Reading David French, I thought of Joseph Brodsky. David’s piece is headed “Community, Ideology, and Cancel Culture.” It contains some important truths. David writes that “the cancellations that ‘stick’ — the attacks that truly make people afraid — come not from the Left against the Right or the Right against the Left, but rather from within.” Yes. “When your own tribe casts you out, that’s the greatest pain.” Oh, yes.

Joseph Brodsky was a poet born in Leningrad in 1940. He became a dissident, with all the dangers that this entails. He was exiled in 1972 and, 15 years later, won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1991, he became the U.S. poet laureate.

Norman Podhoretz was not happy with him. He put a question to Vladimir Bukovsky (the great dissident who wrote To Build a Castle). “Brodsky stood up to the KGB,” said Norman. “Why can’t he stand up to Susan Sontag and The New York Review of Books?” Bukovsky answered, “You have to understand: It was easier to stand up to the KGB. Everyone you admired, everyone you cared about, everyone whose approval you wanted, would applaud you for it.”

So very human. In our country today, libs fear to incur the wrath of libs; cons fear to incur the wrath of cons. Incurring the wrath of the other side — a badge of honor, you know?

• They will hound Jack Phillips to the grave. “They”? Yes, they. I don’t think I can name a single other baker — but I can name Jack Phillips, the most famous, or infamous, baker in America. He is still tied up in the court system.

In 2012, he refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where he won. In 2017, someone called Phillips to ask for a cake celebrating a “gender transition”: blue on the outside, pink on the inside. Again, Phillips refused. That case is working its way through the courts. For a news article, go here.

These suits against Phillips are not blows for civil rights, as I see it. They are harassment of a man who is trying to make a living. In the glorious market of the United States, you can get a cake for anything. You can get it in any size, shape, color. Knock yourself out. Let the market work for you.

I think of the penalty in football, “piling on,” and I think that’s what they — “they” — are doing to Jack Phillips.

Holy Moses, do I hate bullying. This feeling is almost the basis of my politics.

• Did you see this? “Starting school at 7:30 a.m. isn’t good for teens, psychologists say.” (Go here.) That’s what I was trying to tell everybody, way back!

• There is a conflict between China and Taiwan. The conflict comes down to this: China wants Taiwan. Insists on having it. Taiwan wants to be Taiwan. Elon Musk has a solution, as he told the Financial Times.

“My recommendation,” said the world’s richest man, “would be to figure out a special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable. Probably won’t make everyone happy. And it’s possible, and I think probably, in fact, that they could have an arrangement that’s more lenient than Hong Kong.”

We have a saying in golf: “Every shot pleases somebody.” The Chinese ambassador to the U.S. tweeted, “I would like to thank @elonmusk for his call for peace across the Taiwan Strait and his idea about establishing a special administrative zone.” The Taiwanese representative in the U.S. was of a different mind: “Taiwan sells many products, but our freedom and democracy are not for sale.”

The spirit of the Taiwanese, like the spirit of the Ukrainians, is inspiring.

Musk, you recall, opened a Tesla showroom in the Xinjiang region earlier this year. Xinjiang is where, according to the U.S. State Department, the Chinese government is committing genocide against the Uyghur people.

There is frequent occasion to quote Willi Schlamm: “The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.”

• Kanye West is always good for some interesting observations. One of the latest is this: “I prefer my kids knew Hanukkah than Kwanzaa. At least it will come with some financial engineering.”

That’s what has been missing from my life (one of the things): financial engineering.

• The House Judiciary Republicans posited a kind of holy trinity: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” Seriously, that is the entirety of a tweet they sent out: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” See it here.

Not very long ago, the House Judiciary Committee was chaired by Henry J. Hyde, Republican of Illinois. He was serious, whatever his flaws. The Republican Party was serious, whatever its flaws. The decline has been steep, fast, and dizzying. More like “collapse” than “decline,” really.

• In the New York Times, John Leland had a fascinating story, fodder for a great deal of comment. The heading of the story: “How a Dog’s Killing Turned Brooklyn Progressives Against One Another.” The subheading: “After a sudden confrontation that left a golden retriever dead, neighbors came together online to support the owner of the dog. But then things changed.” This truly is a story of our times, and a story of our country.

A homeless, deranged man attacked a woman and her dog, killing the dog. The attacker is black; the woman is white. This being America, a question naturally occurs: What if the attacker were white and the woman black? Would that have affected people’s reactions?

If I know America, the answer is yes.

• I was watching, or rather listening to, a protest against Ben Sasse, who will apparently be the next president of the University of Florida. The students were chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Ben Sasse has got to do.” My entire life, I have heard students, and others, chant, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, [someone or something] has got to go.” I appeal to the creativity of today’s youth: Can you please come up with another chant, sparing us another 50, 100 years of this stale one?

• Here is a phrase I have heard over and over again, from Republican politicians, and those who echo them: “the corporate media.” I wonder whether someone could explain what this means. Is Fox, for example, a corporation?

I also hear “legacy media” (never positively). What does this mean? Outlets that have a legacy? Is National Review a legacy medium?

My guess is, “legacy media” and “corporate media,” both, mean “media I don’t like.”

One of the worst things about idiocy is the lingo that accompanies it.

• Here’s something nicer: Sandy Koufax. I swear, the dude is handsomer today, at 86, than he was at 25.

• All of my life, I have heard golf announcers say that so-and-so is “moving quietly up the leaderboard.” All that means is: The broadcast has not covered them. I thought of this when reading an article about college football: “Notre Dame has quietly rebounded from its 0-2 start.”

• You know the expression, which you sometimes see on social media, “First World problems”? That came immediately to mind when I read this headline: “‘Sometimes hitting it too well is a problem:’ Padraig Harrington explains links golf.” (Article here.)

Hitting it too well! The golf version of a First World problem, for sure. I am striving . . .

•I got an e-mail from Senator John Kennedy (R., La.), asking for money.

Stupidity rhymes with Socialism!
Wait, no, that’s not right. It’s just the first thing I thought of when Socialism came to mind. It’s apparent that Nancy, Chuck, and Joe Biden don’t see it that way, and that doesn’t help me sleep at night.
That’s why I’m fighting tooth and nail every single day against these hair-brained Woker loonies that would rather see America’s Democracy crumble than help it remain the greatest country in all of human history.

Uh-huh. That would be “hare-brained,” by the way. If you’re going to accuse others of stupidity . . .

• John Bolton taught me a new word, in a (very interesting) column headed “Putin Must Go: Now Is The Time For Regime Change In Russia.” That word is “resile”: to “recoil” or “retract”; especially to return to a prior position. (I got this from Merriam-Webster.) Here is what Bolton writes: “Later, Biden himself dutifully resiled from regime change.”

You can live ten lifetimes and not know all of English (or maybe of any language). Marvelous.

• A headline reads, “Trump Angrily Lashes Out After His Deposition Is Ordered.” (Article here.) Question: Can you lash out non-angrily?

• Let’s have a little music. For a review of Medea, the opera by Cherubini, go here. For a review of Tosca (Puccini), go here. For a review of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Shostakovich), go here. All of these are reviews of performances at the Metropolitan Opera. For a Salzburg chronicle — a chronicle of the Salzburg Festival in Austria — go here.

• Laurence Silberman, the great judge, passed away recently. He once stated, “I have always thought that the most heinous act in which a democratic government can engage is to use its law-enforcement machinery for political ends.” That statement can be found in the obit by Sam Roberts in the New York Times. I would like to note something else. Roberts writes,

At Dartmouth, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 1957, he was tossed out for a semester for spending a night at a dorm at Skidmore College, then an all-women’s school. “Of course today my defense should have been, I was trying to integrate the school,” he said.

Glad to see you, my friends, and I’ll talk to you soon.

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