Enjoying the view from Limbo
The president of the United States told The New York Times within the past few days, with perfect equanimity and matter-of-factness, that his authority and decisions with regard to foreign policy, up to and including any threats and military engagements against America’s allies, are limited only by “my own morality, my own mind.” This may provide reassurance, or more likely rapture, to his...
Donald Trump, fresh off his great victory-that-will-end-in-quagmire in Venezuela, has instantly returned to his repeated threats to attack Greenland if Denmark does not cede that territory voluntarily. To state the obvious, it is long past the time when anyone can rationally try to explain away such threats as “trolling” or “joking.” He is saying explicitly that the United States “needs Greenland,” and that...
Pete Hegseth, U.S. Secretary of Cowardly Murder and Russian Capitulation, has said that Americans are too fat and too dumb to serve in the military. He is surely right about this. Fortunately, Hegseth himself is not fat. There is no such thing as a “narco-terrorist,” just as there is no such thing as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” These terms of art have been manufactured...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 16, 2025 · Last modified December 21, 2025
In the immediate aftermath of the murder of the politically trivial and offensively pseudo-Christian MAGA grifter Charlie Kirk, Rob Reiner, a knee-jerk and sometimes offensive Hollywood progressive (though one who actually earned his living and reputation through honest work rather than by playing up to powerful political factions), offered an appropriate and elegant public statement about Kirk’s killing. Here is the Huffington Post’s...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 2, 2025 · Last modified December 3, 2025
In a brilliant response to the infamous meeting in Miami in which Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner attempted to sell their country and all their allies to the Kremlin in exchange for some financial kickbacks for themselves and their immediate supervisor, i.e., Vladimir Putin’s American branch plant manager, Donald Trump, Ukraine has sent its own team of negotiators to the same city to...
America Descending / Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published November 23, 2025
Here is the final paragraph of Allan Bloom’s indispensable essay on the fate of the American mind: This is the American moment in world history, the one for which we shall forever be judged. Just as in politics the responsibility for the fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime, so the fate of philosophy in the world has devolved...
Is there a level of cowardice lower than Donald Trump? After a few weeks of off-and-on posturing about “getting tough with Russia,” Trump has boldly reasserted what was never really in doubt, namely that Vladimir Putin owns him and always has, and that Trump will happily go down in history as the man who served as Putin’s battering ram into the gates of...
The trouble with followers.– The weakminded types who are quickest to join a crowd for fear of being left alone outside also tend to be the quickest to run for the door for fear of being left alone inside. Seeing how it feels.– Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was one of the loudest MAGA cheerleaders while Donald Trump was lying and rabble-rousing to foment...
For months, Donald Trump’s presidential path has been determined, both overtly and implicity, by his glaringly obvious desperation to quell the public appetite for transparency about “the Epstein files,” a grotesque treasure trove of documents which, as we already know, includes so many references or allusions to Trump’s long-term friendly relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and so many indications of his...
A tyrant is not a man who desires bad things. (No one desires bad things.) A tyrant is a man who is ignorant enough to have no idea what a good thing is or where to find one; who was raised poorly enough never to have learned the difference between wishing something could be so and believing one has every right to force...
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