If you can tell an adult’s politics by their haircut, cross the street.
Save yourself the time and trouble.
Washington Bends to RFK Jr.’s ‘MAHA’ Agenda on Measles, Baby Formula and French Fries
Yet so long as he is not talking about vaccines, Mr. Kennedy’s ideas are winning cautious support in some surprising places. Dr. Willett said he agrees with Mr. Kennedy that the National Institutes of Health should rebalance its research portfolio to spend more studying ways to prevent disease. Dr. Nestle praised him for taking on the food industry.
“When President Trump announced on Twitter that he was appointing R.F.K. Jr., he used the words industrial food complex,” she said. “I couldn’t believe that. It sounded just like me, and R.F.K. sounds just like me.”
Let me put on my editor hat and quarrel with the language around the vaccine issue: the term "vaccine skeptic" is patently condescending. People, by and large, should be skeptical of what they put in their bodies. If anything, Americans are not skeptical enough of what they put in their bodies — corn syrup, food dyes, seed oils, sugar, et cetera.
But in vast swaths of the American Left and major media outlets, the term "vaccine skeptic" is shorthand for someone too stupid to understand what's good for them. No matter how you feel about vaccines, you have to recognize that calling someone stupid is the least effective way to get them to change their behavior, yeah?
Just what is vaccine skepticism? It's skepticism of something you're putting in your body, of something you're being told by the government to put in your body.
To all my friends on the political Left that can't possibly imagine why anyone wouldn't take a vaccine, how do you feel now that the government in many states can tell a woman what to do with her body? Do you trust the government to make the best decision for your body?
Do you trust the government?
That is the question at the heart of the vaccine issue. And on both sides of the political spectrum, I think there's good reason not to.
I've long been a liberal (but not a Democrat!) that trusts government. I largely trust in the vast swaths of bureaucrats that wake up every day and do arcane, mundane jobs that make my life better. They study how to increase the yield of a corn crop, research the efficacy of mRNA vaccines, study weather patterns across the Great Plains. These little things add up in a hundred thousand little ways that make my life better. I can largely trust that the food I'm buying at the store is safe to consume and matches the nutritional label on the packaging, saving me from the need to research and test my own food before I consume it — something I as an individual could never do. The government helps us in so many ways — it subsidizes the production of gasoline so that I might drive long distances across the country, it regulates radio frequencies so that I can receive stream music on my iPhone, it maintains roads I travel on every single day.
But has the government kept us healthy? Obesity rates are through the roof and chronic disease has never been more prevalent. Rates of autism and cancer and a slew of neurological diseases have never been higher. So I'll ask again: has the government kept us healthy?
Has the government protected us from the corporations that stand to profit off of our sickness? Health insurance companies, big food science companies, chemical and plastics companies — does the government prevent them from denying you coverage or from injecting dangerous chemicals into your food? How much plastic is accumulating in your brain?
Are we better off now than we were fifty years ago? By some metrics, yes, but by others, no. We're fatter and sicker than we've ever been, we die from preventable diseases, we're beholden to corporations that pump unspeakable amounts of money into our political system in order to influence our elections. We the people have such little control over our system of governance — as I've said before, do you think a vote for Kamala would have changed the role of corporate money in our politics any more than a vote for Trump? Democrats, Republicans…it makes no difference. They're each beholden to corporate money.
So why should anyone trust the government?
A few days ago, I was driving across Wyoming and listening to the latest episode of Club Random, an interivew with Andrew Schulz.
Though I've never quite been a fan of Schulz's particular brand of bro comedy, I respect his insistence of having conversations with people from across the political spectrum. In this interview, Bill asks Andrew, in the context of his opinion on Israel, would he be willing to live anywhere in the Islamic world and, well, just watch for two minutes.
Andrew: "If you don't agree with me, you're dumb" is why Trump is elected. And this is what Democrats do...
Bill: Yeah, but sometimes dumb is dumb.
Andrew: Yeah, but people are dumb! So deal with that shit. You know what I mean? Stop acting like everybody's smart. Like, this is the problem, you have all these people that go to Ivy League schools and they're like "we know better than everyone else and we'll just tell you what to do and you guys are all stupid and I know you feel like you want this, but you don't really want this and if you disagree with me you're an idiot." And then all of a sudden, [people] go "fuck you guys, I'm voting for [Trump]. And it's very simple.
Bill: Yeah, that's true, too.
Andrew: So we can't speak down to people if we know they're going to react emotionally.
This might not strike you as particularly insightful, but it hit me like a bolt of lightning.
I'm guilty of that very thing. When someone presents me with information that is objectively wrong, my first instinct is to correct them. I'm more interested in the facts than I am in that person's experience and feelings.
And is this not the root of so many of our problems? Instead of trying to correct people when they are wrong, why don't we try to understand why they feel the way that they do?
I'm reminded of a foundational principle of Buddhism, Taoism, and other eastern philosophies: the more we try to control, the less control we have. Or to quote Princess Leia on the bridge of the Death Star, "the more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
I hate to frame the issue of vaccines (or any other issue) as one of "educated vs. uneducated" since the latter has such an undue, unfair, and elitist stigma attached to it, but that's exactly what this is: a significant portion of the citizenry is simply not educated on how vaccines work, and the portion that is educated is far too pompous, condescending, and certain about what they know — so certain that they become unwilling or unable to admit when they're wrong.
Let me be pointedly clear: education does not make someone better than anyone else, and neither does intelligence. (Intelligence and education are two very different things, despite what educated people will insist.) Education does not equate worth.
One more time for good measure: education does not equate worth.
People simply cannot be blamed for what they don't know, just as they can't be blamed if they weren't born with a capacity for intelligence. (That statement feels obvious, though I will no doubt be pilloried by some for writing it.)
As I've said before, not only is it cruel to blame people for things beyond their control, it's also not an effective political tactic. (My god, Democrats, why is that so hard to understand?) If anything, it is a failure of the education system in this country that basic biology (and virology) are not commonly-understood topics. But here we are, and it does no good to blame the people that don't know what they don't know. Ya know?
The Return Of The McCarthyite Chill
It's Friday, so Andrew Sullivan:
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.
It might be reasonable to suspect that someone as successful as he is must just be playing dumb online, while displaying a hidden command when it comes to policy. Yet even if you are sympathetic to his goal of reducing the size and scope of government — as I am — focusing on firing federal employees is just about the worst possible way to achieve that end. Fewer people working at the Food and Drug Administration, for example, doesn’t mean regulators getting off the backs of pharmaceutical companies trying to bring drugs to market. Instead, it makes drug-approval processes longer and more arduous. Or consider: Republicans have tended to oppose student-loan forgiveness, but now cuts at the Department of Education may lead to there not being enough workers to collect debt. Put another way: Muskian methods may be enacting a de facto version of former President Joe Biden’s policies.
I too support the thinning of the federal government, of culling corruption and bloat from the system.
But the way in which DOGE is doing it… I’m just amazed at someone with the reputation of being so intelligent is doing this culling so sloppily, so ineffectively.
It’s almost as if he didn’t deserve that reputation to begin with? Like, maybe Elon is really great at a few things, but might not be good at everything?
What’s more likely? That he's great at some things? Or that he’s an infallible super-genius?
Elon Musk Searching for Mysterious Billionaire Who’s Making Everyone Hate Tesla
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.
Once again, Andrew Sullivan:
So here’s what I’d ask of readers who say that I have Trump Derangement Syndrome: tell me how you personally parse all these claims that were a mere warmup for the rest. When you heard him say he was better than George Washington, did you giggle? Did you just ignore it? Did you roll your eyes? Did you feel a tinge of nausea? Did you actually believe it? Or have you stopped caring altogether?
This matters because it is central to Trump’s success: no sane person with a grip on reality — unless they had just arrived from outer space — could believe vast tracts of his speech. With huge self-evident lie after huge self-evident lie, insane exaggeration after insane exaggeration, you are instantly forced to choose between walking away from the nutter or acquiescing to his madness. And since he is president, you can’t walk away. So the lies become Truth for millions; narrative replaces reality; aggressors are victims; exploding debt is fiscal prudence; weaponization of the law is anti-weaponization; and on and on.
The best metaphor for Trump’s entire raison d’être is the incident cited above, when at just five years old, he was found throwing rocks at a baby: find someone weaker, first humiliate them, and then destroy them. And for Trump, this doesn’t have to lead anywhere. It is an end in itself. The bullying of others is what gives him life. He does it for those he favors as well as those he wants to destroy. Here is Trump on Truth Social in July last year, for example, on Musk. This is necessary even for Trump’s allies:
When Elon came … asking me for help on all his many subsidized projects … I could have said “drop to your knees and beg” and he would have done it.
Canada and Mexico are best understood as the baby in the playpen. Trump himself re-negotiated a trade agreement with both in his first term. Have they violated that deal? No. Have they refused to cooperate on fentanyl and illegal migrants? No. Has Mexico reduced the pressure on the Southern border to almost nothing. Dramatically. Is there anything they can or could do to please Trump? No. The point is the abuse. And like all abusers, Trump constantly shifts what he is demanding, gaslights, threatens, charms, attacks … so that you begin to realize there is nothing you can do except wait for his mood to change. Welcome to monarchy.
The abuse is the point.
Avoid hysteria, which Trump wants and exploits. But avoid also being co-opted by a single one of his lies, to see clearly, and to speak simply. Read those you disagree with; get off most social media; choose doubt over certainty; restraint over impulse; resist this authoritarian and irrational moment by refocusing above all on the simple truth, as best as you can, and fighting all those on both extremes trying to annihilate it.
Get off social media. Choose doubt over certainty.
Very Weird Ideas About What It Means to Respect Someone's Political Project
There’s a constant jumping from one foot or the other among social justice liberals right now, as their once-inescapable form of engagement becomes more and more embarrassing - this stuff is true and good, oh that part that’s not good? it never mattered, oh actually it’s still good. Traister gives us my favorite move of all, the “canceling isn’t bad because canceling doesn’t actually hurt anybody” thing, which as I will not stop pointing out amounts to trying to defend a political tactic by asserting that it doesn’t work. If canceling doesn’t hurt anybody, why have so many left-leaning people spent such an immense amount of time trying to hurt people through the tactic of canceling?
As someone who a) gives a shit about politics and b) has been part of a tiny and irrelevant political fringe my entire life, it just drives me batty that people won’t stand up and advocate for these politics if they believe them. If you want to defend a political moment or argument or tribe, defend it! Make the affirmative case! Stop hiding behind arguments about how none of this matters or by watering down specific political beliefs until you’re representing as some vague “Good people doing good!” pablum.
Food Lobbyists Plot to Have It Their Way With RFK Jr.
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.
He's crazy. 🙄
"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).
Some post-election thoughts:
• 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.
Marianne Williamson: The Democratic Elite Should Resign
We have to ask ourselves: What happened to the critical thinking on the part of the average Democratic voter? When did we become the party who just said: Okay, whatever the DNC says! What has happened with the Democratic Party is the nightmare that George Washington and John Adams were afraid of. The role of the party is supposed to be to stand to the back, let the voters decide, and then the party steps in. But if your main media partners suppress, blacklist, de-amplify anybody but their chosen candidate; if they are willing to lie and smear anyone else to make sure that nobody even wants to hear them, even if they know they exist, then where we go is where we got to. They’ve done this twice. They did it in 2016 by suppressing Bernie Sanders. I don’t know who would have won that primary if they had taken their fingers off the scale, but I do think Trump would never have been president either way, because the Democrats would have shown up, more happily.
Trump's re-election rests solely on the shoulders of the Democratic Party.
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.
Do not become cynical.
We will all be okay.
Could Harris win? And 25 closing thoughts
Isaac Saul:
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.
Emphasis mine.
Trump Is Courting Apolitical Young Men. Will It Pay Off?
Finn Murphy, a 20-year-old college student in Carolina Beach, N.C., generally stays away from politics. But when he listened to snippets of the podcast, he liked what he heard. That’s why, hair still wet from an afternoon of surfing, he was standing in line last week alongside people three times his age to cast a vote for Mr. Trump.
“He’s strong; he’s a man,” Mr. Murphy said. “I’m here to make sure he wins.”
Anecdotally, this is working. Trump has won over a lot of young men this way, if only because he appears “strong.”
Ever the showman, he’s closed the loop on making our politics entertainment. Recently, I heard a guy my age — single, white, rural, gay — tell me he really appreciated Trump working at a McDonalds for a day, “so he could understand what it’s like for those of us without anything.”
Nevermind that it was a choreographed publicity stunt — it worked.
What does this say about our country, that we can’t discern real from fake, television huckster from serious politician?
Some people would say there is no difference, and hasn’t been in many, many years.
We are not a serious people. And we might deserve what we get.
That fills me with sadness.
A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles
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.
How a Pro-Trump Army Built a Movement to Reject Elections
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.
I’m trying to enjoy this calm before the storm.
I Don’t Want to Live in a Monoculture, and Neither Do You
Few things can change your perspective for the better more than being attacked from both sides of America’s culture war.
If you think the left is uniquely intolerant, how do you process right-wing censorship? Or if you think the right is uniquely prone to political violence, how do you process far-left riots? When faced with similar behavior from one side or the other, hard-core partisans retreat to specious comparisons. They comfort themselves with the idea that no matter how bad their own tribe might be, the other side is worse.
But there’s a different perspective. Remove yourself from a partisan team, and you can more clearly see that human nature is driving American conflict just as much, if not more, than ideological divisions.
I’m inherently suspicious of the notion that simple ideas can solve complex problems, but what if a simple idea can help us embrace complexity? Intellectual diversity matters. Opening your mind to a wider range of perspectives is transformative. It doesn’t just protect the minority from the majority, it also helps protect the majority from itself, and the institutions that learn that lesson will be far more tolerant and successful than those that close their doors to opposing points of view.
No American faction — or party — has a monopoly on virtue or insight. For those of us who see diversity, equity and inclusion as good values, the answer is less for the right to beat the left or for the left to beat the right, but rather for the right to be open to the left, and the left to be open to the right.
David French remains one of the best political writers in the national media.
An Elon Musk-funded group called Future Coalition PAC is targeting Muslim voters in Michigan and Jewish voters in Pennsylvania with diametrically opposed political advertisements about Kamala Harris. In areas of Michigan with relatively large Muslim populations, the Super PAC is painting Harris as a close friend of Israel and is suggesting that she is beholden to the beliefs of her Jewish husband Doug Emhoff; in parts of Pennsylvania with relatively large Jewish populations, the advertisements call Harris antisemitic and say she “support[s] denying Israel the weapons needed to defeat the Hamas terrorists who massacred thousands.”
Meanwhile, a related PAC also funded by Musk is microtargeting likely Black voters on Snapchat with ads that says Kamala Harris is trying to ban menthol cigarettes (surveys have shown that 81 percent of Black smokers use menthols, and big tobacco has disproportionately marketed menthol cigarettes to Black Americans).
The future (and the population) will be controlled by the people that know how to use computers.
”I also acknowledge that in American public life, women can’t seem to apologize enough for our mistakes,” she said. “While our male counterparts’ past — or recent — mistakes are minimized as youthful indiscretions or ‘poor judgment,’ women aren’t afforded that same forgiveness. Again, the only thing I can do is to say I’m sorry and commit to doing better.”
One of her mayoral rivals, Portland Commissioner Rene Gonzalez, had his license twice suspended more than two decades ago and also received seven speeding tickets between 1998 and 2013, according to court documents first reported by Willamette Week.
While court records show numerous candidates for Portland mayor and City Council have been cited for parking or traffic violations in Oregon, Rubio’s number and repeated flagrant lapses of settling them are unparalleled. Over two decades, she had her licenses suspended six times and courts referred her unpaid parking tickets to a collection agency on at least 100 occasions, records show. Days after The Oregonian/OregonLive first reported on her driving record, Rubio damaged a parked Tesla and then left without leaving a note for the car’s owner.
Portland gonna Portland.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is Expected to End His Presidential Campaign
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to end his troubled independent presidential campaign this week, according to three people briefed on his plans, and is in talks to throw his support behind former President Donald J. Trump.
Three of the people briefed on Mr. Kennedy’s plans emphasized that nothing was final, and that the iconoclastic Mr. Kennedy could still change his mind, but said that plans were in the works for him to appear alongside Mr. Trump on Friday. Some people close to Mr. Kennedy were still arguing against an endorsement, according to two of the people.
Biden dropping out of the race changed my personal calculations. Not being a straight-ticket voter, between Trump, Biden, and RFK, my choice was RFK. Trump is deranged, Biden is unfit for four more years, and RFK was the only candidate talking about the role of corporate profit in our politics.
But given his position on corporate control of our politics, that he’s even considering a Trump endorsement at this stage is unconscionable.
And while I’m still a bit unsure about Kamala, I’m way more comfortable with her than I am Trump or RFK. Hell, I don’t have to preface every comment about her with “I don’t agree with everything she says, but…”
But that’s more of a commentary on public sentiment than anything else, and I’ve long been wary of public sentiment.
I’ll work out my thoughts on Kamala another time, though it’s clear that my problems with Kamala aren’t with her at all, but with the Democratic Party. If they hadn’t spent the Trump era reacting to Trump by swinging out wide to appeal to the Nonsense Left (of which, don’t forget, I was a member!), desperate to make Kamala’s centrist, moderate record as a prosecutor seem like a negative, I wouldn’t feel so much whiplash around her nomination.
This is why I’m so uneasy about the Democrats: there’s a profound lack of reckoning with their own decisions. For years, I’ve heard how Hillary wasn’t elected because Americans hate women, but almost nothing about how she A) insulted half the electorate, B) refused to travel to certain key swing states, C) carried a profound sense of entitlement that her time had come, and D) was the obvious corporate candidate. (Though Trump turned out to be one, too, as they almost all do.) Rather than reckon with some of their own irrational decisions on covid, George Floyd, even Trump himself, most Democrats exclaim how stupid, hateful, and ignorant Trump voters must be to present any criticism of the Left at all.
Believe me, that’s a very tempting, addictive narrative. But it’s too easy. There’s zero introspection involved, and that is always dangerous.
The panic of the Trump era gripped us all — Right, Left, and everyone else — in different ways, but the Democratic Party suffered acutely. Any criticism of the party line and suddenly you were tantamount to a fascist.
And while I believe that the Left’s heart is in the right place, we cannot abandon logic and reason when we get scared. As a country, we’ve made this mistake too many times — Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind.
It’s the reticence of the Democrats to grapple with their own fear that I find unsettling. That fear motivated them to insist that Joe Biden was fit for another term.
“He’s wearing clothes!” they’d shout of their emperor, furious if you said otherwise.
That same fear has motivated them to turn on a dime to Kamala. Her narrative changed from ‘ineffectual’ to ‘savior’ overnight.
Let’s be honest: she’s neither of these things. But the way the Democrats have treated her in the last month has me deeply unsettled by the sentiments and excitations of the party.
The Republicans have scared me for a while now, but the Democrats, in their inability to introspect, are dutifully following along behind.
Currently reading: Burning the Books by Richard Ovenden 📚
Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propoganda:
No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state! … The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you … You do well to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed.
Family, family, family. All in the name of family.
R.F.K. Jr. Admits He Left a Dead Bear in Central Park
Strangely, his story is remarkably similar to not one but two stories I know of personally from my time living in Montana. A guy, or should I say a dude, finds a dead bear on the side of the road, moves it to another more populated place, thinks it's funny.
But it's stupid. Is it disqualifying stupidity? No. But is it a stupidity that's remarkably common among men, particulary (though obviously not exclusively) out West, of a certain class? Go to any bar in Big Sky or Jackson or Bozeman and you'll discover that this shit is obnoxiously common.
RFK has certainly become weird enough in the minds of most people that he’ll never be elected. What bothers me is the entitlement he’s displaying here. Sure, it might pale in comparison to Hunter Biden on the board of a Ukranian energy corporation or Trump’s, well, entire life, but c’mon. Rich people doing rich people shit isn’t charming.
Trump as the Opium of the People
Slavoj Žižek:
Capitalism is the first socio-economic order which de-totalizes meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning. There is, after all, no global “capitalist world view,” no “capitalist civilization” proper: the fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East. Capitalism’s global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the Real of the global market mechanism.
This, then, is what drives millions to seek refuge in our opiums: not just the new poverty and lack of prospects but the unbearable superego pressure in its two aspects: the pressure to succeed professionally and the pressure to enjoy life fully in all its intensity. Perhaps, this second aspect is even more unsettling: what remains of our life when our retreat into private pleasure itself becomes a brutal injunction?
VP Kamala Harris Is Not “Veep” Selina Meyer
This election will have real consequences, but reality is in danger of being squeezed off the agenda in favor of a heightened performance piece that calls itself the election but is actually a multimedia event, cut up and memed across social platforms, re-edited, rolled in conspiracy theory and baked under oodles of manipulated footage, ready to pop up on your last remaining sane aunt’s media feed.
Biden’s cabinet is carefully mixed, for better or worse, with progressive and conservative-leaning Democrats — a balance that reflects the President’s preferences as a leader. But Harris is less of a known quality. Faced with this reality, we can only look to her inner circle. There, with its deep ties to Silicon Valley and the business wing of the Democratic Party, the real vision of Harris 2024 starts to emerge.
The moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
The podcast itself is an extraordinary performance. At one point, Andreessen concedes that their major problems with President Joe Biden — the ones that led them to support Trump — are what most voters would consider “subsidiary” issues. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” he says. If we take this podcast at face value, we are to believe that these subsidiary issues are the only reason they’ve chosen to endorse and donate to Trump.
These subsidiary issues take precedence for Andreessen and Horowitz over, say, mass deportations and Project 2025’s attempt to end no-fault divorce. We are looking at a simple trade against personal liberty — abortion, the rights of gay and trans people, and possibly democracy itself — in favor of crypto, AI, and a tax policy they like better.