The pond was delighted to see correspondents greet the new year with verve, vivacity and verse.
Meanwhile, the pond continues its peregrinations, this time taking in the origin story for the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way.
You see, before going on his valiant mission to help destroy the planet, the humble lad first attended the Nimmitabel Public School (still perched on a hillock in the hamlet).
The village has fallen on hard times since that golden age, but the pond was pleased to see the old Sundowners movie pub had been given a refuge for coffee swillers, and that the abandoned railway station had been turned into a men’s shed. (The hamlet’s never been the same since the night they drove the old line down and the bells were ringing).
Sad to say, some have forgotten the beefy boofhead’s noble battle against satanic windmills in his early days, putting him on a similar career path to that of King Donald.
Angus did his best, but the pond was startled and appalled to see a wind farm lurking not far from the village which had groomed the child.
Once again the WCRS (whale corpse removal squad) had done a tremendous job cleansing all traces of the carcasses of the creatures daily killed by those infernal machines (handily, they’d also removed the corpses of all the Oz critters routinely mashed to a pulp), but it was mortifying to see some farm animals loitering nearby, apparently unaware of the dire peril surrounding them. As for the landscape, how they ruined the vision of bleached, parched tundra:
In related news, the pond was shocked to see Wired recently recycling ancient warming myths:
How long before this fear mongering ends?
How long before Nimmitabel’s shame vanishes in the wind?
How long must the pond wait until returning to the sweet, climate-science denying bosom of the lizard Oz, the IPA, and the likes of the Riddster?
A wag at Salon dubbed 2025 the year of the hive mind, mainly on the basis of shows such as Pluribus and Sinners (those with a taste for bad 2024 action flicks might want to throw in the profoundly inert Jason Statham blathering about the bad queen bee’s spawn and the need to protect the hive in TheBeekeeper).
Of course none of these match the hive mind at the lizard Oz, which launched a truly despicable jihad to round out the year.
Now a new year looms like a pox and soon it’s back to herpetology studies - in due course after the pond has finished its high country tour.
Meanwhile, may the happy holydays continue for correspondents trying to crank up the energy for the exhausting, debilitating business of yet more reptile wrangling …
Oh, and enjoy the view…
Buckle up. If anyone thought 2025 was a bummer, 2026 is shaping up to be a doozy, with a high quota of cockies at large, and reptiles determined to act as galahs …
A screen cap of a survey recently featured in a David Pakman YouTube video …
The pond was hoping to provide incontrovertible proof that the whale-killing machines located near the Hume highway had done bumper seasonal business killing stray whales and assorted wildlife ... while grazing creatures fled in stark, abject terror from the hideous death machines, more threatening than a bunch of Martians in a bad Spielberg re-make.
The pond produced nil visual results.
Rumour has it that a team based in Goulburn is sent down each day early in the morning to clean away the blood and guts of hundreds of dead whales...so that clueless city dwellers passing by have no idea of the carnage that's been committed.
The pond is offering a reward for a Hume highway dead whale sighting ... some visual alternative to this dreadful banality ...
And now just because the logarithms wanted to remind the pond of the lettuce's travails ...
The pond was grateful that Apple dropped the last episode of the first season of Pluribus before Xmas ... it had a zinger of a hook for the next season, and there's something in the constant talk of the hive mind which echoes the pond's voyages through the collectivist, jihadist lizard Oz mind - though frankly it's not so much a blissful group who've achieved a group think nirvana, as a bunch of hysterical, screeching Carols lacking the charms of Rhear Seehorn (talk of Pluribus is not a pond endorsement for dropping bucketloads of cash on assorted US streaming services).
Speaking of the latest jihad, the reptiles were still boxing away this day, though there were a few chinks in the armour ...
The Lynch mob was to hand to maintain the rage ...
Bad luck or systemic failure? How the left flipped the script on Bondi Bondi Beach has produced much more evasive indictments of anti-Semitism. For too many on the left, Islamophobia is the thing and anti-Semitism just a natural consequence of whatever the Israeli government does.
... so it was off to the intermittent archive with him.
The pond has done all the work it intends to do on that matter.
You want to suffer? Follow the link and hope the intermittent archive is working.
All the pond could think was how typical was the Groaning, and the illustrations, featuring the usual downcast look, or a surly aggressiveness ...
Thank the long absent lord that this groaning dispenser of pearls of wisdom is now a former Treasury assistant secretary.
Curiously the craven Craven broke ranks, with a piece which was as ancient in tone as the aged prof is absent of wisdom ...
The pond decided that all that was needed was a reminder that the reptiles don't do humour ...
Perhaps reading the craven Craven was even more dysfunctional than enduring a family Xmas dinner, even worse than hunkering down with rellies ...
Reading him trying to be funny about rellies induced a profound sympathy in the pond for anyone who had him for a relative and had to endure his company at Xmas... and as for those illustrations, the long absent lord have mercy on the ghost of long departed lizard Oz graphics department.
The lizard Oz editorialist also tried a walk on the wild side, with one of three featured editorials stepping outside the current jihad to contemplate Vlad the sociopath ...
Strange how the reptiles always fail to mention that it's King Donald and his minions that have enabled Vlad the sociopath ... and that it's the likes of Faux Noise that helped give King Donald and his minions to the world.
And speaking of the King, strangely the reptiles overlooked the stunning Xmas spirit emanating from the disunited states, far more noble than that other King's Xmas message ...
That's more than enough of that, before the pond hits the rellie-laden road, and the reptiles disappear over the horizon ...
Before hitting the road, the pond would like to end on an up note ... words, and more specifically, dictionaries containing words ...
This strand was triggered by Louis Menand, scribbling a few days ago in The New Yorker ...
Apart from being reminded that the pond - once a dictionary fanatic - now never opens a dictionary, amongst the things the pond enjoyed?
Learning new words and concepts ...
...He also introduces us to terms likely to be new to many readers: “sportocrat,” “on fleek,” “vajazzle,” and the German word Backpfeifengesicht, which is defined as “a face that deserves to be slapped or punched.” Martin Shkreli, the pharma bro, was his illustration, until he came across a tweet from Ted Cruz’s college roommate. “When I met Ted in 1988,” it said, “I had no word describe him, but only because I didn’t speak German.”
Only Ted Cruz?
Carol would have a lot more Backpfeifengesichts in her sights ...why, the pond can think of a parade of reptiles who show their Backpfeifengesichts to the world.
The pond was dragged back to the days when a bloody good time was had by all ...
....Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, published in 1961, flipped the script. Fatsis says that it “changed lexicography.” Web. III had an open-door policy. It was descriptivist. The editors did not abandon the concept of Standard English, which they defined as English “well established by usage in the formal and informal speech and writing of the educated,” and they indicated when a word was considered nonstandard. But they eliminated the label “colloquial” and reduced the number of words labelled as slang. The spirit was nonjudgmental. This seems unexceptionable today, when even popular language columnists, such as the Times’ John McWhorter, are manifest descriptivists. Language is what people say, not what they ought to say. But Web. III was brutally attacked. This was not too surprising. The people who attacked it were professional writers, and their attacks appeared in leading publications. No groups could have had a greater proprietary interest in Standard English. Verbal punctilio was the very basis of their livelihood. If anything goes in the realm of usage, they go, too. So the Times attacked Web. III for “permissiveness” and “informality.” “Intentionally or unintentionally,” the paper said, “it serves to reinforce the notion that good English is whatever is popular.” Let the Times decide what’s fit to print, please. The Atlantic called Web. III “a scandal and a disaster.” It was ridiculed at entertaining length by Dwight Macdonald in these pages and, some forty years later, at equally entertaining and longer length, by David Foster Wallace, in Harper’s. (The proximate target of Wallace’s article was A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, but he devoted a lot of his piece to attacking Web. III. Some of his claims about it were erroneous.) In 1964, the Times saw fit to run a story with the headline “Outdated Webster II Still Sells; Educators Like Old Dictionary Better Than New One.” The flash point was the inclusion in Web. III of “ain’t.” (The president of Merriam-Webster had ruled out “f*ck,”(*amazingly this has to be google bot approved) over the objections of the dictionary’s editor-in-chief, Philip B. Gove.) The “ain’t” taboo is a little odd; the word is just a contraction of “is not,” “are not,” or “am not.” But, in 1961, the use of “ain’t” in the United States was a very clear marker of social class, like saying “I seen him at the mall.” The “ain’t” controversy laid bare the stakes in lexicography: language use as an indicator of status. This was, after all, the era of “My Fair Lady,” which is entirely about language and class. The setting of the musical is British, but that may be why it was so popular in America. Americans didn’t see themselves being lampooned. The 1956 Broadway production won six Tonys, including Best Musical, and had the longest run of any musical at the time. The cast album reached No. 1 on Billboard and remained in the Top Two Hundred for four hundred and eighty weeks—nine years. “My Fair Lady” touched a cultural nerve, and it prepared the way for the hostile reception of Web. III. The New Yorker, itself a cynosure of proper usage in those days, ran a cartoon showing a receptionist at Merriam-Webster telling a visitor, “Sorry. Dr. Gove ain’t in.” That was no doubt enjoyed by the magazine’s “My Fair Lady” fans. The war over Web. III was, in short, a culture war, and culture wars are really class wars. Which group is up or down, top or bottom, in or out? Who is calling the shots for whom? In a review for The American Scholar, Jacques Barzun, the Columbia historian, called Web. III “the longest political pamphlet ever put together.” According to the editors of the new edition, Barzun complained, “whatever ‘the people’ utter is a ‘linguistic fact’ to be recorded, cherished, preferred to any reason or tradition.” He made it clear that this was not a cultural dispensation of which he could approve. Is the latitudinarian, post-humanist, post-standard world that Barzun dreaded the world we are living in today?
Remember that Dwight Macdonald reference - what a right royal dweeb he was, the pond will dare to go there - but not before before being startled ...
....Looking at online dictionaries, you can see plenty of selection going on, but it’s hard to grasp the principles that are guiding it. Take “groyper,” a name for followers of Nick Fuentes, the white-nationalist Svengali. (“Svengali” is in the O.E.D. and Merriam-Webster, but not in Cambridge.) “Groyper” has popped up a lot recently, because Fuentes was in the news. But the word is reportedly eight years old—and it has still not made it into the online O.E.D., Merriam-Webster, or Cambridge dictionaries. It does have an entry in Wikipedia, whose policy of giving entries to everything helps it keep ahead of the dictionaries. It can also operate quickly because it’s crowdsourced. It does not employ experts. Having found the definition for “groyper” somewhere, you might care to know how to spell it. In Wikipedia, the word is capped as a proper noun, but the Washington Post lowercases it in most uses. Normally, you’d look to a dictionary to tell you which is correct, but, since most popular online dictionaries do not recognize “groyper” as a word, this can’t be done. Welcome to the desert of the virtual. On the other hand, the free Merriam-Webster online does list “cheugy,” a word meaning uncool, used especially as a put-down of trends associated with millennials. It is possibly related to the excellent Australian word “daggy,” but the coinage is credited to one Gaby Rasson, who is supposed to have used it with her friends at Beverly Hills High School in 2013. Not exactly Dr. Johnson territory. “Cheugy” has no etymology. It’s a nonsense word. Rasson said it just sounded right. “Cheugy” is pretty niche. It’s missing from Cambridge, the O.E.D., and even the American Heritage Dictionary, and it seems to have lapsed into disuse. It is also missing from the latest print edition of Merriam-Webster—the twelfth, which was released in November—and will presumably proceed to disappear down a lexical memory hole. Scientific and medical terms are a problem, partly because there are so many but mainly because nonspecialists almost never use them. The standard edition of Merriam-Webster does not give us a lot of help with even the brand-name versions of these terms. It defines “Prozac” as “a preparation of fluoxetine”—technically correct, but not what people are thinking when they use the word. Merriam-Webster admits “Lipitor” as a word online; the O.E.D. does not. Product names generally are an area of oversupply. Merriam-Webster has “Kleenex,” but not “Triscuit,” even though Triscuits have been around longer. American Heritage does not have “Triscuit,” though it does have “Kleenex” and “Coke.” The O.E.D. has all three brand names, plus “Guinness.” Speaking of brands, “OED” is a word in the O.E.D.
Daggy.
So it's not just the pond that appreciates Tamworth...though really Barners had grown out of "daggy" into disreputable clown.
And then there was this ...
...If you’re too old or too young (and you always are), generational slang is impossible to stay current with—and what’s the point, anyway? Any Gen Z-er can tell you what “gooning” means, but it’s not in most dictionaries; nor is its near-synonym “edging.” For such words, on the borderline of respectability, the fallback resource is the online Urban Dictionary (which has “fleece quarter zip” without a hyphen). But it, too, is crowdsourced, and you will often get random irreconcilable meanings, along with an alarming amount of contributor trash talk. Is “Skibidi” a word? Is “six seven”? How do you define them? They have no content. What about “bigly”? A lot of what comes out of our mouths is word salad.
The pond has been startled to note of late that the Daily Beast has taken to referring to King Donald's minions as "goons" and as members of assorted "goon squads", a sad traducing of a noble BBC comedy show which introduced the notion of excellent bacon that could only be had before the war ...
It got darker, because bringing up the goons reminded the pond of an outing by Daniel Kolitz in Harpers:
Endless masturbation? That reminded the pond of the lonely business of looking at the reptiles, hunched over and going hard at it ...
This past January, a few dozen young men in hoodies and baggy jeans congregated outside a coffee shop in Tempe, Arizona, to mourn the death of a twenty-seven-year-old man named Nautica Malone. They arrived on foot and riding shotgun in parents’ cars; they carried flowers and votive candles, homemade placards and shirts printed with Malone’s smiling face. The café where they were gathered, Bikini Beans, was part of a chain whose baristas wear bikinis. Days earlier, Malone had pulled up to the drive-through window, nude from the waist down, a hand on his penis. The barista was already filming by the time the car reached her window. It’s hard to say why this particular sex crime went viral. Maybe it was something about Malone’s expression: he looked confident, even sultry, like he was hoping somehow to seduce the barista. Whatever the reason, the video was soon inescapable online. The view count was still climbing when Malone drove a few towns over and shot himself in the head in the front seat of his Dodge Challenger, leaving a note to his wife and young children asking for their forgiveness. Malone’s death was covered widely in the tabloids and trended on social media, where it was described as the “Goonicide.” His vigil, meanwhile, was an ironic, livestreamed stunt that came to be known as the “Gooneral.” Remarkably, this language—Goonicide, Gooneral—was broadly legible to hundreds of thousands of people who engaged with it online. The implication, unmistakable, was that the verb “to goon,” the root of these terms, had broken containment. By the time you read this article, a full definition might be needless, but in the sincere hope that that day has yet to—will never—arrive, I will provide one.
Sorry, Mr Kolitz, TMFI, and you can call that a word ...
Back to Dwight, and one of the joys of the intertubes is that you can visit long lost times ...
If you happen to subscribe to The New Yorker, you can read the text in situ, and at that point the advertisements offer a real distraction.
You learn a lot about the magazine and the demographic that Macdonald was writing for ...
Discerning females...
Mobile men ...
A lust for air travel... including good old Qantas ...
And above all, a seemingly unquenchable thirst for grog ...
And throughout all the advertising, a deep desire to be in Europe, or be European, or at least drive British cars, or swallow imported expensive grog while dressed in fashions that emulated a sense of European style.
There was more, a lot more. There were ads for the Saturday Evening Post, for the TV Guide, for clothing, for hotels, for diamonds as big as the Ritz, for Sony, an advanced technology marvel ...
How different it now is, while in between the ads, Macdonald burbled on, outraged by any hint of dictionary modernism ...
Enough already.
It's all there in the intermittent archive for those who want more ...
All gone now ... the past is a different country...but speaking of the breezy air of the present, the pond was exceptionally disappointed that Menand didn't mention the real word of the year ....
...Texting has produced a substantial vocabulary of acronyms and shorthand expressions, many of which date to when cellphones had numeric keypads, or at least to when messages were restricted to a hundred and sixty characters. (How did we ever live like that?) Many of those terms have migrated into e-mail and even into print. Merriam-Webster acknowledges the text-speak invasion by including LOL, TMI, IRL, and IMHO. But it does not recognize SMH, LMK, or JK—or “u” for “you” or “r” for “are.” “JK” can be important to know. The practice of acronyming and nicknaming is now widespread, part of a general speeding up of speech: “def,” “rando,” “preggers,” “fomo,” “homes,” “GOAT.” Are these words? They function as words.
Once a word is in print, is it permanently in the lexicon? Or do words have a sell-by date? If you search the O.E.D. for words used in print for the first time in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” you will get, amazingly, a hundred and seven results. Many of those words became part of the language, but many others (“fardel,” “bisson,” “drossy”) were nonce words that are now considered obsolete. Should they be included in a dictionary, since Shakespeare is Shakespeare and people still read “Hamlet”?
Then, there is linguistic play with parts of speech—nouns recently converted to verbs, verbs used as adjectives. I suspect that blogging and online writing in general have increased this kind of stylistic freebooting (one of the best things to happen to American prose, IMO). But the question of when a grammatically trans term deserves a dictionary entry remains unsettled. Merriam-Webster has the verb form of “nail,” for instance, as used in the sentence “She nailed the test,” but not the adjectival form, as in “Tom Brady was nails in the fourth quarter.” None of the online dictionaries carries “awkward” as a noun, as in “Being seated next to his ex at the company dinner served up a big bowl of awkward.”
There are also what could be called pop-up words, labels that attach to a certain social or cultural phenomenon as it flashes across the sky. Some of these are minted for the occasion, like “TACO,” for Donald Trump’s tariff waffling, and others are older words given new prominence, like “quarter zip.” But is “quarter zip” spelled with a hyphen? Don’t ask Merriam-Webster, Cambridge, or the O.E.D. None of them has it. By the time they do, quarter zips may already be too cheugy for school.
What, no mention of FAFO?
The pond can't think of a more relentless activity this past year, and there's going to be a heck of a lot of FAFO'ing done in the new year ...
But that's for later ...sharpies ready at the noggin, with the lizard Oz reptiles sublimely unaware of what their US kissing cousins helped unleash on the world ...
Xmas day, and the reptiles seem to be asleep at the wheel, with holdovers and hangovers all the go...
The pond doesn't expect things to get better later in the day.
The pond hadn't intended to stick around this long into the celebrations, but took a grim interest in how long the current jihad would last, and it's beaten the lettuce by a long way ...
Surely the trick is not to blame individual Jewish people for the criminal actions of the current government of Israel, nor all Muslims for ratbags inspired by fundamentalist craziness (especially given the actions of one Muslim during the terror attack), nor for that matter lumber the entire US population with blame for providing endless entertainment watching the end times unfold, thanks to mad King "Battleship" Donald.
Stripped of some Bondi elements, the bromancer did attempt this trick ...
...All religious traditions seek to answer the same basic questions: Who are we? Why are we here? What meaning does our life have? What does it mean that we relate to other human beings? And what becomes of us? The truth is that human beings can survive almost anything, if they believe their lives have meaning. If they don’t believe this, there is very little worthwhile that they can achieve at all. Christmas is the Christian story of the birth of Jesus. It is the moment when eternity announces itself as a human being. It elevates the very conception of human nature by God becoming man. Far beyond Christianity, Christmas is a feast day that celebrates hope. It’s the happiest feast in the Christian calendar and it’s become a worldwide symbol of joy and good fellowship, for Christians and non-Christians alike. Sometimes I’ve celebrated Christmas in Muslim countries and while this isn’t universal in the Muslim world, there’s been a lusty singing of Christmas carols and decorations and celebration.
The story of Christmas, centred on the birth of a child, is necessarily a story of hope. It celebrates innocence. In all of human experience there is nothing so innocent as a newly born baby. In the scheme of the Christian symbol, it also celebrates the paradox of God’s power, power in helplessness, strength in vulnerability, hope in the smallest and humblest. A new baby promises renewal of the community, splendour in the life ahead, though that life will doubtless have its share of suffering and pain. When Mary first took the child Jesus to the temple, she was told he would suffer and that as his mother, “a sword shall pierce your soul too”. Yet at the moment we receive the new infant, all future difficulty is put aside, and the overwhelming reaction is just joy and wonder at the miracle of birth.
See how he tried the trick, though it's insulting and demeaning in that special condescending bromancer way - why, they're almost Xian, what with their lusty singing of Xmas carols and decorations and celebration.
The pond would have been more impressed if he'd done some lusty chanting of Muslim prayers ... what with him being so ecumenical and all ...
Never mind, time to invite the bromancer to join in a dinkum seasonal celebration ...
The Greek writer, Lucian of Samosata (c. 125-180 CE), in his dialogue, Saturnalia, relates a conversation between the god Cronus (ie. Saturn) and his priest, in which he declares that people should enjoy themselves during his festival:
Mine is a limited monarchy, you see. To begin with, it only lasts a week; that over, I am a private person, just a man in the street. Secondly, during my week the serious is barred; no business allowed. Drinking and being drunk, noise and games and dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping of tremulous hands, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water,–such are the functions over which I preside. But the great things, wealth and gold and such, Zeus distributes as he will. (Lucian, Saturnalia II) (More Saturnalia here)
Corked faces? Could you use coal? That'd be something the lizards of Oz could get behind ...
Instead the pond wanted to share a few opportunities missed by the lizards of Oz, all the more poignant because they emanated from their kissing cousins at the WSJ ...
Talk about a vision to chill the soul, should such a thing exist in King Donald's world ...
And so endlessly on, and still bored by Xmas? Bored with family and/or friends?
Bored by tedious Xmas games, songs, parties and bromancer singalongs?
The New Yorker arranged a delightful alternative form of boredom...though why they offered this as respite from the Xmas season must remain a deep mystery...
Yes, Boss Peter Navarro, a tariff cheerleader, established a template of performative sycophancy for Trump Administration officials. Now that this is everyone's top priority, where does that leave him? Ian Parker on a lonely climb to power ... Peter Navarro, Trump’s Ultimate Yes-Man (*archive link)
It's an exhaustive, and exhausting to read, slam dunk of a profile, and blessed with a portrait by the New Yorker's favourite cover artist ...
It's impossible to do a modest selection of the slams, because there are so many of them ...
...many accounts, Navarro’s among them, tell of years of large and small humiliations. He was kept outof key meetings, including during the pandemic, when he wasn’t put on the main government task force; his calls weren’t returned; nobody wanted his memos, including one in which he misidentified which Administration official had written a hostile and anonymous Times op-ed. Olivia Troye, an adviser to Vice-President Mike Pence, has said that she had standing orders to take such memos out of Navarro’s hands, shred them, “and make sure he never stepped foot” in the Vice-President’s office. Navarro once grabbed Troye’s wrist to try to wrestle back some of his documents. (Navarro told me that Troye’s story was “utter bullshit.”) He became known as a West Wing lurker, and as someone likely to make a scene in a corridor—by, say, yelling at the head of the F.D.A. about the virtues of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment. Navarro has recalled, “I’d be sitting in the Oval or the Roosevelt Room fighting just about everybody else. And it was uncanny.” Last July, in Milwaukee, he had a few hours of simple, happy fawning. It didn’t last. A few months later, as Navarro was upending the world economy, Musk called him “truly a moron.” And, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick once sneaked into the Oval Office, at a time when Navarro was known to have an appointment elsewhere, to persuade the President to put a ninety-day pause on most tariffs, and to type out a Truth Social announcement of the pause while they waited. (Navarro, by keeping to his schedule that day, added more than four trillion dollars to the S. & P. 500’s total market capitalization.)
Simple, happy fawning?
Even in the personal notes there were bon mots ...
...On July 17, 2024, just after midnight, Navarro was released from the prison camp in Miami. Later that day, he flew to Milwaukee, to make his second-ever speech at a political party’s national convention. A woman named Bonnie Brenner flew with him. They were newly engaged. Brenner, who is in her early sixties, worked for decades as an assistant to senior banking executives. She and Navarro had met in the corridor of their apartment building, in Washington, D.C., not long after the January 6th riot. Navarro had then just finalized his divorce from Leslie LeBon, who had added a note to her website: “For all emails received regarding the Trump Administration, we will forward your email address to a politician of our choice and make a donation to them in your name.” In the divorce settlement, Navarro, who had orchestrated the Administration’s “buy American” rhetoric, got the Lexus.
Not to mention the endless backflips amidst the fawning ...
...Navarro, long rejected and unelected, made no attempt to set professorial boundaries in his new advisory role. He threw himself into every campaign argument. Trump hadn’t hired a kooky, maverick academic who happened to agree with him on tariffs, as has often been suggested. Rather, he’d found someone with no compunctions about performing agreement. Navarro, in his ethnic scapegoating, quickness to anger, and difficulty with noncompliant women, may have been temperamentally aligned with the MAGA movement he was joining. But, aside from the topic of Chinese black hearts, almost nothing that Navarro has said or written in support of Trump reflects views that he’d consistently articulated beforehand. Unlike many people in the Administration, Navarro was prepared to take Trump’s words literally—when the President said he wanted to tear up NAFTA overnight, say, or to overturn the 2020 election. And Navarro has had the agility to follow, in a synchronized swerve, Trump’s changing message on any issue, from the value of the COVID vaccine to the finality of the Liberation Day tariff rates. (Navarro: “This is not a negotiation.” Trump: “The tariffs give us great power to negotiate.” Navarro: “The Boss is going to be chief negotiator.”) Navarro came to define himself against those around Trump who—lacking the rigor of his unsqueamish servitude—sometimes pursued strategies of delay and diplomacy. Navarro, using language from military aviation, told me that in the first Administration “there were simply too many bogies inside the perimeter” to “swiftly move the Trump agenda.” He has identified these obstacles as a “confederacy of globalists, Never Trump Republicans, wild-eyed Freedom Caucus nut jobs, and self-absorbed Wall Street transactionalists,” and he has taken the time to insult many of them individually, including John Bolton, Gary Cohn, Stephanie Grisham, John Kelly, Jared Kushner, Mark Meadows, Don McGahn, H. R. McMaster, Steve Mnuchin, Mick Mulvaney, Brad Parscale, Mike Pence, Rob Porter, Wilbur Ross, and Rex Tillerson. (He speaks warmly of Miller and Bannon, and had a soft spot for Anthony Scaramucci, because he also went to Tufts.)
By the end of the read - for those who make it - the pond guarantees that, after a quick, cleansing cold shower, even those who just did superficial skinny dip will feel the urgent need to head back to have a chat with family and/or friends ...
Still want more weirdness before returning to the Xmas bosom?
Charlie Kirk’s Movement Is at War With Itself Turning Point USA’s annual convention turned into a four-day referendum over Nick Fuentes.
Inter alia...
...As I’ve previously written, the GOP’s old guard has been late to recognize just how much influence Fuentes has over young swaths of the party. Even at AmericaFest, some denial still lingered. On some level, that instinct was correct. Many people seemed unconcerned with fights over right-wing policy and ideology. “I had no idea there was friction,” Daniel Fisher, an attendee in his 30s from Pennsylvania, told me about the fight over Fuentes. “I’m not too well aware of what’s actually going on currently in the Republican political realm.” Many people seemed content to watch live versions of The Daily Wire and other conservative shows that were being taped in the main hall. When I spoke with the Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet this afternoon, he conceded that “there was family business being handled onstage.” He refused to directly talk about Fuentes, and directed me to a straw poll conducted by the organization. He emphasized that the results—AmericaFest attendees agree that Israel is the U.S.’s top ally—are evidence of unity within TPUSA. But even the young people I spoke with who were opposed to Fuentes told me that he and his supporters are a serious problem for the future of the right. The Groypers have “taken over all of the TPUSA chapters in central California,” Adrian Ayub, a 28-year-old running for a spot in California’s state assembly, told me. I tracked down leaders of several TPUSA chapters in California who were at AmericaFest, and they agreed that Fuentes is a problem. Dylan Frazin, the vice president of the Cal State Fullerton TPUSA, told me that he was a “free-market capitalist” and that he was sick of ascendant “National Socialists” on the right. “I know people that have direct ties to Nick Fuentes that have been showing up to Turning Point meetings at other chapters in the California area,” Frazin said. Young anti-Fuentes attendees I spoke with also repeated the same sentiment about him to me: The Boomers don’t get how much of a problem he is for the future of the right. “It’s true the Groypers are here,” Dimas Guaico, a 29-year-old advocate with Generation Zion, told me. “I feel like a lot of the leadership here, including TPUSA leadership, haven’t done enough to call Groypers out. “Now I feel like it’s too late.” Even with its hundreds of chapters and get-out-the-vote efforts, TPUSA has always been a fundamentally online organization. Kirk was so successful in building TPUSA into a conservative juggernaut in part because he was better at marshaling the internet than other establishment groups. His famous “Prove Me Wrong” events at colleges, for example, were perhaps more about producing viral clips for the internet than they were about showing up at any specific college. But the same dynamic now also helps illustrate why TPUSA is beset by infighting. To generate relevancy and influence, social-media algorithms demand spectacle, conflict, and edginess. Fuentes is a master of all three. He doesn’t have the money or resources TPUSA does, but you don’t need those things to go viral or win hearts and minds online. And he didn’t need to physically be at AmericaFest 2025 to be inside everyone’s heads.
Still bored, still not ready to rejoin the party?
Try Suzanne Schneider's L'Afffair Carlson in the NYRB ...
...On November 5 the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, convened an uncomfortable meeting. “I made a mistake, and I let you down,” he told a hall full of the conservative think tank’s staff and fellows in a video leaked to The Washington Free Beacon. A week earlier Roberts had recorded a staunch defense of Tucker Carlson, whose recent interview with Nick Fuentes, the stridently racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic online personality, had split the conservative world in two. Fuentes, a white nationalist, peppers his praise for Hitler with denunciations of the state of Israel and its American lobbyists. Carlson, for his part, was careful to stop short of blaming the Jews for Israel’s conduct during the interview with Fuentes and distances himself from the overtly fascist right. (“I’m totally anti-Nazi,” he told the podcaster Theo Von last week.) But over the past several years he has made his own rogue forays into openly antisemitic territory: promoting “replacement theory,” accusing George Soros of waging a “demographic war on the West,” and describing the Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” The interview with Carlson was tame by Fuentes’s standards, but he still found an opportunity to accuse “organized Jewry” of undermining American social cohesion. Carlson’s willingness to grant the interview, and his friendly, admiring tone, proved too much for many movement conservatives to stomach.
It's a long march, requiring a triumph of the will, to get to the end...
...the resurgence of open antisemitism on the right has many sources of fuel, from an unresponsive political system that leaves Americans distrustful of elites and vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking, to the live-streamed genocide committed in the name of the Jewish people. But in a prodigious twist of irony, the post-liberal thinker who has perhaps done more than any other to reestablish the intellectual legitimacy of white, Christian nationalism is the Israeli-American founder of the National Conservatism movement, Yoram Hazony. It was telling that, at the November 5 meeting, Roberts announced that he had called on Hazony, his “closest Jewish friend in the world,” to guide him through his personal and professional crisis. Hazony, whose NatCon conferences have brought together hundreds of conservative intellectuals, policy wonks, and politicians, including Brexiteer Nigel Farage, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and a who’s who of the institutional side of the MAGA movement—from J.D. Vance to Tulsi Gabbard, Russell Vought, Sebastian Gorka, Josh Hawley, Steve Bannon, Patrick Deneen, and Roberts himself—has labored to construct a reputable theoretical scaffolding for ethnonationalism since the populist upsurge of 2016. His 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism presents a view of the nation that runs dangerously parallel to those that understand American Jews as a foreign pathogen within the body politic. The ideal political community, he posits, emerges naturally out of membership in families and tribes—from common history, culture, language, or religion. (The state of Israel is his template for his illiberal, nationalist vision of democracy.) All of this makes the idea of a multiethnic, multiracial democracy quixotic if not altogether farcical: “What is needed for the establishment of a stable and free state is a majority nation whose cultural dominance is plain and unquestioned, and against which resistance appears to be futile.” Perhaps nowhere comports so poorly with Hazony’s idea of the nation as the United States, where the separation of church and state and the rejection of ethnicity as the basis of political belonging have allowed Jews and other minorities to flourish. But for Hazony “the United States is held together” by something quite different: “the bonds of mutual loyalty that unite the American nation, an English-speaking nation whose constitutional and religious traditions were originally rooted in the Bible, Protestantism, republicanism, and the common law of England.” To put it in Fuentes’s cruder idiom, the US will cease to be America “if it loses its white demographic core and if it loses faith in Jesus Christ.” The two men think similarly not only about the US but about Israel. Both of their politics tend toward the inevitable conclusion that the Jewish state is the only place where Jews can genuinely participate in a national polity. In his 2022 book Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Hazony argues that public institutions in the United States should be organized around Christian principles, suggestively citing a conversation with the neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol, who allegedly told him that, “as a matter of political theory, he thought only Christians should be able to vote in a Christian majority nation such as America; and that, by the same principle, only Jews should be able to vote in Israel.” This statement, presented by Hazony without comment, is not so far from Fuentes’s argument that, as he reportedly told Alex Jones in 2021, Jews have “no place in Western civilization.” When it comes to Hazony himself, Fuentes seems to have taken these ideas to their logical conclusions, rejecting both Hazony’s American identity and the premise, central to Hazony’s thought, that there is such a thing as a “Judeo-Christian” tradition. Whatever their personal antipathy for one another, Hazony and Fuentes are similarly aligned in seeing no way to separate Judaism from Zionism, arguing that the latter expresses the former’s true nature; where they differ is in how they assess the moral status of that project. In his interview with Carlson, Fuentes rejected the idea that “Israel has nothing to do with Jewishness, Jewish identity, the Jewish religion,” arguing that “the blood-and-soil nationalism of Israel, it stems from this ethno-religion which is Judaism.” After years of insisting that there is no daylight between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the right finds itself facing a new kind of influencer who is willing to take the package deal.6 For his part, Hazony seems loath to connect the dots between the ideology he has helped legitimate and the resurgence of antisemitism on the American right. In a recent interview with The New York Times’s Ross Douthat, he claimed that “Trump turns out to have probably the most pro-Jewish administration that there’s ever been.” On the day his comments were published, The Washington Post reported that the US Coast Guard would no longer classify swastikas and nooses as symbols of hate. (The policy was later reversed on account of the uproar it prompted.) To the extent that Hazony acknowledges an uptick in antisemitism on the right, his proposed solution is to send young conservatives on chaperoned trips to Israel. He may find that getting them to appreciate the wonders of Jewish life over there is easier than getting them to Shabbat dinner.
The language and conduct of Israel’s unceasing war against Gaza suggests that there is something more than the rational interests of a nation-state at play. The sheer extent of the carnage hints at a pleasure in destruction, not to speak of a drive towards absolute victory which is bound to be self-defeating. However shattered the force of Hamas, however long it takes the Palestinians to re-enter the struggle, the actions of Israel will surely guarantee the permanence of this war. In this context, Trump’s claim in October to have personally resolved a ‘3000-year’ conflict acquires another layer of irony. It is hard not to see his proposal earlier this year as madness: a ‘riviera’ in northern Gaza with international, above all US, protection, and the ever dwindling fragments of the rest of the Strip to remain as ruins into the mists of time. ‘There are no metaphors in Gaza,’ the Palestinian journalist Abdullah Hany Daher writes. ‘There is only what is gone and what remains.’ The proposal is a parody in miniature of the two-state solution to which it also pays lip service. Reference to a potential state for Palestine was hedged in with conditions and, with considerable reluctance on the part of Netanyahu, was only included in the final hour. What it offers is two utterly unequal peoples up close and personal, divided by an ever shifting, Israeli-imposed, land-grabbing Yellow Line, which is rapidly hardening into a partition of Gaza in all but name. On 7 December, Israel’s army chief, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, called the line – which gives Israel control over 58 per cent of the territory – a ‘new border’. Israel appears to want two things: to achieve a total victory and to guarantee that the war with the Palestinians never ends. Not all but a significant majority of Israeli Jews support the war. It seems fair to ask: what is Israel thinking of? In a cabinet meeting convened on 7 October 2024 to mark the first anniversary of the Hamas attack, Netanyahu called for the war to be renamed War of Resurrection or War of Revival. Operation Iron Sword, as it had been called until then, downgraded the cause. It was more suited to an incursion than to the full-scale military campaign unleashed in response to Hamas’s onslaught. Some ministers objected to the link with the 1948 War of Independence, or Nakba, to use the Palestinians’ term, a link made explicitly by Netanyahu. The war, they argued, was not a battle for the creation of the nation-state, even if it was deemed to be an existential fight for its survival. For Netanyahu, however, revival was of the essence: ‘We rose from the terrible disaster of 7 October. We rose with momentum to our feet and we returned war to our enemies. We established the national revival enterprise in the Land of Israel, in our strong and prosperous state. The same applies to the entire campaign: this is the war of revival for our people, a direct continuation of the War of Independence.’ If ‘revival’ is presented here as a smart business deal with a new shot of investment, the idea of ‘returning’ war to the enemy can be read in more than one way. Is Israel raining war down on the ‘aggressor’, no holds barred, or is violence being dispatched back to where it came from – ‘returned’ – in so far as Israel always presents violence as the responsibility of everyone apart from itself? Either way, Israel is rising from the ashes as a warrior state. In the eyes of Netanyahu’s critics, however, the war merited no new, grandiose title since the Hamas attack that provoked it was only made possible by criminal negligence on his part. Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition, took to Twitter/X to address the prime minister: ‘You can change as many names as you want; you will not change the fact that on your watch the most terrible disaster since the establishment of the country happened to the people of Israel. This government is not the government of revival, it is the government of guilt.’
It's another very long walk to the end, and a bitter end it is too ...
...against all evidence, Israel persistently denies the deliberate targeting of civilians. In the interview, Netanyahu took this as the moral divide between the conduct of the IDF and the ‘terrorism’ of the PLO. But carefully collated army testimony cites a tolerated ratio of one hundred civilians dead for every senior Hamas commander, up to twenty civilians for low-ranking personnel. This is one of the few statistics to emerge from Israel which does not provide estimates of the actual numbers of the dead: hundreds of thousands if we count those still buried beneath the rubble. In the words of the former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy, writing on the so-called ‘ceasefire’, ‘they have smashed the whole place up and can kill as they please.’ Consider one example out of so many: the case of Jumaa and Fadi Abu Assi, brothers aged nine and ten, killed in the town of Bani Suheila by a drone attack on 29 November (the agreed first date of the ceasefire was 10 October). They had been picked out as legitimate targets when they approached the Yellow Line in search of firewood. What, exactly, is on offer? To ‘kill as they please’, or to become one of those people – Jews – who, in this sinister account, are there to be killed. In Netanyahu’s twisted vision, the Jews are always on the verge of catastrophe. Either you become a killer or you die. One thing seems certain. If you accept these terms, there will never be enough corpses to go around. One more strand takes us back to Netanyahu’s Knesset speech of 7 October 2004 and what has unfolded since. When Netanyahu was a child, his father, the distinguished Jewish scholar Benzion Netanyahu, was writing his biography of the 15th-century sage Don Isaac Abravanel, who offered a messianic vision to save the world. The book was published in 1953, thanks to the painstaking efforts of Benzion’s wife, Tzila, who had deciphered and transcribed his handwritten manuscript. Reverence towards Abravanel passed down through the generations, seeping into the family atmosphere. Following the expulsion from Spain, Abravanel fervently believed, there would be no redemption, no safe haven or national home for the Jews, without a divine force that would arise at the climax of an apocalyptic catastrophe. According to Avner Ben-Zaken, an Israeli historian of science, Abravanel has attracted followers among political philosophers and Hebraists from the beginning of the modern era to the present day. Fearful for the future, they shared a need and longing for political stability, which could only be achieved by insisting on a political threat, ‘even’, in Ben-Zaken’s words, ‘one that may be fictitious’. Abravanel was anticipating one of the most dangerous components of modern Israeli statehood as it would come to be personified by Netanyahu. Israel is always on the brink of disaster, as indeed are all the Jews. It will take catastrophe and a war of resurrection to save them. What should be aimed for is a ‘restrained catastrophe’, to be managed as a perpetual state of war which will render any definitive settlement impossible. Never ending the conflict with the enemy will act as an ‘adhesive’ to maintain the political unity of the Jews. It is a strategy fraught with risk – a breakdown of all restraint and a slide into new catastrophe. In 2015, when Ben-Zaken wrote his essay, no one was yet talking about genocide. Netanyahu’s abiding fear is not that peace can never be achieved but that it might be. He is the Israeli leader who has most fully actualised Abravanel’s age-old dream. On his way to address Congress in March 2015, Netanyahu stopped off to visit his father’s grave and then released a press statement: ‘My father was never afraid to go out into the storm’ – the exact image used by Benzion Netanyahu to describe Abravanel. Legend has it that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, once told Netanyahu that he would be the last prime minister, the one destined to transfer the leadership to the Messiah. Meanwhile, bodies trailing behind him, he still seems to believe he can sweet-talk his way to the stars.
Even the Nine rags managed to offer something of interest on Xmas day, even if it was just a reprint of a WaPo outing ...
Sure it was a week old, sure WaPo had run it back on 16th December, safely stored in the archive, but at least they tried ... at least they reheated the chook with style, because nobody can do conspiracies, feuds and nonsense like Candace ...
Splendid stuff ...King Donald and his minions have really nailed the meaning of Xmas ... aided and abetted by Bari Weiss, working hard to give lesbians a bad name ...
In the seasonal bromancer, lizard Oz, hive mind spirit ... quick, lock up the furriners ...
Meanwhile, hasn't this two month old John Oliver outing aged remarkably well? Come on down Bari, what a name you've made for yourself (not to mention the lesbianism you've traded off on while selling down the river)
