This is grossly unfair.

Yes, it’s true, last week I did draw my Sig Sauer P365 X-Macro and shoot a local firefighter, volunteer Santa, and grandfather of 22.

But friends, I had no choice!

His vehicle, a 3400-pound, fully-loaded, Toyota Prius, was heading RIGHT AT ME. We all know a car is a deadly weapon!

Yes, I’ve heard the liberal haters. “You were in a crosswalk!” “He was slowing down!” “It was a red light!” “He was screaming, ‘Please, Mister, don’t shoot!’”

But what terrorist-lovers don’t understand is that I didn’t have the luxury of sitting in my patchuli-filled living room, wearing a fleece Patagonia vest, and watching 11 slow-motion videos of him desperately waving pictures of his grandkids while I pumped shell after shell into his car. I was faced with a split-second1 to make my call, and I did what had to be done.

I’ve heard some anti-Second Amendment wimps asking why I unloaded my whole 17-round magazine, 15 of them after his car had already stopped. Muscle memory. I’ve been trained to keep firing until witnesses pull out their cell phones. One shot, 17 shots, it’s basically the same thing.

I know that once I get my day in court (and my full pardon the next day), America will see that I have justice2 on my side.

Multiple videos surfaced, showing the tragedy from different angles, but there was no consensus on why Good died. For many on the left, it was cold-blooded murder by an ICE agent. For others, the agent was acting in self-defense as he faced Good’s dangerously accelerating car.

Each side was amazed the other couldn’t see what was so obvious in each video. It was the blue-and-black dress controversy, but with much higher stakes. Rashomon in the real world.1

So what really went down?

That Wednesday morning, Good sat in her parked maroon Honda Pilot, partially blocking traffic on Portland Avenue. She was cheerfully bouncing to the noise of the honking horns and protesters blowing whistles. Her wife was outside the car. They thought ICE rounding up illegal immigrants was wrong and were there to oppose it. Her wife later said, “We had whistles, they had guns.”

Although Good’s car was parked at a diagonal, it was still possible to pass her, and some cars were doing so. A gaggle of unmarked ICE vehicles was lined up nearby. One agent, later identified as Jonathan Ross, began circling her car, counter-clockwise, filming with a cell phone camera.

Ross’s 47-second video starts on the right side of Good’s Honda as he steps out of his own vehicle. He approaches, holding his cell phone and filming as he walks. There is a dog looking out the right rear window of Good’s Honda.2

Good leans out her window as Ross approaches, still with a half smile. She says, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Ross says nothing, just keeps circling.

This moment seems important. If Ross is supposed to be assessing a threat, Good seems to present as inoffensive a presence as can be imagined. She reassures him that she’s not mad. Maybe she’s trying to placate him. In my mind, this should make it clear to Ross that Good, while possibly very annoying and interfering with his work, is not an active threat. Not everyone sees it that way, of course.

Ross continues around the car, filming its license plate.

Rebecca Good, Renee’s wife, standing at the back of the car, starts smack-talking Ross: “We don’t change our plates every morning… It’ll be the same plate when you come talk to us again.” Rebecca is filming Ross as he films her and the car.3

Rebecca seems more aggressive than Renee.

Once he’s completely circled the car, Ross switches his phone from his right to his left hand.

Next, we hear two ICE agents approaching from the other (driver’s) side of the Honda. They are shouting at her.

Out of the car. Out of the car. Get out of the fucking car.

Rebecca Good reaches to get into the car, but can’t seem to open the right-side door. As Ross starts to pass in front of the car, we can see Renee Good turn towards her driver’s side window, looking at the agents (one of whom is trying to open her door). Her front wheel is clearly turned left.

As Ross walks in front of her car, Good does a slight reverse, preparing to change direction. You can see her turning her tires to the left. Because Ross is walking forward and Good is reversing slightly, Ross traverses more rapidly across the front of the Honda. Rebecca is now crying at her, “Drive, baby, drive!”

What is Good’s goal at this point? To me, it seems she’s preparing to turn right and (foolishly) try to get away from the ICE agents. Not everyone agrees.

The wildest accusation, popular on Twitter, is that this smiling mom of three has suddenly become eager to kill, and she’s turning her wheels to run down Ross. Remember, Ross has already passed in front of her car once previously. She could have charged him then! Why wait?

Good has no violent history; she’s done nothing violent up to this moment in the confrontation. She’s even told Ross, “I’m not mad at you,” and yet we’re supposed to believe that she’s suddenly become a ruthless killer.

And that her wife is essentially telling her, “Kill that guy, kill him now. And then spend the rest of your life in prison!”4

Madness.

But obviously, some people, like AJ, are quite mad.

Let’s look at more camera angles.

One day after the shooting, the New York Times put together a video report based on three cell phone videos (but not Ross’s cell phone video, which came out later).

In the first part of the Times video, at real speed, you can see ICE officers approaching the Honda while Ross circles around the front. One officer has their hand on the door handle. This is seconds before Ross is going to draw and shoot Good.

At the 9-second mark, the Honda’s wheel has turned towards Ross, and he has begun to draw his gun.

But the tire keeps on turning before we hear any shot. At the 10-second mark, it is already turning away from Ross, so the car can go down Portland Avenue. At the end of that 10th second in the Times video, Good has turned the wheel further, and the car is accelerating, already passing Ross. She was not aiming at him. It is only then that we hear the first shot.

Ross fires three shots. The first goes through the front windshield on its right side. It seems it was fired over the hood of the car from the side. The other two shots were aimed at the car’s side, although at this time, it’s not clear what they struck or which bullet killed Good.

Scrolling further along the Times video makes things clearer. From another angle, you see the first shot again at the 2:12 mark. Good’s front tire is already turned away from Ross.

At the 2:20 mark, the video freezes to show Ross’s feet, out of the Honda's path. You can see the cloud of smoke from that first shot.

Why do people think Good was aiming at Ross? Well, probably most of them haven't bothered to watch the New York Times video (though you can find it for free on Twitter). They’ve perhaps seen Ross’s cell phone video or a freeze frame of the supposedly murderous Good, smiling as she tries to kill Ross. That and their political priors are enough to convince far too many people.

Confirmation bias is what these partisan times are about. It convinces MAGA supporters that Good wanted to kill, just as it wrongly convinced liberals that Kyle Rittenhouse had not been acting in self-defense back in 2020.5 All too often, we see what we want to believe. We can even watch the same videos and come away with different conclusions.

Perhaps I have deluded myself, but I remain sure that Good was not aiming at Ross. But did she hit him anyway? That is less clear.

Some viewers of Ross’s cell phone video are sure it shows him being hit, but in the chaos of him dropping his left hand (holding the phone) and raising his right (to fire the gun), I can’t tell. There is also a grainy video from a worse angle that some claim shows Ross being hit.

The Times took that grainy video and time-synced it with another and argued that it did not show him being hit. This image is at the 2:52 mark of the Times video.

To me, it looks like he lurches back in this moment. Given where his feet are, it seems possible that the car brushed against his torso, or even just pushed on his left hand as he held the phone.

But whatever causes his backward movement, he remains on his feet and firing. He is not staggering or spinning. If he was hit, he wasn’t hit very hard, and not from the front of the Honda.

Now, about motivations.

Good’s original motivation seems clear. She was there to make it harder for ICE vehicles to get where they were going.6 This may have given ICE grounds to arrest her. Her mood seemed cheerful (bouncing in her car before ICE shows up), and her smile friendly, but it’s possible that I’m wrong and she was actually being smug and condescending, as some have suggested.

Murderous? I simply can’t see it, not for a second. And remember, middle-aged ladies are about the least murderous demographic. I know this doesn’t mean they can’t kill, but men and women are very different. Despite what some liberals claim, biology matters. Women are less murdery!

But even though I’m pretty sure Good was not murderous, she was being sadly foolish.

Protesting is good! It’s patriotic! Shout at or film ICE! No special training is needed. But once you start organizing blockades, using large, dangerous vehicles, you are entering risky territory.

Think about the Civil Rights protests. The SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) worked hard to train their activists in the proper way to protest. They knew that their strength was in appearing more decent, more civilized than their opponents. They avoided anything that smelled of violence.

A car is a deadly weapon. Driving it in a peaceful protest is dumb.

Renee Good’s decision to suddenly flee, and Rebecca Good encouraging her (“Drive baby”), was foolish. Any good defense attorney will tell you never to run away. Even if the cops are in the wrong, when they tell you to get out of the car, you get out of the car. That doesn’t mean Good deserved to die, but it does mean she was making bad choices.

And what about the ICE agents? They seem less professional than the protesters, and with far less excuse. They started the encounter seeming pissed off, especially the two who approached Good and told her to “Get out of the fucking car.” I imagine they were angry. They had been held up by this bouncy lady, and they wanted to arrest her and get her out of their way so they could do their job. I understand that, but it does not seem an ideal attitude for law enforcement.

Atlanta defense attorney Andrew Fleishman made the point that experienced police prefer a low-key approach because it tends to be far more effective.

Remember, Good was sitting calmly in her car the first time Ross walked in front of her. She didn’t start trying to move her car until after two ICE officers barged up, yelling at her and trying to grab the handle of her door. I can easily imagine a quieter approach getting entirely different results.

And now, what about Jonathan Ross?

I’ll lay my cards on the table: I think he was in the wrong.

Experienced law enforcement professionals have noted that Ross twice made the mistake of walking in front of the car. Smart officers don’t put themselves in a position to get run over.

Second, he seemed a bit too ready for trouble, given who he was facing. His decision to switch his phone from his right to his left hand after he circled the car the first time seems deliberately designed to free his gun hand, but Good had shown no violent behavior up to that point.

Third, a reverse before turning is an entirely normal maneuver. Ross must have seen it ten thousand times. He shouldn’t have been surprised or assumed Good had hostile intent, especially because he could see her turning the wheel to the right. In this shot from a 3-second video posted by Joe Scarborough, you can see her right hand at the 12 o’clock position as she continues to turn the steering wheel.

Some observers have made much of the fact that the Honda’s wheels briefly spun while she was turning her wheel, but it was only for a fraction of a second before the car caught traction, and, as I pointed out above, the tire turned AWAY from Ross.

Good was not a threat.

She may have grazed him with the right side of her car as she pulled out, pushing him a little, but she was not heading directly towards him. If she were, Ross would not have ended up to the side of the car.

But that does not mean that Ross committed cold-blooded murder.

It was a tense situation. Just because women rarely murder doesn’t mean they never do. The woman, whom he didn’t know, was in a car, a dangerous weapon. While I saw friendliness in her face, he may have seen a sneer.

And then the car starts to move. He can hear the wheels spinning. It’s only for an instant, but time can be strange in those moments. His brain may have told him she was about to charge into him. At one point, her wheels were, briefly, pointed in his direction.

I think his best, obvious choice was to step aside and let her car pass him.

Critically, even if he thinks she’s trying to kill him, he has a far better chance of escaping death by moving than by firing his gun. If he shoots, he has to hit her, and that hit has to stop her. As we see, it doesn’t. Her car keeps moving until it crashes into another car down the street. His bullets did not stop her car.

And why fire those two follow-up shots? The car was passing him already. The best defense is that he was on automatic at that point, but if he is prosecuted, those last two shots are probably going to be an issue.

Of course, arguing that he made the wrong choice is easy for me to say. I’m not facing a 4,000-pound deadly weapon with only an instant to make the right choice. I can judge him for being in front of the car, and judge him for seeming too ready to draw, and firing those last two shots, but I get to do that from the safety of my own warm apartment.

One thing that gives me pause is that at the end of his cell phone video, someone can be heard saying “fucking bitch.” I assume that’s Ross, although I can’t know for sure. That doesn’t look good, if it’s him.

In the end, this is a tragedy of bad choices. Two women thought they were doing some good by stopping ICE from doing what they considered evil, but chose a poor method. They faced loud, aggressive ICE agents; they panicked; one ICE agent pulled his gun; shots were fired; and three children will never hear from their mother again.

And don’t forget where the bad choices began. President Donald Trump has ordered ICE to carry out a heavy-handed campaign of rounding up illegal immigrants. Kristi Noem has supervised a paramilitary group that goes around masked and acts like a law unto itself. This kind of gung-ho, confrontational behavior was inevitably going to result in tragedy. The Wall Street Journal has reported that previous encounters have led to other shootings and deaths (Videos Show How ICE Vehicle Stops Can Escalate to Shootings). The Goods and the ICE agents made bad choices, but ultimate responsibility rests on Trump’s shoulders.

Saving democracy? Trump doesn’t care about the welfare of a bunch of foreigners. He’s already said he’s ready to accept Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s anti-democracy vice president, as Venezuela’s next leader (and snubbed Nobel Peace Prize winner María Machado). Oil? We have plenty of that, and Venezuelan oil isn’t free; there are still production and transport costs. And how much would we get? Currently, Trump says he’s demanded 30 to 50 million barrels from Venezuela, but America uses about 20 million barrels per day. Stopping drugs? Venezuela is not a major source of illegal drugs. Most fentanyl is produced in Mexico from chemicals imported from China and India. Small amounts of cocaine are moved through Venezuela, but it isn’t a big player with the drug cartels. Trump’s own Justice Department has dropped an early claim that Maduro led a cartel named “Cartel de los Soles.” (Cartel de los Soles wasn’t a real cartel; rather, it was a Venezuelan nickname for corrupt officials who had gotten involved in the drug trade.)

So why illegally send the U.S. military in to kidnap Maduro, given the high diplomatic cost of alienating allies and the likelihood of destabilizing Venezuela even further?

I have no sources at the CIA, but I’m pretty sure the real reason for the Venezuelan operation is ego. Trump wanted to feel important, and so his staff manufactured a fake conflict over trivial amounts of drugs so that they could then justify Maduro’s kidnapping. They might have sold themselves some blather about “America asserting itself” or “preempting Chinese influence”—Stephen Miller might even believe it—but it’s all garbage. Trump wanted to look big, and Maduro was an easy target. The talk about democracy and oil was just Trump and Co. trying to justify what they already planned to do.

At least during the Cold War, we overthrew Latin American governments in order to fight communism. True, most of those countries weren’t actually in any danger from Marxism, but at least the Soviet Union was more than an imaginary threat. This time, we’re staging a coup just to make our narcissistic leader feel better about himself.

The same is even more obviously true about Greenland. In 2019, someone brought the big chunk of ice to Trump’s attention, and it captured his wandering imagination. On Twitter, he riffed about the possibility of buying it, even tweeting a picture of a Trump hotel on stony Greenland soil.

When Denmark reacted with shocked disapproval, Trump felt miffed. He canceled a planned state visit and brooded over the insult.

“Greenland was just an idea, just a thought. But I think when they say it was ‘absurd’ and it was said in a very nasty, very sarcastic way, I said, ‘We’ll make it some other time.’”

Some other time has come. Then it was just an idea, but now it’s his wounded vanity that needs soothing. Trump may never actually use force against Greenland—that would be crazy, even for Trump—but I wouldn’t bet my life savings on it. Just ask Nicolás Maduro how far Trump will go to feel better about himself.

Every evening she puts together another window on America. Richardson, a historian, often delves into the past, but her focus, and her appeal, is offering a daily rundown of what’s happening, which mostly means, going over the terrible things Trump and the Republican Party had done that day.

Her calm, authoritative, scholarly voice lays out in smooth prose a highlight reel of right-wing horrors. Her cool tone makes her words seem especially trustworthy. She’s no rabble-rousing screamer. She’s just laying out the facts, a neutral voice of reason. I will often see acquaintances post one of her letters to a flurry of “angry” and “shocked” emojis. Richardson is the play-by-play announcer for Resistance Libs.

Putting my cards on the table, I’ve never liked her. Every article I’ve glanced at has seemed slanted in some subtle or not-so-subtle way. She’s usually not lying, but framing the case for the prosecution in a way that her audience will eat up. Even when her sentences are technically accurate, the overall approach feels dishonest.

A few days ago, however, she stepped well over the line of journalistic integrity.

In her Sept 13, 2025 letter, she wrote about the Charlie Kirk murder, and the right-wing’s attempt to brand the alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, as a leftist.

By telling her millions of readers that Robinson was “not someone on the left,” but was actually “far right,” she was reinforcing a bizarre theater that had been spreading among left-wing accounts on Bluesky and Facebook.

When Richardson sent this letter, very little was known about Robinson except that his family was Republican and some of the bullets he had used had words carved on them, including “Hey Fascist, catch!” and “O Bella ciao,” the lyrics to an old Italian anti-fascist song.

The fact that he shot a right-wing influencer and used bullets etched with anti-fascist words, made most reasonable people think his motivation was left-wing. Of course, it was (and is) quite possible that he did not have any coherent motivation. After all, another bullet casing read “If you can read this, you’re GAY, lmao,” suggesting he might have simply been a murderous Internet troll.

So what evidence led Richardson to describe Robinson as “far right”?

Richardson seemed to have glommed onto an internet theory that Robinson was actually a groyper.

Groypers, for those of you lucky enough not to know, are far-right, antisemitic, racist trolls whose symbol is a green frog, similar to, but not the same as Pepe the Frog (don’t ask), who they nicknamed “the Groyper.” They use memes and trolling tactics to try and get young people to leave traditional conservative movements. They’re constantly borrowing memes from other online movements to try and confuse people or just because they’re assholes.

The “Tyler Robinson was a groyper” theory is based on the idea that he was using his anti-fascist memes in the way a groyper would, trolling with layers of irony. (These Internet sub-cultures love irony. Often, they layer in so much irony, they themselves seem unsure of what they really mean.)

Given what we knew when Richardson published her September 13 piece, this theory was not impossible. Groypers are trolls, do steal memes, and did hate Charlie Kirk for being too moderate. But there was no real evidence, beyond the memes (which are used by many Internet sub-cultures), to link groypers to Robinson. It’s fine that Richardson felt the need to mention the theory, but it should have been hedged with cautions and caveats. For her to write about this fringe theory as if it was the most likely reason for the assassination was grossly irresponsible (as many people on social media said at the time).

The most likely story was always that Robinson, like most shooters, was simply insane. If he was that rare shooter who had a coherent political philosophy, it was probable that he’d shot a right-wing figure because he was a right-wing figure, not because he was insufficiently right-wing. The groyper theory was fringe near-nonsense.

But I still saw the theory repeated again and again on Facebook as if was the most likely reason Kirk was shot. Understandably, people on the left didn’t want Robinson to be “one of us.”

Then the bottom fell out of the groyper theory.

On Tuesday, Jeff Gray, the Utah County Attorney, issued the charge sheet for Robinson. Among the bits of information offered, Gray shared parts of a text message string between Robinson and someone who was, it was claimed, his roommate and lover (a trans woman).

The text string shows someone who seems more sane than I expected (although this does not mean actually sane, I’ll leave the experts to decide that one), and provided a perfectly understandable motive. “I had enough of his hatred.” The fact that Robinson’s lover was trans (assuming the Utah state attorney was not lying in the indictment), seems to suggest that what motivated Robinson (again, assuming he was the shooter) was Kirk’s well known hostility to pro-trans policies in America.

Is anything else possible? Of course. This is early on and we have weeks and months ahead to find out what the prosecution can dig up to make a case against Robinson. But the groyper theory, already hanging by a thread, was almost certainly out.

So would Richardson use her newsletter to confess to her millions of fans that she’d jumped the gun and wrongly offered a fringe theory as fact?

No, of course not. Here is her September 16 letter, written after the charges were revealed.

Shockingly, all we get is one bland sub-clause, “although the motive of the alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, remains unclear.” She adds a reminder that “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides,” as if to hint, “but he still might be far-right.”

No mention of her previous irresponsible claim that Robinson was “far right.” No mention of the evidence that he targeted Kirk because of “his hatred.” Just a quick aside, and then we’re moving on, folks, nothing to see here.

The damage was done. Millions of Americans had been informed by their trusted scribe that Robinson was part of the far right. And they believed her! (It’s that calm, confident historian’s voice!)

Even Jimmy Kimmel got burned, saying on his show “the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” Immediately the Trump administration put pressure on ABC and others to pull the plug and Kimmel’s show was suspended “indefinitely” on Wednesday evening.

And the groyper theories are still out there, poisoning rational discourse. The Utah charge sheet has discouraged some, but in recent days I’ve seen many on Facebook and Twitter claim that you can’t trust the charge sheet, the text messages might have been faked, anything but believe that Richardson and others had simply been terribly, embarrassingly wrong.

Cuomo has led in every poll except Public Policy Polling, which gave Mamdani a slight edge. Complicating the race is that New York uses ranked choice voting, which means a candidate who gets the most votes in the first round may not finish as the winner. In the polls that take that into account, Mamdani gains significantly on Cuomo but doesn’t score a win.

But the race isn’t over until Tuesday, and there are seven other candidates in the Democratic contest who have some views on what New York needs.

I met with one of them, Whitney Tilson, to discuss his campaign for mayor. He may not, as he quickly admits, be a favorite to win, but he brings a lot of experience as well as new ideas to the table.

Tilson is the 58-year-old son of Peace Corps volunteers who met and married in the Philippines. He spent part of his childhood in Tanzania and Nicaragua before heading off to get degrees in government and business from Harvard. His first job out of college was joining the founding team of the non-profit Teach for America, which places teachers in underserved communities around the country. He then went on to manage a hedge fund, Kase Capital Management, for 18 years. Since retiring from finance, he has been involved in business writing and charity (from helping those suffering in Somalia’s wars to raising money for victims of COVID in New York).

Housing

On housing, Tilson doesn’t think the answer is more publicly funded housing. Instead, he wants a city that prioritizes changing zoning rules and cutting red tape so that private developers can build the housing New York needs.

It’s all supply and demand…

…The majority of the people on the [debate] stage were talking about rent [freezes]. I want rents to go down by 20%…

…Have you ever looked at Austin? Austin's rents went up by 25% in a single year, you know, coming out of the pandemic, a lot of people moving down there. And the city business leaders and government saw that as a crisis … They changed zoning restrictions, sped up the regulatory approvals, etc. … As a result, there's a glut and rents and housing prices have dropped.

In general, this seems accurate, although it’s unclear how much resulted from Austin changing the rules and how much was due to Austin already being more development-friendly than New York City.

From a National Multifamily Housing Council report:

In recent years, Austin has adopted more pro-housing policy in its Home Options for Middle-income Empowerment (HOME) initiative—reducing minimum lot sizes and allowing up to three units on single-family lots—but these changes came after the large spike in development seen post COVID. — NMHC

So while the NMHC sees deregulating and up-zoning as good, the new housing was helped more because

Austin, and the state of Texas generally, has a more favorable regulatory environment than much of the coasts. — NMHC

It’s this East Coast clogged regulatory environment that Tilson wants to fix.

Under Bloomberg, it was two years start to finish to develop a project, from getting zoning and approvals to revenue generation. Now it’s four years. We need to get it back to two years.

Or to quote him from the first debate:

Unleash the private sector to build a lot more supply … Ease zoning restrictions, fight Nimbyism.

Unlike Tilson, the other mayoral candidates support a rent freeze. When asked during the second debate, five of the seven candidates raised their hands in support of a freeze. Cuomo waffled by saying he’d leave the decision up to the rent board.

The evidence is overwhelming that a freeze would be bad for New York.

Freezing rents freezes owners’ income while costs—property taxes, maintenance, utilities—continue to rise. Some owners may be able to cut into profits, but others will be forced to cut back on building upkeep, letting needed repairs slide. New developers are less likely to build in a climate that makes higher profits harder to achieve, which will exacerbate the housing crunch.

A freeze is also regressive. It helps tenants no matter what their income. Sure, some working-class tenants may be shielded from higher costs, but plenty of upper-middle-class New Yorkers also get to live in those same protected apartments.

Public Safety

In general, Tilson is happy with the direction crime numbers have been heading.

Murders down from January through June 1st … Six of the seven major felonies down this year….

…I give a lot, a majority, of the credit to [police commissioner] Jessica Tisch. I will keep her on.

Like most of the mayoral candidates (Mamdani being a major exception), Tilson supports hiring more cops.

The key to reducing crime is fully staffed police out there enforcing the laws … We need to make crime illegal.”

He is also against closing Rikers because New York doesn’t have enough cells for the number of prisoners.

What would he do to fix Rikers?

Shrink it and rebuild it. Modern jail facilities, like the new jails being built, require 75 percent fewer corrections officers … The most dangerous thing about Rikers is the physical plant … There are areas that don't have camera surveillance just because they're hundred-year-old facilities … If you can get Rikers down to 2,000 from 7,500, I think you can fix it

Homelessness

What about the problem of homelessness?

We're talking about the street homeless, about 4,000 people. Not the 90% of homeless who are in shelters.

I don't think you can eliminate it until you outlaw it. I would call on the city council to reverse the homeless bill of rights. Not all of it, just one piece of it: the right to sleep outside. A lot of communities, in fact, the entire state of Florida, but even in liberal California, San Jose, and San Diego, they are passing legislation saying, no, you're not allowed to sleep outside.

This is a forcing mechanism to make the city serve the last and most difficult 10%, because nobody wants beat cops going in and arresting people and sending people to Rikers. It's not a crime, it's a tragedy for people who are out there. But what no other candidate is willing to say, because they get accused of criminalizing homelessness, is you have to outlaw it—combined with the involuntary commitment law that's getting passed in Albany.

Of course, this brought up deinstitutionalization, a nationwide trend (that began in the 1950s and accelerated through the 1970s1) which shut down mental hospitals (many of which were horrible), but often failed to find any decent substitutes, leaving some vulnerable people abandoned on the streets.

The first 50 percent [of deinstitutionalization] probably made sense. The last 50 percent has been a disaster.

I asked someone what they did when they shut down the mental health hospital. The answer was: “We gave them a bus ticket to the Port Authority.”

Education

What issues does Tilson feel have not been talked about enough?

On education reform, we should end social promotion after third grade. If a kid can't read even at a basic level, we say stop. You don't go on to fourth grade. We're not going to allow you to keep lying to the kids and parents [telling them] that things are fine.

I'm the only champion of charter schools out there. We've got the best charter sector in the country. It's really rigorous.

Could we convert New York’s schools to a charter system?

Right now about 15% of New York City public school kids [are in charter schools]. And I can see that number going up modestly over time, so I'm not calling for a New Orleans-style, you know, charterized the whole system. But I do think we need to introduce charter-type accountability in the system. There are public schools that have been failing kids for not just decades, but generations.

Tilson pointed out that Mississippi has had educational success by focusing on the basics. Teachers in Mississippi used proven educational practices like phonics (rather than trendy but ineffective techniques like Whole Word and Whole Language approaches), and students were required to repeat third grade if they didn’t meet reading standards. As a result, a cash-starved school system still managed to improve immensely between 2013 and 2022.

Not Mamdani

In the first debate, Tilson said that he was ABZ (Anyone But Zohran), playfully echoing all the progressives who were saying ABC (Anyone But Cuomo). In the second debate, he said that he’d place Cuomo number two after voting for himself.

Realistically, Tilson knows his chance of winning is somewhere between slim and divine intervention.

Yeah, with polling at 1% in the last poll … So what do you do? I got into the race recognizing it was always gonna be a very difficult lane for an outsider first-time candidate.

But as Mamdani rose in the polls, Tilson became more focused on making sure he did not win the Democratic nomination.

I think he is a wolf in sheep's clothing. I think he is at his core, a radical socialist who truly believes in the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America], the organization he is one of the leaders of, to abolish capitalism, defund the police, and whip up as much anti-Israel sentiment as possible. All of those are disqualifying for me. And I put him in a very different, much more dangerous category than the guy polling third, Brad Lander, who is just your run-of-the-mill progressive. I don't think it would bring about the ruin of this city if Lander were to become mayor. I think Mamdani would ruin this city.

Because he sees Mamdani as such a threat, Tilson has been following through on his ABZ motto. Tilson’s latest Facebook ad touts a semi-endorsement from the New York Times, but spends much of its 30 seconds explaining why Mamdani would be a terrible choice. “Let me keep it simple. Rank me #1, Cuomo #2, and not Mamdani!”

What to do?

I liked Tilson. I took an issues quiz before meeting him, and he was my top match. We agree on many points, from how to build more housing to wanting schools to have stricter standards. I also enjoyed our chat. He’s a smart guy interested in a wide range of topics (at one point, we segued from the 1898 Spanish-American War to the Bataan Death March of 1942 to running the New York City Marathon, which Tilson has done, and I have not).

I also share some of Tilson’s worries about Mamdani.

I don’t see him as quite the extreme threat that Tilson does, probably because I am less concerned about how a New York mayor feels about Israel. And unlike some, I do not think Mamdani is antisemitic.

But even so, some of Mamdani’s views on Israel suggest a worldview and style that is wrong for New York City. Below is his official statement the day after the October 7 attacks, where 1,200 died, mostly Israeli civilians. His response gave equal weight to the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians “in the last 36 hours.” While it’s reasonable (if politically maladroit) to make the case that in the long haul both Israelis and Palestinians have contributed to the current quagmire, that’s not what you should be saying in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 horrors. It’s like yelling “All Lives Matter” at a Black Lives Matter rally. It’s neither the time nor the place. That choice, and others, suggest that Mamdani’s instinct is always to follow the DSA position.

Mamdani has toned down some of his rhetoric, but given his policy recommendations, I don’t think he’s changed his views. He supported defunding the police in 2020, now he calls for a Department of Community Safety to replace some police functions. He’s also going to make city buses free (never mind the hit to the budget), and create government-sponsored grocery stores (which will almost certainly be expensive boondoggles that will also take away income from small neighborhood bodegas and groceries).

It is clear that Mamdani remains the anti-capitalist activist who tweeted this back in 2020. This may wow the crowds at the DSA, but calling what Amazon or Walmart do “theft” is juvenile nonsense.

As Michael Powell said in The Atlantic

Zohran Mamdani is a left-wing daydream of a New York City mayoral candidate

But few of Mamdani’s policy and funding proposals weather scrutiny

So I’m ABZ as well.

My final ranked-choice vote on Tuesday will be:
Whitney Tilson
Zellnor Myrie
Brad Lander
Adrienne Adams
and, unfortunately, Andrew Cuomo.

Why vote for Cuomo at all? Because it’s a two-man race, and if Cuomo doesn’t win, Mamdani will. I’d prefer a sleazy, competent mayor to a socialist whose goals, if achieved, would damage my city in multiple ways.

It reminds me of the 1991 governor’s race in Louisiana. Corrupt former governor Edwin Edwards had won the Democratic nomination, but he was up against David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the KKK, whom Louisiana’s Republican voters had chosen as their nominee. Darkly humorous bumper stickers during the campaign said, “Vote for The Crook: It’s Important.” Edwards was victorious.2

Good luck, New York!

I started my day in my new home (one year now) of Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It’s a diverse community of 130,000 with many immigrants: 41% Latino, 25% Asian, and 28% White. The median household income is $86,380, with a 21% poverty rate; the median rent is $2,000. Homeowners make up 32% of households, which is about average for the city.

I took the subway to teach, about 8 miles away. 40 minutes door-to-door on the D express. The ride was crowded, but I managed to score a seat when people got off at Atlantic Ave. No fuss, no issues. I like the view as we travel over the Manhattan Bridge (and I can squeeze in a couple of tweets before we go back underground).

Two classes yesterday: one on 9/11 and the other on current political movements. In the 2nd class, we covered wokism and Trumpism. The students were engaged, with a range of views, although we had no vocal conservatives (my main conservative was home sick; she sent an apologetic email, nice kid). One kid defended a woke POV, but a Mexican-American guy argued white men got attacked too often. A kid who I think is trans pointed out that lefties have their own conspiratorial beliefs; he gave the example of wearing masks when there was no need, and we discussed the politicization of reactions to COVID. We also discussed why Trump may have made gains among Asian and Latino voters, and I shared this fun map showing the shifts in 2024’s vote.

(New York still went 68% for Harris, but Trump’s 30% share was a 7-point gain over the 23% he got in 2020. He got more votes in almost every election district. My own local district was 85% for Biden in 2020 but only 73% for Harris in 2024.)

After class, I jumped on an electric Citi Bike to whisk downtown for a late lunch with a progressive buddy. Citi Bikes have added hugely to my quality of life. So much fun to just grab a bike (I pay for an annual membership) and zip to where I’m going faster than the subway could take me and with more exciting scenery. We ate at Dudley's in the Lower East Side (one block from the Tenement Museum). I had the chopped salad (meh) and roasted Brussels sprouts (very tasty!), and we talked about politics, trans controversies, and the woes of traveling to the beach (his husband's family is pro beach vacations; neither of us is a beach person). We weren't on the same page on every issue, but there wasn't anything we couldn't talk about.

While we chatted, we sat outside in the beautiful spring weather and watched the pretty women (me) and pretty men (him) walk by. It was lovely. Our waitress told us she was from Colombia. We didn't ask to see her papers.

(Ok, it wasn't perfect. A young woman sitting down next to us carelessly let her purse tip over my Diet Coke, which spilled onto one pant leg. Annoying but no big deal. She apologized, and the soda was replaced.)

A quick subway ride home (the B and the N) and a brief stop at my bodega (it really does exist!) before finally getting home to my spacious by NYC standards (750 sq ft) apartment. This morning, the windows are open and I'm getting a gentle breeze and listening to the soothing sounds of chirping birds. A bit farther away, I can hear construction of some sort (they’re remodeling a gas station), which is less soothing, but tolerable.

I survived.

My odds remain good. The city’s murder rate continues to decline. New York had 113 homicides at this point last year, only 80 so far this year. My own police precinct, the 72nd, has had no murders this year (we had 3 for all of last year). New York is one of the safest cities in the United States.

None of this is me saying New York City has no problems. Disorder is too present, and we have too many homeless people on the streets. As I was saying goodbye to my buddy, I was also keeping an eye on a homeless couple drifting past behind him. They were probably harmless, but you keep an eye out. It would be better for all of us if they had somewhere safe to be.

And I’m also not saying that crazy progressive ideas don’t still exist. I saw that video of the stupid Yale kids forming a human chain for Gaza. But whatever “woke” is, there’s less of it in the air and in my classrooms than there was just a few years ago. Even my students whom I’d call ‘woke,’ are more open to other ways of seeing the world, which wasn’t as much the case back in 2020.

All I’m trying to tell y’all is the craziness you see on Twitter isn’t the reality that I live every day.

The reason Trump gave for this massive economic upheaval (he calls it “Liberation Day”) is that he wants to revitalize America’s industrial base. Trump often waxes nostalgic, and his movement is called “Make America Great AGAIN” because he thinks we aren’t any more. He wants to rebuild the factory-dotted landscape of the 1950s (along with a few white picket fences and dad going off to work with a lunch pail while mom stays home with the 3.5 kids).

Empty, dead sites, factories that are falling down…will be knocked down, and they’re going to have brand new factories built in their place. We’re going to be an entirely different country.

But we are a great country!

Compared to other big, rich countries, America is by far the greatest.

Pro-MAGA accounts claim this growth in wealth has benefited Wall Street and the billionaire class (ironic coming from Trump and Musk), and now it’s time for working-class Americans to get their share, but this view is completely wrong.

The median household income in the United States was $80,610 in 2023, meaning half of American households made more than that! This is far higher than Germany's median of around $60,000 or Japan's of $32,000.

The Fed St Louis shows this rise since 1984.

And if you look at the Census breakdowns, ALL classes of Americans have benefited.

The median household income of Americans—in inflation-adjusted 2023 dollars—has gone from $54,530 in 1967 to $80,610 in 2023, pushing everyone’s income higher.

13% of people made less than $15,000 (2023 dollars) in 1967. In 2023, that number had fallen to 7.4%

Move up a column, and 9.4% made between $15,000 and $24,999 in 1967. By 2023, only 6.7% were that poor.

Now, look at the rich end of the chart. In 1967, only 1.7% made more than $200,000. In 2023, a whopping 14.4% were pulling in the gravy.

So yes, the rich did get rich faster, but everyone had more money because the whole country was prospering. More income meant more consumer goods (dishwashers, air conditioners), including some that had never existed (home computers, cell phones) and others that had vastly improved in quality (cars). And it wasn’t just stuff. We also have longer life expectancy to enjoy all the stuff. The average American lived 71 years in 1967 but 79 years in 2023.

This doesn’t mean America is perfect. Our European allies (ex-allies?) live longer, and people in Japan live longer still (obesity may be part of the problem here). Our health insurance is spotty, and we have too much gun violence. But overall, America is not a poor, struggling country with a downtrodden working class. We are rich and getting richer.

Well, were.

Later that night, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the young woman—Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Öztürk—had been arrested because she had “engaged in activities in support of” Hamas, but Homeland Security gave no examples.

The only Gaza-related activity Öztürk’s fellow students recalled was her co-writing an op-ed critical of Israel in March 2024. This may be what got her in trouble.

Shortly before she was arrested, Öztürk had sent a worried text to Najiba Akbar, a former chaplain at Tufts with whom she’d become friendly.

I recently learned that someone added all my information to a doxxing website called Canary Mission because of the op-ed published last March

Canary Mission is a pro-Israel group that hunts down critics of Israel and posts their supposed anti-Israel content online. Canary Mission has a page on Öztürk, claiming that she “engaged in anti-Israel activism in March 2024, in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israelis,” but the only evidence they offer is a link to that same op-ed. The rest of Canary Mission’s page on Öztürk focuses on her academic career.

Terrifying stuff.

On Thursday, two days after Öztürk was seized, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a bellicose statement that was equally vague on details:

“If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason you are coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we are not going to give you a visa,” Rubio told reporters.

Rubio mentioned no specific crimes committed by Öztürk. He suggested she came to America “to participate in movements” that were “harassing students” and “taking over buildings,” but made no claim that Öztürk herself did any of those things. She simply wrote an editorial that showed she shared some views with those who had done these bad things.

That same logic of guilt by association would have had me in jail for arson during the 2020 George Floyd protests, because many of the people burning buildings were left-wingers, and I am also on the left!

And what about that op-ed Öztürk co-wrote in March 2024? I’ve read a dozen of these letters, manifestos, and op-eds since horrible attacks of October 7 2023 (and Israel’s counterstrikes on the Gaza Strip), and this one stands out for being incredibly moderate. The writers picked their words carefully, clearly trying to convince with reason rather than emotion. Their main complaint was that the school’s president had ignored a Tufts College Community Senate resolution that the school

acknowledge the Palestinian genocide, apologize for University President Sunil Kumar’s statements, disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel. These resolutions were the product of meaningful debate by the Senate and represent a sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law. Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.

This wasn’t a terrorist press release. There were no justifications of Palestinian violence or pictures of death gliders. Hamas was not mentioned once. The students even admitted that there was a case to be made for the University staying out of political disputes.

While an argument may be made that the University should not take political stances and should focus on research and intellectual exchange, the automatic rejection, dismissive nature and condescending tone in the University’s statement have caused us to question whether the University is indeed taking a stand against its own declared commitments to free speech, assembly and democratic expression.

And they went on to say they favored open debate and supported the humanity of all people.

We reject any attempt by the University or the Office of the President to summarily dismiss the role of the Senate and mischaracterize its resolution as divisive. The open and free debate demonstrated by the Senate process (exemplified by the length, open notice and substantive exchange in the proceedings and the non-passing of one of the proposed resolutions), together with the serious organizing efforts of students, warrant credible self-reflection by the Office of the President and the University. We, as graduate students, affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people and reject the University’s mischaracterization of the Senate’s efforts [emphasis added].

Some of these were controversial points—divesting from companies with ties to Israel is wrongheaded—but nothing was outside the range of reasonable debate.

Her teachers and fellow students said she was not an activist.

“It doesn’t really make sense, because she wasn’t a figure on campus,” Ms. Akbar said. “I don’t think she was active in banned groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. From what I know, she was doing her thing, doing her Ph.D.”

Ms. Öztürk has not been charged with any crime, and her friends are at a loss to understand how the law-abiding, introspective student they know matches the portrait of a political activist being presented by the government.

Is what the government doing to Öztürk legal? Maybe?

Öztürk had a student visa, since revoked, which gave her fewer legal rights than someone holding a permanent residence status (a green card). The Department of Homeland Security has said Öztürk is being deported under 1952’s Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), one of the provisions of which allows the State Department to deport people who are deemed a threat to America’s foreign policy.

How a quiet graduate student could be a threat to foreign policy boggles my mind.

Even if the INA gives Rubio the right to deport Öztürk—which it may—doing so solely because of her words, and not because of any material actions in support of terrorism, may have violated the First Amendment. American courts have long ruled that in most cases the First Amendment applies to non-citizens.

For example, in 1945, the Supreme Court ruled that Harry Bridges, an immigrant from Australia, could not be deported simply because of his alleged communist ties (Bridges v. Wixon, 1945).

In a concurring opinion, Justice Frank Murphy said:

once an alien lawfully enters and resides in this country he becomes invested with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to all people within our borders. Such rights include those protected by the First and Fifth Amendments and by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. None of these provisions acknowledges any distinctions between citizens and resident aliens. They extend their inalienable privileges to all ‘persons’ and guard against any encroachment of those rights by federal or state authority. Indeed, this Court has previously and expressly recognized that Harry Bridges, the alien, possesses the right to free speech and free press and that the Constitution will defend him in the exercise of that right (emphasis added).

On Friday (March 29), U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston halted deportation until she could determine if her court still had jurisdiction over Öztürk. This may save Öztürk, but Secretary Rubio and the Trump administration seem very determined to make an example of her.

Because that is what she is: an example. No sane person thinks Öztürk herself is a threat to America, but for the Trump administration she represents a way to punch back at all the student protests that roiled American college campuses in the aftermath of Hamas’s October terrorist attack.

Those protests sometimes did go beyond what was right and legal, with extremists singling out Jewish students and Jewish businesses for harassment. Many critics, and not just Republican ones, felt that campuses had long downplayed the dangers of antisemitism and thus may have helped to create an environment that enabled the intimidation of Jewish students. Antisemitism had been viewed in some social justice circles as not as bad as other kinds of bigotry, perhaps because Jews, now considered white, were viewed as privileged, not oppressed. This is a dumb point-of-view, but not uncommon in progressive spaces.

The left’s blind spot for antisemitism is a problem (although almost certainly there is more antisemitism on the right), but it has nothing to do with Rumeysa Öztürk. She wasn’t a violent radical. She was simply a studious young woman who wanted to teach children and live her life in peace.

But someone has to pay, and if you can’t deport that blue-haired kid who occupied Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall because they are a citizen, you can punish the shy Tufts student who has only a visa to protect her. It’s petty, unjust, possibly illegal, and hence very Trumpian.

And wrong.

The First Amendment is there for a reason. Our country was built by brave men speaking out against injustice, putting their lives and “sacred honor” on the line so that future generations could be free from the fickle whims of autocrats.

Free speech isn’t a luxury that we drop the minute someone calls out “national security.” Free speech is vital to the health of our Republic. We can’t debate ideas if we can’t talk about them. Is supporting Israel militarily right or wrong? How should we view what is happening in Gaza? Are West Bank settlers making peace less likely? No question should be off-limits.

And when we invite students to visit our country, we are asking them to share in that vigorous intellectual debate. We don’t want a two-tiered system where some students can speak their minds while others must stay silent or risk being deported. This is personal for me. As a history professor, I teach many kids here on student visas. I want them to fully partake in all that America has to offer, including her glorious and unique right to speak freely, and damn all tyrants.

If America deports Öztürk for her words alone, it is creating a chilling precedent where free speech depends on citizenship status, betraying the principles that define our nation.

America should never be ‘the land of the free only if we like what you’re saying.’

When you’re tempted to offer your two bits on the horror of the day, instead tweet: “Oh god, those poor people. My heart goes out to them!”

That’s all.

Whether it’s the Los Angeles wildfire inferno or an ugly mass shooting in Texas, send your thoughts and prayers, and keep your uninformed “here’s what it all means” rancorous garbage to yourself.

“I’m not uninformed!”

Of course you are, you cocksure nitwit. The event you’re drooling over for clicks just happened a few hours ago. I guarantee 80% of the info you’re hearing is incomplete or outright wrong. The “fog of war” is a cliché for a reason. In any chaotic event, the people who know what’s going on (if there are any) are busy dealing with the thing and, in any case, probably only see a small piece of the puzzle. The people telling us about the thing—from stunned government spokespeople to decent reporters to grifting Twitter turds—are necessarily going to garble some of the facts because they’re human (or assholes).

And unless you’re an actual wildfire fire prevention expert (or ballistics expert, or hurricane relief expert, etc.), the “facts” you think you know are probably wrong. Too many people file something their cousin Joey’s wife’s hairdresser told them as “rock solid evidence” in their memory banks.

Early disaster news gathering is like playing a game of “telephone” in the dark while air-raid sirens are drilling holes in your eardrums.1 Whatever you’ve heard—whether from mainstream or social media—it’s distorted.2

And it’s ten times worse if any political angle can be squeezed into the event.

Mass shootings are easy. “It’s gun control, stupid!” “No, it’s liberal schools that radicalize kids!” “It’s Christian nationalism!” “It’s trans groomers!” “It’s racism!”3

The Los Angeles wildfires? “It’s incompetent leftist governments that have DEI-staffed fire departments and spend more on the homeless than fire prevention!” “Are you insane? Climate change has led to hotter, drier weather, making wildfires bigger and harder to stop!”

And those initial takes might not be all wrong. I can imagine incompetent government officials not doing enough to prevent the fires. I can imagine long-term weather patterns making events like this worse. But at this early stage, we’re guessing. Some of those factors certainly matter somewhat, but I suspect the biggest cause of the out-of-control wildfires is building dense residential neighborhoods nestled in beautiful, easily crisped foliage in the heart of a dry country prone to high winds that has the potential to turn any spark4 into ground zero in hell.

But I don’t know; nobody knows. This is why I’m fine waiting a few days for smarter, better-informed people to weigh in with carefully considered evidence. They’ll face criticism—it’s not THAT, it’s THIS!—and we’ll eliminate some of the stupider ideas and maybe reach a consensus explanation.

Because there’s no rush! There’s no need for an answer today. Gun control will not get passed today. Liberal governors will not be kicked out of office today. Take a breath, and wait.

This doesn’t mean doing nothing at all. If it’s a big disaster like a hurricane, reach out to charities that do good work in the hard-hit region.5 Send some money, send some positive vibes, and then go hug someone you love. When lives are tragically cut short, it’s a note from fate reminding us we must always treasure our family and friends.

EDIT
P.S. I just listened to a (short) personal account from writer Meghan Daum that I highly recommend to you. It IS an expert account because she’s an expert in what happened to her. Special Episode: Letter From the Los Angeles Fires. She has some general smart thoughts (“If the fires are at zero percent containment, so is anyone’s idea of what really happened”), but mostly, she just tells her own story. She’s a good egg. I’m a long-time subscriber to her podcast. I like her for many reasons, but starting because her book “The Problem with Everything” was an important early step in my road to becoming more critical of lefty madness. Maybe you could subscribe to her as well.

Yes, our nation has gone completely Hunter S. Thompson-level bonkers.

[EDIT: But not quite as bonkers as I originally thought. Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano posted a picture of a Star Wars TIE fighter being hauled along by a truck, implying it was a drone. I thought he was serious and pasted it in this essay with some snide commentary, but he said he was being sarcastic, and I believe him. I really should not have fallen for that. Sorry, Senator Mastriano, you were funny, I was gullible. My bad!] To replace him, I’ll give you a Facebook post by U.S. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.]

From the Wall Street Journal:

Officials across the East Coast are pushing the federal government for more answers about the wave of mysterious drone sightings, with some seeking local authority to shoot down the unauthorized aircraft.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, said over the weekend that state agencies were monitoring the drone sightings in his state but that he was unhappy with the flow of information coming from federal officials. Connecticut state Sen. Tony Hwang, a Republican who represents Fairfield County where numerous drone sightings have been reported, said there has been a breakdown in communication with the federal government.

Former and future President Donald Trump:

"The government knows what is happening. Look, our military knows where they took off from. If it's a garage they can go right inside. They know where it came from and where it went. For some reason, they don't want to comment, and I think they'd be better off saying what it is. Our military knows. Our president knows, and for some reason they want to keep people in suspense. I can't imagine it's the enemy, because if it was the enemy they'd blast it."

Nonsense.

What happened? At some point in November, regular salt-of-the-earth Americans1 started reporting seeing bright lights attached to what they thought were drones. The sightings began in New Jersey but spread to New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. The government received over 5000 tips. At this point, there have probably been far more. A Facebook group was created to discuss the sightings and has more than 75,000 members. People have been sharing videos of themselves pointing at bright lights and claiming they were looking at drones. On December 13, Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland and newly elected Senator Kim of New Jersey both joined the chorus of scary drone spotters by tweeting their own supposed drone videos.2

Obviously, these sightings are a mass hysteria. “A phenomenon that transmits collective illusions of threats, whether real or imaginary, through a population and society as a result of rumors and fear.” In no rational universe is there a widespread and coordinated assault on our skies across that many different states by mysterious, nefarious drones. The mind boggles at coming up with a James Bond-style conspiracy that would suddenly unleash thousands of VERY VISIBLE drones on America just to have them weave around like drunken fireflies.

There have been hundreds of similar hysterias in history. Remember the great Clown Panic of 2016? People claimed evil clowns were trying to attack children. Clown sightings spread nationwide, terrorizing parents and kids, but no actual evil clowns were ever found (despite a mob of Penn State students launching a surreal clown hunt).3

More grim was the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, where teachers across the country were accused of engaging in Satanic rituals involving preschoolers. A number spent years in jail because of testimony from 4-year-olds whose strange stories were prompted by leading questions from gullible police and prosecutors.

We’ll never track down the exact chain of events that triggered the Drone Panic of 2024, but we can guess the rough outlines. A few people started shouting (on social media, of course) that they saw something funny in the sky. Others looked at the sky and shouted the same thing. Then more shouting, more people looking at the sky, many seeing funny business.

None of this is surprising. Most people are clueless about the sky.4 There are weird blinking lights speeding by all the time, and mostly, we just ignore them. Untrained people don’t know whether they’re drones, helicopters, Boeing 767s, or Xglrnak-7 coming in to kidnap and probe some midwesterners.

But when you tell people to look for strange stuff, goldarnit they’re going to look, and many of them will see stuff. We’re susceptible that way!

And there’s a lot of stuff up there! Most of the lights people are seeing are airplanes (it’s so helpful for nefarious flying objects to display FAA-compliant running lights). Some of the other UFOs people are seeing are actually drones. The FAA says more than 1 million drones have been registered. And I guarantee a lot more drone owners have been sending their expensive babies up in the sky, either to look for the “strange” drones or to help prank America.

I’ve read complaints that the federal government hasn’t done a good enough job of quieting peoples’ fears, including many from state and local officials, but I don’t know what else they could have done. It’s hard to say, “Those things you are seeing are just airplanes and stuff, and you’re too credulous,” because government officials don’t know what each person is seeing. They have to laboriously track down reports and verify that, yes, indeed, this was just a plane. That was a star. And over there Grandma Bessie just forgot to put her contacts in again.

John Kirby, a spokes for the National Security Council, said on Monday:

We have not identified anything anomalous or any national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the Northeast.

I mean, what else can they say? Go back and inside and stop yammering at us?

Or maybe we should be worried

And then there are the ‘other’ drones.

In December 2023, Virginia military bases started spotting bunches of real drones invading their airspace. The Wall Street Journal published a long piece on the incursions.

U.S. officials didn’t believe hobbyists were flying the drones, given the complexity of the operation. The drones flew in a pattern: one or two fixed-wing drones positioned more than 100 feet in the air and smaller quadcopters, the size of 20-pound commercial drones, often below and flying slower. Occasionally, they hovered.

The U.S. military is not authorized to shoot down drones over American soil unless they pose an immediate threat, and they were unable, even after much effort, to track down where the drones were coming from. Finally, in early January, they found one Chinese student who had used a drone to take pictures of navy ships. No connection to the Chinese government could be found—he claimed photography was a hobby5—but he was still sentenced to six months in prison.

And drone swarms around military bases haven’t stopped. More recently, they’ve been seen around Edwards Air Force Base in California.

This is more serious than the New Jersey panic. Many of the incursions are probably irresponsible civilians, but some could be foreign actors.

There’s even a chance that a few real spy drones triggered the New Jersey panic, as the state has its own military bases. (Although I remain skeptical.)

And there’s our drone future to worry about. We already see drones being used extensively in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Drones are getting smaller, more sophisticated, and cheaper. Small suicide drones with explosive charges are chasing down individual soldiers. It’s easy to imagine a world where thousands or tens of thousands of armed drones swarm a battlefield. Or a city. That would be cause for a real panic.

I saw this video back in 2020, and it still scares me.

Five days later, Pennsylvania police arrested Luigi Mangione at an Altoona McDonald’s and charged him with murder. In addition to a gun like that used in the killing, Mangione had a note seemingly confessing to the crime (although, for now, he has not pled guilty).

…it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. [Mangione is wrong. UHG is 17th by market cap.] It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it…

Thompson was married with two kids. He was rich but came from modest roots (his father had been a grain elevator worker, his mother a beautician), unlike Mangione, a scion of a very wealthy Pennsylvania family, who went to an elite Baltimore prep school and received two degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.1

Shocking to me, many Americans on social media showed no sympathy for Thompson.2 Instead, they said he got what he deserved because he was a health insurance executive. Many treated Mangione like an outlaw folk hero.3

The replies on an NPR Facebook post were typical:

Others didn’t say the murder was justified but suggested it was at least understandable. Talking to Joy Reid on MSNBC, Senator Elizabeth Warren said, “Violence is never the answer…but you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands.”

Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel featured a segment showcasing staffers’ texts thirsting for the alleged murderer because he was a hottie. Mega-millionaire Kimmel called the murder of a man whose two sons, 16 and 19, will never feel his hugs again “a crime we can relate to.”

When I pushed back against this POV and tweeted, “Insurance executives are not murderers,” more than 1000 people replied, most disagreeing with me.

This is madness.

We sign contracts with for-profit health insurance companies, knowing they will pay out less than we put in. We also know in advance that they will keep some money back for expenses and profit. That’s the bargain! The same is true for life insurance and homeowner’s insurance.

Even if they weren’t for-profit corporations, they could not give everyone all the money they wanted every time they wanted it. Doctors and hospitals always push for more tests and procedures than are necessary. They leave it to the insurance company to play the bad guy. If insurance companies paid out every claim in full, they would go broke!

Economist Noah Smith argues that insurance companies aren’t the main problem; rather, it’s the high amounts charged by providers. UnitedHealth Group (United Healthcare’s parent company) had a net profit of 6.11%. (Despite what Mangione's manifesto says, this is not large. The average net profit of the S&P 500 in the first two quarters of 2024 was at least 12%.) About 83% of the premium income goes to pay medical costs. An ambulance ride in New York City will cost you at least $1385. The national average for an MRI is $1325. A typical colonoscopy is $2750. American medicine is expensive.

The rest of UHG’s income covers operating costs and that 6.11% profit.

A reminder: There is not an unlimited supply of healthcare that nasty insurance companies are keeping from us. Doctors, nurses, ambulances, and expensive hospital equipment are all in limited supply. If I’m seeing my doctor, you can’t see her. If I’m having a cardiac ablation, that 8-person team isn’t available to fix your heart. Healthcare is a scarce resource. In America, we regulate that scarcity using money mediated by insurance companies. Countries with more socialized medicine tend to regulate it with different kinds of gatekeeping, including both turning down patients for procedures and (more often) putting them on waiting lists.

A 2023 Guardian article reported that over 120,000 people died on National Health Service waiting lists in 2022. Many of these would have died even with treatment, of course, but some could have been saved. English NHS employees decide who goes on the front of the line, and sometimes they make the wrong call.

“Record numbers of people are spending their final months in pain and agony, waiting for treatment that never arrives,” said Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary. “The basic promise of the NHS – that it will be there for us when we need it – has been broken.”

I saw this firsthand yesterday. A Canadian Twitter follower of mine, Adam Burgoyne (@big_figgot), posted that he’d had a health scare and gone to the hospital. They did a quick check to see if he was dying and then put him in the waiting room. Six hours later, he gave up and went home. That was December 5. Later, he died of an aortic aneurysm. He was 39. Rest in peace, Adam.

No matter what system you use, there will be gatekeepers. Whether they are private insurance doctors ruling on whether your expenses are covered or public bureaucrats deciding where to put you on a waiting list or in a waiting room, someone will make the call, and sometimes, that call will result in tragedy. This is inevitable.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that companies like UHG always make good choices. An October Senate report, “How Medicare Advantage Insurers Have Denied Patients Access to Post-Acute Care,” outlined how UHG used AI to turn down patients asking for post-acute care (care after severe illnesses).

The suit continued arguing that despite the high error rate, the company and its subsidiary "continue to systemically deny claims using their flawed AI model" because they know that only about 0.2% of policyholders will actually appeal denied claims and that the vast majority will either pay out-of-pocket costs or forgo the remainder of their prescribed post-acute care.

That sounds quite bad, but UHG is a for-profit company. Working hard to avoid paying out too much (by their definition) is how they make a profit. They may have crossed an ethical line in their use of AI, but we shouldn’t be surprised that the capitalist company that we hired to insure us behaves like a capitalist company.

This doesn’t make insurance executives like Brian Thompson murderers.

“Yes they are, they just do it through paperwork.”

That’s simply not the same. Imagine Sally needs possibly life-saving heart surgery. UHG rules the care is not covered (maybe she’s a bad risk, maybe the AI made a mistake). Sally dies. Is her death partly UHG’s fault? Perhaps, but they didn't kill her; a bad heart valve killed her. “But UHG could have saved her!” Perhaps, but that’s not the same. The hospital could have saved her, too, but they decided not to work for free. You could have saved her by handing over $100,000, but I don’t think you would.

None of this means that America’s dependence on private insurance is the best we can offer or to deny the insurance horror stories we’ve all read. But every system will have those stories some of the time. Sometimes, the system will not “be there for us when we need it.”

Could America do better? Matt Bruenig—a smart left-wing pundit—wrote a piece for the even more left-wing Jacobin arguing that our system is overpriced due to bloated administrative costs.

They [insurance companies] are directly responsible for over half a trillion dollars of administrative waste and (at the very least) indirectly responsible for the provider rents that are bleeding Americans dry. The quicker we nationalize health insurance, the better.

So perhaps our best choice is to replace our system with something like England’s or Canada’s. But none of that means that our current system is run by murderers who deserve to be executed by good-looking vigilantes.

You disagree? Fine. Let’s follow this argument to its logical conclusion. Brian Thompson was a mass murderer. They are all mass murderers. Every single insurance executive. Letting them walk free is an offense to justice. There are already “WANTED” posters with health insurance CEOs’ names and faces pasted around New York City. Pick those bastards up. Throw them all in jail today! Or send them to the guillotine! Madame Defarge awaits!

If they are truly evil and worthy of execution, as so many claim, their companies must be dissolved. Yay! No more insurance companies!

And tomorrow, when you need to go to a clinic for an endoscopy or visit the hospital for that gallbladder operation? I hope you have lots of cash, or your hospital won’t admit you, and your surgeon won’t operate. We can build a new system—with a gaggle of new problems—but that will take years. In the meantime, there will be unimaginable chaos, and the suffering of those without fat bank accounts will be immense.

Sure, my picture is crazy, but don’t blame me! Blame everyone calling Thompson a murderer. If the health insurance business is genuinely evil and its participants deserving of execution, the plug should be pulled immediately.

The adult reality is that Thompson was an imperfect man working in an imperfect industry. If we don’t believe healthcare should be a for-profit enterprise, the solution lies in electing legislators committed to building a better model. Addressing our troubled healthcare system requires political action, not demonizing or murder.

Just be warned, whatever new system we create will have its own injustices and victims.

Do you still think Thompson was complicit? Perhaps you’re right, but then maybe most of us are. Do you work for a petroleum company? A bank? A casino? Whatever you do, someone probably thinks it’s evil. I just came back from a Las Vegas trip that cost me a few thousand dollars. That’s money I didn’t give to charity or use to pay some poor person’s medical bills.4 Maybe I’m the bad guy.

And what about you? Make any unnecessary purchases lately?

First, the giant orange elephant in the room: Yes, a big reason to vote Harris, maybe the biggest for many people, is that she’s not Trump. Which is fine! There’s absolutely nothing wrong with voting against a horrible candidate, and Trump was one of our worst presidents.1

Orange Man IS Very Bad

Start with Trump’s long record of boorish behavior, from saying he liked to grab women “by the pussy” because, as a celebrity, they’d let him, to his contempt for military men like Senator John McCain. “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” McCain spent five years tortured in a North Vietnamese prison camp. Trump got out of the Vietnam draft by claiming to have bone spurs in his feet.

Trump’s attack on McCain is typical of his special scorn for America’s military. He’s referred to soldiers who died in World War Two as “losers” and “suckers.”

On at least two occasions since becoming president, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his views, Trump referred to former President George H. W. Bush as a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese as a Navy pilot in World War II.

Just this August, he was chastised for showing disrespect to Medal of Honor recipients. At an event where Miriam Adelson was receiving the Medal of Freedom, Trump opined that the Medal of Freedom was “much better” than the Medal of Honor because the recipients of the latter were “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.”

Trump’s defenders claimed he was just joking around, but it’s not normal for an American president to joke about dead American heroes.

Veterans of Foreign Wars Commander-in-Chief Al Lipphardt, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, was not amused.

When a candidate to serve as our military’s commander-in-chief so brazenly dismisses the valor and reverence symbolized by the Medal of Honor and those who have earned it, I must question whether they would discharge their responsibilities to our men and women in uniform with the seriousness and discernment necessary for such a powerful position.

Or take his behavior as president. Trump’s brain accumulates random bits of trivia—he can talk at length about whale psychology or whether it’s better to be eaten by a shark or electrocuted—but he was notoriously uninterested in the actual work of the job. His staff learned to keep his daily memos short because Trump was too impatient to read long, detailed briefs about the business of the country he was running.

And while Mr. Obama liked policy option papers that were three to six single-spaced pages, council staff members are now being told to keep papers to a single page, with lots of graphics and maps.

But if his name was mentioned in a policy paper, he’d read more of it.

National Security Council officials have strategically included Trump's name in "as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he's mentioned," according to one source, who relayed conversations he had with NSC officials.

In terms of actual policy, Trump was bad. He appointed the three Supreme Court judges who made overturning Roe vs. Wade possible, thus taking away abortion rights from millions of women. In addition, he appointed hundreds of lower court judges, which will make American legal rulings skew more conservatively for decades. He cut taxes on the rich, which helped to increase the deficit.

Worse, he abused the power of the presidency for his personal gain. Trump repeatedly threatened to use the FBI against his political opponents. He asked the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden in order to help his reelection campaign and then illegally withheld military aid to try and pressure them to do his bidding.

Seeing alliances as zero-sum quid pro quo relationships, Trump has repeatedly undercut America’s ties with its allies, including NATO.

“We were supporting NATO. They screw us on trade so bad, the European nations. And then on top of that, they were screwing us on the military. So they’re taking a tremendous advantage of us. It’s not sustainable. You can’t keep doing this.” 

Attempting to Break Democracy

This is the biggie.

The January 6 riot was not an isolated event. For the two months leading up to it, Trump engaged in relentless election denial. In fact, even before the election occurred, he was actively laying the groundwork to challenge any outcome in which he didn’t emerge victorious.

On Sept 23, 2020, he was asked whether he would “commit here today for a peaceful transfer of power after the November election.” He refused:

“We’re going to have to see what happens. You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.”

During the Sept 29, 2020 debate, he said:

they’re sending millions of ballots all over the country. There’s fraud. They found ’em in creeks. They found some, with the name Trump, just happened to have the name Trump, just the other day in a wastepaper basket. They’re being sent all over the place. They sent two in a Democrat area. They sent out a thousand ballots. Everybody got two ballots. This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen

…It’s a rigged election…

There was no good evidence to support these allegations. This Reuters article outlines the safety measures used to make sure voter fraud does not occur. The United States already has a long history of voting by mail without problems.

Five states - Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington - hold their elections primarily by mail and have documented almost no cases of cheating. Oregon, for instance, has sent out more than 100 million mail ballots since 2000 and reported around a dozen cases of proven fraud.

Calling into question the results of an election before it’s even taken place is not normal, and Trump did it repeatedly.

Denying Reality

Once all the votes were counted and it was determined that Biden had won (Saturday, November 7), Trump, with the help of unscrupulous lawyers, sought to overturn the results. They filed dozens of lawsuits. None succeeded. Trump’s own Attorney General, William Barr, told him he had lost. On Dec 1, Barr officially announced that…

the Justice Department had not found any evidence of fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

Despite this, between November 7 and January 6, 2021, Trump made repeated references to fraud and a stolen election, feeding rampant paranoia among his supporters. He also tried to pressure swing state officials to try to flip the results and give him the presidency.

Pressured by Trump, Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (a Republican) ordered a full hand recount. The recount was finished on November 19, with Biden still winning Georgia. Trump requested a machine recount, which again left Biden the winner. On December 14, the official Democratic electors met and cast their 16 votes for Biden. That same day, 16 Republicans falsely declared themselves Georgia’s official electors, committing election fraud.

On January 2, Trump called Raffensperger and asked him to “find” the votes needed to give Trump a win.

“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,”

“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president said during the call. “You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”

That “big risk” implied threat was made while Trump was still president and in charge of the Justice Department.

In Arizona, similar pressure was put on Rusty Bowers, Arizona’s Speaker of the House (a Republican). On November 22, Trump and Rudolph Giuliani called Bowers and urged him to find evidence of fraud and then replace Arizona’s current slate of electors with a pro-Trump slate.

“I swore an oath to the Constitution,” Bowers said.

“Well, you know,” Giuliani said, “we’re all Republicans, and we need to be working together.”

“Mr. President,” Bowers said, “I campaigned for you. I voted for you. The policies you put in did a lot of good. But I will do nothing illegal for you.”

“We’re asking you to consider this,” Trump again told Bowers.

For his refusal, Bowers faced weeks of harassment by Trump loyalists.

Caravans of trucks climbed the road to Bowers’s house with pro-Trump flags and video panels and loudspeakers blasting to his neighbors that he was corrupt, a traitor, a pervert, a pedophile. His daughter Kacey, who had struggled with alcoholism, was now dying, and the mob outside the house upset her. [She died a few weeks later.] At one point, Bowers went out to face them and encountered a man in a Three Percenter T-shirt, with a semiautomatic pistol on his hip, screaming abuse. Bowers walked up close enough to grab the gun if the Three Percenter drew. “I see you brought your little pop gun,” he said. “You gonna shoot me? Yell all you want—don’t touch that gun.” He knew that it would take only one would-be patriot under the influence of hateful rhetoric to kill him. He would later tell the January 6 congressional committee: “The country is at a very delicate part where this veneer of civilization is thinner than my fingers pressed together.”

And it wasn’t just Republican bigwigs who faced pressure. On Dec 3, 2020, Rudy Giuliani posted a video of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two election workers, falsely saying they were cheating Trump as they counted votes. Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss received numerous threatening voicemail messages saying, among other things, that they should be hanged for treason.

Giuliani later lost a defamation lawsuit and now owes the women almost $150 million dollars (which he may not have).

In addition to pressuring state leaders and election workers, Trump’s allies, guided by Giuliani, John Eastman, and others, organized more slates of fake electors. Their goal was to replace the actual electors with their fakes. Key to this plan was pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the real electors and insist that the fake electors be counted instead. Constitutionally, it is the current Vice President who is supposed to certify the results of an election. Finally, the schemers believed there was the possibility that Pence could be convinced to declare the election completely corrupted, at which point it would be thrown to the House of Representatives to decide (which would have almost certainly led to a Trump victory).

While these maneuvers went on, Trump had spent two months rousing up his fans, using speeches and tweets, repeatedly telling them that they had been robbed. This all laid the groundwork for the January 6 Capitol riot.

January 6

A December 19 tweet from Trump set the fuse.

Trump supporters retweeted his viral message. Grassroots organizers rented buses. Individual Americans decided this was important enough to drive or fly to Washington. Extremist groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters also planned to be in Washington and hoped to do something to stop the steal.

On the afternoon of January 6, a few hundred thousand loyal fans gathered near the White House to listen to Trump. Within a few hours, the election was supposed to be certified at the Capitol building.

The intent of Trump’s speech remains controversial. Defenders say that he called for a peaceful protest, which he did a little bit:

I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

But his speech was filled with far more incendiary phrases, asking his supporters to “fight like hell.”

this year they rigged an election. They rigged it like they’ve never rigged an election before.

we’re going to have somebody in there that should not be in there and our country will be destroyed and we’re not going to stand for that.

Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.

You will have an illegitimate president. That’s what you’ll have. And we can’t let that happen.

We won in a landslide. This was a landslide. They said it’s not American to challenge the election. This was the most corrupt election in the history, maybe of the world.

We must stop the steal and then we must ensure that such outrageous election fraud never happens again, can never be allowed to happen again.

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

There was also pressure on Mike Pence to “do the right thing” (meaning not certify the election results). Earlier that morning, Trump had spoken to Pence by phone: “You don’t have the courage to make a hard decision.” In his speech to the crowd, he kept up the arm-twisting on Pence.

I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so.

Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. All he has to do, all this is, this is from the number one, or certainly one of the top, Constitutional lawyers in our country. He has the absolute right to do it.

And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a, a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold our Constitution.

Even before Trump stopped speaking, the crowd had started heading toward the Capitol Building. Most of the crowd just had cell phones and MAGA hats, but the extremists had put together their own riot gear, including bear spray and plastic handcuffs. Someone hung a noose in front of the Capitol, and some in the crowd called for Mike Pence’s death. Many of them expected the election to be overturned that day.

Jensen [a Trump supporter] thought Pence would be the first to be arrested. When a friend texted to tell him that Pence had just “banged the gavel” to open the joint session, Jensen replied with photographs of Trump supporters streaming past the Washington Monument en route to the Capitol and a short message. — “That’s all about to change ;)”
— Washington Post

In the confused situation, the undermanned Capitol Police were unable to stop the crowd from reaching one side of the building and breaking inside. A much larger part of the crowd remained on the other side and—not realizing the building had been breached—repeatedly pushed against another group of police, screaming and pounding on them in attempts to break through. Inside, a minority of the rioters pushed through the halls in a surreal romp while the nation’s representatives scurried for safety. Some rioters yelled for the vice president to be arrested.

At 2:24 pm, while this was happening, Trump tweeted:

Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!

Shortly afterward, he tweeted a more soothing message, but the crowd didn’t seem to be reading their Twitter feeds.

Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!

At 2:44, one rioter, Ashli Babbitt, was killed while trying to break through a door to access the House chamber. By 3 pm, rioters were in both the House and Senate chambers.

Various officials tried to reach Trump and get him to call the crowd off. At first, Trump, who was watching the riot unfold on television, ignored them. Finally, at 3:13 pm, facing pressure from his closest advisors, he issued a more forceful call for the rioters to stand down.

I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!

At 4:17, he issued a video call for the rioters to go home, adding, “We love you. You’re very special.”

Reinforcements gradually arrived (the Washington DC Police, FBI teams), and the crowd dispersed. Later that night, the 2020 election was finally certified. Trump had failed, but not for lack of trying.

Watch The New York Times’ video story of what happened.

For a good moment-by-moment overview, try this Washington Post multimedia piece.

No, the Democrats Were Not As Bad

At this point in any election discussion, someone usually chimes in that Democrats are just as bad. They’ll bring up Hilary Clinton and the 2016 election. Except Clinton conceded her 2016 loss the very next day. True, she said stupid things much later and even called Trump an “illegitimate” president, but she took no legal action, and her words had zero effect as Trump was already president by that time.

Obama, the sitting president, hosted Trump at the White House and carried out the usual procedure of helping a new president transition into the job. And yes, some whining Democrats called for “faithless” electors, but while this is bad, no actual action was taken. The scale of election denial in 2016, while bad, was a faint shadow of what went down from November 2020 to January 2021.

His Own People Say “No”

But don’t believe me about Trump; listen to the people who know him well. President Trump has been rejected by many of his own former staffers, starting with former Vice President Mike Pence.

“I believe anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”

Can anything be more clear than that?

General John Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff and also Secretary of Homeland Security, called Trump “an authoritarian” and said that he had praised “Hitler’s generals” for their “loyalty” (meaning loyalty to Hitler personally).

“I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”

On October 25, 2024, thirteen former Trump senior staffers issued an open letter backing up General Kelly’s accusations and condemning Trump.

Yesterday, General John Kelly –-a retired four-star general and Donald Trump's former White House Chiefof Staff- told the American people what those of us who served in the Trump Administration have seen up close: Donald Trump is increasingly unstable, unfit to serve, and his second term would be more dangerous.

In a second term, those who once tried to prevent Donald Trump from his worst impulses will no longer be there to rein him in. For the good of our country, our democracy, and our Constitution, we are asking you to listen closely and carefully to General Kelly's warning. We unfortunately know all too well how serious and dire it is

Many other officials have condemned Trump, including Mark Esper, former Secretary of Defense.

“any elected leader needs to meet some basic criteria: they need to be able to put country over self, they need to have a certain amount of integrity and principle, they need to be able to reach across the aisle and bring people together and unite the country. Look, Donald Trump doesn’t meet those marks for me.”

These men and women were solid Republicans, people who had been in government for many years. They had acted as breaks on some of Trump’s worse impulses. Next time, if there is a next time, he’s made it clear he’ll pick more obedient guys. Like Hitler’s generals.

Here’s Trump on Joe Rogan:

TRUMP: The biggest mistake I made was I picked some people, I picked some great people, you know, but you don’t think about that. I picked some people that I shouldn’t have picked, I picked a few people that I shouldn’t have picked.

ROGAN: Neocons?

TRUMP: Yeah, neocons, or bad people, or disloyal people

So Why Kamala?

Ok, Trump is bad, but why vote for Harris?

Because she’s a typical mainstream Democrat. I’m not thrilled, but I’m also not appalled. Not being appalled is good! And she may surprise us. Harry Truman wasn’t seen as a great leader when he was chosen as vice president, but he rose to the challenge after President Franklin Roosevelt’s death.

I believe Harris will be a status-quo Democrat, just as she’s been her entire life in politics. In every job she’s held, she did what was expected. As district attorney of San Francisco and then attorney general of California, she prosecuted crooks. Hardly a soft-on-crime progressive. As a senator, she had a liberal voting record, but she wasn’t a wild-eyed socialist. In 2019 and 2020, she echoed social justice ideas about “equity,” but this—despite what her critics have ridiculously claimed—does not make her a Marxist. She’s always been an establishment Democrat, and she’ll continue to advance establishment policies.

Immigration? She’s supported Biden’s increased crackdown on border crossings, which should satisfy some immigration concerns.

Migrant crossings at the US-Mexico border remain at their lowest levels since 2020, according to new federal data obtained by CNN, as Republicans and Democrats spar over border security.
— CNN (Sept 30, 2024)

She’ll be far better than Trump on abortion. Roe vs. Wade was overturned (because of Trump-appointed judges), and a key policy goal of Harris is to protect women’s reproductive freedom as much as possible. From the Democratic Platform:

President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Democrats are committed to restoring the reproductive rights Trump ripped away. With a Democratic Congress, we will pass national legislation to make Roe the law of the land again. We will strengthen access to contraception so every woman who needs it is able to get and afford it. We will protect a woman’s right to access IVF.

She will continue to support Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, as opposed to Trump’s stated goal of quickly making peace, which can only mean quickly surrendering to Putin’s demands.

Alongside our allies, the United States has rallied a coalition of approximately 50 nations to provide much needed security assistance to Ukraine and coordinated unprecedented international actions to impose tough sanctions on Russia and hold Putin accountable on the world stage.

She made clear in her convention speech that, unlike Trump, she will not denigrate America’s troops or leaders:

As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world. And I will fulfill our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families, and I will always honor and never disparage their service and their sacrifice.

I worry a bit about her economic policies, but I worry more about Trump’s. Both of them are more willing to spend than save, and while I’m no economist, our national debt seems way too high.

Take a look at the CRFB (Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget) analysis of the Harris vs. Trump campaign plans. The analysts admit there is some guesswork here, but their mid-range approach has Harris adding 3.5 trillion to our debt while Trump adds 7.5 trillion. Again, I don’t like Harris’s approach, but I hate Trump’s!

And inflation? As of September, it’s back down to 2.4% per year, which is normal.

The Elevator Pitch: Vote Harris

Trump is a horrible choice. He was a lazy, inconsistent leader who pandered to whoever flattered him the most.

After his electoral defeat, he spent two months trying to overturn the results, even though election officials, many of them Republicans, assured him that he’d lost, as did his own attorney general. He ignored all of them, instead listening to enablers like Giuliani and Steve Bannon. He repeatedly claimed he’d been robbed, and his team pushed frivolous court cases and concocted a fake elector scheme.

Finally, he tried to intimidate Mike Pence into refusing to certify the vote and encouraged a violent mob to target the Capitol as a strong-arm tool—a mob whose anger had been stoked by Trump’s lies. And even after January 6, he still refused to admit that he lost, as he does to this day.

For all these reasons, even top Trump officials, starting with Pence, have said that he is unfit to be president of the United States.

The easy alternative is Kamala Harris, who, if she doesn’t inspire excitement, seems likely to be a normal leader. After a chaos-agent like Trump, conventional will be a relief. Harris will support America's allies and show respect to our military. She’ll try and advance a liberal policy agenda that won’t make Republicans happy, but it won’t involve toppling America’s democracy.

Do I think Trump, if elected, would try and become a dictator? Honestly, no. Ideologically, he’s not a fascist (I don’t think he has an ideology), and I have great faith in our democracy’s guardrails.2 But I also know he has no loyalty except to his own massive ego. He wants to be king of the hill and will happily make corrupt choices if they seem likely to benefit him. Democratic norms are a vital, precious commodity, and they don’t disappear overnight; if they go, it’s after being worn down over time like water dripping on stone. Trump’s choices are likely to degrade those norms. He’s already said he would pardon the January 6 rioters who swarmed into the Capitol. The Constitution should never again be under the protection of this narcissistic blowhard.

The choice is between restoring stability or embracing chaos. Voting for Harris means choosing conventional politics and the preservation of democratic norms.

Kayfabe is a term from professional wrestling that refers to the portrayal of events, characters, and storylines as real, even though they are scripted or staged to preserve the illusion of authenticity for the audience, and it perfectly describes Trump’s style. Trump doesn’t care whether it’s true or not, as long as he can convince the rubes it really happened.

This particular illusion starts with a tweet (it’s always a tweet) from Konstantin Kisin, a podcaster and writer who is well-known in the heterodox community.1 Kisin calls himself “non-partisan,” but like many heterodox types, he’s been leaning in a right-ish direction, although Kisin, as a citizen of the UK, will not be voting in American elections.

In his tweet, Kisin argues that Trump is preferable from a “geopolitical perspective” because “the world only respects one thing: strength,” and he quote-tweets a video to prove his point.

Except the video that supposedly shows Trump’s strength is a lie, kayfabe, a fantasy of invented virility.

Kisin’s shared video starts with a brief clip from the debate that has Trump saying:

He said why do you send me a picture of my house, I said, “You’re going to have to figure that out Abdul,” and for eighteen months we had nobody killed.

Impressive! Trump threatened “Abdul,” and Americans stayed safe. (Only it didn’t happen.)

The video then cuts to a longer clip from a July 2024 Sage Steele2 interview with Republican Congressman Wesley Hunt (Texas) and Republican Congressman Byron Donalds (Florida). In the clip (at the 43-minute mark), Hunt tells a more dramatic version of that Trump story.

I’m going to give you my favorite President Trump story. My number one favorite of all time. When we were negotiating with the Taliban, while President Trump was still the president, the president wanted to get out of Afghanistan, but he wanted a conditions-based withdrawal, meaning that you do what we tell you to do, and then we’ll start pulling troops back slowly as long as you abide by our rules. It's President Trump and Mike Pompeo, and they’re talking to Taliban leadership in the room, and they have one translator in the room. President Trump looked at the Taliban leader and said this, “I want to leave Afghanistan, but it’s going to be a conditions-based withdrawal,” and the translator translated, and he said, “If you harm the hair on a single American, I’m going to kill you,” and the translator goes, [Hunt mimes a shocked expression], and Trump goes “Tell him, tell him what I said,” and he reached in his pocket, pulled out a satellite photo of the leader of the Taliban’s home, and handed it to him, and got up and walked out of the room. [exclamations of amazement] Do you know not a single American was killed for 18 months? That’s the definition of strength. That’s what I’m talking about.

Wow, that’s tough and manly. I can see why Kisin was impressed. Trump kicking ass and showing photos!

Except it never happened.

The minute I listened to Hunt’s story, I knew it didn’t pass the smell test. Michael Bay wouldn’t write dialogue that obvious. “If you harm the hair on a single American, I’m going to kill you”? Trump having a photo in his pocket? Handing it to the guy and walking out? I can imagine the shot in the movie, but the real world isn’t a James Cameron film. Hunt’s story is cartoonishly bad.

And untrue. There was no threat, no photo, and Trump never met with Taliban leadership.

So what did happen?

A tentative plan for Trump to meet with Taliban leaders at Camp David had been discussed in August and September 2019, but it fell through. A full peace deal was later negotiated and signed in Doha, Qatar, on February 29, 2020. A macho Trump was not there. The deal was signed by stodgy American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad.

A few days later, on March 2, Trump did speak by phone to Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a top Taliban official and negotiator, still in Qatar. There was no mention in the news of any threats or photos. Instead, Trump sounded conciliatory.

Two days later, Trump called Baradar. According to an official who listened to the exchange, Trump told him, “You guys are tough fighters.” Then Trump asked, “Do you need something from me?”

“We need to get prisoners released,” Baradar said, adding that he had heard Ghani would not coöperate. Trump said that he would tell Pompeo to press Ghani.3

Trump never went to Qatar. Baradar never went to Washington.

A year later, Trump’s kayfabe started to reshape that conversation with Baradar.

In July 2021, speaking to a crowd of Arizona supporters, Trump suddenly claimed to have threatened a Taliban leader. As recounted by The Huffington Post, Trump said:

“let’s call him Mohammed” — who Trump characterized as speaking entirely in grunts. The former president recalled threatening “your village, where I know you are,” in a call with the leader. “That’s going to be the point at which the first bombs drop.”

In August 2021, in a conversation with talk radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump added details to his tale, saying he told the Afghan leader that America would

“hit you harder than anybody has ever been hit in world history…I believe I repeated the name of his town,” Trump told Hewitt. “‘That will be the first place that we start. And I won’t be able to speak to you anymore after that, and isn’t that a very sad thing?’ But that is the story.”

“I believe I repeated the name of his town.” You can hear Trump making it up as he goes along. Note that there is still no mention of a photo.

The photo arrives a year later, in a September 2022 interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity (quote from The Huffington Post).

Hannity: “Didn’t you at one point tell him, ‘I know exactly where you are,’ and give him the exact coordinates where he was?”

“No, I sent him a picture of his house,” the former president claimed. “He said, ‘But why, but why, do you send me a picture of my house?’ I said, ‘You’ll have to figure that out.’”

This is the version of the story that Trump told in his debate with Kamala Harris.

Finally, in July 2024, Congressman Hunt recounted his “number one favorite Trump story” that actually puts the two men in the room together, and Trump’s “sent” photo became Congressman Hunt’s “handed” to him photo. A fantastical story had steadily evolved and became even more outlandish, making Trump sound even more manly. Hunt’s implausible tale was the one that impressed Konstantine Kisin.

I don’t know if Hunt actually heard this story from someone (Trump?) or just made it up himself. Neither option reflects well on the congressman—either he’s a fool or a shameless fraud—but I’m sure Trump didn’t mind. It’s all kayfabe.

To be fair to Trump, his own fake story doesn’t have Trump and “Abdul” in the same room.

DAVID MUIR: Vice President Harris, thank you. President Trump, your response to her saying that you began the negotiations with the Taliban.

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, thank you. So if you take a look at that period of time, the Taliban was killing our soldiers, a lot of them, with snipers. And I got involved with the Taliban because the Taliban was doing the killing. That's the fighting force within Afghanistan. They don't bother doing that because you know, they deal with the wrong people all the time. But I got involved. And Abdul is the head of the Taliban.4 He is still the head of the Taliban. And I told Abdul don't do it anymore, you do it anymore you're going to have problems. And he said why do you send me a picture of my house? I said you're going to have to figure that out, Abdul. And for 18 months we had nobody killed.

Again, look at how the story developed. In 2020, we have a normal diplomatic phone call. In 2021, Trump ‘remembered’ threatening to bomb someone’s home, and this quickly evolved into a more specific threat where Trump had probably shared the name of the man’s hometown. Then, in 2022, Trump tells us that a photo had been sent (via email? special courier?) to intimidate “Abdul,” the story he repeated at the debate with Harris. Finally, in 2024, we hear a Trump supporter making up an even more elaborate and ridiculous myth of Trump looking the leader of the Taliban in the eye and threatening to kill him.5

Trump fans bought those lies hook, line, and sinker. And continue to buy them. Many will support Trump because fake stories like this have convinced them that he’s a strong leader who can intimidate dangerous men.

If Trump becomes president again, will he be firm in international negotiations? I can’t know, but I’m sure Imaginary Trump will stand tall. He’ll clench his jaw like Schwarzenegger and narrow his eyes like Eastwood. Perhaps he’ll claim to have roughed up world leaders with slaps, gut punches, clotheslines, or body slams.6 Who can predict how far the kayfabe will go?

I realize this essay won’t change anyone’s mind. Even if people believe Trump was lying (and the evidence is hard to deny), they’ll rationalize it. “Maybe he didn’t say those exact words, but he still faced down Afghanistan.” (By giving them everything that they wanted.) Or convince themselves it doesn’t matter because everyone lies.

But the truth does matter, and America deserves a real leader, not a kayfabe showman. And if you think Kamala Harris is just as bad? Well, at least be honest about who you’re choosing instead.

Clara Jeffery, editor-in-chief of Mother Jones magazine, was angry. Some poor flight attendant had had the temerity to wish Jeffery a “blessed” night as she landed in San Francisco. A clear sign of “creeping Christian nationalism”! In her tweet, Jeffery tagged Alaska Airlines to make sure they knew what their employees were up to.

Jeffery was obviously being incredibly wacky. Flight attendants wish passengers well after every trip. Usually, with a pro-forma “Bye, buh bye, bye” as bleary passengers file out of the plane. Making a “blessed” goodbye wish isn’t weird. Lots of Americans use “bless” and “blessed.” Jeffery herself has been known to bless a few things!

None of what happened to Jeffery was evidence of a rising Christo-Fascist state led by hordes of Bible-worshiping Alaskan Air flight attendants. For all Jeffery knew, the blessed flight attendant might be voting for Harris! She extrapolated a paranoid world of creeping Christian nationalism from one anodyne word.

In reality-land, Christianity in the United States is on the decline. Growing numbers of Americans identify as atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular.” According to the Pew Research Center, if these trends continue, Christians will make up a minority of the country within 50 years.

Does Jeffery truly believe that Christians are taking over the country? I can’t say. It’s an idea I’ve heard echoed in some corners of the left, but I think her reaction was probably more fueled by contempt (“this ain’t Montgomery”) than fear.

To be very clear, this is not universal for progressives. I know a few lefty Christians, and most of my atheist friends wouldn’t be contemptuous in the way Jeffery was. However, for a type of sanctimonious lefty, Christians are an acceptable object of scorn in a way that no other religion would be. It is unthinkable that Jeffery would have made fun of a woman who was Buddhist or Hindu. If a flight attendant had said, as-salamu alaykum (Arabic for “peace be with you”), Jeffery wouldn’t have uttered a peep, but belittling Christians guarantees applause from some.

Unfortunately for her, Jeffery’s tweet escaped her local Twitter bubble and the resulting firestorm made her a target for a day.

Look at that ratio! Sixteen thousand comments! And climbing! It reached twenty-seven thousand comments later that evening. The quote-tweets went on for days!

When people pushed back politely, Jeffery was having none of it. She knew she was in the right!

The obliviousness of Jeffery’s response to Armand Domalewsky (a left-wing Bay Area activist) was impressive. She accused the flight attendant of being part of a “dominant culture” that wanted to “enforce their norms.” But as Zaid Jilani (another lefty) pointed out, Jeffery was the dominant one. She is the editor-in-chief of a well-known political magazine and a product of elite institutions. She attended the Sidwell Friends School—whose alumni include Chelsea Clinton, Sasha Obama, and Malia Obama—and received a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. She was the one with power trying to enforce her norms on society by tweeting contempt for a harmless Christian greeting uttered by a powerless flight attendant.

As Jeffery’s ratio picked up steam, did she recognize that she’d put her foot in it? Of course not! In a follow-up tweet, she said…

It wasn’t her; it was all the dumb right-wingers who were at fault! Never mind that many of those dunking on her came from the left.

I respected Jeffery’s insistence on doubling and tripling down. Once the mob has you in its crosshairs, apologizing is pointless. If I were her, I’d have made my account private and waited for the hubbub to die down, but I respect her trying to brazen things out. In the end, however, sanity, or the advice of friends, convinced her to delete the offending tweet. By Sunday morning (after hitting 10 million views), it had disappeared.

Is any of this important? Not very, of course, but it does offer a lesson. Jeffery’s attitude towards Christians and non-coastal America is too common on the left, and as a center-left guy who wants Kamala Harris to win, I think it’s bad for all of us. There are a lot of Christian voters out there!

As Jeremiah Johnson pointed out, Democrats are trying not to be the weirdos, and Clara Jeffery and those like her are not helping our cause! It's all too reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s “basket full of deplorables” line that alienated many voters in 2016. I know people who still think Hillary was correct (“well, they ARE deplorables”), and that’s their right, but if you want to win elections, it’s not the sort of thing the editor of an influential magazine should be spouting.

Working-class Americans are increasingly voting for Republicans, and making fun of their values is not the way to win them back.

It’s especially perverse for Jeffery to attack working-class values when Mother Jones is supposedly dedicated to the cause of the working class. It was named after Mary Harris Jones (1837-1930), nicknamed Mother Jones, a trade union activist who fought hard for the rights of the working poor.

Jeffery, however, seemed contemptuous of working-class Americans and their worldview. It was that contempt, the elitist snobbery, that made so many people angry.

The meta irony is it’s all rage bait. Clara Jeffery was angry at the woman who wished her a blessed day, which in turn made Twitter angry at Jeffery. Everyone was looking for their rage fix, and everyone found it, including me!

This whole kerfuffle broke when a story came out (first reported by Oliver Darcy at CNN) that Nuzzi had engaged in inappropriate texting (nothing physical) with a politician, which might not have been big news if the politician wasn’t the infamous Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

On Thursday, Sept 19, New York Magazine issued the following statement:

Recently our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine's editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine's standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures. Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign. An internal review of her published work has found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias. She is currently on leave from the magazine, and the magazine is conducting a more thorough third-party review. We regret this violation of our readers' trust.

This “former subject” was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Also on Thursday, Nuzzi responded to a New York Times inquiry to say

Some communication between myself and a former reporting subject turned personal…

…During that time, I did not directly report on the subject nor use them as a source…

The relationship was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict. I deeply regret not doing so immediately and apologize to those I’ve disappointed, especially my colleagues at New York.

A Kennedy representative told the Times

Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece

A more salacious Daily Beast article reported that the story originally leaked because Nuzzi had sent Kennedy “intimate” photos, and that Kennedy had been privately boasting about them (if true, this confirms my opinion that he’s a complete jerk). The Beast described a relationship that involved inappropriate texts, but, again, no physical contact. How much of this is true, is, of course, impossible to say. Note that New York Magazine and The New York Times gave more bland stories than did the tabloid-like Daily Beast.

Now what about all this is unfair?

Nuzzi being put on leave by her bosses at New York Magazine was entirely reasonable. Reporters should never get involved with subjects, particularly ones of such stature. It’s now New York’s call as to whether she continues at the magazine. The third party review they mentioned may uncover how much of the story is true.

If that’s all that happened—a reporter crossed professional boundaries and her employer responded—I wouldn’t be writing this.

What gets me to type a bunch of words is the dark delight with which a wide swathe of Twitter, including some of her fellow journalists, have piled onto Nuzzi. I won’t quote from most of the tweets, but they’ve brutally ridiculed her and her actions, seemingly taking pleasure at her situation. And, notably, they said far less about RFK Jr.’s behavior.

Why did so many show so much glee?

Yes, she crossed a journalistic line. That should be, and was, reported on. And, again, her bosses need to make a call, which might include firing her. But none of that required people to gloat over the chaos. There are real people involved here who are suffering real pain. Not just Nuzzi and Kennedy, but also Kennedy’s long-suffering wife, actress Cheryl Hines, and Nuzzi’s former fiancé, Politico writer Ryan Lizza (word that their engagement had ended came after the story broke).

Beyond the usual schadenfreude, there’s probably some political revenge involved. Nuzzi as a writer hadn’t fit neatly into either left or right ecosystems. This made partisans suspicious. She had also written a big piece on President Biden’s fitness for office—The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden—that inspired anger on both left and right.

Some Democrats felt the criticism of Biden, particularly of his appearance, was unfair; while Republicans complained that the article had been too long in the making and was only being released because of Biden’s bad June 27 debate performance (a nonsensical accusation; articles take time to write and their release isn’t planned to advance one party’s interest).

It’s possible (despite New York Magazine’s denials) that Nuzzi’s texting with Kennedy might have affected her July 2024 story about Biden, but this seems unlikely. I read the story when it came out, and, while it was well-written, it didn’t break any bombshells beyond “old guy looks really old.” Did it add to the pressure on Biden to resign? Probably. But there were a million other pressure points on Biden, including top Democratic Party leaders. Moreover, most Democratic partisans are happy he resigned! A weak candidate has been replaced with a substantially stronger one. But anger at Biden’s ouster, even if it was smart for the party, lingered among his hard-core supporters.

More bizarrely, the Nuzzi-Kennedy story reopened the door to progressives who have long claimed that Nuzzi was a racist because of snarky tweets from her past, like this one:

Her 2016 tweet was obviously satirizing all the crazy “birther” conspiracy nonsense that Obama had to face while president. It simply doesn’t make sense as anything else. I’ll bet Obama himself would laugh at it. The full exchange makes it even clearer:

Graham and Nuzzi are joking. And not at Obama’s expense, but at the expense of anyone who could believe such foolishness (“Kenyan Muslim lizard person,” c’mon!). But haters are bad at humor and if there’s no blinking neon sign screaming “SATIRE,” they assume it has to be racism.

Other tweets were just as obviously jokes trolling the right, but, again, went over the heads of angry progressives. The “Kenyan Anti-Colonial” line in the tweet below is making fun of Republican Newt Gingrich, who used that label to describe Obama back in 2010. That it’s an anti-Republican joke is made especially obvious by Nuzzi choosing a photo of Obama looking adorable with a small child. She’s deliberately contrasting nice guy Obama with the crazy words Republicans were using to describe him. “The real intruder” is also making fun of the way conservatives characterized Obama. The hashtag “#tcot” stood for “top conservatives on Twitter.” Again, she’s showing that the abuse Obama received from conservatives was ridiculous.

Beyond the politics and the perverse accusations of racism, I think a lot of the Nuzzi hate stems from people’s strange (to me) inability to feel any empathy for her. In the eyes of many, she’d done something ludicrous, and this somehow erased empathy. Flirting with a man almost 40 years her senior. How easily ridiculed! And, yes, that she’s young, attractive, and successful (all things that feed jealousy), probably fueled some of the nastiness.

I still find the callousness upsetting.

How can people have no empathy for Nuzzi? Yes, you probably aren’t texting with RFK Jr., but haven’t you ever done foolish things? Forget your knee-jerk denial. Think back to when you were young and stupid. Think of the risks you took. The awful choices. Especially when your brain was under the influence of alcohol or hormones (far worse than cocaine for triggering insane behavior).

You wouldn’t ever text a sexy picture? Not even to a major crush? Not even tipsy?

I’ve never texted a nude photo (and the Internet thanks me), but I’ve said things via text that I’d NEVER want to see the light of day. And before texting existed, I’ve done things that make me incredibly grateful digital cameras weren’t a thing when I was sowing the insanity of youth. I’m not spilling my worst moments—let’s not discuss what went on in certain apartment building stairwells—but they would not do my reputation any good.

Post-divorce, I’ve even received an unsolicited photo from a date! And when my sender sobered up, and asked me to delete that image from my phone, I immediately did so because my name is not Kennedy.

I shared my anecdotes not to blow my own horn, but to make the point that even a boring guy like me has stories. Most of us have stories. Attraction makes people break the rules. They’ve written ten thousand novels and plays about this!

Maybe you’re so boring that you’ve never danced along the precipice of disaster. Fine. But can’t you at least imagine it? Not even for a moment? I can think of a few late night talks where a friend told me, “and if I’d had one more drink, I don’t know what would have happened!” Most of us have faced those forks in our roads.

I’m not saying all this because I think New York Magazine should forgive Nuzzi. That’s not my call or my point. What I wish we saw with the Nuzzi story is a little more humanity, humility, and mercy. Humanity to recognize, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Humility to admit that we still don’t know the whole story. Reading one-sided takes in The Daily Beast or The New York Post is not getting the full picture of what went down between all the various characters.

And mercy? The willingness to remember that we all make mistakes and that not every mistake should be career destroying.

The eagerness of Twitter mobs to be judge, jury, and executioner never ceases to disturb me. Mob justice is never justice. Online mobs are the heart of cancel culture. And no, I’m not saying Nuzzi doesn’t deserve some sort of penalty. I’m saying that it should not be your or my or any mob’s call to decide that penalty. Cancel culture is a mob of strangers arrogantly thinking they have the right to decide someone else’s fate, and, like all mobs, taking unholy pleasure in their sense that the pain they are inflicting is equivalent to justice.

Leave judgments to those directly concerned. I’m not saying she’s a saint. How would I know? She may be an awful person (although she doesn’t seem that way to me). Worse stories may leak. But I don’t know enough to judge her and neither does any other outsider.2 Leave it to her bosses to decide her future.

How it went down

“Ok, the security perimeter is set.”

“But sir, what about that building over there? Nobody is on the roof.”

“It’s fine, Jenkins. We’ll leave it that way.”

“Sir, it’s not safe. What if some lone-wolf loser kid who surfs the web for porn and nearby politicians decides it’s the perfect platform to go out in a blaze of glory?”

“Damnit, Jenkins, you’re good. That’s exactly what’s going to happen.”

“Sir?!?”

“Scranton has put out the word. Big Orange has to go.”

“Well, if you say so sir. My oath to Scranton supersedes any other duty.”

“Good boy, Jenkins.”

“But sir, won’t the other agents notice?”

“All 100 of them have been given their orders. They’ll stand down until he opens fire on the Cheeto, then we’ll snuff the kid.”

“The local cops?”

“Klaus Schwab wired a million to each of their bank accounts. They’ll look the other way.”

“How did we get the kid to take the job?”

“We promised him a lifetime PornHub account.”

“But is that young kid a good enough shot?”

“Not a chance. That’s why the real shooter is a trained Seal Team Six sniper waiting inside the same building.”

“And what happens if Big Orange moves his head an inch?”

“Jesus Jenkins! We can’t plan for everything! If Orange moves, the whole tamale goes up in smoke. I just hope Bret Weinstein doesn’t find out about this. That dude sees through all our plans!”

Wait, there’s more

Not convinced?

Here’s the video Benny Johnson1 posted:

Who is Chris Martenson, the “PhD” in the video who claims that two shooters are CONFIRMED?

Chris earned a PhD in neurotoxicology from Duke University, and an MBA from Cornell University. A fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, Chris’s work has appeared on PBS and been cited by the Washington Post. He is a contributor to SeekingAlpha.com.

Neurotoxicology.

When asked on Twitter about his lack of relevant experience, Chris shot down questioner.

So there you have it folks. A neurotoxicologist who has an economics YouTube channel has offered us definitive ballistics proof on the Trump shooting cover-up.2

A horrible thing has happened, and way too many grown-ass adults who should know better went completely ‘round the bend looney toons bonkers and god, I wish they’d stop!

Reality

What happened is a crazy guy shot at former president Donald Trump and killed at least one bystander. This is terrible. Political violence is anti-democratic and dangerous. It must always be unequivocally condemned. I happen to dislike Trump, and I am horrified that anyone would try and kill him. That is immoral and dangerous for our nation. Any other reaction is evil or stupid or both.

Like this obscene tweet from popular streamer Destiny (currently with 4.4k likes). A man died, a human with a family and loved ones who will mourn him, and Destiny tosses off the tragedy with a childish edgelord tweet. I understand how people end up seeing the lives of their fellow Americans as mere check marks on an “us” or “them” team roster, but I reject this inhuman mindset.

I’m sure Destiny is a decent guy in other contexts. He probably hugs his girlfriend and buys his buddies goofy birthday presents.1 I’ve heard him speak passionately about peace in the Middle East. But he’s got full-on partisan brain, and like most of us, he’s pretty good at dehumanizing anyone on the other side.

Conspiracies have a field day

A big thing happened, so of course, there were the conspiracies, and spreading conspiracies is very, very, very bad!

This guy puts it well.

Well said, Mr. Wise!

Not like this guy.

Oops. Same guy. Awkward!

Lots of people don’t really hate conspiracy theories. They just hate OTHER people’s conspiracy theories!

And man, what a bonkers theory this one is. No, it was not a fake assassination attempt. Trump operatives didn’t hire some loser to climb on top of a building even though he had to know he would certainly die after he fired a bullet from FOUR HUNDRED FEET AWAY that was somehow guaranteed to only nick the president so he could then make his iconic fist bump of victory.

“Hello, sad, unbalanced loser who happens to have amazing aim with a rifle?”

“Yessir!”

“We have a little job for you.”

“I’ll do it, sir!”

And guns don’t work that way. Yes, I’m told a good marksman can hit a target at 400 feet, but there’s going to be a little randomness, wind, target movement, hiccups. Your circle of accuracy is gonna be a couple of inches. Do you think Trump is really going to risk that bullet being one inch off target? Fuggedaboutit.

“You’re right, Carl. That’s a dumb theory. The reality is the Democrats deliberately tried to kill him.”

Oh my. I hope there aren’t any fringe randos spreading THAT theory!

No randos. Just the richest man in the world, racking up half a million likes for batshit nuttery.

Look, this theory is a hair better than the first one because some people do want Trump dead, but it still has the problem of finding that loser and convincing him to commit suicide for your cause. Then add in all the people who’d have to be on the payroll to make sure everything went according to plan. And THEN add in the idea that they’d all keep their mouths shut because humans are so damn good at keeping secrets.2

Musk’s incompetence argument is better but far from proven.

Guarding a president is HARD. Four presidents have been assassinated (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy), and others came pretty close to dying. (If Hinkley had been a slightly better shot, President Reagan would have been number five.) The Secret Service is supposed to be good, but they don’t have unlimited manpower. They can’t drop 1,000 agents onto every field to cover every single approach. Yes, after the fact, it seems pretty dumb that they left that roof open, but it’s easy to see holes after someone’s gone through them. There’s a fair chance they marked that area as local law enforcement’s responsibility, and then the po-po messed up. Or maybe it was a Secret Service screw-up. We just don’t know. Let’s wait for the full investigation before we start using our mad Photoshop skillz to scrawl little red circles and arrows on satellite maps.

It’s the media!

Lots of people were raging over early headlines like this one:

Yeah, that seems kinda dumb, but you have to remember this was in the early moments after the attack. While an assassination attempt seemed the most likely reality, nobody knew for sure. When I first saw the video, I wondered if Trump was ducking in response to firecrackers. His reactions seemed too slow for it to have been bullets. Of course, I didn’t say anything like that because I know better than to jump to conclusions!

The smart thing for the media to do is to NOT jump to conclusions, even obvious ones, because they might turn out wrong! As they often are. Remember the Jussie Smollet attack? Or the Pulse Nightclub shooting? The first never happened, while the second turns out to have not been a homophobic attack.3 I don’t blame the media for getting those wrong at first, but it’s a reminder that taking care is always good.

Why did people want the media to rush to judgment? The most common argument I heard was that the media, for ideological reasons, was somehow trying to play down the fact that Trump had been shot, so they were saying things like he “fell.”

Seriously? You think the media wants to cover up a shooting? A shooting?!? A thing that will get them zillions of page views? Are you utterly mad? Do you think they would turn down free money? Editors salivate for adrenaline-pumping stories like this one! And even if they wanted to (madness), they have to KNOW there is no way they can play down PRESIDENT TRUMP BEING SHOT!

Yes, in the past the media has sometimes skewed stories out of bias. Liberal papers, for example, have often mentioned the race of a victim of police violence only when it wasn’t white. That’s bad. But if you think that means they’d play down an assassination attempt, you are living in Conspiracy Land! (Also, the shooter was white!)

Political implications

Maybe there are political implications. But do you really think you know what those implications are 15 minutes after the dude was shot? Do you really have to spew your theory that Trump is going to be president because of those iconic photos?

It was badass. I mean, c’mon, it was. And so? Who’s it going to thrill? His fans?

Sure, this dude is stoked, but I’m pretty sure he was going to vote for Trump anyway. My gut feeling is the attempt will help Trump’s chances, but I also know that America is incredibly divided, and most people’s votes are already set in stone. Biden could have been photographed holding the rifle, and Democrats would still vote against Trump!

It’s also bad taste to be talking politics while a tragedy is unfolding. Can’t you wait at least until the morning after?

And to all the “America is doomed” tweeters, an assassination attempt doesn’t mean America is over as a civilized nation. Scroll back up. We’ve had FOUR presidents actually assassinated, along with numerous other attempts. Poor Gerald Ford had TWO attempts on his life within a few weeks of each other! America survived all that!

Listen to Nick.

It was the heated rhetoric!

You know what? It might have been! There have been way too many nasty words funneled into our collective brain, and that can’t be good, and it’s obvious that we should all be calming the fuck down (although, sadly, we won’t).

But while some rhetoric goes much too far—do we really have to call Trump (or Biden) Hitler?—there’s no proof that any particular words set this lunatic off. Remember, one thing we know for sure is that the shooter was crazy (suicide by Secret Service is not a button sane people push). Reagan got shot because some guy was nuts about Jodie Foster. Do we cancel all her movies? (I mean, I think she’s overrated as an actress, but she’s done good stuff. I liked “Inside Job.”)

We should keep two things in mind. First, we’re allowed to criticize leaders, especially when we think they’ve done bad stuff! Not allowing us to lambaste important people is anti-speech! What if they actually did the stuff we’re accusing them of doing? Can’t we say that’s bad?

I know some of you think Trump didn’t do anything wrong, but Jesse disagrees! As do I! I don’t think Trump is Hitler, and gloating about his possible death is awful, but there is plenty of legitimate criticism of his behavior after his 2020 electoral defeat. That you may disagree with these critiques doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be heard!

And second, remember that a lot of that heated rhetoric is coming from inside the house! Is Trump posting a video with an image of Biden tied up in the back of a truck promoting calm, non-violent discourse? Doesn’t seem like it!

Calm the fuck down

So, could everyone just chill? An attempted assassination is bad. Gloating about it is bad. Drawing instant conclusions about it is bad. Conspiracy theories are very bad.

It’s been a maddening 18 hours, but one thing that soothes me is realizing that much of the madness is Twitter-centric. Yes, a lot of people off social media are also going a bit cray-cray, but most folks are going to spend today going about their normal lives. My bodega guy is still going to make awkward small talk with me. Delivery dudes will still bring your Seamless order. Your mother-in-law will still paste on that saccharine smile when she greets you at the door tonight. Normality continues.

And for those who still want to jabber? Maybe read Nate Silver’s post-assassination-attempt tweet and then go out for a nice long walk.

It was...eh. Not meh, but eh.

He didn't look befuddled the way he did on debate night. He answered the questions, side-stepping a fair bit, but that's normal for a politician. He denied the legitimacy of polls that said he was losing, but that’s also normal for politicians who aren’t doing well in them! I didn't catch any big gaffes. I was expecting a more fragile Joe Biden than I saw. I didn’t cringe in psychic pain the way I did last Thursday.

But he was still subdued. He lacked the force you'd want to see in a leader. The most roused he got was when Donald Trump’s name came up, and Biden's clear loathing for his opponent energized him. “Trump is a congenital liar.” He said it with teeth clenched, and you knew it wasn’t an act. There were also a few classic Biden grins now and then to show the guy we used to know.

I liked Biden’s responses to Stephanopoulos asking if he would step down, assuming Democratic leaders asked him to. (I’m roughly paraphrasing these quotes from memory) “They aren’t asking me to; I’ve talked to all of them [he names a few].” Stephanopoulos pressed him, “Is there anyone who might convince you?” “I suppose if the Lord on High came down.” And then, “But I’m not going to answer these hypotheticals.” (Biden was not talking about the Lord there, to be clear, but about Democratic politicians!) There’s some fibbing in there (Biden knows some leaders are beginning to grumble), but that’s, again, standard for a politician.

He's absolutely not a vegetable, as some Biden-haters have claimed (have they actually watched the guy??). That’s pure nonsense. I saw no specific signs of dementia. Yes, I'm no neurologist, but I did see my own father fade in his late 70s and early 80s, and Biden wasn't at all like my dad.

I don't think he's wandering around the White House in slippers and a dirty bathrobe until they lead him off to Dr. Jill Biden, who gives him his "special shot" to perk him up for an interview or a speech. I'm sure he's in meetings with staff, as has been described, listening and issuing orders. In this interview, he was focused and aware and...

...and still kinda tired. I don't think this is "elder abuse," as some have opined. He's still Joe Biden. But I suspect that in some (maybe a lot) of those meetings, he fades a bit as age catches up and his body demands a nap. And at a certain point, far too soon, his day is over.

The interview did nothing to dispel the stories from a range of media outlets describing Biden in decline.

numerous aides, foreign officials, members of Congress, donors and others who have interacted with Biden over the last 3½ years, noting that he moves more slowly, speaks more softly and has moments when he loses his train of thought more often than even just a year ago
— Washington Post (July 5)

I can easily believe that is true, but also that

several senior White House aides who interact with Biden regularly said that he continues to ask probing, detailed questions about complicated policy matters and can recall facts from previous briefings in minute detail

So I imagine a Biden who’s usually there, making most of the decisions a president should be making, but at a slower pace, leaving a lot, probably too much, to staff. And then, sometimes, he fades into a daydream or confused jumble, especially as the day wears on.

Is my analysis true? Obviously, I can’t know. Nobody who isn’t close to him on a regular basis knows, and those in his inner circle aren’t the most reliable witnesses. All we can do is speculate. And that interview will do little to reduce speculation.

Biden needed to hit a home run and then hit a dozen more in the coming weeks. And he did not.

The interview reassured me slightly. I think he’s more functional than I had thought before, but that’s a low bar. I think he’s still making policy decisions, but age has clearly slowed him down a lot. And remember, four more years will inevitably see further decline. Even with this improved-from-the-debate Biden, I think the best choice is for him to bow out of the race.

As the debate wore on, his performance improved a little, especially when he could channel his palpable anger towards Trump, but it was never great.

Trump, in contrast, was Trump. Lying constantly (illegal immigrants are NOT going on Social Security, Nancy Pelosi did NOT turn down National Guard troops on January 6, food prices have NOT quadrupled, every legal scholar did NOT think overturning Roe v. Wade was good, etc.), bragging about his greatness (I was the best, under me America was the best), but his lying and bragging was high energy and the contrast with Biden was stark.

So now what?

First, how badly is Biden impaired? I don’t know. None of us know. I’m bugged by how many folks are confidently stating that he has dementia. Having absolute confidence that we can judge Biden’s overall mental state from a single debate appearance is unmerited. After all, the very next day saw Biden give a solid appearance at a public rally. And now the story being shopped around by his staff is that he’s quite sharp from 10am to 4pm, but after that he starts to fade.

I can believe that. Maybe.

I play poker. Not so long ago—in my early 50s—I was in games that went 24 hours straight. Obviously this was bad for my mental acuity! I became increasingly zombie-like as we meandered into the next day. Yes, this was dumb, but my theory was the other players were also fading so it was ok. Which might have been true, but also suggests that my judgment was getting worse as time went on!

At the end of those sessions I was completely out of focus and tongue-tied, my brain in a fog. My ability to say anything beyond “you owe me 500 dollars” was shot.

I can easily imagine an 81-year-old Joe Biden tripping over his words at 9:15pm even though he had been clear and coherent six hours earlier. Of course, that’s still bad. I don’t want a president who’s only good for six hours a day. It’s a hard job and a nuclear crisis can hit at 3am.1

And that’s the best case scenario. I can also imagine “fairly clear during the day” Joe is a myth spread by his staff to cover up the steady decline of the man. Maybe he’s already deep in dementia and fading fast. He’s obviously far from his peak, but the first 30 minutes of the debate had me worried that he could no longer function at all.

Of course, my speculation means next to nothing. Perhaps if we heard form a panel of respected medical experts, we could have a clearer understanding of Biden’s mental health, but I don’t how that could be convened (or whether its findings would be accepted by the nation).

Kat Rosenfield, a writer for whom I have immense respect, suggested that if Democrats (and the rest of us) picked Biden over Trump, they were prioritizing winning over democracy. She was not endorsing Trump—in her next tweet, she argued the best choice for democracy would be to pivot to Vice President Kamala Harris—but she argued that picking a muddled Biden was anti-democratic.

Framed that way, it sounds reasonable—picking the cognitively functional man over the one ensnared in dementia—except we don’t know that Biden actually has dementia, and, just as importantly, there are deep questions as to whether Trump himself is cognitively functional enough to be president.

Yes, he sounded more vibrant than Biden, his voice more confident. He still has that con-man sparkle. Each glib sentence rolls out of his mouth without hesitation, even when (as is often the case) they don’t make a lot of sense. His rambling style today is markedly different from the sharp businessman persona that allowed him to shine on talk shows in the 1980s and 1990s. The past four years have not been kind to him. A few weeks back, for example, during a long meandering stump speech, he went on a bizarre tangent about whether it would be better to be electrocuted or be eaten by a shark. Is that functional?

And Trump’s reputation has always been that of an incurious man averse to deep thought. Even before he became president, he said he wanted short briefings, and he got them. His daily briefing was cut down to 3 pages, compared to Obama’s 12-14 pages. “I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.” World crises boiled down to a page. Is that functional?

[Tom] Bossert [Trump’s former Homeland Security Advisor]…[said] Trump had Situation Room aides produce “books of chyron prints” – a way to boil down cable news to the messages displayed at the bottom of screens. Stephanopoulos and Hickey call this “surely one of the most prosaic tasks ever required of the highly trained intelligence officers serving in the White House”.

Bossert was not the only official who criticized Trump’s phobic reaction to learning the facts of his job. Secretary of State under Trump Rex Tillerson reportedly called Trump “a fucking moron.” Defense Secretary under Trump Mark Esper called him a “threat to democracy” National Security Advisor under Trump John Bolton said he was “unfit to be president.” And there are many others. This level of contempt by a president’s senior staff is unprecedented. Does that sound functional?

And how lucid was Trump during the debate? Here he is at the 30 minute mark, being asked about whether he would accept Putin’s seizure of Ukrainian territory:

BASH:  … I’m going to come back to you for one minute. I just want to go back to my original question, which is, are Putin’s terms acceptable to you, keeping the territory in Ukraine?

TRUMP:  No, they’re not acceptable. No, they’re not acceptable.

But look, this is a war that never should have started. If we had a leader in this war – he led everybody along. He’s given $200 billion now or more to Ukraine. He’s given $200 billion. That’s a lot of money. I don’t think there’s ever been anything like it. Every time that Zelenskyy comes to this country, he walks away with $60 billion. He’s the greatest salesman ever.

And I’m not knocking him, I’m not knocking anything. I’m only saying, the money that we’re spending on this war, and we shouldn’t be spending, it should have never happened.

I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelenskyy as president-elect before I take office on January 20th. I’ll have that war settled.

People being killed so needlessly, so stupidly, and I will get it settled and I’ll get it settled fast, before I take office.

BASH:  President Biden, you have a minute.

BIDEN:  The fact is that Putin is a war criminal. He’s killed thousands and thousands of people. And he has made one thing clear: He wants to re-establish what was part of the Soviet Empire. Not just a piece, he wants all of Ukraine. That’s what he wants.

And then do you think he’ll stop there? Do you think he’ll stop when he – if he takes Ukraine? What do you think happens to Poland? What do you think of Belarus? What do you think happens to those NATO countries?

And so, if you want a war, you ought to find out what he’s going to do. Because if, in fact, he does what he says and walks away – by the way, all that money we give Ukraine and weapons we make here in the United States. We give them the weapons, not the money at this point. And our NATO allies have produced as much funding for Ukraine as we have. That’s why it’s – that’s why we’re strong.

Trump’s answer was confidently delivered but politically incoherent. Trump said it was not acceptable for Putin to keep the Ukrainian territory he had captured, but immediately follows up by saying that Zelensky should never have been given any money. “The money that we’re spending on this war, and we shouldn’t be spending.” This is insane. Without any money, Putin would have overwhelmed Ukraine’s defenses. Then Trump confidently adds that he will have the war settled before he takes office on January 20, 2025, which is pure piffle. Why would Putin settle with a guy who says he doesn’t want to give Ukraine any more aid?

Biden, on team rational, states the obvious: that Putin wants to control Ukraine which is why the United States and its NATO allies have opposed him.

So who do I want in the White House? A man who’s ready to give Ukraine to Russia (but claims he isn’t) or a man who knows it will take US military aid to keep Ukraine free? Biden is clearly more compos mentis on this topic. (Even if he seemed to suggest Belarus was a NATO ally!)

Biden is your old duffer of a grandpa who can get a bit confused but has a basic understanding of the world. Trump is your fast-talking crooked old uncle who never read a book and babbles lunatic conspiracy theories. It’s not a great choice, but I’ll take the duffer.

If it was truly a question of a “dementia-addled Dem party puppet” up against a clear-thinking, sane Republican with whom I disagreed on many issues, I could pull the “R” lever in November; but Trump is no Nikki Haley or Ted Cruz. He’s a short-attention-span narcissistic blowhard and airhead who has been condemned by wide swathes of his senior staff and who was willing to undermine democratic norms in an attempt to stay in office, and who therefore should never be allowed in the Oval Office again.

If you don’t believe me, listen to Mike Pence, the man Trump tried to pressure into not certifying the 2020 vote:

I believe anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again

Which doesn’t mean Joe Biden should president either. I agree with Kat Rosenfield there. His performance at the debate was bad. This doesn’t mean he’s the drooling idiot described by Twitter experts, but I see a tired old guy who’s well past retirement, not a strong president. Under normal conditions, if he’s well rested, it’s quite possible he’s able to make good decisions about appointing staff and choosing policy directions. That’s not dementia or being a puppet but it’s not great. And, of course, he could have dementia. I’m not a doctor specializing in cognitive decline. At the very least, he seems below what we should demand from our leaders.

This is why Democrats should replace him. Even if somehow you could prove to me that he has a better chance of beating Trump than some other Democrat, it’s wrong to choose someone who can’t handle the stresses of the job at something close to peak efficiency.

Of course, the same applies to Trump, with the added baggage of being temperamentally and morally unsuited to being president.

If Biden and the Democrats choose to soldier on, I’ll vote for him in November, but it will be with a heavy heart. The Republican Party has already shown itself wiling to get behind someone incredibly unfit for the most important job in the world. I can only hope Democrats, and Biden, make the better and more patriotic call. Our ballot options shouldn’t have to be “awful” and “not as bad.”

The new scandal slithering down the Interwebs is the claim that the Trump campaign is calling for a “unified Reich” as a dog-whistle to their Nazi fanbase. No, sorry, much as you hate Trump, it’s not true.

The madness started when Trump posted a 30-second video to his Truth Social website. The video showed headlines announcing a future Trump victory plastered across the pages of old-timey-looking newspapers. At the 5-second mark, this image is on the screen.

Look closely. On the left side you can see in blurry letters “CREATION OF A UNIFIED REICH.” (The video is no longer on Truth Social, but there are copies everywhere if you want to watch the whole thing.)

This blurry filler text sets the election campaign's ball of crazy rolling down a Nazi-themed bowling alley.

The thrilled Biden team immediately screams that Trump plans to “create a UNIFIED REICH,” just like Nazi Germany.

Biden himself, in Scranton Joe mode, is filmed in a short mini-ad saying, “Is this on his official account? Wow. A unified Reich? That’s Hitler’s language! That’s not America’s!”

Media outlets jump on the story with headlines confirming Trump’s Reich reference (but with little context, of course).

After the heat, the Trump campaign took down the video, blaming a staffer’s mistake for everything.

"This was not a campaign video, it was created by a random account online and reposted by a junior staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the President was in court," said Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt in a written statement.

Nobody on the left was buying it. Trump is a Nazi! As if we didn’t already know it!

Ok, now cool your chickens, Leeroy.1 Alarm bells should already be sounding in your noggin because Trump being a Nazi is such a perfect story for salivating Trump haters that you really ought to double and triple-check it. “Too good to be true” is a cliché for a reason!

For those preferring facts to a frothing feeding frenzy, David Graham lays out all the details in The Atlantic.

Trump’s account has removed the video, and his campaign said it did not create the video but reposted it from another user. It also said the post was done not by Trump but by a staffer who hadn’t noticed the “Reich” reference. Although Trump has a long history of blaming staffers for foolish posts, the excuse here is plausible. The video appears to have been made using a stock video template available online. And the text that appears in the video—about the “unified Reich”—comes, as the Associated Press notes, from a Wikipedia entry about World War I (“German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich”) rather than anything about Nazis. It’s a safe bet that the gospel singer Candi Staton wasn’t aiming to boost Hitler when she used the same template for a video of a song about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

Read Graham again. The anonymous video creator did not deliberately insert supposedly Nazi elements in the video. It came from an already-existing template of stock footage of “Newspaper Vintage History Headlines.”

The text in the template had been grabbed from the Wikipedia page on World War I. The wording has since changed (of course), but the Wayback Machine has a copy of the original “unified Reich” language.

The “unified Reich” referred to in that Wikipedia entry has nothing to do with the Nazis. Before 1871, Germany was divided into over a dozen independent states. After the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), Germany became a unified country under Kaiser William I. “Reich” means “realm,” and so the new state referred to itself as a Deutsches Reich (German Realm). Hence the phrase “unified Reich.” It’s referring to a Germany that existed before Hitler was even born. It’s true that the Nazis later used the term (“the Third Reich”) but so did the democratic Weimar Republic (1919-1933).

Again, the Trump team did not choose the filler text; it was in the template from the start.

Still not convinced?

Don’t forget that Graham discovered that Candi Staton, an African American gospel singer, had used the same template in her video for “1963.”

Here’s a closeup of those same words (“CREATION OF A UNIFIED REICH”) in her video. Is anyone insane enough to argue that Ms. Staton is secretly a Nazi?

What clearly happened is some Trump fan used a quick-and-dirty template to create the video and nobody on Trump’s team noticed that some language in the background had that hot-button “Reich” word in it. Should they have taken more care? Obviously! Of course, so should Candi Staton’s video team!

Trump, however, unlike Ms. Staton, doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt.

Trump’s problem here is that even though his excuse makes sense, he is also an authoritarian who has used anti-Semitic language. Believing that he might have posted subtle Nazi messaging doesn’t require much of a leap.

I think it requires more of a leap than does Graham, but he’s not wrong to remind us that Trump has said an awful lot of awful things.

But still, c’mon man! Do you really think that there is a large base of Third Reich lovers out there, and Trump’s campaign was deliberately signaling to them that he was on board with their goose-stepping dreams? And the method they used was some blurry text on the left side of a briefly shown image?

And the answer from many liberals is, “Yes, we do. He’s a Nazi, and he’s trying to create an American Reich.” It’s these folks who will continue to believe—despite any debunkings—that Trump and his team were deliberately using Nazi words (even though the words in question weren’t even about the Nazis and weren’t written by anyone in the Trump campaign!).

I doubt it; I really do. Trump is not a fascist in any historical way. He doesn’t have a secret Hitler shrine. He’s a narcissist who loves the adulation of the crowd and hates losing. He desperately wants to be back in the White House where he can be a winner and bask in the cheers (that will never fill the void in what passes for his soul). He may also hope that winning will protect him from his legal difficulties and help advance his business interests.

Despite his lack of Hitlerian bona fides, Trump is still awful for democracy. His contempt for democratic norms, his months-long refusal to accept defeat in 2020, and his attempts to circumvent the results have tarnished our great country. I’m sure he’ll do more harm to our democracy if he’s victorious this November.2 And it’s not inconceivable that he’d try and finagle a third term if it seemed at all possible.

There’s also the actual policy content of the video! The narrator says that Trump will deport 15 million people! It also calls for “no more wars,” suggesting that Ukraine will be abandoned to Russia. And if you want an actual deliberate antisemitic dog whistle, there’s a headline inserted saying, “PRESIDENT TRUMP REJECTS GLOBALIST WARMONGERS.” “Globalist,” like “cosmopolitan,” has often been used as a euphemism for “Jews” (although, in their defense, many Klaus Schwab-fearing anti-globalists are genuinely unaware of this history3).

None of this, however dreadful it is, makes Trump himself a Nazi fanboy. Democrats need to stick to the stuff he actually does and says; there’s more than enough ammunition there. I’m also never in favor of building campaign talking points on lies. They may be tasty kibble for hardcore Trump haters, but they aren’t going to convince less partisan undecided voters who have steadily refused to buy into the “democracy is in danger” argument.

This whole story rests on nonsense. Even if you believe the video contained deliberate Nazi dog whistles (a crazy-making view that ups my perpetual political migraine to an 11), in no way did he literally “call for a unified Reich.” If we want to be against “disinformation” and “misinformation,” we need to stop spreading it. The excuse that disseminating lies may win Democrats an election isn’t good enough and probably isn’t accurate. All it will do is add one more annoying set of talking points for Democratic hacks that will convince nobody but the Democratic base. I’m not looking forward to six months of my friends saying, “But we know Trump said he wanted an American Reich!”

Oy vey.