A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, March 24, 2025 8:30 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Supreme Court’s new religion case could devastate American workers

Catholic Charities v. Wisconsin risks giving employers a sweeping new power to ignore laws protecting their workers.

By Ian Millhiser | Mar 24, 2025, 5:30 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/scotus/404678/supreme-court-catholic-charities-wis
consin-religious-liberty-workers

If you know the name of a case the Supreme Court will hear on March 31, Catholic Charities v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, you can probably guess who will prevail.

The Court’s Republican majority almost always rules in favor of Christian litigants who seek an exemption from a federal or state law, which is what Catholic Charities is looking for in this case. (Notably, the Court’s Republicans have not always shown the same sympathy for Muslims with religious liberty claims.)

But, while the outcome in Catholic Charities seems unlikely to be a surprise, the stakes in the case are still quite high. Catholic Charities seeks an exemption from Wisconsin’s law requiring nearly all employers to pay taxes that fund unemployment benefits. If the Court grants this exemption, the justices could give many employers a broad new power to evade laws governing the workplace.

Like every state, Wisconsin taxes employers to fund benefits for workers who lose their jobs. Like most states, Wisconsin’s unemployment benefits law also contains an exemption for church-run nonprofits that are “operated primarily for religious purposes.”

The state’s supreme court recently clarified that this exemption only applies to nonprofit employers that primarily engage in religious activities such as holding worship services or providing religious education. It does not apply to employers like Catholic Charities, which provide secular services like feeding the poor or helping disabled people find jobs — even if the employer is motivated by religious faith to provide these secular services.

Catholic Charities, however, claims that it has a First Amendment right to an exemption, arguing, among other things, that Wisconsin’s limited exemption for some religious nonprofits and not others discriminates against Catholics.

None of its arguments are persuasive, at least under the Supreme Court’s existing decisions. But precedent plays hardly any role in how this Court decides religion cases. The Republican justices routinely vote to overrule, or simply to ignore, religion cases that they disagree with. The Court’s very first major decision after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment gave Republicans a supermajority on the Court effectively overruled a decision governing worship services during the Covid-19 pandemic that was only a few months old.

Realistically, in other words, the Court will likely decide Catholic Charities based on the justices’ personal preferences, rather than by following the doctrine of stare decisis, which says that courts should typically follow their own precedents.

That said, it remains to be seen how far this Court might go in its ruling. It could choose to distinguish Catholic Charities — which is a legitimate charity that does genuinely admirable work — from employers who claim religious exemptions only to hurt their own employees. But if it chooses to be expansive, it could overrule a line of precedents that protect workers from exploitative employers who claim a religious justification for that exploitation.

“Religious liberty” doesn’t mean religious organizations get civil society’s benefits and none of its costs

In order to understand the Catholic Charities case, it’s helpful to first understand the legal concept of a “corporation.” Corporations are entities that are typically easy to form under any state’s law, and which are considered to be entirely separate from their owners or creators. Forming a corporation brings several benefits, but the most important is limited liability. If a corporation is sued, it can potentially be liable for all of its assets, but the owners or controllers of that corporation are not on the hook for anything else.

Corporations can also create their own corporations, thus protecting some of their assets from lawsuits.

Think of it this way: Imagine that José owns two businesses, one of which sells auto parts, and another that fixes cars. If these businesses are incorporated, that means that José’s personal assets (such as his house) are protected if one of his businesses are sued. Moreover, if both businesses are incorporated as two separate entities, a lawsuit against one business cannot touch the other one. So if, say, the auto parts company sells a defective part, that company could potentially be put out of business by a lawsuit. But the car repair company will remain untouched.

Catholic Charities is a corporation that is controlled by the Roman Catholic Church. According to its lawyers, the president of Catholic Charities in Superior, Wisconsin, is a Catholic bishop, who also appoints its board of directors. The Catholic Church gains significant benefits from this arrangement, because it means that a lawsuit against Catholic Charities cannot touch the church’s broader assets.

Under Wisconsin law, however, the church’s decision to separately incorporate Catholic Charities also has a cost. Wisconsin exempts employers that engage in religious activity such as worship services from its unemployment regime, but it does not give this exemption to charitable corporations that only engage in secular activity. Because Catholic Charities is a separate legal entity from the church itself, and because it does not engage in any of the religious activity that would exempt it from paying unemployment taxes, it does not get an exemption.

Presumably, the church was aware of all of these consequences when it chose to separately incorporate Catholic Charities. The Catholic Church has very good legal counsel, and its lawyers would have advised it of both the benefits of separate incorporation (limited liability) and the price of that benefit (no unemployment exemption). Notably, Catholic Charities has paid unemployment taxes since 1972.

But Catholic Charities now claims that this decades-old arrangement is unfair and unconstitutional. According to its brief, “the Diocese of Superior operates Petitioners as separately incorporated ministries that carry out Christ’s command to help the needy,” but “if Catholic Charities were not separately incorporated, it would be exempt.” That very well may be true, but if Catholic Charities were not separately incorporated, it also would not benefit from limited liability.

That brief alleges three separate constitutional violations — it claims that Wisconsin discriminates “against religious groups with more complex polities” (that is, with more complex corporate structures), and it also raises two claims that both boil down to an allegation that Wisconsin is too involved with the church’s internal affairs because its law treats Catholic Charities differently if that entity were not separately incorporated.

The discrimination claim is weak, because the Constitution does not prohibit discrimination against entities with complex corporate structures, it prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion. Wisconsin law treats Catholics no differently than anyone else. If a Muslim, Hindu, Protestant, Jewish, or nonreligious charity also provides exclusively secular services, it also does not receive an exemption from the state’s unemployment law.

Similarly, Wisconsin law does not entangle the state in the church’s internal affairs, or otherwise dictate how the church must structure itself and its subordinate entities. It merely offers the church a bargain that it is free to turn down — the church may have limited liability, but only if it accepts the consequences of separate incorporation.

A decision for Catholic Charities could have disastrous consequences for workers

Realistically, the immediate consequences of a decision for Catholic Charities would be virtually nonexistent. The church maintains its own internal program that pays unemployment benefits to laid off workers, and it claims that this benefit program “provides the same maximum weekly benefit rate as the State’s system.” So it appears that, no matter who prevails before the Supreme Court, unemployed former employees of Catholic Charities will still receive similar benefits.

But other religious employers may not offer benefits to their unemployed workers. If Catholic Charities prevail in this case, that victory would likely extend to all organizations which, like Catholic Charities, engage in secular charitable work motivated by religious belief. So workers in other organizations could be left with nothing.

Historically, the Supreme Court was reluctant to allow religious employers to seek exemptions from laws that protect their workers, and for a very good reason — abandoning this reluctance risks creating the situation the Court tried to ward off in Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor (1985).

Tony Alamo was often described in news reports as a cult leader. He was convicted of sexual abuse against girls he considered to be his wives. One of his victims may have been as young as nine. Witnesses at his trial, according to the New York Times, testified that “Alamo had made all decisions for his followers: who got married; what children were taught in school; who got clothes; and who was allowed to eat.”

The Alamo Foundation case involved an organization which was nominally a religious nonprofit. But, as the Supreme Court explained, it operated “a number of commercial businesses, which include service stations, retail clothing and grocery outlets, hog farms, roofing and electrical construction companies, a recordkeeping company, a motel, and companies engaged in the production and distribution of candy.” Tony was the president of this foundation, and its workers received no cash salaries or wages — although they were given food, clothing, and shelter.

The federal government sued the foundation, alleging violations of federal minimum wage, overtime, and record keeping laws. And the Supreme Court rejected the foundation’s claim that it was entitled to a religious exemption from these laws. Had the Court ruled otherwise, it could have allowed people like Tony Alamo to exploit their workers with little recourse to federal or state law.

The Alamo Foundation opinion warned, moreover, that permitting the foundation to pay “substandard wages would undoubtedly give [it] and similar organizations an advantage over their competitors.” Cult leaders with vulnerable followers would potentially push responsible employers out of the market, because employers who remained bound by law would no longer be able to compete.

Indeed, the Supreme Court used to be so concerned about religious companies gaining an unfair competitive advantage that, in United States v. Lee (1982), it announced a blanket rule that “when followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.” Religious entities were sometimes entitled to legal exemptions under Lee, but they had to follow the same workplace and business regulations as anyone else.

It’s important to be clear that the Catholic Church bears little resemblance to the Alamo cult, and Catholic Charities certainly does not exploit its workers in the same way that the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation was accused of doing.

But the Court paints with a broad brush when it hands down constitutional decisions, and the Constitution does not permit discrimination among religious faiths. So, if the Catholic Church is allowed to exempt itself from workplace regulations, the same rule will also extend to other religious employers who may be far more exploitative. Should Catholic Charities prevail, religious workers can only pray that the Court writes a cautious opinion that doesn’t abandon the concerns which drove its decision in Alamo Foundation.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, March 24, 2025 11:59 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

very little remaining of Traditional Democrats

the mob of NeoDemocrats have taken over

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Thursday, March 27, 2025 8:15 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump's war on science

By Matthew Yglesias | Mar 27, 2025

https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-war-on-science

. . . in the course of life, scientists would occasionally discover various health hazards that were inconvenient to the interests of private industry. It turns out, for example, that nicotine is addictive and that inhaling smoke causes cancer and lung disease. It turns out that while fossil fuels are incredibly useful, they cause greenhouse gas emissions, and coal generates incredible amounts of particulate pollution that seems to have wide-ranging negative consequences for human health. It used to be the case that industrial activity was releasing tons of sulfur dioxide into the air, causing acid to rain down on major American cities. In a well-functioning market economy, we study these kind of externalities and try to come up with cost-effective ways to address them.

But Newt Gingrich (who deliberately dismantled Congress’ scientific expertise) and George W. Bush made it clear that any finding of fact that could justify regulatory intervention was per se unwelcome.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/it-is-time-to-restore-the-us-office
-of-technology-assessment/

Republicans could have responded to neutral presentation of scientific facts by saying something like, “It’s true that stricter tobacco regulation would save lives, but I’m opposed to it on philosophical grounds of freedom.” Instead, we had Mike Pence running around telling people that smoking doesn’t kill.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/mike-pence-defend
ed-his-smoking-doesnt-kill-op-ed-in-a-2000

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, March 28, 2025 5:23 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Chief Justice Roberts Hands Trump the Keys to Power

By Keith Raffel | March 26, 2025

https://www.creators.com/read/raffel-ticket/03/25/chief-justice-robert
s-hands-trump-the-keys-to-power

First, there's the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee. In that case, Roberts cast the deciding vote to reverse a century of precedent by authorizing corporations, other outside groups and wealthy donors to spend unlimited sums on elections. Just days after the decision, President Barack Obama warned the decision "will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections." Unlimited contributions have indeed tilted the American electoral process toward the interests of corporations and the rich. Today, the largest contributor to Trump's 2024 campaign, Elon Musk, is playing an unprecedented role in the current administration.

Second, in 2013, Roberts assigned himself to write the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, which threw out a key section of the Voting Rights Act. A 2024 article in the Journal of Political Economy found evidence that the Shelby County holding decreased turnout of minority voters due to "voter suppression tactics that have occurred in the absence of federal oversight." As two professors wrote in an American Economic Association paper: "Our findings suggest that perhaps Chief Justice Roberts should be slightly less optimistic about the state of democratic equality in the South."

Third, in 2023, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump should be taken off the state's ballot because of the 14th Amendment's bar on candidates who have "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the United States or "given aid or comfort to its enemies." Upon review, Roberts and four associate justices held that a statute must be passed by Congress for such a disqualification to take effect.

Fourth, Roberts again assigned himself to write for the majority in last summer's United States v. Trump. In his opinion, the chief justice conjured up a right to immunity for the president "from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority." In a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor says Roberts "invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law."

Trump agrees wholeheartedly with Sotomayor's analysis. He has said, "I have the right to do whatever I want as president" and "He who saves his country does not violate any law." He appears to know, too, that he owes Roberts a debt of gratitude. On March 4, cameras caught Trump patting Roberts on the arm and saying, "Thank you again. I won't forget."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, April 1, 2025 7:09 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

How to collapse America from the inside out

By Thom Hartmann | March 31, 2025

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/how-to-collapse-america-f
rom-the-inside-out/

If Putin wanted to kill America, how would he best do it? Exactly like this:

— Install a puppet or ally inside the government; as Lincoln foresaw, a tyrant doesn’t need to invade. He just needs to rise from within. Trump has repeatedly echoed Kremlin talking points, undermined NATO, attacked Ukraine, praised autocrats, and created chaos at home. If Putin picked a candidate, it would be Trump — and the intelligence community has confirmed Russian efforts to help him win in both 2016 and 2020.

— Dismantle American institutions from the inside; Putin’s best move would be to encourage the erosion of U.S. government capacity: devalue science, underfund law enforcement, defund agencies, destroy trust in elections, and sabotage public health. All are happening as you read these words.

— Stoke internal division; a divided America is a weak America. Putin’s cyber and propaganda ops have long stoked racial hatred, anti-government sentiment, anti-vax ideology, and far-right extremism. Trump accelerates all of it. Musk’s X (Twitter) has become a vector for disinformation, propaganda, and fascist apologia.

— Weaken U.S. alliances around the world; Trump has repeatedly threatened to pull out of NATO, praised Putin’s invasions, and undermined Western alliances. Now he is threatening our allies with the possibility of invasion. This is textbook Kremlin strategy — divide the West, and conquer its influence.

Whether Trump and Musk are taking direct instructions from Putin or simply operating in ideological lockstep is a question of degree, not direction. The destruction they are today inflicting on America is strategic, not accidental; coordinated, not chaotic; and oligarchic, not populist.

And whether Trump and Musk are doing it on Putin’s instructions, acting out the Dark Enlightenment vision of a CEO America, or simply trying to wipe out any institutions that might challenge their exercise of raw power, that’s exactly what’s happening right now. The outcome is the same: the deliberate disempowerment of the American people and the dismantling of a liberal democratic order that has stood for 240 years.

These two men and their enablers in the Trump regime are quite literally taking apart our American government while, at the same time, doing away with our protections against wealthy predators and destroying our international alliances.

The Founders had this noble idea that, as I detail in The Hidden History of American Democracy, they’d largely borrowed from the Iroquois Confederacy and other northeastern tribes: people can govern themselves when power-hungry psychopaths are kept in check.

It animated George Washington when he wrote:

“As mankind become more liberal, they will be more apt to allow, that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community, are equally entitled to the protection of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations in examples of justice and liberality.”

And Abraham Lincoln, who rescued our nation from the fascist Confederate oligarchs who’d taken over the South and then dared try to bring down our democracy through warfare:

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

And here we are. So far, Trump and Musk have or are in the process of:

— Gutting the IRS so badly that the country will lose an estimated $500 billion to morbidly rich tax cheats
— Killing off the EPA, so polluters can run free and profit from giving us cancer
— Disbanded the Public Integrity Section that once prosecuted corrupt politicians
— Shut down the DOJ unit that was prosecuting violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
— Moved the ATF under Kash Patel’s overview with the goal of neutering it
— Crippling the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) that stops big banks and insurance companies from ripping off average people
— Taking a hatchet to NASA, presumably to hand more power and money to SpaceX
— Dismantling the Department of Education to create more demand for private for-profit schools
— Paralyzing the Department of Health and Human Services that protects us from disease and pandemics
— Mutilating the National Labor Relations Board that protects workers’ rights
— Proclaiming their intention to end FEMA, so Americans are on their own when climate-change-driven disasters strike
— Tearing apart the Social Security Administration so seniors will have to rely on big banks for retirement options
— Demolishing the National Institutes of Health that develops new drugs and cures for disease
— Seizing control of the FCC so they can end net neutrality and dictate content of radio and TV programming
— Stripping NOAA of its workers so we’ll have to rely on for-profit companies for our weather reports and storm warnings
— Kneecapping the Department of Transportation to block new public transportation projects and deregulate big trucking companies and self-driving cars
— Ripping up the Department of Energy so it can’t fund any more “green” energy projects
— Wiping out the Department of Housing and Urban Development to prevent any new low-income housing projects
— Attacking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to leave Americans defenseless
— Largely ending the ability of the Office of Civil Rights within the DOE to enforce anti-discrimination laws in education
— Defunded the National Institute of Justice that works against terrorism and far-right extremism
— Eviscerating the Department of Veterans Affairs and other programs that help our veterans (including shutting down the suicide prevention hotlines)
— Defunding the Department of Agriculture to gut food stamps/SNAP, school lunch programs, and supports for small family farms
— Paralyzing the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) that oversees the executive branch to make sure anti-terrorism efforts don’t violate civil rights
— Weakening the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) so it can’t do its job of protecting minority or disabled workers and job applicants
— Firing scientists at the FDA, gutting oversight of drug manufacturers.

And that’s just a partial “so far” list.

Meanwhile, Trump is snatching students off the streets and transporting them to a brutal private for-profit prison in Louisiana with no due process whatsoever in clear defiance of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; proposing changes to voting laws that will prevent tens of millions of married women from casting a ballot; and threatening to seize foreign, sovereign lands by force.

There are several factions at work here.

— First, there’s Trump himself, who’s so filled with hate against the government that once threatened to imprison him for his crimes that he’s more than happy to hand a meat axe to anybody who’ll make government workers squeal in pain.

— Next come Musk and the so-called PayPal Mafia of German, South African and homegrown billionaires who think women should not be allowed to vote, capitalism and democracy are incompatible with each other, and appear to have fantasies of ruling over a whites-only ethnonationalist state run like a corporation.

— And finally, there are the old fashioned rightwing billionaires who simply don’t want to pay their fair share in taxes or have their companies regulated; these are the guys who, for over 50 years, have been following the Powell Memo to build the infrastructure — media, legal, lobbying, think tanks, etc. — that has made all this possible today.

Americans are starting to wake up to the damage these men (the ones driving the process are all white men) are doing and this weekend millions of protestors will show up in the streets of every city in America to make their discomfort and anger known.

It’s a beginning. If public opinion becomes too strong to ignore, it’s possible some Republicans will decide that protecting our republic is more important than fearing a primary challenge funded by the richest man in the world; that could stop much of what Trump’s doing dead in its tracks.

On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that such demonstrations could provoke Trump to fulfill his previous threats to follow the examples of Putin, Lukashenko, and Erdogan and declare a state of insurrection, mobilizing the military against the citizens of America.

At that point, all bets are off and the window to save American democracy will have shrunk to a matter of weeks or months.

Whether Putin is running this show — as those who point to his reportedly regular phone conversations with Trump and Musk argue — or it’s a homegrown effort to cripple our nation is almost irrelevant; the reality is that they’re well down the road in a way that may be irreparable, at least within a generation or more.

As my old friend Rob Kall points out over at OpEdNews.com, institutional knowledge is a critical resource for both companies and governments, and these mass firings are ripping it out of our nation’s systems of governance leaving a hole that will take decades to re-fill.

Thus, with Congress neutered and the courts half-paralyzed and moving slowly, it falls to us to stop this anti-American destruction spree. And that will require massive public expressions of outrage, demands for action, and relentless pressure on our politicians.

The key to mobilizing public pressure is to make clear to Americans exactly what Trump and Musk are really up to. To help people understand that this regime’s real agenda — which they are ruthlessly executing right in front of us — is to destroy the United States of America as it was and turn our country into something much more like Hungary or Russia.

And, to the extent that our corporate media is too timid or too bought-off to raise the alarm, that work falls to us, to me and you.

Tag, we’re it. Pass it along.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, April 1, 2025 10:35 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How to collapse America from the inside out

Unless this is a 4-year breakdown of Joe Biden*'s Presidency, nobody is interested.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, April 1, 2025 10:35 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
very little remaining of Traditional Democrats

the mob of NeoDemocrats have taken over

And the polling for Democratic Party approval continues to plummet.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, April 19, 2025 9:44 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Solving the Trolley Problem: Towards Moral Abundance

by Kyle Munkittrick | Friday, Apr 18, 2025

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/04/solving-the-trolley-prob
lem-towards-moral-abundance.html

Trolley Problem meets ‘I Want To Go Home’ meme

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, inadvertently exposes a blind spot in our collective moral calculus. In making their case for a better politics, I think they’ve also, as an accidental by-product, solved the infamous Trolley Problem. Free download at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Ezra+Klein+Derek+Thompson

Abundance argues that improving the supply of things like housing and energy is good on its own term and that material abundance can help address collective problems, like homelessness or climate change. The choice between allowing people to sleep on the streets in tents or forcing them into shelters is, as Klein and Thompson point out, a false dilemma caused by poor housing policy. The choice between growth and progress vs climate change is a false dilemma caused by poor energy and construction policy. Klein and Thompson are, justifiably, focused on the political thorniness of these issues, but, in their efforts, also demonstrate something startling: they implicitly demonstrate that material abundance can obviate moral quandaries.

The Trolley Problem is so well known and over-explored it’s easy to forget that it is relatively new. The Trolley Problem is a modern moral dilemma. There are no trolleys in nature. You cannot replace the trolley with a bear or a hurricane or an opposing tribe—those things do not run on tracks, their brakes can’t go out, and there is no simple lever by which you choose their behavior. The Trolley Problem is a problem of technology, yet none of its solutions are allowed to be.

The Trolley Problem is, as it is usually presented, a false dilemma. There is no correct answer to the problem; both options are tragedies, neither better, regardless of permutations. Even being asked to make the choice is morally corrosive (as I’m sure Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thompson would agree). The Good Place demonstrates this to absurd comedic effect.
Michael from The Good Place pointing at his diagram of how to kill everyone in the Trolley Problem
Another ‘solution’ to the Trolley Problem

It is the ridiculous Sisyphean repetition of The Good Place trolley episode, along with our own decades of obsession over the problem, that resonates most with Abundance. What if instead of trying to figure out if one or five is the better choice with infinite variations and philosophical arguments, we just fix the trolleys? This is the core insight of what I call Moral Abundance—the idea that technological and material progress can eliminate moral dilemmas entirely.

Consider climate change. Abundance not only recommends choosing among existing tech like moving from coal to solar, but also explores near-future examples like cultured (aka lab-grown) meat. This tech does exist, but it’s niche, nascent, and expensive. It’s also unsettling and popular for politicians to oppose it. But Abundance, correctly, holds up cultured meat as a worthy goal because in addition to helping address climate change (agriculture is a major contributor), it would also allow us to effectively end the moral stain that is factory farming.

Yes, we can remove factory farming by just banning it, but that’s a political non-starter. It would mean less food choice (not great), inequity where only millionaires get steak, eggs, and bacon (sad!), potential food shortages (bad) or, worse, famines (very bad). In a Trolley Problem-esque version of the dilemma, the question we’re asked is who should suffer, animals in cages or people in famine?

The answer of Abundance is neither. We can obviate the question with progress. The implicit claim of Abundance is that material abundance not only makes things cheaper, easier, or higher quality, but also makes it easier for people to be better. Abundance, yoked to technological and social progress, can mitigate root causes of moral dilemmas, obviating them.

To formalize this concept: Moral Abundance proposes that material and technological abundance, by removing constraints or scarcity, can mitigate moral issues and render some specific moral questions effectively obsolete. By changing the landscape of debate, abundance makes it easier for everyone, on net, to be better than they would or could otherwise be. Moral Abundance shifts our attention from the moral question in front of us to the opportunity to eliminate it all together. The solution to the trolley problem is not one track or the other, but to invent, build, and deploy safer trolleys.

Moral Abundance is, in part, about recognizing that our environment can be moral, and we can choose to intervene. Noah Smith makes a compelling political argument that anarchy is not welfare, that is, allowing people to be anti-social doesn’t help them or society. We can make the same argument about nature: chaos is not amoral. Nature or the status quo harming people is bad. It is evil, even though there is no actor. We tolerate it because we believe cannot control or change it. Moral Abundance challenges that helplessness by recognizing our capacity to reshape the context of ethical dilemmas, not just navigate within them.

Moral Abundance also recognizes the function of time and progress to create a kind of chronological moral luck. By virtue of living today it is easier to be good, because of massive social and technological progress, than it was a century ago. Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series, along with The Culture and Star Trek in the pantheon of great post-scarcity fiction, demonstrates this moral luck. Despite deep flaws, the future of Terra Ignota is more moral than our own society on almost every measure because material constraints (of health, of travel, of energy) are all but eliminated. Moral Abundance also results from improved circumstantial moral luck. Abundance reduces the possibility of scarcity forcing individuals into tragic choices—the bad luck of facing that specific unavoidable dilemma. Moral Abundance reminds us that material, social, and technological progress can be powerful inputs to moral progress.

As such, Moral Abundance invites ethicists and philosophers to consider the practical world of technological development. Elements of Moral Abundance are already present throughout philosophy. The capabilities approach developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen offers a particularly useful framework. “Capabilities” here are real freedoms—the actual ability to choose different ways of living. By focusing on what people can actually do rather than abstract rights or resources alone, this approach naturally aligns with Moral Abundance’s emphasis on expanding practical moral options. A surprising example comes from Shulamith Firestone, who explicitly argued in her Dialectic of Sex that technological advances like artificial wombs would be necessary for true gender equality. Firestone has one of the first, clearest examples of identifying a particular technology as a direct solution to a seemingly intractable moral issue.

More recently, bioethicists like Julian Savulescu, Ingmar Persson, and Thomas Douglas have proposed “moral enhancement” technologies to improve human ethical capacities directly. These could make us less selfish, more tolerant, and less neurotic, among other pro-social benefits. And at the bleeding edge of technology, Amanda Askell is working not to merely constrain AI, but to instead actively shape its development toward moral ends. These philosophers are practical experts in the relevant sciences (neuroscience, biochem, machine learning) and have put their reputations on the line advocating for specific paths that technology should take.

So what path should food production take to achieve Moral Abundance? Before factory farming and the green revolution, famines were common due to the chaos of nature. As factory farming, the green revolution, the refrigerated shipping-container, GMOs, and global free-trade improved and matured, famines basically went away. Consider these two graphs below from Our World In Data on Famines.

Deaths per 100,000 people, globally, due to starvation, came down 90% from the 1960s to the 2010s. Absolute deaths are down 98% on the same time horizon. Does this mean we have perfect global food equity? No, but, my goodness, I’ll take a near order of magnitude reduction in absolute and relative deaths due to famine in a 50 year period over nothing.

History is full of examples of Moral Abundance at work. Kerosene and electricity did more to end whaling than any concerted conservation movement. Legal systems of justice obviated dueling and honor culture. Automation and safety measures has made mining, once famous for tolerating carnage, come to see every death or injury as a preventable tragedy. Anesthesia and sanitation made surgery all but pain-free, orders of magnitude safer, and dramatically more effective. Long-acting reversible contraception (IUDs, Nexplanon, etc) has done more to reduce unwanted and teenage pregnancy than centuries of religion, cultural norms, and after school specials. Each dilemma was its own trolley problem (light vs whales, coal vs miners) obviated by progress.

But while famines have faded into history, the horror of factory farming has grown. This is critical to remember: abundance can create more moral good overall even if new moral wrongs emerge. Before the 20th century, famine was a given, there was no alternative. As disorienting as it seems, that we can even ask the question, “Who should suffer, animals in cages or people in famine?” is progress. Moral Abundance pushes us to continue our progress, to look past the initial false-dichotomy, and to ask weird questions about our future, like What if we could get the meat without the animal? One question obviates the other. Abundant, affordable, high-quality cultured meat could keep famine rare, reduce climate impact, and reduce animal suffering.

Cultured meat, you might rightly point out, exists today and we don’t have these benefits. Transitions to new technologies are uneven. Innovations often start out as rare, limited, and expensive luxuries—they are not abundant. Cultured meat will likely become cheaper and more ubiquitous, just like cell phones did and EVs are becoming. Which, in turn, will make it easier to eat factory-farmed meat less, just as EVs make it easier to pollute less. Material abundance is a necessary (but not sufficient!) condition for Moral Abundance.

This also does not mean that any form of abundance, such as cultured meat, only facilitates moral goods. New technologies destabilize things (that can be bad), lead to surprising new problems (e.g. phones are addictive), and during the transition, can be inequitable (e.g. EVs are still often a ‘luxury’ and not an option for many). Moral Abundance doesn’t presume utopia or mindless techno-optimism. Moral Abundance’s pursuit is to give ourselves more options and thereby make it easier to be better. And it does not happen in a vacuum. Klein and Thompson vociferously argue that high state capacity and a flourishing, dynamic private sector combine to facilitate the conditions under which Moral Abundance is possible.

As we build toward Moral Abundance, we might envision a future where our descendants no longer wrestle with the ethical quandaries that consume us today—not because they’re inherently wiser (though, if enhanced, they just might be), but because the technological foundation we lay now helps create a world where factory farming, climate catastrophe, and resource scarcity have become historical footnotes rather than pressing moral emergencies. Moral Abundance challenges us not just to build a better future, but to build a future in which we can be better.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, April 19, 2025 12:34 PM

The Trolley Problem is bullshit made up by college fart sniffers.

Ezra Klein is a douche bag.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, April 23, 2025 8:14 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The Trolley Problem is bullshit made up by college fart sniffers.

Ezra Klein is a douche bag.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

Trumptards and Confederates are/were absolutely evil but they feel/felt that their behavior is normal and necessary for their happiness and they won't stop until dead. Lincoln chose killing Confederates rather than endless talking to them in vain about ameliorating their atrocious behavior. Democrats are facing the same choice with Trumptards.

Was the Civil War Inevitable?

Before Lincoln turned the idea of “the Union” into a cause worth dying for, he tried other means of ending slavery in America. What we feel when we study Lincoln’s life through the war is not so much the force of fixed convictions imposed on others as a sense of his discovery, in real time, of what he believed.

By Adam Gopnik | April 21, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/28/lincolns-peace-michael-v
orenberg-book-review-1861-jay-winik

Out of guilt or amnesia, we tend to treat wars, in retrospect, as natural disasters: terrible but somehow inevitable, beyond anyone’s control. Shaking your fist at the fools who started the First World War and condemned millions to a meaningless death seems jejune; historians teach us to say that the generals did their best under impossible conditions. Mournful fatalism is the requisite emotion, even when mad fury would be more apt. Efforts at de-escalation are cast as weakness or cowardice, while those who lead nations into catastrophe are praised for their “strength of character,” or for stoically accepting what was supposedly unavoidable. We rarely honor those who turn back at the brink. John F. Kennedy’s compromise during the Cuban missile crisis is an exception, though only because prudence and caution—our removal of nuclear missiles from Turkey—were neatly covered up and presented as pugnacity and courage: we had made the Russians “blink.”

The habit of describing war with metaphors drawn from natural disasters is as old as war writing. Homer himself uses natural metaphors to ennoble violent human actors: Achilles is a wildfire sweeping across the Trojan plain. Given what Greek warfare actually entailed—pitched battles of close combat, where victory meant cutting others to death with edged weapons—the figure feels less like a metaphor than a mask.

So it is with us. The Civil War lingers in memory as brutal and heartbreaking, but also as heroic and tragic, accompanied by an Appalachian campfire fiddle. It is the altar of American existence—a sublime sacrifice and a perpetually contested example—so thoroughly sanctified that to ask if it might have been avoided by pragmatic compromise feels almost obscene. No war, no Lincoln, no Emancipation Proclamation, no Gettysburg—neither the battle nor the address—to inspire and instruct us? And yet three-quarters of a million people died, and the enslaved people in whose name the war was fought emerged still trapped in an apartheid terrorist state. Was it worth it?

In “1861: The Lost Peace” (Grand Central), Jay Winik—the author of several fine works about American history—takes up that question of whether the Civil War might have been avoided. The title overpromises a little. Nowhere in the book do we encounter a truly plausible compromise that might have averted the conflict. What Winik offers instead is a portrait of two sides talking past each other, rather than with each other. Still, he traces the efforts of those who genuinely wanted to prevent war and the trauma of secession—and shows how Abraham Lincoln tried at first to listen and then at last refused. Download Jay Winik’s books at https://libgen.rs/search.php?&req=Jay+Winik

The early chapters are given over to what will be, for many, a familiar story. We hear again how an underrated, grotesque-looking backwoods lawyer with scant experience (one term in Congress and two failed Senate runs) managed—by virtue of being a moderate and, usefully, an outsider; a man of the frontier rather than of Boston or New York—to wrest the Republican nomination from the seemingly inevitable William Henry Seward, of New York, and go on to win the national election against the pro-slavery Democrat John Breckinridge.

We’re told about the assassination plots brewing before Lincoln had even taken office, forcing him—in ways widely seen as comical, not to say cowardly—to sneak into Washington under the protection of the newly founded Pinkerton private-detective force. (By rumor, though not in fact, he was dressed in women’s clothes.) Southern states were already passing resolutions of secession one after another, with South Carolina taking the lead. Meanwhile, the Confederate noose was tightening around Fort Sumter, in the waters off Charleston, where the Northern garrison was effectively under blockade.

The reasons for the radical action were plain. Lincoln, despite his efforts to present himself as a moderate, was what we would now call a single-issue candidate. The issue was slavery, and his categorical rejection of it. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong” was his most emphatic aphorism on the subject, along with his famous injunction: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”

Though absolute on the moral question, Lincoln was neither the hard-core political abolitionist we may wish him to have been nor the apologist for slavery some later commentators have made him seem. He was, instead, a democratic politician trying to build a coalition—and he knew that, to keep the border states within it, a firm New England abolitionist line would fail, while a focus on containing slavery, not eradicating it, might succeed.

And so, during that strange American interregnum between election and Inauguration—it was even longer in the nineteenth century, with the ceremony held in March—Lincoln struggled to find common ground with the Southern secessionists. He began a pre-inaugural exchange of letters with Alexander Stephens, of Georgia, a friend from his congressional days who made it clear that, in the Southern mind, everything was secondary to the preservation of slavery. “We at the South do think African slavery, as it exists with us, both morally and politically right,” Stephens wrote. “This opinion is founded upon the inferiority of the black race. You, however, and perhaps a majority of the North, think it wrong. Admit the difference of opinion.”

The enterprise of avoiding war was likely doomed from the start. Nonetheless—and here lies the new emphasis of Winik’s book—there was an attempt at a “Peace Conference” (Winik oddly capitalizes it throughout) during this pre-inaugural period, and it was more substantial than most subsequent histories have acknowledged. If it didn’t resolve the crisis, it at least exposed the depth of the deadlock.

The conference took place in Washington, at the Willard Hotel, where Lincoln had stayed since his arrival, using his suite as his office. The Willard, like the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York, has gone through many incarnations, but in the nineteenth century it seemed more central to Washington life than either the White House or the long-unfinished Capitol. (Its cast-iron dome was still incomplete.) From February 4th to the 27th, the conference drew delegates from twenty-one of the thirty-four states then in the Union. It brought together representatives from the South—most notably from Virginia, the cradle of Presidents, which had not yet committed to secession—with Republicans from the North, many of them, as Winik reveals, operating under the direct or indirect guidance of Seward. Though the delegates were mostly former members of Congress, the gathering wasn’t limited to them; the former President John Tyler, of Virginia, who held no official position but remained influential, was present.

It was, by all indications, a comfortable negotiation. Both sides dined—if a Willard menu from that year is to be trusted—on lamb chops, stewed kidneys, and, precociously, frozen custard, which, like baseball, would not become a national mania until after the war. It is perhaps less surprising, then, given their shared table, class, and manners, that both sides, including almost all the Republicans, were ready to concede the permanence of slavery in the South in exchange for ending the threat of secession. A Thirteenth Amendment was proposed, and could probably have passed, guaranteeing the continued existence of slavery in the states where it already prevailed. Even Lincoln was prepared to accept this.

The unresolvable issue was the extension of slavery into the territories. Here, the arguments were fierce, layered with subtexts and overtones more audible then than now. For all the civility of tone and talk of compromise — Lincoln went so far as to agree that a fugitive slave could be recaptured and returned to bondage — the real conflict was profound and, in the end, unbridgeable. Like the conflict in the Middle East today, it was rooted less in clashing interests than in vast and irreconcilable mutual fears. The underlying meanings were evident to all: any limit placed on slavery, the Southerners believed, was intended to hasten its extinction; any constitutional blessing of slavery, the North understood, was intended to support its extension.

To use an awkward but apt modern analogy, it was as if the right-to-life movement, having won the Presidency, were to concede that reproductive freedom would remain protected in blue states like New York and Massachusetts, but be entirely eliminated in red states, with harsh penalties. Blue-state voters would see that the true goal was to end abortion everywhere, and that agreeing even to a temporary truce meant accepting the long-term influence of hostile neighbors on a vital and defining issue.

Behind the Southern delegates’ suspicion was a kind of post-October 7th trauma: John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, in 1859, had convinced the South that the Black population was poised to rise up in bloody rebellion if given the chance. This, in retrospect, was plainly chimerical—the enslaved had not, in fact, joined Brown’s insurrection, and, when Black enfranchisement did eventually come, however briefly, during Reconstruction, Black Americans, far from turning violently on their former masters, embraced electoral politics with enthusiasm. But the Southern establishment was unshakable in its belief that any concession to abolitionists would end in the massacre of white families. Stephens wrote indignantly to Lincoln of “such exhibitions of madness as the John Brown raid into Virginia, which has received so much sympathy from many, and no open condemnation from any of the leading men of the present dominant party.”

Lincoln nonetheless participated warmly in the Peace Conference debate, insisting that his task was simply to follow the Constitution, which he understood to prohibit secession from the Union as an act of treason. Yet, for all his provisional concessions, he effectively ended the conference by declaring, “In a choice of evils, war may not always be the worst. Still I would do all in my power to avert it, except to neglect a constitutional duty. As to slavery, it must be content with what it has. The voice of the civilized world is against it.”

Those words may now strike us as unduly mild, but behind them lay the doctrine of the “Scorpion’s Sting”—the idea, adopted by antislavery advocates around the world, that if slavery could be encircled and confined, it would destroy itself, as the scorpion is said to sting itself to death when trapped in a ring of fire. The scorpion metaphor, though pungent, was poorly chosen. Just as frogs do not, in fact, remain in water as it boils but leap out when they are scalded, scorpions are actually immune to their own venom, and, when encircled by fire, they die not by stinging themselves but from heat-induced convulsions that only appear to be self-inflicted. That image offers a better metaphor for the war to come. Stoic suicide doesn’t occur in nature. Frenzied, senseless self-destruction does.

Yet Lincoln’s words signalled—clearly, to anyone attuned to their overtones, and everyone at that conference was—that slavery was to be put, or left, in a position where it would have to end itself. Slavery had a cursed past, and a present to be tolerated, but no future. No one quite said this; everyone grasped it. And so the Willard Peace Conference quietly foundered. Its resolutions were rejected in the Senate and never even reached a vote in the House.

Southern paranoia and Northern complacency together may explain what, at first glance, seems to us the oddest feature of the Willard meetings: that no one on the Northern side proposed a rational plan for gradual emancipation and enfranchisement, presumably subsidized by the already wealthy industrialists of the North and carried out over some specified interval. Such plans had been tried before—in Pennsylvania, as early as the seventeen-eighties, and proposed for Virginia, though unsuccessfully, by Thomas Jefferson. Surely a similar scheme, however brutal its delay for the enslaved, might have spared the country the full scale of the war to come. Lincoln himself returned to the idea in 1862, when he proposed a program of compensated, gradual abolition for the border states. Yet even then, at the height of the war, sympathetic border-state representatives refused to act. Slavery had embedded itself too deeply, not only as an economic engine but as a terror-bound cultural institution.

The tragedy was that, while the South could not overcome its paranoia about the violence it would suffer if the slaves were freed, the North could not imagine the scale of the violence it was choosing. The assumption, of course, was that the conflict would last twelve weeks—just long enough to put the erring states back in their place. But only a few months later Julia Ward Howe would be staying at the same Willard Hotel when, in the course of a day, she saw a column of freshly inducted Union soldiers, in blue uniforms, marching and singing lines from a newly adapted spiritual: “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the ground.” The words struck her as too direct, and she composed a loftier version in her hotel room, substituting God’s vengeance for that of the abolitionist: “He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword / His truth is marching on.” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was born. It was only November, and already more than forty thousand soldiers had fallen. The eternal language of euphemism—swords and lightning—had begun its work, displacing the reality of bullets breaking bodies.

In the wake of the failed conference, Lincoln skillfully replaced “abolition” with “the Union” as the war’s compelling purpose. The case he made to connect the end of slavery with the preservation of a political arrangement was subtle. Secession, he maintained, was a denial of democratic rule. Slavery had, from the beginning, been a national issue. It could not be fenced off and become a parochial one now. This was the logic, easily lost to us because it’s so familiar, behind the memorable line in the Gettysburg Address, delivered two years later, that the great question of the war was whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated”—that is, to liberty—“can long endure.” Without a strong central authority—not a dictator or a king but a unifying rule of law—a free state would be torn apart by demagogues and dissension.

Yet the argument, though it has come to seem foundational, is in some ways specious. As Southern critics noted at the time, for the wrong reasons but not with the wrong logic, the American Revolution was itself an act of secession—from a functioning and successful union. Many regions have broken apart at the will of their inhabitants. It is easy to imagine horrors today that could make, say, California and Oregon and Washington want to declare themselves a separate polity, and it is hard to invoke a moral principle to tell them that they can’t. From this perspective, the idea of “union” was one of the most disingenuous diversions in American history: the transformation of an abstract constitutional principle into a cause worth dying for.

Why this new argument proved so powerful remains something of a mystery. Edmund Wilson, in his study of Civil War literature, “Patriotic Gore,” saw in it the blunt, power-fixated logic of human history: big states swallow small ones. The North was stronger and bigger, and it swallowed the South. The bleak truth, Wilson suggested, is that people like joining armies of conquest. Presumably, when the Great Canadian campaign begins, there will be no shortage of soldiers to fight it, or of apologists ready to enumerate the horrors of Canadian life that must be erased, poutine aside.

And yet Canada, oddly, offers a clue to the peculiar appeal of Lincoln’s abstract ideal of “union.” Donald Trump’s threats have, almost overnight, caused a famously divided and centrifugal nation to cohere into a single national front. Something like that happened across the North at the outset of the Civil War, when “the Union” became not just a constitutional principle but a moral rallying cry. The South, for its part, responded in kind: secession swiftly forged a fractured region into a reactive unity, bound by fear of emancipation and faith in a mythic agrarian freedom.

In an illuminating study of American Jews during the conflict, “Fear No Pharaoh” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Richard Kreitner notes that even pro-slavery rabbis in New York were converted by Lincoln’s unionist rhetoric. Morris J. Raphall, who led the Greene Street Synagogue and had defended slavery on Biblical grounds, abruptly reversed himself when Lincoln invoked the vision of a united America. American Jews, Raphall insisted, knew the “difference between elsewhere and here.” His son enlisted in the Union Army and lost an arm at Gettysburg. As in the post-mass-immigration moment of the First World War, a crisis proved necessary to forge a common identity. “Elsewhere” and “here” always make for more compelling rallying cries than “right” and “wrong.”

This bleaker view is reinforced by the historian Michael Vorenberg’s new book, “Lincoln’s Peace” (Knopf), which picks up the story at the other end of the conflict, as the war was drawing to a close after unfathomable death and suffering. Vorenberg’s account, despite the intervening carnage, returns us to a situation eerily similar to the one that preceded the war: the white South, though militarily defeated, had no intention of accepting anything resembling racial equality. And, while Robert E. Lee might have declined to resort to guerrilla warfare, many of his lieutenants carried on a program of suppression by terror. In that sense, Vorenberg argues, the Civil War never truly ended.

Lincoln’s assassination was, in this light, a last-ditch terrorist assault on the national government—one that very nearly succeeded. Seward and Vice-President Andrew Johnson survived the conspiracy only by chance. The pattern of compromise persisted, with the politics of the border states still exerting undue influence. Indeed, one of the most fateful disasters in American history—Johnson’s embattled Presidency—was a by-product of those very compromises: Johnson, a Tennessean, was chosen to replace Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine, on the 1864 ticket in a bid to appease the border states, with predictable results.

In “American Civil Wars” (Norton), Alan Taylor broadens the frame to include parallel struggles over national identity and democratic renewal in the eighteen-sixties—not only in the United States but in Canada and Mexico as well. One could broaden it further and argue that the period from 1848 to 1871—bracketed by the liberal revolutions and the end of the Franco-Prussian War—was marked by a series of violent shocks across the Western world, culminating in the establishment of a liberal political compact that, in some form, endured into our own time. Lincoln’s “passion” became so sanctified, in this reading, because it was the most extreme instance of a common struggle. In this view, the American experience was not exceptional but emblematic—a subset of the painful emergence of something resembling genuinely popular democracy.

What’s striking about the new literature on Lincoln and the war is that, though one may expect him to be in some sense debunked or “deconstructed,” he remains a largely idealized figure. Winik is admiring of his firmness of purpose at the war’s outset; Vorenberg mourns its absence at the war’s end. Matthew Stewart, in his recent study of the influence of idealist philosophy on abolitionism, “An Emancipation of the Mind,” goes further. Drawing on quotations from Karl Marx, a Lincoln enthusiast, Stewart argues that Lincoln was essentially the first Marxist President: embracing a view of labor not far from Marx’s own, and opposing the peonage of working people in all its forms.

This is obviously tendentious—nor does Stewart mean it entirely seriously—but, then, Lincoln, like Jesus, is easily made to conform to whatever ideological need the historian brings to him. If a left-wing, quasi-Marxist Lincoln is a plausible invention, so is a far-right, conservative one of the sort evoked by Harry V. Jaffa, the godfather of the Claremont Institute. Jaffa saw Lincoln’s choice of war in 1861 as wholly heroic—an almost Christlike epiphany that united revelation and reason in a moral crusade. He cast Lincoln as the embodiment of a set of absolute values: Biblical revelation and Greek reason joined in opposition to the relativism of modern liberal humanism, with its taste for irony and its acceptance of a plurality of forms of existence. Jaffa was, in effect, allying Jerusalem and Athens against New York. He wanted the American home built on rock, not shifting sand, and believed Lincoln was its carpenter.

In truth, we have no difficulty building our abodes on sand—that’s why the most expensive homes in Los Angeles and Long Island are called “beach houses.” There is no bedrock to build on, in the world or in morality. The political ground beneath our feet shifts, grows squishy, and is meant to. What we feel when we study Lincoln’s life through the war is not so much the force of fixed convictions imposed on others as the gradual emancipation of his own mind—a sense of his discovery, in real time, of what he believed. A powerful intuition that slavery was absolutely wrong evolved into a tragic fatalism, haunted by a sense of Providence, and finally opened into a horizon of hope, shaped by the scale of suffering Lincoln had helped to unleash. This much death had to make for a better land.

Yet believing that the war was inescapable is not quite the same as believing that it was right. Was the Civil War “worth the sacrifice”? Suppose that someone had had the force and the imagination to craft a plan for gradual emancipation. Full enfranchisement might have been delayed for several years, but the enslaved would have been free at last. And what of the human cost? If eight hundred thousand people had been deliberately murdered over the next four years—in some expanded version of the Trail of Tears or the Bataan Death March—would we see that as an unfortunate necessity of history or as an unforgivable crime?

Of course, some eight hundred thousand did die—many in horrific ways—while the formerly enslaved were left to fend for themselves in a postwar state where apartheid was enforced by terror. Why, exactly, is that outcome morally preferable—or more readily excused? These were not slaves but soldiers, who, in some collective sense, chose to fight. But was that choice entirely their own? Or was it made for them, by circumstance, by duty, by the illusions of glory, not to mention the blunt force of conscription? We are far too ready to depict the suffering of others as the price of the history that seemingly rewards us now.

The truth is that we accept mass dying with enormous aplomb. More than a million perished in the COVID-19 pandemic, but those who complacently predicted that it would be no more than a season’s pain appear to represent the new common sense: lockdowns were excessive, the health establishment overreacted. Mass dying barely fazes us—until, that is, it becomes personal and particular. Leo Tolstoy revered Lincoln, calling him “a Christ in miniature, a saint of humanity, whose name will live for thousands of years.” Yet in “War and Peace” he captures the raw vulnerability of a young soldier—brave, devoted, almost absurdly loyal to the cause and its flawed leaders—wounded in battle. As blood seeps away and he imagines death nearing, the soldier slips into a state of wonder at existence. These passages, among literature’s most poignant and strangely affirming, bridge the gap between the vastness of war and the intimacy of a single death. A youth, swept into combat by patriotic fervor, faces bullets and, fallen, gazes at the sky, not with moral clarity or anger but with innocent bewilderment: Existence is so good—why am I dying for this? Major Sullivan Ballou, writing to his wife, Sarah, before the First Battle of Bull Run, mused, “I know I have but few claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me—perhaps it is the wafted prayer of little Edgar—that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, nor that, when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.” Early in the fight, a cannonball tore off his leg. He lingered in agony for a week, very likely in no condition to whisper anything, least of all her name.

Lincoln’s elegiac words about the dead soldiers at Gettysburg remain true: from their sacrifice, we still can take renewed commitment to their cause, that of liberty against tyranny. But we should also remember that the purpose of the struggle of liberty against tyranny is not to carry on the fight but not to have to. We can’t forget these soldiers’ lives, but neither should we forget the manner of their dying. Even if we return to the original proposition—that the Civil War was unavoidable, or that of all the bad choices war was not the worst—it doesn’t alter what happened at Bull Run or Antietam. Remaining alive to other people’s pain, in the face of heroic rhetoric, retrospective rationalization, and two-sided tribal terror, is perhaps the hardest moral task we face—and one at which we almost always fail. Sometimes the only people who can see the sky are the soldiers who die beneath it.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, April 23, 2025 1:32 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The Trolley Problem is bullshit made up by college fart sniffers.

Ezra Klein is a douche bag.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trumptards and Confederates are/were absolutely evil but they feel/felt that their behavior is normal and necessary for their happiness and they won't stop until dead. Lincoln chose killing Confederates rather than endless talking to them in vain about ameliorating their atrocious behavior. Democrats are facing the same choice with Trumptards.

Do it tough guy. You keep talking about it every day, but you're a dirty little pussy and you have no stones.

Stop being a whiny little faggot and go start your Civil War.

Give me one good reason to put you into the fucking ground for good.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, April 29, 2025 2:51 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.

Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.

T

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Tuesday, April 29, 2025 4:37 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.

OH PICK ME!!!! PICK ME!!!!!

We come here to laugh at you every day, Ted.

We're only responding to you bumping all your threads which show a hilarious timeline of all the things you thought were true but turned out to be lies. All of your failures. You're the only one adding anything new to your threads and keeping them alive. Nobody would pull them up from the 12th page where they belong if you didn't do it every other day.

These threads are a timeline of your failure of a life, because THIS is all you are. Politics is all you are. The Democratic Party is all you are.

And your Party is Dead, and your time is almost up as well.

It's really sad how you choose to use what is left of it.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 10:32 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.

Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.

T

I’m independent Gilligan. It means I don’t blindly follow any political party. I’ve told you this many times. Yet you still cannot grasp the concept of someone being their own person. Not just another follower. You are MAGA. This means you are a follower. And, influenced by stories created by others who avoid the truth.

The trillions lost in the stock market crash is just the beginning. It is MAGA that’s dying. It is destroying itself. Which is why the whole world is laughing at Trumps’ intellect, well, lack thereof.

And Gilligan, there is something else that I am. I am a truth teller. As you post bullshit, conspiracy theories and lies because you hate, I post the truth.

OH yeah, as for me posting in threads I’ve created, don’t you? I've been to a few of your threads over the years. I'm pretty sure I've seen you posting there. You're a funny guy Gilligan.

T

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 2:12 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.

Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.

T

OH PICK ME!!!! PICK ME!!!!!

We come here to laugh at you every day, Ted.

We're only responding to you bumping all your threads which show a hilarious timeline of all the things you thought were true but turned out to be lies. All of your failures. You're the only one adding anything new to your threads and keeping them alive. Nobody would pull them up from the 12th page where they belong if you didn't do it every other day.

These threads are a timeline of your failure of a life, because THIS is all you are. Politics is all you are. The Democratic Party is all you are.

And your Party is Dead, and your time is almost up as well.

It's really sad how you choose to use what is left of it.

I’m independent Gilligan. It means I don’t blindly follow any political party. I’ve told you this many times.

And it's been a lie every time you've made that claim.

You don't have any thoughts of your own. You speak in headlines and political cartoons.

You are 100% Democrat through and through and you are the stupidest person I have ever known.

And your bit about being a "truth teller" is beyond hilarious. Everything you ever posted here turns out not to be true in retrospect. You should stop cataloging all of your failures to figure out when you're being lied to in all these threads.

Your dead party is all the evidence anyone needs to see this.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 3:30 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.

Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.

T

OH PICK ME!!!! PICK ME!!!!!

We come here to laugh at you every day, Ted.

We're only responding to you bumping all your threads which show a hilarious timeline of all the things you thought were true but turned out to be lies. All of your failures. You're the only one adding anything new to your threads and keeping them alive. Nobody would pull them up from the 12th page where they belong if you didn't do it every other day.

These threads are a timeline of your failure of a life, because THIS is all you are. Politics is all you are. The Democratic Party is all you are.

And your Party is Dead, and your time is almost up as well.

It's really sad how you choose to use what is left of it.

Nothing else to say

T

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 3:57 PM

So shut the fuck up for once then.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 3:58 PM

You still didn't tell us what you were doing when you went into hiding for 3 weeks after the election, Ted.

You weren't cutting yourself, were you?

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 11:45 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Forced Amnesia

By Fintan O’Toole

The metamorphosis of J. D. Vance from economic realist to champion of Trump’s grievance-fueled politics reveals how little Democrats have done to connect with working-class Americans.

May 29, 2025 issue

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/05/29/forced-amnesia-fintan-otoo
le/

In Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling 2016 memoir of “a family and a culture in crisis,” J.D. Vance, now vice-president of the United States, gives an evocative account of the relationship between his hometown and the heroic age of American industrial capitalism.1 The beating heart of Middletown, Ohio, was its steel plant, then called Armco. Vance encapsulates the self-respect and sense of purpose that came from working there:

My grandfather loved the company and knew every make and model of car built from Armco steel. Even after most American car companies transitioned away from steel-bodied cars, Papaw would stop at used-car dealerships whenever he saw an old Ford or Chevy. “Armco made this steel,” he’d tell me. It was one of the few times that he ever betrayed a sense of genuine pride.

Yet the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy, coming to consciousness toward the end of the twentieth century, knows very well that the world of Papaw’s pride is gone. Indeed, Papaw himself knows it. He has no interest in seeing his grandson follow him into the steel plant:

“Your generation will make its living with their minds, not their hands,” he once told me. The only acceptable career at Armco was as an engineer, not as a laborer in the weld shop. A lot of other Middletown parents and grandparents must have felt similarly: To them, the American Dream required forward momentum. Manual labor was honorable work, but it was their generation’s work—we had to do something different. To move up was to move on.

What both Vance and his grandfather understood back then was the ruthlessly dynamic nature of capitalism. Vance was born into Ronald Reagan’s America, when neoliberalism—the belief that market forces must be liberated from regulation, high taxes, overactive government, and any real sense of social obligation—was reshaping the “commonsense” understanding of the economy and society. In the 1980s this ideology was pulling off the great trick of credibly presenting itself as a set not of ideas or value judgments but of undeniable facts that everyone had to accept. As Gary Gerstle writes in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022), “A key attribute of a political order is the ability of its ideologically dominant party to bend the opposition party to its will.” Neoliberalism became a political order in exactly that sense. Both Republicans and Democrats effectively told the industrial working class that its life of manual labor was over. Market forces had to be obeyed, and what they demanded was precisely what Papaw told J.D.: America had to do something different.

Papaw’s wisdom is most potently dramatized in a pivotal scene in the 1998 movie Primary Colors. The film, based on Joe Klein’s roman à clef, is a thinly disguised account of Bill Clinton’s dramatic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992. John Travolta’s Jack Stanton is an obvious proxy for Clinton in his Comeback Kid phase, when he overcame lurid revelations about his sexual promiscuity to open a path to the presidency.

The critical moment in the movie comes when the embattled Stanton addresses a meeting of workers in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It is based on a speech Clinton gave in the city in February 1992, but in the movie the location is the cavernous shop floor of a factory that has already closed. As Travolta speaks, the camera cuts away frequently to men in hard hats and women with hard faces, most of them white—anxious representatives of the declining American working class. The candidate lays on his good old boy southern charm. But then he becomes deeply serious:

I’m gonna do something really outrageous. I’m gonna tell the truth…. No politician can reopen this factory or bring back the shipyard jobs or make your union strong again. No politician can make it be the way it used to be, because we’re living in a new world now, a world without economic borders…. And in that world muscle jobs go where muscle labor is cheap—and that is not here. So if you wanna compete, you’re gonna have to exercise a different set of muscles—the one between your ears.

The workers are really listening to him now, precisely because he’s not just another politician telling them what he thinks they want to hear. He delivers both a warning and a promise:

Now this whole country’s gonna have to go back to school…. And I will make you this deal: I will work hard for you. I will wake up every morning thinking about you. I will fight and sweat and bleed to get the money to make education a lifetime thing in this country, to give you the support you need to move up. But you have got to do the heavy lifting your own selves.

The proletarians cheer Stanton to the very rafters of their hollowed-out industrial space.

The idea of “moving up” echoes from Primary Colors to Hillbilly Elegy. It is the program for those who toiled in Portsmouth’s shipyard and Middletown’s steelworks. But as Vance voices the message through Papaw, in order to move up, these communities must first move on. Moving on means getting over it—“it” being history, identity, belonging. It means swallowing their pride. What industrial workers have to get over is not just the sense of self-esteem that comes from looking at a great ship or a handsome car and knowing that you had a hand in making it. It is also faith in America’s innate superiority, both industrial and military, over the rest of the world.

In 1989—around the time that Donald Trump was railing against Japan for “taking advantage of the United States”—Middletown’s steel company was partially acquired by the Japanese industrial conglomerate Kawasaki and would soon be renamed Armco Kawasaki. As Vance records in Hillbilly Elegy, “Kawasaki was a Japanese company, and in a town full of World War II vets and their families, you’d have thought that General Tojo himself had decided to set up shop in southwest Ohio when the merger was announced.” In order to survive in the America Reagan had made, the workers of Middletown had to forget Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

It is striking that 1989 was also the year that Francis Fukuyama published, in the neoconservative journal The National Interest, one of the defining political essays of the period, entitled “The End of History?” He postulated:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

The end of history was not an abstract academic concept. It was happening in Middletown. And the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy is OK with it. He dismisses the anti-Japanese sentiment in the city as “mostly a bunch of noise.” He and Papaw are equally realistic about the necessity of adapting to the relentless “forward momentum” of capital:

The Kawasaki merger represented an inconvenient truth: Manufacturing in America was a tough business in the post-globalization world. If companies like Armco were going to survive, they would have to retool. Kawasaki gave Armco a chance, and Middletown’s flagship company probably would not have survived without it.

In Vance’s telling the industrial working class realizes that economic nationalism is a temptation it must resist. Globalization is an established fact. If the money and the technology are coming from a country that many of Middletown’s older residents fought a war against, such is life. Papaw, who used to threaten to disown his children if they bought a Japanese car, shrugs and says, “The Japanese are our friends now.” He presumably ignores the “bunch of noise” that came from the TV, where Trump, contemplating a run for the presidency in 1988, told Oprah Winfrey that the Japanese “think the United States is made up of a bunch of fools. They’re laughing at us.”

Here are not just two different stories but two conflicting ways of understanding American capitalism, rooted in sharply divergent conceptions of history. In the Vance version, time moves in a straight line: both the glory days of all-American steel and the bitter conflict with Japan are over. Move up and move on—if the Japanese know how to run industries more profitably, it is best to embrace their investment and learn from their know-how. Wallowing in a warm bath of past American greatness is a luxury neither workers nor bosses can afford.

In the Trump version, history is circular. The default condition of American capitalism is global superiority—if it has been lost, it can be restored by sheer political will. As the historian Jennifer M. Miller summarizes Trump’s position in an illuminating essay on his obsession with Japan:

If Japanese businesses were booming while American ones were declining, this was not because they designed superior products or because their workers had better education and training. The fault lay squarely with incompetent leadership; Japan’s success only could come from gaming the system. Rather than long-term investments in American education or a focus on growing economic inequality, the United States needed assertive leaders, who could confront Japan, return it to its “natural” place as the junior economic partner, and thus lead the United States to an economic revival.2

Neither of these stories has much to say about inequality, exploitation, or the rapacity that drives environmental destruction and climate breakdown. The Vance of 2016 could write affectingly about the symptoms of these diseases—poverty, drug dependency, alienation—but was no more interested than Trump was in their structural economic causes. Neither man presented any real critique of the Reaganite neoliberal revolution of the 1980s. Yet their visions of the nature of American capitalism itself were radically distinct.

Vance’s was orthodox conservatism: market forces are inexorable, and the wise course is to adapt to them as best one can. The burden of this adaptation must be borne by workers themselves. Just as Stanton/Clinton tells the proletarians that they must do the heavy lifting, Vance concludes in Hillbilly Elegy that the denizens of the Appalachian Rust Belt need to “stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.” Government is impotent and essentially irrelevant: “No politician can make it be the way it used to be.”

For Trump, on the other hand, everything was political. The Rust Belt could be resurrected, and the time could return when men like Papaw might look through the skin of a Ford or a Chevy and see the solid skeleton of Middletown steel inside—but only if America had a leader mighty enough to bring the Japanese and all the other foreigners to heel. What was not yet expressly articulated in this early Trump messaging was that while no democratic politician could return things to the way they used to be, an uninhibited strongman could do so by forcing foreigners to obey the natural law of American supremacy.

There was no doubt about which of these ways of thinking appealed most to the very rich—and it was not Trump’s. Depoliticizing economics in the way the Clinton character does in Primary Colors and Vance does in Hillbilly Elegy was a recipe for the accumulation of vast wealth by a tiny minority of Americans. If government is powerless to control the operation of market forces, its real job is to get out of their way. Most of the fruits of the new economy would naturally appear at the top of the tree.

Adjusted for inflation, the wealth held by families in the United States almost quadrupled between 1989 and 2022, but the share of it held by the bottom half of the population remained static at just 6 percent. Last year alone the nineteen richest households added $1 trillion to their accumulated assets, and the top 0.00001 percent now control a larger share of America’s wealth than ever before. The story Vance told in 2016 was a very good one for the richest Americans: it suited their purposes that the Middletown folk should understand capitalism as essentially impersonal and apolitical and accept that the best they could do was to “make things better” for themselves without blaming either government or “faceless companies” for their struggles.

Now, however, the vice-president has ditched, along with most of his other political positions, his moral tale of realistic adaptation to the relentless change inherent in capitalism. It has been replaced by the president’s fable of a politically driven restoration of the past. Trump’s economic agenda is doubly recursive: it repeats almost exactly his messaging from the 1980s, which in turn imagines a recovery of the heroic age of American industrial might. The end of history has ended. Trump has built an imaginary time machine in which “the way it used to be” is also the way it must and will be. And in this radical revision of the ideology of American capitalism, Fukuyama’s “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” is not merely obsolete; it must be confronted. Universalism, liberalism, and democracy are the enemies of American exceptionalism, of national greatness, and above all of the triumph of the will that must be embodied in the leader who declares, “I alone can fix it.”

As it happens, this replacement of one hegemonic idea with another is now playing out in a particularly ironic way in Middletown itself. In Hillbilly Elegy the steel plant is saved because Kawasaki comes in to “retool” its machinery. But more recently another kind of retooling was envisaged. Cleveland-Cliffs, the company that owns the plant now, declares on its website an intention to shift “away from manufacturing commodity steel in favor of higher-margin, specialty products.” To this end the Biden administration had allotted a $500 million grant to help the Middletown plant upgrade its aging blast furnaces, powered by coal, to ones fueled by hydrogen and electricity. But according to CNN the Trump–Vance administration—under the influence of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—intends to ax that grant.

This is OK because adaptation to economic change is out and political will is in. The future does not have to be planned for or funded because the past is returning. The Middletown plant does not need to shift to the production of high-value sustainable steel because Trump will use tariffs to ensure that it does not have to compete with cutting-edge global companies. King Coal will reign again, and the good old dirty jobs will be filled by men doing men’s work, all thanks to the great leader who made the foreigners bend the knee.

Leaving aside for the moment the viability of this new way of imagining American capitalism, we must ask why most of the oligarchy thought, when it swung behind Trump’s bid for reelection in 2024, that it could do without the old ideological model. The myth of a depoliticized and impersonal economy, in which essentially the same assumptions would apply whether the president was a Clinton or a Bush, served the superrich extremely well. Not only was wealth redistributed upward, but new forms of lucrative exploitation—the appropriation on a staggering scale of personal data for private profit—were allowed to flourish virtually unimpeded. Information technology, too, was construed as an unstoppable force to which everyone would have to adapt.

The problem for the very rich, however, is that as a political project neoliberalism hit the buffers in 2008. The great banking collapse exposed the idea that market forces operate outside politics as a convenient and no longer credible fiction. It became unavoidably obvious that the system of finance capitalism that replaced the old industrial complex is entirely dependent on public institutions. The moral basis for neoliberalism’s radically unequal distribution of the spoils of the new globalized economy had been a sense of rough justice: those who took the risks deserved the rewards. Yet it turned out that these were not the rules after all—the risks were socialized, but the rewards were privatized. For the rich, the bet had always been “heads I win, tails you lose.”

It also became obvious that “moving up,” the working class’s recompense for “moving on,” was not so easy. Both Vance’s Papaw and Clinton/Stanton had pledged that muscle jobs would be replaced by brain jobs. This was not just a political proposition; it was what most manual workers wanted for their children. But for far too many families it was a false promise. Democratic and Republican administrations did invest in training schemes, and many workers were indeed enabled to transition to new kinds of work. Overall, though, the social mobility that was supposed to be boosted in fact diminished. Ninety percent of the children of the New Deal order—those born in 1940—went on to earn more than their parents did. But the children of the neoliberal order—those born in 1980—had a fifty-fifty chance of earning less than their parents. Instead of receiving the lifelong reeducation that working families were promised, many of them were excluded by ever-rising college fees or cheated by scams like Trump University.

Yet as Gary Gerstle puts it, “A reigning political order does not release its grip easily…. Its decline is marked by contradiction, contestation, and even chaos.” During Trump’s first term those forces were at play almost as much within the regime as in American society as a whole. The old ideological order was still represented by figures like Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, who came from one of the great temples of neoliberal globalization, Goldman Sachs. Tax cuts for the rich and deregulation for businesses sustained a Reaganite economic agenda. But that old order could not fully impose itself—Cohn resigned in March 2018 when Trump moved to impose tariffs on foreign steel. Neither, however, could Trump himself, with his freedom of action limited by the Covid-19 pandemic, quite follow his own impulses. In the contest of economic ideologies, the result of Trump’s first term was inconclusive.

Where Trump had nonetheless succeeded, though, was in creating a mass base for an idea of capitalism that is entirely at odds with the neoliberal imagination. Against the insistence that no politician could reopen a Rust Belt factory, he established the notion that this was true only of the weak and foolish leaders that democracy had foisted on the American people. And against the image of inhuman market forces, anonymous as the weather, he made capitalism personal again.

Under neoliberalism, industrial workers had been told they must learn not to take capitalism personally. Successful adaptation required self-suppression. One must not allow oneself to feel humiliated when the vanquished of World War II turn up as the co-owners of the steel plant. One must relinquish the pride of having one’s own labor infused in powerful and beautiful machines. One must forget the generations of struggle embodied in the local histories of labor unions. One must, indeed, disremember the whole New Deal order and its transformative benefits for working people, their families, and their communities. Market forces cannot accommodate those emotions. This is tough, but it’s nothing personal.

Trump, however, personifies American capitalism. He performed in fourteen seasons of The Apprentice as a figure deeply embedded in its mindset—the magnate, the mogul, the tycoon, the titan of commerce. His act was, of course, more impersonation than personification. But this made it all the more effective: for mass consumption, an invented and exaggerated character sends a clearer signal than a real person.

No less importantly, Trump allows his fans to take possession (albeit in phony forms) of all the feelings that they were not supposed to express or indulge while their world was being taken from them. He presses hard on the raw nerve that Vance was so careful to avoid in Hillbilly Elegy: exploitation. In the neoliberal order, it was the vice that dared not speak its name. In his economic discourse, Trump speaks no other language.

But he also displaces exploitation from economic reality—instead of labor being taken advantage of by capital, America as a whole is continually abused and despoiled by foreign countries that laugh at the weakness of its leaders. Instead of moving on, as the steelworkers of Middletown had to do when they accepted their former Japanese enemies as saviors, there can be endless return to grievance, humiliation, and outrage. In place of forced amnesia, Trump offers a seductive dream time in which American history is sanitized into nostalgia. (The dark sides of the pre-Reagan industrial past are either suppressed—in the case of racism—or, in the case of its organized sexism, effectively celebrated as a golden age of manliness.)

For the superrich, this personalization of capitalism has two superficial upsides. One is that it seems to provide some kind of answer to the knotty question of what comes after the fall of the neoliberal order. The working class can be given the political agency it was previously denied; its pent-up emotions are unleashed and turned against all those who insist on a regulated and redistributive form of capitalism. The other is that it appears much easier to deal with political power when the complexity of democracy is reduced to a single individual.

These delusions are possible only because so many of the rich believe their own propaganda. As Gerstle puts it, “Cultivating ‘entrepreneurs’ of the self has long been a cardinal feature of the neoliberal order, and it shows no sign of waning” in the continuing half-life of that era. The tech oligarchs who facilitated Trump’s second coming know very well that he is a fake tycoon. But they can see and admire his astounding abilities as an entrepreneur of the self. He is not just an exploiter of social media technologies—he is one of the great exemplars of their governing ethic of endless self-invention.

The built-in flaw of this cult of the self-made man is that it leads those who have created vast fortunes to believe that they did it all themselves. They are subject to the same amnesia that neoliberalism demanded of the working class. They lose touch with all the things that made liberal democracy so essential to the development of capitalism: the rule of law; the relative stability that comes from allowing different sections of society to feel they have a share of power; public investment in education, health care, and science; the creation and maintenance of physical and digital infrastructures; predictable government informed by an expert bureaucracy. They build their own rockets and go into orbit far above the social and political conditions that have made their wealth possible.

In ditching democracy for autocracy, they also underestimated the autocrat. If you’ve created a trillion-dollar business, you might naturally think of Trump the serial bankrupt as merely a cartoon capitalist. You can recognize, and bow down to, Trump’s political genius while imagining that it is merely an exercise in branding, a big Trump sign placed over the door of a tower that’s actually owned by you and your confreres. Since everything else about Trump is an act, you can assume that he doesn’t really believe that he alone can will into existence a radically reshaped American capitalism. Surely he does not imagine that a single crude weapon—a blunderbuss of tariffs on all imports—will undo the effects of decades of economic globalization?

But he does. He has been absolutely consistent over nearly five decades in his conviction that American capitalism is an ideal system that will work perfectly once there is a leader strong enough to stop foreigners from rigging it. That leader, of course, is his indispensable self. America’s destiny will unfold from his instincts and impulses, so long as they are unchecked by democratic processes or the petty rationalism of evidence-based decision-making.

If capitalism is to be made personal, it would be a good idea to begin by understanding the person who is going to embody it. There is a reason Western capitalism ditched absolute monarchy: personal rule is rule by whim, prejudice, grudge, and tantrum. There are always opportunists who make money from chaos, and they will batten on the spoils of Trump’s bedlam. But capitalism as a system abhors uncertainty. Its beneficiaries are now ruefully remembering, far too late, that science, intellectual freedom, international cooperation, and social stability create wealth—and that giving untrammeled power to an autocrat bent on obliterating all of those things is a very efficient way to squander it.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, May 16, 2025 1:41 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

An Autopsy Report on Biden’s In-Office Decline

“Five people were running the country,” a political insider told the authors of the new book Original Sin. “And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”

By Tyler Austin Harper | May 16, 2025, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2025/05/biden-original-sin-d
ecline/682818/

Halfway through King Lear, storm clouds gather, and Shakespeare’s protagonist rages, “You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, / As full of grief as age; wretched in both.” And so, the mental unraveling of one of literature’s greatest characters begins. That Lear starts to lose his mind in this moment, in Act II, is important: If he were mad from the jump, the cause of his eventual downfall would be medical, not moral, and the king would bear no responsibility for the catastrophe that greets his kingdom. Precisely because the aging ruler is of sound mind in Act I, during which he sets into motion the events that threaten his sanity and his life, the blame is his to bear in Act V, when he has lost both.

Last year, the United States went through a presidential election filled with Shakespearean echoes. As Joe Biden tottered and fell (literally as well as metaphorically), more than a few pundits compared him to Lear, a man who was ruined by age, pride, and the flattery of sycophants. That analogy is picked up by Original Sin, the latest and most significant book to date about Biden’s cognitive decline, which was written by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson and draws on hundreds of interviews. It features an epigraph from Lear, and its first chapter gives airing to the view that, like Lear, Biden bears responsibility for his country’s fate. Quoting a senior adviser to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, the title of that chapter is simply: “He Totally Fucked Us.”

Tapper and Thompson’s exposé joins a growing list of post-election appraisals blaming Biden for Harris’s loss. (I wrote one of these myself.) Yet the curious thing about the experience of reading Original Sin is that one comes away unable to lay the blame, or the majority of it anyway, at the feet of Scranton Joe. Here, the Lear analogy falls apart.

Original Sin suggests that, unlike Lear, who begins his rule flawed but with his mind intact, Biden may have been losing his grip before he took his oath of office. If this is true, Americans unwittingly voted for and were then led by a president who was not up to the job, a state of affairs that certain among the Biden faithful seemed committed to concealing. Tapper and Thompson studiously avoid saying this outright; to their credit, they do little editorializing. The book is written not unlike an autopsy report, describing a gruesome political car crash in dispassionate, clinical detail. The American people, however, must confront the possibility that the book raises: that we may not have had a president capable of discharging the office since Barack Obama left the White House, in 2017.

One might debate whether the former president can be held fully responsible for his disastrous reelection bid given his seemingly shaky mental acuity (which he continues to deny, saying that reports of his decline in office are “wrong”; Original Sin does not include his responses to any of the book’s allegations). Biden’s claims that he would have won a rematch with Donald Trump—which he reiterated in an appearance on The View last week—suggest that he is not fully tethered to political reality. But Original Sin leaves little doubt that his enablers, at least, understood what they were doing. (Former first lady Jill Biden denies this as well. She said on The View that her husband was “a great president”; though she did not mention Original Sin by name, she said, “The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us.”)

In an author’s note, Tapper and Thompson offer a forewarning: “Readers who are convinced that Joe Biden was little more than a husk from the very beginning of his presidency, barely capable of stringing two sentences together, will not find support for that view here.” But rejecting the most extreme claims made about Biden’s acuity hardly puts to rest the question of whether he should have run in 2020. And the idea that Biden was fully capable of doing the job when he first took office is quite hard to square with the 300-odd pages of meticulous reporting that follow.

It is of course literally true that Biden could string two sentences together at the start of his presidency (and can now). But Original Sin makes clear that even before he launched his first campaign against Trump, Biden was struggling. The authors write, “Those close to him say that the first signs he was deteriorating emerged after the death of his beloved son Beau in 2015”—a decade ago. Tapper and Thompson point to recordings from 2017 of Biden speaking with Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter of his memoir. These tapes, which came to light six years later as part of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 2023 investigation into Biden’s inappropriate handling of classified information, suggested that the president had lost a mental step, or several. “He grasped to remember things, he sometimes had difficulty speaking, and he frequently lost his train of thought,” the authors write, describing the recordings and the special counsel’s sense of them. “Biden was really struggling in 2017,” Tapper and Thompson write, adding, “His cognitive capacity seemed to have been failing him.”

Three years later, on the presidential campaign trail, Biden’s struggles became more obvious to those around him. Tapper and Thompson report that, in 2020, members of Biden’s inner circle gave the candidate a teleprompter with scripted questions for a local-news interview. It was an apparent effort to work around his dwindling communicative and cognitive abilities: Aides lamented that even then, “they couldn’t rely on him to stay on message, and he often had a very short attention span.” The book’s most astounding previously unreported story from Biden’s 2020 campaign concerns his staff’s attempts to create videos of the candidate speaking with voters over Zoom. Tapper and Thompson’s description of this is worth quoting at length:

Quote:
Biden would sit in a room with several monitors beaming the face of real Americans in front of him so that they could discuss issues of importance.

The videos came back, hours of footage. Some on the team couldn’t believe their eyes.

“The videos were horrible,” one top Democrat said. “He couldn’t follow the conversation at all.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” said a second Democrat, who hadn’t seen Biden in a few years. “It was like a different person. It was incredible. This was like watching Grandpa who shouldn’t be driving.”

A special team was brought in and told to edit the videos down to make them airable, if only a few minutes worth. They had to get creative.

The authors go on to write, “Edited, the videos likely appeared fine to viewers, Biden no worse than any other senior on Zoom. But two of the Democrats who were involved in the films’ production together were dumbfounded. ‘I didn’t think he could be president,’ the second Democrat said. After what they’d seen, they couldn’t understand how Biden could be capable of doing the job.” (Two other top Democrats blamed the lousy footage on the awkwardness of Zoom.)

The idea that this same man, only a short time later, was able to reliably prosecute the duties of the position to which he was elected is hard to believe. Indeed, some incidents cataloged in Original Sin suggest that Biden may have been struggling to do the job even early in his term. Cabinet meetings were “terrible and at times uncomfortable,” one Cabinet secretary told the authors. “And they were from the beginning.” Biden relied on note cards and canned responses. (Some Biden aides told Tapper and Thompson that Cabinet meetings are stilted in every administration, and that Biden was more engaged in smaller meetings.)

In his term’s first year, the authors write in the book, the president met with the House Democratic Caucus, ostensibly to ask its members to vote for a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package. But after delivering prolix remarks that one congressperson characterized as “incomprehensible,” Biden did not make the ask—which many of the politicians present thought was a strategic decision. Later that month, then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked him to address the caucus once more, hoping that this time he would push for the package. Yet again, Biden dithered and prattled. And yet again, a Democratic congressperson told Tapper and Thompson, Biden’s address was “meandering and incoherent.” Biden did finish with a strong demand: “That’s all I gotta say … let’s get this done.” The only problem? The assembled politicians weren’t sure what exactly the president wanted done because he had, once more, neglected to ask them to do anything. According to Tapper and Thompson, Pelosi believed that this was another strategic omission on Biden’s part. A different member of the Democratic leadership told Tapper and Thompson that it might have been a memory lapse: “We wondered: Did he forget to make the ask, or is this just him being a super-safe politician? Between his stutter and aging, we were never quite clear on what, exactly, was going on.” The next year, he did seem to have trouble with his memory; in 2022, according to one witness, Biden found himself unable to remember the name of his own national security adviser, Jake Sullivan—“Steve,” he called him at least twice—or his communications director, Kate Bedingfield, whom he once resorted to calling “Press.”

Biden’s limitations were also clear during a rambling interview with Special Counsel Hur in October 2023. It took place during the two days after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, which means that when Biden was ostensibly in charge of directing American foreign policy during a moment of profound geopolitical tension, the president was incapable of sitting through an interview without forgetting words and dates and going on rambling tangents. Rather than reacting with alarm to this fact, the White House mounted a pressure campaign against Attorney General Merrick Garland. As first reported by Politico, Biden insiders were furious that Garland hadn’t edited Hur’s observations about the president’s shoddy memory out of the classified-documents report, and most of Biden’s senior advisers reportedly believed that Garland would not continue in his role as AG during the president’s hypothetical second term.

One Biden campaign consultant referred to in the book, who was conducting focus groups around this time, found that voters were concerned that Biden’s apparent decline would put the country at risk: “Many of them were worried,” Tapper and Thompson write. “What if an international crisis unfolded in the middle of the night?” These voters were not the only ones having these morbid thoughts. “The presidency requires someone who can perform at 2:00am during an emergency,” Tapper and Thompson write. “Cabinet secretaries in his own administration told us that by 2024, he could not be relied upon for this.”

As some high-ranking Democrats quoted anonymously in the book put it to Tapper and Thompson after Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump last June: “Just who the hell is running the country?” At least one unnamed source close to the Biden administration was willing to provide the authors with an answer. “Five people were running the country,” this insider said, seemingly referring to the president’s closest advisers. “And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”

Near the end of their book, Tapper and Thompson offer a glimpse into how powerful Democrats responded to the grim spectacle of Biden’s early-summer face-off with Trump. The authors describe a scene at the home of James Costos, an ambassador to Spain under Obama, where celebrities and politicians gathered to watch the debate. As a doddering Biden tanked onstage in front of some 50 million Americans, the film director and Democratic donor Rob Reiner became scared, then furious. “We’re going to lose our fucking democracy because of you!” he screamed, seeming to direct his ire at the closest thing to a Biden official in the room: Second gentleman Doug Emhoff.

What Reiner apparently failed to consider, but what Original Sin prompts readers to ask, is whether America’s democracy was already meaningfully diminished. Describing how some in Biden world justified propping him up for reelection in 2024, a longtime aide told Tapper and Thompson: “He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years—he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.” In other words, before Biden stepped down from the race, the plan for some aides seemed to be to Weekend at Bernie’s a cognitively impaired president in the hopes that, upon winning a second term, he could be hidden from the public while unelected staff took care of the real business of governing. “When you vote for somebody, you are voting for the people around them too,” this aide offered as a way of justifying what was, by any reasonable metric, an effort to undermine democracy and defraud the American people.

The members of Biden’s staff weren’t the only ones comfortable with abandoning democratic norms. The former president enjoyed the support of the Democratic Party, which at his behest blew up the old primary schedule, putting South Carolina in the first slot. The ostensible justification was anti-racism and elevating voters of color in a heavily Black state. According to Tapper and Thompson, aides at both the White House and the Democratic National Committee admitted that “the main motivation was helping Joe Biden, not uplifting Black voters.” South Carolina was a strong state for Biden, and the thinking seemed to be that a steady performance there might put primary challengers to bed early. In other words, the DNC appeared to try its level best to tip the process in favor of reelecting a man who a majority of the public thought could not do the job.

“Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak,” asks Kent in King Lear, “When power to flattery bows?” The nobleman is one of the only characters in Shakespeare’s play who gives the king honest advice, and who warns Lear that the course of action he has chosen is dictated by pride, the result of following those who tell him what he wants—not needs—to hear.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Original Sin is how few Kents populate its pages. Dozens of people in Biden’s orbit suspected that he was not physically or mentally equipped to be the president of the United States, yet they helped him seek that office and keep it when he couldn’t reliably perform its duties. These people then sought to return Biden to that office for four more years, even if that meant the country would most likely have been quietly run by unelected aides. In a rational world, Congress would hold bipartisan hearings about how this happened and whether and to what extent Biden’s aides hid the truth from the public. Then again, in a rational world, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump—who has spent his first months back in office intentionally dismantling core institutions, flouting the law, and threatening the Constitution—would have been elected president in the first place.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, May 18, 2025 8:45 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Deindustrialization: Causes and Consequences
It’s not mostly about globalization, and it’s not what ails workers

By Paul Krugman | May 18, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/deindustrialization-causes-and-cons
equences

A few months before the 1992 election, I, along with some other Democratic-leaning economists, flew to Little Rock to meet with Governor and presidential candidate Bill Clinton. The ostensible purpose was to discuss policy, but it was obviously also an audition for a job in the administration. At one point, Clinton asked what could be done to restore manufacturing to its previous share of employment.

Heads turned to me; this was clearly my department. I said something like this: “Sorry, governor, but that’s really not feasible. Even if we could eliminate the trade deficit, manufacturing employment would only rise modestly and would still be a much smaller share of the economy than in the past.”

Needless to say, I didn’t get a job. It was one of the best things that has ever happened to me.

The inconvenient fact is that economy changes over time, and so do the industries in which people work. A century and a half ago, despite the growth of manufacturing, America was still largely a nation of farmers. Today, hardly any of us work on the land:

Source: Census, BLS

Oh, and many, possibly a majority of farm workers are foreign-born, and many of them undocumented.

Although some politicians still portray rural areas and small towns as the “real America,” you don’t hear a lot of nostalgia for the days when agriculture dominated American employment. (If you ask me, Queens, New York comes a lot closer to being who we are now.)

There is, however, a lot of nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s, when more than a quarter of U.S. workers were employed in manufacturing. Income inequality was much lower in that era, so much so that many blue-collar workers considered themselves middle-class. And there’s a widespread narrative that (a) attributes those good times for American workers to the availability of well-paid jobs in manufacturing (b) attributes the relative decline of American manufacturing to overseas outsourcing and trade deficits.

But is this narrative right? Yes, it’s a simple, compelling story. But as I tried to explain to Clinton all those years ago, the math behind the story doesn’t work. To preview the conclusions: Even if we could somehow eliminate our trade deficit (which Trump’s tariffs won’t do, but that’s another story), America would not reindustrialize. — our manufacturing sector would be slightly bigger, but nothing like what it used to be in the 1950s and 1960s. And any wage gains for ordinary workers would be trivial at best.

I should say that some people who have bought into the deindustrialization-through-globalization story get annoyed if you point out that it’s mostly wrong. They seem to believe that pointing out the weakness of the deindustrialization story means that you don’t care about American workers. So let me be clear: I do care, a lot, about the fate of American workers. But as I’ll explain later, trying to recreate the economy of the 1950s won’t help them.

This post will, by the way, be a somewhat wonky exercise. But it’s important to understand that policies based on misplaced nostalgia (especially those being wielded so disastrously by Donald Trump) will hurt workers, not help them.

Beyond the paywall I’ll discuss:

1. The limited (not zero) role of international trade in deindustrialization

2. The limited (again not zero) role of deindustrialization in depressing wages

3. What would actually help restore the middle-class society I grew up in

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, May 20, 2025 5:06 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Talented Mr. Vance

J. D. Vance could have brought the country’s conflicting strands together. Instead, he took a divisive path to the peak of power.

By George Packer | May 19, 2025, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/07/jd-vance-reinvent
ion-power/682828/

J. D. Vance poses a problem, and at its core is a question about character. In the years after the 2016 election, he transformed himself from a center-right memoirist and public speaker, offering a complex analysis of America’s social ills and a sharp critique of Donald Trump, into a right-wing populist politician whose illiberal ideas and vitriolic rhetoric frequently out-Trump the original. According to Vance and his supporters, this change followed a realization during Trump’s first term that the president was lifting up the fallen working class of the heartland that had produced young J.D. To help his people, Vance had to make his peace with their champion. According to his critics, Vance cynically chose to betray his true values in order to take the only path open to an ambitious Republican in the Trump era, and as a convert under suspicion, he pursued it with a vengeance. In one account, a poor boy from the provinces makes good in the metropole, turns against his glittering benefactors, and goes home to fight for his people. In the other, the poor boy seizes every opportunity on his way up, loses his moral compass, and is ruined by his own ambition.

Both versions suggest the protagonist of a 19th-century novel—Pip in Dickens’s Great Expectations, Lucien in Balzac’s Lost Illusions. A novelist who set out to narrate the decline of the American empire in the 21st century might invent a protagonist like J. D. Vance. He turns up in all the key places, embodying every important theme. He’s the product of an insular subculture (the Scots-Irish of Appalachian Kentucky) and grows up amid the ills (poverty, addiction, family collapse) of a dying Ohio steel town ravaged by deindustrialization. He escapes into the Marine Corps in time for the Iraq War, and then into the dubious embrace of the cognitive meritocracy (Yale Law School, West Coast venture capital, East Coast media). At a turning point in his life and the country’s—in 2016, with the surprise success of Hillbilly Elegy and then the surprise victory of Trump—Vance becomes a celebrity, the anointed spokesman for the 40 percent of the country that comprises the white working class, which has sudden political power and cultural interest. He’s tasked with explaining the world he came from to the world he recently joined.

With his gifts of intellect and rhetoric, Vance might have brought the country’s conflicting strands together. They had combined to make him, and he knew them deeply—their flaws, their possibilities, their entwined fate. Instead, he took a path of extreme divisiveness to the peak of power, becoming a hard-line convert to the Catholic Church, post-liberal populism, and the scorched-earth cause of Donald Trump. Vance became a scourge of the elites among whom he’d found refuge, a kingpin of a new elite, avenging wrongs done to his native tribe.

At every step the reader wonders: Is our hero motivated by conviction, or is he the creature of a corrupt society? Does he deserve our admiration, our sympathy, or our contempt?

Still only 40, Vance is likelier than anyone to be the next president. (The biggest obstacle, for several reasons, is Trump himself.) His rise has been so dramatic and self-dramatized that he calls to mind those emblematic figures from history who seem both out of a storybook and all too human, such as Shoeless Joe Jackson and Huey Long. In the end, the question of Vance’s character—whether his about-face was “authentic”—is probably unanswerable. Few people are capable of conscious, persistent self-betrayal. A change that begins in opportunism can become more passionate than a lifelong belief, especially when it’s rewarded. Ventriloquize long enough and your voice alters; the mask becomes your face.

What’s more important than Vance’s motive is the meaning of the story in which he’s the protagonist. More than any other public figure of this century, including Barack Obama (to whom his career bears some similarities), and even Trump, Vance illuminates the larger subject of contemporary America’s character. In another age, his rise might have been taken as proof that the American dream was alive and mostly well. But our age has no simply inspiring and unifying tales, and each chapter of Vance’s success is part of a national failure: the abandonment of American workers under global neoliberalism; the cultural collapse of the working class; the unwinnable forever war; a dominant elite that combines ruthless competition with a rigid orthodoxy of identity; a reaction of populist authoritarianism. What seems like Vance’s tragic wrong turn, the loss of real promise, was probably inevitable—it’s hard to imagine a more hopeful plot. After all, the novel is about a society in which something has gone deeply wrong, all the isms have run dry, and neither the elites nor the people can escape blame.

The power of Vance’s story depends on the image of a hick struggling to survive and escape, then navigating the temptations and bruises of ascent. At the start of his memoir he describes himself as an ordinary person of no real accomplishment who avoided becoming a grim statistic only by the grace of his family’s love. This self-portrait shows the early appearance of Vance the politician, and it’s belied by the testimony of people who knew him. Friends from the Marine Corps and Yale described to me an avid reader, confident and well-spoken, socially adept, almost universally liked—an extraordinary young man clearly headed for big things. (Vance himself declined to be interviewed for this article.)

As an enlisted Marine, Vance worked in public affairs, which meant that he saw no combat in Iraq during some of the most violent years of the war. Instead, he acquired a sense of discipline and purpose in a fairly cloistered milieu. He was already interested in political philosophy, and on the sprawling Al-Asad air base, in Anbar province, Vance and a close friend discussed Jefferson and Lincoln, Ayn Rand, Christopher Hitchens and the “new atheists,” even Locke and Hobbes. He was also a conservative who revered John McCain and was, the close friend joked, the only one on the base who wasn’t disappointed when a mystery visitor turned out to be Dick Cheney rather than Jessica Simpson. But Vance began to have doubts about the war before he ever set foot in Iraq. In a chow hall in Kuwait, officers on their way home to the States described the pointless frustration of clearing Iraqi cities that immediately fell again to insurgents. The ghost of Vietnam had not been vanquished by the global War on Terror.

In 2003, still in his teens, J. D. Vance enlisted in the Marines and was deployed to Iraq, where he read thinkers such as Locke and Hobbes, who had influenced the American Founders.

“I left for Iraq in 2005, a young idealist committed to spreading democracy and liberalism to the backward nations of the world,” Vance wrote years later. “I returned in 2006, skeptical of the war and the ideology that underpinned it.” Whether that ideology was called neoconservatism or liberal interventionism, its failure in Iraq led in a straight line to a new ideology that was also old: “America First.” On foreign policy Vance has been pretty consistent for two decades. When, while running for a U.S. Senate seat in 2022, he remarked, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” you could hear the working-class Iraq vet taking a shot at elites who send others to bleed for abstractions and are indifferent to the human collapse of Middletown, Ohio.

“America First” wasn’t the only available response to disillusionment with Iraq. Other veterans who’d entered politics—Dan Crenshaw, Jason Crow, Tammy Duckworth, Seth Moulton—continued to be concerned about human suffering and the fate of democracy abroad. Nor have they abandoned liberal democracy for blood-and-soil nationalism. Vance is a politician with an unusual interest in ideas and a combative nature fed by an old wound. The combination makes him capable of going a long way down an ideological road without paying attention to the casualties around him.

Raised loosely evangelical, Vance became a libertarian atheist in his 20s—the stance of many smart, self-taught young men of the aughts in search of totalizing positions that could win mostly online arguments. “I prided myself on an ability to overwhelm the opposition with my logic,” he wrote years later. “There was an arrogance at the heart of my worldview, emotionally and intellectually.” Both Rand and Hitchens took him away from the community of his upbringing—from a poor white culture of non-churchgoing Christians whose identification with the Republican Party had nothing to do with tax cuts. Libertarianism and atheism were respectable worldviews of the new culture that Vance badly wanted to enter.

“I became interested in secularism just as my attention turned to my separation from the Marines and my impending transition to college. I knew how the educated tended to feel about religion: at best, provincial and stupid; at worst, evil,” he would write in 2020, after his conversion to Catholicism. “Secularism may not have been a prerequisite to join the elites, but it sure made things easier.” This ability to socialize himself into new beliefs set a pattern for his career.

Vance took just two years to graduate from Ohio State, and in 2010 he was accepted by Yale Law School. Entering the Ivy League put him through what the sociologist J. M. Cuddihy called “the ordeal of civility”—repression of one’s class or ethnic background in the effort to assimilate to the ways of a dominant culture. As Vance later wrote, he had to get used to the taste of sparkling water, to learn that white wine comes in more than one variety. In an earlier time, the dominant group would have been the WASPs. In the early 21st century, it was a liberal multiethnic meritocracy for which a Yale law degree opened the way to power.

In this world, there was nothing odd about a descendant of several centuries of native-born white Christian Americans taking as his “Yale spirit guide” the daughter of Hindu immigrants from India. The route to New Haven is in some ways shorter from Andhra Pradesh than from the hills of eastern Kentucky. What counts is class, and class is largely a matter of education and credentials. Usha Chilukuri had all the right qualities to civilize Vance: raised in a stable, high-achieving family of California academics; Phi Beta Kappa at Yale College; master’s degree from Cambridge University; even-tempered, politically opaque, hyper-organized, mapping out her work and life with Vance on Post-it notes, whiteboards, and spreadsheets. When Vance’s friend from the Marines visited New Haven, Usha told them both that they’d done a good job of “course correcting” their lives. In Vance’s memoir she’s a kind of life coach, counseling him to unlearn hillbilly codes and habits—helping him talk through difficult subjects without losing his temper or withdrawing, expressing pride when he resists going after another driver who flips him off in traffic.

Hillbilly Elegy—both book and film—makes much of a scene in which Vance is so baffled by the complicated tableware at a Yale dinner with recruiters from a white-shoe law firm that he has to leave the room and call Usha for guidance. “Go from outside to inside, and don’t use the same utensil for separate dishes,” she tells him. “Oh, and use the fat spoon for soup.” The picture of a raw youth going from outside to inside with the help of his super-striver girlfriend is a little misleading. “I never got the sense that he was worse off because he hadn’t gone to Yale or Harvard, just because he was so well-spoken,” a law-school friend of Vance’s and Chilukuri’s told me. “He was intriguing to Usha, and to the rest of us too.” Being a chubby-faced working-class Marine from the Midwest might have brought cultural disadvantages, but it also conferred the buoyant charisma of a young man who made it out. Regardless of place settings, Vance quickly mastered the essential Ivy League art of networking. Classmates picked him out early on as a political leader.

Everyone who met Vance in those years seems to have been impressed. He didn’t have to put on Ivy League airs, or wave a hillbilly flag, or win sympathy by reciting the saddest chapters of his childhood. He kept stories of his abusive mother and her checked-out partners almost entirely to himself—a close friend was surprised by the dark details of his memoir—but he didn’t cut himself off from his past. He watched Ohio State football every Saturday with another Buckeye at Yale, and he remained close to his sister, Lindsay, and to friends from his hometown and the Marine Corps.

In the early 2010s, when he began to publish short articles on David Frum’s website FrumForum and in National Review, they were mainly concerned with the lack of social mobility in the working class. His voice was perfectly tuned to a moderate conservatism, strengthened by his authentic origin in heartland hardship—skeptical of government programs for the poor, but with a sense of responsibility to the place he came from. I’m making it, he said, and so can they if they get the right support. In an early essay, from 2010, he defended institutions like Yale Law School against a rising right-wing populism that saw a country “ruled by perniciously alien elites.” This burn-it-down politics was a luxury that poor people couldn’t afford. His “political hero,” according to Hillbilly Elegy, was Mitch Daniels, the centrist Republican governor of Indiana. His choice for president in 2012 was Jon Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor and ambassador to China, who made Mitt Romney seem a bit extreme.

Vance planned to write a policy book about the problems of the white working class. But when he came under the wing of the professor Amy Chua, the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, who fostered his relationship with Usha and recommended him for coveted jobs, she urged him to write the story of his life.

In 2017, when Vance was still a progressive darling due to his ability to explain Donald Trump’s appeal among white working-class voters, he went on Late Night With Seth Meyers to promote Hillbilly Elegy.

At the end of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance describes a recurring nightmare, going back to childhood, in which he’s pursued by a terrifying antagonist, a “monster”—in at least one dream his unstable mother. While he was at Yale she became addicted to heroin, and he later had to drive to Ohio to keep her from ending up homeless. The nightmare returned just after he graduated—but this time the creature being chased is his dog, Casper, and the enraged pursuer is Vance. At the last moment he stops himself from hurting his beloved pet, saved by his own capacity for self-reflection. The dreamer wakes to a bedroom filled with all the signs of his happy new life. But the past is still alive, and the nightmare leaves a haunting insight: “I was the monster.”

Reading the book today is like the reversal of roles in Vance’s dream. The earnest, sensitive narrator of Hillbilly Elegy sounds nothing like the powerful politician who sneers at “childless cat ladies,” peddles lies about pet-eating Haitian immigrants, sticks a finger in the face of the besieged president of Ukraine, and gets into profane fights with random critics on X. Vice President Vance is the pursuer. So it’s a little disorienting to return to Hillbilly Elegy and spend a few hours in the presence of a narrator who can say: “I love these people, even those to whom I avoid speaking for my own sanity. And if I leave you with the impression that there are bad people in my life, then I am sorry, both to you and to the people portrayed. For there are no villains in this story.”

As a writer, Vance passes the most important test in a work of this kind: He’s honest enough to show himself in an unfavorable light—hotheaded, cowardly, often just sad. He’s wary of any simple lessons or wholly satisfying emotions. He loves his family and community, but he is unsparing about their self-destructive tendencies. He rejects the politics of tribal grievance and ostentatious piety that now defines the populist right. If the book has a message, it’s the need to take responsibility for your own life while understanding the obstacles and traps that blight the lives of others—to acknowledge the complex causes of failure without giving in to rage, self-pity, or despair. “There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government,” Vance warned, “and that movement gains adherents by the day.”

It’s not a message to impress the MAGA mind. The author’s nuanced analysis and policy ideas might well make Vice President Vance retch. In countless interviews and talks related to his New York Times No. 1 best seller, Vance spoke movingly about his childhood, criticized the low standards that both right and left impose on his people, and offered no easy answers for their desperate lives, only a kind of moral appeal to self-betterment and community that sounded like the centrist commentary of David Brooks. In his open-collar shirt and blazer, with smooth cheeks and boyish blue eyes, a fluent delivery and respectful responses, Vance appeared to be living proof that the meritocracy could take a self-described hillbilly and make him one of its own, creating an appealing celebrity with an important message for comfortable audiences about those left behind.

So Hillbilly Elegy is a problem for right-wing populists—and also for Trump opponents who now loathe Vance, because it takes an effort not to sympathize with the book’s young hero and admire the eloquence of its author. By 2020, when Ron Howard’s movie was released, at the end of Trump’s first term, critics who might have turned to the book for insight had soured on the white working class, and they excoriated the film. (Tellingly, it was far more popular with the general public.) By then it was no longer possible to have an honest response to a book or movie across political battle lines. Hillbilly Elegy, published four months before the 2016 election, came out at the last possible moment to shape a national conversation. It belongs to an era that no longer exists.

Other than learning how elites get ahead, Vance made little use of his law degree. He spent a year clerking for a Kentucky judge, and less than a year at a corporate firm in D.C. Even at Yale he knew that practicing law didn’t interest him. What he later called “the most significant moment” of his law-school years was a talk in 2011 by the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. I spent time with Thiel for a magazine profile that year, so I’m familiar with the pessimism of his thinking: America is going through a period of prolonged stagnation; supposedly revolutionary digital technologies like the iPhone and social media have turned out to be trivial, while chronic problems in the physical world—transportation, energy, bioscience—haven’t improved; and this lack of dynamism drives elites like the ones in Thiel’s audience to compete furiously for a dwindling number of prestigious but ultimately meaningless jobs.

This analysis of a soulless meritocracy in a decadent society held more than intellectual interest for Vance. Thiel was describing what Vance had already begun to feel about his new life among the credentialed: “I had prioritized striving over character,” Vance later wrote. “I looked to the future, and realized that I’d been running a desperate race where the first prize was a job I hated.” The talk gave an abstract framework for the psychological conflicts besetting a refugee from decline: burning ambition, and the char of guilt it leaves; longing for elite acceptance and resentment of elite disdain (the professor who scoffed at state-school education, the classmate who assumed that Marines must be brutes); what Vance called the “reverse snobbery” that a poor boy from flyover country feels toward the Yale snobs who know about butter knives while he alone confronts a belligerent drunk at the next table in a New Haven bar. In an interview with Rod Dreher of The American Conservative upon the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance said, “It’s the great privilege of my life that I’m deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism.” He added, “But it would have been incredibly destructive to indulge too much of it when I was 18.”

Elite anti-elitism—contempt from a position of strength, the ability to say “Thanks but fuck you”—offered a way out of the conflicts. This was the first of many gifts from Thiel, and Vance would go on to indulge it every bit as destructively as his new mentor could wish. But not yet. He was still hard at work earning his credentials and preparing to enjoy their fruits.

The author of Hillbilly Elegy could only have a complex view of Donald Trump: an intuitive grasp of his appeal for people in Middletown, and horror at his effect on them. In an essay for this magazine published just a few weeks after the memoir, in the summer of 2016, Vance called Trump “cultural heroin”—the most apt metaphor possible. Trump was an overwhelmingly tempting drug that brought relief from pain but inevitably led to self-destruction, enabling all the ills—resentment, bigotry, coarseness, delusional hope—of a white working class in rapid decay. Shortly before the election, Vance warned that a refusal by Trump to accept its results would further alienate his supporters from politics, saying he hoped Trump “acts magnanimous.” Late on Election Night, when Trump’s shocking victory appeared imminent, ABC News, suddenly in need of an authority on Trump voters, pulled Vance from Yahoo News into its main studio as a native informant. “What are they looking for from Donald Trump?” George Stephanopoulos asked. “What do they want tangibly?” Vance replied that they wanted a change in direction, and that if Trump failed to bring one, there would be “a period of reckoning.” Then he added with a slight smile: “I do think that folks feel very vindicated now, right? They believed in their man. They felt like the media didn’t believe in their man.”

What did Vance believe in?

Trump’s win brought the author of Hillbilly Elegy to new prominence as a national voice. It also placed a roadblock directly in the path of his ambitions. He had identified himself as a Never Trump conservative, privately wondered if Trump was “America’s Hitler,” and voted for neither major-party candidate. Suddenly the establishment that had embraced him and elevated him beyond his dreams could no longer offer means of ascent. Just about everyone who knew Vance assumed he intended to enter politics, but the Daniels-Huntsman-Romney species of Republican was halfway to extinction.

In January 2017, a week after Trump’s inauguration, a group of about a dozen conservatives—adherents of “reform conservatism,” a modernizing, more inclusive strain that took seriously issues such as inequality and the environment—gathered with Vance at the Washington offices of the Hoover Institution to advise him on his political future. These were policy intellectuals who had encouraged and validated young Vance. They discussed what their agenda should be now that a Republican few, if any, of them had supported was president. Were there positive aspects to be gleaned from Trump’s populism on issues like immigration? How far should Vance go to accommodate himself to the cultural-heroin president? One thing was certain: The people in the room were already losing their value to Vance.

A week later, on February 3, he spoke about Hillbilly Elegy and Trump at David Axelrod’s Institute of Politics, in Chicago. He gave one of his most thoughtful performances, trying to tie the unraveling threads of the country back together, urging his audience to see the common ground between working-class Black and white Americans, arguing that both the cultural left and the racist alt-right represented a small number of mostly coastal elites. But he also made a startling claim about Trump that he would return to in the coming months and years: “If you go to one of his rallies, it’s maybe 5 percent him being really outrageous and offensive, and 95 percent him talking about ‘Here are all the things that are wrong in your community, here’s why they’re wrong, and I’m going to bring back jobs.’ That was the core thesis of Trump’s entire argument.”

Never mind the tone, Vance was saying, it’s trivial—pay attention to the content. But his percentages weren’t remotely accurate, and he was ignoring the inextricable bond between inflammatory language and extreme policies that held Trump’s speeches together and thrilled his crowds: What’s wrong in your community is them. Vance, too intelligent not to sense the hollow core of his claim, was taking a step toward Trump.

He also informed his audience that he was moving back to Ohio.

According to a classmate, while still in law school Vance had gotten in touch with Thiel, who extended an open invitation to come see him in Silicon Valley. After graduation, marriage to Usha, and short stints in the legal profession, he moved to San Francisco and, in 2016, started working at Thiel’s venture-capital firm Mithril. But technology investing seemed to hold little more interest for him than corporate law. What excited him was politics and ideas. Thiel was preparing to endorse Trump and was mounting a radical attack on America’s sclerotic and corrupt institutions—universities, media, corporations, the regulatory state. His rhetoric became extreme, but his goals remained vague. Trump was an experiment: Thiel wanted to blow things up and see what happened, and if it all went wrong he could move to New Zealand, where he’d invested millions of dollars and acquired citizenship. The alliance between Thiel (monopoly advocate, cognitive elitist, believer in supermen, admirer of the antidemocratic thinkers Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss) and Vance (son of the common people, who get screwed when things go wrong and have no way out) shows that reactionary populism is capacious enough to appeal to every resentment of the liberal status quo.

With prolonged exposure to the master class—the junkets in Aspen and Sun Valley—Vance collected disillusioning stories that would later help justify his political transformation: the tech CEO whose answer for the loss of purpose among displaced workers was “digital, fully immersive gaming”; the hotel mogul who complained that Trump’s anti-immigrant policy made it harder for him to find low-wage workers. One feels that these clueless capitalists, like the condescending Yalies of half a decade earlier, played a genuine role in Vance’s turn away from the establishment, but that he enlisted them disproportionately. Incidents like these provided a kind of indulgence that allowed him to feel that he wasn’t with the elites after all, wasn’t betraying his own people while explaining their pathologies over dinner to the superrich—a role that was becoming more and more distasteful—and under the table he and Usha could quietly signal to each other: We have to get the hell out of here. These people are crazy.

The Vances moved first to Columbus in 2017, then bought a mansion in Cincinnati the following year and filled it with children while they both pursued the extremely busy careers of the meritocracy. Vance explained his return to Ohio as a desire to give back to his troubled home region and help reverse its brain drain; his political ambitions went unmentioned. He announced the creation of a nonprofit to combat the opioid epidemic, but the group, Our Ohio Renewal, raised almost no money and folded before it had achieved much more than placing a couple of op-eds. He put more effort into funding regional start-ups with venture capital, but one of his biggest bets, an indoor-agriculture company in Appalachia, went bankrupt. With seed money from Thiel, in 2019 Vance co-founded his own firm, Narya Capital, and invested in the right-wing video-sharing platform Rumble and a prayer app called Hallow. Like Thiel’s Mithril Capital and big-data company, Palantir, the name Narya comes from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—a novel that obsesses a certain type of brainy conservative, particularly younger religious ones, with its hierarchical social order and apocalyptic battle between good and evil. As Vance turned away from classical liberalism, Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers gave way to Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. That same year, he became a Roman Catholic.

Around Easter 2020 Vance published an essay about his conversion in the Catholic journal The Lamp. It describes a largely intellectual experience, informed by reading Saint Augustine and the literary critic René Girard, driven by disenchantment with the scramble for credentials and consumer goods, and slowed by his reluctance to embrace a form of Christianity that would have been alien to Mamaw, his late grandmother. He finally made up his mind when he “began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her kind of Christianity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims.” Vance hoped that Catholicism would help him to care less about professional prestige, “let go of grudges, and forgive even those who wronged me.” However he is doing in private, it’s hard to see the hand of Catholic humility at work in his public life. His conversion anticipated a sharp turn in how he went about pursuing power, and it coincided with a wave of high-profile conservatives turning to religion. The essay was titled “How I Joined the Resistance.”

Vance didn’t give up his former beliefs all at once. It took him four years, from 2017 until 2021, to abandon one politics for another—to go from Never Trump to Only Trump. Compared with the overnight conversion experiences of innumerable Republicans, this pace seems admirably slow, and it probably reflects Vance’s seriousness about political ideas. He took time to make them intellectually coherent; then the moral descent was swift and total.

Tom Nichols: The moral collapse of J. D. Vance

A close friend of Vance’s, another Ohioan, gave the most generous explanation of his political conversion. “His views have always been kind of rooted toward doing good for the working-class segment of America,” the friend told me. Progressives embraced an identity politics that placed Vance’s people somewhere near the bottom, and standard conservative policies hadn’t worked for them, especially on trade. In Ohio, Vance found that his people had become big Trump supporters. By 2018, the friend told me, Vance believed that Trump “was committed at least to doing the things he said and fixing the problems that J.D. also identified as problems”—the loss of jobs and decline of communities. In 2017 Vance had said that manufacturing jobs had been lost mainly to automation, and that protectionism wouldn’t bring them back. Before long he was blaming globalization, China, and the Republican donor class. “At that point J.D. realized he was very aligned with Trump on the issues,” the friend said.

In 2018, Vance told an acquaintance that he was thinking of voting for Trump in 2020. Onstage with Amy Chua that same year at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he said that people he knew in Ohio were angrier at Wall Street and Silicon Valley types than at ethnic- or religious-minority groups, and that Trump’s speeches, though “tinged with criticisms of Mexican immigrants or Muslims,” directed 85 percent of their vitriol at “coastal elites.” Another doubtful calculation—but it allowed Vance to align Trump’s more acceptable hostilities with those of his people and, by implication, his own. He wasn’t going to insult Mexicans and Muslims in front of an Aspen crowd, but the crowd itself was more than fair game.

The next year, at a pair of conservative conferences, Vance argued that libertarianism didn’t have the answer for what ails American parents and children, workers and communities. He championed a “pro-family, pro-worker, pro-American-nation conservatism,” and he said: “In my own life, I’ve felt the demons that come from a traumatic childhood melt away in the laughter and the love of my own son.” The policy implications weren’t entirely clear. He was against abortion, Facebook apps designed to addict children, pointless wars that got his Marine buddies killed, and CEOs who didn’t care about American workers and families; he was for mothers and kids. He ended one speech by saying, “Donald Trump has really opened up the debate on a lot of these issues, from foreign policy to health care to trade to immigration.”

By 2020 Vance had publicly turned away from the residue of Reaganism toward what came to be called “the new right,” “national conservatism,” or simply “populism.” In a sense, he was following the well-trod path of his generation of conservatives. The Republican establishment had failed, the reformers hadn’t amounted to much, the Never Trumpers had lost—here was the obvious alternative.

But what had Trump actually done for people in the postindustrial heartland? The fentanyl crisis raged on, manufacturing job growth remained anemic, and the president’s main achievement—a tax cut—benefited corporations and billionaires far more than the working class. Vance knew all of this, and in early 2020 he wrote to one correspondent: “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).” But the political winds had turned, and now he massaged his public remarks about Trump into vague approval while keeping his criticism private. Vance was getting ready to enter politics.

The generous account of Vance’s political conversion contains some truth. It still fails to explain what followed.

A change in his view of tariffs didn’t require Vance to go to Mar-a-Lago with Peter Thiel in early 2021 to seek the disgraced ex-president’s forgiveness, then start and never stop repeating the very lie about a stolen election that he had warned against in 2016. In moving away from the Enlightenment and globalist neoliberalism, he could have stopped at the reactionary writer Christopher Caldwell or the post-liberal scholar Patrick Deneen. He didn’t need to spend 90 minutes schmoozing with an alt-right podcaster and rape apologist who goes by Jack Murphy (his real name is John Goldman), insisting ominously: “We are in a late-republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Cassie Chambers Armstrong: ‘Hillbilly’ women will get no help from J. D. Vance

Vance could have run for the Senate as a populist without maligning half his compatriots—liberals, immigrants, women without children—as hostile to America. He could have become a father without devoting a speech to mocking the “childless left.” The Catholic Church didn’t command him to stop caring about human beings in other countries, or to value Israel more than Ukraine because most Americans are Christian and Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not Kyiv. He could have turned away from his Ivy League credentials after they stopped being useful without declaring war on higher education and calling professors “the enemy.” He could have put aside his law degree and still held on to what it taught him about judicial independence and due process.

The 2024 Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee, where Vance became Trump’s nominee for vice president

After 2020 the prevailing politics on the right was apocalyptic, vituperative, and very online. Vance, ever skilled at adaptation, went with it all the way. If, as his patron Thiel argued, the country was under the control of a totalitarian, brain-dead left, almost any form of resistance was justified. When Vance argued that “the culture war is class warfare,” he was giving himself license to stigmatize large groups of Americans and flout the rule of law as long as he did it in the name of an abstraction called the working class.

But Vance never got away from elites. He simply exchanged one set of benefactors for another—traded Yale professors and TED audiences and progressive Silicon Valley CEOs for the money and influence that came with Peter Thiel, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump Jr. One elite elevated him to justify their contempt for the working class; the other championed him in order to burn down the first. Vance is interesting not only because he changed camps and was talented enough to thrive in both, but because the camps themselves, out of the lesser sin of decadence or the greater sin of nihilism, have so little to offer the country.

Vance transformed himself into the fullest incarnation of the Trump reaction—fuller than Trump himself, because Vance is more intelligent and disciplined, less likely to wander and stop making sense. He willed this change on himself because he had a lot to atone for and he was in a hurry. It won him Trump’s blessing in 2022 in a U.S. Senate race that Vance was losing, which gave him the Republican nomination and the election, leading to his choice as vice president in 2024, which could make him Trump’s 44-year-old successor in 2028.

Vance’s political transformation is so complete that it’s also physical. In the film adaptation of the Vance novel, imagine a scene in which the protagonist’s features in 2016 dissolve into a very different face circa 2025. The round cheeks and pudgy chin are now hidden by the growth of a Trump Jr. beard. The blue eyes, no longer boyish, are flatter, and they smile less. And the voice, which used to have an almost apologetic tone, as if he wasn’t sure of his right to hold the stage, now carries a constant edge, a kind of taunt. He’s more handsome but less appealing, and the loss of appeal comes from the fact that, like the movement that now runs the country, he’s animated by what he hates.

Like Trump, Vance shows no interest in governing on behalf of anyone outside MAGA. But the various phases of his life story make him—and him alone—the embodiment of all the movement’s parts. In a speech in March at a business conference, he called himself a “proud member of both tribes” of the ruling coalition—meaning of the populists like Steve Bannon, and of the techno-futurists like Elon Musk. He discounted the likelihood that they’ll fall out, and he insisted that innovations such as artificial intelligence will benefit ordinary Americans, because—despite the evidence of the past half century—“it’s technology that increases the value of labor.” MAGA can’t breathe without an enemy, and workers and innovators have “the same enemy”: the government. But MAGA is now the government, and the contradictions between its populists and its oligarchs are obvious.
photo of Vance in blue suit and red tie walking down steps with U.S. and other flags in background

Vice President Vance arrives in the Rose Garden for the president’s announcement of his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, 2025.

Vance’s transformation has another advantage besides the obvious one for his political prospects. When he grins slyly and says, “I’m gonna get in trouble for this” before launching an attack on some despised group, you can feel him shucking off constraints that he’s had to impose on himself since that recruitment dinner at Yale—or even earlier, since he was a boy in Middletown surviving the violence of adults. This more aggressive Vance has drawn closer to that hillbilly culture he long ago escaped. The vice president of the United States doesn’t let a challenge to his honor pass. He’s quick to anger, ready with a jibe, picks fights on social media, and brandishes insults such as “moralistic garbage” and “smug, self-assured bullshit.” He divides the world into kinfolk and enemies, with steadfast loyalty for those in the first category and suspicion or hostility for the great majority consigned to the second. He justifies every cruel policy, blatant falsehood, and constitutional breach by aligning himself with the unfairly treated people he grew up with, whether or not his administration is doing them any actual good. His idea of American identity has gone hard and narrow—not the encompassing creed of the founding documents, but the Appalachian dirt of the graveyard where his ancestors lie buried.

To succeed in the world of elites, Vance had to let himself be civilized, at a psychological cost. When that world no longer offered what he wanted, he found a new world of different elites. They lifted him to unimagined heights of power, and at the same time they brought him full circle, to a return of the repressed.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, May 20, 2025 5:08 PM

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Originally posted by second:
An Autopsy Report on Biden’s In-Office Decline

What decline, you stupid fuck?

I have 4 years worth of posts out of you telling me that Joe Biden* was fine.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, May 25, 2025 12:22 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Coming Democratic Civil War

By Jonathan Chait | May 25, 2025, 9 AM ET

A seemingly wonky debate about the “abundance agenda” is really about power.

What has drawn many Americans to Trump is his claim that the system is so broken that, as he promised, “I alone can fix it.” The last time they held power, Democrats did little to rebut that claim. Now they must decide if they will abandon their legalistic commitment to fragmentary proceduralism or allow Trump’s boast to be vindicated.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/abundance-democrats-
political-power/682929/

A civil war has broken out among the Democratic wonks. The casus belli is a new set of ideas known as the abundance agenda. Its supporters herald it as the key to prosperity for the American people and to enduring power for the liberal coalition. Its critics decry it as a scheme to infiltrate the Democratic Party by “corporate-aligned interests”; “a gambit by center-right think tank & its libertarian donors”; “an anti-government manifesto for the MAGA Right”; and the historical and moral equivalent of the “Rockefellers and Carnegies grinding workers into dust.”

The factional disputes that tear apart the left tend to involve wrenching, dramatic issues where the human stakes are clear: Gaza, policing, immigration. And so it is more than a little odd that progressive activists, columnists, and academics are now ripping one another to shreds over such seemingly arcane and technical matters as zoning rules, permitting, and the Paperwork Reduction Act.

The intensity of the argument suggests that the participants are debating not merely the mechanical details of policy, but the very nature and purpose of the Democratic Party. And in fact, if you look closely beneath the squabbling, that is exactly what they are fighting over.

The abundance agenda is a collection of policy reforms designed to make it easier to build housing and infrastructure and for government bureaucracy to work. Despite its cheerful name and earnest intention to find win-win solutions, the abundance agenda contains a radical critique of the past half century of American government. On top of that—and this is what has set off clanging alarms on the left—it is a direct attack on the constellation of activist organizations, often called “the groups,” that control progressive politics and have significant influence over the Democratic Party.

Quote:
What initiated this Civil War? A book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson – Abundance – Simon & Schuster (2025)

Download a free copy from the mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Ezra+Klein+Abundance

In recent years, the party’s internal divides have been defined almost entirely in relation to the issue positions taken by the groups. The most progressive Democrats have been the ones who advocated the groups’ positions most forcefully; moderate Democrats have been defined more by their relative lack of enthusiasm for the groups’ agenda than by any causes of their own. The Democratic Party’s flavors have been “progressive” and “progressive lite.” The abundance agenda promises to supply moderate Democrats with a positive identity, rather than merely a negative one.

That dynamic has only raised the stakes of the abundance agenda within the party. Its ideas are ambitious enough, but its political implications have set off a schismatic conflict not just over a collection of proposals and the Democratic Party’s direction—but over who should have the standing to direct it.

After percolating for years among policy wonks, the abundance agenda—a term coined by my colleague Derek Thompson in a 2022 essay—ascended suddenly in response to the deflating failure of the Biden administration’s policy program.

“We have to prove democracy still works,” Joe Biden said in his first speech to Congress. “That our government still works—and can deliver for the people.” That summer, after the Senate had approved a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, Biden declared the mission accomplished. “Today,” he announced at the White House, “we proved that democracy can still work.”

But in the months and years that followed, an unsettling realization began to creep in. A massive law had been enacted, yet Americans did not notice any difference, because indeed, very little had changed. Biden had anticipated, after quickly signing his infrastructure bill and then two more big laws pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into manufacturing and energy, that he would spend the rest of his presidency cutting ribbons at gleaming new bridges and plants. But only a fraction of the funds Biden had authorized were spent before he began his reelection campaign, and of those, hardly any yielded concrete results.

More than two years after signing the infrastructure law, Biden was “expressing deep frustration that he can’t show off physical construction of many projects that his signature legislative accomplishments will fund,” CNN reported. The nationwide network of electric-vehicle-charging stations amounted to just 58 new stations by the time Biden left office. The average completion date for road projects, according to the nonprofit news site NOTUS, was mid-2027. The effort to bring broadband access to rural America, a centerpiece of Biden’s plan to show that he would work to help the entire country and not just the parts that had voted for him, had connected zero customers.

Rather than prove democracy still works, Biden’s experience proved the opposite.

The odd thing about this deflating record is that a very similar thing happened the previous time Democrats held the presidency. Barack Obama came into office facing a catastrophic recession that he believed he could resolve with a gigantic new program of public works. Obama harkened back to the New Deal, when millions of Americans had been employed constructing roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, but quickly learned that, as he bitterly put it, “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” The lesson sat there, mostly unexamined, for a dozen years, inspiring no efforts to understand or change it, until Biden came into office. A Democratic president again hoped to follow FDR’s model, and again discovered it had somehow become impossible.

This time, the failure inspired a little more introspection. Policy wonks, mostly liberal ones, began to ask why public tasks that used to be doable no longer were. How could a government that once constructed miracles of engineering—the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge—ahead of schedule and under budget now find itself incapable of executing routine functions? Why was Medicare available less than a year after the enabling legislation passed, when the Affordable Care Act’s individual-insurance exchange took nearly four years to come online (and had to survive a failed website)? And, more disturbing, why was everything slower, more expensive, and more dysfunctional in states and cities controlled by Democrats?

Finding answers to these questions began as a series of disparate inquiries into such neglected topics as restrictive zoning ordinances, federal and state permitting regulations, and the federal government’s administrative procedures. But many who pursued these separate lines of inquiry experienced similar epiphanies, as if a switch had suddenly been flipped in their heads. They concluded that the government has tied itself in knots, and that enormous amounts of prosperity could be unleashed by simply untying them.

The closest thing to an institutional home for the abundance agenda is the Niskanen Center, formerly a heterodox libertarian think tank, which became a haven for Never Trump Republicans before veering, in recent years, toward promoting abundance. Some journalists, including several at this magazine, have also championed these ideas. Three new books have expressed abundance-agenda themes: Abundance, by Thompson and Ezra Klein; Stuck, by my colleague Yoni Appelbaum; and Why Nothing Works, by the Brown University scholar Marc Dunkelman. The proliferation of such works is a sign of the excitement these ideas have generated. And the abundance libs are rapidly winning over Democratic politicians, especially moderate ones.

The movement is still working out precisely what is, and is not, included in its program. But the canonical abundance agenda consists of three primary domains.

The first, and most familiar, is the need to expand the supply of housing by removing zoning rules and other legal barriers that prevent supply from meeting demand. Over the past 90 years or so, and especially since World War II, American cities have thrown up a series of restrictions on new housing. Some 40 percent of the existing structures in Manhattan, for instance, would be illegal to build today, and where the rules don’t ban new construction outright, they make it prohibitively time-consuming and costly. The same dynamic has strangled housing in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, and other places where people want to live but can’t afford to.

The second focus of abundance is to cut back the web of laws and regulations that turns any attempt to build public infrastructure into an expensive, agonizing nightmare. The cost of building a mile of interstate highway tripled in a generation. California approved a plan to build high-speed rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco 17 years ago and, despite having spent billions, still has no usable track.

Permitting requirements, which have slowed the green-energy build-out to a crawl, are a special focus.

The third domain, and the one that has received the least attention from commentators, is freeing up the government, especially the federal government, to be able to function. Policy wonks call this issue “state capacity.” The government itself is hamstrung by a thicket of rules that makes taking action difficult and makes tying up the government in lawsuits easy. The abundance agenda wants to deregulate the government itself, in order to enable it to do things.

Revealingly, when the government does act swiftly, it frequently does so by suspending or ignoring its standard procedures. In January 2020, researchers in Seattle spent weeks trying and failing to get government permission to test the flu samples they had gathered for coronavirus, which was spreading rapidly elsewhere. Eventually, the researchers just ignored the rules and ran the tests, creating the first measure of the spread of COVID in the U.S. Similarly, Operation Warp Speed, Trump’s greatest and arguably only triumph, involved an end run around normal vaccine-development protocol. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro got an overpass on I-95 rebuilt quickly and safely, but only by suspending normal highway-construction bureaucratic requirements. The fact that the government has to ignore its rules if it wants to do something important ought to raise the question of why those rules have to be followed the rest of the time.

All of these policies sound so obvious and unobjectionable that one might understandably grow a bit suspicious. Who would favor keeping a bunch of pointless rules? Why would anybody oppose abundance?

You might think Democrats, in particular, would uniformly embrace plans to allow Democratic-run states and cities to expand, to build more zero-carbon energy, and to restore the bureaucratic confidence of the New Deal heyday. But this turns out to be a highly controversial proposition, because the limitations on building and the government were largely imposed by the left itself. What’s more, these limits remain a core part of the interest-group politics that has dominated the Democratic Party for more than half a century.

In the years after World War II, the New Deal seemed to have permanently triumphed, and the legitimacy and power of government were beyond contestation. Many liberals now believed they could direct their energies in new directions. The task was to prevent the government machine, powered by its unstoppable alliance of Big Business and Big Labor, from subordinating the needs of the citizens. A new vision took hold, shared by writers and activists such as Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader. In his 2021 book, Public Citizens, the historian Paul Sabin describes this citizen-activist movement as “a legal attack, led by liberals, on the post–World War II administrative state.”

Unlike the Roosevelt generation that had preceded them, these liberals saw their task as restraining the power of government, rather than establishing it. “The fundamental wrong,” Carson said in a 1963 speech, “is the authoritarian control that has been vested in the agricultural agencies.”

This new, anti-statist form of liberalism had two hallmarks. One was its reliance on lawyers and lawsuits. This reflected the influence of Nader, who rocketed to fame as a consumer advocate and became the most admired man in America by articulating a distrust of the system that defined public sentiment in the age of Vietnam and Watergate. “We are creating a new professional citizen role,” he boasted to Time magazine. Those citizens were lawyers, or were represented by lawyers, who would devote their power to prying open the works of the state and holding it accountable.

The second was its faith in groups of citizens outside of government who could serve as a check on its power. The Port Huron Statement, the 1962 New Left manifesto by Students for a Democratic Society, envisioned a huge network of citizen-activist groups: “Private in nature, these should be organized around single issues (medical care, transportation systems reform, etc.), concrete interest (labor and minority group organizations), multiple issues or general issues.”

These visionaries believed the future of activism would revolve around a collection of specialized citizen-activist groups. And they were correct. By 1971, The Washington Post reported that Nader had created a “bewildering network of organizations, all devoted to a staggering array of public issues” and bearing Nader’s imprint, many of which still operate today. They pushed for the passage of laws, then fought in court to expand their reach, creating tools to slow down or block government action.

They achieved some genuinely laudable results, including laws regulating pollution and consumer safety, and those protecting poor communities from being steamrolled by the likes of Robert Moses. But their emphasis on litigation and cumbersome legal requirements (what the law professor Nicholas Bagley calls “the procedure fetish”), combined with the empowerment of interest groups, has over time inverted Roosevelt’s preference for results over legalism. The Naderites sought to prevent the government from doing harm, but in too many cases, they ended up preventing it from doing anything at all.

The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, provides the clearest example. Passed in 1969, at the zenith of the environmental movement’s influence, the law required the government to undertake environmental-impact studies before authorizing major projects and created elaborate legal hurdles to navigate.

Activist groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund saw NEPA as a potent tool to stop Washington (and, through state-level copycat laws, state and local governments) from building harmful projects. They pursued an energetic legal strategy to expand the law’s reach, turning it into a suffocating weapon against development. Over time, the environmental-impact statements required to start a project have ballooned from about 10 pages to hundreds; the process now takes more than four years on average to complete.

Most perversely, NEPA and similar laws have become a way to stop efforts to address climate change. The environmental movement was created during an era when activists saw their highest priority as preserving nature by stopping construction. In the era of global warming, however, preserving nature requires building new infrastructure: green-energy sources, pipelines to transmit the energy, and new housing and transportation in cities where density allows for a less carbon-intensive lifestyle. But environmental groups have not, for the most part, altered their desire to stop building, nor have they reconsidered their support for laws that freeze the built environment in place.

Joe Biden learned this the hard way.

After the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate law, Democrats began to realize that, thanks to a maze of legal impediments, the hundreds of billions of dollars in green-energy infrastructure they had authorized would not materialize any time soon, if at all.

Democratic moderates, with support from the Biden administration, set out to negotiate a permitting-reform bill that would impose a two-year cap on environmental-review statements and allow the federal government to plan the transmission lines needed to connect the new green-energy sources. Many Republicans, suspicious of infringing on states’ rights, opposed it. More striking, so did hundreds of environmental groups. They objected to legislation that would, in the words of one letter to Democratic leadership, “truncate and hollow-out the environmental review process, weaken Tribal consultations, and make it far harder for frontline communities to have their voices heard.”

And because climate activists opposed the bill, many progressives did too. “This is a good day for the climate and the environment,” Senator Bernie Sanders said after the permitting-reform bill died in Congress. Two years later, in the waning days of the Biden administration, a second effort to pass permitting reform failed again, and while moderate Democrats expressed dismay, progressives celebrated. “Thanks to the hard-fought persistence and vocal opposition of environmental justice communities all across the country, the Dirty Deal has finally been laid to rest,” then–House Natural Resources Chair Raúl Grijalva boasted.

Last year, Biden prevailed upon Congress to suspend environmental review for new factories that would produce computer chips, under the bipartisan CHIPS Act. He did so by relying on a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats, over strident objections from environmental activists and progressive Democrats.

Progressives are not indifferent to building green-energy infrastructure or manufacturing computer chips, but they place greater value on defending the prerogatives of local activists. The New Left model of citizen-activist groups empowered by litigation remains the core of the progressive movement’s theory of change.

“Meaningful community engagement is the key to unlocking our clean-energy future,” Christy Goldfuss, the executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said by way of explaining the group’s opposition to permitting reform. Some housing activists likewise oppose zoning reform because they see the key to housing justice as giving local activists the power to block new housing. The New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom has held up the tenant-union movement as a way to solve the housing crisis. “Its strongest political strategy at the moment,” she writes, “is pushing for local ordinances that give community members the authority to assess new housing developments that use city resources to determine whether they would displace residents or reduce a neighborhood’s affordability.”

The driving insight of the abundance agenda is that the organized citizen-activist groups descended from the Nader movement are not merely overly idealistic or ineffective, but often counterproductive. This is a diametric conflict: The progressive-activist network believes that local activists should have more legal power to block new housing and energy infrastructure. The abundance agenda is premised on taking that power away.

This helps explain why much of the progressive left rejects the abundance agenda, not merely as insufficient or naive, but as directionally wrong. Anthony Rogers-Wright, then the director of environmental justice at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, told my colleague Jerusalem Demsas a few years ago that permitting reform means “taking away the ability for all communities, but especially environmental-justice communities, from self-determination and using the courts as a way to get relief if a project is found to be harmful.” A policy brief on solar power from the progressive Roosevelt Institute last year proposed that the government should provide subsidies for community groups fighting new solar plants.

The theory underlying this position is that Nader-style citizen engagement is an important component of democracy, and that building up activist groups engaging in these litigation strategies creates powerful constituencies for the left. David Dayen, the editor of the progressive magazine The American Prospect, wrote an essay in 2023 critiquing the abundance agenda as an attack on basic democratic rights. Dayen, approvingly quoting the economist Marshall Steinbaum, argued that the effort to sideline community activists “boils down to the idea that people can’t be trusted.” A better policy, Dayen proposed, was “a liberalism that builds power,” which means “the government actively supporting the very groups that have been left out of past economic transitions, building the necessary coalition for long-term transformation.”

Whether or not this strategy has actually built power—the evidence from Biden’s presidency is discouraging—it remains foundational to the party’s activist superstructure. The progressive movement seeks to maintain solidarity among its component groups, expecting each to endorse the positions taken by the others.

Much of the most vociferous opposition to the abundance agenda has zeroed in on its betrayal of this principle. The Roosevelt Institute’s Todd Tucker attacked Ezra Klein on X for his “survivor island approach to coalitions—first unions and Dems team up to vote enviros off the island, and then Dems turn on labor.” David Sirota, a left-wing journalist, complained, “Abundance Libs are insisting the big problem isn’t corporate power & oligarchs, it’s zoning laws & The Groups? Come on.” Austin Ahlman, a researcher at the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly advocacy organization, mused, “You have to wonder whether the Abundance faction stuff would have landed better if the proponents had not laid the groundwork for it by first broadsiding every other organized constituency in the democratic tent.”

This angry response is not merely a knee-jerk reaction to criticism, but the logical outgrowth of a well-developed belief system. Since the Obama era, many of the component groups in the progressive coalition have drifted further left on their core demands. (Single-issue lobbies are naturally incentivized to grow more extreme over time—what organization is going to decide its pet cause is too unpopular or costly to merit a strident defense?)

At the same time, they have grown more purposeful about their belief that each group must stand behind all the positions outlined by the others. That is why civil-rights groups will demand student-debt relief, abortion-rights groups endorse abolishing the police, or trans-rights groups insist that Palestine should be liberated. Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an heir to the Hunt oil fortune who became a full-time progressive organizer, and who has raised and donated millions to causes such as the Sunrise Movement, the Debt Collective, and Black Lives Matter, articulated the principle of cross-endorsements in her book, Solidarity. She argues for “the necessity of working in coalition with progressive social movements,” and of resisting the opposition’s efforts “to weaponize a movement’s fault lines.”

Such progressives are not wrong to see the abundance agenda as a broader attack on their movement. Their theory of American politics depends on empowering the very groups the abundance agenda identifies as the architects of failure and barriers to progress.

But that dynamic also explains why the abundance agenda is likely to become the tentpole of the party’s moderate wing, even for politicians who have mixed feelings about its particulars. As the Niskanen Center’s Steven Teles and Robert Saldin have pointed out, the factional division between group-aligned progressive Democrats and the abundance Democrats opposed to them is already playing out in several cities. (San Francisco, where the failures of progressive urban governance are most pronounced, has the most organized abundance faction.)

In the 2020 Democratic primary, candidates competed for the groups’ favor by endorsing their most far-reaching and politically toxic demands, such as decriminalizing illegal border crossings and abolishing private health insurance. Abundance may provide an escape from that dynamic in 2028. Democrats who reject the demand to maintain solidarity with the groups at all costs will find themselves free to endorse policies that the majority of the country supports.

The first fissures are already beginning to appear at the national level. Some elements of the abundance agenda have appeal to the left. (There are, in particular, left-wing YIMBYs.) But most of the elected officials who have identified with it come from the party’s mainstream and moderate wings, such as Pete Buttigieg; Governors Kathy Hochul, Wes Moore, and Josh Shapiro; and House members Jake Auchincloss, Scott Peters, George Whitesides, and Ritchie Torres. Torres offers the most instructive example: Having previously carved out an identity as a gleeful antagonist to the party’s left wing on Israel and other divisive issues, he announced in January, “I feel like the abundance agenda is the best framework that I’ve heard for reimagining Democratic governance.”

By contrast, the progressive icon Elizabeth Warren told The Bulwark in April that she hasn’t read Abundance and plans to steer clear of the debate around it—a strange decision for a proudly detail-oriented wonk, but one that makes sense given the divides the issue has opened up on the left.

The formation of ideological factions within political parties is a staple of American history. The divide over slavery ruptured the Whigs; the progressive movement began within both the Democratic and Republican Parties, before migrating entirely into the Democratic camp. A faction can reorganize a party’s priorities, generating new alliances and rivalries, and pull new constituencies into a party while driving others out. Many factions start among intellectuals and writers, eventually developing followings among politicians.

Because the abundance agenda has developed out of the work of policy wonks, rather than political operatives, it was not cooked up to help Democrats in elections. It is far from a complete response to the party’s dilemma. The abundance agenda says nothing about social issues; an abundance lib could be for or against Medicare for All, the participation of trans women in college sports, or any number of issues that split the party. It is not a theory of everything.

It does, however, meet several political needs of the moment. It addresses the lack of faith in public services, which plunged after COVID. It promises to bring down consumer costs, which remain the public’s top concern. It provides a direct response to Elon Musk’s assault on state capacity. And it offers a plausible route to improving living standards at a time when high inflation and elevated interest rates and debt make promising big new social benefits harder.

Perhaps most important, the abundance agenda supplies Democrats with a vision of the future that contrasts sharply and clearly with Donald Trump’s. The president has lectured the country about the need to make do with less in the service of his self-destructive tariff regime. He has attacked plans to build denser cities as an assault on suburbs, defunded scientific research, sought to shut down the green-energy transition, and paralyzed the bureaucracy with arbitrary restrictions. The abundance agenda creates a unified program to reverse all these retrograde ideas, along with a practical understanding of the impediments that must be overcome to do so.

What has drawn many Americans to Trump is his claim that the system is so broken that, as he promised, “I alone can fix it.” The last time they held power, Democrats did little to rebut that claim. Now they must decide if they will abandon their legalistic commitment to fragmentary proceduralism or allow Trump’s boast to be vindicated.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, May 25, 2025 12:48 PM

Been watching Ezra Klein recently.

He sounds more MAGA every time a camera is put in front of him.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, June 1, 2025 7:32 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

An article about Trump, Trumptards and the Republican Party without mentioning those proper nouns.

5 ‘Argument Tactics’ That Narcissists Rely On — By A Psychologist

By Mark Travers | May 31, 2025, 04:15pm EDT

Mark Travers writes about the world of psychology.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2025/05/31/5-argument-tactics
-that-narcissists-rely-on---by-a-psychologist/

To strip the power from an emotional abuser, you must recognize their argument tactics for what they are: logical fallacies.

Narcissists tend to vastly overestimate the accuracy of their own beliefs. They become defensive, or even combative, when confronted with viewpoints that don’t align with their own. As a 2023 study published in Frontiers in Psychology explains, this is due to the fact that narcissists often exhibit very low levels of intellectual humility.

As a result, they rely heavily on manipulative argument tactics that serve to protect their inflated self-image. At face value, these tactics might seem clever, or maybe even intellectually sound. In reality, however, these tactics focus more on control than they do logic.

A 2024 study in published in Memory & Cognition also notes that individuals prone to such poor argument tactics are highly likely to accept and perpetuate information that confirms their existing beliefs.

Narcissists exploit this cognitive bias to others’ wits end: they frame their arguments to align with their victims’ fears or insecurities, or in ways that defend their warped self-image.

As such, they’re adept at spinning webs of flawed reasoning that feel convincing — but, under any actual scrutiny, they fall right apart. In other words, many of their go-to argument tactics are riddled with errors that are designed to deflect blame and derail conversations. In turn, they keep themselves in a position of control.

Here are five logical fallacies narcissists often rely on, and why they keep them in their repertoire.

1. Ad Hominem

The ad hominem fallacy occurs when someone chooses to attack the person making an argument instead of addressing the actual argument itself. They refuse to engage with the issue that was brought up, and instead discredit the speaker by focusing on their personal traits, emotions or past behavior. As a result, they shut down the discussion in its entirety.

For instance, say you confront a narcissist about their manipulative behavior. With an ad hominem attack, they might respond with, “You’re just insecure and bitter, that’s why you’re making such a big deal out of this.”

Rather than addressing your very real concerns, they attack you instead. As a result, your criticisms are rendered “irrational” in their eyes.

Narcissists heavily rely on ad hominem attacks, largely due to the fact that they will avoid engaging with facts that threaten their self-image at all costs. By turning the discussion into a critique of the accuser rather than their own actions, they change the course of the conversation. They make the victim feel self-conscious about raising concerns, which ensures the narcissist remains in control.

2. False Dichotomy

The false dichotomy fallacy arises once someone presents two extreme options as the only possible choices; they ignore the existence of middle-ground or nuance. This type of reasoning serves to force the victim (and the conversation as a whole) into a total gridlock. In turn, they prevent the possibility of any thoughtful discussions ensuing.

For instance, if you critique something that a narcissist says or does, they might respond in black-or-white statements like, “Either you agree with me, or you’re against me.” They equate any disagreement whatsoever with outright hostility.

But, in reality, relationships cannot function without compromise. Nor can discussions be productive without acknowledging the existence of both parties’ perspectives. Regardless, the narcissist limits the conversation to two opposing sides, which takes reasonable discourse out of the question entirely.

Narcissists favor false dichotomies given how well they simplify complex issues in ways that solely benefit them. By forcing you to choose between two extremes — total compliance or rejection — they pressure you out of thinking critically or independently. More cunningly, this also serves to instill you with guilt: as though refusing to align with their viewpoints equates to a signal of disloyalty.

3. Straw Man Argument

“Strawmanning” refers to the distortion of another person’s claim, which makes it easier to attack, refute or ignore. They refrain from acknowledging any of the actual points that were made, and opt instead to exaggerate, oversimplify or misrepresent the argument.

Consequently, the argument is painted as unreasonable or extreme. This eschews them from accountability, while simultaneously dismissing your concerns.

Imagine that you’ve calmly expressed your discomfort about a narcissist’s behavior. In response, they start a tirade with, “Oh, so now I’m the worst person in the world? I guess I can never do anything right!”

But by grossly exaggerating the complaint, they turn it into an extreme accusation (which was never never actually made) and trick you into focusing on damage control instead.

Strawmanning is useful when a narcissist feels the need to redirect the conversation, or when they want to put their victim on the defensive. They turn your genuine concerns into a caricature, or create an entirely new, false version of it, to ensure the discussion revolves around their feelings instead of their actions.

Not only does this discourage you from bringing up concerns in the future, but it also allows them to cherry-pick which of your points are worth giving credence to — even if they aren’t based in reality.

4. Red Herring

A red herring is a distraction tactic in which an unrelated topic is brought up purely to steer the conversation away from the real issue at hand. This technique is used to discombobulate the opposition, and to, once again, make it impossible to hold the person accountable for their actions.

For example, when confronted about emotionally hurtful behavior, a narcissist might suddenly say to you, “Well, remember when you forgot my birthday last year?”

With this completely out-of-left-field rebuttal, your attention is diverted away from their actions. In lieu of admitting any kind of wrongdoing, they portray you as the aggressor and themselves as the victim.

Red herrings are ideal when a narcissist is confronted with an argument that makes them feel uncomfortable, as they can derail the discussion in a manner that still allows them complete control over the narrative. Much like the other fallacies, red herrings divert your focus in a direction that ultimately only benefits them.

You’re forced into a position in which you must now defend yourself. Distractions like these are thrown in the hopes that their behavior will pale in comparison to yours — or that you forget you even brought it up in the first place.

5. Appeal To Hypocrisy

An appeal to hypocrisy, or tu quoque fallacy, is made by deflecting criticism with the fact that the accuser has likely done something similar in their lifetime. Once again, rather than addressing whether their behavior is right or wrong, the argument is sidetracked to whether the other person has ever made a similar mistake.

In charged discussions, this appeal may actually seem like a valid rebuttal, which is what makes it so reliable. Ultimately, however, it’s simply another way to avoid taking responsibility.

For instance, imagine that you’re trying to call a narcissist out about lying. Instead of explaining why they lied, or admitting that it was hurtful, they instead say, “Oh, so you’ve never lied before?”

Dishonesty is no longer the topic at hand; your past mistakes are instead. With this logic, they make it seem as though only a “perfect person” has the right to call them out.

Narcissists employ appeals to hypocrisy when they have no desire to engage in a meaningful conversation about their actions. They choose instead to create a false equivalence that vindicates them — a reality where there’s neither a need to take accountability or admit that their behavior was unjustified.

Concerned that you might have narcissistic tendencies? Take this science-backed test to find out if it’s cause for concern: Narcissism Scale https://therapytips.org/personality-tests/narcissism-scale

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, June 1, 2025 1:03 PM

Shut up, faggot.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, June 2, 2025 6:49 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Hating New York

Paul Krugman / Jun 2, 2025 at 5:33 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/hating-new-york

MAGA and MAGA-adjacent types are very good at finding things and people to hate. They hate immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans), LGBTQ people and wokeness. They hate universities and are doing their best to destroy American science. The New York Times reports that they hate Europe. And they very much hate New York City.

OK, I’m not impartial on this issue. I grew up on Long Island and still think of NYC proper as “the city.” I live in Manhattan now, and my experience is that if you can afford housing — which is admittedly a huge problem — it’s actually a very good life, with an incredible range of things to do either in walking distance or a short subway ride away. Not everyone wants to live this way, but nobody is saying they should. All we ask is that some Americans be allowed to have favorable views of a place that provides the advantages density and, yes, diversity can offer.

But that, of course, is exactly what the U.S. right refuses to accept. New York is one of the safest places in America, yet much of the country insists on seeing it as a terrifying urban hellscape. Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, insists that everyone is afraid to ride the subway:

If you want people to take the train, to take transit, then make it safe, make it clean, make it beautiful, make it wonderful, don’t make it a shithole.

Indeed, the subway is such an intolerable shithole that more than 4 million people ride it every day, myself among them. To be honest, the subway isn’t beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, and you can’t take it without coming into close contact with people who don’t look like you. But it’s quite safe — more on that in a minute — and it works very well at getting people quickly across the heart of a densely populated city.

As an aside, it’s remarkable that federal officials — who are supposed to work for all of us — feel free to trash-talk major American cities, as long as the cities in question vote Democratic.

But anyway, Duffy is an idiot, so I found it more interesting when Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, who reputedly isn’t an idiot, declared that “We want the U.S. to be more like Florida and less like New York.” I guess that he gets some points for trash-talking the whole state, not just the big city. But still.

What was he going on about? Well, Florida spends considerably less money on government programs and hence manages without an income tax. “And I can tell you having lived in both, it’s better not to have an income tax, and Florida gives better services.”

So is Florida clearly a better place than New York? Let’s look at some numbers:

Sources: Centers for Disease Control, KFF, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy

Start at the top. In my opinion, one important aspect of the quality of life is not being dead, and New Yorkers on average live three years longer than Floridians. Life expectancy is even higher, 81.5 years, in New York City.

Why do New Yorkers live longer? One answer is that city life — which involves a lot more walking than suburban life — is generally good for you.

Another is that New Yorkers are considerably less likely than Floridians to be murdered. In my experience many Americans simply refuse to believe that New York in 2025 isn’t what it was in 1975, that it’s actually a low-crime city. But it is.

And New Yorkers are much less likely than most Americans to die in traffic accidents. Why? In the city and surrounding areas, one main answer has to be that so many people take public transit rather than driving.

Which brings us to the whole issue of subway safety. Last year was unusually bad, with ten people murdered on the subway. Some of the murders were gruesome. But bear in mind, again, that 4 million people ride the subway each day — and that in 2023 thirty-four hundred Floridians died in car crashes. Taking the subway is much, much safer than driving.

Some Florida residents may also have died from lack of adequate medical care. Seniors in Florida, as in every state, are covered by Medicare. But Florida has refused to expand Medicaid, and in general New York makes much more effort to ensure coverage. As a result, Floridians under 65 are more than twice as likely as their New York counterparts to lack health insurance.

Of course, when Bessent says that America should be like Florida, he probably isn’t thinking about being unable to afford medical care, an issue that rarely arises for people with a net worth of at least $500 million.

He is, however, thinking about taxes. But here’s the funny thing: for most Floridians, taxes aren’t all that low. The state has a 6 percent sales tax, plus additional sales taxes levied by some local governments, and significant property taxes. The bottom 40 percent of Floridians pay almost exactly the same state and local taxes as a percentage of their income as the bottom 40 percent of New Yorkers.

The difference is at the top, where New Yorkers pay a state income tax plus, if they live in the city, a city income tax on top. So yes, if you’re in the top 1 percent, you pay much lower taxes if you live in Florida.

And these high taxes on the rich must do a lot of damage to New York’s economy, making it much less productive than Florida’s, right? Um. There are multiple reasons New York has such high real GDP per capita, but if taxes are doing a lot of harm you sure can’t see it in the data.

So what’s with Scott Bessent telling the United States to be more like Florida? It’s especially unseemly when he cites his personal experience of living in the two places — after all, he’s in the class that will never need Medicaid, probably never takes public transit, and benefits from Florida’s highly regressive tax system.

If you want to make the case for Florida-type governance, OK. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that what’s good for Scott Bessent is good for America.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 2, 2025 1:52 PM

Shut up, faggot.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, June 3, 2025 6:34 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America

Yarvin wants to destroy democracy. J. D. Vance, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen are among his fans.

The reactionary blogger’s call for a monarch to rule the country once seemed like a joke. Now the right is ready to bend the knee.

By Ava Kofman | June 2, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”

Moldbug acknowledged that his vision depended on the sanity of his chief executive: “Clearly, if he or she turns out to be Hitler or Stalin, we have just recreated Nazism or Stalinism.” Yet he dismissed the failures of twentieth-century dictators, whom he saw as too reliant on popular support. For Moldbug, any system that sought legitimacy in the passions of the mob was doomed to instability. Though critics labelled him a techno-fascist, he preferred to call himself a royalist or a Jacobite—a nod to partisans of James II and his descendants, who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, opposed Britain’s parliamentary system and upheld the divine right of kings. Never mind the French Revolution, the bête noire of reactionary thinkers: Moldbug believed that the English and American Revolutions had gone too far.

If Moldbug’s “Open Letter” showed little affection for the masses, it intimated that they might still have a use. “Communism was not overthrown by Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky, and Václav Havel,” he wrote. “What was needed was the combination of philosopher and crowd.” The best place to recruit this crowd, he said, was on the internet—a shrewd intuition. Before long, links to Moldbug’s blog, “Unqualified Reservations,” were being passed around by libertarian techies, disgruntled bureaucrats, and self-styled rationalists—many of whom formed the shock troops of an online intellectual movement that came to be known as neo-reaction, or the Dark Enlightenment. While few turned into outright monarchists, their contempt for Obama-era uplift seemed to find voice in Moldbug’s heresies. In his most influential coinage, which quickly gained currency among the nascent alt-right, Moldbug urged his readers to rouse themselves from their ideological slumber by taking the “red pill,” like Keanu Reeves’s character in “The Matrix,” who chooses daunting truth over contented ignorance.

In 2013, an article on the news site TechCrunch, titled “Geeks for Monarchy,” revealed that Mencius Moldbug was the cyber alias of a forty-year-old programmer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin. At the same time that he was trying to redesign the U.S. government, Yarvin was also dreaming up a new computer operating system that he hoped would serve as a “digital republic.” He founded a company that he named Tlon, for the Borges story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in which a secret society describes an elaborate parallel world that begins to overtake reality. As he raised money for his startup, Yarvin became a kind of Machiavelli to his big-tech benefactors, who shared his view that the world would be better off if they were in charge. Tlon’s investors included the venture-capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund, the latter of which was started by the billionaire Peter Thiel. Both Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, then a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, had become friends with Yarvin after reading his blog, though e-mails shared with me revealed that neither was thrilled to be publicly associated with him at the time. “How dangerous is it that we are being linked?” Thiel wrote to Yarvin in 2014. “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people”—social-justice warriors—“wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head (this is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left). Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kinda know it.”

A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret. In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has started quoting his “good friend” Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our “out of control” bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat “the Cathedral.”

“There are figures who channel a Zeitgeist—Nietzsche calls them timely men—and Curtis is definitely a timely man,” a State Department official who has been reading Yarvin since the Moldbug era told me. Back in 2011, Yarvin said that Trump was one of two figures who seemed “biologically suited” to be an American monarch. (The other was Chris Christie.) In 2022, he recommended that Trump, if reëlected, appoint Elon Musk to run the executive branch. On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,” he said.

In another timeline, Yarvin might have remained an obscure and ineffectual internet crank, a digital de Maistre. Instead, he has become one of America’s most influential illiberal thinkers, an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump Administration. “Yarvin has pushed the Overton window,” Nikhil Pal Singh, a history professor at N.Y.U., told me. His work has revived ideas that once seemed outside the bounds of polite society, Singh said, and created a road map for the dismantling of “the administrative state and the global postwar order.”

As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. “If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” he wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.” What many see as the most dangerous assault on American democracy in the nation’s history Yarvin dismisses as woefully insufficient—a “vibes coup.” Without a full-blown autocratic takeover, he believes, a backlash is sure to follow. When I spoke to him recently, he quoted the words of Louis de Saint-Just, the French philosopher who championed the Reign of Terror: “He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”

Earlier this year, Yarvin and I had lunch in Washington, D.C., where he had come to celebrate the regime change. He was in his usual getup: bluejeans, Chelsea boots, a rumpled dress shirt under a motorcycle jacket. After taking a few bites of a cheeseburger topped with crispy onions, he pushed his plate away. Last year, he explained, he’d decided to start taking an Ozempic-like drug after a debate with the right-wing commentator Richard Hanania about the relative merits of monarchy and democracy. “I destroyed him in almost every way,” Yarvin said, nudging a tomato with his fork. “But he had one huge advantage, which was that I was fat and he was not.”

The injections seemed to be working. As I ate, Yarvin’s phone filled with messages, some of them complimenting his glow-up. That morning, the Times Magazine had published an interview with him, accompanied by a moody black-and-white portrait. Until recently, Yarvin, with his frazzled curtain of shoulder-length hair and ill-fitting wardrobe, had seemed indifferent to his appearance. Now, wearing his leather jacket, he glared out at the reader through stylishly tousled hair. His friend Steve Sailer, a writer for white-nationalist websites, said he looked like “the fifth Ramone.”

In person, as in print, Yarvin expresses himself with imperious self-assurance. He is nearly impossible to interrupt. “When the rabbi is speaking, you let the rabbi speak,” Razib Khan, a right-wing science blogger and a close friend of Yarvin’s, told me. Even his friends and family, however, acknowledge that he has room to grow as a communicator. He talks in a halting monotone, rarely answers questions directly, and is prone to disorienting asides. In the middle of saying one thing, he is always getting distracted by something else he could be saying, like a G.P.S. that keeps suggesting faster routes.

Yarvin, for his part, was relieved at how the interview with the Times had gone. “My main goal was, how do I not damage any of my relationships?” he said. For years, Yarvin was best known, to the extent that he was known at all, as the court philosopher of the Thiel-verse, the network of heterodox entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and hangers-on surrounding the tech mogul. He mentioned that a businessman he knew had once complained to a journalist that Thiel had not invested enough money in his company. “That’s one strike and you’re out, and he was out,” Yarvin said, sighing theatrically. His second goal, he said, was to reach the Times audience. This seemed surprising: he has called for the government to shut down the paper. “I tend to be more interested in outreach to people who share my own cultural background,” Yarvin explained.

He likes to tell the story of his paternal grandparents, Jewish Communists from Brooklyn who met at a leftist gathering in the thirties. (He has less to say about his maternal grandparents, Tarrytown Wasps with a cottage on Nantucket.) “The vibe of American communism was ‘We’ve got thirty I.Q. points on these people, and we’re going to win,’ ” he said. “It’s like, what if all the gifted kids formed a political party and tried to take over the world?” Yarvin’s parents met at Brown, where his father, Herbert, was pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy. After finishing school and failing to get tenure (“too arrogant,” Yarvin said), Herbert tried his hand at writing the Great American Novel, then joined the Foreign Service as a diplomat. In the following years, the family lived in the Dominican Republic and Cyprus. Herbert was cynical about working for the government, and Yarvin seems to have inherited his disdain: he has repeatedly proposed closing America’s embassies, a prospect the State Department is now considering in parts of Europe and Africa.

Yarvin is reticent on the subject of his childhood, but friends and family suggested to me that his father could be harsh, domineering, and impossible to please. “He controlled their life with an iron fist,” someone with close knowledge of the family told me. “It was absolutely his domain.” (Yarvin vehemently rejected this view, saying that people who are controlling tend to be insecure, “and that is very much not the way of my father.” Better words to describe him, he said, would be “stubborn,” “intense,” and “formidable”—like “a good manager.”)

Growing up, Yarvin was sometimes homeschooled by his mother, and skipped three grades. (His older brother, Norman, skipped four.) The family eventually moved to Columbia, Maryland, where Yarvin entered high school as a twelve-year-old sophomore. “When you’re much younger than your classmates, you’re either an adorable mascot or a weird, threatening, disturbing alien,” Yarvin said, adding that he was the latter. Yarvin was selected to participate in a Johns Hopkins study of math prodigies. He attended the university’s Center for Talented Youth, a summer camp for gifted children, and was a Baltimore-area champion on “It’s Academic,” a television trivia show. Andrew Cone, a software engineer who currently lives in a spare room in Yarvin’s home, told me that Yarvin’s childhood seems to have left him with a lifelong feeling of inadequacy. “I think he has this sense of being not good enough, that he’s seen as ridiculous or small, and that the only way out is to perform,” Cone said.

Yarvin went to Brown, graduated at eighteen, and then entered a Ph.D. program in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Former peers told me that he wore a bicycle helmet in class and seemed eager to show off his knowledge to the professor. “Oh, you mean helmet-head?” one said when I asked about Yarvin. The joke among some of his classmates was that the helmet prevented new ideas from penetrating his mind. He found more of a community on Usenet, a precursor to today’s online forums. But even in groups like talk.bizarre, where intellectual peacocking was the norm, he stood out for his desire to dominate. Along with posting jokes, advice, light verse, and “flames” (blistering takedowns of other users), he maintained a “kill file,” a list of members he had blocked because he found their posts uninteresting. “He wanted to be viewed as the smart guy—that was really, really important to him,” his first girlfriend, Meredith Tanner, told me. She was drawn to Yarvin after reading one of his virtuosic flames, and the pair dated for a few years. “Don’t get involved with someone just because you’re impressed by how creatively they insult people,” she warned. “They will turn that skill on you.”

Friends from Yarvin’s twenties described him as a reflexive contrarian who revelled in provocation. “He wasn’t a sweet kid, and he could sometimes be nasty, but he wasn’t Moldbug,” one said. Politically and culturally, Yarvin was a liberal—“a big old hippie,” as Tanner put it. He had a ponytail, wore a silver hoop earring, dropped acid at raves, and wrote poetry. Tanner recalled that when she once questioned the value of affirmative action in college admissions, it was Yarvin who convinced her of its necessity.

After a year and a half of doctoral work, Yarvin left academia to seek his fortune in the tech industry. He helped design an early version of a mobile web browser for a company that came to be known as Phone.com. In 2001, he began dating Jennifer Kollmer, a playwright he met on Craigslist, whom he later married and had two children with. Phone.com had gone public, leaving him with a windfall of a million dollars. He used some of the money to buy a condo near the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco and the rest to fund a self-directed study of computer science and political theory. “I was used to getting pats on the head for being smart,” he said of his decision to leave the cursus honorum of the gifted child. “Diverging from the pat-on-the-head economy was a strange and scary choice.”

Out in the wilderness, Yarvin delved into recondite history and economics texts, many of them newly accessible through Google Books. He read Thomas Carlyle, James Burnham, and Albert Jay Nock, alongside an early-aughts profusion of political blogs. Yarvin traces his own red-pill moment to the Presidential election of 2004. As many of his peers were being driven to the left by lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Yarvin was pulled in the opposite direction by fabrications of a different sort: the Swift Boat conspiracy theory pushed by veterans allied with the George W. Bush campaign, who claimed that the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, had lied about his service in Vietnam. It seemed obvious to Yarvin, who believed the accusations, that once the truth emerged Kerry would be forced to drop out of the race. When that didn’t happen, he began to question what else he’d naïvely taken on trust. Facts no longer felt stable. How could he be confident in what he’d been told about Joseph McCarthy, the Civil War, or global warming? What about democracy itself? After years of energetic debates in the comments sections of other people’s blogs, he decided to start his own. It did not lack for ambition. The first post began, “The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.”

The German academic Hans-Hermann Hoppe is sometimes described as an intellectual gateway to the far right. A retired economics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Hoppe argues that universal suffrage has supplanted rule by a “natural élite”; advocates for breaking nations into smaller, homogenous communities; and calls for communists, homosexuals, and others who oppose this rigid social order to be “physically removed.” (Some white nationalists have made memes pairing Hoppe’s face with a helicopter—an allusion to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of executing opponents by throwing them from aircraft.) Though Hoppe favors a minimal state, he believes that freedom is better preserved by monarchy than by democracy.

Yarvin nearly ended up a libertarian. As a Bay Area coder and a devotee of Austrian-school economists in his late twenties, he exhibited all the risk factors. Then he discovered Hoppe’s book “Democracy: The God That Failed” (2001) and changed his mind. Yarvin soon adopted Hoppe’s imago of a benevolent strongman—someone who would govern efficiently, avoid senseless wars, and prioritize the well-being of his subjects. “It’s not copy-and-pasted, but it is such a direct influence that it’s kind of obscene,” Julian Waller, a scholar of authoritarianism at George Washington University, said. (Over e-mail, Hoppe recalled that he met Yarvin once at an exclusive gathering at Peter Thiel’s home, where Hoppe had been invited to speak. He acknowledged his influence on Yarvin, but added, “For my taste his writing has always been a bit too flowery and rambling.”) Hoppe argues that, unlike democratically elected officials, a monarch has a long-term incentive to safeguard his subjects and the state, because both belong to him. Anyone familiar with the history of dictatorships might find this idea disingenuous. Not Yarvin.

“You don’t ransack your own house,” he told me one afternoon, at an open-air café in Venice Beach. I’d asked him what would stop his C.E.O.-monarch from plundering the country—or enslaving his people—for personal gain. “For Louis XIV, when he says, ‘L’état, c’est moi,’ ransacking the state holds no meaning because it’s all his anyway.” Following Hoppe, Yarvin proposes that nations should eventually be broken up into a “patchwork” of statelets, like Singapore or Dubai, each with its own sovereign ruler. The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp. (How the board itself would be selected is unclear, but Yarvin has suggested that airline pilots—“a fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others. What’s not to like?”—could manage the transition between regimes.) To prevent a C.E.O. from staging a military coup, the board members would have access to cryptographic keys that would allow them to disarm all government weapons, from nuclear missiles down to small arms, with the push of a button.

Mass political participation would cease, and the only way that people could vote would be with their feet, by moving from one SovCorp to another if they became dissatisfied with the terms of service, like switching from X to Bluesky. The irony that dissenters like Yarvin would probably be repressed in such a state appears not to concern him. In his imagined polity, he insists, there would still be freedom of speech. “You can think, say, or write whatever you want,” he has promised. “Because the state has no reason to care.”

Yarvin’s congenital cynicism about governance disappears as soon as he starts talking about dictatorial regimes. He has kind words for El Salvador’s strongman, Nayib Bukele, and has encouraged Trump to let Putin end the liberal order “not just in Russian-speaking territories—but all the way to the English Channel.” Picking at a plate of fried calamari, Yarvin praised China and Rwanda (neither of which he has visited) for having strong governments that insured both public safety and personal liberty. In China, he told me, “you can think and pretty much say whatever you want.” He may have sensed my skepticism, given the country’s record of imprisoning critics and detaining ethnic minorities in concentration camps. “If you want to organize against the government, you’re gonna have problems,” he admitted. Then he returned to his airbrush: “Not Stalin problems. You’ll just, like, be cancelled.”

For certain people, like meth addicts or four-year-olds, Yarvin said, too much freedom could be deadly. Then, gesturing to the homeless population camped in the neighborhood, he suddenly began to cry. “The idea that this represents success, or this represents the ‘worst of all systems, except for all the others’ ”—he was referencing Churchill’s famous comment about democracy, which I’d paraphrased earlier—“is highly delusional,” he said, wiping away the tears. (A few weeks later, on a trip to London, I watched him break down while giving a similar speech to a member of the House of Lords. It was less affecting the second time around.)

Presumably, Yarvin’s monarch would act decisively to safeguard his wards. At the Venice café, Yarvin lauded the Delancey Street Foundation, a nonprofit rehab organization, whose strict program he has characterized as exerting “fascist-parent-level control.” Some of his own proposals go further. On his blog, he once joked about converting San Francisco’s underclasses into biodiesel to power the city’s buses. Then he suggested another idea: putting them in solitary confinement, hooked up to a virtual-reality interface. Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”

Yarvin’s call for an American strongman is often treated as an eccentric provocation. In fact, he considers it the only answer to a world in which most people are unfit for democracy. An “African country today,” he told me, has “enough smart people in the country to run it—you just don’t have enough smart people to have a democratic election in which everyone is smart.” Because of such remarks, Yarvin is sometimes identified as a white nationalist, a label he delicately resists. In a 2007 blog post titled “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,” he explained that, though he is “not exactly allergic to the stuff,” he finds both whiteness and nationalism to be unhelpful political concepts. During lunch, he told me that he feels a rueful sympathy for the bigots of the past, who had some of the right intuitions but lacked the proper science. Neo-reactionaries tend to subscribe to what they call “human biodiversity,” a set of fringe beliefs which holds, among other things, that not all racial or population groups are equally intelligent. As Yarvin came to see it from his online research, these genetic differences contributed to (and, conveniently, helped explain away) demographic differences in poverty, crime, and educational attainment. “In this house, we believe in science—race science,” he wrote last year.

For several hours, Yarvin shuffled through his pitches for strongman rule, like an auctioneer desperate to clinch a sale. I listened patiently, though I was often puzzled by his factual distortions and peculiar asides. “What is the right policy in a completely new-from-scratch regime for African Americans?” he wondered aloud at one point. At first, this seemed like a non sequitur: I’d been pressing him on how he would define success in the second Trump Administration. Answering himself, he said that the “obvious solution” to problems of inner-city drug abuse and poverty would be to “put the church Blacks in charge of the ghetto Blacks.” Yarvin, who is an atheist, is not particularly interested in theocratic rule, but he advocates creating different legal codes to govern different populations. (He has cited the Ottoman millet system, which granted religious communities a measure of autonomy.) To keep the “ghetto Blacks” in line, he went on, they should be forced to live in a “traditional way,” like Orthodox Jews or the Amish. “The approach that the twentieth century took is, if we could just make the schools good enough, they would all turn into Unitarians,” he said. “If you’ve seen ‘The Wire’ and lived in Baltimore, both of which I have, that does not seem to work at all.” It wasn’t until he reached the end of his speech, ten minutes later, that I realized he was, in his own way, addressing my initial question. “Unless we can totally reëngineer DNA to change what a human being is, there are many people who should not live in a modern way but in a traditional way,” he concluded. “And that is a level of revolution that is so far beyond anything the Trump-Vance regime is doing.”

Yarvin is not known for his discretion. He has a habit of sharing private correspondence, as I discovered when he started sending me unsolicited screenshots of text messages and e-mails he’d exchanged with his wife, his friends, a fact checker at the Times Magazine, and someone nominated to the new Administration. He seemed troubled by the thought that the wit and wisdom they contained might be lost to posterity. He was more guarded about his friendship with Thiel, but he did mention a conversation they’d privately filmed together last year and boasted about a fortieth-birthday gift he’d received from the billionaire: Francis Neilson’s “The Tragedy of Europe,” a contemporaneous commentary on the Second World War, though not the first edition that Yarvin had been hoping for.

Thiel has always had a prophetic touch. He co-founded PayPal, became the first outside investor in Facebook, and created Palantir, a data-mining firm that has just received a new contract to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carry out deportations. Thiel supported Trump back when doing so still made one a pariah in Silicon Valley. In 2022, he donated fifteen million dollars to J. D. Vance’s Senate campaign, the largest amount given to a single candidate in congressional history. A longtime libertarian, Thiel appears to have taken a Yarvinian turn around 2009, when, in a widely quoted essay published online by the Cato Institute, he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Yarvin linked to it approvingly in a blog post titled “Democraphobia Goes (Slightly) Viral.” They soon met for the first time, at Thiel’s house in San Francisco, and, according to private messages I reviewed, struck up a confiding correspondence. Yarvin’s e-mails were long and homiletic, full of precepts gleaned from pickup-artist blogs; Thiel’s were straightforward and concise. Both men seemed to take for granted that America was a communist country, that journalists acted like the Stasi, and that tech C.E.O.s were their prey.

In the fall of 2014, Thiel published “Zero to One,” a best-selling treatise on startups, with Blake Masters, his employee and a longtime Moldbug fan. Before the book tour, Thiel asked Yarvin for advice on fielding questions he might get on how to steer more women into tech. The premise appeared to strike them both as misguided, since women, in their view, were less likely to have men’s aptitude for computer science. As Yarvin put it in one e-mail, “There’s simply no way short of becoming a farce for Google, YC”—Y Combinator, the startup accelerator—“etc, etc, to ‘look like America.’ ” Yarvin suggested that Thiel deploy a pickup-artist tactic called “agree and amplify”—that is, ask a journalist, who probably had no solution in mind, what she would do to tackle the problem. “The purpose here is not to get the interlocutor to sleep with you, but to get her to fear this issue and run away from it—and ditto for future interviewers,” he wrote. Once, at a dinner, Thiel quizzed Yarvin on how one might go about taking down Gawker. (As it turned out, Thiel had already decided to secretly bankroll Hulk Hogan’s defamation lawsuit against the online publication, which eventually bankrupted it, in 2016.) In e-mails obtained by BuzzFeed, Yarvin bragged to Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart editor, that he’d watched Trump’s first election at Thiel’s house and had been “coaching” him. “Peter needs guidance on politics for sure,” Yiannopoulos replied. Yarvin wrote back, “Less than you might think! . . . He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”

When I recently visited Yarvin’s Craftsman home, in Berkeley, I noticed a painting that Thiel had given him: a portrait of Yarvin in the style of a role-playing-game character card, bearing the legend “Philosopher.” As I sipped tea from a novelty mug featuring an image of Yarvin with a cartoon crown, he told me that it would be “cringe” for him to broadcast his relationship with Thiel—or with Vance, for that matter, whom he met through Thiel around 2015. “Does a normal Ohio voter read . . . Mencius Moldbug? No,” Vance reportedly said one night at a bar during the 2021 National Conservatism Conference. “But do they agree with the broad thrust of where we think American public policy should go? Absolutely.” “He’s a really cool guy,” Yarvin said of the Vice-President, who followed him on X earlier this year. (The White House did not respond to requests for comment.)

Although Yarvin tried to be discreet, he mentioned that Thiel has a bit of a “weirdo edge” and described Andreessen, the venture capitalist, as someone who, “apart from the bizarre and possibly even nonhuman shape of his head, would seem much more normal than Peter.” After Andreessen invested in Yarvin’s startup, Tlon, the two got to know each other; they texted and went to brunch long before Andreessen came out as a Trump supporter, last year. Andreessen has been known to urge his associates to read Yarvin’s blog. “Tech people are not interested in appeals to virtue or beauty or tradition, like most conservatives,” the State Department official said. “They are more like right-wing progressives, and for a long time Moldbug was the only person speaking to them this way.” (Andreessen and Thiel declined to comment.) Apropos of his relationships with powerful men, Yarvin paraphrased to me “a wonderful piece of advice for courtiers” that he’d picked up from Lord Chesterfield’s “Letters to His Son,” an eighteenth-century etiquette manual addressed to the author’s illegitimate child: “Never bug them. And never let them forget you exist.”

Yarvin has had more success as a courtier to startup founders than as a founder himself. He launched Tlon in 2013, with a twentysomething former Thiel fellow. Yarvin approached computer science the same way he approached the U.S. government—with, as he put it, “utopian megalomania.” Yarvin’s visionary goal was to build a peer-to-peer computer network, named Urbit, that would allow users to control their own data, free from scolds, spies, and monopolies. Each user on the Urbit network is identified with an N.F.T. that acts like a digital passport. Even though Urbit promotes decentralization, the system is designed around a hierarchical model of virtual real estate, with users owning “planets,” “stars,” or “galaxies.”

In an early sketch of the system, Yarvin named himself its “prince,” but he struggled to attract subjects to his imaginary kingdom. Like Yarvin’s political theory, his programming language, which he wrote himself, was daring, abstruse, and sometimes mistaken for a hoax. Ever the contrarian, he reversed the meaning of zeros and ones. After decades of work and an estimated thirty million dollars of investment, Urbit seems to function less like a feudal society and more like the Usenet forums of Yarvin’s youth. (The trade publication CoinDesk has called it “a slower version of AOL Instant Messenger.”) “It doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to,” a former Urbit employee told me, describing Yarvin as “the world’s first computer-science crank.” Yarvin left the company in 2019.

No longer needing to worry about spooking investors, Yarvin threw himself into the life style of a self-described “rogue intellectual.” Under his own name, he launched a Substack newsletter, “Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince.” (Today, it is the platform’s third most popular “history” publication.) He became a fixture on the right-wing podcast circuit and seemed never to turn down an invitation to party. On his travels, he often hosted “office hours”—informal, freewheeling discussions with readers, many of them thoughtful young men, alienated by liberal guilt and groupthink. What wins Yarvin converts is less the soundness of his arguments than the transgressive energy they exude: he makes his listeners feel that he is granting them access to forbidden knowledge—about racial hierarchy, historical conspiracies, and the perfidy of democratic rule—that progressive culture is at pains to suppress. His approach seizes on the reality that most Americans have never learned how to defend democracy; they were simply brought up to believe in it.

Yarvin advises his followers to avoid culture-war battles over issues like D.E.I. and abortion. It is wiser, he argues, to let the democratic system collapse on its own. In the meantime, dissidents should focus on becoming “fashionable” by building a reactionary subculture—a counter-Cathedral. Sam Kriss, a left-wing writer who has debated Yarvin, said of his work, “It flatters people who believe they can change the world simply by having weird ideas on the Internet and decadent parties in Manhattan.”

Such people have come to be known as the “dissident right,” a loose constellation of artists and strivers clustered around the Bay Area, Miami, and the Lower East Side micro-neighborhood Dimes Square. The milieu was drawn together by a frustration with electoral politics, Covid lockdowns, and the strictures of “wokeness.” Vice signalling has been central to the scene’s countercultural allure: instead of sharing pronouns and employing the approved nomenclature (“unhoused,” “Latinx,” “justice-involved person”), its members have revived insults like “gay” and “retarded.” Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, the hosts of the “Red Scare” podcast, are among the most prominent avatars of the scene. In 2021, Thiel helped to fund an anti-woke film festival in New York, and Yarvin read his poetry at one of its packed events. Urbit now hosts a literary magazine designed to look like The New York Review of Books. “If you are an intelligent Jewish-American urbanite who wants to play around with certain Nietzschean and eugenic themes, you aren’t going to join tiki-torch-bearing marchers chanting that ‘the Jews will not replace us,’ ” the conservative commentator Sohrab Ahmari observed in an essay last year. “No, you turn to the dissident right.”

Yarvin has emerged as a veteran edgelord of this crowd, which he compared to San Francisco’s gay subculture in the seventies and to the Lost Generation of literary modernists—tight-knit communities whose members bonded over their sense of being outsiders. James Joyce, he said, sold few copies of “Ulysses,” but his friends, like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, “knew that what he was doing was good.” So it was with the creatives of the dissident right, whose endeavors, he felt, had been overlooked by the intolerant Cathedral. This past April, Yarvin pitched Darren Beattie, the acting Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, on a plan for “dissident-right art hos” to take over the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Lately, Yarvin has been trying to flip some of his newly acquired cultural capital into the real thing. Last year, he returned to Urbit as a “wartime C.E.O.,” after which several top employees resigned, and in February he raised more money from Andreessen Horowitz. According to a draft of an unpublished Substack post, his newest plan is to promote Urbit as an élite private club whose members, he believes, are destined to become “the stars of the new public sphere—a new Usenet, a new digital Athens built to last forever.”

The night before Trump’s Inauguration, I drove Yarvin to a black-tie “Coronation Ball” at the Watergate Hotel, in Washington, D.C. The event was organized by a neo-reactionary publishing house, Passage Press, which recently released Yarvin’s book “Gray Mirror, Fascicle I: Disturbance,” the first of a planned four-part cycle outlining his vision for a new political regime. Its endnotes predominantly consist of QR-code links to Wikipedia pages: “Denazification,” “L’État, c’est moi,” “Presentism (historical analysis).” As I negotiated the icy streets, Yarvin explained that during the Elizabethan era the finest minds in the arts and sciences were to be found at court. When I asked if he saw a parallel with Trump’s inner circle, he burst out laughing. “Oh, no,” he said. “My God.”

Like most journalists, I had been denied entry to the ball, so I ordered a drink at a bar in the lobby. Standing next to me was a man wearing a cowboy hat and a burgundy velour suit—a Yarvin enthusiast, it turned out, named Alex Maxa. He ran a party-bus company in San Francisco, and in his free time he made memes featuring Yarvin’s likeness. He said that he was drawn to Yarvin’s work because “it makes me feel like I’ve got something that people in Washington who think they’re really smart can’t actually make a compelling argument against.” He’d wanted to go to the ball but tickets, whose price had surged to twenty thousand dollars, were now sold out. Not long afterward, I met two of Yarvin’s friends, who encouraged me, and another journalist I was with, to confidently walk into the party with them. Maxa was already inside, having taken a similar approach. “Lol I just waltzed right in by asking where the coat check was,” he texted.

Passage Press had billed the event as “MAGA meets the Tech Right.” It was not false advertising. In a banquet hall awash in pink and purple light, Anton, from the State Department, Laura Loomer, a Trump whisperer known for her anti-Muslim bigotry, and Jack Posobiec, who popularized the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, mingled with venture capitalists, crypto accelerationists, and Substack all-stars. Earlier that evening, as guests dined on seared scallops and filet mignon, Steve Bannon, the ball’s keynote speaker, called for mass deportations, the “Götterdämmerung” of the administrative state, and Mark Zuckerberg’s imprisonment.

Eight years ago, Mike Cernovich, a first-gen alt-right influencer, had co-hosted an inaugural party known as the DeploraBall, a winking reference to Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate crack about half of Trump’s supporters belonging in a “basket of deplorables.” It was, by all accounts, a shambolic affair, plagued by journalists and protesters. One of Cernovich’s co-organizers, Tim Gionet, who goes by the online pseudonym Baked Alaska, was removed from his role after posting antisemitic content on Twitter. Now, at the Coronation Ball, Baked Alaska was served for dessert—a nod, it seemed, to Gionet, who was then on probation for participating in the January 6th insurrection. (He was pardoned by Trump the next day.) Cernovich pushed a baby around in a stroller and marvelled, like a proud father, at how far the movement had come. “I was one of the oldest guys in the place!” he tweeted the following afternoon. “Real right wing. High energy and high IQ.” In 2008, Yarvin, in his “Open Letter,” had called for a reactionary vanguard to form an underground political party. The Coronation Ball made it clear that this was no longer necessary. His web-addled counter-élite was now the establishment.

Yarvin was dressed in the same tuxedo, including a bright-red cummerbund, that he’d worn to a party at Thiel’s house in D.C. the night before, where, as Politico reported, Vance had amiably greeted him with “You reactionary fascist!” He’d also worn the tux to his wedding last year. Yarvin’s first wife died in 2021, from a hereditary heart disease, at the age of fifty. At the ball, he was accompanied by his second wife, Kristine Militello. A former Bernie Sanders supporter and an aspiring novelist, Kristine described herself as having been “red-pilled” during the pandemic, after losing her customer-service job at an online wine retailer. She first encountered Yarvin on YouTube, where she watched a video of him arguing against the legitimacy of the American Revolution, and proceeded to read everything he’d written. She sent him an admiring e-mail in 2022, seeking advice on how to break into New York’s dissident-right literary scene, and they met for drinks a few weeks later.

Recently, Yarvin has taken to describing himself as a “dark elf” whose role is to seduce “high elves”—blue-state élites—by planting “acorns of dark doubt in their high golden minds.” (In this Tolkien-inspired metaphor, red-state conservatives are “hobbits” who should submit to the “absolute power” of a new ruling class made up, unsurprisingly, of dark elves.) He didn’t always express himself so quaintly. In 2011, the day after the far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik killed sixty-nine people, many of them teen-agers, at a summer camp in Norway, Yarvin wrote, “If you’re going to change Norway into something new, you need the present ruling class of Norway to join and follow you. Or at least, you’ll need their children.” He praised Breivik for targeting the right group (“communists, not Muslims”), but condemned his methods: “Rape is beta. Seduction is alpha. Don’t slaughter the youth camp—recruit the youth camp.”

Yarvin’s own recruitment efforts seemed to be working. Near the open bar, I spoke to Stevie Miller, a sprightly sophomore at Carnegie Mellon who has been reading Yarvin since the seventh grade. (Yarvin told me that he’d encountered several gifted Zoomers who’d read him as preteens because his “high-I.Q. style” served as a “high-I.Q. magnet.”) Two years ago, Miller hung out with Yarvin at Vibecamp, a gathering for nerds and techies in rural Maryland. Yarvin, who left early, asked Miller to help him throw his own party in D.C., which came to be known as Vibekampf. Afterward, Miller became Yarvin’s first personal intern. “My parents, New York Jewish liberals who I love, were totally mystified,” he said.

After half an hour, I was escorted out of the party, as were other reporters throughout the evening. Security mistook Maxa, my friend from the lobby, for one of our kind, and he was ejected, too, though not before pressing through the crowd to get his photo taken with the dark elf.

Even Trump’s most pessimistic critics have been startled by the speed with which the President, in his second term, has moved to impose autocracy on America, concentrating power in the executive branch—and often enough in the hands of the richest men on earth. Elon Musk, an unelected citizen, has led a squadron of twentysomethings on a spree through the federal government, laying off tens of thousands of civil servants, shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, and seizing control of the Treasury Department’s payment system. Meanwhile, the Administration has launched an assault on civil society, revoking funding at Harvard and other universities that it claims are bastions of ideological indoctrination and punishing law firms that have represented Trump’s opponents. It has expanded the machinery of immigration enforcement, deporting three U.S.-born children to Honduras, a group of Asian and Latin American immigrants to Africa, and more than two hundred Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, where they may remain until the end of their lives. U.S. citizens now find themselves with a government that claims the right to disappear them without due process: as Trump told Bukele, the President of El Salvador, during an Oval Office meeting, “Homegrowns are next.” Without a vigorous system of checks and balances, one man’s crank ideas—like starting an incoherent trade war that upends the global economy—don’t get filtered out. They become policies that enrich his family and his allies.

Since January, a cottage industry has arisen online to trace links between the government’s chaotic blitz of actions and Yarvin’s writings. Yarvin is hardly the Rasputin-like figure with Oval Office access that certain Bluesky users imagine him to be, but it isn’t difficult to see why some people may have come to this view. Last month, an anonymous DOGE adviser told the Washington Post that it was “an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin.” Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff, recently quote-tweeted him. Vance has called for the U.S. to retrench from Europe, a longtime Yarvin desideratum. Last spring, Yarvin proposed expelling all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turning it into a luxury resort. “Did I hear someone say ‘beachfront?’ ” he wrote on Substack. “The new Gaza—developed, of course, by Jared Kushner—is the LA of the Mediterranean, an entirely new charter city on humanity’s oldest ocean, sublime real estate with an absolutely perfect, Apple-quality government.” This February, during a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, Trump surprised his advisers when he made a nearly identical proposal, describing his redeveloped Gaza as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Whenever I asked Yarvin about resonances between his writing and real-world events, his response was nonchalant. He seemed to see himself as a conduit for pure reason—the only mystery, to him, was why it had taken others so long to catch up. “You can invent a lie, but you can only discover the truth,” he told me. We were in London, where he was attending the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a conservative conference co-founded by the psychologist Jordan Peterson. (Yarvin described Peterson to me as “a dandy” with “a weird narcissistic energy coming off of him.”) Accompanying Yarvin on his travels were Eduardo Giralt Brun and Alonso Esquinca Díaz, two millennial filmmakers who were shooting a documentary about his life. Their goal was to make a naturalistic character study in the style of “Grey Gardens,” in which, as Brun put it, “the camera just happens to be around.” It wasn’t going to plan. Yarvin kept repeating the same monologues, which meant that much of the footage was the same. The filmmakers worried that his racist remarks would turn viewers off. One afternoon in London, Díaz had filmed Yarvin getting his portrait painted with Lord Maurice Glasman, a post-liberal political theorist who has been called “Labour’s MAGA Lord,” for his support of Brexit and his ongoing dialogue with figures like Steve Bannon. At one point in their discussion, Yarvin had pulled out his iPhone to show Glasman that he’d hacked the chatbot Claude to get it to call him by the N-word.

Some thinkers would envy the attention Yarvin is receiving. But he dismissed his influence as a “fraudulent currency” since it has yet to cash out in the revolution he desires. He poured scorn on DOGE (“so much libertarian DNA”) and Trump’s tariff plan (not mercantilist enough). In a recent essay on Substack, he criticized the decision to dispatch plainclothes ICE officers to jail college students and professors for political speech—not on moral grounds, but because the thuggish optics were likely to provoke resistance. Yarvin’s oracular pronouncements and bottomless disdain for actually existing politics have inspired a viral post: his face under the words “Your anti-regime actions work well in practice. But do they work in theory?” The conservative activist Christopher Rufo has compared Yarvin to “a sullen teenager who insists that everything is pointless.” I came to think of him as a reactionary Goldilocks who would be satisfied with nothing less than the inch-perfect autocracy that he’d constructed in his mind.

This apparent desire for control also shows up in some of his relationships. Not long ago, I visited Lydia Laurenson, Yarvin’s ex-fiancée, in Berkeley. The two began dating in September, 2021, after Yarvin posted a personal ad on Substack, explaining that he’d recently lost his “widower virginity” and was looking to meet someone of “childbearing age.” Laurenson, a freelance writer and editor, replied the same day: “I have historically been a liberal but my IQ is really high, I want kids, and I’m incredibly curious to talk to you.” Yarvin went on Zoom dates with other women who answered the post—among them, Caroline Ellison, the ex-girlfriend of the now imprisoned crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried—but he and Laurenson soon found themselves in an all-consuming romance. She told me that the ethos of her relationship with Yarvin was “ ‘We’re going to be geniuses together and have genius babies.’ I’m making fun of it a little bit, but that really was it.”

Like Yarvin, Laurenson had been a precocious child who went to college early. She’d also maintained a blog with a cult following, where, under the pseudonym Clarisse Thorn, she wrote about sex-positive feminism, B.D.S.M., and pickup artistry. She and Yarvin fought often, sometimes about politics. Laurenson had moved away from the left, but she hadn’t fully embraced neo-reaction. When I asked her if she’d ever changed Yarvin’s mind about anything, she said she’d gotten him to stop using the N-word, at least around her. (He later told this magazine that he was not using the word in the spirit of “a Southern plantation owner.”)

The bigger source of tension, according to Laurenson, was Yarvin’s autocratic attachment style. When they fought, Laurenson said, he insisted that she provide a rational justification for ending hostilities. She felt that Yarvin’s slippery personal attacks resembled his manner in public debates. “He makes up explanations that seem reasonable, but are actually false; he attacks the character of the person who is trying to point out what he’s doing; it’s like a DDOS attack of the soul,” she told me in an e-mail, referencing the cyberattack strategy of overwhelming a server with traffic from multiple sources. James Dama, a friend of Laurenson’s who had his own falling out with Yarvin, recalled, “He would make a coarse joke about Lydia’s weight or looks, not get a laugh, and then get angry at Lydia for being too stuck up.” (Tanner, Yarvin’s first girlfriend, described a similar pattern of insults and demands.)

Laurenson and Yarvin broke up in the summer of 2022, while Laurenson was pregnant. He told me that his desire for closeness might have struck Laurenson as “overbearing and stifling,” and that he had a bad habit of making “a joke that’s sort of a barb,” but he denied that he was ever purposefully cruel during the relationship. (He added that, after the relationship ended, “my natural instinct was, I’m going to cut her down to size every time I can”—something, he noted, he was “very good at.”) A few weeks after their son was born, that December, Yarvin sued for partial custody, which he received. An ongoing family-court case remains acrimonious. “The parents are in disagreement about nearly every issue,” their mediator observed last year.

Now that they share a toddler, Laurenson spends a lot of time thinking about Yarvin’s own childhood. “He has this class-clown thing going on, where he very much craves attention,” she said. To her, it seemed that his embrace of a provocative ideology was a kind of “repetition compulsion,” a psychological defense that allowed him to reframe the ostracization he experienced growing up. As America’s most famous living monarchist, he could tell himself that people were rejecting him for his outré ideas, not for his personality. She wondered if he’d first adopted “the monarchist thing” as a kind of intellectual sport, a bit from Usenet, and then, like the parallel world in the Borges story, it had slowly taken on a reality of its own. “Is it just like you found this place where people admire you and allow you to troll as much as you want, and then you just live in that world?” she asked.

In the past decade, liberalism has taken a beating from both sides of the political spectrum. Its critics to the left view its measured gradualism as incommensurate to the present’s multiple emergencies: climate change, inequality, the rise of an ethno-nationalist right. Conservatives, by contrast, paint liberalism as a cultural leviathan that has trampled traditional values underfoot. In “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018), the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen argues that the contemporary American emphasis on individual freedom has come at the expense of family, faith, and community, turning us into “increasingly separate, autonomous, non-relational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” Other post-liberal theorists, including Adrian Vermeule, have proposed that the state curtail certain rights in the service of an explicitly Catholic “common good.”

Yarvin is calling for something simpler and more libidinally satisfying: to burn it all down and start again from scratch. Since the advent of neoliberalism in the late seventies, political leaders have increasingly treated governance like corporate management, turning citizens into customers and privatizing services. The result has been greater inequality, a weakened social safety net, and the widespread perception that democracy itself is to blame for these ills, creating an appetite for exactly the kind of autocratic efficiency Yarvin now extolls. “A Yarvin program might seem seductive during a period of neoliberal rule, where efforts to change things, whether it is global warming or the war machine, feel futile,” the historian Suzanne Schneider told me. “You can sit back, not give a fuck, and let someone else run the show.” Yarvin has little to say on the question of human flourishing, or about humans in general, who appear in his work as sheep to be herded, idiots to be corrected, or marionettes controlled by leftist puppeteers.

Whatever gift Yarvin has for attracting attention, his work does not survive scrutiny. It is full of spurious syllogisms and arguments retconned to match his jaundiced intuitions. He has read widely, but he uses his knowledge merely as grist for the same reactionary fairy tale: once upon a time, people knew their place and lived in harmony; then along came the Enlightenment, with its “noble lie” of egalitarianism, plunging the world into disorder. Yarvin often criticizes academics for treating history like a Marvel movie, with oversimplified heroes and villains, but it’s unclear what he adds to the picture by calling Napoleon a “startup guy.” (He has favored the revisionist theories that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by the seventeenth Earl of Oxford and that the American Civil War, which he calls the War of Secession, worsened living conditions for Black Americans.) “The neat thing about primary sources is that often, it takes only one to prove your point,” he has proclaimed, which would come as news to historians.

Some of his most thoroughgoing critics are on the right. Rufo, the conservative activist, has written that Yarvin is a “sophist” whose debating style consists of “childish insults, bouts of paranoia, heavy italics, pointless digressions, competitive bibliography, and allusions to cartoons.” He added, “When one tries to locate what it is that you actually think, he cannot help but discover that there really isn’t much substance there.” The most generous engagement with Yarvin’s ideas has come from bloggers associated with the rationalist movement, which prides itself on weighing evidence for even seemingly far-fetched claims. Their formidable patience, however, has also worn thin. “He never addressed me as an equal, only as a brainwashed person,” Scott Aaronson, an eminent computer scientist, said of their conversations. “He seemed to think that if he just gave me one more reading assignment about happy slaves singing or one more monologue about F.D.R., I’d finally see the light.”

Intellectual seriousness may not be the point. Yarvin’s polemics have proved useful for those on the right in search of a rationale for nerd ressentiment and plutocratic will to power. “The guy does not have a coherent theory of the case,” the Democratic senator Chris Murphy, from Connecticut, told me. “He just happens to be saying something out loud that a lot of Republicans are eager to hear.”

It is not difficult to anticipate the totalitarian endgame of a world view that marries power worship with a contempt for human dignity—fascism, as some might call it. Like his ideological nemeses the Bolsheviks, Yarvin seems to believe that the only thing standing in the way of Utopia is an unwillingness to use every means possible to achieve it. He claims that the transition to his regime will be peaceful, even joyous, but fantasies of violence flicker throughout his work. “Unless the monarch is ready to actually genocide the nobility or the masses, he has to capture their loyalty,” he wrote in a Substack post in March. “You’re not going to foam these people, like turkeys with bird flu. Right?”

Yarvin’s strong opinions on how the world ought to work extended to this profile. Some of his suggestions were intriguing: he floated the idea of staging a debate with one of his ex-girlfriends, and invited me to follow him to Doha for a meeting with Omar bin Laden, one of Osama’s sons. Others were officious. At one point, he sent me nine texts objecting to my use of the word “extreme”—“a hostile pejorative,” he explained, which my article would be better off without. (He’d previously boasted several times in our taped conversations that he was more “extreme” than anyone in the current Administration.) A few days after the Coronation Ball at the Watergate Hotel, he wrote to The New Yorker to complain that I’d walked in without his publisher’s permission; he said that he hoped the incident would not turn into “Watergate 2,” and referred to himself as “certainly the most media-friendly person in the scene!” (Jonathan Keeperman, his publisher at Passage Press and the host of the ball, once suggested that the Republican Party should “lamppost”—that is, lynch—“the journos,” so this was not a particularly high bar to clear.)

One morning this winter, I woke up to twenty-eight texts from Yarvin expressing concerns about my reporting technique. “The problem is that your process is slack and I can feel it generating low-quality content—because it’s not adversarial enough,” he wrote. “When the process is not adversarial, I don’t know what I am contending against.” He briefly considered whether I was “too dumb to understand the ideas,” or whether I’d succumbed to the mental self-censorship that Orwell called “crimestop.” He urged me to watch “The Lives of Others,” an Oscar-winning film that depicts the relationship between an East German playwright and a Stasi agent who is tasked with surveilling him. The Stasi agent, he wrote, “can actually write up the ideas of the playwright, *without even thinking them* It is not even that he is ‘opposed’ to the dissident ideas. It is that he does not even let them touch his brain.” In the film, the Stasi agent eventually “cracks,” after he comes to sympathize with the playwright’s views. Yarvin, presumably, was the playwright.

He said that he was coming to see me, on the other hand, as an “NPC,” or non-player character. He proposed giving me a Voight-Kampff test, the fictional exam in “Blade Runner” used to distinguish androids from humans. His version would involve the two of us debating “the ‘blank slate theory’ versus ‘racism’ ” and recording the conversation. (“By ‘racism’ I mean of course human biodiversity,” he elaborated.) When I explained that my reporting process did not include submitting to on-demand tests, Yarvin sent me a screenshot of “August 1968,” W. H. Auden’s poem about the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring:

The Ogre does what ogres can
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech

He went on to say that although he’d agreed to participate in this story because “no publicity is bad publicity,” he would now try to kill it if he could.

I was struck by the contrast between his messages and the coolheaded tone he’d recommended that Thiel and other friends deploy when handling the media. After the 2013 TechCrunch article identifying Yarvin came out, Balaji Srinivasan, the entrepreneur, proposed in an e-mail “to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them.” Yarvin dissuaded him. “What would Heartiste say?” Yarvin asked, referring to the white-nationalist pickup-artist blog “Chateau Heartiste.” “Almost always, the right alpha answer is ‘nothing.’ Say nothing. Do nothing.”

On a balmy afternoon in late February, Yarvin and his wife, Kristine, were driving down a country road in the South of France. They were accompanied by the documentarians, Brun and Díaz. “Where are we going, Kristine?” Brun asked from the passenger seat, turning the camera around to film her in the back beside me.

She said that she had only the vaguest notion. “Honestly, he just tells me everything last minute,” she explained. “It’s kind of like being a dog. You just know that you’re going in the car, and you don’t know if you’re gonna go to the dog park, or you’re gonna go to the vet, and you’ll find out when you get there.”

“Spontaneity,” Yarvin chimed in.

“That’s a word for it,” Kristine teased.

We were on our way to meet Renaud Camus, a seventy-eight-year-old novelist and pamphleteer, who, in 2011, published “The Great Replacement,” an incendiary manifesto that argued that liberal élites were behind a conspiracy to replace white Europeans with migrants from Africa and the Middle East. The title phrase has since become a rallying cry for white nationalists around the world, from Charlottesville, Virginia, where, in 2017, marchers chanted, “You will not replace us,” to Christchurch, New Zealand, where, two years later, a man who’d published a manifesto with the same title as Camus’s killed fifty-one Muslims.

As we crested a hill, the walls of Camus’s castle, Château de Plieux, loomed into view. “Does anyone know if he’s related to Albert Camus?” Yarvin asked. “I think he’s not related to Albert, but he’s a lovely, old, gay, literary Frenchman.”

Brun, who is Venezuelan, wondered what he would do if Camus “has a sign that says ‘No Foreigners Allowed.’ ”

“Well, are you here to replace us?” Kristine joked. Nobody replied.

Yarvin rang an impressive metal bell beside the door, and we were soon ushered inside by Pierre Jolibert, Camus’s partner. Upstairs, Camus was waiting for us with a bottle of champagne. With his manicured white beard and brown corduroy jacket, complete with a bow tie and gold pocket-watch chain, he looked like a nineteenth-century man of letters. Speaking perfect English, with an English accent, he made it sound as though he’d had no choice but to buy the castle, which dated from the early thirteen-hundreds, after his library grew too large for his small Parisian flat. That was thirty-five years ago. Now, acknowledging the stacks of books that were overtaking his cavernous study, he said that he was running into the same problem here.

Over several glasses of champagne, Yarvin fired a series of questions at Camus, though he rarely waited long enough for his host to give a full answer. What did Camus think of Philippe Pétain? Charles de Gaulle? Napoleon III? Napoleon I? Ernst Jünger? Ernst von Salomon? Ezra Pound? Basil Bunting? More than an interaction, Yarvin, the former trivia champion, seemed to want a pat on the head for his display of learning.

After we headed downstairs for lunch—strips of sizzling duck, a quiche Lorraine, red wine—Yarvin resumed his cross-examination. Did Camus rate Thomas Carlyle? Michel Houellebecq? Louis XIV? What would he say to Charles Maurras if he were alive today? What would Dostoyevsky have thought about the Covid lab-leak theory?

Camus let out a high-pitched giggle whenever Yarvin asked a particularly odd question, but he was baffled by his guest’s repeated inquiries about Brigitte Macron, the French First Lady, who Yarvin suspected was actually a man. “We are dealing with the most important thing in the history of the Continent,” Camus exclaimed, referring to the rise of nonwhite immigration to Europe. “What does it matter if Mrs. Macron is a man or woman?”

Brun asked the men to move to a window so that he could shoot them from outside. As Yarvin gazed at the patchwork of neatly tended fields below, he spoke about the Great Replacement as “one of the greatest crimes” in history. “Is it greater than the Holocaust? I don’t know. . . . We haven’t seen it play out yet.” He’d been drinking since his arrival and seemed to be in an emotional state. “I have three children,” he told Camus. “Will they be basically lined up and marched into mass graves?” They had been discussing Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic novel, “The Camp of the Saints” (1973), which depicts an invasion of Indian migrants destroying European nations. Sobbing now, he continued, “I want my children to die in the twenty-second century. I don’t want them to experience some kind of insane post-colonial Holocaust.”

After dessert, coffee, and a rum from Guadeloupe, it was time for an evening stroll. Carrying a wooden cane, Camus led Yarvin through the small town of Plieux. Spring had arrived early: a cherry tree was blossoming with little flowers. As they passed the local church, Yarvin took out his phone to show Camus a photo of the toddler he shares with Laurenson. “The mother of that child was not my wife,” he said confidingly. A moment later, he was reading a poem by C. P. Cavafy, in tears once again.

When Yarvin and Camus went on ahead, the filmmakers paused to assess the day’s shoot. Brun said that Yarvin reminded him of the long-winded character in “Airplane!” who talks so incessantly that it drives his seatmates to kill themselves. We wondered what Camus was making of the afternoon. It wasn’t long before we found out. “If intellectual exchanges were commercial exchanges—which they are, to a certain extent—the amount of my exports would not reach one per cent of that of my imports,” Camus wrote in his diary, which he posted online the following day. “The visitor spoke without interruption from his arrival to his departure, for five hours, very quickly and very loudly, interrupting himself only for curious fits of tears, when he spoke of his deceased wife, but also, more strangely, certain political situations.”

It was dark by the time we all returned to the château. “Thank you so much for your hospitality and your duck and your castle,” Yarvin said, looking around. “How much money did you spend on it?”

Lovingly squeezing Yarvin’s arm, Kristine said, “You can’t just ask people that!”

Camus gave Yarvin some of his books as souvenirs, but Yarvin’s mind already seemed elsewhere. Tomorrow, he would fly to Paris to meet with a group of red-pilled Zoomers and Éric Zemmour, a far-right polemicist who once ran to be the President of France.

As we headed to the car, Yarvin was buzzing with boyish excitement about his performance. He turned to me and the filmmakers. “Was that good?” he asked. “Was that good?”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 3, 2025 1:14 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

That Book About Biden’s Decline

By Jim Newell | June 03, 2025 11:37 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/06/joe-biden-original-sin-dem
ocrats-2024-election.html

Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet was at the event. He’d never felt as if the White House had a coherent policy. “It seemed like there were two competing sides of the debate within the administration … but no one had publicly articulated the president’s view on the matter.” Bennet “had come to believe that Biden’s inability to mediate between the people in his administration with different political viewpoints had led to an incoherent overall position on the issue. . . .

As the presidency went on, decisions that would once have been two weeks late started coming months late, if they arrived at all. It took until June of a presidential election year for Biden to recognize the festering political wound of his immigration policy and take executive action to stanch the flow at the border. The administration’s plans for resolving the Israel–Hamas war were clear to no one, and pleased no one. Even on the issue nearest to his heart—the defense of Ukraine—the administration was trapped between a growing GOP base that wanted to drop involvement altogether and Ukraine supporters of all persuasions who felt the administration was taking it too cautiously. And the defining decision of them all—to drop out of the race due to loss of confidence from the American public—came a year and a half too late.

There have been endless debates since the election about whether it was Biden’s decline or Biden’s governing missteps that did Democrats in. The short answer is that it was both.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 3, 2025 1:17 PM

Shut up, faggot.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, June 5, 2025 5:03 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Notes from an Occupation

America is an occupied country, ruled by partisans hostile to democracy.

By Marilynne Robinson | June 26, 2025 issue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilynne_Robinson

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/06/26/notes-from-an-occupation-m
arilynne-robinson/

A well-planned occupation seizes the heights of the defeated civilization, so that the people will see their leaders ousted or humiliated and made docile. It will likewise discredit and weaken those features of the culture in which its people placed confidence and pride. If this model were applied to our situation, we might expect to see the Supreme Court diminished, the Congress disempowered, and the Constitution desacralized by indifference or contempt. The press would come under attack. Our incomparable universities and research institutions would lose autonomy and resources. The mighty dollar would be weakened. Bonds with allies would be breached, and the occupied country would be held in contempt for the damage its default had done to the world order, and to democracy, having put aside its responsibility for demonstrating the viability of popular government.

Examples of the seizing of cultural heights abound. In 70 AD the Romans utterly razed the Temple at Jerusalem and Jerusalem itself in order to deal with the Jewish population’s resistance to their oppression. In 1814 the British, still wanting to break the back of the Revolution, burned the American Capitol Building, destroying the Library of Congress. Someone among the insurrectionists of 2021 might have read a book on imperialism and realized how easily the same results could be achieved if the occupiers were not an alien force, but merely partisans hostile to what the idea of democracy had made of the country over the decades and centuries of its flourishing.

Historically, in America, two contending factions have had enough in common with each other to maintain a basic coherency in government. Then in the late twentieth century their differences became inflamed. The competition became both brutal and unserious. On the right, real interest in the general welfare became secondary to a crusade bent on unconditional and permanent victory. An entanglement with something resembling religion gave it claims to a special righteousness that owed nothing to fact or reason or to the conventions of civilized politics.

Homegrown insurrectionists would have special knowledge of a culture’s vulnerabilities and sensitivities. They would know how to induce corrosive shame, for example. They might have resentments specific to the culture’s measures of status and accomplishment, which would add piquancy to the neutering of centers of influence. None of this is normal, though it has consolidated itself under cover of the customary transfer of power. It claims a mandate to transform the country fundamentally, to return it to its competitors, if there should be another election, irreversibly changed and damaged.

I am proposing, of course, that America actually is, at present, an occupied country. I will call the occupiers Red and the occupied Blue, since these colors are in general use for distinctions of this kind and seemingly cause no offense. To the extent that this statement is complicated by the fact that those in power were elected, their conduct in office seems not to be what many of their voters were led to expect or would have chosen. So the polls tell us. Elections do indeed have consequences, and should have them. The sovereignty of the people must be honored even as they begin to repent of their choices. This is among the many crucial norms that depend altogether on respect. It cannot mean only that the electorate must be deferred to, even when it is misinformed or aroused to unhealthy excitements.

Democracy cannot decline far without ceasing to be democracy. The spirit of its politics might well become so degraded that the people, whose authority can have no legitimate successor, are ousted altogether. We can see who would displace them—the ultra-rich, the tech visionaries, and the hordes of hangers-on who are enchanted and ambitious. To note that these interests are powerful now and have been for many years is to toy with the kind of disrespect for the American system that could be fatal to it. But in our present circumstances, it should be the first order of business to speak forthrightly about the need to reform the culture so that it can sustain democratic institutions. New attention to the First Amendment would be a beginning. We could have excellent arguments about what this reform would mean and how it could be accomplished, if we managed to keep these corrupting influences from compromising any attempt to restore democracy.

Simultaneous with corruption there is also a clash of worldviews that is rarely acknowledged. The country is said now to be polarized, an image that implies that we lie along the same continuum of belief, at opposite extremes but with an expansive middle ground between the two sides that awaits only certain moderating concessions to bring us closer. This metaphor does not really suggest the nature of our problem or the depth of it. It has not been helpful. It is past time to try considering a new image for our situation.

We might think of America as two nations of roughly comparable power, contending with each other for authority and resources and cultural influence. Since they occupy the same terrain and govern the same population, each of them, when it wins an election, is in effect superimposed on the other for a limited period. This system maintains equilibrium well enough, so long as both sides accept it. It has been manipulated, especially by means of laws that affect voters’ eligibility. Lately the Red side has claimed that the system is rigged by corrupt election workers or faulty machines. In these times, accusation is more potent by far than exculpation, since there is a prevalent cynicism that inclines the public to credit slander. Nevertheless, with all these defects and encumbrances, meaningful power has remained in the people’s hands.

What kind of power? How much power? Can one election signify, to history and posterity, that the practices of many generations will be put aside? We hear endlessly, with diminishing grounds for the claim, that we are the richest and strongest nation of all time. If this is true, ought there not to be presumptive respect for the political achievements of the generations whose effort and ingenuity brought us here? This might sound like conservatism. Adherence to the Constitution is conservative in the strict sense. Valuing our great institutions, our great reforms, and the good name our parents and grandparents gave us for generosity toward the world’s poor would be conservative, and patriotic, since our nation has created itself through the continuous development of its laws and the scrutiny of its conscience—at best, of course, and somewhat intermittently, but effectively enough to allow us a rough notion of what we have to lose. The threat to all these things and much, much more is now very real. These people who call themselves conservative are root-and-branch radicals. So it is time to face the fact that their demolition of government and society as we have known them more strongly resembles a hostile occupation than a normal presidency.

Being themselves Americans, the insurrectionists know how to identify things that are especially valued, anywhere and everywhere, throughout the country. A very clear marker of special status is tax exemption. Schools and universities, research centers, charities, performing arts centers, and religious institutions all enjoy the passive subsidy of tax exemption because they have been seen as contributors to public life. This not only marks them out as the kind of thing Americans might take pride in, which might even be involved in their sense of self and country. It also gives them an enormous vulnerability. The exemption, long-standing and crucial in many cases to their stability or survival, can be abruptly ended. For all the talk about probing for corruption or antisemitism, this is basically a dirty trick. Given warning that the government had changed its views on fostering socially beneficial institutions, some of them would no doubt have made changes in their plans and their funding. Caught by surprise, they are vulnerable, not only to the fact that they must defend themselves against the hostile probing of the Red government, but vulnerable also to the pressures that force damaging concessions to their inquisitors. They have thrived any number of years as trustees of health and faith and culture, and now they are to expose their integrity, their reason for being, to “judges” who have only disrespect for them.

Aside from the fact that tax-exempt institutions, by virtue of this status, are acknowledged as important presences in society and therefore constitute an elite, it is the underlying economics of the arrangement that offends. The services they offer, because they are passively subsidized, are a distribution of wealth to a public that would pay more for them, or be excluded from them, if they were available only at their true cost.

The same people who resent any sharing of wealth, however it may enhance their own lives, seem also to be indifferent to culture or suspicious of it. These traits are mutually reinforcing. It is as if the resources that have sprung up and matured on American soil had no legitimacy as heritage, no meaning as testimony to what we have made and who we are, what hopes our forebears had for us, what we enjoy and aspire to. Since these institutions have flourished on generosity and autonomy and have existed to serve a diverse public, they are generally associated with a generous view of things. They are, for the present, the shrines and monuments of the Blue country, the one that is occupied. They are in danger of harm or worse, as, by implication, are any or all of the institutions that have accepted this subsidy in good faith. What Blue America intended as an enrichment of national life, Red America has used as a standing threat.

This is a paradigm case for the Red approach to governing. Support can be pulled away from alliances, making foreign leaders regret ever having trusted us. The stock market can be altogether severed from reality, inflated with promises or deflated by threats. Research grants can be abruptly withheld. The simple willingness to be dishonorable destabilizes everything American power affects, instilling anxiety on every side. This is no doubt true among those nations we are told to consider hostile, at least until some whim suggests otherwise. Instability, shrewdly managed, is a great multiplier of power.

Is all this shrewd? Or is it desperate opportunism, an exploitation of resentment to distract “the base” from the damage kicked up by fecklessness? The methodology of the Red country is always to refuse or withhold money from services most people rely on, without regard to consequences other than their own empowerment, and with utter indifference to the value that is lost. If a research project is suddenly unfunded, the work done to that point may well be worth nothing no matter what it cost. If the research would have had consequences for health care, the future expense in terms of disability or early death would turn this supposed thrift into pure loss. Since education is a value, undermining its institutions is a loss, a depletion of the worth that has amassed in them during the long, and prosperous, period that Americans invested in them, believing that learning enhanced personal and societal well-being. There is such a thing as false economy. It is easy to undervalue implicit worth as opposed to cash, even when the amount of money involved is relatively trivial.

If a case were to be made that the Red regime is acting with a shrewd knowledge of Blue American sensitivities and passions, I would look at the campaign against the universities. The accusation made against them is that they have failed to adequately protect Jewish students from antisemitism. I have spent virtually my whole long life in universities, and I find it difficult to imagine that they are disposed to harbor, or to be indifferent to, this pathology. The word is very powerful, as it should be. But here its power has been put to cynical use. It has overshadowed and eclipsed the issues around DEI, around equity, which has evolved in the public mind into a form of discrimination against the white majority, more particularly against the white male minority. Not so long ago we were intensely aware of the complexities of racial justice, an awareness framed by one long history of inequity—a weak word in this context—that denied Black people the expression of their gifts, the recognition of their competence, their just earnings and their political rights.

The list is too long to be attempted here. The mindset that perpetuated this injustice persisted in various forms after and despite the civil rights movement. It pervaded the culture so thoroughly that no one can be certain he or she is not affected by it. Therefore policies that take into account the fact that prejudices might influence decisions are appropriate and necessary. Blue Americans, white or not, might be grateful for the corrective. But in Red America, now that they are in charge, these three letters can bring down disaster on anyone who accepts their meaning and the history that lies behind them. So protections fall away from one population and the loss is not noted because the pretext is the protection of another one. I will not mention the questions that should arise as we see Latin Americans jostled onto airplanes, expelled or imprisoned on no certain grounds except their ethnicity. We know that we can backslide, that we can act in appallingly bad faith. We know by whom this betrayal is most liable to be felt.

The Red country threatens friends, shamefully abandons a brave and resourceful Ukrainian people as they struggle to defend their country from invasion. Honor is not a concept invoked by Red America. It is another conservative virtue for which they have only contempt. Zelensky predicted—so far accurately—that offering the US a financial stake in Ukraine in their natural resources would be the only way to get Trump to soften his pro-Russia stance.

The crisis of democracy must find a democratic solution. Fortunately, this is quite possible. The border between these two Americas is entirely open, and on the Blue side, migrants are welcomed with all possible warmth.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, June 5, 2025 5:05 PM

Shut up, faggot.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, June 6, 2025 6:29 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

What’s behind Trump’s assault on Harvard and crown-jewel US universities?

Decades-long suspicion of elite universities has evolved under President Trump into a full-scale war against institutions deemed to have grown overtly political – punctuated this week by curbs on the flow of international students to Harvard.

By Simon Montlake | June 05, 2025, 1:22 p.m. ET

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2025/0605/trump-universities-ha
rvard-international-students

The escalating battle between President Donald Trump and Harvard University is a high-stakes cultural and political standoff that echoes far beyond higher education. Public deference toward the scholarly excellence that Harvard represents has been eroded by a backlash against elite universities now seen by many voters as bastions of political liberalism. This growing resentment, mostly on the political right, has fueled an assault on their exalted status.

It’s a battle that has been years in the making: Conservatives have long seethed at the ideological tilt on most college campuses and accused administrators of stifling free speech. But it took the reelection of Mr. Trump, a businessman who started his own failed eponymous university and is finely attuned to status and slights, to light the fuse.

New actions this week expand what amounts to a multipronged assault on elite universities. On Wednesday, the Department of Education asked for a review of Columbia University’s accreditation status, citing antisemitism on its campus. That evening, President Trump issued a proclamation suspending visas for new foreign students at Harvard for national security reasons.

Asked recently in the Oval Office about the dispute with Harvard, Mr. Trump blamed the university for being defiant. “Harvard has got to behave themselves,” he said. “Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. They’ve got to behave themselves.”

The Trump administration has already slashed federal funding of scientific and medical research, of which Harvard is a major recipient. In February it began investigating 10 universities – all in Democrat-run states – accused of failing to protect Jewish students during a wave of campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas. Columbia bowed under pressure; other universities sought to reach agreements to unlock federal funds. But Harvard balked at the maximalist demands of the White House.

Now it finds itself squeezed from all sides. In addition to the billions of dollars in frozen grants and federal contracts, and the administration’s repeated efforts to block the enrollment of international students – Wednesday’s proclamation came after an earlier effort was halted by a federal judge – Mr. Trump has also threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, which would impact donations. The spending bill passed recently by Republicans in the House of Representatives would hike the 1.4% tax on Harvard’s $53 billion endowment to 21%, adding to the financial and political pressure on the university.

The Trump administration argues that universities including Harvard have done too little to address rising antisemitism.

“If you want to make an example and to demonstrate your power, how better to do it than to go after the university that’s at the top of the heap?” asks Brian Rosenberg, a former president of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, who now teaches at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “It sends a chilling message.”

A dispute years in the making

As far back as 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr. penned his book “God and Man at Yale,” colleges were catching conservative criticism for diverging from traditional values. But the relationship between GOP leaders and elite universities grew far more hostile during the past decade, as universities became more explicitly political in their messaging – often in direct opposition to Mr. Trump and his movement.

In 2019, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that sought to condition federal grants and other funding for colleges and universities on their protection of free speech (President Joe Biden partly rescinded the directive in 2023). In a 2021 speech, JD Vance called universities “the enemy.”

Notably, Mr. Trump, Vice President Vance, and Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, all graduated from Ivy League schools. GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik, whose aggressive questioning of university presidents at a 2023 congressional hearing on antisemitism helped launch the current conflagration, is a Harvard grad.

Polling suggests the public has mixed views of the current fight. In a recent AP/NORC poll, 56% of U.S. adults said they disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of college issues; among Republicans, however, 83% expressed approval. At the same time, the public perception of universities overall has grown far more negative, with the percentage of Americans saying they have “a great deal of confidence” in higher education falling from nearly 60% in 2015 to just 36% in 2024, according to Gallup. This shift reflects rising concerns about the affordability and efficacy of a college education as well as the political climate on campuses.

Now this battle threatens to permanently weaken institutions once revered as crown jewels in an American economy that runs on talent and advanced research. Harvard has frozen hiring, cut spending, and hunkered down for what both sides agree could be a drawn-out dispute. Its vaunted research capabilities, which attract global talent and spin off commercial ventures, are most at risk, particularly if overseas researchers fear being denied visas.

No one thinks the United States’ oldest university – founded in 1636 and named after a Puritan minister who was its first major donor – will go out of business. But its ambitions, prestige, and influence could start to diminish, even as classes of graduates continue to don gowns in Harvard Yard.

That prospect would delight cultural warriors in Mr. Trump’s policy circles who want to leverage government power over liberal-coded institutions and bring them to heel. “The universities seem all powerful and they have acted as if they were all powerful, and we’re finally revealing that we can hit that where it hurts,” Christopher Rufo, a conservative education activist, told The New York Times in April.

Initial efforts to calm the waters

Harvard President Alan Garber took office amid a firestorm after the resignation of Claudine Gay, who had been taken to task in December of 2023 by Republicans in Congress over hate speech at Israel-Hamas war protests and then accused of plagiarism.

Initially, Dr. Garber had worked to repair relations in Washington. Harvard hired Republican lobbyists and sought to cooperate with Mr. Trump’s antisemitism taskforce.

Harvard removed faculty members from its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, which was enmeshed in controversy, and indicated an openness to making other reforms. Dr. Garber revised the university’s definition of antisemitism, and compiled and published evidence of harassment of both Jews and Muslims on campus. Analysts say Harvard sought to get ahead of a formal Title VI investigation under the Civil Rights Act by telegraphing that it had erred and would make amends while defending its academic freedom and autonomy.

That strategy unraveled in April after the Trump administration sent a letter with an expansive list of demands for federal oversight of the university’s hiring, admissions, student discipline, and other core functions. It also demanded greater “viewpoint diversity” – more conservatives on campus – and the derecognition of pro-Palestinian student groups.

Backed by Harvard’s governing body, Dr. Garber rebutted the demands as government interference that Harvard could not accept. After the White House retaliated by pulling $2.2 billion in federal funding, the university sued. The New York Times later reported that the April 11 letter of demands may have been sent in error by the White House.

Dr. Garber told The Harvard Crimson that the university faced “a very stark situation” under the demands. “We saw ourselves as being given the choice of standing up for fundamental rights of universities, including First Amendment rights, or letting this demand go by,” he said. “When you think of it in those terms, there really was no choice.”

As the Monitor recently reported, the university has been buoyed by public support for its stance, including from other universities and from Harvard alumni who include influential and deep-pocketed allies. Some Harvard professors have pledged to donate part of their salary to the university; Dr. Garber has done the same.

“Everyone is looking at austerity,” says a staffer at Harvard Law School who didn’t want to be named because of the sensitivity of the dispute. At this year’s graduations, parents of students expressed far more pride than in past years in being connected to the school, the staffer says. “The message is that ‘We know that you’re in the trenches, and we support you.’”

Harvard has faced many crises in its history, including the 1950s Red Scare and campus uproar over the Vietnam War, says William Kirby, a Harvard historian and a former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He says this crisis ranks among them, since it pits the university against an administration pressing a “full-throated attack” with unreasonable and unlawful demands.

“There’s absolutely no good faith on the part of those in the government pursuing this vendetta,” he says. “They’re asking for things that would be impossible, I think, for any university to do and to maintain any semblance of its own values.”

A symbolic target

Harvard’s defenders and critics agree on one thing: It’s a big target. And if it can’t stand up to the Trump administration, given its wealth and reach, then other universities are even less likely to prevail. In Chinese, this is known as “killing the chicken to scare the monkey,” notes Professor Kirby, who teaches China studies as well as business administration.

Prosecutorial resources “are finite,” says Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Making an example of “a high-profile target” helps “with enforcement of all the others. It’s an efficient use of resources to correct wrongdoing.”

Harvard’s resources are also finite. It became dependent on federal grants without hedging against the risk of a political backlash as it adopted increasingly liberal messaging, argues Dr. Greene, a former professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas. “This isn’t really about autonomy. It’s not really about competing visions of civil rights. It’s really a fight over [political] interests,” he says.

He supports the Trump administration’s demands of Harvard with one exception: viewpoint diversity. That goal is correct and long overdue, says Dr. Greene, but falling short on that isn’t a violation of the Civil Rights Act. Still, he adds, it would be “educationally good practice and politically smart for Harvard to diversify its faculty and student body” by welcoming more conservatives.

Mr. Trump isn’t the first president to use civil rights law and the federal funding spigot to strong-arm universities. President Barack Obama used Title IX to change how universities treated students accused of sexual misconduct. That directive didn’t impinge, however, on academic freedoms such as faculty hiring, admissions, and curriculums.

Critics of Harvard say its defense of academic freedom is undermined by its own failure to uphold free speech and a pervasive culture of self-censorship among students. Surveys show that most students and faculty at Harvard identify as left or center-left. The university was ranked dead last in a 2025 survey measuring free speech on college campuses by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Academics who teach contentious topics at Harvard say that, properly managed, classroom debate flows freely, away from the spotlight of public protests and social media outrages. “We have no shortage of differences of opinion. This is a place of free and open inquiry,” says Professor Kirby, who has led discussions on China-Taiwan relations, among other topics.

“They know they can’t resist forever”

Mr. Trump recently suggested taking $3 billion from “a very antisemitic Harvard” and redistributing the money to vocational and technical schools. While that suggestion is at odds with the purpose behind scientific and other research grants, research that trade schools can’t replicate, analysts say such attacks resonate with Mr. Trump’s base that distrusts higher education.

A more plausible scenario is that federal dollars will flow instead to institutions that aren’t at odds with the administration, and that Harvard’s research talent will follow suit. The university could tap wealthy donors to make up shortfalls for a while, but that is a stopgap measure at best. It also leaves Harvard open to other pressure points, including visa approvals for international students and scholars.

“The difficulties that can be made for Harvard are more than what Harvard can manage. On some level I think they know that they can’t resist forever,” says Dr. Greene.

Professor Rosenberg agrees. “Even for an institution with this kind of wealth and reputation, this is going to be extremely difficult to navigate. I think if there were a reasonable exit ramp, Harvard would take a serious look at it.”

Harvard could opt to scale down its research labs, shrink its workforce, and focus more on undergraduate teaching and midcareer programs that generate income. But that would put it at a competitive disadvantage to peer institutions at home and abroad. The research talent that powers Harvard’s long line of Nobel Prize-winners and other markers of excellence may also look outside the U.S.

At some point, some students who might have chosen Harvard in the past may think about going elsewhere. While the prestige of elite schools like Columbia and Harvard remains strong, the perception that they are awash in political activism has also filtered down, says Elizabeth Doe Stone, president of Top Tier Admissions, a college-prep consultancy. “Families that are not even conservative, but are more politically moderate, are thinking about their child’s education and wanting it to be focused on having a typical college experience and not having the distractions of the political climate.”

For now, though, Harvard is still Harvard. “The brand is incredibly resilient. What we’ll find out in this next year is just how resilient,” she says.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 6, 2025 11:38 AM

Fuck Harvard and your Anti-American "intellectuals" working there.

If they love the Chinese so much, I suggest they all move to China.

Maybe it would be good for them. They could get a real taste of what they're trying to turn America into.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, June 6, 2025 11:59 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Fuck Harvard and your Anti-American "intellectuals" working there.

If they love the Chinese so much, I suggest they all move to China.

Maybe it would be good for them. They could get a real taste of what they're trying to turn America into.

You understand nothing. You’re anti education. Do you understand what that says about you? What you’re telling everyone about yourself? That you are anti knowledge. Anti being well read. Anti competent, aware and skilled.

You say you are a jack of all trades. Hey dummy, you knew nothing until you learned. Until you educated yourself and acquired the skills. And that Gilligan applies to all life skills. Too bad your education ended where it did. You might have amounted to something. But it did end and you didn't.

You’re not a genius like you said in one of your posts about when you were young, you’re a moron. Big difference, big difference. Hurry now, try to find where I misspelled words. Too funny...

T

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Sunday, June 8, 2025 1:57 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Where Is Barack Obama?

The “audacity of hope” presidency has given way to the fierce lethargy of semi-retirement.

By Mark Leibovich | June 8, 2025, 8 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/06/obama-retirement-
trump-era/683068/

Last month, while Donald Trump was in the Middle East being gifted a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar, Barack Obama headed off on his own foreign excursion: a trip to Norway, in a much smaller and more tasteful jet, to visit the summer estate of his old friend King Harald V. Together, they would savor the genteel glories of Bygdøyveien in May. They chewed over global affairs and the freshest local salmon, which had been smoked on the premises and seasoned with herbs from the royal garden.

Trump has begun his second term with a continuous spree of democracy-shaking, economy-quaking, norm-obliterating action. And Obama, true to form, has remained carefully above it all. He picks his spots, which seldom involve Trump. In March, he celebrated the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act and posted his annual NCAA basketball brackets. In April, he sent out an Easter message and mourned the death of the pope. In May, he welcomed His Holiness Pope Leo XIV (“a fellow Chicagoan”) and sent prayers to Joe Biden following his prostate-cancer diagnosis.

No matter how brazen Trump becomes, the most effective communicator in the Democratic Party continues to opt for minimal communication. His “audacity of hope” presidency has given way to the fierce lethargy of semi-retirement.

Obama occasionally dips into politics with brief and unmemorable statements, or sporadic fundraising emails (subject: “Barack Obama wants to meet you. Yes you.”). He praised his law-school alma mater, Harvard, for “rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt” by the White House “to stifle academic freedom.” He criticized a Republican bill that would threaten health care for millions. He touted a liberal judge who was running for a crucial seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. When called upon, he can still deliver a top-notch campaign spiel, donor pitch, convention speech, or eulogy.

Beyond that, Obama pops in with summer and year-end book, music, and film recommendations. He recently highlighted a few articles about AI and retweeted a promotional spot for Air Force Elite: Thunderbirds, a new Netflix documentary from his and Michelle’s production company. (Michelle also has a fashion book coming out later this year: “a celebration of confidence, identity, and authenticity,” she calls it.) Apparently, Barack is a devoted listener of The Ringer’s Bill Simmons Podcast, or so he told Jimmy Kimmel over dinner.

In normal times, no one would deny Obama these diversions. He performed the world’s most stressful job for eight years, served his country, made his history, and deserved to kick back and do the usual ex-president things: start a foundation, build a library, make unspeakable amounts of money.

But the inevitable Trump-era counterpoint is that these are not normal times. And Obama’s detachment feels jarringly incongruous with the desperation of his longtime admirers—even more so given Trump’s assaults on what Obama achieved in office. It would be one thing if Obama had disappeared after leaving the White House, maybe taking up painting like George W. Bush. The problem is that Obama still very much has a public profile—one that screams comfort and nonchalance at a time when so many other Americans are terrified.

“There are many grandmas and Rachel Maddow viewers who have been more vocal in this moment than Barack Obama has,” Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Institute, told me. “It is heartbreaking,” he added, “to see him sacrificing that megaphone when nobody else quite has it.”

People who have worked with Obama since he left office say that he is extremely judicious about when he weighs in. “We try to preserve his voice so that when he does speak, it has impact,” Eric Schultz, a close adviser to Obama in his post-presidency, told me. “There is a dilution factor that we’re very aware of.”

“The thing you don’t want to do is, you don’t want to regularize him,” former Attorney General Eric Holder, a close Obama friend and collaborator, told me. When I asked Holder what he meant by “regularize,” he explained that there was a danger of turning Obama into just another hack commentator—“Tuesdays With Barack, or something like that,” Holder said.

Like many of Obama’s confidants, Holder bristles at suggestions that the former president has somehow deserted the Trump opposition. “Should he do more? Everybody can have their opinions,” Holder said. “The one thing that always kind of pisses me off is when people say he’s not out there, or that he’s not doing things, that he’s just retired and we never hear from him. If you fucking look, folks, you would see that he’s out there.”

Obama’s aides also say that he is loath to overshadow the next generation of Democratic leaders. They emphasize that he spends a great deal of time speaking privately with candidates and officials who seek his advice. But unfortunately for Democrats, they have not found their next fresh generational sensation since Obama was elected 17 years ago (Joe Biden obviously doesn’t count). Until a new leader emerges, Obama could certainly take on a more vocal role without “regularizing” himself in the lowlands of Trump-era politics.

Obama remains the most popular Democrat alive at a time of historic unpopularity for his party. Unlike Biden, he appears not to have lost a step, or three. Unlike with Bill Clinton, his voice remains strong and his baggage minimal. Unlike both Biden and Clinton, he is relatively young and has a large constituency of Americans who still want to hear from him, including Black Americans, young voters, and other longtime Democratic blocs that gravitated toward Trump in November.

“Should Obama get out and do more? Yes, please,” Tracy Sefl, a Democratic media consultant in Chicago, told me. “Help us,” she added. “We’re sinking over here.”

Obama’s conspicuous scarcity while Trump inflicts such damage isn’t just a bad look. It’s a dereliction of the message that he built his career on. When Obama first ran for president in 2008, his former life as a community organizer was central to his message. His campaign was not merely for him, but for civic action itself—the idea of Americans being invested in their own change. Throughout his time in the White House, he emphasized that “citizen” was his most important title. After he left office in 2017, Obama said that he would work to inspire and develop the next cohort of leaders, which is essentially the mission of his foundation. It would seem a contradiction for him to say that he’s devoting much of his post-presidency to promoting civic engagement when he himself seems so disengaged.

To some degree, patience with Obama began wearing thin when he was still in office. His approval ratings sagged partway through his second term (before rebounding at the end). The rollout of the Affordable Care Act in 2013 was a fiasco, and the midterm elections of 2014 were a massacre. Obama looked powerless as Republicans in Congress ensured that he would pass no major legislation in his second term and blocked his nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

“Obama, out,” the president said in the denouement of his last comedy routine at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in 2016. In Obama lore, this mic-drop moment would instantly become famous—and prophetic.

After Trump’s first victory, Obama tried to reassure supporters that this was merely a setback. “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes,” he said in an interview with The New Yorker. Insofar as Obama talked about how he imagined his post-presidency, he was inclined to disengage from day-to-day politics. At a press conference in November 2016, Obama said that he planned to “take Michelle on vacation, get some rest, spend time with my girls, and do some writing, do some thinking.” He promised to give Trump the chance to do his job “without somebody popping off in every instance.”

But in that same press conference, he also allowed that if something arose that raised “core questions about our values and our ideals, and if I think that it’s necessary or helpful for me to defend those ideals, then I’ll examine it when it comes.”

That happened almost immediately. A few days after vowing in his inaugural address to end the “American carnage” that he was inheriting, Trump signed an executive order banning foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States for 90 days. The so-called Muslim travel ban would quickly be blocked by the courts, but not before sowing chaos at U.S. points of entry. Obama put out a brief statement through a spokesperson (“the president fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion”), and went on vacation.

Trump’s early onslaught made clear that Obama’s ex-presidency would prove far more complicated than previous ones. And Obama’s taste for glamorous settings and famous company—Richard Branson, David Geffen, George Clooney—made for a grating contrast with the turmoil back home. “Just tone it down with the kitesurfing pictures,” John Oliver, the host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, said of Obama in an interview with Seth Meyers less than a month after the president left office. “America is on fire,” Oliver added. “I know that people accused him of being out of touch with the American people during his presidency. I’m not sure he’s ever been more out of touch than he is now.”

Oliver’s spasm foreshadowed a rolling annoyance that continued as Trump’s presidency wore on: that Obama was squandering his power and influence. “Oh, Obama is still tweeting good tweets. That’s very nice of him,” the anti-Trump writer Drew Magary wrote in a Medium column titled “Where the Hell Is Barack Obama?” in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. “I’m sick of Obama staying above the fray while that fray is swallowing us whole.”

Obama did insert himself in the 2024 election, reportedly taking an aggressive behind-the-scenes role last summer in trying to nudge Biden out of the race. He delivered a showstopper speech at the Democratic National Convention and campaigned several times for Kamala Harris in the fall. But among longtime Obama admirers I’ve spoken with, frustration with the former president has built since Trump returned to office. While campaigning for Harris last year, Obama framed the stakes of the election in terms of a looming catastrophe. “These aren’t ordinary times, and these are not ordinary elections,” he said at a campaign stop in Pittsburgh. Yet now that the impact is unfolding in the most pernicious ways, Obama seems to be resuming his ordinary chill and same old bits.

Green, of the Progressive Change Institute, told me that when Obama put out his March Madness picks this year, he texted Schultz, the Obama adviser. “Have I missed him speaking up in other places recently?” Green asked him. “He did not respond to that.” ??(Schultz confirmed to me that he ignored the message but vowed to be “more responsive to Adam Green’s texts in the future.”)

Being a former president is inherently tricky: The role is ill-defined, and peripheral by definition. Part of the trickiness is how an ex-president can remain relevant, if he wants to. This is especially so given the current president.

“I don’t know that anybody is relevant in the Trump era,” Mark Updegrove, a presidential historian and head of the LBJ Foundation, told me. Updegrove, who wrote a book called Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House, said that Trump has succeeded in creating a reality in which every president who came before is suspect. “All the standard rules of being an ex-president are no longer applicable,” he said.

Still, Obama never presented himself as a “standard rules” leader. This was the idea that his political rise was predicated on—that change required bold, against-the-grain thinking and uncomfortable action. Clearly, Obama still views himself this way, or at least still wants to be perceived this way. (A few years ago, he hosted a podcast with Bruce Springsteen called Renegades.)

From the July 1973 issue: The last days of the president

Stepping into the current political melee would not be an easy or comfortable role for Obama. He represents a figure of the past, which seems more and more like the ancient past as the Trump era crushes on. He is a notably long-view guy, who has spent a great deal of time composing a meticulous account of his own narrative. “We’re part of a long-running story,” Obama said in 2014. “We just try to get our paragraph right.” Or thousands of paragraphs, in his case: The first installment of Obama’s presidential memoir, A Promised Land, covered 768 pages and 29 hours of audio. No release date has been set for the second volume.

But this might be one of those times for Obama to take a break from the long arc of the moral universe and tend to the immediate crisis. Several Democrats I’ve spoken with said they wish that Obama would stop worrying so much about the “dilution factor.” While Democrats struggle to find their next phenom, Obama could be their interim boss. He could engage regularly, pointing out Trump’s latest abuses. He did so earlier this spring, during an onstage conversation at Hamilton College. He was thoughtful, funny, and sounded genuinely aghast, even angry.

He could do these public dialogues much more often, and even make them thematic. Focus on Trump’s serial violations of the Constitution one week (recall that Obama once taught constitutional law), the latest instance of Trump’s naked corruption the next. Blast out the most scathing lines on social media. Yes, it might trigger Trump, and create more attention than Obama evidently wants. But Trump has shown that ubiquity can be a superpower, just as Biden showed that obscurity can be ruinous. People would notice.

Democrats love nothing more than to hold up Obama as their monument to Republican bad faith. Can you imagine if Obama did this? some Democrat will inevitably say whenever Trump does something tacky, cruel, or blatantly unethical (usually before breakfast). Obama could lean into this hypocrisy—tape recurring five-minute video clips highlighting Trump’s latest scurrilous act and title the series “Can You Imagine If I Did This?”

Or another idea—an admittedly far-fetched one. Trump has decreed that a massive military parade be held through the streets of Washington on June 14. This will ostensibly celebrate the Army’s 250th anniversary, but it also happens to fall on Trump’s 79th birthday. The parade will cost an estimated $45 million, including $16 million in damage to the streets. (Can you imagine if Obama did this?) The spectacle cries out for counterprogramming. Obama could hold his own event, in Washington or somewhere nearby. It would get tons of attention and drive Trump crazy, especially if it draws a bigger crowd. Better yet, make it a parade, or “citizen’s march,” something that builds momentum as it goes, the former president and community organizer leading on foot. This would be the renegade move.

Few things would fire up Democrats like a head-to-head matchup between Trump and Obama. If nothing else, it would be fun to contemplate while Democrats keep casting about for their long-delayed future. “The party needs new rising stars, and they need the room to figure out how to meet this moment, just like Obama figured out how to meet the moment 20 years ago,” Jon Favreau, a co-host of Pod Save America and former director of speechwriting for the 44th president, told me. “Unless, of course, Trump tries to run for a third term, in which case I’ll be begging Obama to come out of retirement.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, June 8, 2025 2:16 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Fuck Harvard and your Anti-American "intellectuals" working there.

If they love the Chinese so much, I suggest they all move to China.

Maybe it would be good for them. They could get a real taste of what they're trying to turn America into.

I'm not anti-education. I'm anti-indoctrination.

I bought my house with cash when I was 32 years old and haven't held a single cent of debt since I was 25 years old. Virtually retired now for going on 15 years.

Don't talk to me about "success", mutt. You keep living your sad little life alone in that shitty little apartment because you spent your entire adult life buying shit you didn't need and paying interest and high taxes just to be able to keep paying those bills. Meanwhile you have no family or friends that care a lick about you and your time on earth has almost run out.

Your life sucked. Your life continues to suck. And when you're gone there will be nobody there to mourn you because your dead whore of a mother is already dead and everyone else you ever knew hates being around you.

You are a complete failure.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, June 9, 2025 7:59 AM