Readings...

 

One of the pond's gripes about the lizard Oz is that as soon as the pond finishes its morning visit and returns to the real world, there's a sudden gush of stories ... none of them noted by the reptiles, but turning up in the pond's correspondence, thanks to correspondents aware there's another world out there.

This morning petulant Peta went into raptures about the diet drink man, the "diet" drink only pussies imbibe when they've got the sugar fears ... and yet she, and so the pond, missed out on this angle ...

That was the Beast's gloss of a story you could find at Newsweek: JD Vance Foreword in Project 2025 Leader's Book Raises Eyebrows.

JD is the pond's new favourite US politician, as we share a hillbilly past, and never mind that the pond's father used to roam the house shouting "turn that goddam hillybilly music off"...

At one point drugs were so bad in Tamworth, per the Northern Daily Bleeder, that the junkies living next door to the pond's old family home managed to burn down their nest ...

Now every time that the diet drink man makes a move the pond can recognise the sort of gauche nerd striving to get away from the drugs and above that goddam hillbilly music, yet secretly still in its thrall, and inclined to be tone deaf to the world ...

Here he is again, in the New Republic ... it's essentially the same yarn, but when you live in a town where the chief excitement is the train arriving once a day, you learn to love telling the same stories over and over again ...

Then there was Paul Elie in The New Yorker... J. D. Vance’s Radical Religion (paywall):

In all the commentary about Donald Trump’s choice of Senator J. D. Vance as his running mate—he’s the survivor of a tumultuous upbringing in small-town Ohio, a former marine, a Yale Law graduate, the author of the 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” and the hero of the 2020 movie adaptation, a convert from Never Trumper to fervent acolyte—one aspect of his biography that could prove of major consequence has received scant attention: his religion. He became a Catholic in 2019, and since then he has aligned himself with conservative-Catholic currents of thought that have already had profound effects on the Supreme Court—and, through the Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, on American life broadly. Should Vance become the Vice-President, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—all conservative Catholics—would have a Catholic ally of like mind in the executive branch. (President Biden’s Catholicism leans progressive, and is more devotional than doctrinal.) For now, Vance’s presence on the ticket represents the union of Trumpism and a movement that sees Catholicism as the embodiment of tradition, stability, and a top-down ordering of society, which would be enshrined through regime change. That’s a lot of symbolism to lay on a commitment of faith that a thirty-nine-year-old man made just five years ago, but Vance’s embrace of Catholicism is deeply bound up with his stated belief that religion has the power to shape the country...

...His conversion to Catholicism seems at once sincere and opportune. In an interview with Rod Dreher of The American Conservative, posted the weekend he was baptized, in August, 2019, Vance said, of Catholicism, “I’ve been reading and studying about it for three years, or even longer.” In 2016, he started a nonprofit intended to address the causes of opioid addiction and other social scourges. The next year, he joined a venture-capital outfit, led by the former AOL chief executive Steve Case, which focussed on identifying investment opportunities apart from the coasts. He was living in Columbus, Ohio, and travelling regularly to Washington, where Chilukuri Vance was a clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts. Around that time, he recalled in a 2020 essay, he had “a few informal conversations with a couple of Dominican friars”: one was Father Henry Stephan, at St. Gertrude’s Priory in Cincinnati, who had majored in politics at Princeton and served as an intern for Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain—a founding member, in 1960, of William F. Buckley’s Young Americans for Freedom, the crucible of the postwar conservative movement. (Stephan declined to comment for this article.) Those conversations led to “a more serious period of study.” He and Chilukuri Vance, new parents, had bought a house in Cincinnati, where each worked remotely. (By then, she was a lawyer at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a firm based in California.) He was baptized and confirmed by Stephan at St. Gertrude’s.

The 2020 essay is a chronicle of Vance’s conversion; it appeared in The Lamp, a Catholic journal, under the headline “How I Joined the Resistance.” When he entered college, at Ohio State, Vance writes, he was an atheist who read Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Two of the figures who changed his way of thinking, he explains, were St. Augustine, whose “City of God” he read at Ohio State, and the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who gave a talk at Yale Law in 2011. Vance, in his essay, recounts being surprised by Thiel, whom he remembered denouncing the élite legal culture of which Vance was becoming a member, and, he writes, “arguing that we were increasingly tracked into cutthroat professional competitions. We would compete for appellate clerkships, and then Supreme Court clerkships. We would compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness.”

Thiel’s remarks, as Vance remembers them, were rooted in the thought of René Girard, a French-born polymath whose ideas Thiel had come across when he was a student at Stanford, where Girard was a professor. Girard, born in 1923, converted to Catholicism in 1959, and his texts are still best known among theologians and scholars of philosophical anthropology. One of his most influential ideas is that society is enslaved to a process of “mimetic desire” whereby people learn to want the things that others have, strive to have them for themselves, and then regard themselves as rivals when in fact they’re just imitating one another. Vance looked into Girard’s work, and over time, he writes in The Lamp, he came to see “mimetic rivalry” as an apt description for what goes on not only in places like Yale Law but in the meritocracy generally. The thrust of the essay is that becoming a Catholic was a means of defying the patterns of imitation fostered by the “meritocratic master class”—and, not coincidentally, what he saw as its way of inducing its members to believe that “Christians are rubes.”

Yet it could be said that in the years after law school Vance simply moved out of one élite and into another—and that he has thrived through mimetic rivalry. In Silicon Valley, he worked for Mithril, a venture-capital firm co-founded by Thiel. He wrote “Hillbilly Elegy,” appeared as a contributor on CNN, and wrote opinion pieces for the Times and The Atlantic. He ran for the U.S. Senate and won, bolstered by fifteen million dollars from Thiel. As a senator, he pivoted from harsh criticism of Trump to positions so closely akin to the former President’s that Steve Bannon suggested to Politico’s Ian Ward that Vance could be, as Ward put it, “St. Paul to Trump’s Jesus—the zealous convert who spreads the gospel of Trumpism further than Trump himself ever could.”

In the past few years, Vance has become a favorite of conservative Catholics. The Times’ Ross Douthat noted that he and Vance have been friends since “before he became a politician.” In 2021, Vance spoke at the Napa Institute’s “annual intellectual apostolic conference preparing Catholics for the Next America.” The next year, he gave a keynote address at a similar conference at Franciscan University, in Steubenville, Ohio, organized by the former New York Post and Wall Street Journal editor Sohrab Ahmari, himself a Catholic convert. One of the other participants was Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard Law professor (and a convert) who is a proponent of “integralism,” a scheme of governance that, as the Pepperdine University political scientist Jason Blakely observed in Commonweal, in 2020, “seeks to subordinate temporal power to spiritual power—or, more specifically, the modern state to the Catholic Church.”

In 2023, Vance took part in a discussion at the Catholic University of America with the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, an advocate of “post-liberalism,” which, he explains in his books “Why Liberalism Failed” and “Regime Change,” is the view that liberalism has become an “invasive progressive tyranny” and so must be replaced by “a conservatism that conserves.” Vance greeted Deneen with a bear hug; during the discussion, Politico reported, Vance “identified himself as a member of the ‘postliberal right’ and said that he views his role in Congress as ‘explicitly anti-regime.’ ”

On the issue of abortion rights, Vance has been explicit—and inconsistent. As a Senate candidate, he called himself “100-percent pro-life,” opposing abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and supported a national abortion ban. Recently, Vance, in effect imitating Trump’s present views, has praised the Supreme Court’s ruling that the legality of abortion should be decided by the states. (“Alabama’s going to make a different decision from California. That is a reasonable thing. And that’s how I think we build some bridges and have some respect for one another,” he told Fox News on July 15th.) He has also spoken in support of the “abortion pill” mifepristone’s availability. (“The Supreme Court made a decision saying that the American people should have access to that medication,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Donald Trump has supported that opinion. I support that opinion.”)

But the post-liberal resistance goes far beyond restricting legal abortion. The intellectual historian Mark Lilla spelled out its implications in a recent essay in The New York Review of Books. “The Catholic postliberals would like to establish (or reestablish) a more communitarian vision of the good society,” Lilla writes, “one in which democratic institutions would in some sense be subordinate to a superior, authoritative moral vision of the human good—which for many of them means the authority of the Catholic Church.” For Deneen, post-liberalism involves elevating “leaders who are part of the elite but see themselves as ‘class traitors’ ready to act as ‘stewards and caretakers of the common good’ ”—and to enact their views on abortion, marriage and divorce, euthanasia, the free exercise of religion, and other issues without the constraints of legal precedent or the democratic process. Evidently, Vance fits the bill. After learning of Trump’s choice of running mate, Deneen, in a statement, called Vance “a man of deep personal faith and integrity, a devoted family man, a generous friend, and a genuine patriot.”

God featured prominently at the Republican National Convention, and Vance’s childhood was recast as a redemption story; Vance, in his speech accepting the Vice-Presidential nomination, said proudly that his mother, Bev, who was in the convention center (seated next to the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson), has been nearly “ten years clean and sober.” The religious aspect of Vance’s American story may not be of particular interest to his running mate. But, if Trump is elected, it could bear on his public policy. After President Ronald Reagan took office, in 1981, he stocked his Administration with conservative Catholics steeped in the Church’s history of fervid anti-Communism—the Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig; the C.I.A. director, William J. Casey; and the national-security adviser, William P. Clark—who then helped shape policies backing Church-allied oligarchies in El Salvador and Nicaragua as necessary for the Cold War “containment” of Communism. Were the Trump-Vance campaign to prevail in November, the post-liberals who hope for a state informed by Catholic principles could perhaps have a channel to get their ideas into the West Wing. With Vance’s nomination, that process may already be under way.

Where is She when She's desperately needed?

The pond isn't the only one to love this hick from the stix. There was Martyn Wendell Jones in The Bulwark, with this a starter sample ...

One of many kickers in that piece ...

Vance’s specific ideas and the crowd he got them from are well known; for Vanity Fair, James Pogue did a good job summarizing the tech billionaire Peter Thiel influence nexus and the Thiel-funded coterie that Vance ran with online in a long feature two years ago. Pogue notes: 

"Vance and this New Right cohort, who are mostly so, so highly educated and well-read that their big problem often seems to be that they’re just too nerdy to be an effective force in mass politics, are not anti-intellectual. Vance is an intellectual himself, even if he’s not currently playing one on TV."

The modest thing I would add to this and other good reporting on Vance’s ideology is that the man doesn’t just have cracked beliefs but cracked instincts. Almost endearingly, he and his pals seem to think that workaday politics is an opportune context for doing a bit of grand theory, and further, that their theorizing will help them win over the citizens of the U.S.A., a country whose most notable contribution to philosophy is literally called pragmatism.

He not be a hillbilly ma, he be a barking mad fundamentalist Catholic nerd, probably off reading Cardinal Newman in his spare time as a warm up for gay bashing ...

Rumours that the orange swamp monster is already unhappy with his pick just adds to the frisson ...

Then there are more minor pleases that a reptile diet makes the pond miss out on ...Donald Trump Told Nephew to Let His Disabled Son ‘Just Die’

....Trump III also revealed that his uncle regularly used the N-word and made more insensitive comments about using money to help disabled people with medical expenses.
In another incident, Trump III reportedly went to the White House with disability advocates in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic to garner national support for caregivers. After the meeting, his uncle pulled him aside and expressed concern about money.
“Maybe those kinds of people should just die,” Trump III claimed the former president said, given “the shape they’re in, all the expenses.”
“I truly did not know what to say. He was talking about expenses. We were talking about human lives,” wrote Trump III. “For Donald, I think it really was about the expenses, even though we were there to talk about efficiencies, smarter investments, and human dignity.”

Charming man ...

But the best story came from the NY Times.

For those who prefer the Graudian, the paper did a gloss on the story ...Rupert Murdoch in secret legal battle with children over media empire – repori.

The original story by Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler was a ripper and essential reading for students of the house of Murdoch.

There was one stand out feature. The bid to change the trust was dubbed "Project Harmony", up there with Newspeak  and the whole war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength rag ... because never has so much disharmony featured in a story about harmony and the harmonious house of Murdoch in these troubled times...

The Secret Battle for the Future of the Murdoch Empire. Rupert Murdoch, the patriarch, has moved to change the family’s irrevocable trust to preserve his media businesses as a conservative force. Several of his children are fighting back

Well it's not so secret now and how the writers of Succession must be mourning the way that show ended too early ...

Rupert Murdoch is locked in a secret legal battle against three of his children over the future of the family’s media empire, as he moves to preserve it as a conservative political force after his death, according to a sealed court document obtained by The New York Times.
Mr. Murdoch, 93, set the drama in motion late last year, when he made a surprise move to change the terms of the Murdochs’ irrevocable family trust to ensure that his eldest son and chosen successor, Lachlan, would remain in charge of his vast collection of television networks and newspapers.
The trust currently hands control of the family business to the four oldest children when Mr. Murdoch dies. But he is arguing in court that only by empowering Lachlan to run the company without interference from his more politically moderate siblings can he preserve its conservative editorial bent, and thus protect its commercial value for all his heirs.
Those three siblings — James, Elisabeth and Prudence — were caught completely off-guard by their father’s effort to rewrite what was supposed to be an inviolable trust and have united to stop him. Lachlan has joined on Mr. Murdoch’s side. Remarkably, the ensuing battle has been playing out entirely out of public view.
Last month, the Nevada probate commissioner found that Mr. Murdoch could amend the trust if he is able to show he is acting in good faith and for the sole benefit of his heirs, according to a copy of his 48-page decision.
A trial to determine whether Mr. Murdoch is in fact acting in good faith is expected to start in September. Hanging in the balance will be the future of one of the most politically influential media companies in the English-speaking world.

Good faith? Good faith?!!! 

She's got a lot to answer for, but you can see why the story's a ripper ...

Representatives for the two sides declined to comment. Both have hired high-powered litigators. The three Murdoch siblings are represented by Gary A. Bornstein, the co-head of litigation at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Mr. Murdoch is represented by Adam Streisand, a trial lawyer at Sheppard Mullin who has been involved in estate disputes concerning Michael Jackson and Britney Spears.
Few media stories have been watched as closely as the succession battle over the Murdoch empire, both because of the irresistibly Shakespearean nature of the drama, and because of the empire’s outsize political influence. Mr. Murdoch’s decision in 2018 to formally designate Lachlan as his heir put to rest years of speculation over his wishes for the company.
What it did not do, though, was ensure that Mr. Murdoch’s wishes would survive him: The existing trust gives all four of his oldest children an equal voice in the company’s future.
The Murdoch family has been divided before. James and Elisabeth at one point competed with each other and Lachlan to eventually take over the company, and at various times they have clashed with one another and their father. James, who once helped run the company with Lachlan, left it in 2019 and now oversees an investment fund. Elisabeth runs a successful movie studio, Sister, and has for years sought to position herself as the “Switzerland” of the family, maintaining good relations with all. Prudence, Murdoch’s oldest child and the only one from his first marriage, has been the least involved in the family business and has remained the most private of the children.
But given Mr. Murdoch’s advanced age, this battle has all of the makings of a final fight for control of his sprawling media conglomerates, which own Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and major newspapers and television outlets in Australia and Britain. It has already driven a new wedge into the famously fractured family.
Politics, and power, are at the root of the struggle. Since Mr. Murdoch designed the trust nearly 25 years ago, the family’s political views have diverged sharply. During Donald J. Trump’s rise, Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan became more closely aligned, pushing the company’s most influential outlet, Fox News, further to the right, making the other three children increasingly uncomfortable.
Mr. Murdoch has called his effort to change the trust Project Harmony because he hoped that it might head off a looming family struggle when he dies, according to a person with knowledge of the family. But it has had the opposite effect.

There she blows, Project Harmony ...

Harmony? Harmony?!!!

You can see why the story is a ripper ...

After filing his petition to amend the trust, Mr. Murdoch met separately with Elisabeth and Prudence in London, hoping to win their support, this person said. Instead, they were furious. Elisabeth responded to the possibility with a string of expletives.
Days later, on Dec. 6, Mr. Murdoch’s representatives went ahead with the motion to make the changes at a hastily called special meeting of the trust in Reno, Nev. The representatives for the three children sought to adjourn the meeting and block the proposed changes but failed, according to the court decision.
The fight has left Mr. Murdoch estranged from three of his children in his twilight years. None of them attended his wedding to Elena Zhukova, his fifth wife, in California last month. (Lachlan did.)
In a handout image provided by News Corp, Rupert Murdoch and Elena Zhukova at their June 2024 wedding ceremony at his vineyard estate in Bel Air, Calif.Credit...News Corp., via Associated Press
Though the trust is irrevocable, it contains a narrow provision allowing for changes done in good faith and with the sole purpose of benefiting all of its members. Mr. Murdoch’s lawyers have argued that he is trying to protect James, Elisabeth and Prudence by ensuring that they won’t be able to moderate Fox’s politics or disrupt its operations with constant fights over leadership.
According to the court’s decision, Mr. Murdoch was concerned that the “lack of consensus” among his children “would impact the strategic direction at both companies including a potential reorientation of editorial policy and content.” It states that his intention was to “consolidate decision-making power in Lachlan’s hands and give him permanent, exclusive control” over the company.
The document makes it clear that Mr. Murdoch’s actions have pushed Elisabeth, Prudence and James into a joint posture against him. The siblings share legal counsel and are fighting to retain their voice in the company’s future, arguing that their father is trying to disenfranchise them. They say Mr. Murdoch’s move violates the spirit of the initial trust, enshrined in its “equal governance provision,” and that it was not done in good faith.
This will be one of the main issues in the trial. As the Nevada probate commissioner, Edmund Gorman Jr., wrote in his decision: “A rational fact finder could find that the determination that the Amendment was in the best interests of the beneficiaries was made with ‘[d]ishonesty of belief, purpose, or motive,’ i.e., in bad faith.”
The action is taking place in a Reno probate court, which is devoted to dealing with family trusts and estates. Nevada is a popular state for dynastic family trusts because of its favorable probate laws and privacy protections. The decision obtained by The Times contains a review of the facts by a probate commissioner whose role is to adjudicate cases.
The trust holds the family’s shares in Mr. Murdoch’s empire, which is now mainly divided between two companies: Fox, which includes Fox News and the Fox broadcast network, and News Corp, which holds his major newspapers.
All six of Mr. Murdoch’s children have an equal share of the trust’s equity. That includes Chloe and Grace, the two younger children he had with his third wife, Wendi Deng. But those two have no voting rights.
As of now, the voting rights are shared among Mr. Murdoch and his four oldest children through their own handpicked representatives on the trust’s board. But Mr. Murdoch has the ultimate control and cannot be outvoted. After he dies, Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence each get a single vote. As Mr. Murdoch put it in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2006: “If I go under a bus tomorrow, it will be the four of them who will have to decide which of the ones should lead them.”
The probate commissioner’s review of the facts shows that Mr. Murdoch is moving to expand Lachlan’s voting power to secure a majority and ensure that he cannot be challenged. The changes would not affect anyone’s ownership stake in the company.
To bolster his argument that he’s making the change in order to benefit all of his heirs, Mr. Murdoch has moved to replace two of his longtime executives as his personal representatives on the trust with two people with more independence. One is William P. Barr, an attorney general under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Trump, who was also a guest at Mr. Murdoch’s most recent wedding.
The court document shows that Mr. Barr is leading Mr. Murdoch’s effort to rewrite the trust. It quotes Mr. Barr’s statement when he introduced Mr. Murdoch’s move at the special meeting of the trust on Dec. 6. Mr. Murdoch, he said, “knew the companies and the environment better than anyone else and believed that Lachlan was in the best position to carry on that successful strategy.”

William Barr? How much better can the story get?

The pond will allow that it would have been better if the writers had somehow got Rudy into the storyline, but even the best Succession scribes would struggle with that one, while the actual plotline is way better than good enough ...

The basic contours of the trust date back to Murdoch’s divorce from his second wife, Anna Murdoch Mann, mother to James, Elisabeth and Lachlan, whom Mr. Murdoch divorced before marrying Ms. Deng in 1999.
Concerned about the destructive potential of a dynastic succession fight, Ms. Mann insisted that the divorce settlement give the four children equal control over the empire, people close to the family have said. As part of their agreement, Mr. Murdoch locked this provision in place permanently through an irrevocable trust.
But Mr. Murdoch came to see that provision as untenable after he placed Lachlan in charge of Fox and News Corp in 2019. A primary source of the problem was his younger son, James, who had been passed over in favor of Lachlan. In recent years, people close to James and his wife Kathryn have said that after Mr. Murdoch’s death they would consider joining with Elisabeth and Prudence to wrest control from Lachlan and tame the companies’ wilder right wing instincts.
James and Lachlan shared operating responsibility for the companies from 2015 to 2019, a relationship that frayed during the Trump administration, as the two split over Fox’s fawning treatment of Mr. Trump. Lachlan and his father dismissed James’s concerns, pointing to the network’s record ratings. James left the business following Lachlan’s ascension to chairman and chief executive in 2019, and stepped down from the News Corp board in 2020, citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets.”
James and his wife, Kathryn, a longtime climate change activist, remain occasional, and cautious, public critics of the family empire. After wildfires ravaged Australia in early 2020 they shared their “frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage” of climate change in a statement to The Daily Beast, noting “the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia.” After the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol in Washington, James indirectly criticized Fox News, saying that unnamed “outlets that propagate lies to their audience” had “unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces that will be with us for years.”
In the spring of 2019, Mr. Murdoch’s children — including the two children he had with Ms. Deng — received payouts of roughly $2 billion each from Murdoch’s sale of his movie studios and other assets to the Walt Disney Company. James and Kathryn announced at the time that they would devote part of that fortune to causes like climate change and combating “high-tech illiberalism.”
According to several of his associates, Mr. Murdoch has come to resent James’s criticisms and complaints, given that the family empire, which Mr. Murdoch built almost single-handedly, has made James and his siblings multibillionaires. The court document indicates that Mr. Murdoch’s representatives have referred to him in their own communications as the “troublesome beneficiary.”
James had differed with his father and brother over Fox News, arguing its play to Mr. Trump for short-term ratings gains would undercut its parent company’s long-term prospects, a fight he lost before parting ways with them.
Since leaving the company, James has been managing his own portfolio of investments, with a controlling interest in the company that runs Art Basel and major stakes in media companies in India.
It has always been unclear how serious James was about trying to make any move against Lachlan, or if he would have the backing of his sisters for such an effort. The fact that they have come together to preserve the trust suggests that he and his sisters are now solidly aligned against Lachlan, and that they may well try to oust him, or at least try to influence the direction of the company, after their father’s death.
Whether they will have the legal power to do so will soon be determined in a courtroom in Reno.

Credit where credit is richly due ...

Benjamin Mullin contributed reporting.
Jim Rutenberg is a writer at large for The Times and The New York Times Magazine and writes most often about media and politics. More about Jim Rutenberg
Jonathan Mahler, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, has been writing for the magazine since 2001. More about Jonathan Mahler

The pond is routinely ambivalent about the NY Times, but just as you'll never read about News Corp job cuts in the lizard Oz - it's the Graudian for that - so you'll never read this sort of ripping yarn ...

Have a few cartoons, just for the heck of it and to round the late arvo readings out...