The Corruption Requires the Stupidity

When one stares into the abyss ...

The abyss. The darkness. The meaningless void that life rebels against. It stares at us. Nietzsche warned about this moment—when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. When the frameworks that make meaning possible collapse, when the principles that make reasoning together conceivable dissolve, when words lose their moorings to reality and power becomes the only truth—that’s when the abyss stares back.

It is very much staring us in the face right now.

Which brings me to Lindsey Halligan.

On November 24, 2025, a federal judge threw out Donald Trump’s prosecution of James Comey. Not because Comey was innocent. Not because the evidence was insufficient. But because the prosecutor Trump installed to indict his enemy—Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance lawyer and Trump’s personal defense attorney with zero prosecutorial experience—was never lawfully appointed as a U.S. attorney and therefore had no legal authority to bring charges at all.

Judge Cameron McGowan Currie’s ruling was devastating: Because Halligan’s appointment violated federal statute, “all actions flowing from it were unlawful exercises of executive power.” The indictment was void. And because the statute of limitations expired while Halligan pursued her invalid prosecution, Comey likely can never face the same charges again.

Trump’s attempt to weaponize the Justice Department didn’t just fail—it immunized his target. The corruption was so obvious, the execution so incompetent, that it collapsed under its own illegality.

And this is what staring into the abyss looks like in practice. Not some abstract philosophical crisis, but the concrete collapse of the frameworks that make legal reasoning possible. When you cannot distinguish between legitimate prosecution and personal vendetta, when appointment statutes become “technical” obstacles rather than constitutional constraints, when the only question is loyalty rather than legality—you’re not just breaking rules. You’re destroying the conditions that make rules intelligible.

The corruption requires the stupidity. And the stupidity reveals the abyss.

Understanding what happened requires seeing the timeline not as a series of unfortunate errors but as the inevitable unfolding of corruption that cannot permit competence. September 20, 2025: Trump posts on Truth Social, addressing Attorney General Pam Bondi directly: “Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.’”

September 22, 2025: Erik Siebert, the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who had expressed doubts about prosecuting Trump’s enemies, is pushed out. Lindsey Halligan—Trump’s former personal defense attorney—is sworn in as his replacement.

September 25, 2025: Three days later, Halligan secures a two-count criminal indictment against James Comey. She is the sole prosecutor presenting to the grand jury. She later admits she did not present the case to the full grand jury.

September 30, 2025: The statute of limitations for Comey’s alleged offenses expires.

October 9, 2025: Halligan secures an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James on charges of bank fraud and false statements. Again, Halligan alone presents to the grand jury.

November 24, 2025: Judge Currie throws out both cases, ruling that Halligan’s appointment violated 28 U.S.C. § 546—the statute governing interim U.S. attorney appointments. Because Siebert had already served his 120-day term, the Justice Department could not simply install a new interim prosecutor. The power to appoint belonged to the district court, not the Attorney General. Halligan had no legal authority. Her indictments were void. And because she pursued an invalid prosecution past the statute of limitations deadline, Comey cannot be recharged.

The corruption immunized its target through its own illegality.

It is almost comedic to imagine the narrative pretzels one must jump through in order to pretend that a coherent argument can be made here, that what we are witnessing is the application of a good faith effort in pursuit of justice. You would need to explain how installing your personal defense attorney as a federal prosecutor to indict your named enemies isn’t corrupt. There is no framework that makes this defensible. The appearance of impropriety isn’t subtle—it’s the entire structure. You would need to argue that violating the appointment statute is a “technical” issue rather than a constitutional constraint. But that requires treating the law as an obstacle to be gamed rather than a framework constraining power. Once you make that move, you’ve abandoned the rule of law entirely. You would need to justify why the prosecutor indicted within three days of taking office, presenting to a partial grand jury, mere days before the statute of limitations expired. The timeline screams vindictiveness. There’s no good-faith explanation for this haste—no sudden discovery of crucial evidence, no compelling prosecutorial necessity. Just Trump’s public demand followed immediately by prosecution.

You would need to explain why, after the judge ruled the appointment unlawful, the White House “stands with” Halligan and Bondi says the ruling “does not” affect her role. This isn’t defending a good-faith legal position—it’s doubling down on the violation itself.

None of these things can be defended coherently without abandoning basic principles: that the rule of law constrains power, that procedures matter, that appointment statutes exist for reasons, that the appearance of justice matters, that constitutional constraints aren’t “technical” obstacles. The corruption required destroying these frameworks. And destroying frameworks requires stupidity—not because the people involved lack intelligence, but because intelligent defense of the indefensible is impossible.

You cannot think clearly while maintaining that personal lawyers should prosecute personal enemies, that appointment statutes are technical trivialities, that three-day indictments after presidential demands aren’t vindictive, that partial grand jury presentations are proper procedure, that immunizing your target through illegal process is winning. The framework cannot cohere. So stupidity becomes the only option. Not chosen stupidity, but necessary stupidity—the epistemic collapse that corruption requires.

When I searched for conservative responses to the Halligan appointment and prosecution, I found something more revealing than silence. I found fracture. The response wasn’t unified defense or unified condemnation—it was the complete breakdown of any coherent conservative position, revealing exactly what Jonathan Chait describes in his devastating Atlantic piece on the brain death of conservative thought.

Andrew McCarthy—former federal prosecutor, Fox News contributor, National Review writer—called the indictment “ill-conceived,” “incoherently drafted,” and “factually without foundation.” In a piece titled “With More Scrutiny, the Trump DOJ Indictment of Comey Gets Worse,” McCarthy concluded the case “should be dismissed.” On Fox News, he characterized it as “a mess” and stated “the charge itself is incoherent.” This is a conservative legal analyst, writing in National Review, appearing on Fox News, saying the prosecution was indefensible garbage.

But we should pause here to acknowledge National Review‘s broader posture in this moment. While McCarthy—a contributor—maintained intellectual honesty about the Halligan prosecution, the publication itself has been busy providing intellectual frameworks for constitutional crisis. In March 2025, they published an editorial outlining scenarios where “the executive may have a persuasive case for defying a judicial order”—a roadmap for extra-constitutional power dressed as constitutional analysis. When I critiqued this editorial, National Review senior writer Dan McLaughlin devoted an entire article to dismissing my concerns without engaging the substance, calling me “a Substack writer” and hiding behind procedural pedantry.

McLaughlin wrote: “When the courts seize powers never granted them in the Constitution, that is a usurpation of power—and arguably an even worse one than executive overreach, precisely because there are so very few remedies for it.” There’s the argument laid bare: because judicial overreach is difficult to remedy constitutionally, extra-constitutional remedies become justified. This isn’t constitutional analysis—it’s constitutional surrender dressed as principle.

So when McCarthy calls the Comey prosecution incoherent while National Review publishes frameworks for justified executive defiance of court orders, we’re watching the fracture in real time. The conservative legal analyst maintains standards while the institution provides intellectual cover for abandoning them. McCarthy says the Halligan prosecution is garbage. National Review says the executive can ignore judges. Both appear in the same publication, serving different functions in the ecosystem of conservative intellectual collapse.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board—the flagship of conservative economic thought—published an editorial after the dismissal titled “The Gang That Couldn’t Indict Straight,” mocking the administration’s incompetence. “In its rush for retribution, the Trump Administration cut corners” and “This is what happens when officials don’t follow legal procedure. They lose cases.” Not defending. Mocking.

The Federalist—which has refashioned itself from Trump-skeptical to slavishly pro-Trump under Mollie Hemingway, who dismissed Trump in 2016 as “a demagogue with no real solutions for anything at all”—did mount a defense. On November 10, it published “Evidence Contradicts Comey’s Claim His Indictment Is Political,” arguing that Halligan “backed up the charges with evidence that far surpasses what is necessary to survive a motion to dismiss.” After the dismissal, The Federalist blamed a “partisan judge” and argued the ruling represented a “judicial coup against presidential power.”

The Heritage Foundation posted a video to social media, where Roger Severino crowed that “James Comey needs to face justice. It’s long overdue” in September 2025, but produced no substantive legal defense of the Halligan appointment or prosecution procedure.

And the White House? Karoline Leavitt called the ruling “technical,” described Judge Currie as a “partisan judge,” and insisted “everybody knows that James Comey lied to Congress. It’s as clear as day.” No legal argument for why Halligan’s appointment was valid. No defense of the procedure. No engagement with the vindictive prosecution claim. Just the assertion that Comey is guilty and the judge is biased.

This isn’t silence. This is something worse. This is the complete fragmentation of conservative intellectual infrastructure into warring factions that cannot even agree on whether to defend blatantly illegal prosecutions, let alone how to defend them. You have McCarthy and The Wall Street Journal—traditional conservative legal thinkers—saying this is indefensible garbage while National Review provides blueprints for ignoring judicial authority. You have The Federalist—now fully captured by Trump—saying the judge is partisan and the prosecution was fine. You have Heritage making vague supportive noises while producing nothing substantive. You have the White House calling constitutional constraints “technical” and judges “partisan.”

Chait documents this pattern: “I regularly search for the best conservative defense of these actions. Most of the time, I find nothing.” But what I found here is more revealing than nothing. I found conservative legal analysts on Fox News and in National Review calling the prosecution “a mess” and “incoherent” while the publication employing them argues executives can defy court orders. I found The Wall Street Journal editorial board—the voice of conservative economic establishment—mocking the administration’s incompetence. And I found The Federalist abandoning any pretense of legal argument for pure tribal defense: the judge is biased, therefore the ruling is wrong.

Conservative intellectuals aren’t just silent. They’ve fractured into camps that cannot speak to each other: the traditional conservatives who maintained intellectual standards and are being pushed out or marginalized within their own publications (McCarthy calling prosecutions garbage while National Review justifies defying courts), the fully captured who defend anything Trump does through pure partisanship (Federalist), and those trying to have it both ways through vague gestures without substance (Heritage). The Halligan case didn’t produce silence. It produced a demonstration that there is no longer a conservative intellectual movement capable of coherent response. There are only fragments that used to be a movement, now unable to agree on whether openly corrupt prosecutions should be defended, condemned, or ignored—or whether the rule of law itself should be maintained or abandoned when inconvenient.

We should pause for a moment, however, to harken back to how The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board assessed the risk of a second Trump term before the election. Low. Probably lower risk than Kamala Harris, they reckoned.

“A second Trump term poses risks, but the question as ever is compared to what?” they wrote in October 2024. “Voters can gamble on the tumult of Trump, or the continued ascendancy of the Democratic left. We wish it was a better choice, but that’s democracy.”

They acknowledged Trump’s “character flaws” and that it “surely wouldn’t be a return to ‘normalcy.’” But: “We don’t buy the fascism fears, and we doubt Democrats really do either.” Their concern wasn’t authoritarianism but whether Trump “can successfully address the country’s urgent problems.”

The risks they identified? That Trump “has instincts but no clear philosophy of government” and his second term would be “more of a policy jump ball.” That he might pursue tariffs instead of free markets. That he surrounds himself with “grifters and provocateurs who flatter him.” That Tucker Carlson might have more influence than Jared Kushner. That it “could result in four more years of divisive partisan warfare.”

What they didn’t identify as a risk: Installing personal defense attorneys as federal prosecutors to indict political enemies in violation of appointment statutes. The systematic weaponization of the Justice Department. The appointment of a Secretary of Defense who advocates war crimes and calls the Geneva Conventions “arbitrary rules.” The complete collapse of the rule of law documented in federal court ruling after federal court ruling. Federal investigations of senators for stating constitutional law.

“The authoritarian rule that Democrats and the press predicted never appeared,” they wrote confidently. “Mr. Trump was too undisciplined, and his attention span too short, to stay on one message much less stage a coup. America’s checks and balances held.”

Six months later, they’re publishing editorials titled “The Gang That Couldn’t Indict Straight,” mocking the administration for cutting corners “in its rush for retribution” and losing cases because “officials don’t follow legal procedure.”

I thought somewhat differently at the time. A stance that would have been seen by these same WSJ editorial board members as hyperbolic, with partisan blinders on.

In October 2024, three weeks before the election, I wrote: “If you are actually gullible enough to believe that Kamala Harris is a mortal threat to American capitalism, freedom of speech and democracy, as this rising fascist cabal of political power out of Silicon Valley is trying so desperately hard to convince you of, then there’s probably not much I’m going to be able to do here to convince you otherwise. But for the rest of you, who come at this from a somewhat less insular perspective, let me warn you of something: it is these people who are out for your freedom of speech and your democracy. They are literally wolves circling what they think is a dying carcass of the American political order.”

I continued: “These people are deeply fucking dangerous. They have way too much power and way too much money...what these people—from Elon Musk, to Marc Andreessen, Keith Rabois, and others—are fighting for is merely the capacity of these people to seize political power for their own ends. They believe they can run the world better, and they are prepared to do what it takes to remove their obstacles to obtaining that power...They are, in fact, 21st century fascists. Propelled by their egos of their impressive economic and technological successes, they have fallen headfirst into a dark Nietzschean, will to power frame, that if not confronted, would sunset our entire experiment in self-government.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board would have read that and dismissed it as partisan hyperbole. “We don’t buy the fascism fears,” they wrote confidently. They were sophisticated analysts weighing risks and tradeoffs. I was apparently someone who couldn’t see past partisan blinders.

A year later, the sophisticated analysts are publishing “The Gang That Couldn’t Indict Straight,” mocking vindictive prosecutions. And I’m documenting how the Secretary of Defense received $348,000 to write a book advocating war crimes while a federal prosecutor with no legal authority indicted Trump’s enemies in violation of appointment statutes while the regime opens federal investigations into senators for stating constitutional law.

The difference wasn’t intelligence or analytical sophistication. It was willingness to take seriously what was being said explicitly. When Trump promised retribution, I believed him. When Silicon Valley billionaires funded explicitly anti-democratic candidates, I believed they meant it. When people published books advocating monarchy, I believed they were serious. When Hegseth wrote that we should “rip arms off and feed them to hogs” and ignore “what other countries think” about the Geneva Conventions, I believed he would try to implement exactly that worldview.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board, with all their sophisticated analysis and careful weighing of risks, couldn’t process that someone might actually mean what they say when what they say is monstrous. Their framework assumed everyone operates within frameworks—that Trump’s rhetoric was positioning, that authoritarian positions were provocations, that threats were negotiating tactics. They looked at explicit statements of authoritarian intent and concluded: manageable risks, probably lower than Harris.

They were catastrophically wrong. Not because they lacked information but because their analytical framework couldn’t process what the information meant. When someone tells you they’re going to do something monstrous, and you have sophisticated reasons why they won’t actually do it or why it won’t be that bad, you’re not being analytical—you’re rationalizing your unwillingness to believe what you’re hearing.

This is the brain death Chait documents. Not just the inability to defend what’s happening now, but the prior failure to predict it would happen despite being told explicitly that it would. The fracture isn’t just between McCarthy calling prosecutions incoherent and The Federalist defending them, or between McCarthy maintaining standards while National Review publishes blueprints for defying courts. It’s between The Wall Street Journal in October 2024 saying “we don’t buy the fascism fears” and The Wall Street Journal in November 2025 mocking vindictive prosecutions they apparently didn’t think would happen.

And it’s between me in October 2024 saying “these people are deeply fucking dangerous” and “21st century fascists” and being dismissed as hyperbolic, and me in November 2025 documenting exactly the dangerous fascist behavior I predicted while the sophisticated analysts who dismissed me are reduced to mockery having failed to prevent what they assured us wasn’t a serious risk.

The sophisticated framework failed. Completely. Because sophistication that cannot recognize monsters when they tell you what they are isn’t sophistication at all—it’s a defense mechanism against believing uncomfortable truths. McCarthy calls it “a mess” and “incoherent.” The WSJ mocks it as incompetent. National Review justifies ignoring courts when executives find them inconvenient. But none of them predicted it would happen. None warned that installing Trump posed the risk of exactly this kind of vindictive, illegal prosecution backed by frameworks for defying judicial authority. They assured us the risks were manageable, that checks and balances would hold, that we shouldn’t buy the fascism fears.

The checks didn’t hold. The balances failed. The fascism they didn’t buy is documented in federal court rulings and federal investigations of senators for stating constitutional law. And now they’re left mocking the incompetence of prosecutions they said wouldn’t happen, defending against fears they said were overblown, criticizing or providing cover for the very administration whose risks they assured us were acceptable.

Which brings me to Pete Hegseth.

If Lindsey Halligan shows us what corruption looks like when it destroys legal reasoning, Pete Hegseth shows us what it looks like when it destroys military culture. The pattern is identical. When you cannot defend your position coherently, you have two options: silence or redefinition. Halligan’s defenders fractured—McCarthy and the WSJ calling it garbage while National Review justifies defying courts, The Federalist defending it tribally, Heritage gesturing vaguely. Hegseth redefines the terms entirely.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—former Fox News host, author of The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free—thinks he’s arguing with woke professors and purple-haired Portland activists about diversity training and pronouns. He’s not. He’s arguing with Dwight D. Eisenhower about the fundamental purpose of American military power. The man who led Allied forces to victory over the Nazis in World War II. The man who became president and warned America about the military-industrial complex. The man who, more than perhaps any other single figure, shaped modern American military culture into what it became in the post-war period.

Eisenhower hated war. The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, the general who planned D-Day, who wrote two speeches for that day—one for success, one for failure—who bore the weight of sending tens of thousands of young men to storm beaches where German panzer divisions waited, who carried those deaths with him for the rest of his life. He hated war. He saw it as an existential necessity when confronting evil like Adolf Hitler, something you must be capable of winning, but never something to glorify. Never something to celebrate. Never something to seek.

This is why Eisenhower changed the Department of War to the Department of Defense. Not as cosmetic rebranding but as philosophical statement: America’s military posture is defensive. We maintain the capacity for violence to deter and defeat aggression, not to celebrate brutality as masculine virtue. This principle runs deep in post-WWII military culture. The Geneva Conventions. The Uniform Code of Military Justice requiring soldiers to disobey illegal orders. The integration of legal and ethical training into military education. The understanding that while war sometimes cannot be avoided, it should never be sought, and when fought it must be constrained by law—not because law is weakness but because law is what separates civilization from barbarism.

Pete Hegseth—who received a $348,000 advance from HarperCollins to write his book—calls this “woke.”

One might take a moment to dwell on these things for more time than our scrolling-addled brains typically have patience for in this dystopic future we inhabit, because the contempt this book deserves requires documenting its actual content. On the Geneva Conventions, Hegseth writes: “What do you do if your enemy does not honor the Geneva conventions?...Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism? Hey, Al Qaeda: if you surrender, we might spare your life. If you do not, we will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs.”

He continues: “We are just fighting with one hand behind our back—and the enemy knows it...If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! Who cares what other countries think?”

On LGBTQ service members: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and its repeal served as a “gateway” and “camouflage” that “opened the door for broader political and ideological changes” undermining military effectiveness. He admits he once believed “we needed everybody” when “America was at war,” but “later came to see this mindset as naive,” stating that “our good faith was used against us.”

On diversity: The Pentagon “will not stop until trans-lesbian black females run everything.” Regarding DEI initiatives: “Turns out, all the ‘diversity’ recruiting messages made certain kids—white kids—feel like they’re not wanted.”

On the American left: He compares them to “Jody”—military slang for someone who sleeps with a service member’s spouse while they’re deployed—writing they “stayed home and wrecked our house. America-wreckers, all of them.”

On countering extremism: “Rooting out ‘extremism,’ today’s generals push rank-and-file patriots out of their formations.”

On Confederate base names: He advocates renaming Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg because “legacy matters. My uncle served at Bragg. I served at Bragg. It breaks a generational link.”

This is the book. These are the positions. This is what the Secretary of Defense believes about the military culture he now controls.

I’m going to speak for Eisenhower here, and you’ll excuse me the indulgence of maybe suggesting what a dead man might think. But I’ve studied the man, I’ve read his speeches, I know how he thought about these questions. And I think there’s an argument to be made about how Eisenhower might respond to Hegseth and what he’s doing with the great institution Eisenhower helped build. Eisenhower would look at Hegseth’s call to “rip arms off and feed them to hogs” and see not a warrior but a sociopath. Not strength but its corruption. Not masculine virtue but the desperate performance of someone who mistakes cruelty for courage because he’s never borne the weight of what violence actually means.

Eisenhower, who bore the responsibility for D-Day, who understood the weight of violence better than Hegseth could imagine, who carried those deaths with him for the rest of his life—he would be horrified by someone treating war as an arena for demonstrating masculine dominance rather than as tragic necessity. The Geneva Conventions weren’t imposed by “international tribunals” to make themselves “feel better.” They were written by people who had seen what unrestrained warfare produces—the Holocaust, the systematic torture and execution of prisoners, the complete breakdown of civilization into barbarism. They were written by the victors of World War II, including American generals like Eisenhower, who understood that maintaining constraints on violence isn’t weakness but the foundation of any military culture compatible with democratic governance.

Hegseth poses the question, “who cares what other countries think?” Petulance. Flippancy. Fuck the world. We’re America, and we can do what we want!

Meanwhile, the world moves to diversify away from America.

There is a growing patriotic wave in China where consumers are turning away from American brands and buying local instead. At the forefront is a Gen Z movement called Guochao, which roughly translates to “national tide.” The numbers are devastating: Gucci’s online bag sales in China have dropped more than 50% compared to two years ago while local premium brand Songmont has surged 90% in the same period. Nike used to be the market leader in China for athletic wear just four years ago with 25% market share. Today they’re down to 20%, displaced by a Chinese company called Anta whose China business is now 30% larger than Nike’s. Starbucks had 34% market share in China in 2019—they’re down to 14%. Tesla’s market share just shrank to 3%, down from 8% the previous month, the lowest level in three years. BYD now leads with 23% market share.

The younger you are in China, the more you dislike the United States. This shows up in surveys. It shows up in state media. And it shows up in consumer behavior—a generation of Chinese consumers rejecting American brands for local alternatives that are increasingly competitive, increasingly innovative, increasingly aspirational.

Scott Galloway, discussing this trend on his Prof G Markets podcast, identified the pattern: “We think we can treat people like shit and we’re like ‘Oh you know these people the young people’ America is not in vogue anymore...The Chinese have stepped up their innovation. They don’t have Tesla but they have BYD. They don’t have Nike but they have Li-Ning and Anta. They now have viable competitors.”

He continued: “I just think we have slowly but surely just figured out a way—it’s like we shoot ourselves in the foot and then we know let’s put the gun in our mouth...acting like an asshole to everyone all the time, eventually it’s going to bubble up in terms of consumer preferences.”

China is Nike’s third largest market. It’s Coca-Cola’s third largest market too. It’s Tesla’s second largest market. Half of Qualcomm’s sales last year came from China. These are not peripheral relationships—American companies depend on Chinese consumers in ways that “who cares what other countries think?” simply ignores.

When Hegseth writes “who cares what other countries think?” about ignoring the Geneva Conventions, he’s not just rejecting international law. He’s rejecting the entire framework of alliances and shared values that won World War II and maintained American power through the Cold War. He’s rejecting NATO. He’s rejecting the idea that American power derives from anything other than raw capacity for violence. He’s rejecting the economic interdependence that American companies actually rely on while pretending American dominance is self-sufficient.

Eisenhower would recognize this immediately: not as the “warrior ethos” but as the petulant ignorance of someone who’s never borne responsibility for anything larger than a Fox News segment. Not as strength but as the flailing performance of weakness—the desperate insistence that we don’t need anyone else right as everyone else decides they don’t need us.

The world is watching. Not with fear of American strength but with pity for American decline. They’re building alternatives to American brands, American payment systems, American technology, American alliances. They’re diversifying away from dollar dependence. They’re creating parallel institutions. And they’re doing it faster than the people writing $348,000 books about “warrior ethos” seem to notice.

“Who cares what other countries think?” They don’t care what we think anymore. That’s the answer Hegseth can’t process. That’s the consequence his framework can’t accommodate. That’s what happens when you mistake petulance for strength and flippancy for strategy.

The difference isn’t between “strong” and “weak.” It’s between two completely incompatible understandings of what strength is for. Eisenhower’s conception: Strength exists to protect. To defend the defenseless. To win wars when they must be fought and to prevent them when possible. To bear the terrible responsibility of violence when necessary while never losing sight of violence as tragedy, not triumph. To subordinate force to law and military power to civilian democratic control. This is why Mark Kelly—Navy combat pilot, astronaut, Senator who flew combat missions and commanded the Space Shuttle—risked his career to appear in that video reminding service members they have a duty to disobey illegal orders. Not because he’s weak but because he understands what Eisenhower understood: strength without principle isn’t strength at all. It’s just capacity for harm untethered from purpose.

Hegseth’s conception: Strength exists to dominate. The strong should rule the weak. Legal constraints are obstacles imposed by effeminate elites who’ve never seen combat. “White kids” should feel wanted while others shouldn’t. LGBTQ service members accepting who they are constituted betrayal—”our good faith was used against us.” Diversity initiatives are persecution. Efforts to root out actual extremism in the ranks become attacks on “patriots.” The fact that you could “rip arms off and feed them to hogs” makes you strong. The willingness to threaten this proves masculine virtue. “Who cares what other countries think?” The Geneva Conventions are weakness. Restraint is emasculation. Law is for the weak.

This isn’t a “warrior ethos.” It’s nihilism dressed in camouflage. It’s the replacement of virtue with violence, principle with power, strength with brutality. It’s toxic masculinity in its purest distillation—not masculinity itself, which can be virtuous, but its specific corruption that treats dominance as the highest good, kindness as weakness, cruelty as clarity, and legal constraints as emasculation. Eisenhower would have recognized men like Hegseth immediately. Not as warriors but as bullies. Not as strong but as small. Not as masculine but as desperately performing masculinity to cover weakness they can’t acknowledge—the weakness of men who never bore the weight of actual command responsibility, who never had to order young men to their deaths, who never had to live with those deaths afterward, who never had to look into the eyes of mothers who would never see their sons again because of orders you gave.

Just as Halligan couldn’t defend illegal prosecutions coherently and her defenders fractured into incompatible camps, Hegseth cannot defend these positions within existing frameworks. So he redefines the terms until the framework itself dissolves. The Geneva Conventions become “arbitrary rules” imposed to make “international tribunals feel better.” Legal constraints on violence become “fighting with one hand behind our back.” Eisenhower’s defensive military culture becomes “woke” ideology undermining effectiveness. LGBTQ service members accepting who they are becomes betrayal of “good faith.” Diversity becomes discrimination against “white kids.” Countering actual extremism becomes persecution of “patriots.” The legacy of generals who fought to preserve the Union becomes worth abandoning for the legacy of generals who fought to destroy it. Restraint becomes weakness. War crimes become “winning wars according to our own rules.” Cruelty becomes strength. Alliance structures become constraints to ignore.

This is George Will’s “Trumpty Dumpty” logic made operational in his recent Washington Post column: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” When you cannot defend your position within existing frameworks, you redefine the frameworks until nothing means anything anymore. Call drug trafficking boats “narco-terrorists.” Call fentanyl Americans voluntarily consume “chemical weapons.” Call commerce “armed conflict”—but not “hostilities” when the War Powers Act would apply. Call the military culture that won World War II and maintained American power for eighty years “woke.” Call the Geneva Conventions “arbitrary rules.” Call systematic exclusion “warrior ethos.” Call war crimes “winning according to our own rules.”

The corruption requires the redefinition. Because if you accept that words have stable meanings anchored in reality, Hegseth’s positions become indefensible. Advocating war crimes violates every principle our military was built on. Rejecting the Geneva Conventions puts American service members at risk and destroys the alliance structures that make American power possible. Treating legal constraints as “arbitrary” rather than framework invites atrocities. Claiming LGBTQ acceptance was betrayal requires treating human dignity as tactical deception. Calling Eisenhower’s principles “woke” requires claiming that the general who defeated the Nazis was effeminate. Advocating to ignore “what other countries think” destroys NATO and the entire post-war order that American power rests upon.

You cannot maintain these positions while thinking clearly about what military culture should be, what American power rests on, what separates justified force from barbarism, what the difference is between civilization and its collapse. So you must either stop thinking clearly or redefine the terms until clear thinking becomes impossible. Hegseth chose redefinition. And he got $348,000 from HarperCollins to do it.

Two cases. One shows corruption so obvious it requires fracture—conservative intellectuals unable to agree whether to defend, condemn, or ignore illegal prosecutions, splitting between those calling it garbage and those providing blueprints for defying courts entirely. One shows positions so indefensible they require redefining reality itself—war crimes become “warrior ethos,” Geneva Conventions become “arbitrary rules,” Eisenhower’s military culture becomes “woke.” Together they reveal the complete breakdown of conservative intellectual infrastructure. When you cannot defend illegal prosecutions, you fracture into warring camps calling it garbage, defending it tribally, justifying defiance of courts, or making vague gestures. When you cannot defend war crimes, you redefine war crimes as virtue. Both strategies serve the same purpose: avoiding the choice between honesty and exile.

The corruption has destroyed the conditions making thought possible. What remains is strategic silence, tribal defense without legal argument, linguistic manipulation where words mean whatever power declares them to mean, institutional cover for abandoning constitutional constraints, fracture into camps that cannot speak to each other because they no longer share even basic frameworks for evaluating whether something can be defended. Most chose these strategies. Almost none chose intellectual honesty.

And this—not some abstract philosophical crisis but the concrete collapse documented in federal court rulings and $348,000 book advances advocating war crimes and National Review editorials justifying executive defiance of judicial authority—is what the abyss looks like when it stares back at you.

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” — George Orwell

Mark Kelly—former Navy combat pilot, astronaut, sitting United States Senator—stated a simple legal fact on video: members of the US military can refuse illegal orders. Not as opinion. Not as political positioning. As established law codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and affirmed at Nuremberg when “I was following orders” was rejected as defense for war crimes.

The Trump Administration opened a federal investigation into him for saying this.

Jesse Watters praised the investigation on Fox News: “You have to make examples out of people.”

Slow down. Read that again. One more time. Let it register fully.

A sitting senator stated constitutional law. The executive branch opened an investigation into him for stating it. State propaganda praised this as making an example.

This isn’t approaching fascism. This isn’t fascism-adjacent. This is fascism—the actual thing, not the metaphor, happening in real time on national television while we debate whether calling it fascism is too divisive.

The Trump Administration isn’t investigating Kelly for corruption or lawbreaking. It’s investigating him for defending the principle that law constrains executive power. The investigation isn’t meant to find wrongdoing—it’s meant to intimidate through spectacle of state punishment. The message isn’t “we enforce laws” but “invoke constitutional constraints and we come for you.”

And Watters—state propagandist on the regime’s preferred network—praises this openly: “You have to make examples out of people.” That’s Goebbels. Not as hyperbole. As accurate historical parallel. Making examples means using state violence visibly enough that others learn to submit without needing to be targeted. The cruelty is the point. The intimidation is the goal. The investigation is the punishment.

Kelly defended the constitutional framework distinguishing American military forces from authoritarian ones—the framework saying law constrains power, that orders can be illegal, that service members have the duty to refuse commands violating constitutional or international law. This is why Admiral Holsey resigned over Caribbean boat strikes. He understood that following illegal orders doesn’t protect you—it implicates you.

And now the Trump Administration investigates Kelly for defending this principle while Fox News calls for him to be made an example.

Think about what this means. If you can be investigated by federal authorities for stating that military personnel can refuse illegal orders, then there are no illegal orders. If defending constitutional constraints on executive power becomes grounds for federal investigation, then constitutional constraints no longer exist. If senators can be “made examples of” for invoking established law, then law has been replaced by will.

This is the mechanism. This is how constitutional republics die. Not through formal coup or dramatic collapse but through making it dangerous to invoke constitutional protections. You don’t repeal the law protecting refusal of illegal orders—you just investigate anyone who mentions it until no one dares. You don’t ban opposition—you make examples until opposition becomes unthinkable. You don’t eliminate the Constitution—you prosecute people who cite it until citing it becomes sedition.

Eventually no one invokes it. Eventually no one remembers it protected anything. Eventually “the president ordered it” becomes sufficient justification for any action, any violation, any atrocity. That’s the world this investigation is building. That’s the world Watters is praising. That’s the world taking shape while we watch.

Kelly is doing what constitutional officers do: defending that law constrains power, that orders can be illegal, that military serves Constitution rather than personal loyalty to whoever holds office. This isn’t radical. This isn’t partisan. This is baseline constitutional governance—the floor beneath which lies only authoritarianism.

The Trump Administration is doing what authoritarian regimes do: weaponizing state power against those defending constitutional constraints, using federal investigation as punishment for opposition, making examples to terrorize others into silence.

Watters is doing what fascist propagandists do: praising political persecution on state television, normalizing investigation-as-intimidation, celebrating the “examples” that teach everyone else to submit.

This is it. This is the thing. Not the prologue, not the warning sign, but the actual consolidation of authoritarian power happening on Fox News while many Americans debate whether noticing this is “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Two plus two equals four. Members of the military can refuse illegal orders. A senator stating this law is not sedition. Investigating him for stating it is fascism. And calling it fascism is not divisive—it’s accurate.

The abyss stares at us. Corruption that immunizes its targets through its own illegality. War crime advocacy receiving $348,000 advances. Institutional frameworks for defying judicial authority. Federal investigations of senators for citing constitutional law. State propaganda praising “making examples.” Conservative intellectuals fractured into camps that cannot agree on basic reality while their institutions provide cover for abandoning it.

This is what Nietzsche warned about. Not some distant abstraction but the concrete collapse happening now. The frameworks that make meaning possible—law constrains power, words have stable meanings, constitutional protections are real—dissolving before us. And in their place: power as the only truth, words meaning whatever the leader declares, investigations of anyone who invokes protections that no longer protect.

But meaning is not given by frameworks alone. It is constructed through rebellion against the void. Through the conscious choice to say two plus two equals four when power insists it equals five. Through defending law when law becomes dangerous. Through naming fascism when fascism is praised on television. Through walking the wire when every force conspires to make you fall.

The center holds not because it is strong but because we choose to hold it. The wire bears weight not because it cannot break but because we choose to walk it together. The tent stands not because storms cannot tear it but because we raise it again each time it falls. These are not guarantees. These are choices. Made again and again, in the face of the abyss, in defiance of the void, in rebellion against the meaninglessness that would consume everything.

Lindsey Halligan violated appointment statutes. Her prosecutions were void. The corruption immunized its targets. Pete Hegseth advocates war crimes. Mark Kelly stated constitutional law. The regime investigates him for it. Fox News praises making examples. National Review publishes frameworks for defying courts while McCarthy calls prosecutions garbage. The Wall Street Journal mocks incompetence they said wouldn’t happen. The Federalist defends everything. Heritage gestures at nothing.

And two plus two still equals four.

There are twenty-four hours in a day. Law can constrain power if we defend it. Words can have meaning if we refuse redefinition. Constitutional protections can be real if we invoke them knowing the cost. The abyss can be resisted if we choose rebellion over submission.

The corruption requires the stupidity. The stupidity reveals the abyss. And the abyss can be faced—not with certainty of victory but with certainty that submission is unthinkable.

Hold the center. Walk the wire. Defend the framework. Say what is true. Name what is happening. Refuse the void.

Because meaning is not given. But it can be made. Through the conscious choice to remain conscious when consciousness itself becomes dangerous. Through defending law when defending law brings investigation. Through stating truth when truth becomes sedition. Through holding tension when power demands collapse.

Our soul is meaning. Constructed, such as it is. Built through rebellion against the forces that would dissolve it. Maintained through the choice to walk the wire together even as the abyss stares back.

The first movement was the only movement. And in every act of resistance, in every defense of framework, in every refusal to let words lose meaning or law become will or strength become domination—the beginning happens again.

May love carry us home. Not as escape from the abyss but as the force strong enough to face it. Not as naivety but as the recognition that what we defend is worth defending precisely because the alternative is the void.

The circus continues. The wire still holds. And we continue with it, conscious beings choosing meaning against meaninglessness, law against will, truth against power, humanity against the abyss.

Two plus two equals four.

There are twenty-four hours in a day.

And though the darkness stares, though frameworks collapse, though corruption requires stupidity and stupidity reveals the void—we can still choose to say what is true, defend what is real, and walk the wire together into whatever comes next.

Because the alternative is unthinkable. And we are not done thinking yet.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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