On September 30th, Texas state lawmaker and the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in the state James Talarico appeared virtually at an event and told the audience that he’s been sick.

For a little over a week, the lawmaker stayed off the campaign trail; the absence ended when he appeared at the Austin City Limits music festival a couple days ago.

This brief absence from the campaign created a void that was filled with all kinds of claims from Talarico’s conservative opponents.

The campaign of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who Republicans nominated to face off with Talarico, demanded “proof of life.” His crowds led chants of “Where is James Talarico?”

While the Paxton campaign was half-trolling, they contributed to a conservative media environment that quickly spawned its own theories about what was really happening with Talarico.

Rumors flourished on social media, and a mixture of right-wing influencers and conservative media leaders helped fan the flames. One popular theory, pushed by right-wing influencer Nick Sortor, was that Talarico had actually checked into a mental hospital in Ohio. He supplied audio that appeared to show an employee at an Ohio mental health treatment facility confirm that Talarico had recently checked out of their care.

Sortor, an influencer who touts 1.6 million followers on the service formerly known as Twitter, quickly found purchase amongst other online personalities on his side of the aisle. Libs of Tiktok, a popular account whose owner has been hosted by the Trump White House as part of its effort to sanitize its role in the Epstein scandal, boosted Sortor’s exclusive, claiming it showed Talarico was “unfit to serve.” Charlie Kirk’s former organization, Turning Point, was all in. Some failed GOP candidates joined the fray as well as Trump administration staffers. Mainstays of conservative media like Townhall and BlazeTV boosted the theory.

But by Sunday night, the conspiracy had fallen apart. The treatment center confirmed Talarico had never been there (under federal law, they’re not allowed to publicly disclose patient details anyway). Talarico has been back out on the trail, and he exhibits no obvious signs of mental illness. He says he’s never even been to Ohio.

(It’s not obvious why he couldn’t just see a therapist in Texas, but conspiracy theories are usually more fun if they’re elaborate.)

At the end of this very silly conservative media cycle, it’s likely that many observers of right-wing news will continue to believe that Talarico didn’t have the flu at all. He really did check into a mental health facility in Ohio for reasons that cannot be explained.

But to everyone else in the country, a conspiracy theory that conservative media spent days egging on just blew up in the GOP’s face. The Republicans are facing the race of their lives in Texas, and instead of trying to prove to voters that they can be taken seriously on issues like the economy, the war in Iran, or other areas where the party is badly hurting, they have unleashed their army of conspiracy theorists to energize their base rather than persuade undecided voters.

There is a time when a strategy like this could have worked politically, but it increasingly looks desperate. And what’s worse than that is that it’s priming millions of conservatives to accept very low standards for the voices they should be trusting.

These influencers and media outlets are seen by conservative readers as an alternative to a mainstream media that has often leaned excessively left. But you don’t address bias with bias; and you certainly don’t address it with fantastical lying. The conservative media ecosystem is badly broken.

The past few months have seen an avalanche of stories about Georgia GOP Congressman and U.S. Senate candidate Mike Collins and his ties to white nationalists.

These include the revelation that one of his former staffers was infatuated with Nazi and KKK imagery, his son-in-law is a white nationalist influencer, and his former chief of staff was in a racist group chat.

Collins for his part has tried to distance himself from these associations. “I’ve repeatedly said nobody speaks for me, I only speak for myself,” he recently told the press, adding that he has “always condemned racism and antisemitism regardless of the source.”

Politically speaking, it would behoove Collins to demonstrate to voters that he doesn’t share the views of his far-right former staffers and family members as he campaigns to unseat Georgia’s Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff. The Peach State is in the process of becoming majority-minority; pretty much all of the state’s population growth in the past six years is the consequence of growth in minority populations.

Yet in interviews with civic leaders from minority communities, I found that he has more or less been completely absent during this campaign.

“I have seen Ossoff at many Latino mainstream events. I have not noticed Collins at many at all,” Jerry Gonzalez, a longtime Latino politico and executive director of GALEO Impact Fund, told me. (The Fund has endorsed Ossoff.)

Nonpartisan organizations, too, said they haven’t seen or heard from Collins on the trail.

Shafina Khabani, the executive director of the Georgia Muslim Voter Project, told me she is unaware of any contact he’s had with the state’s growing Muslim community.

“Mike Collins has not reached out to our organization - I haven’t heard about him doing outreach to any other Muslim orgs in Georgia but unsure,” she said.

Even some conservative members of Georgia’s minority communities haven’t heard from Collins during this campaign.

Sunil Savili, an Indian businessman and the founder of Indian Friends of Atlanta who told me in the past that he leans conservative in his politics and who has attended at least one event with Georgia’s GOP Governor Brian Kemp, hasn’t seen Collins.

“No one reached me,” he said.

Some of Collins’s own constituents, too, have been in the dark.

Sarita Dyer, a retired U.S. Army Sergeant Major and black woman who lives in Collins’s district in Northeast Georgia, told me she’s never had much luck in getting his office to be responsive to his concerns. And she had no rapport with her congressman.

“We don’t bite! The black community don’t bite,” she told me, telling me that she’s seen campaign signs but that Collins hasn’t campaigned black constituents in her communities and she hasn’t seen him.

A look at Collins’s recent schedule reveals a campaign schedule fixated on the GOP base and an avoidance of minority neighborhoods, with the exception of the Morrow, GA stop which is south of Atlanta.

Collins’s campaign strategy differs from the other Republican at the top of the ticket: billionaire Rick Jackson, who is running for governor. Jackson has made a point of campaigning in diverse areas; he recently campaigned at the Korean Festival in Duluth, as one example.

That’s a marked contrast from Collins, who appears to be fixated on attending events where the only nonwhite person in the room is the help.

Collins’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

This past July, a GOP-aligned outside group called OneNation announced that it would be spending $15 million on digital and broadcast ads attacking Georgia Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff.

These ads supplemented the over $40 million spent by the Senate Leadership Fund, the GOP Super Political Action Committee (PAC) boosting Georgia GOP Rep. Mike Collins, who faces off with Ossoff in November’s Senate race.

If you live in a competitive region in Georgia, as I do, you probably can’t go a day without seeing one of OneNation’s ads attacking Ossoff.

One of them features a woman identified as “Lisa Gay” from Jasper, Georgia. In that ad, Gay decries Ossoff for allegedly voting to raise taxes and make things more difficult for her family:

I’m at home raising two boys, while my husband works two jobs and night shifts to pay our bills. Senator Jon Ossoff voted to gut our child tax credit and raise our taxes by $2,000 a year.

As Popular Information notes, this is one of the most “dishonest” ads of the cycle. What Gay is referring to is not a vote by Ossoff to raise anyone’s taxes, but his vote against President Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which, among other things, implemented a broad series of tax and spending changes. While it did include a small increase to the child tax credit and other tax cuts that could benefit middle class families, it also included broad cuts to health care coverage and even larger tax cuts for many of the richest Americans. Even if you disagree with Ossoff about the merits of the legislation, voting against a tax cut is not quite the same thing as voting to raise someone’s taxes.

But what’s more interesting is who has been tapped to relay this message. Gay is portrayed as an everyday working mother who is struggling to get by in the economy. The truth is actually more complicated.

Her full name is Lisa Mcpherson Gay, and she is the chair of the Turning Point Action Moms Coalition of Cherokee County. That’s part of the right-wing activist coalition that was chaired by the late Charlie Kirk.

I reached out to Mcpherson Gay to ask her if she was paid by either Turning Point Action or OneNation for her role in the commercial. She did not respond to a request for comment.

While it’s impossible to know exactly what her financial situation is without talking to her, a property search in Jasper, Georgia, suggests that she and her husband own a sizable home. Zillow says the home, built in 2021, has four bedrooms and two bathrooms; its estimated value is $366,000. It’s unlikely that the small increase in the child tax credit would do much to this family’s bottom line; a more than triple increase in health insurance premiums for some residents as a consequence of the OBBBA is likely to be far more destructive.

OneNation is classified as what’s called a 501(c)(4), a type of nonprofit that is not allowed to directly endorse candidates but is allowed to spend money in political ways; one advantage of this type of organization versus a traditional PAC is that it does not have to disclose its donors. So we don’t know exactly who is spending so much money misleading Georgia voters. But with that sizable investment, you can bet that it’s not struggling mothers. OneNation and Turning Point Action did not respond to requests for comment.

While we don’t know who’s paying for OneNation’s ads, we don’t have to guess who is sponsoring commercials supporting Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson. Jackson, who serves as the CEO of the health care staffing behemoth Jackson, spent over $100 million of his own money to win his party’s nomination.

Now he’s blanketing the airwaves with tens of millions of dollars from his fortune to defeat former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is the Democratic nominee for governor.

One of those ads features a series of Georgians talking about Lance Bottoms’s tenure as mayor of Atlanta. While it’s fair to raise complaints about the former mayor’s rocky years — she was the chief executive of the city during the beginning of the pandemic and George Floyd-era unrest — what’s curious about the advertisement is how it portrays its interview subjects.

As Democratic activist Seth Taylor notes, many of the interviewees are misleadingly labeled.

Takosha Swan, for instance, was a GOP candidate for Lt. Gov during the 2026 primary (she appears top right in the image collage at the beginning of this article).

Another woman, identified only as Ginger Howard, a “small business owner,” was an official in the Republican National Committee who has spent years working on behalf of the party.

Yet another interviewee, Azad Ahmadi, was as Taylor notes a “committee chair with the Georgia Black Republican Council and reported that he planned to vote for Donald Trump for the third consecutive presidential election.”

None of this is disclosed in the ads. As Collins’s campaign continues to flounder, it’s understandable why Jackson may not want to portray himself as a typical Republican politician. But in his quest to reinvent himself as the champion of everyday Georgians, he’s hiding key details about the people he has enlisted to help him capture the governor’s mansion.

In an interview with Fox News, Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico made clear that he would be adopting a more moderate tone on transgender issues than he had in the past.

“I oppose trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it endangers safety or fairness. Every sport has to be safe and fair,” he told the conservative-leaning network.

He also said he would support a national ban on transgender surgeries for minors.

The candidate, who has served in the Texas legislature for multiple terms, was quick to point out that he had supported restricting surgeries in the past. But going on Fox to affirm these positions in front of a national audience suggests that Talarico understands that viral video clips that showed him aligning himself with the cultural left on these topics in the past could be a liability in the Texas Senate race.

But there is a bigger issue at stake here than whether Talarico is politically adjusting in the face of his competitive Senate race against Texas’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.

In the post-Obama years, Democrats have often found themselves carving out the most culturally liberal position on mainstream issues no matter where they’re located in the country. You’d have Democrats in the South and Midwest talking almost identically to Democrats in New England or California when it comes to issues such as abortion rights or transgender activism.

Beyond being politically intelligent, Talarico understands that compromise is an essential part of democracy.

Two-thirds of Americans support requiring transgender athletes to “compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth,” according to one Pew Research poll. 56 percent of Americans support banning minors from receiving “medical care for a gender transition.” This is for Americans overall, mind you. The polling in Texas is likely to be far more conservative.

Does this mean politicians should chase public polls? Well, to some extent, yes. In a representative democracy, we elect representatives to do the people’s will. If Talarico chose to simply ignore the majority of Texans, he would not only put himself in a worse electoral position, he would also be disrespecting their democratic consensus.

That doesn’t mean that activists can’t play a role in trying to change public opinion. They aren’t elected by anybody, and they don’t have an obligation to listen to their constituency of voters each election.

But I think many Democratic Party electeds have behaved more as activists than lawmakers when it comes to this issue. Talarico’s tonal pivot is not only going to help him in an election against a corrupt and extreme Paxton, but it will help affirm that the party does indeed believe in the promises of representative democracy.

The Wall Street Journal came out this week with a blockbuster story about Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senator John Fetterman.

The story — which relies heavily on former staffers providing documentation about their former boss’s erratic behavior — has ping-ponged around the political press.

It shows that Fetterman has little interest in his actual job, regularly declining to meet with constituents from children’s hospitals to veterans. Instead, the evidence suggests that Fetterman is obsessed with media, both social and traditional, where he often appears to defend his adoration of the foreign state of Israel and criticize his own party.

But if Fetterman were merely a Likudnik and contrarian, you could make the case that he is still a functioning lawmaker. Yet the evidence continues to mount that he simply does not seem interested in doing his job; he rarely meets with constituents or does open events in Pennsylvania.

And his behavior is erratic to the point where his mental health is in question. Beyond his incoherent speech patterns any time he’s ever challenged about any of his views whatsoever, he is apparently a recluse whose behavior alarms everyone around him.

Yet none of this came as any surprise.

After Fetterman’s stroke during the 2022 election campaign, many impartial observers could see that he was clearly struggling.

Yet Democrats rose to his defense, downplaying his health issues. Disability activists circled the wagons around him, decrying attacks on his ability to hold office as “ableism.”

Republicans, meanwhile, made Fetterman’s health a major campaign issue, implying that he was hiding major problems that make him unfit to serve.

Four years later, the roles seem to be totally reversed.

Now, Republicans are running to Fetterman’s defense.

Responding to the Wall Street Journal story, Pennsylvania’s Republican Senator Dave McCormick wrote that “they hate that he is an independent thinker who refuses to fall into line so they want to silence him.”

(It’s not clear who “they” is in this case, given that the Wall Street Journal is not exactly known as a leftist newspaper.)

It’s obvious why the Republicans won’t touch the issue of Fetterman’s poor mental health. In a narrow Senate majority, flipping Fetterman into their column could help them regain the balance of power in the future; alternatively, staying quiet about Fetterman’s flaws now would give them a weaker target in 2028, when they have an opportunity to unseat him with their own candidate. If Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro were to replace a resigned Fetterman with a mentally fit Democrat who could actually do his basic duties, the Republicans wouldn’t have much of a shot in the next election.

All of this makes me wonder if either political party has any objective standards beyond simply wanting their party to have more power.

A year ago, Fetterman threw a fit on an airplane because he didn’t want to wear his seatbelt. He had to be forced to wear a suit while present in the Senate chamber. His behavior is often more reminiscent of that of a toddler than someone who expects to serve in the most powerful legislative body in the world. He is clearly mentally ill, and even a foreign government seems to be taking advantage of this fact.

His party should be irrelevant to the question of whether he is fit to serve in the U.S. Senate; the answer is clearly no. But as long as he insists on maintaining his seat, he at least serves the purpose of making both major parties look unprincipled and hypocritical.

Anyone familiar with the basics of college football knows that Michiganders are not huge fans of Ohio. But Ohio State University graduate and current Vice President JD Vance appeared in Michigan on Friday to campaign for former Congressman Mike Rogers, who is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate this year.

While there, he took a shot at the University of Michigan, claiming that “less than a half of the people who go to the University of Michigan are actually from the state of Michigan.” He called it a “scandal,” and then went on to blame foreign students for that statistic.

“If you’re the mother of a child who’s applied to the University of Michigan and you know that his SAT score or her SAT score was 200 points higher than the foreign national who got in above them, Mike Rogers is going to fight for you,” he intoned.

There are a number of curious assumptions here. For one, I’ve never heard anyone claim that America’s foreign students are having university admissions standards lowered for them; they are disproportionately Asian — and it was Asian students themselves who brought the case that led the Supreme Court to outlaw racial preferences in admissions. If anything, they believe and quite a bit of evidence suggests that Asian students have had a harder time getting into schools that used race as one factor for admissions.

But the other assumption here is that Michiganders are being kept out of their own state’s top tier university by the presence of foreigners. Recall that Vance claims that fewer than half of the students at the University of Michigan are from Michigan itself.

I looked up the statistics on the matter, and there is some truth to matter that the school has tons of out-of-state students. From a recent report from the university, 18,800 undergraduates at the Ann Arbor campus came from Michigan while 16,558 came from out of state.

But are all of these Michiganders being Great Replaced by foreigners? Not quite.

In 2025, just around 15% of students at the school were from abroad.

At the Ann Arbor campus, out-of-state residents pay more than three times in tuition, on average, than in-state students. If anything, they are helping subsidize the operations of the school.

Vance’s remarks, however, are in a long line of statements from the Trump administration that aim to place foreigners at the center of all our problems. If housing is too expensive, it’s the immigrants’ fault. If your guy doesn’t win the New York City mayoral election, it’s the foreigners to blame. There is no problem too big or too small to put at the feet of people from other countries.

That isn’t to say there aren’t legitimate debates to be had about things like immigration and university policies. But Vance’s sloppy appeals to nativism and white fright aren’t rooted in reality.

Did you hear about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) leader who lives in a $1.4 million home his parents helped him afford?

The story of Gustavo Gordillo, who helps lead the DSA’s chapter in New York City, has been ricocheting across right-wing media. Fox News describes the story as so:

The arrangement has drawn scrutiny because Gordillo has become a prominent voice in New York City’s democratic socialist movement while criticizing wealth, high investment returns and the affordability pressures facing working-class residents. Critics say his living arrangement — in a valuable Brooklyn property purchased and renovated by his family — undercuts that message and highlights the contrast between his political rhetoric and the financial advantages provided by his family.

By now, this has become a sort of paint-by-numbers story for conservative media. Right-wing reporters, editors, and publishers have come to fetishize the following narrative:

1. There’s a progressive who rails against the rich and advocates for the poor.

2. But this progressive isn’t even poor themselves. In some cases they are upper middle class or richer!

3. Therefore, that progressive is nothing but a filthy hypocrite.

Vermont’s Independent Senator Bernie Sanders and leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker both have been put through the assembly line of this argument in recent days; Sanders owns three property while Piker’s social media fame has made him a multimillionaire.

But if you think about all of this for more than a few seconds, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Politics isn’t just about advocating for your personal position in life. This Randian perspective that people are largely out for themselves has a certain appeal in the United States, but even here you can see that it doesn’t quite explain the world very well.

Pro-life activists advocate for the rights of pre-born children they may never meet; animal rights advocates risk jail time to save the lives of animals who may never know about their sacrifices; police and fire fighters regularly give their lives in the line of duty to prevent harm to innocent people.

In each of these cases, you have instances of people using their prestige and power to protect people or other living things who don’t share their privileges. Not only is it not hypocritical, it’s actually quite ordinary.

Yet in the Fox News article above, you see endless repetition of this idea that activists who are well-off are only pretending to care about the poor. Rob Henderson, a pundit who has accrued a lot of fame and fortune off his rags-to-riches story, smugly notes that “in Dostoevsky’s novel ‘The Possessed,’ it was the sons of rich boomers who were the most in love with socialism. Not the poor. The more things change, the more things stay the same.”

It is true that to extent the United States as we knows it has anything we can identify as socialism — namely, democratically held assets and redistribution of wealth — much of it is very much thanks to the wealthy. Franklin Roosevelt, who heralded the New Deal and broke the power of America’s financial class over the economy in the 1930s, was famously wealthy. George Washington, our nation’s first president and perhaps the most important Founding Father, was one of the richest men in North America — yet it is thanks to him that democracy was reborn on planet earth.

Politics is often the purview of people who have the time and resources to invest themselves in studying public policy and organizing to change the political system. That’s something that’s very hard for poor people to do. The vast majority of revolutionaries across the world have been educated and come from upwardly mobile families.

Yet Henderson’s lazy reprieve that everybody who believes in democratic socialist ideals is just rich and out of touch might be catnip to Fox’s boomer audience, but it doesn’t reflect reality. Policy programs like Social Security and Medicare and expanding them to more people are consistently popular with workers and other people.

Probably the most unpopular views that some DSA politicians promote are their social cultural views, which don’t map neatly onto the economic spectrum. Demonizing the police or advocating for open borders are certainly unpopular amongst most Americans. But it’s not true that just rich leftists have unpopular ideas. Stephen Miller’s crusade against birthright citizenship and a return to the immigration policies of the 1920s, for instance, is equally unpopular among Americans. And while Henderson coined this phrase “luxury beliefs” to demonize the left, I can’t think of a more lazy belief than thinking the United States economy would still function if we cut immigration down to the levels that Miller advocates for.

Ironically, all of this messaging from the right functions as a form of standpoint epistemology, which is typically associated with the left. Progressives have for years argued that only minorities can really understand certain issues and therefore should be deferred to on those topics. Conservatives are now adopting the same worldview to try to rebut the rising support for democratic socialist/social democratic policies.

Yet if a poor person advocates for more economic redistribution, the line of attack is different: that person’s just a lazy moocher who wants more money from the rich. So if a rich person advocates for redistribution, they’re a hypocrite; if a poor person does so, they are just envious. Really, it seems that the right’s problem is advocating for the poor at all.

But the left, too, has to change it’s approach to messaging around this topic. Progressives tend to fetishize the “working class.” Portraying yourself as living a meager or blue collar existence is seen as politically desirable. But why does it really matter if an elected leader was born rich or born poor if they advocate for the wrong policies? Ultimately, we should be much more focused on debating ideas than debating people; character assassination can make for decent politics, but it makes for bad governance.

I don’t know what makes an otherwise healthy-looking person commit suicide, but I have had a close brush with it.

When I was still working in Washington, D.C., I was at a Metro (that’s the subway system in the nation’s capital) stop when a man hurled himself onto the tracks in front of a train. I was lucky enough to not be looking directly at him at the time; but I could hear the screaming of onlookers.

To this day, I wonder if there was something I or someone else could’ve told that man to prevent him from taking his own life.

Suicide isn’t a well-understood phenomena, although we know enough about it to dismiss libertarian theories about how people just choose out of their autonomous free will to selfishly end their lives.

We know that ecological factors can increase or decrease suicides; one of the most interesting facts about suicide, to me, is that during and after society-wide catastrophes like the 9/11 attacks or the London Blitz, suicide rates actually went down. Social cohesion went up, and people felt a greater sense of solidarity. They were in this together.

Likewise, we know that certain pharmaceutical drugs increase suicidal ideation. They make people more likely to harm themselves.

So if factors outside of one’s own soul can impact their risk of suicide, what factors led to the suicide of Cambridge academic Jason Arday? Arday, if you’re not familiar with him, was a British scholar who was recently exposed for committing plagiarism and other fabrications. This led to his resignation from Cambridge and a massive deluge of media coverage

Suicide is too complicated of an issue to come to a definitive conclusion; we don’t understand it well enough to provide a forensic analysis of this case. I didn’t personally know Arday, and I don’t know what was going through his mind when he took his life.

But I do know that Arday’s tragic end and the behavior that led up to it is a microcosm of the pathologies of both sides of the political spectrum.

Conservatives obsessed with Arday’s case because they saw him as representative of negative trends in academia. Here was a black academic who specialized in racial theory who fudged his research. A story like that is crack-cocaine for the modern day British and American right. And where there’s demand, there’s coverage. There were hundreds of articles written in the British press about a singular academic and his misdeeds. While Arday’s behavior as an academic was clearly inappropriate, it’s hard to justify the disproportionate coverage of it. The man was being treated as if he was a supervillain. From his perspective, not only was his career finished but he was basically the Worst Man In the World.

But for conservatives, he was more than a man. He was a symbol of everything they’ve come to hate about Western culture. So he had to be made an example of. The fact he was clearly mentally unwell — we know, for instance, that he was on the autism spectrum — was not a consideration in the endless pile-on. Because for those who were crucifying Arday, the larger mission of winning the culture war was the ultimate goal.

(I don’t think it’s relevant to the accuracy of the charges against Arday, but an openly racist theorist, Nathan Cofnas, led the crusade against him.)

Yet we can’t let liberals off the hook here. Questions about the veracity of Arday’s work and his life story arose as early as 2023, shortly after his appointment to Cambridge as the university’s youngest black scholar ever. They were not taken seriously.

I don’t know exactly how Arday rose to the prestigious position he was in, but I do know that progressive culture in spaces like nonprofits, universities, political campaigns, and other progressive-dominated institutions practices a sort of paternalistic racism towards minority groups.

While conservatives like those who make up the ranks of what’s left of the Make America Great Again movement constantly proclaim that minorities come from sub-human cultures — witness Stephen Miller’s constant refrain that if we import the “Third World” we will “become the Third World” — progressives seem to affirm some of the very same underlying views with their own low standards for minorities.

Whether it’s demanding that schools get rid of testing in order to boost their black and Latino numbers or smearing anyone who points out the deficiencies in a female or minority political candidate or lawmaker as racist or sexist, progressives have more or less argued that minorities can’t be asked to uphold the same standards of behavior and achievement as white men can.

I have witnessed progressive organizations time and time again being willing to elevate people who were clearly not qualified for their positions solely because they were lowering standards for their demographic characteristics. Progressives think they are helping minorities by doing this, but what they’re really doing is setting up more cases like Arday’s. And when you build a house of cards like that, it’s eventually going to come falling down.

Then the racist conservatives can point to those cases and say, “Ha, I told you. Of course the black man was a DEI hire. People from their culture can’t be accomplished all on their own.”

So I propose that we end this toxic symbiotic relationship between progressives lowering standards for minorities and conservatives freely generalizing about entire cultures and peoples as inferior. Instead, we should do what my friend Tyler Austin Harper suggests from his latest piece in The Atlantic:

What I propose is that the public give Arday a courtesy in death that he was often denied in life: Let’s treat him like a person. Not like Cambridge’s magical negro, or like Simon & Schuster’s golden goose, or like the fetish object of internet racists, but like a flawed human being who should still be alive but is not. That requires being honest about who Arday was, not despite his tragic death but because of it. After all, it was systemic, ritualized dishonesty—his own and others’—that undid him.

In June of 2020, Amazon.com posted a Black Lives Matter across the homepage of its massive commercial website. It was hardly the only company doing so — everyone from Amazon to Nintendo took to their public relations channels to remind us that Black Lives Matter.

Founder Jeff Bezos was so proud of the company’s stance that when an irate customer objected to the firm taking a political stance on the issue, he posted the email on Instagram for everyone to read. He also posted his response, which decried the “disproportionate risk that Black people face in our law enforcement and justice system.” He informed the customer, named Marcy, that he wanted her to know that he supported “this movement that we see happening all around us, and my stance won’t change.”

It was a remarkable act from one of the world’s richest men. I can’t recall another instance of a billionaire posting a rando’s email to him to publicly shame them while expounding on his own virtues.

But Bezos, who has always been a savvy operator, understood something about the summer of 2020. It was the apex of what we now refer to as wokeness — this constellation of culturally progressive ideas that proclaimed that all of society is conspiring against minorities and that we have to be willing to curb normal standards of liberalism to positively discriminate towards certain oppressed groups in order to correct these injustices.

While all that sounds perfectly rational on paper, in practice it ended up largely being a disaster for the very people it was intended to help.

Universities that dropped testing requirements actually ended up hurting the underprivileged. Massive de-policing after 2020 led to skyrocketing murders of young black men as crime went undeterred. Maoist self-criticism and witch hunts in progressive-leaning organizations — from newspapers to nonprofits to universities — did nothing to harm the right but crippled many left-wing organizations when the country needed them most. A comedian-turned-U.S. Senator who helped pass a law to empower sexual assault victims was railroaded out of office for mildly inappropriate behavior he could have easily just apologized for.

And where were we left after the decade of wokeness that seized the country from 2014 through 2024? Donald Trump is once again in office. His administration has banned virtually all refugees from America except for white South Africans who benefitted from Apartheid. We have maybe the most racist government since Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson’s administrations. A decade’s worth of fiery protests and progressive McCarthyism resulted in nothing more than empowering some of the worst elements of the far-right.

So it should be no surprise that Bezos, the supposedly proud antiracist, showed up at Trump’s inauguration, swinging a million dollars around to fund the event. There is really no contradiction between Bezos embracing wokeness at the height of progressive America’s cultural revolution in 2020 and then embracing Trump and purging the Washington Post of anyone who opposes America’s stunning levels of economic inequality.

That’s because wokeness never challenged America’s elites. It wasn’t co-opted by Amazon and Bezos, it never challenged them in any meaningful way in the first place.

A few years before America’s woke era kicked off with the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, I was covering protests at Occupy Wall Street. I had never seen anything like it in my life. Americans from all walks of life were coming together to say that Wall Street had too much power and that prosperity is out of reach of too many people.

At the Occupy encampment in Washington, D.C., I even found a protest sign that had been made based on an article hat I myself had written:

But Occupy soon descended into the privilege call outs and sectarian tendencies that came to dominate the progressive left over the next decade. If you were white, you needed to cede ground to someone who was black. If you were gay, you should really get your own space to speak rather than being drowned out by someone who is straight. And don’t get me started on all the white men who supported Bernie Sanders. The nerve!

Increasingly, the progressive space in America turned into a carbon copy of the Lebanese political system; no longer were we the 99 percent. We were different shades and colors who can never overlap. How can you possibly say that a white working class person has the same interests as a black working class person. Has the former ever been called the N-word? As Bezos told us in the post written above, his white son doesn’t have to worry about being choked by a police officer (that’s not entirely true, but maybe the fact that Bezos is a billionaire is more important than the fact that he’s white?).

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells us that woke 1.0 was crazy — riffing off a New York City councilman who said the same — she’s not wrong. But it was more than a temporary delirium that gripped America’s progressive class. It was an exercise in self-destruction that did nothing to threaten the power of America’s elites while doing everything to put its poor and underprivileged even more at risk.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Since the inception of this newsletter in late 2024, I’ve never used a paywall. I always imagined that my content should be free — why should I try to gate keep information? But I wanted to post more on this newsletter because I think you, the readers, deserve it. Balancing this newsletter with my day job, the other freelancing I do, and my tutoring, however, can be difficult. So what I’ve decided to do is to experiment with an occasional paywall. If you’re a free subscriber — don’t worry. You’ll still get plenty of free content. But I would also appreciate if you spend the equivalent of a cup of coffee on supporting me because that will enable me to spend the time you deserve on updating this newsletter as often as I can.

In 2005, former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) executive Steve Rosen made a boast to Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker. Grabbing a napkin and pushing it towards Goldberg, he said, “You see this napkin? In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”

It was hardly an exaggeration. In the decades since AIPAC was formed, the organization developed awesome power, particularly going into the 1990s and 2000s. Resolutions or legislation dealing with Israel would typically pass with the votes of over 90 percent of the Congress, with little debate or discussion.

Why was this? To explain, I want to share a little anecdote from when I worked in Washington, D.C.

Read more

A series of recent and upcoming Democratic primaries has the party’s establishment in a panic:

• In Michigan, the Bernie Sanders-aligned candidate Abdul El-Sayed looks like he will now easily defeat Michigan Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens to become the party’s U.S. Senate nominee.

• In Wisconsin, democratic socialist and state lawmaker Francesca Wong has a massive lead in the race for the party’s gubernatorial nomination.

• In New York City, democratic socialists and other progressives defeated establishment picks in a number of races, even unseating two long-term incumbents.

• In Colorado, longtime incumbent Congresswoman Diana DeGette was ousted by 29-year-old Melat Kiros, a political newcomer.

One interpretation of these results is that the party is shifting far to the left. In all of these cases, the challengers were clearly more progressive than the incumbents and establishment picks.

This interpretation has been adopted by much of the mainstream media and Fox News — which has become obsessed with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a political group that supported many of these insurgent candidates.

But another way to see these results is that they are the consequence of political and governance weakness by Democratic elites in many parts of the country.

After all, many Democratic incumbents are totally fine. Georgia Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff, for instance, here in the Peach state is beloved by both moderate and progressive Democrats alike. He ran unchallenged in his recent primary and is expected to defeat the Republican candidate, Georgia Congressman Mike Collins, in a landslide.

But the difference between Ossoff and some of these other Democratic mainstays that have been trounced by the rebels is that he has his finger on the pulse of Democratic voters. He has campaigned strongly against the legalized corruption that governs the nation’s capital, and on the issue igniting Democratic activists since 2023 — Israel’s wars — he has found himself clearly siding with the next generation of voters by loudly condemning that state’s war crimes. He doesn’t agree with the party’s left wing on everything, but he also doesn’t demonize them.

You can’t say the same for Stevens, the Michigan congresswoman who appears to be on a collision course with one of the most humiliating defeats an establishment figure has ever suffered.

Stevens, a four-term congresswoman, has been backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the primary Israel Lobby group in the United States. They’ve spent tens of millions of dollars on ads boosting her and attacking El-Sayed, never once mentioning their actual issue (assuring unconditional military support for Israel). The spending gap is so lopsided that El-Sayed is outspent more than ten-to-one.

It is difficult to find any historical analog for a candidate who has been so badly outspent coming from behind and winning the race. But that is what El-Sayed is apparently poised to do.

Why is that? Is he a top tier political talent? I’d argue that he’s charismatic and has adopted popular positions on things like the wars in the Middle East, health care, and corruption in politics.

But with all due respect to El-Sayed, the main advantage he has is how bad of a candidate Stevens is.

She’s spent the last few weeks of the campaign not assembling a compelling policy platform or high-impact and inspiring advertisements but instead whining about how people online are mean to her. It’s hard to imagine that a high schooler with a decent ounce of self-respect would campaign for class president this way, let alone should a candidate for the most exclusive legislative body in the world engage in petty self-victimization.

I would argue that all of the incumbents who are falling to the insurgents suffer from the same level of entitlement and lethargy. They’ve failed to put together a compelling vision and are relying on outside groups and party leadership to smear everyone who opposes them as racist or sexist. It’s hardly any surprise that these kinds of Democratic elites are seeing themselves pushed out of the party tent. After all, it’s not a party if everyone there is as dull as Stevens is.

The Supreme Court’s upholding of birthright citizenship – the policy by which anyone born on U.S. soil will be conferred American citizenship – has caused a firestorm amongst conservative nativist intellectuals.

Seeing judges appointed by George W. Bush and Donald Trump side with preserving the 168-year policy has been a betrayal to these pundits, who were hoping that under the second Trump administration they could finally rid America of a policy they see as devaluing American citizenship.

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh warned that the ruling will “directly lead to tens of millions of more foreigners flooding into this country,” and that “most of them will not even attempt to assimilate.” He went on to complain about the Mexican American population of California and the Somali American residents of Minnesota. Jesse Kelly, a syndicated radio host, warned that importing “barbarians” is the Democratic Party’s electoral strategy.

Mollie Hemingway, editor in chief at The Federalist, described the ruling as apocalyptic. Sean Davis, the CEO of that media organization, went further – suggesting that sterilizing foreigners or denying entry to women altogether should be on the table to prevent birthright citizenship.

Contempt for women seemed to be a theme from the nativists. Joel Webbon, a far right Christian nationalist pundit, warned that “your children don’t get to have a country because 4 women sit on the Supreme Court.”

Given the extent of the rhetoric, you’d think the country was about to fundamentally change. Yes, there are legitimate issues to be discussed, like the practice of birth tourism, where wealthy foreigners pay to travel to the United States and have their kids here solely for the purpose of establishing citizenship. But you don’t need to throw out the baby with the bathwater; immigration and tax policy could be used to deal with edge cases like that.

But all the courts did was uphold a precedent that has been in place for more than a century and a half. Is it really so terrifying that the United States – like almost all New World countries – has birthright citizenship? Are white people really going to be replaced en masse, with the United States turned into a “third world” country?

I would propose that these far-right pundits are more comfortable with living in a diverse country than they let on.

In economics, there is a concept called revealed preferences. Consumers will tell you what they really like by their actual behavior. What they want is what they buy.

The pundits I discussed above all argue as if they feel that America will be doomed when it becomes majority minority. “Import the third world, become the third world,” has become their slogan de jure. If we have a country full of people from Mexican, Indian, or Haitian ancestral origin, we will transform into those countries and bring all their sociological and economic problems.

But through their revealed preferences, we can see that they may not be so confident in this thesis after all.

Walsh, for instance, lives in the thriving metropolis of Nashville, Tennessee. According to the local chamber of commerce, “over 35% of Nashville’s net in-migration from 2024 to 2025 was due to international migration”; around a third of downtown businesses are owned by minorities. While Walsh has been ranting about Somalis in Minneapolis, he would probably enjoy this Somali-owned tea shop in his city (I visited the last time I drove up). In a moment of clarity, Walsh admitted he loves Indian food.

Hemingway and Davis, meanwhile, are denizens of Metro Washington, D.C. A quarter of Northern Virginia’s residents are foreign-born. Kelly lives in and broadcasts from Houston, which was ranked by one measure as America’s fifth-most diverse city and second-most diverse large city (the top three most diverse cities were all in Maryland, also bordering D.C.). Webbon is in Austin, a very liberal and diverse city. Nick Fuentes, the charismatic racist streamer, lives in predominantly Hispanic suburb of Chicago. Brandon Gill, one of the most vociferous nativists in Congress who wants to stop even legal immigration, is married to an Indian American woman.

Speaking of marriage, it’s ironic that the nativists are led by President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Trump is married to an immigrant and the grandson of one himself. Vance is not only married to an Indian American woman, but he goes out of his way in his memoir to praise her family for its strong bonds.

My goal here is not to shame any of these people for enjoying the very cosmopolitanism and diversity they now decry. But I think what’s happening on the nativist right is what once happened on the woke left. Pundits and influencers are trying to one-up each other for attention and clicks, driving themselves into ideological ghettoes that are fundamentally indefensible.

While there are plenty of valid critiques of our immigration system, the idea that the United States will crumble because the court upheld the traditional meaning of the 14^th Amendment is just a fantasy – and deep down, these pundits can realize it by just acknowledging that diversity has been a success for the country.

New York City operates a network of elite public high schools which go on to graduate students who fill the ranks of Ivy League universities and other top colleges and arenas of higher education.

Every year, thousands of students compete to get into these high schools; the city publicly releases demographic data to reveal to residents who was admitted.

That data was just released, and a number of media outlets have covered the results. This is the education-focused publication Chalkbeat:

About 3.5% of the roughly 4,000 offers in total went to Black students, edging up slightly from last year’s 3%. About 6.5% of offers went to Latino students, down slightly from 6.9% the year before.

Overall, Black students made up 19.3% of students this year; Latino students made up 42.3% of the nation’s largest school system. About 17% of the students who took the SHSAT last year are Black, while 25% are Latino.

The number of offers to Asian American students at specialized high schools ticked up to 56.5% from 54% the year before. Offers to white students fell slightly to 23.5% from about 26%. Asian American students make up 18.7% of students citywide; white students make up 16.1%.

The publication goes on to note that “for years, integration advocates have called to change the testing admissions system to these prestigious schools,” calling attention to the racial disparity at these schools.

The New York City elite public high school system and others around the country — think Thomas Jefferson in Northern Virginia or Lowell in San Francisco — have frequently come under this critique. The schools are, relative to the general population, disproportionately filled by the ranks of South and East Asian kids, often the children of first-generation immigrants. Proportional to population, black kids are typically the most underrepresented. White kids, meanwhile, are increasingly facing stiff competition from the children of Asian migrants.

The main avenue of criticism is to excoriate these schools for basing admissions on testing. In New York City, this test takes the form of the Secialized High Schools Admissions Test, or SHSAT. Critics argue that a more holistic admissions process would account for the broader qualities of the student and result racial disparities.

The problem with this argument is that a well-designed test tends to be the most objective measure we have for predicting student success. And when universities started going test-optional, they actually hurt the chances of disadvantaged students in admissions.

But there is a larger fallacy at work here. A few years ago, I spoke to some researchers who had studied specialized high schools. What they found is that these schools appear to succeed through what is called selection bias. For folks who haven’t had a graduate-level statistics training, let me explain with a simple analogy.

Imagine there’s a town where only people who are six feet or taller are allowed to live.

(I’m not sure if this would be illegal or unconstitutional, but that’s the great thing about analogies, you’re allowed to be as fanciful as you want!)

If you made a ranking of the tallest towns in America, that town would always be at the very top. Someone who is not familiar with the requirement might even think to themselves, “Wow, I should go and have kids in this town. They’ll end up being 6’5”. Maybe they can even play in the NBA!”

But the reason the actual the town is so tall is because they don’t even admit anyone who is short.

This is how specialized high schools work. Their rigorous admissions standards ensure that the students who attend are academically gifted and appropriately placed. Admitting students who are not would not necessarily benefit those students — they’re not being correctly matched to a curriculum that meets their needs. Lowering standards at these schools will ensure that the students who graduate are not as well-prepared for the future as they currently are.

If you admitted a student who had, say, 20 percent worse performance on the SHSAT than the current admitted students, that student would not automatically be as successful as the current ones. They may even find themselves falling behind in courses that are far more demanding than are appropriate for them.

So what’s the solution?

I think first we have to acknowledge the purpose of education. I have been a tutor and part-time educator for half a dozen years. My goal is not to turn every student into a Harvard grad. I try to figure out what my students are struggling at and help them improve. They all end up in different places, but I know I’ve done my job if they’re doing better than they did before.

The goal of the education system shouldn’t be to pretend that everyone is going to end up in the same place. It’s to improve things for everyone. Many of the Asian American students who fill the ranks of specialized high schools around the country have parents who push them extremely hard in academics. I remember one Indian American child I tutored whose mom made him do half a dozen sports (this is actually overkill, do not ask your child to do this!).

You can protest that even students who don’t have parents like this should be filling the ranks of Stuyvesant or Harvard. But that’s just not reality. Those schools are made for the top-performing students to bring out their potential.

That isn’t to say that students who aren’t as academically gifted or driven should just be discarded. The better approach is for us to make sure there are plenty of paths for success in American life — trade schools for non-college graduates, for instance, are amongst the most important engines of mobility.

I think a lot of the progressives who engage in these debates are surrounded by people who went not only to college but to elite prep schools; the idea that someone can succeed without doing that is alien to them.

Progressives are right that everyone should have a shot at a decent life. But the solution is not to lower standards and try to force a square peg into a round hole. The current specialized school system does well cultivating talent amongst students who are appropriate. What we need to work on is not changing these schools but improving things for everyone else.

One of my favorite documentaries is Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. Well, I use the term documentary loosely here, as Moore himself has acknowledged that his films are more like op-eds — you’re not getting a balanced picture so much as you’re getting one man’s point of view.

But what made Columbine a stronger film than most of Moore’s work what the agnosticism in some of his conclusions. Moore, for instance, has plenty to say about Charleton Heston, the late actor who headlined a National Rifle Association rally not too long after the Columbine tragedy. But he also acknowledges that high gun ownership in Canada does not seem to be associated with the levels of violence we have here in the United States. After the film concludes, you’re left with a bunch of hypotheses about American violence, but you still don’t quite understand why it is we seem to have way more shootings and homicides than any developed country and even many poor nations.

I first watched the movie in a high school classroom where a buddy of mine, a staunch conservative who to this day would probably hurl himself into a volcano rather than vote for a Democrat, admitted he kind of liked Moore after watching Columbine.

And yet despite how much I appreciate Moore for making a nuanced movie in this case, I do have to slight him for leaving out a pretty obvious explanation for why America has as much violence as it does.

No, I’m not talking about poverty — high poverty does not produce the same levels of violence in say, Ghana or Vietnam, as it does in the United States.

Nor am I endorsing the racist theory of the case. Yes, violent crime rates amongst young African American men are higher than most other categorizations, but the vast majority of black people never commit any kind of violent crime at all. Heck, if you look just at white Americans, we still have alarmingly high levels of violence. And if you expand your analysis beyond the United States, you’ll find that many black-majority nations are actually safer than the United States is. The aforementioned Ghana is actually safer, on average, than the U.S. is. Race, after all, is a social construct, not a biological fact. While it may be useful to talk about why men — across societies and history — tend to be much more violent than women, it’s not super useful to talk about race.

Instead, what I wish Moore had talked more about is honor culture and how it’s contributed to the spread and resilience of violence in the United States. A recent study published in the prestigious journal PNAS did just that.

The causes and consequences of the American South’s honor culture

In the 1990s, a social psychologist named Richard Nisbett conducted research looking into the American South’s unique culture. Nisbett and others had noticed that the South had far more violence than the rest of the country; shootings and homicides in the region were astronomical. Many of these acts of violence stemmed from seemingly trivial interactions — disputes over what someone had called someone else, for instance.

Nisbett published research showing that many Southerners uphold what is called an anthropology a culture of honor. Honor culture, as it’s often called, is one where protecting your reputation is paramount. If someone insults you, threatens your property, or undermines your manhood, you have not only a right but an obligation to respond aggressively.

He did experiments where he found that the cortisol levels — that’s the hormone related to stress — went way up when southerners were insulted compared to people in other regions of the country. Southern culture was different and it made a real difference in how the study participants internalized threats to their reputation.

Where did this culture come from? The conservative economist Thomas Sowell has written extensively about how much of the South was settled by Scots-Irish who imbued that culture onto the region — a culture that then spread to African Americans, who were brought there as slaves. But is there some way we can show that honor culture is helping drive violence?

Carrying a risk of violence with them

Gabriel Lenz, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, worked with a team to study that question through the lens of internal migration. Their study, which was published in PNAS late last year, provides ample reason to believe that not only has honor culture helped drive violence in the South, but the spread of that culture promoted violence across the country.

Lenz told me that he was interested in the question of violence in part because of his own life’s experiences. He had grown up in Canada and would cross the border into Detroit and experience bad neighborhoods for the first time.

“I’ve always just wondered, like what went so wrong?” he told me.

In this study, he and his colleagues looked at white Americans who grew up in the South and frontier states — where honor culture is common — and what would happen when they migrated to other regions of the country.

Why white residents? Because as the majority group in the United States, white residents were not geographically concentrated in certain regions and had wide variation in homicide rates. African Americans, for instance, have always overwhelmingly lived in the South. By focusing on white residents, they were able to compare white residents who on paper were similar — demographically, that is — but who moved to the same regions from different regions of the country.

What they found is that white residents born in historically more unsafe regions like the South carried an elevated risk of being killed in homicides even after they had moved to safer states. White residents who moved to those same locations from comparatively safer states did not carry the same risk.

To buttress their results, Lenz and his colleagues carried out a set of surveys of migrants. They found all the telltale signs of honor culture beliefs — witnessing violence at some point in your life, distrust of institutions, embracing the idea that you shouldn’t back down from a fight.

In our conversation, Lenz explained the historic rise of honor culture in these states as a response to the lack of authority or government infrastructure.

“The culture of honor is very intuitive for anybody in a high violence situation — usually places where the government’s not there,” he told me. “If you quickly learn that you’re on your own to protect yourself — your family, neighborhood, gang, community, whatever — you quickly learn what protects you is having a reputation of being scary. Because that might deter people from harming you. It’s a defensive response.”

Peace through cultural change

Conversations about how culture drives violence quickly devolve into food fights. At this point, a lot of Americans roll their eyes at lectures about “toxic masculinity” from the left or “black culture” from the right.

Part of the reason for that is that the vast majority of men don’t commit any violence at all. The same is true for African Americans. But that doesn’t mean there is no cultural component to American violence.

Simply looking at economic status, racial classification, gender, or age does not explain the elevated levels of violence we see in America — especially in the American South.

But the honor culture thesis — when paired with easy access to guns — does help explain why there’s so much violence in this country. Trivial arguments that could be resolved by shrugging your shoulders and walking away are turned into gunfights when you:

1. Believe that your life itself depends on defending your reputation and/or your community’s honor.

2. Have a firearm handy.

Although it was not the topic of study for this paper, Lenz also acknowledged that this is important data that could help explain elevated crime rates among black Americans. As Sowell noted years ago, the majority of black Americans were brought to the South; the honor culture that impacts the white residents studied by Lenz impacts them as well, even as they moved to far-flung locations like Oakland and Chicago.

But what can we do about all this? Part of the solution might the kind of peacebuilding work that violence interrupters and youth mentors and faith leaders around the country do.

But another solution is to recognize that sometimes culture flows from the legal and political environment. The book Ghettoside, for instance, painstakingly chronicles how under-policing in black-majority communities helped create a Wild West environment where people felt like they had no choice but to take the law into their own hands. No detective is going to come and solve your son’s murder. So you might as well round up the boys and go shoot it out yourself.

To the extent that we have seen cultural change around violence in America, it’s been driven in part by better and more effective policing and criminal justice.

“The government just needs to really try to convince black Americans that it could be different, and that they’re safer, and that the state will come when they’re called…treat them fairly, treat them with respect, and we’re dealing with the legacy of that — those weak institutions, weak government,” Lenz told me.

When Hunter Biden — one of two surviving sons of former President Joe Biden’s — was just a small child, he experienced life-changing trauma.

A week before Christmas, his mother drove Hunter and two of his siblings on a rural road when a tractor trailer slammed into their car. Just six weeks after Joe Biden was elected to the Senate from Delaware, Hunter’s mother and his 13-month-old sister Amy were killed.

Hunter and his brother Beau survived, but they suffered injuries inside and out. Hunter experienced both a fractured skull and brain damage; the trauma was something his body was left to carry for the rest of his life.

I bring all this up because I just learned it when Hunter appeared on the Dax Shepard and Monica Padman-helmed interview podcast Armchair Expert. The younger Biden has been having a bit of a media moment lately — which involves joining X and dropping some of the most fire Tweets on the service, sounding off on politics alongside California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, and touring the broader podcast circuit.

Until now, I — like many Americans — thought of Hunter Biden as little more than the least impressive offspring of the former president. It seemed like he survived largely off of nepotism related to famous father (how likely is it, really, that Hunter’s an expert on both public transit and Ukrainian gas?). And the Hunter Biden laptop revelations made sure the entire world knew about his less savory exploits.

But beyond the sensationalist and lewd details of Hunter’s personal life there appears to sit a man whose worldview appears to be perceptive and enlightening. He’s become a bit of a social media sensation lately not because he just happens to be related to a famous person — who really cares about Chelsea Clinton’s Tweets, as a counter-example — but because he’s actually an excellent writer and interview subject.

The Shepard interview above, for instance, is a fascinating discussion about the toll that addiction can take on a person; Shepard, a recovering alcoholic himself, and Biden discuss the topic with a mastery only people who’ve experienced it themselves can deploy.

And his commentary on politics has been just as refreshing.

Take his defense of Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, who has been mired in a bunch of scandals about his personal behaviors (ranging from tattoos to sexting). Biden challenged critics of Platner to prove that they’re so clean and proper:

I always say to people: show me your phone. Give me access to your iCloud. Let's go through it and pull everything we can find that's inappropriate... And if that's the standard by which we're going to judge people, particularly people in elected office, then I don't think we're going to have many people in elected office.

He’s even pretty funny. When someone online mocked him for his drug addiction, arguing it doesn’t make him look sympathetic, he retorted, “Sympathetic? I actually look pretty good for a crack addict. Give me some credit dude.”

And he’s even a great artist, although maybe his paintings weren’t really worth $500,000 a pop.

It’s been surprising that Hunter Biden is more than your run of the mill nepo baby. He’s actually witty and more than a little talented. But should we really be shocked that someone whose life has involved so much trauma — from the early deaths of many of his close family members to living with drug addiction — can make us laugh, smile, or even think?

“Hurt people hurt people,” the old adage goes. And there’s a lot of truth to that, including in Hunter Biden’s life. His drug addictions and infidelity destroyed his first marriage; his business and personal conduct served as a political anchor around his father’s neck.

But if you look around the world of art, entertainment, and culture, some of our best minds have been people who have lived messy lives.

Take Mel Gibson, the epic actor who helmed the Lethal Weapon series and put on his director’s hat for The Passion of the Christ and Hacksaw Ridge. Decades ago, Gibson was in the news for an antisemitic tirade; years ago, he also plead guilty to misdemeanor battery of his loved ones. That’s terrible behavior. But I’m still going to watch every movie he makes.

Tom Cruise, an even bigger action star, has always been controversial for his membership in The Church of Scientology. But however odd or discomfiting we find the practices of Scientologists, we’re all going to be comfortably seated to see Tom Cruise screaming as he does some of the most insane stunt work of any modern actor.

Sure, there’s the occasional Tom Hanks, a man so pure he was chosen to portray Mr. Rogers in the biopic. But a lot of creative, artistic, musical, and otherwise talented people are wildly imperfect. Let’s remember that Vincent van Gogh cut off his own ear.

Producing art often requires us to reach for places that other people haven’t been. That means tapping into trauma and terror, like Biden’s experience losing his mother and sister to a horrific car accident and years battling drug addiction. While he and other flawed creatives have lived lives that brought considerable pain to their loved ones, we should encourage them to use their trauma for good.

On Monday, The New York Times published a groundbreaking piece in its Opinion section by famed foreign affairs columnist Nick Kristof.

Kristof spent months investigating claims of sexual assault and rape of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers and settlers. He relied on countless testimonies in addition to work done by Israeli human rights organizations that have painstakingly documented the use of sexual violence by Israelis against Palestinians.

Kristof, who is one of the most respected journalists in the world, came under the usual attacks. He was accused by the Israeli Foreign Ministry of “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press” — using a term reserved for an historic practice of falsely accusing Jewish people of murdering non-Jewish children as part of their religious rituals.

This capped off a torrent of hate online from Jewish conservatives and others who see themselves as ideologically aligned with the Israeli government.

All of this is predictable by now. This is always what happens when someone prominent highlights atrocities committed by the Israeli state. You get called antisemitic, accused of singling out Israel and committing blood libels; heck, the former antisemitism czar for the Biden administration retweeted someone suggested the Times staff should be hanged (I will assume she didn’t read the post carefully, but who knows).

But there is one allegation in Kristof’s piece that has been particularly controversial. A blindfolded detainee alleges that Israelis used a dog in the process of sexually violating him.

Many people scoffed at this allegation because they argued a dog can’t anatomically do that.

Journalist David Shuster cited unnamed “canine experts, veterinarians, and trainers” to make his argument:

(Shuster’s claim that a retraction is being considered has been denied.)

Sadly, this is not a difficult debate to resolve because there are numerous examples of cruel or sadistic individuals training dogs to do exactly this.

They include Klaus Barbie, a Nazi prison commander known as the “Butcher of Lyon.”

Barbie’s crimes are vast, but one particularly galling tactic is described by Judith Miller in One by One by One: Facing the Holocaust:

Barbie kept two German shepherd dogs. One was trained to lunge and bite. The other was trained to mount naked women who had first been ordered on their hands and knees, a humiliation that could cut deeper than the whip, than having one’s fingernails pulled out, or one’s nipples burned with cigarettes.

The Nazis were not the only ones who used a form of torture that recruited man’s best friend. In Pinochet’s Chile, sexual violence was common. Another German shepherd was again deployed for this purpose:

Women were particularly targeted for sexual abuse, suffering rape, forced pregnancies, abortions and sexual slur. A German Shepherd dog called Volodia was trained to rape inmates. Female and male prisoners were also subjected to beatings, hangings, electric shocks, Russian roulette, asphyxia and deprivation of sleep, among other torture methods. Prisoners called the secret detention centre La Discothèque due to Pinochet’s agents blasting loud music at all times.

In a sign that history doesn’t repeat itself but rather ryhmes, one of the women who oversaw the use of dogs to torture people was a Chilean-born German Ingrid Olderock, who was the descendant of parents who were affiliated with the Nazi Party. She came to be known as the “woman of the dogs.”

It shouldn’t have to be said that if these dogs could be trained to commit these vile crimes, then dogs anywhere could be trained to do the same thing. David Parker Ray, for instance, a notorious American rapist and serial killer, reportedly trained dogs to rape some of his victims.

This does not mean that Kristof’s reporting on this case is accurate. The best way to bring about justice in these cases is to have a thorough investigation. The Red Cross should be allowed to visit Palestinian prisoners, as is the norm in warzones across the world. Foreign journalists should be allowed to independently visit Gaza without Israeli military handlers (Kristof’s reporting was all from the West Bank).

There are ways to get at the truth, but they require sincere and independent investigations with an open mind.

Sadly, dogs are capable of raping humans. History has shown us this time and time again. But one reason people may find it so unbelievable is because dogs have never been recorded to do this in the wild. It is not a behavior that comes naturally to them.

The only reason dogs would rape a human being would be if they have been abused and brainwashed into doing so. It is not the dogs’ folly. It is ours.

UPDATE: Judith Miller, who I cited above, offered a clarification to her book I cited:

California is the most fifth-most Democratic state in the nation. It’s one of the last places in the country where you’d expect the country to struggle to nominate a gubernatorial candidate who will serve as the state’s Democratic flag-bearer.

But the California Democrats seem to be uniquely politically incompetent. Their flagship candidate, Eric Swalwell, not only dropped out of the governor’s race but also resigned from Congress following a series of allegations related to harassment of women.

Katie Porter, the once-promising Warrenite economic populist, hasn’t been able to consolidate the field (her history of abusing her staff might be one reason why).

Meanwhile, Republicans have a small chance of shutting out the Democrats altogether. California uses what’s called a top-two primary — meaning that everyone of every party competes in the same primary contest and the top two contenders advance to the general election. If two Republican candidates get the most votes, Democrats will find themselves without a candidate in one its masthead state.

One way to sort out this problem is for Democrats to unite around a candidate for governor who can beat back the Republicans and help solve the state’s longstanding problems — like its unaffordability crisis and pervasive chronic homelessness.

Some had hoped that former Vice President Kamala Harris would be the solution here. She had been considering running for governor, which would have instantly cleared the field; she almost certainly would’ve assumed the awesome duty of managing one of the largest economies on earth.

But Harris not only whiffed on running for that office, she seems to have no public opinion about who should be governor of her state.

On Monday, Harris released a list of endorsements for California races. Perusing the list, you’ll find plenty of incumbents — like Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — but what you won’t find is Harris’s choice for the governor’s race.

Why did Harris refuse to weigh in on the most important race in the state? My guess is it’s the same reason she refused to weigh in on a referendum back in 2024 that increased penalties for some crimes.

She’s simply averse to leading.

Now, to be fair, I’m a biased party. The one time I chatted with Harris in person, she spent the whole time dodging my question.

But dodging difficult choices is more or less Harris’s forte. In her long career as a Democratic politician, it’s difficult to ever locate a time when she actually led the party on any issue in particular. She typically waits for a position to become politically safe before adopting it — that is, if she adopts any position whatsoever. Simply dodging the difficult question is her usual approach.

Does that sound like someone who should run for president to you? Does that sound like someone who could manage the entire country?

Harris has told us time and time again that she lacks presidential qualities. The question is whether Democratic primary voters are listening.

Have you ever heard of Daryl Davis?

Davis is a black musician known for seeking out and befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan. After finally making a friendship with a black person, dozens of Klansmen decided to hang up their robes. Davis even keeps them in his home as a reminder of his success changing hearts and minds.

(Full disclosure: I’ve met Davis and we served on a board of advisors of a nonprofit together once.)

Davis’s origin story — how he fell into becoming a full-time Klan de-brainwasher — is set in an all-white music venue he performed at in Maryland back in 1983.

Entranced by Davis’s music, a white man approached him and said, “I really like y’all’s music. This is the first time I ever heard a black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis.”

Davis informed the man that Lewis, a rock ‘n’ roll legend, was in fact inspired by black musicians himself.

Although the white man was unconvinced by Davis’s explanation, he decided to have a drink with him. That’s when he explained that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Imagine that: a Klansman who so enjoyed a black man’s music that he sat down and had a polite outing with him.

I think about this story when I watched the latest culture war erupt over the Super Bowl. Even something as trivial as a Halftime Show turned into a ritual of Red vs. Blue.

Most Americans, and presumably most of the Blue Tribe, watched the official Halftime Show, featuring Puerto Rican performer Bad Bunny. But some members of the Red Tribe rallied behind counterprogramming put on by the right-wing activist group Turning Point USA (their show was called “The ALL-AMERICAN Halftime Show.”)

The counterprogramming was spurred by the perception that having Bad Bunny — a Latino artist who has made no secret of the fact that he isn’t a big fan of Donald Trump’s immigration policies — was somehow diverting from mainstream American culture, which TPUSA sees itself as shepherding.

Some Republican Members of Congress even want there to be a federal investigation into Bad Bunny, while pundit Megyn Kelly protested the fact that so much of the Halftime Show was in Spanish instead of English:

Who gives a damn that we have 40 million Spanish speakers? We have 310 million who don’t speak a lick of Spanish! This is supposed to be a unifying event for the country. Not for the Latinos.

Missing the melting pot in the room

The problem with all these arguments about Bad Bunny vs. Kid Rock or how our entertainment should either be in English or Spanish is how divorced they are from the actual world of music.

Music has always served as one of America’s ultimate forms of melting pots. Kid Rock himself plays a guitar — an instrument whose predecessor was first developed in North Africa and whose modern form was pioneered in Spain.

Yes, Spanish-speaking Spain gifted the modern world the guitar. Everyone from the Beatles to Kid Rock can thank the Spaniards for the musical talents that made them household names. And if you look at the kind of music that Americans have gravitated towards, we have hardly been limited to the Anglosphere.

If you look at today’s Billboard Hot 100, which serves as a repository for the week’s top songs, you’ll find a list as diverse as the United Nations: Bad Bunny is one of the nation’s most listened to artists, but so are Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, and the Korean folks who have been driving every parent in the country crazy with their single from KPop Demon Hunters.

(Kid Rock is nowhere in the top 100, for what it’s worth.)

Mind you, these are the top tracks in the United States, not globally. The kind of music that Americans like to listen to spans a wide range of cultures and languages. While Kelly may have the image in her mind of an America that’s still culturally aligned with Green Acres, that’s just not the kind of country that we live in anymore.

I know that’s scary for a lot of people because when things around you change you often feel like you’ve lost something. Human beings are social creatures, and we grow attached to our environments.

I don’t think rubbing into the faces of old white folks like Kelly and those older than her (basically: Donald Trump’s base) that the future of America will look totally different than what they grew up in is a very savvy move. That’s just kicking someone while they’re down.

The alternative I would suggest is just to draw skeptics into accepting diversity by pointing out that it has a lot of benefits. I mean, go and watch Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show. I don’t speak Spanish, and yet I have to admit that it was a banger.

I play guitar myself, and that means that I owe my own small musical talents to a diverse etymology. I’m playing a Spanish-Moorish instrument and picking up songs from a wide range of cultures.

The tunes I’ve learned come from cultures far removed from my own, and yet I don’t feel like I appreciate them any less. They include:

• Aberdeen, a folk song written by Avi Kaplan, a Jewish American of Ukrainian and Russian family background.

• Last of My Kind, a country song written and performed in part by Shaboozey, an artist whose parents are from Nigeria. (Here’s a joke I made on TikTok after learning it.)

• A whole lot of stuff by First Aid Kit, an indie band that hails from Sweden.

Something you have to remember about human languages is that they’re just an attempt at getting across what we believe and what we feel. Music is another way to do so. And it transcends barriers like parochial languages, national borders, and political beliefs.

Music is the ultimate American melting pot, and this is a country more than big enough for both Bad Bunny and Kid Rock.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is remaking the government’s approach to autism, the neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts as many of 3 percent of American children.

In a sweeping move announced earlier this week, the HHS announced the appointment of 19 new members to what’s called the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, or IACC.

“The intention of this committee to advise the [National Institutes of Health] on how to spend autism research dollars — set priorities for research funding,” explained Amy Lutz, an historian of disability at the University of Pennsylvania who has written multiple books about autism and disabilities and has a minimally speaking autistic son herself.

The IACC has been around for two decades and has played a key role in helping guide autism research policy for the United States. If someone wanted to completely change the federal government’s approach to autism, there would be few places worse to start than the IACC.

And if the members named to the committee this week are any indication, RFK Jr.’s approach will radically differ from the mainstream. For one, it seems to offer a wholehearted embrace of controversial pseudoscientific communications method that advocates claim has transformed the lives of profoundly autistic people but which has also been tied to some of the most abusive cases in autistic treatment history.

A miracle technology that lets profoundly autistic people learn calculus in a day

Last year, RFK Jr. came under fire from some autism advocates for describing some autistic individuals as suffering so profoundly that they “will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

While Kennedy’s statement may have been hyperbolic, it is true that some people on the severe end of the autism spectrum — who typically cannot speak on their own or only repeat a few words at best — are so profoundly intellectually disabled that they cannot do these tasks.

These nonverbal autistic people usually require lifelong assistance of some kind.

You can hardly blame Kennedy, then, for aggressively searching not only for a cure for autism but also a way to help these nonverbal autistic people communicate.

Kennedy and his foundation, the Children’s Defense Fund, believed they had happened upon such a miracle cure a few years ago.

They helped promote a documentary called Spellers, a high production value film that can now be viewed on YouTube for free.

The premise of Spellers is simple. For years, the world has written off nonverbal autistic people as intellectually disabled. But maybe they are not suffering from an intellectual disability at all — maybe the thoughts inside their heads are no different than anyone else’s.

The key to unlocking those thoughts is handing these nonverbal individuals letter boards where they can slowly spell out their thoughts. Through techniques called , Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) or Spelling 2 Communicate (S2C) facilitators help these individuals, usually referred to as spellers, spell out their thoughts.

In RFK Jr.’s mind, these facilitated messages are nothing short of miraculous.

JB Handley, a former private executive and one of the co-producers and stars of Spellers, joined RFK Jr. for a virtual book event back in 2021.

Handley, whose son is nonverbal and uses S2C, regaled RFK Jr. with the story of how his son, who was written off as intellectually disabled, was actually brilliant once taught how to spell out his thoughts.

“He learned to do calculus and essentially a day and his calculus teacher said I can’t teach him anymore,” Handley told Kennedy. You need a college level teacher because he’s too fast.”

He also told the Kennedy scion that his son picked up foreign languages through osmosis. Kennedy sat transfixed, not questioning a word of it.

In the world of spelling, such stories are not uncommon. The image above comes from the Instagram of Marie Myung-Ok Lee, a novelist and Columbia who along with her fellow Ivy League husband picked up spelling as a way to help their son Jason communicate.

Things went from doctors telling her that her son had an IQ of just 40 to him writing complex essays and even auditing college classes. All thanks to a letterboard.

(If you want to see what spelling with Jason looked like, watch this video his mother posted on Instagram.)

Thanks to RFK Jr., advocates for spelling now populate the IACC and will have a deep influence on how the government supports this method with taxpayer dollars.

The committee includes several prominent spelling advocates and practitioners like Katie Sweeney and Krystal Higgins. It also includes several nonspeaking adults like Caden Larson and Elizabeth Bonker, who were featured in Spellers. (A previous iteration of the IACC did include one speller as well.)

To advocates for spelling, this is a breakthrough moment. The federal government is finally putting its weight behind communications methods that they believe can unlock an entire world for nonverbal autistic people — prove to Americans that they are just as intelligent as anyone else.

But these methods have long alarmed autism researchers and advocates, who point to an obscure but important history.

(Although this is not the focus of this article, it should be noted that RFK Jr. also elevated vaccine skeptics to serve on the IACC.)

Does spelling unlock the mind of the autistic person or the facilitator?

The letterboards that the spellers use find their origin in a technique called facilitated communication (FC).

In the latter half of the 20th century, a group of educators and therapists who worked with nonverbal children decided to help them type out their thoughts instead. The practice was popularized in Australia and soon made its way across the Pacific Ocean to the United States.

One of the FC practitioners who leapt head-first into the practice was named Janyce Boynton.

One day she was working with a student named Betsy Wheaton, whose story was later captured in the Frontline documentary “Prisoners of Silence.”

As she helped Wheaton type out her thoughts, she was horrified. She noticed that Betsy was acting out more and more, including with physical violence.

Boynton began to worry that Wheaton was being abused at home. And sure enough, she began to type out messages confirming those fears — accusing her entire family of sexually abusing her.

Betsy and her brother were removed from the family by the local authorities while they investigated.

But her parents denied the allegations and hired an expert, Dr. Howard Shane of Boston Children’s Hospital, to try to debunk the messages Betsy had been writing.

He came up with what’s called a “double-blind” exam to test the authenticity of the messages.

The test was simple: Betsy and her facilitator would be shown a series of objects. When they were shown different objects, we could see if Betsy, with the aid of her facilitator, would type out the picture she saw or the one her facilitator saw.

When Boynton participated in the test, she realized she couldn’t get the answers right when she didn’t see the object that the evaluator showed only to Betsy. It was that day that her faith in the process crumbled, as she wrote in her journal article years later:

I felt such devastation, panic, pain, loneliness—a myriad of emotions difficult to put into words. The whole FC thing unraveled for me that day, and I did not have an explanation for any of it. Almost immediately, I started rationalizing away the truth. Though it was not true, I went away from the testing telling myself that the situation had been hostile, the evaluator had been hostile, everyone had turned against me. Incredibly, I even tried facilitating with the child in the week or two after the testing, resulting in more outrageous and false allegations. The parents, understandably, asked that I no longer work with the child. I felt tremendous loss.

The Wheatons were reunited and Boynton turned against the practice of FC. The double-blind tests that Shane had used in her case became commonplace in studies of FC. To this day, there is not one scientific study that has validated its use. In every study, facilitators and their clients failed the double-blind testing — with researchers coming to the conclusion that it was the facilitators who were actually authoring the messages.

Researchers by and large did not come to the conclusion that the facilitators were acting in bad faith. Instead, they pointed to something called the ideomotor effect, a psychological process where people involuntarily move their bodies in response to their thoughts. The effect could explain not only why facilitators were unwittingly authoring these messages but also how people operate devices like Ouija boards.

In the years since the wave of debunking studies in the 1990s, FC has largely fallen out of favor. But new variations of a facilitator using a letterboard, like RPM and S2C, continue to proliferate.

There are differences between these newer methods and FC; FC practitioners generally touched the client and guided their hands or shoulders. Under RPM and S2C, practitioners typically hold up a letterboard instead.

But the danger of prompting and guiding students to type is still there, which is why American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and every mainstream autism organization opposes the use of spelling. Instead, they encourage the use of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices.

There are a range of AAC techniques and devices that nonverbal people have used to communicate. These can include writing, drawing, using gestures or facial expressions, pointing to pictures, or using apps on a tablet.

But advocates for spelling find these methods to be frustrating. They do not produce complex essays or treatises like what we’ve seen from spellers. Yet to this day, RPM and S2C techniques have never passed the simple test that Shane devised.

The dangers of government-backed spelling

But isn’t spelling worth investing in, even if it hasn’t been scientifically proven to work?

The problem, argues the mainstream autism community, is that if we can’t verify that spellers’ words are their own, we open up the possibility of abuse.

These include the case of a professor who molested a young man who she believed was spelling out his consent and a mother who murdered her child after she believed that he wanted to commit suicide.

The possibility of falsely gaining someone’s consent also raises a gamut of deep moral and ethical questions: Should someone be allowed to vote through the use of a facilitator who is helping them type out their thoughts? Should they be able to give consent for marriage? Can they write their own wills?

“These appointments contribute to the normalizing non-speaking autistics as having intact language and literacy skills—which not only conflicts with the evidence but negates the best practices and therapies that this extremely vulnerable group depends on,” Katharine Beals, an autism researcher at Drexel University and the mother of an autistic child herself, told me.

The worry for much of the mainstream autism community is that these appointments will steer the federal government towards supporting unproven communications techniques while starving legitimate research of funding.

"The concern is that we’ll be taking hundreds of millions of dollars and basically incinerating it in pursuit of completely unscientific alternative therapies and already debunked theories of autism causation,” Lutz said.

Lutz is the mother of a nonverbal child herself. The issue is deeply personal for her.

“At the profound end of the spectrum where my family is, our kids are in desperate need of better interventions, long term supports and services,” she said.

In 2011, Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared on CNBC, where he was asked about a then-obscure Chinese company called BYD (which is an acronym for Build Your Dreams).

“They’re ramping up production of their electric vehicles,” the host told Musk.

The South African-born entrepreneur laughed.

“Why do you laugh?” she responded.

“Have you seen their car?” he carried on, grinning from ear to ear.

“You don’t see them at all as a competitor?” she asked.

“I don’t think they have a great product…I don’t think it’s particularly attractive. The technology is not very strong,” he told her with an arrogant tone.

In 2024, BYD surpassed Tesla in total revenue.

Last year, they surpassed Tesla in total electric vehicles sold globally.

And that’s not the end of the bad news for Tesla and Musk.

The Canadians just announced that they’d be reducing their 100% tariff on Chinese cars to single digits, all but guaranteeing that the country will be flooded with Chinese automobiles. And there’s a lot of reason to think the Canadians will bite.

Tesla’s sales have been plummeting across the world, with a particularly sharp dive in Europe — registrations were down 71% in Sweden and 66% in France year over year.

The company is laying off more than 1,000 workers in Germany, a fact disclosed by the local workers’ council.

The reason for these sales declines can be debated, but they are occurring as Chinese EV sales are seeing massive growth, especially in Europe. We aren’t seeing a broader decline in EV registrations at the same level as what is happening to Tesla, and it’s obvious why.

Musk has become one of the world’s most polarizing billionaires by attaching himself to far-right politics from the United States to Germany. The days where Musk cozied up to presidents Democratic and Republican alike (like most CEOs) are over. Today, he spends his days telling us that white people are so persecuted they are on the verge of being slaughtered en masse if they become a minority in the United States (Elon apparently never goes outside in Texas, where he lives, where white people are already a minority.)

It would be easy, however, to blame Musk’s increasing embrace of extremist politics as the sole reason for the company’s sudden failures.

There’s also the greed.

Earlier this year, Musk announced that Tesla would no longer be offering their Full Self-Driving (Supervised) [FSD] service as a one-time purchase. Instead, the company will require you to subscribe month to month if you want to use the autonomous technology.

Uptake of these subscriptions has been very low, despite all of the hype Musk has put out there into the world about how amazing FSD is.

(If you want a laugh, read this Wikipedia article about all the false claims Musk has made about when FSD will finally be finished and what it is capable of.)

So the company just announced that they would be removing Autopilot from cars that are newly sold. Autopilot has long been a free feature in Tesla cars. It combines basic lane centering with traffic-aware cruise control. It is not only a basic feature on Tesla cars, it’s a basic feature on each of Tesla’s competitors. It lets you let the car drive itself, within the confines of one lane, safely on the highway. When I owned a Tesla, I probably used Autopilot for dozens of hours. I use the equivalent technology on the competitor EV I use today. It doesn’t cost me a dime.

By removing Autopilot, Musk is essentially making his smart car dumber than a Toyota Corolla you could buy ten years ago. He’s also making it more unsafe. These sorts of highway driving systems reduce fatigue and help avoid deadly driver errors. Now, you will only be able to get any self-driving aides by paying Musk $99 a month for an FSD subscription.

Rather than improving the service or lowering the price, Musk is simply using his market power to coerce his consumers to give him more money. One reason why he might want to boost FSD subscriptions is that his trillion dollar pay package is tied to the goal of achieving a certain number of subscriptions. We now know that safety and value matter far less to him than getting even more obscenely rich.

All across social media, EV enthusiasts are swearing to never buy another Tesla. And if the West continues to go in the direction of Canada, they may make good on their promise. The EVs coming out of China have been wowing consumers who have access to them for years. Even Ford’s American CEO decided to daily drive a Chinese EV.

It now looks like China is poised to take over the automotive industry in the same way the Japanese did with the rise of giants Honda and Toyota. The U.S. auto industry will continue to shrink, and Tesla will become a niche brand rather than a market leader.

It didn’t have to be this way, but it seems like we here in America put all our eggs in the Tesla basket; other American automakers did not have Musk’s wisdom of investing early and big in electric vehicles.

But now that Musk’s wisdom has given way to insanity, prepare to live in an automotive world where Beijing calls the shots.