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Trump’s alleged ability as a negotiator is key to his appeal. Expressions that rationalize authoritarian behavior — e.g. “He makes the trains run on time”, “He’s a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch” — are about tolerating bad acts in exchange for results. But Trump doesn’t get results. He acts on impulse and fails to see the big picture, and that’s why he’s getting his strategic ass spanked red by a cloistered bunch of theocrats and the guy who was second banana on Win Ben Stein’s Money.

For the second time in seven months, Trump has threatened Jimmy Kimmel because of a joke. When this happened last September, ABC pulled Kimmel off the air, only to reverse course when the decision became a PR Chernobyl. The FCC talked a big (and stupid!) game, but they didn’t make good on threats to pull broadcast licenses. And Ted Cruz — of all people — played a major role in getting the FCC to change course, thus taking the unlikely hero trope in a new and kinda-smarmy direction.

Now, Trump is running the exact same play that failed seven months ago, only dumber. The first difference is that the incident last September strengthened Kimmel’s position. Everyone in TV knows that late night shows are dying; that opinion is as agreed-upon among TV people as “it’s only gay if you’re in view of the coastline” is among sailors. But Trump’s botched martyrdom of Kimmel did the impossible: It caused the ratings for a late night show in the 2020s to trend up:

The network affiliates who were willing to temporarily put politics over business last fall are unlikely to do so now that Trump is asking them to take a bigger hit for a less offensive joke. Nexstar and Sinclair — the conglomerates who led the affiliate revolt — remain businesses, and there is no business model that recommends burying a viable show that ABC already paid for so that you can air reruns of Punky Brewster.

Another problem is that all the parties involved ran the math on this dustup last year and it favored keeping Kimmel on the air. When ABC took Kimmel off the air, they didn’t know how big of a PR hit they would take, but they quickly found out. They also didn’t know if Nexstar and Sinclair were willing to die on this particular hill, and it turned out that they weren’t. Bluster can make people think that they face a bigger threat than they do — that’s really the whole point of bluster — but it only works when people don’t know what they’re facing. Once the threat has been accurately assessed, bluster just makes you seem like a tropical bird hopping around on the forest floor, waving its plumage and hoping desperately for someone to notice.

A third problem is that the fact that Trump uses the executive branch to attack his enemies is even more well known now than it was last fall. To win its suit against ABC, the FCC will need to convince a judge that they’re just doing their job, and it’s just a goofy coincidence that their actions correspond with the president’s vindictive late night ramblings. Unfortunately for them, the fact that Trump has hurled the power of the executive branch at James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, and many others like a gorilla flinging his poo is well-established. Each new Trump lawsuit makes the next one less likely to succeed, because arguments like “we were not directed by the president — we truly believe that James Comey has engaged in seashell-based terrorism” become somehow-even-less-believable.

Trump’s chances of success are close to zero. ABC has already shown a willingness to fight it out in court, Kimmel is still on the air, and the affiliate revolt that was key last time has not materialized. Trump will almost certainly lose, possibly hilariously. So why did he even pick this fight? We all know the answer: Because he’s not acting strategically — he’s just doin’ shit.

Trump does not engage in rational cost-benefit analysis; he eats himself into a KFC-induced state of torpor, watches Fox News, and rage-tweets. The products of those sessions become US policy. Trump’s attacks on his enemies often don’t constitute “gaining leverage” because “leverage” means strengthening your position relative to your opponents, while Trump’s bluster often weakens his position. He’s not “gaining leverage” — he’s yelling “fuck you” into the wind, and his adorably naïve cheerleaders perpetually try to spin his tantrums as strategic master strokes.

It’s not great that the commander in chief is incapable of strategically outflanking the guy from The Man Show. It’s even worse that he’s gotten himself into a staring contest with a bunch of nuclear-aspiring theocrats that’s already lasted two weeks longer than he predicted. Because I think that Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be a disaster, I’m hoping that the president’s manic flailing will somehow work out. But I know the difference between “gaining leverage” and “pissing yourself with rage”, and unfortunately, I know which thing we’re witnessing here.

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This popped up on my timeline yesterday:

If 2014 me could see that tweet, he would be crushed. That version of me — who was jazzed to my fingertips to be writing for TV — thought I was at the beginning of some grand crusade of enlightenment. It turns out that I was actually working on a project that would eventually invoke dread in smart people similar to what you feel when someone at a party takes out a guitar, or when your Uber driver starts talking about Israel. The lesson — I think — is that if you ever think something good has happened to you, you’re wrong.

Much of social media reacted negatively to the piece, so I watched it. It was about how chatbots can contribute to delusion and even abet suicide, and it contained all of the selective anecdotes, misrepresentations, and omitting of context that I’ve come to expect from the show. But the thing that floored me was this joke:

Holy fucking shit — my former boss just joked that he’d like to see four tech leaders killed in a maritime accident! And the audience applauded…yyyyyyyyyikes! This is the first time I’ve said this in my 20-year comedy career, but: Where the fuck were the lawyers? They cleared that? I once had a joke on that very TV show killed because it was “insensitive to Florida,” and now “Haha, those people should drown, like those other five people recently did,” gets waved through? I’ve written some fucked up jokes in my time, but I don’t think I’ve ever written a joke quite that fucked up.

And apparently, John thinks that death is not sufficient punishment for makers of AI. He ended the piece by calling back a joke about a “Satan” chatbot, and he made it clear that he thinks that certain tech leaders are going to hell.

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Most people hate haute-radical talks about the ethics of stealing — like the recent one from the New York Times — because they’re a sub-kindergarten-level of “debate”. I hate them for a different reason: I know that at some point, my name is going to come up. And sure enough, ten minutes in, that New Yorker writer — who must be the most dunkable public figure since Shawn Bradley — mentioned me. It happens every fucking time — I’m the ur-example of justifiable theft, to be cited forever by trust fund kids who want to steal daydrift pants from Lululemon.

But here’s the thing: I am nothing like those bratty, cosplaying rich kids. For starters: I’m fictional. That’s actually why my situation is ethically justifiable — I’m less of a character and more of a thought experiment. But if I had lived, I lived during a time that is so dramatically different from present-day America that the story might as well be sci-fi. Rationalizing theft because of my tale is like rationalizing animal abuse because Fred Flintstone used a bird as a record player.

Les Miserable starts in 1815. Any history buffs reading will know that in 1815, France had just lost a fucking world war! We had to pay reparations three times our annual budget, which is why we shifted to a prostitution-and-pulled-teeth-based economy. That came after decades of suffering through the seven plagues of pre-industrial economies: droughts, floods, freezes, hail, fungus, boll-weevils, and shit-for-brains leaders who are worse than the other six things combined. Hugo began writing Les Mis in 1845, right in the teeth of “the Hungry ‘40s”, a continent-wide economic collapse caused by potato blight. And I know that America has been brought to its knees by a kinda-substantial rise in the price of eggs (What’s that? It’s already over? Interesting.), but consider that paying a tad more for eggs is not the same as spending three decades subsisting on fleas, rocks, and one single garbanzo bean at Christmas.

I stole bread to feed my widowed sister and her seven kids. If my sister lived in the US in 2026, she would get social security survivor benefits. Her family would be covered by CHIPS and Medicare, programs created and expanded by “neoliberal” presidents that Piker treats as the moral equivalent of Pennywise the clown. She’d be eligible for food stamps, the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other forms of assistance. And I’d surely be able to find a job in America’s famously-high-employment economy, since I’m strong, capable, and always played by someone with roguish good looks like Hugh Jackman or Dominic West.

Do you remember what I did after the whole bread-and-prison kerfuffle? I started a business (and also considered letting my future son-in-law bleed to death in the street, but let’s talk about the factory). The book goes into detail about the prosperity my factory created: People got jobs, and I used the profits to supplement workers’ wages and fund health care — it all sounds pretty neoliberal! But you know what I didn’t do? Let people steal. Because if I couldn’t sell my goods for profit, the whole operation would have gone tits-up. And then my workers would have had to go back to traditional French occupations, such as prostitute, mime, prostitute, syphilis-riddled painter, painter-prostitute, and opium-addicted philosopher who is also a prostitute.

Did you know that I’m based on real guy? It’s true: I’m based on Eugène Vidocq, an ex-convict who became a prominent member of society. Vidocq, like me, was an entrepreneur who employed low-status members of society. He also — wait for it — founded a private police force! In fact, Vidocq is sometimes called “the father of the French national police force” — the real me did not support lawlessness! I don’t know if Vidocq would have thrown that little fucker Gavroche face-down on the cobblestones and cuffed him — Gavroche, too, is fictional, so we can only speculate — but we know that Vidocq was on the other side of the revolt in the book! Real people are complex! Alas, I am not, because I’m Vidocq filtered through Victor Hugo and exist merely to embody the concept of an ethical person forced to break the law.

So, sure: If you find yourself in post-Napoleonic France, and your sister’s husband squirts off seven rounds and then croaks, feel free to hit the nearest Au Bon Pain — which in France is called “Barney’s Bread Barn” — and steal what you need. But if you’re not in that situation, don’t pretend that you are. Modern countries have exactly the type of safety net that’s missing in Les Mis, and it’s weird that the descendants of those highly-successful movements sometimes pretend like nothing has changed. But it did change — you won, you fuckin’ losers! You’re rich, healthy, and well-insured; the only women selling their hair in 2026 are cam models making millions on OnlyFans (and they get to keep the hair on their head). So, next time you have this conversation, leave me out of it, or better yet: Just don’t have this conversation at all.

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***Not everyone knows this story, so: The title is a reference to the time that someone (in some tellings FDR, in some tellings Churchill) suggested to Stalin that the Pope should be involved in shaping the post-World War II order, and Stalin replied “How many divisions does the Pope have?”

Hasan Piker is being shoved in our faces like Harvey Weinstein’s junk at a mid-2000s Miramax after party. The 34 year-old Marxist has recently been profiled in seemingly every publication short of Cat Fancy and Mature Asian, though, to be fair: It’s possible that he was profiled in Mature Asian. The latest edition of that fine publication is currently on my coffee table, ready to be read this Friday evening while I enjoy my pipe.

Democrats are Piker-curious because his fans are disproportionately young men, and Dems have what you might call a “cardigan-wearing NPR-weenie problem”. But the eye contact at the orgy here is that Piker happens to be a morally confused hard-left midwit whose whoopsies include saying that America deserved 9/11 (he later apologized), saying that Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel (he doubled down on that statement just this week!), and who recently Jane Fonda’d his way through China. To some Democrats, that makes him beyond the pale. But other Democrats fear reprising the endless purity tests that helped turn Democrats into the party of NPR Weenies to begin with.

I won’t opine on Piker’s views except to say that I think he’s a supernova of high school-level moron bait, and I wish America would respond to his schtick the way we’d respond to Trucker Ass-flavored Pringles (which do not exist as of press time). My goal here is to address the question of whether — from a purely practical standpoint — Democrats will net more votes by embracing Piker or by shunning him. I’m placing ethical questions entirely aside: For the purposes of this exercise, if I could net one single Democratic vote by reanimating Hitler’s corpse and putting him on a podcast where he and Goebbels review kung fu movies, I would say “Yes, do that.”

This debate is largely a continuation of the debate over Joe Rogan — many discussions of Piker make the comparison explicit. Kamala Harris famously turned down an interview with Rogan partly because her staffers found Rogan objectionable, and the liberal/progressive reaction to Bernie Sanders going on Rogan’s podcast in 2020 is part of what pushed Rogan towards Trump. Democrats have also noticed that the right dominates the bro-facing podcast space, and our pining for the emergence of a “liberal Joe Rogan” has come to resemble Kenneth from 30 Rock waiting for the rapture.

I understand those who think that Democrats need to stop deigning to only associate with the chosen few who flawlessly complete our America Ninja Warrior-style Purity Obstacle Course. Those tests narrow our coalition and make us look like judgemental assholes. We also need to occasionally talk to people with different views in order to have any shot at reclaiming our status as the party of free speech. But I think the comparison between Piker and Rogan is spurious for two huge reasons:

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I recently weighed in on the question of whether movies need to mean something. I used to think that they did; I would argue obnoxiously that movies had to contain commentary — I’m humiliated to admit that I may have used the phrase “hold a mirror up to society” at some point. But I now think that it’s fine for a story to just be a story. That’s what a decade of watching Hollywood ham-fistedly cram cornball woke messages into stories like they’re force-feeding a goose will do to a person.

But sometimes movies do say something, and that can be good! In fact, my favorite filmmakers — the Coen brothers — often make movies that at least seem to have a point. I might be wrong (TM) about that, of course; maybe I’m up my own ass when I watch Intolerable Cruelty and think “This is a metaphor for the Franco-Prussian War”. But the only way for the Coen brothers to correct my likely misinterpretations would be to break their longstanding policy of explaining their movies, so…fuck you, guys who made things that brought me great joy! Looks like I really boxed you in!

Of the 19 Coen brothers movies (counting Bridge of Spies, which they wrote but didn’t direct), 11 strike me as having a message. Or, actually: Nine seem to have a message, and two have themes that I’m going to round up to “messages” because I want to include them in Part 2, which I’m calling “The Coen Brothers Nihilism Suite”. There will also be a Part 3 called “Curmudgeons and Kidnapping”. Today’s Part 1 is about artists and the creative process, so I’m calling it “The Life of the Mind”.

Barton Fink

My takeaway message: Writers who pretend to serve the common man are often full of shit

I really enjoyed this movie about writers who are definitely not me. It was good to think about how some writers — not me, for sure, but others — really struggle to see the world through the eyes of ordinary people. These phonies go on rants about how art should serve the people and play-act being poor, but they’re really just self-absorbed egotists who don’t listen. And that’s an interesting meditation on writers who lack the salt-of-the-Earth esprit de corps that comes so naturally to me.

My favorite joke in this movie is that when Barton thinks he cracked the case — when he get a burst of inspiration and writes “something beautiful” that he calls “the most important work I’ve ever done” — it’s the same fucking thing that he wrote at the beginning of the movie. Movie characters usually go through a harrowing experience and then learn something about life — Barton had a harrowing experience but didn’t learn jack shit. He thinks he’s been enlightened, but he can’t move beyond what he knows.

In the funniest possible outcome, Barton Fink was the toast of the Cannes Film Festival and then bombed at the box office. Which makes the whole project some sort of self-proving commentary on movies and art. The top-performing movie when Barton Fink came out was Terminator 2: Judgement Day, which is a damn good ‘90s proxy for the Wallace Beery movie that Fink couldn’t write. I think that “write what you know” is often bad advice, but maybe writers don’t really have a choice — we are who we are, and though we sometimes imagine that we can live in the common man’s world, we’re just tourists.

Hail, Caesar!

My takeaway message: Movies have worth

This message is pretty explicit — it’s expressed in a monologue at the end of the movie. And I should probably mention that I don’t know if the Coens believe any of these alleged messages — this might not be “We believe the following proposition to be true” so much as “Here’s a notion…whaddya think?”

But I think that the Coens probably do think that movies have worth. They clearly love movies, and their list of favorite movies is full of ones that they must have enjoyed as kids. Hail, Caesar! came late in their careers when they were probably thinking “Did any of this mean anything?” The main character is highly religious and wants to do the right thing but often seems annoyed by the movie business, which — from what I know of the movie business — is how everyone feels all the time. It’s natural to wonder “Is this all worth it?”, and the movie seems to say “yes”.

Inside Llewyn Davis

My takeaway message: Some people need a creative partner

No movie ever made me think “Shit, they made a movie about my life” more than Inside Llewyn Davis. I saw the movie late in 2013, when I was a close-but-not-quite comedian living in New York and gigging at some of the exact same places that Llewyn plays in the movie! MacDougal street is now full of comedy clubs, not folk venues, and in the 2010s, the now-defunct club from the movie was a bar that hosted comedy. It was like someone followed me around with a camera, edited out all the masturbating, and put it on screen.

Except that there was one key difference: I never had a comedy partner. The movie starts shortly after the other half of Llewyn’s folk duo commits suicide, and Llewyn’s most caustic moments — and he is a guy who mostly has caustic moments — come when someone mentions his better half. Llewyn gets offered a spot in a new group and says “no” — it’s suggested that the group ends up being Peter, Paul, and Mary. He blows it with his girlfriend and chooses not to be in his son’s life. It seems like things will never work out for him as long as he’s alone.

I sometimes wonder if the movie was partly the Coen brothers wondering what their lives would have been like if they didn’t have each other. If so, they’re basically saying “I’d be in an endless failure spiral if not for you,” which is sweet. And if they did, indeed, make a movie about how bleak things would be if they didn’t have each other, then that’s just an arthouse hipster’s way of conveying a warm, sunny message.

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If you watch Zohran Mamdani’s recent Meet the Press interview, you can see how people would think “this is a reasonable guy”. In the interview, Mamdani is the epitome of an off-the-shelf Democrat. He talks about pre-K and progressive taxes, he has positive things to say about the police, and he says “affordability” more than Hodor from Game of Thrones said “Hodor”. He’s got an up-with-people affability that would make Pollyanna roll her eyes and do the “jerk you off” hand motion. Far from being the bleeding edge of a radical movement, the Mamdani in that interview is the Amazon Basics version of a Democratic politician.

That can be tough to square with the Mamdani who said that “When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” referring to the Israeli Defense Forces. That quote sticks in the mind partly because it’s radical and partly because it’s utterly confused — what the fuck is he talking about? Who is the boot and what are the laces in that metaphor? Mamdani is also married to a woman who liked several posts that celebrated the October 7 attack on Israel, including one that called claims of mass rape a “hoax”. And Mamdani has a long rap sheet of anti-police and anti-Israel rhetoric, including saying in 2020 that we should defund the police, calling police “racist” and “anti-queer”, saying that police, prisons, and “apartheid in Palestine” are symptoms of “white supremacy”, and being slow to disavow the phrase “globalize the Intifada” even as he was running for mayor.

And a lot of people are wondering: Which Mamdani is the real guy? Is it the hard-edged, Rage Against the Machine Mamdani, or the touchy-feely, Florence and the Machine Mamdani? Honestly, that question just makes me wonder about the meaning of the word “real”. Because I feel like I have a read on Mamdani — he seems like a type person I’ve known several times in my life. And when I think about who that guy is and what his journey looks like, the contradictions fade away and a coherent picture emerges.

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I’m glad that some folks have decided to debate whether Project Hail Mary was too long instead of talking about the Iran War. I want in on that — I don’t know what else to say about the Iran War. I wish we didn’t have The Dumbest and Drunkest in charge. Let’s hope it ends soon so that the mullahs can get back to shouldering the blame for ruining their country and Trump can get back to his real passion: interior decorating.

Matt Yglesias recently gave his thoughts about why movies are getting longer, and Frank Bruni weighed in yesterday. I think that Matt and Frank nailed the main two causes of this objectively-true phenomenon:

1. Movies had to be short when theater screen time was precious, but now that owning a movie theater is a like owning Party City in Eastern Ukraine, theaters are more amenable to movies with long run times.

2. Because basically everyone would rather watch a movie at home, pantsless, and farting with brio while suffering no social repercussions, studios are trying to coax people back to theaters with “event” movies.

Notice that both of these reasons relate to the trend of studios relying on a small number of big-budget movies. Low-to-middle budget movies in which a chimp attends college or 50-somethings in Martha’s Vineyard grapple with divorce are extinct. Basically everyone agrees on the dynamic: The movie industry has changed, blockbusters are make-or-break events for studios, and changes in the business have driven changes in substance. But why is length the result? I think there are a few factors beyond the ones that Matt and Frank identified.

One thing that seems trues is that CGI-heavy action sequences are basically un-cuttable. Movie scripts often change a ton — your gritty drama about a heroin-addicted poet will turn into an animated romp starring a rapping beaver. As the story changes, scenes that once seemed essential become extraneous, and stuff that isn’t working gets cut. The expression “Kill your darlings” exists because writers think that all of our ideas are flawless, brilliant gems, so we need a tough-but-fair person somewhere in the process to say “that sucks and it’s cut”.

But if a metric fuckton of money and God-knows-how-much production time have been spent on a huge sequence, there’s no way in hell that’s getting cut. This isn’t just sunk cost fallacy — this is sunk cost fallacy plus the knowledge that if you go to your boss and say “We wasted $10 million of your money,” your boss will say “I understand, I respect your honesty, now step into this rocket: I’m going to fill it with scorpions and fire it into a volcano.” Most projects start bloated and get edited down, but if you hired half of Taiwan to spend a year animating a scene that also required shutting down Italy for a week and building a full-scale replica of the moon, you can’t say “Ehh…it feels redundant. Cut it.”

Blockbusters are also written differently than other movies. Summer tentpole scripts tend to get passed around like liquor at a 9AM meeting at the FBI; it’s common to have several writers take a pass at a script, with the number going up every time an executive thinks “fucking fuckballs we’re fucking fucked”. Film industry blogger Stephen Follows tracked the average number of writers on feature films, and sure enough: The number has gone up over time:

And the genre with by far the most multiple writers is “adventure”, i.e. “summer popcorn fare in which a robot fights an elf or whatever”.

When different writers with different visions take passes at a script, you often end up with ten pounds of story in a five pound bag. You might struggle to cut things, and you might not be able to cut things if some scenes have to stay just for later scenes to make sense. The expression “a camel is a horse designed by committee” very much applies to screenwriting: A camel is a horse with extra parts, some of the parts are fucking ridiculous, and the answer to the question “does anyone like this thing?” is “yes — people in foreign markets”.

I haven’t seen Project Hail Mary, though I plan to — I’ll see it when I can watch it in my own house where the only asshat talking over the dialogue is me. But I’ll guess that the padded run-time in this particular instance might be due to a very old reason: It was a book first. It used to be that a two-VHS-tape movie that overstayed its welcome was invariably based on a book. Books — especially old ones — are often cradle-to-grave biographies written by some surly Russian who: 1) Was paid by the word, and 2) Had plenty of time to write on account of being snowed in 11 months a year. Those are very different rules from the ones that prevailed in the film industry. And books and movies remain different mediums, and what works in one might not work in the other.

I’ll probably like Project Hail Mary, because I loved The Martian. I like stories where a competent group of people tackle a problem without their petty grudges getting in the way — you know, fantasy. And if it has a triple-ending problem — which Matt and Frank agree that it does — I’ll browse baseball stats for the last 20 minutes. Yet another advantage of watching at home! Because many of the problems caused by the watch-movies-at-home era can be solved by watching movies at home.

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Two things above all cause my bullshit detector to blare like the warning system in a plane that just lost both engines:

1. When a company runs an ad where the message is “We love our jobs!”, as if that company’s employees aren’t engaged in the same drudgery-for-sustenance trade as every other worker on the planet;

2. When a single academic paper seems to be the entire evidentiary source for a narrative.

Condition #2 has recently been met: In virtually every discussion I hear about AI these days, someone references a Stanford paper that appears to have found early evidence of AI-induced job loss. Some see this finding as the canary in the coal mine for widespread job displacement, and, in fact, the paper is called “Canaries in the Coal Mine” — that’s a lack-of-subtlety that would impress Larry Flynt! The paper has been cited by Tristan Harris — one of the most prominent voices warning about the dangers of AI — and also by the Washington Post, The New York Times, CNBC, Fortune, and others. It’s become to conversations about unemployment and AI what The Simpsons is to this blog: It will be mentioned at some point, it’s just a matter of when.

The paper’s claim is that young workers in “AI-exposed” sectors have experienced a 13 percent decline in employment since the launch of Chat GPT. You can see how this supports a narrative: The Warrenite left plays the “Tech Companies are Evil” song more than Lynyrd Skynyrd plays Freebird, and it’s an article of faith among some that recent graduates are entering the worst job market since the eruption of Mount Mazama in 5,700 B.C. This is, of course, the type of situation that leads people to twist findings to fit preferred narratives, and that appears to have happened here.

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At a recent public event, our vice president — in a presumed attempt to garner the favor of those in attendance — opined in a manner that, upon due consideration, could call the fortitude of Mr. Vance’s character into question. The matter regarded the discourse between President Trump and Pope Leo XIV, and Mr. Vance commented thusly:

While persons of sound temperament might debate the merits of Mr. Vance’s conjecture, a fair-minded observer would surely also be compelled to concede that the vice president’s purported standard is only intermittently applied by the source of its provenance! To wit: Is Mr. Vance — whose public statements include a spurious claim about the culinary practices of Haitian immigrants and concocted statements about Social Security — a man whose utterances are uniformly “anchored in the truth”? And moreover: Has Mr. Vance’s foreperson in the Oval Office demonstrated a commitment to being “careful” in his proclamations on public policy? I submit that he has not! Verily, I contend that the Commander in Chief is, in actuality, demonstrably delinquent in the values that Mr. Vance professes to cherish!

For, truly: Could a person of sound mind reasonably characterize the following statement as “careful”?

In what japery does the vice president partake?! Surely jest is afoot! He professes one standard for a public figure who has granted him no patronage, while expressing no such expectation for the figure to whom his own fortunates are intertwined! Such roguishness! Such knavery! The Vice President doth seemingly aspire to mictorate on the nation’s leg and induce us to believe that the culprit is precipitation!

Surely, Mr. Vance’s reputation will suffer great deterioration as a result of this logical delinquency. Our leaders are meant to be men of unimpeachable moral hygiene, are they not? And as such, what conclusions must be wrought from such a demonstrable act of feeble-mindedness — I do not pretend to conject but am, indeed, forced to surmise! As, logically, are others! And the time-honored adage on the topic of character befoulment surely has application in this context: “Besmirched in the spring, ‘til autumn shall greater defacement bring!”

It appears most conceivable that Mr. Vance, his comeuppance so imbibed, may soon see fit to discharge his duties in favor of someone with more robust logical faculties. Indeed, the depth of his credibility debasement may be so vast that no other course is feasible. A government cannot sustain the faith of its people if its chief executors are known to be fabulists and scoundrels. For an administration to persist while failing to command the trust of the citizens that imbue it with power would be a tragic perversion of the Founders’ intent. Surely, the administration would so concede! And surely, remonstrations and resignations are imminent! For the vice president — occupier of the second most-powerful station in our land — hath, with this dissemblance, undoubtedly situated his pickle twixt the spinning wheel. And only in a nation in which propriety is a distant memory would consequences not ensue.

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For as much as I chide Bluesky for being a greenhouse for every bad lefty idea that sustains the MAGA beast, I understand why it became A Thing. A crazy billionaire bought Twitter and used it to stump for an authoritarian loon. He made tweaks that made the platform less fun, unless you enjoy sports betting ads and hot takes about the origins of World War II. As much as tales of billionaire influence are often overblown, in this case, the story was true: An ultra-rich guy seized a media platform and used it to promote his Ayn-Rand-and-ketamine-influenced views.

So, progressives bolted. They packed up their NPR tote bags and RBG workout tapes and fled to Bluesky. This exodus was more than a fit of pique; it was a concerted attempt to build a Twitter alternative. And right after the election, it looked like it might work:

That spike led to a flurry of “Could Bluesky Replace Twitter?” articles. It wasn’t the world’s craziest theory; MySpace, Vine, and Clubhouse prove that it’s possible for Platform A to be replaced by Platform B (especially if Platform B explores bold new horizons of porn). But in the last 18 months, Bluesky has slowly bled out:

Meanwhile, back on Twitter, conservative voices are dominating the conversation, as shown by this bubble chart compiled by Nate Silver:

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Orbán is out in Hungary. I’m happy, because I dislike Orbán’s brand of ethno-nationalist illiberalism, and because I’m tired of typing that goddamned “a”-with-a-li’l-hat-on-it in Orbán’s name (if you’re on Windows, it’s “NUM LOCK + ALT + 0225 + SHIFT + WINDOWS + CONTROL”, hold down for 70 seconds). Orbán’s ouster also seems like a good time to reflect how badly the big theory of political change from ten years ago has fared.

Circa 2016, people thought that we might be witnessing the beginning of a populist authoritarian wave. Trump won in the US, Brexit passed in Britain, the Law and Justice Party was in power in Poland, and Orbán was making his illiberal intentions known. The rule that I learned in college — that when a country becomes an established liberal democracy, they don’t go backwards, sort of like how once you start getting your groceries delivered, you’ll never set foot in a grocery store again — seemed wrong. Liberal democracy was maybe not the end of history. And I was an acolyte of this thinking — if this piece is a dunk on anyone, it’s a dunk on my eternal bête noire: me from the past.

One thing that made the “rising authoritarianism” theory compelling was the presence of a plausible instigating event: The advent of social media. The story went like this: Social media bypassed gatekeepers and democratised information, which empowered fringe elements that had been shunned by establishment types in politics and media. It also gave politicians who speak the people’s language a direct line to their audience. It empowered the common man and reminded us why most framers of Western constitutions greatly feared the common man, whom they considered smelly, ignorant, and more than ready to burn witches or murder Jews if they thought it would increase crop yields by even a miniscule amount.

The theory had logic, but a global shift towards populist authoritarianism hasn’t happened. Brexit is unpopular, the regimes in Poland and Hungary have been voted out, and Trump would be out if Kamala Harris hadn’t responded to a question about using taxpayer dollars to fund gender reassignment surgery for anyone anywhere in the world (or whatever the question was) with: “Sure”. No new Western governments have hopped on the authoritarian bandwagon in the past decade. Social media is still with us — and it has not morphed into a Lincoln-Douglas-style long-form tête-à-tête, to say the least — but what looked like the beginning of a wave now looks like more of a self-contained ripple.

So, what about the theory was wrong? To my mind, definitely the notion that people were becoming ideologically right-wing. We really need to drop the idea that most people are ideologically anything — they’re just not. John and Jane Average Dipshit are not crusaders, they don’t want to be foot soldiers in your silly little Socialist Revolution or corpses in your re-conquest of Christian civilization; they want a better, simpler life, and also for their enemies to be killed by hornets, if possible. Political types ascribe to grand, high-falutin theories, but regular people who have a shot at experiencing joy or sex at some point in their lives do not. So, we political types need to stop imagining that every tremor in the political landscape is a harbinger of a seismic shift that will lead to permanent victory for one ideological faction or another.

But the political shift that probably did occur involves immigration. Though social media did not suddenly turn people into acolytes of Nietzsche and Carl Schmitt, it did make nativist politics far more potent. Old Media would deem, say, video of a random immigrant being an asshole on a bus not newsworthy, but social media personalities will circulate that video all the way to the bank. And a politician whom establishment types would have laughed off as a xenophobic loon can now take their case straight to the masses. These changes combined with the fact that…ya know…there’s a there there — you won’t find me arguing that Western governments deserve five-star reviews for their handling of immigration — are why basically every liberal democracy has a noisy anti-immigration party. Centrist parties need to get with the times and neuter the potency of anti-immigration politics. That was the policy of incoming Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar, a man whose nationalist credentials are surely helped by the fact that his name — if he was British — would basically translate to “Johnny Anglo-Saxon”.

I should probably get “VOTERS DO NOT UNDERGO BIG IDEOLOGICAL SHIFTS” tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. Most voters are practical, not ideological — their concerns are typically material and first-order. They also seem to periodically get bored with their leaders — rarely does any party anywhere in the world enjoy more than a decade in power before voters say “Nah, fuck that” and elect anyone else. Permanent ideological shifts basically never happen. And the good news is that the ideological conquest of the Western world by illiberalism that many of us feared a decade ago has not happened. The weird news is that any of us ever thought that it might.

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A recent finding by political scientists at UC Berkeley and Yale has been getting a lot of attention. The researchers studied which opinions by hypothetical political candidates changed voters’ opinions the most, and the part that I highlighted below — the bit that academics are too prudish to call “the money shot” — is what I want to talk about.

The study finds that the policy change Democrats could make that would improve their standing with voters the most is to move to the center on affirmative action (i.e. ditch affirmative action or substantially changing it). And a surprising second place is ending racial preferences for small business loans, which is odd in light of the fact that presumably few Americans are appealing to the Department of Agriculture for help with their corn-based startup. The paper found that moderating on affirmative action would gain Democrats an incredible 4.5 points of vote share, and for context: The last Democratic presidential candidate to lose the popular vote by even half that margin was Michael Dukakis.

So, two questions spring to mind:

1. What’s causing this?

2. Why don’t Democrats do something about it?

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So, I was browsing Truth Social the other day — I love funny cat videos! — and did you know that the president has an account on there? He does! And he recently wrote this:

I’ll bet that my reaction to that was the same as most people’s: I opened a browser tab and googled “3J93TG AMRWGSNOPPTH” because my fingers were too panicked to properly type “25th Amendment”. The president’s psychotic threats have led to calls for use of that amendment from people including J.B. Pritzker, Mahdi Hasan, and Marjorie Taylor Greene — which, by the way, happens to be the “fuck, marry, kill” you’re confronted with when you enter hell. So, could the amendment possibly be invoked?

Short answer: No, it is unbelievably unlikely. The removal process under the 25th Amendment is actually more cumbersome than plain old missionary-position impeachment.

The first step in the involuntary removal process is for the Vice President to declare the President unable to perform his duties. That means that Vance would have to turn on Trump, which is theoretically possible because Vance is a soulless vessel of pure self-interest. But Vance is also smart enough to know not to pull that ripcord too early — this is an “if you come at the king, you best not miss” situation. So — though I’m sure that Vance is capable of behind-the-scene policking that would make Machiavelli cream his jeans — he’ll be the last person to publicly get on board.

A majority of the president’s cabinet secretaries have to join the Vice President in declaring the President unfit. That strikes me extremely unlikely because the one qualification for serving in Trump’s cabinet is “loyalty”, with even “minimal competence” and “sobriety” seemingly optional. So, this group of D-level flunkies — most of whom would be Assistant Managers at Little Caesar’s if they weren’t in the cabinet — has to turn on their meal ticket. And that seems as about as likely as Morgan Freeman winning “Best Girl/Girl Scene” at the Adult Film Awards.

If the Vice President and a majority of the cabinet agree that the President can’t serve, then the President can submit a declaration to Congress that he is fit. And that — I’m sure we can agree — is by far the funniest part of this process. What happens if the president sends Congress this?

If the president asserts his fitness, then the question goes back to the VP and the cabinet (I guess this back-and-forth was designed to prevent an “I’m not dead yet!” situation). But if the executive branch holds its ground, the question goes to Congress. Congress can remove the president with a two-thirds vote in both houses. You may notice that this is a higher barrier than impeachment: Impeachment requires two-thirds in the Senate but only a simple majority in the House. So, in order to remove the president via the 25th Amendment, you need the same level of political support required for impeachment and 72 more votes in the House and a majority of the cabinet and the Vice President. The process is not a fast track.

The Amendment also has a poorly-defined and never-tested process through which Congress could create a body that would rule on the president’s fitness instead of the cabinet. It seems that the thinking was that things might boil down to a medical question, so Congress could empanel a Seal Team Six Of Doctors to make the call. That is cosmically unlikely to happen here — the filibuster would have to be overcome, and it would be ethically dodgy. It would probably lead to Republicans and Democrats becoming Mark and Jeremy in that episode of Peep Show where they keep trying to get each other committed.

So, there will be sufficient political support for impeachment before there’s support for the 25th Amendment. And if you’re thinking “but impeachment is for crimes,” okay: Pick your favorite impeachment-level Trump crime. Does pardon-selling rub you the wrong way? What about using foreign policy for personal enrichment? Abuse of power was big in the ‘70s, or Congress could litigate some of the DOJ inquiries that Trump shut down — America loves a reboot! There are endless options in the vast menagerie of Trump crimes — if enough support for removal ever emerges, impeachment is the obvious route.

One thing we’ve learned during the Trump era is that our institutions can be neutered by blind partisanship. All the processes that were designed to check a president’s power break down if enough people sacrifice all notions of fairness and objectivity. And the upshot is that only one thing can remove a president: A massive shift in the political winds.

If that ever happens to Trump, we’ll almost certainly hit the impeachment bar before we hit the 25th Amendment bar. People are talking about the 25th Amendment now because it would probably be considered in a world where our leaders care more about the country than about their party holding power. We don’t live in that world, and our system lacks remedies for blind partisanship. And anyone hoping that the 25th Amendment might be a remedy is bound to be disappointed.

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In HBO’s upcoming reboot of the Harry Potter series, the role of Severus Snape — which was previously played by a white actor — will be played by Paapa Essiedu, who is Black. The decision has sparked backlash, though it also responds to criticism that the Harry Potter series is too white.

A society’s artistic works reflect its values. What we see on screen helps define us as a culture. And that’s why the decision to cast Essiedu as Snape — and the response to that decision — is a clear sign that we, as a society, have become…uh…we’ve devolved into…

…

…

You know what? Fuck it — I can’t do this shit anymore.

Who gives a fat rat’s jizzpouch about any of this? This debate exists in a galaxy several light years beyond retarded. I’m a grown fucking man, I’ve got a kid and a mortgage, I can’t treat the casting choices in the Little Wizard Boy TV show like they’re the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s insane-times-a-billion that there are adults in our society — people who can VOTE!!! — who would devote one nanosecond of their precious time on Earth to fretting over the skin color of the mean professor at Magic University.

To tell the truth, I hadn’t even decided where I was going with this article. Was I going to be furious because Snape is white in the books (is he white in the books?), or up-in-arms because there’s one Black guy at Hogwarts and he’s the bad guy? The “bad guy” outrage is pretty dumb, because Snape isn’t a stereotypical scary Black guy character — he’s not a Chicago street pimp mugging people at knifepoint. And doesn’t Snape turn out to be good? And don’t the people screaming for more “BIPOC” actors want them to also get juicy bad-guy roles — can they only play Johny America, the Nobel Prize-winning firefighter? On the other hand, the “they’re erasing white characters!” stuff is inane, too — is race even part of the Harry Potter universe? Do the characters have races — aren’t they witches or vampires or some shit? My answer to all these questions is: “Fuck this, fuck this, fuck this, I hate this so fucking much, yes I write a newsletter and culture war = clicks but I’d rather floss my asshole with barbed wire than pretend to care about any of this über-retarded bullshit.”

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