Grayson Quay

Josh is a five-foot-tall aspiring priest with a prosthetic leg who wears half a dozen assorted crucifixes and medals, causing him to jangle as he lopes around on crutches. He also carries so many holy cards in his pocket that you’d think he was worried about being spontaneously challenged to the Catholic equivalent of a Yu-Gi-Oh duel.But most importantly for my purposes, Josh will talk to you about Church politics until you’re ready to jam an aspergillum through your eardrum.When I first approached him, purely out of curiosity, he sent me an article from the National Catholic Reporter suggesting that the odds-on favorite, Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, was a paper tiger.

Take a drive through Steubenville, Ohio, Patrick Deneen urged the crowd at the recent Restoring a Nation conference. In downtown Steubenville, he assured us, the “blessings of liberty” are on full display. I didn’t bother making the trip. I know what those blessings are. We have the same ones where I grew up, in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, less than an hour away: a population that’s dropped 50 percent since 1940, record fentanyl overdoses, crippling brain drain, hulking husks of abandoned steel mills, empty storefronts on main street, the steady decay of once-beautiful public spaces and everywhere the poisonous fallout of family breakdown. The people I grew up with are dying — and the best the libertarians can offer them is a U-Haul.

After a bit of a hiatus, my wife and I decided Thursday night to pick up where we left off with Seinfeld. As fate would have it, we ended up watching the episode “The Couch.” Jerry and Elaine go to a local restaurant. The owner, Poppy, swings by the table to assure them that the duck is succulent. Jerry tells Elaine he’d just as soon have stayed home and ordered pizza from Pokeno’s. Elaine tells him she refuses to eat Pokeno’s pizza because the owner donates to radical anti-abortion groups. Jerry, testing Elaine’s resolve, then calls Poppy over to the table and asks where he stands on the abortion issue. Poppy tells a story (heartbreaking in its content but hilarious in its delivery) of his mother undergoing a forced abortion in a Cuban re-education camp.

My fellow Americans, I speak to you tonight with a heavy heart. Earlier this week, an eighteen-year-old wielding an AR-15 opened fire at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killing nineteen students and two teachers. I ask all of you to keep them and their families in your prayers. I’ll be doing the same. But I’m tired of giving speeches like this, and I’m sure you’re all tired of hearing them. The pattern is familiar by now. A gunman opens fire in a school or a grocery store or a movie theater or a church. We offer our thoughts and prayers. We spend a few news cycles arguing about gun control and mental health and school security. And then we all move on. Rinse and repeat.

At the conservative Christian schools I attended from kindergarten through the end of undergrad, I became familiar with two types of believers: the knuckle-draggers and the nuance-mongers. The knuckle-draggers didn’t swear or drink. They watched dumb faith-based movies like God’s Not Dead. Secular music was suspect. Any engagement with the products of mainstream culture was accompanied by a humorless and formulaic discussion of how said opus fit into a “Christian worldview.” And when election time rolled around, they didn’t have to think twice. Only one issue mattered. Democrats wanted to kill babies, so voting anything other than a straight GOP ticket was out of the question.

“Everybody want to know what I would do if I didn’t win,” said Kanye West, the only 2020 presidential candidate to truly grapple with the horrors of abortion, as he accepted his award for Best Rap Album at the Grammys in 2005. He paused. The room was silent. Then Ye dropped the bomb: “I guess we’ll never know.” The crowd erupted in applause. That’s the energy I felt Monday night at the Supreme Court as the world learned a majority of justices was prepared to strike down Roe v. Wade. You’ll find no nuance here. The pro-choicers lost, and I’m going to inject 500ccs of their tears straight into my veins. Cope and seethe. At around 9:30 on Monday, I was already in my pajamas, settling in for a quiet night with my wife. Then she showed me her phone.

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” Harvey Dent says to Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight. His words prove prophetic. By the end of the film, the heroic district attorney Dent has become the vengeful Two-Face. President Biden has had a similar arc, although he was never much of a hero and was always two-faced. “[W]hen it comes to issues like abortion…I’m about as liberal as your grandmother,” Biden said in 1974. “I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” Based. Unfortunately, this version of Biden wasn’t long for this world.

Record-high inflation and soaring gas prices are boons for the Republican Party. Nothing sours the electorate on the party in power faster than pain at the pump. “People are becoming poorer,” Tucker Carlson said during a recent segment. “The standard of living of Americans, who for almost 100 years have enjoyed the world's highest standard of living in any big country, is plummeting. So, what's the administration doing to fix this? What are they doing to help? Well, of course, that depends upon whether or not you're Ukrainian.” It’s a note Tucker has struck before. The Democrats in power only care about virtue signaling. It’s Ukrainian flag pins and transgender admirals all the way down. You can go broke for all they care. Just make sure you go woke first.

Last week, conservative media company the Daily Wire announced it would begin selling shaving supplies under the brand name Jeremy’s Razors. Why is a media company selling razors? Because Harry’s Razors, a longtime Daily Wire sponsor, recently dropped the partnership due to “misaligned values.” In the launch video for Jeremy’s Razors, Daily Wire co-CEO Jeremy Boreing mocked the woke razor companies with which he plans to compete. “[Michael Knowles] went and said that boys are boys and girls are girls, and that was just too much for Harry's,” Boreing said. “And it's not just Harry's, either. Gillette razors used to be the best a man could get. Then they decided that men are too toxic, unless you're the kind of man who teaches his daughter to shave her beard.

A few months ago, I saw an intelligent and fairly prominent conservative writer lionizing Marjorie Taylor Greene on Twitter. My reply was something along the lines of, “Come on. Do better. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a moron.” In response, this writer told me I was being elitist and engaging in snobbish respectability politics. MTG was a brave patriot who has done far more good than the establishment GOP, he said. I would just have to lower my standards. Maybe I am a snob. I want leaders who enjoy intellectual pursuits and conversations. Construction workers probably want a president they could have a beer with and who looks like he did a real day’s work at some point in his life. Businessmen respect a savvy dealmaker.