Today Marco Rubio walked up to the microphones and delivered what might be the cleanest example of Orwellian doublethink you can fit into a single sentence: the United States struck Iran “pre-emptively” because we believed Israel was going to strike first, and Iran would retaliate against U.S. forces—so we hit them before they hit us. In other words, the “imminent threat” was the retaliation expected after the attack we expected.
Read that again slowly.
When I was a graduate student at UF, I didn’t set out to become a “politics and religion” guy. I set out to restart a student group that had gone dormant, because it felt unhealthy—intellectually and civically—to let “religion” be treated as the default, unquestioned atmosphere.
This morning I ran into a Rousseau quote that felt like it had been smuggled out of a sci-fi novel.
The phrase Christian nationalism is having one of those weeks where it stops being an abstract grad-seminar category and becomes a live description of power.
If Democrats want to exploit the openings Republicans have left, they can’t do it with a vibes-only pitch about “normalcy.” I say that as someone who voted for George W. Bush twice and, then as now, found the old conservative catechism genuinely persuasive: local control, constitutional restraint, civil liberties, sober budgets, personal moral leadership. Whatever else “conservative” meant in the 1980s and 1990s, it was at least marketed as a philosophy of limits—an argument that power should be hemmed in by law, custom, and conscience.