two words about guns and shootings

 Two words and 

one comma

Most of us

Want no comma

“No

More”

Republicans seem

To want to keep it

“No,

More”

The heartbreak of

Gun shootings!

my head hurts

 This hurts my head. 

Maybe it’s the 4AM belief I could read and understand such a piece.

Americans might be used to hearing conservatives blame postmodernism and critical race theory for social problems. Dr. Weaver, who died in 1963, took aim at a philosophical concept called nominalism, the rise of which he traced to early modernity. (Think of philosophers like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.) Nominalism involves the rejection of universal concepts and absolute truths — including transcendental moral truths. Nominalists believe that truth is embedded in the particulars of the world around us. There is no universal objective moral reality as Plato and other philosophers believed and it does not exist as an expression of the divine.

Dr. Weaver insisted that nominalism was not merely wrongheaded; it was the source of all our woes. In his introduction to “Ideas Have Consequences,” he called the shift to nominalism evil and likened it to Macbeth’s seduction by “the witches on the heath.” Like Macbeth, Dr. Weaver wrote, “Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions.” By challenging the idea of universal objective moral reality, modern man had succumbed to individualism, relativism, materialism, historicism and politics as will to power.

 In my research on the MAGA New Right and in the countless hours I’ve spent in conservative academic circles, I’ve heard this Weaver-esque refrain again and again. It is hard to think of a single significant thinker of the MAGA New Right who would disagree with his assessment of the ways in which modern thought is inherently corrosive or who would dissent from his insistence that we must restore some kind of transcendental moral orthodoxy to our politics.

But conservative ideas have consequences, too. When Dr. Weaver argued that modern ideas are evil, he helped legitimate the repression of anyone who thinks about truth differently. When the thinkers of MAGA New Right suggest that only conservatives — or as some put it, heritage Americans — have access to America’s founding principles or that America is a Christian nation, they are providing a justification for authoritarian actions on the part of the government.

(—in, The 77-Year-Old Book That Helps Explain the MAGA New Right, by Laura Field, nytimes, dec.13, 2025)

I’m going to take two aspirins.

Don't call me in the morning.