You can pretty much rest assured that its not the Trump thesis. Trump just isn't smart enough or interested enough to grasp something like this at all.
Rubio has endorsed Vance for 2028, but it's probably an endorsement of convenience. By doing this, Rubio has raised his flag in the National Conservative camp. This, moreover, may actually be what Rubio believes.
Rubio is drawing a lot of attention, and getting a lot of excitement, in Reaganite and other genuinely conservative camps. He's not a populist. The big question is whether he can overcome the stench of having been associated with Trump. A secondary question is whether contemporary American culture, less than half of which is all that conservative, sees itself in this fashion very deeply.
In contrast is Pete Hegseth, who will never overcome the stench of Trump.
The Department of Defense posted this item about its activities this past week:
We have gathered at the Pentagon for our monthly worship service.
We are One Nation Under God.
Christopher Hale@ChristopherHale 13hDoug Wilson routinely mocks the pope and the Catholic Church.It’s beyond shameful that @PeteHegseth allowed him to lead taxpayer-funded anti-Catholic worship services.
Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸@jimstewartson 13hListen. Doug Wilson is one of the most disgusting revanchist monsters on Earth. He doesn’t think women should vote, wants slavery back, and believes the U.S. should be a theonomy—Government by God. He runs a cult in Moscow, ID.This is wildly unconstitutional & deeply immoral.
I don't know who Stewartson is, but describing Wilson as a revanchist is correct. Monster might be a bit much, but he doesn't think women should vote and does think that the U.S. should be a Calvinist theocracy. I don't know what he thinks about slavery and I'm not going to look it up, but Wilson is articulate and extreme.
And that's why Hegseth's actions here are really disturbing. Rubio is trying to stake a claim for Western Civilization as special, something the National Conservatives hold and which a lot of people disagree with. Hegseth is here advancing Christian Nationalism of a type that holds a very peculiar view on the United States' place in the world.
A recent development in the story of women in combat roles in the U.S. military:
I think it's pretty clear that the leadership in the DoD feels that women should not be in combat roles. I have some old threads on this, and I don't think they should be either, but the interesting thing here is how the DoD has crept up on this.
They must be uncomfortable with just issuing a decision, as over the past year they've taken incremental steps, which the administration really hasn't done on anything else. It would sort of suggest that they think this is the bridge too far.
It might also suggest a bit of a realization that things can be reversed and therefore the goal is to build a basis to avoid a reversal.
The impact of Woodrow Wilsons' administration recognizing Carranza, whose followers had blown off the Convention of Aguascalientes, and who personally hated the United States, was becoming immediately clear.
While Wilson had his hand on the scale of the Mexican Revolution, he was issuing a proclaimation about American Thanksgiving.
President Wilson issued a proclamation regarding Thanksgiving.
Proclamation 1316—Thanksgiving Day, 1915
October 20, 1915
By the President of the United States of America
A Proclamation
It has long been the honoured custom of our people to turn in the fruitful autumn of the year in praise and thanksgiving to Almighty God for His many blessings and mercies to us as a nation. The year that is now drawing to a close since we last observed our day of national thanksgiving has been, while a year of discipline because of the mighty forces of war and of change which have disturbed the world, also a year of special blessing for us.
Another year of peace has been vouchsafed us; another year in which not only to take thought of our duty to ourselves and to mankind but also to adjust ourselves to the many responsibilities thrust upon us by a war which has involved almost the whole of Europe. We have been able to assert our rights and the rights of mankind without breach of friendship with the great nations with whom we have had to deal; and while we have asserted rights we have been able also to perform duties and exercise privileges of succour and helpfulness which should serve to demonstrate our desire to make the offices of friendship the means of truly disinterested and unselfish service. Our ability to serve all who could avail themselves of our services in the midst of crisis has been increased, by a gracious Providence, by more and more abundant crops. our ample financial resources have enabled us to steady the markets of the world and facilitate necessary movements of commerce which the war might otherwise have rendered impossible; and our people have come more and more to a sober realization of the part they have been called upon to play in a time when all the world is shaken by unparalleled distresses and disasters. The extraordinary circumstances of such a time have done much to quicken our national consciousness and deepen and confirm our confidence in the principles of peace and freedom by which we have always sought to be guided. Out of darkness and perplexity have come firmer counsels of policy and clearer perceptions of the essential welfare of the nation. We have prospered while other peoples were at war, but our prosperity has been vouchsafed us, we believe, only that we might the better perform the functions which war rendered it impossible for them to perform.
Now, Therefore, I, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States of America, do hereby designate Thursday the twenty-fifth of November next as a day of thanksgiving and prayer, and invite the people throughout the land to cease from their wonted occupations and in their several homes and places of worship render thanks to Almighty God.
In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the City of Washington this twentieth day of October in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and fifteen and of the independence of the United States the one hundred and fortieth.
Signature of Woodrow Wilson
Louis Botha, once a Boer General, of the South African Party won the 1915 South African general election and retained power.
French forces reached the town of Krivolak on the Vardar river in Vardar Macedonia. The British dug in at a mountain pass near Kosturino and Doiran Like.
The Ottoman Empire brought an end to Armenian resistance at Urfa.
The British Commonwealth recognized women as bus and tram operators for the duration, something that had been going on for some time.
Sweden established the Swedish Infantry Officers College.
Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Today -100: October 20, 1915: With bleeding heart ...: Headline of the Day -100: Male voters in New Jersey reject women’s suffrage in the referendum by roughly 133,000 to 184,000. It los...
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Not quite no women in combat. . . but you can see it from there:
Hegseth announces troops in combat jobs will have to meet highest male physical standards
I always find mindself in an odd spot, vis-à-vis Hegseth. I'm obviously not a fan of the Trump Administration, or of Hegseth, but I think moves like this are in fact in the right direction.
Odd that this comes up when it does, by the way.
Related threads:
Hirohito threw Tojo under the bus for Pearl Harbor.
Manhattan elevator operators went on strike.
It's odd to think of them going on strike. They were common at the time, and were into the 1960s. Now, of course, they're so rare that most people have never encountered one.
Related threads:
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Lex Anteinternet: Pioneer Day. Pie & Beer Day. Public land sales, ...: Flag of the putative State of Deseret. Church and state should be separate, not only in form, but fact - religion and politics should not be...
In that, we noted this:
One of the Salt Lake newspapers has started a series on this, noting basically what I just did (I actually started this tread prior to the paper). This doesn't cover it all, however. It'd explain none of what we see in Wyoming backers like Harriet Hageman. We'll look at that next.
Now we're taking that look. More specifically, we're looking at the question of how Harriet Hageman, John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis can look at the people who voted them in, and say, basically, "screw you and the horse you rode in on".
We'll note first that we don't think the answer is the same for all three of them.
Let's start with Hageman.
Hageman, unlike Mike Lee, is not a Mormon. For that matter, neither are Barrasso or Lummis (although we'll note that Barrasso's religious history should inform our views on him. Indeed, it's difficult to learn much about Hageman's religious background at all. Sometimes she's listed as a "Protestant", which she no doubt is, but that doesn't mean much in this context, as that category includes such things as Anglo Catholics and Missouri Synod Lutherans, to liberal Episcopalians. It also includes the vast numbers of various small Protestant churches that often ignore vast tracts of American Christianity while being either very conservative or very liberal on things they pay attention to. Hageman never really says what her Protestantism is allied to, or where she attends church, or if she even does. One biography says she's a "non denominational" Christian, which fits in well with the far right she's part of. A slight clue of her views is that she's married to a Cheyenne lawyer who is much older than she is with nearly twenty years on her age and who had a prior marriage. They have no children. Those last two items pretty much take her out of the Apostolic Christianity category, and out of those Protestant churches that are close to Apostolic Christianity.
If Hageman has no children, what she has is the weak tea of a career, the thing feminist sold on women as the fulfillment of their testimony and which, just as with men, turned out to be a fraud foisted upon them, and which continues to be each year at high school graduation. I'm not saying having a career is bad, but the focus on it as life defining is pretty much living a lie.
What Hageman also has is a history.
Harriet Maxine Hageman was born on a ranch outside of Fort Laramie, Wyoming, in the Wyobraska region of Wyoming, a farming dominated portion of the state that lacks public lands and which is unique in many ways. Her father was James Hageman, who served as a longtime Republican member of the Wyoming House of Representatives until his death in 2006. She is a fourth generation Wyomingite, descending from James Clay Shaw, who moved to Wyoming Territory from Texas in 1878. Harriet is one of six siblings. Her brothers are Jim Hageman, Dewey Hageman, and Hugh Hageman, Her sisters are Rachel Hageman Rubino and Julie Hageman. Rachel Rubio passed away in 2024, shortly after Harriet was elected to Congress. One of her kids is a lawyer. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was read at her funeral.1
When Harriet ran for Governor, all three of her brothers, but not her sisters, were included in a video talking about how much she loved people, and how family was central to her. Maybe all that is true, but here's where the story, from our prospective, gets a bit interesting.
Hageman went to Casper College on an ag scholarship. Indeed, she was at CC at the same time I was. From there, like me, she went on to US, and ultimately on to law school.
She didn't go on to the ranch, or a career in agriculture.
I guess I didn't either, but my story is the story of early death, which intervenes with our desires and which determines our path in life more than we care to admit. I don't know what Harriet's story is, but I would note that as a rule, from her generation, daughters of ranchers weren't going back to the family ranch after high school graduation. It wasn't that they would not, it was that they could not. Those that retained a role in agriculture did so through the result of marriage, often knowing men who were farmers and ranchers. Indeed, off hand, the few daughters of farmers or ranchers I know who ended up in agriculture ended up in it in just that fashion.
Hugh Hageman ended up in ranching. Dewey Hageman seems to has well. Jim Hageman seems to have as well, or at least he's still in the Ft. Laramie area. In the video, all three really look like ranchers.
When I was growing up, as noted, women didn't end up in ranching except through marriage. Usually no effort was made whatsoever to try to incorporate them into a ranching future. Quite a few times, quite frankly, they were expected to marry into a ranching family, but even by the 1980s things had turned to where that was no longer the case, and many started to move into other careers. Law has always been a really popular career for ranchers and farmers to send their children into, as basically farmers and ranchers don't believe that lawyers work. Indeed, for the most part, they don't believe people in town actually work either.
Jim Hageman, the father of the family, himself came from a large ranching family in Converse County. In the near hagiographies written about his daughter, it's noted how he built the ranch from nothing, but frankly, that's just not true. He was born in an era in which the younger sons of ranchers could still secure ranch land, with help through loans and loan programs. Now that's impossible.
But that puts Harriet straight into the Wyoming agricultural family myth.
I love ranching, as anyone here can tell. But I'm a realist, and perhaps a cynic. My own family has been in the region since at least 1879. Hageman's, apparently, since 1873. People who came out here didn't do so because, usually, they were wealthy, although some did, which is another story. Rest assured the progenitor of the Hageman family in Wyoming, a Clay, wasn't.
What they were, however, were beneficiaries of one of the largest social welfare programs in American history, maybe the largest. In 1873 the genocidal aspect of that program was still well under way. Basically, the US used the Army to remove, at gunpoint, the native inhabitants and corral them into largescale concentration camps and then gave the land away to those willing to engage in agriculture. Most of those who took up the opportunity were dirt poor. The program was kept up and running until 1932, at which time the Taylor Grazing Act was thankfully passed and the land preserved.
Homesteading was very hard and difficult work and the majority of homesteads failed. But still, it wasn't as if homesteaders came into "virgin" lands and tamed it with their own two bare hands. The government removed or killed the original inhabitants. In many areas, the government built large-scale irrigation projects for the new ones, at government expensive. Homesteaders were admirable in many ways, but they weren't without assistance.
James Hageman was born in 1930, which means when he was first starting his ranching life, land was still affordable, something that ceased to be the case in the 1980s but which would still have somewhat been the case when Harriet's brothers were entering their adult lives. Most men from ranch families tried to stay in ranching, if they could. Most still do. When you meet somebody who talks about having grown up on a ranch, but isn't in ranching, it's because the "ranch" was a 20 acre plot outside of town (not a ranch) or because they were left with no alternative.
What those left with no alternative were given, so that their older brothers could carry on without trouble, was what English "Remission Men" were given in earlier eras. . . something else to do. In a lot of cases, that something else was a career in law or medicine.
That's what Harriet got.
Well, what does that tell us?
Well, quite a lot. A girl from a ranching family who had nowhere to go, she had to marry into agriculture or pursue a career. While I knew her when she was young, a bit, I don't know if there was every a ranching suitor. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there had been, as the tobacco chewing young Hageman was quite cute and very ranchy.
Well, whatever the case was then, she ended up with what lawyers call a boutique firm and made it the focus of her life, seemingly. She ultimately married a lawyer twenty years her senior, more or less, and they didn't have a family for whatever reason. Frankly, it's sad.
She was also left with a heritage that focused on the frontier pioneer myth.
Lots of ranch families have that, and in their heart of hearts believe they should have been given their public lands they were leasing by right, even though they couldn't afford it then, and they couldn't now. They often don't believe that other people really work, as they falsely believe that their own work is exceptionally hard. Many believe, at least in the back of their minds, that they are the population of the state, and those who aren't in agriculture are only able to get by as agriculture supports them.
It's a false, but deeply held, narrative.
And hence Hageman's, in my view, desire to transfer public lands from the Federal Government. In her mind, I suspect, those lands somehow, magically, go write to farmers and ranchers who, in her view, probably, rightfully deserve them.
That's not, of course, what would happen. It'd actually destroy ranching. But being from the Wyobraska wheat belt, where most agriculture is farming, and the land is already publicly held, she doesn't realize it.
And she hasn't been on the farm, really, since sometime in the late 1970s or early 80s, at least in the sense we're talking about.
The whole thing is really sad, quite frankly. But personal grief shouldn't make for bad public policy.
What's the deal with Lummis and Barrasso.
Let's take Barrasso up first.
Barrasso isn't a Wyomingite and its an open question to what extent he identifies with the state or its people at all. He's from Reading Pennsylvania, and the son of an Italian American cement finisher who had left school after 9th grade and an Italian American mother. He was born in 1952, putting him solidly in the Baby Boomer generation. The beneficiary of a Catholic education, he came here as a surgeon.
He's nearly the archetypical Baby Boomer, and in more ways than meets the eye. But to start off with, he was the child of hardworking blue collar Italians from the Catholic Ghetto who were probably bound and determined not to see him suffer they way they had, so they aimed for the blue collar mid Century minority's dream. . . send your kids into a profession and they'd really be something. Hence why there were so many Irish American, Italian American and Jewish American lawyers and doctors.
But a lot of that dream really went awry.
Dr. Barrasso and his first wife Linda had two children. His ex wife has had a local public life, but remains pretty quiet about their marriage. She remarried to a local lawyer.
Barrasso remarried too to a widely loved local woman who had been to law school, but who was not barred. She's since tragically died of brain cancer. I knew her before their marriage.
None of this is facially surprising or atypical, but in context, its' revealing. Barrasso's early connection with Wyoming was professional. That's why he came here. And his early life has the appearance of being very Catholic. That is significant.
It's significant in that when Barrasso was growing up, Catholics did not divorce easily and bore the brunt of having done so for the rest of their lives. In my family, back before World War One, or around it, one of my mother's uncles divorced and remarried and the relationship with the family was completely severed. Apparently it was later somewhat repaired, but only somewhat. Leaving a spouse and leaving the faith was a betrayal. It's still not taken lightly by serious Catholics.
But seriousness was not what the Baby Boomer generation was about. It was about "me". The couple divorced, for some reason, and he remarried. The whys of the topic were never raised in his political career as post 1970s, that isn't done.
It probably should be.
Barrasso has pursued his political career the way it seems he pursued his life. He compromised. He compromised on his faith (he's now a Presbyterian) and he's compromised in his political views. He was a moderate, but now is Trump's lap dog. His views change when they need to change. Apparently here, he thought it better to side with Lee and stay as quite as possible.
What about Lummis?
I know very little about Cynthia Lummis, which frankly is fairly typical of Wyomingites. He website says she was born on a Laramie County ranch, but Wikipedia just states Cheyenne. Her father was active in Republican politics and she, a lawyer, was elected state treasurer at one point. Like Hageman, she has an agricultural degree. She's a Missouri Synod Lutheran, which puts her in a very conservative branch of the Lutheran faith, but that appears to have no bearing on this matter.
She tends to stay out of public view for the most part.
On the public lands matter, her connection with a southeast Wyoming ranch may indicate something. As noted here, there's very little public land in the eastern part of Wyoming. But overall, we just don't know very much about her. She's basically a legacy of an earlier era in Wyoming when we didn't feel it was important to really know too much about a person.
Maybe we should.
Footnotes:
1. Blessings on the hand of women!
Angels guard its strength and grace,
In the palace, cottage, hovel,
Oh, no matter where the place;
Would that never storms assailed it,
Rainbows ever gently curled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
Infancy's the tender fountain,
Power may with beauty flow,
Mother's first to guide the streamlets,
From them souls unresting grow—
Grow on for the good or evil,
Sunshine streamed or evil hurled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
Woman, how divine your mission
Here upon our natal sod!
Keep, oh, keep the young heart open
Always to the breath of God!
All true trophies of the ages
Are from mother-love impearled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
Blessings on the hand of women!
Fathers, sons, and daughters cry,
And the sacred song is mingled
With the worship in the sky—
Mingles where no tempest darkens,
Rainbows evermore are hurled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
Related threads:
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 went into effect.
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