Blore's Razor

Two nights ago at the Grammys, Bad Bunny won Album of the Year—the first time a Spanish-language album has clinched the top honor. His powerful acceptance speech grabbed headlines at a time when simply speaking Spanish is grounds to be profiled and detained by ICE. He stated, “We’re not savage; we’re not animals; we’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans…Hate gets more powerful with more hate. The only thing that is more powerful than hate is love.”

As Bad Bunny’s team gears up for their Super Bowl performance this weekend, MAGA is going apoplectic with rage, trying to organize a boycott. Turning Point USA has vowed to host its own “All-American Halftime Show” to celebrate “Faith, Family, and Freedom.” (Who’s going to remind them that Puerto Ricans are American citizens?) 

The Right’s killjoy attitude made me consider what a truly American soundtrack would be for the Super Bowl. With all of today’s political division and anger, I imagine it would be loaded with minor keys, dissonance, uneven rhythms, tension, and eerie synths. It would get louder as life’s stresses ratchet up, and would be masked temporarily by the distractions of a hit TV show or football game. It would be heard most clearly through chainlink fences, abandoned buildings, and streets cratered with potholes. It would quiet slightly as payday loan signs and pawn shops give way to Applebee’s and Home Depot, becoming fainter still among the small, polished storefronts of boutique businesses. 

But this anxious thrum would never disappear completely because the threat of losing it all underlies my life and yours. On any given day, a person in the US can set out on the road to bankruptcy. It happens when your child goes to the ER with a spiking fever. It happens when your 401(k) collapses because of self-dealing executives. It happens when your home burns down, and the insurance company denies your claim. It happens when you’re forced to close your business because ICE arrests you at your immigration hearing. It happens every damn day here. 

Right now, we have no real, dependable financial or physical security. Our soundtrack keeps our nerves on edge because we are at the behest of a rich few who would rather hoard resources and armor-plate their lives than pay their fair share of taxes. 

Compared to the rest of the developed world, the average American is unhealthy, unhappy, and in debt. We don’t even rank among the world’s 20 happiest countries—a list dominated by Scandinavia and other parts of Europe. Young people in the US are especially anxious, lonely, and stressed, feelings that have persisted for several years after the pandemic. And although people over 70 comprise only 11 percent of our country, they hold 30 percent of our wealth—a record share that is growing. 

We also spend comparatively more on healthcare, and yet we lead shorter, more disease-prone lives, with higher rates of obesity, chronic lung disease, HIV/AIDS, drug overdoses, infant mortality, and homicide.

A mind-boggling 72 million Americans—41 percent of working-age people—have medical debt. This number swells to 79 million if we include elderly folks. Even if you have a job, whether or not you hold medical debt is basically a coin toss.

Conservatives contend that we pay lower taxes than many nations, which is true, but with soaring prices for basic necessities and without a proper safety net, the majority continues to sink. Further, the ascension of AI and the continued consolidation of American companies are likely to exacerbate the plight of the working and middle classes. 

Folks may struggle to find work outside of service, healthcare, or the trades in the near future. A majority of the white-collar workforce could be replaced by cheap robots. Lawyers, radiographers, artists, engineers, teachers, writers, and many more professions could be replaced by a lucky few humans overseeing super-intelligent machines. 

Capital always acts in its own best interest; that is, profits over people. Every imaginable way that a company can make its owners and shareholders more money is explored. The tech broligarchy seems to believe that workers are an expensive problem to be solved—fat to be trimmed from the lean filet of our “optimized” market. But if you don’t pay living wages, boys, who do you expect to buy your shit? 

Most of our elected leaders aren’t helping. Many Democrats would rather cruise with the establishment and line their own pockets than work to unite the party with actual progressive policies. Republicans are even more hopeless; they brazenly slash food benefits while giving tax breaks for private jets and throwing money at wars against non-white people, internally and abroad. Their supreme leader’s main concern right now is building his gilded ballroom over the ruins of the White House’s East Wing.

Whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, independent, or non-voter, can we agree on one thing? If a person works 40 hours a week, they shouldn’t also have to be on food stamps or Medicaid. This is the government subsidizing greedy companies that refuse to pay their workers a living wage. 

As it stands, there’s too much luck and inherited privilege at play. The wealthy can drive their luxury cars down an open four-lane highway playing whatever song they want. They can swerve or even crash without much consequence. Look at Trump: six business bankruptcies, and yet he and other nepo babies fail up. The less fortunate are given a narrow balance beam, where a stiff breeze can throw them off course, and that stress-filled American soundtrack often becomes deafening.

Broadening opportunities for this second group is patriotic. The opening line of our Constitution reads, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Promoting our “general Welfare” is often forgotten because people with grotesque wealth have convinced enough voters that having a strong social safety net (i.e., welfare) is anti-American. The truth is that punishing poverty runs counter to our most noble founding values. 

For those who believe that we’re a Christian nation, how about we lead with love, generosity, and acceptance rather than worshiping wealth and large corporations?

And here’s a radical idea: we should accept folks as they are—irrespective of gender, sexuality, culture, and ethnicity. That is what underpins American liberty. We have an enviable diversity that could serve as our country’s greatest strength if we let it. Can you imagine the collective sigh of relief if we all just dropped our weird prejudices? 

It might even help us change our current soundtrack to a better, more uplifting song—something sexy and fun like Bad Bunny.

Do you have friends who voted third-party in 2024? Folks who self-righteously eschew both the Left and Right, seeing Democrats and Republicans as two sides of the same coin? They might be self-described “Independents” who have difficulty stating which news sources they trust, putting FOX News and The New York Times into the same bucket of skepticism. Perhaps they’re calling for candidates with a more middle-of-the-road approach, or they don’t see anyone who perfectly embodies their values and have given up entirely on voting. Head, meet sand. 

While I share some of this cynicism in my darker moments, the false equivalence of Dems and the GOP is intellectually lazy. There are core differences between the two parties—they aren’t “the same” because leaders on both sides of the aisle make money from insider trading.  

A Democratic president, despite his faults, would never terrorize Minnesota with a $28.7 billion, poorly trained, racist paramilitary force. He would never consider seizing Greenland and alienating our allies. He would not punish red states by freezing $10 billion in federal funding for needy children.  He would not accept a luxury jet from Qatar or brazenly make $1.4 billion during his first year in office. He would not take a secondhand Nobel Peace Prize to assuage his ego. He would not try to stage a coup with fake electors because he didn’t like the results of a presidential election. And he would never issue a presidential pardon to hundreds of violent felons who attacked Capitol police officers. 

These are the acts of a deranged, power-hungry Emperor Palpatine. Broadly speaking, MAGA Republicans are the Empire—united, unthinking, unquestioning, obedient to male authority, and obsessed with power. They are deploying violent masked stormtroopers in cities, who are killing civilians and trying to ignite a backlash to justify further oppression and control. 

In their better moments, Dems make up the scrappy Rebel Alliance, which struggles to unite such a diverse coalition of interests. I’m disappointed that they are not meeting this moment as a party. They’re disorganized, unpopular, and weak. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, in particular, have failed to produce more than “strongly worded letters” and one government shutdown, taking a short stand for healthcare subsidies. We have an all-brains, no-balls problem. (MAGA suffers from the opposite affliction.)

There are pockets of effective resistance and courageous messaging coming from individuals, such as AOC, Jasmine Crockett, Bernie Sanders, Ron Wyden, Mayor Frey of Minneapolis, and Mayor Mamdani of NYC. Folks like these with strong progressive values and backbones should be leading the party. Democrats’ current leadership is simply too comfortable, compromising, and feckless to embrace any ideas outside of its old centrist establishment. 

The United States has not had a truly progressive president in my lifetime. Unfortunately, in the spirit of compromise, Democratic presidents governed right-of-center or moderate at best. Bill Clinton got “tough on crime” and helped fuel our current mass incarceration crisis. Barack Obama passed a half-cooked universal healthcare bill and continued extrajudicial drone strikes. Joe Biden…what did he do again? At least these presidents didn’t embarrass Americans and upheld the dignity of the office. (Even Clinton’s sex scandals seem quaint when compared to Trump, Jeffrey Epstein’s former bestie, who has been convicted of sexual assault and is accused of raping a 13-year-old.)

Overall, Republicans are a minority party that plays the game better than Dems. They stick together and tolerate being led by a grotesque, convicted felon because he’s helped them consolidate power and punish their political enemies. 

One conservative insider estimates that up to 40 percent of young GOP staffers in DC are “groypers”—chronically online white supremacists who despise women. A leaked Telegram chat from these Gen Z Republicans contained messages such as “I love Hitler” and referred to Black folks as “watermelon people.” Tell me who you hang out with, and I’ll tell you who you are.

Racism and misogyny have proven to be potent political forces during times of economic uncertainty. The problem is that this MAGA ideology eventually throws most groups under the bus. It is inherently unstable because you can’t win elections without women and people of color. To remain in power, MAGA needs to change the rules of the game (e.g., gerrymandering, postponing or canceling elections, disenfranchising women, etc). Alternatively, it can pivot hard back to the economic populist issues that made it attractive in the first place. 

Underlying MAGA’s appeal is ignorance, fear, and poverty. Blaming immigrants, non-whites, and women is an old tactic to deflect blame from the actual cause of misery in the United States: a widening wealth gap and a lack of social mobility. 

But no matter how many ways progressives and democratic socialists convey this, it does not seem to break through with most Americans. Tribalism and calls to white or masculine identity are more magnetic than economic arguments. Also, a quote often (mis)attributed to John Steinbeck gets to the crux of the issue: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” 

Right now, these “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” don’t understand how progressive policies will help the working and middle classes. This is a failure of Democratic messaging and needs to be remedied. 

Most importantly, when the pendulum of power inevitably swings back our way, progressives should govern with audacity and without compromise—the same way MAGA Republicans have. The key difference, of course, is that our positions actually reflect what a majority of Americans support. Most people want Medicare for All, regulations on big business, a higher minimum wage, higher taxes for the wealthy, strong unions, access to abortion, investment in infrastructure, and a stronger social safety net (i.e., welfare). 

Taking a clear, progressive stand on all of these matters will go a long way. We also must promise to prosecute every masked ICE vigilante who has assaulted our civilians in ICE detention centers, on the streets of Minneapolis, and everywhere. Make accountability matter again. And to sweeten the deal for young, disaffected non-voters, Dems shouldn’t be afraid to call out Israel’s Netanyahu and Iran’s Khamenei for genocide.

Above all, progressives—whether they run as Dems or not—must craft a platform that’s uplifting and aspirational. Reflexively blaming white men for everything may be satisfying in the short term, but alienating specific groups based on blanket assumptions is exactly what we’re fighting against. 

Imagine a world where, when you die, your ashes are mixed into an engraved brick that is used to build your city. Crowds pour into the streets, marching from all directions with instruments and playing a dirge that swells into an animated anthem. People unite in the city square to honor your memory. I don’t cry easily, but the fourth time I saw this scene from Andor, I still had tears running down my face. This custom from the planet Ferrix was one of the strokes of world-building genius that made me fall in love with the show. 

I began watching Andor a few years late but right on time, and I’ve had it on repeat ever since. Trump had just taken his second oath of office and was ramping up his mass deportation efforts. Our country’s most racist high school dropouts joined ICE with $50,000 signing bonuses. They donned tactical vests and covered their faces to avoid accountability for their crimes. Later, the Trump administration started killing people in boats off the coast of Venezuela, finally kidnapping the country’s president and telling the world that we will take their oil. 

Oppressing large groups of people and seizing resources from smaller, less powerful countries are actions that mirror Emperor Palpatine’s designs on absolute power over the galaxy.  To see Andor for the first time in 2025 felt prophetic. Although it was released in 2022, creator Tony Gilroy had witnessed and exposed the abuses of malignant tyrants like Trump throughout history. 

The Empire’s brutality, lies, and need for control hold an eerie parallel to the rise of MAGA fascism in the United States. There is a cultish devotion to a single leader, abetted by a hypocritical and corrupt bureaucracy of anonymous, masked agents. Similar to stormtroopers, ICE agents are deindividuated, morally disengaged, and unbridled by laws or decency. They routinely rough up civilians with impunity, as demonstrated by the countless videos of ICE assaulting people, breaking car windows, and most recently, murdering an unarmed Minneapolis woman in broad daylight. 

And just like in Andor, there are seeds of resistance everywhere—throughout our cities and in our deepest red rural counties. These are folks who reject the manufactured narrative, folks who witnessed George Floyd and Renee Good being killed in cold blood and seethe against the gaslighting and propaganda. We all saw the videos.

In Andor, the Imperial Security Bureau supervisor Dedra Meero works tirelessly to astroturf violent resistance in occupied areas—in the case of the planet Ghorman, this is a pretext to seize control of a resource the Empire needs to construct the Death Star. The anti-Ghor propaganda being pumped throughout the galaxy isn’t enough: Supervisor Meero tells her boss, “You need Ghorman rebels you can rely on to do the wrong thing.” 

During a tense demonstration in the city square of Palmo (Ghorman’s capital), an imperial sniper intentionally shoots a young imperial security trooper, igniting a violent massacre. Stormtroopers and security droids gun down hundreds of people. Imperial propaganda claims it used justified force for security reasons. Sound familiar?

Kristi Noem could only dream of Supervisor Meero’s success with the false flag attack: Noem failed to goad Portland into a violent pushback after deploying the National Guard. (Instead, we came dressed in inflatable animal costumes and made the occupying force look ridiculous.) 

Both the Empire and the Trump administration command us to reject the truth we see with our own eyes. In an episode that won Andor an Emmy for writing, Senator Mon Mothma makes her final address to the Galactic Senate following the Ghorman Massacre. She says, “The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous.”

Our government’s propaganda is failing: they call victim Renee Good a “domestic terrorist” and promise absolute immunity for murderous ICE agents. We know better. This administration is intentionally poking progressive cities with the tip of its spear, trying to justify imprisoning or deporting people for their political beliefs or skin color.

Mon Mothma’s speech continues, “When the truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.” 

In the United States, it’s clear as kyber crystal who that loud monster is and where his appetites have led us: Donald Trump is like Emperor Palpatine except he’s more attention-hungry, weaker, pettier, and dumber. Also, Palpatine wasn’t a convicted rapist.

In the midst of so much blatant injustice, I keep returning to a quote from my favorite monologue in the show: Nemik’s Manifesto. It states, “The imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort—it breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.”

This administration knows it is racist and wrong and is scared of being overrun. They are treating us as if we are blind and stupid. They believe their violence is a show of strength, but it’s temporary and there will be a reckoning. When we have our own Nuremberg trials, Kristi Noem, JD Vance, and Stephen Miller will face the consequences of their lies and manipulation. They will need to own every broken car window, every injured protestor, and every murder in detention facilities and at the hands of ICE agents. 

And soon, when Trump chokes on that holy cheeseburger, the world will dance in the streets. 

During the Reagan administration, the unwritten Eleventh Commandment was, Thou shalt not speak ill of fellow Republicans. In 2025, in the wake of the assassination of a notorious young conservative, the new Twelfth Commandment dictates, Thou progressives shalt not speak of Charlie Kirk. Period.

Journalists, pilots, firefighters, teachers, military members, and university professors have all been fired for their comments in the wake of this shooting. There was a website (recently removed) called “Charlie’s Murderers,” where disgruntled Christian nationalists could dox and intimidate people who dared to question Kirk’s sainthood. 

Flags across the country were flown at half-mast by presidential decree. The White House announced that October 14, Kirk’s birthday, will now be recognized as a National Day of Remembrance. The NFL hosted moments of silence at their games. And Huntington Beach had a roving gang of white men in MAGA hats with Jesus flags chanting, “White men, fight back! White men, fight back!” 

That was, of course, before the white male assassin from the Republican, gun-loving family was captured. And not coincidentally, the day after the assassination, Trump’s “justice” department quietly removed a study from its website showing that the vast majority of political violence is committed by right-wingers.

While Tyler Robinson’s motives remain unclear because he’s not cooperating with the authorities, there’s been a torrent of consequences for progressives.

Under pressure from Trump, Jimmy Kimmel’s show was temporarily thrown off the air for a rather anodyne observation. He said: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” No lie detected.

One man, Larry Bushart Jr. has been held in a Tennessee jail for over a month with his bail set at $2 million. His crime? Posting trolling memes about Kirk to a Facebook page. 

What’s remarkable to me is that some of the folks, like former Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, have been fired for paraphrasing the young bigot’s past statements. Here is word-for-word what Kirk has actually said:

• “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” (TPUSA Faith Event, 4/5/2023)
• “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.” (Kirk’s response to the Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce engagement, The Charlie Kirk Show, 8/26/2025)
• “If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?” (The Charlie Kirk Show, 1/3/2024)

And parroting conservative Christian views, he has called trans folks an “abomination” and a “throbbing middle finger to God.”

Of course, not everything he said was so racist or misogynist. He shared a rather tender exchange with a trans student that surprised me. I disagree with his urging this person to find their “diagnosis,” but this opinion was given with thoughtful sensitivity rather than his usual fire and brimstone. (I reckon it’s a lot easier to spew hateful rhetoric when the person affected isn’t standing in front of you.)

Let’s get one thing clear: there has been a near-universal condemnation of this horrible murder. Democrats, independents, Republicans, and the politically unaffiliated have overwhelmingly come out against this violence. Certainly nobody important or influential has been “celebrating” Charlie Kirk’s death. Violence and murdering aren’t really progressives’ thing, actually. (Again, look at the study Trump tried to hide.)

• We weren’t the ones who bloodied capitol police officers on January 6, 2021. Those were confederate flag-waving Trump supporters who later received pardons.
• We weren’t the ones who assaulted and killed elected legislators for their politics. It was a right-winger who assassinated Melissa Hortman, Minnesota’s Speaker of the House, her husband, and dog this year—a heinous act that received zero response from the White House. Oh, and let’s not forget the right-wing lunatic who nearly beat Nancy Pelosi’s husband to death.
• We weren’t the ones who ordered an armed, poorly trained group to bust the skulls of immigrants and protesters. Those would be America’s least favorite racists and high school dropouts: ICE agents.

We were, however, the ones who have tried to make this country a little bit easier for everyone, advocating for affordable healthcare, housing, and education. We’ve tried to stand up against the oppression of women, LGBTQ+ folks, and minorities that the Bible is often used to justify. You know what they say: There ain’t no hate like Christian love. 

Are progressives losing the messaging war? Absolutely. Can we be insufferable in our virtue signaling? Yes, yes we can. Do we have too many ancient establishment leaders who are not meeting the moment? One-hundred percent.

But progressives are coming from a place of fairness and love. We’re pissed off but largely peaceful. Trump’s white MAGA goon squad says, Fuck your feelings! and they don’t realize that we are NOT their enemy. We aren’t the reason they can no longer afford their groceries or find decent wages. 

Right now, MAGA’s fury is centered on women, immigrants, and trans folks. And Charlie Kirk’s death is being used as a cudgel to silence us and an excuse to go to war. But when that rage finally discovers the real culprit of their misery—the dirty-rich oligarchs who consistently put profits over people—Americans may actually be able to reconnect across this abysmal political divide. 

The best decision I ever made was not where I went to college, the career I pursued, or whom I married—it was the one-year roadtrip my spouse and I took to figure out where to buy a house.

This dream was brewed in 2015 over many Malbec-drenched nights in San Martin de los Andes, the Patagonian lake town where Jon and I lived for 5 months. Very early on in our relationship, we’d moved from San Francisco to Argentina—the country abroad that was European enough for Jon and Latin American enough for me. 

After a few months in Buenos Aires, we were ready for somewhere cozier and greener. Following a random conversation at a dog park in our Belgrano neighborhood, we were convinced to move to a place we’d never heard of on the border with Chile.

Because San Martin was so friendly and picture-perfect, Jon and I hatched a plan to explore a variety of midsize American cities when we returned to the States. We made a short list of what appealed to us: we wanted a university town with abundant nature, progressive values, kind non-pretentious people, and a solid bike infrastructure.

On our roadtrip, Jon and I stayed with family or in AirBnBs to get a feel for the local hospitality. We especially loved Fort Collins (Colorado), Asheville (North Carolina), and St. Pete/Dunedin (Florida). Those towns spoke to our bike-loving hearts and leftist ideals. They also had excellent breweries.

Some people are lucky enough to be born where they belong—Jon and I were born seeking that feeling, living abroad and traveling widely through our 20s. The opportunity to choose Eugene (and now, also Yachats) has allowed me to become who I am. Planted in a east coast soil, I wouldn’t have flourished in quite the same way. I enjoyed a wonderful upbringing in Laguna Beach, California, but the appearance-obsessed culture, traffic, and desert landscape never quite fit me. I’m a hiker attracted to wide open spaces, mossy fern-filled forests, and King Tides. 

I love the wildness of Oregon, especially on the coast. The surf is powerful and unpredictable, carving lush inlets around capes and natural bridges through lava rock tide pools. Sometimes the rain and wind are so intense they drown out conversation or blow you off your feet. It’s not for everyone, but it’s absolutely the place for me.

For those who have the means, starting with the question where do I want to be? allows everything else to fall into place. I’ve lived in London, Niigata City (Japan), Porto Alegre (Brazil), San Francisco, and many other places along the way. 

When you choose a place, you’re adopting an aesthetic and a group of people with shared values and customs. You get a local government, land-use laws, specific tap water, and seasons. You inherit an area’s decisions about how much public space to protect versus how many “No Trespassing” signs you see. More than any other variable, your environment shapes your opportunities and future.

In my experience, being a small fish in an enormous pond (especially as a young adult) pays off—I had incredible job opportunities in San Francisco for several years. It may be tempting to move to a more affordable state such as Texas or Missouri to afford a 3,000-square-foot house, but with that change comes decreased tax bases and wages. Low local taxes may mean fewer public spaces and vast privatization of the most desirable, beautiful land—the areas along mountain ridge-lines, rivers, and lakes are open only to wealthy landowners and those who can afford private club memberships. If you choose to be the big fish in a cheap state, you may also find your financial situation shrinking relative to the rest of the world. (It’s easier to travel abroad with California wages, for example, rather than those from Oklahoma.) 

I still carry parts of everywhere I’ve lived with me. I adopted the Japanese custom of shoe removal and the Brazilian/Argentinian ritual of drinking maté. I regularly cook Southeast Asian dishes, and for a while, I asked questions with a Londoner’s polite upward inflection. And perhaps no place sticks with me as much as Mexico: I speak the language, spend 4-6 weeks there every year, and my personal style, art, and home decorating have embraced the bright palettes of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and the Yucatan Peninsula. 

In my life, I’ve fallen in love with at least as many places as people. Laguna Beach, Berkeley, San Francisco, San Martin de los Andes, Oaxaca City, Annecy (France), Eugene, and Yachats. Every time it happens, my priorities shift. Everything flows from your surroundings. Don’t let your boss tell you where to live, if you can avoid it. It’s a privilege to choose where you lay your head each night. Find that place you love and see who and what else fall into place. 

Just hearing HIS dumb name makes me want to crawl back into bed. Is anyone else tired of this trifling wannabe dictator in HIS revenge era? 

HE seeks flattery and commits retribution against perceived enemies. HE’s breaking U.S. institutions with his dishonesty, selling off American prestige to the highest crypto bidders while HE golfs at taxpayer expense. Our country has a huge “For Sale” sign as we become an unreliable ally and an international joke. 

How can we be expected to go on about our lives when THE BIG DUMP is setting the stage for full-fledged fascism? 

Real pushback has been slow to materialize: 

• Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer wrote “a strongly worded letter.” (Thank you, Senator, for that thimble of water you threw at the raging inferno.)
• Columbia University surrendered to THE BIG DUMP’s demands in fear of losing $1.3 billion in federal funding. 
• Paramount paid a bullshit $16 million settlement because they needed a merger to be approved by the government. 
• Countless law firms are doing pro bono work for this administration under looming threats of executive orders. 
• Tech CEOs and media conglomerates are bending the knee, so they, too, can receive favorable treatment. 

Who has the courage to cut off HIS tiny hands while they’re in our government’s cookie jar? 

Fortunately, the response hasn’t all been defeatist. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s team has struck a nerve by mimicking the all-caps childishness of THE BIG DUMP’s Truth Social. (Camille Zapata, the Governor’s social media lead, has been brilliant here.)  

South Park creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone are also having a moment. One of my favorite parts of the show’s season premiere was the artwork around the White House: a Caesar-esque BIG DUMP portrait with a micropenis. One of HIM riding a tank. And others of HIM making love to a military plane, a glory hole, and a sheep. These background elements were masterpieces set in gaudy gold frames.

Because let’s face it: nobody embodies self-serving excess like THE BIG DUMP. Winning at any cost, staying in the spotlight, and denying accountability for wrongdoing are HIS three guiding values. HE has sold tacky branded sneakers, trading cards, watches, crypto, and bibles. HE lies, cheats, and steals without shame to get what HE wants in business, government, and golf. 

And HE’s rarely faced consequences for his bad behavior: If you’re rich, they let you do it. 

In a way, HE’s the perfect American—the dark apotheosis of our culture’s cruelest extremes. Rather than our individualism, we got rapacious greed; instead of our independence, we got isolationism; we traded our directness for bullying aggression; and our proud patriotism has given way to white Christian nationalism. And true to our nation’s roots, HE’s the consummate showman and entertainer who would do absolutely anything to get ahead. 

Imagine if every American behaved as THE BIG DUMP does, with no curiosity or tenderness. No awareness of anyone else’s agency or needs. No compassion or love. Just angry puffery and a win-at-all-costs mindset. Mad Max comes to mind. Avarice reigns and humaneness dies.

I’ve likened THE BIG DUMP’s track record to a white shirt covered in stains—if it were just one scandal, one stain, we wouldn’t be able to avoid looking at it or talking about it. But because HIS crimes have coalesced into a foul, sweeping skid mark, we can no longer unite on a single talking point. The elements of HIS greasy splatter include:

• SEXUAL ASSAULT – Being convicted of sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, facing over two dozen assault accusations from women, and most definitely having HIS name in the Epstein files.
• ATTEMPTED ELECTION FRAUD – Calling Georgia’s AG to find “11,780 votes” after the 2020 presidential election
• PREFERRING LOYALTY TO COMPETENCE – Packing the government with shady, inexperienced sycophants
• BLATANT CORRUPTION – Accepting a $400 million Qatari jet and offering White House access to people who buy HIS crypto coin
• MILITARIZED RACISM – Using ICE to harass and deport law-abiding brown folks, while allowing in white immigrants from South Africa

These are just a few examples from the top of my head. You can see how all of this overwhelmed the stain-free shirt a long time ago. HE’s a bad hombre who has become the stain, setting an example to others about an ugly new American way: a world in which integrity, honesty, and decency don’t matter. HE displays “leadership” by projecting false strength, bullying, and burying enemies in lawsuits. 

THE BIG DUMP doesn’t have any real friends. HIS third wife recoils at HIS touch. HE’s fundamentally alone, and doesn’t realize HE’s being used by Stephen Miller, JD Vance, the Heritage Foundation (Project 2025), and others to usher in hyper-conservative wet dreams. They made a deal with the devil and it’s paying off—for now.

I know of only one family member who voted for THE BIG DUMP: my dad. We haven’t talked in years and it makes sense why he’d want this administration. He’s a gambler who never paid child support and rarely came around while I was growing up. He’s never taken accountability for his choices, and feels entitled to my attention by virtue of being my biological father. In other words, he demands unearned respect. 

THE BIG DUMP mirrors this type of warped masculinity: one based on selfishness and domineering rather than the hard work of protecting those more vulnerable. I imagine many of the men who voted for HIM have similar stories. I wonder if they feel their lives have improved now that there’s a new tax write-off for private jets. 

Americans are feeling the financial strain from decades of self-serving policies architected by millionaires on both sides of the aisle. In fact, the top 10% of U.S. households owns 67.2% of the wealth, while the bottom half owns only 2.5% (Federal Reserve 2025). 

And rather than rising up at the injustice of our extreme wealth inequality, THE BIG DUMP tells us to blame wokeness, feminism, and immigrants. Women and “diversity hires” aren’t the issue here; greedy individuals and corporations are. HE tells us to direct our pain to the left or the right—anywhere but up. HIS rich backers are getting huge tax breaks while HIS tariff costs trickle down into our grocery stores. HE’s counting on clueless suckers to support HIM.

Deep down, we know that a real man would be helping others rather than seeking to enrich HIMSELF. Be careful, MAGA: future generations of your family will be embarrassed by your allegiance to one of the world’s worst leaders. I know I am.

Sitting down to write this, a dozen other compulsions compete for attention. I adjust my Spotify playlist, blaming the music for throttling my writing mood. I mindlessly refresh my email on my phone. Instagram sings her familiar siren song with the promise of infinite art, hiking, and cat content. 

With easy access to “anything and everything all of the time” (as Bo Burnham put it), my Paleolithic brain struggles to focus. It’s a relatively slow organic machine that predates our modern information, technology, and entertainment landscape. Our tools are quickly outshining our endemic capabilities—and with AI’s imminent takeover of our attention and economy, this will only get worse for us mere mortals.

I’m not blind to the benefits of our current world: I’m still blown away that I have a pocket-sized device serving as my telephone, music player, library of books and magazines, multilingual dictionary, note-taker, ride-hailer, personalized atlas, camera, and so much more.

But it often feels like a Faustian bargain: we reap the benefits of having so many capabilities in one small machine, but we’re forced to ward off the intrusion of time- and dollar-seeking companies who purport to offer their services for “free.” They collect and profit off of observing our behavior. They sell our information to other companies, who use it to power their marketing algorithms or nascent AI technologies. And on social media, influencers do whatever it takes to capture our most precious asset: our attention.

How would our world’s greatest minds have responded to having a smartphone? Would they have been empowered, intoxicated, addicted, or stultified? Is it easier or harder for a genius to emerge in today’s frenetic media landscape? 

I can imagine the favorite apps of some historical figures:

• Ernest Hemingway – X – Rising star in the manosphere and passionate about keeping trans women out of sports
• James Baldwin – Reddit – A top contributor known for destroying racist and homophobic trolls 
• Oscar Wilde – Grindr – Gets busted in Texas under a rarely enforced anti-sodomy law
• Marilyn Monroe – OnlyFans – Makes more money than Elon Musk
• Buffalo Bill Cody and Calamity Jane – TikTok – Their cowboy-core videos promote “The Wild West Show,” which routinely sells out in the country’s largest stadiums
• Abraham Lincoln – Bluesky – Still believes he can create a more perfect union through reasoned discourse
• Julia Child – YouTube – Shows you how to “make that soufflé your bitch” 
• Mark Twain – Facebook – Just trying to keep up with his children and grandchildren between writing sessions
• Eleanor Roosevelt – Instagram – Cats and sapphic art abound while she slips into your wife’s DMs
• JFK – Ashley Madison, Raya, Tinder – DTF wherever and whenever

To harness the power of all of our modern tools, impulse control and self-discipline are paramount. It’s much easier to spiral down an algorithmic rabbit hole—an addictive short video feed tailored to our specific interests—than it is to use apps intentionally for higher purposes. 

Building community, organizing politically, and producing creative work (rather than derivative AI slop) should be the goals. There’s room to zone out and let the social media feed take the wheel, but too much time ceding control to the machines and our brains get flabby. At least that’s how I feel after an Instagram bender. 

Be conscientious about the time you spend online and “go touch grass,” as the kids say: it will feel much better between your fingers than your phone ever will.

“Things are different online, where I feel like I’m fighting a constant war for your attention. I carefully script all of my videos to maximize the addictiveness of each sentence. Beyond the initial hook, I sneak in little micro-hooks to everything I say, making sure to recapture your attention if it does start to drift.” 

Adam Aleksic (Gen Z content creator) in his 2025 book, Algospeak

At Oregon Country Fair this year, I spotted something unusual. A young blonde in daisy dukes and a crop top was sitting on a painted carousel horse. She stuck her butt out and looked coquettishly at a professional camera while a woman snapped dozens of photos from all the angles. This thirsty ingenue seemed plucked straight from Coachella, Burning Man, or Euphoria—not our humble hippie fest in the forest! The influencers had finally invaded.

A 2023 Morning Consult Poll found that 57 percent of Gen Zers want to be influencers. I can take a charitable interpretation: perhaps a desire to be known is part of our American cultural DNA. We invented Hollywood; we’re fanatics for professional sports; we’re world-renowned for our marketing and propaganda. Even our current president is more of a twisted showman than a real leader. Fame has infiltrated all aspects of our lives.

But the path to becoming a public figure is what has changed. Attention used to be a result of someone’s skillfulness. In the 90s, everyone knew who Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Jordan, Britney Spears, and Tyra Banks were. And say what you want about their careers, but they all had immense talent. Wide recognition of a name or face would follow one’s athletic or artistic performance. It might occur with an assist from some savvy PR, but there was typically substance behind a celebrity’s stardom. 

These days, why spend time developing your talents when you can simply pay for tens of thousands of Instagram followers? And why do the hard work of finding truth when sensational lies and destructive practical jokes are more likely to go viral? 

The primary goal of an influencer is to get your attention. To increase engagement with their content. To amuse, excite, or enrage. To go viral. To gain followers. And to avoid breaking the platform’s rules. In fact, driving engagement is so important that a University of Oxford study found that influencers will minimize their creativity to pander to the algorithm. 

Not all influencers are talentless hacks, of course, but there are quite a few desperate clout-chasers who have no skills beyond self-promotion. It’s not their fault that the algorithm rewards braindead megaphones. They’re conditioned to become thirsty loudmouths with no ears, who shout from the digital rooftops, “LOOK AT ME!!!” 

And don’t get me wrong: there are many popular influencers I enjoy on Instagram—most of them serve content with cats, hiking, or painting (or some combination of the three). I spent an hour sampling videos from popular creators I’d never heard of: Charli D’Amelio, Addison Rae, Emma Chamberlain, Vinnie Hacker, Reagan Yorke, and others. I feel like I have a hangover after a lobotomy. Or perhaps it’s as if I’ve been eating cotton candy all morning: it’s light, fluffy, irresistible, and will give me serious health problems if I don’t stop. Is anyone else allergic to influencer-speak? The constant WORD EMPHASIS and unnatural intonation remind me of how folks talk to toddlers—only much faster. 

I decided it would be less painful to read a book about the phenomena rather than listen to any more of them. Adam Aleksic, a 24-year-old Harvard graduate and “Etymology Nerd” TikTok star, just published an exceptional book called Algospeak. He presents thoughtful reflections on this era and an admirable self-awareness about the bizarre game of algorithmic attention-seeking: “It’s an unfortunate reality that all influencers somehow manipulate your emotions to go viral, since we’re all competing for your attention and we know that your attention is tied to your emotions.” 

As Aleksic illustrates, there are still many influencers from whom we can learn skills, build community, or enjoy a laugh. But we should all be wary of whom we follow. Just as we are what we eat, our brains are what we watch and hear. A recent NYTimes opinion piece stated, “Social media platforms are designed to be addictive, and the sheer volume of material incentivizes cognitive ‘bites’ of discourse calibrated for maximum compulsiveness over nuance or thoughtful reasoning.” There’s been talk of a “post-literate” generation, which isn’t an exaggeration: fewer Americans these days are even capable of finishing a two-hour film let alone a 150-page novel. Short videos can broaden our familiarity with a range of subjects in relatively little time, but deep thinking is absent. The medium is the message, indeed.

In other words, if we spend too much time consuming content from low-rent pranksters and hollow pretty faces, we will, as a people, get much stupider. Choose your influencers wisely because you become who influences you.

What’s happening in global trade right now reminds me of middle school. There were bullies who felt they could harass and intimidate the smaller, smarter students. And for a while, their aggressive tactics worked: the victims coughed up some homework or lunch money. 

But years down the road, what became of these two groups of students? Many of the bullies became criminals and lonely deadbeat parents, while their bookish victims are more likely to have happy families and good jobs. 

On the world stage, Trump’s America is the uneducated bully. He has unilaterally threatened to raise tariffs on our allies and competitors alike, wrongly believing this will “force” other countries to the negotiating table. He’s done this based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what a “trade deficit” is. 

The tl;dr is this: The US has been awash in cheap goods from around the world because 1) we have more money to spend on shit than a lot of other countries , and 2) we have an insatiable consumer culture. For a long time, our trading partners built industries to feed the “American Dream”—and we, in turn, got access to abundant, affordable stuff.

That era may be coming to an end. If we, the bully, continue down this road of trying to strong-arm smaller countries with tariffs, we’ll end up a weak, isolated loser. Other world leaders such as Xi Jinping, Mark Carney, and Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo know better than to capitulate to American aggression. 

Would tanking the US economy finally break the cult leader’s spell? 

Throughout the Trump era, reasonable people on the left and right have assured themselves that the fan-fever would break with each colossal misstep:

• In 2016: There’s no way Americans will vote for a misogynist who bragged about “grabbing women by the pussy.”
• In 2020: There’s no way Americans will support an anti-science moron whose failed Covid-19 leadership contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
• In 2021: There’s no way Americans will continue supporting the traitor who fomented a violent insurrection on our Capitol.
• In 2024: There’s no way Americans will re-elect a criminal who was convicted of 34 felony counts.
• In 2025: There’s no way Americans will continue supporting a racist who is detaining and deporting non-white legal US residents (in defiance of the courts) while welcoming white Afrikaner “refugees.”

Misogynist, moron, traitor, convicted criminal, and racist. 

And yet, here we are. None of these failures dented his popularity the way we’d assumed—but his biggest challenge is yet to come. These tariffs are threatening our addiction to material goods.

If we continue on this course, in the next few weeks, Americans will see the prices of nearly everything start to rise. Container ships, normally filled to the brim with all of the shit we’re used to getting on the cheap, have been arriving at our shores empty. We cruised on inventory for a while, but that’s drying up. 

When Trump’s boneheaded tariff policies make everything more expensive and difficult, will he still have support? It’s not the first, second, or eighteenth time we’ve asked ourselves this question. But maybe—just maybe—MAGA will wake up when their wallets are empty and they only have Trump to blame.

Given Trump’s recent waffling and tariff pauses, he may actually recognize the fragility of his fan base. In America, he can be a misogynist, moron, traitor, convicted criminal, and racist—but rising prices on everyday goods are a bridge too far. It’s the economy, stupid. 

The first time I noticed myself becoming an invisible woman was in San Cristobal, Mexico. I was at Café Bar Revolución and watching a reggae trio. After the final set, the fetching young bassist came and took a seat next to me at the bar. He was originally from a small village in Chiapas and had been playing music as long as he could remember. We flirted and cracked jokes for 20 minutes until he asked me, “Cuantos años tienes?” I smiled and shared that I was 37. Without another word, this babyfaced motherfucker maintained eye contact, mouth slightly agape, backed slowly off his barstool, and disappeared into the crowd like Homer Simpson into some leafy hedges. I just laughed and pulled out the book I’d brought. 

This experience gave me a preview of what 40-something Hollywood starlets and my mom had warned: as women age, they tend to become invisible. And it’s true. Women’s main currency throughout history has been their youthful appearance. Strangers’ eyes used to linger much longer on my face and body. I get fewer free drinks, unsolicited conversations, and catcalls compared to when I had teenage acne. Men will argue, “It’s biology and such.”

Do I miss these parts of being younger? Not really. Dating was fun, but the impossible beauty standards of the 90s only led to eating disorders and cosmetics buyers’ remorse. 

I don’t want to bank my life’s prospects on an asset class with constantly diminishing returns. This obsession with women’s appearance centers the perspective of straight men (and self-comparing women). But here’s the thing: as women’s power and role continue to expand, so too are our ways of being seen.

I admit we aren’t living in the Golden Age for women’s progress in the United States. Roe vs. Wade was overturned; DEI initiatives are under assault; trans women are targeted by cruel people and dumb laws; and we have a thrice-married convicted rapist who calls himself the “fertility president” in the White House. Margaret Atwood couldn’t have dreamt up a worse anti-feminist hellscape. 

But this rampant small dick energy is an expression of misogynist fear—a backlash to women’s recent progress. Social conservatives want to return women to the domestic and economic cages of decades past. They want to preserve a world where men control women’s futures. They want us to begin life as pretty faces, grow into being walking wombs, and finally become unpaid caretakers for everyone else. Their twisted vision depends on women’s subservience—they want us to play a supporting role and exist only in relation to others: sister, daughter, wife, mother.

The good news is that they’re losing. In fact, it’s kind of a blowout, like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese taking on Trump and Vance in a pickup basketball game. What it means to be an American woman has expanded enormously. Our meal ticket is no longer tied to the options of low-wage work, marriage, or motherhood. In theory, we can become whoever we want to: artist, astronaut, doctor, CEO. Undoing this progress would be very difficult and unpopular. Women have grown accustomed to being considered in ways our mothers and grandmothers never were.

For generations, American men have been seen by dint of their power and wealth. There’s the way a room shifts when an influential man walks in. Eyes drift to him. People subtly turn their heads and bodies, smiling or allowing themselves to be interrupted. Crowds part in anticipation of his movements, and a spotlight seems to follow him. It helps if he’s well-dressed or handsome, but appearance is one factor of many. It’s influenced by the way he carries themself, gestures, or speaks. It’s often preceded by his accomplishments and reputation. 

More and more women are getting this type of respect that runs deeper than our skin. We should not fear becoming invisible as we age. We own merit beyond our looks, and our currency has no expiration date. Our visibility is no longer constricted by youth or beauty. We make ourselves undeniable by our actions, just like men.