Latest posts
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The Party of No Consequences: Why Approval Ratings Are a Dead Metric in a Dead Democracy
There was a time back when reality TV was still filmed in actual mansions and not in crumbling democracies that people used to care about approval ratings. Pollsters would trot out their little charts, cable news would plaster bar graphs across the chyron like an EKG of democracy itself, and voters would argue about whether
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Trump’s Jail Talk: When Presidents Play Sheriff of Dissent
It starts, as so many American breakdowns do now, with a social media post typed out between the golf course and the motorcade. On October 8, 2025, President Donald Trump fired off on Truth Social that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “should be in jail” for “failing to protect ICE Officers.” He added, as a flourish,
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The AI Boom’s Cisco Moment: Seventh-Inning Hype with Dot-Com Déjà Vu
If the stock market were a baseball game, investors in Nvidia and the broader AI trade would be screaming from the bleachers, “Relax, we’re still warming up!” But Lisa Shalett of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management begs to differ. In an October 7 Fortune interview, she invoked a metaphor that landed like a bucket of ice
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The Guard Was Called (and Illinois Put On Notice)
The White House confirmed that the president authorized federalization of three hundred Illinois National Guard troops to “protect federal officers and assets” in Chicago. Governor J.B. Pritzker answered with fury, saying he had been handed a manufactured performance disguised as an ultimatum: activate the Guard himself or watch Washington seize control. The move followed a
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The Clean-Energy Purge: Trump Axes Billions While Blue States Burn
Once upon a shutdown, the Department of Energy quietly became an executioner. In the first two days of October, with government stalled and Congress gridlocked, the Trump administration canceled roughly $7.56 billion in clean-energy funding—snatching away support from 223 projects across 16 Democratic-leaning states. Projects included caliber hydrogen hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest,
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Day One of the Fascist Purge: Russ Vought of OMB Plans to Punish Democrats
The shutdown was supposed to be about budgets. Instead, it has become a bonfire of the civil service, and the match is being struck in Russ Vought’s hand. On the first day of the shutdown, he told House Republicans that mass firings would begin “in a day or two.” This wasn’t speculation. He described a
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Trump at Quantico: A Live Lie Broadcast—And the Camera Didn’t Stop Rolling
He stood before a sea of stars and bars and medals—generals, admirals, the brass elite—at Marine Corps Base Quantico. The optics were as cinematic as any rally: the uniforms glinting, the flags waving, the towers of power gathered in homage. Into that tableau walked Donald Trump, armed with a speech filled with rhetorical grenades. According
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Being Good at Goodbye
The hardest skill I ever learned was not empathy or leadership or writing a book. It was goodbye. Goodbye is the only thing I’ve been allowed to master. It’s the only certificate hanging on the wall. Some people collect diplomas; I collect exits. I don’t mean the cinematic goodbye—the one where a person drives off
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Dominion and Giuliani’s $1.3 Billion Secret Settlement: When Lies Pay and Democracy Gets the Bill
There’s a peculiar magic trick the powerful love: make a noise so loud it draws attention, then vanish the outcome so no one can reverse-engineer the fraud. Yesterday, a mammoth defamation case—one purporting to demand $1.3 billion from a man who spent years amplifying election falsehoods—ended not in a verdict or a sensation, but in