America, November 2025

Three things from this morning that fill me with almost unspeakable rage and disgust.

First of all, Bari Weiss on what the world needs now:

Bari Weiss is representing ALAN DERSHOWITZ, in late November 2025, as a charismatic voice of the center-left in America, in comparison to the center-right reasonableness of Dana Loesch. Reminder: this is the person who now heads CBS News.

Alan Dershowitz might be the single worst person in the entire Epstein files other than Trump and Epstein himself. He’s center-left in pretty much the exact same sense that Albert Speer was center-left in Germany in the spring of 1945, except as far as I know Speer didn’t rape young girls. Meanwhile Dana Loesch — now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long long time — is Weiss’s idea of the reasonable center-right in America today (I know you think I’m being hyperbolic and unfair and misrepresenting and distorting because how could I not possibly be? CLICK ON THE VIDEO).

In October 2022, Loesch attracted press attention for a rally speech supporting Senate candidate Herschel Walker. Walker had been accused in a Daily Beast story of abetting his ex-girlfriend’s abortion, the story being then reported in many notable publications. Walker denied the allegation, which had not been independently verified by other publications at the time of Loesch’s speech, and announced plans for a lawsuit. Loesch’s speech included the statements “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate!” and “If the Daily Beast story is true, you’re telling me Walker used his money to reportedly pay some skank for an abortion, and [Sen. Raphael Warnock] wants to use all of our moneys to pay a whole bunch of skanks for abortions. So, it doesn’t change anything for me!”, which occasioned some commentary in the press.

Moving right along, Rachel Why Can’t We Just Work With The Good Parts of RFK Jr’s Public Health Agenda? Bedard is explaining once again in the New York Times how the public health establishment has to be a lot more tolerant of and compassionate toward superstitious morons who murder their own kids:

When I shared the experience of watching Mr. Hildebrand [man whose eight year old daughter died from the measles because he belongs to primitive religious cult with insane ideas about vaccines] with a friend who grew up in an evangelical church, she recognized something immediately. “What he was doing is called testimony,” she said. Testimony, in the tradition she grew up in, is “speaking the story of how you came to your truth, and how it helped you find your life’s purpose,” she explained. It’s about achieving catharsis, community and a calling all at once.

Well golly gee, aren’t we feeling all anthropological and ethnographic this morning. What about the dead kid, Rachel? How is she feeling this morning?

Anti-vaxxers are often characterized as misinformed, and people like Mr. Hildebrand are often characterized as exploited by leaders of Children’s Health Defense [this is the racket RFK Jr. ran before his ascension to America’s chief public health official] when they are vulnerable. But that doesn’t give the people I met at the conference enough credit for the agency they exercise in their lives, or for how sincerely they hold their beliefs. They are there by choice because they accept the group’s worldview. In that world, they feel believed and valued, and are encouraged to think of themselves as brave instead of scared.

Yeah it’s called being in a cult.

I now understand more viscerally that MAHA and the anti-vaccine movement are growing because they offer people ways to translate their stories into new purpose. Public health and conventional medicine, on the other hand, are only losing people who we might otherwise help. We cannot affirm untrue beliefs, but perhaps we should start listening for new ways to meet people in their moments of need.

How about the now-dead eight-year-old girl’s “moment of need,’ DOCTOR? Maybe she should have been forcibly removed from the care of the parents who murdered her via their deadly superstitions while she was still alive? Just spitballing here!

Finally we have a Thomas Edsall piece [gift link] that lays out in detail, via various quotes from Eminent Professors of Law, why it’s going to be completely impossible to prosecute Trump for any aspect of the non-stop crime spree that is his second term, thanks to the worst Supreme Court decision ever, rendered by the worst SCOTUS chief justice in the long and mostly dismal history of that institution.

I will have such revenges on you both,

That all the world shall — I will do such things —

What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be

The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep

No, I’ll not weep:

I have full cause of weeping; but this heart

Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,

Or ere I’ll weep. Oh fool, I shall go mad!