Anglospherics

DELEGATION IS ANTI-CONSTITUTIONAL:

March 5, 2026

The Role of Delegation Theories in Deforming the Constitution (Tom Merrill | 3.4.2026, reason)

The case against delegation rests on the proposition that the Constitution, in the first sentence of Article I, gives “[a]ll legislative Powers” to Congress. One would therefore assume that sensitivity to delegation would be at its height when the President or some regulatory agency claims the power to issue so-called “legislative rules”—regulations that have a force and effect similar to that of a statute. At one time, the courts were very cautious about such delegations, and said they would refuse to recognize agency rules having the force of law unless they were explicitly authorized by Congress.

More recently, however, the Court has adopted something of the opposite presumption: that any statute that mentions “rules” or “regulations”—even if this could plausibly mean housekeeping or procedural rules—also includes the authority to issue legislative regulations, that is, rules that are functionally equivalent to mini-statutes. This newer presumption, which has never been justified by the Court in any considered decision, has the effect of permitting the transfer of lawmaking authority from Congress (whether this was intended or not) to administrative actors and the President.

As should be obvious, the unstated assumption that any reference to rules means authority to make binding legislative regulations has resulted in an enormous transfer of legal authority from Congress to the Executive.

Anglospherics Puritan Nation Religion

KNOW NOHINGS:

March 5, 2026

Smashing Plato’s Egg: Hidden in plain sight (Arron Reza Merat, Fall 2025, Hedgehog Review)

Michael Beresford Foster (1903–1959), Oxford tutor of A.J. Ayer, is among the most known for this view. The reason Greeks had no science, Foster argued, is because their philosophical traditions assumed an uncreated world. Unlike the Christian and Jewish God, who created nature ex nihilo, Plato’s Demiurge assembled the world out of a preexisting and eternal cosmos. God is analogous to a worker who makes things for a purpose—a chair for sitting, a pen for writing—and it is this purpose, or telos, that makes the object intelligible to the human mind. For the Greeks, natural objects were defined through reason alone, which can apprehend the true essence of things simply by contemplating the form given to them by their artificer. Matter, on the other hand, was irrelevant to knowing for the Greeks. It contributes nothing positive to an object’s being, obviating the need for science, based as it is on knowing through the empirical investigation of matter. The pagan theory of God presupposed here meant that God was not independent of the world and therefore has no omnipotent power over it. Nature in Greek thought, which tends toward panentheism, depends on God for its activity but never for its existence.

The God of Christianity is of another order. He is radically separated from Creation, which He creates out of whole cloth by establishing the conditions of possibility for all things. But through this arbitrary act of divine will, known in Christian theology as voluntarism, the purpose of the things He creates ex nihilo (and therefore the means by which humans can know them) is known only to God and remains forever obscure to His creatures. The Christian God who created the world from nothing is like an artist who paints on a whim. We do not know the purpose of the things in the world and—unlike with an artist who might, if she chose to, tell us her reasons—we cannot interview the Creator.

The Greek mode of thought is therefore incompatible with Christian cosmology in that it assumes one can know the mind of God through the things He made. For Christians, as for scientists, knowing is the humble endeavor of forever grasping at our mysterious reality. Only God really knows, and the best we can do is rise a little from our fallen state to know slightly more than nothing. Ecclesiastes 1:13 captures the idea: “I set my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind!”

End of History

NOW THE REFORMATION:

March 3, 2026

The Coming Iranian Revolution (Abbas Milani, 3/03/26, NY Times)

The people of Iran wanted a revolution based on the idea of modern citizenship and a social contract, to bring democracy, freedom, independence and a republic, even an Islamic one but without clerical rule. Ayatollah Khomeini promised those ideas, giving Iranians and the Western powers what they were desperate to hear. In the end, what he orchestrated was a counterrevolution.

In a suburb of Paris, in the months before the overthrow of the shah, the ayatollah gave scores of interviews. He concealed his political ambition and suggested he would ultimately step back from governance, though in past writings he often espoused rule by the clergy. He even wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter, asking him to defang the Iranian military and promising to keep Iran free of Soviet domination and the country’s oil on the markets. But all along, he was keen on clerical despotism and, as it soon became apparent, harbored deep resentments against the United States.

In another indication of his counterrevolutionary mode, many people in predominantly Shiite Iran believed that a reformed conception of Shiism was needed to make it amenable to modernity. But Ayatollah Khomeini, from his first major book in the 1940s and later as the supreme Shiite religious authority, insisted on keeping traditional rituals and dogmas, thus quashing the idea of modernizing Shiite Islam.

The romance of revolution, ignorance about Ayatollah Khomeini’s past writings and his pose as a defender of a liberal democratic polity in the months before the shah’s overthrow made the bait and switch work, albeit briefly. Iranians from all walks of life, Western leaders and many prominent intellectuals saw him as the flag bearer of Iran’s democratic aspirations.

Now Iran just needs to return to the traditional Shi’a wait for the messiah, like the West.

Long War

WE’LL TEACH YOU TO TAKE HOSTAGES!:

February 28, 2026

Trump’s Enormous Gamble on Regime Change in Iran: A few paths to success, many to failure (Tom Nichols, February 28, 2026, The Atlantic)

This is not a preemptive war. It is a war of choice, a discretionary war. It is a war for regime change. Many of Iran’s 92 million people want the regime removed. But it is far from certain that this will be the outcome.

To think about the possible courses of this war, we should start by clearly understanding three realities: First, Iran is a terrible regime that deserves to fall. The regime recently murdered thousands of its own citizens who were seeking freedom from their oppressive rule, and no one should be shedding tears for the mullahs hiding in their bunkers.

Second, “success” is not impossible—if by “success” we mean the fall of the ayatollahs and the rise of a better, more humane, pro-Western government that does not seek to destabilize the Middle East; dominate Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen; and eradicate Israel. But the path to that success is exceedingly narrow and mined with significant hazards. Destroying the regime’s capabilities is relatively easy, but nothing permanent—as Americans learned in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is achieved by bouncing rubble and piling up bodies. Destroying the regime itself is a far trickier business; dictatorships have a high pain tolerance, especially when the hapless citizens, not the leaders, bear the brunt of that pain.

Third, the president has not offered a strategy, or identified any conditions that would signal that U.S. goals have been achieved. Yes, he has vowed to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, but beyond that, he seems to be arguing for just inflicting military damage on the regime, on the assumption that enough ordinance on enough targets will weaken the grip of the ayatollahs. Once the theocrats are on the ropes, the thinking seems to go, the people of Iran will finish the job of regime change for us.

We’ve mishandled the regime for nearly 50 years now, especially post-9/11, when they begged to be let in out of the Cold. But the reality is that the American people would even support nuking Iran. Donald would have had no trouble getting Congressional approval for an operation based around regime change.

Identitarianism

TRUMPISM DOESN’T WORK:

February 28, 2026

The Post-Liberal Laboratory: Sixteen Years of Orbán’s Hungary (Kaiser Bauch, 2/25/26, LEO)

[I]t is important to acknowledge that the period between the financial crisis and COVID was a great economic time for the whole East-Central European region, propelled mostly by advantageous global conditions. The post-communist EU member states were all growing rapidly—on average about 3.2%.

While Hungary grew above the average and was among the top performers, the problem is that Hungarian growth was driven primarily by rising employment and hours worked. ‘Orbánomics’ was based on attracting foreign capital investment into factories, mostly but not exclusively in automotive, to create jobs. In this, Hungary was successful, yet this growth model—which economists call ‘extensive’ rather than ‘intensive’—started to break down around 2019, before the COVID crisis hit.

It is a model that requires more and more capital and more and more additional labor every year to maintain economic growth. Yet the Hungarian labour force is declining and the country started to experience labour shortages. Moreover, if one looks at labour productivity growth measured as GDP per hour worked in the same period (2013-2019), Hungary was among the worst performers in the region—growing 1.7% on average while the regional average was 2.3%. It also had by far the biggest mismatch between labour productivity growth and GDP growth—meaning that this growth was not sustainable unless the labour force (or working hours) continued to expand. But more on that later.

Since COVID, things have only gotten worse.

At the End of History, there is no viable alternative to liberalism.

Anglospherics

THE GLORY OF THE WEST:

February 28, 2026

The Last Speech: “A Thing Called Civilization” (Sir Roger Scruton, February 26th, 2026, Imaginative Conservative)

What is Civilization?

Let’s leave aside the idea of Western civilization. After all, it depends which way you’re going around the globe whether it’s West or East. Look instead at the idea of civilization. What is it? What is a civilization? It is surely a form of connection between people, not just a way in which people understand their languages, their customs, their forms of behavior, but also the way in which they connect to each other, eye to eye, face to face, in the day-to-day life which they share.

This is something which has ordinary dimensions in the workplace and in the community, in our day to day. But also it has a high culture built upon it, works of art, literature, music, architecture, and so on. These are our ways of changing the world so as to be more at home in it.

I think that is the distinctive feature of Western civilization, that it is a comprehensive civilization constantly giving us new ways of being at home, ways of being in relation to each other, which bring peace and interest as the primary bonds between our neighbors.

It is the universalism that distinguishes us and, effectively, makes the West the only civilization.

Israel/Palestine

PALESTINE IS A NATION:

February 27, 2026

Americans’ sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have shifted dramatically, new poll shows (LINLEY SANDERS, February 27, 2026, AP)

Now, their support is about evenly balanced, with 41% saying their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, and only 36% saying the same about the Israelis.

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

End of History

WHAT’S LEFT OF WHITE SUPREMACY…:

February 24, 2026

The System Everyone Hates Is the One That Has Actually Worked (Richard Hanania, Oct 24, 2025, Doomslayer)

Neoliberalism was a response to stagnation and malaise around the globe. Outside the Communist Bloc, the mid-20th century was dominated by Keynesianism in the West and state-led development in the Global South. Governments regulated industries, controlled capital flows, and expanded welfare states. By the 1970s, cracks appeared in this system: stagflation (low growth and high unemployment) in the United States and Europe and recurring fiscal crises discredited state-centered models. In the developing world, mounting debt and balance-of-payments problems forced governments to seek assistance from international institutions, setting the stage for policy change.

This atmosphere of crisis created an opening for market-oriented thinkers who had been marginalized in earlier decades, perhaps most notably the Chicago University economist Milton Friedman, who would win the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976 and become highly influential as a public figure advocating for deregulation. The law and economics movement, centered on figures including Ronald Coase, Richard Posner, and Gary Becker, also emerged at the University of Chicago, and they began to apply cost-benefit analysis to government regulations that had previously gone unquestioned. They called for taking efficiency concerns into consideration when interpreting legal doctrine.

Neoliberalism was characterized by taking seriously classical liberalism’s commitment to free markets and limited government. In the context of the world created by the 1970s, this approach meant slowing the growth in the money supply, deregulating industry, taking a skeptical approach to labor unions and industrial policy, opening markets up to the free flow of capital and trade, and in some cases, trying to shrink or at least prevent the expansion of the welfare state.

This cross-partisan convergence toward such ideas beginning in the late 1970s and continuing into the early 2000s has been called hegemonic neoliberalism. The first wave was identified with the right, associated with the tenures of Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) and Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990). The second came in the 1990s in the form of the “Third Way” leaders, notably Bill Clinton (1993–2001) and Tony Blair (1997–2007). Far from rejecting their conservative predecessors, they consolidated the new order: Clinton championed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), welfare reform, and financial deregulation, while Blair’s New Labour accepted Thatcherite economic reforms.

…once you have a system where everyone succeeds? The End of History demonstrates that white men are nothing special.

Identitarianism

APPLIED DARWINISM:

February 24, 2026

The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem (Tom Nichols, 2/23/26, The Atlantic)

Over the past few months, during his agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino has worn an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. It looks like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.

By this, I mean that some Republicans are deploying Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and espouse ideas associated with the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the early 1930s. A few recent examples: An ICE lawyer linked to a white-supremacist social-media account that praised Hitler was apparently allowed to return to federal court. Members of the national Young Republicans organization were caught in a group chat laughing about their love for Hitler. Vice President J. D. Vance shrugged off that controversy, instead of condemning the growing influence of anti-Semites in his party. (In December, at Turning Point USA’s conference, Vance said, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.”)

Even federal agencies are modeling Nazi phrasing. The Department of Homeland Security used an anthem beloved by neo-Nazi groups, “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad. The Labor Department hung a giant banner of Donald Trump’s face from its headquarters, as if Washington were Berlin in 1936, and posted expressions on social media such as “America is for Americans”—an obvious riff on the Nazi slogan “Germany for the Germans”—and “Americanism Will Prevail,” in a font reminiscent of Third Reich documents.

Trump, of course, openly pines to be a dictator. In his first term, he reportedly told his chief of staff, General John Kelly, that he wished he had generals who were as loyal as Hitler’s military leaders. (The president was perhaps unaware of how often the führer’s officers tried to kill him.) More recently, the White House’s official X account supported Trump’s pursuit of Greenland by posting a meme with the caption “Which way, Greenland man?” That is not merely a clunky turn of phrase; it’s an echo of Which Way Western Man?, the title of a 1978 book by the American neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson, a former Presbyterian minister who called for America to expel its Jewish citizens.

Identitarianism is evil.

Identitarianism

LET MY PEOPLE GO:

February 22, 2026

What I Saw at the Battle of Minneapolis: The national media has moved on. Minnesota is still under siege. (Jonathan V. Last, Feb 21, 2026, The Bulwark)

Nearly every person I spoke to in Minnesota told me about a web of clandestine services that have sprung up to support neighbors targeted by the government.

The Twin Cities have tens of thousands of residents who cannot leave their homes for fear of being abducted by DHS. These people cannot go to work. They cannot shop for groceries. They cannot go to doctors’ appointments. Many of them cannot send their children to school.

Various civic groups have self-organized to help them. Food banks deliver groceries. People donate money to pay rent. Doctors finish their shifts and then make house calls. The governor told us about a group of doulas who make secret home visits to deliver babies to mothers who cannot go to a hospital, because DHS agents view health care facilities as abduction traps.

Think about that: You now live in a country where volunteers deliver babies at home, in secret, off the books, because mothers fear that if they go to the hospital, they will be abducted by masked, armed agents of the state while giving birth.

This is not a hypothetical. It is your lived reality. It is America.

DELEGATION IS ANTI-CONSTITUTIONAL:

KNOW NOHINGS:

NOW THE REFORMATION:

WE’LL TEACH YOU TO TAKE HOSTAGES!:

TRUMPISM DOESN’T WORK:

THE GLORY OF THE WEST:

PALESTINE IS A NATION:

WHAT’S LEFT OF WHITE SUPREMACY…:

APPLIED DARWINISM:

LET MY PEOPLE GO:

You Missed

THE FUTURE ALWAYS HAPPENS FASTER THAN YOU EXPECT:

THE NEXT ORBAN?:

RISE THE TIDE:

IT DEMONSTRTES THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF EMPATHY: