Space tourism and economy market size is projected to surpass $900 billion by 2030 – Finbold – Finance in Bold

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Global space tourism or human spaceflight for recreational purposes was estimated in 2021 to be roughly worth around $598 million. In 2021, the space tourism sector made giant leaps with four complete space missions for recreational purposes, including a mission where only civilian passengers were on board.

With technological advances and more interest from the public, by 2030, space tourism is expected to become a $4 billion industry, while the entire space economy is projected to be worth $900 billion by 2030, according to a dossier published by Statista.

These numbers indicate that the projected growth for the space tourism market could develop at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 37.1% from 2022 to 2030. This high growth is pushed by high-net-worth individuals and a few companies taking the lions share of investments, like SpaceX, which had an influx of capital at a tune of $6.87 billion in 2021.

One of the significant breakthroughs that will enable further growth of space tourism is reusable vehicles, which should reduce the cost of space travel in the long run and help grow the suborbital flight market.

At the moment, Virgin Galactic offers space flights at a bargain price of $450,000, so expecting to go on a space flight soon may disappoint some enthusiasts.

Setbacks felt in the travel and tourism industry due to Covid-19 have also spilled over into the space industry, especially tourism. These impacts will probably prolong the time of space missions and the flow of investments, while the damage done to supply chains could have even more far-reaching effects on the entire industry in the long term.

Furthermore, customer demand damage that the pandemic did, along with the rise in inflation and rates, could further dampen peoples enthusiasm for space travel. Despite this, these two stocks may stand to benefit from the investments pouring into the space sector.

Ultimately, government budgets will play a key role in how fast the growth returns on track and continues this critical mission for humankind to explore space.

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Disclaimer: The content on this site should not be considered investment advice. Investing is speculative. When investing, your capital is at risk.

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Space tourism and economy market size is projected to surpass $900 billion by 2030 - Finbold - Finance in Bold

Nichelle Nichols remembered for her contributions to representation in media and space travel WABE – WABE 90.1 FM

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On the Monday edition of Closer Look, critically acclaimed author, filmmaker and Afro-futurist scholar Ytasha Womack discusses the legacy of trailblazing actress Nichelle Nichols. Nichols died Saturday, July 30, aged 89.

Known by many for her role as Nyota Uhura in the originalStar Trek series, Nichols played a pivotal role in the fabric of media during the Civil Rights Movement. The first Black woman to play a lead role in a television series and among the first women depicted as a scientist in space, her innovative contributions to the field opened a realm of possibility for women, people of color and youth. Nichols later became a key figure in recruiting women and minorities to work with NASA and helped mold the future of space travel.

You cant think about science fiction without her name coming up, without her image being one of significance, Womack said. Shes so multi-faceted. She took her role seriously and understood the impact. I think thats something creatives can be inspired by.

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Nichelle Nichols remembered for her contributions to representation in media and space travel WABE - WABE 90.1 FM

Billionaire Jared Isaacman Always Wanted to Be an Astronaut. Now Hes Leading a Civilian Space Mission. – Robb Report

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Ever since Jared Isaacman attended the Aviation Challenge summer camp at age 12, his goal was to flyfast. The New Jersey native, 39, is founder and CEO of Shift4; in 2020, his companys IPO made him a billionaire, but hed become a serious pilot long before then. He earned his pilots license in 2005, at age 22, and just four years laterafter moving through single- and multi-engine instrument ratings to jetsIsaacman broke the round-the-world speed record in a Citation CJ2. Attaining an experimental type rating allowed him to pilot L-39 Albatros and A-4 Skyhawk fighter jets and ultimately to form an aerobatic squadronthink Thunderbirds or Blue Angelscalled the Black Diamond Jet Team. Composed of Isaacman and six other pilots, the group flew more than 100 air shows between 2011 and 2014. We flew seven fighter jets, 18 inches apart, doing formation loops, rolls and other maneuvers, he says. The team included former USAF Thunderbirds and civilians like myself. It was a great brotherhood.

Isaacman cofounded Draken International in late 2011 and built it into the worlds largest private air force, with more than 100 fighter jets used to train pilots from all the main US military branches. Isaacmans favorite: The A-4N Skyhawk, which is basically the bad-guy jet that Viper and Jester flew in the original Top Gun.

But his latest obsession is space. Last year he funded the first all-civilian orbital mission, a three-day trip using SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets for transport. Isaacman and his Inspiration4 crew raised over $240 million for St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital, in Memphis, including $100 million from Isaacman himself. Next: Polaris Dawn, a new, five-day mission scheduled to lift off later this year. We caught up with the record-breaking civilian astronaut to talk mission prep and the future of citizen space travel.

Did you really ever expect to get to space as a civilian astronaut?

My passion for aviation and seeking out the most demanding and challenging flying I can do is in part because I did want to be an astronaut, starting when I was in kindergarten. But I did think that flying fighter jets and air shows would be as good as it gotI never imagined I would have a chance to lead a mission to orbit.

How will Polaris Dawn be different from Inspiration4?

With Inspiration4, I initially had no idea I would lead the first civilian mission to orbit Earth. The idea came together in a matter of weeks. Once I knew it was a first, I took the responsibility seriously. We assembled a strong crew and had meaningful objectives in space alongside what we wanted to accomplish here on Earth

Such as?

We wanted to show how nongovernment astronauts could be happy, healthy and productive in space. If Inspiration4 was successful, we knew it would open the door to more interesting missions. Now that the door is open, theres a lot for us to build in space to truly open up this frontier. Polaris is a series of technically demanding developmental missions that will conclude with the first flight of the brand-new launch vehicle Starship.

With Polaris Dawn, well fly higher than any human being has gone since we last walked on the moonthe highest Earth orbit ever flown. Well also test the first new spacesuit designed in 50 years with an EVA [extra vehicular activity, aka a space walk], as well as new operation protocols for pre-breathing [astronauts breathe pure oxygen before a space walk to avoid decompression sickness] and deploying cube satellites [miniature satellites used for remote sensing and telecommunications]. Finally, well communicate over a new constellation of laser-based Starlink satellites [being tested to ensure viability for outer-space communications]. Those will be key to long-range spaceflight.

How did you choose the crew?

The Polaris missions involve a lot more risk than Inspiration4, so the crew needed to meet the mission objectives. Polaris is a joint program with SpaceX, so we assembled two talented engineers at SpaceX that we knew from Inspiration4: Sarah Gillis, the SpaceX lead astronaut trainer, and Anna Menon, a SpaceX managing engineer and mission director of mission control who previously worked as a biomedical operator at NASA. We also have Scott Kidd Poteet, who I flew with for over a decade and who worked previously at Draken. He served as the mission director for Inspiration4.

Are there other missions planned after Polaris Dawn?

Polaris IIs objectives will be designed based on what we learn from Polaris Dawn and the un-crewed test flights of Starship. Polaris III will be the first crewed flight of Starship and the super-heavy booster. This vehicle is bigger and more powerful than the Saturn V rocket that put human beings on the moon a half century ago. We will test-fly it, and if successful, Starship will be the vehicle that will return human beings to the moon and ultimately bring the first humans to Mars. Starship could someday be the 737 of human spaceflight.

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Billionaire Jared Isaacman Always Wanted to Be an Astronaut. Now Hes Leading a Civilian Space Mission. - Robb Report

Can you solve this brain-busting optical illusion that stumped Elon Musk? – New York Post

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To solve this illusion would be a cubic feat.

Puzzle lovers are frazzling their noodles over this physics-defying optical illusion, in which stationery cubes appear to be spinning. The trick first went viral on Twitter in 2020 whereupon it notably caught the eye of Tesla boss Elon Musk the square-o-dynamic image is currently gaining traction amid the internets current optical illusion craze.

[Warning: Spoilers Below]

The visual jigsaw shows two cubes sitting in place; however, when the viewer clicks on the shapes, the screen flashes black and they appear to rotate like disco cubes. But heres the catch: the boxes were actually static the whole time.

The illusion is reportedly caused by a perception principle called the phi phenomenon, an illusion of movement created when a pair of stationary objects are placed side by side and illuminated rapidly, per the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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Unfortunately, the exact mechanism behind this optical parlor trick is yet unclear, writes the New World Encyclopedia. But most scientists believe its a physiological phenomenon rooted in the ways the brain and optic nerves communicate.

One of the most powerful motion illusions I've seen: The cubes appear to be rotating in opposite directions but they're not actually moving at all

Credit: @jagarikin pic.twitter.com/RgUFskZbZU

Nevertheless, the illusion has caused a stir on social media and not just among the hoi polloi: Even SpaceXs Elon Musk was impressed with the corneal confuser, notably replying Wow to a tweet detailing the illusion in 2020.

There have also been numerous variations on the moving cube trick, including one posted in May by a Japanese illusion aficionado who goes by Jagarikin on social media. In it, the illusion of movement is created by the fact that theyre situated on a pinwheeling black-and-white circle.

In the realm of illusory motion, few images compare to this purple-and-yellow pattern shared last month, which looks as though its both three-dimensional and moving, but is, in fact, stationary and flat.

Not content with merely feeling like you have the spins? Take a gander at this trippy image, which reportedly fools the viewer into thinking that they have gone colorblind.

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Can you solve this brain-busting optical illusion that stumped Elon Musk? - New York Post

Elon Musk’s Starlink Pricing Reportedly Slashed By 50% In France But There’s A Catch – Benzinga

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SpaceXs Starlink high-speed satellite internet connection is now available at a bargain, Tesla North reported, citing emails from the company sent to users shared on aReddit thread.

Starlinks monthly use fee is reduced from EUR 99 ($100.64) to EUR 50, the report said. This huge reduction, however, comes with new soft data caps on bandwidth usage, as per a new fair use policy, it added.

The fair use policy stipulates that all users will continue to have unlimited data, with priority given to users consuming 250GB data or less, the report said, citing an email sent to French customers of Starlink. Those whose data usage exceeds 250GB/month may experience slower speeds during periods of network congestion.

To regain priority, these users can opt to buy additional data at EUR 10 per 100 GB, the report said.

Related Link: Elon Musk Applauds His SpaceX and Starlink Ventures Accomplishing These Feats

The new pricing and related changes will take effect from August 3 and the new fair use policy will be implemented in October.

SpaceX reportedly said in the email this pilot program will serve to connect the greatest number of people without degrading the quality of service.

The long-term payoff will be the same Starlink service at half the price, it added.

SpaceX and its subsidiaryStarlink are led by Tesla, Inc. TSLA CEO Elon Musk.

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Elon Musk's Starlink Pricing Reportedly Slashed By 50% In France But There's A Catch - Benzinga

Elon Musk hopes for peace & respect between the U.S. and China – Teslarati

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Elon Musk said that he hopes for peace and respect between the U.S. and China. His answer was in response to a question asked by a Tesla shareholder at Teslas Annual Shareholder Meeting.

One of the questions asked by Tesla shareholders via Say.com and upvoted was how is Tesla viewing the geopolitical risk between the U.S. and China. Recently, U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, took a trip to Taiwan and China isnt taking this too well.

Her visit has already affected Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd (CATL) which delayed its North American battery factory plans until September or October.

When he first saw the question, Elon jokingly asked,

Now what could possibly go wrong in answering this question?

Teslas factory in China is its largest export hub and China has been very supportive of Teslas ambitions in the nation. However, China and the U.S. are having a bit of tension as of late. While I personally dont agree with Chinas stance on a lot of things, I understand that Elon Musk and Tesla asked a very loaded question.

Let me just say that I hope for peace and respect.

One of the attendees advised Elon to move to the next question which I think was wise.

After all, he is Elon Musk and all too often, his words get twisted by those with their own agendas and narratives to spin.

Im adding my thoughts on this and I agree that peace and respect are important. I also think that this drama between the two nations (and yes, I feel its drama) hurts both nations and the people of these nations more than it does the leaders or their own egos.

At the end of the day, we all have to live our lives and these political tensions affect how we live our lives. War is, in my opinion, unnecessary and harmful. Like Elon, I too, hope for peace and respect.

Disclaimer: Johnna is long Tesla.

Id love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or see a typo, you can email me at johnna@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @JohnnaCrider1

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Elon Musk hopes for peace & respect between the U.S. and China - Teslarati

Twitter responds to Elon Musk’s claims, China fires ‘provocative’ missiles near Taiwan, and basketballer Brittney Griner sentenced in Russia as it…

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That's according to Japan's Defence MinisterNobuo Kishi, who said it involved five ballistic missiles which were fired by China as part of an unprecedented live-fire military drill in six areas that surround Taiwan.

The show of force comes a day after a visit by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the self-ruled island, which Beijing regards as its sovereign territory.

The White House has condemned China's decision to launch live missiles near Taiwan as "irresponsible" and said it expected Beijing would continue to react in the coming days.

"Beijing's provocative actions are significant escalation and its long standing attempt to change the status quo," said national security spokesperson John Kirby.

China's state broadcaster CCTV says the drills will run until Sunday.

Images released by the Chinese military show what appear to be long-range live-fire drills from undisclosed locations.

If you want to learn more about the dispute between China and Taiwan, as well as the Australian government's position, have a read here:

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Twitter responds to Elon Musk's claims, China fires 'provocative' missiles near Taiwan, and basketballer Brittney Griner sentenced in Russia as it...

How the Claremont Institute Became a Nerve Center of the American Right – The New York Times

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Some of the most pointed criticisms of Claremonts recent prominence have come from scholars with similar backgrounds. I think theres a story here about the insularity of the conservative world, says Laura Field, a political philosopher and scholar in residence at American University, who has published several sharp critiques of Claremont over the last year in The Bulwark, a publication started by Never Trump conservatives. Claremont has been pretty much unchallenged by broader academia, Field told me, as many academics, liberals but also other conservatives, tend to consider political engagement in general, and Claremonts ideas and public manners in particular, beneath them. In contrast, Claremont scholars understand the power of a certain kind of approach to politics thats sensational, she said. Field pointed me to a recent exception, a small panel discussion in July, in Washington, in which Kesler took part. Kesler defended the upsurge of populism as pro-constitutional, and so, he said, even though it takes an angry form in many cases, it was difficult to condemn it simply as an eruption of democratic irrationalism. Bryan Garsten, a political scientist at Yale, responded that it was very generous to interpret the current populism as erupting in favor of an older understanding of constitutionalism, but even if that was partly true, he questioned whether populism could be expected to generate a new appreciation for constitutionalism or whether it wouldnt do just the reverse. It is, Garsten said, a dangerous game to try to ride the tiger.

Nonetheless, Claremonts recent successes have made for effective fund-raising. Klingenstein, Claremonts chairman, who runs a New York investment firm, was, as recently as 2019, Claremonts largest donor, providing $2.5 million, around half its budget at the time. Claremonts budget is now around $9 million, and Klingenstein is no longer providing a majority of the funding. Theyre increasingly less reliant on me, and thats a good thing, Klingenstein said. (On Steve Bannons War Room podcast on July 15, he noted that the budget kept going up.) Other big recent donors, according to documents obtained by Rolling Stone, include the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation and the Bradley Foundation, two of the most prominent conservative family foundations in the country.

Many Claremont scholars are still supportive of Trump but have also cultivated relationships with other figures of potential future importance, especially Ron DeSantis, perhaps envisioning a day when Trumpist conservatives find a more dependable and effective leader. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, which has many Claremont graduates on its faculty and a robust presence in Washington, conducted an event with DeSantis last February at which he called DeSantis one of the most important people living. According to The Tampa Bay Times, Hillsdale has helped DeSantis with his efforts to reshape the Florida education system, participating in textbook reviews and a reform of the states civics-education standards. But Claremonters are not entirely willing to cast Trump aside. Trump is loved by a lot of Americans, Kesler told me, and youre not going to succeed in repudiating him and hold the party together, hold the movement together, and win. He said that the future lay probably with Trumpism, some version of Trump and his agenda, but not necessarily with Trump himself. And thats because I dont know that he could win. The argument in 2016 was, Were taking a chance on this guy, were taking a flyer, Kesler said. And I just dont think theyre willing to take a second flyer.

Harry Jaffa used to ask what it was that American conservatism was conserving. The answer was generally ideological American conservatism was not about preserving a social structure, as in the old European societies, but rather the American idea, a set of principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. What appears unsettled at Claremont is the foggy question of whether or not a republic is too far gone to be conserved, William Voegeli, the senior editor, wrote in the spring issue. Which would be the bigger mistake to keep fighting to preserve a republic that turns out to be beyond resuscitation or to give up defending one whose vigor might yet be restored? Voegeli, at 67, comes down on the side of the central conservative impulse, which is that because valuable things are easy to break but hard to replace, every effort should be made to conserve them while they can be conserved. But he acknowledges that some of his younger colleagues appear ready to abandon conservatism for counterrevolution, in order to re-establish Americas founding principles. Kesler was sanguine. We need a kind of revival of the spirit of constitutionalism, which will then have to be fought out, through laws and lawsuits and all the normal daily give and take of politics, he said. Thats what Im in favor of. And its moving in the right direction.

Tom Merrill, of American University, also studied Jaffas work and believes there is much in his teachings to appeal to both liberals and conservatives. I think the country is so divided right now that if you had a Republican candidate who was like, You know, we messed up in a bunch of ways but were mostly pretty good, I think that there would be a big middle lane, and it would defuse some of this anger. The American right at present, Merrill argued, was in need of guidance and leadership that could not come from the traditional establishment, which voters had rejected. There is a movement out there that isnt the Republican Party, that needs people to speak for and sort of shape the message, he said. In the past, that had meant movement conservatives cordoning off the undemocratic, un-American elements on the far right. Claremont could have filled that role, he argued, but the central challenge facing the right is, Can someone take those themes and articulate them in a grown-up way?

Some at Claremont have expressed a desire to work with liberals, yet their strategy seems to suggest the opposite. When I asked Williams what Claremonts ideal future would look like, he cited the deconstruction of the administrative state. He told me recently that the June Supreme Court ruling constraining the E.P.A. is a step in the right direction, and he would like to see Congress get back into the act of legislating instead of delegating rule making to bureaucracy, a long-term and complicated process involving legislators learning rules that they havent used in 30 years. Prudence, he added, dictated that change should be incremental. Though I can anticipate your next question, which is, You guys talk like counterrevolutionaries, Williams said. One of the goals of the more polemical stuff is to wake up our fellow conservatives.

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How the Claremont Institute Became a Nerve Center of the American Right - The New York Times

What the Woke Left and the Alt-Right Share by Slavoj iek – Project Syndicate

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Russia's war in Ukraine has shown the defining political fault lines of our age to be fundamentally bogus. While the Kremlin represents the alt-right, and Europe stands for the politically correct liberal establishment, both sides ultimately are fighting over the spoils of a global capitalist system that they control.

LJUBLJANA The Canadian psychologist and alt-right media fixture Jordan Peterson recently stumbled onto an important insight. In a podcast episode titled Russia vs. Ukraine or Civil War in the West?, he recognized a link between the war in Europe and the conflict between the liberal mainstream and the new populist right in North America and Europe.

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Although Peterson initially condemns Russian President Vladimir Putins war of aggression, his stance gradually morphs into a kind of metaphysical defense of Russia. Referencing Dostoevskys Diaries, he suggests that Western European hedonist individualism is far inferior to Russian collective spirituality, before duly endorsing the Kremlins designation of contemporary Western liberal civilization as degenerate. He describes postmodernism as a transformation of Marxism that seeks to destroy the foundations of Christian civilization. Viewed in this light, the war in Ukraine is a contest between traditional Christian values and a new form of communist degeneracy.

This language will be familiar to anyone familiar with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbns regime, or with the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. As CNNs John Blake put it, that day marked the first time many Americans realized the US is facing a burgeoning White Christian nationalist movement, which uses Christian language to cloak sexism and hostility to Black people and non-White immigrants in its quest to create a White Christian America. This worldview has now infiltrated the religious mainstream so thoroughly that virtually any conservative Christian pastor who tries to challenge its ideology risks their career.

The fact that Peterson has assumed a pro-Russian, anti-communist position is indicative of a broader trend. In the United States, many Republican Party lawmakers have refused to support Ukraine. J.D. Vance, a Donald Trump-backed Republican Senate candidate from Ohio, finds it insulting and strategically stupid to devote billions of resources to Ukraine while ignoring the problems in our own country. And Matt Gaetz, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Florida, is committed to ending US support for Ukraine if his party wins control of the chamber this November.

But does accepting Petersons premise that Russias war and the alt-right in the US are platoons of the same global movement mean that leftists should simply take the opposite side? Here, the situation gets more complicated. Although Peterson claims to oppose communism, he is attacking a major consequence of global capitalism. As Marx and Engels wrote more than 150 years ago in the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

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This observation is studiously ignored by leftist cultural theorists who still focus their critique on patriarchal ideology and practice. Yet surely the critique of patriarchy has reached its apotheosis at precisely the historical moment when patriarchy has lost its hegemonic role that is, when market individualism has swept it away. After all, what becomes of patriarchal family values when a child can sue her parents for neglect and abuse (implying that parenthood is just another temporary and dissolvable contract between utility-maximizing individuals)?

Of course, such leftists are sheep in wolves clothing, telling themselves that they are radical revolutionaries as they defend the reigning establishment. Today, the melting away of pre-modern social relations and forms has already gone much further than Marx could have imagined. All facets of human identity are now becoming a matter of choice; nature is becoming more and more an object of technological manipulation.

The civil war that Peterson sees in the developed West is thus a chimera, a conflict between two versions of the same global capitalist system: unrestrained liberal individualism versus neo-fascist conservativism, which seeks to unite capitalist dynamism with traditional values and hierarchies.

There is a double paradox here. Western political correctness (wokeness) has displaced class struggle, producing a liberal elite that claims to protect threatened racial and sexual minorities in order to divert attention from its members own economic and political power. At the same time, this lie allows alt-right populists to present themselves as defenders of real people against corporate and deep state elites, even though they, too, occupy positions at the commanding heights of economic and political power.

Ultimately, both sides are fighting over the spoils of a system in which they are wholly complicit. Neither side really stands up for the exploited or has any interest in working-class solidarity. The implication is not that left and right are outdated notions as one often hears but rather that culture wars have displaced class struggle as the engine of politics.

Where does that leave Europe? The Guardians Simon Tisdall paints a bleak but accurate picture:

Putins aim is the immiseration of Europe. By weaponising energy, food, refugees and information, Russias leader spreads the economic and political pain, creating wartime conditions for all. A long, cold, calamity-filled European winter of power shortages and turmoil looms. Freezing pensioners, hungry children, empty supermarket shelves, unaffordable cost of living increases, devalued wages, strikes and street protests point to Sri Lanka-style meltdowns. An exaggeration? Not really.

To prevent a total collapse into disorder, the state apparatus, in close coordination with other states and relying on local mobilizations of people, will have to regulate the distribution of energy and food, perhaps resorting to administration by the armed forces. Europe thus has a unique chance to leave behind its charmed life of isolated welfare, a bubble in which gas and electricity prices were the biggest worries. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently toldVogue, Just try to imagine what Im talking about happening to your home, to your country. Would you still be thinking about gas prices or electricity prices?

Hes right. Europe is under attack, and it needs to mobilize, not just militarily but socially and economically as well. We should use the crisis to change our way of life, adopting values that will spare us from an ecological catastrophe in the coming decades. This may be our only chance.

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What the Woke Left and the Alt-Right Share by Slavoj iek - Project Syndicate

Bodies Bodies Bodies Review: Euphoria With Knives – The New York Times

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Perhaps best known for releasing jaw-dropping original films like Moonlight and Midsommar, the film distributor A24 is also in the business of glamorizing youthful nihilism. Its co-produced HBO series Euphoria, where teenage sex bombs dress up their thousand-yard stares in glittery eye shadow, is an easy example. Now so is Bodies Bodies Bodies, a horror film directed by Halina Reijn thats bloated with pompous irony. This is a movie perfectly tailored to one of A24s key demographics: bougie 25-year-olds who value branding over substance.

Its not that Bodies Bodies Bodies is bad. Its visually appealing and nicely acted. But this film is not special, and like its shallow characters, it is persistently unaware of its own inanity. Stocked with fresh talent Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), Rachel Sennott (Shiva Baby) and Chase Sui Wonders (Generation) are among the glitzy cast this could be a scathing satire. Instead, Bodies Bodies Bodies is so intent on oozing cool-kid apathy that it serves up a whole lot of nothing.

If youre a fan of slashers, youll recognize the plot: Young, hot people get trapped in a remote locale and are picked off one by one. The hotties in question are a group of twenty-somethings embittered by lifelong friendship (save a Tinder date played by the tragically underutilized Lee Pace); the locale is a faraway mansion. Fresh out of rehab, the flighty Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) is eager to show off her new love, Bee (Bakalova), to her estranged besties.

Unfortunately for Bee, Sophies friends and probably Sophie herself are heinous. Sophies sobriety gets a tepid Yay! before her buds glug down champagne and snort up coke. Petty arguments and egoism underscore every interaction. David (Pete Davidson), whose parents own the estate, is particularly bothered by Paces character, Greg, who he insists is not, like, that hot. (Spoiler alert: He is.) The film gets its name and premise from a game the gang plays, a sort of manhunt-meets-mafia that kicks off with everyone taking a shot and hitting the person next to them in the face. In case you didnt get it, these are not good people.

The only thing that really sets Bodies Bodies Bodies apart is its place in the A24 hype machine, where it doubles as a 95-minute advertisement for cleavage and Charli XCXs latest single. Overused Twitterspeak like the words toxic, narcissist and gaslighting have been lampooned in plenty of other projects, as has the fragility of well-heeled young people. There are certainly other slashers in this vein. The genre persists, in part, because audiences love to watch fat cats go splat.

These privileged prats get their comeuppance, sure, but the moral lands with a whimper rather than a bang. This is little more than a movie about terrible rich people that was made so other rich people could laugh at it and think, Thank God Im not terrible. Everyone else will just have to stomach the cost of the movie ticket.

Bodies Bodies BodiesRated R for bodies, bodies, bodies. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters.

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Bodies Bodies Bodies Review: Euphoria With Knives - The New York Times

What is the Vaccine for Political Nihilism? – Harvard Political Review

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From the point each of us checks into the political arena, we are vulnerable to, what I call, political nihilism. It is born out of the insurmountability of our current bleak political, economic and societal situation. The prospect of almost incomprehensible odds alongside the back-to-back catastrophes weve all endured I imagine, has the capacity to put any sane person in a state of political nihilism: A mode of thinking that perceives politics as a meaningless endeavor.

A symptom of this virus is an increasing amount of hopelessness. No hope to solve ecological devastation; no hope to acknowledge, let alone heal, harshly infected wounds of injustice; no hope for people to take political and economic power from multinational corporations to foster democratic rule.

Those of us who are politically active are always under threat of succumbing to political nihilism and the intractable despair with which it infects us. Activists, year after year achieving only smaller and smaller victories, are constantly hounded by this feeling that a genuine social transformation is simply not possible. Similarly, when we ourselves harbor the belief that reform is implausible, we put ourselves on track to check out of the political arena.

Logically, the ultimate outcome of political nihilism is political apathy: complete indifference toward the current political system. A survey following the 2020 presidential race concluded that twice as many non-voters than voters agree that It makes no difference who is elected president. Despite record turnout that year, 80 million Americans stayed home, even in the face of a pandemic requiring a decisive governmental response, economic collapse, and several police murders. Non-voters were also more likely to say that the media cares more about profit than the truth, that the economy is rigged for the wealthy, and that the majority of issues discussed in D.C dont affect them personally.

This virus of political nihilism flourishes in the debt economy. The average American holds a little over $90,000 in debt. Whether it be credit card delinquencies, student loans, or mortgage payments, such debts have shackled everyday people since the mid-20th century rise of American neoliberalism a political philosophy that characterizes the private marketplace as the fundamental source of national prosperity. Consequently, for 40 years, the U.S political economy has been dominated by military spending, privatization, and tax cuts, prioritizing the whims of wealthy elites while leaving everyday Americans overburdened with the inflated expenses of life. In doing so, neoliberalism neglects issues that might improve quality of life, including those that could bring Americans back into politics.

Furthermore, neoliberalism is more than just a political or economic system: It is an ideology motivated only by profit maximization. As such, corporations and businesses often have little regard for the financial capacity of everyday people, inevitably contributing to the debt spiral in which many Americans find themselves. The result? Widespread social misery. The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that debt burden increases the risk of attempted suicide. Student loans are discouraging young people from buying homes and having children. Unsecured debt has also been implicated as a correlate of voter disengagement. It is, thus, clear that the debt economy is amplifying a new culture of despair that puts the future on the backburner.

So, what is the vaccine for political nihilism? One of the most prophetic voices of our time, brilliant scholar and public intellectual Dr. Cornel West, describes himself as a prisoner of hope. As Dr. West puts it, Hope is a verb, not a noun, its motion and movement, its active. Blind optimism without action is purposeless, but blind despondency has the potential to cause irrevocable damage. We must, instead, West claims, adopt actionable hope.

Cornel West comes from the Black prophetic tradition. He prides himself on coming from the same vein of thought as Fredrick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois, Ida B Wells, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. These figures never needed empirical evidence to decide whether they wanted to take a stand against illegitimate power structures. These figures did their work not by checking the polls but rather by listening to those who were suffering. After all, the condition of truth is to allow that suffering to speak.

The remedy of active hope is being proposed today. Dr. Joanna Macy, faculty member at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and Dr. Chris Johnstone MD are rereleasing a revised version of their book Active Hope in the summer of 2022. They define active hope as finding, and offering, our best response to global issues, especially in this moment of crisis. When our responses are guided by the intention to act, it draws a semblance of meaning essential to our well being.

Some inchoate modern social movements have chosen to take this vaccine of active hope. Fifteen to 26 million people in the U.S. participated in George Floyd protests. Medicare For All rallies swept 50 of the nations cities on July 24, 2021. Most recently union workers at Kellogg, John Deere, and student workers on university campuses straightened up their backs for better conditions. Whether or not we check out, struggles like these will always push for progress.

Such efforts are overlooked as soon as the media lets go of the story. But it is of utmost importance that we as journalists, activists, and citizens constantly wrestling in the political arena prevent the struggle for change from falling out of the social consciousness. Recognizing rising cynicism and despair while simultaneously responding with active hope is the most difficult existential dilemma we face.

Active hope is a great catalyst and inspiration to involve ourselves in the struggle. However, to be a hope takes a deep commitment; to be a hope takes tremendous fortitude. Political battles will include political losses, many of which will cut deep. But daring to struggle is daring to win. And if we dare not to struggle, we dont deserve to win. Active hope implies that peace and justice only are as possible as our willingness to fight for it.

We must acknowledge that our societys quest for revolutionary transformation is inseparable from a radical tradition of faith. Moving headstrong exclusively in the direction of the rational or logical will only lead us down the rabbit hole of political nihilism, especially in a profit-motivated society that feeds debt and precipitates despair. If there is any chance at a better world, it will not be because the numbers are in our favor, but because of the durability of our perseverance. Only one question remains: Are we up for the challenge?

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What is the Vaccine for Political Nihilism? - Harvard Political Review

Children of Men Is the Movie We Need to Get Us Through Turbulent Times – Goalcast

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After I saw Children of Men in the theater as a sixteen-year-old in 2006, I fell into a depression and cried in my room for three days.

While that may not exactly be a glowing review, the movie both touched and unnerved me deeply.

Its beautiful cinematography was at once breathtaking and heart-rending, with the camera slowly panning over a landscape of a broken society scrambling both for survival and humanity.

The images I saw on screen felt like a premonition.

Set in a not-so-distant future in which the human race has become infertile, the film opens on a scene of the protagonist, with social and political themes already dominating headlines.

Between the threats of environmental degradation, fossil fuel wars, the then-prominent narrative of terrorist hostility toward the U.S., and resulting animosity toward immigrants and minorities, I couldnt help but feel as though what I saw in the film was more than fiction.

It was like looking into a crystal ball and seeing the future. As a thoughtful and sensitive person, I felt so little hope about the world I was inheriting.

And yet

In her book, Hope in the Dark, writer Rebecca Solnit characterizes hope as giving ones self to the future, thus making the present inhabitable. Good thing, because our present reality is often times nearly uninhabitable.

Our children are killed in their schools. Innocent people face police brutality for their race, gender, or sexual orientation. Womens rights are being openly threatened in industrialized nations in a way they havent been since the work of the suffragettes. People are getting sicker. Food is getting scarcer. Our world is getting hotter.

It would be so easy to excuse ourselves as we fall into despair. Yet some of us hope, if only to make the present inhabitable.

Hope stems from a darkness as much of the womb as of the grave, Solnit writes. To hope is to balance on the edge between symbolic birth and death, to assert existential freedom as well as the recognition of infinite variability.

As real people in a real world, this means that, yes, we may now find ourselves plunged into darkness. Butwe are the ones who choose what we see when we turn on the light.

Solnits description of dual-natured hope resembles Nietzsches concept of nihilism. Nihilism for Nietzsche was a response to the inevitable contradiction of the Christian-Moral worldview: a will to truthfulness that eventually finds its metaphysical foundation to be untrue. This realization culminates in the onset of metaphysical uncertainty; the death of God.

For us, we sense intrinsically that the direction weve been going, the assumptions weve been making, dont hold the promise ascribed by our predecessors. Although we feel this awareness subtly gnawing at our consciousness, we are afraid to stop, turn, and look it in the face. To do so would be very literally to look in the face of death.

What would we see there? The corpse of manifest destiny? Of industry? Of unending growth and prosperity, every man the master of his castle? The death of a vision of perpetual convenience and ease? The official death knell of monotheism and the comforts we still cling to in its wake?

Fundamentally, Nietzsche argued that we would see the death of our identity itself. No longer can we be passive receivers of culture, resources, and ontology. There is no one above us manufacturing it for us. Our truths are no longer self-evident.

Modern individuals are thrust into a central antagonism in that we are notto esteem what we know, and not to beallowedany longer to esteem the lies we should like to tell ourselves (10). That is, we are so frightened by the sudden realization that we are masters of our own reality instead of subject to the omnipotent paternal figure on whom we previously relied that we are temporarily barred from social and moral agency.

This is the stage of paralysis we face when the lights have just gone out.

For Nietzsche, this is nihilism.

In its most positive form, nihilism is a coping stage, a mourning period in which we pine for the metaphysical certainty of unconscious devotion to divine will. We can see this so clearly in the schism in American politics; one side clings to order and meaning, the other eschews it, offering nothing to replace it but relativism.

This stage can be a path into despair and further existential paralysis, or it can be the jumping-off point for engaging in the creation of a transformative, emancipatory, and participatory reality.

In other words, not God, not government, but we as the collective creative consciousness determine our fate. If a movie can communicate this much wisdom, its seriously worth a watch.

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Children of Men Is the Movie We Need to Get Us Through Turbulent Times - Goalcast

Port: The most patriotic thing you could do today? Stop listening to idiots – Grand Forks Herald

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MINOT, N.D. On a recent episode of Stephen Colbert's talk show, Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama who is today one of the hosts of a wildly popular left-wing podcast, said Republicans support "a bunch of terrible stuff that makes life worse and shorter for a lot of people."

He said the Republican slogan for the midterms ought to be, "We'll make life worse and shorter."

Meanwhile, across the widening chasm that is America's political and cultural divide, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, during a recent broadcast of his nightly show, accused Democrats of having "given up on the country and given up on the people who live here."

Democrats believe there's "no future worth having," he ranted.

"They don't care about you at all," he said.

Are these men right?

Is American politics dominated by Republicans, who want us to be miserable and die, and Democrats, who have descended into nihilism?

Well, no. That's not right at all. And yet, millions upon millions of us listen to people like these men who fill up television screens and social media threads and hours of podcasts hurling invective across the political divide.

They're evil.

We're good.

No wonder our nation is dysfunctional.

Another example is the recent kerfuffle over the PACT Act , which saw Democrats and Republicans at odds over funding for medical care for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits. It should have been an easy bill to pass, even despite debates over the amount of funding and whether or not that funding out to be discretionary or nondiscretionary.

Grownups should be able to resolve those sort of differences easily. Instead, we got Jon Stewart cursing at people on television while Republicans and Democrats jockeyed to convince Americans that their opponents want veterans to die slow, cruel deaths from cancer.

There is no "loyal opposition."

Dissent, in a democracy, should be considered a form of patriotism (except when motivated by rank partisanship). In today's politics, disagreeing with one side just means you're evil to them.

And here you readers are, nodding along, thinking I'm basically right, in a quaint sort of way, but maybe also thinking that Carlson has it right (or Lovett, depending on your biases), and that somehow today's Democrats (or Republicans!) are different. That they really are horrendous, uncaring troglodytes.

Carlson and Lovett and the legions of other hate-spewing pundits thrive off of people like you. It's how they make their living.

Yet they're wrong. And you're wrong, if you believe them.

Democrats haven't given up on America. Republicans don't want people to be miserable or dead. Conservatism isn't bigotry, liberals aren't trying to turn your children into transgender communists, and nobody stole the 2020 election.

Most of us, whatever our politics, have universal goals, mostly concerning peace and prosperity, and only differ on the paths we ought to take to get there.

I'm not even sure that the braying reactionaries who package and sell this stuff to you really believe it, though they sure believe in the paychecks, and they believe it will get your attention. They believe it will draw your ears and your eyes and perhaps your votes, and they care very little that what they're saying is tearing our society apart.

If there are nihilists in American politics, it's them.

The only thing we have to do to improve things is to stop listening. Stop tuning in. And stop imputing to anyone who disagrees with you the worst possible motivations.

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Port: The most patriotic thing you could do today? Stop listening to idiots - Grand Forks Herald

Rental unit: Out of the Blue dir. by Dennis Hopper – Style Weekly

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I first saw this 1980 film on a grainy old VHS copy from Video Fan on Strawberry Street when I was in high school, and remember being a little depressed by it, while also thinking it was a low budget mess. My how times change.

For so long this movie was lost and hard to find, but after a recent 4k scan restoration championed by actresses Natasha Lyonne and Chlo Sevigny, the film looks better than it ever has. I found myself enjoying (and often laughing) at the brave improvisational acting and oddball writing and editing choices, which director and star Dennis Hopper later said were inspired by Abstract Expressionism and the video work of his friend, artist Bruce Conner. Critics called the movie a spiritual successor to Hoppers early megahit, Easy Rider, showing how hippie optimism plunged into addiction and late 70s nihilism. But I mostly think of it as a coming-of-age, punk rock classic and tomboy actress Linda Manz finest moment, which is plenty enough reason to check out the new version.

Some back story: The project originally started out as an afterschool TV special being shot in Vancouver with Canadian tax shelter funds. It was about a runaway teen played by the spunky child actress, Manz (the memorable narrator who improvised her lines in Terrence Malicks Days of Heaven) and starring Raymond Burr as her therapist. However, the original director and writer got fired two weeks into the production, and thats when things got whacky. Enter the wild-eyed, Hollywood exile, Hopper, still in the throes of a major drug-and-alcohol addiction of bejeezus-belt proportions and not having directed since his underrated box office bomb, The Last Movie (1971). If you dont know much about Hopper, he was a brilliant still photographer with a great eye, had superb taste in collecting modern art, and could be a supremely talented actor when focused. But he was also known in Hollywood as a difficult human trainwreck, exhibiting a feral, almost Charlie Manson-like intensity, especially during the 70s.

Intrigued by the natural acting abilities of Manz, one of films greatest tomboys, Hopper rewrote the script over the weekend while wearing out his friend Neil Youngs album, Rust Never Sleeps, which is where the new title Out of the Blue comes from; the song My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" also would be quoted years later in Kurt Cobains suicide note. By the time Hopper was finished, the story had been transformed into a bleak meditation on youthful alienation and the burgeoning punk rock ethos, with fuddy-duddy Raymond Burrs part cut out almost entirely and repeated violent, flashback scenes of a drunken Hopper, playing Manz father, driving a semi-truck into a school bus full of howling children. Hopper somehow managed to shoot and cut the film in around 10 weeks.

Manz plays CeBe, a street-smart young girl who acts tough to hide her insecurity and despair about her alcoholic, ex-con father, Hopper, just released from prison for killing the schoolbus kids, and her junkie mom (Shannon Farrell). CeBe idolizes Elvis Presley and Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and late at night, chants mantras into the otherworldly CB radio of her dad's mangled truck, saying things like subvert normality and kill all hippies. A juvenile delinquent, she roams the streets getting accosted while finding her sense of family within the punk scene, jamming along with real Vancouver punk/New Wave band, Pointed Sticks, who get a nice cameo. But there are also scenes in the film that are truly weird and disturbing; Hopper often appears to not be acting as he incoherently rambles, his eyelids half-open, or rages like King Lear in close scenes with Manz that can feel like revelatory improvisation exercises by two method actors.

As a director, Hopper shows his underlying talent not only with the gritty photography (his early black-and-white photos are some of the best of the 60s) but also by a displaying real trust in his young actress to inhabit the part. The real power of "Out of the Blue" is in Manz disassociated performance, which feels utterly authentic. She would later say the role was very close to who she was as a person; she grew up on the streets of New York, her single mother working as a maid in the World Trade Center. Sadly, this would be her only lead role (as an adult, she had a supporting role in Harmony Korrines Gummo) yet she always shows great instincts and comedic timing, as well as the uncanny ability to express honest emotion onscreen, from rage and grief-stricken loneliness to the giddiness of childhood play. Here, her characters embroidered, jean-jacket look feels like a perfect time capsule; its a shame nobody ever made a movie back then pairing Manz and Jackie Early Haley, whose Bad News Bears character Kelly feels like a spiritual cousin to CeBe. Manz died from lung cancer in 2020.

Another thing that really jumped out this time was how much the films controversial closing scene [too explicit to describe here] foreshadows Hoppers role as Frank Booth in David Lynchs masterpiece, Blue Velvet. Its all right there. No wonder Hopper begged Lynch to give him the role of the psychotic killer, allegedly telling the director, You have to let me play Frank Booth. I am Frank Booth! Somehow by dredging up his dark personal demons onscreen, which he already seems to be doing in Out of the Blue, Hopper managed to sober up and resurrect his career as one of the great villains in Hollywood history in Blue Velvet.

Out of the Blue competed for the Palme dOr at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival, but mostly its been a VHS cult classic shared among friends for years. This new 4K Blu-ray restoration finally gives it the deluxe treatment. Not only does the cleaned-up, 35 mm print look and sound exponentially better (Neil Youngs lonely solo music has rarely been used to better effect in a movie, aside from Jarmuschs Dead Man) but there are over 15 hours of extra features included. Among these is a long, fascinating interview with Hopper conducted by Tony Watts in 1984; the 40th anniversary restoration premiere Q&A with Julian Schanbel, Natasha Lyonne and others; Gone But Not Forgotten: Remembering Linda Manz, a featurette featuring Lydia Lunch and Leif Garrett among others; a short film by original writer Leonard Yakir; a radio spot by Jack Nicholson, who called the film a masterpiece; extended interviews with admirers Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Philippe Mora, Schnabel and others, that look to have been filmed during the pandemic by videoconference; Dealing with Demons, Brian Cox on acting with Dennis Hopper; an interview with director Alex Cox (Repo Man); more interviews with 11 original cast and crew from the film the list just keeps on going and going, its truly remarkable the wealth of content. Its nice to see one of the most memorable cult films of the '80s finally get its due -- and then some.

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Rental unit: Out of the Blue dir. by Dennis Hopper - Style Weekly

Harry V. Jaffa and Allan Bloom: The Contested Legacy of Leo Strauss – Public Discourse

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This essay is part of Public DiscoursesWhos Who series, which introduces and critically engages with important thinkers who are often referenced in political and cultural debates, but whose ideas might not be widely known or understood. The series previously considered the life and work of Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Maritain, and Michael Oakeshott.

On the surface of things, there might be little to connect Harry V. Jaffa (1918-2015) and Allan Bloom (1930-1992). Bloom was a cosmopolitan sophisticate, having lived and taught in Europe for many years and his passion was for philosophy at the highest level. He was not open about his sexual orientation, his political interventions were vigorous rebuttals of feminism, and he mounted a spirited defense of both the differences and the complementarity of men and women. We might say he was more interested in the philosophic life than political contests.

Jaffa, on the other hand, was briefly a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, for whom he wrote that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. He was an American patriot whose overwhelming interest was the American regime, in both its original founding and its rebirth under Abraham Lincoln. Unlike the seemingly apolitical Bloom, Jaffa courted controversy, for instance, in his very public opposition to gay marriage in California. Yet the problem on the surface of things does get to the heart of things.

The connectionand the conflictbetween Bloom and Jaffa is based on different interpretations of the work of Leo Strauss, the twentieth-century political philosopher who taught them both. In essence, Strauss can be said to have promoted two significant ideas. First, the idea that there is a fundamental break between ancient and medieval philosophy, on the one hand, and modern philosophy, on the other. Second, the idea that philosophers throughout history, perhaps less so as modernity progressed, wrote in an esoteric manner. Esoteric writing is the practice of speaking to two different audiences at the same time and saying different things with the same words. Arthur Melzer has written an exhaustive treatment of the subject, but parents of small children will also be familiar with the practice.

Jaffa described Strauss as the Socrates of our millennium, a characterization Bloom never had an opportunity to affirm or deny. Yet in his obituary of his teacher, Bloom wrote, those of us who knew him saw in him such a power of mind, such a unity and purpose of life, such a rare mixture of the human elements resulting in a harmonious expression of the virtues, moral and intellectual, that our account of him is likely to evoke disbelief or ridicule from those who have never experienced a man of this quality. For both Jaffa and Bloom, their encounter with Strauss was the turning-point in their lives, akin to the escape of the prisoners from Platos cave.

Two Approaches to Strauss

The clever if somewhat unfortunate title of his last book, The Crisis of the Strauss Divided, plays upon Jaffas second and most famous work, a study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates entitled The Crisis of the House Divided, and gets to the heart of the difference between these two figures. With Jaffa at Claremont in California and Bloom at Cornell, Toronto, and Chicago, the consequences of that division turned into East Coast and West Coast Straussianism. Jaffa and Bloom represent the two ways of understanding Strausss devotion to political philosophy, specifically with respect to esotericism and natural right, as I will discuss below. In other words, ought one to accentuate the philosophical or the political in that term?

Jaffa, the former boxer, was by far the more political of the two men, Bloom the more philosophical. Jaffas work on Lincoln, the Constitution, and his very public debates with other scholars and even Supreme Court nominees were legendary for their acrimony. William F. Buckley, Jr. famously said, If you think Harry Jaffa is hard to argue with, try agreeing with him. It is nearly impossible. Jaffa was a political animal through and through. Bloom, by contrast, fled Cornell for the University of Toronto as an escape from the political radicalization of American campuses, returning to his beloved University of Chicago only much later.

Blooms scholarly work consisted mostly of translations and close commentaries on the same. He cultivated an urbane and detached style, seemingly uninterested in day-to-day politics. But this was not entirely true. He had a steady stream of phone conversations with well-placed graduates in Washington, DC, keeping him up to date on even the most intricate details. Saul Bellow, the American novelist, detailed these conversations in his fictionalized biography of his friend, Ravelstein. While some of the accounts are exaggerated for dramatic effect, it is clear that Bloom delighted in politics, or at least in the great issues of war and peace, though one could never imagine him campaigning.

If we consider their first works of scholarshipJaffas on Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, Blooms on the ancient rhetorician Isocratesthe picture becomes more blurred. Whats more, Bloom did write on the American Constitution, and Jaffas pugnacity was born of a devotion to the truth at least as strong as that of any philosopher. The one did not simply take up the political side of Strauss and the other the philosophical, so much as develop his legacy and establish each his own by means of emphasis. And regarding that legacy, all hinged on the idea of classical natural right.

Classical natural right was Strausss attempt at capturing the difference between premodern political philosophy and the modern emphasis on individual rights. Modern rights (always in the plural) attach to an individual from the state of nature or, in the rarefied version of John Rawls, the original position. These rights are not even political insofar as they are not up for debate or negotiation. Classical natural right, by contrast, looks to the organizational principles of the society or the regime, as Strauss preferred. As Aristotle put it in the Politics: Justice is a political matter; for justice is the organization of a political community, and justice decides what is just. Classical natural right did not rely on pre-political fictions to understand politics, but looked to the best of human nature to orient the political order. As we will see, Blooms reading of Strauss emphasized the need to decipher the esoteric meaning of texts, which might not entail any consideration of natural right, while Jaffa believed that following Strauss back to premodern philosophy required an intense focus on natural right.

Overcoming Orthodoxies

For Allan Bloom, the role of the teacher is to free a young mind from the reigning orthodoxies of the day, the stories told by the city. In his phenomenally successful Closing of the American Mind, he decried the influence of German philosophy on the students he was encountering in the classroom. These young men and women had absorbed a soft nihilism or relativism through the general culture and were, as a result, unteachable. Since they believed nothing, there was nothing from which the teacher could turn their eyes. According to Bloom, relativism has extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life. What good is it to turn someones eyes from shadows if they wont open them?

Bloom pursued zetetic philosophy, in which the search is more important than the discovery because philosophy is less a doctrine than a way of life. Socratic skepticism is not nihilism, however. The philosophic life is an adventurous struggle out of Platos cave. To join Bloom on this adventure meant he was going to offer signposts, not conclusions. And so we find his scholarship consisting mainly of commentaries on works he translated, most notably on Platos Republic and Rousseaus Emile. What he sought in these works and offered to careful readers and students was adamantly not to reduce philosophy to a set of definitions and easy-to-remember formulae.

Given that Bloom thought philosophy must question all considered judgments, it is no surprise that his criticism of John RawlssA Theory of Justice was so spirited. Bloom asks, Is he a seeker after truth, or only the spokesman for a certain historical consciousness? Rawls, as he notes, ignored the history of political philosophy, as if the nihilism of Nietzsche, the historicism of Hegel and Marx, or the penetrating examination of the soul in Platos dialogues never happened. For Rawls, life is easy to understand and its fulfillment an easygoing eudaimonianisma life of simple pleasure. A thoroughgoing student of Rawls could never produce great literature. There would be no dilemma for Hamlet, no dagger floating before Macbeth.

In a section of the review entitled The Misuse of Aristotle, Bloom pointed out that Rawls used Aristotles authority to claim something the philosopher never stipulated. According to what Rawls called the Aristotle principle, humans want to develop their capacities, and societies that allow and encourage them to do so are, on balance, betterthat is to say, they would be chosen from the original position. But Aristotle never said any such thing, and the passage Rawls cited to suggest that he did points in another direction. According to Bloom, the argument from the Nichomachean Ethics teaches that philosophy is the only way of life that can properly be called happy. Indeed, Bloom goes on to say much more: The philosopher is not as such a social man; Aristotle never even says that the moral virtues, including justice, are necessary to the philosopher in order to philosophize. This open questioning of the utility of the moral virtues to the philosopher was the source of contention between Bloom and Jaffa.

The Examined and Examining Life

One of Jaffas most direct responses to his younger contemporary was in a review of Blooms bestseller. According to Jaffa, Bloom was unable to understand the American mind because he was too preoccupied with philosophy and too uninterested in politics. As Jaffa put it, no one can comment instructively on the relationship between political life and the philosophic life who does not know what political life is. It is a fair comment, but was it fair to Bloom? Consider Blooms thoughtful appreciation of Raymond Aron, one of the greatest political minds of the twentieth century, or his own book Confronting the Constitution. Jaffa goes on, several pages later: For Bloom the question is not, What is Justice? It is, Which book about justice do you like best? Jaffas complaint was that Bloom was more concerned with philosophical texts than philosophical truth or, more to the point, natural right.

Indeed, the charge of nihilism underlies the whole review. For instance, Jaffa suggests Bloom was more concerned that his students relativism was dclassthan that it was wrong: One might say that American relativism is comic in its blandness and indifference to the genuine significance of human choice, whereas in its German version fundamental human choices take on the agonized dignity of high tragedy. Yet elsewhere in the same review Jaffa writes what could have come from the pen of the man he was criticizing. According to Jaffa, The life lived in accordance with the knowledge of ignorancethe truly skeptical life, the examined and examining lifeis, by the light of unassisted human reason, the best life. The next sentence, though, gets to the heart of their disagreement: The regime that is best adapted to the living of this life is the best regime. Again, Bloom would probably agree, but might argue that it is a non sequitur. Once one has discovered the best life, pursue it, and dont engage in politics.

What would Strauss say? The question arises because both laid claim to his legacy. In his review of Closing, Jaffa writes, One can only conclude that if Bloom says that the one thing needful is the study of the problem of Socrates, and yet makes no mention of Strausss study of the problem of Socrates (or of Greek philosophy), then he cannot think that Strausss study is the needful one. For Jaffa, following Strauss back to premodern philosophy meant devoting oneself to classical natural right. For Bloom, it meant uncovering the esoteric meaning of texts, which might be indifferent to natural right altogether. Although he never says it, there is a strong suggestion throughout this review and other pieces that Jaffa considered Bloom to be Strausss Alcibiades.

Productive Tension

The contest between Harry Jaffa and Allan Bloom over the legacy of Leo Strauss has passed to their students with generally much less acrimony. But that tension, like the one between Athens and Jerusalem that Strauss so often returned to, has produced some of the finest scholarship of the last half century or more. From the students of Bloom, translations and commentaries have added to the treasury of works we have to study. From the students of Jaffa have come some of the most penetrating studies of American politics. When the streams cross and the West Coast turns to philosophical texts or the East to American politics, especially to the work of Tocqueville that Jaffa never fully appreciated, the divisions are blurred and the results are invigorating.

It would not be too much to say that the students of Bloom and Jaffa are producing the most interesting work in political philosophy, broadly understood. Blooms students include Thomas Pangle, Catherine and Michael Zuckert, and Francis Fukuyama. Jaffa taught Thomas G. West, John Marini, and Hillsdale Colleges president, Larry P. Arnn. Indirectly, Jaffa and Bloom influenced Harvey C. Mansfield, Pierre Manent, Daniel J. Mahoney, and Charles Kesler. While only a partial list, their scholarship would be the foundation for a far better education in political wisdom and statesmanship, as well as literature, than any reading list produced by the American Political Science Association.

Understanding political philosophy far more broadly than it usually is may be the most important legacy of Bloom and Jaffa. The only project they worked on together, a study of Shakespeares political thought, opened for their students and others the body of great literature as a source of political wisdom. Freed from the reigning orthodoxies of our day, theirs are often alone among students of literature who can see that the tedious categories of race, class, and gender are mere shadows dancing on the wall.

Whatever might have divided them, Harry Jaffa and Allan Bloom both found in Leo Strausss classroom an approach to philosophy that changed their lives. Their own students found the same in their classrooms, and so unto the third and fourth generations. There are real and important differences in what they experienced and, more importantly, how they understood it, just as with Socrates students. If Strauss really was the Socrates of our millennium, Bloom and Jaffa are the best evidence for this claim.

Source for Allan Bloom photo: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf7-00081, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

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Harry V. Jaffa and Allan Bloom: The Contested Legacy of Leo Strauss - Public Discourse

Vengeance: Conspiracy Theory – Fort Worth Weekly

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Its a plot as old as plots: a city slicker comes to the countryside with preconceived notions about the rural folk and then finds that theyre smarter and better than his city friends (or, alternatively, that theyre just as venal as the people he left behind). Short-statured sitcom actor B.J. Novak portrays this city slicker in his directing debut Vengeance, a movie that transports him to West Texas, and if this satire isnt entirely successful, theres more than enough to suggest he has talent as a filmmaker.

Novak stars as Ben Manalowicz, who has secured his place as a staff writer for The New Yorkerand now thinks of branching out into podcasting. His boss (Issa Rae) pointedly asks him what yet another middle-aged white guy could possibly have to say. His answer comes in the form of a distraught phone call from Ty Shaw (Boyd Holbrook), whose sister Abilene (Lio Tipton) has died in her small town a five-hour drive from the Texas city she was named after. Ben and Abby slept together a few times while she was in the Big Apple pursuing dreams of music stardom, and she made it seem to her family that the two of them were much closer than they were. When Ben is guilted into traveling to Texas to attend her funeral, Ty seriously tells him that she didnt die of an opioid overdose like the authorities say but was murdered by a conspiracy of Mexican drug cartels, pedophiles, and the deep state. A podcast is born, initially with the insensitive title Dead White Girl.

Speaking of insensitive, Ben plays along with the fiction that he and Abby were practically engaged, because he means to make fun of the paranoid rednecks or at least hold them up to ridicule while he investigates what makes them tick. His disillusionment plays out in humor that is admirably specific to the region: When Ben asks whether the city of Abilene is near Dallas, he receives the curt reply, Dallas aint Texas. Later on, at his literal first rodeo, he gives a big cheer for the University of Texas and quickly finds out hes deep in Tech country. A local music producer (Ashton Kutcher, going for understatement for once) gestures at the blasted desert landscape and tells Ben, People here have creative energies and nowhere to plug them in. It goes into conspiracy theories, drugs, and violence. (The movie was actually filmed in the Albuquerque area, since youre wondering.)

Yet the script doesnt set out to absolve the Texans, either. For all the Christian paraphernalia in their house, the Shaws call Abbys youngest brother El Stupido (Eli Bickel), and Ben is the only one who addresses the boy by his given name of Mason. The boy, in turn, gives him a vital piece of information that cracks the mystery. The family conceals an important piece of information from Ben, and the New Yorker finally explodes at them in that most Texas of locations, a Whataburger parking lot. To Tys defense that they followed their hearts, Ben says, You follow your heart, the world is flat, and vaccines contain microchips.

If only that line hadnt come in the midst of a much longer speech. Novak the director lets Novak the writer go on for too long. The climactic confrontation with the villain of the piece really needed pruning, even if Im chilled by nihilism of the bad guys thesis that America is the way it is because were all going to die someday and our social-media hot takes will be the only proof that we were ever here. Vengeance has more than a few amusing moments and was significantly better than I expected, but it still feels like the work of a beginner who has more to learn.

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Vengeance: Conspiracy Theory - Fort Worth Weekly

The Catastrophic Decline in Religious Faith And What To Do About It – Patheos

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Is That All There Is? Disaffiliation From Religion Increases

Perhaps one of the least liked of Jesuss parables is that of the wealthy man who reaps a great harvest, puts up extra barns, believes he should eat, drink and be merry, and finds himself dead that night. What a downer. Im reminded of Peggy Lees fabulous song Is That All There Is? thinking that those would be the last words of the wealthy man.

Exceptan awful lot of people think that is enough. They are satisfied with whatever the world can give; if they die, they die. Such is the nihilism afflicting the nones, the disaffiliated from religion folks. Statistics tell of a catastrophic decline in religious faith among those in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, but particularly among those who are younger. Each generation is less religious, and that fact is radically changing society. Most observers throw up their hands in confusion and despair, unsure why this is happening. However, the fact is we know why it is occurring. Its complicated, but we can understand.

Just a few factors in this decline include lack of religious practice in childhood, disaffiliation in high school and decline of the two-parent family, pluralism in religious belief, a politically conservative identification with religion., the absence of religious experience, and the inability of religion to answer big questions. There are other reasons, but these are the most important.

Two things mitigate a vibrant return to religious faith. First is the fact that the disaffiliated were never that connected to religious faith to begin with. Their parents and grandparents had begun the gradual disconnection decades before. Second, the growing isolation of individuals is directly connected to the decline in religious faith, which was the major player in community and civic life. Even now, those with the most connection to religious faith are the most involved in civic affairs and community practices.

Yet, a few things can be done to change all this:

Religious researchers point out that in the recent past, those who left religion were likely to come back as older adults. These researchers now say dont expect the disaffiliated to return. Not really having left much, they are not motivated to come back to something that never really fed them. I am not that pessimistic. The Church has always been able to talk to the culture, though it almost always is late to the table. Its time for the Church and those who think religious faith is important to step up. The modest proposals above wont completely deal with the nihilism gripping our world. But successful implementation of these suggestions might nudge the worldly from an eat, drink, and be merry way of approaching life to finding an answer to Peggy Lees soulful musical question, Is That All There Is?

***For clarity of reading, I deliberately left out footnoting the research as it is easily available on Google from the Pew Research Center, NPR, and other outlets.

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The Catastrophic Decline in Religious Faith And What To Do About It - Patheos

VIDEO: Wasted Space Release John Wick-Themed Video for ‘The First Time We Met’ – Broadway World

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New York-natives Wasted Space has released their hard-hitting, new video "The First Time We Met." The chaotic, post-hardcore track is pulled from the group's recently released EP Never Odd Or Even, which dropped earlier this spring. The band is also currently on tour to support the 4-track EP. Despite the heavy topics that the track addresses, the video for "The First Time We Met" brings out a more lighthearted side of the three-piece.

The three-piece group shares of the track, "The song is about the haunting feeling of depression and anxiety, the music video is a spoof on John Wick where 'Bones' has come to kill us all for some unexplained reason. A little funny backstory is Bones is our lead singer's 'roommate' who he makes fun little skits for TikTok and Instagram with. Often these skits include some kind of mischief on Matt's part to the detriment of Bones so anyone following the band knows that there is a dispute between the two."

While the track is heavily marked by vocalist Matthew Lupkin's intricate, doom-filled delivery, "The First Time We Met" video brings a comical narrative to the forefront of the visual with a John Wick-inspired theme. Displaying their hilarious attitudes and DIY roots, the band is met with inevitable ruin and destruction as Lupkin comes face to face in a shoot-out with Bones. Despite taking on a more humorous tone, "The First Time We Met" effortlessly delivers a swift punch to the gut through groovy guitar riffs and echoing drums.

Based out of Buffalo, NY, Wasted Space brings groovy riffs, solid rhythms, and thought-provoking lyrics to the forefront of their releases.

Wasted Space is the group's interpretation of humanity and its steady decline, as they reflect the overwhelming sense of nihilism and cynicism that is imposed on society by the direction of the world and the people who inhabit it. The only way forward is to throw your hands up and embrace the chaos, hopefully with a smile.

Their latest release, Never Odd Or Even, and their new video for "The First Time We Met" are both currently available.

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VIDEO: Wasted Space Release John Wick-Themed Video for 'The First Time We Met' - Broadway World

The MFA Novel and the Mystery Box – Patheos

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If youve picked up a volume of literary fiction in the past decade or sopreferably one that drew favorable coverage in the New York Review of Books or snuck its way onto the Man Booker longlistyoure probably already familiar with the phenomenon of the MFA novel. Strictly speaking, of course, one does not need to have the degree to write such a book. It is a matter of style and tone rather than a rigid descriptor, reflecting the distinctive mode of writing selected for by both elite educational institutions and an increasingly insular publishing ecosystem.

The MFA novel is typically brief rather than epic, loath to channel the experiences of anyone beyond the author herself. Its plot is wispy and ill-defined, with its meandering storylines periodically punctuated by episodes of bad sex, substance abuse, reflections on the allure of suicide, gazes into the abyss of social media, and ruminations on impending climate apocalypse. One thinks of Sally Rooney, Lauren Oyler, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jenny Offill, and countless othersall very talented writers, to be clear, but all engaged in very similar projects. The dominant sensibility of the MFA novel is what Elif Batuman described in 2010 as an impulse to make literature into an unhappiness contest, or an unhappiness-entitlement contest.

The influence of the MFA novelor, more precisely, the style of storytelling it exemplifieshas spread far beyond bookstore shelves and culture websites. Perhaps most notably, its a sensibility that shows up across the various streaming video series usually classed as prestige TV. How else to classify the moody, shoegazy character studies that constitute HBOs I May Destroy You, or Amazon Primes Fleabag, or Hulus The Bear?

Batuman and plenty of other writers have criticized this turn in storytelling for its self-doubt, its chic nihilism, and its parochialism. But perhaps theres a deeper issue in play here.

In a kind of enantiodromia, the ubiquity of the MFA novel and its mixed-media progeny may have produced and cemented the dominance of an opposite form of storytelling: the mystery-box narrative. Despite its near-omnipresence throughout popular culture, this kind of story is only rarely recognized as such. Or, perhaps, that is precisely why it remains so invisible.

Famously associated with film director J.J. Abrams, the mystery-box narrative launches the reader or viewer into the story in medias res, with the protagonists context and circumstances left deliberately unclear. As the story unfolds, the hero or heroine learns more about his or her own background, and about the rules and internal logic of the universe around them.

Abramss own work, of course, is suffused with this approach. Tasked with crafting the seventh Star Wars film, Abrams opens that movie by declining to explain precisely how the galaxy tipped from its post-Return of the Jedi equilibrium back into open warfare. He leaves his heroines parentage ambiguous, shuffles the beloved Luke Skywalker almost entirely offscreen, and makes his archvillain a smoke-shrouded figure of unclear significance. Whereas in 1977, George Lucas felt the need to spell out backstory in a lengthy title crawl, here the opening crawl serves primarily to obfuscate.

All of this, of course, is calculated to generate that most elusive of reactions: solid word-of-mouth and fan engagement. For popular movies and shows, vast fan communities now stretch across the internet, generating massive Reddit threads and page after page of dedicated messageboards devoted to speculating about plot points. Creators now know that split-second allusions to obscure elements of lorethe enormous corpus of backstory generated by decades-old franchiseswill be obsessed over for years by super-fans. A prime example of this is the TV show Westworld, which has derived most of its punch from its heavy reliance on asynchronous timelines as a source of mystery, and that regularly sparks feverish online debate.

The mystique of the mystery box has come to dominate pop culture. Just consider the near-maniacal fear of spoilers that overtakes the internet upon release of a much-anticipated genre film. This concern is historically novel: years ago, film trailers would lay out the movies entire plot, including the endinga choice that didnt deter audiences from showing up. The element of surprise, in other words, wasnt the only element that mattered.

And what happens when the other elements start to drop out? In the work of fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson, mystery-box storytelling reaches its apex. The Stormlight Archive, Sandersons as-yet-unfinished magnum opus, painstakingly unspools its story across a series of colossal, thousand-page volumesvolumes that would be virtually unreadable, if Sanderson didnt artificially generate plot momentum by withholding crucial background information from the reader.

As the Archive develops, its two lead characters slowly drift through the events of a fantastical world, picking up scraps of knowledge about the cataclysm that rocked their cosmos long ago and repristinating elements of pre-cataclysm wisdom. Protagonists spend page after page brooding over their own uncertainty, as they puzzle out the mysteries around themmysteries that readers know will eventually be disclosed, when the author finally deems it convenient. But properly speaking, the internal logic of the narrative doesnt demand this drip-feed of backstory, leaving the mystery increasingly feeling like an excuse for bad pacing. Indeed, if the rules and backstory of Sandersons fictional universe were laid out in a couple of pages, the justification for the series sheer bulk would collapse: Sandersons prose and character development, considered apart from the mystery-box milieu, arent especially strong. (Contrast this approach with J.R.R. Tolkien, who had no qualms about spelling out the logic of his legendarium from the outset, or Patrick Rothfuss, whose novels have a reverse-whodunit structure focused on how a foregone outcome will be achieved.)

The strange reality of contemporary American fiction, irrespective of medium, is that the MFA novel and the mystery-box narrative exist as a kind of cultural yin and yangone ubiquitous in high culture and the other in popular entertainment, with each serving as a foil to the other. In the MFA novel, plot is nothing, a dclass distraction from the virtuosity of the style and the nuances of the characters (or politics) on display. In the mystery-box narrative, plot is everything; stories become an interlocking mass of Chekhovs guns and internal cross-references, where the greatest imaginable sin is a plot hole or a failure to stick the landing.

Despite their differences, though, these two currents share a common root. The singular virtue that both modes of storytelling select for is a kind of technical competencefor the MFA novel, the proficiency of a well-chosen phrase or memorable personality, and for the mystery-box narrative, the skill of revealing just enough information to keep the consumer hooked. Altogether out of view is whether a story corresponds to any kind of essential truth or universal experience. Rather, for the MFA novel, what matters is that a story captures someones truth; for the mystery-box narrative, truth is merely internal coherence.

In the end, both tendencies reflect a loss of faitha loss of faith in storytelling as a means of access to anything beyond bare contingency. And yet it seems to me that the stories that linger are those penned by authors confident in their ability to say something true. Those creators might be wrong, but at least they are audacious enough to trust that their vision of the world can speak for itself.

Without that faith, a far gloomier, more forgettable media landscape awaits.

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America’s heart of darkness: Making sense of the nonsensical allure of MAGA – Salon

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The Republican-MAGA movement's reactionary agenda is clear enough. But the deeper motivations of many Trump supporters, at least beneath their absurd and offensive stated beliefs, is much less so.

What we might call the Great Demolition plot includes establishing a corporate oligarchy, a neo-feudalist regime based on long-term minoritarian rule and a malevolent pseudo-Christian theocracy undergirded by state thuggery and social authoritarianism, all of it infused with an incoherent ideological blend of anarchic libertarianism (on guns and most forms of regulation) and fascistic nightmare (white supremacy, antisemitism and numerous grades of conspiracy theory).

Millions of Americans support this regressive and oppressive agenda, but their views are not identical or monolithic: There are the probably well-meaning but horribly misguided Joe and Jane Average, the bloodthirsty fascists, the apoplectic culture warriors, the scheming plutocrats, the uniformed sadists, the gun-radical civilians, the Christian nationalists and "Dominionists," the QAnon believers, the con artists and grifters, the conformists, the deeply traumatized and the profoundly misinformed. All understand themselves to be "patriots," of course.

Clearly, there is a wide spectrum of motivations, beliefs, personalities, interests and objectives, intensity of conviction and degree of lunacy among these mistaken millions. But how can one account for this herd-like descent into paranoia, cultish-nihilistic rage against reality, and proliferation of sociopathic behaviors? A general answer is that extreme beliefs bear little if any connection with the object they purport to discuss. They stem from complex and often subterranean interplay between biological forces (such as neural-hormonal wiring or gender), constructed biographies (whether individual or collective), economic interests, one's sense of belonging and social networks, and "belief formation," meaning the cognitive, affective and behavioral dynamics of decision-making.

What is behind crazy beliefs? Craziness, in one form or another. Crazy beliefs result from dysfunctions and toxicity that, in many individuals, generate unbearable anguish. A more specific answer, then, is that fear plays a central role in individual devolution and mass indoctrination. As Corey Robin points out, fear has a social history. It is a political feeling, the raison d'tre and oldest manipulation tactic of repressive groups and regimes. Many Americans suffer from fear, derived from multiple poisoned sources. Desperate and despondent, they lash out through nihilism, tribalism and rhetorical or actual violence.

Fear has been part of the human experience since time immemorial. From Howard Sackler's screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's 1953 film "Fear and Desire":

There is a war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, nor one that will be, but any war. And the enemies who struggle here do not exist unless we call them into being. This forest then, and all that happens now is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear and doubt and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time but have no other country but the mind.

Britain and the United States, to cite the obvious examples, were able to develop generally successful and more or less democratic governments over time because powerful potential enemies were far away, while internal dissenters often emigrated or were crushed. Historically, this included Roman Catholics in the U.K. and anarchists, socialists, Black radicals and other political dissidents in the U.S. In America's case, two vast oceans allowed for safety from external invasion and also for considerable social, individual and ideological diversity. Yet after the traumas of 9/11, the war on terror, the Great Recession, the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan and the COVID pandemic, Americans reacted as many other peoples have done before them, sliding downward into mass intolerance and violence.

That included the wholesale and largely unquestioned surrender of supposedly cherished freedoms through emergency laws and mass surveillance; extrajudicial kidnapping, torture and imprisonment; new forms of unconventional warfare (i.e., drones) waged against civilians and militants alike; and an enormous consolidation of power in the presidency and the executive branch. All of this went along with military adventurism, political radicalization and polarization, and an upsurge of magical beliefs and both mental and physical health crises, including opioid addictions, obesity and suicide.

After 20 years of mismanaged war in the Middle East, the U.S. finds itself in a situation disturbingly similar to Weimar Germany: disaffected veterans, militarized police, and right-wing radicalism converging with "mainstream" conservatism.

Fear is also inflamed through the national obsession with world domination, military power, militarized culture and gun idolatry. Historian Kathleen Belew, author of "Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,"argues that each modern U.S. war was followed by a significant increase in domestic radicalism, white supremacy activism and paramilitary agitation. After 20 years of brutally mismanaged war in the greater Middle East, the U.S. finds itself in a situation disturbingly similar to Weimar Germany in 1919: With a relatively large and often disaffected veteran population (think of Timothy McVeigh), growing fascist penetration of the police and the military, increasingly militarized police forces, and armed militias (akin to the Freikorps in Germany) assaulting the legal-constitutional order. Right-wing radicalism has begun to converge with "mainstream" conservatism, fueled by a proliferation of entrepreneurs of chaos and the widespread cult of guns.

Fear also comes from the economy: Since the 1980s, economic survival has continued to demand more expensive degrees, longer working hours and greater productivity. Increasing financial pressure on individuals, families and communities has weakened the middle class by raising the costs of education, health care and real estate, and undermining wages, job security and organized labor. Americans fear exploitation and intimidation in the workplace, and also fear loss of status, health coverage and retirement pension. What's more, they fear each other, and not entirely without reason a factor that helps explain the proliferation of guns. (This is nearly identical to the classic "security dilemma" of international relations theory.)

Global economic forces subject Americans to the rule of the unaccountable one percent, the whims of the FIRE corporations (finance, insurance and real estate) and the condescension and pandering of their lackeys in both political parties. Workers tough it out while the masters of the new Gilded Age buy politicians, lawmakers, judges, think tanks, media outlets and experts; corrupt and exploit the skewed tax system; flout the law and the public interest (no major executive was incarcerated for the 2008 Great Recession); and corrupt the public spirit. To say that the system is rigged, as critics on both the left and right proclaim, is nowhere near adequate.

Abandoned by corporate Democrats, in 2016 the (white) working and middle classes turned in desperation toward an arsonist leading a gang of saboteurs. Their rage resulted from their dysfunctional context; their radicalization was a reaction against structural injustice. Their radical politics may be understood, in part, as a desperate reaction against despair. As Hannah Arendt wrote in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" about 1930s fascism, "the masses' escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they're forced to live.... It's a protest against the real conditions of existence."

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Male anxiety and overcompensation have further befouled this witches' brew. Dominant models of American personhood, and especially manhood, are rooted in stereotypes of heroism, self-reliance, stoicism, greed, athleticism and competitive vigor, not to mention heterosexuality. Reality appears somewhat different, as the hard right is characterized by panic, emotional incontinence, unhinged rage and homicidal schadenfreude. (Of course I mean Donald Trump, but consider also Ann Coulter, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Ingraham, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, etc.)

Archetypes of manliness are grotesquely distorted by far-right online "communities" of gamers, "incels" and white supremacists, and entirely too many women who embrace a cartoonish vision of masculinity and denigrate feminism. Anguished "conservatives" and "patriots" are incensed by women's progress, the evolution of gender mores and increasing acceptance of a wide range of LGBTQ+ identities. They are simultaneously insecure and arrogant, fragile and bellicose. Their aggressive bombast and misogyny only serves to reveal the compensatory role played by performative toxic masculinity in lessening their inner turmoil and re-establishing a vague semblance of psychic safety.

There is a continuum that encompasses run-of-the mill misogynists, "pick-up artists," men's rights activists, the online manosphere (e.g., MGTOW), extreme gamers, incels, incels who murder women, the alt-right, and activists and politicians who want to strip women of their rights. Male supremacy also feeds white supremacy, as white sexual anguish stokes racial anguish over Black men's virility and fuels the spread of the "great replacement" conspiracy theory.

This shared hostility toward women and minorities springs from recognizable sociopathic traits: entitlement, grievance, raging righteousness, cruelty, and social domination. Many are looking for father figures, authoritarian or even punitive fathers, for unapologetically dominant alpha males (John Wayne, Rambo, Trump, "Top Gun," John Wick) and models on how to be a real man (Jordan Peterson). In April of this year, Tucker Carlson infamously pushed an apocalyptic-messianic "documentary" called "The End of Men" that advocated "testicle tanning," or exposing male genitalia to red light, supposedly to boost testosterone levels, as a form of "bromeopathy."

In his 1897 classic of sociology, "Suicide," mile Durkheim argued that suicide was not a purely individual phenomenon, but was influenced by collective forces. A society that nurtures functional "little platoons" ( la Edmund Burke) and the sound social integration and regulation of individuals helps them cope with the rigors of life. When that kind of integration fails, the result may be what Durkheim called "selfish suicide" (individuals who feel disconnected), while deficient regulation may facilitate "anomic suicide" (when an individual lacks a sense of rules and meaning). On the other hand, too much integration, as in the military or cult movements, can facilitate "altruistic suicide" (self-sacrifice for the group), while excessive regulation may facilitate "fatalistic suicides" (in which someone breaks under the weight of rigid social norms). In other words, unbalanced forms of social cohesion produce specific pathologies. It's not much of a leap to conceive that American society, with its social isolation, incessant consumerism, endless commercial spectacle and social Darwinism, could produce all sorts of alarming compensatory strategies, such as the manic, cultish, bellicose energy of the MAGA faithful.

Indeed, the fear of death whether biological and social is the fear that underpins countless others. As anthropologist Ernest Becker showed in "The Denial of Death," individuals will do almost anything to lessen or forget this primal terror. Trumpers repudiate their loved ones, vilify reason and science, internalize outlandish lies and embrace servitude and mob rule. Cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias and amnesia are the ticket into the warm embrace of the tribe, which is both an extension of one's precious ego and a framework for security the basis of Abraham Maslow's pyramid of fundamental human needs.

Furthermore, terror management and grief processing are closely connected. Elizabeth Kbler-Ross famously identified five stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining and acceptance. Millions of Trumpers grapple with loss and remain stuck at the initial, pain-filled levels of the grieving process: "The COVID virus is a myth, I am in control" (denial); "Mask mandate is Nazism and/or communism" (anger); "Dr. Fauci stole my life" (anger and depression); "If I take vitamin D, I won't be affected" (bargaining). They take longer to move toward acceptance, if that ever happens: "I will wash my hands and keep a safe distance." David Kessler, a foremost expert on grief and close collaborator of Kbler-Ross, added a sixth stage: seeking meaning. But actual meaning can only come after an acceptance of reality. Delusional sense-seeking is what happens when individuals and groups short-circuit the process, skip healthy grieving and rush into compensatory worlds.

The fear of economic exploitation, violence, political sclerosis, loneliness and death is easy enough to understand. Yet another fear torments Americans: fear of freedom.

The fear of economic exploitation, violence and war, institutional or political sclerosis, solipsism and death is easy to understand. Yet another fear secretly torments many Americans: fear of freedom, or rather fear of the charges and duties that responsible freedom entails. Erich Fromm, in his study of Nazism "Escape From Freedom," explains that the rigors of freedom create considerable anxiety in many individuals, who seek to lessen stress through three mechanisms: destructiveness, conformity with (and submission to) the group, and seeking refuge in an authoritarian movement that seems to offers direction and meaning. Today, the mainstream, conventional American sense of self is self-centered, entitled and inauthentic; and therefore also insecure and hyper-vigilant, aggrieved and bellicose. An epidemic of narcissism and unmoored subjectivity that cuts across generations, races, genders, sexual orientations, classes and political affiliations has fed the current crisis. Irritable individual sovereignty, freed from any sense of responsibility, helps many Trumpers indulge their narcissism, intellectual laziness and conformity.

Indeed, willful ignorance is key here. In 1546, John Heywood, perhaps inspired by Jeremiah 5:21, wrote: "There are none so blind as those who will not see." Self-indulgence mixes with the old populist mystique of practical knowledge and vocational skills to feed the fear and hatred of analytical culture and critical thinking and the particularly demanding form of freedom it offers.

As Richard Hofstadter remarked some 60 years ago, anti-intellectualism and paranoia are American traditions embedded in the national experience. In his 1963 classic "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," heargues that intellectuals and experts are viewed as "pretentious, conceited, effeminate, and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive" and un-American. Historically, the American glorification of the "common man" tends to feed demagoguery, favors the lowest common denominator and fuels self-absorption, religious fundamentalism and suspicion of the experts and other Others. It is Jacksonian democracy run amok. Mangled English and a smug ignorance (of science, history, the world, legitimate sources of knowledge) become evidence of one's authenticity (Trump, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush) and good character. Hostility toward critical knowledge is also a form of revolt against the Enlightenment, against an ideal of truth that demands questioning one's ego, one's limits, one's safety and one's world. This ontological insecurity feeds paranoia, which Hofstadter defined as "the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy" that characterizes "more or less normal people" throughout American history.

Paranoia is found across historical time and space. Its American avatar harks back to medieval Christian millenarianism and end-time fantasies of destruction and salvation, which Norman Cohn describes as

the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies, systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.

This portrait of medieval lunatics can be applied verbatim to contemporary QAnon believers, Christian nationalists and other "patriots." Trumpism is a charismatic, cultish and nihilistic mass movement that calls for destruction "for them" and salvation "for us." This helps explain why sadism, cruelty and sheer frenzy run deep in the MAGA circus: they bind the mob together toward mass cruelty and some apocalyptic showdown. Charisma replaces common sense. As Bret Stephens writes about the decay of moderate conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic: "Where there is sense, there is not much charisma; when there is charisma, there is almost no sense."

Trumpist zealots converge on style and substance, while their goals and deeper motivations remain diverse. Many Trumpers are not fearful at all, but arrogant, domineering and coldly conniving. Others the sour, surly, and surreal specimens whom Jordan Klepper interviews regularly demonstrate the truth of the adage that "there are limits to human intelligence but no limits to human stupidity." Others, like the morally flexible evangelicals, use the "Cyrus the Great" rationalization (Isaiah 41:2-4, 45:1-3) to proclaim that Trump, though imperfect, was anointed by God because he delivered their most cherished goals. Millions of others spurred by anguish are riding along in the bacchanal, serving as the useful idiots and shock troops for the Pied Pipers, princes and principalities (Ephesians 6:12) of Trumpistan.

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America's heart of darkness: Making sense of the nonsensical allure of MAGA - Salon