cREATION IS BEAUTIFUL:

High Lights: Our lives are governed by wondrous phenomena that we don’t often stop to consider. (Melissa Kirsch, April 25, 2026, NY Times)

Knowing that the spectacle of the northern lights occurs because of electromagnetism doesn’t help to explain the feeling I had that night in the cornfield, the deep gratitude I felt for days afterward. I kept thinking about how we’d gone from total darkness to pyrotechnics in an instant. I had this feeling that there was magic in the world around me, that beauty could emerge from nothingness and I didn’t have to do anything to summon it.

THE eND OF hISTORY IS UNDEFEATED:

The Rise And Fall Of ‘Petty Tyrants’: History shows that bad leaders can successfully undermine democracy — but the story always ends the same way. (Danny Hillis, April 23, 2026, NOEMA)

Once in power, every leader, good or bad, faces difficulties. The fork in the road is how they choose to handle unwelcome realities. For vain leaders, admitting difficulties would mean admitting personal failure. The psychological stakes of honest assessment are unbearable, so they take the path that avoids it.

Setbacks are blamed on the incompetence of subordinates. Those who insist on bringing up unpleasant truths are replaced with sycophants who reinforce petty tyrants’ exaggerated sense of genius. Eventually dissenters are frightened into silence.

To hide the truth from the outside world, petty tyrants must deceive and distract. Detachment from reality does not require stupidity, just the willingness to choose an appealing story over obstinate facts. So energies become focused on fabricating and supporting a convenient story and demonizing scapegoats. Institutions responsible for gathering objective information that might contradict the narrative are deliberately weakened. Critics are portrayed as traitors.

As the leaders and their associates concentrate their efforts on deceiving others, they begin to deceive themselves. To sustain the illusion, they must act as if they believe their own lies, as must those around them. Whether they actually believe becomes irrelevant. They are trapped in their own illusion.

As appearance replaces performance and loyalty replaces competence, the system begins to reward flattery rather than governance. Insiders learn to exploit the tyrant’s vanity, not only to stay in favor, but to advance their own agendas. Corruption becomes systemic. Extraction replaces stewardship and, as parts of the system become parasitic, the deterioration accelerates.

Once decisions are based on false premises, weaknesses are made invisible. But reality does not care. When Mussolini’s troops invaded in summer uniforms, winter still came.

As reality diverges from the fabricated narrative, the functional damages — the military defeats, the economic collapses, the institutional failures — create catastrophes that cannot be hidden. The spell is broken not by some moral awakening, but by these concrete disasters. Once a sufficient portion of the loyal supporters realize they have been duped, the leader will eventually fall.

The energy required to deceive is unsustainable. Reality is relentless. The tyrant who chooses to fight it is doomed.

THERE IS NO VIABLE ALTERNATIVE TO LIBERALISM:

Postliberalism’s Hungary Gambit Failed (Thomas D. Howes, 4/22/26, Civitas Outlook)

In the debates about postliberalism since Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed appeared in 2017, postliberals and their friends (e.g., Kevin Roberts) would that conservatives needed to stop fearing the use of power; some of their close friends in the new right would even echo Carl Schmitt, saying that in politics you need to reward friends and punish enemies; they would ask rhetorically “do you not know what time it is?”; others would dismiss proceduralism as an obstacle to promoting the common good. Among postliberal intellectuals, Adrian Vermeule opposed Madisonian, called for a more powerful and bureaucracy, and said we would be better off; Gladden Pappin bragged about the organizations that were formed to Trump loyalists to fill government positions; Christopher Rufo said these kinds of efforts, which included DOGE (a brainchild of Curtis Yarvin), were an “,” an effort to install a new elite, which echoed the arguments of Patrick Deneen’s book Regime Change. What they learned from Viktor Orbán was that you could decrease the separation of powers and weaken the checks and balances of a government by filling strategic positions with loyalists.

Postliberals also pushed a dubious economic agenda. Power should be used, they argued, to shape the economy; was all the rage, and various forms of right-wing dirigiste strategies were suggested, including 1930s-style corporatism, as it was by Orbán’s employee, Gladden Pappin. Viktor Orbán not only resisted mass immigration (as his replacement, Peter Magyar, does), but he also, they argued, saved Hungarians from the “globalists” who were hollowing out industry with their doctrine of free trade.

So, when Dreher admits Orbán’s loss was about the economy and corruption, postliberal’s conservative critics rightly gasp. Those are precisely the things we warned about—using political power to create advantages for your political party, stifling political speech, rejecting proceduralism for partisan advantage, and misguided economic policies that make countries poorer. The argument was primarily about corruption and poor economic policy. One might argue that more autocratic control is not intrinsically corrupt, but opponents of postliberalism always saw corruption as one of its consequences; and even then, Orban’s autocratic tendencies, his attempts to tip the scales to secure more power for himself and his party, were certainly a good part of what Magyar and his voters opposed.

Postliberals are a minority in American politics, but they punch well above their weight. They are well organized, operate in lockstep, and are loyal to one another—they behave in many ways like the leftists who for decades carried out a strategy of a “long march through the institutions.” Like Joseph de Maistre, one of their intellectual forebears, they believe that social revolutions succeed from the top down, through strategically placed elites. The more transparent their unpopular project, the less successful it will be. They are willing to talk in popular fora about their movement as a populist one, about a fight against the “globalists” and mass immigration, when it is far more about acquiring power for a much less popular social project—this is especially the case for the integralist faction (e.g., Vermeule and Pappin). They want to remove limits on the executive branch’s power, fill the government with loyalists, and form a compliant court, all for someone who shares their comprehensive vision (e.g., Vance).

The fall of the Orbán government not only cut off a huge amount of postliberal funding, but it also exposed their project to further scrutiny. They are leaving Hungary embarrassed and rejected by the Hungarian people. This also leaves them with no political power. Any near-future prospect they have is tied to J.D. Vance, whose power in turn depends on Donald Trump. We have seen many of Vance’s friends already thrown under the bus by Trump, particularly Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. It is unclear whether Trump even likes Vance or will endorse him. The 2028 primaries are a long way away in Trump time.

Donald is going to force JD out and replace him with Marco.

APPLYING DARWINISM:

Trump, his ‘low IQ’ slur, and the right’s race obsession (Michael Mathes, with Raphaelle Peltier in New York, 4/22/26, AFP)

“Trump’s characterization of people of color as ‘low IQ’ is a racist dog whistle with a long history in the US,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a professor of communication studies at Colorado State University, told AFP.

During the periods of colonialism and 19th century slavery, “white male elites took for granted that they were cognitively superior to women and people of color and, thus, divinely appointed for leadership.”

Trump’s recent repeated use of the expression dovetails with the American far-right’s apparent obsession with genetics and phrenology, a pseudoscience of cranium size and shape as a supposed marker of intelligence.

DEPARTING THE ANGLOSPHERE:

What Went Wrong in Israel? A Genocide Scholar Examines ‘What Zionism Became’: In his new book, Omer Bartov tracks how a liberatory strand of Zionism transformed into an extremist ideology that he sees as responsible for genocide in Gaza (Aaron Gell, 4/21/26, The Guardian)

Much of What Went Wrong? focuses on what Bartov frames as the original sin of Israel’s founding, the resistance to granting meaningful legal weight to the lofty words contained in the nation’s declaration of independence, coupled with the founders’ subsequent failure to adopt a national constitution and bill of rights. Had Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, pushed for either approach, Bartov argues, the nascent state might well have grown into the kind of liberal democracy it has, however speciously, long proclaimed itself to be.

Despite his condemnation of present-day Israeli society, Bartov does see a narrow path toward the nation’s peaceful coexistence with its neighbors. A section of the book is devoted to the confederation plan championed by a group of Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals called A Land for All – a version of which was originally considered by the United Nations in 1947. Under this scheme, sovereign and independent Palestinian and Jewish states would exist side by side, divided roughly along pre-1967 borders. Citizens of both entities would be allowed to live and travel freely throughout the combined territory, but would vote only in their own national elections – not unlike the way an Italian, for example, can live and work anywhere in the EU while voting in Italy.

Bartov acknowledged that the idea seems far-fetched as corpses are still being dug from the rubble of Gaza and Israel is prosecuting yet another bloody war. But what he sees as the nation’s preference for military confrontation over diplomacy depends entirely on American support, he pointed out, and that patronage is now being tested as never before. As a result of the Gaza genocide, a clear majority of Democratic voters now have a negative view of Israel. More recently, the ill-conceived US-Israeli aggression against Iran has significantly eroded GOP support. “Maga is becoming anti-Israel,” Bartov said, due to “Netanyahu completely leading Trump by the nose into a completely idiotic war”.

Despite some alarming strains of ethnic bias underlying the perception of wealthy and powerful Jewish interests manipulating the US government, pointing out antisemitism has lost effectiveness, in part because the influence of pro-Israel donors on US politics – and Israel’s campaign to convince the US to wage war on Iran – is undeniable. Additionally, the charge of antisemitism has grown hollow, Bartov said, due to its flagrant “weaponization” as “a tool to shut people up” as the state wreaks destruction on its neighbors. “Having claimed to be the definitive answer to antisemitism,” he writes in What Went Wrong?, “Israel is now the best excuse for antisemites everywhere, a nation whose addiction to violence and oppression, reliance on great powers and financial clout, and constant harping on the horrors of the Holocaust as an excuse for untethered violence against Palestinians are making even some of its erstwhile supporters shrink from it in discomfort, or horror and disgust.”

As a result, America’s indulgence of its longstanding Middle East ally may at last be reaching its limits. Should the United States withhold military support – as is advocated by growing numbers of Democratic policymakers – “Israel will have to go through a process of coming to terms with itself,” Bartov predicted. Under such circumstances, the country would have no choice but to pursue diplomacy. Ironically, that might be the so-called Jewish state’s best hope for a peaceful and prosperous future.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

IT’S A HOMOCENTRIC UNIVERSE:

The Pentagon released its UFO videos – so I went to the US to chase aliens. This is what I found
What is behind the surge in ufology? The recent spike can be traced to the top of the US government, which inspired me to start investigating … (Daniel Lavelle, 22 Apr 2026, The Guardian)

I don’t know what I was expecting, but I fantasised about having a Woodward and Bernstein moment on my trip. In a dusty diner in the American south-west, a source would hand me a brown envelope containing indisputable proof of the alien invasion. However, none of the major players in the disclosure movement – those who have been lobbying the government to declassify the UFO evidence – replied to my emails or calls. These include Elizondo and the Blink‑182 frontman Tom DeLonge, who has an entertainment company devoted to uncovering alien life.

The radio silence prompted me to dig a little deeper into the stories of whistleblowers such as Elizondo and Grusch. It didn’t take much excavating to realise that the alien invasion wasn’t all that it seemed. […]

In 2008, Bigelow’s company was the only bidder for a $22m government contract to research the technical aspects of the putative advanced aerospace weapon systems of the programme’s title. It did not mention that it wanted intel on monsters, apparitions, orbs, portals, werewolves or dinosaurs, but that is exactly where the taxpayers’ money went.

Elizondo disputes the Pentagon’s statement that he never led AATIP. In 2021, he filed an official complaint, accusing his former employer of campaigning to discredit him. That year, a book co-authored by Lacatski cataloguing AAWSAP’s research claimed that AATIP was “an unclassified nickname” used for a “completely separate, small” initiative to study UFOs encountered by people in the military.

What is clear is that the full story of Elizondo’s background was not apparent in the initial reports around his whistleblowing. In his 2024 memoir, Imminent, he wrote about possessing psychic powers. He also claimed he had met “remote viewers” – people who believe they can see things that their eyes can’t, sometimes thousands of miles away. Elizondo claimed he managed on one occasion to pay a psychic visit to a jailed terrorist. If these details had been publicly available when he blew the whistle on the Pentagon, his story may not have taken off in the same way.


Elizondo did not respond to my many requests to interview him, but I seized an opportunity to meet him in Washington DC in May 2025, at a UFO hearing he was chairing. The meeting was organised by the UAP Disclosure Fund, “a nonpartisan nonprofit supporting UAP legislation, protecting whistleblowers, and raising public awareness for greater transparency”. We spoke briefly before his opening speech and he promised me time later. I then took my seat and watched him put forward the views he has been sharing for close to a decade: that UFOs are thumbing their noses at physics while posing threats to national security.

At one point during the three‑hour-long event, Elizondo held up a photo of what appeared to be a large, white floating disc casting a shadow on what looked like agricultural land. Elizondo described the object as “lenticular” and “anywhere between 600 and 1,000ft in diameter”. Elizondo claimed he received the image from a civilian pilot. However, internet sleuths were quick to point out that Elizondo’s lenticular object was almost certainly two irrigation circles, one white and the other black, creating the illusion of a flying disc.

Seven months earlier, at an event in Philadelphia, he had presented a slide purporting to show a giant light emerging from clouds in Romania. He said it looked like “the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. The image, which ended up online, was believed by many other observers to show a window reflecting a ceiling light. Indeed, if you look closely, you can see the outline of what appears to be a head of hair, presumably that of the photographer.


Then there were those videos recorded by the US navy. Mick West, a UFO video analyst, deduced that the object of the video that made an officer go: “Oh gosh,” was likely glare from a nearby heat source – probably a jet plane’s exhaust.

YOU CAN’T BE BOTH CHRISTIAN AND MAGA:

Trump, Leo, and the Death of Integralism (Stephen Daisley, April 20, 2026, First Things)

Wait until the quixotic utopianism of the Catholic integralists encounters the final boss of postliberal politics: immigration. While many faithful American integralists will submit to the pope’s instruction, the Catholic Church’s pronouncements on immigration attack concepts as fundamental to Republican politics today as freedom and enterprise were in the Reagan and Bush years.

Even if some accommodation could be reached between Catholic social teaching and either Republican postliberalism or Democratic economic justice, such an arrangement would be agonizingly fragile in a polity where executive power can change every four years and legislative power every two. Orbán’s illiberal democracy, which he has spent the past sixteen years embedding in the institutions and culture of Hungarian national life, looks set to be dissolved by a successor keen to embrace all the European Union diktats Orbán’s ascendancy was predicated on opposing. On how a postliberal order can be developed into a society organized around material and spiritual virtue, integralism has few convincing answers. On how such an order would be maintained against the vicissitudes of democracy, it has no answers.

Integralists will not like hearing it, but there is already a means by which to live faithfully, extol the doctrines of the Church, and contribute to the forging of a common good society. Their old enemy, liberalism, properly understood, gives the Catholic holder of public office the freedom to live a life integrated to the eternal verities and ordered to virtue, while exercising temporal power under the law with ex officio neutrality, and promoting a culture conducive to religious devotion in which the faithful are secure from coercive state secularism. It is an imperfect model, it does not always deliver victory, and its concepts and mechanisms have been directed to un-Christian and anti-Christian ends and will be again. That is all the more reason to fight for the proper understanding and application of liberalism, and thus the right and ability of the faith to flourish in “enemy” territory, rather than taking the political Catholic tradition out of the mainstream and into the coercive, authoritarian fringe.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

The end of oil? As fuel shocks cascade, 53 nations gather to plan a fossil fuel phaseout (The Conversation, April 21, 2026)

US President Donald Trump is a longtime climate denier and oil industry ally, who sums up his own energy policy as “drill, baby, drill”. Yet he is doing more than almost anyone to speed up the global shift from fossil fuels to clean energy and electric vehicles (EVs).

After the US and Israel struck Iran in late February, Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz and triggered the largest disruption of oil supply in history.

Ironically for Trump and his oil industry donors, this crisis may be an irreversible tipping point for clean energy.

Darwinists believe an awful lot of Malthusian nonsense, but their Peak Oil obsession was particulary amusing.