Worthy Reads: It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Quadrennium

Worthy Reads for November 2024

Welcome to Worthy Reads, where I share some things that I think are worth your time. It has the rare De Civitate paywall. Everyone gets the first half of Worthy Reads, but only paying subscribers get the second half. Retweets are not endorsements.

The most recent election in which the major candidates roster changed in July.

HOUSEKEEPING: This is likely the final De Civ post before my traditional election night preview. “Don’t Vote” was mega-length, even for me, and took me away from several real-life obligations that I need to catch up on. However, I couldn’t take a hiatus without giving something back to the true heroes of De Civ, the paylisters, who’ve waited patiently since August 20 for some hawt paylister content.

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“The Flight 401 Election,” by Ron Belgau:

Consider the case of Wojtyła (along with Walesa, and Havel). During Wojtyła’s time as Archbishop of Krakow, the Vatican’s framework for diplomacy with the Eastern Bloc (Ostpolitik) was driven by the strategy of salvare il salvabile (saving what can be saved). The Vatican’s bureaucrats accepted the existence of the Soviet Union and its control of the Warsaw Pact countries as an essentially immovable historical fact, and the question was: given this, what sort of room for maneuvering can we find?

This was an essentially tactical game. It produced various concrete initiatives which were (sometimes) successful in preserving some degree of religious freedom for Catholics behind the Iron Curtain.

However, Wojtyła, Havel, Walesa, and others refused to take Soviet influence for granted. Their vision was much less practical. They wanted to destroy communism and create a free and democratic culture in nations that were (apparently) irrevocably enslaved to Soviet power. Havel expressed something of the ethos that motivated this kind of activism when he wrote:

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

At any point prior to 1989, there was a strong case to be made that the Vatican’s pragmatic approach represented the more effective strategy, and that Wojtyła, Havel, and Walesa were romantic dreamers. There was certainly no reason for optimism, no calculation that would show that their approach was more likely to succeed than the more pragmatic approach taken by the Vatican’s Ostpolitik. Nor did Wojtyła, Havel, or Walesa act as they did out of certainty of success: they acted as they did because their vision for their nation was right, the Soviet vision was wrong, and they were not prepared to live the lies that were required to prop up the Communist regime.

Mr. Belgau (a friend) did not actually title this “The Flight 401 Election.” He decided calling it that would be a dumb gimmick. Instead, he called it “Amid the Wreckage of the Christian Right” when he published it in 2016.

I, however, have absolutely no shame about either gimmicks or unhelpful obscurity, so I’ve headlined it as “The Flight 401 Election.”¹

I like this as a companion to my recent long essay, “Don’t Vote.” My essay ends, more or less, in despair. I leave you in the position of Boromir in Lothlórien: determined to fight on, honorably, until the bitter end, but reduced to tears by a few words from Lady Galadriel:

She spoke of my father and the fall of Gondor, and she said to me: Even now, there is hope left.

But I cannot see it. It is long since we had any hope.

That, uh… that line hits me pretty hard these days.

Ron Belgau, on the other hand… He has been, I think, much more pessimistic about the conservative political project than I’ve been for a lot longer than I’ve been. Yet he offers a picture of hope, a picture that goes through Pope St. John Paul II and Commissioner Harvey Milk. Worth the read.

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“Trump Attempted A Coup,” by Bentham’s Bulldog:

Then, on January 6, Trump incited the mob that attacked the capital. The entire purpose of the mob showing up to protest was to get Pence to certify the set of fake electors. What do you think they were protesting? After the mob broke into the capital, many of them trying to hang Pence, Trump poured fuel on the fire, saying:

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”

This would be a bit like if a bunch of my followers were in the midst of violently attacking the white house, attempting to execute Biden, thinking they were honoring me, and I choose that time to Tweet out how terrible Biden is. Then, Trump sat around for hours, doing nothing as the mob violently attacked the capital. The only thing he Tweeted that was at all pacifying was:

“Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”

For hours, he sat around doing nothing as he was called on by his children and close advisors. This is because he was hoping that the mob would successfully intimidate Pence into certifying the fake electors. When McCarthy called him and urged him to call off the mob, Trump suggested that the rioters cared more about their country than McCarthy.

I’ve had some pushback on my recent argument that voting for Trump 2024 is cooperating with evil, because Trump committed an insurrection in 2020.²

Is this piece by Bentham’s Bulldog better than my previous work on President Trump’s treason? ‘Course not! He highlights some of the wrong details and his argumentat is often cursory.

But is it shorter? Heck yeah. And that is a considerable virtue.

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Amicus Curiae Brief of Alabama in U.S. v. Skrmetti, regarding the corruption of medical science:

Through years of litigation defending its own age limits against challenges by private plaintiffs and the United States, Alabama has exposed a medical, legal, and political scandal that will be studied for decades to come. The federal government, [self-identified] “social justice lawyers” from prominent activist organizations, and self-appointed experts at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) conspired to abolish age limits for sterilizing chemical treatments and surgeries. Central to their strategy was the WPATH Standards of Care 8 (SOC-8)—a purportedly evidence-based set of recommendations that would be used by their lawyers to convince courts to enshrine in law the previously unimaginable.

Their job wasn’t easy. When WPATH hired Johns Hopkins to review the evidence behind permanently altering children’s bodies to address gender confusion, the team “found little to no evidence about children and adolescents,” a fact shared with (and privately acknowledged by) the federal government. Perhaps for that reason, WPATH suppressed publication of most of those reviews. Some SOC-8 authors opted to conduct no systematic evidence reviews precisely because doing so would “reveal[] little or no evidence and put[] us in an untenable position in terms of affecting policy or winning lawsuits.” And after finalizing SOC-8, WPATH shared a copy with Admiral Rachel Levine, the Assistant Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Levine demanded that WPATH remove from the guideline all age limits for chemical treatments, chest surgeries, and even surgeries to remove children’s genitals. After some initial consternation “about allowing US politics to dictate international professional clinical guidelines,” WPATH obliged.

This is a filing from U.S. v. Skrmetti, which The Nine will decide in the coming year. The Biden Administration sued Tennessee over a bill Tennessee passed banning “medical procedures” that “enable a minor to identify with… a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.”

In other words:

• If you are Of The Left, Tennessee banned “gender-affirming care for trans kids.”

• If you are Of The Right, Tennessee banned “child sex change surgeries and drugs.”

Pick your preferred language. As I have written before, when it comes to gender, the semantics is the substance, and I won’t try to slice that knot here. That isn’t what interests me today.

This brief describes a conspiracy. It is only an allegation, but the allegation is credibly made by a state government, backed by exhibits, it is consistent with ample past evidence, and it is not refuted—nor even acknowledged—by the opposition amicus briefs, at least not as far as I saw in a brief scan.

The conspiracy is straightforward: medical doctors and researchers with strong political, social, sexual, and metaphysical views decided that a specific course of action (“gender-affirming care”) is Good, for non-scientific reasons. They took control of the institutions that are supposed to decide, on the basis of neutral scientific evaluation, what the effects of medical treatments are. With assistance from other captured institutions, as well as direct collaboration with powerful politicians, they systematically rigged their results, suppressed all dissent, brushed all of it under the rug for explicitly political reasons, and presented their repackaged prejudices as The Science. Then, other co-conspiring institutions—such as the White House—used these made-to-order “scientific” conclusions as pretext for a legal assault on anyone who disagreed.³

Don’t worry! There are lurid details, too, to keep the reading lively!

Setting aside whatever you believe about the question of “gender-affirming care”/“child sex changes,” this is really bad. This sort of thing, ultimately, is why 30-40% of Americans continue to (falsely) believe that President Biden’s 2020 election win was illegitimate. It’s why they continue to (falsely) doubt the efficacy and safety of covid-19 vaccines in adults. They’ve seen behind the curtain. What looks like the Great and Powerful Engine of Truth turns out to just be a few men wearing lab coats, none of them honest, many of them horny.

Many such cases.

This is also, maybe above all, bad for gender dysphoric kids. (I think that’s a neutral term?) It seems that they (and their parents) need clear and reliable medical evidence about the effects of various treatments in order to make good decisions. So do voters, for that matter, as much of the country is trying to decide if what it is seeing in this field is child welfare or child abuse. As always, the noble lie backfires.

I’ve never posted an amicus brief as a Worthy Read before, so here’s a quick orientation: The first 10 pages of the PDF are just court nonsense. (In court, you put your Works Cited page at the beginning of the document, not the end.) Pages 11-19 are an executive summary. (Confusingly, these pages have printed page numbers 1-9.) The rest of the document, Pages 20-52, are the actual argument. That sounds long (32 pages!), but court margins are so big your English teacher would mark “see me after class” and lots of it is footnotes, so you only actually have to read about 6,000 words. (That’s the length of “Harrison Bergeron” and “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.”)

If you have time, I suggest skipping directly to the argument and just reading it, ignoring everything else. If you don’t have time, then I recommend the executive summary section.

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“The Moral Economy of the Shire,” by Nathan Goldwag:

This is a society organized around family and clan dynamics, where power flows not from the office, but from who you know, and the web of favors, debts, and relationships you can call upon. The Tooks are not powerful because they hold the Thainship, they hold the Thainship as a signifier of being “the first family” of the Shire, in terms of wealth and influence. The Mayor of Michel Delving’s main job is to preside over banquets because, in a political structure like this, those sort of social events are where everything is actually decided and established, in the subtle, informal relationships between the families who own everything. There’s no bureaucracy or administrative apparatus because there is no need for one. The Shire is not conducting war or diplomacy or trade, and isn’t administering large populations of subjects, and there would be no reason for the Oldbucks, Brandybucks, Tooks, etc to support the kind of centralization of state power that could challenge their informal reign.

…The other term we need to know if we want to understand the Shire is “clientelism”, perhaps more commonly refereed to as “patron-client relationships”. This is a social-political structure that emerges organically in many different contexts, and consists of a set of mutual, hierarchical obligations between powerful “patrons” and a network of “clients” who depend on them, economically, socially, or politically. It seems likely, from what we see of the Shire, that clientelism is the main organizing force within Hobbit politics. This would be far from unusual, in this sort of system.

I don’t have any real commentary on this piece, but I really liked it. Tolkien is so beautiful because his world fits together so nicely with other bits of the real world you’ve either never heard of or never considered. I expected to complain about the usual pitfalls of this type of essay—turning some smart observations into a “deconstruction” that “exposes” the “dark underbelly” of Tolkien’s world—but Goldwag deftly avoids those pitfalls. So just read and enjoy.

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Here’s the paywall. Whether you’re free-list or pay-list, thank you for reading this far, and I hope you enjoyed!

Below the paywall: writing by Charles Lehnan, Simcha Fisher,

Jane Psmith

, xenocrypt, and the video of the month.

If you are one of those four people, you should not have to pay me to see what I wrote about you! Email me and I’ll give you a free De Civ subscription so you can read it.

Otherwise, if you want to join the ranks of the glorious De Civ paylisters, for whom I do all that I do, you can upgrade your subscription here:

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