Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Tuesday, July 28, 2026
CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 146th Edition. What does the SAVE Act, Groypers, A coup in progress, Dominionism, Women staying barefoot and pregnant, and the Lumpenproletariat have in common? A movement, it's leaders, and it's really dim backers.
Donald Trump has been having a major hissy fit that the Senate will not take up the SAVE Act. Senate Majority Leader Thune says the votes just aren't there.
Let's hope, and pray, they are not.
According to the misleading GOP propaganda, all the SAVE Act would require is that registered voters go to the polls with photo ids.1 That's simply not true.
It does require that, but it also requires that in order to vote at all, you present, when you register, with proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport. The majority of Americans do not hold passports. Indeed, up until very recently you could visit our nearest neighbors without either, until international paranoia changed that. A lot of people can't find their birth certificates, and getting one is a major pain that a lot of people won't bother with if they're challenged on this.
This, moreover, disproportionately impacts the poor and women, but it hits everyone else as well.
Americans are notoriously mobile. They move for jobs, work, and just to move. A lot of people eventually lose their vital records. If you move from Los Angeles to Austin, for example, you might have lost your birth certificate along the way. Those keeping track of them are amongst those who are most likely to be well established. The same for getting certified copies of the same. If you are working a low paying job, finding the time and the cash to get a certified copy won't be easy.
Women, moreover, are by far the most likely to be impacted, with poorer women most of all. This is because women are most likely to have changed names. A woman may have been born Alice Jones, but upon getting married, she may be Alice Smith. Now a birth certificate won't do. A marriage certificate will also be required.
But what if Alice is in that group, like Rachel Rodriguez-Williams was until recently, when she suddenly changed her name form her hyphenated, semi woke, moniker to just Williams (neatly avoiding the problem, perhaps, of her not being a WASP). She may have a birth certificate showing her to have been born "Sanchez", and a marriage certificate showing where Williams came from, but there's very unlikely to be an official document showing "Sanchez-Williams". That's simply a convention she likely adopted.
For that matter, I've known professional women who used their husband's last name as their own for professional reasons, but their maiden name for work in which they were well established.
The fact of the matter is that the SAVE Act would take out a lot of women voters. It would particularly take out a lot of black and Hispanic women voters.
And all to address a problem that doesn't exist. We know for a fact that the number of non citizens voting in this country is miniscule. Chances are much higher than some of the handful of "illegal" votes are actually legal, rather than there being hoards of illegal voters going to the polls.
And the GOP knows this as an absolute certainty.
So, what's up with this?
Well part of it is that the GOP is using the Nazi Party playbook of 1932, or more accurately the 1932 Nazi Playbook Plus. The Nazis hadn't actually been in power, yet, in 32, so they could legitimately claim they were going to fix inflation, etc.
But a lot of their campaign was that everything was the fault of the Jews.
The GOP has no successful record this term to run on. Everything it ran on has failed or turned out to be lies. The Republicans didn't run on "I'm going to raise your taxes in a hidden way, boost inflation, and start a new war with no plan on how to win it" but that's what they've done. So, now, in order to try to stay in power they need to create bogus issues. Communist and aliens are running amok, they claim.
No, they are not.
But it's more than that, or may at least may be more than that.
And here's the big clue:
House Speaker Mike Johnson says he grows more confident "with each passing day" that the GOP will retain control of Congress because:
This is a God thing. We have intercessory prayers who are on the ground at the Capitol praying.
That's right. They are confident that God will intervene.
Well, praying for a just victory in anything is certainly not immoral and even laudatory. Praying for victory is certainly not unheard of.
Most Christians in this context, however, would at least add the proviso to their prayer that they win, "if it be God's Will". Many more, however, would simply pray that God's Will be done in the election, and leave God's desires up to God.
Frankly not doing so here involves some rather shocking propositions, not the least of which is that those seeking God's intervention are asking God to return control of Congress to a political party that doesn't really exist in its old form, and instead to one which does not welcome the immigrant, as commanded by the Bible, rewards the wealthy, which is cautioned against by the Bible, launches unjust wars illegally, which is certainly immoral and which is headed by a serial polygamist, a condition which is completely immoral.
How can they do that?
They are doing that as people like Mike Johnson and some of the fringe elements of the Evangelical far right that are surrounding this administration sincerely believe that they have a Divine mandate to bring about an Evangelical Christian United States. Johnson claimed that God was making him a new Moses. He wasn't kidding about believing that, he does.
Now, Moses didn't lie to the Jews, but at least Johnson seems to think that his status allows him to lie to advance the cause, a shockingly anti Christian view. Others around Trump who hold these views don't openly express this as much, although Paula White has pretty clearly stated that she believes, or claims to believe, that God has created some sort of exalted role for Trump, but that doesn't mean they do not hold them. Some fairly clearly do.
But why would they sabotage voting for this goal?
Two reasons, the first being the obvious one, the second being a less obvious one that we're suggesting, but frankly can't prove, yet.
The first reason is that the Republicans can't win an honest election, and they know it. The panic on that is really starting to set in, and we're beginning to see, for the very first time, some Republicans putting distance between the GOP and themselves. Harriet Hageman just did that by voting against the budget reconciliation bill even though it means she's bucking Trump. That almost certainly must mean she's looked at polling data and knows that she's in political trouble. People backing the SAVE Act are hoping that if a lot of female and poor voters are knocked out of the electorate, they stand a better chance.3
They're probably right on that, but maybe not quite as right as they suppose.
So, the second reason?
It's the next step on the advance towards an Evangelical Christian state.
How so?
Some in his movement believe that women should not be allowed to vote.
The best example of this is Idaho based minister Doug Wilson, whom Pete Hegseth is a fan of. Wilson asserts that women should only be allowed to vote if they are the head of a household. In Wilson's view men are of course the default head of households. I suppose that this would really only come up if a woman was left being a widow, sort of.
Now, while a skeptic can see all sorts of ways around that, in an Evangelical Christian State they wouldn't exist. People aren't going to be allowed to shack up, and they're not going to be able to easily divorce either (and they certainly aren't going to be marrying a member of their own gender).2 So, if couples are going to do what comes naturally, and what naturally results occurs, at a bare minimum the original type of Common Law Marriage will come about.4
So gals won't be voting, at least not very darned often.
And if the SAVE Act passes, the next step has occurred. A lot of women simply won't be voting.
And of course, women who won't be voting, won't be standing for elected office either.
Sound extreme and conspiratorial?
It is, but people like Johnson in the Evangelical right around Trump are extreme. And many are engaged in a conspiracy to steal the 2026 election right now.
At least Wilson is honest about his goals.
Which takes me to the lumpenproletariat.
The last few years, as an observer of local politics, I've been watching the collection of individuals who support the far right in this state. They come from all walks of life and backgrounds, but they disproportionately come from the lower middle class/poor boundary, and are very often rather badly educated. This isn't always true, but where it isn't t here's some demographic information that sort of predicts their views. A not inappreciable number are women.
Some are just highly rural. Rural people in this state tend to be badly educated on politics and extremely conservative in an unthinking way. If you discuss things closely with them, they often hold views diametrically opposed to the people they're backing, they just don't realize what the people they're backing support.5 This has long been the case and can be demonstrated all the way back to the 1930s when the Democrats saved ranching while the ranchers were pissed off at them. What I've noticed about this, however, is that younger ranchers and farmers no longer fit this mold. The GOP may have a lock grip on Baby Boomer ranchers, but it doesn't have one on Gen X and Y ranchers. The bloom is beginning to fade from the rose on this one.
Others who are at least somewhat educated tend to have very strong and identifiable religious views sounding in the Evangelical far right or in the LDS. That demographic favors a much more traditional role for women than is currently common, and frankly would probably be okay with women losing their vote if that helped restore the pre 1940 status quo ante of domestic life. Natrona County legislator Jayme Lien, for example, is a Mormon who notes that: "Outside of her legislative role, she identifies as a homeschooling mother and works as a homemaker/working mother, and has historically assisted with her family's concession business at local events like the Central Wyoming Fair and Rodeo"
Am I saying something is wrong with that weltanschauung? No, I am not. Indeed, the irony of much of this is that on some things I agree with the underlying traditionalist view, while being horrified by the attack on women in public and business life. What I am saying, however, is that people vote for a candidate not really appreciating that candidate's weltanschauung, and then are surprised when we get results that reflect that. Most women in Wyoming do not identify as homeschooling mothers, and for good reason. If all of a sudden they get policies that favor that, and the crop of Charter Schools that have popped up recently are barely disguised religions schools, they shouldn't be too surprised.
A person shouldn't leap to conclusions either. A highly devout LDS family in my neighborhood has a crop of election signs up all favoring the moderate thinking Republicans.
Beyond that, however, are a group of people that are just pathetic.6 Some women are amongst them and at least one is a candidate this year. She simply has nothing in her life other than the biggest political crush going on a WFC candidate. She's literally do anything for him, and in fact has been excusing his rather upsetting court record. These people are the Rosa Luxemburgs of Republican far right. The revolution they're seeking is going to dump them like a box of rocks should it succeed, but in their pathetic semi impoverished poorly educated lives, they can't see it.
Were women to be disenfranchised from voting by the SAVE Act, and they lose their votes, and if their male fellows in the same demographic were to, they probably wouldn't even care. They're besotted the way Luxemburg was with Communism. It's all they have.
Clara Zentkin and Rosa Luxemburg, 1910.
Footnotes:
1. At one time, it might be noted, the GOP adamantly opposed the concept of a national ID which would have fulfilled all of these rolls as well as being a Social Security Card. This was probably always a good idea, but they've traditionally hated it.
2. I'm not in favor of easy divorce or same sex unions either. This is part of the way that the GOP has managed to gain power. People who have real conservative views on these things and many others, as well as strong religion based views, have found themselves voting for the Republicans as morality seems to mandate it. This has been hotly debated in Catholic circles as many well informed Catholics are horrified by Trump and his administrations, but at the same time felt they had no other moral choice.
Personally, I've never voted for Trump and the last three election cycles have voted for the American Solidarity Party.
3. While it would be folly to count on it, one thing the GOP hardly seems to notice that Republican voters are not very highly motivated as a rule and a lot of the remaining GOP voters may very well fall into a lower middle class/poor class that is barely motivated to go to the polls, while man y Democrats are highly motivated. The GOP could actually hurt itself.
4. Barely noticed, some in this camp are opposed to pharmaceutical birth control, which at least observant Catholics also are. I note this as in this context, it emphasizes not only a preference for marriage, but an absolute need and mandate for it.
5. At least in Wyoming, which is the least religious state in the US, most ranchers are actually adherents of the American Civil Religion. Whether you disagrees with their views or not, you'd find that in regards to sexual morality most only oppose homosexcuality, and are fine with everything else. Accordingly, they'd be horrified by policies that opposed pharmaceutical birth control or mandated common law marriages, the latter of which they have a particular interest in defeating. They also tend to be very provincial and intensely dislike monied interest buying up agricultural land, which the GOP is just fine with.
In short, they're actually either moderate Republicans or moderate Democrats in their actual world outlook, but don't put much thought into it.
6. I'm not going to go into two remaining categories in detail, but there are two more.
One is the Groypers. They really detest women, while longing for them at the same time. Basically pathetic early 20s basement dwellers, they sort of lust for women that they can't have, and as a result, they don't like real world women.
This group, best characterized by Nick Fuentes, feels that women and minorities have deprived them of their rightful place in society. They don't like women, and they don't like Jews. If women lost the right to vote, that'd serve them right, in their view.
The other are the flat out weird and stupid. These people have always existed, but before the Internet they didn't really have a voice. They sure do now. They don't necessarily oppose women voting, but they tend to think the whole world is one giant conspiracy.
As an example of that, I saw an instance in which a far right wing candidate attempted to defend another who has fallen into ill repute, only to see a third party race in to declare that all opposition to the far right is involved in a pro pedophile, chem trail, anti agricultural conspiracy. That's flat out nuts, absolutely everyone kind of backed away from the entire topic, but it shows how wacky things have become.
Wednesday, July 28, 1976. Earthquakes in northeastern China killed 650,000 people.
Earthquakes in northeastern China killed 650,000 people.
The loss of life on this scale is nearly unimaginable. It equates to the number of Americans, of both sides, killed in the Civil War.
Last edition:
Friday, July 23, 1976 Sadaharu Oh becomes the third professional baseball player to hit 700 home runs.
Sunday, July 28, 1946. Wells exposes the assault of Sgt. Isaac Woodard, War Crimes in the Philippines, the passing of St. Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception.
Howard C. Petersen, Assistant Secretary of War, announced that 131,028 American and Filipino citizens, mostly civilians, had died "as a result of war crimes" from December 7, 1941 until the end of World War II. All but 595 of that figure were Filipino.
St. Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception, an Indian native, died at age 35. She is the first woman of Indian origin to be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church, and the first canonized saint of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church.
Orson Welles read the affidavit of Sergeant Isaac Woodard on his radio show. Woodard had been blinded in a race based assault.
Last edition:
Saturday, July 27, 1946. No to a united India.
Friday, July 28, 1911. War ending as other prepare for war.
Government troops defeated Haitian rebels at Les Cayes.
The Australasian Antarctic Expedition departed London aboard the SY Aurora.
Gen. Joseph Joffre was made the Chief of the General Staff of the Army of France, the first person to hold that position..
Canadian Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier announced a plan of cooperation between the Canadian, British, Australian and New Zealander navies.
Last edition:
Thursday, July 27, 1911. Ordered to ride.
Labels: 1910s, 1911, Art, Coles Phillips, Equine Transportation, French Army, Health, Military, Old Age, Omar Bradley, Theodore Roosevelt, Women
Monday, July 27, 2026
Lex Anteinternet: Donald Trump. Flagellum Dei? Can anything good come out of Donald Trump's Dictatorship?
Quite a while back we ran this:
Lex Anteinternet: Donald Trump. Flagellum Dei?: A man who has conquered others, should conquer himself Pope Leo the Great to Atilla the Hun. He never did. He died following drinking too ...
Which essentially raises and addresses the same topic.
When I first went to post this topic, I was going to limit it to the war, and the war will be principally what this addresses. But in thinking about it, the question is a bit broader than that.
Much broader.
Going to war, however, war is one of the worst evils that nations impose upon each other. They invoke the worst of human suffering and bring about the worst human behavior. The worst human abuse, or at least one of the very worst, homicide, is the very essence of war. Wars inflict death. Death upon combatants, but death upon the wholly innocent. And not only death by armed military violence, but also by accident and starvation. That alone makes war a horror.
But the horrors of war are not limited to death. No war has ever been fought that did not visit rape upon women. Not one single one. Wars are fought mostly by men, and mostly by young men. Men are taught to hate the enemy and dehumanize them. Sooner or later, some of them become wartime rapist. This is true in every single war, some wars more than others, and in every single army. Logic holds that if you can teach men to kill, you will have some break the bounds of any decency.
Wars also involve theft on an epic scale. Western armies have, for many years, banned looting by soldiers but it happens anyhow . Beyond that, wars sanction state theft to at least some degree.
Indeed, war simply visits mass immorality on the cultures that fight, and the location of the fighting. I was listening to We Have Ways, the excellent British podcast on World War Two, the other day (I'm still in the early episodes of the podcast) when a general question episode came up, and one of the topics that was addressed was the wide scale licensing of prostitution. Both the Germans and the British not only tolerated prostitution, but they basically organized and licensed it on a the basis that they needed to in order to address the health concerns it gave rise to. In Amsterdam there were enormous lines to brothels after it was liberated. We've already touched on this in regard to the Japanese government, post occupation, creating brothels specifically for U.S. servicemen. We've often touched upon the post 1953 decay of American morality in this area which gave rise to porongoraphy and the Sexual Revolution and wondered if it was tied to World War Two. Well, here's more evidence that it very much was.
The Trump interregnum likes to pretend that this war started 47 years ago, which is a complete fable But the precursor to it, the Hamas attack on Israel, brought rise to it directly. And that attack featured murder and rape right from the onset, by Hamas. The Israeli response brought about mass homicide. Now we're fighting Iran, for Israel, with Iran having been involved in the Hamas Israeli War. There's no reason at all to sympathize with Iran. That doesn't amount to, however, sympathizing with everything Israel did, including what amounted to genocide in Gaza, and getting the United States into a regional war with Iran.
We don't really know where this will all end, but we can predict a lot of it with some certainty. One certainty is that a war launched with an erroneous belief that it would start an internal revolution badly miscalculated that, and it won't result in one. Iran may have lost what little air force it had and what pathetic navy it had, but it's not defeated. It's a land power to start with. The US is going to have to go into Iran on the ground, which Israel will not do. So we're going to fight a ground war in Iran for Israel. Moreover, that war will not be a series of raids. It'll be a real ground war and it will last, first as a conventional war and then as a guerilla war, for years.
Wars change everything.
And that's not all this incredibly corrupt administration is visiting upon us.
This summer provides plenty of proof, as if it was needed, that we're in a climate emergency, and yet Donald Trump grins and smiles as he guts alternative energy projects, and people like Harriet Hageman watch their family homestead burn and still refuse to acknowledge reality. Money is flying into the pockets of the Trump family and his associates with nobody really questioning it yet. The status of women as coequals in humanity is retreating as a creepy octogenarian comments on them openly in press meetings while keeping the perpetrators of rape at Epstein Island potentially secret.
Things are bad.
Catholic theology addresses the problem of evil with the partial answer that we know that God will not allow an evil to occur unless a greater good can come out of it. That does not mean that God sanctions the war, but rather that when humans cause such evils, God doesn't arrest our behavior if a greater good can come out of it.
Can a greater good come out of this?
I think a series of them can.
First and foremost, this war is achieving right now an acceleration of something generations of environmentalist have striven for By boosting the price of petroleum to epic levels, which stands to get worse, it will reduce the consumption of it, and it will accelerate the conversion of energy generation to renewable green sources. The US was a leader in this until troglodytes and reactionaries insisted that global warming was a fib and longed for the giant car era of the 1950s. Well, Trump has killed that, and probably forever.
Nations that were going to renewable energy are nearly gloating about it now Those that trailed behind, save for the United States where the MAGA troglodytes are in control, are now rushing towards it, knowing that something Trump has said, that the prices will go right back down, is either a lie or amazingly ignorant.
Petroleum prices will not go back down for a generation. An oil and gas infrastructure that took three generations to build cannot and will not be rebuilt overnight. Moreover, the destruction of it, which is already disastrous, will get worse as the war goes on. It took all the way into the mid 1960s to rebuilt Europe after World War Two. This will be no different.
Moreover, the US doesn't have the money to do it. A good that may come out of this war is that the drunk sailor/roaring 20s level of spending the US has engaged in will now come crashing to an end. Nations like China that have funded it are stopping. By 2027 the US will be forced into a financial reconciliation that Trump pretended he was going to bring, but which he lied about, along with everything else We will have to get our financial house in order.
As part of that, this war is very likely to be the end of a bloated military that has become partially rogue. Before Trump II Americans could always depend on the loyalty of the military to its laws. It can't now . The military has engaged in two fully illegal wars with far right Evangelicalism being prominent in the military in the current one
This war is going to be so big that the nation will have to call up the National Guard and Reserves to fight it. We've had to do that for every war since Vietnam. After the Vietnam War the military was held in contempt, even though it had done nothing to deserve it. This time, it will be again, but it will deserve it. The contempt will go right into the Guard and Reserves. The nation's ability to engage in these foreign "adventures" will be reduced because the nation will have a very low ability to fill the ranks of the forces necessary to do it, and on top of it, we just won't have the money. Our military will start fitting in with those of our European allies, smaller, professional, and regional. We'll need to depend on our Allies just to defend ourselves, and all of that will be a good thing.
The Trump interregnum has seen the nation, moreover, completely betrayed by the capitalist class. Donald; Trump, Elon Musk, and a host of the rich and powerful have not been there for you and that's finally obvious. Indeled, we learned, as we should have known, that the avarice of greed would turn, in many instances, to avaricious lust, with some of the rich and powerful flying offshore to fuck teenage girls. Rather than bring them to justice, Trump has hid their names. And, frankly, at this point, in spite of what Trump's supporters claim,there's plenty of evidence that he may have fucked teenage girls himself, and its pretty hard to believe he didn't know about that going on even if he didn't. So we learned that not only are the rich and powerful detrimental to our economic welfare, they're detrimental to our environmental welfare, and even detrimental to the security of our daughters. With the bloom off the rose of the worship of the rich, and after watching the nation fast forward into economic ruin, there's some rational hope that the rich will be brought to heel by having their wealth significantly reduced.
And then there's the weirdness of the far right Evangelicals. The Trump Administration is likely to bring that to an end, and it needs to end.
Various members of the Administration, most notably J. D. Vance but also including Marco Rubio, have lectured Europe on it losing its culture, by which they mean, if they will not openly state it, it's Christian culture. There's some reason to make that criticism, but it cannot really be made by a country governed by an authoritarian serial polygamist assisted by a Speaker of the House whose sympathetic to the New Apostolic Reformation and in which Paula White is a spiritual advisor. The crash of the Trump administration, and it will crash, will bring the NAR down with, and most likely damage the Evangelical Right beyond repair.
Every time the world in general has faced an existential threat since the dawn of Christianity, if not before, there have been those who concluded that the world itself was ending. There are those who have concluded that right now. There are those who seriously wonder if Donald Trump is the Antichrist. Peter Theil, the billionaire Evangelical (and homosexual) had oddly found a voice in First Things expressing the view that the Apocalypse is here citing much of what I just did.
Is it?
Well, who knows. But what we do know is that every age that featured such crises brought that view about. Christians during Attila's day though the end had arrived, and for some, on a very persona level, it had. When the Vikings started raiding European coastlines many presumed the same thing. By the 1970s Hal Lindsey was scaring people with The Late Great Planet Earth.
What we also know is that true moments of crisis can be transformative. Europe, once it became the center of Christianity, has wandered away from the Church repeatedly, with the Protestant Reformation being only one such example.
Already a huge portion of Americans are disillusioned and disgusted. This can be seen socially, culturally and politically. Most Sundays now I can hardly find a seat at Mass and confession lines are like what I used to only see at Easter. Here in "Red" Wyoming, there's a significant movement to take the Wyoming Freedom Caucus out of office. The Democrats appear slated to regain the House, and maybe the Senate, in November, to no doubt be followed by a Custer like last stand by Trump in the Oval Office in which he refused to recognize the game is up. Republicans, and some Democrats, are fretting about the small-scale rise of Social Democrats, but capitalism is being allowed to run roughshod over average people and needs to be restrained, and certain "social" policies present everywhere else on Earth are long overdue here, such as "socialized" medicine. And fascism always gives rise to the opponent of socialism, and the GOP has turned largely fascist.
All of this is to suggest maybe some good will come out of this.
Tragic Prelude, a mural in the Kansas State Capitol. Brown carries in one hand a Bible and a rifle in the other. Union and Confederate troops are fighting and dying in the background and foreground. Tornadoes and a prairie fire approach. An era, really, not unlike our own.
In some ways, the first Trump administration was the opening campaign of a second Civil War, this one a Cold Civil War, by the same forces that brought about the first in 1860-65. The nation's great failure after winning that war was to pass on extremely severely punishing those who brought it about, the slave owning oligarchs of the South. That opportunity is going to present itself here a second time, in very short order.
The first time caused legal reforms to the Constitution. This one needs to as well.
The first one, perhaps ironically, also caused a major religious shift in the county and brought about the downfall of the southern Episcopal Church. This one needs to bring about the downfall of far right Evangelicalism, and probably will. The Episcopal Church in the South fell of its own accord for supporting the Confederacy. The NAR will fall for helping bring about and advancing Trump.
The United States is a conservative nation, mixed with classical liberal aspirations. That will reflect what comes next, and we need to return to that.
Saturday, July 27, 1946. No to a united India.
The Muslim League rejected British plans for a united independent India.
Lynchings in Georgia hit the nationwide press.
Last edition:
Friday, July 26, 1946. OPA back in business.
Tuesday, July 27, 1926. The Filipino House votes for an independence plebiscite.
The Philippine House of Representatives voted to approve a resolution calling for a plebiscite on independence for the U.S. Territory. It was vetoed by U.S. Military Governor, Leonard Wood, but the legislature overrode the veto and the measure then went to the final consideration of U.S. President Coolidge, who vetoed the measure the following year.
The US and UK entered into an accord to address alcohol smuggling.
Hearst newspapers ran this editorial:
Last edition:
Monday, July 26, 1926. Ports of call.
Thursday, July 27, 1911. Ordered to ride.
French Minister of Defense Adolphe Messimy ordered that any officer who was "unable to ride a horse" to retire. The order was given as a way to force the retirement of elderly officers, but ws not really unprecedented. Theodore Roosevelt had issued a similar order, requiring a long ride, when he was President of the United States.
The French order was not in effect long as it was regarded as impractical.
Omar Bradley received notice that he'd been accepted to West Point.
Last edition:
Monday, July 24, 1911. Hiram Bingham at Machu Picchu.
Labels: 1910s, 1911, baseball, boats and ships, Exploration, Inca people, Iran, Peru (Machu Picchu), Sports
Saturday, July 27, 1901. Second USS Maine launched.
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The second battleship to bear the name USS Maine was launched.
Give the rapid advance of ship designs, she'd be rapidly obsolete and served as a training vessel during World War One and be decommissioned in 1920. While a third Maine battleship was planned during World War Two, it was cancelled. A submarine with the name was launched in 1994 and is still serving.
Last edition:
Wednesday, July 24, 1901. O. Henry.
How to eat like a Silk Road Merchant.
This is, by the way, the first use of "Alexander the Great" as a label on this site, to my huge surprise.
For that matter, it's the first time the Silk Road has shown up as well.
Sunday, July 26, 2026
The Sign of Their Own Surrender: A misunderstood version of what was, doesn't get you to what ought to be.
This started off as a Blog Mirror on a post on a different blog.
I find the reference to Hillsdale particularly interesting here:
The Sign of Their Own Surrender
Why the Trump administration's new warning signs at the Smithsonian say more about conservative history's weakness than its strength.
I won't claim to have a lot of familiarity with Hillsdale, but what I do know, bothers me. From my very little exposure to it, it seems to focus in part on a sort of rah rah Americanism, in so far as culture and history are concerned (and of course the two are highly related.
That sort of view of American history was once very common in general. I'm old enough to have seen the very end of it when I was in grade school, and I'm also young enough to see it pass away. To give a really bad example, as it doesn't involve school text or teaching at all, if you grew up in the 1970s, you could simultaneously see She Wore A Yellow Ribbon run as a not that old rerun on television, and find Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee in the bookstore.
Students had received a pretty narrowly focused history education prior to the 1970s The United States was always right. There was that slavery thing but that was fixed. The West had been won, not conquered, and even if it had been conquered, it was to the benefit of the conquered people.
The Vietnam War really changed all that in a way that it had not been since the 1840s when the country had gone through the Mexican War. Conservatives never got over that.
The oddity to it is that people in this cultural camp would rather be taught lies than the truth, which never serves anything, and they want children taught lies if it means they'll come out of school believing in an unvarnished version of American Exceptionalism. The fact of the matter is, as this article points out, it won't. In the age of the Internet, while many evils have been spread, you really can't just keep a lid on the past. Pete Hegseth can restore Medals of Honor conveyed for action at Wounded Knee but you can't keep the facts, on both sides, from being known about what happened there.
People who are following Hillsdale on stuff like this think you can. In reality, however, what happens is the miseducated student eventually hits university or just real life. It only takes one crack in the dam to cause a flood, and soon they're off and questioning everything.
This is already happening in various spheres, I might note. One of the most interesting example is in Christianity. The entire Protestant Reformation was based on ignorance and its pretty provable. Of all the Reformation era reformers, only Luther had some serious points, and he didn't intend to cause a separation from the Church at all but, rather, once he started rebelling, he couldn't stop. At any rate, what this leaves Protestants with is that every single Protestant faith is founded on some sort of error, and often back with lies. For those with enough savvy or interest, it's easy enough now to find that out. What was the early Church like, they pose. Well, the Didache isn't too hard to find, nor are the works of the Apostolic Fathers. Lots of very serious Protestants have done this, often trying to support their view that their brand of Protestantism reflects the early Church, only to find that it doesn't, and then convert to Apostolic Christianity.
The same is true of history. The American Revolution was founded upon some amazing principals, but at the same time amongst the reason the colonists cited for rebelling was that the Crown was trying to halt westward expansion in recognition that the natives were also his subjects and that they were upset as the Crown hadn't forced the Church of England upon Quebec. The Constitution is amazing but there was a giant acknowledged hypocritical compromise allowing Southern states partial credit for slaves for representation purposes. The Civil War wasn't a glorious highly decorative contest between two equally valid points of views, but a rebellion against decency and humanity by Southern oligarchs. We didn't enter World War Two to save humanity, but entered it only because were were attacked in spite of a real effort by FDR to get us into the war earlier, and once in it, we didn't defeat the Germans or Japanese single handedly by any means. The British had more troops in the field in Europe until late 1944 and the Soviets always had many more in the field. The Japanese regarded the war in China as the main event up until some point in 43 or 44.
It's just the attempt to whitewash American history, which by and large is admirable, that leads to something like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Indeed, that book came out while I was still in high school and within the last two years I was continually in a situation where a highly educated person who just discovered it was repeatedly engaging me with "did you know"?
Locally there's been a movement in the Trump era to allow for "charter schools" here which are nothing other than private schools that come as close to being Protestant schools as conceivably possible. I'm familiar with one and it proclaims that teaches an "American Classical Education" and that it is "a Hillsdale College Member School, a distinction that offers our school access to curriculum and training from the Hillsdale College K-12 Education Office.". I've known at least two families that chose it as their own world view was in the MAGA camp. The irony here is, as it is so often, that neither of the two families who are so concerned about their children receiving an "American Classical Education" are living an "American Classical Life".
They probably just don't know that.
Which gets back to, well, this:
In order to get back to what you think needs to be restored, you need to know what actually was.
I don't know about the rest of it, but history wise, the current variant of an "American Classical Education" ain't going to get you there.
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I was going to post on it individually, but the July 4, or thereabouts, editions of Catholic Answers had some fascinating discussions on Catholics and the United States.
In spite of what poorly catechized American Catholics may think, there's always been tension between being a Catholic and an American, and early on the country was outright hostile to Catholics. As Catholics always have a worldview that's international in scope, as they view the Church as the Bride of Christ and serving all humanity, Catholics never have the really narrow world view that quite a few very far right wing Evangelical Protestants do. The episodes are worth checking out, but the second of the two is really fascinating on how Catholicism can and is impacting the United States and American culture long term.
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I was also going to post on the recent excommunication of the SSPX and relate it to how far right conservatism has crawled out very far on a branch that's going to snap off. I ended up shelving that, even though I'd started a pretty developed post on it. I'll just complete my thoughts on it here.
Pope Leo XIV recently took an action which his immediate predecessors wouldn't. He excommunicated the SSPX, the Society of Saint Pius X . As this is sort of a confusing topic, we will refer you to this, which explains it.
This is a really serious action. The Vatican didn't just address a few figures in the SSPX, but the whole SSPX. If you are going to an SSPX Mass, you are excommunicated.
Frankly,. while the Pope doesn't consult me on such matters, he did what needed to be done here. And there may be some who should take heed on on this, such as German bishops. Pope Leo isn't messing around. The SSPX is in schism which, in turn, introduces a certain element of irony.
The SSPX is not as large of group as the controversy might cause a person to suppose. Part of the reason this briefly received so much attention is that the SSPX stream sort of flows into the lake of traditional Catholicism, and that's a much larger group.
The actual SSPX has approximately 1,500 formal, professed members globally, including about 750 priests. The SSPX claims around 600,000 worshippers worldwide, with an estimated 25,000 adherents in the United States, but that's a rough number as not everyone who enters the doors of an SSPX church actually quite appreciates what it is, and some are Trads flirting with the society. The SSPX dates back to November 1, 1970 when French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who had served the Catholic Church as Apostolic Delegate for French-speaking Africa, Archbishop of Dakar, and Superior General of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, a missionary order of priests, formed it in contravention to the Vatican. In 1988 the organization went into schism the first time when it ordained Bishops without the authority of the Vatican. The ordinations, as they were done by Bishops with valid holy orders, were illicit, but valid ordinations. They were slowly brought back into the Church and the ordinations lifted, but now they've done it a second time.
Okay, so what's behind this all?
Archbishop Lefebvre, who was at Vatican II and seemingly approved of it at the time, was in the group of traditionalist Catholics that came to take exception to it, most specifically, in the case of the SSPX, ecumenicalism and the new form of the Mass. Ecumenicalism is more of a European thing than an American one, so that one might baffle Americans a bit. It was a big deal here for awhile, but as the Baptist and Baptist like churches are such a big deal here, as opposed to everywhere else, it's more or less gone away. At the same time, in the US, the churches that were closest to Catholicism, the Anglican churches and the Lutheran churches, have been suffering a substantial decline and, as their churches "liberalized" and they began to self educate, they've started to cross over to Catholicism on their own.
For that matter, the Catholic Church globally has become more conservative in recent decades. The Latin Mass, however, is another matter. After Vatican II, and actually separate from it, the new form of the Mass came in and it came in with the "vernacular".
The Latin Mass, in its high version particularly, is beautiful, but frankly the new ordinary form of the Mass is as well, and, well, it has real advantages, the ability to understand it in your own language being a big one. Beyond that, however, the Church enormously expanded the set of readings with the new Ordinary Form from the much more limited set in the Latin Mass. There are real historical reason for both the long lasting use of Latin, which had started off as the vernacular for the Roman Rite, and the limited number of readings, but neither of them held any longer by the mid 20th Century.
The real dispute, however, is over Vatican II's reforms or more particularly, "Dignitatis Humanae," which recognizes a civil right to religious freedom, and "Nostra Aetate," which encourages dialogue with non-Christian religions while recognizing elements of truth and holiness within them. The SSPX feels that these went too far because (to reduce the argument unfairly) "there's no salvation outside the church". The SSPX maintains that these documents are not magisterial whereas the Church maintains they are.
The ultimate irony here is that there's no question that all observant Catholics acknowledge a duty of obedience and that the Pope is the head of the Church. As ultra traditionalist, the SSPX acknowledges this as well. Given that, it's almost impossible to rationalize their taking the SSPX into schism, which is a grave sin.
There's probably a forlorn hope in the part of members of the SSPX that the Church will change its mind on the excommunication and, for that matter, on "Dignitatis Humanae," and "Nostra Aetate". It's not going to.
While the SSPX may refuse to accept that, the entire event brings into focus why Pope Francis clamped down on the Latin Mass. The Mass can still be said, and for that matter the Ordinary Form of the Mass can still be said in Latin, but to say the Traditional Latin Mass requires permission and that's largely been withdrawn.
This was baffling to American Catholics when it happened, but the fact of the matter is that Traditionalist Catholics center around TLM, even if that's not what makes them traditionalist. It's probably difficult to explain to outsiders, but it's one form of observance that's very obviously traditional. Added to that, the persistent use of forms from the TLM in the Ordinary Form (kneeling when others are standing, not taking communion form Extraordinary Ministers, the wearing of manteas, all are visible form. You could be, however, a traditionalist, and I'm sympathetic with traditionalist, without doing any of those things. The line, I suppose, is when a type of devotion crosses into intolerance of a certain sort, or a rejection of something that's magisterial.
I'd thought that Pope Leo might open the TLM back up, but now that this has occurred, I doubt it. I think he's acting forcefully in keeping the sheep inside the gate for their own good.
Before "liberal" Catholics start rejoicing, however, I suspect certain "liberal" groups within the Church are next.
A hint that Pope Leo may be redirecting cames nearly simultaneously. The Pope has called for meeting of the Presidents of the world's Bishops' conferences to discuss Amoris laetitia, Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family, and which was not popular with "conservatives". On June 30 Pope Leo announced that he is calling the presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences to Rome in October for “synodal discernment” on how “to proclaim the Gospel to families today, in light of Amoris laetitia.” My guess is that it's going to be scaled back.
Pope Leo has been left with the Synod on Synodality, started by Pope Francis, which is supposed to issue its final report in October, 2028. June 30, 2027 is the deadline for Dioceses and Eparchies to prepare their reports. An international Ecclesial Assembly is slated to occur in October 2028. Some of the group reports have been released already, although that gives input on their thoughts and not really on where the Vatican may be headed. Pope Francis had throughout this process wrestled with the German Bishops who, in the eyes of many, were headed towards schism.
Whether it comes in October, or in 2028, I suspect the German Bishops are going to get the same message the SSPX did and told to conform or be excommunicated. The big difference, however, is that the laity who follow the SSPX are all volunteers, so now they have to determine if they follow their desires, or the Church. My guess is that a fair number will follow the Church. German Catholics, however are to the right of their Bishops by quite some measure and are much more conservative, and the Bishops themselves have been faced with the fact that their leadership has been plagued with declining attendance. If Pope Leo excommunicates the Bishops, or some of them, a large number of their laity are not going to be that upset, and the Bishops for that part have no real ability to follow the example of Martin Luther and take entire congregations out of communion with Rome. Those days are over unless you have a willing laity, and they do not.
All of this means, accordingly that Pope Leo is acting, well, very Catholic, and very traditional Catholic at that. For those who were hoping for a Pope that acted that way, it appears we now have one.
Speaking of Bishops, it was Pope St. John Paul II who required Catholic clergy to no longer hold elective office, as a small number did. That didn't prevent association with politicians, however. One figure who has done that a fair amount since Donald Trump's second term started has been Bishop Robert Barron, who was a highly popular Bishop with a blog. Bishop Barron's close association with Donald Trump has made some of us quite nervous, as Trump definitely isn't a religious man.
There's a lot that occurs within the Trump administration that should worry Catholics. A core membership of the Trump inner circle are American Evangelicals of the far right persuasion who don't believe Catholics are even Christians (and therefore share an interesting mindset with the SSPX which believes that pretty much all American Evangelicals are going to Hell).
Trump's far right positions has naturally caused the rise of the far left in some quarters, notably in New York, which will be sending a Democratic Socialist to Congress, and in Colorado which appears slated to do so. Democratic Socialists are not Communist and, indeed, in the revolutions of the 1910s through 1970s, Democratic Socialist would get the bullet in any country Communists took over. Nonetheless, Donald Trump, who did not seem that gung ho about fighting communists in the 1960s when he actually literally could have, had he wanted to, is all about fighting the Reds now.
All of the above gets back to what should true conservatives and true traditionalist do?
In terms of the Church, as I noted above, I'm sympathetic with traditionalist and I feel badly for them about the general loss of the Latin Mass. But I've noted that when there's a very orthodox priest and traditionalist Catholics in the Catholic population, it tends to show up best a devotionals in their behavior. Frequent attendance at confession, the wearing of outwardly Catholic clothing, and often large families Good for them. They serve, I'd note, as an influence on the larger Catholic community as a sobering and inspiring reminder of the core of the Faith.
But here's the thing. The education of everyone, like it or not, at a younger age, is much better now than it was in the 1960s. For that matter, it's much better now than it was in the 1990s, or 2000s. Vatican II is actually part of that. Following Vatican II the new Mass included many more readings than the TLM did, and no wonder. Advances in printing and the like no longer meant that the Church was challenged with the transmission of the Gospel to a polyglot world the way it had once been. If there are beautiful traditions to look back on, we have to acknowledge at the same time that restoring something means restoring what should benefit us, and that we can't go back, as much as we might want to, to an era when most people knew less and their world was smaller.
Put another way, modern Americans are not going back to what they think the 1950s were like in terms of education (what the 50s were actually like is another matter) and even Rod Dreher doesn't think we're going to build Benedictine walled cities any longer.
That doesn't mean accepting the present either, particularly one in which Americans, civilly, are in the Age of Stupidity.
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