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.
“First, They Came for Mahmoud Khalil”
profiles Mahmoud Khilil for : “Khalil’s grandparents had lived in a small village in historic Palestine close to Tiberias, a city on the western bank of Lake Tiberias. His grandmother would often talk about how they shared a piece of land for farming with their Jewish neighbors, Mahmoud said in a documentary for BreakThrough News. ‘Tiberias was one of the first cities that the Zionists targeted in 1948 with ethnic cleansing. In April 1948, a month before the Nakba, the Zionist militias burnt one of their villages. When they heard the news about it, they had to leave immediately,’ he added, explaining his family’s decision to flee to Syria, where he was eventually born in a refugee camp.”Fellow student activist, Sueda Polat, “remembered Khalil being ‘firm, but not rude.’ She tells Drop Site that his approach toward the administration was that of engaging as equal parties, ‘not, like, I’m a student and you’re an administrator but, rather, we’re two parties coming to the table to discuss things.’ She added, ‘he wasn’t deferential. Through and through, that man is a diplomat, in every sense’…Khalil was unapologetically comfortable with his name and identity being associated with the pro-Palestine protests. Paras, a classmate of Khalil’s…, had been working for months on an oral history project of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. One of her key interviewees was Khalil, with whom she had spoken at length. ‘I was concerned about his safety, about whether we should put his name or mention him anonymously. He would always say, “use my name, I don't care.”’”
For more on the campus protests, see my April 2024 piece, “In Defense of Woke Zoomers.”
“FIRE and Coalition Partners File Brief Rebuking the U.S. Government for Attempting to Deport Mahmoud Khalil for His Protected Speech”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), best known for defending conservative speech on college campuses, filed a “friend of the court” brief along with “the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Rutherford Institute, PEN America, and the First Amendment Lawyers Association” which “argues the Trump administration’s attempt to deport Khalil constitutes textbook viewpoint discrimination and retaliation in violation of the First Amendment.”
FIRE reports: “The administration is relying on a rarely used Cold War-era statute that empowers the secretary of state to deport a lawfully present non-citizen if the secretary determines their ‘presence or activities’ has a ‘potentially serious’ effect on America’s foreign policy. The administration claims that authority extends even to deporting green card holders for protected speech. FIRE disagrees. The statute is unconstitutionally vague and gives the secretary of state unfettered discretion to deport lawful permanent residents without giving them notice of what conduct triggers expulsion. Not only does the First Amendment trump a Cold War-era statute, but the sweeping authority the administration claims it confers ‘places free expression in mortal peril,’ as FIRE’s brief argues.”
See my article, “Why Free Speech? (Part 1),” for reflections on FIRE’s activities in defense of free speech.
“A Trump-Friendly Crowd Shows Its Love. But Not for Musk.”
The New York Times reports on Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s attendance at the NCAA Division 1 wrestling championship in Philadelphia: “The crowd was largely made up of cornfed men with cauliflower ears from places like Ohio, Missouri, Iowa and Pennsylvania, and while almost all of them said they were pleased with Mr. Trump’s time in office so far, interviews with more than a dozen attendees revealed more complicated feelings that were beginning to surface about Mr. Musk.”
“Katy Travis, a 48-year-old wrestling mom from Columbia, Mo., said she thought Mr. Musk’s constant presence ‘looks ridiculous.’ That he is as empowered as he is just makes the president ‘look weak,’ she said, which is about the worst thing that can be said of someone at a Division I wrestling championship. ‘It makes him look like he’s kissing ass to get money,’ Ms. Travis said of the president….
“‘I know there’s a lot of concern about what he’s doing, as far as the DOGE stuff and all,’ said Mr. Scandle, [a] retired police officer from Pennsylvania. ‘I understand everybody’s concern. I’m concerned. I own stock, and you know, it’s red every day, and I’m worried.’ But, he added, he trusts Mr. Trump to take the wheel when necessary. ‘I think everything will work out,’ he said. ‘It normally always does with him.’”
In “Election Reflections,” written shortly after Trump’s electoral victory, I argued that the threat posed by Musk was “existential” and that “Musk is a far more dangerous figure than Trump.” As Musk’s domineering role continues to divide the Trump coalition, which I reported on in “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's Assault on the American People,” it remains to be seen how much longer the MAGA base will give Trump the benefit of the doubt as he continues to facilitate Musk’s technofeudal takeover of the state apparatus.
“The Democrats’ Brahmin Left Problem”
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party finds itself in a prolonged existential crisis, unable to convincingly counter either Trump or Musk.
writes at that “The Democrats have become and remain today a ‘Brahmin Left’ party. ‘Brahmin Left’ is a term coined by economist Thomas Piketty and colleagues to characterize Western left parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters and increasingly dominated by highly educated voters and elites, including of course our own Democratic Party. The Brahmin Left character of the party has evolved over many decades but spiked in the 21st century. The chart below illustrates this trend.”
“The chart does not show the most recent elections but election surveys agree that education polarization spiked further upward in both 2020 and 2024. Indeed, in the most reliable 2024 election survey the differential between unmodeled college and non-college Democratic support (compare the blue line in the chart) reached 27 points—literally off the Piketty chart and more than twice its level in the 2016 Piketty data.”
Teixeira argues that “the Democrats’ current challenge is…really is about comprehensively de-Brahminizing a profoundly Brahmin Left party, not just sanding off a few rough spots in Democratic positions/rhetoric or populist posturing or (that old standby) better messaging. Nor is it about just waiting around for Trump to screw up—which is already happening and will continue to happen. Of course Democrats should take advantage of these opportunities but such openings will never suffice for convincing working-class voters that the Democrats have truly become a different kind of party—their party—and not the Brahmin Left party they have been watching evolve for decades.”
He concludes: “Just as Trump shook up the Republican Party and decisively changed its image and political base, Democrats need a political entrepreneur who will shake up the Democratic Party and decisively change its Brahmin Left trajectory. That entrepreneur will have to be unafraid of the professional class blowback (accusations that you are racist, sexist, transphobic, a bigot, MAGA-lite, etc.) that will inevitably arise and aggressively push back against that class and its priorities…Such a politician might actually be able to remake the party and face down the Brahmin Left dead-enders. But is such a politician or politicians out there in the Democratic ranks? I’ve got my doubts. Not only have breaks with party orthodoxy been extremely modest so far, they have been regularly and mercilessly attacked within the party…So am I confident the Democratic Party can de-Brahminize? I am not. But I am confident that the party will fall short of both its electoral and policy goals if it can’t.”
“American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage”
The Wall Street Journal reports that “American women have never been this resigned to staying single. They are responding to major demographic shifts, including huge and growing gender gaps in economic and educational attainment, political affiliation and beliefs about what a family should look like…Stories of women complaining about the lack of quality men have long infused pop culture—from ‘Pride and Prejudice’ to Taylor Swift’s oeuvre. Yet women throughout history rarely questioned whether finding and securing a romantic partner should be a primary goal of adulthood. This seems to be changing. Over half of single women said they believed they were happier than their married counterparts in a 2024 AEI survey of 5,837 adults. Just over a third of surveyed single men said the same.”
The article notes that “Marriage rates for both men and women are in decline, in part owing to less pressure to pair off and higher expectations for a would-be match. ‘Dating apps make people feel like there might always be a better option,’ said Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland. ‘They view looking for a marriage partner the same way that you view looking for a job candidate.’”
The lack of economic opportunities for working class men is also a major factor in these trends: “Men’s economic struggles seem to be having the biggest effect on women without a college degree, whose marriage rates by age 45 have plummeted from 79% to 52% for those born between 1930 and 1980, according to research by Cornell University economist Benjamin Goldman. ‘Young men without a degree are struggling so much as a group that there simply aren’t enough with steady jobs and earnings for non-college women to date,’ said Goldman.”
“The Conservative Women’s Magazine With Big Ambitions, and Sex Tips for Wives”
At the same time, an increasingly visible group of young American woman has gone in the opposite direction, making marriage the primary purpose of their lives. The New York Times profiles Brittany Hugoboom, founder of Evie magazine, a “conservative Cosmo…opposed to what she calls ‘modern’ feminism.” For Hugoboom, “Femininity does not mean feminism, which Mrs. Hugoboom doesn’t define as equal rights but as a self-hating movement that is anti-family and anti-male—one that shames women who ‘choose conventional roles.’ Despite running two companies, she is particularly critical of what she calls ‘girlboss feminism.’ Her interpretation of that term—which went from broadly celebrated to roundly dismissed in the 2010s—is that it encourages women to ‘be just like men’ to succeed in corporate fields. Such messaging, she says, has made women anxious, lonely and unfulfilled. Instead, she believes, faith, family and love, not ‘casual sex, careerism or ideological activism,’ supply the greatest satisfaction.”
However, Hugoboom’s lifestyle appears to represent the same class strata of upper-middle class and rich women behind ideologies like girlboss feminism: “Back at the Hugobooms’ apartment, as the sun set below the skyline, their two daughters, ages 3 and 1, wandered in with Mr. Hugoboom’s sister, who was on babysitting duty. The baby, dressed in pale pink, sat in Mrs. Hugoboom’s lap and fed her mother cheese crunchies as she continued to talk about her businesses. The scene could have easily appeared in a mid-2010s magazine profile of a female founder striving for a work-life balance, embodying the exact sort of feminism Mrs. Hugoboom denounces.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.