Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
If you’re already subscribed and want to help the publication grow, consider sharing Handful of Earth with a friend.
“Blood and Soil”
ponders what it means to be American at . He writes that “the right has become increasingly characterized by a deep distrust of modernity and a yearning for what one might call the authenticity of traditional folkways. In one sense, that’s nothing new—since the time of Edmund Burke, being a conservative has always meant being resistant to rapid, radical change and protective of the timeworn institutions of the past. But in its contemporary manifestation, the sentiment is deeper than the ‘back in my day’ chauvinism that comes naturally with age and economic security. The contemporary right’s nostalgia and its rejection of the modern human condition is more spiritual than that; it’s almost mystical. It appeals to the young even more than to the old. And the impulse feels less reactionary than revolutionary—a mobilizing vision that appeals not to mere political or economic self-interest, but to a pervasive hunger for new meaning in life. Like all revolutions, it seeks to wipe away the profane, fallen world we have inherited so as to resurrect a purer one that was lost to the corruption of some earlier time. This is not the conservatism of William Buckley, Ronald Reagan, or Paul Ryan. Underpinning it is an alienation that should not be mistaken for the mere antagonism to changing norms that characterized those earlier iterations.”He continues: “From the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, that culture of casual egalitarianism was coupled with an increasing centralization of power in the federal government. We became bound together within what was increasingly emerging as a clearly unitary nation-state. These two factors together made fertile ground for the rooting of a common identity as citizen before all other competing claims on one’s self-conception: class, ethnic origin, colonial allegiance, family title, etc. Whatever other social status we could claim for ourselves was, in the eyes of other Americans, an abstraction from another continent that we had left behind generations ago. We were Americans because we didn’t define ourselves that way.”
Woodhouse insightfully notes that “As the U.S. evolved into a global superpower, the esteem attached to our common status as American citizens rose like the value of a Fortune 500 stock. But that era is now over, and the stock has plummeted. In the twenty-first century, it’s no longer quite so special to be an American. Mere common legal membership within a polity that was once but is no longer exceptional in the world is too weak a source for national pride. We must now invent new foundations upon which to base our nationalism, so we have turned to the old mythologies: ethnicity, heritage, historical ancestry. This is the baggage the pioneers shed from their feudal European pasts; it was their very absence that once defined us as Americans. Now they’re back again as siren songs to the American right.”
For more on the unique history of the United States and its implications for what it means to be American, see my interview, “Whiteness and the Working Class.”
“FBI Nominee Kash Patel Warned Elon Musk Is Becoming ‘One Ginormous Trust’”
reports on the latent tensions in Trumpworld for : “An unearthed episode of a podcast hosted by Trump loyalist and FBI-director nominee Kash Patel reveals a pre-existing tension underlying the already-rocky marriage between the MAGAworld populists and the Elon Musk–led Silicon Valley elites who powered Donald’s Trump’s campaign….In an episode from October 2022, Patel warned not only of Musk’s financial motives, but of his monopolistic ambitions and hunger for consumer data and defense contracts—the very things that concern the economist-populist wing of Trump world.” The article continues: “‘What's he going to do with all the data? That's my concern,’ Patel said. ‘The data collection—he's got a global wifi satellite system, in space, for the world: Starlink. He has Tesla, he has, as I said, the SpaceX program, and now he'll have Twitter.’ Patel found himself asking a version of the question many Musk critics have been asking themselves amid the DOGE takeover, in which the billionaire and his associates have seized control of government databases, frozen payments, accessed federal employee, vendor and taxpayer data in a deluge of changes with questionable authority, at best. ‘What do you do with everyone's personal information?’ Patel asked.”
You can find my analysis of these contradictions within Trumpworld in “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's Assault on the American People.”
“U.S. Bioweapons Program Behind Lyme Disease?”
James Li interviews
about the United States government’s “bug born weapons programs” for Breaking Points. Newby, author of the 2019 book, Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons, documents the government’s efforts to weaponize ticks and other bugs as a part of Cold War-era biological warfare. In the interview, she connects the efforts of scientists to profit off of Lyme disease vaccines to the perverse incentives surrounding vaccine development during the covid pandemic. The interview is well worth listening to in full.“Scientist Exposes Secret Behind ‘Blue Zone’ Diet Myth: Pension Fraud”
On the topic of health and deception, this article in The Times discusses recent bombshell research by Saul Justin Newman on the “Blue Zone” theory of diet and longevity. This theory, which has been promoted by a range of scientists and popular health writers, is, according to Newman, based on widespread pension fraud and poor record-keeping: “In the late 1990s the mountainous province of Nuoro in Sardinia caught the eye of researchers, who marvelled at the large number of inhabitants living long enough to celebrate a 100th birthday. The longevity of these ‘super agers’ was ascribed to a diet rich in fresh vegetables, with little red meat, and red wine in moderation—plus a healthy prioritising of family life and the importance of community. However, a prize-winning researcher has proposed an alternative explanation: pension fraud on a grand scale.”
Newman notes that “Okinawa, for an example, is world famous for having this extreme longevity. But if you look at the statistics from within Japan, they have the shortest average lifespan, all the provinces of Japan, they also have the highest murder rate. They have one of the worst economies. And of course, one of the most heavily bombed during the war…And there was this instance, in Japan, where they discovered 230,000 of their centenarians … were already dead, and there are only 40,000 left. Now, those 40,000 may also have been dead, they just couldn't certify that they were dead. So when you have these claims of all these, you know, thousands of people living past the age of 100, or 105, you have to be extremely dubious about that. Because if history is any guide, there's fraud and error all the time and this seems to be the primary cause of these records.”
“The Raunchy Right Has Triumphed”
analyzes the rise of the “raunchy right” at . She discusses a “MAGA babes” pinup calendar released by the anti-woke beverage company, Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right Beer: “The pictures in the calendar, political ideology notwithstanding, are objectively bad. The compositions are lifeless, the settings sterile, the poses stiff and unnatural; the models are so Photoshopped that their skin no longer looks like skin. Some of the images are so comically un-sensual that it seems like they’re doing it on purpose. Observe this remarkable snapshot of a blonde in sky-high stiletto heels and a flour-stained apron, awkwardly perched on the cold, hard countertop of a contractor-grade kitchen in which not a single meal has ever been prepared. Beside her on the counter is a grocery store cake with a can of beer shoved into its center, and, I’m sorry, I have had dental surgeries sexier than this photo.”Rosenfield perceptively writes that “Some people would point to this as evidence of the oft-cited trope that conservatives are simply bad at art, that they lack the openness and imagination to produce meaningful and beautiful things. But I suspect that this is just what happens to a movement that defines itself through negative polarization, that eschews the coalition-building power of beauty because it’s too busy embodying whatever its opponents find most hideous. The paradox of the aesthetic of the online right is that it’s explicitly and intentionally unaesthetic; its purpose is to disgust its enemies rather than to delight its friends. And so nobody cares if the art is beautiful. They only care if it triggers the libs.”
“Love in America”
The Atlantic republishes a 1938 essay by French journalist and historian, Raoul de Roussy de Sales, on love as a “national problem” in the United States: “America appears to be the only country in the world where love is a national problem. Nowhere else can one find a people devoting so much time and so much study to the question of the relationship between men and women. Nowhere else is there such concern about the fact that this relationship does not always make for perfect happiness. The great majority of the Americans of both sexes seem to be in a state of chronic bewilderment in the face of a problem which they are certainly not the first to confront, but which—unlike other people—they still refuse to accept as one of those gifts of the gods which one might just as well take as it is; a mixed blessing at times, and at other times a curse or merely a nuisance.”
The Frenchman reflects on the odd mixture of pragmatism and perfectionism in American culture: “The prevailing conception of love, in America, is similar to the idea of democracy. It is fine in theory. It is the grandest system ever evolved by man to differentiate him from his ancestors, the poor brutes who lived in caverns, or from the apes. Love is perfect, in fact, and there is nothing better. But, like democracy, it does not work, and the Americans feel that something should be done about it. President Roosevelt is intent on making democracy work. Everybody is trying to make love work, too. In either case the result is not very satisfactory. The probable reason is that democracy and love are products of a long and complicated series of compromises between the desires of the heart and the exactions of reason. They have a peculiar way of crumbling into ashes as soon as one tries too hard to organize them too well. The secret of making a success out of democracy and love in their practical applications is to allow for a fairly wide margin of errors, and not to forget that human beings are absolutely unable to submit to a uniform rule for any length of time. But this does not satisfy a nation that, in spite of its devotion to pragmatism, also believes in perfection.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.