course with each other.

What puzzles me, though, is that the Covenant School is pre-K through 6, and I doubt that even a Catholic religious education class would get very deeply into sexual function of any sort with children of that age, let alone same-sex attraction or transgenderism -- and a Presbyterian school even less so. And I can almost guarantee it won't bring up either Aquinas or natural law (the last Presbyterian writer I consulted on Aquinas said he treated reason as an idol, and he was also too fat).

And beyond that, I very much doubt that Ms Hale ever studied Christianity very closely as either a child or an adult -- and at age 28, her Christian schooling was almost 20 years behind her. So it may well be that she associated the school with her family or her upbringing in general. I saw another opinion piece that suggested she was trying to hurt her family in doing the shooting, and in fact her family may have been the next set of victims she had in mind.

So what we're looking at is less a specific objection to Christian doctrine, although the most complete expressions of Christian doctrine do say that same-sex attraction and transgenderism are violations of natural law, but instead more of a free-floating resentment of common sense and a troubled conscience, which in her case are only generally related to Christianity. And this likely involves matters beyond just gender identity. Andy Ngo made an interesting point in his interview on the same Tucker Carlson show from March 28:

. . . in my reporting on Antifa for years now, one observation that I notice was that disproportionately the riot arrestees are gender diverse, they don't identify with their biological sex. On some nights it was as high as 20%, magnitudes higher than what the -- what we held on people in the wider American population who are trans identifying.

Separately, Study: ‘Transgender’ Youth at Highest Risk for Violent Radicalization:

It found that “transgender and gender diverse students reported higher support for VR compared to students who identified as women.” In fact, youth who identified as transgender or gender-diverse were at the highest risk for violent radicalization.

The whole question of transgenderism is highly charged politically, which is preventing any sort of dispassionate discussion. Nevertheless, a body of clinical literature is emerging that suggests transgenderism is a separate paraphilia from same-sex attraction.

Blanchard's transsexualism typology is a proposed psychological typology of gender dysphoria, transsexualism, and fetishistic transvestism, created by sexologist Ray Blanchard through the 1980s and 1990s, building on the work of earlier researchers, including his colleague Kurt Freund. Blanchard categorized trans women into two groups: homosexual transsexuals who are attracted exclusively to men and are feminine in both behavior and appearance; and autogynephilic transsexuals who experience sexual arousal at the idea of having a female body.

This theory is reinforced by empirical evidence that shows that neither cisgender nor same-sex attracted people are sexually drawn to transgender individuals.

The current study sought to describe the demographic characteristics of individuals who are willing to consider a transgender individual as a potential dating partner. Participants (N = 958) from a larger study on relationship decision-making processes were asked to select all potential genders that they would consider dating if ever seeking a future romantic partner. The options provided included cisgender men, cisgender women, trans men, trans women, and genderqueer individuals. Across a sample of heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and trans individuals, 87.5% indicated that they would not consider dating a trans person, with cisgender heterosexual men and women being most likely to exclude trans persons from their potential dating pool.

This is to say that even same-sex attracted people across the board -- we're talking almost 90% of every possible orientation -- won't date trans people. Apparently even among the conventionally gay, trans is just too phony, it doesn't seem to turn anyone's crank. Is this the source of the free-floating resentment that observers are noting among trans people?

For that matter, is this why it's such a key objective in the trans movement to get kids started on hormones and surgery before puberty, which is to say before they can even begin to realize what their sex lives will be like when they become adults?

All I can think are there are lots of questions, and there are limits to what you can do even when you make an effort at violating natural law. We've been in a moral panic, and it's been over more than COVID. We're about done with COVID, but less so with the other stuff.

Remember Dr Koop?

More than a dozen years ago, my doctor told me I needed to start monitoring my blood sugar and changing my diet to keep things within limits. So I did, and my readings stayed within normal parameters for some time, or they did until the COVID lockdowns, masking, and social distancing. Once I was allowed to go back to the doctor -- remember, this activity was proscribed as well -- he began to worry, my numbers were climbing to the point that something might need to be done.

But my diet hadn't changed at all, although given the lockdowns and everything, I wasn't getting as much exercise. In any case, for nearly three years after 2020, my blood sugar readings were wildly erratic, and the doctor was getting more and more worried, although my diet hadn't changed, other than a few foods becoming unavailable due to the pandemic-related supply chain crisis.

Then all of a sudden, the pandemic went away, or more precisely, everyone was catching COVID in spite of everyone having to get vaccines and boosters. For much of 2022, the LA County health department was threatening to reimpose one or another form of closure, social distancing, or masking, until the health director, the notorious Dr Ferrer, finally threw up her hands and told the press and the county supervisors that reimposing restrictions would cost the health department its remaining credibility -- as I chronicled here, the TSA had finally refused to enforce masking at LAX, and Amtrak and Metrolink had refused to enforce masking on trains.

Somewhere right around that time, when all the remaining restrictions went away, the authorities power-washed the social distancing stickers off the sidewalks, and even the most timid barbers and retailers went mask-optional, I think right around the holidays, my numbers suddenly went back to normal.

In fact, over the past several weeks, my numbers have wound up pretty much the best ever, better than when I was 15 years younger. No meds, just the same diet. I think the final influence was that since the holidays, the number of people wearing masks at Sunday mass has gone from maybe 50% to 10%. I haven't been back to the doctor yet, but I'm assuming he'll recognize the results. I think it's generally understood that the public health response to the perceived COVID crisis damaged everyone's health in all sorts of ways yet to be fully quantified, if ever.

Now and then over the period of the pandemic, I've run into YouTube homilies by Fr William Nicholas, a pastor in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, most recently here:

One of his homilies three years ago, after the lockdowns started, made the point that humans aren't meant to have their faces covered, viz, by wearing masks. He didn't use the term specifically, but I think his implication was that this type of general masking was a violation of natural law. Just recently, in fact, we had Pope Francis by implication invoking natural law in the matter of transgender ideology:

“All humanity is the tension of differences. It is to grow through the tension of differences,” the pope said. “The question of gender is diluting the differences and making the world the same, all dull, all alike, and that is contrary to the human vocation.”

Almost simultaneously, the US Catholic bishops issued a statement on medical care that uses hormones or surgery to modify a person's apparent sex:

As such interventions “do not respect the fundamental order of the human person as an intrinsic unity of body and soul, with a body that is sexually differentiated,” the committee states that Catholic health care services must not perform them.

Somewhere around the time I went to college, the term "natural law", which I hadn't heard before (I was raised Protestant) made me shudder. It struck me as part of a whole bundle of Catholic terms like "immaculate conception", "beatitudes", "state of grace", "mortal sin", and so forth, that were simply alien. It took me much of a lifetime to get past all that. But even leaving its religious context aside, the term "natural law" is extremely useful, as in discussing the case of the self-identified transgender woman who killed six people at a Nashville, TN Christian school.

The legacy media is struggling to get its head around the incident. According to NBC News,

A sense of “resentment” might have played a role in a 28-year-old’s deadly attack on the private Christian school they once attended, Nashville police said Monday.

. . . The former student is alleged to have left behind writings being studied by local and federal investigators.

“We have some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident,” Drake told reporters hours after the shooting. “We have a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.”

He said Hale was transgender.

Officials “feel that she identifies as trans, but we’re still in the initial investigation into all of that and if it actually played a role into this incident,” Drake said.

Another piece notes that a group of trans activists had scheduled a well-publicized “Trans Day of Vengeance” for April 1. While there is no formal connection yet established between the shooter and the event or the group, it

purports to seek revenge for what they term “trans genocide,” a conspiracy theory that claims that transgender people are systemically targeted with violence. However, an examination of FBI statistics by the Daily Wire shows no proof to corroborate this claim. In 2021, only two of the 271 recorded hate crimes against transgender individuals resulted in murder. These figures are substantially lower than those of other groups and insufficient to substantiate allegations of “trans genocide.”

The Nashville police chief did, nevertheless, speculate that "a sense of 'resentment' might have played a role" in the attack.

Another factor that's hard to avoid is that the public health establishment has been hijacked by crazies. The COVID pandemic gave them a foot in the door that allowed them to impose destructive policies on world populations for a period of years. This is in contrast to someone like Dr C Everett Koop, Reagan's Surgeon General, cited as "the only surgeon general to become a household name" due in particular to his campaign against smoking as a public health issue -- under his tenure "smoking rates in the United States declined significantly from 38% to 27%."

Contrast Dr Koop with Admiral Rachel Levine, the first transsexual to do whatever they's been doing:

Wikipedia notes that Dr Koop was the first recent surgeon general to revive the tradition of wearing an admiral's uniform, and here we see that Dr Levine, although they isn't surgeon general, is wearing such a uniform, primarily to hitchhike on Dr Koop's prestige. (It's arguable that they's become a household name, though for different reasons, I suppose.) The problem is that Admiral Levine is a public health authority who's in essence declaring that natural law no longer applies, unlike Dr Koop, whose general public health position appears to have been to avoid doing things that are bad for you.

It's pretty clear to anyone who pays attention that transsexualism brings with it a whole cluster of pathologies. I don't care if it's Trump, DeSantis, or some other Republican, but a major 2024 platform needs to be to get the crazies out of public health. Whether it's COVID or transsexualism, they've been actively promoting things that are bad for everyone.