A Child’s Healthy Body Is Not a Problem to Be Solved

By Chloe Cole

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

Like many in my generation, I was always trying to grapple with where I belonged when I was kid. I was the youngest of five children, separated from my older siblings by a wide age gap. As I grew older, I related most naturally with my brothers. I was a tomboy, though at the time, that word did not seem weighty or political. It simply described how I felt: a girl who felt more comfortable in pants and short hair than girly dresses and bouncy curls.

 

Fitting in at school was even harder. I didn’t necessarily struggle academically, but I struggled to find a purpose in the classroom. Bullying left me with memories that are still difficult to revisit. People could feel unpredictable and cruel, so naturally I felt that my healthiest and safest relationships were in the company of animals. They didn’t expect anything from me or ask me to be anything other than myself to deserve affection.

 

That is what I wanted more than anything: to feel loved. Yet I began to believe that, to make other people happy, I would have to become someone that I was not.

 

Puberty intensified my discomfort. I had once been excited about growing up, but my developing body drew unwanted attention. Adults and children alike made uncomfortable comments about my curves and maturing figure that only agitated me further.

 

At the age of twelve, I got my first phone, which unlocked access to the world of social media. Online, I found people who seemed remarkably similar to me. They spoke openly about difficult childhoods, alienation, identity, and the feeling that something about their bodies did not match who they were inside. The explanation they offered was simple: They had been born in the wrong body. It made sense that maybe I had been, too. The more I read, the more I wondered whether this was the cause of my resistance to the female stereotype — that maybe, inside, I wasn’t a girl at all.

 

No child that age can make fully informed adult decisions about identity, fertility, sexuality, or lifelong medical treatment. And yet, before I was even a teenager, I began moving down the path of transgenderism. At first, the changes were gradual. I cut my hair shorter. I changed how I dressed and even acted to some extent.

 

Eventually, I told my friends and parents that I was transgender. My parents were at a loss. They wondered whether this belief pointed to something bigger and deeper than just an identity crisis, and they responded by doing what any responsible parents would: They sought professional help.

 

Their hope was to send me to therapy, get to the bottom of this, and perhaps let me be a child again. Unfortunately, the exact opposite happened. My parents were not permitted to sit in on any of my conversations with the therapist. They had little idea what was being discussed behind closed doors, even as they watched their daughter grow more and more distressed.

 

Instead of asking why I felt disconnected from my body, the professionals around me taught me that my feelings were not only valid but that they dictated my identity. Meanwhile, they told my parents I would kill myself if I wasn’t affirmed completely.

 

While my parents had their hesitations, they allowed me to begin the medical process, having been emotionally blackmailed. By the time I entered high school, I went by a new name and was on puberty blockers and testosterone. The drugs were powerful — my voice and body changed drastically. People I had known for years didn’t even recognize me. I began using boys’ restrooms and locker rooms. Anyone who remembers high school can remember the smells and atmosphere of a boys’ bathroom. Beneath the awkwardness, as I reflect on that time, I now realize just how dangerous it would have been if the boys around me had discovered that I was female.

 

In June 2020, at the age of 15, I underwent a double mastectomy. For four years, I clung tightly to the belief that transition was the saving grace of my story. But life was not greener on the other side. I learned that young men carry struggles of their own, including profound loneliness and pressure to conceal vulnerability. There often seemed to be no place where a boy or man was allowed to struggle honestly. I experienced that isolation firsthand.

 

Harder questions began surfacing. What if I wanted to be a mother? Or what if I wanted to be a wife? In my desperate pursuit of finally feeling whole, I had lost pieces of myself that I could never get back. When it struck me that I would never be able to nurse my children and that the medical interference in my life could affect my ability to have biological children at all, the illusion began to collapse. I started reconnecting with reality — not all at once, but piece by piece.

 

This awakening lit a fire under me. I could not keep living a lie. I had a choice: to separate myself from the world and spend my life mourning what had been done, or to completely immerse myself in the fight against the ideology that had defined my life.

 

Realizing that future generations might be affected by whether or not I spoke up, I found my purpose. I began testifying before lawmakers and traveling the world speaking out against what had been done to me, working to ensure that, one day, every child in every state is protected.

 

I am so grateful to U.S. Representative Bob Onder (R., Mo.) for spearheading legislation bearing my name. As a physician, he understands that medicine carries an obligation to do no harm. In my case, and in the cases of too many others, that oath was broken.

 

The Chloe Cole Act provides a federal civil remedy for individuals who were subjected to irreversible gender interventions while they were minors. Rather than regulating gender interventions directly, the bill allows detransitioners and their parents to sue the medical professionals who prescribed puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or performed gender surgeries. Those harmed may seek compensation for the lifelong physical, emotional, and financial harms those irreversible procedures caused. The bill also establishes a lengthy statute of limitations, ensuring that those harmed have a meaningful opportunity to seek justice.

 

My story cannot be rewritten, but another child’s story still can. Today, Congress has an opportunity to ensure that fewer families experience what mine did. The Chloe Cole Act would establish a national standard that puts children’s long-term health at the front and center of the medical system. That’s why I am calling on all members of Congress to move this legislation forward to a vote when they return in September. Every day lawmakers delay is another day vulnerable children are told that healthy bodies are problems to be solved rather than gifts to be protected.

 

There is nothing more evil than taking the most vulnerable of our society, lying to them about who they are, and taking away their health permanently. Yet I refuse to believe that evil gets the final word.

 

Everything I have gone through has shaped the woman I am today. I believe God has given purpose even to the parts of my story I would never have chosen. My suffering is not meaningless — this has become my life’s purpose. The Chloe Cole Act may bear my name, but it belongs to all of us.

Israel, Take Heart: There Is Still a Market for the Truth

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

The New York Times letters page recently played host to a discussion that should give Jews some reason for optimism. But I hadn’t quite realized it until I read an exchange on social media this morning.

 

Both the letters and the social-media exchange went right to the heart of a question: Is it worth it to put one’s energy relentlessly and wherever possible toward debunking the lie that Israel committed genocide in Gaza?

 

The answer remains yes.

 

The New York Times letters were specifically addressed to an extravagantly poorly reasoned op-ed comparing Israel’s defensive war in Gaza to the Armenian Genocide and even the Holocaust. A scholar of the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide wrote to the Times to object to the facile false equivalency. As did others.

 

One tactic of the pro-Hamas propagandists in the West is to accuse Israel of genocide, and then when Israel’s defenders point out that this is a lie, the propagandists pretend that the term isn’t what’s important and that Jews are showing a guilty conscience by focusing so much on that one word. This is annoying and dishonest but in its own way heartening, because it is an admission by Team Genocide that they have lost the argument against Israel’s defenders.

 

But rarely do we see, in the general discourse, someone who thinks Israel guilty of monstrous behavior declare the importance of not calling it “genocide.” One letter writer to the New York Times did exactly that:

 

I hope it is uncontroversial to say that collective punishment, the killing and maiming of innocent civilians and the destruction of their homes and critical infrastructure are wrong. Can we leave it at that? Unless you’re a pedantic scholar or a legal expert, semantic labeling is an unnecessary distraction that adds controversy to the uncontroversial.

 

This is another important sign, because it tells us that contesting the genocide libel makes a difference. It exacts a cost to exaggerating Israel’s crimes, even if that “cost” is minimal. Once “genocide” is seen even by Israel’s staunch critics as a way to derail the debate, a reality-based conversation might finally be possible.

 

And a preview of that conversation can be seen in the aforementioned social media exchange today. Eliot Malin, an attorney focusing on international law, responded to a post claiming there exists a public consensus that the blood libel is true. Malin calmly explained two points.

 

The first is that the organizations that levied the accusation of genocide against Israel made clear that they were not applying the accepted definition of the term as it is used in international law. For example, Amnesty International stated that legal precedent would likely exonerate Israel of genocide, so they used a different formula. B’Tselem did the same. The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, having since been dismissed from that position, had said explicitly in an interview that he didn’t charge Israel’s leaders with genocide, only war crimes, because the evidence simply wasn’t there to accuse them of genocide.

 

So that’s the first thing to understand about the distorted debate around the genocide accusation: All basically agree that you would have to change international law to charge Israel with genocide.

 

Malin’s second point explains why. Another user on X asked him to answer for a specific part of the genocide accusation: deliberately seeking a group’s destruction “in whole or in part.”

 

This is actually a key phrase in the definition of genocide. It seems rather easy to say that any losing side in a war was destroyed “in part.” Which is why the term “in part” is explained further in the law. “In part” is actually a higher bar that it seems, and that’s a good thing. Otherwise nothing would distinguish genocide from war at all.

 

Here is Malin’s explanation from the precedential case law:

 

In Jelisić, the first case to confront the question, the Trial Chamber noted that, ‘[g]iven the goal of the [Genocide] Convention to deal with mass crimes, it is widely acknowledged that the intention to destroy must target at least a substantial part of the group.’ The same conclusion was reached by the Sikirica Trial Chamber: ‘This part of the definition calls for evidence of an intention to destroy a substantial number relative to the total population of the group.’ As these Trial Chambers explained, the substantiality requirement both captures genocide’s defining character as a crime of massive proportions and reflects the Convention’s concern with the impact the destruction of the targeted part will have on the overall survival of the group.

 

So there you have it. Malin’s willingness to present the relevant case law all in one place is commendable, especially since it was in response to a random questioner. And it paid off not only for his interlocutor but for anyone who saw or might see the conversation.

 

Truth exists. It is on Israel’s side of this fight. And there is still a market for it.

Sewer Socialism, but Worse

National Review Online

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

Wisconsin Democrats appear prepared to try to resurrect what was once known as sewer socialism in the state, although now in a less practical and more radical form.

 

Marquette’s latest polling for the state’s gubernatorial race, published on July 29, has Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong at 38 percent, 22 points in front of second-place Mandela Barnes, the former lieutenant governor who lost a Senate race against Ron Johnson and just dropped out. Wisconsin’s Democratic leadership prefers the third-place David Crowley (7 percent), the current Milwaukee County executive. Governor Tony Evers endorsed Crowley after his lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez, also withdrew from the race because of gross financial mismanagement. The single primary debate saw Hong go unchallenged while Barnes and Crowley did yeoman’s work convincing viewers that neither of them is up to the job.

 

Those who haven’t spent much time drinking Leinenkugel’s on Lake Winnebago may not know that Wisconsin has experienced an extraordinary bout of Democratic political success since Evers defeated Scott Walker’s attempt for a third term. Since that day in 2018, every executive position has gone to Democrats. The state supreme court majority has flipped from a 5–2 conservative majority to a liberal one by the same margin. The Republican legislature, the last bulwark against progressive excess, has shrunk from a near supermajority to a biennially endangered majority.

 

But now Democrats are about to undertake a massive act of ideological hubris. The party must reckon with the fact that Evers was elected not because of his unique skills but because Wisconsin wanted a boring schoolteacher two years into the first Trump administration, and the left was happy enough with the deal because Evers functioned as a sock puppet for left-wing activism. No one, though, told Evers this. So one can imagine his and the Dem establishment’s shock as they’re realizing that Evers’s endorsement is worth less than an Ostmark.

 

And so Wisconsin finds itself seriously considering a journalism dropout and failed restaurateur in Francesca Hong. Elected to the state assembly in 2020, Hong has never needed to be, or shown an interest in being, anything other than the stereotype of a Madison progressive. Whether the subject is Israel, defunding the police, or killing off school choice, she has gleefully taken the leftmost position and spends time with the likes of Hasan Piker. A card-carrying member of the DSA, Hong is the latest of the Platner/Mamdani school to take a crack at winning a Democratic primary in the cause of socialism.

 

The national and state GOP would prefer that Hong get the nod to run against Republican Tom Tiffany, currently a congressman for a safe-red Wisconsin district, because Hong appears the most beatable in a general election and because of the opposition fundraising she’ll provoke. Tiffany has the advantage of an unopposed primary run, and ads of him hanging out with dairy cows, quilting with his mom, and raising an old-fashioned are straight out of the playbook that worked for the likes of Tammy Baldwin, Bryan Steil, and Evers. Compare the optics of aw-shucks spots with the anti-Hong ads blanketing the state and the cringe-inducing clips showing Hong’s relative inexperience with hostile press. Look at her laundry list of growth-and-culture-crushing policies: doubling the corporate tax rate while instituting an estate tax in a state with twice the average of large, family-owned businesses, public banking, and state-run farms, to start. Milwaukee, one of the two blue strongholds, is a city of African-American and Jewish voters who prize the school-choice options and must look askance at the DSA’s calls for returning their kids to failed public schools and the group’s antisemitism. Then, there are her past remarks about defunding the police. Given all of that, one can see why the GOP won’t mind if Hong is the Dems’ contender.

 

But what if she wins a general election? As local reporters have noted, Hong seems to have found a bipartisan lane with her AI moratorium push. Blue and red enclaves along the shores of Lake Michigan have been some of the first in the nation to loudly denounce what they perceive as AI data centers’ 19th-century-style industrialization of what was farmland the year before and the threat to the freshwater of the Great Lakes. Moreover, state-level Republicans, other than Ron Johnson, have yet to prove that they can win statewide races in this decade.

 

If this race bounces the wrong way, the Wisconsin public is going to get a return of sewer socialism — good and hard.

The Two Types of History

By Maggie Phillips

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

On the morning of July 4, the entry line for Henry VIII’s old stomping grounds stretched across the imposing forecourt nearly to the street. The Hampton Court Palace grounds wouldn’t open for nearly an hour, but the genial crowd, many carrying folding chairs and other sundries for a day out, chatted excitedly.

 

It was the first day of the Rest Is History Festival, two days of panel discussions and demonstrations hosted by the world’s most popular history podcast of the same name. Once admitted, the thousands of attendees grabbed coffee and pastries before heading to the lawn of the palace, settling themselves in front of the main stage to greet the festival’s stars, podcast hosts Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland (not the Spider-Man actor). It’s the kind of place where organic cheers spring up from different places in the crowd when their favorite historical figures garner a mention from the stage. Throughout the day, Sandbrook and Holland played host to other guest historians in conversations about ancient Persia, the six queens of Henry VIII, and of course, the Roman Empire.

 

At the time of their opening remarks, Holland could not yet reveal that he had recorded an interview with the other Tom Holland, Spider-Man star and Telemachus in Christopher Nolan’s screen adaptation of the Odyssey. Holland would only admit that he had seen the film, and he thought it was pretty good. Two days later, both Toms Holland would be on the red carpet at The Odyssey’s Leicester Square premiere, the historian’s support for the film drawing the ire of none other than acknowledged ancient Greece and Rome appreciator Elon Musk.

 

“Tom Holland is such a cuck,” Musk posted on X the day after the London premiere, when Holland (the historian) reposted a favorable review of the film. Musk was among the chorus of online haters who had opposed the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and trans actor Elliot Page as a Greek soldier. Holland replied with characteristic politesse:

 

 

The internet standoff between a mild-mannered academic and the world’s first trillionaire is not as unlikely as it might sound. Holland made his bones writing about classical Greece and Rome. Musk is an out-and-proud classical history buff. One of his legion of children is named Lycurgus, a figure of ancient Sparta. He frequently sprinkles his X posts with Latin phrases, quotes from Tacitus, and once, a picture of himself in gladiatorial armor with the Roman imperial acronym SPQR. At one point he mused it might be time for a modern-day Sulla.

 

Both in the run-up to the film’s release and now as it commands Homeric box office numbers, why and how we delve into the past has become a live topic among academics and cultural commentators of late—and on display in the Musk-Holland dispute are two different approaches to this subject. The Rest Is History Festival was Holland’s approach on the podcast made manifest: a humble curiosity about the past that invites people in. It is a dynamic (and attractive) approach that contrasts mightily with both the chauvinism and sentimental nostalgia that can curdle an enthusiasm for history into something toxic and divisive.

 

Musk’s approach to history, on the other hand, is a distinctly utilitarian mode. Included among his many missions—electric vehicles, getting to Mars, freight tunnels—is the preservation of Western (European) civilization. (Or his understanding of it anyway, as something muscular, powerful, and innovative.) He is concerned about the parallels between the decline of the Roman Empire and the threats that multiculturalism and declining birth rates pose to our current society. The classical Greeks and especially the Romans were great civilizations to be emulated, Musk believes, but we must learn from their errors or suffer the same fate as the Western Roman Empire in A.D. 476.

 

Others exploit the Greek and Roman past in support of a much more explicit ethnic supremacy. The neo-Nazi outlet Stormfront, for example, once used the Parthenon on its web banner alongside the phrase “every month is white history month.” And for some on the left, the response to white supremacists co-opting Greco-Roman history and imagery has been a backlash to “classical education,” a move to decolonize it, and to “save the classics from whiteness.”

 

But on the Rest Is History podcast, Holland and Sandbrook are not deploying history to take down a rival ideological camp. A typical episode is more of an exploration of the past than a polemical exercise. Their version of history knows its own limits as a discipline, both as a prognosticating tool and as a roadmap.

 

Two conversations that sunny Saturday illustrated that seeking to better understand the past can be, above all, a profoundly human endeavor. The first was a conversation with historian Dan Jackson about “the Pit of Death,” the 19^th-century Hartley Colliery mining accident in the Northeast of England that killed more than 200 men and boys. Pictures of the miners were projected onto the giant screen, and although we sat there with picnic hampers and smartphones more than a century and a half later, the poignant details of the tragedy felt surprisingly fresh and recent. On the lighter side, a cosmetic demonstration about how 17^th-century women altered their appearance to communicate and inveigle proximity to power evoked parallels to the present vogue for plastic surgery, fillers, Botox, and even “Mar-a-Lago face.” And are the spots that aristocratic courtiers used to affix to their faces really so different from the brightly colored pimple patches teens wear out of the house today? (“People are still people,” my teenager marveled.)

 

But a conversation between Tom Holland and the English classicist Mary Beard demonstrated the real crux of The Rest Is History: that to study the past is to appreciate that we are a part of something larger than ourselves, and often, something that is outside our ken.

 

The subject of Beard and Holland’s conversation was the surprisingly alien Roman past, where slavery and violence, even in domestic contexts, were casually ubiquitous. When Holland asked her what we today would find most surprising about ancient Rome, “The dirt,” Beard answered. “The sense of appalling deprivation.” Beard pointed to one particularly piquant vignette from the Roman historian Suetonius, in which a stray dog pads into an elite dinner party with a human hand in its mouth and deposits it onto the table. At the time this was viewed as a favorable augur for the emperor Vespasian’s political future—but where did he get the hand? Suetonius doesn’t concern himself with this question, or with the stray dog for that matter, suggesting that neither would have been considered particularly remarkable by contemporaries. “The ancient world, wherever you went, was a pretty nasty place,” Beard said.

 

On the one hand, our ancestors are totally different than we imagine—according to Beard, a staid formality, not raucous high spirits, would have characterized the audience at gladiatorial games, for example. On the other hand, while we tend to consider ourselves more evolved than the primitive people in the ancient past who watched men kill and maim each other for sport, we do still quite enjoy hearing about and imagining them.

 

These instructive both/and insights are perhaps a useful corrective in our era of popular nostalgia and romanticism about the past. Online, for example, it is often (and wrongly) asserted that modern people work more days annually than medieval peasants. Elsewhere, “Western heritage” social media accounts present the past as a time when men were men, all the women were feminine, and all the children were above average. Matt Walsh is all over X complaining about Nolan’s The Odyssey for things like showing an Odysseus who deals with trauma and guilt from war, and the casting of non-white actors to tell the story of what he calls “a foundational text of western civilization.” “What is the point of a story set in ancient times that doesn’t even try to actually capture ancient times?” he asks.

 

The irony, of course, is that in dispensing with some technical historical accuracy (inasmuch as a story with witches and cyclops can be historically accurate), Nolan is getting to emotional truths of the story that make it recognizable to people millennia later. And it is unclear why a social conservative like Walsh would like to see more sex, misogyny, and wanton killing in his Odyssey instead of, his own Daily Wire boss correctly identified, a clear Christian allegory. The violent and ugly historical accuracy Walsh desires would have overshadowed the themes the film chose to accentuate—humility, self-denial, atonement, what we owe our fellow human beings—that render it intelligible to modern audiences who live in a Christ-haunted world. Walsh also gloated over Nolan’s admission that his script scrubbed the Odyssey of its original misogyny as proof-positive that the film could not be a Christian adaptation. Walsh, then, seems less interested in his civilization as an incubator of the true and the good than as something that exists purely to sustain itself for its own sake. Within this framework, history is not an anthropocentric story but a mere record of power and domination.

 

Both at the festival and on their podcast, whether Sandbrook and Holland are talking about the Battle of Little Bighorn, Joan of Arc, or ancient Rome, the focus is on humanity rather than civilization writ large. And no one could accuse them of undervaluing the latter in their work. But they are not interested in arguing that a civilization is good because it is powerful, or that it is powerful because it is good. Holland’s book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World sees Western civilization and its intellectual tradition as worth preserving precisely because a Christian society upholds the human person’s inherent dignity and worth.

 

For the people who view history as an unerring road map to civilizational glory, the past is a cautionary tale: We have to learn from the great empires’ failures to avoid decline.

 

But Sandbrook and Holland are pursuing something more interesting than retrofitting the past to suit their ideological priors. During a Q&A at the conclusion of the festival’s first day, Sandbrook said his favorite series the podcast has done to date was about the fall of the Aztecs. Not because it dwells on decline per se, but because of its challenge to the listener to consider the stories of both the conquistadors and the indigenous Mexica people. Holland, for his part, said the drama of the Titanic story was among his favorites, because it invited the listener to consider how social class and competing international interests contributed to the ocean liner’s tragic sinking and its aftermath.

 

The Rest Is History contemplates the past as a different country, but without indulging in the temporal hubris of people who simply happen to be alive, flattering themselves that they are superior to their predecessors. The result is something refreshingly apolitical and convivial. And the appeal of this approach was evident in the festival, which according to its producers attracted 5,000 people over the course of its two days.

 

It was history as communion, both of a current and asynchronous nature. My daughter and I waited in line with a woman who came from the United States for the event; she listened with interest to my daughter’s impressions of her first trip to London, then gave us a tip that we could see the only surviving original of Beowulf at the British Library (we took her up on it; worth the trip!). Later in the so-called “Haunted Gallery” of King Henry VIII’s apartments, where the screams of a doomed Catherine Howard are said to be still audible, someone else approached us just to say hi, saying they had recognized us from the audience of a West End show we had attended the night before.

 

That first day, Sandbrook summed it up best: “The past is ultimately unknowable,” he said. And it is because Holland and Sandbrook keep this last part always in mind that they approach the past less as a “how-to” manual and more as a humbling reminder that one day, much of the way we live will be unknowable to future generations. As the popularity of both the podcast and the festival shows, The Rest Is History has found a winning formula in a study of history that is more interested in understanding the past than proving the present wrong.

Absurd Brainrot

By Karen Swallow Prior

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

When I began teaching literature at an evangelical Christian university almost 30 years ago, one daunting task I faced was introducing my bright-eyed, biblically trained, often sheltered undergraduates to modern schools of thought that undergirded some of the literary works I assigned. One of these was absurdism.

 

It was important at that time for my students to understand this philosophy in order to better appreciate the literature we’d be reading. It’s even more important now—especially for Christians—to understand absurdism so as to recognize how it is playing out today in real life.

 

“Absurd” essentially means “irrational.” As a philosophy, absurdism confronts the inherent irrationality of life. It is most closely associated with the 20^th century French-Algerian philosopher and novelist Albert Camus, growing out of existentialist philosophy but parting from it in significant ways.

 

Existentialism posits that human existence precedes human meaning. In other words, human beings can’t simply assume that God or the universe will confer meaning to our existence, but rather, we are responsible to make that meaning for ourselves. Existentialism has a long history but gained prominence with Soren Kierkegaard, a 19^th century Danish philosopher. But the search for meaning goes back much further, of course. The writers of the Old Testament books of Ecclesiastes and Job wrestle to find meaning in the brevity of our lives and the depth of our suffering, for example.

 

Finding and making meaning is a weighty responsibility that absurdism rejects, saying instead that the search for meaning is futile. Even so, we must persevere, embrace life in its meaninglessness, and even choose to be happy. Camus doesn’t deny that ultimate meaning exists, but he sees an unbridgeable gap between whatever meaning does exist and our ability to know it. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus explains:

 

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me—that is what I understand. And these two certainties— my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them.

 

Camus likens human existence in the face of this inability to know the meaning of the world to Sisyphus, who in Greek mythology was condemned by the gods to push a giant boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down again each time, over and over, for eternity.

 

Instead of endless pushing of a boulder, modern people, Camus writes, have:

 

Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm.

 

Human beings are made to desire meaning. The challenge of being human within the absurdist worldview is to find meaning, even joy, in the face of such futility. Thus, absurdism often expresses itself through dark humor.

 

The most famous literary movement to grow out of this philosophy is Theater of the Absurd, whose playwrights include Samuel Beckett and Eugéne Ionesco. Theater of the Absurd features non-linear plots, irrational dialogue, meaningless repetition, unceasing circularity, and a bizarre mixture of the tragic and the comic. If life is meaningless and then you die, you can cry about it—or laugh in the face of it all.

 

Popular culture has its own versions of meeting meaninglessness with comedy. The 1999 film Office Space is often cited as an example of absurdism expressed in the modern workplace with all its pointless, dehumanizing rules and rituals. Even more exemplary is the sitcom Seinfeld, “the show about nothing,” which satirizes the utter shallowness of the four main characters, for whom the placement of shirt buttons and the death of a romantic partner provide equal fodder for endless discussion and complaint. The fact that the show ends on the very same note on which it began (circling back to  a conversation on said buttons) echoes the absurdism of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, a two-act drama in which, as one critic put it, “nothing happens, twice.”

 

In literature or on television, all this is funny, instructive even, in the Aristotelian sense of catharsis.

 

In real life, however, absurdism is not as lofty or inconsequential. Indeed, while Camus offered a few possible responses to absurdism, he recognized that a common—and potentially destructive—response is rebellion.

 

Rebellion against the seeming meaningless of life can take many forms. Some—social protest, economic upheaval, philosophical movements—require the sort of high-level, collective thought and reflection that is the luxury of the detached and disaffected.

 

However, for the common, everyday person who finds no meaning in modern life—the one who must work long hours without satisfaction or joy in order to acquire food, shelter, and video games—there are easier, more readily accessible outlets for rebellion.

 

Enter internet trolling, meme-making, and “shitposting.”

 

While these activities are not identical, the last covers them all. Shitposting (sometimes more delicately referred to as “trashposting”) is, as one source puts it, a “style of online communication characterized by deliberately low-quality, ironic, or absurdist content, often used for humor, provocation, or community bonding.”

 

This strain of absurdism derives, as The Culture Atlas explains, from “a penchant for surrealism, irony, and dark humor.” It thrives on “creating and sharing content that challenges conventional norms of comedy and communication.” And it purposely cultivates an aesthetic committed to “deliberate degradation of quality.”

 

In other words, the ridiculousness is the point. If existence itself lacks meaning, at least one can get the meaning of the joke. The more absurd, the better.

 

For example, during July’s America250 celebration, President Donald Trump shared on Truth Social an image of a large crowd that was obviously fake. Some circulated the post with comments about how low Trump’s intelligence must be to not recognize the doctoring of the photo and to share the image as if it were real. But this is a misunderstanding of what such a post is doing and to what effect. An image like this isn’t being presented as real. It’s a joke—as are more and more of the images and posts being posted by federal social media accounts. This kind of posting—trolling—is an embrace of meaninglessness itself—of the absurd. It’s a rejection of truth and of caring about truth. It’s a repudiation of excellence and caring about excellence—because truth and excellence exist only as measured against the objective, external standards that absurdism says we can’t know.

 

Trump’s post is but a small, insignificant example of absurdist humor. A more consequential example is portrayed in the harrowing Netflix documentary Train Wreck: Storm Area 51. A social media post calling on viewers to storm a classified military base drew millions of viewers and posed a risk to national security that the government took very seriously. But it turned out to be “just a joke,” a shitpost that ran so far amok that it eventually involved the U.S. military and cost taxpayers $11 million in the government’s attempt to protect the base from a what appeared to be a credible threat.An article at the Berkeley Political Review explains this phenomenon of absurdist humor this way:

 

Endless shitposting and the “brain rot aesthetic” are Camusian revolts, embracing chaotic, meaningless content to cope with an overwhelming reality. Faced with existential threats, absurdist humor becomes a way to navigate the void.

 

But it’s not just fun and games. The same article further explains that as a deliberate “rejection of traditional political messaging,” such posts are inherently political. They express the choice “to engage in pointless content rather than traditional political discourse” and reflect “a deep skepticism of politics as a means of change.”

 

Absurdity, then, takes the place of argument or persuasion.

 

The lulz garner clicks, the guffaws build camaraderie, and the manufactured fraternity shores up a faux sense of shared courage against the disorientation created by a world of rapid change. Rather than rage against the machine that produces underemployment, overeducation, lifetime debt, and addiction to porn, one can mock. It is an existential choice to laugh in the absence of the transcendent: civility, mutual respect, human dignity, and even the ultimate source of these—a holy God.

 

Proverbs 26:18-19 warns, “Like a maniac shooting flaming arrows of death is one who deceives their neighbor and says, ‘I was only joking!’” Troublingly, some experts observe that online trolling and similar behaviors are correlated with “what psychologists call the Dark Tetrad: sadism, psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism.” Indeed, research by the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats has linked “extremist content under the guise of edgy, rebellious humor” along with its “faux sense of rebellion,” to real-life racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and mass violence. These things are no joke.

 

What made it so challenging to teach my evangelical undergraduates about absurdism all those years ago is the fact that then—if not now—absurdism appeared to be philosophy far removed from Christian engagement with the world, including politics. Evangelicals were (or claimed to be) the defenders of “truth-with-a-capital-T,” the ones holding back the tide of creeping relativism, and apologists for the ultimate meaning to be found beyond and outside of ourselves. That is no longer the case—even if it ever really was.

 

Life indeed does imitate art.

 

Now absurdism is everywhere, every day, not merely present but celebrated, embraced, and even helping to direct our national political landscape.

 

Of course, human existence offers many absurdities. But absurdism as a worldview or philosophy of life contradicts core Christian understandings. The preacher in Ecclesiastes confronts the seeming vanity of life and the limits of human endeavors, but ultimately recognizes that God has a purpose for our existence even if we cannot always see it for ourselves. The book begins with the exclamation,

 

“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
    says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
    Everything is meaningless.”

 

Yet, it concludes with the essential meaning of human life:

 

Fear God and keep his commandments,
    for this is the duty of all mankind.
For God will bring every deed into judgment,
    including every hidden thing,
    whether it is good or evil.

 

Likewise, after much suffering and argument, Job finally understands that the meaning of our lives is “too wonderful to know” and is found only in God.

 

We may not always be able to see the meaning in everything. Camus was right about that. But Christians believe that we can know the ultimate source and end of all meaning—the Creator who became human and entered into this life to experience human existence with us. We can know that truth, goodness, and beauty are worthy of being pursued and cultivated because they reflect the nature and character of God as well as the design for the human beings made in his image. We can know, too, that even the most mundane and futile-seeming tasks, when done to serve our neighbor and to glorify God, matter both now and for eternity.

 

When the absurdist tears down, we can build up.

We Must Not Let China Plead the Fifth on Covid’s Origin

By Jianli Yang

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

Anthony Fauci was back in the hot seat last week. Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) once again sparred with the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) over the origins of Covid-19, while newly released materials — including Fauci’s personal notes and diary entries made public through congressional investigations — provided fresh fuel for accusations surrounding Fauci’s role in directing the country’s response to the pandemic.

 

I have little interest in the political theater surrounding a renewed Fauci drama. What concerns me is something far more consequential. Covid-19 caused an estimated 28 million excess deaths worldwide, shattered hundreds of millions of lives, and inflicted economic damage measured in the tens of trillions of dollars. Yet more than six years after the pandemic’s onset, remarkably little progress has been made toward discovering the virus’s true origin.

 

That failure should disturb anyone who cares about preventing the next pandemic. Unfortunately, the American debate has been focused on the wrong battles.

 

There are two principal hypotheses regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2. The first is that the virus emerged naturally and spread naturally into the human population. The second is that it escaped from a laboratory. But even that second hypothesis contains two distinct possibilities that are too often conflated. One possibility is that a naturally occurring virus was being collected, stored, or studied in a laboratory and accidentally escaped. We have historical precedent for this: In 2004, the SARS coronavirus escaped from a laboratory operated by China’s Center for Disease Control in Beijing. The other possibility is that the virus resulted from laboratory manipulation, including gain-of-function (GoF) research, before leaking from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

 

These distinctions matter.

 

Even if scientists eventually establish that SARS-CoV-2 originated in nature, that would not eliminate the possibility of a laboratory accident. A naturally occurring virus can still escape from a laboratory. By contrast, if convincing evidence were ever produced that the virus had been artificially engineered, then laboratory leakage would no longer be merely one possibility — it would become the only plausible explanation, because nature does not manufacture laboratory-designed viruses.

 

This is where the United States enters the story. Did NIAID, under Fauci’s leadership, provide funding through EcoHealth Alliance that ultimately supported gain-of-function-related research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

 

If the answer is yes, and if future evidence were to establish that Covid-19 resulted from an engineered virus leaking from that laboratory, then American institutions — including the National Institutes of Health, NIAID, and their leadership — would inevitably bear part of the responsibility.

 

China’s refusal to cooperate makes it extraordinarily difficult for the United States to determine conclusively whether the virus was engineered in Wuhan. But determining whether American agencies funded or collaborated on research that crossed into gain-of-function territory is largely within America’s own power. Why, after more than six years, does this question remain unresolved?

 

That is precisely the investigation America should have undertaken thoroughly and transparently. Instead, Wednesday’s hearing seemed designed less to resolve these substantive questions than to produce another round of made-for-television partisan combat. If Congress truly wishes to advance the search for Covid’s origins, it should conduct a comprehensive, credible accounting of NIAID’s relationship with EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Such an inquiry would not only clarify American accountability; it might also uncover critical evidence pointing toward the pandemic’s true source.

 

More importantly, the United States should be leading an international political and scientific campaign to compel genuine cooperation from Beijing. From the very beginning, the Chinese government violated both the spirit and the obligations of international public-health cooperation. Authorities suppressed whistleblowing doctors, silenced journalists, censored scientists, destroyed or restricted access to early data, refused independent access to crucial records, removed online databases, and tightly controlled every stage of the investigation. Every meaningful inquiry encountered political barriers erected by Beijing.

 

To borrow an American courtroom metaphor (indeed, one that Fauci himself displayed on repeat on Wednesday), Beijing has effectively “pleaded the Fifth” hundreds of times. The irony, of course, is that the Fifth Amendment exists to protect constitutional rights. Beijing has transformed it into a governing philosophy.

 

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the entire Covid-origin investigation is how unserious the international community ultimately became. The so-called joint World Health Organization–China investigation in early 2021 was less an investigation than a carefully choreographed diplomatic performance. Its most memorable conclusion — that transmission through imported frozen food was more likely than a laboratory leak — would have been hilarious had the stakes not involved millions of deaths.

 

The report quickly became a symbol of how political constraints can overwhelm scientific inquiry. At first, governments demanded answers. International organizations raised concerns. Scientists called for transparency. Then, gradually, the voices faded. Congress largely moved on. Successive American administrations shifted priorities. Scientific institutions turned their attention elsewhere. The WHO continued requesting information but lacked meaningful leverage. The United Nations General Assembly, pandemic-related international meetings, the G-7, the G-20, NATO, the European Union, and numerous multilateral forums quietly allowed the issue to drift into the background.

 

It is as though Covid’s origins became the world’s forgotten cold case. One almost gets the impression that the international community collectively granted Beijing the same kind of pardon President Biden granted Anthony Fauci.

 

Still, the most curious question is not whether China obstructed investigations. It clearly did. The real mystery is why so much of the world eventually accepted that obstruction.

 

One overlooked fact deserves greater attention. According to reporting by the Associated Press, Chinese leader Xi Jinping ordered a nationwide scientific mobilization on Covid origins in early January 2020, shortly after the outbreak became apparent. Beijing rapidly directed enormous state resources toward investigating the virus while simultaneously tightening political control over information related to the outbreak. Around the same period, Major General Chen Wei, China’s leading military virologist from the People’s Liberation Army, assumed a central role in Wuhan’s pandemic response and in work involving high-security laboratories.

 

Xi’s urgency was entirely understandable. At that moment, perhaps no one on Earth had a greater incentive to know the truth than China’s supreme leader. Until he understood where the virus came from, Xi could not know whether China faced another biological threat, whether military laboratories had experienced a catastrophic accident, whether local officials had concealed vital information, or whether the political survival of his own government might eventually depend upon the answer. Every day without certainty would have been another day of strategic anxiety.

 

Now more than six years have passed. Given Xi’s extraordinary concentration of power, his obvious motivation to discover the truth, the immense resources of the Chinese state, and China’s world-class capabilities in virology and biotechnology, it strains credulity to believe that he still does not know far more about Covid’s origins than the rest of the world.

 

Knowing the truth, however, is not the same as revealing it. If the truth threatens the stability or legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, concealing that truth becomes a political imperative. If this analysis is correct, then Covid’s origins are no longer merely a scientific question — they are a geopolitical one.

 

If Senator Paul — and every American leader genuinely committed to uncovering the truth — truly wants answers, then the objective should not be to win another cable-news argument with Anthony Fauci. America has already spent years fighting theatrical, partisan, and deeply personal battles that generate headlines but very little knowledge.

 

The real challenge is building sustained domestic and international political will to make transparency on Covid origins an enduring priority in relations with Beijing. That means coordinating democratic allies, integrating origin transparency into broader diplomatic engagement, demanding continued access to evidence, supporting independent scientific investigations, protecting researchers from political intimidation, and refusing to let the issue quietly disappear simply because it has become inconvenient.

 

In short, stop giving Beijing a pardon. With all due respect to constitutional traditions, it is long past time to stop allowing the Chinese Communist Party to “plead the Fifth.” The victims of the greatest pandemic in a century deserve better than another Washington shouting match. They deserve the truth.

Fauci’s Treatment at Republican Hands Retraumatizes Politico

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

The Covid-era retrospectives that Anthony Fauci’s congressional testimony (or lack thereof) inspired are not exclusive to the right. Politico, too, reflected on the indignities that typified that grim period in American life. Indeed, Fauci’s treatment by the GOP reminded the outlet’s reporters of what they claimed many Americans resented most about the pandemic: the incivility.

 

“Rather than an evaluation of what went wrong and right, or how to do better next time, the rage stood out,” wrote the three reporters who bylined Politico’s roundabout defense of Fauci’s professional integrity.

 

“Republicans said it was about accountability; Democrats a vendetta,” the dispatch continued. “The nasty divide, which historians have said tracks that of prior pandemics, underscores the challenge in hoping to do better when the next pandemic hits.”

 

Logically, then, if the “next pandemic” hits while Democrats are in charge, we will rerun America’s Covid experience. After all, how can we “do better” if we studiously avoid any critical retrospection on that period?

 

Sure, there was plenty of incivility to go around during the pandemic, but that hardly rates as a concern when compared with the pandemic’s myriad other outrages.

 

American schools were closed longer than anywhere else in the industrialized world — a policy that Fauci regularly advocated. The learning loss that a generation of students inherited from that disastrous and epidemiologically questionable policy will plague the country for years to come.

 

In the name of “equity,” pandemic-era relief schemes violated the fundamental rights of property owners and somehow convinced Biden administration officials to abrogate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

 

Religious liberties — the right to worship as well as freedom of conscience objections — were violated, and the federal judiciary spent much of its time beating back unconstitutional usurpations of power by the executive branch.

 

The pandemic represented a unique threat that compelled policymakers to experiment and innovate. Many of those experiments were valuable. Others weren’t. But those that weren’t hung around far longer than a rational evaluation of their merits would warrant.

 

As I wrote at the time, nearly 1,000 days into America’s pandemic experience, the number of inexplicable governmental interventions into private affairs seemed increasingly untethered to the threat still posed by Covid:

 

Vaccination cards are still currency in parts of blue America. Masking in almost every medical setting, up to and including veterinary offices, is standard. Performative displays of hygiene theater contribute to a rise in “behavioral” maladies such as hypochondria, even if they have few other measurable effects on our environment. Colleges and universities maintain Covid-testing regimens that conflict with their education.

 

According to the researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz, “Many people still say they feel more anxious, emotionally exhausted or socially disconnected than they did before 2020” — a “lingering” effect of “prolonged pandemic stress” that can “reshape both brain and immune system function over time.”

 

It’s a miracle that many people aren’t psychologically tortured by their experience during the pandemic. The incivility that Fauci experienced from Congress on Wednesday objectively pales before a cursory audit of the era’s many affronts to individual liberty. A thorough accounting of that period would be an elementary act of civic hygiene. And, yes, there is still some residual “rage” — understandably so.

 

Either Politico’s reporters experienced none of this, or they cannot bring themselves to make any concessions to a version of our shared reality that conservatives would recognize. That may be an explanation for this otherwise inexplicable piece of reporting, but it’s no excuse.