Beyond the cost implications for Apple, domestically manufacturing iPhones would likely lead to substantial price increases for stateside buyers. It’s either the tariffs or the domestic manufacturing costs; pick one. American citizens don’t, by and large for now, want to work for peanuts in factories, with all the surrounding pollution, and the factories would need to be built, too, all of which costs money. Cheap foreigners could be drafted in, yet the current White House regime is happily fostering a heightened hostile environment for migrants. Automation could be maximized, which means fewer jobs are created and requires specialists and research.
Manufacturers could absorb these costs, and reduce their profit margins, and upset investors and retirement portfolios. There are ways forward, with various pros and cons; it’s just nowhere near as trivial as the Trump administration is portraying it. Tariffs are a rather blunt approach to what needs coordination between private and public sectors, long-term training and investment, and political nous.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives estimated this week that a Chinese-made iPhone currently priced at $1,000 could balloon to $3,500 if manufactured in the US. Meanwhile, an April 3 analysis from Rosenblatt Securities warned that tariffs alone could drive the price of the iPhone 16 Pro Max 1TB — currently $1,599 — up to nearly $2,300. And that’s before the US-China trade war escalation went into warp.
Our uneducated populace is to blame for much of this mess. We Americans do not understand economics. We don’t know the difference between price and cost, we simply want to work less (yet for more money) so that we can buy ever-more inexpensive things.
That’s not possible without the very consequences we seem to be angry about.
How to fix it? I don’t know. I get the distinct feeling that it’s somewhat inevitable if American citizens aren’t willing to adjust their expectations. (Not something we’re known for.)
Like a game show host, Trump announced a series of tariff rates on many of America’s major trading partners.
How did he come up with the rates?
It seems by a crude formula: A given nation’s trade deficit with the U.S. divided by that nation’s exports to the U.S.
Trump calls these “reciprocal tariffs,” and the claim is that we are taxing foreign nations at only half the rate they are taxing our imports. The numbers are illusory, however, some of them apparently made up (Brazil at only ten percent?) and others counting a VAT as a net tax on American imports, which it is not.
What timeline are we living in?
This is perhaps the worst economic own goal I have seen in my lifetime. I cannot think of any credentialed economist colleague—Democrat, Republican, or independent—who would endorse it. And I haven’t even mentioned the risk that some foreign nations will retaliate against American exporters, damaging our economy all the more.
The last two months have felt like all the chickens of the last 40 years have come home to roost. Since I became politically aware, I’ve had the lingering suspicion that we would be the ones to bring about our own decline, all because we prioritize money above all else. Americans wanted cheap stuff so badly that we outsourced our own jobs to other countries. Think about that.
Plainly, China is ascendent and America will not be great again. The country of my grandparents’ mythologizing — the country I want to believe in — is gone.
For years, we’ve been hearing breathless warnings about a “campus free speech crisis” from self-proclaimed free speech warriors. Their evidence? College students doing what college students have done for generations: protesting speakers they disagree with, challenging institutional policies, and yes, sometimes attempting to create heckler’s vetoes.
This kind of campus activism — while occasionally messy and uncomfortable — has been a feature of American higher education since the 1960s. It’s how young people learn to engage with ideas and exercise their own speech rights. Sometimes that activism is silly and sometimes it’s righteous. Often it’s somewhere in between, but it’s kind of a part of being a college student, and learning what you believe in.
But now we face an actual free speech crisis on campus that goes beyond just speech. It’s an attack on personal freedoms, due process, and liberty. The federal government isn’t just pressuring universities over speech — it’s literally disappearing students for their political expression. If you support actual free speech, now is the time to speak up.
The latest example of this authoritarian overreach is particularly chilling: Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts who was here legally on a student visa, was abducted by masked agents in broad daylight. She was disappeared without due process or explanation — only later did we learn she had been renditioned to a detention center in Louisiana.
Her supposed crime? A year ago, she co-authored an op-ed in The Tufts Daily criticizing her university administration’s stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Not advocating violence. Not supporting terrorism. Not even criticizing the U.S. government. Just exercising core First Amendment rights by publishing criticism of her own university’s policies in a student newspaper.
When does America cross the Rubicon?
When is this country no longer a democracy?
When does it become something else?
I’ve been asking these questions of people for a few months now, and there’s no consensus answer. When a president runs for a third term? When an administration ignores the rulings of the Supreme Court? (Trumpets will say Biden already did this.) When the president jails people, citizens or not, that oppose him, First Amendment be damned?
Racism is still a blight on American life. But wokeness is not how we heal; it has simply redefined the problem to the benefit of educated elites. By focusing on immutable characteristics like race, the woke moral panic has allowed economic elites to evade responsibility for their regressive view that elites should not only exist but rule. And in presenting race rather than class and income as America’s deep and worsening divide, the purveyors of wokeness have ended up comforting white, liberal elites, even as they have called them white supremacists.
It pains me to agree with her because I really dislike her appearances on Real Time, but I bought this book to learn about opinions I don’t necessarily agree with.
A press that is so solidly on the side of that powerful few, so solidly of it, that afflicts the afflicted and comforts the comfort-able, will hasten our demise. And that should terrify us all.
She loses me here. The press, or at least every journalist I know, is not on the side of the elite.
They’re noble, fiercely curious people who insist on interrogating the powerful.
But that’s not to say they didn’t lose the plot in the last decade. I think a lot of journalists, because they’re largely all from an educated class, were imbued with certain ideals. Ideals that, as a gay man, benefit me personally.
But perhaps those ideals didn’t reflect those of the larger populace.
That’s a tough thing to realize. I am of the generation of journalists that grew up in this era, and I want to believe that what I knew was good and just and true.
But I can’t continue to live in a world that’s so painfully incongruent with this one I’m currently living in.
In other words, I was wrong.
There’s a lifetime of heartbreak in that admission.
Not satisfied with effectively buying a co-president role in Donald Trump’s administration, Elon Musk has turned his attention — and money — towards a key race in the swing state of Wisconsin. The billionaire’s America PAC is claiming to give $100 to registered voters who sign a petition against “activist judges.”
It’s not the first time Musk has promised money in exchange for signatures on petitions: he did the same thing leading up to the presidential election in November. It’s illegal to pay someone to vote or to register to vote, but Musk’s approach is meant to intentionally toe the line. Some election law experts say the tactic is legal because the offer doesn’t require a person actually vote; others say that requiring signatories be registered voters is what violates the law.
Fuck Elon and fuck billionaires meddling in our politics.
I have absolutely no time for campus protests that go over the line into intimidation of other students. If crimes have been committed, I have no problem prosecuting. But offensive speech? It’s allowed in America. Handing out fliers? It’s how America began! A campus can (and should) discipline its students; but the federal government intervening to seize a legal resident and trying to deport him for speech — along with a dragnet for finding others to throw out — is an outrage in a free country.
Very few American citizens have read the Constitution. Most treat it as they do their holy books: they cherry-pick the rules they like, have no problem judging others by those particular rules, yet seem to know hardly anything about the rest of the document.
Or worse, they know nothing of the Constitution — not a single article or amendment. They just speak with confidence about what it does or does not contain, the document itself be damned.
This ignorance feels particularly galling when coming from the Right, which it so often does, because those that so fervently support Trump and his ilk seem to fetishize the Constitution, always going on (and on) about their love of America and the "rule of law” while wearing at least one piece of clothing brandishing Old Glory. So you'd think they'd care a bit more about America's founding document, about the Emoluments Clause or the Twenty-second Amendment or, hell, the most famous amendment of them all.
But let's not bullshit each other: this isn't about the rule of law.
This is about hate.
This is about hating someone so much that you openly choose to ignore the rules laid out in the document you claim to love so much. You'll do anything to punish people that disagree with you because — and let's not stop being honest now! — your ego is so fragile, your skin so thin, that you can't stand even the smallest criticism.
You can almost hear the rage-sputtering from the Trumpets. "But! BUT!! BIDEN!!" To that, I respond, "Yeah, Biden. And Bush and Clinton and FDR and Eisenhower." What does it matter who the current president is? It's the power of the presidency I find so dangerous, hence the need to keep it in check. But going on about Biden seems to be less about Biden than Trump, more about airing of grievances as a smokescreen for the guy you support being able to do whatever he wants.
And to my friends on the Right, yes, I'm aware Biden did some very-likely-illegal shit. He certainly made some moral decisions I disagree with, and I've grown deeply suspicious of his extended family and the privileges they’ve enjoyed since he became vice-president. Put another way, the Right has raised some good points about Biden’s moral failings — and the corruption of the Democratic Party.
But to criticize Trump is not an endorsement of Biden, just as criticizing Biden is not an endorsement of Trump.
What does it say about us that we can't seem to really understand that? The level of vitriol I experience from Liberals and Conservatives alike who seem to assume I'm endorsing the "opposing team" when I criticize theirs is, well, I think you'd be shocked at what people feel entitled to say to my face, all because I don't tow their party line.
We've all somehow lost our ability to be rational in the face of hating the "other team."
Wokesters? Trumpets? I'm looking at you both.
You need to knock it off.
You need to learn that your hatred of the people you disagree with has been engineered and cultivated. It's what keeps you watching your videos, and thus what sells ads on those videos. It's a cruel irony that rage is what keeps our brains engaged, keeps us clicking and scrolling. There's an evolutionary reason for this, but we live in a very different world than the one in which our species evolved. (We have computers, for fuck's sake.)
Seriously, if we deserve to keep this country — and if we’re still being honest, maybe we don't — we have to stop hating each other. Pay attention to your thoughts — if you experience a flash of hatred for someone because they're a Democrat or Republican, you're sick. You've been infected with a toxin and you need to seek treatment.
Admitting you're unwell is the first step. Being around people who don't think like you is important, too. Having conversations with people who don't think like you is even better. You'll realize that not every Wokester hates personal liberty and not every Trumpet is a bigot.
This is not some grand epiphany, I know, but I'm going to keep writing it: we need to stop hating each other. I don't care how you manage to do it, but the United States will not survive if you don't.
Yes, you.
Mark my words: we lose this republic if our hatreds control us.
He’s spent the last few months rampaging through the federal government, resulting in an enormous amount of chaos and a historic decline in Tesla sales that’s currently causing the automaker’s stock value to collapse.
In other words, there’s clearly a billionaire whose unpopular actions are responsible for Tesla’s woes, and it’s Musk himself. But the multi-hyphenate businessman, who’s never been comfortable looking in the mirror, is instead blaming a shady cabal of Democratic billionaires for his self-inflicted woes.
Elon, my dude, did you think Trumpets were the ones buying your electric vehicles? What, exactly, did you think would happen when you started to move fast and break the federal government?
You can either live by your principles and have mere billions…or you can be the richest man alive.
Pick one and shut the hell up, you whiny little bitch.
…we are now faced with a new authoritarianism. The tech industry, once able to peacefully bury its head in the golden sands of California, has woken up to its most important choice: whether to ally with the powers of the state—as Big Tech did during the COVID era, becoming the useful pawn of an authoritarian censorship apparatus—or to rapidly course-correct and ally itself with decentralized authority.
There is no greater decentralized authority than that of the family. And the philosophy of the early internet is at its nature, too, one of decentralization. It prizes creative destruction—birth and death and birth again—of ideas and companies, and the freedom that comes from ensuring that no central authority can ever control, stifle, or break the long arc of creation and innovation. This is fundamentally the philosophy of technology, and one we must ensure is embedded in our most consequential technologies going forward.
So far, so good.
We must also normalize working from home as a benefit for mothers of young children. Not a right, but a benefit. It is more important than fertility benefits, maternity benefits, child care benefits. I single out mothers here because we can’t ignore the trends showing that women workers are essential to the growth of the American economy—and we desperately need more of those working women to become mothers.
As someone raised in part by a mom who worked from home, I agree.
I was recently asked how I would make motherhood high status if given the opportunity, and many people were surprised by my suggestions. I didn’t mention tax incentives, reducing the cost of childbirth, or increasing the housing supply—all important parts of a pro-family agenda that others are better equipped to discuss. Instead, my suggestions were small, focused on seemingly insignificant changes to the culture, which can have an outsize impact on altering the status hierarchy of daily life. We are living in an age of memetic power and memetic war. Meme it and we will be it, the operating principle goes. This means that we need a society that praises the family in little ways, both on screen and off.
I would argue that technology is already doing a better job of this, as many platforms and popular influencers now celebrate motherhood, homeschooling or family-centric ways of living. But the physical world can help signify these priorities as well, through things like changing the name of “carpool lanes” to family lanes, making it a norm that families always board first in all forms of transportation, and ensuring that parking lots have family-reserved parking for the safety of mothers and children.
Nope. She lost me.
I've long had complicated thoughts on the concept of family. As a gay man, I've grown to resent the privileges granted to people who, by virtue of who they fuck, have kids (i.e. straight people). All those little concessions made for moms and dads and their children. Parents get away with murder in this culture, and the entitlement we teach them to expect is an astounding thing to behold.
Of course, my friends with kids don’t see it. It's like that analogy of culture being the water a fish swims in: the fish doesn’t know what water is, having always lived underwater, until it’s pulled from it. In the same way, we’re only made aware of our culture in its absence. Parents come of age expecting that the rest of us will make thousands of little compromises on their behalf. Not knowing any other way, those parents come to believe they deserve those concessions.
But as a dear friend once put it, "how is it my fault you fucked up your birth control?"
And yet my thoughts on the matter have evolved. I've learned to recognize the importance of strong family units in a healthy society. As I've grown, I've come to realize my immediate family unit was the greatest privilege I've been given. As a direct consequence, my childhood was idyllic. I owe much of my sense of security, safety, and confidence to my parents.
I've noticed too that as I get older, the friends that tend to really 'stick' are those that come from similar backgrounds — nuclear families (though not exclusively) with two parents who remain married (though there are some exceptions). It's not something I was conscious of when choosing my friends, but I wonder how this shared background has enabled certain relationships to last while others seem to fall away?
As I travel around the country, I meet a lot of angry, damaged, hurt people. The influence of trauma on the American public cannot be overstated, and I'm shocked by the trauma some have had to endure. Abuse, neglect, poverty, violence… It's astounding what so many people carry around in their minds and in their bodies.
While I once held resentment toward the privileging of 'family' in our culture, a bit of reflection helped me realize that I myself owe everything to a strong, healthy family — so why wouldn't I want to support the development of that same thing for everyone else?
Still, I have my limits, and I draw the line at “family lanes.”
A new true crime documentary series from Blumhouse Television, No One Saw A Thing examines an unsolved and mysterious death in the American Heartland and the corrosive effects of vigilantism in small town America.
A revealing slice-of-life of rural Middle America that raises some compelling philosophical questions about human nature. Is murder justified if the victim is a known bad apple? Can violence be passed down from one generation to the next? (Genetically, it would seem that answer is yes.) Is there some preternatural darkness that can pervade a certain town or landscape? Do we need violence?
About half of the county’s 22,000 residents were obese, a quarter of them smoked cigarettes and almost 20 percent were diabetic — numbers that had become increasingly typical in rural America, where working-age adults were dying at higher rates than they were 20 years earlier, according to data from the C.D.C. People in the country’s poorest places were now almost twice as likely to develop chronic disease as those who lived in wealthy, urban centers on the coasts, helping to create a political climate of resentment. Mingo County had been solidly Democratic for much of its history, but more than 85 percent of voters supported Donald J. Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
When we have billion-dollar corporations focused solely on generating profit, each advertising directly to the people, what did we expect would happen?
When Google and Facebook — advertising companies, not social media companies — have direct control over the algorithms that show us what they want us to see, all in the service of giving Mars and Pepsi and ConAgra and Monsanto and every other enormously wealthy corporation the ability to advertise to us right on the computer in we keep in our pocket, what did we expect would happen?
In a society organized around the accumulation of money and wealth above all else — above morality, above compassion, above human life, above happiness — what did we expect would happen?
This crisis we Americans find ourselves in — can we agree we're in a crisis? — has been a long time coming. When Reagan deregulated in the 1980s and Republicans cheered "trickle-down economics," when Bush 1 negotiated NAFTA and Clinton signed it, what did we expect would happen?
We Americans have prioritized access to cheap goods over the health of our economy and our citizenry. Saving money is the only thing we care about, and in the process we sold out our rural towns and factory cities, we sold out our fellow citizens who might not have the ability to control their impulses. Perversely, this doesn't affect those of us who can, and certainly not most of us fortunate enough to have an education. (And thus tend to skew to the Left.)
This country is grounded in a delusion that we are each in control of our lives. We call it individualism, and it's right there in the foundational document of America, the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. We tell ourselves this story that we're all equal to one another and thus we're all equally able to control our impulses, nevermind the science that says otherwise.
We unleash these million- and billion-dollar profit-seeking corporations on the most vulnerable populations, all under the guise of 'liberty.' Let them buy whichever sugary drink they want! Let them pick which fast food restaurant they can afford for dinner! And if they don't buy healthy food, let's blame them for it — after all, we choose to (and can afford to) eat our vegetables, so they must just be stupid (or lazy).
We Americans are so thoroughly convinced of the delusion of individual liberty (ignoring neurology, genetics, and environmental circumstance) that we use it to blame the poor, uneducated, and unhealthy for their poverty, ignorance, and sickness.
Those three words — “the free world” — mean nothing to Trump and never have. And he has now fatefully told the entire world, including our former allies, that this is America’s position now as well. He has updated Reagan with these words: “We were with you then. We see no reason to be with you now. In fact, we’re siding with a dictator who threatens you.”
This is a Rubicon, I’m afraid, that cannot be fully uncrossed. But I have a feeling that the American people, including many who voted for Trump, will see this new alliance with Putin against a beleaguered, little democracy with the same disgust and nausea that I do.
This is who Trump is. But it isn’t who Americans really are. I have faith that the West, now mortally wounded, can yet survive Trump and Putin, and re-emerge at some point. But it may be a dark, dark few years before the dawn’s early light breaks out again.
Even if you believe Thompson was all the evil things so many people online say he was — a corrupt corporate CEO guilty of insider trading and working as the face of a company that denies life-saving coverage to tens of thousands of Americans a year in the name of profit — he was a corporate cog. He was responsible to a board and to shareholders. And, in short order, he'll be replaced by another CEO. Nothing will change, except that killing someone in the middle of Manhattan whom you deem evil could now become more normal.
I know how a lot of people might react to me writing this, because I've already encountered the refrains. "It's good these people are scared," is one common throughline of the response. In other words: "No, I don't necessarily support killing corporate CEOs in cold blood on the streets, but if CEOs scale back their predatory behavior because they’re scared of reprisal, that’s a net good.” Or, of course, people might react by saying that I am more worried about the killing of one CEO than a system that kills tens or hundreds of thousands of people a year.
I suppose there's something appealing about these kinds of arguments. They are not entirely unlike arguments I've made in the past — like that we should be prosecuting more corrupt presidents and members of Congress, not fewer, stability of the system be damned. The obvious difference, though, is that when I made those arguments they came from a place of demanding accountability — insisting that the system do a better job of rooting out corruption and evil, not cheering extrajudicial violence on the streets.
To put it differently: If you are hoping for our rich corporate overlords to live in fear of expedited, unanswerable and unexpected punishment, then you are necessarily hoping for us common folk to start delivering that punishment. Which requires us to be the arbiters of who is good and who is evil. The left might consider how long it'll be until abortion-providing doctors or trans activists or Democratic politicians start regularly being mowed down in the street in the name of striking fear into evildoers. If that's the world you want to live in, I strongly suggest signing off the internet and going to spend some time outside.
While I really dislike a lot of these people, none of us should want to live in a country where assassination becomes a method of political expression. It’s hard to see democracy surviving if elected leaders and corporate leaders feel they might be shot at any point. And that’s why we have to actually get our laws working again. I hope that men like Carl Nichols and Fortune 500 CEOs start to wake up, and see that there is deep rage outside their clubby environs that can’t be fixed with security measures but must be addressed by some measure of social obligation to the people who live here.
After all, societies that give citizens no way to control their own lives, but put the fate of their people in the hands of distant masters with no concern at all for their wellbeing, invite disaster. We’ve always known that. It’s one of the main reasons for the passage of our antitrust laws. So I hope we can get some control over our society again, before we truly do spin out of control.
We know it’s not antifa because they’ve never been this effective.
When our cities are no longer safe for extraordinarily wealthy insurance CEOs, what’s our country coming to?
Health care industry executives, like those in the insurance and defense industries, face increased risks “because of the services that are being provided and the emotion that comes along with some of those services,” Mr. Komendat said.
That’s an actual quote in the New York Times.
“Because of the services that are being provided and the emotion that comes along with those services.”
Wow.
What an obtuse way to say “these industries kill a lot of people.”
Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers.
The hacking campaign, nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, is one of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history, and it has not yet been fully remediated. Officials on a news call Tuesday refused to set a timetable for declaring the country’s telecommunications systems free of interlopers. Officials had told NBC News that China hacked AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies to spy on customers.
iMessage and FaceTime Audio, always. If you need to communicate with an Android user, Signal.
Although much of the early criticism of Kennedy’s nomination has focused on his skepticism regarding some vaccines, the nominee is a longtime critic of the food industry, which he says is a leading contributor to America’s obesity epidemic. In recent months, he has called for a crackdown on food additives, limits on certain crop protection chemicals, stronger guidelines regarding what he says are conflicts of interest among regulators and business, and a review of any substance causing, what he argues, Americans to be “mass poisoned by big pharma and big food.”
What a kook. 🙄
In videos that have gone viral this year, Kennedy has singled out ultra-processed food as a priority for what Kennedy has called his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda. In one video devoted to the potential dangers of Yellow 5 food dye, Kennedy stands before a table with Doritos chips and Cap’n Crunch cereal and claims the ingredients used in such products are one reason more than 40% of American adults are classified as obese by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The dye, also known as tartrazine, has been linked to behavioral problems in children and other health risks. The European Union requires child warning labels for products with tartrazine.
Kennedy has made similar arguments about the widespread use of seed oils – including those from corn, soybeans, sunflowers, and peanuts – especially in highly processed foods. Research suggests that high levels of seed oils, rich in polyunsaturated fat, can cause inflammation. America's overreliance on seed oils in fast food and snack products, Kennedy claims, is a major overlooked factor in the health crisis.
"Increasing number of voices on the right target the food industry," an October memo stated, which went out to clients that include McDonald’s and America’s largest candy makers. The lobbyists warned that Kennedy’s MAHA movement “had gained increasing momentum among conservative figures who have taken a more vocal interest in the way food is produced and regulated.”
Herein lies the problem with both sides of our bipolar political spectrum: the American public no longer possesses (and if they do, they're reticent to demonstrate their use of) discernment and critical thought.
Trump bad, Biden good. Or Biden bad, Trump good.
It's all incredibly unintelligent, and it's been disappointing to watch the Left tumble off that same cliff the Tumpets did years ago. But I've watched if first-hand among friends, neighbors, colleagues. If you so much as question the current state of immigration, in the eyes of many Democrats, you may as well be MAGA. If you agree with RFK's positions on food safety and public health, you're a vaccine denier. If you posit that the American economy rebounded fairly well from covid, you're a libturd (if you're talking to a Trumpet) or a neoliberal (if you're talking to a Leftist).
• Boy, did the Democrats blow it. Right now, I would love to have a sit-down with Jaime Harrison (DNC chair), Gretchen Whitmer (DNC vice-chair), and for good measure, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
• I am furious with every liberal expressing shock at Trump's re-election. I know many, and they are the ones I can hardly bring myself to speak to right now, not the Trumpets.
• I'm far less anxious than I was in 2016 or 2020. We saw this election coming. I went into it clear-eyed. Trump is a known entity. I'm nervous for the future, but I can't say I'm unprepared.
• For every aghast liberal scold exclaiming, "how could you vote for a rapist?!," shut the fuck up. Democrats didn't have a primary, Democrats kept telling us Biden was fit for office when it was obvious he was not, and Democrats had zero plan to deal with immigation or the economy. (Instead, they decided gaslighting the public on those issues was the right tack.) Trump didn't win, Democrats lost.
• Telling voters they shouldn't trust their feelings is a losing tactic. Duh. Told you so.
• Maybe if liberals want to win, they should spend more time around conservatives. Move out of your cities and into a small town — I dare you.
• Democrats are obnoxious. The open condescension with which they speak about rural people, white people, heterosexuals, men, and Christians is astounding. I say this as someone who used to do that very thing. (But you can't move to rural America and maintain that condescension and hope to make any friends.) That condescension is hateful — knock it the fuck off.
• To my shocked liberal friends: what work did you do between 2020 and 2024 to change the outcome of the election? And don't say "vote," because that is the bare minimum required of an American citizen. Seriously. Being a citizen is work — tell me, what work did you do? Do you live somewhere surrounded by people that think like you? How many Trumpets do you talk with on a regular basis? How many do you count as friends?
• Any person claiming Harris lost the presidency because she's a woman or black is in denial. Full stop.
• I'm upset, yeah, but more than anything I'm sad. I'm trying — expending real mental effort — not to be angry. Not at the results of this election, but at this cycle, this endless stream of bullshit, these false choices. Let's be real: a vote for Kamala or a vote for Trump is pretty much the same. Sure, Kamala gave lip service to an inheritance tax — a tax that would've affected me personally — but do you think it was ever gonna pass? Do you really think the Democrats are any less in-the-pocket of big corporations than the Republicans? C'mon. They're two sides of the same coin, and capitalism as we know it is rigged against you. I'm sorry you don't want to admit it Democrats, but it's true.
• And yet a vote for Trump is a Faustian bargain, no matter what you think of him. We are all now at the mercy of his ego.
• We Americans got the president we deserve. The over-educated wealthy that live (though not exclusively) on the coasts and in the cities parade their liberal platitudes — "science is real," "black lives matter," "we believe women," etc. — and do they give away any of their money? Of course not. That should say everything. Real liberal values would compel them to help the poor, not condescend to them. History tells us that it's really this simple: societies crumble when wealth accumulates at the top. Class unrest consumes the population, as it will and should, and everything we cherish — democracy, civility, safety, all our creature comforts… it all goes out the window. This election is a verdict that damns the elite, the wealthy, those at the top. They — we — should've known better. That's what all that education was for… Instead, we treated education as a way to climb the corporate ladder, to make ever-more money, to make ourselves richer and fatter and safer… the next iPhone, a new car, another home. We lost sight of the social contract: an education is meant to better ourselves in service of helping others, not to buy more shit and surround ourselves with people that think exactly as we do. We failed.
Whichever way this goes, do not let the outcome make you cynical.
Don’t gloat if you win. Don’t throw a tantrum if you lose.
We’re adults. Listen to the people that disagree with you. Ask them questions. (Cherish the people that ask you questions in return.) Be open to being wrong.
Heading into the weekend, I kept thinking about metaphors to make some type of big statement about how important I think Tuesday’s election is for our nation. No matter how many ways I tried to word it, all I could think about as an analogy to a potential Trump victory was my friend, sitting inside a casino he’s probably lost a zillion dollars in, finally scoring a big win against the house—the machine that always has the odds in its favor—flipping that table, with the chips, drinks and cards on it, and then getting kicked out carrying a massive Publisher’s Clearing House-style novelty check.
I don’t like that this is how I think of the government, the Democratic party and the media, conjoined as one unbeatable, dystopian chimera with the odds always in its favor—but I can’t help it. What else could you possibly call a ruling party of elites, using one hand to rig their primary process while using the other to write diatribes about the importance of democracy? What else could you call the party that blankets its deeply flawed policy prescriptions under the cloak of the moral high ground? What do you call the party that used to preach freedom of choice, speech and liberty that now takes its cues from giant pharmaceutical corporations and the military industrial complex? How about the party that outright lied in 2020 to the public about the president’s involvement in a Chinese influence-peddling scam days before the last election?
Whatever happens on Tuesday, I'm feeling sick about what comes after.
I am a bit bewildered about how so many people in the media (and Harris’s campaign) still don’t “get” Trump. He does a shift slinging fries at McDonald’s and a lot of journalists mock him; he drives a garbage truck and a lot of journalists mock him; he does a goofy dance on stage at rallies and a lot of journalists mock him; he goes on long-form podcasts and a lot of journalists say he’s wasting his time. But these things are endearing. They connect with normal voters. They humanize him. They matter. Whatever you think of him, Trump is one of the best retail politicians alive.
It should be easy for Vance to imagine a world in which school shootings don’t happen — that is the pre-Heller world he grew up in! — but fixing the problem of school shootings requires admitting that a collective action problem exists. It requires admitting that the current policy solution — sending kids to school with fucking Kevlar in their backpacks — is less effective than restricting gun ownership in any meaningful way. He cannot do that. Trump cannot do that. Trumpism cannot allow that debate to happen.
Do you want to live in a country where the vice president refers to schools as “soft targets”? That’s a vote for JD Vance. That’s a vote for Donald Trump — a vote for the line on the school shootings chart to keep going up, forever.
Trump simply cannot use the tools of democracy to run the country on our behalf. His brain does not work that way, even when it appears to be working. He is too selfish, too stupid, too cognitively impaired, too fucked in the head by social media — too whatever. He just can’t do it. He will make our collective action problems worse because he doesn’t even know what kind of problems they are. There is a reason he loves dictators and that all his biggest ideas involve forcing people to do things at the barrel of a gun: mass deportations, arresting his critics, sending the military into American cities to quell protests. He is unable to imagine a world where people cooperate for any reason other than the threat of violence, and so violence has become an inextricable part of his movement.
I traveled to four battleground states and interviewed dozens of election officials, activists, lawyers and ordinary citizens, read through hundreds of pages of court transcripts and sat in on many hours of local meetings like the one in Washoe. What I found was that although the Stop the Steal movement of 2020 has evolved into the considerably more sophisticated “election integrity” movement of 2024, its success is still premised on persuading election administrators of two things that are not true: that widespread election fraud is a real and present threat to democracy and that they have not only the authority but also the legal duty to do something about it — that they must “do their duty” and deny certification.