The End of Caring What Jews Think

Bruce Pearl, Auburn basketball coach and prominent Jewish Republican, has delivered an ultimatum unto Vice President J.D. Vance: cut ties with Tucker Carlson, or he won't support Vance's 2028 presidential bid.

I don't know if Pearl will stick to his guns on this. I do feel quite confident that Vance will not oblige Pearl. Vance, if nothing else, sees which way the winds blow, and there is increasingly little profit in politicians paying heed to Jewish objections.

This, alas, is not unique to any party. If anything, it is more noticeable amongst Democrats -- not because the problem is "worse" there, but because Jews are of course far more successfully imbricated in the Democratic Party coalition and so the waning of influence is far more noticeable. But this cycle has already seen a slew of "local Jews raised the alarm about [candidate]" followed by "[candidate] wins anyway." It's gotten noticeable.

And while sometimes the "alarm" is making a mountain out of perfectly reasonable molehills, it isn't always. Graham Platner's totenkopf is an obvious example; Avila Chevalier attending an October 8 pro-Hamas rally is another. And while Melat Kiros' demurral on whether the Boulder firebombing murder was antisemitic isn't quite as bad as one might think from the topline description, it certainly isn't good. While it is clear (and I'm gladdened) that Kiros is quite clear in condemning the murder, it is in fact still quite bad when "is burning an elderly American Jewish woman alive because one is mad at Israel antisemitic?" is treated as a sort of trick question one must tip-toe around.

These are, in short, reasonable alarms to raise; and it matters that they are often ignored with impunity. And that's a change. So what caused it? Obviously, a lot of factors are in play, but one that looms large for me is that fragmenting of a hitherto relatively unified Jewish political consensus over the past few years. The Leviathan has fallen, and we are now in the era of the warring kingdoms. Here was my prediction at the onset of Trump 2.0, tell me if it looks familiar: 

So what we are looking at over the next several years is an American Jewish community that simultaneously is under unprecedented threat and is wracked by unprecedented internal division. What I expect to see, then, is that a depressingly large proportion of Jewish political action will take the form of fratricidal squabbling and internal jockeying for position. If the suzerain is falling, the border lord upstarts are going to race to annex as much territory as possible.

[....]

Even as external threats grow ever grimmer, Jews will relentless concentrate on our own internal power plays -- trying to grab space for ourselves and prevent the growth of our rivals.

Now again, maybe you think that the status quo hegemony of the ADL-type organizations was sufficiently awful that this transition is necessary and salutary, notwithstanding the growing pains. I won't argue the point here. But necessary or no, during the anarchic interregnum it's hard to imagine Jews being able to leverage much in the way of political influence. We are weak externally, and we are weak internally, and that is a very scary position to be in no matter how you slice it. 

I take no pleasure in vindication here. And (since this sort of caveat is always necessary whenever a Jew has a temerity to speak about Jews) I don't claim that this vulnerable position is unique to Jews, or is worse for Jews, or falsifies other vulnerabilities, or anything of the sort. I'm speaking about Jews-qua-Jews, not making some tacit comparative point. But for Jews, this is where we are. And it is a very unpleasant place to be.

This is a change for Jews. It used to be that "Jews are upset about X" was a substantial political negative, either intrinsically (people genuinely cared about Jewish feelings) or at least instrumentally (people correctly calculated that being perceived as being hurtful to Jews was a political loser), now both of those premises are increasingly shaky. The former has been rattled, but (perhaps more importantly) the latter has been decisively falsified. The lesson of 2026 is that backlash from Jews (and I'm trying here to be agnostic as to whether the backlash is "fair" or not) can be safely ignored.

Indeed, I might go further: it's not (at least not always) just a matter of people no longer feeling the need to listen to the Jews. It's more than agnosticism; Jewish discomfort or anger or panic is seen as a sign one is doing right -- akin to (in the Democrats case) learning that an evangelical church is sounded the alarm about the candidate. But even that undersells it, because it doesn't account for the libidinal sense of release being experienced. There is, at least in some quarters, a very strong undercurrent of glee in standing against the Jews -- a sensation that people are throwing off shackles that had constrained them. So it's more than just not caring about what Jews think, and it's more than a sort of negative polarization based on correlating Jews with conservatism. It's a more primal desire that associates Jews with these negative feelings of self-censorship and walking on eggshells and suppression, and now suddenly feeling free to break the chains.

This was central to my thesis about Platner, of course. And he's hardly alone. What crystallized this thought for me was an odd duck story about a local Portland coffee shop, Heretic Coffee, which received a donation routed through the Jewish Federation (the shop had made the news for offering free meals to persons facing hunger due to SNAP cuts). There was clearly some confusion about the donation, which was unsolicited. The shop owner initially reached out unsuccessfully to the Portland JFed, when the gift actually was from someone working through the SF JFed (hence perhaps why the former initially had no idea what the coffee shop was assking about). And the shop owner didn't seem to realize that it wasn't really a gift from the JFed at all, but rather an individual Jewish donor using the federation as a donor-advised fund.

But what could have just been a comedy of errors became something grimmer when the shop owner decided to "do his own research", determined that the gift must be "blood money" due to the JFed's alleged support for Israeli genocide, and defiantly tore the check up. Again, much of this misapprehends the structure of a donor-advised fund in the first place, but I don't actually want to focus on these details. Rather, what stood out to me was the owner's preemptive acknowledgement that he would likely face severe backlash from the Jewish Federation's supporters, and that he was ready for it and eager to receive it and prepared to be martyred by it. At one level, it stands out for viewing Jewish antipathy as a positive -- if the Jews cry out, he won't take that as a cause for concern but as further proof of his righteousness. But at another level, the bravado about his bold stand masks a pretty clear calculation -- and I think probably a correct one -- that the owner doesn't think he'll be martyred at all. For every mad Jew, there will be countless others ready to fete him for his bravery (see also: the Cornell student who said he wasn't interested in working for a Jew and then quickly raised $20,000 off the ensuing backlash).

So yeah. This is a new era for Jews in American politics -- an era where Jewish concerns are routinely ignored, if not viewed as an outright positive. It won't last forever -- nothing does -- but I don't harbor much optimism for the near-term.

The Lovable(?) Selfish Incompetent

I'm going to describe a character archetype to you, found in many modern comedies. These characters have an extremely high opinion of themselves, but are generally incompetent. They are also typically portrayed as selfish and self-absorbed, though occasionally one will get a peek at a supposedly deep-seated vulnerability or "heart of gold" in extreme situations. Finally, and essentially, the characters are not presented as antagonists even though 85% of the time they make a good person protagonist's life harder (either through the aforementioned incompetence, selfishness, or both). From the show's perspective, one is clearly supposed to find these characters lovable -- if only in a "oh, that rascal!" sort of way.

Examples of the archetype include:

• Tom Haverford (Parks and Rec)
• Bender (Futurama)
• Kayla (Hacks)

My question is: why? Why are we supposed to like these characters? Why are we supposed to view them as anything other than antagonists? Why is the incessant message that they deserve infinite grace and good humor and are, underneath it all, good people? They're not! They're obnoxious, terrible people who rarely (if ever) face any accountability for being self-absorbed entitled jerks.

Am I the only one who hates these sorts of characters? I'm not saying they shouldn't be on television -- bad people can make good characters -- but it's maddening that the shows don't seem to present them as truly bad people, when they are. At least with Eleanor Shellstrop her being objectively terrible (at first) is the explicit plot of the show. Yet I talk about how Kayla is an objectively awful human being, and people act as if I'm punching a puppy. I'm sorry, but "lovably chaotic" my ass. If this person was in your life you'd want to chuck them out the window, and if you couldn't do it because she's an untouchable nepo baby it would only accentuate the hellish injustice of being in a society where people like her get to fail up.

Okay, rant over.

Family in Paris: It's Getting Hotter

I am back from Paris. It was very hot. And I need to vent.

Before I do so, I want to stress that we had plenty of fun on this trip. When I told my mom I was invited to present at the Critical Theories of Antisemitism conference, she seized the opportunity to organize a whole family vacation around the trip, including my parents and my brother, sister-in-law, and their daughter (who's six months younger than Nathaniel). And as far as that project is concerned, it was great. We saw a lot of neat things, and more importantly, we got to spend time together as a family.

But on the travel side of traveling, boy did we get rogered.

As a quick point of reference, here was what the plan was, travel-wise:

• June 12: Depart PDX for Chicago O'Hare, then continue onward to Paris.
• June 13: Land in Paris.
• June 13-17: Stay all together as a family in an AirBnb in Passy
• June 17: Brother and his family leave for wine country.
• June 17-20: Parents and our family go to an AirBnb in the Marais while I attend the conference.
• June 20: Parents leave for Normandy.
• June 20-24: Jill, Nathaniel and I go to a hotel in Montparnasse for the remainder of the trip.
• June 24: Fly home (via O'Hare), arriving in PDX at 9:30 PM.

With that said, here's the actual blow-by-blow.

June 12

• We arrive at the airport three hours early for our international flight, scheduled to depart at 1:45 PM. As soon as we get to the ticketing desk, we learn that our flight to Chicago has been delayed such that we'll miss our connection to Paris. The woman at the desk tries to rebook us on another flight.
• We spend three hours at the airport perpetually almost being booked on another flight. At one point she told us to run to the Delta counter to check our bags for a flight leaving in 40 minutes, only for that flight to get delayed (and thus make our connection impossible). Nathaniel is a good sport for most of this, but by the third hour he's starting to get understandably cranky.
• Eventually, the agent gives up and tells us to call a phone number. The earliest we can get rebooked? 7:30 PM ... the next evening (through Heathrow). It will get us to Paris a full thirty hours later than scheduled.
• We go home.

June 13

• I hear it might be a bit warm in Paris, so I decide to use the extra day to get a quick haircut. I'm so excited, I accidentally back out of our garage before the garage door actually, you know, opens. Now it won't close. Oops. No time to deal with that.
• We get a worried text from our neighbor who noticed our garage door was open. Aren't we supposed to be on vacation? That stung.
• Off to the airport (we manually closed the garage door before we left)! We've actually done the PDX-Heathrow flight before with Nathaniel before, so we're optimistic. And it pays off -- he sleeps through most of the flight! Way to go champ!

June 14

• We land in Heathrow. There is a tram to take us from where we land to the main terminal.
• Just kidding: the tram is out of service. We have to walk the entire distance.
• We get to our departure gate, which is actually apparently a bus depot. And given how long the bus ride to the airplane took, I think our plane may have actually been on a runway in Gatwick.
• We get to our plane. While we've purchased a seat for Nathaniel so he doesn't have to sit in our laps, the gate agent tells us that our car seat won't fit in the plane seat and we'll need to gate check it (along with our stroller, which we had already been gate checking).
• We board the plane and reach our aisle. The flight attendant is confused as to why we don't have a car seat, since it would absolutely fit on the plane.
• We land in Paris. Our "gate checked" stroller and car seat are not gate checked at all but are sent to regular baggage claim.
• Finally we reach the AirBnb 30 hours later than expected. My parents had hired a private chef to cook dinner from us; he's in the middle of serving when we arrive. It looks delicious but we're too tired to really appreciate it. It is a warm evening, but it will get hotter.

June 15-17

• We spend several quality days together as a family. I take the metro to a bunch of art galleries and auction houses (including one that had a very neat preview of a chateau's collection being auctioned off), then walk to the Arc de Triomphe. 
• It is getting hotter.

June 17

• Brother, sister-in-law, and niece all say goodbye, while the rest of us travel to an AirBnb in the Marais. The apartment has two main levels (not including a terrifying basement we don't mess with). The bottom level has two tiny bedrooms and a bathroom. The upper level has a spacious kitchen and living room, all as one space. The problem is that the crib will literally only fit in the upper level, meaning that once Nathaniel goes to sleep we're all trapped in our hobbit hole bedrooms from dusk till dawn.
• I spend the day visiting art galleries. It is a lot of fun.
• It is getting hotter.

June 18-19

• I attend my conference, which is very nice, and my parents are able to watch Nathaniel so Jill can have some personal time as well.
• We book a time at an indoor petting zoo near our next hotel in Montparnasse, since that seems like a fun activity to do with Nathaniel.
• It is getting hotter. News reports speak of a generational heatwave making headlines around the world, with temperatures into the 90s and still rising. Paris is in a state of declared emergency.

June 19

• Our last night in the Marais. We are ready to check out of the AirBnb in the morning and move to our final stay location, the voco Paris Montparnasse, while my parents depart for Normandy.
• At 10 PM, we receive a message from the hotel that the air conditioning is broken. They suggest calling them for compensation and assistance rebooking.
• We call them. Nobody answers. The hotel may not even be open, as it is getting hotter.
• Scrambling, we book a new hotel near the Opera. It is almost three times as expensive as the old hotel -- which is what happens when you book on eight hours notice in the midst of a generational heatwave. Luckily, the email from voco suggested they'd provide compensation.

June 20

• We check into our new hotel. The people there are lovely and we really like the neighborhood. I decide to spend the day with the family to ensure we get settled rather than attend the last day of the conference. In spite of everything, I'm glad to be at this new hotel, particularly given their robust assurances that their air conditioning was in top-notch condition.
• On the other hand, Nathaniel learned how to whine today when he doesn't get what he wants. Literally -- it was a milestone discovered mid-trip. How lucky for us.
• I do go to the conference closing dinner in Montmartre. I consider not going, because I am very tired and it is getting hotter, but I decide to attend. By sheer exhaustion-related luck, I elect to Uber to the restaurant rather than take the metro, which turns out to be exceptionally wise as the restaurant is up a mountain of steps from the closest metro stop and the temperature is now approaching 100 degrees. Disaster averted.

June 21

• Conference is over -- now it's just family time! We decide to go to the petting zoo anyway, even though it is nowhere near our new hotel. It is a lot of fun, though it was extremely hot waiting outside on the building waiting for it to open.
• It is getting hotter.

June 22

• We finally get in contact with the voco to discuss compensation. We ask to be paid the difference in rates between the hotels, since we had to rebook at the last minute. The man at the desk is confused as to why our new hotel costs so much, and says that had we called him, he could've found a hotel for much less money, so no, he will not reimburse us for the difference. After all, what if we had booked the Ritz Carlton?
• We point out that we did not book the Ritz Carlton, that the reason the new hotel was more expensive was because it was last-minute in the midst of a historic heat wave, and that we tried to call the original hotel and nobody answered so we were forced to do our best. These are apparently not persuasive arguments. There will be no reimbursement.
• Defeated, we decide to see the Calder exhibit at the Louis Vuitton Fondation. It is fantastic, and more importantly, extremely well air-conditioned, which is important because it is getting hotter.

June 23

• It's our last full day in Paris. We have some ideas for some things to do, but ultimately we decide to stay close to the hotel and its air conditioning. It is the hottest it has been the entire trip -- over 100 degrees.

June 24

• Time to go home! We leave for Charles de Gaulle at 10 AM. Today will be even hotter than yesterday, but thankfully we'll leave before the temperature peaks.
• Our flight to Chicago takes off on time. But Nathaniel -- who has always been fantastic on flights and has really been a rock star this entire trip -- decides that our luck has run out. He screams for the first third of the journey, then for the second third decide he needs to run up and down the aisle. Finally he sleeps a little bit for the final hour (but starts screaming again during the landing).
• We arrive in Chicago forty minutes early, and we have a three-hour layover. How lucky for us! We can relax, let Nathaniel run around, change his diaper, even grab some dinner. We just have to get through customs, pick up our checked bags, recheck our checked bags, and go back through security.
• Customs line stretches approximately back to Wisconsin. A nice official spots us and moves us up in the line (thanks Nathaniel), but then the customs agent checking people at the front of said line goes on break and isn't replaced. The line stops. It's been an hour since we landed.
• Finally reach the customs agent, who is very interested in exactly what sort of "academic conference" I was attending in Paris. I debate whether telling him I was at a conference on "global antisemitism" will make it more or less likely I'll be thrown into a prison camp. Land of the free, baby!
• We wait for our checked bags. They don't show. Whoops -- turns out there were two flights arriving from Paris at the same time, and this was the other one. We sheepishly move to the correct baggage carousel.
• We wait for our checked bags. They don't show. Whoops -- turns out someone took them off the carousel while we were at the wrong one and set them aside. We sheepishly gather our bags and then immediately recheck them. This process feels gratuitous. It's been two hours since we landed.
• There is a tram to get from the international to the domestic gates. It is up a flight of stairs. There is one elevator with a capacity of approximately 1.5 people, which moves at a speed best described as "glacial", and a line of twelve people in wheelchairs in front of us. We decide to take an escalator, studiously staring upward to avoid seeing any signs suggesting strollers can't go on escalators.
• After the tram and two more elevator rides, we get back into a long security line. By the time we reach the front, it has been three hours since we landed. We arrive at the gate fifteen minutes before boarding, having had no time to relax, let Nathaniel run around, change his diaper, or grab dinner. My eye is feeling irritated.
• We board the plane. The plane then sits delayed on the tarmac for an hour. My eye is getting worse, and starts exploding with tears. Fortunately, being absolutely exhausted and being unable to open my eye without excruciating pain synergize surprisingly well, and I sleep through most of the flight. Even better, so does Nathaniel.
• We arrive in Portland a mere hour late (better than thirty hours, amirite?). Grab our bags, grab a taxi, get home before midnight. Remember we need to call someone in the morning to fix the garage door. Go to bed. Pray that Nathaniel approximates sleeping through the night (he does, but only because he doesn't fall asleep until two AM).

Fin.

Mal Voyage

Greetings from Portland!

That's not a sentence I wanted to write. If things had gone to plan today, Jill, Nathaniel and I would be en route to Paris right now. But a delay on our first flight meant we were going to miss our connection in Chicago, and from there the day devolved into three hours of camping in front of an American Airlines agent as she strove unsuccessfully to find us any alternative flights. 

There were several occasions where we almost got booked on a flight to London, but then we kept being kicked out. But the most comical sequence came in attempting to get us on a flight to San Francisco (to London, to Paris). The timing was tight, since by the time we got around to that solution the flight was leaving in forty minutes (of course, we had been at the airport for almost two hours at that point). So the gate agent told Jill to get in line at the United booth so we could check our bags immediately in the event she was able to get us on the flight. Which she was able to do ... until she wasn't ... and then she was again ... and then she wasn't ... and then she was. And I have a corresponding text chain with Jill where I tell her to come back ... no stay in line! ... wait, no, come back--DON'T COME BACK GET BACK THERE!

And after all of that, the San Francisco flight was delayed too, so we wouldn't make the London connection.

After three hours, we gave up and rebooked a flight tomorrow evening to London and then onward to Charles de Gaulle, which will get us in a scant thirty hours later than scheduled. Huzzah.

A few bits of silver lining. 

1. We'll be able to sleep in tomorrow morning.
2. We've actually done this Portland --> London flight before, and Nathaniel did great on it. To be sure, five months old and seventeen months old are very different in terms of travel experience. But Nathaniel is a phenomenal sleeper and the flight is a red-eye, so we're optimistic.
3. And speaking of Nathaniel, he did pretty great all told. Most of the time we were at the airport, he was cheery and climbing around and generally a happy camper. By the end -- when we had blown past lunch time (we gave him snacks) and nap time -- he was understandably starting to get a bit cranky. But he instantly fell asleep on the Lyft ride home (which again augurs well for sleeping on the plane).

Anyway, the trip is off to an inauspicious start. Here's hoping tomorrow goes better.

First Last Day of "School"

It was Nathaniel's last day of school today.

Now, there are a lot of asterisks around that statement.

First, he didn't attend for the full year. He started in January, and didn't move to his current class for a few months after that.

Second, he's not even 18 months. What is "school", compared to "daycare"?

Third, he's coming back to the same place for summer camp in a few weeks. And related to the above, for an 18-month old, what is the difference between "school" and "camp"?

But even with all of those caveats, I am verklempt. He is positively thriving, and it is a joy to see. He's confident and he's active and he's learning and growing at an incredible rate. Picking a preschool/daycare felt extremely high stakes -- probably higher than it actually is -- but to the extent there was a "right" choice, boy did we ever make it.

And yeah, sometimes he’s a bit tuckered out. But that’s okay too.

So pride of my guy!

The Candidate of Their Choice

Before it was butchered by the Roberts Court, a key purpose of the Voting Rights Act was to ensure that, where cohesive minority communities exist, they would have a reasonable opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice.

For Black communities, this often understandably meant electing a Black representative. But not necessarily.

For example, the Tennessee congressional district that until recently was anchored around Memphis is a majority-Black district represented by a White man, Steve Cohen. Why does Cohen represent that district? The same reason anyone represents any district: the majority of voters in his district like him, he's earned their trust, so they keep reelecting him. Periodically during his tenure he would draw an African-American challenger, often to much fretting and teeth-gnashing from the national media, and each time he would absolutely flatten them, because again, Steve Cohen was well-liked and trusted by the voters in his district. That he kept winning, and winning handily, in a majority-Black district was not a failing of the Voting Rights Act. Neither would it have been a failure of the Voting Rights Act if Memphis decided to vote differently. The purpose of the Voting Rights Act is to give cohesive minority communities, like that which exists in Memphis, the ability to elect the candidate of their choice. If they choose someone like Steve Cohen, that's their prerogative.

All of this is introduction to the fussing that's surrounding Debbie Wasserman-Schultz's decision, in the wake of Florida's latest round of partisan gerrymandering wrecking her current district, to run for re-election in the safely-blue and majority-Black 20th district (just north of, but not encompassing, her current turf). The complaint is that, with the evisceration of the VRA already signaling a cataclysmic drop in Black representation (particularly in the South), Wasserman-Schultz's bid will necessarily come at the expense of one of the few districts where a Black Democratic representative might have shot at winning.

But again: the point of the VRA is to permit minority communities to elect the candidate of their choice. And either they'll choose to elect DWS or they won't. If they do, that's their prerogative. If they don't, that's also their prerogative. It's not a foul for Wasserman-Schultz (or any other politician) to try to win the support and backing of another political community, any more than she is entitled to the support of a community. Again, either she wins or she doesn't, but that's a decision that can and should be made by the voters of the district.

I'll give this Mo Tkacik column an inch of credit for at least gesturing at a more viable basis for complaining at DWS' choice: that she should have run in the 22nd district (where she lives) because with a strong candidate it represents an at least outside chance at a Democratic victory and Democrats need to expand the playing field as far as possible. Sure, she'll probably lose in the 22nd. But she might not, and she'll give team Blue a better chance than any other candidate. Meanwhile, a Democrat will represent the 20th district no matter what. So DWS is placing her own self-interest in trying to occupy a safe seat over the party's interest in winning as many seats as possible.

Maybe. It's not exactly clear to me why DWS is the only strong candidate Democrats could possibly run in the 22nd district -- a depressing thought, if true. And this being Mo Tkacik, by the end of the column it dissolves into rambling about AIPAC and some real old-school classics about how DWS rigged the primary for Hillary Clinton against Bernie. Aside from its nostalgic value, though, that last part again speaks to this very frustrating tendency in some segments of the Democratic Party (and, to be sure, all segments of the Republican Party) that losing an election under via normal political contestation must be cheating.

On that note, there's chatter that some of the Black candidates running in the 20th District have held a meeting to see if any will drop out, in the hopes that this will consolidate the Black vote and make it more likely one of them will win. Under "Bernie was robbed" logic, non-viable candidates dropping out and endorsing a remaining candidate is, of course, the most abusive act of rigging imaginable. Under actual, normal politics, there's no problem here and such a decision is their prerogative as well. Once again, DWS is not entitled to this seat, and she is not entitled to have the political factions which oppose her just roll over and clear a path for her. If at the end of it all she wins, good for her. If she doesn't, good for whoever does. Either way, the most we can hope for is that the voters in one of the apparently few remaining majority-Black districts are able to elect the candidate of their choice.

SovCit Therapy

My current algorithmically-fed guilty pleasure is watching clips of "Sovereign Citizens" losing in court.

"Sovereign Citizen", for those who don't know, is an umbrella term capturing believers in an array of pseudo-legal gibberish that they think provide, more-or-less, a get-out-of-law-free card. There are probably infinite permutations of SovCit "theory", many of which these days don't use the term "sovereign citizen" (as they've gotten wise that this has become the generic term courts use when rejecting their nonsense). But if you've ever heard someone talk about how we're actually under Maritime Law or how the courts are actually bondholders, or offered to give some magic words that discharge your car payment or mortgage without actually paying for it, you've probably encountered a SovCit.

In various corners of the internet, SovCit peddlers confidently declare that they've cracked the code of U.S. law and so are immune to normal rules and regulations (like needing a driver's license to use a car, or being subjected to the criminal jurisdiction of their county judge). Once they're haled into court, however, they're frequently outraged and dismayed to find that their legal incantations have no effect. As in any conspiracy theory, the proponents always have an explanation for why it didn't pan out, usually taking the form either of (a) you didn't use the right magic words or (b) the judges/police/bailiff/everybody is corrupt and treasonous. And so the theories remain resilient in spite of loss after loss after loss. "As oft as reason is against a man, so oft will a man be against reason."

So why are these videos grabbing me right now? Well for one, in spite of their widely-acknowledged fringe status, I have to ask just how long it is before one of these cranks makes it onto the bench or some other position of substantial legal influence. After all, just how distant is their crackpottery from the crackpottery that dominates the MAGA movement? Are we really relying on the vetting capacity of this administration to keep them at bay? They're of a kind! One can very easily see how the sovereign citizen's self-serving assertions about the fictitiousness of pretty much all contemporary "law" -- as much as they are gibberish -- would hold appeal for a movement that fundamentally is about making up new law as they go in order to serve their own self-interest.  If anti-vaxx nuts can worm their way into top healthcare postings, I don't think we can be sanguine about SovCits finagling their way into the DOJ.

But leave the doomsaying aside. I think the main reason I'm enjoying these videos, as a law professor, is because right now there is something deeply cathartic about watching bad legal arguments lose. In a world where the highest court of the land acts in increasingly arbitrary and lawless fashion, to see a domain where law matters is a form of escapism. No, I'm not saying that an opinion like Callais is (quite) sovereign citizen caliber. But as a law professor, it genuinely and sincerely hurts to see how weakly rule of law constrains those actors constitutionally empowered to declare what the law is.

And yes, I can hear the tutting from a section of the bleachers that it was naive to ever think that law was anything other than dressed-up politics or judicial preference. But as popular as that line is (and as much as its proponents are now, with some justification, crowing with vindication), I still don't fully believe it. The late Fred Schauer's insight about "easy cases" -- the fact that most legal disputes are not in fact seriously contested and are the subject of massive intersubjective agreement from judges of wildly different social and ideological priors -- continues to carry weight. More importantly, the notion that most of the time legal questions should have relatively reliable answers is an important one. There is little point to the existence of the legal profession if the answer to every legal question posed by a client is "I dunno -- depends on the judge." We believe and we have to believe that there are cases -- a lot of cases, most cases -- where one can answer a legal question with a reasonably confident legal conclusion.

The SovCit smackdowns speak to that. They are dramatic, albeit in many stylized, illustrations that law is what it is even in the face of very loud yelling and screaming and dancing to try and incant it into something that it isn't. In a time where it sometimes seems as if force of political will alone can convert gibberish legal arguments into binding precedent, it is nice to watch brute insistence crash against actual legal reality.