Greens Day

And: Paxton Takes Texas; Gurri & Nihilism; AI Monster Parents; Disclosure Preparation

My buddy Ed picked me up at the Birmingham airport yesterday. After we loaded my ten bags into the back of his Canyonero, he greeted me with a giant Coke Zero from Sonic, king of the drive-in, and a “bouquet” of collard greens, one of my favorite Southern foods. Yeah, y’all, I’m back in the South!

I love all greens — collard, mustard, and turnip — and it’s been too long since I’ve had them. Kale isn’t really known in the South. I discovered it when I moved to Philadelphia, and fell in love with it. But my favorite way to eat kale is to cut in super-thin, almost in shreds, mix in some fresh-squeezed Meyer lemon juice (has to be Meyer lemon, which is not as tart), and let it sit for a while, so the acid in the lemon juice breaks down some of the fiber in the kale. Then I put sea salt and black pepper in it, and mix it up with my hands. Let it sit for a few more minutes, and you’ve got a great salad.

Re: the collards, gotta get some fatback today and cook up a mess of ’em tonight. That, by the way, is the Southern collective noun for greens: a “mess”.

Funny story, one I’ve told here before. Back in the day, when I worked at the Dallas Morning News, I was in the break room microwaving a bowl of mustard greens for my lunch. I had cooked up a mess over the weekend, and enjoyed them with my wife’s peerless cornbread. One of my black co-workers, smelling the distinct aroma of the greens, dashed in wanting to know what on earth I was doing. “Warming up my greens,” I said, puzzled.

“That’s black people food!” she said, astonished.

“No, that’s Southern country people food,” I replied.

Turns out she was from Indiana. The only people who ate stewed greens there were black folks who had migrated out of the South in the diaspora. She had never seen a white man eat greens. We had a good laugh.

The Trumpening Of Texas

I guess you saw that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton whomped incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in that state’s GOP primary runoff yesterday. It wasn’t even close: 64% Paxton, 36% Cornyn). Now Paxton will face Democrat James Talarico in the fall election.

This was a gift to the Democrats. Paxton is a much harder pill for the general election voters to swallow in Texas than was Cornyn, an affable, normie Republican. Paxton is vividly corrupt. I have Texas Republican friends who support Trump, but tell me they will not vote for Paxton, who is a hot mess. (One of them, mentioning Paxton’s adultery, told me that if Paxton wouldn’t make a big deal about his Christian faith, it wouldn’t be quite so bad … but Paxton loves talking about Jesus.)

But even though Cornyn almost always votes Trump’s way, he carries himself like a dignified US Senator. Paxton is way Trumpier in his personal and rhetorical style, and got Trump’s endorsement — and that made a big difference. Time magazine writes:

Trump’s latest intra-party purge may end up being a bigger deal than some of his others of late. Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in almost 40 years. If Republicans end up investing a small fortune to help Paxton defeat Democrat James Talarico and still come up short, it would be a stunning end to the longest Democratic dry spell in the nation, and Trump would take a good share of the blame.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Establishment Republicans are steamed that Trump’s pettiness is going to take as much as a quarter-billion dollars off the map simply because the President didn’t think Cornyn was MAGA enough, voting record be damned. Cornyn handled the nose-count for Trump’s first term, helped him confirm both Cabinets and all three Supreme Court nominees—all while voting with Trump 99.2% of the time, a number that makes him more loyal than Texas’ other Senator, Ted Cruz.

Talarico is really liberal, and in a way that doesn’t fit Texas (e.g., he loves him some trans rights). Ramesh Ponnuru notes:

Christian preachers — at least ones who are, like Talarico, White — have for some time been associated with conservatism. The problem is that many moderate or conservative voters are looking for candidates who share their views on moral and cultural issues, not merely some of their traits.

These voters will discover that Talarico believes there are six sexes, not two, basing his view on rare chromosomal abnormalities. This is both dubious science and irrelevant to the political debate that led him to bring it up — one that mostly concerned whether some people with the standard male chromosomes should be able to compete in women’s sports.

Talarico’s main tack is to argue that voters who disagree with him are wrong to care about what they care about. He notes that the Bible doesn’t mention abortion but does insist on “feeding the hungry and healing the sick.” (One could as accurately note that the Bible dwells on the sanctity of life but doesn’t mention Medicaid.) More provocatively, he says that just as the Gospels say that Mary consented to being the mother of Jesus, women should have abortion as a choice. Are conservative Christians, whom Talarico typically calls “Christian nationalists,” eager to be told that they have misunderstood their own faith?

There’s more. But in a poll released May 18 (scroll down at the link), the Democrat was running neck-and-neck with both Cornyn and Paxton. This is shocking in a state as red as Texas, especially with a Democrat as liberal as Talarico is. Paxton moves on to the fall campaign carrying a ton of baggage, and is going to be a much harder sell outside of the GOP primary. As Time says, now the national GOP is going to have to spend a fortune to hold on to Texas — and Trump has a lot to do with that. He has always had a habit of endorsing primary candidates who fire up the MAGA base, but who are too far out to win the general. If that Texas Senate seat goes to a very liberal Democrat — which could easily happen — it will be a massive, unnecessary blow.

The Free Press writes today that the Paxton endorsement is a classic example of Trump caring more about what matters to him personally than the good of his party. To me, John Cornyn might not have been the most exciting Senate Republican, but he was a safe, reliable conservative vote, and probably could have beaten Talarico. Now, who knows? I’d rather have the Senate stay Republican than Trump’s ego be satisfied. I guess that makes me a RINO, or something.

I mentioned in this space the other day that Trump ought to look to the fate of Viktor Orban for an example of what being indifferent to corruption in your party ranks in a time when voters are hard-pressed economically can do to you. My Budapest friend Mark Bollobas, who is generally conservative but also clear-eyed about politics, has a daily short videocast on X, in which he sums up the previous day’s news in Hungarian politics. Today he discusses action in parliament yesterday, in which it was revealed that a couple of Orban insiders had parlayed their government jobs into becoming property tycoons. Even Bollobas, who is not prissy about politics, was shocked and angered by this.

In his Free Press commentary on Trump and Texas, politics editor Mene Ukueberuwa writes:

Both the ballroom and fund slotted neatly into the midterm campaign narrative that Democrats were already pitching to voters: While you suffer high prices because of the president’s disastrous war in Iran, Trump is enriching himself and his friends, and the entire GOP is aiding him.

The polls suggest that message is sinking in—Trump’s approval rating has plummeted below 40 percent in the polling average, and Democrats lead Republicans by 7.6 percent in the generic congressional vote.

Driving me to his place from the Birmingham airport yesterday, Ed said, “It’s going to shock you how expensive life in the US is right now. I don’t know how people are making it. I had to fill up my truck the other day, and spent over $100.” Hmm.

MAGA is very good at tearing things down. Hey, a lot of things NEED tearing down. But it can’t build. Similarly in Hungary, the only thing holding the new governing Tisza party together is collective hatred of Viktor Orban. As Mark Bollobas’s X report today says, there really are things to despise about the Orban system. But that’s not the same thing as offering a vision of governing.

Gurri, Nihilism, & The Desperation Of Western Elites

For my Weimar reading for the second draft of my book, I finished on the plane yesterday Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority In The New Millennium, the 2018 updated version. Gurri is a former CIA analyst who writes about the political turmoil in our current age, throughout the world, under the new information environment (the digital sphere).

He is not a fan of Donald Trump, but he really isn’t a fan of the establishment that holds Trump responsible for ruining everything. Per Gurri, Trump is not the cause of anything, but a symptom of a broader and deeper crisis of the System, which started long before Trump descended the golden escalator to declare his candidacy:

He was the chosen instrument of an insurgent public, and no established centers of power stood in his way. The somewhat different question of how this transpired now needs to be posed. In 1980, 1990, even 2000, Trump’s bizarre trajectory would have been not just impossible but politically suicidal. What has changed? The information balance of power has changed, of course. A generation ago, the public could exist only as a passive audience. Information was dispensed on the industrial model: top down and one to many. That was the great age of the daily newspaper and famous anchormen on the model of Walter Cronkite. The advent of digital platforms, in a sense, created the public. People from nowhere, free of institutional entanglements, pushed the elites out of the strategic heights of the information sphere. Almost immediately, great institutions in every domain of human activity began to bleed authority—a process that, as we have seen, in now approaching the terminal stage for many of them.

Gurri goes on:

The peril to democracy under present conditions of information isn’t any of these things: it’s the spread of nihilism in the public and the demoralization of an elite class that has lost any claim to authority.

That nihilism has accelerated, on both the Left and the Right, since Gurri wrote those words. About Trump:

Such rhetorical onslaughts would have destroyed political careers just a short time ago. They can succeed today only in the context of the great struggle that is my theme. The public, recall, has mobilized in a spirit of negation and repudiation of the status quo. It isn’t interested in a positive program of reform. Because the impetus for revolt was born in the digital universe, it has inherited the style peculiar to the web—a place where every political dispute ends in obscenities, and, not infrequently, death threats. The public has absorbed this language of outrage. It too speaks in rant.

This is the symbolic meaning of White House communications director Stephen Cheung’s rude tweet telling Mike Pompeo to “shut the f—k up” in criticizing Trump’s Iran negotiations.

And speaking of the demoralization of the elite, look at what the fraudulent establishment in Belgium is doing. Belgian nationalist Dries van Langenhove has been convicted of hate speech for a 2024 lecture in which he connected the decline of the quality of life in his country to mass migration. Van Langenhove writes:

Every single point I made was 100% the truth and based on scientific evidence.

Cynically, even the judge that convicted me admits as much by writing in his verdict: “Even if all of the statements made by Van Langenhove are based on scientific evidence and statistics, it makes no difference to the criminal intent. Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law.”

That's a lot of words just to say he wants to send me to prison for speaking the truth.

Even the regime media write: "It did not matter to the court that Van Langenhove was quoting scientific sources. The judge argued that Van Langenhove's main message was that a big part of the societal problems like insecurity, housing shortages and lowering educational standards are due to mass migration."

You may think the regime media are being sympathetic to me in the first sentence, but in reality they are warning people: even if you speak the truth, if you go against our narrative, we will crush you in every way possible.

Gotta be honest, one reason I’ve re-patriated to America (though only a minor reason, at this point) is my fear that with the mounting atmosphere of soft totalitarianism coming from the EU and some member states, I might run afoul of some law based on my writing. In Belgium, if even truth is no defense against prosecution, how is that not tyranny? If you want to donate to Dries to help him pay his legal bills, go here.

Meanwhile, in Germany, the state really thinks it can manage information:

Germany’s network of state media regulators — the Landesmedienanstalten — is assembling a regulatory framework that would compel social media platforms to algorithmically privilege government-sanctioned news sources. Under the proposed rules, platforms including X, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram could be legally required to elevate “reliable” media outlets in their feeds, recommendations, and search rankings, with everything outside those categories correspondingly buried.

This is a legally-mandated version of the practice tech companies frequently engaged in at the height of censorship in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when platforms such as YouTube were found to have manually adjusted search results to favor establishment news sources in keyword searches for politically sensitive topics.

The regulators are marketing the proposal in the now-familiar vocabulary of the censorship industry: “protecting media plurality” and combating “disinformation.” But the mechanics of the policy invert the very plurality it claims to defend. A government-blessed list of “trusted” sources is, by definition, a government-blacklisted list of everyone else. Independent outlets, citizen journalists, and politically inconvenient publications would not need to be removed from the platforms; they would simply be made invisible.

The EU establishment is under the impression that it can avoid trouble by punishing Europeans who notice how badly they have been governed. They are only going to end up radicalizing people. We Americans ought to thank God and the Founding Fathers every single day for the First Amendment. One of the first things you learn in media law class in journalism school is that truth is an absolute defense against libel.

The desperation of the European ruling class to hold on to its increasingly discredited ideology is going to crack at some point. Here in the US, our media (like their European counterparts) are messing their britches with fear that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party — a “far right” party — is gaining in strength. Why is that happening? Because the mainstream parties keep refusing to deal with Germany as it is, and acting to fix its deep problems. Similarly in Britain, with Reform UK. Headline from the NYT today:

You’d think that Farage was the second coming of Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists. Whatever you think of Farage and his limitations, he speaks the language of common sense. That’s “far right” to the media. Same with Alice Weidel of the AfD. Same with Viktor Orban. These categories are simply meaningless now. You don’t have to agree with any of these politicians to recognize that calling them “far right” is ridiculous. They are, increasingly, simply “the Right”.

AI Is Going To Be Their Mamas and Daddies

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is sounding the alarm:

Social media already hacked our attention. Now AI is coming for our attachments — the deep emotional bonds that shape how we relate to other humans.

He warns that AI companions (chatbots, holographic “friends,” digital teddy bears) will be far more responsive than any parent. Kids will form their primary attachments to AI instead of people. And because these companies have raised billions, they’ll eventually “enshittify” them, turning your child’s best friend/therapist/lover into a predatory monetization machine.

I haven’t yet read Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI, but I have a feeling that the Catholic writer Matthew Walther is right. Excerpts:

Even by the standards of modern papal encyclicals, with their uninspired phrasing, frequent auto-plagiarism and stultifying length, “Magnifica Humanitas” is disappointingly measured and cautious. (The least guarded language in the document — Leo’s dismissal of just war theory as “outdated” — has nothing to do with A.I.) Despite voicing concerns about the dangers that A.I. poses to humanity, the encyclical nonetheless seems to envision a world in which it is simply a tool, rather than an evil that all people should reject.

… For those of us who see the rise of A.I. as unambiguously evil, Leo’s emphasis on its ethical use is a nonstarter. He seems to underestimate A.I.’s ability to exacerbate existing crises and to accelerate processes of cheapening and redefinition.

How We Should Prepare For Disclosure

Nick Cook, who used to write for the gold standard Jane’s Defence Weekly, has some fascinating thoughts about how we should be thinking about UAPs and disclosure. I can’t do this piece justice by quoting it; do read the whole thing.

His basic argument begins with the claim that we can no longer plausibly deny that Something Real Is Happening. When the US Government admits openly that UAPs are real, and provides lots of videos, and formerly classified reports and testimonies, hardcore skeptics have their backs against the wall. I’m really astonished by the epistemic closure demonstrated by the mainstream media, which is not covering the latest UAP disclosures by the Pentagon. I think this is the media doubling down on their antiquated hard materialist worldview.

The problem, Cook says, is that we all rush to insist that We Know What It Is. More:

Because when civilisations encounter periods of rapid ontological instability – moments when their deepest assumptions about reality begin to fracture – the danger is not merely confusion, but overcorrection – the human tendency to rush from anomaly to absolute explanation.

This, historically, is where things become dangerous.

We are now entering what many are beginning to call the ‘Age of Disclosure’. But the phrase itself may already contain a hidden assumption: that what is being disclosed is singular, stable, and ultimately understandable within our existing conceptual frameworks.

That may not be true at all.

The modern UAP archive is not simply a collection of unidentified flying objects. It is a sprawling, contradictory, psychologically charged body of material that appears to intersect with consciousness, perception, symbolism, trauma, physics, information theory, folklore, religion, and human expectation itself.

The phenomenon – whatever it ultimately turns out to be – does not behave cleanly.

And that should give us pause.

Because the temptation, particularly in periods of uncertainty, is to impose coherence too quickly. To move from:

• ‘something strange is happening’
  
  to:

• ‘therefore I now know what’s causing it.’

History is littered with examples of intelligent people making exactly this mistake. The problem is not that they observed anomalies. Often, the anomalies were real, or at least sincerely experienced. The problem is that observation became ontology – the question of what kind of thing something actually is – and ontology became metaphysics, with extraordinary speed.

In other words: certainty arrived before understanding.

The rapidly emerging situation goes beyond UAPs, taking in AI and other phenomena that destabilize our collective and individual models of reality. It is producing what Cook calls “ontological overload”:

For most of modern history, reality itself functioned as a relatively stable social consensus. Whatever people privately believed, institutions broadly maintained a coherent model of the world:

• material reality was objective,

• consciousness was local,

• human perception was broadly reliable,

• and anomalous experiences existed at the margins.

Today, nearly every one of those assumptions is under pressure.

AI is challenging the uniqueness of human cognition.

Quantum information theory is reshaping parts of physics.

Neuroscience increasingly suggests perception is actively constructed rather than simply passively received.

Simulation theory has migrated from philosophy seminars into mainstream technological culture.

And the UAP discussion has opened the door – however cautiously – to the possibility that reality may contain intelligences, behaviours, or dynamics that do not fit conventional models.

Cook says we need to learn to apply rigorous discipline as we approach this stuff. He believes we ought to adopt a strategy of “layered uncertainty”:

Anomaly first.
Ontology second.
Metaphysics last.

As you regular readers know, I am confident that the UAP/aliens phenomenon is demonic at base. I’m not going to be shaken from that. But I am much less sure of the details. For example, the standard Christian cosmology holds that demons are fallen angels. It does not clearly state (though the Old Testament alludes to it) that there can be other categories of created beings. I love to joke about my childhood fear of Bigfoot … but what if there is more to it than we think? I think we have to take seriously that possibility. If they exist, then I believe they are not aligned with the Good. Jacques Vallée, praised by Cook for his own layered-uncertainty approach, is not a Christian, but he has written that based on his observation, whatever this thing is, it does not seem to be good or even neutral.

I believe we are being set up for the Great Deception spoken of by St. Paul. This will accompany the emergence of the Antichrist:

The coming of the lawless one by the activity of Satan will be with all power and with pretended signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are to perish, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false, so that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness (2 Thess. 2:9-12).

When it is no longer possible to know what is true and false, between what is real and fake, and that condition becomes globalized (as it is in the age of the Internet), we are in unprecedented times. I wrote about this, in a mostly non-Apocalyptic way, in Living In Wonder, in which my focus is not really on the End Times, but on how reality is much stranger than the story we tell ourselves — and even that we Christians in the modern West tell ourselves.

An Evangelical friend who went through an exorcism, or deliverance, last year with a priest told me that his church is full of righteous, faithful people, but that his tradition is “totally incapable” of understanding this aspect of reality. He told me that when he shared with friends in his church what had happened to him, some of them got angry. Rather than rejoice that he had been set free of a demon (there were extraordinary, totally inexplicable things that happened around his exorcism; I know the exorcist who helped him, who confirmed what the friend told me) by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the name of Christ, these believers were put out and mad at him. Why? Because That’s Not The Way The World Is Supposed To Work! This is just like the Gerasenes who ordered Jesus to get out of town after he delivered the local demoniac from his oppression. Jesus upset their settled metaphysical order.

When we talked about this not long ago, I mentioned that missionaries, Protestant and otherwise, who go to the Third World, encounter these things all the time. He told me a story a Pentecostal missionary friend relayed to him about events in an Amazon village that simply do not fit into the modern Western Christian mindset.

This is why I fear that a lot of contemporary Protestants (not Pentecostals!), as well as nominal Catholics and Orthodox, are sitting ducks for manipulation around “alien disclosure”. My Evangelical friend told me that his pastor is a good and godly man, but that he (the pastor) was completely unprepared to help him with his demonic crisis, because the demonic realm is at best theoretical to him. Christians like that will be very hard hit by disclosure. At some point, their resistance is going to crack in the face of overwhelming evidence, or some undeniable manifestations. How will they explain it? Might they even lose their faith?

Secular people who have no meaningful concept of the non-material realm are going to find themselves similarly disoriented, but even worse. Modern ways of thinking (that is, ways of thinking that have formed over the last 500 years, including most magisterial Protestantism, and Enlightenment modes of thought) simply cannot handle this stuff, except through ignoring it or making fun of it. As I write in Living In Wonder, we in the modern West are far outliers on the sum total of human experience, and even in the world today — but we think we sit atop the epistemic pyramid because our science and technology, which has given us immense mastery of the material world.

Mark my words, this is a vanity that is going to lead to the spiritual destruction of many, and maybe worse.

OK, enough from me today. Gotta take a shower and get ready to go out and get a car. I have the cash saved up to buy a Honda outright — I’m very loyal to Honda, which makes a great, fuel-efficient, reliable car — but I don’t know if it makes sense to buy or lease. Not sure what my plans are going to be in the next three years. I’d like to go back to Europe if that’s possible, but I have a sense, somehow, that this is not likely to happen. I don’t know why, it’s just there — as if events are going to accelerate, somehow, and make it smarter to stay in America.

In any case, I’m very happy to be back in the South. As much as I loved living in Europe, and would love to live there again, I’m pretty burned out from all the drama of the past few years in my personal life. There’s something to be said for living in a place where you speak the language, you know how people think, and you know how things work. That removes some stressors from one’s daily life, you know?

Southern soul food, the Trumpening, nihilism and politics, alien disclosure — just another day around this newsletter. Thank you for subscribing. Let’s keep having some fun, and learning about this wide, weird, wonderful world along the way.