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I’ve been listening to the Milwaukee broadcast of the World Series,1 which has familiarized me with the quirks of that media market. I’ve come to know the two egregiously Midwestern supermarket owners who scream their heads off about big savings on brats and canned peas. A local convenience store hawks something called a “cheese mountain pizza”, which is probably even less healthy than it sounds. Miller runs ads — it’s great that they’re getting the word out about Miller beer in Milwaukee. And the broadcast is sponsored by — I’m not joking — North Shore adult diapers. And why not? Many of us will eventually need adult diapers, we shouldn’t be weird about them. Honestly, I think a certain peace of mind might come with knowing “Those functions are in God’s hands now,” and that peace of mind should be easier to achieve if you’re backed by a quality product like North Shore.

But the main thing I’ve noticed about the ads is that every Republican candidate is trying to convince Wisconsinites that their opponent is a dangerous leftist freak. That is their only play, as it has been Republicans’ only play in every election for as long as I can remember. The fact that Democrats rejected gubernatorial candidate and leftist clown Francesca Hong and nominated normie David Crowley instead hasn’t keep right-leaning groups from evoking Hong and Woke 1 at every opportunity. Which illustrates that the mere existence of leftist wackos is an albatross around Democrats’ necks, even when those wackos have explicitly been rejected.

Consider this ad being run against Crowley:

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Netflix creator Barack Obama is in hot water over a joke he told 30 minutes into his set at Wacky Al’s Cackle Castle in Dayton. It’s the Saddam Hussein/Cheesecake Factory line here:

Conservative media figures rushed to get sand up their urethra at this egregious swipe at Middle America. Clay Travis claimed that Obama was “mocking people who eat at the Cheesecake Factory.” Martha MacCallum said that is showed “why Democrats lost the middle class.” Greg Gutfeld went on a rant about how liberals hate the Cheesecake Factory because they hate America. Even the Secretary of the Treasury clapped back, which was unusual, because catty roast jokes are usually the purview of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Here’s the sick burn from man of the people Scott Bessent (Yale University class of ‘84, former Chief Investment Officer at Soros Fund Management, estimated net worth: $521 million):

Aaaawwww shit!!! I declare this man to be Secretary of Zingers! I assume that when it’s Obama’s turn at the dias, he’ll inform Bessent that a lesbian comic from the ‘90s called and wants her suit back, and add that Bessent’s momma is like the Cheesecake Factory, because she’s got low prices and expects parties of ten or more to phone ahead.

Of course, Republicans are (probably wilfully) misinterpreting the joke. Because the joke is clearly not that the Cheesecake Factory is bad — the joke is that it’s opulently decorated. Which it is; check out these interiors, culled from an interview with the mastermind behind the Cheesecake Factory’s “extravagant design”:

You add Saddam Hussein to that, you’ve got something pretty garish. The joke is that Trump has a “more is more” design aesthetic, which is inarguably true. The broader point is that Trump is more interested in vanity projects than improving the lives of the American people, which is the most true thing that anyone could possibly say.

Not for nothin’, though: This is, IMHO, not a very good version of that joke. I once wrote a joke in exactly that format for exactly this context:1 I called Trump’s design style “like Louis XIV and Elvis co-designed a brothel.” A key difference is that I feel that Louis the XIV and Elvis were both notorious for garish design choices. I guess Saddam Hussein was, too, though if I was to list criticisms of Saddam Hussein, I’d get pretty far down the list before I got to “gauche”. Cheesecake Factories are certainly decorated to the hilt, but that’s not really what they’re known for — a joke about their huge menu would have read better. Though, notably: The joke reveals that the author is actually familiar with the Cheesecake Factory. Perhaps too familiar, because they went with a Cheesecake Factory observational deep cut that flew over some people’s heads.

Of course, the right-wing media figures trying to make hay of the joke aren’t just being obnoxious: They’re being woke. They’re pretending that a joke says something that it doesn’t so that they can troll for clout. That’s a signature woke move — think of all the social justice warriors who treated bits where the joke is “blackface is bad” the same as actual blackface. It was literally just last week that conservatives were mocking progressives for getting their tight-fitting gym shorts in a twist over a mildly edgy Shane Gillis joke. But now that it’s Obama, conservatives are soiling their bloomers over a comment that wasn’t made, and they’re counting on their audience to be too dumb or partisan to care about the lie.

They’re also trying to re-run the Cracker Barrel narrative. That was a hit for them last year, and as someone who works in political media, I can tell you: When you find a narrative that works, you flog it like Hasan Piker’s dog. The grain of truth is that there is some snobbery in food jokes, and the “gross normie food” joke jumped the shark many years ago. Being the Knights Templar For Chain Restaurants has been lucrative for conservatives, and since Obama mentioned the name of a chain restaurant, they clearly decided: close enough.

And they’ve proved once again that cynical misrepresentation and self-serving umbrage are bipartisan. I’m old enough to have seen the humorless scold role oscillate between right and left a few times; the question “is Helen Lovejoy a right-wing or left-wing character?” has different answers in different eras. Today, conservatives are playing the role of performatively daft, pearl-clutching scolds. And you’ll get no guesses from me about who will play the role tomorrow.

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Many people have noticed that centrist parties around the world are taking it in their pragmatic, incrementalist shorts. AfD is surging in Germany, Reform UK is competitive with both Labour and the Tories, and France’s election might pit the Commie-Adjacent Party against the Fascism-Curious Party. Meanwhile, in the US, the fact that we can’t rule out AOC vs. Tucker Carlson in 2028 makes me want to write to any living descendant of the Hanoverian kings and politely ask if they’d like to come rule America again, please.

Countless nerds of distinction have tried to explain what’s going on. The New York Times has run a series of articles that attempt to add an “…and why?” to the obvious “what the fuck is this shit?” question. The Times has spoken to many smart people with many fancy degrees, which has led to passages like this:

Mr. Acemoglu, a professor at M.I.T., has tried to provide both an analysis and some prescriptions in a recent book, “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?” In it, he outlines “two broad lines of failure” over the last half-century, which have led to widespread alienation and anti-establishment sentiment.

The first is what he calls the failure to deliver on shared prosperity, especially for a salaried working class hit by automation, globalization and sharply increased inequality, and which now feels deep anxiety about artificial intelligence.

Leaders have forgotten that a key part of their pact with voters is to “take care of the drains,” he said, to ensure the good functioning of the infrastructure of daily life, from roads to education to health care.

It seems that nothing will ever kill the “the working class has been hollowed out” myth; no matter how much data accrues showing a broad trend towards most people getting richer over time — including the poor and middle class — we’re still determined to act like we live in an immersive theatre production of The Grapes of Wrath.1 It’s also funny to cite automation and AI to explain a fifty-year trend, because: 1) If AI is a key factor, then what explains the other 47 years? And 2) I kind of feel that anyone still stewing over losing their bank teller job to an ATM in the ‘70s should get over it.

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It’s been clear for a while that some more-uncouth-than-usual ratfucking supported lefty candidates like Francesca Hong and Abdul El-Sayed during primary season. I wrote about this back in August, when we knew about campaign-funded polls being treated like normal ones and rumor-mongering from lefty pundits. Many other people were on this beat — knowing that we were being manipulated was kind of like knowing that Liberace was gay, in that you did not need to be a Poirot-level sleuth to figure it out.

Now, after the polling and analysis site Fifty Plus One started looking into the legitimacy of a group called Wedgewood Polls, Wedgewood admitted that they’re as fake as a candidate’s accent when courting the “urban” vote. But Wedgewood claims to be fake with a noble purpose — in a public statement, they said that their fake polls were an “experimental project” meant to “expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary”. Here’s the whole statement:

Do you buy that? If you do: Please Venmo me all your money, because I need it to buy…let’s say medicine for my sick…veterans. This is actually the second time that a fake polling firm has tried the “social experiment” excuse: A group called Median Strategies, which produced fake polls favorable to LA mayoral candidate Karen Bass, tried the same move two months ago. So, we’re either in a golden age of Andy Kaufman-esque social experiments or a golden age of online bullshit!

What was this, actually? Some overzealous lefties? A Republican ratfuck? An attempt to manipulate betting markets? Maybe a better question is: Is it possible anymore to disambiguate those three? Republicans have no stronger ally than online lefty freaks, and once you’re committing fraud, you might as well get on Kalshi and try to score big. The biggest divide in American politics is no longer liberal/conservative; it’s normal person/nihilist Batman villain, and whoever did this is clearly on the Batman villain side of the divide.

Wedgewood clearly favored whichever candidate in a race was furthest left. As I write this, Wedgewood’s Twitter account is still live, and it’s full of breathless announcements touting favorable polls for left-leaning candidates. Here are some of their most notorious entries:

The El-Sayed/Stevens/McMorrow poll appears to have had a real impact on that race: McMorrow claims that the poll led to donations drying up and increased calls for her to drop out. It might be true that Republicans who wanted to pick their opponent (El-Sayed) also wanted to pick their opponent’s opponent, and therefore tried to make McMorrow look unviable.

Nate Silver — whose polling model incorporated Wedgewood polls, and who is writing an article about the fallout — found that Wedgewood polls “tended to be ~1 point more favorable for Ds than the consensus”. I did my own as-good-as-you’d-expect-for-some-fucking-comedian analysis and found a +1.8 Democratic tilt (the abundant shortcomings in my methodology are described in this footnote1). But Nate and I are looking mostly — and maybe entirely, because I don’t know which polls are in Nate’s analysis — at general election polls. The dirtiest of Wedgewood’s work appeared to be in the primary — they had Crowley losing by 29 points! Wedgewood may have been mostly interested in the primary and kept the ruse going through the general election because disappearing in a puff of smoke during election season would give away the scam experiment.

It is common for a poll to have a partisan lean. It is not common for a fake poll to have a partisan lean — if you’re making up numbers, you should make up believable ones! The fact that Wedgewood’s numbers weren’t just fake but odd — so odd, in fact, that people eventually sniffed out the ruse — suggests that their motivation was to affect the race. Wedgewood says that they “never intended to sway an election or permanently mislead the public” — I say “bullshit”. And I wonder what a jury in a criminal trial for fraud might say.

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AOC’s recent comment that “woke 1 was crazyyyy” rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. The problem, as I see it, is that she wasn’t saying “woke was crazy and we should not repeat those mistakes,” but rather “woke was crazy and you can’t hold me responsible for what happened way back five years ago.” At least, that’s how it seemed — I’m deducing meaning from the timbre of her laugh and the number of “y”s in “crazyyyy”.

But if AOC is trying to memory hole past wokeness like it’s an ill-advised Mumford & Sons phase, she’s doing it in a weird way. Since her remark — which was in August — she has repeated virtually every trope that most people now agree was, indeed, crazy with four “y”s. She’s like an ex-alcoholic informing us that she’s a reformed and sober person now while dropping the whiskey shot into an Irish car bomb.

Perhaps the most memorable woke 1 trope was the upgrading of institutional violence against Black people from “problem” to “the defining aspect of American society”. That habit was why at woke 1’s peak, large numbers of left-leaning people overestimated police shootings of Black people by several orders of magnitude. Last month, AOC recreated this logical flaw by tweeting this misrepresentation in response to an initiative by fellow Squad member Ayanna Pressley:

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Part of what’s happening in France is that there’s a segment of French political culture that valorizes protest. In much the same way that Americans lionize aw-shucks farmers and the British love a witty cad, some French have an affinity for anyone who is pissed off in public. France seems slower than other countries to tell protesters to shut the fuck up and go home, though based on recent polling, it seems that even they have crossed the “shut the fuck up and go home” threshold.

French romanticization of protests is probably partly due to the rousing, populist, heartthrob-laden rebellion depicted in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Contrary to what most Americans think, Les Miserables is not set during the French Revolution, nor is it set during the July Revolution of 1830 or the revolutionary year of 1848. It’s set during a brief-and-failed rebellion that happened in 1832, which sought to spark a popular uprising but face planted. We probably only remember it because: 1) Victor Hugo happened to be sitting in a nearby park when it happened; and 2) Hugh Jackman’s potent-but-not-overbearing masculinity can make just about any movie a hit.

The context of the 1832 rebellion was that France had mostly experienced monarchical rule since the 1789 revolution. The succession of French governments in the preceding decades had basically been this:

It was that last switch — from a conservative Bourbon king to his more-chilled-out cousin — that really put pleats in revolutionaries’ cockades. They felt that the revolution of 1830 had been betrayed; violent street fighting that left several hundred dead had not produced rule by the people, but rather rule by a guy whom many hoped to be the Bourbon clan’s Michael Bluth. When Gavroche sings about a new king “no better than the last”, he means that new king (Louis Philippe I). Of course, Gavroche is fictional; the real revolutionary “Gavroche” would be a possibly-mentally-disabled mason’s apprentice with a history of violent conduct towards prostitutes.

But the 1832 revolutionaries weren’t just violence-prone Parisian tradesman; they were also often educated young radicals who possibly looked like Eddie Redmayne (though probably not given the hygiene and dentistry standards of the time). Student-led secret societies played a major role in the rebellion, including orchestrating the mechanics1 of the rebellion’s start. Which is notable, because this was not an organic uprising: This was an event planned by secret societies, trade groups, and foreign radicals from Italy and Poland. Les Mis makes it seem like the people, generally were rising up, but the rebellion actually came from a small number of people who tended to rise up at the drop of a chapeau.

And the failure to get the people, generally, to join the revolution was the movement’s achilles heel. The people had, after all, just risen up two years ago, the new guy had barely gotten the seat warm, and many people were republic-shy because the only elected government to that point had mostly invented new methods of mass murder. And when the radicals declared “THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN!!!”, most of Paris said “today is not good for me,” and the rebellion was quickly overwhelmed and defeated.

The legacy of the 1832 rebellion was probably to place the government on a more conservative trajectory. A symbolic move after the uprising was the government’s decision to place Liberty Leading the People — the boob-forward painting depicting events 1830 that heads this column — in an attic, because it was too revolutionary. And the government of Louis Philippe trended in an ever-more-conservative direction until it was overthrown in 1848. That revolution did put power in the hands of the people, and in the first popular election since the capital-”r” Revolution, the masses expressed their love for self rule by…electing Napoleon’s nephew in a landslide. And he soon declared himself emperor to little opposition. The complicating fact in every populist narrative is that many people don’t want freedom or rights or any of that high-minded hippie crap: They want to be led by an awesome winner who kicks ass.

But you can understand why Hugo stripped away the inconvenient parts of history and delivered a story about dashing idealists changing the world while sexy. And that archetype seems to be a frequent character in French political narratives. It’s surely part of the reason why any pissed off student in a yellow vest or truck driver with a scorpion in his ass over EU regulations can win support from a certain segment of the French populace. Today’s rioters seem to have exhausted public support and will probably help usher in a more conservative government, which is a case of history rhyming, though not in a lyrical, show-stopping Broadway kind of way.

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***Hello! I’m doing a Q&A on the podcast this week, so please send your questions and thinly-veiled attempts to get me to talk shit about people to questions@imightbewrong.org. If you’re a paid subscriber, please write to me from the account that you use to subscribe, because — as Martin Luther King said in his famous speech — “paid subscribers before free imbibers”.

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A viral video by The Wall Street Journal’s Emma Camp argues that New York City’s rent control laws cause apartments to be left empty. Or, if not “empty”, then “stuffed with trash like a serial killer’s house that had recently been hit by an earthquake.” Here’s Emma’s entry in the economics-slash-horror genre:

This will be the rare case of me sort of knowing what I’m talking about, because I have personally renovated properties in New York City.1 The unit in the video has so many issues that just these brief glimpses make me want to vomit and cry at the same time. That floor needs to be completely stripped and leveled before it can be replaced, there is surely lead paint everywhere, and I’d be surprised if there’s a single up-to-code outlet in the entire unit. I couldn’t give a repair estimate without knowing the square footage, the remediation issues (is there asbestos?), and how many skeletons of unfortunate hitchhikers are hidden within the walls (NY code states that there can only be three!). But the owners’ claim of $120,000 in renovation costs strikes me as highly plausible.

But Twitter socialists have denounced the video as “landlord propaganda”. Here’s a representative sample of their arguments:

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***Hello! I’m doing a Q&A on the podcast this week, so please send your questions and thinly-veiled attempts to get me to talk shit about people to questions@imightbewrong.org. If you’re a paid subscriber, please write to me from the account that you use to subscribe, because — as Martin Luther King said in his famous speech — “paid subscribers before free imbibers”.

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Anne Applebaum is one of my favorite columnists — she combines an international viewpoint with a Wayne Jarvis-level disdain for nonsense. She’s smart, though possibly too smart, as shown by her recent struggle to grasp the machinations of the dog food-stuffed condom that we call Donald Trump’s “brain”.

I say this because of one passage in an otherwise excellent article about Trump’s recent moves supporting Russia over Ukraine. Applebaum notes several things that Trump has done to favor Russia, some of them related to Ukraine’s attacks on Russian refineries. The simplest explanation is that Trump wants cheap gas for election day, or that he at least wants voters to blame high prices on something other than the war in Iran. But Applebaum dismisses that reasoning on the grounds that it doesn’t make sense:

The president has implied that the point of his new policy is to lower fuel prices for Americans. Perhaps he wants to convince voters that the cause of high prices is Ukraine and not his own war of choice in Iran. But this is not a sufficient explanation or justification for these dramatic actions. The amount of fuel that Russia could export is too small, the impact on pricing too slight, the narrative too late to shape electoral outcomes.

I strongly disagree that this is “not a sufficient explanation or justification” for Trump’s actions. It might not be sufficient for someone whose brain is not a big ball of Band-Aids and hair wadded together, but we’re talking about Trump here. And since we’re stuck with Trump for two more years, I think it’s important that we understand how he operates. Which I think means internalizing a theory that I will crudely — but defensibly1 — dub “Occam’s retard”.

Occam's razor is the principle that when presented with a phenomenon that has multiple explanations, the simplest explanation is the most likely one. Occam’s retard is the principle that when presented with a Trump action that has multiple explanations, the dumbest explanation is the most likely one. I think we innately resist this way of thinking, because it’s scary to consider that huge decisions are being made based on the mix of rage, horniness, and acid reflux that drives Trump’s impulses.

But the evidence for the theory keeps mounting. Trump’s tariff policy is driven by the belief that running a trade deficit means you’re “losing”. His crusade against mail-in voting is driven by lies. We’re fighting a war against Iran because Trump thought that killing the Ayatollah was like catching the golden snitch in quidditch. Any of these policies would change if Trump knew anything about anything at all, but he doesn’t, so they don’t, and history stumbles forward.

Plus, someone may have shown Trump this chart:

Applebaum is right to highlight Trump’s financial ties to Russia. Our two lead negotiators in Ukraine may soon acquire a financial stake in a Russian oil company — that’s a conflict of interest visible from space. And that is only one minor subplot in the vast Trump Corruption Universe, which now has more characters and spin-offs than Star Wars. Applebaum may well be correct that the six-to-ten Teapot Dome-level scandals that Trump has going in Russia are influencing his actions.

But we can’t discount the simple “me make low gas prices happen” just because it makes no fucking sense. It makes no sense to us, people who can look at realities of scale and time and deduce cause and effect. But Trump is Occam’s retard — his actions respond to his processes. And yes, that’s scary, but in order to better understand the world, we need to accept it as true.

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***Hello! I’ll be doing a Q&A on the podcast this week, so please send your questions and thinly-veiled attempts to get me to talk shit about people you don’t like to questions@imightbewrong.org. If you’re a paid subscriber, please write to me from the account that you use to subscribe, because — as Martin Luther King said in his famous speech — “paid subscribers before free imbibers”.

On Monday, a spicy story was all over Twitter, and it went like this: Ukraine knocked out a large portion of Russian server capacity. This was a big blow to Russia’s chat bot army, and it caused noticeable changes to web traffic patterns. There was a claim that Tucker Carlson’s social media views dropped by 71 percent. Germany’s far-right AfD party allegedly saw a similar pattern, and mentions of “Palestine” and “Fauci” dropped off a cliff. The implication was clear: Much of the toxic fuckwittery that one encounters online is a Russian psyop, which many of us have wondered about for some time.

I really wanted this story to be true. It fit so many of my priors — I have often looked at a post and thought “There is no way that any functioning adult human is this dumb.” And the movements that I consider to be rancid piles of dinosaur shit were the ones implicated — the drop-offs happened to the revanchist right and illiberal left, not my favored centrist dweebs. It’s like I saw a headline that said “Study Finds That Trump, L.A. Dodgers Responsible for Simpsons Getting Bad” — I’m prone to believe it because it perfectly fits what I want to believe.

Sadly, the narrative appears to be mostly untrue. Parts of it are true — I’ll sort the mess out in a minute — but the “everyone you hate is a Russian intelligence bot” theory has not been substantiated. I hasten to point out that the theory has not been disproved, either — you are still free to believe that anyone who disagrees with you is a pile of binary code built to advance fascism. But that theory has not been proved yet. As of press time. Which is 8:19 PM EST on Tuesday, October 13, 2026 AD.

Here’s what did and didn’t happen, as reported by The Guardian and Ilya Lozovsky (but I’m adding dirty jokes and they added disappointingly few):

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Identifying the goals of a French protest is like pondering the physics inside a black hole. France has long celebrated the pageantry and drama of protest movements even when the goal of the fucking thing is very much TBD. And so it is with France’s current protests-cum-riots: They are either about school funding, or police brutality, or Palestine, or immigration, or inequality generally, or like…farm…unions…regulations about unions or farmers or something. And of course racism: There’s either too much racism or too little or possibly just the wrong kind.

Only a lunatic would co-sign the goals of such an undefined movement, which is clearly as much about youthful rebellion as anything else. But a solid point is available to les jeunes de Paris should they choose to make it. Though France is not a legitimate target for any “neoliberal hellscape” argument — they have the highest spending-to-GDP ratio in the OECD — how France spends its money is notable. France spends a shocking amount on old people — I’ll run through those wrinkly, grey statistics in a minute, but trust me: French geezers be ballin’. It is accurate to say that spending on French retirees makes it hard to spend money on anything else. France has the most advanced case of a disease that’s sweeping the Western world, which is the hallucination that lavish spending on old people does not diminish resources for the young.

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This week, AOC said something that reflected a brainworm that’s become common on the far left (there’s an evergreen sentence if there ever was one!). Speaking at a fundraiser, she said this of Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate race in Michigan:

My first thought was: “She probably misspoke. She was riffing, she got out over her skis — she can’t really think that anybody can win anywhere? I mean: Could Dennis Kucinich win Mississippi? Could David Duke win Harlem? She probably just strayed from her prepared remarks, and her language got a tad sloppy.”

And then I read the next line:

Well okay! I was trying to give her a pass, but her notes apparently said something along the lines of “Repeat obviously incorrect point for emphasis.”

I don’t know why people struggle to understand the Abdul El-Sayed situation. He’s a weak candidate; he’s running a few points behind what you’d expect from a dime-a-dozen Democrat grown from pickle brine seeded with yeast. He’ll probably still win, because in this cycle, the red states are purple and the purple states are blue — Michigan currently has about a nine point Democratic lean. Winning a state that a Democrat should win by nine by, say, three — which is where El-Sayed is now — is not a good performance. A cynic might argue that AOC is framing things so that if El-Sayed stumbles over the line in Michigan, she can cite that as evidence that she’s a viable presidential candidate. I would never argue that, but a cynic might.

It’s strange to watch people struggle with the concept that a poor candidate can still win in a favorable environment. So, allow me to put it this way: Abdul El-Sayed is Trent Dilfer. Dilfer is the ex-NFL quarterback who won a Super Bowl in 2001 with the Baltimore Ravens despite being mediocre at best. His team was great — the Ravens featured a dominant defense led by Ray Lewis, a player so good that we mostly don’t talk about his proximity to a brutal double whoopsie-doodle. The fact that the Ravens won in spite of Dilfer, not because of him, is easily grasped by football fans, a demographic mostly known for beer consumption and a que sera sera attitude towards head injuries.

If anything, the comparison is unfair to Dilfer, who — I hasten to point out — is 100 times better at football than I am at anything. It’s obviously fucked up that a guy who couldn’t crack the starting lineup of his high school JV squad (me) can look at Dilfer’s career 70.2 passer rating and say “he wasn’t that good.” But it’s true that Dilfer specialized in reliability and being a good locker room guy, which unfortunately for him are euphemisms for “does not football well”. It’s also true that Dilfer is all over various “worst quarterback to win a Super Bowl” lists — in fact, it’s the only NFL category he dominates.

El-Sayed — like Dilfer — is a weak performer who happens to be in a favorable circumstance. If he wins, all it will prove is that he wasn’t quite terrible enough to bungle a task that was achievable for anyone competent. But it obviously doesn’t follow that if his campaign wins, it should be studied and copied so that other candidates can catch that “Bad but not historically bad” lightning in a bottle.

After the Ravens’ Super Bowl win, the league did not collectively say “That proves that Trent Dilfer can win a Super Bowl anywhere!” Even Dilfer’s own team did not conclude that — the Ravens let him go, he got a job as a backup in Seattle, and 23 quarterbacks that year put up a passer rating higher than Dilfer’s career average. If the Patriots had been one of the teams trying to catch the big D, he would have blocked a rookie named Tom Brady, which would have greatly altered the history of pro football and of American women’s sex dreams.

I don’t know how the crowd responded to AOC’s theory. I doubt anyone yelled “Well that obviously isn’t true” — it takes a lot of balls to heckle a fundraiser. But it is clearly not true that scraping out a narrow victory when you should have won easily validates your methods. Leftists push the idea that America is a secretly a far left country because they have to — to admit otherwise would be to admit that their views are a liability. But it’s silly to pretend not to understand a dynamic that football fans have no trouble grasping right away.

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It’s strange: A win for the environment these days often requires defeating environmental groups. That’s because environmental groups are not always concerned about the environment; sometimes they’re self-perpetuation machines that run on outrage, and sometimes they’re a doomsday cult whose main product is TikTok videos. The movement has undergone a Great Schism — people who want to solve climate change have gone one way and people who want to cosplay tired hippie narratives have gone the other.

The permitting deal negotiated by several key senators has forced environmental groups to pick a side. Several groups were embarrassed last week when Punchbowl News obtained a transcript of a conference call in which group leaders outlined a strategy of pretending to be open to the deal while working to kill it. That the groups opposed the deal wasn’t surprising — some environmentalists only get up in the morning so that they can complain about being sold out. But how they opposed the deal was unseemly; we saw how the sausage is made, and several groups got caught metaphorically shoving rats and dirty diapers into the grinder.

Now, several groups have sent a short, timid, and frankly odd letter to Democratic leadership urging a “no” vote. I don’t understand why these groups sent this letter immediately after their strategy was exposed; it’s like they tried to rob a bank with a squirt gun, and when somebody noticed, they said “Yeah, well…hand over the money or I’ll make you slightly wet.” Notably, a few large groups that were on the call did not sign the letter — the Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and the National Wildlife Federation were conspicuously absent. Also missing were a few groups that weren’t on the call to begin with: The National Resources Defense Council, League of Conservation Voters, and Public Citizen did not sign. The letter marshalls tepid support for weak arguments, and the decision to send it suggests that the signatories might be something less than strategic masterminds.

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Liberty Mutual insurance has a new spokesperson: It’s this fuzzy polyp with teeth:

That’s Liberty Bibberty, and you’ve probably encountered…they/them?…if you’ve recently watched football, reality TV, or basically anything broadcast in English. Probably more people know Liberty Bibberty than their member of Congress, and I have no doubt that googling “Libberty Bibberty erotica” would teleport me directly into the heart of darkness.

Liberty Bibberty comes from a riff from a different Liberty Mutual ad — the one with the actor who keeps flubbing his lines. So: Liberty Bibberty is Frasier to that ad’s Cheers. And if you’re thinking “Isn’t Liberty Mutual also the Limu Emu and Doug?” — yes, that is also them. There is basically now a Liberty Mutual Cinematic Universe, with new characters being added all the time.

And it’s not just Liberty Mutual: Geico has the Gecko, an endless parade of recurring characters, and a podcast where you can get to know the Gecko better (seriously). Flo From Progressive is perhaps the most fully-realized fictional character since Anna Karenina — we’ve met her family and friends, we know her hopes and dreams. Jake from State Farm has more interactions with American cultural figures than Forrest Gump. The name of the game in most advertising is “cute mascot + sticky catch phrase”, but the name of the game in insurance advertising seems to be “a fully imagined universe of characters whose depth rivals anything imagined by Tolkien or George Lucas.”

Why is that? And where is this headed? Will we eventually have meticulously-crafted insurance character environments complete with histories and cultural divides, like Narnia or Westereos? Will they speak a bespoke language, like Dothraki or Klingon? Will online fandoms tear themselves apart debating whether it’s time for a female Jake from State Farm? I don’t understand the logic that brought us this far, so I don’t know if there are limits — I can’t rule out the possibility of an arc where the Lime Emu and Doug break up and get other partners, or a Roots-esqu saga in which we follow Flo From Progressive’s family through the generations.

I think we may be witnessing the fruits of an ad executive grudge match. If there’s one thing I learned from Mad Men — other than that one way to deal with alcoholism is to just power through — it’s that advertising people are hyper-competitive. Perhaps Geico’s ad agency dominated the Clio Awards in the 2010s, and their competitors swore vengeance. That would explain the arms race, and it would also explain why the ads are episodic and self-referential — a common move when clout-chasing is to get artsy. There might be ad people out there saying “The Geico caveman ads were cute, but the Farmer’s Insurance Guy is modeled on Plato's Phaedrus, who exemplifies the dual nature of man. Which is why we got Golden Globe winner JK Simmons to play him.”

This trend in advertising makes me respect The General. You probably know The General, the cut-rate insurance company that features super-low-budget ads that use the computer graphics from Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing video. The fact that The General has not only resisted the spokesperson inflation trend, but has not followed any trends regarding flashy or even competent advertising — and yet are still a company — makes me think that their product must be great. It’s sort of Big Dick Energy for insurance — not trying at all makes me wonder what’s under the hood.

I fear this age of self-spawning insurance mascots. If one Liberty Mutual ad can generate another, but the original still exists, then there is a real danger of these ads spiraling out of control. What happens when insurance mascots outnumber humans, which is projected to happen in 2028? Drastic measures may be needed to rein this in. Because I’m not convinced that 30-second insurance ads need to represent the apex of human creativity.

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