CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 100th edition. Downfall, Despair, and hoping for DeGaulle.

100 is a big round number, and as a culture that uses a base ten system for math, we like big round numbers.  So I should use the 100th anniversary of our "Cliffnotes" series, which we're now correcting to what it should have been, CliffsNotes, for something profound.

And, profound or not, I know what I want to post on this, but it's one of those things where its so broad, or difficult to define, that I don't really know how to do it.

So I'll start with this.

The US is in phenomenally stupid times, with our stupidity actually amazingly reduced in various ways to the person claiming to be President, and who most have accepted as the same.¹ That would be, of course, the profoundly self centered, weird, demented, and dumb, Donald Trump.

The Trump regum is profoundly altering everything to such an extent that he's not only harming the US, but the entire world.  When he leaves office the world is going to be profoundly different, and the US might quite frankly never recover from the vandalism of his administration.  He's given rise to the worse instincts in our culture, and revived ways of thinking and acting that haven't been acceptable in our society for decades.  

Worse yet, perhaps, the antiscientifisim of his followers is going to kill people and is harming the planet.

All of which, ironically, would get me branded by some of his acolytes as a "radical lefty", such as those like Chuck Gray look under their beds at night as the monster of their childhood dreams.

One thing that I've had a hard time explaining, but I can do here now, is that in fact I'm an actual conservative.

I've always been opposed to abortion, which would place me in the social conservative camp in and of itself.  I'm not keen on gun control either, although I'm not in machinegun in every closet camp.  I don't believe transgenderism is anything other than a mental illness.  I believe that marriage can only occur between a man and a woman, and beyond that I don't think divorce should be recognized, or at least easily.  I feel that a man who helps bring a child about should be responsible for that child's upbringing and if he's not married to the mother at the time of the child's birth, a common law marriage and all that entails should be legally imposed.  I'd revive the "heart balm" statutes.  I'm extremely leery of the government taking over what I regard as parental and familial obligations, such as the feeding of children simply because they are at school.

All of which should place me in the populist camp, right?

Not hardly.

Well what about the NatCon or Christian Nationalist camp then?

Definitely not.

How so?

Well, that's where I've had a hard time smithing my words to fit my thoughts, but I'll give it a try here.

I think you can, as a conservative, conserve the structure of societal norm, but I don't think you can force your beliefs on anyone.  Indeed, the liberal attempt to do just that with gender norms caused, at the end of the day, the rise of one profoundly immoral man, Donald Trump.  

And beyond that, I think that people who waive the bloody banner of the culture wars have to go right to the source in order to argue for their cause, and that's something most can't do.  The American Civil Religion, in which you can have six wives, as long as it isn't more than one at a time, and a girlfriend on the side, and still go to Jim Bob's Do It Yourself Evangelical Church doesn't comport with that, or frankly Christianity.  

I also frankly am horrified by the anti scientific nature of the populists and the NatCons.  Yes, transgenderism is a horror, but because its an anti scientific movement that doesn't comport with science.  By the same token, denying Global Warming is being caused by humans is also an anti scientific horror.  Admitting poth of those need not be political in any fashion, nor need they be based on religion in any fashion, but if religion motivates and informs your beliefs ti would demand that you oppose them both and accept the science both.

And yet we're denying reality in spades.  If populists get that transgenderism is a fib, on climate change and medicine they're full bore into fiction.  The fact that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has a health role in the government, or that Dr. Oz does, would be comical if it was not so horrific.

Nor does being a real conservative mean that every expenditure of the government on medicine and foreign aid can morally be cut off.  Lethal sins of omission are not conservative, they're gravely evil.

Which in turn gets us to the topic of expenditures themselves.

Every since the The Great Depression conservatives of some stripes have lamented what occured in the New Deal and have detested Franklin Roosevelt.  But here's the thing.  Government expenditures in and of themselves are not wrong, let alone morally wrong, simply because they are.

Rational people would apply principals of subsidiarity to this and look to see what necessary or beneficial expenditure are best undertaken by the government, and at what level.  The simple claim "the government spends to much" means utterly nothing whatsoever.  It is clear that the government is wrongfully not collecting enough in revenue to cover what it spend, but the mere assumption that it spends too much is simply nonsense without something to back it up.  The real question, which hasn't even been asked, is what should it be spending money on?  Many of the things that were cut were things the American public clearly supports or needs.  Conversely, ontoing spending on Trump golf weekends or airplanes for Trump go on, when clearly these are expenditures which do not pass muster.

That leads us, of course, to the fact that Americans are undertaxed. They hate to admit it, but they simply are. Rich Americans are particularly undertaxed.  Indeed, whether a society should even tolerate the uberwealthy is a question that should be asked, but isn't.  It's clear that vast wealth has not been a good thing, by and large, for many who have it, or society as a whole.  Trump, Bezos, Epstein, and Musk are all good examples of this.  Greed isn't good.

So here we find ourselves, due to reasons we've discussed before, not where so many on the right claim, but at an enshrinement of a certain sort of trash culture.  The trailer park come to rule.

Are we doomed?

We may in fact very well be.  It might be the case that the United States as a great nation has run its course, and we're going to take our place with nations like Russia that have lapsed into right wing squalor  But maybe not.

There may be some reasons for hope.

One of those reasons might be the National Conservatives themselves.  When it first got rolling National Conservatism in the form imagined by Patrick Dineen, Rod Dreher or R. R. Reno was a product of despair.  They looked at the state of the country under late liberals, such as President Obama, and felt that the cultural rot had set in so deep there was no recovery from it.  That brought about views like Dreher's The Byzantine Option which, while Dreher now denies it, basically advocated for holing up for generations until sanity returned at some future time.  Not everyone felt that way, and NatCons took over the Heritage Society, where they may have always been in strong numbers anyhow.  

The Success of the Federalist Society in the first Trump administration may have been a bit of a roadmap for them, but more than that, the Heritage Society relied upon Trump's laziness which allowed them to insert themselves into his campaign.  They even managed to get a major fellow traveler, J. D. Vance, in as Vice President.

The reason that this might offer some hope is this.  NatCons may be thick in the Trump administration, but frankly they almost certainly regard some members of his administration as de facto thick.  It's unlikely that the NatCons think much of Kennedy, Noem or Oz, for example.  But they also know that they never could have been influential on their own.  They may be gambling, and it is a gamble, that Trump will burn everything down, and  then, when they push him out, which they will do, they'll seem so much more reasonable in comparison.

There is historical precedence for things like that.  Many nations have gone through terrible cataclysms, including social cataclysms, to be relieved by some sort of normality which didn't fully match what had come before.  The Reformation through England into turmoil to the point where it ulti9mately came unglued, resulting in the English Civil War.  The restored monarchy was a welcome relief from the forces of Calvinism and it ultimately set England towards the path which lead to the modern parliamentary democracy.

Another example might be provided by our own Civil War, which saw forces very much like those in the Republican Party today, including some real fire breathing nuts, try to take half the country out on its own to form a white racist republic.  It's failure resulted in a return to normalcy which has only now unraveled.

There's a real risk to this strategy, however, which frankly is the only strategy that NatCons have or are going to have.  Their shotgun marriage to Trump not only hitched them to somebody loathsome, and whom some of them no doubt loath, but he was the only suitor in town.  It was, that is, a marriage of convenience for both of them.

The risk is that like somebody married to a bad person, it becomes hard for that taint to wash off.  The longer the marriage lasts, moreover, the more that's the case.  The NatCons can't openly dump Trump as the populists will turn on them.  They need to allow him to reign long enough, moreover, that he wreck what they want wrecked, but not so long that they're permanently associated with the wreckage.  And right now, the first really bitter fruits of Trumpism are beginning to be felt.  If they wait too long, they'll had the House of Representatives, then the Senate, and the the Oval Office, back to the Democrats.

That's the second real possibility.

Right now the Democrats do not have their act anywhere near together.  The party is still controlled by the Clueless Old who just don't know what to do, other than, like Robert Reich, insist that they hold on to the policy positions that tanked them. That'd be a stupid strategy.  It might work, however, if the NatComs fail to abandon Ship Trump by replacing him too late.

If that occurs, everything that the populists brought about will evaporate overnight.  Newt Gingrich like, most populists believe that they're burning things down so that they can't be rebuilt.  They can be.  Like Trump's stupid plaza replacing the rose garden, a legislative Kubota can come in and tear it out, and the roses, like them or not, be back in place overnight.

The thing is, however, that this would also be a massive change.  The very things that caused the populist revolt would triumph.  There's a very real chance of that.

But that's not the only possibility.  A third one, even if the NatCons come into power, and even if the Democrats do, but not strongly, is also possible.  That example might be provided by mid 20th Century France.  

The 3d Republic was in terrible shape with politics ripping it apart before World War Two.  The republic technically endured into the Second World War when forces very much like the NatCons took control of it while it was under the Third Reich's heel.  There was serious Allied thought to actually continuing the 3d Republic and even retaining Marshall Petain but the forces that had sided with the Allies clearly did not want to do that. That gave rise to the 4th Republic, and then in 1958, the 5th, under DeGaulle, a right wing Catholic monarchist who restored the country to one in which all sides could seriously work and cooperate.

That latter example may offer the best hope.  The NatCons, like the French right wing, cooperated in the Trumpist nightmare and may very well find themselves discredited by it.  People like Vance may find themselves in the dustbin.  In may take some time, but this might, perhaps, be a watershed moment from which the country emerges a sane new country, not the one that tore itself apart like the 3d Republic, and not one that reflected its late totalitarian stage under a Petain, or in our case, a clown like Trump.

We can only hope so.

Footnotes

1. Donald Trump does not legally occupy the Oval Office and there's a good argument that everything he is doing might end up simply being voided as null as a result.

Last edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 99th Edition appendix. Sydney Sweeney has great jeans, and genes. So does Beyonce Knowles. And stuff.

Labels: 2020s, 2025, Advertising, Beyoncé Knowles, Clothing, Culture, Donald Trump, Evolutionary Biology, flap de jour, Froma Harrop, Politics, Pronatalism, Sydney Sweeney, transgenderism, trends, Women, Zeitgeist

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 99th edition. Sydney Sweeney has great jeans, and genes.

Labels: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2020s, Advertising, Clothing, Conservatism, Culture, Ethnicities, Evolutionary Biology, flap de jour, Liberalism, nature, Patrick Dineen, Pronatalism, Sydney Sweeney, Women, Zeitgeist

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 88th Edition. A predictive issue and other ramblings. Order coming on women in combat roles. Trump's bolt shot.

Pretty effective 1970s vintage Army recruiting poster seeking female recruits.

There's been some interesting signs of things to come recently, including where Hegseth is headed on women in the military, and where Trump's close acolytes are headed in regard to his increasing mental decline.

Interesting times.

We'll start with Hegseth.

As anyone who stops in here is well aware, I'm not a Trump fan.  I'm conservative, actually conservative, but I'm not lockstep in line with anyone.  Frankly, anyone who is, just isn't thinking.  Anyhow, The Trump regime is not conservative but populist, and populist in the same way that gave rise to fascism in various European nations in the 30s, or to Communism to others in the teens and twenties.  But I can see how we got here and indeed I'd been warning about this for some time before it happened.  As readers here know, once Obergefell was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court I feared a political breakdown was inevitable.¹ I also thought that claims made at the time that Obergefell wouldn't lead to a more radical development in the category of gender norms were badly misguided, and I was proved correct about that.  The country was headed toward acceptance of homosexual unions as marriages, irrespective of what social conservatives may think of that, but Justice Kennedy and his fellow travelers hijacking the trend line without any real legal weight behind it jump started the country right into the transgender movement which helped radicalize an already radicalizing populist base in the right wing of the GOP.² 

Women in combat roles in the US came the following year, 2016, and was controversial at the time and remains so in social conservative   I recently posted on it, and I remain very much opposed to it.   While I'm not a fan of Hegseth, he's on record as opposing it as well.

Some time ago Hegseth ordered that the service review its physical fitness standards on a gender neutral basis.³ This isn't really the first time that this has been done and the results can probably be predicted.

Indeed, they can be predicted in part due to the experiences of women in sports competing with men who are surgically and chemically altered to female morphologies, but more on that in a moment.

At the time, I thought that was probably step one towards removing women from combat roles.

Then Hegseth came out with a tweet (I wish government officials would stay off Twitter) endorsing a story in the Telegraph, a British newspaper. The article was this one:

Hegseth, in his comment, noted the problems of women in combat roles, although only briefly and vaguely.

Like a lot of things repeated on Twitter, the Tweet falls sort of teh full story:

IDF chief halts mobility unit pilot program for female combat troops

The IDF is just suspending the study and will get back to a new one.

Before all of this, Hegseth ordered that "transgendered" troops leave the service.  That was probably the least controversial thing he could do, and it makes perfect sense.  Gender Dysphoria may exist, but transgenderism does not.  Moreover, if you have to take medication just to keep your morphology, you really aren't ready for the rigors of military life.

Transgenderism in general, which will also get to below, is really a manifestation of, in my view, a mental illness.  It's a trendy one, however, and is part of the culture wars which gave rise to a radicalized far right, and then to Trump.

Ordering that "transgendered" troops get out of the service is one thing, but then there's this:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist 85th Edition: Hegseth directs Navy to rename USNS Harvey Milk days into Pride Month.

This isn't related to women in combat, but it's certainly a shot in the culture wars and a surprising one.  With the constant storm surrounding the Trump Regime, it didn't generate nearly as much controversy as I thought it would, and that may have been why it was done.  Running that up the flagpole may have been a test by Hegseth to see how much flak he'll get if he orders women out of combat roles.

I suspect it was.

And I suspect that its coming very soon.

Indeed, it has to be soon.

And hence our next prediction.

People have predicted that Trump is running out of steam since day one, but now it appears he really is.  In the old phrase, Trump has "jumped the shark".  Indeed, there's an odd maxim that once something has maximum attention in the public eye, it's probably passed its peak.

There's a lot of evidence of this around, and it makes a big difference to what Hegseth, and others in the Trump Administration, depending upon how savvy they are to trends, are behaving.

Trump is increasingly erratic and weird.  He's also becoming increasingly ineffective.  Having done a lot early on in a flurry of Executive Orders, the Courts, save for the Supreme Court, so far, are effectively saying "hold on Buckwheat" and stopping much of what he's done.  The entire goofball DOGE effort is the same.  Indeed, at least one minor agency is being reconstructed, amazingly, after Musk and his wrecking crew attacked it.⁴  Indeed, DOGE achieved a mess, but that's about it.  Bill Clinton's effort to cut the size of the government, which lead to a surplus in its day, was much more effective.  

Now the wheels are coming off.  Musk is feuding with Trump.  The Senate may not pass the Big Ugly Bill, at least not in the form the sycophantic House did.  Questions are being razed.

Trump is being publicly mocked as "Taco".

The bloom is off the rose, Trump's authority is declining, and the looming 25th Amendment is getting warmed up.

Have you noticed that  James Donald Bowman, aka J. D. Vance, whom we heard from constantly early on, is now pretty much silent.  That's not an accident.  Vance will take over when Trump is booted, and my guess that he doesn't want to be tainted with Trump any more than he has to be.  He's gone from insulting Ukrainian Presidents for not wearing suits, to just not being there.

Which brings this back around to women in the military, and other social issues.  National Conservatives and Christian Nationalist rode into power on Trump's back as they knew that they could.  They also know, however, that they need time to completely overhaul the nation to look like they want it to, and 18 months, all the more time I've given Trump before he is hauled off to an assisted living wing of Mar A Lago, isn't enough.  Four years isn't either, and frankly the Democrats are going to retake the House of Representatives nexts year.  If Vance doesn't secure reelection after this administration is done with, much of what the National Conservatives/Christian Nationalist did during their four years will just be dust in the wind.

In order for anything to stick, it has to be done quickly, so that the electorate is acclimated to it by 2028, or there has to be a plan to stay in power in 2028.  My guess that Vance's disappearing act is part of that.

I fear what else may be.⁵

Back to some rambling.

As is often the case, a certain element of synchronicity tends to work on these posts, with various things coming up with that cause the thread to be posted.  Just as I started contemplating the women in combat topic, again, a couple of such things did which are related.

I subscribe to Mandatory Fun Day on Instagram.  A buddy of mine who had been in the service sent me some of his clips and they're hilarious, if you've been in the Army.  If you haven't, they're probably completely baffling.

Anyhow, as I subscribe on Instagram, they started coming up on Facebook as "reels".  No problem.  The fact that they did, however, meant that I'd get suggested reels by other service members following in the creator's wake.  They were uniformly pretty bad.

All of a sudden, having not taken interest in those, Facebook started suggesting reels by female service members, a large number of which are service women in their t-shirts being cute in a college coed fashion, or worse.  Dancing female soldiers show up, and even twerking ones.  Women showing how they dress in their uniforms, starting with pretty much only skivvies on, is another.  Perhaps the one most illustrative of why I regard this all a problem was one in which a female soldier photographed herself in GI trousers, and regulation brown t-shirt, showing "how I feel when I see my man in uniform", which involved clutching her breasts and and having her free hand south of her fly.

And all of this is observable just on the suggested feed, not on what shows up if you click on it.

One I did click on, as it was so oddly titled, involved a cute young woman making babyish "moo" sounds, in an item entitled "she found her moo".  The voice of the filmer was also female.  Apparently the moo thing is some sort internet trend.

Anyhow, relationships, and you can use your imagination as to what I mean by that, are a problem in college dorms where nobody is expected to kill anyone. They've been a huge problem in the service, and the Marine Corps had to take steps some time ago to order female Marines to knock off seductive filming, some of which featured female Marines nude.  Young women acting like young women away from home and in college dorms isn't surprising, but it sure isn't conductive to unit cohesiveness in organizations in which death and destruction is a routine norm.  

Put another way, the "man" whom the young woman touching body parts which used to be referenced in the Jody Call "The Prettiest Girl I Ever Saw" is going to be a problem in any unit, let alone one in which a soldier may be expected to leave her behind to be killed.^6 7

Moo.

Anyhow, while noting all of this, I also saw a series of stories recently about women being upset by having to compete against men, who are "transgendered".  Also, UW is now being investigated due to Artemis Langford being in a sorority, at the same time that sorority sisters are trying to keep him out.

That caused me to realize how often its women who lead the charge in this are. Women know they are women and they justifiably feel that in sports they shouldn't have to compete against men.  And they aren't the only ones. An international body that regulates boxing has imposed genetic tests on female boxers to make sure they're female.

The reason for all of this is that even second rate male athletes turn out to be almost unstoppable competition in female sports, when they compete as transgendered.  Women resent it, and rightfully.

But oddly enough society hasn't seemingly noted something that Hemingway noted many years ago.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

Ernest Hemingway.

I'm not saying that war is nice. Quite the contrary.  But in some ways its the ultimate athletic endeavor, even now in the era of high tech weapons. And let us be honest  Killing is part of it, but there's never been a conflict anywhere in the world where brutalization and rape haven't been part of it, nor has there ever been one in which some women took advantage of their assets in a wartime pinch.

Women don't belong in combat.

Let's go back to the plight of the UW sorority for a second.

The entire saga here shows how difficult it can be for public institutions in this bizarre era in which we live.  It's obvious that a male should not be in a sorority, and Langford may dress as a female and wish to be regarded as one, but at least the last time I checked on the story, he hadn't "transitioned", which means he's full equipped.  There's no reason that a young woman should be forced to live in close residential confines with a man if she doesn't wish to.

The other sad aspect of this is that this entire saga, in which they've sued, and I don't blame them, and now the Trump Administration is investigating UW, means that his entire delusion has become his identity, when had this been treated as what it was, a mental illness, it might all be past tense by now.  Indeed, just looking it would suggest that it might very well have been.⁸

Anyhow, stuff like this puts universities in the can't win for losing situation.  Charlie Kirk, a right wing populist babbler, has made comments on Langford, and a right wing populist law student just sponsored him talking on campus.

Pity poor UW.

Back to Hegseth t he White House is looking for a new chief of staff and several senior advisers to support him, but there's been no takers.

Again, this Administration has shot its bolt, and its showing.

On other things military, we have this:

June 8, 2025

US Civil Unrest

Donald Trump has federalized some units of the California National Guard and ordered them to Los Angeles in response to violent immigration protests there.

A President federalizing a Guard unit ab initio like this is very unusual.

Some are declaring that this is a first step towards nationwide martial law.  I doubt it.  It's a bad move however.  Troops, including National Guardsmen, make poor police.  They really aren't trained for it, but are trained to use force.

Usually troops, including National Guardsmen, who are deployed in this role aren't given ammunition.  The opposite can happen, of course, as Kent State famously and tragically indicated.  This is a bad look, anyway you view it.

To circle back, how much of what we're seeing now, will stick?  Trump's really on his way out, and it's doubtful the culture has been much impacted, so far.

Footnotes: 

1.  This thread has been getting a lot of views for some reason recently, and is often one of the most popular ones of the week.

2.  Kennedy provides us with another example of the disaster of the very aged being in a position of authority.

3.  The order states:

High standards are what made the United States military the greatest fighting force on the planet. The strength of our military is our unity and our shared purpose. We are made stronger and more disciplined with high, uncompromising, and clear standards.

I am directing the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (USD(P&R)) to gather the existing standards set by the Military Departments pertaining to physical fitness, body composition, and grooming, which includes but is not limited to beards. The USD(P&R) will conduct a review of these standards and how they have changed since January 1, 2015 . The review will also provide insight on why those standards changed and the impact of those changes. The USD(P&R) has the authority to task the Secretaries of the Military Departments and other DoD Component heads as necessary to provide any required information in support of this review and will provide detailed guidance to the Military Departments.

We must remain vigilant in maintaining the standards that enable the men and women of our military to protect the American people and our homeland as the world' s most lethal and effective fighting force. Our adversaries are not growing weaker, and our tasks are not growing less challenging. This review will illuminate how the Department has maintained the level of standards required over the recent past and the trajectory of any change in those standards.

4.  None of which has kept the perpetually behind the curve Wyoming legislature from heading off with its own DOGE effort, just as the  Federal effort is sinking. 

5.  Having said that, by any standard Vance will be more normal than Trump, which doesn't mean he will get reelected in 2028.  

6. They must be banned now, but the Army used to have a lot of Jody Calls that were outright foul, but probably serve to illustrate the atmosphere that units of young men tend to have, for good or ill.  In this call, a solder recalls drinking in a bar and touching a woman next to him in various place until she says "GI, you know the rest", resulting in his now having a bunch of children.

7.  As a totally random item:

As more women head to war, IDF uniforms designed for men expose female troops to risks

The army’s one-uniform-fits-all approach means a fifth of combat soldiers are operating in clothes, vests and other gear unsuited to their physiques, harming safety and effectiveness

8.  I don't know all the details, but from what little you can pick up on the net, Langford's parents seem to have gone through a bad divorce and his father obtained custody.  Langford relates that he solidified his view of himself as a woman following a desperate nighttime prayer.  He was a Mormon, and while many faiths recognize praying for guidance, the Mormon faith has a "burning bosom" line of thought on some things.  The LDS are not, however, supportive of transgenderism, which is interesting, and Langford now identifies as an Episcopalian. Some branches of the Episcopal church have been notoriously willing to accept gender trends, which is part of the reason that the Episcopal Church is rapidly declining in membership.

Related threads:

Women and combat

Killing people and breaking things. . . and women in the service.

Last edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist 87th Edition. No, "Liberals" are not flocking to Musk.

Labels: 119th Congress, 2020s, 2025, Conservatism, Donald Trump, Economics, Elon Musk, flap de jour, Liberalism, Populism, Zeitgeist

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist 85th Edition: Hegseth directs Navy to rename USNS Harvey Milk days into Pride Month.

Fleet oiler, the USS Harvey Milk (for now).

Wow, this is really a shot across the bow in the culture wars.

Hegseth directs Navy to rename USNS Harvey Milk days into Pride Month

The Navy may rename the USNS Harvey Milk, named for the 1970s gay civil rights activist, on orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Renaming a ship for any reason is a fairly phenomenal thing to do, something no doubt on the minds of those who named the ship after Milk in the first place.  It had an element of permanence, and was part of an effort to create acceptance for homosexuals.

Hegseth's actions, and these aren't the only recent ones (we were actually going to make the next in this series on another one of them) are really sending a signal of where the DoD is headed.  But the question ultimately will be is any of this permanent?  And also, how far does he intend to go?  I don't think, at this point, that anyone has thought that the DoD would reverse its position on allowing homosexuals to serve in the military, and it shouldn't reverse it, all of which makes this so surprising.

National Conservatives and Christian Nationalists hope the changes will be permanent, but Trump is losing steam pretty clearly, and the host of other issues, particularly the "size of government" and budgetary ones, are now in pretty stormy seas.  In order to make cultural changes really stick, they need more than four years, probably more than eight.  Hegseth, in the DoD is picking up steam, maybe aware of that, but where this all goes will be interesting to watch.

Last edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist 84th Edition. The uncomfortably agreeing with the far right edition (on some things). Hegseth orders transgenderism out and a bill to outlaw pornography.

Labels: Court, Education, law, Pete Hegseth, pornography, The relationship between men and women, The Second Trump Administration, transgenderism, University of Wyoming, Women, Zeitgeist

"Do not be led astray: 'Bad company corrupts good morals.' Trump, Putin and American Evangelicals.

Note:  This was originally drafted in February, 2024 and not posted.  In looking for something else, I can back across it.

It'll be timely for another post I'm working on. 

St. King Abgar V, an Arab, and the first Christian King.  He died approximatley in 50 A.D.  He adopted Christianity at a time it was a minorit religion and not exactly popular.  Putin and Trump are not like him.

Do not be led astray:

“Bad company corrupts good morals.”

St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 15.

Back in the AnteCovid days which now seem like a lost world, I'd sometimes run into neo monarchist on Reddit, usually due to participating on the Distributist Sub Reddit.  I quit participating there prior to the epidemic, as the discussions were really not worth participating in. Distributism is a modern economic system in its own right, but the sub tended to be populated by people who romanticized the Middle Ages, or who were Socialist trying to view everything as Socialism. An awful lot of the discussion looked like it was being conducted by 15-year-olds hiding in their parent's basements.

Emperor Charles I of Austria, who has been beatified.

Among the real goofball discussions were those by monarchist.  I didn't realize up until then that there are people today who long for a return of monarchy, but there are. Their typical logic was that monarchs are needed as they set the moral tone for the nation.

St. Stephen of Hungary, a Hungarian king from 1000 to 1038.  He outlived all of his children and died at about age 62.  His wife Gisela has been beatified, and one of his children is also canonized.

Hah.

Apparently these people know nothing of real monarchs, as plenty failed to live a moral life.  There are very notable exceptions, some of which appear here, but they are indeed the exception that proves the rule.  There's the entire problem of attacking your neighbor as you want his lands, of course, but beyond that monarchs tended to be pretty icky. It's hard to find an example of kings who didn't have mistresses, or worse. One early English king seems to have had a habit of basically sacking convents and raping nuns, which is really weird.  A joke about a later one is that when he went to Monaco on vacation, the children ran out and yelled "papa" as he was just that.  A Norman Christian king in Sicily kept Muslim women as concubines, to the extent that he was known as The Christian Sultan.  One French king was so randy as a teenage prince that concubines were acquired to satisfy his pre marital urges.

King Henry VIII who definitely was not a saint.

And of course there's King Henry VIII

Even really admired ones often were problematic this way.  King Charles the Great was accorded the title "blessed" for valid reasons, but Charles had at least fourteen mistresses during his lifetime and was rebuked by a noted churchman for still having an eye for the ladies well into old age.  He died, I'd note, at age 72.  King Cnut set his first wife aside to marry another when he became king, which was perhaps justified at the time by the fact that his first wife, a very able administrator, was a pagan and he was a Christian.  Harold Godwinson, whom some in the Orthodox faith regard as a saint, put aside his first wife, Edith the Fair, in favor of Edith of Mercia, for political reasons, although legend has it that Edith the Fair was present at Hastings and identified his body.  Czar Nicholas II who has been canonized in the Russian Orthodox Church for being a martyr shared, in his early years, the same mistress that his brother had.

The imperial household of Czar Nicholas II.

On the latter, I'm not meaning to cast stones at these people's virtues.  Czar Nicholas, for example, seems to have grown more devout after his marriage.  Charles the Great spent his last months fasting and contemplating King Harold Godwinson's first marriage was complicated by the means of its contracting, and his second may have been merely political.  I only note all of this as the silly devotion on Reddit to monarchy, with some of the silliness being extended to some academics, is just that, romantic silliness.

And then we have the bizarre ongoing devotion, in some Christian circles, to viewing Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump as saviors of Christian society.

What on earth?

This seems to have all started with the devotion that developed to Viktor Orbán in the same circles.  Orbán is the champion of illiberal democracy and is blunt in his concept that Hungary is a Hungarian nationality, Christian, nation.  Hungary has not collapsed into an authoritarian state as is sometimes claimed, but it's become one run by a far right nation under a party that espouses Christian Nationalism and Illiberal Democracy.  Orbán is a serious Christian, although interestingly he's a Hungarian Calvinist.  His wife is Catholic, as are most Hungarians, and their children were raised Catholic.  

Orbán is an authoritarian by nature, although democracy is still functioning in Hungary, and he's an admirer of Putin.  I think that's where the American Evangelical fascination with Putin came from.

Putin is effectively a murderer, which is widely known.  His murders come through the state, of course.  Before he rose up in post Communist Russia, he was an employee of the KGB.  His marriage to his only wife, Lyudmila Putin, ended in divorce in 2014.  His been carrying on an affair with retired Russian gymnast Alina Kabaeva since prior to the divorce date, by all indications, and seems to have borne two children through the union.

Putin is at least nominally Russian Orthodox, but its hard to see it being much more than that.  The Russian Orthodox Church as revived as a major Russian institution since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Putin has been careful to seem to be close to Metropolitan Kirill, its head.  The Metropolitan has his own checkered history, as he is rumored to have had a relationship with the KGB in the Soviet Union era.  Metropolitan Kirill is extremely conservative, which is not inappropriate for the head of an Apostolic Church, and Putin has been on at least some social issues as well.  This may simply be Putin's own views, or in part it may be an effort to keep the good graces of the Russian Orthodox Church.  Russia has been, for example, very restrictive in regard to homosexuality.

All of this leads some American Christians to believe that Putin is acting as the bulwark against the corruption of the decline of Western values, but if so, he's doing it in a very corrupt way which inclined killing people.  And Putin seems to have adopted the monarch's view that he can do no wrong, to include invading the territory of Russia's neighbors, assassinations, and sleeping with a woman who much junior than his former wife.

And for American Evangelicals, it might be noted that the Russian government is actually pretty repressive towards non-Orthodox religions, particularly those that depart significantly from the main line of their branches. This has included Evangelical Protestants and the Jehovah Witnesses.  This makes this one of those interesting areas in which some American Evangelicals have adopted as hero a culture which really doesn't have any sympathy for their views.

And then there's Donald Trump.

A large group of American Evangelicals have taken on the view that Donald Trump is their man, with some going much further than that.  Ironically, evidence of him every actually practicing his faith, Presbyterianism, is pretty hard to find.

Trump is a serial polygamist, for one thing.  In spite of American Protestantism and the American Civil Religion having come to fully accept divorce and remarriage, Christianity doesn't, and people who pretend otherwise are adopting something that's fully contrary to Christian tenants.  As the Stormy Daniel affair reveals, Trump isn't beyond some really base sexual conduct.  We won't even get into the allegations of other conduct. By Christian beliefs, bare minimum, Trump lives in a state of outward moral sin, which might be reduced by the doctrine of "invincible ignorance".

Trump is also a liar, cast aspersions against other people, and calls them degrading names.  Lying, at least in classic Christian theology, can rise to the level of a mortal sin.  

For years and years, the dominant Christian faith in the American South as been the Baptist. 

Why is that?

The American Civil War had a lot to do with it.

Prior to the Civil War, in much of the South, the dominant church was the Episcopal Church.  Its roots reached back to the Colonist and back to England.  Most Colonist, as colonization really got rolling, were members of the Anglican Church, although other Protestant denominations were included, most notably the Presbyterian Church, the Church of Scotland, which was the dominant faith for Scots immigrants.

Leonidas Polk, Confederate General and Episcopal Bishop.  He was killed by Union artillery in 1864 at age 58.

Going into the Civil War, the Episcopal Churchmen of the South largely backed the Confederacy.  One Confederate General was an Episcopal Bishop.

The South had always had a fair number of itinerant preachers who were not Episcopal Priest.  While the Episcopal Church seemed to be backing the Southern cause during the war, the itinerant preachers were warning of doom and God's judgment.  The result of the war seemed to prove them right.

The point is, the Southern cause was corrupt and disgusting from a moral prospective from the onset.  Backing corruption, in the end, corrupts.

Bad company corrupts good morals.

This will have a bad end for Evangelicals, and for those of other faiths following the same path.  But particularly for Evangelicals.  For one thing, they are the only religions denomination that's so heavily invested in Trump.  Not other religion, Christian or otherwise, is.

Secondly, the "mainline" Protestant denominations are not only not invested in Trump, they've already sustained their demographic blows by compromising with the leftward drift of culture.  That's split them in many instances, and where it has not, people have voted with their feet. The Episcopal Church, for example, once the Church of the economic elite, is in severe trouble.

The Catholic Church, by comparison, has actually remained stable in numbers in the US, but it should be growing.  The scandals of the earliest 21st Century served the accidental purpose, however, if making its younger adherants, including clerics, more orthodox and conservative, and more "other".  Younger clerics speak as if they're at a last stand, which they really are not, or as if they're the first missionairies into pagan culture.  Nobody is looks upon any current political leader as a Catholic standard bearor, most particularly Catholics.

No, it is some of the Evangelical and Culturally Christian Americans who have adopted Trump with zeal, seemingly thinking of him as a sort of Protectant Knights Templar out to do battle.

When he fails, and he will, as this time he will be unrestrained, they will share the failure, and the consequences of it.

What on Earth does the Republican Party stand for?

Ronald Reagan was the first President that I was able to vote for, or against (I voted for) in my lifetime.

The GOP of that era was far from perfect, but I knew what it stood for.  

It was pro life, pro defense, tough on crime, pro fiscal responsibility, and overall conservative.

People have claimed that for the Trumpist GOP, but what of it?

1.  Pro life?

The GOP went into this election cycle claiming responsibility, which it had every right to do, for the repeal of Roe v. Wade, which returned the abortion issue to the states.  Not surprisingly, however, a controversial issue remains controversial.  Now the GOP is running from the issue as quickly as it can.  It took its pro life plank out of its platform, where it's been for decades.  And now we have Trump, who has flip flopped on the issue for decades, stating this, in regard to a proposed six week provision in Florida:

I think the six week is too short, there has to be more time

This is really a simple issue.  Either you believe that life starts at conception, or aren't sure when a human is a human and therefore you err on the side of life, or you think killing only matters at some arbitrary point in time in which you can't stomach it.

At best, the Republicans here can claim to support State's Rights, but pro life?  Donald isn't.

Added to that is this, which gets also into the next topic.

I am announcing today that under the Trump administration, your government will pay for or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with IVF treatment.

We want more babies!

IVF means the creation of large numbers of embryos that are later killed, and in Catholic theology, IVF  is regarded as a moral evil.  

It's notable that Vance, who is a Catholic convert, has made some statements now generally supporting IVF as he runs towards Trump and away from his Faith.

2.  Fiscal Responsibility?

Trump added 8T to the federal debt in his term in office.

And he proposed, prior to Harris, cutting income taxes on tips, which has no logical defense.  Income is income.

Trump has stood for tax cuts, which have amounted to tax cuts for the wealthy.  People, including the wealthy like Elon Musk, have noted the country is going bankrupt.  Well, this is a big part of the reason why.

Back to the above, the GOP whined endlessly about Obamacare, and now proposes to expand government support for an insurance payment. What the crud?

3. Pro defense?

The Republican willingness in many quarters to abandon Ukraine says all you need to know about this. Added to it, Trump has a weird relationship with Russia that has never been explained.

Much of the current GOP wants to return to isolationism, which worked oh so well during the 1930s.

4.  Tough on crime?

Running Trump says all you really need to know on that.

This party, in spite of what its supporters believe, stands only for reelecting Donald Trump, and nothing else.

Mind you, there were signs of this happening for some time.  The entire spectacle of Evangelical Christians lashing themselves to the decks of the Trump serial polygamy ship was never easy to fathom.  National Conservatives came on board in a calculated fashion, thinking that when Trump shuffled off his mortal coil they'd be in charge, only to see the less popular portions of their beliefs mocked and categorized as "weird".  The Hawk Tuah girl was embraced by the Lynyrd Skynyrd branch of the populist whose Christianity is rather thin and not hardly of the Mike Johnson New Apostolic Reformation variety.

So what does that do to the populist movement in the GOP and the GOP in general?  Well, quite a few real Republicans are abandoning ship, particularly those cultural conservatives who were never really Trumpites, but believed there was a moral obligation to support the GOP due to its cultural conservative positions.  The American Solidarity Party is suddenly getting a lot of attention because its actually prolife.  But a lot of the Trumpites now stand for nothing but Trump and will go down with him like stormtroopers in Berlin on May 2, 1945.  Locally those politicians who have arisen in the Populist Freedom Caucus will keep on saying the same things they've been saying, even as their leader is saying the opposite.

Populism always gets co-opted in the end.  Here, it already has been.  Conservatism, for its part, was simply killed in the party.

An Appeal To Heaven. The 2024 Wyoming Primary

The primary election is this Tuesday. 

On that day, people who didn't go down to the courthouse early to vote, like me, and those who didn't vote absentee, and are voting, will cast their votes.

I've been following politics since at least 1972, when Richard Nixon won his second term in office.  I can remember doing so as a kid.  I was nine.  Teno Roncalio, a Catholic lawyer from Sweetwater County, a veteran of Operation Overlord, and a Democrat, was our Congressman.  Gale McGee, a University of Wyoming professor, and a Democrat was one of our Senators.  The other was Cliff Hansen, a rancher from Teton County when Teton County still had real ranches, and a Republican, was our other Senator.  Stan Hathaway, a Republican Episcopalian at the time, who later became Secretary of the Interior and a Catholic, was our Governor.

Yep, that's right.  We had more Democrats in Congress than Republicans.  Being called a "Democrat" wasn't a slur.

In the 1980s, a very conservative and extremely religious Wyoming politician who was LDS attempted to have a bill passed targeting pornography sales.  He was widely lampooned.  HE had not, however campaigned on his faith, even though it obviously had informed his legislative effort.

I can't recall, until Foster Friess run for Governor in 2018, any Wyoming politician making their faith central to their campaign.  If you knew much about candidates, you often knew what their faith was, but there was never anyone who boldly claimed "I'm a Christian" as a reason to vote for them.  People probably would have been offended if they had, and of course Wyoming was and is the least religious state in the Union.

Something that did happen in that time frame was the arrival of the new Evangelical churches.  I pass one every day on my way to work, and two gigantic ones have been built.  I know very little about the one that I pass, which proclaims itself to be an "Evangelical Free Church", thereby proclaiming a denomination without realizing that its done so, and even less about the two gigantic ones, other than that one has a huge following, including members who are openly living in sin or violating Christ's injunction about divorce and remarriage.

With their arrival, and the campaign of Freiss, who wasn't from here and was never of here, and the evolution in national politics, we now see Evangelical proclamations thickly made, but with the adherence to the message of Christ thinly understood.  One Natrona County legislature, newly imported from Illinois, Jeanette Ward, proclaimed her Christianity while asserting in the legislature that we are in fact not our brother's keeper.  Numerous politicians in the hinterland have claimed that the Constitution is divinely inspired, a minority Protestant and minority LDS view that seemingly has wide acceptance in the populist right.  A candidate in this district proclaimed his Christianity, and his wife, in his support did the same in a mailer, while making statements that are outright lies.

Now someone approached him and said, “Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?”He answered him, “Why do you ask me about the good? There is only One who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” He asked him, “Which ones?” And Jesus replied, “ ‘You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; honor your father and your mother’; and ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

The young man said to him, “All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?”

Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to [the] poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.  Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Matthew Chapter 19.

We are all familiar, of course, with the uncomfortable comment from Christ that its harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.   This statement is so disquieting that one entire branch of Christianity, the heath and wealth gospel group, has dispensed entirely with focusing on it.  They aren't alone, however.  I heard plenty of homilies in the 70s and 80s, probably the 90s, from Priets who discussed "spiritual poverty".

I don't hear that much anymore from Apostolic Christians, whose clerics have become increasingly more orthodox.

And I think the warming is real.  Vast wealth corrupts.  You only have to look at the impact of the vastly wealthy to realize that, whether it be Elon Musk or Donald Trump and their personal morals.

People who look at Trump and see him as a devout Christians are fools.

But then, a lot of American Christians are Christian Light.

How does this relate here?

Well, in a culture loudly proclaiming itself to be Christian, that of the American political right, we see an awful lot of people whose adherence to the basic tenants of the Gospel are absent. That's why one right wing commentator could seriously maintain the Hawk Tuah Girl was exhibiting a conservative value (pleasuring her man, she stated), rather than seeing her for what she is, a sad example of a person whose become debased.  Whole sectors, however, of the far right have become debased in various degrees, which is not to say that the left is a beacon of moral purity.

Seeing either party as a Christian one is foolish.

Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign. 

And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.  

They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred. 

To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments. 

Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body's hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself."  

From a letter to Diognetus (Nn. 5-6; Funk, 397-401)  

I'm fearful of what this election holds in more ways than one.  One thing I'm afraid of is that the co-opting of Christianity by the Trumpists will harm it.  The only really Christian party in the race is the American Solidarity Party, but it doesn't stand a chance.  Some elements of Christian Nationalism are actually deeply Christian, with an understanding of Apostolic Christianity, whereas some parts are American Protestant, which have an erroneous view of the end of the Apostolic Age.  They are not compatible.  The deeper National Conservatives, for that matter, are an insurgent group within the far right seeking to slip in, take over, and effect a sort of social revolution. They saw J. D. Trump as their Trojan Horse, but thought they were through the gates of Troy too early.

Real Christian movements do rise up periodically. But that's what they do, rise up.  They aren't imposed down.  Some of that has already occured, with the far left reacting strongly to it.  But that doesn't seem to be appreciated here.

I don't see a lot of really deep Christianity out there in the political field.  If I did, frankly, quite a few of those things that the Democratic left have proclaimed as weird would be practiced, which may be why J. D. Vance, for all the negative attention he's attracted, is the only really honest figure in the Trump camp.  He does believe the traditional things he says, I'm quite sure, currently regarded as "weird" or not.  But then, like the members of the New Apostolic Reformation, which he's not party of, he's seemingly willing to make common cause with lies in order to try to advance what he regards as a greater good, something that's always tactically iffy and morally reprehensible.

Satan, we're told, is the father of lies.  Lying, we're told, is a sin.  In Catholic theology at least, it can be a mortal sin, which has not deterred at least one Catholica elected official here from campaigning on a whopper during the last election.  Lying always has a bad end.

Lying will have some sort of existential bad end for those now doing it.  Lying to yourself does as well.  You can't really be "a devout Christian" with multiple marriages, or when shacked up, or when favoring your career over others or over nature, or while prioritizing wealth, 

And if you are seeking to transform society, you have to give society a reason to transform.  Simply declaring that you are on the side of God doesn't really do that.