I do not normally write about physics, or acoustics, or epidemiology. I am writing about them right now, however, because a piece has been circulating in my corner of the internet that illustrates a pattern I do write about: the pattern of confident debunking that is itself badly wrong, and that gets social traction precisely because it sounds measured.

The specific fight is about data centers; more specifically about the sounds that they make. The more general question, however, is how a piece of writing can be so fluent, so credentialed-sounding, and still so confidently wrong, and what that failure mode tells us about the broader market for debunking.

This failure mode has grown in the last few years. The capital-R Rationalist-adjacent takedown. The Substack exposé of someone else’s Substack exposé. The piece that wins by tone rather than evidence, and that counts on the reader not checking the citations. It is a genre, and it has conventions, and in this case Andy Masley has followed them faithfully. You might be concerned that I am doing the same here. No need to worry; unlike Masley, I do not pretend to be a high priest of all things data center.

What’s this argument even about?

Benn Jordan is a musician and YouTuber who has spent years recording sounds outside the human hearing range. He recently released a widely-viewed video arguing that data centers emit infrasound at levels that correlate with health complaints from nearby residents. The video has real problems – misrepresented citations, overreaching mechanistic claims, a self-run experiment with serious design flaws. It also contains real empirical work and a reasonable core question. It’s a fascinating video that, if taken with grain of salt, can be quite informative about the potential problems data centers may pose for local communities and how we might better mitigate against them.

Andy Masley runs a Substack covering AI and the environment. He is a former physics teacher. He sometimes does decent work on the hysteria around AI land and water use, even at one point having forced the author Karen Hao to correct her own book citing water consumption levels 1000x higher than reality. Ostensibly riding high on that achievement, he has now published a 10,000-word takedown of Jordan arguing that infrasound harms from data centers are “fake.” The piece has been getting circulated around techno-optimist circles (where I often find myself) as a definitive debunking.

But unlike his critique of Hao’s work, his criticism of Jordan’s video (and his subsequent online behavior) is seriously lacking to the point of undermining the rest of his work. Jordan has overreached. Masley has overreached further, in the opposite direction, while positioning himself as the corrective. This essay is about the second overreach, because the first is getting plenty of attention already and the second is not.

I am not here to defend Jordan’s video. Several of Masley’s specific criticisms of it are correct, and I will say so plainly. Jordan is an anarchist, and can be a bit of a crank at that. Sometimes he does incredible journalism (see: this takedown of Flock security cameras), and other times his political zeal gets the better of him. The problem is that Masley does not stop at the defensible criticisms. He keeps going, past the evidence, past his expertise, past the point where a good faith critique would hedge, before finally arriving at the audacious (and unscientific) title “Contra Benn Jordan, data center (and all) sub-audible infrasound issues are fake.”

Before we go any further, I want to make one thing absolutely, positively clear: Andy Masley is claiming that all alleged issues ascribed to sub-audible infrasound are fake. He expands the claim in a followup tweet after Jordan responded less than pleasantly:

Masley’s claim is not that Jordan’s interpretation is strained, or that his evidence is weak, or that his conclusions outrun his data. His claim is that Jordan’s sources say the exact opposite of what Jordan says they do. This is a very strong claim. It is also one you can check.

What follows is technical in places, but not difficult. The concepts involved can be explained in a few paragraphs each, and they have to be, because Masley’s argument depends on the reader not having them. Once you have them, the argument falls apart on its own.

Before we get going, let’s first define infrasound as a phenomenon. After all, it is the central focus of this argument. Infrasound is defined as “Sound at frequencies less than 20 Hz,” given that 20Hz is the approximate lower limit of the range of human hearing.

Now, let us start with the single most consequential error in the piece – one that recurs throughout and that a physics teacher, of all people, should not have made.

He does not seem to know what a decibel is measuring

Masley has gone on a full-frontal assault against Jordan, tweeting and Bluesky-ing (what is the verb for that, anyway?) for a few days straight now. In doing so, he has revealed that he does not understand the difference between what a microphone measures and what a human hears; a confusion on which he has built a significant portion of his argument.

When we talk about sound levels in decibels, the number is meaningless without knowing decibels of what. A high pitched sound and a low pitched sounds are audible at different decibel levels. To address this issue, different weighting scales have been developed over time. When discussing whether a sound was audible, perceptible, or harmful, we need to know what weighting scale was applied to the measurement. The three relevant scales at play here are:

• dBA (A-weighting): designed to approximate how the human ear responds to audible sound. It severely filters out low-frequency content. A 10 Hz signal gets attenuated by roughly 70 dB under A-weighting.

• dBC (C-weighting): applies much less filtering at low frequencies. Better for measuring loud, low-end sounds.

• dBG (G-weighting): specifically designed for infrasound, weighted to reflect sensitivity in the 1–20 Hz range where infrasound lives.

“60 dB” is a meaningless number without knowing the scale, the way “60 degrees” is meaningless without knowing Celsius or Fahrenheit.

Masley discusses Jordan’s citation of a Polish farm paper that measured exposure to infrasound from farm machinery during an 8-hour workday. The paper identified that half of the measured infrasound sources on the farm reached average G-weighted levels at or above the 102 dBG occupational guidance for a workday.

That’s fine, Masley explains:

Data center and wind turbine infrasound at residential distances is typically in the 50 to 75 dBG range. That might sound like a small gap, but remember that decibels are logarithmic. Every 10 dB increase represents a 10x increase in sound intensity, and every 20 dB increase represents a 100x increase.

So this is telling us that even the loudest data centers near people’s homes are several hundred to over a hundred thousand times quieter than what the occupational standard the Bilski paper is using considers safe for a full 8-hour workday of direct exposure. The paper Jordan is flashing as evidence of infrasound harm is, if you actually read it, implying that our regular daily infrasound exposure could be multiplied by 1000 and still be totally safe.

Except there are four glaring issues with this statement:

1. Masley claims that “Every 10dB increase represents a 10x increase in sound intensity.” This is technically true, but it is the wrong quantity for the argument he is making. Intensity describes the power per unit area carried by the sound wave through the air. What matters for the biological mechanisms Jordan is describing (pressure on the eardrum, stimulation of vestibular structures, outer hair cell response) is not intensity but pressure. And while a 10dB increase represents a 10× increase in intensity, it represents only a ~3.16× increase in pressure. Reporting the intensity ratio rather than the pressure ratio inflates the apparent safety margin by roughly a factor of 300. By the quantity that actually maps to the effects Jordan is proposing, the gap between residential data center levels and occupational exposure limits is one to two orders of magnitude in pressure, not the five orders of magnitude that Masley’s framing implies. It matters significantly less what the power of sound is at the source here than the pressure change at the point of “impact” for the listener.

2. Masley conveniently only cited the broad occupational guidance for 8-hour workdays while omitting the exposure limit for workplaces requiring maintained mental concentration, which is a much lower 86dB. OSHA also identifies 85dBA as the occupational limit for sound exposure over an 8-hour period. Using this number for comparison, data centers are only ~4x quieter than occupational standards allow for certain roles.

3. These figures are for eight hours of exposure. The dose makes the poison. It’s quite absurd to say “this is under the threshold for eight hours of exposure, so it’s surely under the threshold for 24/7 exposure!”

4. The study notes that the impacts of infrasound may pose greater risk to “pregnant women and adolescents,” possibly justifying an even lower rating of dBG.

Masley handwaves away this last point, but studies have shown that there is a potential link between chronic sound exposure during pregnancy and negative health outcomes. The CDC even tells pregnant women:

Avoid low frequency sounds (noises you feel as a rumble or vibration). Low-frequency noise travels through your body more easily than high-frequency noise. Low-frequency noise can cause changes that could affect your developing baby.

Masley’s criticism of this study seems to solely focus on the auditory impact of occupational exposure, without even thinking about how sound works. Infrasound is not a potential threat because of a more intense volume; it is a potential threat because of the pressure changes it causes. For all of his grandstanding over Jordan’s “pseudoscience,” Masley seems to think that decibels only measure sound.

Before I go any further, let me ask you something: does this seem like it says the exact opposite of what Jordan is claiming? There is room for good faith disagreement on the merits of the study, on interpretations of the findings, etc. But personally, I don’t believe that anyone acting in good faith can read the above research as being diametrically oppositional to Jordan’s claims like Masley says it is.

He does not understand what a perception threshold is

Elsewhere, Masley states that infrasound is not an issue because of the volume it needs to be for us to detect it:

Infrasound at 20 Hz needs to be at roughly 79 dB for us to detect it, about the level of a vacuum cleaner running a few feet away. A frequency of 10 Hz needs to be at about 97 dB, like a motorcycle at close range or a subway passing on the platform. A frequency of 5 Hz needs to be at about 107 dB, like a chainsaw at arm’s length.

Masley’s central rhetorical move is pretty simple here: the perception threshold at 10 Hz is 97 dB; residential infrasound levels are below that; therefore, there is no effect.

This is a non-sequitur.

A perception threshold is the level at which a conscious, reportable sensation occurs. It is the floor below which you cannot perceive something. It is not the level below which biological effects cease. These are different things, and conflating them is not a caution any serious researcher in this field would permit themselves.

In fact, Jordan makes this point, comparing infrasound potentially to ultraviolet light: despite being imperceptible, he argues, these both can cause harm in humans. Masley dismisses this out of whole cloth simply because “this blurs two opposite ends of the audible spectrum.” Because one is infra- and the other is ultra-, it’s apparently not even worth considering the broader point that imperceptible waves can be harmful in some scenarios despite their imperceptibility.

Extraordinarily, Masley himself cites this directly. He writes: “research suggests that while inner hair cells don’t respond to infrasound, outer hair cells of the cochlea can respond to very low-frequency sound at levels below what we consciously detect, and some studies have reported cochlear or brain responses under near-threshold or below-threshold conditions.” This implies that sub-threshold sound can have an impact on humans.

He then, in the very next sentence, dismisses the implication entirely: “But no one has shown this mechanism produces the long list of real-world symptoms people often blame on environmental infrasound.” He is now using his belief as argument in support of the same belief: nobody has shown this mechanism produces these symptoms; therefore we should disregard research indicating this mechanism may produce these symptoms, continuing the trend of nobody having shown this mechanism produces these symptoms.

Sub-threshold stimuli produce measurable physiological effects in virtually every sensory system we have studied. This is not controversial. But for some reason, Masley seems to balk at the idea that infrasound can have an impact on humans. The only scenario he generally accepts that infrasound may be a problem is when it becomes loud enough to be perceptible:

When infrasound is loud enough to detect, or when the thing producing it is also producing audible sound, it can affect us in the same way ordinary noise pollution affects us.

There is a deeper problem here, too. Jordan’s entire argument is about sub-threshold effects. His claim is not “people can hear the data center” or “people can consciously detect the data center.” His claim is “the pressure waves affect biology below the level of conscious perception.” Masley’s rebuttal is “the signal is below the threshold for conscious perception.” Yes, obviously, that is the point.

Masley has spent hours attacking Jordan for claims Jordan never made, because Masley apparently believes “sub-audible” might as well mean “nonexistent.”

He confuses “perceptible” with “audible”

The threshold error described above is quantitative: Masley treats the audibility threshold as the floor below which all biological response stops. What I want to flag now is a separate, conceptual error that runs beneath it – one he commits so consistently that I am not sure he realizes he is committing it.

Audibility and perceptibility are not the same thing.

Audibility refers specifically to conscious auditory perception: the brain registering a signal as sound via the inner hair cells of the cochlea. Perceptibility is broader. It includes any sensory or physiological detection of a stimulus – whether or not the brain classifies it as sound. To say a signal is inaudible is to say it does not produce a conscious auditory experience. It says nothing about whether other pathways detect it, respond to it, or produce effects.

Throughout Masley’s piece, “inaudible” does the work of “undetectable,” “imperceptible,” and “biologically inert” – three claims that are not equivalent and that require separate evidence. He never makes this distinction. He appears not to know it exists despite citing research which clearly states:

Pure tones become gradually less continuous, the tonal sensation ceases around 20 Hz, and below 10 Hz it is possible to perceive the single cycles of the sound. A sensation of pressure at the eardrums also occurs. The dynamic range of the auditory system decreases with decreasing frequency.

Consider the vestibular system. The semicircular canals of the inner ear respond to pressure changes and acceleration. They do not produce conscious auditory perception – they produce balance, orientation, and spatial awareness. Low-frequency pressure waves can stimulate vestibular structures at levels far below what the cochlea registers as sound. The sensation, if any, is not heard. It is felt as dizziness, unsteadiness, or nausea. This is not speculative. It is the operating basis of clinical tests like vestibular-evoked myogenic potentials, a standard tool used by ear, nose, and throat doctors.

Studies have shown a signal can be inaudible and still make you dizzy above the occupationally safe decibel range. This is not a controversial claim. At a infrasonic frequencies, one can increase the amplitude of a soundwave ten thousand-fold, and it will never become tonally audible despite posing significant risk. Masley writes as though it cannot be true.

The most telling moment in the piece is when Masley cites Salt & Hullar – a study specifically about a mechanism by which the inner ear detects infrasound without rendering it as conscious sound. The outer hair cells respond; the signal is processed; no auditory percept is generated. This is, precisely, detection without audibility. Masley cites it. Then he just handwaves away the implication because there hasn’t been enough follow-on research on the subject. This would be fine if the headline of his article was “I’m not entirely convinced that infrasound is a problem.” But no, the idea of infrasound being potentially problematic is fake, pseudoscientific, conspiracy theory.

The cash-out is this: Jordan’s entire claim is about perceptible but inaudible effects – pressure waves that the body registers through pathways other than conscious hearing. Masley’s entire rebuttal is that the signal is inaudible. These two writers are not disagreeing about evidence. They are using different definitions of what counts as the phenomenon being studied. And Masley does not appear to realize this, because he appears to believe that “you cannot hear it” and “nothing is happening” are the same sentence despite repeatedly citing studies which state the contrary.

He does not understand the nocebo literature he is citing

Masley relies heavily on the work of Crichton & Petrie, a body of research on the nocebo effect: show one group a video emphasizing harm from wind turbine infrasound, show another group a neutral video, expose both to real and sham infrasound. The high-expectancy group reports more symptoms, including during sham exposure. This is a real finding. It belongs in any honest treatment of this research area.

But here is what the Crichton & Petrie studies actually show: high-expectancy groups report more symptoms than low-expectancy groups. They do not show that low-expectancy groups report zero symptoms. They do not show that infrasound has no physical effect at all. They show that expectation modulates symptom reporting.

A study showing that expectation amplifies a signal is not the same as a study showing there is no signal. Masley treats “nocebo effects exist” as synonymous with “nocebo effects mean your research is bunk.” This is not how that works.

Consider what this means for Jordan’s double-blind experiment. Jordan ran a study with a “haunted painting” cover story, specifically to equalize expectation across groups. Masley’s response is to dismiss the entire design by leading with the nocebo literature – in effect assuming a nocebo explanation regardless of what the blinding protocol was. This is unfalsifiable reasoning. If nocebo explains symptoms when the design is bad and nocebo explains symptoms when the design is good, then crying “nocebo effect” is more rhetorical shield than scientific analysis.

I will grant that Jordan’s experimental design has problems that I would like to see him fix in the event he seeks to recreate this test, from incomplete blinding to the issue of subwoofer artifacts. But those problems are not “subjects were primed by expectation.” Masley does not engage with those specific problems. He just gestures at nocebo and moves on, confident the reader will not ask what would actually falsify the claim.

Furthermore, Crichton & Petrie show that expectation modulates symptom reporting. They do not show that infrasound has no effect. This is not the “exact opposite” of what Jordan claims. It is, at most, an important qualification to it.

The evolutionary argument is physics-illiterate

Here Masley makes his quixotic stand.

“It would be a little strange if we evolved to feel bad when infrasound is present, because the Earth has always had a lot of it, in the same way Earth has a lot of sources of infrared light.”

This argument fails at the level of physics before it gets to biology.

Natural infrasound – from thunderstorms, ocean microbaroms, atmospheric gravity waves, wind over terrain – is intermittent, spectrally broad, and non-stationary. It varies by season, geography, weather. It is not a constant feature of any individual’s sensory environment.

Industrial infrasound from a data center HVAC plant is continuous, tonally pure at specific frequencies, and temporally consistent. It is, in an engineering sense, a different phenomenon. Arguing that humans must be adapted to industrial continuous-tone infrasound because we evolved alongside transient broadband natural infrasound is like arguing that humans must be adapted to staring at a 500-nit monitor six inches from our faces for twelve hours a day because the sun has always existed.

The sun has always been bright. This does not make a welder’s arc safe to look at without goggles. Masley’s evolutionary argument is of this quality throughout.

He makes this point himself and glides past the implication. He notes that natural phenomena like thunderstorms, earthquakes, and ocean waves “produce infrasound at levels that dwarf anything humans have built.” If you believe, as Masley does, that the levels matter – and he does, he spends half the essay arguing they do – then you must grapple with the fact that the exposure profile of a 24/7 standing-wave data center source is categorically unlike the intermittent natural sources he invokes. He does not grapple with this. He just says “strange” and moves on.

He does, however, cite among natural infrasound sources other contributors of modern infrasound around us:

Refrigerators, HVAC systems, distant highway traffic, wind blowing past a building, ocean waves, thunderstorms, washing machines, trains, airplanes, and even the swaying of tall buildings can generate them.

Let’s take a look at these sound sources:

• Refrigerators: typically ranging 40-50 dB at around 400-500 Hz (not infrasound!), which is attenuated much more easily than infrasound by drywall, which cuts sound transmission by ~24dB at that frequency

• Residential HVAC systems: These can be such a menace that there are entire papers written about how to control for the sound made by HVAC systems to avoid noise complaints. These mostly concern audible sound (again, not infrasound). When considering internal air vents, HVAC systems often make enough noise that there are plenty of forum posts complaining about them and asking for recommendations to attenuate the sound. Either way, a terrible comparison to make.

• Washing machines: these are often louder than the previous two, functioning between 50-80dB, but the sound they emit is between 100-1000Hz (again, not infrasound!). Additionally, you do not run a washing machine 24/7 like you do a refrigerator, an HVAC system, or a data center.

• Trains: these are passing phenomena, and are still subject to serious regulation regarding their sound emissions. And again, these emit sound all over the audible range.

• Airplanes: see trains

• The swaying of tall buildings: tall buildings can generate both airborne and structure-borne infrasound (the latter meaning sound that moves through the building materials themselves rather than the air), often in the range of 0.0-1.0 Hz. It is a good thing we have people discussing the noise they make and an entire industry dedicated to mitigating the sounds generated by tall buildings.

One might argue that there is infrasound emitted alongside the audible sound in some of these cases. But that’s not the point of Jordan’s video! Again, he’s not complaining that data centers are too audibly noisy, and that said noise also contains some infrasound; he’s arguing that data centers are emitting imperceptible yet harmful infrasound without accompanying audible sound. Masley’s false equivalence here makes me skeptical he understands the difference.

Whether infrasound is natural or manmade, most of what we encounter in daily life is transient, intermittent, or actively mitigated. Jordan’s argument, despite his general posture toward AI, is not that data centers should be eliminated. It is that they should be mitigated against, in the way we already mitigate against every other major source of audible sound and infrasound in our environment. That is not a radical position. It is the position the rest of the sound-producing industrial world has already adopted.

What honest skepticism of Jordan would look like

I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying infrasound from data centers is causing mass harm. I am not saying Jordan’s video is reliable to a fault. I have said, and I mean it, that Jordan misrepresents some sources, that his experimental design is compromised, and that his citation practices need serious improvement.

An honest skeptic could say many things about Jordan’s video. They could say his Finnish citation is misleading. They could say the heart-contraction paper he relies on doesn’t replicate. They could say his haunted painting experiment has design problems. They could say the audible noise pollution story is a well-established mechanism for the symptoms residents report, and that Jordan hasn’t demonstrated the effects of infrasound rise above this level. All of these would be defensible.

What an honest skeptic could not say is that Jordan’s sources, as a body, say the “exact opposite” of what Jordan claims. That is a specific claim about the literature. It is also false. The sources Jordan cites are, at worst, ambiguous or overreached-from. At best, they say roughly what Jordan says they say. They do not, as Masley has repeatedly asserted, diametrically contradict the video they are supposedly citations for.

Masley has staked out a position that effectively equates to “data centers are an unmitigated good.” He writes in his response to Jordan:

✅ Data centers don’t waste water.

✅ AI artwork is without victims.

✅ Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment.

His first statement is pretty clearly correct at this point. He’s generally right on item 3, although it is still difficult to find adequate clean power for data centers. But Masley has painted himself into such an ideological corner that he can’t even recognize the ethical issues posed by AI art and the artists whose work on which it is trained without compensation.

Physicist, heal thyself

Masley opens his piece with this observation about Jordan’s video:

This video is a perfect case study of highbrow misinformation. The host is cool. He opens with the nuance that his video is hosted in a data center... The video looks rigorous and technical, and is presented with the professionalism and chill vibes of the kind of explainer you might see from Hank Green and other trustworthy sources. He surrounds himself with equipment and images that look scientific... A big powerful bad guy is being taken down by a chill local dude.

Masley accuses Jordan of being, effectively, an Alex Jones in a nice sweater: “This is effectively a high-status Alex Jones video, it’s really uniquely terrible, but it’s also flying under the radar of most educated people because it looks and feels reasonable.” It takes a certain lack of self-awareness to make that accusation while wearing the same sweater.

Masley’s piece is written with the confidence of a man who believes—gleefully— that he has caught someone else in an error. That confidence is the most consistent signal in the essay. It is also the thing least warranted by its contents.

He has written elsewhere all of the ways he wants the AI debate to be better. Among these concerns, he lists the tribalistic nature of AI debates at the moment. He worries that it’s too socially acceptable to treat data centers as boogeymen. It’s unfortunate, then, that Masley has become tribally and reflexively supportive of data centers at every turn.

In one article, Masley cautions readers to avoid hyperbolic adjectives. In another, he misrepresents an unclear field of study as “fake” and “pseudoscientific.” Since then, he’s gone on the war path, calling Jordan “goofy,” “dumb,” and “a waste of everyone’s time.” When confronted with feedback around his behavior and seemingly bad-faith argumentation, he had the following to say:

If Masley wants to elevate the already noxious debate around AI, he should look in the mirror first.

Masley’s claim was not that Jordan was somewhat mistaken, or that Jordan had overreached, or that Jordan was a bit fast and loose with his sources. His claim was that Jordan’s sources, as a body, said the “exact opposite” of what Jordan claimed they said. This is demonstrably false.

Unlike Jordan, I am not going to assume the worst of Masley. I am not going to say he’s a bought and paid for shill. I don’t think that’s fair. Masley has said that he must assume Jordan is a liar because he can’t possibly be that stupid:

I’m going to be similarly charitable to Masley: no human can possibly be so dishonest and disingenuous as to misrepresent the literature as well as the person they are critiquing. Because of this, I am left to assume that Masley just does not understand how sound works and is too arrogant to admit as much.

In 1946, the radio critic John Crosby coined a phrase for a genre he despised: "human misery programs." Shows like Goodwill Court paraded real people through their legal and domestic catastrophes decades before the rise of Judge Judy, while audiences listened in shock. The format offered, in Crosby's words, "life in the raw without poetry, without art." This raw, artless entertainment was the subject of many moral panics throughout following decades as it evolved from radio to television, and now into our political norms.

As I’m not one to partake in moral panics, I’ll avoid falling into the same trap of screeching about reality TV rotting our brains and poisoning the minds of the youth. Sometimes, this stuff can just be mindless fun. But while it may just be a good time to enjoy spoiled and talentless celebrities sling insults at one another, the moral calculus changes when one of them gets elected President. Frankly, I’m not going to lose a ton of sleep over the daily lives of reality stars. What I do lose sleep over, however, is the changing moral codes of a society which looked at the excesses of reality TV and made them the foundation of our modern political landscape.

In The Modern Thumbscrew, Crosby writes:

About two thousand years ago, a Roman emperor used to pitch winsome young Christian girls into his eel pond and watch with great enjoyment while they were devoured by the eels. This served two purposes. It fattened the eels for the table and it amused the emperor.

This practice has been illegal for some time but the enjoyment of human suffering, otherwise known as sadism, is still buried not too deeply in all of us. Since radio is always eager to gratify our instincts, particularly our baser instincts, it has devised its own eel pond, the human misery program…

With the rise of audience participation radio, Crosby argued, came a decline in the care we have to offer our fellow man. Eighty years later, the programming has broadened. And so has our debasement.

When tragedy is fan service

When federal agents arrested Jen Shah on camera during the third season of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, the episode drew 823,000 viewers—a season high, with the strongest 18–49 year old demographic performance in show history. The production framed her arrest as high drama: the Feds "stormed the bus," her castmates reacted in real time, and audiences watched a woman's life implode as thrilling entertainment. This rise in viewership wasn’t due to audience concern for the elder victims of Shah’s wire fraud scheme; it was driven by schadenfreude.

Shah had spent two seasons being positioned as a villain. The editing, the confessionals, the narrative construction of her as volatile and dishonest—all of it trained viewers to experience her downfall as deserved. When the arrest aired, audiences weren't merely learning about alleged crimes. They were consuming her legal peril as televised "just deserts," the payoff for hours of programming that had built toward this moment. For many, her conviction and sentencing were not about justice for her victims, but were instead the conclusion of an enthralling story arc.

But the machinery doesn't always require a villain. Sometimes it just absorbs tragedy wholesale. In August 2011, Russell Armstrong—husband of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member Taylor Armstrong—died by suicide, days before the second season was set to premiere. Taylor had spent Season 1 hinting at marital troubles; she would later reveal that Russell had been physically abusive throughout their marriage. His death was real. The abuse allegations were real. The tragedy visited upon a family was real. And audiences ate it up.

What followed was remarkable in its shamelessness. Taylor's grief, her revelations about abuse, her journey as a survivor and single mother—all of it became storyline. The network framed its decision to proceed as honoring Taylor's wishes, as giving her a platform to speak about domestic violence. Perhaps it was. It was also a business calculation. The publicity around Russell's death had made the season unmissable. A real suicide had become a ratings hook, and Taylor's trauma became content that viewers consumed and discussed over wine and appetizers. The show didn't manufacture her deservingness. It simply metabolized her catastrophe into entertainment, no justification required.

The pattern repeats across franchises. When Vanderpump Rules imploded in the Scandoval affair—Tom Sandoval's infidelity with Raquel Leviss exposed in real time across social media—the audience response followed the same trajectory: a massive spike in engagement, a collective permission to gloat, and a rapid normalization of contempt. Sandoval became the most hated man in reality television, a status he leveraged into a villain tour and a spot on Special Forces and later The Traitors. The machinery of reality entertainment doesn't just tolerate humiliation; it monetizes the aftermath.

When Love Island contestants face public disgrace, when Below Deck crew members get fired on camera, when any of a dozen franchise "villains" encounter real-world consequences, the response follows the same emotional logic. The audience has been trained to see certain people as deserving of what happens to them. The worse it gets, the more satisfying the viewing experience becomes.

Destigmatization

But it’s not all bad.

Emily Nussbaum's history of reality television, Cue the Sun!, captures something that Crosby and his fellow critics missed: these formats, for all their exploitation, also "made visible the sort of people that television had historically ignored, from the working-class single moms on Queen for a Day to Cuban American activist Pedro Zamora, a young gay man with AIDS who turned into a national star on The Real World." In spite of their flaws, Nussbaum explains, these shows had and have their redeeming qualities. They serve to destigmatize sensitive topics and reach audiences that no government outreach initiative ever could.

Queen for a Day, which ran from 1956 to 1964, invited women to compete for prizes by narrating their hardships—illness, poverty, marital abandonment—to a studio audience that selected winners by applause meter. The show was, by any reasonable standard, exploitative. Critics at the time called it vulgar programming, created by vulgar people, for vulgar people—and it was insanely popular. But it also gave women permission to speak publicly about struggles that respectable society preferred to ignore. Some real relief followed, both emotional and material.

This is the central ambivalence that haunts any serious analysis of the genre. The old silences—around poverty, illness, sexual identity, addiction—were often cruel, enforcing shame where solidarity was needed. Reality television broke some of those silences. When Pedro Zamora appeared on The Real World: San Francisco in 1994, he reached an audience that public health campaigns couldn't. When Intervention documented addiction and recovery, it humanized people who had previously been invisible or reviled as demonic street scum. The genre's willingness to show "life in the raw" creates genuine moments of recognition and compassion.

Some stigmas deserved to die, and reality programming has helped seal their coffins. The question is what inhibitions died with them, and what norms are at risk today.

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Some taboos exist for a reason

There's a distinction worth preserving between stigmas that deserve to fall and taboos that deserve to hold. The taboo against discussing poverty in public was cruel. The taboo against reveling in someone's poverty—against treating their hardship as entertainment—served a different function. It maintained a floor of human dignity that made solidarity possible.

Human misery programs erode that floor. They train viewers to toggle quickly between horror, curiosity, and amusement—to feel morally superior to the people on screen, to enjoy watching them get "pulled down." The confession that once created empathy becomes, through repetition and commercial incentive, a spectacle that licenses contempt. The programming broadens; the debasement deepens.

LiveLeak, which operated from 2006 to 2021, represented the next iteration: not sanitized studio suffering but raw footage of accidents, war, and street violence, served up as shock content. The site became notorious for hosting videos of real deaths—car crashes, combat footage, executions—framed as "must-see" clips. Its successors continue the tradition across platforms that nominally prohibit such content but struggle to enforce their rules. Many my age—myself included—saw men torn to pieces in industrial accidents or riddled with holes in some far off desert before we even graduated middle school. This reality has not gone away; it has only expanded with the increase in phone and social media usage among children.

Media ethicists have described the YouTube-style compilations of crashes, wipeouts, and fights as inviting viewers "to take pleasure from someone's misfortune"—schadenfreude industrialized and algorithmic. The recommendation engines that serve this content don't distinguish between curiosity and cruelty. They optimize for engagement, and engagement spikes when the footage is shocking. The psychological effect of habituated exposure to real violence in short video windows is not mysterious. It dulls moral discomfort. It trains the eye to scan for impact without registering the human cost.

And then the footage becomes political.

The political turn

Watch the discourse around Charlie Kirk's assassination and Renee Good's killing by a rogue ICE agent, and you see the same emotional machinery at work. Kirk was shot by a political opponent; Good was shot by a federal agent who'd positioned himself in front of her slowly moving car. One death was condemned across the spectrum; the other was defended by the administration that employed her killer. The circumstances could hardly be more different, but the audience response was identical: parse the footage, search for narrative cues, determine whether the victim "had it coming," and license yourself to mourn or gloat accordingly.

In Kirk's case, the search for deservingness took a familiar form: Was he a provocateur who'd spent years dehumanizing his opponents? Did that make his death a tragedy or a comeuppance? Online, a minority celebrated; a government-backed campaign to punish insufficient mourning followed. The footage of his death became content—parsed, memed, used as inspiration for an AI slop tribute song—while the administration used the killing to crack down on "political extremism." Tragedy metabolized into spectacle, then into political weapon.

In Good's case, the calculus inverted. Did she deserve to die for not perfectly complying with agents under pressure? Did she deserve sympathy as a victim of excessive force? Partisans parsed the same footage and reached opposite conclusions, each side certain the video proved their case. The same pseudo-juridical calculus that determines whether we're permitted to enjoy a Housewives villain's arrest was being applied to a woman being shot three times in the head seconds after telling her killer she wasn’t mad at him.

Our brains, trained by a media diet of setup and schadenfreude, process political assassination and government sanctioned murder through the same moral calculus they bring to reality television. The instinct to search for deservingness—to determine whether the victim earned their fate—is the instinct that decades of human misery programming have cultivated and rewarded. The discourse around actual death now operates on the same emotional infrastructure as the discourse around whether Jen Shah deserved her arrest.

The regulation red herring

As audience participation shows and reality TV continued to rise, so did their opposition.

The Federal Radio Commission, in the era of Crosby's complaint, held content-based licensing power and occasionally wielded it. In the case Trinity Methodist Church South v. FRC, the D.C. Court of Appeals warned that unregulated broadcasting would make the nation "a theater for the display of individual passions." The Mayflower doctrine (and the Fairness Doctrine that followed) attempted to limit one-sided controversial speech. Critics screamed and howled, as one contemporary article put it, yet audience participation shows "go on and on and on." The attempts to regulate or morally discredit the genre never erased audience demand.

The parallel to contemporary debates over content moderation, platform liability, and political incitement is almost too neat—and equally futile. Section 230 shields platforms from liability for user-generated content. The First Amendment constrains government regulation of speech. Private content moderation policies are inconsistently enforced and easily circumvented. Despite periodic panics and reforms, the structural incentives to monetize spectacle persist. The platforms that host real violence are, in the aggregate, too profitable to regulate out of existence. The political actors who benefit from transforming tragedy into tribal marker have no incentive to dial back the temperature. And those who seek to address the negative impacts of these programs often seek a regulatory solution rather than a cultural one.

To be clear, I am not calling for an end to any of the wonderful rules that protect our rights to free speech, assembly, and petition for redress of grievances. Rather, I am outlining just how futile attempts at regulating away our new reality really are. Without a cultural change, regulation is useless.

Why we’re cruel

And here's the deeper problem: schadenfreude is not an aberration. It's a feature of normal human cognition, located at the intersection of social comparison, envy, and self-esteem. Psychological research has consistently found that people with low self-esteem or threatened self-evaluations report stronger enjoyment of others' misfortune. Watching someone else fail—especially someone perceived as arrogant, successful, or morally compromised—offers a way to soothe one's own insecurities. The pleasure is real, even when we know it's ugly.

Human misery programs—whether broadcast, streamed, or posted—offer an efficient way to access this pleasure. The formatting does the moral work for you. By the time Jen Shah gets arrested on camera, the show has already established that she's a villain who deserves what's coming. By the time a political figure's death circulates as content, the partisan framing has already established whether mourning or gloating is appropriate. The viewer doesn't have to do the psychological labor of justifying their reaction. The content has pre-justified it.

Reality formats and outrage-driven politics both exploit this dynamic. They offer viewers the satisfaction of watching someone "pulled down" without the guilt that might otherwise accompany such pleasure. The victim deserved it. The footage proves it. The audience is vindicated.

Our suffering is tragedy. Our neighbors’ suffering is a bummer. The suffering of strangers is entertainment. The only reason that our media ecosystem rewards this content is because we reward it.

The bed we’ve made

We have, over eighty years, broken down many stigmas that deserved to fall. The silences around poverty, illness, addiction, and identity were often cruel, and breaking them was a genuine good. But in the process, we've also eroded a different set of inhibitions: the taboos against open contempt, against treating human ruin as spectacle, against the pleasure we take in watching people we've decided deserve it.

The programming has broadened—from radio sob stories to reality TV arrests to political assassinations and jackbooted tyranny circulating as memes. And our debasement has kept pace. The same neural pathways that fire when we watch a Housewives villain get arrested fire when we watch footage of political violence. The same moral calculus that determines whether we're permitted to enjoy a reality star's downfall determines whether we're permitted to enjoy—or at least not mourn—a political figure's death.

Without a cultural reckoning with schadenfreude—without rebuilding some of those taboos against open contempt and glee at others' pain—regulatory fixes will fail. The machinery—our machinery—will keep turning real lives into fuel. The footage will keep circulating. We, trained by decades of practice, will keep watching.

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It's a question worth asking when a dictator falls. What kind of person looks at the historical record—the exiles, the assassinations, the mob violence, the palace coups—and thinks, "Yes, I would like to try that"? What internal calculus produces someone willing to watch their country disintegrate rather than relinquish power? And what does that leader's absence mean for their country?

Nicolás Maduro is now in American custody, which means we'll get to observe one data point up close. The man who starved Venezuela while lecturing the world about imperialism, who jailed opponents while praising his faux democracy, who presided over an economy so fictional that his government's GDP figures bore no relationship to what satellites could literally observe—that man will now answer questions in a New York courtroom instead of a Caracas palace.

Good. Let's examine how we got here, and why it might matter.

Dictators and the Dark Triad

Sociologist Brian Klaas has observed that leaders display the "dark triad"—narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism—at rates far exceeding the general population. The conventional wisdom holds that power corrupts, but Klaas suggests the causation runs the other way: Corruptible people seek power in the first place. The selection mechanism for political leadership risks filtering for exactly the wrong traits. This is especially true when checks and balances fail to distribute power properly, and the draw of ultimate control pulls in malefactors.

Maduro is a textbook case. He inherited a revolution already cannibalizing Venezuela's economy, doubled down on every policy that wasn't working, and refused to acknowledge reality even as eight million citizens fled the country. The "dictator's information problem"—the phenomenon where questioning the official line becomes so dangerous that leaders never learn when things go wrong—meant he was governing a fantasy while the actual country collapsed around him.

"In actual planned economies," notes economist Arnold Kling, "we have seen social morale degenerate while cynicism and corruption spread." Venezuela proved the point with brutal efficiency. Chávez and Maduro built an economy on the premise that central planning could substitute for market prices, that revolutionary zeal could substitute for innovation, and that narcotics trafficking could substitute for a viable economy. They got all three wrong, and millions suffered for it.

It is good and right that Maduro is gone. But I understand the hesitation some feel about how it happened.

The Precedent That Matters

The Iraq comparison is already everywhere—cable news, Twitter, the usual suspects warning about blood for oil. It's the reflexive historical rhyme whenever American forces remove a foreign leader, and it oversimplifies the situation to the point of distortion.

The Iraq war was an exercise in maximalist ambition. The Bush administration didn't just want to remove Saddam Hussein; they wanted to transform Iraqi society, install democratic institutions, and use that transformation to reshape the entire Middle East. It was hubris dressed as idealism, and it failed catastrophically.

A more fitting precedent is Panama in 1989. George H.W. Bush ordered Operation Just Cause and captured Manuel Noriega, who was under federal indictment for drug trafficking. Panama held elections. Democracy took root. American forces went home. It wasn't pretty, but it worked. And while corruption still runs rampant through Panama's government, life has objectively improved for the Panamanian people.

Like Noriega, Maduro faced federal drug charges. Like Noriega, he ran a criminally corrupt regime that violently suppressed democratic movements. Like Noriega, his removal created space for legitimate governance rather than imposing a new order from outside.

Both Noriega and Chávez pioneered a playbook that authoritarian leaders around the world have since copied: Use anti-colonial rhetoric to camouflage what is actually just socialism and corruption. Wrap yourself in the flag of the oppressed while oppressing your own people. Blame America for every failure while your cronies get rich. Other countries struggle with corruption, political dysfunction, and the impartial application of the law. But Chavismo didn't just struggle with those things—it actively opposed them as bourgeois obstacles to revolutionary justice.

Maduro's removal matters because it creates the possibility—not the guarantee, but the possibility—that Venezuela could join the community of nations that at least aspires to lawful governance.

Maduro's capture has the potential to mimic the success of Operation Just Cause: a targeted removal of a criminally indicted drug trafficker who happened to be running a country—no occupation, no nation-building, no lasting commitment to spending American blood and treasure in a foreign land. But Trump has already begun undermining this best-case scenario. He's talked about the United States "running" Venezuela. He's posted about extracting Venezuelan oil for American consumption. He's discussed inviting American oil corporations back into the country. These are not the statements of a president planning to get out of the way. These are the statements of a president who sees Venezuela as a prize to be claimed.

The Execution Problem

The man who ordered Maduro's capture displays his own version of the dark triad. Donald Trump's narcissism is legendary. His transactional approach to relationships, his inability to admit error, his instinct to personalize every conflict—none of this is news. His supporters have decided these traits are features rather than bugs. His critics have been pointing them out for a decade.

This administration has demonstrated, repeatedly and consistently, that it cannot execute complex operations requiring sustained attention and institutional competence. They alienate allies. They staff critical positions with loyalists rather than experts. They get bored when the cameras move on. They tweet inflammatory nonsense at precisely the wrong moments. They pick fights over trivial matters of ego while substantive issues languish.

The capture of Maduro was the easy part. What comes next is hard.

Venezuela's economy has been systematically looted for two decades. The infrastructure is destroyed. The diaspora is scattered across Latin America. There is no clear leader who can step up besides Maduro's lieutenant, Delcy Rodríguez. The military and militia are riddled with Chavismo loyalists. Russia and China have billions invested and won't simply accept a pro-American transition.

Managing all of this requires patient, boring, unglamorous diplomacy. It requires resisting the urge to turn Venezuela into a campaign prop. It requires working with regional partners—Brazil, Colombia, Caribbean nations—who have their own interests and sensitivities. It requires, in short, exactly the kind of institutional competence this administration has never demonstrated.

But the deeper problem isn't institutional—it's psychological. The narcissist who announces he will "run" Venezuela cannot conceive of an outcome where he isn't the protagonist. The Machiavellian who muses about extracting oil cannot resist treating a humanitarian intervention as a business opportunity. The man who has spent his entire life believing he can will reality into existence through sheer assertion cannot accept that Venezuela's problems require patient, self-effacing work rather than dramatic declarations of victory.

This is the mechanism by which good operations yield bad outcomes. The initial strike was sound. The legal justification, while debatable, has precedent. The immediate result is positive. But every day that Trump pushes for American control rather than Venezuelan self-governance, every statement about oil extraction, every hint that this is about American interests rather than Venezuelan freedom, the operation drifts further from Noriega and closer to Iraq. The elder Bush succeeded in Panama because his administration understood that the point was to leave. This administration, much like the younger Bush's, shows every sign of believing the point was to stay.

"If your position boils down to 'norms for thee but not for me,'" Jonah Goldberg has observed, "you don't actually believe in norms." This administration has treated norms as obstacles to be overcome rather than constraints to be respected. That approach might work for capturing dictators. It's catastrophically ill-suited for building stable post-authoritarian orders.

The George Washington Question

There's a telling contrast in the history of the Americas. George Washington voluntarily relinquished power—twice. He declined a third term as president and rejected any suggestion that he should be king. "That was unusual, unlikely—exceptional." It established the precedent that American leaders would submit to democratic accountability.

Simón Bolívar, the liberator of much of Latin America, took a different path. Out of a belief that Latin America was not ready for democracy, he a became a caudillo. The tradition he established was one of strongmen claiming power for themselves rather than transferring it peacefully. Venezuela has never fully escaped that tradition. And the current leader of the United States seems more sympathetic to it than to the American one.

The question now is whether Maduro's removal will produce something closer to the Washington model—peaceful transfers of power, institutional constraints on executive authority, leaders who submit to law rather than embodying it—or whether it will simply produce a new strongman claiming legitimacy from the intervention that installed him.

The precedent set by this operation may matter more than the operation itself. Is this a return to thoughtful regional engagement, or the beginning of a new era of hemispheric intervention? The answer depends largely on how the administration handles the aftermath—and on whether they can resist their own worst instincts long enough for Venezuelan institutions to take root.

Constitutional Considerations

What also matters is the method by which Trump executed this removal. One can argue this was simply criminal justice—enforcement of the law against an indicted narco-trafficker. But you cannot ignore that Maduro was the leader of a sovereign nation. A military action of this magnitude demands some coordination with—or at least notice to—allied governments and other branches of our own government.

At minimum, committing what can be described as an act of war without notifying Congress, the branch constitutionally empowered to declare war, reveals Trump's own strongman tendencies laid bare.

The backlash has been deserved to some extent. Trump has limited constitutional authority for military actions like this. I've seen compelling arguments that this may have skirted just within his purview as an exercise of law enforcement, but I'm uneasy. And his unsubtle threats toward the leaders of Colombia, Cuba, and even Denmark give me serious pause.

Some have responded with lines like "Now Russia has a free pass to kidnap Zelensky" or "Now China has cover to interfere with Taiwan." Let me be clear: they were already doing those things. The concern isn't that this action might incentivize other major powers to act recklessly—they already were. The threat is that Trump himself may feel the draw of a new manifest destiny, a new colonialism. The real risk is that his appetite for regime decapitation may have been whetted rather than sated.

Where We Go From Here

Maduro deserves to face justice. The Venezuelan people deserve a chance at something better than the grinding misery they've endured for a generation. And the Noriega precedent that critics dismiss too quickly offers a real model for success. Panama is a functioning democracy today. Indonesia moved on from Suharto's dictatorship and has since regularly had peaceful transfers of power. Post-authoritarian recoveries happen. They require patience and restraint, but they happen.

The threat to this outcome isn't American power or intervention as a concept. It's not Venezuela's complexity or the challenges of rebuilding a looted economy. The threat is specific and personal: Donald Trump's apparent inability to let a good outcome speak for itself.

If Trump can follow the elder Bush model—support elections, defer to regional partners, resist the urge to extract resources or claim permanent credit—Venezuela could join Panama in the success column. If he can't, if his psychology compels him to turn a humanitarian intervention into an imperial project, then he is bound to watch his popular military action curdle into an unmitigated disaster.

Venezuela's future is genuinely open. That's more than could be said a week ago. And that's worth something—even if the man who made it possible is the greatest risk to its realization.

And naturally, the discourse started immediately.

The conservative activist had long been a target for the ire and criticism of progressives, liberals, and even moderates like me for some time. He regularly espoused positions that I found incorrect, ignorant, or immoral. Many shared my distaste for the flavor of influencer that Charlie Kirk was.

For many, this was enough to not mourn his death — or even to celebrate it. To them, Kirk’s death is the end of a Twitter timeline filled with hate and vitriol. It is the end of anti-science fearmongering and fascistic fawning over totalitarianism in our government. It is the end of Russian state-sponsored talking points and the justification of horrible violence against the marginalized.

But I’m crushed. And in light of some questions that I’ve received from family and friends over the last day, as well as some discourse I’ve seen online, I think it’s worth explaining why that is.

Charlie Kirk wasn’t the best of us. But he engaged in peaceful debate in the public square. He is someone who went to college campuses and debated people he disagreed with. Sometimes he made obtuse or ghoulish arguments; sometimes his interlocutors did the same. But this type of ugly back and forth debate of ideas is exactly what our First Amendment protects. And Kirk’s killing will do more to quell the exchange of ideas than any law could. That is worth mourning.

He was also a father of two. His wife and three-year-old daughter had to watch him die a gruesome, bloody death. Two little girls are going to grow up without a father. That is worth mourning.

Aside from the personal and moral horror, there is immense social pain caused by political violence that directly affects you and me. Michael Fanone, one of the officers assaulted by the pro-Trump mob on January 6, said this:

That day taught me something too many of us are still trying to ignore: once political violence becomes acceptable—once you decide that your enemy isn’t just wrong but expendable—you don’t control where it leads.

If you cheered this shooting because you hated Kirk, you’re no better than the mob that chanted for Mike Pence’s hanging. If you shrug it off because it happened to the other side, you’re part of the same sickness that’s rotting this country.

Charlie Kirk wasn’t killed by Democrats. And Melissa Hortman wasn’t killed by Republicans. But that Kirk was (seemingly based on early evidence) killed by someone on the left, and that Hortman was killed by someone on the right are enough to fan the flames of disunion.

The result of this is an America where we trust each other less. An America where we see each other as less deserving of the dignity we all deserve. That’s not an America I want to live in. And that continued progression is worth mourning.

Right now, there are enemies of our country — be they Russian bots, radical accelerationists, or grifters of some other sort — that are trying to capture the rage over Kirk’s death and funnel it to support for their causes. They cry out for revenge, for retribution, and for war.

And each person that condones this killing; that spends this time focusing on all of the things that made Charlie Kirk loathsome rather than mourning the loss of innocent life and the further degradation of the bonds which unite us is doing little more than providing these enemies with ammunition.

In a speech before the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum, 22 years prior to his election to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln said the following:

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?-- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

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. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

I’ve seen and spoken to people who are having complex feelings right now. Maybe they aren’t feeling joy at Kirk’s death, but they don’t particularly care to mourn the loss of someone whose existence they felt was antithetical to their beliefs. And I’m not going to shame anyone for grappling with an event like this in their own way; there is no right way to make sense of the senseless.

It is not shameful to feel less than distraught about Kirk’s loss. Nobody is compelled to paint a faux halo over the head of someone they believed to be an enemy of good. Nobody is evil for not mourning Charlie Kirk.

But we should be mourning those two girls’ loss of a father. And we should mourn a wife’s loss of her husband. We should mourn the callousness of our country that leads us to first consider a person’s standing in life before deciding whether to feel distress or schadenfreude at their suffering. We do this regularly — to liberal elites watching their lives turn to ash in the Pacific Palisades; to rural conservatives being carried away by Texas floods; to Jews being raped and murdered at a music festival; to Palestinians being bombed into submission by a genocidal regime.

You don’t need to mourn Charlie Kirk. But he’s not the only one who lost something yesterday. We all did. We as a nation have taken one step further to suicide.

And at the very least, we should agree that’s worth mourning.

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When I write about faith and politics, I try to blend the two in a way that is appealing to religious and secular readers alike. I don’t think I can do that today. This is a letter to any Christian who still supports the administration of Donald Trump, and the moral rot that it has created within the church.

There's a moment in the Gospels when Jesus is led into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. Satan tempts Him to exercise His godly power on the world, to make the stones turn to bread. Jesus rebukes Satan, saying that “Man shall not live on bread alone.” Satan then tempts Jesus to throw Himself off of the highest point of the temple to test God’s ability to protect Him. Again, Jesus rebukes Satan, saying that “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

Finally, Satan offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world if he would simply bow down and worship him. Christ's response is swift and unequivocal: "Away from me, Satan! For it is written: 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.'" Then the devil left Jesus.

This passage has always served as a warning to Christians about the seductive appeal of worldly power. The Gospels show us that worldly power is as tempting to us as bread is to a man who has been without food for weeks. This temptation is made manifest in the actions of Judas, the actions of Pilate, and the actions of the angry crowds demanding the freedom of Barabbas.

And it is made manifest in the actions of American evangelicals today.

Trump rode a wave of evangelical support into the White House. Evangelicals remain his staunchest supporters to this day.

In Leviticus, Christians are commanded: “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”

But evangelicals continue to support the actions of the Trump administration that directly go against this command.

They support not just the deportation of legal immigrants without due process; they support the imprisonment of anyone merely suspected of not having full legal status. And they support this imprisonment being carried out in the Florida Everglades, in an Alligator-infested swamp.

They don’t just tolerate or support this cruelty, either; they cheer it on:

That’s sitting congresswoman and professed Christian Nancy Mace asking for more internment camps to be created. Just years after the Japanese internment camps were rightly ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, we are seeing evangelicals demand their reconstruction.

One other example, Laura Loomer, is not Christian but Jewish. But she recently tweeted out something so heinous, and so deeply supported by pro-Trump evangelicals, that it needs to be mentioned:

It’s worth noting here not just that Loomer is proposing to feed people to alligators, but who she is proposing to feed to alligators. There are not 65 million illegal immigrants in the United States—there are 65 million Latinos. Loomer, a conspiracy theorist and agitator who has found herself a home within the Trump machine, is being cheered on by many Christians after calling for a genocide against Latinos.

But maybe she was just making a joke, right?

What about this?

Much like Loomer, Ann Coulter has made a home for herself in the hateful, vindictive right. This woman, who calls herself “a Christian first and a conservative second” is arguing that there should be more dead Indians. It’s not just un-biblical; it’s Satanic. It’s Hitler-esque.

I know it’s a meme on the right to think that Trump’s critics are calling him “literally Hitler.” I don’t believe he is. But where I once wondered how a society could be come so callous, so indifferent to cruelty to enable the rise of the Nazi, I do not wonder anymore. While I do not believe Trump is like Hitler, I do think that any evangelical who is not made uncomfortable by the image below needs to do some serious reflection and prayer:

What’s worse is that the administration does this under the cover of scripture. They wrap themselves in out of context Bible verses to equate their cruelty to the fighting of a holy war. In the book of Isaiah, chapter 6, Isaiah is given a commission by God—to to a hostile land and preach on behalf of the Lord. He cries out to the Lord “Here am I, send me!” And God tells him to preach a message of healing and redemption to those uninterested.

And what does the administration do with that scripture? It uses those words to justify a militarized police force rounding up, imprisoning, and casting out immigrants and citizens alike without due process:

The Trump administration positions Latino citizens and immigrants alike as enemies of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant world that the President would see built. This dehumanizing language and ideology results in the rise of atrocious behaviors, like rounding up the young children of illegal immigrants, shackling them like violent criminals, and whisking them away in unmarked vans:

It is this callousness that motivates the young social media managers working within this administration to continually harden their hearts and make light of these sad situations with memes:

It is this disregard for human life and dignity that has driven the Republican-led government to slash funding for PEPFAR, a program that has saved almost 30-million lives in the last twenty years. That 3-million people are expected to die as a result of this decision is of no importance to the “pro-life party.”

And it is this cruelty that has led the government to literally light 500 tons of food on fire rather than see it go to needy human beings in the third world, even if incinerating the food actually costs more than giving it away.

I don’t care about your personal politics in this moment. What I care about is that the Trump administration is making true every outlandish warning raised by the left in the election. It is has become caricature of itself, delighting in cruelty for cruelty’s sake.

There is no culture of life being promoted here. There is no law and order being upheld. Even the Christian Nationalists should be upset, as there is no Christ in the White House. They parade their prayer around like a PR tool, they hide behind the cross while relishing in the opportunity to crucify their own enemies.

Whatever this new movement is that’s taken hold in our country, it’s not Christian.

I shouldn’t say what I think these “leaders” deserve. That would be cruel and not Christlike, and I shouldn’t make myself a hypocrite in these rambling paragraphs.

Rather, I’ll quote Matthew 6:5:

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.”

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In 1989, sociologist Ray Oldenburg released a book titled The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. In it, Oldenburg coined the term "third places" to describe the informal public spaces that serve as neutral ground for social interaction outside the home (first place) and workplace (second place). While the term is only a few decades old, third places are certainly not recent phenomena. The ancient Greeks had the agora, and the Chinese had their teahouses. Enlightenment Europe had its coffeehouses, while America’s revolution was planned in taverns.

These spaces function as the connective tissue of American civic life, providing meaning and community outside of economic activity. They exist outside of the social hierarchies that dominate other spheres of life. What Oldenburg called the “leveling principle” allow for us to meet each other as equals, as patrons of a hair salon or as competitors in a game of dominos played on a Brooklyn sidewalk.

But third places are dying. They have been for as long as the term has existed.

Why?

Putnam's Framework and Its Limitations

Released in the year 2000, Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone documented the decline in American associational life between 1980 and 1993. The name of the book comes from one of the case studies Putnam uses to make his point: in that time span, the number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent while league bowling decreased by 40 percent. "More Americans are bowling today than ever before," Putnam observed, "but bowling in organized leagues has plummeted." This pattern extended across virtually every form of civic engagement: membership in parent-teacher associations dropped by more than half, participation in religious activities declined substantially, and union membership fell off a cliff.

Putnam attributed this decline to what he termed "the collapse of American community," arguing that "social capital"—defined as "the connections among individuals' social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them"—had eroded to dangerous levels.

These are the connections formed by third places.

Putnam’s analysis distinguished between two forms of social capital: bonding social capital, which reinforces exclusive identities within homogeneous groups, and bridging social capital, which connects across the in-group/out-group divide. As Putnam explained, "bonding social capital constitutes a kind of sociological superglue, whereas bridging social capital provides a sociological WD-40."

The disappearance of third places represented a loss of both forms of social capital. Neighborhood bars and bowling leagues provided bonding opportunities for people with shared backgrounds and interests. Civic organizations and religious institutions created bridging connections across class, ethnic, and ideological lines. And now those were dying.

Much analysis of the relationship between third places and social capital rightly identifies that there’s a causal relationship—but they often get its direction wrong. Many urbanists today advocate for the return of the third place as a means to increase social capital. But the death of the third place didn’t cause a decline in social capital; a decline in social capital caused the death of the third place.

The rec league, the book club, and the pickup basketball games have decreased significantly over the decades not because there isn’t a place for them, but because there aren’t people for them. The reality is that there are simply more “fun” things to do after work than to schlep a change of clothes across town, change, play a game or two of basketball, and go home and shower. Sure it may be a fulfilling way to connect with friends and stay healthy, but there is far less friction involved in sitting on your couch and scrolling through TikTok for a few hours.

Social Media vs Social Capital

The emergence of social media platforms illustrates how digital alternatives have inverted traditional patterns of social capital formation.

Social media excels at creating bridging social capital—connecting people with shared interests across cultural identities or geographical boundaries. However, it performs poorly at generating bonding capital. The shotgun blast of an social media feed is a dopaminergic powerhouse that makes it impossible to stay too long in one place to be able to bond deeply with any group. The algorithmic curation of content feeds a loyalty to platform while stripping away any loyalty to group or place. Where traditional third places incentivized groups to bond deeply over a given interest and learn more about each other in a non-economic context, digital platforms allow users to avoid these potentially uncomfortable or vulnerable encounters entirely.

Digital technologies excel at providing the “sociological WD-40” of bridging capital while eliminating the "sociological superglue" of bonding capital. It’s worth specifying that these two types of social capital are not oppositional; they are complementary. They build off of each other: bridging capital finds new groups to bond with, and bonding capital creates the trust that is necessary to bridge additional divides.

Derek Thompson's analysis of declining social interaction demonstrates how this digital bonding has substituted for physical gathering without providing equivalent social benefits. Online communities offer easy paths to new interests, but they cannot replicate the complex negotiations, compromises, and mutual obligations that characterize successful civic life.

When Loneliness is a Choice

Putnam's bowlers did not become lonely because their leagues disbanded; they stopped participating in leagues because league bowling no longer provided sufficient social satisfaction relative to available alternatives. We don’t stop going to book club because there’s nowhere to host it; we just get busy with more interesting things in our lives. Technology initially aimed at increasing connection has quickly become a substitute for the traditional forms of engagement that social capital relies on.

If isolation causes loneliness, then creating new spaces for gathering should alleviate the problem. Community centers, public squares, and mixed-use developments become obvious solutions. But if loneliness causes isolation—if people withdraw from available social opportunities because those opportunities fail to provide adequate satisfaction—then building more gathering spaces addresses symptoms while ignoring underlying causes.

The infrastructure of community cannot be divorced from the cultural conditions that make community appealing. Third places flourished when they served functions that could not be easily replicated elsewhere—information exchange, entertainment, nourishment, faith. As these functions migrated to digital platforms, the spaces themselves became redundant regardless of their convenient locations or communal value.

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Could AI Revive Third Places?

The emergence of artificial intelligence both threatens the acceleration of existing trends and presents an opportunity for reversal. A world with AI companions, co-workers, tutors, and entertainers can complete the trend toward total social isolation, or it can give us an opportunity to escape it.

Putnam noted that "social capital is often most easily created in opposition to something or someone else," making bonding capital easier to develop in the face of a trend which uncomfortably disrupts our social norms.

Consider one way AI might enhance social capital formation: Current community organizing efforts fail because they cannot efficiently identify compatible individuals, coordinate schedules, or sustain engagement over time. AI systems could analyze individual preferences, interests, and availability to assemble stable groups for ongoing interaction. Rather than replacing human relationships, such systems would serve as sophisticated matchmaking infrastructure for physical community formation.

Another way AI could incentivize social capital formation is by replacing some of the social capital reducing forms of entertainment in our lives. Many fear AI musicians, and there is good reason to be skeptical/concerned. But is it possible that in reaction, some people may begin attending live concerts with more frequency? When AI inevitably begins being used in movies and TV, is it possible that this may incentivize increased attendance of plays?

Don’t mistake these thoughts as blind optimism; I know that these aren’t the most likely outcomes.

But AI is making people uncomfortable. Many of us cringe at seeing an AI-created piece of art—where is its soul? Its flawed, deeply human view on the world shaped by its creator’s unique experiences? Where is its emotion? These feelings will not go away for many any time soon; there is an energy there waiting to be tapped. Just like today’s Zoomers engage in countercultural usage of cassette tapes and CD players over the more convenient streaming platforms, there is an opportunity here to promote a culture of human connection.

The Choice Between Substitution and Augmentation

The future trajectory of American community life depends on collective choices about how to deploy these emerging technologies. The path toward computational solipsism offers clear advantages: perfectly customized social experiences without the friction, compromise, and occasional disappointment inherent in human relationships. The path toward augmented community requires accepting that some goods can only be achieved through shared physical presence and mutual obligation, even when more “low-friction” or “fun” digital alternatives exist.

This choice cannot be made through policy prescriptions or urban planning initiatives. It emerges from millions of individual decisions about how to allocate our time and attention. The question is whether sufficient numbers of Americans can retain an appreciation for the particular satisfactions that genuine community provides—satisfactions that may be less immediately gratifying than digital alternatives but prove more durable and meaningful over extended periods.

The revival of third places, if it occurs, will require more than better design or smarter technology. It will demand recovery of the understanding that some human needs can only be satisfied through the patient work of building common life with others, despite the inefficiencies and imperfections such work entails.

Whether we still possess this understanding, or can recover it, remains to be seen.

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Somewhere in your kitchen, you probably have salt and pepper shakers. They might sit on your counter, or possibly on your table. If you’re the fancy type, you might even have bottles for oil and vinegar. If you look at the same type of table set from the 18th century, you’ll find these same things. But among them, you’ll also find something curious—a mysterious third shaker.

What was it used for? The truth is, nobody really knows. Some claim it was for sugar, others for paprika or white pepper. One leading thought is that it might have been for some sort of mustard powder. But at the end of the day, nobody can fully say for certain what these shakers were for. This is because these shakers were so ubiquitous that nobody thought it necessary to document what they’re for. Everyone knew its purpose until no one did.

There are other examples of this phenomenon, such as the mysterious “Roman Dodecahedron” discussed by the great Joe Scott in the video below, or the lost Egyptian city of Punt. One can imagine a Roman soldier chuckling at the thought that nobody knows what his nubby brass dodecahedron was used for—it would be so obvious to him!

These stories tell us something important about how civilizations lose knowledge. The most essential things—the customs and understandings that hold society together—often become invisible precisely because they work so well. We stop noticing them, stop appreciating them, and stop defending them. And that way lies disaster.

The conservative temperament starts with recognizing this reality. Much of what makes our modern civilization possible is inherited wisdom that we don't fully understand. If the goal of science, art, or any field of study is to build upon the discoveries and creations that came before us, the goal of the conservative is to preserve those discoveries and creations as well as their meaning so that future generations don’t have to start from zero.

William F. Buckley famously defined a conservative as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop.’” But I think that’s in part because it rolled off the tongue far better than defining one as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling ‘consider the wisdom of your ancestors and make sure you understand the institutions that enabled you to get this far, lest you accidentally destroy them in your desire to make life even better than it is now, thereby undermining your efforts and making it worse.‘“

Conservatism, rightly understood, is not an inhibitor of progress, but an enabler of it. Buckley, a learned and brilliant man, understood this. Progress was not inherently bad; indeed, his home of Manhattan was far better off in the 20th century than in the 19th. Progress! But progress built upon the successes, wisdom, and institutions formed in the blood and toil of the 18th century.

Chesterton's Fence and the Great Relearning

There is a principle with which you will be familiar if you’ve been reading my writing (or really the writing of almost any conservative) for a while called Chesterton’s Fence. In his book The Thing, G.K. Chesterton presents us with a parable:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

Do you see where I’m going with this?

What separates the conservative temperament from that of the populist or the radical is not the religious worship of what is old; it is the demand that we understand what is old before discarding it as no longer useful. The reformer plans removal, the radical reaches for dynamite, and the populist denounces it as bourgeois excess. But the conservative asks: "What dangers was this fence built to keep out?"

In The Great Relearning, Tom Wolfe wrote about what he calls “a curious footnote to the psychadelic movement.” Amidst the influx of hippies and free spirits to 1960s San Francisco, local doctors saw a deluge of medieval diseases cropping up. And no, I don’t mean “medieval” as in “hardcore" or “brutal,” but as in literally medieval:

At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.

Why did these diseases crop back up all of the sudden after centuries? As Wolfe explains, “The hippies, as they became known, sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero.” With the ditching of moral and social norms, the hippies also ditched modern hygiene. Starting from zero meant abandoning the codes that said you should wash your body and clothes, that you shouldn’t share toothbrushes with strangers, that you shouldn’t have communal mattresses.

The era of the hippie was one of what Wolfe calls “remedial education.” It was an era of relearning the value of the old mores and folkways. It was an era that led to the resurgence of both political and temperamental conservatism. What fences were torn down were quietly erected again to serve their once-forgotten purpose.

On a short enough timescale like in the 60s and 70s, the old ways can be forgotten and relearned. But what of the long death of knowledge? What of the things that move from ubiquity to obscurity without a word? What about the third shakers?

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When Relearning is Impossible

I wrote about Jonah Goldberg’s “Don’t Call this Conservatism” two weeks ago. Two weeks later, it’s still stuck in my head. The most notable passage is this:

Philosophically and psychologically, one can think of radicals as termites: wherever you put them, they are only interested in eating what is in front of them. A beautiful antique grandfather clock or a dilapidated fence in a field? They’re both just meals to termites. Conservatives, rightly understood, are more like beavers. They build institutions from what is available to them and fortify and improve the projects that already exist. Their projects serve as bulwarks against the torrent of change brought by the endless river of time to create good places, safe harbors, to live and thrive in.

After a fire or some other disaster, structures can often be rebuilt quite quickly. When they go up in flames overnight, they tend to leave behind some who remember their form and function. But when termites eat, they do so over the course of decades. That dilapidated fence in the field is consumed in years, not days. And if left unchecked, the termites will wholly and completely disintegrate the structure. By the time anyone remembers why the fence was built in the first place, it will no longer exist. It won’t just be broken or removed; its component parts will simply be gone. Constructing a replacement will have to be done from scratch.

The same goes for our institutions.

Our politics is full of termites who think destruction is a virtue. And it once seemed that the termites primarily infested the Democratic party. The anti-vaxxers were rich Bay Area progressives and the “burn it all down” chants came from the college campus left.

But this termite temperament now pervades the right as well. Progressives once dismissed constitutional limits as obstacles to justice; now self-styled conservatives denounce due process as impediments to presidential power. Where it was and is Democrats who ask “why you need a gun” and see the Second Amendment as an archaic obstacle to security, the Republicans now ask the same of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments:

Our constitutional system is one big Chestertonian institution. The Electoral College, equal Senate representation, lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices, supermajority requirements for amendments, delegation of powers to the states—all of these frustrate radicals who want quick action. And it’s not an impossibility that some might deserve to go. But we should understand their purpose before we start tearing them down.

While it seemed Democrats never grasped this institutional wisdom, Republicans now actively abandon it—or worse, become hostile to it. Look at the Republican embrace of tariffs—a policy that contradicts a century of conservative economic thinking. Or consider how gleefully some now talk about using federal power against political opponents.

Genuine conservatism remains skeptical of concentrated power—whether progressives use it for social engineering or right-wing populists for homogenization. It recognizes that the gravest threat to human flourishing comes from eroding those intermediate institutions that stand between individuals and a “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” state of nature.

What makes our moment dangerous is the near-total disappearance of people who understand institutional restraint. Joe Manchin's retirement removes one of the few remaining Democrats who valued this approach. Republicans have systematically purged the Cheneys and Kinzingers who put conservative principles over partisan loyalty.

This institutional vandalism isn't just a political problem. It's a crisis of civic understanding. We're losing the institutional memory that makes self-government work. Like that forgotten third shaker, the reasons our founders structured government as they did, why they built in protections and inefficiencies rather than streamlined systems—all of this is fading from public consciousness.Get Free Access to All Articles

The Work of Memory

The conservative temperament is fundamentally about preserving and transmitting hard-won wisdom about human nature and political possibility so that we don’t have to relearn these lessons the hard way. It's not reactionary nostalgia for some imagined golden age, but recognition that most progress is actually recovery—rediscovering truths that have always existed but have since been forgotten.

This is why conservatives are skeptical of grand schemes for human improvement. History is littered with the wreckage of such schemes, each promoted by smart, sincere people convinced they had found the key to human happiness.

The conservative understands that society's most precious inheritance isn't financial wealth or military power, but cultural wisdom—accumulated knowledge of how to live together peacefully, resolve disputes without violence, maintain order without tyranny. This wisdom lives not in abstract principles but in concrete practices and institutions built over the course of generations.

If American democracy has hope, it lies not in one party beating another, but in cultivating this conservative temperament across party lines. We need Democrats who understand that progressive goals work better through patient institutional development than radical transformation. We need Republicans who remember that conservative principles shouldn’t be used as talking points during election time and then discarded as hindrances when in power. Most importantly, we need citizens who understand that preserving self-government requires more than just voting.

Civilizations lose essential knowledge not through dramatic collapse but through simple neglect. This is what Goldberg argues in his book Suicide of the West: Constitutional government, rule of law, peaceful power transfers—these things are more fragile than they appear. They persist not because they're natural or inevitable, but because each generation chooses to preserve them and to safeguard them for the next. And each generation makes this choice because they are taught the value—the use—of these norms and the institutions that sustain them. The value of these institutions is documented so they may be fortified against the eroding tide of history.

The question isn't whether the world will change—change is inevitable. The question is whether we'll let it be changed by beavers or by termites, as guardians of civilization's wisdom or destroyers of its forgotten treasures. Our choice may determine whether future generations understand our democratic institutions or puzzle over their ruins, much as we puzzle over third shakers and dodecahedrons.

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Yesterday marked day 100 of the second Trump administration. And what a time it has been. For many presidents, the first 100 days of their administration set the tone for the rest of their time in office.

If that trend holds, Trump is in trouble. And so are we.

So let’s start with the easy stuff—what Candidate Donald Trump promise would happen when he got into office, and has President Donald Trump fulfilled those promises?

If you’re lazy, I’ll save you some time: no, he hasn’t.

Promises Made, Promises Broken

Here’s a list of the big hitters. To be clear, this isn’t an analysis of the policies themselves. He promised these policy achievements. He promised many of them in his first hundred days, if not on day one.

Promise Made

Timeline

Promise Kept?

End the War in Ukraine

Day One

No

End Israeli/Palestinian Conflict

Day One

No

Bring Down Inflation

Day One

No

No Tax on Tips

None Stated

No

No Tax on Overtime

None Stated

No

Release the Epstein Files

Day One

No

Cut Energy Prices in Half

Day One

Too Soon to Tell

Gasoline Under $2/gal

None Stated

Too Soon to Tell

Cap Credit Card Interest Rates

None Stated

Too Soon to Tell

Increase Deportations

Day One

No

Blanket Tariffs

Day One

Yes

Pardon January 6 Rioters

Day One

Yes

The war in Ukraine rages. The war in the Levant rages. The inflation rate is the same as it was in September. Tips and Overtime are still taxed, and Congress is unwilling to incorporate either proposal into their budgets. Energy prices have increased. Gasoline is still sky high. Credit card interest rates remain capped. And Trump is deporting illegal immigrants slower than Biden did.

The only two campaign promises I can think of that Trump has unequivocally delivered on? Tariffs and pardoning rioters.

And I would argue (although that’s not the point of this article) that these are perhaps two of the worst promises he could have fulfilled. Some of the analysis below might shed light on why that is.

Trump has not delivered on his campaign promises. So what has happened in the last 100 days?

Unprecedented Executive Overreach

The Republican Party was rightfully in an uproar when Barack Obama said he didn’t need Congress because he had “a phone and a pen.” This astonishing rejection of Congress in favor of Constitutionally dubious executive orders was one of the very reasons I became such an active Republican.

So what does it make of the modern Republican Party when Trump uses his “phone and pen” at a rate that makes Obama look like an anarchist?

One might argue that the ends justify the means, because Trump’s executive orders allow him to just get the job done that needs to be done. But that’s not the case either—his overuse of executive powers in murkier and murkier circumstances has caused Trump to be sued in federal court more than twice as much as any president this century.

These lawsuits mean injunctions, discovery, proceedings, and more that delay the implementation of his policies by years, while costing taxpayers millions.

Even if you agreed with Trump on every single issue, you must accept that his reliance on executive power is at best ineffective, and at worst autocratic.

At the same time Trump has taken his cudgel to Congressional authority, he’s also taken it to the kneecaps of your financial health.

Kneecapping American Markets

Since his inauguration, Trump has threatened every friend and foe of the United States with tariffs and trade disruptions. The market has not responded kindly.

On April Second, after Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement of tariffs on everyone from Canada to the penguins of McDonald Island, American markets plummeted further. Only two times have a president’s first hundred days been worse for the American economy: the dot-com bubble popping in 2001 and the constitutional crisis of Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

And while those

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Killing America’s Soft Power

Trump’s tariffs and thuggish behavior have not only harmed US markets; they have irreparably harmed our relations with other countries.

Canada

Newly re-elected Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney has said that “The old relationship we had with the United States… is over.”

Singapore

Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said that “The recent ‘Liberation Day’ tariff announcements by the US confirms this stark reality: the era of rules-based globalisation and free trade is over.”

Japan

Japan has consistently been one of the most pro-America countries over the last few decades. Japan regularly supports America and cooperates with us to limit China’s strength in the Pacific. But now Japanese leaders see the United States as “a delinquent kid extorting someone,” and call on others to “never give in to the American extortionists.”

South Korea

Another historic ally of the United States in the Pacific, South Korea is responding to US tariffs by turning toward China. China has gone from continually antagonizing the South Korean people and opposing South Korea’s ability to defend itself from North Korean missiles to a place of shelter from America’s unwarranted attacks.

China

One could argue that these relational hits are worth projecting strength to China and limiting their power. But in addition to alienating key allies in curtailing China like Japan and South Korea, Trump has only projected weakness. After seeing the response to his tariffs from markets and allies, Trump has begun to backpedal. But now Chinese people and media are laughing at Trump “chickening out” or “caving in.” He—and by proxy the United States— is a laughingstock in the PRC.

But even if Trump does fully backpedal, the damage is done. He looks weak in China, and it will take decades to regain the trust of our allies. He could completely walk back every piece of foreign policy and trade policy implemented in the last 100 days and it would not matter. Trump has flipped the game board over in rage.

In Crashing the Car of Pax Americana, Ben Hunt writes:

Once you toss over the game table, even if you reset the table exactly as it was before, the other players must take into account the possibility that you will toss it over again. Their reactions in every game you play with them in the future will be different, much more wary and suspicious, and game outcomes that required a measure of trust and coordination will now be completely out of reach.

World-renowned investor, author, and Trump-neutral Ray Dalio has also warned of the same, writing that “whatever happens with tariffs, these problems won't go away.“

Even if in four years’ time a moderate Republican or a Democrat is elected, I don’t think we can be certain that things are going to change back to the way they were before.

In just 100 days, Donald Trump has undone the post-WWII international consensus that made America thrive. And foreign leaders, investors, and academics alike are warning that it is not coming back.

What else has happened in the last 100 days?

Constitutional Crisis after Constitutional Crisis

While all of this has been happening, Trump has been trampling over the Constitution.

I’ve already written about his unconstitutional actions in deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Mohsen Mahdawi. I’ve written about his defiance of the courts who have demanded they be given their constitutionally protected due process. A I have warned about his desire to punish United States citizens with deportation and exile.

The Trump administration has now deported a US Citizen—a child with cancer nonetheless.

To be clear, this is incontestably unconstitutional.

You Can't Deport US Citizens

The Trump administration has also been using plainclothes federal officers—with zero identification—to round up and disappear immigrants with zero due process. And when judges prevent them from doing so demanding they follow the letter of the law, they are arrested.

Trump continues to defy the courts. These smaller constitutional crises are building up to something much greater and more horrifying.

Hear the Alarm

My previous article warned that we have crossed the Rubicon. I was not exaggerating. I was sounding an alarm that continues to ring out warnings for our country.

Our markets are teetering on the edge. Our foundational principles of due process and equal protection under the law are at risk. The Bill of Rights is being actively trampled at every turn. And the party whose members so frequently fly the Gadsden Flag have decided to welcome the boot.

You will not fully feel the effects of Trump’s tariffs for another few months—ports have only just begun to go quiet. You will not fully understand the danger of enabling a would-be autocrat to trample upon our civil liberties maybe for years—tyranny slithers quietly toward total control until it is ready to strike. And you will not fully feel the pain of surrendering America’s position as global leader perhaps for decades—until China’s flag flies high the world over and we bemoan the American century that could have been.

All because of 100 days.

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At first glance, it’s easy to see why one might believe I’ve moved left: I’m vociferously opposed to the Trump Administration. I’ve argued that the right’s pearl-clutching on “moral decay” is misguided. I’ve (on rare occasion) defended the Biden administration. I even held my nose and voted for Kamala Harris.

In an age where so much of our political opinions are informed by reading the headlines of news articles rather than their entire contents, I wouldn’t blame the busy reader for skimming my headlines alone and imagining I’ve taken a large step leftward.

But I haven’t. And I think the easiest way to explain how and why I haven’t is with the concept of the Political Compass.

The Political Compass

For those unfamiliar, this is the Political Compass:

The compass is an attempt to help us understand politics better than with simple right/left definitions. Ronald Reagan and Justin Amash are both figures on the political right, but they have very different belief systems. As do Bernie Sanders and Stalin. It’s inadequate to simply call them right/left-wing.

By introducing a second axis, we can more clearly define where these types of figures sit. While Stalin and Sanders sit on the left, Sanders is far more libertarian on issues of policing and surveillance than the former leader of the USSR. And while Justin Amash would generally agree with Ronald Reagan on economic issues, they would be almost diametrically opposed on foreign policy issues.

Setting the Stage

So where have I historically sit? And where have each of the parties historically sit?

Before going any farther, I want to describe my process:

• Nearly a decade ago, I took the Political Compass test for myself, marked by the red dot on the chart below

• Before writing this article, I took the test as if I were the median member of Congress from each party, marked by party logos on the chart below (this did require some guesswork, but I tried to be as honest and fair as possible)

• I then retook the test for myself and for each party.

So, with that all being said, here’s where the political landscape lied in circa 2014:

The cool thing about this visualization is that by measuring ideology in space, we can start to measure the ideological “distance” between different groups of people. For example, let’s measure the distance between myself and each major party as of 2014:

With this visualization, it’s pretty easy to see why I became a Republican: they were closer to me ideologically at the time.

After all, the Democrats were the party of reckless spending, of finger-pointing at an imaginary billionaire boogeyman as the cause of society’s problems, of Obama’s “phone and pen” executive orders that spit in the face of Congress’ Article I powers. They were the party of the Iran nuclear deal, of California’s housing failure, and of the foolish abandonment of nuclear energy. Worst of all, they were the party of “doing something” at any cost, where action was the sign of success rather than outcomes. It didn’t matter if gun control laws, for example, actually created insane loopholes and workarounds that spun up cottage industries and increased the supply of illegal firearms to criminals—it mattered that the Democrats were trying! This entire worldview seemed objectively foolish to me.

In contrast, the Republicans were the party of the free market, of federalism and subsidiarity, of Chesterton’s fence. If the Democratic party was the party of angry teens thrashing about demanding abstract “change,” the Republican Party was the party of sensible adults in the room, accepting that some change might be nice but we should really be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In contrast to Obama’s “phone and pen” approach, the Republicans were the party that spent years developing a cohesive framework for a fairer tax code, a stronger commitment to the Constitution, and a more confident foreign policy. It was called A Better Way, and you’ve probably never heard of it, because the modern GOP has become actively hostile to the conservative principles upon which it is founded.

The Republicans weren’t perfect for me—after all, there still was some distance between us on some issues. But they were the party that was the closest ideologically to me.

But things have changed quite a bit in the last decade.

Not conservative. Not liberal. Just Christian.

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The Leftward Shift

If neither party had shifted ideologically over the last decade, I would actually be even more aligned with the Republican Party over the democrats (10 cells away from the Republicans, but 14 cells from the Democrats).

But that’s not what happened. At the same time that some of my positions changed slightly on the margins, both parties underwent significant ideological changes. The Democrats began to abandon Obama’s vision of an all-powerful executive branch at the same time that Republicans adopted said vision. The Republicans lurched leftward on economic issues with their attacks on Wall Street and reliance on 19th-century tariff policy at the same time that some Democrats began rediscovering the value federalism and states’ rights to self governance.

What’s interesting is that I didn’t shift left; both parties did:

In contrast to the two major parties, I actually moved right a bit over the years. Sure, the Democrats moved left with the rise of Katie Porter’s whiteboards and Elizabeth Warren’s “greedflation,” but shockingly, so did the Republicans.

Trump’s economic plan has its many righteous critics. But amidst the torrent of stock market min-crashes and freaked out economists stands one of the loudest pro-Trump voices I have ever heard: Batya Ungar-Sargon. A regular on CNN these days, she consistently defends the simultaneously spend-happy and austere economic plan coming from the White House.

In case you’re wondering who Batya Ungar-Sargon is, here’s an excerpt from her Wikipedia page:

And here is her ideology, in her own words:

Please note, I’m not nut-picking. I’m not just going “look at this Trump supporter who’s a lefty, they must all be!” The Trump administration and its hangers-on have consistently embraced a left-wing economic vision that, so far, has been disastrous for the United States.

It is why longtime Trump advisor Steve Bannon calls himself a Leninist and props up Biden FTC Chair Lina Kahn as an intellectual heavyweight in the Democratic Party. It’s why Trump has drawn criticism from lifelong conservatives for his attempts to put price caps on medication while drawing praise from Bernie Sanders. It’s why Trump has embraced traditionally progressive policies like capping credit card interest and ending taxes on tips.

You can say what you want about these policies on their merits. But they are not conservative. These policies are the very kind of progressive “do something” policies that kept me far away from the Democratic Party for many years.

Part of this “do something” mentality is indeed Republican Party’s drastic shift toward authoritarianism. From the carcass of the party of federalism and subsidiarity arose a populist patchwork of grifters and influencers who have cannibalized what was left of the conservative party and left in their wake an economically illiterate statist blob.

If you read nothing else today, take fifteen minutes and read through Jonah Goldberg’s incredible “Don’t Call this Conservatism.” In it, Goldberg says this:

Populist and nationalist economics have always been conducive to statism. There is nothing inconsistent between Steve Bannon’s “Leninism” and his desire for a new New Deal—the goal of American progressives since the first one. The whole point of populism is special pleading for a special group and statist intervention on their behalf. Trump has turned the GOP into a statist party, committed to industrial policy and protectionism.

When Donald Trump says “no tax on tips,” he is making a special pleading for an interest group of voters that is diametrically opposed to the historical Republican wisdom of “broaden the base, lower the rates.” It’s not just bad tax policy; it’s authoritarian lunacy. Rather than reducing the size and influence of the federal government, he is using it as a carrot and a stick to drive allegiance.

The economic policy that has Trump touting himself as a fighter for the everyman is the same economic policy that he uses to engage in kleptocratic practices that have foreign nations openly bribing him with personal planes and special favors in order to access American markets. The executive overreach Trump is leveraging to cap medicine prices is the same executive overreach under which he is deporting and exiling American citizens.

Goldberg continues:

If there is any idea more central to American conservatism than adherence to the rule of law and fidelity to the Constitution, I struggle to think of what it might be. And the Trump administration, on a near-daily basis, signals its contempt for both. The rule of law is being replaced by the Benavides rule: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”… The new Populist Front is contemptuous of any moral imagination that cannot be weaponized against its enemies—but rarely and only selectively applied to its friends.

You might support a Trump policy here or there. But his anti-constitutional approach to governance means that you will only be favored so long as you are a friend; so long as you bend the knee. You may be a full-blown Trump supporter. But in no world can you reasonably call Trumpism conservative.

And unfortunately, this ideological shift among the parties leaves me closer to the Democrats than to the Republicans:

Let me be clear: the Democratic Party is not conservative. There simply is no conservative party in the United States these days. I stand where I have been standing. But the progressive, authoritarian lurch of the Republican Party has left me standing alone.

Ronald Reagan once said: “I didn't leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.”

I am not a Democrat. I will likely not be a Democrat. I will support Democrats where and when they deserve my support, and I will offer Republicans the same support when deserved. That is, when they stand against the tyrannical malignancy of the White House and recommit themselves to the conservative principles of subsidiarity, federalism, and Chestertonian impulses.

Until that day, I will have no choice but to say that I didn’t leave the Republican Party; the Republican Party left me.

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Imagine this: You are 16 years old. You flee your home country because gang members are extorting your family, threatening to kill you and rape your sisters if you don't pay up. You escape legally to the United States. Along the way, you cross paths with a police officer who mistakes you for a gang member because of your Chicago Bulls hat. Despite this, you build a life—gaining legal status, finding steady employment, marrying a U.S. citizen, and starting a family. Then, seven years after that brief encounter, without warning, you're torn from your home, deported without charges, and sent to a maximum-security prison filled with the very gang members who once threatened your family—despite a judge explicitly ruling you cannot be deported, let alone to your home country. This shouldn’t have happened—the government even admits you were wrongly deported due to an “administrative error.” But when the Supreme Court rules unanimously that you must be returned to your legal home in the United States, the executive branch just says no. So you continue to rot in a third world prison without even being charged.

This is what happened to Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Now imagine this: You are a student in America. While you immigrated from another country, you are a permanent legal resident. You hold strong views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While some in your movement resort to violence and hate speech, you advocate for peace. You articulate your disagreements eloquently. You build friendships across political divides. Then suddenly, you're rounded up and deported without due process—your crime nothing more than holding the "wrong" political opinion. Your education, your future, your voice—all silenced in an instant.

This is what happened to Mohsen Mahdawi.

Legal residents jailed without charges. Students disappeared off the street for their opinions. These aren't works of dystopian fiction—they are happening now, in America, today.

Where men were free.

Ronald Reagan once laid out the mandate for lovers of liberty across the world:

❝  

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

  Ronald Reagan

What we're witnessing isn't a future threat to democracy—it's its active dismantling. When government authorities can defy judicial orders, jail legal residents without charges in foreign prisons, and target individuals based solely on their political expression, we have already crossed the Rubicon.

The machinery of authoritarian control doesn't arrive announced with tanks and soldiers. It creeps in through "exceptional cases," through targeting those with the least political protection, through actions justified as necessary for security while fundamentally undermining the constitutional protections that truly keep us secure.

Martin Niemöller was a prominent Lutheran pastor during the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. A staunch nationalist conservative, Niemöller sympathized with the Nazis for much of the 1920s and early 30s. After Hitler gained power, however, Niemöller became a staunch critic of the regime within the church and in public. For this crime, he spent the last eight years of the war in Nazi prisons and concentration camps.

You may not know Niemöller’s name, but you likely know this quote from him in 1946:

❝  

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

History has taught us this terrible lesson repeatedly: the persecution of less powerful groups—immigrants, students, activists—is rarely the end goal. No, it is the testing ground. First come those whose suffering provokes the least public outrage. Then, emboldened by success and public indifference, the circle widens.

Think it couldn't happen to you? How about this quote from the president himself?

How about this headline?

White House exploring legality of sending U.S. citizens to foreign prisons

Trump "would only consider this, if legal, for Americans who are the most violent, egregious, repeat offenders of crime," Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

www.axios.com/2025/04/15/americans-el-salvador-prisons-white-house

The suggestion that even American citizens could face deportation and imprisonment without charges is no longer unthinkable—it's been openly discussed by those in power. When the executive branch believes can simply ignore court rulings without being held accountable by Congress, what protection remains for any of us?

Imagine waking up to discover that your government views your political opinions as grounds for punishment. Imagine facing exile without charges, without a hearing, without the opportunity to defend yourself. Imagine being sent to a country where your life is in danger—not for any crime, but for how you think.

You are not safe.

When the Trump administration and its supporters argue that immigrants—or even criminals—are not entitled to due process, they saying that you aren’t either. Our Bill of Rights ensures that even those who commit the most heinous crimes are entitled to their day in court. This is not for the protection of the criminal, but the defense of the wrongly accused.

The English jurist William Blackstone wrote numerous texts throughout his career; many of these provided the intellectual foundation for the Founding Fathers’ understanding of human rights. In 1760, Blackstone wrote that “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” This is known as Blackstone’s ratio, and it is the most succinct explanation of our legal system that I know of.

Blackstone’s touch can be seen in the Declaration of Independence, among other foundational documents. Among the many reasons for American Revolution, the founders list a few of note:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

Due process isn't a legal technicality—it's the bedrock protection against tyranny. The right to express political opinions without government retribution isn't a luxury—it's the essential prerequisite for democratic governance. When these protections are denied to anyone within our borders, they are weakened for everyone—including you.

The founders understood this well. The Constitution intentionally extends its protections to all "persons"—not just citizens—because the Founders understood that a government powerful enough to violate the rights of some will eventually violate the rights of all. The targeting of non-citizens and foreign students today creates the precedent that could lead to your persecution tomorrow.

Are you prepared?

In 2016, Trump’s election spurred numerous bouts of doomsaying from the left. “He’s a threat to democracy,” they would say. “He’ll become a dictator,” they would cry.

It was very easy to see these as hyperbolic at the time. Sure, Trump was an obviously immoral person and a narcissistic dunce, but the institutions that upheld our democracy for centuries would continue to do so.

Even after his first term, and his attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power on January 6th, these cries still seemed a bit much. After all, the guy tried to undermine our institutions and lost—at the ballot box, in court, and in the halls of Congress thanks to the Capitol Police.

But this is hyperbole no more. Our moderating institutions either refuse to do their jobs or are ignored. The crisis isn't approaching—it's here:

• A legal resident, a father of three, and the husband of a U.S. citizen has been sent to rot in a third-world prison without being charged with a crime.

• Students are disappeared and face deportation without a hearing for peaceful political expression.

• The administration is looking for ways to do these same things to U.S. citizens.

• Judicial authority is being ignored by the executive branch.

• Constitutional protections are treated as optional rather than binding.

Every day we normalize these violations, we move further from constitutional governance and closer to the rule of tyrants and mad kings. It is this normalization that made way for the end of the Roman Republic and gave rise to the era of Caesars. It is this callous indifference which enabled the rise of the Nazis. It is this cold, cynical refusal to act from elite institutions that has allowed petty tyrant after petty tyrant to take hold of the levers of unchecked power.

You stand at a moment of profound choice. Will you defend the constitutional order that has preserved American liberty for generations? Or will you watch silently as it's dismantled piece by piece, case by case, person by person—until the day it's your rights that are violated?

The time is now.

This is perhaps the moment of moments—one which will define a generation. You and I can choose to:

1. Demand immediate accountability for officials who defy court orders,

2. Make the protection of due process and free speech absolute requirements for any candidate seeking your vote, and

3. Support organizations fighting these constitutional violations on the frontlines,

or we can choose to watch our democracy erode with our liberties in tow. Our constitutional republic won't collapse in a dramatic moment but through the accumulated weight of violations we failed to confront. The threat isn't theoretical—it's embodied in people like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, in students silenced through deportation, in each case where constitutional protections are treated as inconvenient obstacles rather than sacred obligations.

History will judge us not by our words but by our willingness to stand against these fundamental threats to American liberty before the mechanisms to do so are dismantled completely.

If you want to act, here is a list of non-partisan organizations worth supporting:

• The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

• The National Coalition Against Censorship

• The Institute for Free Speech

There are surely more, but these are a few that I know are good. It is important that this is not a partisan issue, and to support non-partisan groups. Trump’s assault on the Constitution is not partisan; it is personal. Resistance to this slow coup must be a united front. I do not care about whether you want higher or lower taxes.

I do not care about your stance on defense spending. I care about whether you will take the risk and support the system that has allowed us to be the freest and most prosperous country in the history of the world. And I care that you will have a spine and act when the die is cast.

The time is now. Tomorrow may be too late.

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In response, the markets are actually having a decent day:

$SPY ( ▲ 0.26% ) | $DJIA ( ▼ 0.07% ) | $VIX ( ▼ 4.85% )  

I was going to write today’s newsletter on how the tariff plans aren’t actually reciprocal. How we tariffed countries like Singapore and Australia with which we have free trade agreements and trade surpluses. Or how we literally tariffed an uninhabited island populated only by penguins.

But that’s all moot for now.

So instead, I want to talk about the ideological shift happening in MAGA world. If it wasn’t so concerning, this shift would actually be pretty funny:

Trump implemented a dumb idea, saw the blowback, and is now backing down while trying to make it look like this is all part of a grand plan. And his followers/defenders are celebrating his backtracking as “the art of the deal.”

In other words, it’s looking a lot like the Trump Policy Scam Cycle in full effect.

The Trump Policy Scam Cycle

How a wannabe king plays with world leaders and your attention to look strong at all costs

www.bearlythinking.com/p/trump-policy-scam-cycle

But the problems aren’t over. This last week has shown the world that the global economy is resting in the hands of a demented, cantankerous octogenarian with no foundational principles. Under Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, Congress alone is the body that has the power to implement tariffs. But over the decades, Congress has slowly but consistently abrogated its responsibilities, including by delegating the tariff power to the Presidency.

Congress can undo this delegation and take back the tariff power today. There is even a bill circulating to do so, with some Republican support. Unfortunately, the chances that this bill actually goes anywhere are slim, as Congress waits for Trump’s “master plan” to play out.

Trump wants it to look like he has a master plan. His lackeys and apparatchiks seek to make it look like he has a master plan. But he has no plan. Former director of the National Economic Council and chief economic advisor to President Donald Trump Gary Cohn tried to explain the economic realities to Trump multiple times during his first administration:

The President of the United States spent a week groin-punching the American economy (including your retirement accounts, your pensions, and your employers) just because he’s “had these views for 30 years.”

As Jeremiah Johnson wrote over at Infinite Scroll: “There is No Plan. They're Just Morons.”

There is No Plan. They're Just Morons.

Trump doesn't have complex trade theories. He's just an idiot.

www.infinitescroll.us/p/there-is-no-plan-theyre-just-morons

So what happens when you have a moronic, anti-market policy implemented with zero clear justification coupled with a legion of unprincipled grifters performing a sort of fecal haruspicy in order to make sense of Trump’s antics?

You get MAGA Maoism.

In response to the market collapse of the last week, so many pro-Trump talking heads sought to justify his actions at any cost. And in doing so, they adopted the language of the left. Many mainstream MAGA mouthpieces (say that three times fast) today sound no different than the progressive left of the 1960s, 1990s, and 2010s.

Don’t believe me?

Fine, let’s take a little quiz!

Below is a list of quotes from prominent MAGA influencers, and from folks on the left like Mao Zedong, Noam Chomsky, etc.

Take note of which one you think is which! There’s an answer key at the bottom.

MAGA or Maoist?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Ready for the results? I’d love for you to comment below or reply to this email to let me know how you did:

1. MAGA — Trump supporter (and noted plagiarist) Benny Johnson

2. Maoist — literally Mao Zedong

3. MAGA — Right-wing internet personality & consultant Emma-Jo Morris

4. MAGA — Trump Secretary of Commerce Scott Bessent

5. Maoist — Progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren (okay technically not a Maoist but the alliteration demands some wide brush strokes)

6. Maoist — Mao Zedong again

7. MAGA — Right-wing pundit Steve Cortes

8. Maoist — Socialist academic and genocide denier Noam Chomsky

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Is it not concerning that Trump world is nearly indistinguishable from the leftists and progressives they claim to oppose? Is it not terrifying that the Chinese Communist Party is posting clips of Reagan while the party of Reagan is embracing Maoist thought?

Trump saw the writing on the wall and caved on tariffs, at least for now. For the moment, it’s not worth talking about tariffing penguins anymore. It’s not worth talking about Singapore, or Australia, or Oren Cass or Peter Navarro.

But there is no guarantee that Trump’s surrender is permanent. What needs to be talked about—yelled from the rooftops and screamed in the halls of congress—is that we have a President with a Third-Worldist ideology whose daily whims dictate whether we face feast or famine.

This MAGA Maoism, as Drew Pavlou calls it, will fail. We’ve seen over the last week that this movement does not have the ability to succeed in any meaningful way. But we have a responsibility to stand in their way and demand Congress does the same. Because, as, Drew puts it, “They are going to fail, but my God they will inflict an insane and psychotic amount of destruction and suffering in the process.”

Congress can put a stop to this madness today. But they need a backbone first.

It’s up to us to keep the pressure on them, and to encourage them to reclaim their constitutional responsibility.

That may sound like a big ask. But it boils down to many small actions.

Actions like calling your representative and demanding they support Don Bacon’s H.R. 2665 to take the tariff power back from the President.

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Something strange is happening.

I don’t know if you were paying any attention to the election results coming out of Wisconsin and Florida last night, but some early takeaways are beginning to emerge.

First of all, Republicans got a wake up call.

In Wisconsin, Democrat-backed Susan Crawford beat Trump-endorsed Brad Schimel to tip the balance of the state’s Supreme Court toward the left. But what’s more fascinating is where Crawford made her gains relative to Trump: everywhere.

Every county, every region, and every partisan affiliation voted more for the Democrat-backed candidate than they did just six months ago. And while the totals are all still to be tabulated, it looks like the same exact thing shifts happened in Florida, where Mike Waltz’s deep-red former constituency was actually competitive for once.

This is partially because Trump’s agenda is wildly unpopular with most Americans:

But it’s also because his right hand man Elon Musk is even more unpopular among Americans of all political stripes:

Crawford’s campaign took full advantage of this reality. Their campaign strategy was effectively to link Schimel to Musk and then shut up about everything else.

And this makes plenty of sense! Because currently, Democrats are the least popular (among their own voters and the rest of the electorate) they have ever been throughout modern history:

As I wrote in the aftermath of the November Presidential election, Democrats need something to run on. Oppositional partisanship is helpful in the short term. It’s getting them wins. And Trump and Musk are making it very easy to do (be on the lookout for a recap of the “Liberation Day” fiasco currently unfolding next week).

But that’s not enough.

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Many analysts are keen to point to these election results and draw a comparison to the 2017 special elections that foretold the 2018 blue wave. I understand the urge.

But 2018 Democrats didn’t just have opposition to Trump to run on. They had environmental policy. They had a hold of the culture on LGBT issues. DEI was ascendant. Now, the culture has turned. The pendulum has swung against the Democratic Party. They no longer have a hold of the zeitgeist.

The Democratic Party of 2025 is facing the terrain of 2017, but with the toolset of 2014. The bench has evaporated, and the issue set on which Democrats align most with voters is opposition to Trump and Musk. The oldest members of Congress are almost all Democrats:

The only voices in the Democratic Party today that are presenting a clear, compelling, forward-looking message that resonates with the average voter are the likes of AOC and Jasmine Crockett. But when it comes to the economy and issues that matter to your pocketbook and mine, they’re barely any better than Trump.

Left-wing populist wishcasting cannot be an antidote to right-wing populist follies. The party cannot rely on AOC and Jasmine Crockett. Its reliance on “The Squad” as its face of the future is the very thing that helped to radicalize voters against Democrats and put Trump back in office.

No, Democrats need to start figuring out how to present a common-sense economic and social policy that the average voter can resonate with if they want to keep winning, and they need to do it quickly.

Trump has destroyed almost every norm in the book. He’s now suggesting he might run for a third term. Any and all voters who would be repulsed by this behavior have already been unceremoniously booted from the party. Pointing at the embryonic fascism festering inside of the GOP is not enough to keep it at bay.

Democrats need to grow up, and grow up now. Otherwise, their best political strategy will remain shutting up and letting Trump make his own enemies.

But at what cost? How much does your 401k need to shrink? How many enemies do we need to make out of allies? How much do we need to ensure a CCP-dominated century and watch all of our institutions burn to ash before the median voter decides enough is enough?

We’re well past the Rubicon.

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Look, I know I’m prone to using dramatic prose. What can I say? I love a good turn of phrase.

But now’s not the time for that.

The spin coming from the White House around this story published by Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg is shameful. As many of those involved try to manipulate the facts to cover their own rear ends, there needs to be a clear accounting of the truth. And because of our hyper-partisan media environment, it must be one that relies not on partisan dynamics or individual reputations, but on the facts alone.

So I’m leaving out the opinion and the bluster for a change. All that you will find below is a list of 26 things I know about this event, with each line containing links to evidence.

I don’t want to convince you of anything. Today, make your own opinion.

These are all facts. This is what I know, and now it’s what you know.

Now you can make up your own mind about who to believe.

You can make up your own opinion on whether our government is run by competent patriots or inept stooges put in place solely because of their undying loyalty to one man.

You can determine all on your own if this administration is one worth defending when it clearly doesn’t defend you.

Sorry, a little bit of opinion did end up sneaking in there at the end.

I told you I’m a sucker for prose.

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These independents give us fresh perspectives and help to break us out of the hyper-partisan mud in which we get stuck.

It’s a path worth walking, but a narrow one that’s easy to fall from.

For every Haidt or Cowen, we find a dozen self-proclaimed heterodox thinkers who begin by questioning one orthodoxy only to become adherents of another. The "Intellectual Dark Web," coined by Eric Weinstein and popularized in Bari Weiss's 2018 New York Times article, initially represented intellectual independence but has largely fragmented along predictable partisan lines. What starts as thoughtful critique of established institutions and norms often becomes a new conformity—different destination, same rigid thinking.

This phenomenon reveals what we might call the heterodoxy trap.

From Free Thinker to Franchise Player

Understanding this pattern requires distinguishing between two fundamentally different paths to heterodoxy.

The first path involves thinkers who develop robust intellectual frameworks and independent thought processes absent partisan motivation. Their heterodoxy emerges from methodical reasoning and principled analysis, not reflexive contrarianism. Their positions occasionally align with different partisan camps, but this alignment is incidental rather than central to their identity. They effectively possess an intellectual immune system against partisan capture.

The second, more treacherous path occurs when individuals stumble into heterodoxy by challenging a single orthodoxy, usually within their professional or social circles. Their heterodoxy is defined not by what they believe but by what they oppose. They gain attention precisely because they appear to be apostates—liberals criticizing "wokeness" or conservatives denouncing Donald Trump.

This distinction matters. The first group thinks in systems. The second thinks in reactions. Using the seemingly new focus of this newsletter as an example, the first group may oppose Trump on principled grounds, while the second uses their opposition of Trump to meander to something that might resemble a set of principles.

Having tasted the rewards of challenging one orthodoxy (attention, book deals, speaking engagements, Substack subscriptions), the second group discovers that continued relevance requires not thoughtful critique of all sides when appropriate but increasingly strident alignment with their new audience's expectations. Like a political version of what psychologist Albert Biderman described as captive bonding, they gradually adopt the very qualities they once criticized in their former tribe.

When Rebels Become Regurgitators

Consider the trajectory of evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. Their heterodox journey began with criticism of progressive excesses at Evergreen State College—reasonable enough. Yet their subsequent evolution reveals the classic pattern of heterodoxy collapse: Weinstein shifted from campus critic to political partisan, even expressing disappointment at not receiving an administration position after supporting Trump's campaign. Their critiques, once directed at multiple power structures, now consistently target one political direction while offering uncharacteristic charity to the other. They didn't escape ideological capture; they merely switched teams and sought leadership positions within their new tribe.

Dave Rubin's transformation follows an even more transparent arc. Beginning as a progressive commentator on The Young Turks, Rubin rebranded as a "classical liberal" critical of the left. But his evolution didn't stop there—it accelerated. His commentary quickly leapfrogged traditional conservative positions, embracing election denialism and promoting fearmongering narratives about immigrants. His interviews, once featuring ideological diversity, narrowed to predominantly showcase voices from the conspiratorial fringes. Rubin didn't get out of the prison of ideology; he simply redecorated his cell.

Jordan Peterson initially gained prominence for criticizing compelled speech laws in Canada and offered substantive arguments for nuance in the age of identity politics. Yet his trajectory has increasingly aligned with partisan conservative positions unrelated to his expertise. His principled takes on personal responsibility have given way to meandering jeremiads and pseudo-scientific diet promotions. As his audience became increasingly conservative and skeptical of mainstream science, the man who warned against ideological possession now embraces many of his followers' political fixations.

Tim Pool's transformation from independent journalist to right-wing commentator perhaps most clearly demonstrates audience capture in action. Driven by social media algorithms that reward outrage (and some Russian cash to boot), Pool evolved from a seemingly reasonable populist to an apocalyptic doomsayer. Rather than advancing a coherent populist framework, Pool now dedicates airtime to vivid scenarios about how political opponents and outsider groups threaten societal collapse—narratives that reliably generate engagement even as they fail to materialize.

The Market Forces of Intellectual Conformity

Why does this pattern repeat so consistently? Why do so many seemingly heterodox thinkers descend back into the pits of partisan orthodoxy? The answer lies not just in the individual failings of these thinkers but in the structural incentives that shape our discourse.

True heterodoxy—the persistent commitment to evaluating each issue on its merits rather than through ideological prisms—faces powerful market disincentives. The audience for genuine intellectual independence is vanishingly small compared to the vast market for partisan affirmation. Media analytics confirm what content creators quickly learn: ideological consistency and party loyalty generate substantially more engagement than nuanced case-by-case analysis.

Consider the economics. A YouTube channel that criticizes both progressive and conservative orthodoxies with equal vigor will likely attract smaller audiences than channels that consistently validate the priors of a specific ideological cohort, as they alienate or frustrate twice as many viewers. Even a modest partisan skew can significantly boost metrics, as a higher percent of viewers interpret the creator as “on their side.” This leaves independents stuck in constant tension of trying to please enough viewers to be able to continue making content full time without losing their actual independence.

This isn't merely a matter of cynical calculation by content creators. Audience psychology drives these incentives. If a creator fails to at least try to reach audiences how they want to be reached, they will not able to create content that moves the needle on a consistent enough basis to counteract the radical fringes that make most of the money in political commentary spaces. Most consumers of political content don't actually want the cognitive burden of thinking alongside the voices they follow. What they want—what we all tend to want—are intellectual shortcuts.

If I agree with Ben Shapiro on several key issues, it becomes cognitively efficient to outsource my thinking on new issues to his judgment. Similarly, if I view Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a reliable thought leader, her position on an emerging controversy gives me a shortcut to deciding how I feel about a topic without having to shoulder the burden of actually thinking about it. These shortcuts aren't just lazy, either—they're necessary cognitive adaptations to the overwhelming torrent of information we face daily.

The problem intensifies when our information diet consists predominantly of these shortcuts. What psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls "System 1" thinking—fast, intuitive, and association-based—gradually replaces "System 2" thinking—slow, deliberative, and analysis-based. We stop evaluating arguments and start pattern-matching positions to those who we feel are inside of our tribe.

Political identity thus becomes not just a set of beliefs but an epistemological framework that determines what evidence we find credible and which authorities we trust. If Donald Trump supports a policy, millions of Americans will immediately support it while millions of others reflexively oppose it—regardless of the policy's specific merits. This pattern repeats across the political spectrum with different figureheads serving as cognitive shortcuts for different audiences.

The heterodox thinker who resists these dynamics pays a considerable price. They sacrifice larger audiences, greater monetization opportunities, and the psychological comfort of tribal belonging. They must continually disappoint portions of their audience by refusing to deliver the consistent ideological product that audience desires. The algorithmic social media market punishes this behavior with ruthless efficiency.

Few can withstand these pressures indefinitely. Even those who begin with genuine commitment to intellectual independence eventually feel the gravitational pull of audience expectations. Each small concession to audience preferences is a tiny death that shifts their center of gravity until, often imperceptibly, they find themselves orbiting a new ideological star.

This isn't just a problem of media figures. It's a mirror reflecting our own cognitive tendencies. Before we judge the heterodox thinker who slides into partisan alignment, we might examine whether we ourselves are engaging in critical analysis of complex issues or simply employing these unreliable shortcuts based on tribal affectation.

Genuine Mavericks vs. Tribal Mercenaries

So what distinguishes genuine heterodoxy from its counterfeit cousin? Who are the real free thinkers? Several patterns emerge from observing both the substance and structure of a thinker's positions over time:

1. Critique Inequity: Genuine heterodox thinkers criticize multiple sides, even when doing so risks alienating portions of their audience. Their criticism follows principles rather than partisan convenience. If you map their critiques over time and find a dramatic shift from an even distribution to a heavily skewed one, you're witnessing the heterodoxy trap in action. If you never anger your audience, you're not being heterodox—you're being strategic.

2. Complexity Avoidance: True heterodoxy acknowledges tension between competing values and embraces nuance. Watch how consistently a thinker applies analytical standards across different topics and targets. When a voice that once demanded rigorous evidence and nuance suddenly accepts reductive framing along partisan lines, you're watching heterodoxy deteriorate into tribal signaling.

3. The Predictability Trap: If you can reliably predict a thinker's position on new issues based solely on partisan alignment rather than their stated principles, you're likely observing new orthodoxy rather than heterodoxy. This becomes particularly revealing when they align with positions that contradict their previously established principles. Genuine heterodoxy occasionally surprises.

4. Money Matters: When a thinker's income depends on maintaining a particular audience, watch for growing reluctance to challenge that audience's core beliefs. Pay attention to patterns of monetization—book deals with partisan publishers, speaking engagements at ideologically homogeneous events, or fundraising that invokes partisan grievances. Financial incentives shape intellectual positions more often than we care to admit.

5. The Dinner Party Test: Genuine heterodox thinkers maintain dialogue across political divides. Track who they interact with over time. When a supposedly heterodox voice appears exclusively in ideologically homogeneous spaces and their collaborators come increasingly from one political camp, entropy toward partisan alignment has likely occurred. If you only dine with one tribe, you're probably a member.

Escaping The Gravitational Pull of Partisanship

The heterodoxy trap presents a cautionary tale for those attempting to transcend partisan boundaries. The institutional and financial rewards for aligning with partisan camps far exceed those for maintaining principled independence. "Audience capture"—a phenomenon described by social media analysts like Gurwinder Bhogal—operates as a subtle but powerful force, like gravity pulling independent satellites back into predictable orbits.

For consumers of heterodox content, vigilance is essential. Yesterday's refreshing independent voice may be tomorrow's partisan operative. The label "heterodox" often serves as temporary branding during transition between orthodoxies rather than a durable intellectual commitment. The path from heterodoxy to new orthodoxy isn't inevitable, but it is well-traveled. Understanding this pattern helps us distinguish between genuine independent thinkers and those merely passing through heterodoxy on their way to a new partisan home.

True heterodoxy requires more than challenging a single orthodoxy; it demands consistent application of principles regardless of partisan convenience. In a media ecosystem that rewards partisan alignment, maintaining genuine intellectual independence requires robust intellectual honesty, deep self awareness, and a willingness to consistently disappoint significant portions of one's audience. Because of this, it also unfortunately tends to require financial independence.

Perhaps most importantly, it requires humility—recognition that no political camp possesses a monopoly on truth or virtue. When heterodox voices evolve into absolute certainty about complex social questions, they've likely fallen into the trap, exchanging one form of dogmatism for another.

In an age where algorithms reward outrage and tribal affirmation, true heterodoxy may be our most endangered intellectual species. It's worth protecting.

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In the Russian Empire, as in many monarchies, the Tsar was viewed as a ruler chosen by God. This divine right meant, logically, that the Tsar himself could be seen as an extension of God. To maintain their hold on power, the Tsars embraced this idea, cultivating an image of a benevolent leader who always had the best of intentions.

But when things went wrong, at whose feet should the blame lie?

In 1944, Russian writer Viktor Nekrasov coined the phrase “Good Tsar, bad Boyars.” This phrase encapsulated the argument made by believers in naïve monarchism: if the Tsar was blameless, anything bad that happened was instead the fault of the boyars—the aristocrats and bureaucrats.

This naïve monarchical view was used by many leaders throughout Russian history:

• Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great regularly found nobles to blame, try, and execute for the failures of their governments

• Joseph Stalin’s purges targeted Soviet leaders, academics, doctors, and many others as scapegoats for the USSR’s failures.

• Vladimir Putin regularly uses this phenomenon to publicly humiliate other officials for his own failures, maintaining a relatively high personal approval rating within Russia even as trust in the government collapses.

Immediately after the end of World War II, many Germans held onto a view of Hitler as a Good Tsar. “If only the fuhrer knew” was a saying that circulated throughout the country—if only Hitler knew what Heydrich and Goebbels were up to, surely a good man like him would stop the tragedy!

If it was not abundantly obvious by now, let me make it so: Good Tsar, Bad Boyars is nothing more than an attempt to excuse the poor behavior of a leader who is otherwise held up on a pedestal.

A leader like Elon Musk.

A leader like Donald Trump.

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Elon’s Bad Boyars

When his DOGE units got thousands of federal employees fired, Musk deflected blame by stating that his team doesn’t have the authority to hire and fire; other bureaucrats are the ones with that power. And when federal agencies made incorrect spending cuts, Musk claimed that this was due to their own incompetence or active sabotage of his efforts, not a result of his approach.

And as protests against Tesla cut the valuation of his company, Musk refuses to reflect on the impact his actions may have had on Tesla’s public profile. Instead, he blames George Soros and Reid Hoffman as the reason people won’t buy his cars anymore.

Trump the Good Tsar

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump did pretty much everything in his power to deflect blame. The lack of testing kits was Obama’s fault. PPE shortages were the fault of state Governors. Deaths caused by vaccine hesitancy were the fault of the World Health Organization.

As air traffic collisions are on the rise during his administration, Trump doesn’t accept that his reduction of air traffic control employees may be to blame. Nor does his administration look at the impact of the changes made by Trump’s Secretary of Transportation. Instead, Trump points to DEI.

When the Trump administration cuts off intelligence sharing to Ukraine and hundreds of innocent Ukrainian civilians die in the resulting Russian airstrikes, Trump does not accept a connection between his actions and unnecessary death. Instead, Trump blames Zelenskyy for starting the war.

When they targeted federal agencies and stopped paying contracts they were legally required to fulfill, Trump’s government was sued. And when the Supreme Court ruled against him, team Trump didn’t accept the outcome of the case. No, they framed the Supreme Court as an obstructionist wing of Trump-hating bureaucrats, and cried that Trump needed more power over the court.

The Tailspin

The Good Tsar, Bad Boyars trope can and should be cause for concern when employed in our country. Not only is it concerning for us to be importing the ideals of a historically totalitarian country and culture, the acceptance of this trope can pave the way to rapid shifts toward authoritarianism.

As a part of the Trump Policy Scam Cycle, this naïve monarchism can be used to shift the blame to outside parties. As a result, Trump’s team can use his failures to argue for a greater consolidation of power when those very failures show why he should have less.

After Trump’s unilateral announcement of sweeping tariffs against our closest allies, the stock market saw its worst performance in years. While any reasonable person can draw a clear line between Trump’s tariffs and the collapsing markets, Trump actually argued that these market declines were the result of globalist collusion. And at a time when he should be backing down from his tariff madness, he is doubling down on inflammatory language about turning Canada into the 51st state.

We are in a tailspin, folks. And it looks like this:

• Trump implements a bad policy

• Something bad happens

• Trump blames the bad thing happening on some “Bad Boyars” somewhere and claims he needs more power

• The Republican Party does nothing to keep him in check

• Trump finds a way to gain more power

• Trump implements an even worse policy

When our congress is too feckless and cowardly to push back, and our media atmosphere is too divided for a signal to break through the noise, there is no effective counterweight against Trump for now.

But eventually the shoe will drop.

Bad Boyars, Good Tsar fell apart after Tsar Nicholas II plunged the country into irrevocable chaos. It is starting to fall apart for Musk as Tesla and SpaceX face public relations backlash and dried up pipelines due to his terrible behavior. And it will eventually fall apart for Trump as people decide that the eggs are still too expensive and their 401ks are too dried up to tolerate his antics.

And I believe the waves are forming: a poll conducted this month in Michigan found that Kamala Harris would beat Trump 48% to 41% if the election were held today, with 41% of independents switching their vote to Harris. Voter regret is real.

The tide is going out. The emperor has no clothes, and there are only so many more scapegoats he can hide behind.

The Republican Party is in the same boat that Tesla shareholders are in: when is the chaos too much for us to tolerate? When do we reach the point where we must excise the tumor or let the cancer take over?

It’s not too late yet. But the shoe has to drop. The tide has to go out. And the enablers have to make a decision.

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It’s defined in Wikipedia as “the behavior of strictly following the orders of a superior despite knowing that compliance with the orders will have an unintended or negative result. It usually implies following an order in such a way that ignores or otherwise undermines the order's intent, but follows it to the letter.”

And over the last month, Google searches for the term have nearly doubled:

Why?

Simply put, the term is being used to excuse the negative impact of numerous Trump executive orders.

Like when Trump’s executive order demanded that service academies stop teaching about racial history, so the Air Force stopped teaching recruits about the Tuskegee Airmen:

Or when Trump’s Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth banned Black History Month, rendering National Guard regiments unable to participate in local parades:

Or when Elon Musk’s DOGE team fired senior staff at National Parks, rendering remaining staff unable to adequately serve guests:

Since Trump’s inauguration and subsequent flurry of executive orders, the term “malicious compliance” has served as a cop-out for many on the right. Rather than considering the consequences of their actions, members of the Trump administration leap before looking and then point the finger when they step on a rake.

It’s not wise, it’s not prudent, and it’s certainly not conservative.

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Chesterton’s revenge

In his 1929 book The Thing, famed conservative author G.K. Chesterton presented a parable:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

This parable and concept, known as Chesterton’s Fence, has come to dictate much of modern conservative thought. Drawing on Chesterton’s influence, National Review founder and arch-conservative William F. Buckley once said that “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

Conservatism is about preserving the usefulness of existing institutions, structures, and norms that exist in our world. It’s not about preventing all reform, but about standing against the tide and calling for patience. To be conservative is to have a loud, booming voice in your head at all times demanding you look before you leap.

That is the opposite of how the current administration works. And the result is poorly thought-out, sloppily written executive orders that create significant negative outcomes.

It’s not malicious compliance that creates these bad outcomes, but fear of legal prosecution. It’s not malicious compliance that makes doctors hesitant to abort an ectopic pregnancy; it’s the fear of being thrown in jail due to legislation that doesn’t contain carve-outs for non-viable fetuses/the health of the mother. It’s not malicious compliance that makes the Air Force stop teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen; it’s the fear of being punished under military law for insubordination.

As Jane Coaston put it:

When you write a legislation or sign an executive order, you should follow the conservative practice of considering all of the worst possible outcomes and adjusting for them,

Incompetence can be dangerous

Incompetent, hastily executed reforms often throw out the bathwater without even checking if there’s a baby in the tub.

This is dangerous.

Incompetently written abortion laws have unnecessarily risked the lives of mothers in many red states. Incompetently freezing PEPFAR funding has already killed over 14,000 people. And incompetently managing our alliances has pushed out allies into China’s arms and set Europe on a path toward war in our lifetime.

None of these is due to malicious compliance.

They are the product of aggressive, unchained populism that wields “reform” like a hammer and only sees nails.

When you hear a talking head or a politician complaining about “malicious compliance,” it’s easy to shrug your shoulders. But that phrase should instead set off alarm bells. Because that phrase is perhaps the best way to tell if a supposed “leader” has given even a second of thought toward the consequences of their actions.

And if they haven’t they should be avoided like the plague.

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Hey folks, short post today.

It was President’s day on Monday. Here’s perhaps the most important statement ever made by a President of the United States, made in our nation’s infancy:

And here’s a quote from Napoleon Bonaparte, dictator of France, parroted by our current President:

Remember when someone said that Trump envisions himself as the new monarch?

Well, theory confirmed:

Y’know, like this:

Trump seeks greater control of independent regulators with his new executive order

President Donald Trump is moving to give the White House direct control of independent federal regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.

apnews.com/article/trump-order-agency-independent-regulator-b3f13291374d91491a13f164b402f51b

It’s likely this gets struck down partially or in full as part of the Trump Policy Scam Cycle. But when people show you who they are, believe them.

It’s an open-book test, folks. I am wary of hyperbolic language. I truly am, and I encourage you to be as well. I don’t want to write about politics every single week for a newsletter that’s meant to also talk about faith, culture, and personal growth.

But if your finger isn’t figuratively on the safety of your rifle, you aren’t paying enough attention.

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It seem that again and again, every few days the Trump administration unveils a new policy only for it to be frozen by a federal judge. From his illegal USAID shutdown to his constitutionally dubious repeal of birthright citizenship, Trump’s executive orders are getting put on ice by judges at an extraordinary rate.

In response, team Trump has decried these judges as “highly political activist judges”. In a press briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that the administration would “continue to seek every legal remedy to ultimately overturn these radical injunctions.” Trump’s new vizier Elon Musk has stated that “There needs to be an immediate wave of judicial impeachments.”

On the right, the message is that Donald Trump’s actions have been stymied by gavel-waving leftist radicals, hellbent on stopping the Trump agenda.

But are these injunctions radical? Are these judges radical?

What’s an Injunction, Anyway?

Injunctions, simply put, are court orders require that a person do/refrain from doing something. They can take many forms:

• Temporary Restraining Orders (TROs) are short term (<10 day) halts a certain behavior while the ordering court gets time to issue a more permanent order

• Temporary Injunctions do the same, but can last slightly longer

• Permanent Injunctions are lasting, but are the most difficult to obtain

Typically, an injunction is used when the government is planning to do something, and is then sued to determine the constitutionality of its action. While the courts sort things out, there is often some sort of injunction to keep things at the status quo until relevant judges have a chance to make a more informed decision.

When George Bush signed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in March of 2002, he stated that:

Certain provisions present serious constitutional concerns. I expect that the courts will resolve these legitimate legal questions as appropriate under the law

Indeed, the “certain provisions” Bush mentioned were quickly enjoined while relevant lawsuits made their way through the courts.

Bush’s words reflect the growing behavior of our Legislative and Executive branches: try something and let the courts figure out if you’re allowed to do it. Because of this, injunctions have been on the rise for decades. As Congress has continued to abdicate its responsibility to the Executive, Presidents have taken more and more power into their own hands. With Congress in a perpetual deadlock on all but the most important issues, the President is often pressured and enabled to take action and punt on constitutionality to the courts.

Simply put, the injunction is a pause button meant to give the courts time to act responsibly. And the rise of the injunction is the result of Congress and the Executive acting in an increasingly irresponsible manner.

This trend is bipartisan. For example, the courts have also notably enjoined Barack Obama’s DAPA and DACA immigration programs, as well as Joe Biden’s Vaccine Mandate and Oil/Gas leasing moratoriums.

So when Trump complains about unfair treatment, just know that he’s being treated the same exact way every single president in modern history has been treated.

But what about the injunctions and the judges themselves?

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Radical Injunctions, or Radical Orders?

Just like Obama and Biden were mainly to blame for their orders being enjoined, the blame for these new injunctions lays right at the feet of Trump and Musk. Far from being stymied by screeching leftists, these executive orders were enjoined by a bipartisan group of respected jurists. Let’s take a look:

Birthright Citizenship

What it is: A January 20th executive order to restrict citizenship eligibility, overturning the 250-year precedent of extending citizenship to all persons born on U.S. soil.

Who enjoined it: Judge Joseph Laplante, a George W Bush appointee; Judge Deborah Boardman, a Joe Biden appointee; and Judge John Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee.

Why: All three judges determined the order likely violates the 14th Amendment, and that the executive branch does not have the power to effectively rewrite a constitutional amendment through an executive order.

Federal Funding Freeze

What it is: A January 27th memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget which would halt all federal financial assistance, including grants and loans.

Who enjoined it: Judge John McConnell, a Barack Obama appointee; and Judge Loren AliKhan, a Joe Biden appointee.

Why: The judges determined that the executive branch lacked unilateral authority to suspend federal funding without congressional approval. Since Congress appropriates funds, Congress would have to be the one to modify said appropriations.

DOGE Treasury Department Control

What it is: A directive to the Treasury department to allow Elon Musk and other unelected individuals with no government oversight to access sensitive Treasury Department payment systems and data

Who enjoined it: Judge Paul Engelmayer, a Barack Obama appointee; and Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Bill Clinton Appointee

Why: The directive potentially violates federal privacy laws, a lack of authority for DOGE to access sensitive information, and the potential for DOGE to interfere with congressionally appropriated funds.

The “Fork in the Road” Directive

What it is: A directive from the Trump administration allowing federal employees to accept a “deferred resignation” program, allowing them to receive pay and benefits until September 30th of this year

Who enjoined it: Judge George O’Toole Jr., a Bill Clinton appointee

Why: Lack of legal authority for the president to act unilaterally, and the coercive nature of the ultimatum given to federal employees.

USAID Shutdown

What it is: A reduction of the USAID workforce from 14,000 to 300 employees, a pause of USAID funding, the shuttering of USAID offices, and the firing of key USAID personnel such as its inspector general

Who enjoined it: Judge Carl Nichols, a Donald Trump appointee

Why: An infringement on Congress’s power of the purse — Congress appropriates funding to USAID, and only Congress can rescind said funding

Of all judges mentioned, only Judge Kollar-Kotelly has previously caused controversy in her rulings. All others have uncontroversial histories.

So you tell me

On one side of the conflict, we have a broad bipartisan bench of respectable jurists with very little controversy. On the other, we have two men who have repeatedly been credibly accused of sexual harassment, have been outed as liars, and have regularly called for the jailing and even execution of their political opponents.

On one side of the conflict, we have a government body exercising its authority to delay implementation of executive orders that would drastically change how the government operates overnight. On the other, we have two men that are trying to bombard their political opponents with a flurry of actions within the span of days.

On one side of the conflict, we have appointees that have been repeatedly vetted and voted up or down based on their qualifications and reliability. On the other, we have two men known for their mood swings, their unpredictability, and their blatant narcissism.

So you tell me:

Who’s the radical here again?

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On February 1st, the Trump administration imposed a 25% tariff on our allies, Mexico and Canada.

The reason?

Allegedly, fentanyl trafficking.

The administration claims that Mexico and Canada aren’t doing enough to prevent the trafficking of fentanyl across their borders with the United States, and claimed that the tariffs were a tool to obtain cooperation from our neighbors on border security.

But in the last few days, each new statement from Trump and his advisors has seemingly given a new reason for the tariffs:

• Trump seems to believe that tariffs are actually good economic policy (a belief which almost every economist agrees is untrue)

• His advisors want to shift away from the income tax and toward tariffs as the main revenue generator for the government

• Trump seems to think that the United States is subsidizing Canada, and that this would simply correct trade imbalances while maintaining existing import/export levels

• He also somehow believes that Canada should become the 51st State, and this would help to induce their capitulation

So, to clarify the position of the administration: the tariffs are good policy, but they’re also just meant to threaten Mexico and Canada into cooperating on the border, but they’re also meant to weaken Canada as a country.

Does that make sense to you? No?

Well, it doesn’t matter. After a weekend of chaos and the stock market plummeting on Monday, Trump stuck a deal with the Mexican and Canadian governments: they would do more to secure their borders, and the tariffs would be put on hold. Victory, right?

Well…

While Mexico agreed to reinforce its border with 10,000 members of its National Guard, the impact will likely be negligible: under Biden, the Mexican government regularly deployed 20,000-30,000 members of its military to the border. And according to NBC: “It is currently unclear if Mexico’s newly promised National Guard deployment would even increase the net number of currently deployed troops focusing on migration and drug trafficking in Mexico, or if redeployments would make them more effective in any way.” What’s more, the Trump administration also agreed to dedicate more resources to stopping the flow of arms from America to Mexico.

And while Trump claims he secured over a billion-dollar investment from Canada to secure its border, that plan was announced in December, before Trump even took office.

So to distill this all down to a few bullet points:

• Trump slaps tariffs on Mexico and Canada

• The stock market plummets

• Mexico and Canada agree to continue doing what they were already doing

• Trump pauses tariffs while committing more resources toward Mexico and claims victory

Or, in an image:

This is the Trump Policy Scam Cycle (or TPSC).

The TPSC and How it Works

Simply put, the reason for these tariffs and similar baffling proposals is that Trump prefers to obtain compliance by threats and leverage, and to be seen doing it this way. 

In the minds of Trump and his followers, this makes him a strong leader in the same vein as monarchs of old. But in reality, what Trump is effectively doing is forcing America to hold a gun to its own head and dare the other side to let us pull the trigger.

In the first Trump term, this seemed to work more than most expected (myself included). But in his second term, it seems that world leaders and political advisers have Trump figured out:

❝  

You’re mistaken if you think there’s a metric of success for Trump. He’s not reading spreadsheets or DEA reports. He’s looking at headlines and social media retweets.

  John Feeley, former U.S. Ambassador to Panama

What matters to Trump is not tangible results, but whether he can claim that he made another leader or government bend to his will. This is the ultimate goal of the wannabe monarch: not to improve the lives of his people, but to project power to his subjects and foreign leaders. To this end, Trump follows a clear-cut process:

1. Introduce an insane proposal

2. Portray any backlash as “fake news” from political opposition

3. Eventually come up with a somewhat believable justification for his actions

4. Allow the opposition to come up with a proposal that costs them nearly nothing and allows him to declare victory

5. Repeat with a new target

The tariffs are an example of this happening in real time. But we can use this framework to make an educated guess about how Trump’s actions will play out in the future. Let’s use his Elon Musk-backed takeover of USAID as an example.

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USAID and executive overreach

On his first day in office, Trump ordered a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid. After significant backlash, he created some short-term exemptions for wildly effective and popular programs like PEPFAR. But those small carve-outs didn’t stop his attack on all U.S. foreign aid programs.

For the past two weeks, Trump and Elon Musk have taken major steps to “dismantle” the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Agency headquarters and campuses have been shuttered. Members of Congress were denied entry to the premises. The website was taken down and replaced with a notice statin

On Friday, February 7, 2025, at 11:59 pm (EST) all USAID direct hire personnel will be placed on administrative leave globally, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs. Essential personnel expected to continue working will be informed by Agency leadership by Thursday, February 6, at 3:00pm (EST).

In addition to being an expensive, undignified operation that serves to damage trust in the United States across the world and drive more countries into the arms of China, this is plainly unconstitutional. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service wrote it clear as day:

Because Congress established USAID as an independent establishment (defined in 5 U.S.C. 104) within the executive branch, the President does not have the authority to abolish it; congressional authorization would be required to abolish, move, or consolidate USAID.

When Congress establishes an agency, only Congress can eliminate that agency. What we’re seeing from Trump and Musk here is the stuff of third world banana republics, not the United States of America. And while I have a low opinion of Trump himself, I’m certain he has some capable people in his sphere who know that this cannot be a lasting move without Congressional approval. The courts will almost certainly shut some of these efforts down.

So what is the plan here?

We’re somewhere between steps 2 and 3 in the process. The insane idea has been implemented. The backlash is happening. And now, Secretary of State (and somehow acting Administrator of USAID) Marco Rubio has said the following:

There are things that we do through USAID that we should continue to do, that make sense, and we'll have to decide, is that better through the State Department or is that better through something, you know, a reformed USAID?

This is a massive step back from Elon Musk claiming that the agency is “a criminal organization that needs to die”.

Despite his recent Trumpist language around the agency, Rubio has long been a massive supporter of USAID. Some quotes from his tenure in Congress include:

• “Foreign Aid is not charity. We must make sure it is well spent, but it is less than 1% of budget & critical to our national security.”

• “We don’t have to give foreign aid. We do so because it furthers our national interest. That’s why we give foreign aid. Now obviously there’s a component to foreign aid that’s humanitarian in scope, and that’s important too.”

• “Foreign aid is a very cost-effective way, not only to export our values and our example, but to advance our security and our economic interests.”

• “Foreign aid is less than 1% of our budget. But foreign aid can make a difference when properly used. And if you ever have a chance, travel to the African continent and you will meet people who are alive today because the American taxpayer funded antiviral HIV medications that kept them alive. It will not be easy to radicalize people who are alive because the American taxpayer saved their lives and the lives of their children.”

• “Anybody who tells you that we can slash foreign aid and that will bring us to balance is lying to you.”

As a member of his administration, Rubio has to emulate Trump to avoid being canned. But it seems likely to me when viewed as a part of the TPSC that Rubio, a long-time USAID supporter, is searching for a way to give Trump a win through a “reformed USAID.”

This probably looks like a USAID that does less, but still exists and performs its core functions. Likely a USAID that does slightly less humanitarian work and slightly more political interventionism. A USAID that helps less and evangelizes America more—a USAID that is, simply put, less convincing and less effective.

But again, it’s not about results for Trump. It’s about being seen browbeating others into submission.

He will probably get his way, to the detriment of American interests and global health. He will likely be able to staff top roles at his “reformed USAID” with more cronies and lackeys, and the agency’s overall productivity will decrease. And while many USAID workers will stay in their positions in the long run, their credibility will be undermined, their relationships damaged, and trust in America reduced.

But at least the king looks strong.

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Friends, something changed on January 20th. I talked a little bit about this in last week’s post, but I want to view this at a slightly different angle.

Last week, I wrote this:

When Trump removes pro-life language from the Republican Party platform, the pro-life evangelicals who claim it as their top issue say nothing. When Trump’s executive actions strip LGBT people of their rights, groups like the Log Cabin Republicans say nothing. When Trump removes the ban on sending thousand-pound bombs to Israel, the pro-Palestine activists who criticized Biden as a genocide enabler said nothing. When Trump seeks to remove birthright citizenship, second-generation American Latino voters who voted for Trump say nothing.

To be honest, when I stepped away after hitting the “Publish” button, I wondered to myself if I exaggerated a bit with that statement. Maybe, I thought, my words were too strong to reflect reality.

I realize now that they weren’t strong enough.

So many of the things that seemingly mattered to many prior to the election in November don’t matter at all to them now. The roaring complaints about inflation and economic uncertainty are now but a whimper. The raging protests over Palestine have gone quiet.

The silence is deafening.

The Egg Crisis that Wasn’t (But Might Be)

Remember in 2023 when egg prices peaked at over $4.50 per dozen? You could’ve convinced me there would be riots in the streets. Many on the right pointed to this singular measure as a representation of how wildly the Biden administration had screwed up the economy.

But now?

Egg prices are rapidly nearing their historic highs:

Which is more, the cost of eggs in many regions which swung heavily toward Trump is actually higher than it was at any point under Biden:

And this trend does not seem to be stopping any time soon. Experts say that the lingering bird flu is creating a major upward pressure on egg prices as well as expected egg yields in the future.

Trump’s policies are also not likely to alleviate this pressure at all. Rather, his aggressive deportation measures are set to exacerbate supply issues in the agricultural sector for years to come. Approximately 40% of crop farmworkers in the United States have no work authorization. It’s expected that Trump’s immigration policies will pose a threat to:

• Agriculture, including crop farming and livestock farming

• The construction sector (for both commercial and residential builders)

• Businesses in the restaurant and hospitality sectors

• And many more sectors who employ the 5% of workers in America who are undocumented

Beyond the issue of deportation itself, Trump’s policies now have farmworkers and workers from other sectors afraid to show up to work. The result? These industries will slow down, or even grind to a halt. And inflation will surge.

Now, you would expect those who cried out so loudly about egg prices and inflation prior to 2025 to be furious now. Right?

Wrong.

It’s as if the entire population has amnesia. Not only is this group of people not angry about grocery prices and inflation, but they are actively upset at anyone who dares to suggest that they should be angry.

Turn on Fox News. Go on Twitter. Try your hardest to find a single Trump supporter willing to say that “you know what, eggs are still too expensive and he should be doing something about that.”

You won’t.

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The Outlaw and Disorder Party

Republicans also used to be the party of “law and order”.

Donald Trump himself famously tweeted that phrase out in all caps:

So why, then, does the party of “law and order” do nothing, and say nothing, when Donald Trump pardons the violent rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021?

Take a look at this picture:

In this picture, United States Capitol Police Officer Michael Fanone is laying face down on the Capitol steps. He is being beaten with a set of crutches, punched in the back of the head, and his baton has been stolen to be used against him. In the crowd, Fanone hears someone scream out to “Kill him with his own gun!”

Fanone fortunately was rescued from this situation before he could be shot and killed.

But the men who attempted to end his life are now walking free.

While many in the Trump camp played the riots down as “otherwise peaceful and patriotic people who got too riled up,” reality tells a different story. The party of “law and order” supported the pardoning of these criminals, only for many of them to act exactly how violent criminals do:

• A former doctor who participated in the riots was shot and killed after she brandished her firearm and pointed it at strangers

• An Indiana man was shot by police after struggling over his firearm with an officer at a traffic stop

• A North Carolina man pardoned by Trump is now charged with child-related sex crimes

• A Texas rioter who was pardoned is now wanted on child solicitation charges after trying to meet up with a minor after sharing explicit messages

• A Missouri woman pardoned by Trump was involved in a fatal car crash while driving under the influence

But when Senate Democrats moved to introduce a resolution condemning Trump’s pardon for these violent criminals, Republican leadership blocked it.

Where did the party of law and order go?

Do Palestinian Lives Still Matter?

During the Biden presidency, many progressives protested loudly against his attempts to strike a balance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They called him a supporter of genocide for enabling the killing of Palestinian people. Arab-Americans helped steer critical electoral votes toward Trump.

But now Trump is in office.

And do you know what idea he’s promoting? To “clean out” Gaza by ethnically cleansing the region of Palestinian people.

Where are the protests? Where are the encampments?

As Hamas retakes power in the region and shoots alleged “collaborators” in the streets without trial, where are the protests? Where are the encampments? Where are the people willing to stand up and scream that Palestinians are people entitled to human rights? And why did this new silence on the issues arise so suddenly starting on January 20th, 2025?

It’s not just those on the right that turn a blind eye to Trump’s deficiencies or his problems; it seems to be that anyone who at one point helped topple the Biden administration must now give excuses for Trump to justify their past selves.

Gone are the days of taking responsibility for mistakes. Gone are the days of owning up to a political move going wrong. Now we live in the time of conspicuous silence.

What does this mean for you, dear reader?

It means that you can’t just question what you see online these days. It means you now must question what you don’t see.

Why aren’t prominent voices you agree with not talking about certain issues?

Is it because they don’t exist?

Or is it because those voices are ignoring them to save face?

How was this post?

Let me know why in the comments!

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