Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, published a piece this week at American Greatness that deserves more scrutiny than it will probably receive. Not because it’s unusual — it isn’t — but because it crystallizes a logical problem at the heart of how a certain kind of commentary has chosen to defend the current administration’s conduct in the Persian Gulf.

The piece concerns what Kimball frames as Trump’s masterstroke against Iran: a campaign of military strikes, aggressive rhetoric, and ultimately a ceasefire that Kimball presents as a historic victory. The rhetorical centerpiece of that campaign was a Truth Social post in which the President wrote, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Kimball’s argument is essentially that critics who found this alarming were performing hysteria, and that the Babylon Bee had it right: Trump was simply taking “a seemingly extreme position to negotiate the best possible deal.”

It sounds plausible until you follow the logic one step further — and then the entire argument collapses.

Before we talk about Fox News, before we talk about political double standards and broken-glass graphics and the machinery of partisan media, we need to start where this story actually starts: with the women.

Five women came forward. One of them — a former staffer who began interning for Eric Swalwell in 2019 when she was 20 years old — told CNN that he raped her in 2024, that she was heavily intoxicated, that she told him to stop, that he didn’t, and that she was left bruised and bleeding. She described living in fear every single day since. “I always felt like if I came forward, I was going to suffer the consequences because he was so powerful,” she said.

A second woman described waking up naked in a hotel room with Swalwell after a night of heavy drinking with no memory of what had occurred. Two others described receiving unsolicited explicit photos and sexual messages. A fifth described being kissed and groped without consent at a bar.

There is a document circulating in conservative policy circles right now called the Mass Deportation Coalition Playbook. It proposes removing over one million people from the United States in a single calendar year. It recommends worksite raids, bank account freezes, and what it calls a “whole-of-government approach” to locate, detain, and expel people who entered the country without authorization or overstayed their visas.

It is a serious document, in the sense that serious people wrote it with serious intent. And it ends with a flourish that deserves serious attention: a call, as America approaches its 250th birthday, for citizens to ask themselves whether they want to “preserve America for Americans.”

I would like to apply that principle consistently. Let’s follow it where it actually leads.

On Sunday night, the President of the United States posted an AI-generated image of himself to Truth Social. White robes. Red sash. One hand radiating divine light, the other laid healing on a sick man. Bald eagles. The Lincoln Memorial. Orthodox Easter.

Within hours the revolt came — not from the left, not from comedians, but from inside the house. Marjorie Taylor Greene called it “an Antichrist spirit.” A conservative commentator said he couldn’t imagine the narcissism. Far-right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos, who has defended this man through nearly everything, drew a line: “We tolerated this kind of meme against our better judgment.” His own Truth Social followers told him he would burn in hell.

A picture. An AI picture. That’s what broke the spell.

The final score was 34–17. Someone spiked the ball. The crowd went home. By Wednesday nobody could tell you who scored in the third quarter, and by the following Sunday the whole thing had been replaced by a new game with new stakes and a new reason to care for exactly three hours.

This is not a criticism of football. It is a description of what football is for. The game is engineered for maximum present-tense engagement. The drama is real, the stakes feel enormous, and then the clock hits zero and the whole apparatus resets. Designed obsolescence is not a flaw in the product. It is the product.

Contemporary Christian music has accidentally adopted the same production philosophy — and unlike football, it has no idea that’s what it’s doing.

The "millionaire exodus" is built on data produced by a firm that profits from wealthy migration. The capital flight threat is mostly overstated. And the real crisis — the one actually crushing wages, suppressing mobility, and hollowing out economic participation — isn't about tax rates at all. It's about rent. Adam Smith knew this in 1776. We keep forgetting it.

The image circulates with clockwork regularity: a stern-faced politician, a plummeting stock chart, bold letters screaming EXCLUSIVE. “16,500 millionaires left the UK in 2025,” the caption declares, followed by the inevitable sneer — Tax the rich, they said. Hmmm. It is designed to end a conversation before it begins. And it gets traction, partly because the number sounds authoritative. As we’ll show, it largely isn’t. But more importantly, it’s misdirection — a proxy war about tax rates that distracts from a more fundamental question the original thinkers of capitalism already answered.

That question isn’t whether wealthy people leave when you tax them. It’s whether the wealth being extracted from ordinary people is productive at all — or whether a large chunk of it is simply rent, a toll extracted for access to things nobody built. On that question, the evidence is clear, the economics are settled, and the politics are where we keep getting stuck.

A TikTok recently claimed that Christianity is built on a lack of consent — pointing to Mary, the Annunciation, a woman who never agreed to what happened to her. It’s a provocation that contains a real question. But it’s aimed at the wrong target. The consent problem in Christianity isn’t in the founding theology. It’s in what the institution did with that theology — specifically, what it chose to ignore. Because the founding story, read carefully, is not a story about a woman who had no choice. It is a story about God asking. And the men who built the church looked straight at that and decided it wasn’t the point.

That’s the argument. Now let’s build it properly.

Before engaging the consent question honestly, a prior distortion has to be cleared away — one that is far uglier than most people acknowledge. A persistent tradition insists on rendering Mary as young as twelve years old. The Gospels themselves do not support this. The Greek word used is parthenos — a young, unmarried woman. The parallel Hebrew term, almah, carries the same meaning. Neither word denotes a child.

There’s a moment in the Gospel of Matthew that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. Jesus is in Jerusalem, in the final week of his life, surrounded by the most powerful religious leaders in Israel — the chief priests, the elders, the men who had spent their entire lives studying, teaching, and enforcing the law of God.

And he looks them dead in the eye and says:

“Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.”

A recent Substack article asked Christian denominations to unite under a single banner — literally. The author, drawing on Ben Franklin’s “Join or Die” snake cartoon, designed a flag representing the Body of Christ and flew it outside his house. It is sincere. It is creative. And it raises a question the article never quite answers: unified to accomplish what, exactly?

The urgency is borrowed from Franklin’s original context: colonies facing military annihilation. The threat was concrete. The “or die” part meant something specific. In the article’s adaptation, the threat stays vague. Die how? From what? The piece asserts that division is fatal without ever establishing what the wound actually is.

The deeper problem, though, isn’t what the article fails to argue. It’s what it quietly assumes: that unity is primarily institutional — a matter of denominations aligning, flags flying, common banners raised. That assumption deserves a direct challenge, because it may have the thing exactly backwards.

There’s a question people ask about the Bible that they rarely admit they’re asking: what did these people get away with?

Not in an academic sense. In a practical one. They scan the stories of Abraham, David, Jacob, Samson — men who lied, cheated, acquired women, committed what we would today call war crimes — and they’re looking for the outer edge. The fence line. The place where God apparently still called a man “friend” despite everything.

It’s a strange kind of moral cartography. And it tells us something important: many people read the Bible not as a story of grace, but as a guide to the legal minimum.

A conservative writer recently responded to New York City’s delayed fare-free bus program with a gleeful “Hahahahahaha. You got played, NYC.” A Heritage Foundation fellow called Mamdani a liar and New Yorkers idiots. PragerU compared democratic socialism to a toxic ex.

None of them paused to ask who rides those buses, or why, or what it costs a home health aide making $17 an hour to spend $120 a month just to get to the job that keeps your grandmother alive.

That absence of curiosity is not incidental. It is diagnostic.

When people argue about AI and music, they tend to argue about the wrong thing. The debate usually lands on whether a machine can produce a convincing song — and the answer to that is, by now, obviously yes. But that’s not the question that matters.

The question that matters is: what are people actually paying for when they pay for music?

And the deeper, more uncomfortable question underneath that one: what happens when money and infrastructure can bury the real thing?

There’s a piece of folk wisdom that gets passed around parenting circles like a badge of honor: “Your kids aren’t supposed to like you. You’re their parent, not their friend.”

It sounds tough. Wise, even. And there’s a kernel of truth buried in it — children pushing back against their parents is developmentally normal. Expected. Healthy, even. The teenager who rolls her eyes at everything you say isn’t broken. She’s individuating. Separating. Becoming a person.

But somewhere along the way, this kernel of truth got inflated into a philosophy. A permission slip. A reason to disengage.

The argument that Christianity was invented by men to control people gets passed around as if it were a devastating insight. It is not. It mistakes the backdrop for the subject. The Bible is not centered on men. Men are the occasion for what actually matters — the cold front of cruelty and indifference that makes the real story necessary. The people they overlooked, dismissed, sold, abandoned, and failed to feed: those are the center. The text knows exactly what it is doing. It always has.

Esther and Ruth do not have their own books as footnotes to a male narrative. They have their own books because their stories are the point. Ruth is a foreign widow — two categories of person that the ancient world considered marginal by definition — and the book bearing her name is a story of loyalty, provision, and redemption that requires no male hero to resolve it. Esther saves her entire people through courage that the men around her conspicuously lack. These are not supporting characters. They are what the tradition is actually about.

Meanwhile, the men who nominally lead the story are almost uniformly instructive in their failure. David is an adulterer and a murderer whose kingdom fractures under the weight of his own appetites. Moses never reaches the promised land. The disciples argue about status while Jesus is predicting his death. The great men of the Bible are not great in the way the word usually means. They are present. They are named. And they are repeatedly, almost tenderly, shown to be insufficient.

A policy perspective · Companion to “A Bear Trap in the Living Room”

Imagine two dogs standing side by side. Same size. Same build. Same breed label. One of them, if it decides to attack a child, will cause a serious injury. The other will cause a fatal one. From the outside, they are indistinguishable. Both are dangerous. The difference is degree — and degree is exactly what policy should care about.

We already accept, as a society, that some things are dangerous enough to require registration, licensing, and demonstrated responsibility before a private citizen can own or operate them. Cars. Firearms. Certain chemicals. Exotic animals in most jurisdictions. The logic is not that these things are evil or that their owners are bad people. The logic is that the consequences of failure are serious enough to warrant oversight — and that oversight creates accountability where none otherwise exists.

There is a metaphor that cuts through years of circular argument: owning a pit bull–type dog is like having a bear trap in your home. Everything is fine. Until it isn’t. And when it isn’t, the outcome is categorically different from other kinds of “isn’t.”

The metaphor is imperfect—dogs are not mechanical devices, and most will never cause harm—but it captures the structure of the risk. The problem isn’t the probability of activation. It’s the combination of an unpredictable threshold and a catastrophic consequence. A bear trap in good working order, properly stored, never causes injury. But it creates a persistent level of responsibility that most people aren’t actually capable of sustaining—and crucially, the absence of an accident is wrongly attributed to owner skill rather than to the trap simply not having been triggered. You don’t know which condition you’re in until you find out.

That’s the honest framing. Everything else follows from it.

A rash of viral moments has confused performative politics with protection. The confusion is dangerous — and it’s older than you think.

You’ve probably seen the clip by now, or one like it. A man on a date declines to pay for dinner, making a point of his feminist credentials — equal pay, equal bills. When his date is threatened moments later, he does nothing. He stands aside. The implicit logic: he’s treating her as an equal, which apparently means abandoning her to fend for herself.

The punchline lands hard. Whatever your politics, you’d rather have a conservative — or at least someone who understood that protection and respect are not opposites.

There is a kind of book that arrives at exactly the right cultural moment—naming something real—and stops just short of demanding anything.

Moral Injuries is that kind of book.

Michael Valdovinos has written a serious, well-researched account of what happens when people violate their own conscience—or are forced to. He calls it moral injury: not trauma in the conventional sense, not the fear-response of PTSD, but the rupture that happens when you do something, or fail to stop something, that contradicts your deepest sense of right and wrong. It shows up in soldiers ordered to fire on civilians. It shows up in doctors rationing ventilators. It shows up in executives who watched the system they served produce harm they could have named. The concept is real. The suffering is real. The book takes it seriously.

Content warning: This article discusses sexual violation, abuse of power, and the theological frameworks that enable them.

Let’s start with the story as the book tells it.

A man named Alex is watching TV. His sister-in-law falls asleep in the same room. He becomes aroused. He does not get up and leave. He does not wake her. He does not remove himself from the situation.

There’s a LinkedIn post making the rounds. A therapist writing to parents whose teenagers have gone quiet. Her framing is kind. You’re not trying to argue. You’re trying to help. But somehow everything turns into conflict.

She’s not wrong about what it feels like. She’s wrong about what’s driving it.

The post assumes the parent wants a relationship and is accidentally producing conflict through poor communication. Fix the communication, fix the relationship. It’s a comfortable diagnosis. It lets the parent off easy.