Bundle hysteria with process worship, Democrats? "Democrats feel most comfortable going after Trump's administration for its desire to cut government spending, abolish federal departments, and reduce the power of the bureaucracy — all priorities that Republicans held long before he took over the party — rather than for his demolition of the DEI infrastructure, his ostentatious deportations, or his destruction of the Biden administration’s electric-vehicle agenda." The attitude is always the same. "Give us your money, and then go away, lest you impede the advancement of our agenda."
Give yourself no powers you wouldn't want your adversary to have. "Conservatives should not applaud [the Federal Trade Commission's chief] as he tries to put the government's thumb on the scale in the name of fairness. If the FTC can second-guess editorial judgments to achieve what a Republican majority thinks is the right mix of opinions, a future commission controlled by Democrats can enforce a different agenda." Who let the DOGE out? "The Left’s glorification of the bureaucracy has often been revealed to be a fig leaf covering an inept federal workforce. Paeans to the unimpeachable authority of the civil service are amusing at the best of times, but become less funny when their failures are obvious to millions." Pair those failures with a sense of entitlement. "Federal employees are the permanent government, and they view the president as a figurehead."
Unleash the hounds of DOGE! "Their release reflects a deep-seated desire by GOP neanderthals to remove objective ‘empiricists’ from Washington – presumably the same ‘experts’ who led the nation into mounting debt, high inflation, increasing class divisions and a chronic inability to get things built at reasonable cost."
Does anyone sing "Allentown" any more? "What is interesting today is the massive media focus on college-educated professionals losing their jobs thanks to government scale-downs. The people of Weirton and Campbell would have appreciated this empathy when their lives were shut down."
The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.
1. Higher education losing credibility, first gradually, then all at once. "The left, not the right, picked this fight. Too many institutions set themselves up as the 'Resistance' to Trump and tried to make a lot of mainstream political opinions anathematic, while expecting to be protected from backlash by principles such as academic freedom that they were no longer honoring. This was politically naive and criminally stupid for institutions that rely so heavily on U.S. taxpayer support."
2. Normals noticed the nonsense. "People got fed up with the drumbeat of land acknowledgements, pronoun mandates, trigger warnings, language policing, and hypocrisy. Most Americans got tired of being hectored, lectured, and ridiculed for embracing old-school values like equality, color-blindness, and responsibility."
4. Why not limit the powers of government? “When you have a corrupt political system that allows Musk and other multibillionaires in both political parties to contribute huge amounts of money, the system is broken, period.”
5. The Technocratic Swamp. "The big winner of the Watergate reforms was neither the President nor the Congress, but the bureaucracy... Predictably, the bureaucracy now exercises governmental power without sufficient democratic accountability. Rather than counter the bureaucracy, the Democratic Congresses of the Watergate era and after delegated greater and greater authority to the agencies to regulate an unlimited set of economic, health and safety, environmental, and cultural issues."
6. Trading dead babies for live terrorists will do that. "Did it just become unfashionable to put a watermelon wedge emoji in your bio? Chant 'from the river to the sea?' Hang around college campuses accosting Jewish students?"
7. Deconstruct this! "If women want to be happy, they should embrace what modern feminists falsely claim is the patriarchy."
8. Are you surprised? "Audit finds Illinois vastly underestimated cost of noncitizen healthcare on taxpayers."
9. We just lowered our standards. "Orwell's farmers stopped calling them pigs just as we dropped the Red from the name and pretended China had changed. It hadn’t."
10. The chalkboard is frictionless, reality is not. "Despite the theory’s intuitive appeal, standards-based reform does not work very well in reality. One key reason is that coordinating key aspects of education at the top of the system hamstrings discretion at the bottom."
11. Traffic jams make traffic safer. "Without the friction of congestion to slow vehicles down, the fundamental flaws in our street designs were exposed."
12. The corona tyranny was evidence enough. “The postwar global order is not just obsolete. It is now a weapon being used against us.”
13. Herbert Marcuse approves. "Combine moral zealotry with increasingly blurred lines between political speech and violence long enough, and the outcome is predictable: more violence."
14. Soft power, a dime cup of coffee at a time. “How can you not love a country that can dream up such things?”
15. Respect bourgeois norms, avoid embarrassment. "Dude, you screwed around on your kids’ mom and made a new one, how considerate were you?"
16. The name might be the vow. "Chastity Bowick, an ambassador for the Transgender Emergency Fund of Massachusetts, emphasized the importance of visibility for trans students."
18. The Slavic HordeTM isn't what it used to be. "In 1812-15, according to Harold Nicolson, Tsar Alexander I got as far west as Paris. In 1945, Tsar Joseph Stalin got as far west as Berlin. So far, in 2025, Tsar Vladimir Putin has not even gotten as far west as Kyiv."
19. Mencken's advance auctions go on. "Americans are lukewarm about DOGE because they're torn about its mission. Sure, they have a low opinion of the federal government, but they might be willing to put up with its deep flaws so long as it delivers their goodies."
20. Are you kidding me? "Some of the wealthy are quietly beginning to make calculations about what it would mean if their undocumented workers were deported. Who would mow the lawn?" We're talking about the Hamptons, and a New York Times reporter can't find anyone with the juice to sponsor the gardener?
21. Who will sponsor nannies on the Vineyard? "These requirements underscore that only undocumented individuals who contribute to the U.S. economy through intellectual achievements or who advance the nation’s war machine are deemed worthy of living without the constant fear of deportation."
22. Gender bending. “Men are awful, and the best way for women to prove they’re equal to men is to be just as awful.”
23. Abortion bans are a symptom of broader cultural decay. "Abortion bans don't stop people from needing abortions, they just make access harder and more expensive."
24. Feminism isn't working with men, either. "Teaching men that the core of their identity is inherently flawed isn’t productive. Over the years, many men have written to me, saying the term makes them angry, defensive, and uncomfortable—as it lumps all men together with the worst offenders."
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