Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about David Hogg taking control of the Democratic Party, a post about the younger generation of males, and no Sunday podcast as it was Easter. Subscribe here or here.
One of the amusing sideshows since Trump has taken power is the pearl clutching from the usual suspects about the law and process. The people who sat silent as lawfare was waged against Americans for the crime of holding unapproved opinions are now suddenly concerned with the rule of law. The people who took money from tech companies to remain silent about tech censorship are now carrying on as if they are dissidents because they no longer control the discourse.
Hypocrisy is a feature of man, and it has always had a central role in American politics because America is a nation of moralizers. The one thing we have always overproduced is preachers ready to wag their bony fingers at the people as they lecture them about their many moral failings. The United States is a giant outdoor revival tent where preachers take turns performing for the crowd. When not lecturing the locals, our preachers travel the world to lecture foreigners.
Preachers need to believe they are special, perhaps even called or chosen to lead the sinners out of sin into the land of salvation. You cannot think you are a wretch and at the same time be a preacher. You can be a wretch and confess your wretchedness to the people in the pews as part of your redemption. You can testify about your former wretchedness and how you rejoined the mass of ordinary sinners. You cannot preach unless you are sure you are something special.
After all, the point of preaching is to inform. The preacher not only knows the nature of sin, but he also claims to know the nature of grace. He claims to know the road that leads from sin to salvation and grace. If everyone had this knowledge, then there would be no need for the preacher. Everyone would be free to decide if they want to take the path to salvation or take some other path. This is why every preacher is sure he has been called to lead the sinner down the righteous path.
This is why the fallen preacher is a stock character in our morality tales. In a land full of preachers, we have a superabundance of preachers who turned out to be worse sinners than the people in the pews. Given that democratic politics is just a long running morality play, it is no surprise that our politics features the hypocrite, and the endless cries of hypocrisy are the Greek chorus of our politics. Democracy is a viper’s den of preachers and hypocrites hissing about hypocrisy.
This has been a defining feature of the Trump era. His every utterance seems to draw out the preacher-hypocrite. Here is Jonah Goldberg hilariously claiming he is what stands between the mean orange man and the sacred Constitution. He and his fellow cult members were chanting about the “unitary executive” back in the Bush years, when they intended that phrase to mean, “Ignore the laws.” After all, they preached, the righteous cause of forever war was too important for due process.
Goldberg is typical of the modern preacher. He is a mediocrity’s mediocrity who spends his days smearing people opposed to his cult. In the Bush years, he would preach about the need to rally to a clown like George Bush out of party loyalty. Those questioning this were disloyal deviationists or secretly in league with Old Scratch. When it was his turn to return the favor with Trump, he slanderously claimed Trump and David Duke were buddies in the secret KKK.
The most egregious example of the modern preacher is David French. This chinless weirdo is what not-for-profit politics produces. He imagines himself to be a blend of James Bond, Clarence Darrow, and Jesus Christ. His Twitter feed is dripping with sanctimony as he lectures the world about sin, but it is mostly about the righteousness of David French. It is no surprise that this ridiculous mediocrity is at the New York Times. It is the main chapel of our media.
These two festering lumps of mediocrity are famous examples, but the public square is littered with people who dream of one day standing in front of the masses, lecturing them about their failings. The Covid Karens of a few years ago made clear that behind the pleasant looking face of every stranger could lie the pursed lips of a vinegar drinking scold ready to pounce at your moment of weakness. We are sinners in the hands of an angry God named Karen from Human Resources.
The preacher plays a vital role in human society, but he must be locked up in his church where we can visit him for inspiration. The preacher provides inspiration when inspiration is needed to continue the task of living. In modern America, the preachers have been let out of their churches to run wild in our lives, making sure no one can enjoy the simple act of living. They nose about looking for sin and when none can be found they create chaos that can lead to sin.
The task before the country, if it is to escape this hell of proselytizing, is to herd the preachers back into their churches. Living is about trade-offs, the choice between practical benefits and equally practical costs. For a people to live, they must embrace living, not sit quietly while preached to about the sins of living. That is what we are seeing with the Trump administration. It is the long overdue effort to round up the preachers and put them back in their rightful place.
The price for this freedom will be the endless hypocrisy from the pearl clutchers and bony fingered ministers, now suddenly concerned about law and order. They were silent when the law was ignored but now pretend to care when the law must be ignored to restore order, the only ground in which the law can flourish. That means sidelining the preachers until the coast is clear. Then they can be let loose to preach the gospel of republican virtue to whoever will listen.
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I know I’ve commented this before, but it bears repeating. What we are watching is not hypocrisy, defined as “The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.” What we have today are two completely separate sets of rule books. Lacking a better construct, I call them the Team Blue Rulebook and the Team Red Rulebook. John Roberts can send messages to Trump that “for over 200 years” the appellate process is how we settle disputes last month. Yet on Friday SCOTUS issued an emergency stay on a case that had not been… Read more »
The perfidy of the Trump 45 justices – Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett – their perfidy is simply breathtaking.
Who the hell are these zombies?
I’m starting to think the three + Roberts are solid evidence of a deep strike operation against the Supreme Court & Constitution — the people, or whatever one wants to call it. ”Grow in office?” Maybe not. At the one extreme, one could say that they were chosen for a certain ideological “set”, and husbanded through a career. This pool of potentials would contain those who, while espousing one perspective, would be standing by to put into effect it’s opposite. at the proper moment, they could be tapped to assume the final role for which they were groomed. Paranoia? Or,… Read more »
Our pastor this Easter called them “walking dead” during his sermon.
Those two sets of rules look like two chapters of a single rulebook. Team Blue Rule Chapter is a favorite part of the go fast team. Team Red Rule Chapter is the favorite part of the go slow team. They’re running out of ways to fool us into believing that they are reading from different Bibles. It’s all in one Bible.
This needs to be understood. People might be looking at this deportation thing and be furious the GOP does not have Trump’s back. Trump is arguing the facts here, that it’s basically impossible to get rid of these people even though it’s so easy to let them in. Well, that is because the GOP wanted the 8+ million illegals in this country as much as the Democrats did. They don’t want these people gone. Their “bipartisan border bill” was designed to permanently keep the border open for millions of illegals a year. If anything it took power away from the… Read more »
Everyone needs to admit that the USA is a great mistake, maybe even the Great Mistake, one worse than Luther’s rebellion against his priesthood of thirsty cryptosecularists. (Faith in a god is no evidence that one rejects secularism.) The experiment, as some like to call it, is an abomination, and this because of its hideous, intrinsic, foundational defects. So today’s today’s situation and the Columbians’ one party system is not an aberration contrary to the founding principles but a milestone on the way to the annihilation entailed by the founders’ crazy merchants’ morality. So, like the Phonecians among us, American… Read more »
Agree totally. What precious little legitimacy the Supreme Court retained was set on fire. It joined basically every American institution on the ash heap of lost respectability. Where are the preachers to give us eulogies? That’s right, pretending the dead are alive, no resurrection necessary. Arguing About fairness and hypocrisy with the delusional is pointless.
Team Blue rides the bus of “democracy,” the “rule of law” and “free speech” until it isn’t convenient. Then it’s time for them to squelch dissent, the reasoning being that we can’t even tolerate a shred of evil, lest it cast people into sin. I used to think the opposition was just stupid, but I came to realize that they were nothing of the sort and just playing their part as the “principled opposition” in the great Kabuki theater of politics in the U.S. Boil it down even further and it’s the old saw of “heads, we win, tails we… Read more »
It’s beginning to look like Trump 2nd Verse same as the 1st. He cannot, or is unwilling, to take on the Deep State/Judicial Leviathan.
Yes, every pundit has been opining on how strongman Trump is going to destroy our system of government and “democracy”…whatever that might be with millions of fake mail-in ballots…The reality seems to be that he’s quite the opposite, weak and unwilling to take on our fake legal system, and nominations like Amy are a big part of the problem…Presidents Jackson, Lincoln, and even Clinton ignored SCOTUS decisions when inconvenient, and Washington would likely have had judges like Boasburg shot, which is why we didn’t have such judges…
In fairness, it’s been “Who/Whom” from the beginning. The great Yankee Moralizer John Adams set the tone. He defended the British in the Boston Massacre (“muh due process”, admittedly pre-Revolution but it shows his mindset) and then passed the Alien and Sedition Acts (“I decide who stays or goes”). Here we are many years later retracing the same well-worn trail of the Founders.
It’s simpler than that. It’s partisan politics, and the left is much better at it than the right. They will do whatever moves their side forward. If the truth helps them, they tell the truth. If lies help them, they lie. It’s the old quote about lawyers, “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.” Team blue understands this. They don’t care about the errant calls of the other side calling them hypocrites. It’s… Read more »
There are a whole lot of “preachers” in this choir…Sci-fi great Roger Zelazny wrote that 70% of the public are “trimmers”, whose beliefs change with every change in the wind….,.
Close to the same number who took the jab. The 80/20 rule shows up everywhere
Lately I’ve taken to wondering whether Vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 distributions amount to some sort of an abstract sociological Egregore; a phenomenon so powerful that it almost kinda sorta becomes sentient in its own right.
And it gets truly horrifying if its sentience has a distinctively feminine quality to it…
[NO OFFENSE INTENDED TO 3G4ME]
I first came across that picture in college more than 45 years ago. It’s how I’ve always visualized a nightmare since.
The law is whatever they say the law is. Shockingly, they almost always find the law supports whatever it is they want to do.
The problem is that there has been no accountability for anyone in the managerial class for a very long time. Official accountability is entirely off the table….we need an unofficial accountability or they will keep doing it. Few people will stop doing what they want to do by appealing to their alleged principles. They need to face consequences like prison or being ruined financially.
Tars Tarkas: “we need an unofficial accountability or they will keep doing it“ Classically, about once every century, the Peasants would stage a revolt, replete with scythes & axes & pitchforks & torches, and the Landed Gentry would flee in terror. Our fundamental sociological problem at the moment is that the peasants are far too satisfied. Their bellies are too full. Their houses are too warm in the winter. Their infant mortality rates are too low. And the SSRIs certainly aren’t helping matters. It’s very difficult to stage a proper rebellion if you’re narked up on SSRIs. Which, come to… Read more »
Yes. In the meantime The Chinese Communist Party, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the UN are still preparing to destroy America by invasion. The camps in Panama are still there though the volume of invaders is currently way down. This happened for a time during COVID as well. HIAS is still manning their offices in the area. Mayorkas himself actually visited these camps. Note that the CCP and HIAS work together for similar interests. If the Trump administration was serious about stopping the invasion he would destroy these camps. He would also require employers to use the real ID… Read more »
Good points in general. But the CCP is almost exclusively an instrument of internal control and repression. Unlike the HIAS with its tribal fear of Europeans, the CCP looks inwardly for its preservation (something Zionism laid claim to but has never quite achieved). To China, America is just a source of technology and consumers for manufactured goods. They would likely prefer to maintain the status quo of a hollowed-out U.S. empire pretending to run the rest of the world were it not for the determination of the anti-China hawks in successive U.S. administrations to challenge them directly.
Isn’t Goldberg still mad that Trump walloped Jeb! and prevented his wife from getting a sinecure in a 3rd Bush administration? Had the pleasure of living across an alley from the national HQ of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (yes they still exist) for three years in college. These people all remind me of the weaned-on-a-pickle types you saw shuffling in and out of there every day. Also meant the town was still “dry” despite being the immediate north suburb of Chicago. Our revenge was going out on the fire escape at 2am and hurling empty Hamms bottles onto the… Read more »
Yes, Goldberg’s still butt-hurt over Jeb! That said, we owe a big debt to Jeb! He really sent me across the divide and I’m guessing I’m not alone in this regard. He spoke during lunch at a big financial conference I attended during the first campaign. We hadn’t finished dessert yet and he was already at war with three countries. It was an epiphany for me and I never took the GOP seriously after. My buddy asked me what I thought about Jeb! and I said: “he’s Hillary, but with bigger t*ts”.
Definitely not any Catholics in that organization LOL
The cucks and scolds of Evanston installed an idol to worship at the corner of Church and Orrington. It’s supposed to be Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable even though there’s no drawing or portrait of him which was made during his lifetime. The alleged founder of Chicago left the area in 1800, aged a little more than 50 years.
Thank you, Sir! My Yankee-descended grandmother was a member or that organization, as well as descendant of Republican party founders in Wisconsin. She was also, God bless her, a suffragette who moved to Mississippi to teach black elementary children for a number of years and later traveled to Los Angeles to connect with the religious nuts of the era. She idolized Cary Nation who demolished taverns throughout my home state. Several times as a child I, with my siblings, had to publicly recite at her church the “Temperance Pledge” to never drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. If there had been… Read more »
I’m sure that stayed with those little black children, those enduring lessons about the ebils of Colt 45 and Cool cigarettes, plus it had the added cachet of coming out of the sainted lips of an old white lady from Wisconsin.
To be precise, Jonah Goldberg is more “rabbi” than “preacher” …
“We are sinners in the hands of an angry God named Karen from Human Resources.”
Brilliant, Z. That line’s a classic…
I wonder how AI reacted to that line by Zman 🙂
My, how inconvenient for the faithful. We’ve got to vote harder because . . . trust in the process because . . . the system will work because . . . The Court. Just pick the correct magic lawyers and voila! We are saved! How many years have I heard that refrain? How many even here waxed rhapsodic about this or that court pick? We had a bunch of preachers here the other day warning us that if we didn’t toe the line, the left would do unto us when it was their turn again. Seems I saw Jamie Raskin… Read more »
Respectable conservatives are guided by a set of high-minded principles. The fact that the Left doesn’t adhere to those principles or that they result in Leftist outcomes 99.9999% of the time will not cause them to waver. Ben Sasse 2028!
Oh, I should add that the fact that Conservative Principles just always happen to align with the donor agenda — pure coincidence.
Surely it is a miracle.
Despite the historical failings of Roman Catholicism, at least it had very few religious Entrepreneurs. The ones who did feature took huge risks – Savanarola, Luther – and even in post-Henry VIII England, plenty got roasted or exiled. America has grown them like corn, to the point where we have post-Jesus types like Joel Osteen. And now in post-God America, we have the political Entrepreneur. He or she worships the State and talks about “due process” and “norms” like Cardinals used to talk about doctrine. The J6ers committed modern blasphemy, hence the reaction. Trump is a convenient Lucifer.
Post-America deserves it.
John Knox died penniless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Knox
Righto. The J6ers transgressed a religious shrine, not kidding, can go into detail if necessary but yep, the Capitol Building is a temple, cloaked with the trappings of modern secularism and statism. Just one example: the Capitol is topped, or presided over, by a female figure decked out for combat, variously identified as goddess Libertas, Columbia, Minerva, Athena et al. It ain’t Jesus, put it like that. The Capitol Shrine was installed in 1863. Think of the character of the nation since that time. Is it not a feminist nation of extraordinary warlike nature? An Empowered Shrew of a Nation?… Read more »
Herding preachers/hypocrites is like herding cats.
The one thing preachers/hypocrites can’t stand and will send them scurrying back to cover is ridicule. Make fun of them at every turn. Ask them the right questions to their face and sit back and watch them cover up like a cat covering poo in the litter box. It’s worth the price of listening to them in the first place.
I just have to make sure I check the mirror every morning to make sure I haven’t also put on the robes of preacher/hypo!
I give you Letitia James!
Back in my UMC-going days the Praise Band played The Stones Can’t get No Satisfaction so preacher could riff a sermon off it. On the way out I just asked if he was going to cover Brown Sugar next week. At least he grinned a little.
“Jonah Goldberg”
Wow, now that’s a trip down Memory Lane.
It’s been well over a decade since I’ve seen that name, “Jonah Goldberg”.
It brings back the memories of the existential treason of William F Buckley, and his worthless son, Christopher.
Boy I would love to see the true flow chart of the income into the Buckley family, to include the true origins of that income.
Leonard Downie, the Post’s executive editor, has killed several of Mr. Hart’s cartoons (the cartoon “B.C.”)because, he says, “We don’t promote individual religions anywhere in the paper. We let people discuss religion as an issue, but we don’t advocate a particular religion.”Well now, that’s swell, isn’t it? “We”—the Post, the other papers, the Anti-Defamation League, and everybody else apparently except the millions of American newspaper readers who actually do advocate particular religions—decide what gets promoted and what doesn’t. Religion, for them, is in the same category—maybe even in a somewhat more taboo category—as outright obscenity and explicit racial epithets. Advocating a specific religious… Read more »
The worst side effect of prolonged affluence is the growth of deadweight in society. These are people with no motivation to be productive, so they must find another means of sustenance and typically migrate toward busybody occupations. Their stock in trade is talk, but in reality they are lazy. In a perfect world, they would be cast into the void in search of motivation and the imperative to be truly productive. Methinks free-riding is about to become much harder to get away with the coming recession. A necessary cure.
I remember people making fun of Goldberg for being lazy, too. This was years ago when he was writing “Liberal Fascism.” This guy really just says what he is told to say and rakes in the money. Compare him to Ben Shapiro, who got started around the same time, is younger than Goldberg, also said what he was told to say, and started writing at roughly the same time, and is younger. Look how much farther Ben has gotten, just because unlike Jonah he has a work ethic.
“motivation and the imperative to be truly productive”
Tom, do you grant that there a significant number of people who, due to their poor genetics or old age, will never be truly productive, no matter how hard they try?
This problem will become increasingly pressing as automation makes the labor of many unnecessary. These people will be willing to sell their labor but no one will want to buy it.
In your vision, what becomes of them?
I remember people making fun of Jonah Goldberg twenty years ago, for being an idiot chickenhawk coward who got to where he was because of his shyster mother. I mean, this has been going on for a LONG time. But he has served his masters well and has been rewarded with earthly riches for it. He’s never had to be right and never been accountable for anything he has said in his career. Yet, these people don’t control the narrative anymore… and they know it. Look at how Douglas Murray got laughed off the Joe Rogan show and then he… Read more »
Somehow they have managed to keep George Will on life support. I’m not sure which is more comical, that people actually bought his books, or that people actually didn’t.
Like Z once said on a podcast, more or less, these guys are making $500,000 a year when they aren’t qualified to sell cars in their hometown. It’s a great gig if you have neither principles, skills, nor talents, but this also makes you intensely loyal to the system that is enriching you for no real reason other than to defend it.
The Trump Administration this time around has done a decent job of having back up plans. I wonder what the back up plan could be for a hostile Supreme Court and Federal Reserve?
Perhaps a papal type visit by JD Vance?
One can hope, but my suspicion was from the get go that Trump is betting the farm on the SCOTUS. His executive orders and the ignoring of the lower courts is a major gamble to (re)establish Executive authority, which is the only possible way to right the ship of state—Congress proven to be a hopeless recourse in the past. Could it really be that the Constitution really is a “mutual death pact”?
“Could it really be that the Constitution really is a ‘mutual death pact’?” The Z man remains unconvinced, which is sad. (He’s also still confusing nation and union, as in paragraph 2 above.) It’s stunningly obvious that the preamble is a big lie, one of the most influential in human history. It points the way to absurd developments, too. Why, for instance, do some crazies want children to vote? How could anyone hold so moronic an idea? Read the Columbians’ preamble. We have to admit that children are “People”, and the text claims a unanimity which was not and could… Read more »
It could have made sense, in theory, since he picked the judges
Will the op-ed pages survive the passing of the boomers and the end of USAID? (if it stays ended). Does anyone under 50 read them? What will become of the preachers then? Preachers who are reduced to making tweets on Bluesky don’t carry quite the same gravitas that they did on the editorial page in the pre internet world.
I noticed that for a few months before and after the election zman blog used to come at the top in Google search. Now itis pushed back by the algo to 7th place again. Does that mean the tech compao are back to max censorship again?
I love the idea of locking preachers up in their churches. They used to do that in the Middle Ages — it worked ok for someone like Julian of Norwich. Make Anchoresses Great Again!
Let us also take a moment to pay tribute to the inestimable Earl of Sandwich. Mama was lazy so this man took ACTION.
Without this great white male heh the world would never have had sammiches. We’d look at the bread and the meat, the bread and the meat, but never put them together.
Props.
I see “preachers” as children who have stayed up too late and need to be sent to bed. Some need to be sent to bed without their supper.
I do not thing that what we are dealing with are neo Great Awakening cult leaders out in the middle of nowhere taking advantage of near total geographic isolation absent of most civilizational, (Old World), amenities herding people into their quackery. On the one hand we have a bunch of Friar Savonarolas in pink hair and draped in foreign flags. On the other we have people like Goldberg who isn’t a preacher. He is a liar. He is paid to say anything, no matter how untrue, to get the empire to do the bidding of those who pay him to… Read more »
The Americas were conquered by pirates and preachers. It has always been a yin and yang between the two. At the moment, we need more of the former.
Roll up your sleeves, raise the black flag…you know the rest.
Erick Erickson another one of those creatures on the cuck right. Don’t forget to single him out as one of the more annoying of that breed.
Ah come on Z, the Protestants aren’t that bad! ….well maybe they are actually.
surprised you didn’t anchor things to the Salem Witch Trials episode.
I have no problem with those who preach against actual sin but I have no patience for the DEI preachers.