July 13, 2024: An Oral History

There are certain moments in American history that have become iconic, whether they are triumphs or tragedies. This is not unique to the United States, of course. But given the United States’ role as a cultural superpower, even plenty of people who’ve never been to the country remember precisely where they were when these events occurred.

September 11, 2001 was such a day. Hijackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing about three thousand people immediately and twice that number later through health effects such as cancer. My mother remembers exactly where she was that day - taking my brother and I, who were both toddlers at the time, to buy shoes. 

Another such day was December 14, 2012. It was not the first school shooting in the United States, but as horrific and tragic as all such events are, Sandy Hook was even worse. The majority of the victims were six years old. My mother tells me she was Christmas shopping at the mall that day when news broke of the violence in Connecticut, and her thoughts turned to the families who wouldn’t get to see their children open their Christmas presents.

I was not old enough to remember 9/11, nor did they tell us about Sandy Hook as it was happening. I guess my school was far enough away to not be put on lockdown. It’s sickening that students go to school in this country worried about anything other than their GPA, but that’s the country we live in. And if Sandy Hook didn’t change things, it’s doubtful anything will.

In any case, for me, the day on which I remember exactly where I was happens to be one year ago today. July 13, 2024, the day later immortalized by MAGA musicians Hadas Levy and Forgiato Blow as “J13.”

On this hot, hazy summer evening, I was on vacation in a small Massachusetts town. My brother and I had agreed that we’d eat dinner together at a nearby restaurant, and we were getting dressed for it. I had donned the appropriate attire and was waiting for my brother to do the same. While waiting for him, I was looking at my phone, just the way people tended to do in 2024 (and even more people tend to do today).

It was then that I scrolled onto a political forum and saw the news that there had been an apparent assassination attempt against Donald Trump. He’d been speaking at a rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania when shots were fired, injuring him. It was the closest a President or former President had come to being murdered since the 1981 attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life.

When my brother came downstairs, our conversation went something like this:

Me: Hey, bro. Guess what?

Brother: What?

Me: Trump got shot.

Brother: Are you serious?

Me: Yes.

Brother: Holy shit.

We then proceeded to dinner, a restaurant in a beautiful location with even better food. We ate indoors, my brother urging me to resist the temptation to look at my phone. The restaurant’s employees, or whoever decides what channel the TV will be tuned to, made a very wise decision to show sports as opposed to news. If the TV had been on a news channel, the patrons would not have been able to focus on anything else.

Details emerged later. Trump had been shot in the ear from a distant range. The would-be assassin was a twenty-year-old man named Thomas Matthew Crooks, who’d been shot dead by a team of snipers seconds after he’d fired the shot heard around the world. Trump was treated at a nearby hospital, then flown out of Pittsburgh to attend the RNC at which Hulk Hogan et al would speak.

In all probability, we’ll never know precisely why Crooks tried to kill Trump. He was a registered Republican, but had made a small donation to a progressive cause. He’d only voted once, in the 2022 midterm elections. (Whether you voted in a given election is public record in this country, but who you voted for is not). We don’t know if he backed, for instance, John Fetterman or Mehmet Oz in that year’s US Senate race.

Now, look: I’m not a fan of Donald Trump. I never have been, and I never will be. But I don’t think we should discount the significance of “J13” from a historical perspective. I mean, the bullet grazed Trump’s ear; if he had not turned his head ever so slightly, he would have been dead. One inch. That’s all it would have taken to fundamentally change the course of history.

Immediately after the shooting, Evan Vucci, a photojournalist with the Associated Press, took some of the most famous photos of the year. And say what you will about Trump, but that image of him raising his fist with a giant American flag hanging against the sky has become iconic. We all saw the pictures. 

One of the most famous photographs of 2024 depicting a bloodied Donald Trump raising his fist after being shot in Butler County, Pennsylvania. There’s a giant American flag behind him.

This all occurred amidst the weeks of speculation over whether or not Joe Biden would drop out of the presidential race following the infamous “we finally beat Medicare” debate. The assassination attempt and resulting sympathy votes, coupled with those badass photos (as much as I hate Trump, they were badass) gave me a sinking feeling that Trump had the election in the bag. Biden’s ultimate withdrawal from the election, after which Kamala Harris announced she would run in his place, gave me false hope that we could avoid a second Trump term, but it was ultimately just that: False hope.

I do not know definitively how much this act of political violence, which I condemn in the clearest possible terms, contributed to Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. I simply don’t, and we should be honest about that. But it’s certainly a major moment in American history.

Relative to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, or the September 11 attacks in 2001, the news landscape has shifted massively. Digitally, we are far more divided into our own echo chambers - when Donald Trump says something completely demented that makes him sound just as far gone mentally as Joe Biden, many media outlets, particularly Fox News, don’t cover it. Neither do the social media circles that push QAnon, which is basically what the average Republican voter believes at this point. And those “social media circles” have become the main news source for many as the legacy media digs its own grave.

My point is that in today’s fragmented era of information, it’s a lot harder for there to be one Giant News Story™ that will Make The World Stand Still™. That’s especially true considering how quickly the news cycle has moved during the Trump era, particularly in the last few months. Perhaps Signalgate could have been that moment in a different world. (On a side note, the saying if a Democrat had done this is basically beating a dead horse by now. If Grandma had wheels, she’d be a bicycle. But the point is still valid.)

Despite the systemic factors hastening the news cycle, and despite the increasing atomization of American society, the events of “J13” managed to defy those trends. They have become an iconic American moment, whether we like it or not. 

Furthermore, it’s a sobering reminder that history isn’t just something that happened in the past. We’re all living through it. The guy who wrote that book about “the end of history” following the breakup of the Soviet Union was full of horseshit.

It’s not over until it’s over, and it’s never over.

The Revolution Was A Mistake

An American flag engulfed in flames. Image taken from Accent Banner.

Two hundred and forty-nine years ago today, the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. Following a bloody revolution, the country we know today as the United States came to be. Even today, many Americans mark this day with parades, barbecues, and fireworks.

Of course, I don’t think there’s very much to celebrate today. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” passed yesterday, and it’s going to kick millions of people off their health insurance, drastically increase the budget for ICE agents to snatch people off the street with no due process whatsoever, and make it even more difficult for the country to do anything about climate change. (Not that we were doing much anyway, to be fair.) And of course, that is far from an exhaustive list.

The more I think about it, the more I think the Revolution was a mistake. And to be clear, I’m not saying this just because Donald Trump is President. Plenty of systemic issues in American society would have remained even if Kamala Harris had won that election, gun violence being an example. 

Even if the general public has forgotten in most of the country, I still recall the July 4, 2022 mass shooting at a parade in Highland Park, Illinois. Some people commented at the time that it was appropriate, given where the country has fallen. It occurred as the country was still reeling from several other shootings, such as the racially motivated supermarket massacre in Buffalo, NY and the Robb Elementary massacre in Uvalde, TX. Are you sensing a pattern here? 

It was the Highland Park shooting that specifically motivated singer-songwriter Pat Benatar to announce that she would no longer perform her most famous song. And I respect her a lot for that decision, but it just shows where we’re at as a society.

Of course, gun violence is far from the only reason I’m not proud to be American, but it’s among the biggest. The United Kingdom, the country we gained independence from, had one school shooting in 1996. Dunblane was so horrific that they simply had to act, and they did. There hasn’t been a school shooting in the UK since. Meanwhile, when the American version of Dunblane happened at Sandy Hook, we did nothing. Indeed, less than nothing, for we have even more gun violence than we did prior to that horrific tragedy.

It’s the same thing with Australia after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre - they passed gun control. Of course, Australia had hundreds of thousands of firearms as opposed to hundreds of millions. I’m convinced that even if the will to pass gun control existed in this country, there would be no way to actually confiscate everyone’s AR-15s. 

But let’s imagine what it would be like if Britain had won the Revolutionary War. Now, we can’t be sure of everything. If Grandma had wheels, she’d be a bicycle. 

If the USA had lost the Revolution, slavery would have been abolished decades earlier. There wouldn’t have been a civil war either, so that would’ve been preferable. It’s often said that the South lost the war, but won the Reconstruction, and that creates many issues that persist to this day.

Now, I’m not going to say that environmental racism doesn’t exist at all in the UK and Commonwealth countries like Canada and Australia. It does. But it’s not to the same extent, and besides, look how these other countries address it.

The bill currently being debated in the British Parliament, which is often referred to as “Ella’s Law” after a young girl who died as a result of air pollution, would aim to address it. The bill has support from many MPs of both the Labour and Conservative parties. I expect it to pass overwhelmingly, because who doesn’t want cleaner air? 

Well, apparently the GOP doesn’t want clean air over here. If this bill were brought up in the current Republican-controlled US Congress, it would never get a vote. And even if it did get a vote, few if any Republican politicians would vote for it. That’s how totally captured by fossil fuel interests the GOP has become since Citizens United. 

And we just accept that as normal. We consider it normal that one party keeps pulling us out of the Paris Climate Accords whenever they retake the presidency. Obviously, this accord has little to no enforcement mechanism, so when faced with a leader like Donald Trump it’s basically toilet paper. But other countries are massively reducing their emissions. We’re the only country where “climate change denial” is even a thing, and the rest of the world is going to pay dearly for our revolution.

Consider also the foreign policy of Donald Trump’s second term. During Joe Biden’s presidency, he was able to repair foreign relations to a great extent. He supported Ukraine without reservation. If they wanted weapons from the United States, they typically got them. It was because of this support that the war in Ukraine lasted over three years as opposed to three days. Compare that to Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine. He’s not only withdrawing weapons that have already been pledged, he might even start sending weapons to Russia. He might literally support Russia materially as opposed to just rhetorically, and that’s a disgrace.

It’s not just Ukraine, though. Trump keeps calling Canada, a far greater country than we are (in large part because they don’t feel the need to announce it all the time) the “51st state.” He’s one hundred percent serious about annexing them. Unlike Vladimir Putin, who claimed until the day before the invasion that he wasn’t going to attack Ukraine, Trump’s not even bothering to deny it! 

Whether or not Trump actually follows through with his threats to Canada is only part of the issue. Even if we don’t end up invading our former ally, and Trump leaves office to hopefully be replaced by a Democrat, I don’t think any country is going to trust us again. Any deal that requires longer than a four-year commitment on our part isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on when the next Republican President is going to go back to talking about invading Canada and Greenland. Prime Ministers of other countries might have varied foreign policy, but much like with climate policy, it doesn’t do a total 180° just because a different party took power.

Of course, one reason for this political stability is the Parliamentary system that Canada and Australia inherited from Great Britain. A system where the head of government is selected from the majority party or coalition in the legislature is far more resistant to political gridlock. Additionally, it encourages the formation of multiple parties, which encourages consensus to a far greater degree than the American two-party system. 

Not every Parliamentary system has ranked-choice voting, but those that do are generally more harmonious. It disincentivizes negative campaigning, which means that you’re a lot less likely to attack another candidate if you’re hoping that candidate’s voters will rank you second. Besides, ranked-choice voting can stimulate the growth of third parties, because you’ll now be able to vote for them without feeling like you’re wasting your vote.

Now, I’m not going to defend everything the British Empire did back in the day. Some of their actions were…not great. And that’s putting it mildly. But when you look at the alternative, which is the shitshow that is the United States of America, I think the healthy Parliamentary democracy we could have been sounds rather appealing at the moment.

Level Of Concern

A long-sleeve men’s T-shirt bearing a depiction of US Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) with the caption “Often Disappointed, Always Disappointing.” Image taken from Spreadshirt. I have a short-sleeve version of this design.

For the last few days, all anyone has been able to talk about are the U.S.-initiated strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. At least, that’s how it is currently. Who knows if people will still be talking about them next week; my bet is that they won’t be, at least in the United States. No matter how far the conflict escalates, the fact that we are or were ever involved in the war between Iran and Israel will be memory-holed by most American civilians.

On some level, it’s hard to blame them. Donald Trump is using the tried and true strategy of “flooding the zone.” If so many insane things happen that it’s hard to keep track of all of them, people will have a hard time paying attention to any of them. Therefore, many will decide to check out of politics.

Listen: I’m as sick of politics as many other people. The Facepalm subreddit is now about 85% Trump, whereas it used to have a wide variety of cringe-worthy mishaps. I understand that the United States, as one of the world’s most powerful countries, being in a democratic death spiral is newsworthy. But surely there are some newsworthy events that don’t involve Donald Trump, aren’t there?

As for TourismHell, while it used to be largely about overtourism in European destinations, is now about 70% related to the ongoing boycott of the United States by foreign travelers. And I want to be clear: Foreign tourists are well within their right to travel, or in this case not travel, wherever they like. We’re not exactly acting like welcoming hosts at the moment, at least not at the governmental level. Given the reports of foreigners being detained at customs, including that Australian journalist who covered pro-Palestine student protests, I certainly don’t blame those who decide to stay away. And honestly, a decline in foreign tourism is, practically speaking, the least of our worries at this point.

Even so, the “not visiting the USA” party has gotten a little repetitive, even if I agree that now isn’t a good time to visit the USA. But that’s beside the point. 

Anyway, I said I was sick of politics. And I realize that comparisons to Nazi Germany are pretty much beating a dead horse at this point. They’ve become cliché by now. But I’d imagine the German people were probably sick of politics in 1938. But that doesn’t mean politics were sick of them.

It’s that realization that keeps me glued to the news every single day. I’m here for the chaos, as much as I wish I were not. This could have been avoided, of course, if American voters were okay with a perfectly qualified black woman as President. But we weren’t, collectively speaking, so this is what we get instead.

The strikes on Iran are a serious crime. Trump appears to have contacted Republicans in Congress and not Democrats, but the important part is that he did not receive any Congressional authorization for this act of war. He walked right through any checks on his own power, not that such checks exist when the GOP is determined to delegate their power to Trump. Seriously, I get that they don’t care about democracy or the well-being of the country, but even I am stunned by how little they care about their own power. 

In practical terms, I don’t think this is World War III. At least, not yet. Some would argue that Democrats should saddle Trump with starting World War III in the hopes of tanking his approval ratings, but I’m not certain that will work. And even so, does it matter how low his approval ratings get? We have three and a half more years of him regardless because that’s how the idiots voted.

Yes, tensions will increase in the Middle East. Members of the American military stationed there are likely to face heightened threats to their safety. But none of America’s former allies are likely to join them in this fight. Russia is busy with the genocidal war they started in Ukraine. China has no desire to rock the boat. And India and Pakistan are more concerned with each other than what’s going on in Iran and Israel.

In short, I don’t think this conflict can reasonably be expected to escalate into what an objective observer would call World War III. I simply don’t. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a major “crossing the Rubicon” moment.

If an authorization of military force does eventually pass a la Iraq (which is admittedly doubtful because, again, Congress doesn’t care about their own power) Trump might use a state of war to justify cracking down on protests at home. Our insanely inebriated Secretary of Defense Pete Kegseth has refused to rule out ordering the military to fire on peaceful demonstrators. If he’s not willing to say “absolutely not”, the answer is probably “absolutely yes.”

Moreover, by all accounts, Trump didn’t join the war because he felt Iran was a threat. He joined the war because he was triggered by Elon Musk humiliating him. And that’s incredibly frightening, because it shows how petty and impulsive he is.

Seriously. Who’s to say that he won’t do something even more insane next time his ego takes a hit? I realize that there’s a world of difference between striking military targets (with very few civilians present) in a country that’s long been an enemy of the United States, as opposed to randomly bombing cities in a country that used to be our closest ally. But given that Trump keeps calling Canada the “51st state”, it’s at least conceivable he might actually follow through on these threats.

Of course, I think it’s very likely that this conflict is going to be forgotten by the average American within a month. After a week or two, I don’t think most people will even remember that we struck Iran on June 21 (June 22 local time), even if our involvement in said conflict escalates significantly. It’ll be memory-holed just like mass shootings so often are in this country. And that’s by design.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not convinced that I am. Consider the recent Los Angeles unrest, in which people protested against Trump’s deportations and Trump called in the military. Another Australian journalist (not the same one who got deported while trying to visit friends in New York) was shot with a rubber bullet. It seemed like an enormous escalation at the time, but now nobody’s talking about the Los Angeles unrest anymore, nor the fact that the National Guard was sent in. But guess what?

That was two weeks ago.

Two Democratic lawmakers, state legislators from Minnesota, and their spouses were shot in their own homes in the middle of the night, with one of the couples dying. A few disgusting Senators, such as Mike Lee of Utah and Bernie Moreno of Ohio, spread conspiracy theories and mocked the assassination. As insane a milestone as that is, yet another “crossing the Rubicon” moment if that phrase still has any meaning, most people aren’t paying attention anymore. Guess what?

That was nine days ago.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m deeply concerned about our new involvement in Iran. And I say that sincerely, unlike a certain Senator from Maine. But compared to what’s already happened, and compared to what will surely come next week, it’s hard to give it too much oxygen. 

We’re in for a wild ride, folks.

Another Wild Week

A meme featuring characters from “The Adventures of Tintin” lamenting that it’s only Wednesday. Image taken from a Xitter thumbnail.

For those of you who may have already forgotten (or more likely, hadn’t heard to begin with), my birthday was last week. I turned 25. And I actually wrote a deeply existential essay about it in order to celebrate this milestone. 

As it turns out, that essay would end up being appropriate for more reasons than one.

In the early hours of June 12, a plane crashed in India. The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, operating as Air India Flight 171, was from Ahmedabad and was flying to London-Gatwick. At least, it was supposed to fly there before crashing into a medical school’s residence hall. There was only one survivor on the plane, and I can’t imagine how much going through something like that must fuck with you. 

I mean, this man literally saw well over two hundred people die suddenly and violently right before his eyes. And he jumped out of a window to escape it. I don’t know how you live through that without permanent psychological scarring.

For a world already questioning the safety of air travel in the last few months, this is only likely to ignite further speculation. For the record, I don’t know definitively how much Donald Trump is to blame for all these aviation incidents the news is reporting on. I simply don’t, and I think we should be honest about that. 

However, what I’m pretty damn sure about is that if a Democrat were President right now (as cliché as that saying has become), the GOP would never let them hear the end of it. Indeed, I shudder to think of what they’d be doing to Biden if he were still in the White House. More on that later.

The following day, June 13, Israel launched missiles at Iran. Apparently Trump gave Netanyahu permission to do this, which makes it even more infuriating to me. “Harris the Hawk, Donald the Dove”...what a joke. The “Genocide Joe” crowd seems awfully silent now, and why shouldn’t they be? They should be ashamed of themselves! I certainly would be if I were responsible for Trump being back in the White House.

For the last several days, Iran and Israel have been trading missile attacks back and forth. Because we’ve been helping Israel shoot down the missiles headed for Tel Aviv, and because the Israeli attacks on Iran (unlike the ones on Gaza) have mostly hit military targets, civilian casualties have thus far not been very high. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still an enormous impact.

A map of live air traffic as of about 24 hours ago, courtesy of r/MapPorn.

Take a look at this map. Planes can’t fly over much of the Middle East because Iraq and Jordan closed their airspace. They also can’t fly over Ukraine for obvious fucking reasons, and haven’t been able to for several years. And of course, they’ve never been able to fly over Tibet due to the risk of depressurization and the fact that if the plane needed to descend to 10,000 feet, it would end up in the ground, as would everyone on it.

I feel horrible for air traffic controllers in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan at this point. They’re probably quite overwhelmed, and who knows how long we have until there’s a crash in the Caucasus thanks to this? We can put the blame at least partly on Trump’s hands if this does happen.

This war is sure to divide the world. Personally, I hate the governments of both Iran and Israel, but I just feel horrible for the civilians on both sides who are going to suffer (and in some cases die) for their governments’ genocidal ambitions. I don’t understand why that’s such a controversial take. 

And then, in the early hours of June 14, we received the news that a state legislative leader had been assassinated in Minnesota, along with her husband. They’d been shot dead in their own house. To those who are afraid to go out for fear of being caught in a mass shooting, well, you’re not any safer at home. At least not if you’re a public figure. 

Now, politically-motivated gun violence is not new in this country. Quite a few mass shootings have been classified as terrorism (which is a strategy, not an ideology). But this is the first time in a very long time that the victims have been elected officials, and I honestly wonder if the Democrats need to invest greatly in security for their candidates and representatives. This truly feels like a “crossing the Rubicon” moment.

And I’m being deadly serious. How many people who might otherwise have been bright, promising Democratic leaders will now rule out entering politics for fear that something like this might happen to them or their families? I’d imagine it’s more than any of us think right now, and that number’s only going to grow as the situation in this country deteriorates. 

In the immediate aftermath of this assassination (because let’s call it what it is, an assassination), Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Bernie Moreno of Ohio literally mocked it on Xitter. While Russ Feingold to Ron Johnson was probably the biggest Senate downgrade of the 21st century, it’s hard for me not to see Sherrod Brown to Bernie Moreno being a strong contender for the number two spot. I could make a naughty joke here, but I’m not going to, because this is no laughing matter.

Senators Lee and Moreno should resign. And if they refuse to resign, they should be expelled. At least, that’s what I would be saying if we lived in a sane country!

In reality, if Lee or Moreno were expelled (which will never ever happen, because their Republican colleagues probably all agree with them that this is funny), they’d both more than likely be replaced with people just as awful. And if anything, that might galvanize Republican voters more ahead of the midterms. I hate to say that, but it’s true. And I really don’t know how we’re going to deradicalize people in this country.

And then Trump had the military parade that same evening. I didn’t watch it; I didn’t want to contribute to its ratings, and quite frankly, I liked seeing him triggered. Images circulated online of Trump sitting at the parade looking exhausted and dejected. Honestly, those are hilarious. They say that only about forty thousand people (splitting the difference here) attended the parade, whereas millions went to “No Kings” protests. (Confession time: I chickened out of attending my local protest.)

Donald Trump looking disappointed. Image taken from the Hollywood Reporter.

In the midst of everything I’ve mentioned, there are still riots in Los Angeles. There’s still a war in Ukraine. There was still the recent G7 meeting in the Canadian Rockies at which Donald Trump humiliated the nation he represented once again. On the bright side, Trump mentioned trying for a trade deal with Canada. And I don’t want to be a Pollyanna about anything, but if I was level 10 concerned about the United States invading its former ally before, I might be level 7 concerned now. 

That’s still way too high, of course. And the fact that everyone’s reaction isn’t “Of course we’re not invading Canada, what the hell are you talking about?!” speaks volumes about where we’re at.

And then, of course, there’s the heat advisory in interior Alaska. People are saying that it’s the first-ever heat advisory for Alaska, which is true but misleading. This is the first year that the Juneau and Fairbanks weather stations were able to declare heat advisories, so it’s not surprising that this week’s warning would be the first.

That being said, it’s still pretty alarming. Not only does it serve as further evidence, as if it were needed, that America is failing the whole world through our climate denial and resulting ecocide, but it’s a big problem for Alaskans right now. Temperatures are reaching the low 30s Celsius, or upper 80s Fahrenheit, this week.

Where I live in Massachusetts, a temperature like that is not crazy during the hottest part of summer, even if it’s slightly above average. But as we learned during the 2022 UK heat wave, places are built for a certain climate - Alaska’s homes are meant to keep the heat in. If we’re ever going to meaningfully adapt to the climate crisis, we’ll have to upgrade current housing at northern latitudes to more sustainably cool itself. (Will that ever happen here? Probably not. I know this.)

I honestly don’t know how I stay sane given everything crumbling around me. The craziest part is that in my day to day life, everything looks fairly normal. I don’t live in Los Angeles, admittedly. And I’m a white guy born in the USA, so ICE hasn’t come knocking on my door yet. I’ve traveled abroad twice since Trump took office again and had no problems getting back in, yet. 

That’s the eerie thing. Amidst all this turmoil, so many Americans barely know any of it is going on, because to many, everyday life seems normal. To some extent, I don’t blame people for tuning it out. 

Whether you’re religious, superstitious, spiritual, or none of the above, I think we can all agree. On a philosophical level, humans were not meant to contend with this much chaotic news at any given time. Perhaps social media truly has broken our brains. Like Icarus, we have flown too close to the sun. 

Haze Of Our Lives

It’s been a few weeks since the smoke started.

Now, from the standpoint of proximity to the actual fire, I’m one of the lucky ones. My hometown in Massachusetts was not evacuated, mainly because the actual fires are hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The people of Flin Flon, Manitoba, a small town of about 5,000 people, were not so lucky.

Consider this: Two years ago, there were several days during which New York City’s sky was orange due to the smoke. The Big Apple briefly had the worst air quality in the world. In my Boston suburb, it wasn’t nearly that bad, but there were still a few days when we were advised to stay indoors if at all possible. Compared to 2023, Massachusetts air quality hasn’t been awful.

I say this not to minimize the tragedy that’s currently taking place. Several people have lost their lives as a result of these fires. It’s likely that a few orders of magnitude more people will lose their homes by the end of the fire season. I don’t want to be flippant about that.

Nor do I want to be flippant about the reason these fires are getting worse. Yes, forest fires have always been part of the ecosystem, and they are a natural cycle. There’s a reason why many indigenous peoples used controlled burns to prevent fires from reaching the areas in which they lived. Contrary to what Smokey the Bear once said, some fire is good.

As I write this article, I’m lying sideways beside a beach towel beneath the moderately strong sun. This is the same town beach at which I recently spent part of my 25th birthday. My right leg feels pretty tan, and I know intellectually that I might have given it a little too much sun. A mild sunburn is quite likely, and if I didn’t have a swim shirt on, my chest and back would itch like a motherfucker pretty soon.

Like fire, the sun is an essential ingredient of life on Earth. We need it to survive, unless you’re one of those progressive Norwegian scientists who can grow tomatoes in a greenhouse. In all seriousness, too much sun can be very dangerous. Hell, even looking too directly at the sun can cause severe eye damage. That’s no secret.

We keep hearing about how 2024 was the hottest year on record, and that May 2025 was the hottest May on record. And we’re sure breaking a lot of records, aren’t we?

Here’s the thing, though: The current hottest year on record may well end up being the coldest year of the rest of our lives. We will still have cold days and still have some blizzards, but the overall trend is clear to anyone paying attention. That’s why Jim “Senator Snowball” Inhofe, may he rest in piss, was so brutally mocked.

Trends are real, even when they’re inconvenient.

Earlier today, I went on Google Maps and used their air quality layer. Say what you will about Google as a company and their capitulation to Donald Trump on stupid naming disputes, but their maps are pretty awesome, which is why I keep using them. Anyway, I saw that my area of Massachusetts is back in the lime green zone after enduring a couple days of yellow air quality. It was never that dangerous for most people, but it was less than ideal by our standards.

A Google Maps view of air quality in North America and Europe. Hotter colors indicate higher levels of air pollution.

The “usual suspects” were not terribly surprising. Parts of several Canadian provinces (really, parts of all Canadian provinces) are on fire, so it’s no wonder that they have high AQI indices due to the smoke. There are also wildfires out west in my own country. 

Over in Europe, the Po Valley of Northern Italy was in the yellow/orange transition zone. Being an industrial area surrounded on three sides by mountains, that makes sense. But I noticed that the south of France had worse air quality than northern France (which seemed odd to me thanks to air pollution in and around Paris, even if Mayor Hidalgo’s anti-car efforts have been laudable). 

I took to the Geography subreddit and asked why this was. And I received answers.

Some people said that dust from the Sahara Desert blew into the south of France, hindering the air quality there. That struck me as odd - that’s a pretty far distance for sand to be blown. Phoenix, the “perfect” American city, also has this issue with haboobs. Yes, that’s a silly name, but deal with it.

But then more responses trickled in. It was smoke from the Canadian wildfires, they said. Said smoke had traveled all the way from the remote areas of Earth’s second-largest country geographically to some of Europe’s population centers. The winds carried it across the Atlantic, they told me.

This serves as a sobering reminder that we’re all interconnected in this world. The wildfires in Canada affect air quality not just in Canada and the United States, but also a lot further afield. I also remember reading that one reason South Korea struggled with air pollution was because of industrial activity in nearby China. And speaking of China, that country (along with India) is often cited as an excuse by people who don’t want to do anything about our greenhouse gas emissions. 

But here’s the thing. It’s total whataboutism. Whether or not China truly is a climate villain (and I posit that they are not; their renewable energy revolution is palpable, whatever you can say about their government’s human rights record), that doesn’t change our moral obligation to act. We must, in the words of Bernie Sanders, transform our energy system away from fossil fuels. If not, the fires are only going to get worse.

Of course, we’re not doing that right now. Donald Trump is President of the United States. He’s not only pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accord (which, in all honesty, doesn’t mean much in practical terms since it has no enforcement mechanism), he’s also signed numerous executive orders to drill for fossil fuels on public lands and roll back Biden-era renewable energy incentives. 

Will it completely halt progress toward renewable energy? Probably not. And let’s be honest: Even if Kamala Harris had won, I don’t foresee any new climate legislation being passed with what would still probably have been a Republican Senate. One election wouldn’t have solved this problem. Additionally, it’s not like 1.99°C of warming is “everything’s fine” and 2.01°C is “absolute doomsday” - it’s more nuanced than that. But that’s a topic for another day.

Make no mistake, however: The election of Donald Trump as President was a giant leap in the wrong direction.

That’s the thing about the 2024 election. If it was just about domestic policy, that would be one thing. Gun violence is a massive red stain on this nation, but at least it mostly only affects Americans (the occasional unlucky foreign tourist notwithstanding). But when it comes to the climate crisis, what the United States does carries a massive impact on the rest of the world. Because of Trump, the climate crisis is going to get a lot worse. 

We had no right to elect Donald Trump, and in my opinion, other countries would have every right to invade us if they so chose. 

Yes, the rain may have washed away the smoke for now. But it’s not going to wash away my guilt by association. It’s not all of our fault, but it is all of our responsibility.

Fuck, I hate this timeline!

Trump TV

By all accounts, it’s been a pretty insane couple of days. The FDA announced recently that they would not recommend COVID boosters for people under age 65 unless they were considered to be at high risk. Yes, this is really happening. I’m glad I was able to get an impromptu booster yesterday, and some other people probably will as well. 

But Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Sewage, promised that if we wanted vaccines, we would still be able to get them. He said this under oath. And yet, he was lying, just like many people warned he was. He’s taking away our freedom of choice, and as a result, there will be many otherwise preventable hospitalizations and deaths. I left a comment on the regulations.gov page, but who knows if that’ll do anything. Still, it’s worth a shot.

In the last week or two, Trump announced that he was going to receive a $400 million plane from Qatar to use as Air Force One. Again, this is really happening. As brazenly corrupt as this is, the most worrying part is that the Qatari jet is almost certainly bugged seven ways from Sunday. It’s literally an intelligence nightmare on par with Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard. At this point, you might as well give Vladimir Putin a Cabinet position - for all intents and purposes, he’s already President.

And to those who say Putin must have something on Trump, I understand why you’d think that, but there’s still a gaping hole in this theory. 

We already know lots of horrible things about Trump given how his first term ended and the fact that he was convicted of thirty-four felony charges. I’m not naïve to Trump’s admiration of Putin and how dangerous that is. But my issue with the blackmail theory is this: What could Putin POSSIBLY have on Trump that’s so much worse than what we already know? And, more importantly: Why is he so scared of that secret coming out when he’s proven to be Teflon Don otherwise?

No. I think it’s more likely Trump simply loves Putin and wants to be just like him. That’s incredibly dangerous, of course, and I don’t want to minimize that. Other countries are going to stop sharing intelligence with us pretty soon, if they haven’t already. And we’re going to see more terrorist attacks.

In the midst of all this chaos and outrage, it would be nice if we had a mainstream media that did its job. It would be nice if they called out the Trump administration for all their horrendous acts, as well as the American public for electing that man not once but twice. But that’s not the world we live in.

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock lately, former US President Joe Biden was recently diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of prostate cancer. In my view, it makes the saga last year surrounding efforts to remove him from the race seem even more tragic in hindsight. There have obviously been many questions about how this wasn’t detected sooner - after all, Biden has the best healthcare in the world. 

To be sure, this certainly warrants some discussion in the media. The issue is that it’s all the media is talking about. I’m not going to link to CNN, which has basically become Trump TV at this point thanks to all the “sane-washing” it does, but they’ve been running segment after segment about how the Democrats covered up Biden’s health. As if it’s remotely equivalent to everything Trump and the GOP have done!

Yes, the Democratic Party tried to hide Joe Biden’s decline from the general public. But quite frankly, I don’t care about that anymore. Biden isn’t President anymore, and he’ll never be President again. He’ll be lucky to live out the rest of the year. The point is, he should be politically irrelevant at this point, and he probably would be if the media stopped talking about the cover-up. This could lead into a rant about the Democrats’ age problem, but I won’t go there right now.

Of course, it needs to be said that this is far from the only example of the media sabotaging the Democratic Party. Consider how much they sane-washed Trump during the leadup to the 2024 election. It’s no secret at this point that they desperately wanted to return to the White House for the sake of ratings.

Donald Trump, of course, is a ratings machine. Whether you love him or hate him, you have to pay attention. The idea that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” was basically the modus operandi of his 2016 campaign, and he keeps grabbing your attention with insane threats, such as that to make Canada the 51st state.

Speaking of that particular threat, CNN is totally broken at this point. Or maybe broken is the wrong word - it’s working exactly as they want it to. Again, I’m not going to give them any more traffic through this blog (however small that amount of traffic might be), but I remember that they talked about Trump’s 51st state comments as “Trump eyes territorial expansion.” This is sane-washing of the highest order. 

Honestly, there’s a word for what Trump proposes. There’s a word for forcibly annexing a country with the intent of conquering it and making it part of your own country. The word is invasion.

If you want to know what an invasion entails, look no further than Ukraine. Now, I’m aware that media coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a fraction of what it once was. During the first few days and weeks of the war, Ukraine was everywhere. You couldn’t escape the news about Snake Island, or the siege on Mariupol, or the numerous other war crimes Russian forces have committed the last few years. 

Now, of course, this conflict has faded into the background, especially since the October 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent war against Hamas (and genocide in Gaza) soaking up all the attention. But the war in Ukraine, now well into its fourth year, is still going on, and still just as bloody as ever.

The point is, war is brutal, especially when civilians are targeted like what Russia and Israel are doing. Trump’s proposing doing exactly this to Canada, because they will fight back. Canadians are proud of one thing above all, and that’s not being Americans. It’s hard to blame them when they’ve got universal health insurance and sane gun laws. 

Will Trump actually invade Canada? Who knows. It’s a joke until it isn’t. But it’s incredibly irresponsible of CNN to use the euphemism of “territorial expansion” to describe such an unspeakable crime. 

So, if we have a mainstream media that’s totally in the tank for Donald Trump, what’s the solution? That’s where I come in.

I haven’t been as consistent in writing this blog as I should be, but I’m here to deliver the news as I see it. I might not have a fancy journalism degree, but you don’t need one in order to tell people what they need to know. Your “I Can” is more important than your IQ, isn’t it?

The mainstream media, CNN et al,  is Trump TV. They sanitized everything he proposed, and they continue to do so. Independent, alternative media is the way forward for our country. It’s the only way we’ll convince enough people that they were destructive fools for giving Donald Trump another term in the White House.

He’s Not Kidding

Seriously. How many times do we have to wonder whether or not he’s joking? How many times do we have to look at his repeated “jokes” about running for a third term and assume that he’s not actually going to do it? 

Put another way, how long do we need to look at the evidence that’s staring us all in the face, like we’re all deer in headlights, and still insist that he can’t possibly get away with that? Honestly, he’s done so many things he “couldn’t” do - that didn’t stop him from doing it!

The “inciting incident” for this article, if you will, was the news that President Donald Trump (yuck) has begun selling merchandise with language on it suggesting that he’ll run for a third term as President of the United States. This is unconstitutional by any reasonable reading of the 22nd Amendment.

Let’s look at the language of that amendment: No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of President more than once.

A “Trump 2028” shirt from Trump’s official online store.

Trump has already been elected twice, in 2016 and 2024. As sickening as it is that Grover Cleveland is no longer alone in serving two non-consecutive terms, that’s just how it is. But the Constitution is pretty clear that he can’t be elected again.

That’s a very important distinction, though: Maybe he can’t be elected to a third term, but nowhere in the amendment does it state that he can’t run again. And if he’s running, there’s always a chance he can be elected. A very good chance, in fact, given that he’s Teflon Don.

Of course, Trump is currently ineligible to be President. The Fourteenth Amendment states that anyone who has incited an insurrection against the United States cannot run for President. But the Supreme Court didn’t care - those Republican Injustices (and yes, we should call them “Republicans” rather than “conservatives”) ruled against Colorado when they tried to remove him from the ballot for that reason. And of course, they later ruled in Trump v. United States that Trump specifically was above the law for “official acts.”

Seriously, if a future Democratic President (not that we’re likely to have a future Democratic President) tried to jail political opponents and pass sweeping progressive executive orders to get around Congress, do you think the Supreme Court would be okay with it? Of course they wouldn’t. 

Here’s how it goes: If the President is a Republican, anything is an “official act”, even if it’s something absolutely criminal like invading Canada or building concentration camps. The latter has technically already happened. But if the President is a Democrat, then they can’t so much as wear a tan suit without violating the law.

And that’s before the whole matter of Trump openly defying his own Supreme Court. But at this point, as much as I hate Trump, I have no sympathy for Chief Injustice Roberts when he complains about how his orders aren’t being followed. He had an opportunity to make sure Donald Trump would not return to power, and he not only dropped the ball, he threw it away!

So can Trump run for a third term? Yes. And I truly believe that if he runs for a third term (which elected Republicans want him to do since he’s a giant turnout machine for the GOP), he will be elected a third time. Here’s how it’s going to go.

Trump is going to announce his 2028 campaign right after the 2026 midterms. Of course, this will only be his official announcement, because it’s been clear to everyone with a functioning brain (which excludes half the country) that he’s been running for a third term since the 2024 election.

Democrats will write strongly-worded letters, and Susan Collins (if she’s still a Senator, which I firmly believe she will be because Maine voters are that stupid) will say she’s “concerned” but do nothing to act on that concern. Seriously, that’s how it goes with her - I even have a Susan Collins T-shirt saying “often disappointed, always disappointing”. I’m not kidding.

Ultimately, though, Democrats will not have the power to stop Trump even if they win the House and Senate. Remember that very little of Trump 47’s agenda has actually been voted on by Congress. They don’t matter, and therefore neither do the midterms really matter. Sure, Democrats can order investigations, but what would the investigations really tell us? We all know Trump’s a fascist - we either don’t care or don’t need to be convinced of that.

When Trump files to run, Democratic-controlled states will try to remove him from the ballot. This time, they would seem to have a very strong case against an argument that “two terms means three terms”, or at least that the 22nd Amendment only refers to consecutive terms. 

Yes, a Supreme Court ruling that Trump can be elected for a third term would be a flagrant violation of the Constitution. But so was their ruling that he could be on the ballot in 2024 after January 6. It’s not like the difference is between covertly stealing cookies and getting away with murder.

I think it’s likely that the six (or more) Republican Injustices on the Supreme Court will rule that Trump can run for a third term, he just can’t be elected for a third term. You and I might wonder what the point of running is if you can’t be elected, but that’s beside the point. The Republican Party doesn’t care about logic, and neither do American swing voters.

Now, given the state this country is likely to be in by 2028, it might seem unlikely that Trump would win the 2028 election. Surely the buyer’s remorse will have set in by then, right? 

But I’m not convinced he’d lose. Even with the economy in freefall in 2020 and thousands of Americans dying a day from COVID-19, Trump just barely lost to Joe Biden. And he didn’t have nearly as much power to challenge the results then as he does now. His Republican allies are far more prepared to steal the 2028 election than they were to steal the 2020 election.

More to the point, Trump is a turnout machine. GOP voters are mindless zombies at this point who will turn out whenever he’s on the ballot. If they had to, they’d crawl naked over broken glass in subzero weather just to fill in that bubble. Sure, people might be sick of him by 2028, but I thought they’d be sick of him in 2024 - apparently not. Last year, there were more of them than there were of us. That’s what matters in an election.

If you put a gun to my head, I do believe Trump would win the 2028 election, in which case he doesn’t need to steal it. At that point, the Supreme Court isn’t going to step in. They’ll just say there was nothing we could do just like centrist Democrats often did during Joe Biden’s presidency. 

Some people say that Trump’s mind is going and that he’ll be in no state to run for “threelection” in 2028. But I don’t see it. He lost a lot of weight during his 2024 campaign, and he has the best medical care in the world. And he’s always sounded rambling; that doesn’t mean he has dementia. If anything, given our luck, he’ll probably live to be 100 and never relinquish power until he dies. And even then, Republicans will probably prop him up like that movie Weekend at Bernie’s. 

We will never be rid of the Trump dynasty. The sooner we accept that…well, I wouldn’t say the better. But it’ll be easier to deal with it if we know it’s coming.

How Disney Explains Nostalgia

After some reflection on the subject and the way the Internet (and other digital technologies) have fundamentally changed our lives, I’ve started to think that in many ways, life was better in the past. At least from a U.S. perspective - I can’t speak to the experience of people who live in countries that actually care about their citizens.

By “ancient places”, I don’t mean the time of the Roman Empire, mind you. Instead I’ll talk more about the 1980s and 1990s. Even if I wasn’t old enough to live through that time, it still seems relevant for this purpose, as there are plenty of people still around today who did experience this era.

First of all, I’ve noticed that people are generally less informed about current events than they were in the past. To some extent, this is self-evident; if more Americans knew what the hell was going on, Donald Trump would never have won the 2016 election, let alone the 2024 election. Trump might be the most egregious example of people here voting against their own best interest, but he isn’t the first.

This is no coincidence. With the proliferation of Internet-based news sources, whether they be digital versions of the New York Times, blogs like this one, or conspiracy channels like Infowars, this has jeopardized the ability of physical newspapers to remain competitive.

And when you think about it, why should one go after a physical newspaper? They use paper, a resource that (for now) comes from trees being chopped down. But people being more environmentally conscious is not the chief reason why “traditional news sources” are declining. Simply put, they can’t compete with news sources that can be at your fingertips with no financial cost (though possibly a significant mental health cost).

 America’s “news deserts” are disproportionately located in rural areas of the country. Much like food deserts, places that have limited options to purchase healthy food, news deserts have little to no access to information about events near them. (For what it’s worth, food deserts and news deserts frequently overlap).

It used to be that local politics was something people paid attention to. After all, it’s still commonly said that all politics is local. And I’ll admit that for as much as I follow national (and sometimes international) politics, I barely know what’s going on in my own city. And I’m far from the only one. By some estimates, a third of U.S. news outlets that existed in 2005 had shut down by 2024. And again, rural areas have been hit the hardest by this trend, because they are less likely to have the financial resources to sustain a newspaper.

Speaking of small towns, I recently watched a Wendover Productions video about the proliferation of stores like Dollar General. Now, Dollar General is technically not a dollar store - in fact, since the stuff you buy there breaks every so often, you don’t save much money in the long run. Terry Pratchett was right all along - it is indeed more expensive to be poor, especially in the USA.

But let’s talk about Wendover’s video. When he speaks here at 17:58,  narrator Sam Denby states that “Main Street, USA” is in danger. The stock footage used, perhaps ironically, is of a thriving Main Street in a small American town. 

Once upon a time, these Main Streets were thriving. Nowadays, the only small towns in the USA with thriving Main Streets tend to be affluent areas that 5% or less of the population can comfortably afford to live in, historic locations in New England where architecture has changed little, or places with lots of seasonal tourism. These three categories are not mutually exclusive; in many cases, one of them reinforces the other two.

 Say what you will about Walt Disney as an individual, but I remember watching old Disney movies like Lady and the Tramp and The Fox and the Hound, both of which are set in small-town America. For people of all ages (and not just those cringe-worthy “Disney adults”), these films bring to mind happy memories, and one possible reason why occurred to me recently.

Movie poster for “Lady and the Tramp”. Image taken from the Film Art Gallery.

Movie poster for “The Fox and the Hound”. Image taken from Amazon.

 The Wikipedia article for the former movie states that Walt Disney wanted the setting to be his childhood hometown of Marceline, Missouri. Now, it’s been a few years since I watched Lady and the Tramp, and I’ve never seen the live-action remake. I probably never will. But that’s beside the point.

Anyway, from what I recall, the town featured in Lady and the Tramp (which may or may not be Marceline, Missouri) is a thriving place. There’s lots of local businesses for such a small town, such as a zoo, a dog pound, and of course the Italian restaurant that contains the movie’s most famous scene. I understand that Disney probably took some creative liberties and gave this fictional town (that may or may not be Marceline, Missouri) whatever the plot demanded. 

Now, my Internet’s a bit spotty right now, so getting Google Maps open was a hassle. (Isn’t that another exhibit - if your Internet doesn’t work, you can’t do anything!) But I decided to look at Marceline, MO on that platform and see what it looks like today. Per Wikipedia, modern-day Marceline has a population of about 2,100 - very much a small town. And I want to be clear about one thing: Even if the people of Marceline probably didn’t vote the way I would have liked, I still don’t mean to insult them at all.

Google Street View imagery of Marceline, Missouri. It was taken in June 2023.

On second thought, Marceline doesn’t look like the best example. Given that such a prominent figure of the American entertainment industry grew up there, of course, it may be that it qualifies as a historic town. The town’s elementary school is even named after Walt Disney.

Sure, the buildings don’t look the shiniest, but the shops aren’t boarded up either. There are several restaurants that aren’t just fast food. The hardware store I found is a chain, but it’s not Dollar General at least. By small-town standards in the year 2025 (or rather, 2023, because that’s when the current Google Street View imagery was taken), Marceline’s downtown doesn’t seem too bad.

Another Disney movie that many look back on fondly was The Fox and the Hound. While many will talk about the fractured friendship between Tod and Copper, it occurred to me recently that the movie’s setting is in an idealized rural location. And I’ll explain below why that matters.

Screenshot of “The Fox and the Hound”, taken when Widow Tweed’s efforts to milk Abigail the cow go awry thanks to Tod. Image taken from IMDB.

In today’s iteration of American politics, particularly of some Midwestern states like Iowa and Missouri that have large rural populations, “supporting small farmers” has become a major talking point. Widow Tweed, who takes care of Tod the fox in that Disney classic, is a small farmer who maintains it all herself. She raises her own hens and milks her own cows, leading to the chaotic scene pictured above. 

Needless to say, there’s not a lot of small farms anymore in America. Instead we’ve got Big Agriculture with their factory farms and massive meatpacking plants. Rather than a beautiful pastoral estate like the one Widow Tweed lives on, most farmers today work for a corporate giant. This article from Human Rights Watch, coincidentally published just months before the zoonotic COVID-19 pandemic began, discusses the conditions in greater detail.

The “TL;DR” is that working there is an awfully dangerous job. Lots of workers have chronic pain from the movements they are forced to perform. Many have sinus issues so bad that, according to one worker interviewed, they’re afraid to blow their nose for how much blood will come out. It’s an even more dangerous job than being a police officer in America, which is saying something given that we have more firearms than people. And the workers are disproportionately people of color and undocumented immigrants, because of course they are.

If The Fox and the Hound were set in the 2020s, Widow Tweed’s farm would likely not exist. At a minimum, it would be struggling to stay afloat, taking on plenty of water in the process. Someone should write a modern-day version of it - hell, maybe I’ll try my hand at it eventually. It’s not like I have anything better to do.

I’m not going to say that everything was perfect decades ago. Far from it. But I hope I’ve demonstrated a reason why many people look back on the past, particularly older Disney movies, with rose-colored glasses.

Trump Didn’t “Steal” The 2024 Election

Donald Trump shaking hands with President Elon Musk. Image taken from Yahoo News.

Before I get into the meat of this article, I want to clarify one thing: I am a leftist. The right wing falls victim to disinformation and “fake news” far more frequently than the left does, and when they do, they deserve to be called out on it. But I also think we should be honest with ourselves and call out falsehoods when we see them.

First of all, let’s talk about the 2024 election. At a time when so many Americans want to move on from the election and are sick of politics, I’m going to relitigate that election again. Feel free to click out of this article if you don’t want to hear about it.

A number of people have said that the 2024 election was stolen from Kamala Harris. Sometimes they cite Donald Trump’s January 2025 statement that Elon Musk “knows those voting machines.” Other times they say something far more easily refuted, which is that the election was stolen because “Harris had much larger crowd sizes.”

I readily concede that the metric of the “enthusiasm gap” is largely obsolete, to the extent that it ever really mattered to begin with. The idea that whoever’s voters are more excited to vote for their candidate could only swing an election decided by the tiniest of margins these days. Given how polarized the American electorate has become, of course, presidential elections are frequently decided by a football stadium’s worth of people - that’s no secret.

But the 2024 election was not. It was a veritable landslide by American standards. Democrats don’t want to admit it, but it’s true. A Republican winning the popular vote had not happened since 2004, which is basically a lifetime ago in today’s environment. 

In terms of the “enthusiasm gap,” it needs to be said that every vote counts the same, no matter how the voter feels about it. Whether you volunteered twelve hours a day for your chosen candidate, or whether you walked into the polling place completely and totally inebriated, the voting machine doesn’t care. All that matters is what bubble you filled in on that ballot.

Where this metric can make a difference is when someone decides whether to turn out or not. Indeed, prior to the election many people speculated on whether the pro-Palestine protestors would stay home and cost Kamala Harris the presidency. Spoiler alert: They did. And they doomed all of us to live in this fucked-up nation.

People might also point to the gap between the campaigns in terms of their ground game. After all, during the 2024 election, Joe Biden and later Kamala Harris employed a veritable army of canvassers in every swing state and plenty of other states as well. Donald Trump, meanwhile, did not. He outsourced every aspect of his ground game to inexperienced outsiders.

Indeed, in the last three presidential elections, the candidate with the better ground game has ended up losing. In 2016, Trump’s campaign was basically run on a shoestring out of some dude’s basement, and he still defeated Hillary Clinton where it mattered. In 2020, the Democrats unilaterally disarmed and ran almost no ground game, whereas the Republicans stayed the course despite the COVID-19 pandemic. While this is commonly cited as a reason why Trump came closer than expected to victory in 2020, he still was not able to defeat Joe Biden that time.

It seems that ground game doesn’t matter as much as it used to. Part of that is because of a shift in culture. I’m 24 years old, on the older side of Generation Z, and I was taught never to answer the door if I didn’t know who was on the other side. If a stranger knocks on your door, that’s seen as rude and creepy, whereas it didn’t used to be. I guess Americans have grown increasingly paranoid in recent years.

It’s the same way with phone calls. Whenever someone calls me on my iPhone, I always check the caller ID first. If I don’t know who it is, I immediately hang up. That’s what most members of my generation, which saw one of the largest swings to Trump in 2024, do. 

Another argument that some liberals trot out is that Kamala Harris had massive crowds at her rallies. Many thousands turned out for her Houston rally the week before the election. At the time, many people believed this showed she had a lot of support in Houston, and she might be able to win Texas as a result.

Knowing what we know now, of course, this is a fallacious line of thinking. Houston is a major city - it’s the fourth-largest city proper in the United States, even if it barely feels like a “city” when you’re driving through it. It’s one of the worst-designed cities in the world. But that’s besides the point.

Despite losing Texas statewide by nearly 14 percentage points, Kamala Harris still garnered more than 4.8 million votes there. Of almost five million voters, it’s very easy to get thirty thousand to fill a stadium. But it takes far, far, far more than thirty thousand voters to win Texas. As it turns out, Harris supporters were just a lot more vocal than Trump supporters.

Then again, I’ve never understood the “shy Trump voter.” Imagine being so ashamed to vote for Trump that you’ll lie to a pollster and tell them you aren’t voting for Trump, then not thinking Maybe I shouldn’t vote for Trump. But there are so many people in this country that there are probably some who think that way. 

This might be hard to believe, but not everyone is as plugged into politics as I and my three readers are. Lots of people passively vote without realizing what one or both candidates wants to do if elected. Now, I think that’s a bad thing - I wish Americans were better-informed. But that’s the harsh reality. 

So here’s what I want you all to take away from my little rant. When people ask me Saclux Gemini, did Donald Trump steal the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election from Kamala Harris?, my answer will depend on what you mean.

If you mean, “Did Elon Musk hack into the voting machines so that people who voted for Harris were counted as voting for Trump?”, then no. At least, probably not. It just seems implausible that Trump, who was out of office at the time of the 2024 election, would have been able to hack into machines that way. Voting machines, as Al Jazeera reported back then, aren’t connected to the Internet. However, if one means “Did Donald Trump and Elon Musk take measures to stack the election unfairly in their favor?”, then my answer is far more nuanced. 

It is true that voter suppression exists in the United States. The 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia was one of the most egregious examples . Brian Kemp, whose image has sadly been rehabilitated in the eyes of many moderates, should never have been allowed to oversee his own election. Now that federal Republicans are trying to pass the SAVE Act and will turn a blind eye at best to efforts at the state level, voter suppression is only likely to get worse.

That’s also to say nothing about the media environment we find ourselves in, which was enabled by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Now that Twitter has become Xitter (pronounced “shitter”), far-right content has been greatly amplified, and that has definitely swayed public opinion. We can have a broader conversation about the GOP-friendly media environment another time, but I see no reason to believe that votes were actually hacked.

Rather, it seems more likely to me that American swing voters were even more gullible than usual. Hey, they’ve made dumb decisions before. Was electing Trump in 2024 really that much of a stretch?

In my mind, the discourse about the 2024 election being stolen distracts from more important things the left should be doing. Honestly, Democrats last year should have remembered this more forcefully:

If he gets more votes, he doesn’t need to steal the election.

The Shitstorm Is Coming And It Might Get Loud

A meme I found on ImgFlip. I think this is from that show “Trailer Park Boys”.

A few days ago, there was a fire at the Pennsylvania Governor’s Residence. Governor Josh Shapiro and his family were evacuated from the mansion at 2 AM - if they had not been so swift, the assassination attempt would have succeeded. And yes, I consider it an assassination attempt, because that’s what the perpetrator admitted to. I will not name the perpetrator here; I don’t want to glorify him. 

As happy as I am that Governor Shapiro is okay, I feel pretty certain that political violence is going to greatly increase in this country. It’s easy to get a gun here, but this case demonstrates that you don’t even need a gun to do serious damage. It feels like a “crossing the Rubicon” moment - any candidate who’s an electoral threat to any Republican is in serious danger. There’s no going back from this, even if we one day have a Democratic President again.

A few weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance and several national “security” officials like Pete Hegseth texted their war plans in Yemen to a journalist from The Atlantic. This leak, which has come to be referred to as “Signalgate”, generated a lot of outrage at first. But at first is the keyword.

You see, it’s been less than a month and almost nobody is talking about Signalgate anymore. Okay, that’s not true - maybe foreign intelligence services are still debating how much information they should withhold from us because we can’t be trusted to keep it secure. But the general public in the United States has almost completely moved on from this scandal.

Speaking of intelligence, let’s look at Director of National Intelligence and Russian asset extraordinaire Tulsi Gabbard. Recently she came under fire for having declared her residency in Texas when she voted in Hawaii.This is the “voter fraud” that Republicans constantly cite as a justification for voter ID laws that are really meant to suppress the votes of those more likely to support Democrats. 

Now, voter fraud is a serious crime, even if it doesn’t take place nearly as frequently as Republican officials would have you believe. That being said, I think it says a lot about the current state of affairs that I don’t really care about this that much. I care far more about Gabbard being a Russian spy. And yet, nobody’s talking about Gabbard’s connections to Putin and Assad anymore.

That’s actually a common thread here: Nobody’s talking about any of this anymore.

The attempt on Josh Shapiro’s life should have been an Earth-shattering story. Instead, it wasn’t just memory-holed - people didn’t talk about it much even on the day after it happened. And you’ve gotta wonder, why is that?

I’ve got a reason. That reason is because it was largely overshadowed by the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

If you’ve been following the news, you probably know his story in general terms. If you didn’t see the news about Garcia, or if you’ve simply forgotten amid the chaos of the last few months, then I’ll summarize it.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an American citizen originally from El Salvador. He was recently detained by the Trump administration’s ICE goons and sent down to a notorious prison in his country of origin. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a rare unanimous decision, ordered Trump to “facilitate his return.” Admittedly, they did not provide a deadline by which this must happen, but it’s still a stunning rebuke considering the likes of Samuel Alito sit on said court.

Despite the 9-0 ruling against him by an otherwise very right-wing Supreme Court, Donald Trump has continued to defy this order. He has refused to return Garcia to the United States. Now, in fairness, Garcia is probably already dead. And if he isn’t, Trump is afraid of what the man will say once he’s back. Either case would result in riots in the United States - at least, I’d hope so.

As disgusting as this case is, it’s not even the most important part of that White House meeting. I think you know which meeting I’m talking about.

Donald Trump talking to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the White House. Image taken from ABC News.

During the meeting between Donald Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Trump dodged the question of whether he’d do anything to facilitate Garcia’s return. Bukele told reporters that he would not return Garcia, and Trump seems to be going along with it. “There’s nothing I can do” is what he basically said.

Let’s talk about that for a moment. Even though Trump has been systematically destroying our alliances with other wealthy democracies, the United States remains one of the world’s most powerful countries in terms of military might. If Trump truly wanted to follow the Supreme Court’s orders, Bukele’s opinion be damned, there are any number of actions he could take. Instead, Trump is going to let the leader of a small country like El Salvador walk all over him.

Trump probably thinks that defying a court order makes him look tough. In this context, though, it makes him look like a pushover. In theory, he has so much power over Bukele if he actually wanted to use it. The fact that he chooses to let Bukele control him makes him look like, as some would say, a pussy.

There’s another moment from that meeting that’s getting a lot of attention. I’ll let Trump say it this time:

"Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough."

Now, let’s ignore for the moment how very non-eloquent that quote is. Within the context of what Trump was talking about with Bukele, it’s genuinely chilling.

Trump wants Bukele to build five more prisons in El Salvador for American citizens who disagree with him. 

Is that actually going to happen? Quite possibly if nobody stops him. But if even the Supreme Court isn’t willing to use their own power and instead delegate it all to Trump, can he be stopped at all? It’s doubtful.

Lots of people on Reddit have made Nazi Germany comparisons. Very often, these people are dismissed as alarmists, and sometimes this is for good reason. But make no mistake - I truly believe in a matter of a few months, we’ve gone from 1932 to 1939. Everyone who opposes this administration should be very, very afraid.

Oh yeah, and while everyone else is distracted by the Bukele meeting, Russia launched yet another airstrike on Ukraine, this time the northeastern city of Sumy. As of this writing, thirty-six people have been confirmed dead as a result. Despite this attack occurring as Ukrainian civilians went to church for Palm Sunday, politicians on the religious right here are silent. In fact, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, vetoed a G7 resolution to condemn this strike. This proves that Rubio isn’t actually one of the “adults in the room” - there is no such thing this time.

This gesture should be seen as outrageous, and it is. But it’s more than likely going to be forgotten in a few days when there’s another outrage. Look how quickly “Signalgate” was memory-holed. I’m confident that in a few days, people will have forgotten about Trump’s meeting with Bukele until American citizens are sent to these concentration camps en masse.

Of course, this is a deliberate strategy known as “flooding the zone.” The more crazy shit happens, the less the average person can react to it all, or even know what’s going on. This makes it a lot more difficult to organize a resistance.

Unfortunately, so far it seems to be working.

Cancel The World Cup

One of the opening brawls during a February 2025 hockey game between the United States and Canada. Image taken from The Independent.

Now, I need to get one thing out of the way: I don’t normally care about professional sports. Like, at all. The outcome only really matters to me insofar as if the Boston teams win, the people around me are going to be in a better mood.

That being said, it needs to be said that the World Cup is scheduled for next year. It will be jointly hosted by Canada, Mexico, and the United States. As much as it pains me to say this, I believe that the USA should be stripped of its host status for the event. Here I’ll present some reasons why.

First of all, it’s never been safe to host the World Cup in the USA. Even before Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and reelected in 2024, gun violence has been an enormous stain on the nation. In fact, even before the current set of travel warnings against us due to Trump’s immigration enforcement leading to foreign tourists getting detained, there were still plenty of advisories about the risk of being caught in a mass shooting.

This isn’t hypothetical, either. While foreign tourists have historically rarely been victims of mass shootings, it has happened before. As an example, four Canadian citizens lost their lives in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting at a music festival. And the massacres have only accelerated since 2017.

Sure, people might say “But Saclux, they held a World Cup in South Africa.” And that’s true, they did. While South Africa has an overall higher crime rate than the United States, there’s a lot of nuance to be had here. Even though I’ve never been to South Africa, I’d imagine that in that country, you know where the dangerous places are and to avoid them. 

In the USA, by contrast, danger is everywhere. The top five deadliest mass shootings in American history were at the aforementioned music festival, an LGBTQ+ nightclub, a university, an elementary school, and a church. Even if Trump were not President, I wouldn’t blame any foreign spectators and/or teams if they don’t feel safe.

Aftermath of the 2024 Kansas City parade shooting, which followed that year’s Super Bowl. Image taken from People.com.

The picture above is from Kansas City after the 2024 Super Bowl. It just so happens that Kansas City is one of the places that is to host a soccer game for the World Cup. But given what happened there just last year, will teams feel safe playing anywhere in America? It’s doubtful, and I don’t blame them whatsoever.

Some people might point out that the World Cup will have a crazy amount of security for both players and spectators. And that’s also true. But if someone crazy enough to attack a World Cup venue is that determined, they can still cause a lot of damage in the security line. 

As horrific as all mass shootings are, they’re not the only reason why the United States should not be allowed to host the World Cup next year. Gun violence happened under Biden too, after all.

Lately, Trump has been detaining foreign tourists left and right. The Salvadoran man whom the Supreme Court ordered Trump to “facilitate the return of”? This illegitimate President is defying that order. To be fair, he’s probably already dead given what we know about Bukele’s prisons. 

It’s not just Garcia, though. There are many cases of detained tourists, including from countries that are our former allies. When Russia did this to Brittney Griner a few years ago, it was shocking and received tons of rightful condemnation. But we’ve grown numb to this as Americans, just as we’ve grown numb to so many other atrocities.

And let me be clear: These detentions we hear about on the news are likely only the tip of the iceberg. It’s probably happened to hundreds or even thousands of people since Trump returned to office. Yes, it probably won’t happen to members of a World Cup team, but is that a risk they want to take? Or, more to the point, do they want to support a country that detains tourists from countries that are supposed to be their allies? 

This is to say nothing of US-Canada relations, which are at an all-time low right now. Trump has repeatedly called Canada the “51st state”, and that isn’t going to happen without an invasion. Maybe he is joking, but should we risk World War III by assuming that? Even if he isn’t serious, this rhetoric is incredibly dangerous, and Canada will never trust us again for anything that requires longer than a four-year commitment.

The invasion threats are a joke until they aren’t.

Of course, if America actually invades Canada within the next year, the World Cup will probably be canceled anyway. Whether or not the United States can host it will be the least of anyone’s worries. Even if the invasion does not occur, it’s going to be a shitshow of epic proportions.

The final reason I’m going to present is not explicitly political - it’s merely practical.

I’m far from the first person to make this observation, but public transit in the United States is absolute ass. This is no secret - we prefer our gas-guzzling cars and getting stuck in giant traffic jams. Maybe not all of us (I for one would love better and cleaner transportation infrastructure), but enough of us that it remains this way.

Most of the stadiums that have held World Cup matches have contained abundant transport links for modes that weren’t car-based. Say what you will about Russia in 2018, but at least their major cities have metros. That is not the case in America.

Two sports stadiums in Arlington, Texas, USA. The stadium in the background is the AT&T Stadium, which is to host several World Cup games in 2026. Image taken from r/CityPorn.

Pictured here is AT&T stadium in Arlington, Texas. It is currently scheduled to host multiple games during the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Fun fact: Per Wikipedia, it’s going to temporarily change its name to “Dallas Stadium” in accordance with FIFA’s rules against corporate-sponsored names.

But look at that. As the image’s caption from r/CityPorn said, there is no public transportation in sight. And that’s because none exists in Arlington, Texas. As car-dependent as most of the United States is, Texas takes the sprawl to a whole nother level. The traffic jam out of the stadium is going to be legendary, and it’s going to lead to another deluge of international shame on the United States. As if we needed more shame!

Arlington isn’t the only stadium in the US that’s like this. Even Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, one of the states with better public transportation (which, to borrow a phrase from Not Just Bikes, is like saying you have a better-smelling outhouse), still sees lots of car traffic. There’s a reason why the tradition of hanging out before a sporting event is referred to as “tailgating” in America. But enough about that.

With regards to the transit situation, we can look at one potential silver lining. If FIFA chooses to disregard one random blogger’s advice and host the World Cup in the United States anyway, it’s going to be a mess and an international embarrassment for America. But on the bright side, if enough Americans see how insane we are as a country, we might actually agitate for change, including more walkable cities that have viable alternatives to driving. If it takes a disastrous World Cup to show us that we need to mobilize for a better country, then so be it.

But I wouldn’t count on it.

On Nostalgia

Whenever we’re talking about the past, romanticizing it by saying that things were better then, we’re experiencing what’s known as nostalgia. Google’s dictionary feature defines “nostalgia” as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. Etymologically, it comes from a Latin word related to “acute homesickness.”

All over the world, there’s a common sense that things were better in the “good old days”. Not everyone holds this view, of course - there are people who continue believing the future’s bright. My mother keeps telling me mine’s so bright I need to wear shades, but I’m far from certain that’s the truth.

The fact is, the people who claim that things were better in the past have a leg to stand on. I wish I could say that they didn’t, but I’d be lying to myself, and you’d be fully justified in clicking out of this article right now.

Very often, the term nostalgia is used in the context of older media, particularly video games and TV shows. Let’s take the example of video games first. Now, I’m not much of a gamer these days, even if my current habits aren’t that much healthier than gaming might be. But I still think this is a worthwhile analogy.

If you want to read a book from decades or even centuries past, you can probably find a PDF online if you’re willing to pay enough money. Hell, you could even locate a physical copy on Amazon, not that it’s ideal to give Jeff Bezos any more money than necessary. Most music you’ve heard of is probably available on Apple Music or YouTube, with the latter covering your bases for what’s not found on the former platform.

Movies? Again, they’re mostly on YouTube (or any other streaming platform you can think of) for a small price. It’s no wonder that lots of movie theaters are struggling to stay afloat, and not just because of the general public’s reduced attention span as a result of short-form content. (More on that later).

Video games are different. As I write this article, the Nintendo Switch 2 was recently announced, even if we will not be able to pre-order it from the United States for the time being thanks to the tariffs. And I miss the days when we didn’t have to worry about the unhinged President of the United States levying tariffs and starting a trade war with our former allies, but that’s the world we live in now. See, that’s an example of nostalgia!

The Nintendo Switch 2 might be backwards compatible with the original Nintendo Switch. I’m not sure if that’s been confirmed or not - like I said, I don’t play video games that much. But if any Wii U, Wii, GameCube, or N64 games are available for digital download or not at all, you can be sure it’ll only be a limited selection of said games. 

In fact, unlike the other mediums I listed above, older video games are far less readily available. A 2023 study found that 87 percent of pre-2010 video games released in the United States “have failed to be preserved in any real capacity.” And that’s a problem. 

From my perspective, the general consensus seems to have become that video games are getting worse as time goes on, not better. I wrote a previous article about this, but that relates to Cory Doctorow’s writings about “enshittification”. Eventually, game developers run out of new ideas. Or, if you’re a socialist who believes everything’s the fault of capitalism, you might argue that it’s become profitable to release the games people will buy rather than being innovative, so that’s what the companies chase after. Indeed, the last part is hardly a conspiracy theory at all.

Microtransactions have infiltrated just about every game released today. For all that people are complaining about Mario Kart World costing $90 or whatever, keep in mind that most AAA games these days cost that much (or more) when you consider all the downloadable content that one can purchase. This stands in stark contrast to the “good old days”, when as soon as you bought a game, you were done spending money on it.

 It really is no wonder that indie gaming has gotten more popular in recent years; titles like Undertale are often considered among the best video games ever made. Is it any wonder that a title using a minimalist, EarthBound-esque design caught peoples’ eyes? It’s not made by a greedy game studio that pursues profit over all else.

So yes…games made before the current age of enshittification are popular, and those who can’t play them still pine for them. But there’s more.

Current politics is another area where people yearn for the “good old days”. Perhaps this is mostly unique to the United States, but I’ve had conversations with family members who have told me that prior to Trump, we weren’t nearly as polarized as we are now. Maybe people were still strongly Democratic or strongly Republican, but you could actually be friends with people on the “other side”. Even if you disagreed with someone on, say, what an ideal tax rate was for the highest-income groups, you didn’t necessarily hate their guts.

I want to clarify, of course, that the current situation is far more the fault of the Republicans than the Democrats. The GOP chose to nominate Trump three times in a row, and they choose to keep supporting him and enabling all his disastrous actions. This is a choice they have made and are continuing to make every single day.

Look, I’m only 24 years old. I was not alive when, for instance, the Columbine High School massacre happened in Colorado. But my mother was, and when I talked to her about how it was covered, she said it was utterly shocking. People probably wondered how depraved one had to be to bring a gun to school and slaughter random people. 

Nowadays, school shootings are just as depraved and horrific as they were then, but they’re not as shocking. I remember finishing a writing session in September 2024 as news broke of another shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’d grown used to hearing about such events. And “only” four people had died; this was not Sandy Hook, Parkland, or Uvalde, which goes to show how depraved my country has become when we’re desensitized to these horrific tragedies. 

Other countries aren’t, of course. In fact, numerous nations (including those who were once our strong allies) have put in place travel warnings for the USA about gun violence. Of course, they’ve now put in place other warnings about how you might be detained and deported to El Salvador; if I were not from here, I’d rather travel to Russia at this point. But that’s beside the point, isn’t it?

Besides the example of gun violence, there are plenty of non-political instances of nostalgia being justified. Take the platform YouTube, which has become the monolithic platform for posting any sort of video. Unless, of course, you’re breaking the terms of service for the platform, in which case you’re better off on Rumble. 

I’m not going to say there wasn’t plenty of brain rot on YouTube when I was a kid. Annoying Orange was (and if I remember correctly, still is) quite popular. But kids these days have it worse - just look at the series known as Skibidi Toilet. 

It’s often said that Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast and currently the most-subscribed user on the platform, ruined YouTube. Prior to his meteoric rise starting in 2017, you didn’t need so much production value to be successful. YouTube wasn’t totally innocent, of course, but if you don’t have tens of thousands of dollars and a giant production team behind you, you won’t take off. Very rarely does content go viral organically these days, and that’s a shame.

The Internet itself is becoming consolidated. We no longer have so many kid-friendly places for those under 13 who cannot yet use apps like Discord. When I was a kid, Webkinz was a huge deal, but now it’s pretty much obsolete. Instead, Cocomelon and other forms of total brain rot have taken its place. 

I’d imagine that in cities and countries where the infrastructure is less car-dependent, this isn’t as much of a factor. Kids don’t need to hang out online as much when they’ve got good places to hang out in person. But I’m in the US, where the vast majority of our built environment was bulldozed for the car. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 19, though technically I could have at 16 if I’d wanted to. I can’t imagine how lonely American kids are nowadays.

Overall, I would say that nostalgia itself can be unhealthy. It’s important not to look at the past with rose-tinted glasses when it isn’t warranted. Sometimes your preferences change over time and you just haven’t realized it yet. I know that’s true in my case; I keep feeling a compulsion to write fanfiction, but I simply can’t force myself to when I know I’ll be a lot busier again soon.

There’s also the fact that life sometimes loses its novelty as you get older. Supposedly the older you become, the faster time seems to pass. If I am fortunate enough to reach an advanced age, I might find that out for myself. But you shouldn’t spend your life just wishing.

“Every Country Has Its Problems”

Rodrigo Duterte, former President of the Philippines, at his ICC hearing. Image taken from The Guardian.

Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was recently arrested and sent to the Netherlands to be tried for crimes against humanity during his drug war. Brazilian former President Jair Bolsonaro is indicted for attempting a coup in 2023. And of course, South Korea’s insane few weeks ended with former President Yoon being held accountable.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is President of the United States again. Let’s talk about why that is.

Whenever I complain about something happening in the United States, it’s very common for well-meaning people to come at me with the following refrain: Every country has its problems. No place is perfect, they say.

Here’s the thing: To a point, I agree with them. There is no perfect country anywhere in the world - even Reddit’s beloved Finland is pretty dark in the winter. 

But whenever someone says “every country has its problems” as a way to dismiss the very real atrocities currently occurring in the United States, atrocities that rarely if ever occur elsewhere, I think they’re very wrong indeed. And I’m going to dissect that claim here.

First of all, let’s consider the case of health care. Famously, it costs a fortune here depending on what you need and how greedy your health insurance company is. Consider that a few months ago, the CEO of such a company was assassinated, and much of the country is cheering on the gunman. People are even donating money for his legal defense. This is despite the fact that many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, in no small part due to these health insurance companies.

The United States does not have universal health insurance like essentially every other wealthy nation does. It’s been said before, but all you need to know about the American healthcare system is that there’s a popular TV series in which the main character turns to cooking crystal meth to pay his medical bills. It’s considered some of the best TV ever made, in fact.

Walter White, a TV character who could not exist without the American health care system. Image taken from Wikipedia.

People have always complained about having to pay medical bills, as they should. But this came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit the United States especially hard. And again, this was largely due to the country’s lack of universal health insurance. It’s profitable to deny care to people who need it, after all, and people aren’t going to get tested if it costs too much money for them to do so.

More than a million Americans perished from the virus, and you’d think that would make a pretty good case to make healthcare free. (And yes, it’s not actually free, but it’s paid through your taxes in other countries. Same thing.)

Instead, there are still many lawsuits in place to repeal some or all of the Affordable Care Act. And yes, that’s also known as Obamacare, even though a sizable chunk of Americans don’t know that they’re the same thing. But the ACA was barely a band-aid on the gaping bullet wound that is the American healthcare system, and even that could easily be repealed under the new Trump administration.

Speaking of bullets, let’s talk about another crisis plaguing this country - gun violence. The shootings everyone thinks about are the high-profile cases of school violence like Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde…fuck, there are so many. Then there are others that happen in public spaces, including the deadliest of all - the 2017 Las Vegas massacre. Bump stocks were banned after the latter event, but the Supreme Court re-legalized machine guns last year. 

What has happened in terms of gun control? Absolutely nothing! And indeed, Sandy Hook was the end of the gun rights debate: If you were going to write a story about an event that would get Americans to finally give up their weapons, you couldn’t do much “better” than Sandy Hook. 

This stands in stark contrast to other countries. The United Kingdom banned most firearms after the 1996 Dunblane shooting, and Australia did the same after the Port Arthur Massacre that same year. Canada has had a handful of mass shootings, but here’s the thing - most of those guns come from down here. I’m surprised they weren’t already boycotting us even before Trump!

Make no mistake, people still want gun control. A majority of Americans claim to, in fact. And yet, if anything, firearm laws in this country have become more permissive in the years since twenty first-graders and six staff members were gunned down at Sandy Hook. Couple that with the seventy percent or so of Americans who apparently favor Medicare For All, and you should realize something.

So why is that? If the majority of the population wants things to change, why have they stayed the same?

Well, let’s talk about the United States Constitution. It was written to be very hard to amend - in fact, there has not been a new amendment since 1992.

Because we’re so polarized, and because the bar to ratify a new amendment is so high, it’s my belief that we’ll never see another amendment, no matter how much we might need one. I don’t mean to draw a moral equivalence between the Democrats and Republicans here, but the two parties will never agree on anything significant enough to warrant an amendment ever again. 

Some people might wonder why there aren’t any protests. Part of it is the Kyle Rittenhouse precedent - remember how he literally got away with murdering protestors? Then again, I reject the notion that there haven’t been any protests. Remember 2020?

Massive George Floyd protests that ultimately amounted to nothing. Image taken from the Associated Press.

After the most enormous protests in American history, something would need to change regarding police brutality, wouldn’t it? And yet, the most significant legislative response has been to ban discussion of race in classrooms. That’s pretty disgraceful - we’re worse off than we were before the unrest.

Some people say that Europe is more racist than the United States. I’ll admit that I’m a white man, so I’ve never had racism directed at me, but people who claim that the previous sentence is true literally have no idea what they’re talking about.

Let’s talk about Germany, a country that has learned from its past. Symbols related to the Nazis, perpetrators of horrific crimes during the 1930s and 1940s, have been banned in Germany and several other countries. Still, some people say that Europe’s got more racism than America.

I have not spent any significant amount of time in Germany; maybe black people there are more likely to be jeered at, or even called a racial slur. But that’s typically the worst-case scenario in terms of racism in Germany. Nobody fears the police unless they’ve committed a crime.

In America, it’s quite different. Even after the absolutely massive George Floyd protests, over a thousand people are killed by U.S. police every year, and African-Americans are disproportionately targeted. And that’s not the only example; I’ve talked about redlining and its relation to societal apathy in the recent past. 

So what’s my point here? How is this related to the saying “every country has its problems?”

Well, it’s simple. Other countries may have problems, but they solve them. Whether it’s Australia passing gun control after one major mass shooting, or France amending their Constitution to enshrine reproductive rights into law, or literally every non-U.S. country committing to fighting the climate crisis, other countries fix problems when they arise.

There’s a reason we can’t be like this too.

Most Americans might want things to change here. But as soon as they’re told that “things changing” will benefit people of color too, they suddenly dig their heels in. Racism runs deeper here than a desire to improve their own lives, and that’s pretty sad.

We are a uniquely sick country, and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better. If it ever gets better. I think it’s more likely that we limp along until we implode under the weight of our archaic stone constitution, which might as well be toilet paper anyway.

Trump Isn’t Kidding About Canada

A border crossing between the U.S. and Canada. Image taken from the NPR website.

Well, he’s doing it. After repeatedly going back and forth on when he would implement these horrendous policies, United States President Donald Trump (yuck, I hate saying those words again) has begun his series of tariffs on Canada and Europe.

Canada and the EU have, of course, retaliated, as they have every right to. And I greatly oppose Trump’s action, not just because it’s going to make things more expensive for the average American. It reinforces to me that the U.S. had no right to elect Donald Trump due to our oversize impact on other countries.

But as horrific as the tariffs are, as disgusting as this betrayal may be, I want to bring your attention to a post Trump put on Truth Social the other day. Now, I’m not going to link to that post - we shouldn’t give him our traffic. However, embedded in that Truth Social post was a claim that the only solution for the tariffs is for Canada to join as the “51st state.”

For some, it may be trivial to dismiss that as a joke. That Trump’s just bluffing, and he isn’t brave enough to actually follow through on that threat of annexation. However, this is far from the first time he’s asked for Canada to join the U.S. - he’s been saying this nonstop since he was elected again this past November. 

Yes, Trump lies about a lot of things, and some might say that this echoes his plans during his first term to “build the wall and make Mexico pay for it.” Never mind the fact that U.S.-Canada relations are unlikely to ever recover after Trump leaves, if he ever leaves. But that’s beside the point for now.

In his Truth Social post, Donald Trump stated that the border between America and Canada was “artificially drawn.” If this doesn’t send a chill down your spine, I don’t know what will. And there’s only one reason for that:

He sounds just like Putin.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin during their infamous 2018 summit in Helsinki, Finland. Image taken from NBC News.

Prior to launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that has killed countless civilians and turned entire cities to rubble, Vladimir Putin constantly referred to Ukraine as an illegitimate state. In his speech announcing the start of his “special military operation”, he claimed that he wanted to “de-Nazify” the country. He published this essay arguing that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people.”

It’s also no secret that Trump wants to be just like Putin. Look how many dictators he admires. Remember when Xi Jinping removed his own term limit and Trump said that “we should try President For Life someday”? Well, I do.

As horrific as the war in Ukraine is, a conflict between the United States and Canada would be even worse. Canada is in NATO, meaning that in theory, the rest of the alliance would need to help defend them if it were invaded. And I believe that America’s former NATO allies would fulfill their obligations under Article 5, since their security depends on it. 

I won’t come close to naming all the horrors that would occur if America invaded Canada. It’s entirely possible - maybe even inevitable - that nuclear weapons would be used by one or both sides. That’s to say nothing of the domestic resistance in the United States. While I cannot speak for every liberal, I know that I would like to defect to Canada if the U.S. launches a full-scale invasion of its former ally. The real question is whether or not they’d have me.

The conflict would be truly worthy of the title World War III, and it would be the end of the United States, as well as possibly the end of the world. 

The question then becomes: Who would stop Trump?

I don’t think there’s any way Trump will be talked down from giving the order if he’s truly determined. He has no conscience to begin with, especially since he doesn’t need to run for reelection - he’ll either be out in four years, dictator for life, or dead. Either way, he’s President right now, and his second term is all about revenge. Trump is going to invade Canada if he thinks doing so will “own the libs” who voted him out in 2020.

So, again, who will stop him?

The generals? I doubt it. He nominated Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense not because Hegseth was qualified (he isn’t), but because Trump was confident he would remain loyal. Project 2025 called for purging the military of generals who would refuse to follow orders, and that purge is already taking place. If the generals defy his order to invade Canada, he can just fire them until he reaches someone who is that insane.

There were adults in the room last time. There are far fewer this time.

Congress? No way. Even after Trump incited a mob to personally kill all members of Congress and overthrow the government on January 6, 2021, the Republicans in both chambers still remain loyal. There is no red line for them. They care about kissing the ring more than they care about their own lives, so they’ll never turn on Big Don.

January 6 Capitol attack. Image taken from Britannica.

The people? Leaving aside the fact that half of “the people” keep supporting Trump no matter what he does, it’s unlikely that the protests would be massive enough to be noticed by those in power. It’s not like the media’s been covering them very much. Besides, as I’ve written about just the other day, our cities aren’t designed for protests.

And let’s be honest: You know as well as I do that even if the protests were as enormous as the George Floyd BLM protests in the summer of 2020, they wouldn’t do shit. Those protests certainly didn’t accomplish anything progressive; if anything this country’s gotten more racist since 2020.

Even in spite of the annexation threats, however, I remain envious of Canadians.

It’s not just that they have free health insurance, or that there are a lot fewer mass shootings (and those that do occur can be blamed on American guns). It’s not just that women in Canada still have the right to bodily autonomy. It’s not just that they have better protections for the environment and LGBTQ+ rights, and it’s not just that they keep supporting Ukraine even as America has pivoted to supporting Russia.

It’s that, unlike how it is in America, I would be proud to be Canadian. 

It’s often said that Americans who don’t want to be associated with Trump pretend to be Canadian when they travel abroad; this practice is sometimes referred to as flag-jacking. Come to think of it, I might do that next time. But there’s a reason why the sane Americans do this - Canada has a far better reputation abroad than the U.S. does.

After all, when 9/11 resulted in the closure of U.S. airspace, Canada took in stranded American passengers. When Europe needed help defeating fascism in World War II, Canada joined because it was the right thing to do - we only joined after we were attacked ourselves. Don’t even get me started on the unjustified wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the former of which some Americans fled to Canada in order to avoid being drafted into. 

When the Canadian hockey fans booed the U.S. national anthem a few weeks ago, I wanted to join them. The nation of Canada reflects my values far more than this hellhole - the great white north has all the natural beauty (and more) with none of the political insanity. As Reddit will frequently tell you, politics don’t run peoples’ lives in Canada the way it does down here.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford (a Conservative) strategizing with Canadian Prime Minister-designate Mark Carney (a Liberal). Such a scene would be unthinkable between a Republican and Democrat in the States. Image taken from the Toronto Star.

Here is my stance on the invasion, which I fervently hope does not happen:

I’m not going to apologize, because to apologize means to expect forgiveness, and I don’t expect that. I just want to make clear, in the strongest possible terms, that I do not support any of these atrocities, even if they’re committed in my name.

If you’re a fellow sane American, the best thing you can do is call your Congressperson and tell them to back Seth Magaziner’s (D-RI) bill, HR 1936, which is literally called the “No Invading Allies Act”. There should be no invading allies. Period. 

Trump might be bluffing. I sure hope he is. But counting on his threats being a bluff would be an even dumber decision than Biden running for reelection. We need to act as if Trump might actually invade Canada, because it sure looks like it.

“I’m Sick Of Politics”

A grayscale image of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mike Johnson, and Ron DeSantis from Salon.com.

Take yourself back in time five years. Do you remember where you were, what you were doing? Maybe not. But there’s little doubt that you remember how you felt.

As of when I post this, it has been precisely five years since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. The rest is history - over the course of three years, more than a million people succumbed to the virus in the United States alone. There were days when more people died than perished on the day of the September 11 attacks. 

And yet, despite losing a 9/11 worth of people a day, the pandemic seems to have vanished almost entirely from the public consciousness. If you lost a loved one to COVID, you probably still remember the pandemic, but if you didn’t, it’s easy enough to memory-hole that period. Hell, it no longer holds the same space in my memory that it used to.

We can have debates about why this is, but one thing is worth remembering. I’ll get to that in a moment.

Lots of Americans right now have decided that they are going to check out of current events. “I’m sick of politics”, they say. And honestly, I get it. Having every bit of news you hear be related to what that orange asshat said or did yesterday…it’s exhausting. The other day, I went to AskReddit, and seven or eight of the top ten questions were related to the infamous Trump-Zelenskyy press conference, a humiliating moment for the United States indeed.

So yes…you might be tired of politics. But the German people in the early 1930s were probably also tired of politics, and look where that got the world. 

In other words, we can’t afford to check out. We just can’t.

I mentioned the COVID-19 pandemic above. It’s often said that Trump is responsible for making the outbreak far worse in the United States than it needed to be. And that’s true, but what many people don’t realize is that if Hillary had won in 2016, the pandemic could have likely been averted entirely.

Look at it this way: Trump disbanded the entire pandemic preparedness team in 2018. Maybe I just want to be bitter, maybe that wouldn’t have actually prevented the outbreak from reaching US shores, but I want to be clear about one thing:

When John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, speaks out against his former boss on CNN, I don’t respect him any more than I did before. Bolton was the driving force behind that decision, and over a million Americans (and at least eight million worldwide but maybe a few times that) paid the ultimate price.

And we elected him AGAIN.

People demonstrating in support of abortion rights outside the U.S. Supreme Court building in 2022. Image taken from the Center for American Progress.

Now let’s talk about another direct consequence of Trump’s first election. The people in the above image (or at least, some of them) no doubt believed that they were doing something productive. Never mind that protests never accomplish anything in this country. 

Truth be told, however, the day to protest that decision was November 8, 2016. Hillary Clinton warned us. The President elected for the 2017-2021 term could fill as many as four Supreme Court seats, and in the end Trump filled three with Injustices. I call them Gorey Gorsuch, Gang Bang Brett, and the Contagious ACB, just because I need a modicum of levity to stay sane.

These three Injustices have gotten to work quickly. The Supreme Court is on a warpath, and it’s gonna be a bloodbath of rights dying in broad daylight.

Abortion was first. On June 24, 2022, five Injustices, including the three appointed during Trump’s first term, handed down a decision worse than Dred Scott. Women are essentially slaves to men now - how can someone be a proper citizen without bodily autonomy? I say that not because I want it to be true, but because it simply is.

I don’t need to list the number of reasons why a woman might need an abortion, medically speaking. Those are widely available wherever you get reliable medical information now that the CDC is gutted. Here’s one more qualified source.

I consider myself pro-choice, but my opinion doesn’t really matter, because I am not a woman. I will never need to bear the cross of pregnancy and all the health risks it poses. But five Injustices on the Supreme Court wanted to get in the way of a woman’s decision, and the consequences are horrific. Just ask the family of Amber Nicole Thurman, whom Trump mocked. What a depraved man.

Here’s the thing: Abortion was only the beginning. Japan might be the next country to legalize same-sex marriage, but the USA will probably be the first to take it away after previously legalizing it. What’s next? Cameras in every bedroom to make sure people aren’t having the wrong kind of sex? There’s every possibility that Trump’s election in the face of Dobbs will only embolden these theocrats to make more horrendous rulings, some of which even I can’t imagine right now.

An image, probably AI-generated, that Donald Trump posted on Truth Social to promote an invasion of Canada.

Now let’s talk about our neighbors and former allies to the north. Canada has a new Prime Minister, and his name is Mark Carney. Carney seems like a cool, decently progressive guy - I’d certainly vote for him if I lived up there. And part of me wishes I did live up there.

But you cannot ignore the fact that Trump clearly wants to invade Canada. He keeps calling for them to be made the “51st state”, and referring to outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Governor Trudeau.” And the horrifying thing is, I’m not sure anyone can stop him if he really goes for it.

I’m having a hard time being friends with anyone from Canada on Discord. I feel responsible even though I didn’t vote for this shit. But when the tanks start rolling into Toronto and Vancouver, “I didn’t vote for him” won’t be a valid excuse from my fellow Americans. 

Truth be told, however, I don’t know what American civilians can do to oppose the war. It’s easy enough for me to say I’ll defect and fight for Canada if that happens, but I don’t know if they’d have me, or if the U.S. would let me leave. What I am confident about is that if Trump actually invades Canada, he won’t lose a single supporter he currently has.

Almost nobody in Canada wants this. They. Will. Fight. Back. It’s going to be World War Three, since the rest of NATO will be obligated to come to their defense. Millions of people on both sides are going to die needlessly all for Trump’s ego, making the hockey brawls look like absolute child’s play.

But the worst part? This was all unnecessary. If some Americans had just been willing to have a black woman as President when the alternative was a convicted felon with nothing to lose, we’d still be close allies with Canada. We wouldn’t have alienated the rest of the world, and we wouldn’t be pariahs. I don’t even know if I feel comfortable traveling abroad when everyone, rightly or wrongly, associates American civilians with Trump.

But no. Harris was too pro-Israel, so we had to collectively fuck around and find out anyway. I have immense sympathy for the people of Gaza and Canada, but I have immense hatred for the people of Dearborn who sat this election out (or worse, actually voted for Trump). You have the blood of Canadian civilians and American soldiers on your hands.

The point of tonight’s post is this: After a long, contentious election cycle, you might be tired of politics. I know. I am too. But politics isn’t tired of you.

Leopards On Parade

I know it’s been a long time. Too long, honestly, and I don’t have a good excuse. I just didn’t feel like following the news as closely as I perhaps should have been. Here we go.

Thumbnail of Ryleigh Cooper’s CNN interview. Image taken from CNN’s website.

While I was driving with my mother today back from downtown, we listened to a segment of the David Pakman Show about Ryleigh Cooper. If you’ve heard the phrase “regretful Trump voters” (which I’m sure you have if you’re online in any capacity these days), then you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about here. Here is an article about Cooper.

For those who couldn’t be bothered to read that article, the TLDR version is this: Cooper, 24, is a federal worker from a rural part of swing state Michigan. Or at least, she was a federal worker for the U.S. Forest Service. 

Now, in case you’ve already forgotten (which many people have), Trump’s first term was marked by many attacks on environmental regulations and our system of federal lands. There should have been no reason to assume that things would be any different in Trump’s second term, unless “the same as before, but more of it” counts as different. But that’s beside the point.

In the month and a half since taking office, Trump has fired many federal workers. He’s done this with the aid of Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whose role hasn’t been clarified yet and will probably never be. For all intents and purposes, Musk is currently President, but again, that’s beside the point.

So let’s get back to Ryleigh Cooper. And I have to tell you, while listening to her CNN interview, I felt like my brain cells were oozing out of my ears. I could not believe what I was hearing, and I don’t think you’ll be able to either. And I’ll let her explain it:

“As someone who is more of a swing voter, sometimes that’s what it comes down to. Those single issues … that are resonating with you at this moment.”

Fair enough. A lot of people in this country are single-issue voters; that’s no secret. It’s one reason Trump and other GOP Presidents were able to get Roe v. Wade overturned after a crusade of nearly fifty years. But what was Ryleigh Cooper’s most important issue?

Well, Cooper, like a decent number of women her age, was trying to get pregnant. She’s been through numerous fertility treatments in an effort to do exactly that. She voted for Trump because she wanted to be able to afford an IVF treatment in order to have a child.

Now, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: To want a child, and yet fear that you’ll be unable to have one, is undoubtedly a very difficult experience to endure. As a man who intends to remain child-free, it’s not something I’ll ever go through, but I empathize with this part of Cooper’s story.

But let’s turn the clock back four months and pretend it’s time to vote. I struggle to imagine how, if your singular issue in the 2024 election is anything related to reproductive care from the pro-choice side, you could make yourself vote for anyone but Kamala Harris.

 After all, during her brief (by American standards) 2024 campaign, Harris championed abortion rights and pledged to preserve access to IVF. Trump, meanwhile, said once that he would make IVF free, but he has also bragged about overturning Roe on multiple occasions. He appointed the Supreme Court Injustices who handed down that decision, so he’s responsible more than anyone else for it. Actions speak louder than words; or at least, they should.

This is a classic case of leopards on parade. Cooper voted for Trump thinking he’d take away opportunities from other people; she admitted this herself in her CNN interview. But she thought she would be safe from the negative consequences of electing him. Which, as a newly-fired federal worker, she clearly wasn’t.

A meme about the “Leopards-Eating-Faces Party” that looks like the Japanese flag. Taken from Redbubble.

The other thing I want to address is the broader issue at play here. David Pakman, a very wise man, once said that “millions of Americans have no idea what’s going on”, and he couldn’t be more correct about that. 

Ryleigh Cooper thought that voting Trump was the best decision to make from the standpoint of reproductive rights. It doesn’t matter how much the rest of us know that Trump’s record on these rights has been nothing short of cataclysmic. The politically engaged among us know that there’s a vast gulf between Republicans and Democrats on this issue, and that Trump’s the reason women like Amber Nicole Thurman died after being denied medically necessary reproductive care.

Here’s the thing: The important words there are politically engaged.

Lots of Americans don’t follow the news. On some level, I don’t blame them, for the news is pretty damn depressing these days. But the fact remains that a lot is going on right now, and the German people were probably sick of politics in 1933 - look where that got them. It’s hard to keep track of everything Trump’s doing to flood the zone, and I get it, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Truth be told, Ryleigh Cooper is far from alone. She’s a microcosm of what Green Day would call the American Idiots. According to the Atlanta Black Star article I linked at the top of this page, Cooper voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024, making her a swing voter. If you’re undecided between a party that’s centrist to center-right (the Democrats) and a party that’s completely off the rails (the Republicans), you’re either dumb as rocks or woefully uninformed. 

If you were paying attention, Trump was telling you exactly what he wanted to do. Project 2025 was available on the Internet prior to the election -  all 900+ pages of it! So if you didn’t have even a basic sense of what Trump would enact given the opportunity, that was your problem. 

However, this speaks to a far more important problem for Democrats. No matter what insane things Trump promises, the blue team has not been able to convince voters that Trump actually means it. And I say this as a Democrat: If we cannot break through the disinformation bubble, we will never win again, and we might not deserve to. 

The saddest part? I don’t know what the solution is, short of letting Trump do whatever he wants, ruining the country even more than he already has. Maybe, like Cooper, they will care once they have experienced hardship as a result of their decision to elect a convicted felon as President. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

To her credit, Ryleigh Cooper seems to regret her vote, even if only because she’s been fired from her forest service job and is on the brink financially. Most of Trump’s voters will never abandon him, so at least she has that going for her. I just wish she (and others) would have done her research before the election so that we could have prevented this mess. 

The 48.3% of us who voted for Kamala Harris, meanwhile, didn’t fuck around, but we still have to find out.

Meme taken from user “Being Liberal” on Facebook.

Political Negligence

Aerial view of Washington-National Airport (DCA). Image taken from Engineering-News Record.

Unfortunately, I come to you today with some horrific news. The news, of course, is that American Eagle Flight 5342, a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Wichita to Washington-National, collided with a military helicopter and crashed into the Potomac River.All 67 people on board both aircraft lost their lives. It is the first fatal commercial airline accident in the United States since 2009.

The blame game has started. To be clear, I am not an air safety expert, and I do not know definitively what the investigation will show. However, lots of people online (on both Reddit and BlueSky), as well as former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg , have been blaming the new Trump administration for the crash. 

These people have a good case. After all, within hours of taking office, Donald Trump fired the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), as well as the head of the TSA. Additionally, he has instituted a freeze in hiring new air traffic controllers. You know, the people responsible for making sure aircraft don’t crash into each other in midair. If he replaces these people at all, it will probably be with incompetent loyalists.

So yes - they have a point.

However, I think it’s important to emphasize that if we were going to see a major drop in safety standards for American airspace as a result of Trump taking office, it would have taken a lot longer than ten days to really have an impact. And it’s not like it only takes ten days to become an air traffic controller in some of the world’s busiest airspace from the day you sign up.

Then again, according to this piece from The Guardian, the shortage of air traffic controllers in the United States has lasted for years, which is why we’ve had an increase in near-misses. We are understaffed in this department, and Trump’s decisions haven’t helped matters. But the problem existed before Trump’s second term began, so it’s not entirely on the orange felon.

The elephant in the room is Trump’s press conference that he gave about this crash. I can’t bring myself to watch it, but apparently he kept hammering home the idea that DEI has infected the aviation industry and led to a decrease in safety standards. Whether or not Trump is directly responsible for the tragedy, his rhetoric at the press conference was still highly irresponsible.

As troubling as this is, though, my main point today is not to argue that the tragedy last night at DCA is or is not Donald Trump’s fault. Instead, I want to use this case to illustrate how asymmetric our polarized political environment has become.

Imagine what it would be like if the crash had occurred while a Democrat was President. The Republican-controlled Congress (or even a Congress with a Republican minority) would demand investigations. They would summon the President in for many hours of testimony before every committee in both the House and Senate. Indeed, they’d probably be calling for the pitchforks, especially if that Democratic President had just fired the head of the FAA.

Hillary Clinton during her 11 hours of testimony over the Benghazi attack. Image taken from BBC News.

In fact, you don’t even have to imagine. That’s exactly what happened in 2012 when Hillary Clinton, then the United States Secretary of State, was blamed for the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya. Most Americans could not locate Libya on a map, if they’ve heard of the country’s existnece at all. Regardless, it is in fact a tragedy that four Americans perished in this attack. We should indeed have been upset about it, and Secretary Clinton should indeed have been called in to testify. This incident basically tanked Hillary’s future presidential campaign in 2016, leading to Trump’s first presidency. But I’ll get to that later.

Later in Barack Obama’s presidency, an Ebola outbreak occurred in West Africa. To be clear, Ebola sounds like an absolutely horrifying illness that I never want to catch. And the two American deaths that occurred as a result of this outbreak are tragedies. However, the 2014 midterm elections swung massively against the Democrats, and Ebola is a commonly cited reason why. This enabled Donald Trump to enter office in 2016 with as much power as he had.

During the first three years of Trump’s term, we were pretty lucky. There were no major crises affecting the United States that were not of Trump’s own making. In fact, I still remember watching the RNC last year and feeling like I was watching a film adaptation of Orwell’s 1984, because they kept asking the crowd “Are you better off now than you were four years ago in 2019?”

Of course, four years prior to 2024 was not 2019, but 2020, as the archived MSNBC footage that played shortly thereafter reminded us. That was the year when we couldn’t leave our homes without wearing a mask, or were at least advised against it. That was the year when refrigerator trucks held excess dead bodies of COVID victims. Overall, more than a million lives were lost in the United States from the coronavirus. The fear, the isolation, the boredom…that was Trump’s fault after he infamously disbanded the pandemic preparedness team in 2018.

A 2019 Twitter post from Joe Biden about pandemic threats, posted only a few months before the outbreak reached the United States. Screenshotted from Google Images.

Despite the tragic disaster that was Trump’s first presidency and COVID response, the Democrats were utterly unable to effectively saddle Mango Mussolini with this horrendous record in the 2024 election. They let him get away with claiming that 2020 didn’t happen, to the point where the pandemic was basically memory-holed. That’s why Trump won in 2024 - people didn’t remember just how much of a disaster he was. And their buyers’ remorse will only do so much good now.

Republicans never let Obama get away with two Ebola deaths, or Clinton with the four fatalities in the Benghazi attack. The fact that Democrats let Trump get away with over a million deaths from COVID-19 is absolute political negligence, and I’m almost as ashamed to call myself a Democrat as I am an American. I might even switch my voter registration to NPA at this point.

Even if Trump wasn’t directly responsible for this particular plane crash, he has far more than 67 peoples’ blood on his hands. And the Democrats let him get away with it. That’s the real story here.

Nobody Asked For This AI Bullshit

The worst feeling on the Internet. Image taken from r/Memes.

I remember the good old days when you’d go to Google Search and type in whatever question you wanted the answer to. You’d be pointed to several sites ranked in roughly the order of how helpful the algorithm thinks they’ll be. To some extent, this is still the case today.

However, whenever you Google a question, you’re presented with an “AI search overview” that basically already answers the question. This leaves aside instances where it doesn’t give you correct information, including this infamous case last year in which people were told to eat glue and rocks.

Now, at first glance, this AI may seem (mostly) harmless, provided nobody actually eats glue and rocks. Never mind that AI is apparently cooking the planet at an alarming rate. But maybe, you figure, we can find a greener way to do it. Maybe we can have more energy-efficient data centers, or run them entirely on renewables the way Iceland already is. And for the sake of argument, I’ll grant you that.

But think about this for a moment: Google’s AI search overview basically removes the need for websites. Nobody’s going to provide traffic to a small website like my own if you’re already given the answer to your question. This is how what some call “late-stage capitalism” works; greedy corporations are going to take over the market, and then they’re going to choke out the competition. There will eventually be no competition. 

Probably the most infuriating part about this AI “revolution” is that nobody really asked for it except the tech companies.

Now, I’m not saying that every scientific breakthrough should need to be voted on democratically. If anything, that might be a bad idea in a country where Donald Trump won the popular vote. Besides, some innovations just happen organically. However, artificial intelligence is going to make life so much worse for the vast majority of the population that I can’t help but feel this “innovation” is forced.

Let’s talk about AI “art.” In many ways, I miss the early days of this era, the halcyon era that was spring 2023. Back then, the most prominent use of AI online was to make public figures play video games. And for the record, the videos of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden trash-talking one another over Wii Sports remain some of the funniest content I’ve ever seen. I’ll never forget this exchange:

Obama: Donald’s in the bunker.

Biden: Bunker? Wait, what happened?

Obama: Bunker in golf, Joe.

Even in those early days of artificial intelligence, there were constant warnings about the nefarious purposes for which this technology could (and inevitably would) be used. The first anti-Biden attack ad of the 2024 campaign (before Biden dropped out of the race) was generated by AI and featured a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Given that Trump’s now selling out Taiwan, the acronym GOP once more stands for “Gaslight, Obstruct, Project”.

But let’s move on past the geopolitical implications of AI and deep-fakes and talk about the fine arts. We keep hearing stories about AI-generated novels and maybe even movies. In fact, during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, which went on for nearly five months, one of the key issues at play was related to the use of AI in Hollywood. As the linked Associated Press article notes, the humans won - for now. 

Still, that was a temporary victory. Humans and the movement for creativity must win every time, whereas our AI-pushing overlords only need to triumph once. On some corners of the Internet, AI has already won.

Take the once-popular website DeviantArt. At one time, it was the go-to platform for anything creative. You could (and still can) post digital artwork, photography, or even fanfiction there. However, as of 2025, it’s fallen out of favor among many artists. The reason? According to this online forum, the site is using submitted artwork to train artificial intelligence. Plus, it’s populated with so much slop that you can’t tell what artwork is genuine and which wasn’t actually produced with a human mind behind it. Consider it a warning sign - a cautionary tale, if you will.

Imagine a world where nobody wants to be creative anymore. Yes, we might still enjoy the AI-generated sitcoms and whatnot (hell, they might already be out there), but on this issue I’m very much a purist. The late science fiction author Harlan Ellison put it best. At one point in the linked 1995 interview, Ellison states that it should cost you something to produce art; otherwise, it’s not art. 

And I agree with this. Even if what we might consider our “souls” is ultimately just a product of our brains, we still need to cherish it. It’s what keeps us human.

Maybe some people will still want to write novels or film movies. However, human-made art may pale in quantity to the AI-generated garbage that’s sure to flood our screens and bookshelves (if bookshelves still remain, that is). Why would anyone go to the trouble of writing a genuine novel when they’d get far more royalties from something a computer wrote for them?

Finally, let’s look at the fields of academia. There’s been a lot of talk about DeepSeek (an open-source Chinese AI model) and ChatGPT lately. Since I’m based in the US and have never been to China, I’ll just talk about ChatGPT here. And if my adventures on Reddit are any indiction, we’re in a lot of trouble.

To share my personal experience, I took a course on Middle East Politics in the fall 2023 semester (an eventful time to be taking such a course, to be sure), and the professor kept harping on to us that we were not allowed to use generative AI to write our essays. Each of us needed to write three essays that semester, and each paper was meant to be turned into AI-detecting software before the professor would read it.

Now, I never used ChatGPT to write my papers, because I have at least a modicum of academic integrity. But I can’t know if any of my classmates did, and apparently the software meant to detect plagiarism or the use of generative AI is far from perfect. It’s none of my business whether the other students honestly wrote their papers, but I know I did. 

My university is far from alone; and indeed, this problem is far from unique to the postgraduate level. All over the country, and probably in other countries as well, teachers are having to adjust their curricula to reflect that some students may be turning to AI to write their assignments. But the AI will keep getting more effective, as ChatGPT and other platforms update, and the teachers will struggle to keep up. 

Most importantly, there are some jobs in which you can’t just look at your notes when you need to do something; being a heart surgeon is one commonly cited example. Medical school is already very expensive in the United States, which could lead to a shortage of such professionals; imagine if the existing surgeons cheated their way to their MD?

Fortunately, there is hope, though not a lot of it. Back in November 2024, an AI-generated ad for Coca-Cola caused a lot of controversy and ridicule. We need to have more backlash like this, keeping the many dangers and disappointments of AI in the spotlight. That’s how we might stand a chance at keeping as much of our humanity as possible.

To the tech companies forcing this on us: None of us wanted AI to take over our lives and destroy the planet. Really, we didn’t. So go fuck yourselves. 

We will take back the human race. We will not be force-fed your dangerous, destructive technology like the duck pictured below. 

A meme of a cartoon character force-feeding a duck AI. This image was found on BlueSky, posted by one Marcus Hutchins at Malwaretech.com.

We Are All Digitally Divided

A PSA comparing social media algorithms to addictive drugs. Image taken from Hot In Social Media Tips & Tricks

Much has been made of the term “digital divide” in academia. It’s been well-documented, after all, that countries in the Global South tend to have less access to digital technologies such as the Internet. Given the ubiquity of the Internet today, inability to enter the superhighway of information we know as the World Wide Web has become pretty much a deal-breaker if you wish to participate in the global economy.

With the advent of social media, anyone can have their 15 minutes of fame. You can be famous for writing book reviews, famous for playing video games, or even just famous for being famous. If you don’t believe me, this 2024 CNBC poll suggested that over half of Gen Z-ers wanted to be influencers.

You can show off your personal life to anyone who wants to see it. You can live-stream for hours every day, regardless of whether anybody else is watching. In many ways, this world is more connected than ever before…or is it?

I’ll offer a paradoxical thesis: Despite the popularity of social media, human beings are more alone than they have ever been.

Here’s an example. I’m not going to romanticize the age of cable TV - it was all too easy for the TV companies to screw you over with high prices. Of course, it’s the same way with streaming services where you can pick what you want to have access to. But still, in the cable TV era, it was common knowledge what shows were on at what time. Like so many other things in life, you don’t fully understand what you’ve got until it’s gone.

Kids had their Saturday morning cartoons, during which they’d get up at the ass-crack of dawn and bound down the stairs to binge-watch their shows while binge-eating endless bowls of sugary cereal. Adults had their soap operas in the evening that they might watch with their romantic partner. Finally, anyone who couldn’t sleep (possibly including the aforementioned children who lived on Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs) would have infomercials at 3 AM.

Calvin telling us how amazing Saturdays are. Taken from Reddit.

I probably sound like a boomer saying this, but I remember when the Boston Globe published TV guides in all of its papers, telling you when your favorite shows would be on. Chances were good that at least some of your neighbors would watch the same things, and you’d bond further with these people over what insane plot twist had just been unveiled or who’d won Wipeout last night.

That’s not the case these days. If I’m at a party with a neighbor, and they recommend a TV show for me to watch, I first have to check to ensure it’s on one of the streaming platforms I pay monthly to remain subscribed to. In all probability, I’ll forget about their recommendation, simply because I’m not interested in the show and it’s not on a channel I prefer. Gone are the days when we bond over shared television series. We’ll never again have a show with as much cultural relevance as Seinfeld or whatever else was popular in the 1990s.

Now let’s talk about the news. Obviously, “the news” has varied from time to time, and it’s very often depressing these days if you’re at all sane. Overindulgence in the media can be harmful to your mental health - that is no secret. But think about this for a moment: When was the last time you saw anyone under age 60 reading a newspaper?

A slide from a presentation I gave a few months ago about how the news used to be, versus how it is now.

I’m not talking about the digital editions of the New York Times, the Boston Globe, or whatever local news outlet is still limping along and breathing like Steve from Amazing Race (if you know, you know). I’m talking about the physical newspaper. The kind that got delivered to your door every day for a small fee.

Now, my mother still gets the Globe, but guess what? She’s 60 years old, and even among people her age, she’s in the minority. My grandmothers also get the physical paper, but they’re obviously much older than sixty. Most people I interact with on a day-to-day basis outside my family get their news from social media. And that’s a problem.

As I write this post, it’s been one week since Donald Trump became President again. Despite being convicted of 34 felony counts, despite having promised to implement tariffs on other countries and tank the economy, and despite Sleepy Joe Biden having dropped out and been replaced by a far more energetic candidate, he still won. In my mind, David Pakman said it best: “Lots of people in this country have no idea what the hell is going on.”

Think about that for a moment. Google searches for terms like “did Joe Biden drop out” reportedly spiked on the day of the election. I don’t know about you, but it was a pretty big news story in my (admittedly liberal) circles. I remember lying on the front porch with COVID, enduring endless coughing fits, when I received the Discord ping that President Biden had withdrawn from the race. 

Once I was no longer testing positive, I joined my family inside to watch Biden’s primetime address from the Oval Office. It was an important occasion, but apparently not for much of the country. That’s because 8 PM is no longer “primetime” for so many people. Instead it’s just another time when you might be watching TV, or, more likely, aimlessly scrolling through social media. 

Many people in the United States are just prisoners of the algorithm. The right-wing echo chambers kept attacking Joe Biden, making the red-hatted Trump supporters think their opponent was the 81-year-old Biden instead of the then 59-year-old Kamala Harris. They were blindsided by their ballots when they discovered their options, because they never learned that Harris had replaced Biden more than three months prior. 

The last thing I’ll address here is the bookstore. Now, even if I’ve been reading a lot lately, I’m well aware that this hobby is falling out of favor among the Generation Alpha crowd. They’d rather play Fortnite for hours on end and watch Skibidi Toilet videos in class.

One reason I prefer to purchase my books from the local bookstore is because I want to support small businesses as opposed to Amazon whenever it’s realistically possible. And yes, I like the human element of entering the building and asking for recommendations from the staff. But there’s an underrated reason why I prefer the physical store.

There’s no algorithm.

If I look up a book on Amazon, there’s always a section on the buy page saying people who bought X also searched for Y, or something to that effect. In the long term, I’ll end up reading largely books of the same genre and similar themes, rather than getting a well-rounded array of titles like I might at the bookstore. Ultimately, if I’m going to keep doing these book reviews in the long term, I want to read a wide variety of novels.

I know this analysis largely comes from an American perspective. Some of the problems I’ve talked about on this blog, such as expensive health care and gun violence, are unique to the United States. And some of the loneliness is brought upon us by car-dependent infrastructure, which is not as pervasive in, say, Western Europe. 

That being said, the U.S. is not the only country where social media algorithms have been deployed. And I’m not even going to say that the algorithms are all bad; there are too many videos on YouTube to know what the average user might like without any data.

However, anyone who values personal interaction should be wary of these algorithms. After all, technology is not neutral, no matter how much we’d like to think it is. 

We Need To Talk About Elon

Elon Musk jumping in the shape of an X onstage at a Trump rally. Image taken from NPR.

Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. As of the moment I write this post, his net worth is well over four hundred billion dollars, and it’s rapidly growing to boot. 

To put that into perspective, imagine that you had $400 billion USD. In practical terms, you could never spend all that money in a human lifetime, unless you’re about to become immortal. Which is far from impossible given just how much technology has advanced in recent decades. Even so, that’s an insane amount of money, and Musk is evidently using it to buy the U.S. government.

Given his close alliance with now-President Donald Trump (as much as it pains me to utter those words), Musk has been in the news a lot lately. And, given just how much Trump’s mind has been going over the last few years, Elon Musk is effectively already President of the United States. It doesn’t matter that he’s technically ineligible to be commander in chief - he is Trump’s “puppet master.”

During the “celebrations” surrounding Trump’s inauguration the other day, one moment in particular has captured the Internet’s attention. Given just how taboo the gesture is in a civilized society, I will not put an actual picture of it in this article; to me, it’s equivalent to using the N-word with a hard R. But yes, I am referring to the moment when Elon Musk gestured at the ceiling with his right arm slanted toward the heavens.

The New York Times, in their infinite anticipatory obedience, have described “speculation”  being drawn over the gesture. Quite frankly, I struggled over my decision to even include that link there, because the New York Times has arguably enabled Trump more than any politician. A broken clock is right twice a day. The media is indeed the enemy of the people, because their sane-washing of the MAGA movement helped them return to power.

The other claim I want to address is that Elon Musk, who is autistic, was merely stimming. I want to be clear about one thing: I’m on the autism spectrum myself, and I remember rocking back and forth a lot as a child. Even now, I love rocking chairs and hammocks. These days my stims are mostly vocal, but I do rock and flap on occasion. Sometimes it weirds people out; I get it.

But let me make one thing clear: You don’t make that gesture by accident.

The salute Elon Musk made at the inauguration is one with a very dark past. The people who popularized it were responsible for one of the most horrific events of the last few centuries. The Nazi salute is now associated with the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews and millions of other “undesirables” in Europe. And no, another visit to Auschwitz is not going to make us believe Elon isn’t anti-Semitic.

Indeed, Germany, the country whose government spearheaded these atrocities, is now among the most progressive countries on Earth. It’s far more progressive than the United States, at any rate, when it comes to bigotry in all its forms. There are in fact laws against Holocaust denial, and if you make that salute in public, you will probably be arrested. Here, we let Elon get a pass.

I’m not saying Elon Musk is going to commit genocide against six million Americans, but what I am saying is that he knew what gesture he was making, and was happy with how it would be perceived. Or at least, he wasn’t so unhappy that he would decide not to make it. And I know that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists seem to love it.

Another moment I want to touch upon is the one pictured below. It’s from the “Victory Rally” Donald Trump held the night prior to being sworn in as the 47th President of the United States.

Donald Trump at his “Victory Rally” on January 19, 2025. Image taken from ABC News’ website.

During this event, Trump claimed that Elon Musk “knows computers better than anybody. All those computers. Those vote-counting computers. And we won Pennsylvania by a landslide.” Now, if you call a 1.7% margin of victory a landslide, sure. It was a landslide. It was even enough to narrowly drag former three-term US Senator Bob Casey Jr. under the line. But that’s not the most important moment from this speech.

As much as I hate Elon Musk, he’s an incredibly tech-savvy individual; I’ll give him that. He manipulated the Twitter algorithm to prioritize hateful content, to the point where the site is virtually unusable except by users who love such content. Trump’s right about this.

Yes, on its own, the passage above is a non sequitur. But if you replace “and” with “so” in the last sentence, Trump appeared to state that Musk helped him cheat in the 2024 election and steal Pennsylvania from Kamala Harris.

There are two options here: Either Trump got confused again just like he did about whether or not there were airports in 1776, or he admitted to election fraud. And to be clear, I think the former option is more probable. It’s still not the sort of thing to joke about, even if Trump most likely got every single vote that was counted for him. Then again, Trump won’t tone down the rhetoric, not even when it almost got Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer kidnapped.

The most important thing to note is that Elon Musk is, right now, the most powerful person in the world. He has more power than Trump, Vladimir Putin, or even Xi Jinping. His power may not end with the United States. While I think other countries’ voters are smarter than Americans, only time will tell, and Musk has endorsed far-right parties all over Europe, something German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has acknowledged and condemned.

An image the Democratic Party posted on social media. Where was this energy from Democratss during the election? Image taken from the People’s Party website.

Some people think the bromance between Trump and Musk will be short-lived, that we’ll run into “trouble in paradise” early on in the administration. I hate to say it, but I believe this is likely false.

Remember, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world by far. He might even be a trillionaire in two years. If any Republican member of Congress waffles a bit on Trump’s legislative agenda, Musk has the wealth to single-handedly fund a primary challenger to that disloyal Republican. Even if incumbency is difficult to overcome in a primary, Musk can bully sitting Congresspeople and Senators into submission via the mere threat of a primary. As long as Musk offers that to Trump, I don’t see these two breaking up any time soon.

So what can we do? 

Well, the obvious answer would have been to not elect Donald Trump as President, but that ship has unfortunately sailed. Failing that, it makes sense to boycott the platform Xitter (X/Twitter, pronounced “shitter”) as long as Musk owns it. It’s become a far-right, hateful cesspool that no decent person should support. 

Furthermore, though he’s not quite as evil as Musk, Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, deserves condemnation for blocking his newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. When possible, we should aim to support local retail businesses as opposed to Amazon. All the books I’ve reviewed so far were purchased at small bookstores. To be clear, even if Harris had won, we should still have been doing this - Trump’s policies just make it more urgent.

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