The Nation's Boys' Gym Teacher

 

Somebody who goes on twitter by @TheShallowState proposed an interesting argument with which I partially disagreed, to the effect that this morning's big Hegseth event at Quantico must have been staged by Donald Trump as a TV reality show moment, but is apparently very serious about not being quoted at anybody else's website, so I have reconfigured the following in respect to their desires.

Image by Military Religious Freedom Foundation, god love them for their work.

At first glance at the idea proposed by @TheShallowState, sure, but I wasn't convinced that there wasn't something more behind it. For one thing, because the plan is just so extremely weird. It's not something that has ever happened before, as NBC News (for instance) reported; it's not so unusual to have two or three dozen senior officers gathering at the Pentagon, but more or less all the generals and admirals of the US armed forces, some 800 total, taken. away from posts where you'd think at least some of them should be ready to respond to real military. emergencies in sensitive spots around the world, together with aides, communications personnel, and their own security, which might up the total to as many as 3,000, so much too much for the  Pentagon that they're doing it at Quantico Marine Base instead, and it's bringing on serious logistical problems even though it has supposedly been under discussion for months. (Somebody was pointing out that if the government shuts down today they could all end up stranded in Virginia for the duration, which would be a pretty funny comment on our current millitary readiness.)

And how many months, actually? This is something that has really been important to somebody for a while, and I don't think it's Trump, whose decision announced on Sunday to show up for the event was by all accounts sudden, adding a whole new order of magnitude of logistical difficulties, and he himself has been anxious to play down its importance:

“It’s really just a very nice meeting talking about how well we’re doing militarily, talking about being in great shape, talking about a lot of good, positive things. It’s just a good message,” Trump said in an interview with NBC News. “We have some great people coming in and it’s just an ‘esprit de corps.’ You know the expression ‘esprit de corps’? That’s all it’s about. We’re talking about what we’re doing, what they’re doing, and how we’re doing.”

I thought it must be "Secretary of War" Hegseth, popping off in a way he's done before, in July, when he out of the blue announced a pause in weapons shipments to Ukraine without clearing it with the White House, or with special Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg or secretary of state Marco Rubio, apparently the third time he'd done it, under the prodding of undersecretary for policy Elbridge Colby,  a China hawk who thinks focus on Ukraine is stupid, but the first time it rose to public notice, forcing Trump's own people to scramble to restore the impression that Trump is in some sense in charge. Or maybe with the Pentagon's crazy new media policy, imposing total department control over what reporters can report or who they can talk to in the building itself, which Trump seemed not to have heard of at all:

Note on Libel

 

JD Vance is now using the term "blood libel" to describe criticism of ICE, saying, "The Democrats and the media — because they so hate the idea of a real border — are engaging in a kind of blood libel against ICE agents." Somewhere, our ancestors wept.

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— Joel S. (@joelhs.bsky.social) September 26, 2025 at 3:07 PM

That's not a very good choice of imagery, JD. I wouldn't expect you to know, because I wouldn't expect you to know much about these things, though you went to Princeton, but "blood libel" is a technical term in the history of Jewish people in medieval Europe, who were treated as dangerous foreigners, with their strange languages and strange religion, barred from various occupations, and confined to ghettos and shtetels where they lived segregated from the Christian population, and victimized by a particularly horrible myth; that Jews would steal Christian babies from their parents' houses and kill them, for their blood, which the Christians supposed was used for some kind of magical ritual—like the making of Passover matzoh, the weird Jewish analogue to the Christian communion wafer (historically it was the other way around: the communion wafer, the symbolic Lord's Supper, being modeled from the unleavened flatbread, matzoh, that Jesus would have eaten at his Last Supper, a Passover seder with his followers, telling them, according to the Gospel, that it was his own flesh, and the wine they were drinking was his own blood). 

This was a typical example of the dreadful lies that brought about the persecutions in which Christian peasants or townsmen periodically slaughtered Jews by the dozens and hundreds and thousands, and served as precursors to the 19th-century pogroms of eastern Europe and the 20th-century Shoah, the Nazis' "final solution" to the "Jewish question". 

It's like the ancestor of all antisemitism, born out of the story that the Jews, as a collectivity, murdered God's own baby, his only-begotten son, which in the terrible history of antisemitism is the fons et origo.

ICE, in contrast, is a national police force that attacks ghettosful of aliens, and the story of their violence against the presumed foreigners is no libel, but attested in cell phone videos from all over the country. We've seen them knocking women to the ground and tearing children and their parents apart. If you're looking for a blood libel, you can find something like it in the words of *checks notes* Vice President JD Vance, in the 2024 campaign, spreading the false story that Haitians fleeing from the murderous violence of Port-au-Prince and living completely legally in Ohio under Temporary Protected Status had taken to killing and eating their neighbors' pet cats and dogs. Vance basically admitted that he had no citable evidence but claimed he needed to tell the story anyway, on the weird grounds that the mere presence of the Haitians in town was causing the good (white) citizens of Springfield some kind of "suffering" that couldn't be described, only communicated, apparently, by lying about it:

During a Sunday interview on CNN, the Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential nominee said his evidence for this claim was "the first-hand accounts of my constituents [although media reporting had clearly established by then that there were no such first-hand accounts]." He then went on to defend the dissemination of this false story.

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes," Sen. Vance said. "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.

Totally ignored what? How the American people were "suffering" from a thing that wasn't in fact happening. "It's not real, but the media must pay attention to it!" And given the way people feel about their pets, hardly different from the way they feel about their kids, it's not just like a version of the blood libel. Telling the local citizenry that if they were unhappy it was the fault of those dark-skinned, foreign-accented people in their midst

What's wrong with these people? 

When Speech is Illegal

 

Screenshot via South China Morning Post, October 2013,

The last time I had occasion to devote real time to thinking about the late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel was almost 12 years ago,  when he was in trouble not for something he said on his show, but for his failure to respond to something a small child said, in a segment aired during the government shutdown of October 2013, which he called Kid's Table:

The offending remark came while Kimmel was talking to a group of children, ages 5 and 6, about the United States government’s debt, much of which is held by China.

“America owes China a lot of money, $1.3 trillion,” Kimmel told the children. “How should we pay them back?”

“Shoot cannons all the way over and kill everyone in China,” one boy said.

Or in this case, as he said afterwards, "Kid's Table, the Lord of the Flies edition". It was widely felt, in the Asian American community anyway, that he should at the very least have distanced himself from this bloodthirsty proposal in the followup, which was not quite what he did:

“Kill everyone in China? OK, that’s an interesting idea,” Kimmel said.

He then posed the question: “Should we allow the Chinese to live?”

While one boy said, “No,” most of the children said, “Yes.”

“If we don’t allow them to live, then they’ll try to kill us,” a girl said.

Normalizing the concept of permanent ineradicable hostility between the races. I don't know anything about the races of the kindergartners on the show, but I hope none of them were East Asian in origin—you can imagine how it would have gone if one of them was, how that child would have felt about the discussion, and then you can go on to understand that there were certainly people of East Asian origin watching the show at home.

Protests in Chinatown, protests in my own half-Chinese family, protests from the Chinese embassy, protests from my H-1B Chinese work colleague with the PhD from Urbana-Champaign, not normally in unison with the CPC, who got me to sign a petition, and ABC's swift damage control and Kimmel's apology, which was not too gracious ("I thought it was obvious that I didn't agree with that statement"), though I can see his point. A reviewer for KTAR radio in Phoenix said it was "poignant and hilarious" (just bumped into that one). Anyway that was the end to the controversy as far as I knew. Now I seem to be the only one who remembers it, though I did have to google to remember what it was about, and I may never have known that, because I find I'm seriously shocked by it now. Or could I really have thought it was OK back then? Could I have been resensitized by the explosion of anti-Chinese racism that came with the pandemic so that I now experience it in a different way? No reported pressure of any kind from the federal government, though, ABC seems to have been able to deal with it on a purely business basis.

I thought it would be helpful to have an example of a situation that Kimmel definitely handled badly before we go on to the case on which there is some disagreement.

His response to the September 10 killing of Kirk, in any case, wasn't at all "denigrating the memory of Charlie Kirk", as Stephen Bannon put it; he denounced the murder, as everyone should, and refrained from speaking ill of the victim. What aroused the criticism was what he said about Republican politicians, not involved in the murder one way or the other, but rushing to exploit the murder, starting with Donald Trump, who released a video on the night of September 10, before a suspect had even been identified, blaming it on the "radical left" and unnamed "organizations" that supposedly fund it;

Horst Wessel Moment

Summary of the list by Lawrence Britt, 2003, which I've used for Trumpery for a while now. More elaborated version here.

Jill Filipovic at Slate, with one of the most inevitable reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk, the fear that it might serve as a kind of Reichstag moment for the authoritarians who are already in such a commanding political position—that this uncharacteristic new trend of violence-from-the-left, if that's what it is (and there's a good deal of reason to suppose it isn't—in the morning it was reported that the newly arrested suspect, Tyler Robinson, presented as antifascist, even though he's a kid from Utah, but by afternoon he was getting tagged as a groyper adherent of smiling fascist Nick Fuentes who regarded Kirk as a "fake conservative"), perhaps going back to the attempts on Trump's life during the campaign, or Luigi Mangione's killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December, will serve as the spark for legitimizing and institutionalizing the Trumpian attack on democracy, like the Enabling Act that permitted Hitler to assume dictatorial powers in 1933:

It has also enraged the MAGA right, and they are now demanding revenge—not just on Kirk’s killer, but on Democrats, liberal advocacy organizations, the news media, and progressives more broadly. We are still in the early hours after this appalling murder. But many conservatives are trying to make this into their Reichstag fire: the moment the movement has been waiting for to use as a pretext to suspend democratic rules, crush their opponents, and put themselves fully in charge.

In part because some of them have started saying so themselves, very explicitly.

Wokey-dokey

I had to be reminded or in part informed (by Heather Cox Richardson) of a number of the cultural references in this "Truth" post: Trump's costume is that of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Francis Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now, played by Robert Duvall, the character who says, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," and who leads a helicopter raid over the Vietnamese countryside to the sound of the prelude to Act III of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre (representing the flight through the skies of Wotan's warrior daughters, dashing over battlefields on their airborne horses, to gather the bodies of dead heroes for the afterlife in the Hall of Battles, Wallhall), evoked in the picture by the helicopters over the Chicago skyline; while the three helicopter emojis in the message are apparently used by a certain type of rightwinger to register approval of the Chilean dictatorship  of General Augusto Pinochet and its habit of dealing with dissidents by tossing them, from flying helicopters, into the sea. I don't know why it seems to have been shot somewhere miles away on Lake Michigan, from a boat that's violently on fire, leaving Trump-Kilgore in the position of the cartoon dog saying, "This is fine" when it clearly isn't.  

Dr. Google tells me that "Chipocalypse Now" is the title of an episode from the Disney animated series "Big City Greens", named not for Chicago but for the show's villain, Chip Whistler, a wicked capitalist who hopes to demolish the protagonists' apartment building and replace it with a giant supermarket, but I believe that's just a coincidence.

I'm reasonably confident I understand Trump's motive for changing the name of the department from Defense to War, as from a trope he might have inherited from his cranky rightwing father about the general decadence of the armed forces after they "lost" China, and subsequently North Korea and South Vietnam, to the Communists. Trump referred to it pretty explicitly (if confusingly, in his slippery "weave" style) when he was signing the executive order:

Let Them Eat Sermons

Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a pond on the farm at Pindar's Corners. Still from the 2018 documentary by Joseph Dorman and Toby Perl Freilich.

Hey,  David F. Brooks ("Why I Am Not a Liberal"), what up, man? How's the wife? Read anything interesting lately?

Last May a study came out suggesting that merely giving people money doesn’t do much to lift them out of poverty. Families with at least one child received $333 a month. They had more money to spend, which is a good thing, but the children fared no better than similar children who didn’t get the cash. They were no more likely to develop language skills or demonstrate cognitive development. They were no more likely to avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays.

Notice he doesn't tell us which study he's talking about, or offer a link so we can check it out for ourselves, which is often a sign of something funky in Brooks's social science commentary, at the least that he hasn't read the paper he's talking about (which Dr. Google was able to identify pretty quickly: the. NBER report on the Baby's First Years experiment by Kimberly Noble, Katherine Magnuson, Greg Duncan et al., The effect of a monthly unconditional cash transfer on children’s development at four years of age: A randomized controlled trial in the U.S.). In typical Brooks fashion he does link his source for Baby's First Years (BFY), a piece from two weeks ago in the Substack "abundance" mag The Argument, in the next paragraph, but without acknowledging it as source, in a reference to a different study—

These results shouldn’t have been a big surprise. As Kelsey Piper noted in an essay for The Argument, a different study published last year gave families $500 a month for two years and found no big effects on the adult recipients’ psychological well-being and financial security.

—he's trying, as ever, to hide how little he's read in the preparation of the column. But if he'd read more of her essay, or the excellent coverage of the experiment by Jason DeParle at the end of July in The New York Times, he could have learned that the question is a little more complex.

Normie Distribution

 

I always used to be amused at the Twitter users paranoid about political poll results because they had themselves had never gotten the call from Emerson or Siena, and suspected that the polling outfits must be making the data up. As a New York City resident, a registered Democrat, and a certified Old Fool who kept a land line for a ridiculous amount of time and still today always picks up on a number I don't know on the possibility that the caller might be a long-lost relative or notice of a windfall from a class action I didn't know I was a party to (it's hard to scam me, I want to insist, but it's easy to get me to answer), I could assure them that it does happen, especially on questions of local politics. If the pollster never calls you, that's just a sign of how ordinary you are; there are so many millions of you that they're just never going to get around to your number. 

Sucks to be you! except when I'm trying to come up with an honest answer to whether allegation A makes me much less likely, somewhat less likely, somewhat more likely, or much more likely to vote for candidate C, or whether I don't know or don't care, in which group I increasingly fit, not because I'm any less partisan but either because I already know about the allegation and had already made my decision around it or I'm hearing it for the first time and have no idea whether it's even true or not (identifying it, in my understanding, as a "push poll", not meant to gather information but just to slime the accused candidate in some way that escapes overt publicity, and is probably false anyhow). Both of which happen all the time.