The Week in Review

Woke 1 was Crazy

Um, yeah, Alexandria. Every time ideologues get into power, they go crazy. Ask the folks who lost their heads to the guillotine; ask the Gulag zeks; ask the Jews in Auschwitz. If you had your way, every American would've been held down and vaccinated and every high school locker room would be co-ed and every gay joke would land you in a county jail. Craziness– and a dollop of evil--is in your left-hemisphere-hijacked DNA.

The threat posed by ideologues is especially acute now. We have a pretty good country, but we also have an alarmingly powerful and intrusive central government—Foucault's Panopticon on Steroids. Someone could throw a switch and repress everything.

Indeed, someone recently did. It was called the "pandemic response." Far too many totalitarianish governors got far too much enjoyment out of far too much responding. I think those mandate-slap-happy governors hated to see it all end and only reluctantly let go while tearfully tossing flowers on the pandemic's coffin.

That 2020-2023 spectacle of caprice reminded me of FDR in 1933. He enjoyed eating breakfast in bed and setting a new gold price . . . every freakin' day, thinking prices are better mandated by government than the laws of economics, which is like thinking happiness is better mandated by government than the natural laws of human nature. Sure, those natural laws are elusive and sloppy, and too many of us vacillate between exuberance and wanting to extinguish our existence in this vale of ennui, but at least we can slouch when we're sad. Once the Diocletians who led Woke 1 get in power, slouching won't be permitted.

The WNBA Propaganda Machine is Working

Brett Cooper laughs that the WNBA is completely falling apart. I trust Brett's cultural ear far more than mine, mostly because mine is full of hair that I refuse to trim because I'd rather hear that soft rustle than Cardi B talk about immigration policy.

Still, I demur: I think the WNBA likes the chaos. In fact, I'm guessing it is orchestrating the entire thing. Maybe the two cock-bearing former NBA players who have declared for the WNBA draft were first drafted by dark forces at the (W)NBA.

I mean, come on: All the controversy is putting the WNBA into the public's mental living room for the first time. For 30 years, Americans could unite on one thing: the WNBA is ridiculously irrelevant. But that's over. Even I recognize a few WNBA nicknames, which helps me immensely because I'm far less likely to unwittingly click on a WNBA game when looking for something to watch (my streaming services, I'm willing to wager all my underwear, intentionally omit "WNBA" from the click box; ignoramuses like me click on it, scream "Oh shit!" and click away immediately, but the (W)NBA got a potential boost to its ratings).

I gotta believe it's all P.T. Barnum-esque. But perhaps I've slid into the epistemological dark side, where all knowledge becomes more slippery than Gavin Newsom with a fresh glaze of WD-40 on his way to a Black Face party. I trust nothing and no one that I can't see, hear, touch, or smell, doubting even whether it's really my wife on the other end of that message asking me to send all my Satoshis to Africa to free her from kidnappers.

Maybe, in other words, I'm losing it.

But then yesterday, Will Rahn came to the rescue. He deftly substituted for Nellie Bowles at this week's TGIF column and wrote:

Speaking of lesbians: I keep hearing that the WNBA is falling apart. But what I find odd about this is for the first time in my nearly two score years on this planet, people are actually talking about the WNBA. As Peter Thiel reminds us, the biggest leap is from zero to one, and now all of America can name at least one WNBA player: the Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark. . . . But it seems a win that we’re talking about the WNBA at all.

Speaking of Will Rahn

This dude supposedly keeps his private life, you know, private. But he dropped his guard a bit yesterday and told readers he wrote the column while waiting for his sixth child to arrive.

"Who," I thought, "has six children besides an Amish man, a Mormon man, a Catholic man, an Elon man, or an Inner-City man?"

Turns out, he's behind door three: a Catholic man.

And not just a Catholic man, a Catholic man with a pedigree of conservative Catholicism. His mom is the great Peggy Noonan, whom I used to venerate but, after her fawning appreciation of the most plastic presidential race in history (2008), I now only revere. Noonan, in turn, is the daughter of John Noonan, who was a conservative law professor and Catholic public intellectual until Reagan appointed him to the federal circuit court. He got quite a bit of ink in Patrick Allitt's under-appreciated Catholic Intellectuals & Conservative Politics in America 1950-1985 (that's an Amazon affiliate link, btw; please click it and buy something . . . I don't need the money but I do need the dopamine hit).

Quote of the Week

He’s doing what all good Jacobins do — what they live for! He has sentenced his old comrades of the DNC to death. He’s stuffing his old enemies into the tumbrel and carting them off to the public square for execution. They can see it coming and it’s giving them the heebie-jeebies. And finally, of course, the Mamdanis and El-Sayeds and their spawn will come for Bernie, too, leaving only AOC in the ensanguinated ruins to become America’s Eva Perón. Wait for that!