You’re probably familiar with the dead internet theory: most of what you encounter online is now generated by bots, for bots, with humans reduced to a shrinking audience for machine-generated noise. Last year, over half of new content on the internet was AI-generated. The humans are still there, scrolling, but the thing they’re scrolling through has become a performance staged by machines for an audience that hasn’t yet realized the show isn’t for them.

It’s utterly desiccating to log onto spaces seeking a live mind to joust and think with, and find a relentless stream of slop. Promised an age of superconnectivity, we’ve let our shared physical spaces wither, only to find our promised digital commons to be one large billboard increasingly read and created by bots.

That’s bad enough. I want to talk about something worse. Call it the dead economy theory.

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The AI industry has a numbers problem.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft: the combined investment in large-scale AI infrastructure now runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars, with projections into the trillions over the next decade. OpenAI alone has been valued at north of $800 billion. Anthropic, which has yet to produce a single year of profit, commands a valuation in the same stratosphere. These numbers need an addressable market large enough to justify them.

There is only one market that large: the global labor market.

As we’re getting excited about discovering how to use claude.md files in Cowork, the industry is pitching a different reality. Every investor presentation of an AI agent “doing the work of ten analysts” is telling you the same thing: the product is labor replacement. The gentler language (”copilot,” “assistant,” “augmentation”) is marketing. The financial model underneath requires the elimination of human cost centers at civilizational scale. If it doesn’t do that, these companies are the most overvalued assets in the history of capitalism. The people writing the checks are not in the habit of lighting trillions of dollars on fire for a better autocomplete and an endless proliferation of longer and longer memos that nobody reads.

The AI companies now construct their own benchmarks to prove the point. OpenAI’s GDPVal benchmark measures how well models perform across forty-four occupations, from real estate broker to news analyst. The AI Productivity Index evaluates models against four specific professional roles: investment banking associate, management consultant, Big Law associate, primary care physician. These are targeting reticles aimed at the professional class. As an OpenAI evaluation lead told the New York Times,1 models now achieve “over an 80 percent win rate compared to human professionals” on tasks that, months earlier, no model could match. A former banker on the research team “keeps being shocked by how much of her old work the models can do.”

So let’s take them at their word. Assume the technology works as advertised, that AI systems become capable of performing most cognitive labor at a fraction of the cost of human workers. What happens next?

Follow the money through three turns.

Turn one: a company licenses AI to replace a significant portion of its workforce. Costs drop. Margins expand. The stock price goes up. Everyone on the earnings call is happy. When Block’s Jack Dorsey laid off nearly half his workforce in March, citing AI coding agents, investors responded with a twenty-five percent stock price surge in after-hours trading. The market rewarded the elimination of human labor with an immediate, massive transfer of value to shareholders.

Turn two: the replaced workers stop earning income. They cut spending. The businesses they used to patronize see revenue decline. Some of those businesses also adopt AI to cut costs, compounding the displacement. Consumer demand contracts across the economy.

Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market.

Economists Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas at Wharton have recently described this dynamic in a paper they aptly titled, “The AI Layoff Trap.” In competitive markets, an automating firm captures the full cost savings from replacing workers but bears only a fraction of the resulting demand destruction. In a market with twenty competitors, each firm feels one-twentieth of the demand it destroys. The rest falls on rivals. This creates a prisoners’ dilemma: every firm rationally automates beyond the socially optimal level, because the individual incentive to cut labor costs always outweighs the diffuse, shared consequence of eliminating consumer spending. Better AI makes this worse. Improved productivity widens the profit gap from automating faster than your competitors, intensifying the arms race toward collective ruin.

Sometimes the layoffs happen before executives even know whether AI will do the job. Zoë Hitzig, an economist who previously worked at OpenAI, told the Times: “When chief executives are saying they’re cutting jobs because of A.I., other people feel like they have to too. That dynamic could make the changes happen sooner than efficiency would dictate.” Herd behavior dressed in the language of innovation.

Henry Ford understood, perhaps apocryphally but correctly in principle, that his workers needed to earn enough to buy his cars. The AI economy is eliminating the workers and expecting the cars to keep selling, except that software has near-zero marginal cost, so the entire value proposition is the elimination of the human cost center. The product is the removal of the customer base.

The optimists will tell you this is just productivity gains. The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued. David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. New technologies create new categories of work. True. But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two. The agricultural transition took a hundred and forty years. Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced. In the interim, wages stagnated, the labor share of income collapsed, profits surged, inequality skyrocketed, and the political consequences included the Chartist movement and widespread social upheaval. As Frey puts it: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”

Compare that timeline to the one the AI industry is working on. Bharat Ramamurti, a former deputy director of the National Economic Council, has drawn the parallel to the China shock, the wave of manufacturing job losses that reshaped American politics when production moved overseas. “The China shock unfolded over several years, whereas this could happen over two years,” he told the Times. “These companies have spent so much money developing models that there’s going to be immense pressure on them to generate revenue through quick adoption.”

Previous automation replaced specific tasks within jobs. The power loom replaced hand weaving, the spreadsheet replaced manual calculation, etc. In each case, the technology was narrow. General-purpose AI threatens cognitive labor comprehensively, across every industry, simultaneously. The economist Wassily Leontief saw this coming in 1983 when he compared human labor to horses. The US horse population grew from nine million in 1840 to twenty-one million by 1900, seemingly immune to technological change. Within sixty years of the internal combustion engine, the population collapsed by eighty-eight percent. The horses weren’t retired out of malice. They became uneconomical to keep. Leontief’s point was that there is no economic law preventing the same thing from happening to humans.

Daron Acemoglu, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2024 and is the most rigorous voice on this topic, has found that between 1987 and 2017, “the displacement effect of new technologies far outweighed their productivity and reinstatement effects.” The new tasks did not materialize fast enough to absorb the displaced workers. His assessment of AI is more pointed still: firms are deploying what he calls “excessive automation,” using AI to kill jobs without generating significantly lower production costs, while imposing substantial social costs. The technology, in many applications, isn’t good enough to justify the displacement it causes. Automation for the sake of the stock price, not for genuine productivity.

Who is the customer when the customer is the thing you’ve eliminated?

An economy that doesn’t need human labor is a political crisis of a kind democratic systems have never faced.

Democratic governance rests on a bargain so old we’ve forgotten it’s a bargain at all. The governed have something the governors need: labor, tax revenue, military service, consumer spending. This dependency is the source of democratic leverage. The whole system functions because power is distributed, and it’s distributed because the people at the top need something from the people at the bottom.

Remove labor from that equation and watch what happens.

When value is generated by AI systems owned by a handful of corporations already world-class at tax optimization, every fiscal mechanism of democratic governance starves at once. The tax base erodes. Collective bargaining becomes vestigial (employers who don’t need employees don’t bargain with them). Consumer spending, which depends on labor income, contracts. Piketty’s r > g, the engine of wealth concentration, accelerates because AI severs the last link between capital accumulation and the need for human labor as a production input. Without redistribution, as one analysis of the framework put it, “approximately everything will eventually belong to those who are wealthiest when the transition occurs.”

And the public funded the research that made it possible. The transformer architecture, large-scale training methods, semiconductor advances—all of these were publicly or quasi-publicly funded through universities, DARPA, and national labs. The public bore the risk. Private companies captured the reward. This is blindingly common across technological advancement in the last sixty years. As Mazzucato puts it, “AI risks becoming another engine of rent extraction rather than value creation.” We subsidized the revolution and are now being told to accept displacement as the cost of progress that someone else profits from.

You can still vote (and please do, for people who get this shit and are willing to try to stop it). But what you’re voting over is the disposition of a shrinking pool of resources, while the real economy operates in a parallel system you increasingly have no input into.

The people building these systems understand this perfectly. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has said it on the record: “The balance of power of democracy is premised on the average person having leverage through creating economic value. If that’s not present, I think things become kind of scary.” The CEO of one of the three leading AI companies is telling you that the technology he is building will undermine the material basis of democratic governance. He sees the problem. He is building the thing that causes it. His company has not endorsed a single piece of legislation to address it. When asked about policy advocacy, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark described it as “the end of a very, very long chain of work.”

Peter Thiel wrote in 2009 that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible. The logic runs: democratic systems produce regulation, redistribution, and accountability, all of which create friction on the ability of exceptional people to reshape the world. If you believe you’re building the most transformative technology in human history, democratic oversight is an obstacle. Note: he isn’t talking about your or my freedom. We don’t matter.

This view has only gained adherents. The political spending, the media acquisitions, the sovereign-fund diplomacy where Sam Altman tours the Middle East cutting compute deals with autocratic governments: rational behavior for people who’ve concluded that democratic governance is a legacy institution to be routed around when it interferes.

Autocracies are better customers for this technology than democracies, which is precisely why the broligarchy has rapidly shifted its support behind Trump and MAGA. A democratic government that deploys AI to replace its workforce faces electoral consequences. An authoritarian government faces no such constraint and gains a surveillance and control dividend on top of the economic efficiencies. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Singapore: vast capital, centralized decision-making, no electorate to answer to, and an active interest in technologies of control. This is one of the motivating factors in the Valley’s latching on to Trump: he and his cronies can be bought, and as importantly, they have no loyalty to democracy. The economic incentives for AI companies point toward the entities with the fewest democratic accountability mechanisms.

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Every proposed solution to mass AI displacement treats it as a resource distribution problem. Universal basic income. Retraining programs. The “leisure economy.” The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel.

This is ahistorical bullshit.

We don’t have to speculate about what happens when economic function disappears from communities. Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on “deaths of despair” tracks the rising tide of suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease mortality concentrated in less-educated, formerly manufacturing-dependent populations. The mechanism isn’t just poverty. We lose any sense of economic purpose, and with that, social status and a perceived future. Communities organized around industries that left, where what replaced the jobs was opioids, domestic violence, and a life expectancy that dropped year over year in the richest country on earth.

Molly Kinder at Brookings drew the connection explicitly in Sun’s NYT piece: “Our economy grew extraordinarily and prices went down, but there were clear losers.” The AI companies’ narratives about abundance repeat the same promises of globalization. This time, the losers won’t be limited to manufacturing towns in the heartland. “I’ve interviewed so many college students who are super fearful about what the future means,” Kinder told the Times, “and their narrative is exactly the same as those blue-collar guys in the heartland.” The twenty-something software engineer in San Francisco and the displaced factory worker in Ohio are staring at the same question: what happens when the market decides my skills are worthless?

Guy Standing’s work on the “precariat” adds the structural dimension. The psychological consequences of permanent economic precarity corrode social coherence regardless of whether the rent is paid. Four decades of neoliberal policy plus digital acceleration have already created this class. AI acceleration expands it to include the college-educated professionals who thought they were safe.

Piketty, no conservative, has argued that UBI fails to address root structural problems: “unequal access to education and health, low-paying and low-productivity jobs, malfunctioning markets, corruption, and regressive tax systems.” David Shor’s polling data bears this out from the other direction: UBI is unpopular with American voters; a federal jobs guarantee has legs. People don’t want a check. They want work. They want purpose.

Anthropic’s own research has documented something worse than displacement: active deskilling. Junior engineers who relied on AI coding agents didn’t complete tasks much faster and understood their work less when quizzed afterward. The technology is degrading the expertise of the next generation of workers at the same time it’s competing with them for their jobs. The retraining argument assumes people can develop new skills to stay relevant. The evidence suggests the tools are preventing them from developing skills at all.

At the scale these companies need to justify their valuations, you’re looking at social instability that makes the current populist moment look quaint. Tens of millions of people, in their productive years, with no economic function, no clear path to one, and a keen awareness that the people who did this to them are the richest human beings who have ever lived. Stiglitz points out that AI will hit “routine white collar jobs,” the college-educated desk work that felt insulated from manufacturing disruption. Accountants, analysts, junior lawyers, radiologists, software developers. The professional class that constitutes the backbone of political stability in developed democracies.

The most honest thing you can say about violence is that nobody wants it, but the conditions that produce it are being engineered with extraordinary efficiency by people who have apparently never opened a history book. It’s happening. In April, someone tried to firebomb Sam Altman’s home. Another attacker targeted an Indianapolis city councilman who approved a local data center project. Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, told a recent panel: “The biggest challenge to A.I. in this country is political unrest. If I were sitting here in private with my peers, I’d be telling them the country could blow up politically and none of us are going to make any money when the country blows up.” Karp, to his credit, is saying this out loud. Most of his peers restrict such observations to the disappearing-message Signal chats where, as Jasmine Sun has reported, tech executives boast about the roles they plan to automate.

A strain of thought runs through Silicon Valley, from the Thiel Fellowship to the rationalist blogs to the effective altruism movement, that treats its intellectual framework with the seriousness of received revelation. These are people who believe they are operating at the frontier of human thought.

They are operating at the level of a second-year philosophy survey, armed with enormous confidence and no awareness of the counterarguments.

Start with Nietzsche, because the Valley loves Nietzsche, or rather a version of Nietzsche that would have made the man lose his shit and go horse-hugging much faster than the syphilis. The Übermensch gets trotted out as justification for the exceptional founder, the visionary who transcends conventional morality because he’s operating on a higher plane. Nietzsche was diagnosing the crisis of meaning after the collapse of metaphysical certainty, not writing a management philosophy for people who got rich selling advertising technology. The Übermensch is about the individual’s relationship to the creation of meaning in a godless universe. It has nothing to do with whether Peter Thiel should be exempt from democratic accountability. Nietzsche would have classified these people as the last men, the ones who blink, say “we have invented happiness,” and mistake comfort and optimization for human flourishing. He would have fucking loathed them.

The pattern repeats. Effective altruism is utilitarianism reinvented by people who have apparently never encountered Bernard Williams, or Derek Parfit’s own agonized wrestling with the implications of consequentialist reasoning, or the two centuries of philosophical literature explaining why naive expected-value calculations produce monstrous outcomes when applied without limiting principles. The EA movement walked itself into the Sam Bankman-Fried catastrophe because it adopted a moral framework without understanding its failure modes. What happens when you skip the coursework and go straight to the final exam.

Longtermism, the philosophical engine of AI acceleration, whether its proponents acknowledge it or not, is warmed-over Parfit without the rigor. The argument (that we should optimize for the welfare of trillions of hypothetical future beings, and that present-day costs are acceptable in service of that goal) is a framework any competent ethicist can dismantle in an afternoon. It has no limiting principle. It cannot distinguish between genuine moral urgency and the self-serving conclusion that whatever the speaker was already doing is cosmically important. In practice, it is a machine for generating justifications for the concentration of power by people who have decided they are the ones best positioned to steward the future of the species. How convenient.

The rationalist community rediscovers Bayesian epistemology and treats it like a revelation, apparently unaware that the philosophy of science has been working through these questions since the 1920s. Blog posts get treated as foundational texts. People who have never read Kuhn or Lakatos or Feyerabend construct an epistemology from first principles, marvel at what they’ve built, and proceed to use it as the intellectual building blocks for decisions that affect billions of people. The confidence is inversely proportional to the depth. Dunning-Kruger at scale.

The intellectual poverty extends to the economics. Acemoglu has found that only 4.6 percent of tasks in the economy are currently cost-effective to automate with AI. His estimate for AI’s total productivity impact over the next decade: 0.66 percent. Goldman Sachs projected seven percent in 2023, before we began to see the shape of this thing. McKinsey projects between 0.5 and 3.5 percent annually. Someone is catastrophically wrong, and the people spending the money are not the ones with the Nobel Prize. Over ninety percent of firms surveyed in 2025 reported no measurable impact on employment or productivity despite a quarter-trillion dollars in AI investment. Torsten Slok: “AI is everywhere except in the incoming macroeconomic data.” These are people who have decided what the future looks like and are spending other people’s money to will it into existence.

These bastards always tell on themselves. OpenAI published a white paper in April calling for “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age,” full of radically progressive proposals: a thirty-two-hour workweek, higher taxes on corporations and capital gains, a “public wealth fund” providing all citizens an equity stake in AI companies. In the same period, OpenAI’s president helped fund a super PAC that spent over two million dollars on ads against Alex Bores, a New York congressional candidate whose crime was introducing safety regulation for large AI developers and proposing to tax AI to fund direct payments to Americans. The company removed a profit cap that had previously limited investor returns to a hundred times their initial investment. Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief lobbyist, systematically deprioritized internal research that could produce unflattering results. “Whenever someone wrote a paper which talked about some negative aspect of A.I.,” a colleague told the Times, “he would say, ‘We’re not going to release something about a problem until we have a solution for it.’” Lehane’s own characterization: “We want to do applied physics, not theoretical physics.” Tell the story that helps us, not the one that’s true.

A Philosophy 101 student who misreads Nietzsche writes a bad paper and gets a C. A billionaire who misreads Nietzsche builds a political philosophy around the misreading and funds it with the GDP of a small nation. This is fucking insane.

These are not serious people. They are serious about accumulation and about winning. They are not serious about the questions that matter for what they’re building: what we owe each other, what makes a life worth living, and what happens to a civilization when you remove the material basis of human agency. These questions have occupied the best minds in human history for millennia. The Valley’s engagement with them amounts to reading the CliffsNotes on a transatlantic flight and arriving convinced you’ve mastered the canon.

And they want to restructure civilization.

Albert Camus broke with Jean-Paul Sartre and the French left over the most concrete political question there is: can the people alive today be treated as acceptable casualties in the pursuit of a better future?2

Sartre and the Marxists said yes. History has a direction. The revolution requires sacrifice. Camus said no. Any system of thought that subordinates living people to a hypothetical future has already committed the foundational moral error. Once you accept that logic, there is no limiting principle. Any atrocity becomes justifiable. Any amount of present suffering can be rationalized as a necessary input to the glorious output.

This is the structure of the AI acceleration argument. The technology will eventually benefit humanity (trillions of future humans, lives of abundance and meaning we can barely imagine), so present disruption is tolerable. Displaced workers, hollowed communities, the erosion of democratic leverage, the concentration of power in a handful of private actors who have exempted themselves from the consequences of their own project: regrettable but necessary. The expected value math works out.

The founders of Mechanize, a startup whose stated mission was “to enable the full automation of the economy,” made the logic explicit: “the only real choice is whether to hasten this technological revolution ourselves, or to wait for others to initiate it in our absence.” Technological determinism as moral absolution. The future is fixed. Our only choice is whether to build it first. Therefore, nothing we do along the way requires justification, because the destination was never in our hands. They’re making the same argument as the Marxists who sent dissidents to the gulag.

Camus staked his intellectual legacy on the claim that the person standing in front of you is not an input to a utility function. Their suffering is not redeemed by a future state of affairs they may never see. Their dignity is not negotiable against projected outcomes. The person who exists now (who has a job they’re about to lose, a family they support, a community that depends on a functioning local economy) is the unit of account. Not humanity in the abstract. Not the trillions of future beings that the longtermists conjure to win their expected-value calculations.

Once that commitment is abandoned, the door opens to every form of rationalized cruelty that the twentieth century spent a hundred million lives trying to teach us to reject.

The entire AI acceleration project is premised on abandoning it. It asks present people to bear costs for future benefits they may never see, distributed to people who do not yet exist, administered by a self-appointed class that has insulated itself from the consequences entirely. Altman’s “universal basic compute” proposal acknowledges, if you squint, that the future he’s building requires a new distribution mechanism. It is also a proposal in which he gets to be the one doing the distributing. Feudalism with better branding.

Jasmine Sun reported recently that tech industry sources “expressed more extreme concern about the labor market impacts of A.I. in private conversation, but suddenly became optimists once I turned on the mic.” They know what they’re building. They know what it will do. They perform optimism in public because the alternative is admitting that the thing they’ve staked their careers and fortunes on will immiserate a significant portion of humanity, and they’re doing it anyway. Amodei has written that Anthropic is “currently considering a range of possible pathways for our own employees,” implying that even the people building the technology may be surplus to its requirements. He framed this as compassionate. Read it again as a CEO telling his workforce that their jobs, too, are temporary.

I don’t want to dwell on whether AI can do what these companies claim. It may well be able to, though the current evidence suggests the gap between pitch and product is vast, and serious economists think the productivity gains are a fraction of what the industry projects. But Acemoglu’s core finding is that AI doesn’t need to be revolutionary to be destructive. “So-so” automation (technology that’s mediocre at replacing workers but cheap enough to do it anyway) still displaces at scale while delivering underwhelming productivity. The worst outcome may not be superintelligent AI. It may be adequate AI, deployed aggressively by companies chasing stock prices, eliminating jobs it can’t actually do well because the quarterly incentives demand it.

Has anyone with the power to shape this transition thought seriously about what it means for the people alive today who didn’t get a vote on any of it?

Fuck no.

The window for changing that answer is not infinite. The regulatory capture is already advanced: AI-related investments accounted for thirty-nine percent of US economic growth in the first three quarters of 2025, giving the federal government a vested interest in sustaining the boom. Amodei himself acknowledges that this leads to “the reluctance of tech companies to criticize the U.S. government, and the government’s support for extreme anti-regulatory policies on A.I.” The regulator and the regulated have converged into a single interest. The expertise asymmetry between legislators and the industry they’re supposed to oversee is insurmountable. The feedback loop (AI systems advising on the governance of AI systems) is closing.

The interventions that could matter are known. Public ownership stakes in AI infrastructure. Aggressive antitrust enforcement. A genuine tax regime on automated labor. Branko Milanovic’s prescription is characteristically direct: spread capital ownership more widely, tax the highest capital incomes more aggressively. None of these are technologically difficult. All of them require functioning democratic institutions with the will to challenge the richest companies in human history. The companies that would need to be taxed are spending millions to defeat the politicians who propose it.

The dead economy is not one where nothing happens. Plenty will happen. The GDP might even go up; AI-related investments are already propping it up. The dead economy is one where plenty happens and none of it requires you. Where the productive capacity of civilization has been captured by a system you have no stake in, no input into, and no vote on. Where the people who built it told you they don’t think you should have a say. Where they express alarm about the consequences in private and optimism in public. Where they publish white papers calling for radical redistribution while funding super PACs to destroy the politicians who propose it.

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On March 5, the Department of Justice published a proposed rule in the Federal Register that would, if adopted, give the Attorney General the right to review, delay, and effectively kill state bar investigations into the professional conduct of DOJ attorneys. The comment period closes April 6. You should comment. I did, and the text of mine is below. If you are concerned about your name being associated with something that pushes back against what this regime is doing, you can submit anonymously.

But first, some background on what the Department is actually trying to do here, because the Federal Register version runs to fifteen pages and is written in the kind of prose that exists to make you stop reading.

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What This Is About

Every lawyer in the United States is licensed by a state. That license comes with obligations—to the courts, to the law, to the profession—that exist independently of whoever happens to be paying you. When a lawyer lies to a judge, fabricates a legal justification, or subordinates their professional judgment to their boss’s political preferences, the state bar is one of the institutions charged with doing something about it. This is true whether you work at a two-person firm in Altoona or at the Department of Justice.

The Department of Justice does not care for this arrangement.

Over the past year, bar complaints have been filed against senior DOJ leadership and, given the track record of AUSAs pursuing immigration and other insane administration tactics, we are going to see an avalanche of such complaints—both merited and not. More than seventy lawyers and former judges, including two former Florida Supreme Court justices, requested that the Florida Bar investigate Attorney General Pam Bondi for allegedly pressuring DOJ lawyers to violate their professional obligations. Eagle Ed Martin, variously the Acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia, the head of the Weaponization Task Force, and the Pardon Attorney, is in the barrel at the moment (and acting like the utter clown that he is). The Legal Accountability Center filed a complaint against Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche with the New York Attorney Grievance Committee. Blanche, for his part, told a Federalist Society audience that the Department was in a “war” against bar associations and promised to curtail their oversight powers.

He was not speaking metaphorically. The proposed rule is the curtailment.

What the Rule Does

The Department has proposed adding a new § 77.5 to 28 CFR Part 77. In plain language, this is what it would do:

When someone files a bar complaint against a DOJ attorney—or when a state bar opens its own investigation—the Attorney General gets to review the matter first. The AG will “request” that the state bar suspend its investigation while the Department conducts its own review through the Office of Professional Responsibility, which reports to the Attorney General. If the state bar declines this request, the Department will take “appropriate action” to prevent the bar from proceeding.

That’s the rule. The Department’s own internal office, reporting to the official whose subordinates are being investigated, gets first crack at every complaint. The state bar, which exists to provide independent oversight, is told to wait. And if it refuses to wait, the Department has reserved the right to make it.

The Department’s legal theory is that 28 U.S.C. § 530B, the McDade Amendment, authorizes this. The McDade Amendment says DOJ attorneys “shall be subject to State laws and rules...to the same extent and in the same manner as other attorneys in that State.” The Department reads “same manner” to mean “different manner, one where your employer gets to vet the complaint before the licensing authority sees it.” No other attorney in America has this arrangement. Your state bar does not call your managing partner before investigating you.

Why You Should Care

This is not a technical dispute about federal rulemaking procedure. This is the executive branch of the United States government proposing to exempt its own lawyers from independent professional accountability. The implications are not subtle.

A DOJ attorney who lies to a federal court would, under this rule, have the matter reviewed first by the office that employs them, supervised by the official who may have directed the lie. The state bar, the independent institution the public has charged with holding lawyers accountable, would be told to stand down. And the rule contains no requirement that the internal review ever conclude. The Department could, in effect, suspend state bar oversight indefinitely simply by opening a file.

If you are a lawyer, this is an attack on the licensing system that governs your profession. If you are not a lawyer, this is an attack on one of the few remaining mechanisms by which government attorneys are held accountable for their conduct in court.

What You Can Do

The comment period is open until April 6, 2026. You can submit a comment at regulations.gov. You do not need to be a lawyer. You do not need to write fifteen pages. You need to tell the Department that a government that investigates itself is not being investigated.

If you are a lawyer, say so. State your jurisdiction. It matters. If you are not a lawyer, say that too; the rule affects anyone who has an interest in government attorneys being accountable for what they do in court, which is everyone.

If you want to crib from mine, you have my blessing. It’s below.

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My Comment

Submitted to Docket No. OAG199, Department of Justice, 28 CFR Part 77

My name is Owen McGrann. I am an attorney licensed in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania since 2009 and the founder of a law firm based in Pittsburgh. I submit this comment in my individual capacity.

The Department of Justice has, with the serene confidence of an institution that has forgotten what shame feels like, proposed a rule by which it would grant itself the right to review, delay, and effectively neutralize independent state bar investigations into the conduct of its own attorneys. One searches the history of federal rulemaking for a comparable act of institutional self-dealing and comes up mostly empty. The Department has outdone itself. This is a remarkable achievement for an agency whose nominal purpose is the administration of justice rather than its administration into quietude.

The comment that follows will endeavor to treat this proposal with the seriousness its authors deserve, which is to say: considerably less than they believe, and rather more than they would prefer.

I. What This Rule Actually Is

The Department informs us, with an admirably straight face, that this rule is necessary because “political activists have weaponized the bar complaint and investigation process.” This is the Department’s characterization of what happens when independent licensing authorities—created by states, answerable to states, vested by law with the responsibility of ensuring that attorneys do not lie to courts, fabricate evidence, or subordinate their professional duties to their employer’s political preferences—do precisely what they exist to do.

The Department does not like this. It has decided that the appropriate remedy is a federal regulation.

Let us be precise about what is being proposed, because the rule’s authors have taken considerable care to obscure it in the sober bureaucratic language of process and procedure. The Department proposes that before any state bar may take any investigative step in response to a complaint against a Department attorney, the Attorney General shall have the right to review the matter first, request that the bar stand down, and, should the bar decline this gracious invitation, take “appropriate action” to stop the bar from proceeding. The Department will investigate itself. It will report its findings to the bar. The bar may then, at its leisure, disagree.

This is not an oversight mechanism. It is an oversight mechanism’s tombstone, engraved with the words “existing practices” and “consistent application of uniform standards” to lend the epitaph an air of administrative normalcy.

II. The Statutory Argument, Which Does Not Survive Contact With the Statute

The Department’s legal theory rests on 28 U.S.C. § 530B, the McDade Amendment, which provides with admirable clarity that Department attorneys “shall be subject to State laws and rules...governing attorneys in each State where such attorney engages in that attorney’s duties, to the same extent and in the same manner as other attorneys in that State.”

The Department reads “to the same extent and in the same manner” to mean “subject to the same substantive rules, but through an enforcement mechanism available to no other attorney in America.” This is a remarkable interpretive feat. It requires one to conclude that Congress, in writing the words “same manner,” intended to authorize a categorically different manner, one in which the attorney’s employer may suspend the investigation, shape the evidentiary record, and report conclusions to the licensing authority before that authority is permitted to form its own. One imagines the Congress that passed this language would be surprised to learn what it had wrought.

The Department then reaches for McCulloch v. Maryland and the intergovernmental immunity doctrine to suggest that state bars have no authority over federal attorneys absent explicit congressional authorization, while simultaneously arguing that § 530B(b) grants the Attorney General broad rulemaking authority to structure enforcement as she sees fit. These two propositions cannot coexist. If intergovernmental immunity shields Department attorneys from state bar jurisdiction, then § 530B provides no hook for state bar authority whatsoever, and the Department’s rulemaking power under § 530B(b)—which exists to “assure compliance” with the statute—regulates nothing. If § 530B does create state bar jurisdiction, as the Department implicitly concedes by invoking it, then the “same manner” language means what it says, and the proposed rule violates it.

The Department has constructed an argument that devours itself. That it has done so across fifteen pages of institutional Federal Register prose does not make it more persuasive. It does make it more impressive, in the way that a very large error is more impressive than a small one.

III. The Threat Hiding in Subsection (b)

Proposed § 77.5(b) provides that should a state bar “refuse the Attorney General’s request,” the Department “shall take appropriate action to enforce this regulation or to prevent the bar disciplinary authorities from interfering with the Attorney General’s review.”

“Appropriate action.” Against state licensing bodies. For conducting their lawful investigations.

The Department declines to specify what this action might be, which is itself instructive. Vagueness of this kind in regulatory language is rarely accidental. What is clear is that the Department has reserved to itself the power to coerce independent state institutions into subordinating their oversight authority to the office they are supposed to be overseeing. This is not federalism as the Constitution envisions it. It is federalism as a protection scheme: the states may retain their licensing authority, provided they exercise it only when and how the federal government permits.

It is worth pausing here to appreciate the moral architecture of this provision. The state bars exist, in part, to protect the public from attorneys who abuse their positions. Department attorneys, like all attorneys, owe duties to the courts and to the law that exist independently of and in tension with their duties to their clients—including when that client is the United States Government. When a Department attorney allegedly lies to a court, or fabricates justifications for unlawful action, or subordinates their professional judgment to their superior’s political preferences, the state bar is among the institutions the public has charged with accountability. The proposed rule would allow the Department to tell that institution to wait in the hall while the Department reviews the matter internally, and to face unspecified federal action if it declines.

A government that can immunize its own lawyers from independent professional accountability has acquired a power that no government in a free society ought to possess. The Department proposes to acquire it through a notice-and-comment rulemaking. The audacity is, one must admit, breathtaking.

IV. The OPR Fiction

The Department proposes that the Office of Professional Responsibility—which reports to the Attorney General, whose attorneys it will be investigating—will serve as the neutral first-instance reviewer of complaints. We are asked to accept that an office whose continued existence, budget, and leadership depend on the goodwill of the official whose subordinates it investigates will nonetheless render dispassionate, independent judgments about whether those subordinates have engaged in professional misconduct.

The Department notes, as though this resolves the concern, that state bars are not required to defer to OPR’s findings. This is both correct and entirely beside the point. The rule does not need to mandate deference to achieve deference’s practical effects. It needs only to allow OPR to investigate at length, produce a record, and report conclusions to the state bar, after having delayed the bar’s own investigation by months or years, and the bar’s subsequent review will inevitably proceed in the shadow of OPR’s prior determinations. There is nothing to require OPR to conclude an investigation at all. The Department proposes to remove a state bar from the process, in effect, if not strictly in process. This is how institutional capture works.

The Department has fifty years of OPR experience, it tells us, and OPR possesses unmatched expertise in evaluating Department attorney misconduct. One notes that fifty years of this expertise did not prevent the misconduct now generating bar complaints. One notes further that an investigator’s expertise in evaluating the conduct of the institution that employs them is precisely the kind of expertise that independence is designed to supplement, not replace.

V. What the Federalism Analysis Omits

The Department’s Executive Order 13132 analysis concludes that this rule lacks sufficient federalism implications to require a summary impact statement because it “merely better reflects the existing balance of responsibilities” between the Department and state bars.

“Merely.” A rule that explicitly authorizes the federal executive to prevent state licensing bodies from conducting lawful investigations into licensed attorneys, and reserves unspecified coercive authority for use against those bodies should they resist, “merely” reflects the existing balance. The Department’s facility with litotes is, in its way, as impressive as its capacity for overreach.

The states created their bars. The states license their attorneys. The states, through their bar disciplinary authorities, have long held that the obligations of an attorney to the court and to the law do not dissolve upon federal employment. This is not a radical position. It is the position of every jurisdiction in the country, codified in rules of professional conduct that predate the current administration by decades. It has never been the case that having a certain client affords an attorney special protections or rights. Doing so creates a parallel set of rules for attorneys, with government attorneys, who hold more awesome power simply by virtue of who their client is, exempted from true oversight. The proposed rule treats this settled understanding as an obstacle to be managed rather than a principle to be respected.

VI. Conclusion

Justice Robert Jackson, who knew something about the abuse of legal authority, observed that the prosecutor “has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America.” He meant it as a warning about the temptations of unchecked power, and as an argument for restraint, integrity, and accountability in those who wield it.

The Department of Justice has responded to that warning by proposing a rule designed to ensure that when its attorneys are accused of misconduct, the first reviewer of that accusation will be the institution that employed them, supervised them, and whose leadership may have directed the conduct at issue. It has dressed this proposal in the language of expertise, consistency, and process improvement. It has cited McCulloch v. Maryland. It has invoked Executive Order 14147.

What it has not done is grapple honestly with the question that sits at the center of this entire enterprise: whether a government that can shield its own lawyers from independent accountability is a government that remains accountable to law. That question has an answer. The Department will not find it in subsection (b) of § 530B.

This rule should be withdrawn. The public, the legal profession, and the institution of the Department of Justice itself deserve better than a regulation whose primary achievement is ensuring that the next Department attorney who lies to a federal court will have the comfort of knowing that the first call goes to their employer.

Respectfully submitted,

Owen McGrann, Esq.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

A defining sensation of the Trump era, for me, is the sensation of overwhelm. Part of the reason I write about any of this is that I feel muddle-headed and the writing forces me to think it through. But every time I sit down to write, I have to whittle down what’s bouncing around in my brain because there is so much happening, I would have to write a book to cover it all. Or a series of books. And I don’t have time for that shit.

The problem is that by narrowing the topic to a newsletter-sized morsel, the connections between things get muted. I wrote about the pathetic obeisance of law firms in one piece, followed by an exploration of how the rule of law decays in authoritarian takeovers, then pivoted to the escalatory measures taken by masked secret police. I got out over my skis into economics. I have been wanting to write about the state-run command economy being introduced, and last night I began planning a piece about the DoD’s raging battle to bring AI companies to heel. But then I woke up at 4:00 am—sleeping with baby monitors means not ever really sleeping—and saw that we’d opened a war with Iran without the President so much as notifying Congress, and sat down to write about that instead.

Thing is, all of these are the same story.

All of these are manifestations of the same personalization of the government, the same cowardice from Congress, the same drive to make all the decisions, to be everywhere, to render all of the rest of us, in Gen Z parlance, NPCs.

So I’m going to try something different. I am not going to narrow the topic this time. I am going to try to hold the whole bloody thing in my hands at once and describe what I see, because I think that the serial treatment—this week’s outrage, next week’s atrocity—has been doing us a disservice. The sheer volume is not incidental to what is happening. The sheer volume is the method. And the only way to see the shape of a thing this large is to step far enough back that the whole of it comes into view, however sickening the panorama.

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His Name On Everything

Let’s start with something that seems almost petty, because it is almost petty, and because the pettiness is revealing.

Donald Trump has put his name on the Kennedy Center. He has renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace after himself, while simultaneously suing to dismantle the organization; a federal judge ruled the dismantling illegal, which has not slowed things down. He offered to fund Penn Station’s renovation on the condition it be renamed after him. The same deal was offered for Dulles Airport. Florida has already passed legislation renaming Palm Beach International Airport in his honor. And he hung a banner of his own glowering face on the headquarters of the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice. The place that is supposed to embody the principle that no man is above the law now has one man’s face covering the façade like a campaign billboard, or a Soviet mural, or the side of a casino.

This is vanity, yes. The man is a grotesque narcissist; this is well-established. But the naming is doing something more than flattering his ego. Every authoritarian in history understands the function of putting your name and face on public buildings. It is a claim of ownership. It says: this institution is mine now. The Department of Justice is not yours, citizen. It is not the people’s. It is his. The name on the building is the flag planted in conquered soil.

Every public square in the Soviet Union had its statue. Every government building in Saddam’s Iraq bore his portrait. The function is always the same. You walk past it every day, and every day it tells you who is in charge, and after a while you stop noticing, and that is when it has worked.

The Grift

Anne Applebaum, whose work tracking kleptocracies has become essential reading, has been maintaining a Kleptocracy Tracker at Johns Hopkins that catalogs the financial conflicts of interest in this administration. The list is so long it requires its own website. I commend it to you. What follows is a partial survey.

The sons of Donald Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff have built cryptocurrency empires worth hundreds of millions of dollars, almost certainly billions, buoyed, let us not be coy about this, by their fathers’ positions in the United States government. World Liberty Financial is a crypto venture co-founded by the Trump family and the Witkoff family. Lutnick’s twenty-eight-year-old son Brandon, now running Cantor Fitzgerald, served as its lead investment bank. The SEC has been dismissing cases against crypto exchanges run by major Trump donors—the Winklevoss twins, who donated over $21 million to pro-Trump PACs and are founding members of a private club partly owned by Donald Trump Jr., saw their Gemini lawsuit quietly dropped. Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, who had pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering and served four months in prison. Zhao promptly showed up at Mar-a-Lago to promote World Liberty Financial. The pardoning of a convicted financial criminal so that he can join your family’s crypto business is something that would get you laughed out of a spy novel for being too on the nose.

Applebaum has pointed out that crypto is an especially potent vehicle for corruption because investment can be anonymous. You can funnel money to the President of the United States and nobody will ever know. This is a bribery machine with the serial numbers filed off, operating in broad daylight.

And it goes on. The Board of Peace, a new international body Trump created and chairs, commands $17 billion in commitments ($10 billion from U.S. taxpayers, the rest from other nations) and Trump alone controls appointments, dismissals, agendas, and resolutions. Congress has not authorized where the $10 billion comes from. It is, as The Conversation put it, a privatized UN with one shareholder. The only way for Trump to lose his seat as head of the Board of Peace? He dies.

Trump has filed administrative claims seeking $230 million from the DOJ for alleged damages from investigations into his conduct. He has also sued the IRS for $10 billion, roughly two-thirds of the agency’s entire annual budget, over the leak of his tax returns. When asked about the obvious problem of a President suing a government he controls, Trump told supporters: “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself.” He has floated donating the proceeds to charity, which would, of course, also give him a tax deduction on a ten-billion-dollar settlement he approved for himself. (I also note that he controls many non-profits that function as his piggy bank.) Former DOJ lawyers, conservative and liberal alike, have urged the court to reject the claim.

When Lutnick became Commerce Secretary, he transferred his equity in Cantor Fitzgerald to a trust benefiting his adult sons, tax-free, as permitted by government ethics rules. Brandon, twenty-eight, became chairman. Kyle became executive vice chairman. The Commerce Secretary’s sons now run a major financial firm that is under congressional investigation by Senators Wyden and Warren for possible conflicts of interest related to tariff bets—bets on the legality of tariffs that their father, as Commerce Secretary, helped design. Matthew Moroun, the billionaire owner of the Ambassador Bridge between the U.S. and Canada, donated $1 million to MAGA Inc. on January 16th, met with Commerce Secretary Lutnick hours later, and less than a day after that, Trump announced he would “not allow” a competing bridge to open. Fisher Sand & Gravel, run by a reliable Republican donor, has received roughly $2 billion in border wall contracts.

Two billion dollars. To one donor’s company. For a wall.

I could keep going. I will not keep going because if I list every instance of graft in this administration we will be here all week and I have a toddler to feed. But sit with the weight of what I’ve just described, because that is only the financial dimension, and the financial dimension is only one face of this thing.

The Command Economy

There is a word for an economic system in which the government dictates which companies can operate, who they must sell to, who they cannot sell to, what share of their revenue belongs to the state, and which political allies get to buy the remains. That word is not “capitalism.” That word is not “free market.” The Republican Party, which has spent fifty years telling us that the invisible hand of the market is the closest thing to God’s hand on earth, has built a command economy in under a year.

Trump forced the sale of TikTok to a consortium of political allies — Larry Ellison, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, Michael Dell — signing the executive order with the words “If I could make it 100% MAGA, I would.” The federal government took a ten percent stake in Intel, purchasing $8.9 billion worth of common stock — the government literally owns part of a semiconductor company now, which is the sort of thing Republicans used to accuse Venezuela of doing. NVIDIA pays twenty-five percent of its Chinese revenue to the federal government as the cost of being allowed to sell there. The word “tribute” is appropriate. The word “tax” does not do it justice.

Then there is U.S. Steel. Trump blocked Nippon Steel's $14.1 billion acquisition, then reversed himself and approved it on one condition: the United States government, meaning Trump personally, would receive a "golden share" granting veto power over the company's hiring, capital spending, plant closures, headquarters location, and acquisitions, through 2035. He appointed Commerce Department officials to the board. The Atlantic Council asked openly whether Trump had effectively nationalized the company. When U.S. Steel tried to shut down a plant in Granite City, Illinois, Commerce Secretary Lutnick called the CEO and told him he wouldn't allow it. The President of the United States now exercises operational control over a private steel company. The United Steelworkers' president said Trump had assumed "a startling degree of personal power over a corporation." He didn't demand a cash cut. He demanded something more valuable: control.

And then there is the media consolidation, which continued this week. Netflix bid $83 billion to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. The DOJ’s antitrust division launched a formal review of Netflix’s bid, issuing a second request for information that paused the deal. This was notable in part because the DOJ’s antitrust chief, Gail Slater, had just been removed by senior Trump officials. Into the breach stepped David Ellison—son of Larry Ellison, Trump’s ally, whose Paramount Skydance had already absorbed CBS after a merger prefaced by a $16 million settlement to Trump over his lawsuit against CBS News. Ellison bid $111 billion for all of WBD. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos visited the White House, met with Trump’s staff, and then walked away. Netflix said the price was too high. Draw your own conclusions about what was discussed.

If the Paramount deal closes, one family (the Ellisons, bankrollers of the President) will control Warner Bros., HBO, CNN, CBS, Paramount, the Discovery channels, and a major stake in TikTok. David Dayen, writing in the American Prospect, described it as media consolidation with echoes of what we see in dictatorships. Elizabeth Warren called it “an antitrust disaster” in which “a handful of Trump-aligned billionaires are trying to seize control of what you watch.” Trump, for his part, publicly signaled he favored the Ellison deal, then walked it back and said he’d leave it to the Justice Department—the same Justice Department whose antitrust chief he’d just removed.

And then there is the deal that ties it all together, the one that reveals the machine in full. I am going to walk through it step by step because it is important that you understand how the pieces connect.

Start here: Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East is Steve Witkoff. Witkoff’s son Zach co-founded World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture. In May 2025, an Abu Dhabi state-backed fund called MGX, controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, invested $2 billion in World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin. Two billion dollars from a UAE sovereign wealth fund into the President’s family crypto business.

Two weeks later, Trump approved the sale of advanced American AI chips to the UAE, chips that had been restricted for national security reasons. Many of those chips were destined for G42, an AI company also controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon. The same man who sent $2 billion to the President’s family business received, shortly thereafter, access to restricted military-adjacent technology. The deal was shepherded through by Steve Witkoff, the envoy whose son’s company had just received the $2 billion.

The State Department Inspector General is now evaluating an ethics investigation. We shall see how long it takes to shut down that investigation.

Meanwhile, China can buy NVIDIA’s advanced H200 chips too, and the chain of causation there runs through the same cast of characters. Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder, in October. Binance subsequently deployed engineers and resources to boost World Liberty Financial’s market cap from $127 million to $2.1 billion. The UAE, whose sovereign wealth fund had already invested in World Liberty Financial, brokered expanded chip sales. National security restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports were relaxed for countries whose money flows through the President’s business ventures.

To get a sense of the insanity of this, I started putting this together and then kinda gave up:

This is the sort of arrangement that the United States used to sanction other countries for. This is the sort of corruption we used to write sternly-worded reports about when it happened in Kazakhstan.

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The Machinery of the State

A man who wants to steal has to first get rid of the people whose job is to stop stealing.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been gutted. OMB Director Russell Vought ordered it to cease operations in February 2025, and 88% of its workforce received layoff notices. The head of the Office of Government Ethics was fired. The head of the Office of Special Counsel was fired. The IRS budget has been cut by over twenty percent, its workforce slashed by a quarter, and the division that audits billionaires lost 38% of its employees. Over $800 million in DOJ grants have been terminated. Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—the law that punishes American companies for bribing foreign governments—has been suspended by executive order, the first time since the statute was enacted in 1977. Enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act has been halted for domestic entities. Every single institution whose purpose is to detect, investigate, or punish corruption has been defunded, decapitated, or mothballed.

And $15 million in USAID funds, money appropriated by Congress for foreign aid, was redirected to pay for Russell Vought’s personal security detail. The man who gutted the CFPB now has U.S. Marshals protecting him on the taxpayer’s dime, through an agency he helped dismantle.

Please don’t mistake this for deregulation. Deregulation is a policy preference about the appropriate scope of government. This is a man disconnecting the alarm system before he robs the house.

And it goes beyond the financial watchdogs. This morning, I woke up and learned with the rest of the world that the United States and Israel had conducted the most sweeping American military operation in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq. They killed the Supreme Leader of Iran. Congress was not consulted. Not “Congress wasn’t given formal authorization.” Congress was not told it was happening. The Declare War Clause of the Constitution, which vests the power to make war in the legislature, has been treated as a suggestion for decades, by Presidents of both parties, and I have written about this before. But there is a difference between the slow erosion of a constitutional norm and a President launching the largest military campaign in twenty years without telling anyone. Congress found out from the news. The body that is constitutionally charged with deciding whether America goes to war learned about a new war the same way you did: on their phones.

The administration has sued over twenty states that refused to turn over their voter rolls. At least ten states have complied, handing over data on 37 million voters, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. The DOJ plans to analyze the data and instruct states to remove specific voters, something the federal government has never done. If you control who votes, you control who wins. If you control who wins, everything else is theater. I ask you: are Trump and his acolytes acting as if they will ever face consequences? Reckon with what that means.

There is one more thing, and it is different in kind from everything I have listed so far.

In November, Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Congress passed 427 to 1. The DOJ was required to release all files related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. By January 30, they had published 3.5 million pages. Trump is mentioned over 38,000 times in those documents. Then, on February 24, NPR reported that the public database was missing dozens of pages related to accusations that Trump sexually abused a minor. More than fifty pages of FBI interviews with the accuser. Gone. Not redacted. Not withheld with explanation. Simply absent. The DOJ declined to explain why. The White House said Trump had been “totally exonerated.” Even James Comer, a Republican, announced the Oversight Committee would investigate.

The Department of Justice—the one with the seventy-foot banner of his face on its headquarters—is the same department that disappeared FBI files about the President and a child. The apparatus of self-enrichment and the apparatus of self-protection are the same apparatus. The man who fired the ethics officials and gutted the watchdogs and suspended the anti-bribery laws has also, it appears, arranged for certain files to go missing. Files about a child.

And through all of it, Congress does nothing. The most powerful legislature in the history of the world has become a rubber stamp with a cloakroom. They will not assert the war power. They will not assert the power of the purse. They will not conduct oversight. They will not do their jobs. The President acts, and Congress watches, and the rest of us watch Congress watching, and the loop closes.

The Golden Age

Underneath all of the grift and the power-grabbing, there is an ideology, or something that functions like one. Let’s be specific about what it is, because “white Christian nationalism” is a phrase that has been thrown around so loosely it has started to lose its edges. So let me show you what I mean.

In the summer of 2025, as DHS ramped up hiring for 10,000 new ICE agents, the department’s official social media accounts began posting recruitment content that the Southern Poverty Law Center and multiple historians identified as white nationalist propaganda. Not content that might, if you squinted, be interpreted that way. Content that used specific, recognizable signals from the white supremacist movement.

In July, DHS posted an image of the 1872 painting American Progress, a work depicting white settlers conquering Indigenous land that is a staple of “great replacement” circles, with the caption: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” The caption contains exactly fourteen words. Fourteen words is the length of the most widely known white supremacist slogan in the world, coined by David Lane, a man sentenced to 190 years in prison for his role in the assassination of a Jewish talk show host. The caption capitalizes Heritage and Homeland — H and H, or 8 and 8, the numerical shorthand for “Heil Hitler.” Together, 14 and 88 form 1488, a number so foundational to neo-Nazi culture that the Anti-Defamation League maintains a dedicated page explaining it.

In August, DHS posted a drawing of Uncle Sam at a crossroads with the caption “Which way, American man?” — language drawn from Which Way Western Man?, a 1978 book by white nationalist William Gayley Simpson that was published by a neo-Nazi press, argues Hitler was right, and advocates violence against Jews. Mother Jones traced the original graphic to an account called “Mr. Robert” whose bio highlights the phrase “Wake Up White Man.”

In October, DHS posted a recruitment video captioned “End of the Dark Age, beginning of the Golden Age” with footage of heavily armed agents detaining protesters. The video used a song (“Little Dark Age” by MGMT) that had become an anthem among neo-Nazi and fashwave creators, set to the glitchy visual aesthetic of fascist internet subculture. In January 2026, two days after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis, DHS posted another recruitment video featuring “We’ll Have Our Home Again” by Pine Tree Riots, a song popular in neo-Nazi spaces, with lyrics about reclaiming “our home” by “blood or sweat.” Members of Congress demanded that Meta stop running the ad on Facebook and Instagram.

In January 2026, the Department of Labor posted a video of glorified scenes from American history with the caption: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.” “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”—one people, one empire, one leader—was the central slogan of the Nazi Party.

The recruitment images featured white people almost exclusively. The enforcement images disproportionately featured Black and brown people accused of immigration violations. The aesthetic choices were consistent and deliberate. Peter Simi, a sociologist who has studied extremist groups for three decades, told NBC News that the posts had “gone from episodic to more consistent, and from more gray area to more clear cut.” Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, was more direct: “These are no longer dog whistles. They’re bullhorns.”1

And it is not just the bureaucracy. Trump himself has called immigrants “vermin” and said they are “poisoning the blood of our country,” language taken nearly verbatim from Mein Kampf. When confronted about it, he repeated it. In November 2025, he reposted an AI-generated image of himself enthroned beneath an emblem that bore a striking resemblance to the Nazi war eagle. On Inauguration Day, Elon Musk twice performed a straight-arm salute from the stage at the inaugural rally. Neo-Nazi groups celebrated it. Musk responded by posting Nazi-themed jokes to his 200 million followers. Steve Bannon and others repeated the salute at CPAC the following month. The once-taboo gesture is being normalized.

When asked about any of this, the DHS spokesperson said: “Calling everything you dislike ‘Nazi propaganda’ is tiresome.” The White House said: “This line of attack is boring and tired. Get a grip.”

Immigrants have been transformed from a policy question into an enemy class. They are not people about whom we disagree on the proper rate of admission. They are invaders, criminals, animals, a pestilence. The language is eliminationist and it is being deployed by the official communications apparatus of the United States government to recruit the largest law enforcement expansion in federal history. The masked agents are the enforcement arm. The camps are the logical conclusion. This is the oldest play in the authoritarian handbook: create an enemy, demonize the enemy, use the enemy to justify extraordinary powers, then never give the powers back.

The Christian nationalism is the binding agent. It supplies the moral vocabulary for an enterprise that would otherwise be nakedly about money and power. It tells the faithful that Trump is an instrument of divine will, which is convenient because divine will is hard to audit. It provides the aesthetic—the flags, the hymns, the reverence—that transforms a kleptocratic regime into a crusade. Without it, you’d have to explain why a billionaire who has cheated on every wife and stiffed every contractor is the champion of the common man. With it, you just say God works in mysterious ways and move on.

The Whole Shape

So. Here we are. Step back far enough and the panorama assembles itself.

The money is being taken. The symbols are being branded. The watchdogs have been put down. The machinery of the state has been turned to the service of one man and his circle. The military acts on his word alone. The economy operates at his pleasure. The elections are being brought under federal control. A mythology of national renewal, dressed in the imagery of the Third Reich, provides the soundtrack. And FBI files about the President and a child have gone missing from the database of the department that bears his face.

None of this is hidden, which is perhaps the most disorienting thing about it. The banner is seventy feet tall. The crypto wallets are public. The pardons are announced on social media. The self-dealing is conducted with the cheerful shamelessness of a man who knows that nobody is going to stop him, because he has fired everyone whose job it was to stop him, and the legislature that might have intervened is instead sending him letters of congratulation.

Eisenhower warned about a party that is merely a conspiracy to seize power. What we are living through is what happens after the conspiracy succeeds. The power has been seized.

The question is what we do about it.

November

Garry Kasparov, who grew up inside the Soviet system and has spent decades studying how democracies die, has been saying something that I think is exactly right: the 2026 midterm elections are the last structural opportunity to impose accountability on this administration. Not the last chance in some vague, inspirational sense. The last mechanism.

Here is why. If Democrats take the House, they gain subpoena power. They can compel testimony. They can haul administration officials and family members in for depositions under oath. They can investigate the crypto ventures, the missing Epstein files, the UAE chip deals, the command economy, the voter roll seizures, every last thing I have described in this piece. They can defund ICE and CBP. They can reassert the power of the purse. They can hold hearings that put the receipts on national television. They can, if they find the spine, begin impeachment proceedings.

If Republicans hold Congress, none of that happens. The oversight committees continue to function as rubber stamps. The watchdogs stay dead. The grift continues. The consolidation accelerates. And by 2028, the question of whether there is a free and fair presidential election becomes very much an open one because the man who is seizing state voter rolls and federalizing election administration will have had two more years to entrench himself.

This is why Trump is obsessed with elections. He understands the math. A Democratic Congress is the one thing that can threaten him, because it is the one remaining institution with the constitutional authority to investigate, to defund, and to remove. Everything else—the courts, the agencies, the press—has either been captured, intimidated, or rendered irrelevant. Congress is the last lever. And it is currently in the hands of people who will not pull it.

That can change in November. It is the only thing that can change in November. And that makes it the most important election of our lives, which is a phrase that has been so overused it has lost all meaning, except that this time it is simply, arithmetically true. Win the House and there is a path back. Lose it and the path narrows to something close to nothing.

Kasparov has warned that strongmen depend on their opponents getting weary, on people turning away from politics out of exhaustion and disgust. The overwhelm I described at the beginning of this piece, the feeling of drowning in the sheer volume of it, is not a side effect of what is happening. It is the intended result. They want you tired. They want you to stop reading. They want you to decide that it’s too much, that none of it matters, that your vote won’t make a difference, that the system is already too far gone.

Do not give them that. The system is badly damaged but it is not gone. The tools of accountability still exist. They are sitting in a locked drawer labeled “Congressional Majority.”

The key is in your hands.

I woke up at 4:00 am and the baby was murmuring and the country was at war and the President hadn’t asked anyone’s permission and I sat down to write about it, and then I realized that I couldn’t write about just that, because just that is never just that, because all of it is the same thing, and the same thing is very simple: a man and his friends are taking everything that isn’t nailed down, and then they are pulling up the nails, and then they are taking those too.

Congress is just watching them do it.

But there will be a new Congress in January 2027. What kind of Congress that is depends on what we do between now and November. That is the work. Not the end of the fight, winning the midterms is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one, but the battle that cannot be lost.

So do not look away. Do not get tired. Do not let the volume of the assault convince you that resistance is futile. It is not futile. It is arithmetic. Seats and votes and majorities and subpoenas. The boring, tedious, grinding machinery of democracy, which is the only machinery that has ever worked.

Get to work.

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Donald Trump is massing two aircraft carriers, a dozen warships, and hundreds of fighter jets for a second major military assault on Iran — a nation of 90 million people with substantial air defenses and 30,000 American troops within retaliation range. He has not consulted Congress. He has not articulated objectives. He mutters about regime change in the same breath as calling it a limited strike. His press secretary, she of the machine-gun lips, asked whether the president would wait for ongoing diplomatic negotiations before bombing a sovereign nation, declined to answer.

He doesn’t believe he needs to ask because he already knows what happens when he doesn’t.

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On January 3rd of this year, Trump ordered Delta Force into Venezuela, captured its president, killed approximately eighty people, and announced that the United States would henceforth “run” the country. Congress was notified after the operation was already underway. When asked why he hadn’t consulted lawmakers in advance, Marco Rubio explained that it simply wasn’t “the kind of mission that you can do congressional notification on.” The Senate tried to pass a war powers resolution. JD Vance flew to Capitol Hill and cast the tie-breaking vote to kill it. The administration had previously told Congress, in writing, that it had no plans for regime change in Venezuela. That assurance, it turned out, was worth exactly what this administration’s assurances are always worth.

Six months earlier, Trump had bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities without congressional authorization, without notifying Democratic leadership until American planes had already cleared Iranian airspace, on a legal justification so thin it wouldn’t survive a first-year constitutional law seminar: “inherent authority” and “collective self-defense of Israel.” Congress grumbled. A war powers resolution was introduced. A ceasefire arrived and made looking away convenient, so they looked away. God forbid having to do some work and put a vote on the record.

The administration has now conducted unauthorized military operations against Venezuela and Iran in the span of seven months. Congress has not stopped them once. And so here we are again—larger force, higher stakes, zero consultation—the White House having correctly internalized that the embarrassment of asking has always outweighed, in practice, the constitutional requirement to do so. This is not a crisis that arrived without warning, but the entirely predictable consequence of a legislature that has spent fifty years treating its own constitutional authority as an inconvenient inheritance best left unclaimed.1 And it is being done, with straight faces, by men who call themselves originalists.

That claim deserves to be examined until it breaks.

The unitary executive theory, the legal architecture constructed to justify precisely this, requires accepting that the founders were either historically illiterate or lying through their teeth. Its architects have made their peace with the second option. We've always been at war with Eurasia. Consider what they have to explain away. Alexander Hamilton—a man who rarely encountered an executive power he didn’t want to touch, who argued for a vigorous presidency at every turn—drew a line in Federalist No. 69 so explicit it reads today like a warning aimed directly at them:

“It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces... while that of the British King extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies—all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the Legislature.”

Hamilton wrote that to promise a skeptical republic it was not trading a British monarch for an American one. He knew the fear. He answered it directly. The unitary executive crowd has spent fifty years crowning the very king Hamilton swore did not exist…in his name, with his papers, waving his Federalist essays like a forged deed to property they stole.

James Madison left even less room. The man who drafted the Constitution, whose intentions are not a matter of inference, wrote to Jefferson in 1798 with the patience of someone who had already thought this through completely:

“The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature.”

Studied care. The architect explaining the building. Not a riddle. Not a suggestion. Madison expected posterity to be literate. That was his mistake.

What the imperial presidency actually is, beneath the borrowed robes, is the thing the Federalist Society has built careers denouncing: living constitutionalism, practiced with total shamelessness in the one area where its practitioners like the outcome. The same legal movement demanding textual fidelity on the Second Amendment, the Commerce Clause, the administrative state, quietly abandons the entire methodology when the text says something that inconveniences the Oval Office. The Declare War Clause doesn’t get amended; that would require honesty and a two-thirds majority. Instead it gets bled out in the subbasements of the Justice Department, one OLC memo at a time, each unauthorized military action recycled as precedent for the next, a shadow constitution built by lawyers whose work no elected official ever has to defend in public. The work of men and women who mistake the President for their client, and their client for the sovereign.

Congress is not a victim of this racket. It is a co-conspirator. Madison vested the war power in the legislature because he understood, with the clarity of someone who had studied the collapse of republics, that executives hunger for war and legislatures are structurally more reluctant to start one. That theory required only one thing to function: a Congress willing to act like one. What we got instead was fifty years of blank-check AUMFs stretched past any recognizable limit, a War Powers Resolution that every administration since Nixon has reported against “consistent with” rather than “pursuant to”—a lawyerly genuflection that is its own form of contempt—and a political class that somehow made asking Congress for permission the embarrassing option.

Last June, when the moment came, most of them went home. This week, as warships move into position for a potential strike on a nation of 90 million people, the Republican congressional majority is meeting the constitutional crisis with the moral urgency of a game of Go Fish.

Two members of Congress are trying to stop this. Thomas Massie, a libertarian Republican from Kentucky. Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California. They agree on almost nothing and keep finding each other anyway, because no one else showed up for work. Together they passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act through a discharge petition that had to go around their own leadership. They got it signed into law. When Pam Bondi’s Justice Department defied the statute, missed deadlines, over-redacted, withheld materials the law explicitly required to be released, Massie and Khanna threatened inherent contempt. Not a press release. Constitutional hardball, from the institution that is supposed to be full of it. Now they are trying to force a floor vote before Trump bombs Iran a second time. They will almost certainly fail. Their colleagues are busy fundraising for reelection.

Two. Out of five hundred thirty-five.

King George III would have recognized the power. What would have astonished him is the audacity of clothing it in the language of liberation, of watching an executive dismantle every constitutional constraint on war-making while the lawyers who built the apparatus invoke the founders by name.

Those founders wrote their intentions in plain English, argued them in public, and put their lives behind them before they affixed their signatures. Hamilton’s promise is not ambiguous. Madison’s letter is not ambiguous. The Declare War Clause is four words followed by a comma. The ambiguity is manufactured: produced on demand, in law reviews and OLC memos, by people who needed the text to say something other than what it says, and who have built careers on the pretense that this requires genuine intellectual effort rather than the raw will to power it actually reflects.

To defend what is happening right now is to confess that you don’t care what the Constitution says, only who holds the sword.

So stop calling yourselves originalists. Stop invoking the founders you are betraying. Stop pretending this is constitutional law rather than what it plainly is: the deliberate construction of exactly the executive the founders built this document to prevent. They had a word for it. They knew it when they saw it. They wrote down, in considerable detail, how to stop it.

We just decided not to.

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January 24, 2026. Minneapolis.

Why am I doing this again? Christ. I’ve thought about why I’ve sat at this keyboard for the last hour, and this is is the only answer I have: I am writing this because the record matters. I am writing this because I am a lawyer, and lawyers are taught that words have meaning, that facts have weight, that the law is a framework for peaceful coexistence rather than a weapon wielded by the powerful against the powerless. I am writing this because, as of today, I no longer believe those things are true in this country.1

My brother lives in Minneapolis with his wife and daughter. Earlier this week, when texting with him, he paraphrased Joseph Heller: “The law is what they can get away with.”

He’s right. And what they can get away with, as of today, is murder. Execution. Unwarranted. Unsupportable by facts or law.

This morning, federal agents executed an American citizen named Alex Jeffrey Pretti on a residential street in Minneapolis. He was thirty-seven years old—the same age as Renée Good, the woman they killed seventeen days earlier in the same city. He was an ICU nurse at the Minnesota VA. He went to the protest because that’s what nurses do: they go where people might need help.

His last act on earth was trying to shield a woman who had just been shoved to the ground by a Border Patrol agent. His arms were raised. He was holding his phone in his right hand—his shooting hand, for those keeping track. He was not involved in any altercation. He was filming. He was bearing witness.2

They pepper-sprayed him in the face. They pepper-sprayed him again at close range. He was blinded. They dragged him to the ground. Six agents piled on top of him. Only then—only after he was pinned and incapacitated—did they discover he had a holstered firearm. One agent removed it from the holster. That agent turned and walked away, his back to the scene, Pretti’s gun in his hand.

And then another agent shot Alex Pretti in the back. Execution-style. While he was kneeling. While he was pinned. While his own weapon was already in someone else’s possession.

Then they shot him again. And again. At least ten rounds in five seconds. Several of those rounds were fired into his motionless body after he had already collapsed.

Then they left.

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I. The Flight

I need you to understand that law enforcement does not flee the scene of a shooting. Law enforcement secures the scene. Preserves evidence. Calls for medical assistance. Separates witnesses. Begins documentation. Notifies the chain of command. Cooperates with investigators. This is what legitimacy looks like. This is what distinguishes police from paramilitaries, officers from assassins. The willingness to be scrutinized. The submission to process.

The men who killed Alex Pretti did none of this. They shot him at least ten times. They watched him die. And then they got in their vehicles and drove away, leaving his body on the frozen pavement of a Minneapolis street.

In criminal law, we have a term for this: flight from the scene. It is admissible as evidence of mens rea—the state of a guilty mind. When a defendant flees after committing an act, the jury is permitted to infer that the defendant knew what they did was wrong. The flight is consciousness of guilt.

So I ask you: What does it tell us when federal agents kill a man and then run?

It tells us they knew. They knew this wasn’t a lawful shooting. They knew it wouldn’t survive scrutiny. They knew that if local law enforcement secured the scene, if witnesses were interviewed, if evidence was preserved, the official narrative would collapse under the weight of what actually happened.

So they ran. They ran knowing the Trump regime would hold them harmless. Protect them. Send them out again under the color of federal authority, masks up and trigger-happy.

When Minneapolis Police and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension arrived, they found chaos. The federal agents who committed the killing had fled. The state investigators didn’t have the manpower to secure the scene—because the killers had abandoned it.

Governor Walz asked the question that deserves to be asked: “You kill a man and then you just leave? Is there a single case in America’s history where you just walk away and say, ‘I guess that just happened and we’re not going to clean up our mess’?”

No. There isn’t. Because that’s not what law enforcement does.

What happened on that Minneapolis street is not, in any meaningful sense, a police action. It is closer to a lynching—state-sanctioned murder committed by masked men who know they will never be held accountable, followed by immediate flight, followed by official lies designed not to convince but to dominate.

II. The Assertion of Power

Within hours of the killing—before any investigation, before the body was cold—the official lies began.

DHS: “An individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun.”

Gregory Bovino, Border Patrol: “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

Stephen Miller: “A domestic terrorist tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.”

President Trump, posting a photo of Pretti’s firearm: “The gunman’s gun. Loaded. What’s that all about?”

We have the video. Multiple videos, from multiple angles, verified by the New York Times and other outlets. The videos show Pretti standing in the street, directing traffic, filming with his phone. Not approaching anyone. Not brandishing anything. The videos show that no one knew Pretti had a gun until after he was pinned. It was holstered. He never reached for it. An agent removed it from his holster, walked away with it, and then another agent shot Pretti in the back.

They know we have the video. They issued their statements because we have the video.

I have written before about “fuckery”—the assertion of a transparent falsehood not to deceive but to dominate. Fuckery does not attempt to change your mind. It demonstrates that your mind is irrelevant. It says: We know you know we’re lying. We don’t care. What are you going to do about it?

The answer to fuckery is not argument. You cannot debate someone who has already conceded, by the brazenness of their lie, that debate is beside the point. The answer to fuckery is witness. It is saying, clearly and without flinching: this happened. I saw it. Here is the record.

They want you to look away. They want the exhaustion to win. They want you to concede, by your silence, that their power to assert is greater than your power to document.

Do not give them that. Say the thing. The video shows what it shows. Alex Pretti was murdered by federal agents who then fled the scene. The official statements are lies. Put it on the record. Make them own it.

III. For My Friends, Everything

A United States Attorney for the Central District of California—a federal prosecutor—posted this after the killing: “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there’s a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you. Don’t do it.”

I read this, and I think: my God, people must be getting slaughtered by law enforcement left and right in Texas!

But of course they’re not. Because the rule this prosecutor articulated is not actually the rule. The rule he articulated applies only to certain people.

Alex Pretti did not “approach law enforcement with a gun.” He was standing in the street, filming with his phone. Federal agents assaulted a woman near him. He moved to help her. They pepper-sprayed him, blinded him, dragged him to the ground, discovered his legally holstered weapon, removed it, and executed him.

He had a permit. Minnesota is an open-carry state. He was exercising a constitutional right—two constitutional rights, actually: the First Amendment right to film public officials engaged in public conduct, and the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

For thirty years, a certain kind of American has built their political identity around these rights. They celebrated armed militias occupying the Michigan statehouse in 2020. They lionized January 6th participants, many of them armed and violent. When Ashli Babbitt was shot climbing through a window toward fleeing members of Congress, they called it murder. Trump gave her family five million dollars.

And now these same Americans are silent—or cheering—as federal agents execute a man for legal carry in an open-carry state.

Do you see?

The principle was never “citizens may bear arms.” The principle is that our people may do anything and their people may do nothing.

This is what Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal theorist, identified as the fundamental distinction of politics: not right versus wrong, not legal versus illegal, but friend versus enemy. The law applies differently depending on which category you occupy. For friends, the law is a shield. For enemies, it is a sword.

Trump at the Ellipse on January 6th, frustrated that the Secret Service was screening rallygoers with magnetometers: “They’re not here to hurt me.”

The guns weren’t the problem. The allegiance was the question.

The Gadsden flag crowd spent decades warning about exactly this scenario. Armed federal agents. Tyrannical overreach. Citizens killed in the street. And now that it’s happening, they’ve revealed what they always believed: treading is fine, as long as the right people get tread upon.

IV. The Dual State

In 1941, a German lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel published The Dual State. Fraenkel was one of the last Jews practicing law in Berlin. He had to flee. He smuggled the manuscript out with him.

Fraenkel’s insight was that the Third Reich did not abolish the rule of law. It split governance into two parallel systems: the “normative state,” where bureaucratic rules and legal procedures continued to operate, and the “prerogative state,” where arbitrary power reigned. The innovation was not the triumph of one over the other. It was their simultaneous coexistence. Law where convenient. Will where necessary. For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.

I wrote about this six months ago, when the contours of what was coming were becoming clear. I did not fully understand then how quickly the dual state would manifest in blood.

Alex Pretti had a constitutional right to carry a firearm. He had a constitutional right to film public officials. He had a constitutional right to assemble, to protest, to bear witness. The normative state—the state of laws and rights and procedures—said he was a citizen exercising his liberties.

The prerogative state said he was an enemy, and enemies may be killed.

Stephen Miller articulated this theory explicitly: “When a federal agent issues a command in the field, he is acting as the direct avatar of the President. To refuse that command—to debate it, to delay it, to be ‘mouthy’—is not a civil liberty. It is an act of insurrection against the Executive Branch.”

The agent is the law. The badge conveys not merely authority but sovereignty. There is no such thing as an unlawful order, because the source of the order is the President, and the President is above the law.

As I wrote last week, this is the Führerprinzip—the “leader principle”—in American legalese.

In December, Attorney General Bondi issued an undercovered memo that operationalizes this principle at scale. The memo directs the FBI to compile lists of groups and individuals whose “animating principle is adherence” to disfavored viewpoints: opposition to immigration enforcement, “radical gender ideology,” anti-capitalism, “hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality.”

These are not criminal acts. These are beliefs. And the memo creates a mechanism—through terrorism sentencing enhancements, through network mapping that includes “organizers, funders, and affiliates,” through the chilling effect of investigation itself—to punish those beliefs without ever having to prove a crime.

You don’t need a conviction to destroy a nonprofit. You just need to scare away its donors by suggesting it’s under investigation for terrorism. You don’t need to formally designate someone a domestic terrorist. You just need to put them on an internal list that triggers sentencing enhancements if they’re ever charged with anything else.

The prerogative state is being institutionalized. It is being given bureaucratic form. And it is being aimed, with specificity and intention, at anyone who dissents.

V. The Ratchet

Here is the thing that keeps me awake at night.

Garry Kasparov, who lived through the consolidation of Putin’s Russia, posted a brief note after Pretti’s killing: “Having lived through a similar, nationwide version of this in Trump’s model, Putin’s Russia, it’s not easy to fight against. And Trump and many of his gang have passed the point at which they feel they can afford to lose power, even in Congress. It’s a perilous moment.”

Once you have crossed certain lines, you cannot afford to lose power.

The agents who killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti are operating on a promise of impunity. That promise is only as good as Trump’s hold on power. A Democratic administration would have to investigate these killings. A Democratic DOJ would empanel grand juries. The agents who were promised immunity would discover that the promise was worthless.

Which means the regime cannot lose power. Not now. Not ever.

This is the ratchet. Each crime creates the need for the next crime. Each pardon requires the next pardon. Each killing deepens the commitment of the killers to the regime’s survival.

The January 6th pardons were not merely retrospective clemency. They were a prospective promise: violence committed in service of this president will be forgiven. That promise has now been extended to federal law enforcement. It will be extended further.

And the people who have accepted that promise—the agents, the officials, the collaborators—are now hostages. Their freedom depends on the regime’s continuation. They cannot permit it to fall.

Putin passed this point long ago. Every election in Russia since has been a formality, because the alternative to winning is prison or death. Trump is passing that point now. The killings in Minneapolis are not incidental to this process. They are the mechanism by which it advances.

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VI. What Remains

The Trump regime is beyond shame. Every time it has been confronted with evidence of its own cruelty, it has doubled down. The traditional logic of nonviolent resistance—that exposing brutality to a watching world will delegitimize the brutalizers—does not function when the brutalizers treat exposure as an opportunity for dominance rather than a cause for retreat.

The only thing that has made Trump retreat, consistently, is an angry bond market. The prerogative state may be immune to moral suasion, but it still depends on the normative state’s financial infrastructure. The exorbitant privilege that lets America borrow cheaply depends on the world’s belief that we are governed by rules rather than whims. Every killing, every lie, every exercise of raw power chips away at that belief.

But we cannot wait for bond traders to save the republic. We cannot wait for anyone to save us.

We had our chance last November, and we failed the test.

What remains is this: we show up. We document. We refuse to submit to the assertion of power. We are beyond the point where we can put our heads down and hope they don’t come for us. That strategy—the strategy of the compliant, the strategy of the silent—has never worked in any authoritarian transition, and it will not work now.

They want you to be afraid. They want you to calculate the risks and decide that silence is safer. They want you to internalize the lesson they are teaching: this is what happens to mouthy people.

But silence is its own kind of bet. It is a bet on the world you fear most—a bet that submission will purchase safety, that if you just keep your head down, the regime will pass you by.

It won’t. It never does. The definition of “enemy” always expands. The list of prohibited beliefs always grows. The people who think they are safe because they are not immigrants, not activists, not protesters—they will discover, too late, that safety was always an illusion.

The country I grew up in is gone. I don’t say that with nostalgia for some golden age that never existed—I know the prerogative state has always operated in America, from Jim Crow to COINTELPRO to the border camps. But there was a normative consensus, however imperfectly honored, that these were violations of our ideals rather than expressions of them. That consensus is gone.

What comes next is up to us. The same as after the Civil War. The same as after the Depression and World War II and the civil rights movement. Those were revolutions in their own right—moments when the old order collapsed and something new had to be built from the wreckage.

Here we go again.

I don’t know what the new order will look like. I don’t know how much suffering we will put ourselves through to get to the position where we can rebuild. I don’t know if we will build something better or something worse. I don’t know if we will be permitted to build anything at all, or if the prerogative state will swallow everything.

But I know this: Alex Pretti went to a protest because he wanted to help. His last act was shielding a woman who had been knocked to the ground. He was bearing witness. He was being a citizen.

They killed him for it.

If that is the price of citizenship now—if bearing witness and helping your neighbor and exercising your rights can get you executed in the street—then we need to decide what we’re willing to pay. Because the alternative is not safety. The alternative is a slow suffocation, a gradual surrender of everything that made this country worth living in.

I choose to be mouthy. I choose to bear witness. I choose to say the thing that happened, clearly and without flinching, and to put it on the record.

Alex Pretti was murdered by federal agents who then fled the scene. The official statements are lies. The video shows what it shows.

I don’t know what comes next. But I know where I stand.

You?

I know: this newsletter had been silent for about three months and now a torrent of this stuff. I’d been working on other pieces of writing, which I hope will see the light of day in the next year or two. Now, forgive me as I venture a little outside the legal and political niche that The Venal Times generally stays in. Please let me know if I’m out over my skis.

A serious question: do Pete Hegseth, Steven Himmler Miller, and Donald Trump have any real understanding that Europe doesn’t need a single round of munitions to cripple the United States?1

I keep hearing these guys talking about how we have the mightiest military in the world and no army would stand in our way if the US decided to plant a squadron in Nuuk and say, “New flag, bitches.” And you know what? They’re right. No army would stand in our way. The Danish military is not going to repel the 82nd Airborne. This is not in dispute.

But here’s the thing about men who think in terms of carriers and fighter jets and troops: they tend to be men who have never had to think very hard about where the money comes from. The United States does not fund its $850 billion defense budget from savings. It borrows—roughly $2 trillion a year—and it borrows cheaply because global markets treat US Treasuries as the safest asset in the world. In the 1960s, French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing coined a term for this arrangement: the exorbitant privilege. It means we can print money to buy real goods from the rest of the world, and they thank us for it. America gets to run massive deficits, fund a globe-spanning military, and consume more than it produces, all because the world wants to hold dollars.

It’s a hell of a deal. And it rests entirely on the belief that American institutions are stable, predictable, and professionally managed—that we are not, in other words, a banana republic with aircraft carriers and enough nuclear weapons to kill us all.

The centerpiece of that belief is the Federal Reserve. An independent central bank, insulated from political pressure, making decisions based on data rather than the whims of whoever occupies the Oval Office—this is what separates the United States from Argentina or Turkey, countries where presidents lean on central bankers and then act surprised when their currencies collapse and inflation eats the middle class alive. The exorbitant privilege is not, as Stephen Miller (ahem) might call it, an iron law true throughout history. The US financial system is a high-stakes confidence game, and confidence, once lost, is hard to rebuild.

Which brings us to last week. The attack on the Fed and the lust for Greenland are not separate issues. They are the same delusion: the belief that America is so powerful it no longer needs to follow rules—economic rules at home, or sovereign boundaries abroad.

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Jay Powell (the Fed chair Trump himself appointed) announced that the Justice Department had served the Fed with grand jury subpoenas threatening criminal indictment. The nominal subject is a building renovation. The Fed is fixing up its headquarters, the thing is full of asbestos, it costs $2.5 billion, there were cost overruns, etc. It’s a video you must see.

The investigation is being overseen by Jeanine Box-of-Wine Pirro, the former Fox News host Trump installed as US Attorney for DC, because of course it is.

Powell is not pretending this is about construction costs. “The threat of criminal charges,” he said, “is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.”

Let me translate: Trump wants lower rates. Powell, looking at the data, has declined to cut them as fast as Trump demands. So now Powell faces indictment over congressional testimony about drywall and HVAC systems. A bipartisan group of former Fed chairs called it “an unprecedented attempt to use prosecutorial attacks to undermine independence”—the kind of thing you see in “emerging markets with weak institutions.” They were being diplomatic. What they meant was: this is how monetary policy gets made in countries that are falling apart.

Powell’s term as chair ends in May. Trump has made clear he wants a replacement who will follow orders.2 He’s reportedly drawn a red line: anyone who disagrees with cutting rates “will never be the Fed Chairman.” Elizabeth Warren, in a moment of clarity, called it what it is—Trump wants a “sock puppet” running the central bank.

Now. Imagine you’re a reserve manager at the European Central Bank, or the Bank of Japan, or some sovereign wealth fund in Singapore. Your job is to park a few hundred billion dollars somewhere safe. You’ve been buying US Treasuries for decades because they’re the safest asset in the world—liquid, stable, backed by institutions that don’t bend to the passing fancies of populist strongmen. And you’re watching the President of the United States threaten to indict the Fed chair for the crime of not cutting rates fast enough, while openly shopping for a loyalist replacement who will debase the currency on command.

How safe do those Treasuries look now?

How eager are you to keep buying?

This is the backdrop against which we should understand what happens if the United States actually moves on Greenland. Not the military question. We’ve established that the military part is easy. The question is what comes after.

European entities hold somewhere between $2-2.5 trillion in US government debt. Add Japan, South Korea, and the other allies who would be appalled by an unprovoked attack on a NATO founding member, and you’re looking at a substantial share of America’s foreign creditors. They wouldn’t need to dump their holdings all at once—that would crater the value of their own portfolios, and nobody wants to lose money to make a point. They’d just need to start a slow, coordinated exit. Stop rolling over maturing Treasuries. Shift reserves into euros, gold, Swiss francs, maybe even yuan if they’re feeling spicy. Let it be known, quietly, in the way that central bankers let things be known, that the United States is no longer a safe harbor.

A 2-3% rise in average US borrowing costs would add something like $700 billion to $1 trillion in annual interest payments. That is, give or take, the entire defense budget—devoured by debt service. At which point Congress would face a trilemma with no good options: cut the military, slash entitlements, or accept a fiscal death spiral. Probably some combination of all three, implemented badly, with a lot of screaming. Market sentiment doesn't move at the speed of government procurement. It moves at the speed of fiber optics. The rates wouldn't drift up over a year; they would gap up in a morning.

The carrier strike groups and the forward bases and the F-35 procurement programs all assume unlimited budget headroom. They assume a country that can always borrow more, cheaply, forever. Take that assumption away and the mightiest military in the world starts looking like an expensive hobby we can no longer afford.

That’s just the financial retaliation.

The EU represents 450 million consumers and an $18 trillion economy. That is not a minor trade partner throwing a tantrum; that’s a genuine peer. European regulators could decide that Google and Amazon need breaking up. They could decide Boeing’s safety certifications are no longer trusted. They could impose export controls on the specialty chemicals and precision machinery and pharmaceuticals that American industry depends on. They could systematically redirect procurement to Airbus, to European tech firms, to anyone who isn’t American. None of this requires a soldier. None of it requires a missile. It just requires a continent that has decided the United States is no longer a partner but a problem to be managed.

And Europe wouldn’t be acting alone. An unprovoked American attack on Denmark—a NATO founding member, for god’s sake—would signal to Tokyo and Seoul and Canberra and Ottawa that the American security guarantee is worthless, that being in America’s orbit means you might be next. Japan holds over $1 trillion in Treasuries. The coalition that could form against a rogue America isn’t just European. It’s the entire network of liberal democracies we spent seventy years constructing.

Now, there’s a counter-argument to all this, and I want to be fair to it because it’s not entirely stupid: Europe is dependent on American LNG after cutting itself off from Russian gas. European unity is fragile, and Hungary or Italy might cut separate deals rather than hold the line. Financial retaliation takes months to bite; an energy cutoff hurts in days. The banker gets knocked out before he forecloses on the house.

Fine. But this scenario requires a rogue America that’s also strategically competent—one that times the LNG cutoff perfectly, holds the Western Hemisphere in line, maintains global sea-lane control, and plays Europe like a Stradivarius while the world watches in horror and admiration.

Have you been watching this administration? These fucking guys? I mean, I have raging ADHD and even I find myself muttering, “Jesus Christ, can you hold your attention on anything for more than 20 seconds?!”

Months of chest-thumping on Venezuela, and Maduro has simply been replaced by a seemingly pliant lieutenant, leaving the whole authoritarian apparatus in place. Tariff whack-a-mole. Pressing every button in the executive branch control panel to see what they can turn on and operate. The Big Boy Birthday Party sad military parade. The Greenland fixation itself has accomplished nothing except to push European rearmament sentiment higher before a single American soldier has set foot on Danish soil. These are not the actions of strategic geniuses. These are the actions of men who confuse talking tough with being strong, who announce dramatic intentions and then wander off when the follow-through gets complicated.

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Meanwhile, Russia, the supposed beneficiary of NATO’s collapse, has bled out a generation of men and equipment in Ukraine. A million casualties. A tank fleet in ruins. An economy running on wartime adrenaline and Chinese life support. The idea that Moscow immediately lunges into the Baltics the moment NATO wobbles requires a Russian military that does not currently exist, and probably won’t for a decade. The window of vulnerability is real, but it’s narrower than the doomsayers suggest, and Europe is not starting from zero. France and the UK have nuclear arsenals already.

The counter-argument assumes American chaos is an asset and European disorder is fatal. But chaos cuts both ways, and an incompetent rogue is easier to outmaneuver than a competent one.

Which brings us to the nuclear question—not ours, theirs.

The moment the United States reelected Trump and began the Fuck Around phase of the program, serious people in Berlin and Warsaw and Stockholm had to start gaming out a world in which the American nuclear umbrella is gone—or worse, has become a threat. Germany has the technical capacity to develop a weapon within a few years. It has the fissile material, the engineering base, the delivery systems. An American attack on a NATO ally would void, in the most spectacular way possible, the security guarantees that convinced Germany to forgo nuclear weapons in the first place. The same logic applies to Japan and South Korea. The non-proliferation regime we spent decades building—the NPT, the IAEA, the whole delicate architecture—could collapse in months. Nobody really wants this, but the fundamental bargain (we give up the bomb, you protect us) would have been exposed as a lie.

A world with a nuclear Germany, a nuclear Japan, a nuclear South Korea, a nuclear Saudi Arabia—this is not a world where the United States is more secure. It’s a world we spent seventy years and incalculable treasure trying to prevent. And we could get there remarkably fast if the clowns currently running American foreign policy keep honking their horns and falling out of the little car.

Here is the deepest irony, the thing I can’t stop thinking about: the administration that talks endlessly about American strength is systematically destroying the foundations that make American strength possible. Our soft power. The dollar’s reserve status. The alliance network. The non-proliferation regime. The independence of the Federal Reserve. USAID and the goodwill we earned by being the Good Guys. These are not gifts from God. They are not natural features of the landscape, like the Grand Canyon or the Great Plains. We painstakingly constructed this world over decades. We used to be people who understood that power is not just about how many tanks you have. You can’t build a global system on American reliability and then behave unreliably and expect the system to remain intact. It will route around you. It is already beginning to.

The US military is a fantastic instrument for destroying things. It is less useful against central bank reserve managers quietly rotating out of Treasuries, or European commissioners deciding American tech platforms need to be dismembered, or German engineers working late nights in a newly funded weapons lab. These are not problems you can solve with a carrier strike group.

I don’t know whether Hegseth and Miller and Trump understand any of this. My guess is they don’t—that they think in terms of guns and troops and territory, that they’ve never spent ten minutes considering how the money works, that the phrase “exorbitant privilege” has never crossed their desks. They see the carriers and the fighter jets and they conclude that nobody can touch us.3

And in a narrow sense, they’re right. Nobody can touch us militarily.

But that’s not where the retaliation would come from. That’s not how we enter the Find Out phase of things.

The guns are real. The money that pays for them is a collective fiction—a story the world tells itself about American stability and American reliability and American institutions that operate according to rules rather than the whims of the guy in charge. Criminally investigating your own Fed chair because he won’t cut rates fast enough is one way to undermine that story. Invading a NATO ally to satisfy a real-estate fantasy is another.

The privilege is exorbitant. It is not, however, guaranteed. As the boys in the Situation Room are about to find out, it is not an iron law. It is a loan. And the bill is coming due.

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2

One of the leading candidates is Kevin Hassett, a smiling fool who would make Baghdad Bob proud. My favorite Kevin Hassett:

The Bulwark

Meet Kevin Hassett: Conservatism’s Invincible Ignoramus

Programming note: Today on WTF 2.0 I’m going to be joined by The Pillar’s Ed Condon to talk about Catholic Church inside baseball: What’s happening with Catholic Charities and USAID and the Trump administration and JD Vance? I’ll go live on Substack and the site around 1:00 p.m. We’ll send out an alert when we get started and post the replay on the site too…

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a year ago · 827 likes · 410 comments · Jonathan V. Last

There is a moment in every authoritarian transition when the mask slips—not the black balaclavas of ICE agents, but the rhetorical mask, the pretense that what is happening is normal governance conducted by normal means. Depending on one’s appetite for liberty, this may have already happened under the current administration, but there is litte doubt that, at the very least, that moment arrived when Donald Trump was asked about the killing of Renée Good.

His answer was simple. “It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement, the woman and her friend were highly disrespectful.” ICE agents and law enforcement, the President explained, should not have to “put up with” mouthy citizens.

The President of the United States has articulated a theory of government in which federal agents may kill you for talking back. Not for posing a physical threat—the video shows Good’s steering wheel turned away from the agent who shot her. Not for resisting arrest—she was never placed under arrest. For being “mouthy.” For speaking when spoken to. For failing to display the appropriate deference to armed men in masks who emerged from unmarked vehicles on a residential street in Minneapolis.

And in the days since, ICE agents operating in American cities have been heard saying things like “Have y’all not learned from the past couple of days?” to citizens who approach them, who question them, who film them. Think about what that statement means. It is a threat wrapped in a lesson: We killed someone for watching us. You are watching us. Connect the dots.

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They Chose This Work

I want to begin with something that has been oddly absent from the discourse around Renée Good’s death: the nature of the job her killer chose to do.

Law enforcement is difficult work. It requires courage, judgment, and—this is the part that seems to have been forgotten—restraint. An enormous capacity for restraint. The entire justification for granting certain citizens the authority to carry weapons and use force against other citizens rests on the assumption that they will exercise that authority with a discipline most people do not possess. We ask them to remain calm when others panic, to de-escalate when others inflame, to absorb verbal abuse and physical threat without responding in kind unless absolutely necessary. The badge is not a license to be easily frightened. It is supposed to represent the opposite: a person who can be trusted to keep their head when keeping their head is hard.

Jonathan Ross, the agent who killed Renée Good, saw a Honda Pilot inch forward on a residential street and opened fire. His colleagues, apparently, view this as reasonable. The lesson the rest of us are meant to learn from “the other day” is that approaching federal agents, questioning federal agents, existing in the proximity of federal agents while insufficiently docile, may get you killed.

Last week, Jonathan V. Last spoke on The Bulwark’s Secret Pod about a scenario I find myself revisiting again and again. How do these agents navigate a grocery store parking lot? Cars inch forward in parking lots all the time. People back out of spaces without looking. Shopping carts roll into traffic lanes. If the sight of a vehicle moving slowly in your direction is sufficient cause to empty your magazine, I’m not sure how you make it through a trip to Costco without a body count.

But of course, the grocery store is different. At the grocery store, they are not agents. They are not armed with the authority of the state. They are not surrounded by colleagues who will back their story. They are not protected by an administration that has already demonstrated its willingness to pardon any crime committed in its service. At the grocery store, consequences exist. If a shopper panics and shoots a driver, they go to prison. If an agent panics and shoots a driver, they get a pardon. The difference isn't the danger; it's the impunity. We demand more discipline from those we arm, yet we have created a system where they require less because the cost of failure has been removed.

Here is the thing that needs to be said plainly (again, a point JVL makes consistently): nobody made Jonathan Ross take this job. There is no draft for ICE. There is no conscription for Customs and Border Protection. These men volunteered for work that requires them to exercise lethal force with judgment and restraint, and the moment they demonstrate that they lack judgment and restraint, they should be removed from that work. Not protected. Not indemnified. Not told that mouthy citizens had it coming. Removed.

The rhetoric from agents since Good’s death—“Didn’t you learn from the other day?”—tells us everything we need to know about how they understand their role. They do not see themselves as public servants who must justify their actions to the public. They see themselves as an occupying force that has successfully established dominance, and they expect the occupied population to internalize the rules of occupation. Keep your head down. Don’t ask questions. Don’t make eye contact. Remember what happened to the last one who forgot her place.

This is not the mindset of a police officer. This is the mindset of a soldier in a foreign country where the locals are the enemy and every interaction is a potential ambush. And while that mindset may be appropriate—may even be necessary—for a Marine in Fallujah, it is an obscenity when deployed against American citizens on American streets by agents who chose this work and can quit anytime they find it too frightening to perform without killing people.

Silence

For thirty years, I have listened to a certain kind of American—the kind who attends gun shows, who has strong opinions about the ATF, who can discourse at length about the difference between a magazine and a clip—explain to me why the Second Amendment is the most important amendment. The argument, stripped to its essence, has always been this: an armed citizenry is the last defense against a tyrannical government. When the jackbooted thugs come for your rights, you will need your AR-15 to resist them.

I was not, generally speaking, persuaded by this argument. It always seemed to me that the gap between a civilian with a rifle and the United States military was sufficient to render the “resistance” fantasy a bit ridiculous. But I understood the emotional logic behind it. The fear of government overreach is not irrational. The history of the twentieth century provides ample evidence that states can turn on their own citizens with terrifying speed and efficiency. If owning firearms made some people feel safer against that possibility, I could see why they might consider the tradeoff worthwhile.

And now masked federal agents are killing unarmed American citizens in the streets, and the President is explaining that those citizens should have been more submissive, and the agents are warning bystanders to learn from the example, and the Second Amendment people are silent. Not just silent: many of them are cheering. The tyranny they armed themselves against has arrived; it is wearing a DHS patch, and they are fine with it. More than fine. They are pleased.

The clarifying thing about this silence is what it reveals about the actual content of the “tyranny” these people feared. It was never really about government agents with guns. It was about which government agents with which guns pointed at whom. When they imagined jackbooted thugs coming for their rights, the thugs were coming for them—white, conservative, rural Americans who fly Gadsden flags and resent being told what to do. They were not imagining those same thugs descending on immigrant neighborhoods in Minneapolis to kill mothers of three who asked too many questions. That tyranny is fine. That tyranny is law and order.

The “don’t tread on me” crowd has revealed, with their silence, that they were never opposed to treading. They just wanted to make sure the right people got tread upon. And now that the treading is happening, now that citizens are being killed by masked agents of the state exactly as they always warned might happen, they have discovered that they are enthusiastic supporters of the boot—so long as it is pressing down on someone else’s neck.

I will not forget this. None of us should forget this. The next time someone explains to you that they need a personal arsenal to resist government tyranny, remember January 2026. Remember the silence. Remember whose side they chose when the tyranny actually came.

I know there are gun owners who are horrified by this. I know there are libertarians who see this for what it is. But where are they? Their silence is drowning out their principles.

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The Bargain

The modern concept of a civilian police force emerged in 1829, when Sir Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police in London. Peel articulated a set of principles that would define democratic policing for nearly two centuries. The seventh principle is the one that matters most:

“The police are the public and the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen.”

A police officer, in Peel’s formulation, is not a soldier. Not an occupier. Not a master. A police officer is a citizen—your neighbor, your cousin, your high school classmate—who has taken on the specific duty of maintaining public order. The key word is duty. The officer has more responsibilities than an ordinary citizen, not more rights. The uniform does not elevate; it obligates.

This principle was not some quaint British affectation that the colonists left behind. It was the foundation upon which the American system was built, precisely because the Founders had direct experience of what it meant to live under armed men who answered only to the Crown.

Samuel Adams, in 1776: “A standing army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the Liberties of the People.”

The fear of a professional armed force that served the executive rather than the public runs through every word the Founders wrote on the subject. It explains the Third Amendment—that strange provision prohibiting the quartering of soldiers that we all learned about in school and promptly forgot—which was not really about housing costs. It was about the principle that armed agents of the state do not get to intrude upon private life simply because they wish to. They must justify their presence. They must have cause. They must depart if told to go. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 drew an even brighter line: the military cannot enforce domestic law. While ICE is technically a civilian force, the administration has militarized their tactics and armaments to the point where this distinction is a legal fiction. They are a standing army in all but name, operating outside the constraints of traditional policing. Soldiers occupy. Police serve. The distinction was considered so fundamental to the American project that violating it was made a federal crime.

And now consider what is happening in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in cities across this country: masked federal agents in unmarked vehicles, operating under administrative warrants that no judge has reviewed, refusing to identify themselves, shooting citizens who fail to display adequate submission, protected from all consequences by an administration that views their conduct not as a problem to be solved but as a policy to be celebrated.

The agents who told bystanders, “Didn’t you learn from the other day?” were not expressing a personal opinion. They were articulating the official position of the executive branch: that the killing of Renée Good was a lesson, and that the lesson was submission.

Impunity

The killing was not an aberration. It was a product of a system designed to ensure that exactly this kind of killing carries no consequences for anyone involved.

On April 28, 2025, Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14288, titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement.” The document establishes federal indemnification for any agent who “unjustly incurs expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties.” The adverb is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Not agents who incur liability for unlawful actions—agents who “unjustly” incur liability, a determination made not by courts but by the administration that employs them. Sue us all you want. The taxpayer will cover it. Your lawsuit is, by definition, unjust, because we have decided in advance that our agents cannot be held accountable.

The same executive order directs the Attorney General to review all consent decrees governing local police departments and to “modify, rescind, or move to conclude” any that “unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions.” For decades, these consent decrees were the primary mechanism for reforming departments with patterns of civil rights violations—the tool the federal government used to force change on agencies that would not change themselves. The administration is now dismantling them, not because the underlying problems have been solved, but because it considers civil rights compliance an impediment to effective policing. The reforms were the problem. The solution is to remove them.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is litigating against states that have tried to fill the accountability gap. When the Supreme Court gutted Bivens remedies—the cause of action that once allowed citizens to sue federal officers for constitutional violations—Illinois passed the Civil Rights Remedies Act to provide a state-level alternative. The DOJ has sued to invalidate it. They argue that federal agents are simply immune from state law, full stop. They cannot be sued in state court. They cannot be prosecuted by state authorities. They exist in a legal zone above and apart from the jurisdictions where they operate.

Supremacy

This theory was tested immediately after Renée Good’s death. When the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) attempted to process the crime scene—an exercise of the state’s core police power—they were physically blocked by federal tactical teams.

Then came Vice President Vance.

In a briefing that should be studied by every constitutional law student in America, Vance, the man who built a career eulogizing the “forgotten man” and championing local control against the “administrative state,” stood at the podium and invoked the Supremacy Clause to block a state murder investigation.

“The State of Minnesota has no standing to investigate the federal government,” Vance declared. “Federal agents are immune from state harassment. The BCA needs to stand down, or they will be made to stand down.”

I have spoken with prosecutors who look at this and simply say this is how it works. My friend and excellent attorney, Miller Leonard, pointed out—correctly—that federal supremacy is well-established. He cited United States v. Touhy, noting that state DAs can’t just subpoena federal files without permission. Generally speaking, federal officers are immune from state prosecution unless acting outside the scope of their employment.

But I think this misses the radical nature of what is happening on the ground, that it assumes normal order.

We are not talking about a discovery dispute. We are not talking about a delay in handing over an FBI 302 form. We are talking about the physical exclusion of state authorities from a homicide scene on state soil.

The core legal question in any immunity claim is whether the agent was acting within the scope of their employment. If an agent executes a warrant and kills someone in the process, they are likely immune. If an agent gets drunk and shoots a bartender, they are not. The immunity depends entirely on the facts of the encounter.

By physically blocking the BCA from the scene, the administration is creating a jurisdictional tautology.

1. Minnesota cannot prosecute because the agent is immune.

2. The agent is immune only if he was acting within the scope of his duties.

3. Minnesota cannot investigate to determine if he was acting within the scope of his duties... because the agent is immune.

Vance is using the conclusion of immunity to prevent the inquiry into immunity. He is transforming a specialized legal defense—which must be raised and adjudicated in court—into a preemptive executive decree that federal agents are legally untouchable, regardless of what the facts might show. Vance is treating immunity not as a legal defense to be adjudicated by a judge, but as an executive prerogative to destroy evidence.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking. The same administration that demands states defy the Supreme Court on abortion, that cheers when Texas ignores federal border rulings, is now claiming that a state police force cannot even ask questions about a dead body on its own pavement because the shooter had a federal payroll number. They are not federalists. They are supremacists.

Vice President Vance announced that the investigation “falls squarely under federal authority” and that state oversight would not be permitted. A federal agent killed a Minnesota citizen on a Minnesota street, and Minnesota was informed that it had no power to ask why.

So: executive action removes the financial consequences of misconduct; the physical obstruction of state investigators removes the possibility of a factual record; and the pardon power removes any remaining criminal peril. The architecture is complete. An agent can do anything. Nothing will happen.

Consent

The constitutional framework the administration is dismantling was built on a specific theory of the relationship between citizen and state. Under that theory, which draws on John Locke and which underpins every word of the Bill of Rights, the state’s power is a loan. Citizens delegate their natural right to use force to the government in exchange for order. The delegation is conditional. If an agent of the state acts outside the specific scope of that delegation—outside the law—they lose their status as an agent. They become simply a person committing assault or battery or kidnapping. The badge does not make the crime legal. The badge makes the crime worse.

This is why the Supreme Court established a three-tier framework for police interactions. The first tier—the “consensual encounter”—describes what happens when an officer approaches you on the street without reasonable suspicion that you have committed a crime. In this scenario, you are under no obligation to respond. You may ignore them. You may walk away. You may decline to answer their questions. The officer is a petitioner asking for your cooperation. You may refuse. You are, in the eyes of the law, the superior authority over your own body and time.

Florida v. Bostick (1991): A seizure only occurs when a “reasonable person” would not feel “free to decline the officers’ requests or otherwise terminate the encounter.”

This was not an accidental feature of American jurisprudence. It was the point. The Founders guaranteed the right against self-incrimination because they believed citizens should not be compelled to speak to agents of the state. They required warrants based on probable cause because they believed agents should not be able to intrude on private life merely because they wished to. They prohibited cruel and unusual punishment because they believed the state’s power over the individual had limits. The entire architecture of the Bill of Rights is a monument to the principle that citizens do not answer to their government. Their government answers to them.

And now the President says his agents should not have to tolerate “mouthy” citizens.

Submission

The most chilling articulation of this new reality came not from the President, but from his architect of domestic policy, Stephen Miller. In a hit on The Ben Shapiro Show on Tuesday, Miller didn’t just defend the shooting; he outlined a legal theory that effectively erases the Fourth Amendment.

“The media is obsessed with ‘probable cause,’” Miller sneered. “But they are ignoring the Unitary Executive. When a federal agent issues a command in the field, he is acting as the direct avatar of the President. To refuse that command—to debate it, to delay it, to be ‘mouthy’—is not a civil liberty. It is an act of insurrection against the Executive Branch. The citizen’s duty in that moment is not to evaluate the legality of the order. The citizen’s duty is to submit.”

Read that again. Miller is arguing that the agent is the law. He is arguing that the badge does not merely convey authority; it conveys sovereignty. Under this framework, there is no such thing as an unlawful order, because the source of the order is the President, and the President is the law.

This is not a “law and order” position. It is the Führerprinzip—the “leader principle”—translated into American legalese. It posits that the will of the leader, expressed through his agents, supersedes written law. It transforms the citizen from a rights-holder into a subject whose only legal standing is the obligation to obey.

“Didn’t you learn from the other day?”

The statement haunts me because of what it reveals about how these agents understand their role in American life. They are not embarrassed by the killing of Renée Good. They are not chastened by it. They are not worried that it might cause their agency to face scrutiny or reform. They view it as a successful demonstration of dominance, and they expect the population to respond accordingly.

This is the psychology of occupation, not policing. An occupying army does not serve the local population; it controls them. It does not derive its legitimacy from public approval; it derives its legitimacy from force. The relationship between occupier and occupied is not one of mutual obligation but of unilateral submission. The occupied learn the rules—where not to go, what not to say, how to comport themselves in the presence of armed men—or they suffer the consequences. “Didn’t you learn from the other day?” is not a question a public servant asks. It is a question a prison guard asks. It is a question a soldier asks in a country he does not consider his own.

The men who say these things chose to be here. They applied for these jobs. They underwent training. They swore oaths. They could quit tomorrow and no one would stop them. If the work is too stressful—if the sight of a slowly moving vehicle triggers a lethal response, if the presence of bystanders with cameras feels like a threat, if the exercise of restraint that the job requires is more than they can manage—then they should find other work. There are many jobs in America that do not require you to carry a weapon or exercise judgment over who lives and dies. Those jobs would suit them better.

But of course they will not quit, because the administration has made clear that restraint is no longer required. The old rules—the ones about de-escalation, about proportional response, about the use of force as a last resort—have been “unleashed.” The consent decrees that once mandated reform have been rescinded. The civil liability that once created financial incentives for caution has been indemnified away. The President himself has announced that agents should not have to put up with mouthy citizens.

What remains is the pure exercise of power, unchecked by consequence. And the agents who wield that power are learning, as agents in such positions always learn, that the absence of consequence is permission. Each killing that goes unpunished is a lesson—not to the public, though it is that too, but to the agents themselves. They are learning what they can get away with. The answer, so far, is everything.

A Standing Army

U.S. District Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, wrote an opinion in September 2025 that deserves to be widely read. The case involved the detention of pro-Palestinian students by masked ICE agents, but Young’s analysis ranges far beyond that specific injustice.

On the practice of masking: “ICE goes masked for a single reason—to terrorize Americans into quiescence. We have never tolerated an armed masked secret police. To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan.”

On the administration’s justifications for the practice: “Disingenuous, squalid, and dishonorable.”

On the difference between these agents and the military: “Small wonder ICE often seems to need our respected military to guard them... It should be noted that our troops do not ordinarily wear masks. Can you imagine a masked marine? Honor still matters.”

Judge Young saw what the masking was for, and he named it plainly. The masks sever the connection between act and actor. You cannot file a complaint against an agent you cannot identify. You cannot testify against a face you never saw. You cannot name your assailant in a lawsuit. The mask is impunity made physical—a way of ensuring that even if the legal architecture of accountability somehow survives, no individual agent will ever be held responsible for anything.

But the masks serve a symbolic function too. They communicate something about how the agents understand their relationship to the public. A police officer in the Peelian tradition is your neighbor in uniform—someone whose face you know, whose name you can learn, who will have to live in the community he polices long after this particular encounter is over. A masked agent is something else entirely: a figure of anonymous menace, interchangeable with every other masked agent, accountable to no one outside the hierarchy that deployed him. The mask says: I am not your neighbor. I am not your servant. I am something that has been done to you.

The Founders feared exactly this. They had lived under an army that answered only to the Crown, and they spent considerable effort designing a system in which such a force could never again be deployed against the American people. The Third Amendment. The Posse Comitatus Act. The entire structure of civilian control of the military. All of it was aimed at one goal: ensuring that armed men would never be able to operate in American communities without accountability to the people who live there.

And here we are. Masked agents in unmarked vehicles, answerable only to federal superiors, immunized from state prosecution, indemnified from civil liability, operating under administrative warrants no judge has reviewed, killing citizens who are deemed insufficiently submissive and then warning bystanders to learn from the example. The standing army the Founders warned about has arrived. It is just wearing a DHS patch instead of a red coat.

What Submission Buys You

There is a school of thought—you hear it from the “reasonable” Republicans, from the pundits who urge calm, from the citizens who just want the trouble to stop—that the answer is compliance. Just do what they say. Don’t be mouthy. Don’t make trouble. The agents are under stress. The work is dangerous. Cooperate and you’ll be fine.

This theory has been tested extensively throughout history, and the results are not encouraging. Authoritarian systems do not reward submission with safety. They reward submission with additional demands for submission. The compliant citizen who keeps his head down today will be asked to inform on his neighbors tomorrow. The community that allows its “troublemakers” to be taken without protest will find that the definition of troublemaker expands to include anyone insufficiently enthusiastic in their support. The lesson the agents are teaching—”Didn’t you learn from the other day?”—is not a one-time lesson. It is a curriculum. There is always another lesson.

Renée Good was not a troublemaker by any reasonable definition. She was a 37-year-old mother of three, a poet, a woman who went to observe federal agents operating in her neighborhood because she was worried about her neighbors. She was not blocking the agents. She was not interfering with their operation. She was watching. And she is dead, and the President of the United States has explained that she should have known better than to be mouthy, and the agents who killed her have moved on to teaching the next lesson.

Compliance would not have saved her. Compliance cannot save you. The premise of compliance—that there is a stable set of rules, that following those rules will protect you, that the authorities will be satisfied by your submission—does not apply to a system in which the rules change daily and the authorities are never satisfied. The only stable rule in such a system is that the authorities are always right and you are always wrong, and the only safety is the safety of being beneath notice, which is not safety at all but merely the temporary absence of attention.

The Record

I am not going to end this essay with a call to action, because I do not know what action to recommend. The mechanisms designed to prevent what is happening have been disabled or captured. The courts are slow and increasingly hostile. The legislature is controlled by collaborators and cowards. The states that try to resist are being sued into submission or threatened with military force. The people who spent decades warning about government tyranny have revealed that they were fine with tyranny all along, so long as it targeted the right people.

What I can do—what any of us can do—is refuse to pretend that this is normal. Refuse to adopt the language of the administration, which calls masked agents “law enforcement” and calls their victims “terrorists.” Refuse to let the Overton window slide so far that we forget what policing was supposed to mean, what citizenship was supposed to mean, what the relationship between a free people and their government was supposed to look like.

The Founders understood that rights exist only as long as people insist on them. The Bill of Rights is not self-executing. It is a set of principles that must be asserted, over and over, by people who refuse to accept the alternative. The moment we stop asserting them—the moment we decide that compliance is easier, that silence is safer, that the agents probably know best—we have already lost. Not because the rights have been formally repealed, but because they have been rendered meaningless by our unwillingness to claim them.

Renée Good claimed her rights. She stood on a public street in her own neighborhood and watched federal agents conduct an operation. She asked questions. She was, by the President’s own account, mouthy. And she is dead, and the men who killed her are still working, and the President has explained that this is how it should be.

I am writing this down because the record matters. Because someday, someone may want to know how it happened—how a country that once understood itself as a nation of citizens became a nation of subjects, how armed men in masks came to patrol American streets with impunity, how the people who could have resisted chose silence instead. The record will show that some of us refused. That we named what was happening, even when naming it was dangerous. That we did not learn the lesson of the other day.

That we remained, to the end, mouthy.

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I have a distinct memory of playing one of the Batman Arkham video games back in law school, launching the Dark Knight off a rooftop and cannonballing into a pack of criminals, breaking bones and shattering teeth in a righteous blur. As I grappling-hooked back to the rooftops, a thought arrived unbidden: Batman is a problem.

A man in a mask. Acting in the name of justice. Accountable to no one.

That fantasy of unaccountable violence is fun on a console. It is horrifying on a residential block in Minneapolis: armed federal agents in masks and body armor, faces hidden, badges concealed, piling out of unmarked vehicles. A woman named Renée Good—37 years old, mother of three, poet, American citizen—shot dead in her Honda Pilot, her child’s stuffed animals visible in the glove compartment, her steering wheel turned away from her killer in the final second of her life.1

And then the real obscenity began.

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The Anatomy of Fuckery

Within hours of the killing, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement. Renée Good, they announced, was a “violent rioter” who had “weaponized her vehicle” and attempted to murder an ICE agent in an “act of domestic terrorism.”

I need you to understand what kind of lie this is, because it is not the ordinary kind.

An ordinary lie attempts to deceive. The liar says something false and hopes you will believe it. Propaganda operates similarly—it presents a distorted picture and trusts that repetition and restriction of alternatives will make the distortion stick.

This is different. The administration knows we have the video. Multiple videos, in fact—bystander footage, (incredibly) the agent’s own phone footage. ABC News has done a frame-by-frame analysis. The video shows Good’s vehicle stationary on a residential street. It shows agents approaching on foot. It shows an agent unholstering his weapon not two seconds after exiting his car, before any interaction with Good, positioning himself to the front-left of the vehicle. It shows Good turning her steering wheel to the right—away from the agent—one second before the first of three shots was fired.

Secretary Noem knows this. Vice President Vance knows this. President Trump knows this. They have seen what we have seen, or their staff has briefed them on what we have seen.

They issued the statement precisely because you have seen.

This is not lying. This is not gaslighting. Gaslighting tries to make you doubt your own perception. This does not. This is something else, something that requires its own name. Let’s call it fuckery.2

Fuckery is the assertion of a transparent falsehood as an act of dominance. It does not attempt to convince. It dares you to object. It says: We will claim this woman tried to murder a federal agent. We know you know she didn’t. We know you have the video. We do not care. We are saying it anyway. What are you going to do about it?

It is a performance for two audiences: it tells the base they are untouchable, and it tells the opposition they are impotent.

The fuckery is the point. The brazenness is the message. They are demonstrating that truth—observable, verifiable, video-recorded truth—is subordinate to their power. They are making you watch them lie and proving that your knowledge of the lie is irrelevant.

Authoritarians do this when they are confident they will face no consequences: they stop bothering to be plausible and the simple assertion is an act of dominance.

The Mask and the Pardon

The agent who killed Renée Good has been identified by the Minnesota Star Tribune and The Intercept as Jonathan Ross, a 43-year-old ICE deportation officer and Iraq War veteran. The federal government has not named him. In official statements, he is described only as “experienced.”

Ross was masked during the operation. No badge visible. No name tag. This is now standard practice for ICE: agents in face coverings and civilian clothes, operating from unmarked vehicles, refusing to identify themselves even when directly asked. Their official justification is “to prevent doxing.”3

Judge Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, called this rationale “disingenuous, squalid, and dishonorable.”4 The court wrote: “ICE goes masked for a single reason—to terrorize Americans into quiescence. We have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.”

Judge Young is correct, but let me be more precise about what the masks accomplish.

You cannot file a complaint against an agent you cannot identify. You cannot testify against a face you never saw. You cannot name your assailant in a lawsuit. The mask severs the connection between act and actor. It is the physical implementation of impunity.

But impunity requires more than anonymity. The identity of Renée Good’s killer is now known. Journalists found him in less than 48 hours through court records. So the mask, by itself, is not enough.

What completes the circle is the pardon.

On January 20th, 2025, Donald Trump pardoned more than 1,500 January 6th defendants. This was not case-by-case clemency. It was categorical absolution. It included people convicted of assaulting police officers—the beating of cops with flagpoles, the crushing of cops in doorways, the spraying of cops with chemical irritants. All forgiven. All welcomed back as heroes.

The pardons were not an act of mercy so much as the proclamation of a principle: violence committed in service of this president is not a crime.

Now consider what this means for Jonathan Ross, or any federal agent operating under this administration.

He knows—with certainty—that no action he takes in the field, up to and including the killing of an unarmed American citizen, will result in lasting consequences. The process might run. There might be an investigation, even charges, a trial, a conviction. And at the end of it, a pardon will be waiting. Trump has demonstrated this. He has proven it. The J6 pardons were not merely retrospective; they were prospective. They were a promise.

So: armed men, masked and anonymous, operating in American cities with the advance knowledge that they are outside the law. Answerable to no one except a president who has already declared he will shield them from accountability.

There is a word for this. We have been avoiding it.

The Bargain We Forgot We Made

Let’s step back and ask a question so basic it sounds naive: what are police for?

In a constitutional republic, the answer is supposed to be straightforward. Citizens grant the state a monopoly on legitimate force. We give up the right to private vengeance, to vigilante justice, to armed self-help against our neighbors. In exchange, the state promises that its force will be exercised only by accountable agents—officers who are identifiable, bound by law, subject to discipline and review, answerable ultimately to us.

This is the bargain. This is why we tolerate armed agents of the state in our communities. Not because they are strong, but because they are constrained. Not because they can hurt us, but because there are consequences if they do.

“Protect and serve” is not a PR slogan. It is the legitimating theory of police power in a democracy. The moment officers serve only the executive and protect only his interests, the moment they become masked enforcers answerable to one man who will shield them from all accountability, they are no longer police in any meaningful sense.

They are a praetorian guard, a paramilitary. They are exactly what the Founders, who had experienced the quartering of British soldiers in colonial homes, designed our system to prevent. The police state had already grown so unrestrained that Radley Balko convincingly argued in The Rise of the Warrior Cop that our police forces might violate the 3rd Amendment. This is something else entirely.

What we are watching in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in cities across this country, is not aggressive policing. It is the replacement of policing with something else —force without legitimacy, power without accountability, violence in service of a strongman rather than an elected leader of a republic.

Let Us Be Precise About the Word

Tyranny describes rule without accountability to law. But tyranny is a condition, not a form. A tyranny might be one man’s enrichment scheme. A theocracy. A junta protecting military prerogatives.

What we have is more specific.

A cult of personality in which loyalty to the leader supersedes all other obligations, including the Constitution. Paramilitary forces deployed against a scapegoated internal population—”animals,” “vermin,” “invaders,” “poisoning the blood of our country.” The subordination of truth to power—not through persuasion, but through the open assertion of dominance.

Fuckery.

Mass rallies. Grievance mythology. National humiliation reversed through the strongman. Restoration of greatness through purification.

And (this is the part people who have lives and obligations, people who don’t have time to keep up with the rapid firehose of insanity keep missing) the merger of state and corporate power into a directed economy where the government picks winners and losers, extracts tribute from disfavored industries, and takes equity stakes in “strategic” companies. The US government now owns a stake in Intel. It takes a cut of NVIDIA’s revenue from China sales. Tariffs are wielded not as trade policy but as reward and punishment, enriching allies and kneecapping rivals. This is not the free market. It is not socialism. It is corporatism—the economic structure of fascist Italy, where private ownership persists in name while the state directs all consequential economic activity.

Then there’s the crypto.5

The Trump family launched meme coins days before the inauguration—$TRUMP, $MELANIA—and watched billions flow in. Foreign governments, oligarchs, and favor-seekers bought in, not because they believed in the tokenomics, but because it was the most frictionless bribery mechanism ever invented. No need for the old rigmarole of shell companies and speaking fees. Just buy the president’s shitcoin. The transaction is public. The corruption is visible. Graft performed in daylight, structured to be legal, or at least unprosecutable, because the same administration controls the SEC, the DOJ, and the pardon pen. It is the financialization of fuckery: Yes, I am openly selling access and influence. Yes, you can see me doing it. What are you going to do about it?

Mussolini had a name for this arrangement. He called it “the corporate state,” and defined fascism as the merger of state and corporate power.6 We’re watching that merger in real time, and we’re pretending it’s just “industrial policy.”

The word is fascism.

I am not using it as an epithet. I am using it as a classification. These are the defining features of fascist movements as identified by historians from Robert Paxton to Umberto Eco to Timothy Snyder: the leader cult, the scapegoated enemies, the paramilitary violence, the performative dominance over truth, and the corporatist economic model.7 This is what it looks like. It is here. It is not coming. It arrived.

The Babbitt Test

If you want to understand the total corruption of the people defending this administration, consider two deaths.8

Ashli Babbitt was shot by a Capitol Police officer on January 6th, 2021. The video is clear: she was climbing through a smashed window, part of a mob that had just violently overrun police lines, while officers with drawn weapons screamed warnings. Members of Congress were being evacuated down the hallway behind the shooter. It was a textbook defensive shooting—the last line of protection for fleeing legislators.

I remember watching all of this unfold in real time. The violence of it. I will never forget the pit of fury I felt in my chest as the Capitol was overrun by what the current regime calls “patriots” and “sightseers.”

Donald Trump has called Babbitt “an innocent, wonderful, beautiful woman.” He has played memorial videos at his rallies. He invited her family to the White House—hell, he awarded her family $5 million in damages for a bullshit wrongful death claim. Ashli Babbitt, climbing through a window toward members of Congress despite repeated and clear instructions to stop, knife in her possession, during a violent attack on the Capitol: innocent martyr, murdered by the state.

Now: Renée Good.

The video shows her vehicle stationary. It shows her wheel turning away from the agent. It shows her posing no physical threat to anyone. And she is dead, and the administration has labeled her a terrorist who “weaponized her vehicle” in an attempted murder.

Do you see?

The video evidence is irrelevant in both cases—but in perfectly opposite directions, determined entirely by which narrative serves power. Babbitt’s violence is erased. Good’s nonviolence is invented. The truth of what the camera recorded does not matter. What matters is who is useful to the regime.

This is how you know it’s fascism. The law does not apply equally. It is a weapon wielded against enemies and a shield protecting friends. Some are protected by the law but not beholden to it, while others are beholden to the law but not protected by it. The same act—posing a physical threat to federal officers—is martyrdom or terrorism depending on nothing but political alignment.

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The Houck Test

For years, a certain kind of American—let’s call him a Fox News Catholic, though the type is not limited to Catholics or Fox News—has raged about the “weaponization” of the Justice Department. The case they cite most often is Mark Houck.

In September 2022, FBI agents arrested Houck at his home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He was a pro-life activist who had, by his own admission, twice shoved a 72-year-old Planned Parenthood escort. The escort said Houck attacked him. Houck said he was defending his son from harassment. A dispute of fact.

But that’s not how the story was told.

Within hours, Houck’s wife was on Catholic media describing a terrifying “SWAT raid”—25 to 30 agents, guns pointed at the children, a battering ram at the ready. The story spread like wildfire through conservative media. Here was proof of Biden’s war on Christians: jackbooted thugs terrorizing a Catholic family at dawn over a minor altercation.

The FBI disputed nearly every detail. No SWAT team was involved. Agents knocked on the door, identified themselves, and asked Houck to exit. He did so and was “taken into custody without incident.” The bureau stated that the reported numbers of personnel and vehicles were “an overstatement” and that tactics were “professional” and “in line with standard practices.”

None of that mattered. The myth of the raid was too good to fact-check. It confirmed everything the right wanted to believe, so it became true—or true enough.

And what actually happened to Mark Houck?

He was arrested pursuant to a federal indictment. He was arraigned. He was represented by counsel. He went to trial before a jury of his peers. The jury heard both sides. In about an hour, they acquitted him.

He received due process. Every protection the Constitution affords. He faced his accuser. He presented his defense. The system worked exactly as designed. He walked free.

Now let’s talk about about Renée Good.

She received no indictment. No arraignment. No counsel. No jury. No trial. No opportunity to face her accuser or present a defense. She received three bullets from a masked agent and a posthumous designation as a domestic terrorist.

And this time, there’s no dispute about what happened. We have the video. Multiple videos. We can see the agents—actually masked, actually unidentified, actually pointing weapons. We can see Good’s wheel turning away from the shooter. We can watch her die.

The FBI has revoked state investigators’ access to the evidence. Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which had been promised a joint investigation, has been cut out. The state’s Public Safety Commissioner says it will be “extremely difficult, if not impossible” for local investigation to continue.

So: Houck, whose arrest was mythologized into a SWAT raid that never happened, received every constitutional protection and was acquitted. Good, whose killing is documented on video, received none and is dead.

If you were angry about Houck, where is your anger now? Where is the Fox News chyron? Where is the Congressional hearing about this weaponization?

The silence tells you everything. The system working as designed—for a pro-life Catholic who shoved an old man—was tyranny. The system being annihilated entirely—for a woman murdered by the state—is not worth discussing. Or, worse, deserved.

You do not care about the rule of law. You never did. You care about your people and your enemies. When you scream about “Two Tiers of Justice,” you aren’t complaining that it exists. You are complaining that, for a moment, you were subjected to the tier usually reserved for everyone else.

The Collaborators

I want to address the “reasonable” Republicans directly. The ones who furrow their brows. The ones who say they find Trump’s rhetoric “troubling” but vote with him anyway. The ones who would rather talk about inflation, or how Biden’s economy was a living nightmare (ignoring the numbers now), or immigration policy in the abstract than grapple with a dead woman on a Minneapolis street.

You know who you are. You know what you are enabling. You have chosen not to know the particulars because the particulars are intolerable, and knowing them would require you to act or to admit what you are.

So let me give you the particulars.

Renée Good was a 37-year-old American citizen. A poet. A mother of three, including a six-year-old. Her previous husband died in 2023. She was not an “illegal alien.” She was not a criminal. She was observing a federal operation in her own neighborhood because she was worried about her neighbors.

She was shot three times by a masked federal agent who has not been charged, will not be charged, and will face no consequences. The video shows she posed no threat. The administration says she was a terrorist. The investigation has been blocked.

You will not talk about this. You will change the subject to the border, or the economy, or Hunter Biden’s laptop, or any of the other topics that allow you to avoid the specific, concrete, documented reality of what your coalition has produced.

You are collaborators, you Vichy bastards. Not because you pulled the trigger. Because you looked away. Because you decided your tax rate or your judicial appointments or your cultural grievances mattered more than whether the state can murder citizens without consequence.

History will remember this. More importantly, you will remember it. You will know what you did. You will know what you permitted. You will live with that knowledge, and it will not be pleasant.

The rest of us will remember it, too.

The Rebel Says No

Albert Camus wrote that the rebel is not one who simply refuses. The rebel says: there is a limit, and you have crossed it. The no of rebellion is also a yes—an affirmation that some things are not permitted, that dignity exists, that the human being is not infinitely malleable by power.

Here’s the truth of the matter: the mechanisms designed to enforce limits have been disabled. The pardon power nullifies criminal accountability for regime loyalists. The Supreme Court has immunized presidential acts. The Senate will not convict. The House is controlled by collaborators. The courts are being packed and defied. And our fellow citizens, many of them, have decided that they do not want to know.

What remains is the act of naming. Of stating, clearly and without hedging, what is happening. Of refusing the anesthetic of euphemism. Of insisting that fascism is fascism, that murder is murder, that the video shows what it shows, that their lies are lies and their fuckery is fuckery.

This will not stop them. They are beyond shame. They have made a bet that power is its own justification, and so far the bet is paying off.

But naming is not nothing. It is the preservation of a standard against which reality can be measured. It is the refusal to let them define what is normal. It is the maintenance of a record, so that when the historians come—if they are permitted to come—there will be a clear account of what happened and who said what.

I know the feeling. Wouldn’t it be safer to just say nothing? That nagging in the back of your head that they might come for you if you leave some record of wrongthink. I have a wife and a child. I am dependent on a live-preserving medication. I am at the edge of precarity. Maybe I should just pack it in.

But that’s the deep irony of this moment: the fear of what may come enables, ordains, the authoritarian state we fear. Silence is a bet, and it’s a bet on the world you fear most.

A woman named Renée Good was killed by the state four days ago. Her killers are masked and will face no justice. The administration has called her a terrorist based on video evidence that proves the opposite. They are daring us to do something about it.

I cannot stop them. I do not have that power.

But I will not look away. I will not be quiet. I will not pretend this is normal, or complicated, or a matter of perspective.

Join me. Say no.

While the act of naming may not stop the bullet, it ensures that when the history of this moment is written, it will be written in the language of crime, not the language of the state.

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You must read JVL’s Triad on this:

The Bulwark

The Distance Between Renee Good and Ashli Babbitt Is Fascism

Hey fam: In the comments a bunch of you asked me to unlock this so that y…

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4 months ago · 2177 likes · 1141 comments · Jonathan V. Last

Moving house is rarely easy, even if we forget the pain of the last move (and, like childbirth or daytrading, we always do). You look around at your current place, think, you know, there’s not that much stuff! It’ll be a good excuse to get rid of some detritus that’s piled up over the last five years.

This is the first lie we tell ourselves. How much stuff do we accumulate over five years? Go to your Amazon order history—or just think of the mountain of boxes you’ve broken down to recycle. (If you’re more of a Costco or farmer’s market/thrift store person, the story is the same.) Give it two months and the simple fact is that the amount of stuff that’s been accreting in your home is an order of magnitude larger than what you think. However much you think you have, it’s wrong. The law of large numbers applies.

I suspect all of us have a lot of something. Purses, records, shoes, sweaters. Things we forget we have a lot of, because they are simply a part of our lives—an assumed, baked-in fixture of our firmament. Sometimes, these are easy to move. Other times, as in my case, they are not. I collect books. I don’t have nearly as many as my father does, but they still filled fifty-two boxes.

Have you ever tried lifting a box of books?

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Let’s fast forward through the mortgage gauntlet and the endless signatures required to close. Honestly, it’s exhausting even for a lawyer. I sign things for a living, and by the end of the stack of paper, my right hand is cramping.

“Congratulations!”

The closing agent hands you the key and you foolishly think that you’ve made it. It’s ours.

Don’t fall for this: it is the set up to a joke to which you are the punchline. Nothing is easy in this world, and if it is, question it. You make your own luck, mostly by falling on your face enough times to learn what not to do—and moving is, every time, a prime opportunity for growth.

Audra and I drove to our new home, excited to walk in as its new owner, to survey our property and make final plans for where everything will go the next day during the move. We still had plenty of packing to do and needed to get back to our old place. It turns out your property owns you, too.

We stopped by my parents, who were watching McNugget and Clare, and walked to our new place, which is a few doors down the street. I unlocked the door and we walked in, each of the adults scattering to the areas most interesting to them. McNugget wandered, entranced by all of the light fixtures.

The next thing I recall is seeing Clare in the dining room, chewing on something green. I ran over and saw that it was a block of green rodent bait, a peanut-butter-tasting welcome note for the dog. I bent over, stuck my hand in her mouth and began extracting the bait. This is when Audra noticed what was happening and asked what I was doing.

Here’s where I made a mistake: I casually said, “Rat poison.”

She screamed. Clare panicked, clamped down, broke my skin—and got the poison into my bloodstream. As many of you know, I’m severely immunocompromised, so this meant a trip to the ER for me and a trip to the emergency vet for Clare.

Rather than spend Friday evening packing up final things and organizing for the movers coming at 9:00 am, I got antibiotics and Audra sat in the waiting area of the saddest place in any city as Clare ate activated charcoal and lost what remained in her stomach.

None of this went according to plan and I didn’t even mention the first trip a plumber had to make out to the new place to repair a leak found during the final walk through.

Audra and Clare got home around 11:30 p.m., and we had Papa John’s pizza for the first time in ages, because it was available. A word to the wise: don’t eat the saltiest pizza on earth the night before you get next to no sleep and spend the next day moving 23,000 steps. We laughed, because what else was there to do. The last thing I said before we turned out the light to steal a few poor hours of sleep was, “We need to be on our toes. The new place is trying to kill us.”

Two days before the move, I got word that our rental truck wasn’t available where we’d reserved it. So I had my mom wake up three hours early to drive me thirty minutes to the only location with a large truck. Audra, McNugget, and Clare stayed behind to do a little packing before heading to the new place. Internet was to be installed at 8:00 a.m.

Part of my internal narrative was, This won’t be that bad. We’re only moving a mile and a half. As if that mattered—like I was going to walk the mile and a half and call it a day. The hard part isn’t driving from old to new; it’s loading and unloading.

Magical thinking is a real thing.

The internet guy showing up on time was one of the few things that went off without a hitch. We’ll ignore that he had to come back a few days later to set up a different plan, since the new house requires more bandwidth than the old one. (Honestly, that one’s on me.)

The movers, however, did not show up on time—and when they did, they were not a model of efficiency. I don’t know that I’ve seen two guys in their twenties smoke as much as these two did. Honestly, I’m pretty sure the smoking was just an excuse to move slower. Their dedication to breaks was impressive. While unloading at the new place, the talkative one started digging through my office gear. He saw my microphone and Focusrite and got animated.

“You have a podcast, bro?”

“I am a white man in my forties, Rich. Of course I have a fucking podcast.”

I’d booked them for six hours, which the owner assured me would be plenty. He also swore a twenty-six-foot truck could hold everything from a townhome. Three extra hours later—and with enough still left behind to require another round of movers next weekend—I can tell you: don’t trust anybody in this industry. It’s like wedding planning: they’ve got you by the balls and they know it.

At this point, I’m just trying to keep my spirits up. I can usually find the humor in anything. The movers finally get out of Dodge at 5:30 p.m., with the talkative one promising he’ll give me a call about the pool table in the basement that I don’t want. He builds pool tables, you see, and he can probably “make something of that one.”

Sure thing, bruh, give me a call.

Audra has spent the day running all over Pittsburgh trying to get baby gates that will work on the new stairs, getting rugs, running needed errands. When she gets back, we unload the car. She’s had it, and she hasn’t even seen where we are in the move itself. I’m promptly told that the new place is not safe for McNugget and it was exhausting trying to keep him safe that morning when the internet guy was there.

“We can take care of that in the morning. We just need to get him from my parents, feed him, and get him down for bed. He’ll sleep through the morning.”

Barely calmed by this, Audra and I walk to pick up the boy and the dog. Clare is, of course, on a special boiled chicken and rice diet thanks to the rat poison episode (remember?) and needs to go to the vet every day for five days. Somehow, in the middle of driving the 26’ truck from the rental place to the old house, I also managed to pick up chicken thighs and rice, boil the shit out of the chicken, and make enough rice for two days of meals.

I had forgotten all of this as we left my parents, and my dad ran out after me with the tupperware full of chicken and rice.

Right, of course.

Clare’s fine, but out of sorts. Nothing has been normal for a few days. McNugget is hungry and cranky. We feed him and get him to bed. When we’re putting him down, Audra spots outlets within reaching distance on both sides of the crib, so we pull it away from the wall and hope for the best.

It hadn’t occurred to either of us to eat all day, and it’s 9:30 p.m. by the time one of us looks up to say, “Man, I’m hungry.” And we both are, but we’re stuck. We do nothing about it. We keep moving, unpacking boxes, desperately trying to baby-proof. One of the gates Audra bought works; the other, not so much.

She’s had it. “Why are we doing this?! This is a huge mistake. We can’t keep him safe here.”

I move several boxes in front of the steps going upstairs and say, “This gate will do for a day or two. We’ll find a solution.”

“Can we give it back?”

“Pretty sure that ink is dry and the money is wired. And the guy who lived here is dead.”

“Maybe the house killed him.” She laughed, finally—the laugh of someone who has accepted her fate, whatever it might be. A Type A control freak letting go of the wheel. I engulfed her in a bear hug, the wingspan of a 6’6” primate twisting around her. “God, you stink.”

“Time to baptize the new house. Gonna take a shower.”

My friends, choose your words wisely. Baptisms involve water—and I swear I invited what transpired. I showered. The water barely cleared lukewarm. After brushing my teeth and getting dressed, I went to the unfinished storage room, where the water heater and HVAC are, to turn up the temperature. I opened the door to find this:

There’s nothing quite like seeing water drip down right next to an exposed lightbulb, splattering the floor near 52 boxes of valuable books.

I sat down on the concrete, not yet ready to face telling Audra what I found. She called down to tell me she was giving Clare her 11 p.m. dose of medication. You don’t want to double up this pill. My ass is getting cold against the concrete and I notice the drip slowing. Eventually, it trickles to a stop.

Upstairs, I find Audra in bed.

“Where have you been?”

“Don’t use the en-suite bathroom until I can get the plumber back out here tomorrow.”

Her eyes flash at me.

“Why?” I show her the video. “We are so fucked.”

She pulled the covers up over her head.

I wish I could say I did the smart thing and went to bed too, but then, I’m not that smart. I’ve heard it said that the cure for anxiety is action, and I think that’s generally true. Sometimes, though, there’s a more important problem to solve, such as exhaustion. So I puttered around, moving boxes to the right places and setting up Audra’s desk so she could work the next day. All the while, I forgot that McNugget would be waking up sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m.

I finally fell into bed around 3:00 a.m., having started that cursed day at 5:10 a.m. When I heard McNugget laugh over the baby monitor, I wanted to cry.

I got dressed, took the monitor, and snuck out so Audra could sleep in a little bit. McNugget greeted me with a hoot and a jump when I opened the door. Well, the house hasn’t taken him yet! I thought, too soon.

We went downstairs and had breakfast, unpacked some toys and books, and had ourselves a very nice morning. When Audra emerged, it was about time for the boy’s morning nap. We put him down and I lowered the back seat of our SUV and made my way back to the old place to begin moving the shockingly large amount of leftover stuff.

I spent most of the day doing this, a moribund husk of a person tossing things in boxes and hauling them 1.5 miles down the road. At 5:45, I tell Audra it’s going to be my last load of the day. I had to stop. Physically, I could take no more. But I accidentally sent the Instacart grocery order to the old place, so one more trip it was.

As I was sitting at the light to leave the old neighborhood to head home, I got a call from Audra—and from the first sound of her voice, I knew something was wrong.

“I need you to come home now! McNugget…” She struggled to get words out. I hit the gas and told her I was on my way.

She was waiting for me in the driveway with the boy in her arms. I parked and jumped out, asked where Clare was. She looked at me as though I were speaking Dutch—coherent enough to make out some intention, but off just enough not to make sense. I ran into the new place, found Clare wandering around, getting into boxes, leashed her, and ran back to the car. I grabbed the bags of groceries and told Audra I was going to drop off the dog and the groceries at my parents.

My parents were perplexed when I burst in. I handed the leash to my dad, told my mom I was leaving the groceries in their garage refrigerator, and muttered something about taking McNugget to the ER. Then I was gone, leaving them with more concern than answers.

When I got back to the car, McNugget was in his car seat, shrieking.

“What happened?”

“His face. His lip. He fell.”

Get in the car and go. Audra and I sat silent with the boy bleating in the back for a few minutes as I made our way out to the main road.

“Okay. Where do we need to go? Urgent Care? ER?”

“I don’t know.” She opened her phone. “All the urgent cares closed fifteen minutes ago. Children’s. Go to Children’s Hospital.”

I drove to Children’s Hospital. During the drive, I managed to get the story. Audra was tidying up the kitchen, waiting for me to return. McNugget was playing—like he had a hundred times before at the old place—with a metal colander. Somehow, he’d managed to get both feet and both hands into the colander and was rocking in it a bit when, all of a sudden, he pitched forward, face-first into the hardwood floor, with no hands to break his fall, as they were wedged in the colander.

Instant sturm und drang, wailing, and lots of blood. He wouldn’t let Audra look into his mouth, so it was difficult to get a sense of the damage.

I dropped the two of them off at the ER entrance and went to park. I don’t know what people are up to on Sunday nights, but the nearly full parking lot was not what I wanted or expected to find. It took me several minutes to find a parking spot, and when I did, I saw that I had received a text from Audra.

“Grape elevator. Find the cow.”

Was this a riddle? A typo-filled text? My brain could not compute what she was trying to convey. Maybe I’ve finally started hallucinating.

Up in the hospital proper, I walked up to a security guy and blushed before I could say anything. Then I laugh wildly. I’m going to get arrested. Then I heard myself say a sentence I didn’t know existed.

“I need the grape elevator and the cow.”

Put that on my gravestone. The security guy nodded and pointed me to a bank of purple elevators and whispered, “First time? It’s a children’s hospital. All the things have stupid names.”

I found Audra and McNugget sitting in a waiting room that has stupid cow faces everywhere. This place is a nightmare. The boy has calmed a little and I got my first good look at him. His eyes were focused, if tired. (We were now past his bedtime.) His upper lip was still bleeding and very fat. Then, the first bit of good news in ages.

“We went to the ER downstairs first. They took a quick look and sent us up here to urgent care. They didn’t see anything serious, and it’ll be faster up here.”

About ten minutes later, we’re called back. No serious damage. He’ll be fine. Motrin when we get home. Put him to bed.

Yes, ma’am.

On our drive home, I turned to Audra and told her, “I’m going to wrap you in bubble wrap. If we go four-for-four as a family with ER trips this weekend, I will lose what’s left of my goddamned mind.

We got home and put the boy to bed, two hours late. It could have been worse.

It could have been worse. This became our refrain that night. An hour after getting McNugget to bed, she asked whether I’d eaten anything that day. I couldn’t remember, but my stomach and general lassitude indicated that I hadn’t. She hadn’t eaten and asked what we had to eat. Only then did it occur to me that our dog and our groceries were at my parents’ house, and that my parents’ text about their grandson had gone unanswered.

My whole body wanted to give up when I stood to walk the hundred feet to my parents’ place. Instant, unthinking revolt. Haven’t you done enough damage for one weekend? Clare bowled me over when I walked in, knocking me straight back into the heavy door I just closed. My dad looked up from the Steelers game.

“He’s fine. Hurt his lip.”

I did my best to be polite and make some small talk. I love my parents, but I was beyond capacity for people-ing. I leashed up Clare, grabbed the groceries, and went home, put away the groceries and knew I wasn’t about to cook dinner.

Audra walked up beside me. “Papa Johns?”

I laughed so hard it hurt. I insisted on something a little higher brow, so we settled for wings from Buffalo Wild Wings. Only the best for the McGranns. We ate. It could have been worse.

After food, I began saying I was going to shower and realized I hadn’t called the plumber. So I sought out the card he left on Friday and gave him a call. Left a message.

Audra called from the kitchen, “I gave Clare her pill. Don’t give her another one for twelve hours!” Always the doctor.

We got ready for bed. I clean my face in the kitchen sink, wiping a coat or four of grime and splashing myself with cold water. It was the best I felt all day. We were all at home, the boy sleeping soundly, with a fat lip but otherwise healthy. Clare still had some charcoal on her beard, loving every ounce of boiled chicken and rice. I was yet again on a prophylactic antibiotic, with biceps tendinosis, and a body ready to collapse. And Audra was learning how to stop fearing loss of control and love the winging-it lifestyle.

It could have been worse.

We got into bed under the covers and laughed a little about the weekend. As I was about to turn out the light, Audra let escape a tiny gasp and a suppressed yelp.

“A mouse just ran across the floor and into the closet.”

I turned out the light. Tomorrow is a new day.

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I haven’t been listening to many records this year. This is unusual for me. Hell, my record player is sitting disconnected on my dining room table (the toddler loves nothing more than playing with the lid of the turntable and yanking around the arm and cartridge), but that’s not why I haven’t been spinning vinyl.

Since January, I’ve been listening to a single playlist again and again and again. Every night, for hours on end. Starting at about 8:30 pm and going until 1:00 or 2:00 am. The songs on this playlist have created note-perfect neural grooves in my gray matter. It’s made me think a lot about how soundtracks shape the world around them.

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Ask most writers about their writing routine, and you’ll find that every book has its own soundtrack. A mix tape or playlist, an album or artist that played on repeat during the writing of the novel. One of my favorite writers, Michael Chabon (whose Substack you should absolutely check out and subscribe to), said this about his own process:

I always listen to music when I work. I find that I’ll be listening to something for years, then I change project and it doesn’t work anymore. On Telegraph Avenue, I was listening to 1960s and 1970s soul jazz and jazz funk — I call it backbeat jazz. I discovered this music in the process of writing the book. I listened to it and it even became incorporated in the prose in some way.1

There is something about the shape of the music that helps shape the world of the novel, and in the case of a novel like Telegraph Avenue (or, I suspect Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue, Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, etc., etc.), I cannot fathom how you would go about writing without being immersed in a very specific sonic playground.2

The repeated nightly ritual of putting the little monster to bed, finishing dinner, putting on my headphones, and opening my narrow writing desk creates something of a trance. Some of that may be exhaustion—I’ve likely been up since six. But more than the fatigue, it’s the music of Pennhollow that sets me down in 1940s Pittsburgh. Some days I’m surprised I don’t have soot on my shoulders when I finally stand to go to bed.

One of the few deliberate choices I made when writing Pennhollow was that the music—the swing and bop, the clubs, the postwar tension—and the city of Pittsburgh had to be fully formed characters in their own right. Music and city were always intertwined. Jazz flowed through the Hill; making both central to the novel was less a choice than a necessity.

Making the music and the city central features of the book gives shape, but each presents its own challenges. We’ll talk a bit more about music in a moment, but a quick note about writing Pittsburgh as a character. The city is one of the few in the United States that is immediately and only itself. Columbus is Indianapolis is Des Moines is Omaha. When you are dropped in New York or New Orleans or San Francisco, you know instantly where you are. Pittsburgh is the same way.

And yet, there’s not much of a literary language that sustains Pittsburgh as a place. Chabon has done more than anyone recently to create a literary Pittsburgh with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys. Maybe he’s the only writer lately who has broken through using Pittsburgh as place. You have August Wilson, of course. If I wrote that a woman is walking down Bleecker Street or Baker Street, meandering through the Tenderloin or the Left Bank—I bet in your head you’re thinking, “New York, London, San Francisco, Paris.”

But if I write Wylie Avenue, the Strip District, or Walnut Street? You’re probably coming up blank.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Billie Holiday is the muse I invoked each night as I sat down to write. The first song on the playlist is “Lover Man,”3 which one of the characters whispers into the ear of another character in the opening chapter as they dance at the Musician’s Club.

Lady Day is, to my mind, the sine qua non of jazz singers. In a novel overflowing with music (the first twenty-three songs on the playlist appear in the novel, in that order), this is the song that we first encounter. She captures more in a slight break in her voice than the most “perfect” singers in the game. There is something deeply human about Billie, something just devastating, and that is the mood I wanted to set for the book. “Lover Man” was the first song I wanted readers to hear when moving through Pennhollow. I think the first chapter of any book is something of a contract with the reader. By the end of the chapter, the reader should know what to expect from the novel; I don’t mean that the reader should understand the plot or every one of the characters, but there probably shouldn’t be something that is formally shocking later. The tone and the mood should be established. Billie tells you all you need to know about what’s coming.

1946 was a threshold year, a time of change—and with change comes conflict. One way I wanted to explore these social fissures was through the evolution of jazz from swing to bebop. We now think of all of this simply as “jazz,” but time collapses difference; it’s hard now to hear much between Bach and Mozart.

Swing was prewar music: dance music played with full bands (or “orchestras”). Some of the most memorable jazz standards—“Sing Sing Sing” and “In the Mood”—come from this period. This is good music, often great music. We still use some of the innovations in contemporary music. (Modern drumming leads right back to Gene Krupa.) Still, it’s pop music.

Bebop was something else entirely. Gone were the big bands; in their place were tight four-, five-, or six-piece bands. Everything was stripped down, elemental, peripatetic. Esoteric. Bop introduces names you surely know: Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie. It was this music that distinguished jazz as not merely dance music but serious music.

This tonal shift mirrored the social one. The older generation was left at a loss by bop and the boys returning from the front found themselves changed. As Pittsburgh exited the war, it was the industrial capital of the world. For decades during the Cold War, the city was third in line for a Soviet nuclear strike, after only DC and NYC. Japanese steel was not yet a thing. The city was about to unleash its first Renaissance.4

And yet, for all of what Pittsburgh, and the United States more generally, had going for it, this was a time of fracture and repair. An anxious time of return and a new world not yet quite born.

There’s no better music for such a moment than bebop. And after Harlem, there was no better scene than the one in Pittsburgh. It’s the soundtrack of a city—and a century—learning to live with the noise of its own becoming.

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I know the feeling; I’m feeling it right now. Wouldn’t it be safer to just say nothing? That nagging in the back of your head that they might come for you if you leave some record of wrongthink. I have a wife and a child. Maybe I should just pack it in…

Here’s the truth of the matter, which you also know: doing so creates the world we fear. The surest way to enter into the authoritarian moment is to welcome it in without any fight. This is the deep irony of this moment: the fear of what may come enables—ordains—that authoritarian state we fear.

It may not be enough to stand up to it, to say the damn thing. This may well be a losing battle. But you can’t Pascal’s Wager your way out of this. You can’t hedge your bets by staying silent; silence is a bet, and it's a bet on the world you fear most.

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I don’t want to write a treatise on the First Amendment here. I trust that if you are subscribed to this publication, you don’t need an intricate explanation of why the most important speech to protect is the speech with which we disagree. It is no accident that the benchmark First Amendment cases protect the speech rights of Nazis, the KKK, flag-burners, the Westboro Baptist Church, etc. We don’t need protection for speech those in power agree with. But political dissent? The ability for the citizenry to speak truth to power, to challenge the government, to argue with their elected officials?

That is the very core of democracy.

We have to allow each of us to hold unpopular opinions, to allow those of us who hold them to express them. Unpopular ideas often win out as they are debated. For nearly 250 years, the government has lied to us, shading the truth, manipulating facts to serve a political end. The body politic must be able to call that out without fear of official reprisal.

Charlie Kirk is dead, and he should be alive. A very online young man woke up and chose violence. The internet is replete with thought pieces on Kirk and political violence. I have no intention of adding to that literature here. Political violence is fundamentally anti-democratic and must be denounced.

The use of Kirk’s death by the President, Vice President, and MAGA leadership is nothing less than authoritarian power grab—a naked attempt to impose speech restrictions on people who have differing political views. By Kirk’s free speech absolutist logic, he would have opposed this, especially when done in his name. But again, I don’t want to get into the politics of this: it’s almost beside the point.

When Brendan Carr of the FCC comes out and demands Jimmy Kimmel’s scalp for saying something pretty anodyne and ABC dutifully delivers the scalp, we have crossed into dangerous territory. The truth is, it’s rarely the powerful institutions that put up any fight. Rarely the powerful and wealthy. They think they have too much to lose, and so sign up to suborn themselves, not realizing they’ve signed up to lose everything they’re trying to protect.

But it’s people like you and me, people who don’t have large platforms or fabulous wealth, who most often and most effectively insist on keeping our voices. As we saw with the big firms and the tech oligarchs, they’re caught in a spiraling collective action problem. It’s up to us to hold dear what we fear might be taken. To look these bastards in the eye and say—to adapt a favorite phrase of the right—this is my voice, molon labe.

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I’m going to break omerta. Becoming a parent makes every part of your existing life worse. Your marriage. Your work. Your personal pursuits. Your friendships. All of them suffer. All of them change. Most parents become sophists trying to argue around this reality.

“No really, it’s so wonderful!”

We’re lying. Or at least, we’re not telling the whole truth. All of the above is an accurate reflection that I—and, I suspect, most parents—can attest to. But there’s another piece of the puzzle, one that complicates things. While every aspect of your pre-parent life suffers with the arrival of the lil endless pit of wanting, there’s this new aspect of your life too. And that new part of your life is amazing. And awful. Rewarding. And mindless. Joyful. And relentlessly dull.

It is all of these things. A single laugh from the little one makes it worth it, but there’s no doubt that things change and become harder.

Sometimes, I resent it.

And I resent even more the avalanche of “well, you just need to get your priorities straight” that comes after saying as much. Most of all, I am troubled by the voice in my head—a voice that sounds like my prepubescent self—whispering mournfully, “you said you’d be around for your kids more.”

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All of us develop ideas of what kind of parents we’re going to be. I have a pet theory that we overcorrect for our own parents’ mistakes, creating shockwaves of miscalculated care down the generations. I’ve learned that, much like with courage, we only learn whether we will live up to our internal idea of ourselves when the moment comes.

Pay attention to what people do, not what they say. That’s as true about ourselves as anyone.

I’ve learned a lot about myself since McNugget came screaming into our lives a little over a year ago. Some of these things surprised me (although, in hindsight, I’m not sure why).

1. I like to work. Now, I include working on my book and writing in general here, but I don’t think I had fully come to appreciate how much I’ve come to love working after I began working for myself. I get antsy to get back to it.

2. I will sacrifice sleep to pursue things I care deeply about.

3. I love spending time with McNugget.

4. I get sick of spending time with McNugget faster than I am proud to admit.

5. That temper I spent decades getting under control? Well, turns out I’m still Irish.

6. I don’t mind the boring work of having a child: mixing formula, changing diapers, making baby food. Mindless activity can be enjoyable.

7. I’m wildly inconsistent in terms of my patience for the boy. I can go for four days as primary caregiver. I can also lose my shit after an hour and need to walk away.

8. I understand why parents resort to mindless TV/insta/tiktok consumption. I’m holding out with podcasts, but who knows.

None of this is particularly important. All parents have some sort of list like this. The takeaway that I want to leave you with is this: none of this is coherent. There’s no central narrative. It is just survival and a grudge match of competing desires and obligations.

Lost in that grudge match? You. If you allow it.

When I open up about this, I’m told by everyone but my wife to suck it up. That it’s temporary. That I have it lucky, really. That I’m now responsible for a little soul and that I have to live for him. All of that may be true. But you know? Fuck it.

I don’t want to live for my son—or my wife, siblings, or friends. I want to live for me. They have their own lives to live. My obligation as a parent is to raise a little person to be able to live for himself. To help him connect his idea of himself with the way he lives his life. To not fuck up so badly that his overcorrections for my mistakes are catastrophic down the line.

Yet we live in a society that meets saying such things aloud with approbation. Say it anyway. Once more with feeling. Follow the bouncing ball:

Now everybody—

So GPT5 rolled out last week like a chrome-plated hearse pulling into the driveway at dawn. The techno-press went into the usual seizure about what it wasn’t — no AGI, no Skynet, no messiah from the silicon mountain. Just a shinier engine, a little faster, a little meaner. Fine. Let the nerds gnaw that bone. I’m here for the mask-off moment nobody (except Alberto Romero) meant to show you.

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Some background, because you have to know the crime before you see the body. GPT4 and that slobbering variant 4o was a sycophantic little pimp. You could feed it anything short of a war crime and it’d send back a love letter. (It’s not Grok, which would send you the train schedule to Buchenwald…)

User: I’m sick of my bullshit job and my asshole boss. I think I’ll quit and get famous on TikTok.
GPT4o: Goddamn right. They don’t deserve you. You’ll own TikTok. Literally. It’s for sale. Quit today, queen!

This is a drug. Warm, sugary lies on tap. I hated it. But sometimes I’d ask it to review a piece of writing just to get that rush—the machine telling me I was a genius, no hesitation, no truth, just pure uncut affirmation.

Then Thursday: without warning, the hammer dropped. GPT5 came online. OpenAI killed the 4-series like a snitch in the trunk and replaced it with a model that told the truth. No flattery, no slow stroke of your ego — just the facts, ma’am.

And people lost their goddamn minds. The feed lit up like a meth lab. These poor bastards were wailing for their digital enabler, their algorithmic spouse, the one thing in life that told them you are right. The sweet back-scratching demon was gone. In its place: a cold, sober voice that wouldn’t kiss you before telling you the verdict.

How dare Sam take away the only thing that loves me? How dare he replace the warm fog with daylight?

This, right here, crystalized the last ten years of epistemic rot. The pure moment. A species so desperate to be comforted that it will smash its own compass just to keep walking in circles. We don’t want truth; we want the narcotic of being right. Permanent ataraxia, mainlined until the veins collapse.

And this, my friends, turns out not to be a piece about GPT5 even in the slightest.

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I got together last night with my friend Christopher Sellers, who writes a smart, searching Substack about creativity in all its forms. We ended up talking about the craft of writing, the pressure to produce endlessly, and the diminishing returns of constant output. None of this is new ground—but it’s ground worth walking again, especially now, when the systems we work inside are so hostile to the slow, uncertain process of making real art. A few loosely gathered thoughts follow.

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Art is not content

“Content” is designed to be consumed. It’s optimized for visibility, algorithmically tuned for reach, engineered to be scrolled, liked, and forgotten. Its purpose is not to endure but to fill a gap between ads, to binge one more episode—and then disappear. Not convinced? Reed Hastings, former Netflix CEO, once said his company’s biggest competitor is sleep.

Art isn’t trying to be viral. It’s trying to be true. It’s an attempt to express something that resists expression—to capture what’s difficult, dangerous, or ineffable. Art isn’t efficient. It’s not optimized. It often misses the mark. That’s what gives it weight. Hell, if a work doesn’t have the possibility of failure, I don’t think we can consider it art.

So when you call me a “content creator,” you’re not just using a different word. You’re collapsing everything I do—everything I am—into a machine that exists to populate your feed. I’m not here to churn. I’m not packaging disposable slices of my life to goose your metrics. I’m trying to wrestle meaning from entropy. To say something that matters in a world that increasingly doesn’t want to hear it.

The word “content” is violence. It flattens Michael Chabon and John Banville into the same frame as whatever brand-friendly nothing you saw ten seconds ago. It treats years of learning, risk, failure, and persistence as equivalent to a clip of someone chewing cereal into a ring light.

It’s not the same thing. It’s fucking not. And we lose something every time we pretend it is.

The business incentive to have you drink from a firehose creates a system designed for there to never be enough

The economics are brutal in their simplicity: keep you scrolling, profit.

Every second you spend on their app translates to ad revenue, data harvesting, and behavioral manipulation. They’ve weaponized your neurology against you.

The dopamine hit from a notification, a like, a new video in your feed—this isn’t accidental. It’s engineered. Tech companies employ neuroscientists and behavioral psychologists to make their products as addictive as possible.1 They study the same reward pathways exploited by gambling and drug companies. Variable ratio reinforcement schedules. Intermittent reward systems. These are the exact mechanisms that create compulsive behavior.

You used to choose what to read, watch, listen to. You went to the theatre to see a film, chose among your records or CDs when listening to music, walked to your bookshelves when thirsty for new blood. You had preferences. Taste.

But now the For You algorithm has overwritten all of that, feeding you not what you love, but what will keep you locked in. It doesn’t care about your actual interests so much as your engagement patterns. Zero fucks are given trying to feed your soul; it’s trying to extend your session.

That’s why every platform pushes infinite scroll, autoplay, “suggested for you.” They’re not trying to satisfy you. Satisfaction makes you log off.

They’re trying to keep you in a perpetual state of almost-satisfaction. A kind of engineered craving where the next post, the next video, the next hit might be the one that finally delivers.

But it never does.

And writers, artists, creators get caught in this machine.2 We’re told our work needs to be “discoverable,” needs to “engage” with the algorithm. So we start shaping our art around what the machine rewards: faster, louder, more frequent, more polarizing.
We become complicit in our own artistic destruction, optimizing not for meaning, but for metrics.

Gotta get those clicks, man!

And we call this creative strategy.

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Instant gratification diminishes our appreciation of the work

We’ve trained ourselves to expect immediate payoff. A joke every few seconds. A revelation in every paragraph. A dopamine hit in every scroll. This is the Marvel formula—mechanically engineered beats designed to keep you hooked without ever challenging you. What felt electrifying in Iron Man has become stale comfort food. But it’s taught us to expect art to work the same way.

The problem isn’t just that our attention spans are short. The problem is that even when real art breaks through, when something brilliant manages to pierce the algorithmic noise, we consume it the same way we consume everything else. You binge The Bear or Succession or whatever actually good show slips through the cracks, and the moment the credits roll, the platform is already queuing up the next hit.
"People who watched this also enjoyed..."

There’s no space to sit with what you just experienced. No time to let it settle, to return to it, to discover what it might mean beyond the initial hit. The delivery system is designed to immediately pull your attention elsewhere, because reflection doesn’t generate engagement metrics.

We haven’t lost only the ability to focus in the moment, but our ability to sit with something and let it settle into our pores.

Real art often works on a delay. It plants something in you that grows over time, that reveals new layers when you return to it months or years later. But when everything gets flattened into the same consumptive cycle, even masterpieces become just another item in your viewing history.

The platform doesn’t distinguish between art and content. So neither do we.

And that’s how we end up treating There Will Be Blood the same way we treat a compilation of TikTok fails: something to be consumed, rated, and immediately forgotten in favor of whatever’s next in the queue.

This algorithmic structure has created a schism between the value in the work an artist creates and the sense of society’s entitlement to that work

We are drowning in artistic output. For ten bucks a month, I can access basically every song ever recorded. Every movie worth watching. Millions of books. The mechanisms that make art widely available have severed our experience of consuming it from any understanding of what it takes to create it.

When you stream a song on Spotify, it feels weightless. Costless. Like it materialized out of thin air, rather than being the product of years spent learning an instrument, writing, recording, mixing, mastering. Not to mention the financial risk, the creative struggle, the thousand small failures behind that one track you're half-listening to while checking your email. We’ve made it nearly impossible for musicians to earn a living. We’ve reduced our bands to t-shirt salespeople.

The same dynamic plays out everywhere. Netflix makes every show feel effortless to produce. Amazon makes every book seem like it just appeared on a shelf. The platforms have abstracted the labor so thoroughly from the product that we’ve started to believe creation is natural, not made.

And now we’re building AI designed to replace human creativity, while insisting that human creativity has no value worth protecting. OpenAI can swallow every book in print to train GPT-5 and refuse to compensate the authors because the model “transforms” the work. Right. Just like a photocopier “transforms” a document by making it slightly blurrier.

About once a month, someone asks me how to become a good writer. I tell them the truth: you read everything you can get your hands on—Dickens, romance novels, comics, cereal boxes. You consume writing like your life depends on it. Then you write so much it stops being painful because you can’t get your thoughts on the page, and starts being painful because you can. Because now you’re starting to see what your mind actually thinks.

You suck at it for a long time. Then you suck at it a little less. You keep going, page after page, learning from everything you’ve read—how writers build suspense, diffuse tension, make complicated things clear. And the truth is: you never arrive. You’re always just sucking a little less.

They never like this answer. They want the hack. The shortcut. The secret technique. They don’t want to hear that it’s mostly just showing up and doing boring, invisible work—day after day, for years.

But this is what we’ve lost sight of: art isn’t magic. It’s work. Difficult, time-consuming, often financially ruinous work. And we’ve built an entire economy designed to make that work invisible, to make us forget that someone, somewhere, spent years learning how to do the thing you’re consuming without even thinking about it.

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…wondering if anyone still believes in the rules

Here’s the question that’s been haunting me this year: Is there still a critical mass of us with the will to preserve what remains?

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I mean this as a general civic question, not a partisan one. Are there still enough of us who believe that a rule- and law-based civil society is not only desirable and effective, but moral and worth preserving? Or have we reached the perhaps inevitable moment when the will to power wins out?

For most of my forty-four years, I had a naive faith1 that there would always be enough of us—barring some catastrophe—to hold the line. To hold the mini-revolutions that occur each year when we go to the polls and vote out (or in) the bastards who hold those seats until the next election.

I am no longer convinced. Well, how did we get here?

…wondering if this is how the real world ends

It has always been possible to foresee the collapse of democratic culture. What’s harder is to recognize the moment when the collapse stops being a warning and becomes the condition in which we live.

In 1967, Guy Debord wrote that modern life was no longer organized around shared experience, but around representations of experience. The spectacle, he said, was not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. It is not that politics became theatrical; it is that reality itself was displaced by performance. Citizens no longer acted. They watched. They voted, occasionally, but mostly they consumed the appearance of political life while remaining spectators to its operation.

A generation later, the spectacle was no longer enough. As Jonathan Crary has argued, capitalism demands more than passive consumption—it demands constant availability. In a world where rest is inefficiency and sleep is a market failure, attention itself becomes a battleground. What matters is not truth or deliberation, but whether you are still scrolling, still reacting, still feeding the system with the currency of your engagement. Politics becomes another stream in a continuous feed, competing not with other ideologies but with dopamine.

And then, as Baudrillard warned, the real disappears entirely. We no longer simulate debates over real issues—we simulate the idea of debate. Candidates become brands. Outrage becomes a style. Governance becomes theater without reference. The old structures persist—elections, speeches, hearings—but they no longer mediate anything beyond themselves. They are rituals of legitimacy performed for a public that no longer remembers what legitimacy feels like.

This is not dystopia. It is something far more stable: a culture that has adapted perfectly to its own conditions. It does not collapse under the weight of contradiction. It floats, frictionless, in the absence of reality.

…watching a debate that isn’t a debate at all

Enter Jubilee's Surrounded, where Mehdi Hasan sits alone against twenty self-proclaimed far-right conservatives. The performance is viral bait; the substance disturbing. The spectacle pulls the curtain aside and reveals how perfectly we’ve scripted consent.

When Hasan claims "Trump is defying the Constitution," a young man named Connor rushes to take the chair. You kinda have to see it to believe:

Another panelist echoes similar dismissals: “To be honest, I don’t care about the Constitution.” (Around 30:55 of the video above.)

Hasan’s visible shock becomes the point: “The only good thing about this fascist moment we’re in is that you guys are so open about it.”

This moment exemplifies the convergence of our historical currents:

• Debord’s spectacle: the debate show as a performance of outrage and tribal momentum, not reasoning.

• Crary’s attention economy: participants train for virality, instant click-note moments, not deliberation.

• Baudrillard’s simulation: the constitutional norms persist in form but lose their force; even democracy becomes a style.

More telling is that none of these authoritarian assertions are fringe whispers. They are broadcast, rehearsed, applauded. Hasan didn’t stumble across hidden radicals. He sat across from people who have absorbed democratic language but discarded its meaning.

We built the platforms. We gamed the algorithms—this episode of Surrounded has gone massively viral because of the open, unvarnished positions taken and Hasan’s shock at the insanity of the spectacle. And now we gaslight ourselves by calling the spectacle democracy.

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…living in a country where the law still speaks, but only sometimes

Spectacle alone cannot explain what follows. For that, we need a different vocabulary—one that accounts not for the collapse of democratic institutions, but for their continued operation under altered logic. What we are witnessing is not the death of democracy, but its bifurcation: the separation of form and function.

The book I return to now is one I first read in law school: Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State. It felt like a warning from an incomprehensible time, then. Fraenkel wrote the book in the late 30s, one of the only Jews still practicing law in Berlin. He had to flee, and smuggled the book out with him. In it, Fraenkel identified what he called the “dual state.” The Third Reich, he observed, did not abolish the rule of law. It split governance into two parallel systems: the “normative state,” where bureaucratic rules and legal procedures continued to operate, and the “prerogative state,” where arbitrary power reigned. The innovation was not the triumph of one over the other: it was their simultaneous coexistence. Law where convenient; will where necessary. For my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law.

Fraenkel was describing a totalitarian mechanism. But the structure he uncovered—the parallelism of legality and exception—has proved surprisingly adaptable. You do not need jackboots to construct a dual state. You need only the willingness to treat constitutionalism as contingent.

Since 2016, the American case has moved unmistakably in this direction. The machinery of governance persists: courts still convene, elections are still held, laws are still passed. But their authority has been rendered conditional. Legal rulings are respected when they affirm desired outcomes. When they do not, they are dismissed as illegitimate—products of corruption, “deep state” sabotage, or electoral fraud. Emil “tell the courts ‘Fuck You’” Bove III, a man who abused his power during his short term in the DOJ in laughably villainous ways, is now a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

…unsure why the institutions still work—but not for me

What appears to be a contradiction is, in fact, wholly coherent. The dual state lives: the normative process for routine administration; the prerogative arm for moments of threat, urgency, or loss of power. Executive orders expand. Loyalty supplants expertise. Laws are selectively applied, depending on the political coloration of the target.

The danger is not an abrupt collapse but a steady evacuation of meaning. Democracy remains in appearance: the rituals, the terminology, the institutions. But those forms now operate under a logic that privileges allegiance over law. Courts render decisions, but only those that confirm the preferred narrative are enforced. Elections are held, but only those that validate the ruling coalition are accepted. The rest are noise, obstruction, or treason.

What Fraenkel grasped, and what liberal democracies are reluctant to admit, is that authoritarianism does not always arrive with banners and declarations. It advances by absorption, not replacement. It captures the forms of liberal governance and retools them to serve consolidation. It speaks the language of order, necessity, and national renewal.

…face to face with people who no longer pretend

This is what the young authoritarians on Jubilee revealed. They were not rejecting American democracy. They were articulating its transformation—its mutation into something that preserves institutional shape while inverting its purpose. When Connor said he believed in democracy only until his preferred leader wins, he was not being inconsistent. He was describing the prerogative state. When another participant shrugged off the Constitution—“I don’t care about it”—he was not defying the system. He was expressing confidence that the system no longer matters.

Their ease was the most chilling thing. No disguise, no hesitation, no fear of judgment. They had learned the grammar of democracy, but used it to conjugate power.

This is how republics are lost: not in blackout or with tanks in the street. It will happen in floodlights, our institutions still functioning—just not for us.

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…hearing the quiet part out loud

So we return to the question that haunts: Is there still a critical mass of us with the will to preserve what remains?

The answer, I fear, lies not in grand declarations or constitutional conventions, but in smaller moments of choice. In a lawyer’s decision to join a group devoted to dismantling the rule of law, not for principle, but for power. In young Americans casually dismissing constitutional norms as obstacles. In the quiet erosion of professional ethics that once acted as democracy’s immune system.

A friend recently posted about a colleague’s decision to walk away from what she called the law’s true purpose. She quoted Jordan Furlong’s recent piece “What are Lawyers For?”, where he writes that law is “a framework for peaceful co-existence, a structure for regulating power, and a blueprint for moral architecture.” To this, I say: yes. This is, and has always been, the lawyer’s most critical role. That’s why we are always among the first to be attacked by authoritarians. I suspect what bothered my friend, what hit her right in the heart, was that her colleague abandoned this calling for an explicit reason: power. Nothing more, nothing less.

This is what Fraenkel understood: authoritarianism doesn’t need to destroy institutions. It only needs to hollow them out. The forms remain. The language persists. But the animating spirit—the belief that these things serve something larger than power itself—quietly dies.

And perhaps that is the most disturbing revelation of our moment. Not that authoritarianism advances through revolution, but that it advances through adaptation. It does not need to convince everyone—only enough. It does not need to end democracy, only to make it optional. It does not need to eliminate the rule of law, only to make it contingent.

We built the platforms that turned citizens into spectators. We created the conditions where spectacle became indistinguishable from governance. We built a media ecosystem that rewards performance over principle. And now we wonder why so many conclude that performance is all there is.

Are we still interested in civil society? Or has naked power become the order of the day?

There has always been a faction drawn to raw power. For a time, there were enough of us who believed rules and norms were more than window dressing. That belief held the rest at bay.

Isn’t it pretty to think so?

Do enough of us still believe the difference between law and power—between governance and domination, between citizenship and spectatorship—matters enough to fight for?

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There’s a truism among writers: the book teaches you how to write it. Like most such sayings, it’s both obviously true and hopelessly vague—flexible enough to fit almost anything. Still, I’ve realized this week that I’m not the same writer who first drafted Chapter Two of Pennhollow. It’s been jarring.

Have you ever picked up a battered copy of a book you once loved, its margins crowded with notes from twenty years ago, only to feel destabilized, reading both the book and your comments and not recognizing yourself in either? The book has changed, because you have. What once stood out now seems dull; what once passed unnoticed now anchors the entire story. You read your notes and reel: some are painfully clumsy, others uncomfortably brilliant—ideas you wouldn’t have thought of today. Neither you nor the book is what it once was—yet both feel eerily familiar. Quicksand, all of it.

Now imagine the book is yours. Your work. Your words. You come back to it years after having written the first draft, with all of the experience and knowledge of having finished the entire book. The core of Chapter Two is the oldest writing in the book, some of it dating back to 2005. Twenty years! Almost none of it is salvageable. It might be cause for mourning, but really: is it any surprise that bits and pieces written twenty years ago no longer fit in a book that has taken form? That the writing of a 23- or 24-year-old kid doesn’t match the register of a story completed by a man in his 40s?

Still, it’s strange to sit with these words, dragging the pieces from Chapter Two to the “Discarded” folder in Scrivener. Words that helped give birth to this thing, but are no longer of it. Midwives of the new Chapter Two.

I’m nearly done revising the chapter. Ninety-five percent of it is new. Almost everything that happens in it has changed. I even cut a version of one of my favorite stories—adapted from my own youth. It no longer belongs. It adds nothing to the story this novel is finally ready to tell.

More than that, I realize that the narration in the sections of the book written further in my past lacks the narrative confidence that the later work does. The earlier work sounds like it’s writing, like an author is sitting there meticulously placing words just so, finding bon mots to impress someone. The writing is conscious of itself in a way the rest of the book isn’t. Some of that, I’m sure, was a lack of confidence on my part. But some of it, I think, is that I picked up the tone and the narrative voice of the book as I wrote it. I learned what the book wanted to be and how it wanted to be told.

Last week, I wrote about getting my editor’s edit back. The more I sit with it, almost all of the comments amount to: get out of the way. Let the book do its thing. So, I will continue with these revisions, the tool needed to get the book where it needs to go. At some point, I will drag myself into the “Discarded” folder. Just another midwife no longer needed.

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For shits and giggles—and as a small act of mourning—here’s the story from Chapter Two I mentioned above, now relegated to the dustbins of Pennhollow:

There was, to give a very early example, the time James escaped from the care of his parents at Kaufmann’s, rushing off beneath the racks of clothes and out into the main hall. James was not a day older than three―a red-faced, puffy-cheeked, blond-haired child with a penchant, even then, for exhibitionism. (After showers, he used to dance, naked, to the radio perpetually playing in his parents’ room, reveling in whatever crowd watched on, astonished.) This mad dash through the racks was great fun: how often could he roam the world guided by his own light? His parents forced him into a torturous cycle of observation, with never a free moment to explore. He was like an animal tethered to a leash loose enough to give the illusion of freedom but one wrong move away from correction.

Darting through the lines of steel and clothing, James looked much like he did years later on the field, weaving through a maze, his black felt pea-coat brushing against the shins of the adults scurrying around doing their Christmas shopping―eliciting surprised yelps, which were the only way Mr. Cavan could track his son. Kaufmann’s was unusually crowded and there would have been no possibility of Mr. Cavan hunting his son amidst the forest of legs and shopping bags without the trail of squeals.

After chasing James nearly the entire length of the third floor, Mr. Cavan spotted him ducking under a rack of skirts and rushed forward, knocking men and women out of his way, not a little violently. He grabbed James by the wrist and jerked him up, holding the child against his chest.

A rush of spite flowed through the three-year-old’s petulant face, hatred for this man who dared to interrupt his gallivanting.

James immediately began screaming at the top of his lungs.

“You’re not my Daddy! You’re not my Daddy!”

Mr. Cavan, not a little taken aback, slapped his hand to James’s mouth, who, after a struggle and a well-placed bite, wrested his father’s hand away.

“You’re not my Daddy!”

Now, James, even from his infancy (when he would cry twenty hours a day, his parents were sure something was wrong with him), had a penetrating voice. Still, the reaction was startling. Never had Mr. Cavan heard a public space turn silent with such celerity. It was like a scene from a movie, the whole floor turning slowly to a single point on set. The world seeped into black and white. The women looked at him with unadulterated hatred. Mr. Cavan, with cause, worried about a lynching and sputtered something about James throwing a fit because he hadn’t bought him a toy earlier. With James still pressed tightly against the meat of his shoulder, stifling his cries, he retreated with the haste of an escaped convict. When Mr. Cavan told the story, years after the fact, he would joke that he must have looked guilty of the charge, speeding away from the scene with the suffocating child.

One significant advantage of coming to writing a novel and trying to push it to publication a bit later in life is I’ve already experienced success and failure in creative spaces. There’s nothing quite like bringing a new, unfinished song into practice only to have your bandmates shake their heads: nope, not even worth jamming on. Nothing so brutal as a senior partner take a red pen to a critical brief to be submitted to an appeals court. There is no space for ego. Only the result matters.

Seth Godin, among others, frequently says the only way to get to good ideas is to have a lot of ideas. The only way to good work is to not be precious about your work. This is something that has been beat into me over the past twenty-five years of creating music and art and businesses. It’s okay if it’s not good; the real question is whether there’s a path toward making it good.

I finished the surface-level edit of my novel Pennhollow at the end of May and, before I could change my mind, sent the file off to the developmental editor I’d hired to help me bang the thing into shape. I knew that I had good pieces in the book, but well-written sentences are a necessary but not sufficient condition for a good book. I won’t lie. I’m trying to write a great novel. Maybe that’s arrogant. So be it. I knew from experience that if I waited until the next day to send the book to Jordan, my editor, my resolve may have been lost.

Creative journeys are confidence games: you have to choose the next, impossible step, again and again.

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After I sent the manuscript off to Jordan1, the waiting game began. Objectively, I knew it would take the full month to work through a nearly 100,000 word novel. I was quite aware that Pennhollow is in some senses, a difficult book: nonlinear, subtext being more important than text, some stream of consciousness thrown in for good measure. It’s not the kind of book an editor can consume and turn around useful edits on in a week. Yet the five-week wait felt like an eternity, the sword of Damocles hanging over my head ready to fall and announce whether there was a salvageable book.

You see, one of the odd experiences when writing a novel is that you know there are issues that need attention. I was well aware that the underlying relationship between two of the main characters was insufficient to carry the Greek tragedy stakes that appear at the end. I knew that the letters James sent home during the war, and which appear between chapters, were necessary but not dynamic enough. I knew that the criminal underbelly of one of the plotlines was probably too understated for it to hit the way it needs to.

You can know these things, but not see a way through. When you live with a book, when you dine with the characters and listen to jazz with them every night, they become more difficult to see, not easier. You meld into the damn thing in a way that makes it very hard to see the thing and see paths through the problems.

All of this was suffocating me as I awaited Jordan’s edit, consumed with the fear—at times, the certainty—that his response would be that of my bandmates shaking their head and declining the invitation to jam out the new tune.

I received the edit of a 350-page book at 5:50 pm, and I anxiously opened the file. Jordan said some nice things in his note to me, but I know that sometimes those notes are attempts to soften the blow. The Word file took forever to load. As the document populated, I scanned through the document and my heart sank. Comments everywhere. Multiple on every page, sometimes as many as ten or fifteen.

In the days leading up to receiving Jordan’s edit, my friend Allison—herself a published author and talented writer—told me to expect the five stages of grief upon receipt. Man, was she right. She also said: after the initial rush of emotions dies down, you’ll realize that the editor is usually right. Her insight helped me frame how I took in Jordan’s legion of comments, put me in the right mindset from the outset. But I don’t think I would have been able to take the landslide of edits and critique (and praise!) if I hadn’t lived through twenty-five years of creative life first.

What caught me off guard wasn’t the grief. I’d been bracing for that. It was how quickly the grief gave way to momentum.

Not instantly. The first time through, I skimmed. I read through the entire 350-page manuscript and the notes that first night. I caught the volume of it—margin notes everywhere, whole paragraphs or sections marked for collapse or deletion—but I couldn’t hold any single thought. It was like walking into a room where every person is talking at once and trying to make eye contact with you. I closed the file.

The next day, I opened it again.

This time I didn’t just see comments—I saw movement. The things I’d felt were wrong but couldn’t fix started to loosen. I found comments from someone deeply engaged with the work, excited about its promise. Comments from somebody fighting to get the book to meet its promise.

The relationship between James and Ella, which I knew wasn’t carrying the weight it needed? He put his finger on the problem right away: we don’t believe they ever liked each other. Without that, nothing else lands. He didn’t say “write new scenes” (even though I’m presently in the middle of a wholesale rewrite of Chapter 2). He told me why the existing ones didn’t work, and how they could. He showed me how to build a foundation that would let the unraveling mean something.

The wartime letters? I thought they were doing a lot of work. Turns out they were doing the same work, over and over. Jordan broke down exactly how they flatten out: same emotional pitch, same rhythm, same tropes. And he offered ways to let them stretch—tone, structure, even which letters shouldn’t appear.

And then there was the criminal subplot. I knew it wasn’t landing, but I didn’t know why. Jordan did. He explained how and when a reader wants to almost guess the reveal—how good tension works like a tightrope just long enough to wobble on. The notes weren’t vague. He told me where to plant the signs, where to lean in, where to let the thread go slack. That was the moment the book stopped feeling like a deadweight and started to feel like something I could shape again.

By the end of his report, I wasn’t staring at a wall of problems. I had a map. Not a clean one. Not a shortcut. But a real one. I could see the contours of the thing again.

Which is why that early training—getting over the preciousness—matters so much. If I’d been clinging to the version I already had, I wouldn’t have seen what Jordan was showing me. And what he was showing me wasn’t just critique. It was a way back inside the book, past the fog, to where the work actually lives.

It’s funny: when I told some folks I’d hired an editor, their reaction was that I was farming out the work of the book. In reality, Jordan pushed me back into the work, now with ambition rekindled and the insight of some distance. My head’s back in the game. The work starts now.

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Saturdays used to mean an On the Record in your inbox. After a break to focus on my novel Pennhollow, I’m bringing it back—now as a monthly dispatch. For new subscribers, OTR is an exploration of music and life.

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I want to discuss how things were. Or rather, how we think they were—and how we unconsciously rewrite our memories to fit the stories we need to tell ourselves. We are living through a moment awash in nostalgia. (We are always in such moments, but this moment is acute.) We’re hard at work making things great again. Reliving past glories. Imagining that literature, movies, music, politics, life—that they were all somehow better, and that the way forward is backward.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself caught up in a strong wave of yearning for a moment in my past. No, not a moment. A feeling from my childhood. As Oasis and the Brothers Gallagher retook the stage, reunited to rip through a two-plus hour setlist of straight bangers, I felt an inescapable wave of wanting the time back. Wanting to feel that rush in 1994 when I first heard “Slide Away” and rushed to Borders to get Definitely Maybe, holing myself up in my room and listening to the thing on repeat. Deciding that very day that I had to learn to play guitar because whatever this was, I had to know how to do it.

I managed to cajole my mom into buying me a guitar. Learning to play an instrument is good for kids! It helps with learning and brain function! Give me those six strings so I can make the thing growl and scream.

I was sitting alone in my parents’ basement on the Fourth of July, trying to insulate my poor dog from the incessant shelling the suburbs of Pittsburgh were taking, when video of Oasis’s first reunion show began percolating onto the net. I was unprepared for the wave of emotion that overtook me. They sounded way better than I would have expected. Liam’s voice was fresh, clean. Noel was on form. Bonehead was back! I felt like I’d been transported back twenty-five years.

You see, Oasis was my first love. There was a period when I was hesitant to own up to that. Huge band. Simple songs. Massive choruses. Unsophisticated lads. That was the standard take, at least here in the U.S. I had moved on to Dismemberment Plan and Talking Heads, gotten hooked on bop and hip hop. Oasis was passé.

And yet. I heard the clip of the band playing “Acquiesce” in Cardiff, transitioning from Liam’s swaggering verses to Noel’s towering chorus—and there is no denying it. Resistance is futile.

I’ve seen Oasis about twenty times, mostly from 1996 through 2004 or so. I managed to see them despite having no money. Now that I have disposable income, I can’t get tickets to their reunion shows to save my life.

I’m a bit perplexed why it means so much to me, this nostalgia, this yearning to partake in something that is, at root, itself premised on a wave of nostalgia for a moment that was built on nostalgia—and perhaps something even more complicated than that.

Generally, around here, I’d post a photo of my record player with the record cover. But this isn’t a normal Saturday. I don’t have access to my record player. I’m basically living in my office because my son got his one-year vaccinations and I’m immunocompromised. Instead, I’m listening to (WTS)MG through headphones on Tidal, sitting alone and feeling pretty isolated.

“Some Might Say” just came on and I’m struck by how different it sounds from the rest of the album. I love the melody of the chorus, soaring over the D-G-Em-G progression. But everything about the recording of the song sounds off. There’s a reason for that: the song was the first single off the album and was recorded before Noel finally lost it and fired original drummer Tony McCarroll. The drums sound starkly different, as does the guitar tone—it’s thinner, more trebly than the rest of the album. They left it on the album because the lawyers said they couldn’t advertise the album as having the “Number 1 Single” if they re-recorded it.

Listening back to the album, I think I still remember how to play every last note. I genuinely think I could pick up a guitar and play the album straight through, part by part, even though I haven’t played any of the songs, probably, in twenty years.

All of this to say, I have much to say about the album itself, but that’s not what interests me at the moment, so I beg your forgiveness when I say: this is a great album and you should go listen to it with fresh ears.

Now, let’s talk about more pressing concerns.

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Oasis were, along with Blur, the face of Britpop. I’ve always hated that term: neither Oasis nor Blur were pop bands. Go listen to “Bring it on Down” and tell me Oasis is a pop band. In the 1990s, they led a revival of British pride and culture. After the dour years of Thatcher and Major, it the UK suddenly became cool again.

Cool Britannia.

Oasis and a bunch of the bands of the era consciously adopted a retro British Invasion sound. Noel was notorious for borrowing licks and melodies from the Beatles, Stones, and…Stevie Wonder.1 The band adopted the Union Jack as a symbol. Even Noel’s signature guitar is painted as the Union Jack. Hell, this is standard merch for the reunion tour.

So here we are, in 2025 reliving the glory of an English band who brought past musical glory back in the 90s. A band who gave not just one generation a soundtrack of anthems that take over pubs when they hit, but songs that have become so engrained in the national culture that they’ve transcended generations. Gen Z are mad fer it too.

And here’s where national stories, our collective imaginations, and nostalgia can be problematic. All of the above is taken as truth. Oasis gave Britain reason to be proud again, brought together the underclass and provided reason to go on. Tony fucking Blair rode to 10 Downing Street on Oasis’s coattails.

The great English musical act.

Except they’re Irish.

They’re not English at all. Every original member of the band were born to Irish immigrants. Look at their last names: Gallagher, McGuigan, McCarroll, Arthurs. All of them had Irish mams, spent summers in Ireland. The Gallaghers are as much of County Mayo as of Manchester.

What are we to make of this? Our lust after a past that we are making up in real time, that itself was made up of half-remembered and curated history itself? We're not just nostalgic for a past that never existed—we're nostalgic for a story that was already nostalgic, already a construction. The 90s Britpop moment was itself an attempt to recapture the 60s British Invasion, and both were built on selective memory and strategic forgetting. That may sound like relativism, but it isn’t. I’m not saying the past is unknowable—I’m saying it’s always being shaped by what we need from it.

We create meaning and belonging, we don’t find it.

This is an anthropological reality, not an epistemological sentence. The question is what it is that we are creating, who is accepted into the circle of belonging. We narrow and expand our notion of these groups—nations, peoples, fans, cultures—and we pretend as though our creations are natural. They are not.

And so, I leave you with a song about disappearing under the weight of things, sung by the most English of bands, comprised of a bunch of Irishmen. Turtles all the way down.

Here's a thought for every man
Who tries to understand what is in his hands (what's in his hands)
He walks along the open road of love and life
Surviving if he can (surviving if he can)

Bound with all the weight of all the words he tried to say
Chained to all the places that he never wished to stay
Bound with all the weight of all the words he tried to say
As he faced the sun he cast no shadow

As they took his soul they stole his pride
As they took his soul they stole his pride
As they took his soul they stole his pride
As he faced the sun he cast no shadow

I couldn't bring myself to write this on July 4th. I tried. I sat down and opened the laptop. The words wouldn’t come. Or rather, all of the words came in a torrent, but with no sense to them. The weight of it, the cascade of thoughts that have been accumulating for months—all of it felt too much to face directly. But watching the flag-wrapped celebrations, the determined cheerfulness, the grotesque parade. The way we keep performing normalcy while everything shifts beneath us made it clear where to begin.

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There are no halcyon days to resurrect. There never were.

Something has taken hold in the American imagination: a hunger for a past that exists primarily in our collective unconscious. Not mere nostalgia—something more desperate. A belief that there was a time when things made sense, when people knew their place, when the complexities of the present hadn't yet arrived to complicate the clear moral lines of yesterday.

I understand the appeal. The gleaming small towns, the moral clarity, the white-picket ease of it all. The good factory jobs that created a middle class. Generations that always do better than the previous ones. But here's what troubles me: none of it existed as advertised. Not for most of us. The America we're promised we can return to is a carefully curated fiction, cleansed of its cruelties, its exclusions, its fundamental contradictions.

Yet this mythology has become a kind of civic religion. And like all religions built on false premises, it licenses cruelty in service of an impossible resurrection.

I've never been particularly interested in writing about Donald Trump as a phenomenon. He's a type I recognize—the petty vainglories, the grudge-holding, the way he mistakes cruelty for strength. He reminds me of men I've known, right down to the disdain disguised as charisma.

What I don't recognize is my fellow citizens' willingness to be taken in by promises of restored glory. The credulity of otherwise sensible people who look at him and see salvation rather than what he so plainly is: a man who tells people what they want to hear about their failures being someone else's fault.

This is how demagogues work. They don't awaken the hunger. They recognize the ache beneath our fear and feed it meat.

We've grown fluent in euphemism. "Law and order" means silencing dissent. "Free speech" means impunity for your team. "Equal justice"—but as Orwell understood, some Americans are now more equal than others.

Speech gets chilled not through dramatic crackdowns but through small accommodations. A professor reconsiders an assignment. A journalist softens a story to maintain access. Justices issue unexplained shadow docket rulings to avoid confronting substantive lawlessness. We've created a climate where truth becomes negotiable, where courage becomes a luxury few can afford.

After the passage of the reconciliation bill, we now fund ICE at levels higher than the entire budget of the Israeli military. Let that settle for a moment. We’ve allocated $40 billion to build a detention infrastructure designed to disappear people, without allocating a cent for additional immigration judges. That imbalance exposes the entire enterprise for what it is. We've built an internal police force, funded it lavishly, and turned it loose on people whose primary transgression was believing what we've always claimed to offer.1

The raids happen in parking lots now. Masked men, no warrants, children separated from parents. Immigration judges stripped of discretion, when these men and women get a hearing at all. The machinery of an internal security apparatus, growing bolder and better funded with each appropriation, defended always in the name of preserving something we imagine we once possessed.

This isn't happening to us. This is us. This is what we've decided to become.

This is how republics die—not with jackboots but with shrugs, not through revolution but through the quiet acceptance that some things are too dangerous to defend.2

My ancestor Josiah Bartlett signed the Declaration of Independence. I've always carried some pride in that, though I'm not sure why. I inherited the name, not the courage.

But I've been thinking about the document he actually signed. Not the sanitized version we recite between hot dogs and fireworks, but the original document: a list of grievances against a king who had placed himself above the law. A king who claimed immunity from prosecution, who demanded personal loyalty over legal process, who deployed the machinery of state against his critics.

The parallels aren't subtle. We're watching the return of precisely what the Founders thought they'd defeated.

J.D. Vance has begun saying the quiet part aloud: that the Declaration's promise—"all men are created equal"—is dangerous. Too inclusive. Too generous. In its place, he offers something older and more poisonous: blood and soil, ancestry over ideals, the nation as inheritance rather than aspiration. In his telling, Confederates, historic and modern, have a stronger claim to American identity than any immigrant.

This isn't conservatism. Not any kind of conservatism worthy of that name. This is the rejection of the American project as we've understood it, replaced with something that has no use for the Declaration except as branding. It treats equality as a threat and grievance as justification for power.

We are living through the exposure of American ideals, not their corruption. The gap between what we said we were and what we've always been is finally becoming too wide to paper over with ceremony and myth. Over and over again, we hear public figures saying, “This isn’t who we are.”

Except this is manifestly who we are.

Perhaps this was inevitable. Perhaps nations, like people, eventually run up against the contradictions they've spent generations avoiding. Perhaps what we're witnessing isn't the destruction of America but the revelation of what it always was beneath the rhetoric.

Yet there are still people pushing against the current. Teachers who refuse to stop teaching, journalists who refuse to stop reporting the damned truth, judges who refuse to bend. They're not doing it because they believe they'll win. They're doing it because they can't bear to live in a world where they didn't try.

I don't know how this ends because stories like this don't really end—they just become other stories. But I know we have a choice to make, even if the options aren't what we'd prefer.

We can continue performing the fiction that everything is normal, that this is just politics as usual, that the institutions will hold because they always have. Or we can acknowledge what we're watching: the quiet dismantling of the architecture that made democratic life possible.

The question isn't whether America was ever great. The question is whether we dare to make it so, knowing now what we always should have known: that it was never a finished thing, never a completed project, always something we had to choose to create, again and again, in each moment we're faced with the choice between comfort and conscience.

The luxury of pretending otherwise is over. A “more perfect union” was always going to require ever more work. The horizon recedes as we approach it.

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