This is America + Phetasy Digest
Bridget Shook Up Twitter | Fat Gaslighters Can't Handle the Receipts | Stories of Faith | Keep It Kosher | Transgender Craze is Winding Down | Groypers Gay It Up in Miami | BASED Sociologist Dunks
I know a lot of you are passionate readers who enjoy political nuance. So I want to tell you about Robert Nisbet, a conservative who founded the Sociology department at UC Berkeley, taught at Columbia, and worked at the American Enterprise Institute. A good starting place is “The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America.” It’s a book about the collapse of powerful institutions, a collapse that has played out around us more and more every day: “Nothing quite like our present society, with its multifold changes in morality, economic possibility, and residential patterns, has ever existed.”
After WWII, radicals attacked the middle class with Marxist ideas. They became the “clerisy” — a class of public intellectuals who were the priests of the secular state, where intellectuals of the past were attached to the Church. They encouraged our focus on individualism and centralization specifically because it causes cultural disintegration. It has made us too isolated.
Nisbet says that progress doesn’t work without decline, and anyone who sells endless progress is actually offering total destruction. This grift is part of the newest version of equality, which is “a dangerous social egalitarianism.” Inequality, in his view, forms the essence of the social bond.
He said that conservatives see sexual immorality as a major problem in this decline, where in reality, “it is a weakening of the family that generates what we call ‘sexual immorality.”
He said that the solution is community and local life. Kinship, localism, citizenship. The importance of belonging. Institutions thrive when their functions appear distinctive and important, and they fade when those functions blur. Nisbet believed that freedom requires limits and that, to be healthy, societies need stable authority and order: “In societies where the family tie is fundamental, the power of the government stops literally at the threshold of the house,” he writes in Twilight of Authority. “The state is an association of families, not of discrete individuals.”
Anyway. Stay safe out there, Pham. Thanks for being part of this community. Nisbet would be proud.
DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #288
They LIED About Fat Being Healthy
This one is absolute fire. Bridget started a war on X over whether the idea that “fat is fit” was mainstream. She brings receipts.
WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #377
Choosing To Be Chosen - Kylie Ora Lobell
Author Kylie Ora Lobell joins Bridget for a thoughtful conversation about her book, Choosing to Be Chosen, which tells the story of her conversion from atheist to Orthodox Jew. Kylie’s shift from atheism was sparked by a melting warmth she recognized as God at a Shabbat dinner, and it led her on a five-year journey of embracing kosher laws, rituals, the challenges of conversion, and a profound trust in God amid life’s darkest questions (like child suffering and October 7th).
DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #289
Is The Tide Turning On Trans?
Is the tide turning on trans? The battle for reality continues with mainstream media outlets ignoring biological reality and falsely attributing a school shooting in Canada to a female. Is everyone as sick of the trans debate as Bridget is?
THE SPECTATOR
Meet the male Kardashians
What happens when the Internet’s Groypers gather in Miami Beach for a night of “slay gurl” partying? Reality TV, the likes of which have never been seen.
Also appreciated Lorenzo Warby’s recent, “Left-Progressivism’s Three Foundational Falsehoods”: https://open.substack.com/pub/lorenzofromoz/p/left-progressivisms-three-foundational?r=3rav05&utm_medium=ios
Helpful for getting arms around the scale and scope of the ‘Critical Theory Magisterium’ nut-nut and seeing it for the civilizational wrecking ball that it is. Especially appreciated the embedded talk on Queer Theory (The War on Normal) given by Logan Lancing at the last Genspect conference.
Nice gram yall... So guess what books aren't available at my local library? Shriver's new one isn't but I might give them grace as it is brand new... but Nisbet's book ought to be there. I put in a title request but have no hope they will purchase it.... in which case I will try to get it myself.