– What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck

– Ralph Blasey, the father of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, supported Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court

– Hillary’s Choice by Gail Sheehy

– Interview with Elena Ferrante

– Anne Boyer

“Jeremy Renner Says His Avengers ‘Family’ Have Real ‘Love’ for Each Other: ‘It’s Not Just for Instagram’”

A comment on this NYT op-ed from Kathy Lollock in Santa Rosa, California

I will love you with no regard to the actions of our enemies or the jealousies of actors. I will love you with no regard to the outrage of certain parents or the boredom of certain friends. I will love you no matter what is served in the world’s cafeterias or what game is played at each and every recess. I will love you no matter how many fire drills we are all forced to endure, and no matter what is drawn upon the blackboard in a blurring, boring chalk. I will love you no matter how many mistakes I make when trying to reduce fractions, and no matter how difficult it is to memorize the periodic table. I will love you no matter what your locker combination was, or how you decided to spend your time during study hall. I will love you no matter how your soccer team performed in the tournament or how many stains I received on my cheerleading uniform. I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday. I will love you if you cut your hair and I will love you if you cut the hair of others. I will love you if you abandon your baticeering, and I will love you if you retire from the theater to take up some other, less dangerous occupation. I will love you if you drop your raincoat on the floor instead of hanging it up and I will love you if you betray your father. I will love you even if you announce that the poetry of Edgar Guest is the best in the world and even if you announce that the work of Zilpha Keatley Snyder is unbearably tedious. I will love you if you abandon the theremin and take up the harmonica and I will love you if you donate your marmosets to the zoo and your tree frogs to M. I will love you as the starfish loves a coral reef and as kudzu loves trees, even if the oceans turn to sawdust and the trees fall in the forest without anyone around to hear them. I will love you as the pesto loves the fetuccini and as the horseradish loves the miyagi, as the tempura loves the ikura and the pepperoni loves the pizza. I will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture. I will love you as the doctor loves his sickest patient and a lake loves its thirstiest swimmer. I will love you as the beard loves the chin, and the crumbs love the beard, and the damp napkin loves the crumbs, and the precious document loves the dampness in the napkin, and the squinting eye of the reader loves the smudged print of the document, and the tears of sadness love the squinting eye as it misreads what is written. I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat, and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms. I will love you as a child loves to overhear the conversations of its parents, and the parents love the sound of their own arguing voices, and as the pen loves to write down the words these voices utter in a notebook for safekeeping. I will love you as a shingle loves falling off a house on a windy day and striking a grumpy person across the chin, and as an oven loves malfunctioning in the middle of roasting a turkey. I will love you as an airplane loves to fall from a clear blue sky and as an escalator loves to entangle expensive scarves in its mechanisms. I will love you as a wet paper towel loves to be crumpled into a ball and thrown at a bathroom ceiling and an eraser loves to leave dust in the hairdos of the people who talk too much. I will love you as a cufflink loves to drop from its shirt and explore the party for itself and as a pair of white gloves loves to slip delicately into the punchbowl. I will love you as a taxi loves the muddy splash of a puddle and as a library loves the patient tick of a clock. I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies, and I will love you as the banana peel loves the shoe of a man who was just struck by a shingle falling off a house. I will love you as a volunteer fire department loves rushing into burning buildings and as burning buildings love to chase them back out, and as a parachute loves to leave a blimp and as a blimp operator loves to chase after it. I will love you as a dagger loves a certain person’s back, and as a certain person loves to wear daggerproof tunics, and as a daggerproof tunic loves to go to a certain dry cleaning facility, and how a certain employee of a dry cleaning facility loves to stay up late with a pair of binoculars, watching a dagger factory for hours in the hopes of catching a burglar, and as a burglar loves sneaking up behind people with binoculars, suddenly realizing that she has left her dagger at home. I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled. I will love you until every fire is extinguished and until every home is rebuilt form the handsomest and most susceptible of woods, and until every criminal is handcuffed by the laziest of policemen. I will love you until M. hates snakes and J. hates grammar, and I will love you until C. realizes S. is not worthy of his love and N. realizes he is not worthy of the V. I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple, and until the apple hates a tree and the tree hates a nest, and until a bird hates a tree and an apple hates a nest, although honestly I cannot imagine that last occurrence no matter how hard I try. I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from skim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and no matter how I am discovered after what happens to me happens to me as I am discovering this. I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else – your co-star, perhaps, or Y., or even O., or anyone Z. through A., even R. although sadly I believe it will be quite some time before two women can be allowed to marry – and I will love you if you have a child, and I will love you if you have two children, or three children, or even more, although I personally think three is plenty, and I will love you if you never marry at all, and never have children, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all, and I must say that on late, cold nights I prefer this scenario out of all the scenarios I have mentioned. That, Beatrice, is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.

The Beatrice Letters by Lemony Snicket

The world—the new one—is only worth fighting for if we remember why we’re fighting. Because grief means you have loved and lost. Because love is the ultimate inoculation against imperialism. Like any immunizing agent, there’s part of the virus inside the cure: imperialism is the possessing maw by which territories subsume others for profit. Love is its inverse, a possession that sets other bodies free: You are mine and I am yours and we are now free to build a new thing from these parts. Love is roundly unprofitable and staunchly illogical, the prioritizing of another’s needs over your own. Its malleability, the way it can fold and unfold around all the brittle systems that oppose liberation, isn’t just the conduit to a future but proof that we’re always inventing one, in embraces.

“Over the Edge, Over Again” by Frank Falsi

What lies beyond love that costs nothing? Love that remains, after love is gone. We will stay a family. I see signs now, all the time, that you’re not dead: you’re sleeping. I’ll believe in anything that brings you back home to me. There’s no risk here, just acceptance. Just the request for an answer.

[…]

Real love doesn’t make you act crazy. The reason we act crazy when we are infatuated is because we want it to be real so badly – we want to jump over the distance of time that makes real love what it is. That’s the trick of romance: The crazy infatuation love is so much brighter and turns so many more corners so quickly. Much more exciting than the real thing. But real love, at its finest, makes you feel like you are bursting open, like this: Like hearing a beautiful song, or reading a beautiful poem, or hearing a wonderful story, and the tears come and you don’t know precisely why. It doesn’t hurt; it hurts in a way that isn’t hurting, that we don’t have a word for. Largeness. Enormity. It takes a real strength, a real grace, to stand up straight in the face of that. Especially if you’re not familiar with it.

Jacob Clifton (Gossip Girl Review from the now defunct, Television Without Pity)

'Cause love's such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves

“Under Pressure” by Queen ft. David Bowie

Let’s see which ones come true!

Politics:

1. Democrats gain 10-15 seats in the US House of Representatives, winning back the House, but Republicans hold the Senate.

2. The following Republican House incumbents lose reelection: Mike Lawler (NY-17), Jen Kiggans (VA-02), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), Scott Perry (PA-04), Tom Kean (NJ-07), Derrick Van Orden (WI-03), Monica de La Cruz (TX-15), Ryan Zinke (MT-01), Eli Crane (AZ-02)

3. The following Democratic incumbents win reelection: Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez (WA-03), Kristen McDonald Rivet (MI-08), Nellie Pou (NJ-09), Gabriel Vasquez (NM-02), Susie Lee (NV-03), Tom Suozzi (NY-03), Greg Landsman (OH-01), Adam Gray (CA-13), Laura Gillen (NY-04)

4. Sleeper House flips: TX-15, MT-01, AZ-02

5. Jon Ossoff wins reelection by 4-6 points.

6. Roy Cooper wins the open Senate seat in North Carolina, but Republicans win the open Senate seat in Michigan and the Michigan governorship1.

7. Republicans hold the Georgia and Nevada governorships, but Katie Hobbs wins reelection in Arizona and Democrats win the open Wisconsin gubernatorial race with margins of all races <2 points.

8. John Cornyn loses his primary (as does Jasmine Crockett), and Ken Paxton becomes Texas’ next senator.

9. Michael Bennet becomes Governor of Colorado and appoints Rep. Jason Crow to replace him as senator.

10. Supreme Court rules against Trump on tariffs and against lower courts blocking state bans of transgender girls and women on female sports teams, i.e. will impose a national ban of transgender girls/women competing on girls/women’s sports teams.2

11. Gavin Newsom continues to lead Democratic presidential primary polls for 2028.

12. Kamala Harris announces she isn’t running for president in 2028.

13. Pete Hegseth is the first Trump Cabinet member to get kicked off the island.

14. A Republican Supreme Court justice dies.

Public Figures:

15. Timothée Chalamet wins the Best Actor Oscar for Marty Supreme and he and Kylie Jenner get engaged (he’s the dad that stepped up!!).

16. Travis Kelce retires, he and Taylor Swift get married, and she’s pregnant within <6 months but doesn’t bother revealing it, and instead moves about like Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope in season 3 of Scandal.

17. Sydney Sweeney quietly switches her party registration to Democrat (and then intentionally leaks it).

18. Bennifer Part III

19. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham reveal that they got married and divorced and are now married again.

20. Will and Jada Pinkett Smith (finally) get divorced, as do Prince William and Catherine Middleton.

21. Leonardo DiCaprio marries whatever 5’8” wannabe model he’s currently dating (who doesn’t not resemble his last several exes a la “your new girl is my clone”) because he feels the weight of his own mortality (which I’ve felt since birth but that’s neither here nor there).

22. Charli XCX announces her retirement on her Substack.

23. Olivia Nuzzi announces she’s pregnant (and doesn’t name the father3).

24. Trump pardons Diddy.

25. A member of One Direction gets married.

26. There’s a sex scandal involving one (or more) of the people in the Democratic Punditburo.

27. Deaths: Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Prince Charles, Elon Musk, and *spins wheel* Britney Spears

Media:

28. The Off-Campus show (based on the novels by Elle Kennedy) on Prime breaks records.4

29. Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show is mediocre, but the real story is the surprise guest.

30. Erika Kirk gets her own reality show and it’s a flop, albeit one with lots of praying.

31. Wuthering Heights movie is a hit, the new Pride and Prejudice is a miss.

32. Frank Ocean releases his next album.

33. Grey’s Anatomy ends (finally).

34. Ariana Grande wins the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Wicked: For Good (and promptly breaks up with Ethan Slater).

35. Pop-Punk Renaissance (Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Panic! At the Disco, etc.)

36. Vanderpump Rules finally gets canceled.

37. Katseye breaks up.

38. The Chainsmokers have a hit single.

39. The Bachelorette crashes and burns this season because Taylor Frankie Paul can’t stop hooking up with Dakota, her baby daddy that keeps on cheating on her (or rather “cheating” on her given they aren’t officially together).

40. Barack Obama puts Heated Rivalry on his list of “Must Watch TV”.

Other:

41. At least one of the six still unsolved Millennium Prize problems will be solved.

42. There will be notable advances in AI regulation in the realm of deepfakes and child pornography.

43. There’s another bizarre animal story (Harambe, Tiger King, that goddamn squirrel that apparently predicted Trump winning the 2024 election, etc.).

44. An Alzheimer’s drug is discovered.

45. Historical romance novels, monogamy, and skinny jeans will make a comeback!! (And I’m not just saying that because I’m a huge fan of all of the above).

46. Playboy goes out of business (Inshallah).

47. Lane Kiffin tries to become a TikTok star and when that fails, starts posting daily Bible verses on his Instagram story.

48. A Category 5 hurricane will hit the United States and its name will be retired (see: Andrew, Katrina, Maria, etc.)

49. An animal that was previously believed to be extinct makes a shocking RVTRN.

50. A new self-driving electric car comes onto the market and gives Waymo a major run for its money.

1. Things change but the girl (now the woman) remains the same

   

2. Politically speaking, Americans are finally coming to terms with the reality that non-white people are socially moderate if not conservative, and are veering away from “noble savage” brainworms.
   To be clear, I internalized this 25 years ago when I noticed that the girls and women in my father’s grandmother’s household didn’t eat until they had served the men and boys and cleaned up after them, but better late than never.

   

3. Now more than ever before, I think a lot of people have implicitly decided that being mean is synonymous with being smart.

   

4. My latest political axes

   

5. Not wrong tbh

   

6. Our little baby Esther remains the light of our lives

   

7. I got married on April 4-5, 20251.

8. The Democratization of the Internet is here.

   

9. Taylor Swift released The Life of a Showgirl

   

10. As I remind myself whenever I’m in a bad mood

    

After the 2024 election, there have been seemingly endless arguments over where the Democratic Party should go next.

An ongoing refrain in Democratic politics post 2024 is iterations of “We’re a Big Tent” and “Democrats need the voices of both moderates and progressives” or, in the words of Gavin Newsom, ““I want it to be the (Joe) Manchin to (Zohran) Mamdani party. I want it to be inclusive.” But, what Newsom, and other advocates of the Big Tent are conveniently brushing over is that well, Joe Manchin left the Democratic Party1, and long before the rise of Zohran Mamdani.

My current doomer thesis is that the Democratic Big Tent is doomed to fail electorally, except in off-year elections and midterms, and it’s going to take a marquee loss to JD Vance in 2028 for the Democratic Party to recalibrate into a coalition that can decisively win presidential elections, and especially, win a Senate majority that can actually govern2.

This is why I hold this belief.

Read more

Currently, this battle is raging again because Olivia Nuzzi is the main character of politics social media (again).

Nuzzi, formerly of New York Magazine and currently with Vanity Fair, had an affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when covering him on the campaign trail in 2024, and her ex-fiancé, 1, is airing their dirty laundry in a five-part Substack series. There’s a lot going on in that sordid story, but the relevant aspect is that in June 2024, during her affair with his opponent, Nuzzi wrote a piece titled, “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden.”

In it, Nuzzi characterizes Biden as completely unfit to be president, not just old but massively declining, physically and mentally. She writes,

“Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth.

[…]

The administration was above conspiratorial chitchat that entertained seriously scenarios in which the president was suffering from a shocking decline most Americans were not seeing. If the president was being portrayed that way, it was by his political enemies on the right, who promoted through what the press office termed “cheap fakes” a caricature of an addled creature unfit to serve. They would not dignify those people, or people doing the bidding of those people, with a response.”

After Nuzzi’s affair with RFK was discovered, and especially once Lizza started sharing the details of just how professionally and personally unethical his ex-fiancée was, many members of the Democratic Party, including Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and former senior advisor to Biden, in tandem with affiliated partisan media figures started circling the wagons, insisting that her reporting on Biden is rendered false due to her conflict of interest. Nuzzi is a convenient means of discrediting any opposition to Biden because she’s very compromised and deeply dishonest, but she wasn’t the first or the last person to comment on his age and infirmity.

is currently arguing with Tanden, taking her task for covering for Biden’s age during his presidency2; conversely, she is deflecting by stating that Silver isn’t suitably focusing on Trump’s age, which matters more than Biden’s age since Trump is in the Oval Office.

To be clear, Silver is on the record supporting a constitutional amendment mandating that presidents be 75 or under on inauguration day, and he wrote a piece less than two weeks ago pointing out that Trump is also too old to be president.

But, Silver and Tanden’s isn’t about Trump or about Nate Silver for that matter. The argument is about the Democratic Party, its factional wars, its relationship with the media, and what happened behind the scenes from June 27, 2024, the day of the first presidential debate of the 2024 election between Biden and Trump, and July 21, 2024, when Biden ultimately dropped out and endorsed Kamala Harris.

In 2024, I was a Washington state delegate for Kamala Harris, and prior to Harris securing the Democratic nomination, I was a Washington state delegate for Joe Biden.

I don’t know everything that transpired in the backrooms of the Democratic Party from June 27-July 21, 2024, but I’m sharing my perception of this period in order to confirm existing reporting and correct any potential misinformation about this time.

In addition, people whom I regard as at least partly culpable for the Trump administration (specifically members of the Biden administration and their allies within the DNC) are quietly attempting to claw their way back into grace. If the following reflections raise questions about whether these people ought to be anywhere near power again, I’ll have done my part.

I watched the June 27 debate at home, and I was appalled and furious that Biden’s inner circle had kept us all in the dark about his condition. I knew that Biden was old, but I didn’t realize how frail and tired he was, and not just from a mild cold as his team insisted. Trump isn’t youthful or vital, no matter what his superfans claim, but Biden looked like a strong gust of wind could blow him over, and that is not what I or most of the country wants from our Commander in Chief.

I started frantically texting and making calls to my friends and colleagues, as well as to trusted journalists. I didn’t know what I could do as a delegate, or at first, what the party should even do, but I knew that Biden wouldn’t be able to defeat Trump, and we were sleepwalking into disaster.

After the debate, Biden HQ started calling all the delegates from different Delaware based phone numbers, trying to lock down our support for Biden as the presidential nominee. I picked up the first call, and when I realized why they were calling, I told them I had [solidcore], and hung up. After that, I ignored their (many) calls and deleted their voicemails, but I did screenshot a few things for posterity.

Despite whisperings of an open primary (which Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama apparently wanted), I knew that there was no other real option for the Democratic nominee besides Kamala Harris. Harris was the only one with the full donor list, so swapping her out for Biden seemed like the simplest (if arguably not the most effective) solution to the mess we were collectively in. Moreover, Harris was the sitting Vice President, the first Black woman in the role, and bypassing her for another candidate would not sit well with Black voters, who are still the most reliably Democratic racial group, and the group that propelled Biden to the Democratic nomination in 2020 (and Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Barack Obama in 2008).

But, the Biden team, the Democratic National Committee (especially its chairman Jaime Harrison, who spent much of these 24 days arguing with Biden’s online detractors), and state Democratic parties were frantically trying to ensure that Biden remained the nominee, regardless of the misgivings of many Democratic voters and even some delegates.

People in power were attempting to bequeath Biden the nomination by means of virtual roll call well before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They tried to claim an obscure state law in Ohio meant that if Biden was not formally nominated well before the in-person convention in August, he wouldn’t appear on the ballot in the state. Harrison in particular insisted that pushing Biden through before the convention was an act of democracy and stated, “We certainly are not going to leave the fate of this election in the hands of MAGA Republicans in Ohio that have tried to keep President Biden off of the general election ballot.”

However, at this point, the state of Ohio had already passed legislation ensuring that the deadline for political parties to certify their presidential and vice-presidential candidates was September 1, WELL after Democrats’ convention in Chicago. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine had signed the bill which moved back the filing deadline on June 28, 2024, the day after the disastrous debate, and a week before Democratic power brokers came up with the bright idea to use the law to coronate Biden as our party’s presidential nominee before the convention. As Ben Kindel, a spokesperson for Ohio Secretary of State, Frank LaRose said, “The issue is resolved in Ohio, and Democratic activists should stop trying to scapegoat Ohio for their party dysfunction.”

None of this stopped the Biden team, the DNC, and state Democratic parties from trying to push Biden through by obfuscating these details to the delegates, who are ultimately the ones who decide the Democratic party’s presidential nominee.

This screenshot below is from the chat on our July 13 WA delegate Zoom call, during which Shasti Conrad, the Chair of the Washington State Democratic Party and current Vice-Chair of the DNC, informed us that we’d be nominating Biden by virtual roll call before the in-person convention in Chicago. I pushed back, and was shut down.

The Washington State Democratic Party, like the national Democratic Party, was in complete shambles, and none of the higher-ups were willing to answer my questions or address my concerns, and my fellow delegates, were quite frankly, too cowardly to back me up. They would have rather gone down with the Titanic that was the Biden Administration than grab the tiny door which saved Kate Winslet.

But, I’ve always been much more risk-tolerant than your average liberal woman, so I took matters into my own hands and sent out this email to all my fellow WA delegates.

The replies I got ranged from reluctantly agreeing, to insisting Kamala Harris couldn’t win because she was a woman, to calling me (a woman of color) a racist misogynist for suggesting that Harris (a biracial woman) replace Biden (a white man) as the Democratic nominee. But, not a single one of the other 100+ WA delegates was willing to publicly oppose Biden as the nominee.

I continued my conversations with colleagues and journalists, and while I’m not exactly sure how or even if my internal machinations impacted the final outcome of this fight, Biden ultimately dropped out of the presidential race on July 21, 2024 and within an hour, endorsed Kamala Harris.

To be clear, I knew Harris would lose even before she was the nominee (see above post on alt). But, I believe the internal polling I saw which showed Biden would have lost by much more; he was trailing Trump in New Jersey, and massively dragging down House and Senate Democrats. I trust the polling, even if I take the punditry with a massive grain of salt.

Harris as the nominee saved four Senate seats (Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada) and at least a dozen House seats. She turned a 1980 loss into a 2004 loss; despite the current vibes of the country, she lost the popular vote by only 1.5%, and the electoral college by ~230k votes across Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Relatedly to my previous bit about theater kids, I strongly believe the Democratic Establishment being utterly terrified to challenge the status quo almost resulted in a collective death march to Republicans having 57 Senate seats and 240 House seats, and I’m never going to forgive them for that.

But why did I even bother sticking my neck out? Wouldn’t have it been easier had I kept my head down and let Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and people much more powerful than me handle it all? Why did I put my reputation on the line and under my (extremely unique) real name at that? Why am I sharing this now?

The answer is boring, but I spoke out then and am sharing this now because I thought it was the right thing to do. You can disagree with my actions and motivations, many people that I love do, but I make no apologies.

I knew that Trump and a Republican trifecta would be disastrous for the United States and the world (just the USAID cuts have killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide). I felt that with Harris, we had a fighting chance to prevent it, so I made an effort to give us that opportunity. I couldn’t save the country from itself, but I tried.

Last week, there was an argument, on X-ter over the existence (or lack thereof) of liberal nationalism (as per ), i.e. if liberals are as patriotic as they ought to be, and if this lack of warmth towards Americana™ has electoral consequences.

Obviously, the vast majority of liberals aren’t going to loudly embrace liberal nationalism, and aren’t capable of faking it well enough to bamboozle enough moderate-to-conservative voters to win the Senate. I don’t expect everybody to love America and think it’s the greatest country in the world like I do, but since I actually believe there’s nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America, I see it as my civic duty to put my weight (all 115 pounds of it) into my convictions.

Like Joan Didion said, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes, they know the price of things. And for all my flaws, I possess self-respect in swades.

“Spanberger’s unlikely journey from the CIA to Va.’s first female governor”

Anonymous asked: This may sound fatalist, but I really don’t think there is anything Democrats can do for failsons because what they truly want back is status over minorities and women without effort. Which would mean throwing their base (who they need at least 99% of). That or Trump crashing the economy or sending them off to die in Nigeria.

Well it could also be Venezuela, I’m pretty sure Trump is trying to start a war there too.

But yeah, like I said, one of many electoral problems Democrats have is that these failsons, as you call them, used to vote consistently Democrat, but we still need their votes, especially in swing states. As the country got less white, Democrats thought they would need less of these Midwestern failsons to vote for them, and didn’t realize their Hispanic and Asian counterparts in the Sunbelt aren’t much different from their white brothers up north. If you think about it, that’s the beauty of assimilation, good for the country as a whole, and really bad for liberalism.

And no, Zohran Mamdani doing well with young men in D+80 NYC doesn’t mean we should be running Muslim progressives in every swing state, there’s a reason Abdul El-Sayed is trailing both Mallory McMorrow and Haley Stevens in polls against Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for Michigan Senate that lost to Elissa Slotkin last year.

Anonymous asked: Is the obsession with unions another “I want to be a strong manly man thing”? Most Democratic union members are in things like teachers unions, and most Americans don’t work in easily unionizable jobs.

I’ll be a contrarian and say that Democrats should be worried about blue-collar unions in the Midwest cratering right because the only reason the Blue Wall (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania) was called that is because union workers in those states were the Democratic firewall and when their rank-and-file are voting Republican, as they have in increasing amounts since 2016, Democrats lose those states.

Remember, Biden won because he did better than Hillary with moderate and conservative white men, and he did better than Kamala with Hispanic and Asian men. Kamala matched Biden’s numbers with white voters in the Midwest and even in Kansas!! She just crashed and burned with Latino voters, the demographic went a full 10% right from 2020, and when there are like 1 million Latinos just in Pennsylvania, it’s no wonder she didn’t win the state or the election.

Like, I don’t disagree with this ask, but the problem is, there is literally no way around winning the Blue Wall right under the 2020 census, and the 2030 census will make things even worse because Democrats will need the Rust Belt, NE-02, AND a Sunbelt state to reach 270, and if Democrats don’t do as well as Joe Biden did in 2020 with blue-collar union voters in the Midwest, we aren’t getting that Blue Wall. And Biden barely won the electoral college!! He only won Wisconsin by ~20k votes, and Arizona and Georgia by ~10k.

The thing is, the Sunbelt is significantly redder than the Blue Wall and even if Democrats win Georgia and Nevada (Arizona is R+6 and North Carolina has only voted Democrat once twice in 50 years, in 1976 and 2008), and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, they’re at 264 votes.

In other words, to win the presidency in 2028 (even before the 2030 census), Democrats need to either win the entire Rust Belt + a Sunbelt state or they need to win Georgia + Nevada + NE-02 + a Rust Belt state, and the thing is, where one state in the Blue Wall goes, the rest follow. And, the Blue Wall states haven’t voted for different presidential candidates since 1988, when Bush won Michigan and Pennsylvania and Dukakis won Wisconsin.

Plus:

Before the advent of social media, everyone in politics was not talking to everyone else in politics all of the time. It wasn’t possible. People who worked in politics in different places had their own local political communities — if you did campaigns in Kentucky, it was not easy to be in constant contact with political operatives in California. Different jobs had their own professional communities. The political consultants were separate from the grass-roots activists who were separate from the Hill staffers who were separate from the think tankers who were separate from the journalists who were separate from the pollsters who were separate from the politicians.

People talked to each other before social media. I am not saying they didn’t. There were conferences and lunches and phone calls and panel discussions. But they weren’t all talking to one another all at once, all of the time. And this affects even the people in politics who are not on social media because they are still operating in a professional community where their colleagues are shaped by it. Attention is the most valuable currency in modern politics, and these platforms are where it is traded. This is of course true on the right, where many of the president’s most consequential statements are delivered on the social media platform he owns. But it is also true on the left.

My sentiments about the moderate vs. progressive WARs (pun intended) moving forward:

So much of Democratic infighting could be resolved if the people who staff and run campaigns weren’t abysmal at math, and were capable of accurately cross-checking whatever nonsense that cherry-picking data pundits fed them, and didn’t just accept wrong conclusions at face value.

I’ve been increasingly checking out of politics because everybody is annoying and frustrating me for a number of different reasons. The right-wing is fixated on impregnating as many 20-somethings as possible and the left-wing is seemingly split…

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If I were 11 years old in 2025, I would probably be non-binary.

You may not realize it looking at me, but I genuinely feel like a failed woman sometimes, internally if not externally1. And, when I was younger, I felt like a failed girl, and I feel like if I had the contemporary vocabulary to articulate this feeling of abject alienation from my gender when I was a kid, I’d probably have came to the conclusion I was non-binary. But that said, I was never, and will never be, anything but female, no matter how traumatizing it was for me at times, and how I’d have given anything to opt out of it when I was younger, and sometimes even to this day.2

Part of the sentiment of being a “failed girl” stemmed from the corporeal: I was an early developer™ and wanted OUT of my body since I didn’t understand why I wasn’t flat-chested like other girls my age3. I desperately wanted to opt out of puberty and growing into a woman so to speak, and I would have taken any silver bullet to delay or bypass it, risks be damned. I would wear a sweatshirt in the southern California sunshine so nobody could see the outline of my chest, and so nobody could snap my bra strap (yes that actually happened in the 5th grade). I eventually grew past the worst of that brand of self-loathing, but the physical was only a part of my alienation from my gender.

When I was a kid, I wasn’t very popular with my peers, especially with other girls. I was always too sharp and incisive, ambitious and cerebral, and I also just didn’t understand the way social structures worked, who played with who and whatnot. For a while, I’d hang out with the boys because they were more inclined to overlook my awkwardness, but by late elementary school, kids start sex-segregating and other girls honed in on my oddities, and made it clear to me that I was “not like them.” So, during recess, I’d read a book on the bench and when I was done, walk the perimeter of the playground while balancing the book on my head.

In the 20 years since the 5th grade, I’d like to think I’ve mellowed out, and meticulously sanded down the sharpest of my edges, the ones that scratched me and those around me. I learned to make and retain female friends, but like everything else it took intentional effort and a lot of trial and error. But, even as an adult woman who’s married and loved by her family and friends and husband, I sometimes feel like I’m doing womanhood all wrong. I logically know that there are a lot of women who are my kindred spirits (my mother, my friends, my celebrity blorbo, Taylor Swift), but when I see how people talk about women online, both men and women alike, I just feel so alienated from womanhood at large.

Last week, Helen Andrews published a piece called “The Great Feminization,” and it was praised and criticized and outright derided depending on who you asked. I read the piece when it was posted but I wanted to collect my thoughts before writing it on it.

In the essay, Andrews argues that since the Great Awokening (or even before), the locus of power in Western institutions has shifted. As women started outperforming men academically and professionally, they become the numerical majority in key professions and institutional roles, and Andrews insists that the character of those institutions is fundamentally changed. Andrews writes, “Feminization is not an organic result of women outcompeting men. It is an artificial result of social engineering, and if we take our thumb off the scale it will collapse within a generation.” In other words, she’s disdainful and actively disgusted by this so-called “feminization.”

The thing is, Andrews seems ignorant of the fact that the phenomenon she’s criticizing is responsible for her own power and influence. It’s akin to the right-wing women that rage against feminism, like who do you think gave you the right to vote for Republicans and yap constantly online instead of being barefoot and pregnant from ages 18 to 45 with no respite? Hint: It wasn’t social conservatives!

Regarding Andrews, in The Bulwark, Cathy Young writes:

It’s not that women are bad, says Andrews; but their distinct qualities and values—“empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition”—transform these institutions in ruinous ways. Let too many women flock to academia, and we get touchy-feely stuff instead of “open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth.” Too many women in journalism spell the decline of “prickly individualists” willing to brave public disapproval. (Other, that is, than Andrews herself, who is careful to inform the reader that she’s not like other girls: she has “a lot of disagreeable opinions” and is not down with a “conflict-averse and consensus-driven” culture.) Business? Goodbye, “swashbuckling spirit”; hello, “feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy.”

However, even if Andrews has a directionally correct point about ideological institutional capture in the last 15 years and there are valid critiques to be made about affirmative action and identity politics in academia and the professional world, she doesn’t actually offer any actionable solutions for the problem she diagnoses. She suggests that we collectively should “take our thumb off the scale” and roll back anti-discrimination laws that supposedly make it “illegal to employ too few women.” I’m cool with that, so now what?

Even if Andrews herself doesn’t articulate any real fixes for the feminization problem, her allies on the right do, and those fixes aren’t palatable to me or quite frankly, Andrews herself since she’s a famous author with an extensive bibliography, and clearly doesn’t want to give up the money and status it brings.

Something else that I noticed is that a lot of people are pushing back on Andrews’ argument by (and I’m paraphrasing) saying that women have different strengths, and may not be naturally risk-tolerant but bring other things to the table professionally. On her Substack, which David French referenced in the New York Times, Kelly Chapman writes,

It’s all the same story: once softness becomes moralized as decline, emotional austerity can be the only vehicle for truth. Years in, thanks to the Take Economy, truth can only be truth when it’s dressed in the harshest language possible. Harshness is the only thing that cuts through the fog, the only way to prove you aren’t like the others, the only way to show you know what’s what. For a truth to pierce in the anti-woke sphere, it must pierce indeed. It must cut right to the heart and wound and slice up all that soft flesh, and if you die, all the better. Survival of the fittest. The endpoint is cruelty, just as it was for performative empathy. Power is the only truth. Sincerity is suspect. Redemption4 exists in neither world.

Look, I believe that cruelty is wrong (love all, trust a few, do wrong to none etc.) but it’s blatantly obvious that both Chapman and French approach the world from an inherently religious perspective, and in particular, an Evangelical (and/or Exvangelical) point of view, and this view is fundamentally antithetical to how I see the world. We are all a product of our upbringings and life experiences, but with regards to gender, religion is inextricable from the patriarchy and its expectations of what men and women ought to be like5 so that colors everything they say about gender, and renders their approach diametrically opposed to my own as an atheist.

Ironically, the religious rebuttal to Andrews’ piece makes me feel almost more alienated from the state of womanhood than the original piece, which just disdains women as a collective. Gun to head, I’d rather be dismissed and disrespected by virtue of my sex for qualities I don’t personally possess than be considered innately soft and needing protection from forces stronger than myself (there aren’t any for the record), which both French and Chapman imply are innate to womanhood.

In other words, Helen Andrews’ dismissal of women as lacking in “prickly individualism” and destroying society with their icky feminine empathy is tedious, but my bigger gripe with Andrews piece is what it drew out of other people. I know perfectly well that all women aren’t soft and emotional and incapable of addressing conflict head-on; I exist, as do my friends, my mother, and the mothers of my friends (not to mention Hillary Clinton and the commenters of this piece). But that said, the responses to the Andrews essay make me believe that our understanding of gender et. al might be more unique than I thought.

I think that a lot of people across the political spectrum genuinely believe that women who ARE what Andrews describes as “prickly individualists with swashbuckling spirit” aren’t fully formed adult women. In Wuthering Heights, Cathy Earnshaw says, “I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free,” and I relate, but I also never really got the memo I was supposed to outgrow being that way. I was raised on unconditional love and total freedom by parents that never enforced rules6, and of course the world isn’t as accommodating as my parents, but I’m extraordinarily good at bending it to my will and getting what I want (IYKYK).

In any case, this is why I said that I would identify as non-binary if I knew what it was when I was a kid. Who I am on the inside doesn’t fit into the traditional gender binary as it currently is; I don’t internally conform to gender roles and I don’t WANT to conform to gender roles, but I’m still a woman. Children lack the emotional capacity to articulate that disconnect since their brains aren’t fully developed, and I can absolutely see myself panicking and wanting to abandon being female, since being an adult woman as other people portray it seems terrible! Why would I willingly sign up to be an irrational coward who can’t make decisions for myself? That’s how Helen Andrews describes women, and incidentally, how I actively aspire to NOT be!

However, one of many differences between me and Helen Andrews7 is that I no longer see myself as intrinsically built different than other women, and I definitely do not consider myself as superior to them. I’m always have my quirks and idiosyncrasies, and I’ll always be ambitious and cerebral and way more risk-tolerant than your average woman that voted for Kamala Harris, but at the end of the day, I’m not an alien. Maybe I’m not the exact same as most other women, but we can understand, respect, and love each other.

Yeah, I hate to cook and folding a load of laundry can take me a week of procrastination, and the idea of quitting full-time work when I have children makes me break out in hives, but I’m not the only one. Just because I have aspirations in life beyond poasting and domesticity (for one thing, I want to make a lot of money, and I mean as an individual, not as a household) doesn’t mean I’m not a woman, it just means that I’m a different sort of woman, a more ambitious and outspoken and disagreeable woman (albeit politely so).

I’ve been going through my old Twitter posts and it’s interesting because I almost forgot who I used to be. I don’t want to RVTRN to that version of me, but I think it can be healthy to navel gaze (as a treat). Yes, everybody thinks way too much about themselves8, but sometimes, in order to go forward, you need to go back. I’m not the same person who made these posts anymore, but I am a better version of her, and I’m proud of it.9

• Aubrey Plaza is playing Heidi Fleiss (notorious Hollywood madam and onetime procurer of prostitutes for high-profile clients like Charlie Sheen) in an upcoming movie so I listened to the Heidiworld podcast on Fleiss. Heidi points out that the most likely sex work clients are older men who didn’t successfully pull beautiful women in their youth, and like ... yeah.

• Something I’ve been marinating on is that a lot of people subconsciously (or even consciously) believe that women who are in love with men are automatically dumbing themselves down, and I’ve personally felt like the subject of this assumption before. It begs the question, would I be smarter if I was in love with a woman instead of a man? I don’t think that it’s more profound or intellectual to not be straight, but it’s not uncommon to see people claiming that any woman who shows emotional depth and intellectual prowess isn’t straight, and it just reeks of misogyny.

• Incidentally, I’ve decided that when I have kids, I’m not going to mention being pregnant on main and just pop up one fine day with a small human child. I don’t have any plans whatsoever to be a mommy blogger but who knows? Maybe I’ll surprise myself. The thing is, I don’t want to be seen as a mother, I want to be seen as a human being, and I can’t change society and force it to start regarding mothers as people anytime soon, so I’m going to just supersede that by demanding to be seen as an individual before I’m a mother or a wife.

• Speaking of pregnancy, there’s been a lot of discourse about postpartum bodies, and I tend to agree with the link I included here. I think that most “normal” men aren’t actively disgusted by their wives’ postpartum bodies, and my own husband’s reaction to that tweet was, “Please stop reading Radfem Hitler’s posts,” but women’s fixation on beauty did not come about in a vacuum!! In the age of social media, being beautiful (which stereotypically means young and thin and ~smooth) is a hot commodity so it’s not surprising that women are anxious about losing it! Moreover, we aren’t blind, we see how men talk about women’s bodies, pre and postpartum, and no, it doesn’t actually change things that men have more than one child with the same women. As per this fake Adriana Lima quote:

  

Taylor Swift

Most Romantic Taylor Swift songs (in no order)

• Lover

• Love Story

• Daylight

• This Love

• Enchanted

• New Years Day

• False God

• Mine

• Dress

• Is It Over Now? (I’m SORRY but my husband and I are basically the alternate happy ending of this song so for that, I have to label it a love song)

Life of a Showgirl Song Ranking

1. The Fate of Ophelia

2. Father Figure

3. Opalite

4. The Life of a Showgirl (feat. Sabrina Carpenter)

5. Wood

6. Elizabeth Taylor

7. Actually Romantic

8. CANCELLED!

9. Honey

10. Wi$h Li$t

11. Eldest Daughter

12. Ruin the Friendship

General

• A lot of “The Fate of Ophelia” commentary is kind of unhinged like yes, Ophelia’s death in Hamlet represents patriarchal violence (I was an English major and my senior thesis was on sex, death and the law in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure), but I feel like the insistence that any reimagining of the story is actively offensive to the original text just reads as internalized fury at the idea that ~crazy~ women can genuinely love and be loved in return, and aren’t just fated to be beautiful martyrs. My husband didn’t fix me, but before I met him, even though I hadn’t been actively suicidal for a decade prior, I literally couldn’t imagine myself growing old, and planning for the future mentally and emotionally paralyzed me. But with him, I realized there was life after survival, and I began to conceptualize a life worth living. Look, I’m probably overreacting but there really does seem to be an underlying societal belief that women like me, like Ophelia, don’t deserve happy endings because of who we are, because of the makeup of our brains, because of our history of violence against ourselves, and it makes me angry.

• This all goes back to what I was saying earlier: People seem to genuinely believe that women who are happy in relationships with men lose IQ points and stop being capable of any sound of profundity and it’s just plain misogynistic. Is Life of a Showgirl Taylor’s magnum opus? No. However, I also used to say I didn’t believe in marriage or want kids because I genuinely didn’t believe I was worthy of them to the extent I rejected proposals from two ex-boyfriends, and now I’m happily married so I support it, and after a decent break, I’m sure Taylor’s next album will be different.

• Unfortunately, my friend might be right.

  

Life and Death and Love

• Last year on my birthday, Liam Payne of One Direction died, which I wrote about at the time. I’m glad Liam’s death bought his former bandmates back together when they’d been at odds for so long, like Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson are even doing a documentary series together next year! And, Harry Styles is running global marathons while being photographed with beautiful women, so good for him I guess. It’s just funny how life goes on, even after the death of people you thought would be around forever.

• Something I’ve been thinking about is love as responsibility and love as accountability. My husband finally realized that he loved me when I was mad at him for not living up to my expectations of what he ought to be (I think one of his tweets annoyed me) and made it very clear how disappointed I was. I cared enough to be outraged and upset since I knew he was better than who he was purporting to be, and I think that made it click for him that I was the real deal.

• Generally speaking, I’m very happy. Like, of course there’s some logistical stuff that bugs me and the government shutdown is professionally annoying me, but that said, I feel okay about my life, which is still novel for me. I’m always going to be more morbid than like 99% of people, more fixated on my own mortality, but like I said in my wedding vows, I’m now able to conceptualize a life worth living, and at least in part, I have my husband to thank for that, in addition to my family and friends and pets.

Voters Say They Want Gun Control. Their Votes Say Something Different.

Anonymous asked: As long as liberal and left leaning spaces have control over the institutions of culture, they will always code as elite. “Only war is class war” is cope from progressives that don’t want to give up that cultural power.

If the only war was class war, the Teamsters wouldn’t be endorsing Vivek Ramaswamy lol.

Joe Biden bailed out their pensions to the tune of billions, and the union still didn’t endorse Kamala Harris, although to be fair, that’s also because rank-and-file of the Teamsters votes Republican now due to immigration and cultural issues, and party leadership can’t really go against their membership. It’s probably a favor that Sean O’Brien didn’t endorse Trump.

The problem isn’t really Ohio though, it’s that where Ohio goes, the Blue Wall follows. Biden lost (or barely won depending on which results you look at) union voters in Pennsylvania in 2020, which is why he won the state by only 1.2% and it took a week for the election to be called. The only reason the “Blue Wall” was called that is because pre-2016, Democrats were able to win those states by running up the numbers with blue collar union rank-and-file, and if those voters aren’t voting Democrat anymore, those states are going to be competitive at best since there aren’t enough college-educated voters in them to make up for it.

And no, we can’t just shift our focus to the Sunbelt because Hispanic voters may not love Trump and have buyer’s remorse on voting for him, but they still don’t want to vote for Democrats.

Sunbelt voters aren’t unionized (which isn’t helpful since non-college union voters are still more Democratic than non-college non-union voters) and they still don’t want more immigration, even if they’re naturalized citizens themselves. At least in the case of the Sunbelt, Texas and Arizona actually share a border with Mexico unlike Wisconsin and Michigan, but the point stands.

The Liberal Patriot

The Democrats’ Class Gap Problem

It’s not exactly news that Democrats have a yawning working-class hole in their coalition. Over time, they have shed both white and nonwhite working-class (noncollege) voters, while improving among college-educated voters—though it has varied by election which sector of the working class has contributed the most to Democratic losses. In 2024, it was non…

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7 months ago · 130 likes · 116 comments · Ruy Teixeira

Of course, Democrats since the election have been talking nonstop about the need to reach working-class voters. They’re not unaware their party is increasingly a vehicle for educated professionals, whose priorities are quite different and frequently opposed to those of vast sectors of the working class. They’re just not willing to do much about it except proclaim their deep affection for the working class and assure them they are on their side and are really, really concerned about the cost of living. Efforts to materially change the image of the party on difficult cultural issues have been assiduously avoided, save the occasional and tentative suggestion that perhaps those with unorthodox (or, heaven forfend, conservative) views should not be immediately drummed out of the party.

Anonymous asked: Why are moderates such pushovers? They have better lives than most of the people attacking them, they need to get their licks back.

Punching down is déclassé lol

Numerous speakers warned against throwing any progressive constituency “under the bus,” a phrase that has become a term of art in the factional battle. It stands for the idea that Democrats should not retreat from positions taken on behalf of allies, however unpopular they may be. No compromise with the electorate was the conference’s standing order.

[…]

First, they deny that polls showing any left-wing positions as unpopular convey meaningful information. Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive strategist, roundly dismissed the relevance of polling as “pollingism,” and rejected the very notion that politicians can win support by heeding public opinion. “We know that humans are in fact irrational creatures,” she explained from a panel at Persuasion 2025.

What’s more, where voters do support regressive positions, Democrats should dismiss this as a kind of false consciousness. As various speakers argued, working-class voters facing economic stress tend to lash out at vulnerable targets.

[…]

Attempting to disarm right-wing attacks by abandoning positions that are unpopular with these and other voters is not only unnecessary, but also futile. “You cannot feed your opposition’s narrative,” Shenker-Osorio argued. She is even more absolute on her website: “Conventional wisdom says to meet people where they are. But, on most issues, where they are is unacceptable.”

“Democrats Still Have No Idea What Went Wrong” by Jonathan Chait

Anonymous asked: Why do people online get so aggravated when you imply that socially conservative working class voters might care more about advancing socially conservative beliefs than economic populism? Of course, citizens are going to choose “proper culture” over “life saving healthcare”. Have these morons met the fucking electorate?

I mean, people get mad at me because I don’t moralize about this reality lol. I don’t say “Socially conservative working class voters might care more about advancing socially conservative beliefs than economic populism (and that is bad),” and they somehow seem to believe that I’m endorsing and embracing people that give my husband and me dirty looks when we’re on their turf (aka eastern Washington/northern Idaho) because we have the gall to be in an interracial relationship.

Anonymous asked: Why are Democrats so averse to functioning as a united front?

Because their voters and the people who populate their extended professional and media apparatus are. This isn’t a group problem, this is one of individuals who comprise the group.

Here are some media highlights from recent times.

Books:

We The People: A History of the U.S. Constitution by Jill Lepore

I read Lepore’s These Truths back in 2020 (apt time for it), and We The People is even better. The Constitution is theoretically a changing document, but I think a lot of people on the Left see it as stifling (with regards to the Senate and electoral college) and generalized to a fault (with regards to the First Amendment and the varying definitions to free speech), and the funny thing is that they’re not wrong, but I don’t think they’d prefer the alternative. The fact is that nobody (except like, me and FIRE) really believes in free speech, they want to shut down their ideological opponents, albeit to different levels, but that doesn’t mean the country would be better off without the Constitution and First Amendment. In any case, this book is a timely and necessary addition to the American political canon.

Gwyneth: The Biography by Amy Odell

I really liked this book, despite the angry Goodreads reviews, and I thought it was great fun, and also really interesting in how it conceptualized Gwyneth the person versus Gwyneth the celebrity. I wrote about it more at length here, but generally speaking, I think Gwyneth is very content in the life she currently leads, existing in a metaphorical cocoon of sorts, free to conceptualize “normal” people as a theoretical construct and never having to care about real-world problems, but I also think it’s kind of a coping mechanism for fame. She seems kind of frozen in time in her late teens/early 20s, at about the time she met Harvey Weinstein, and the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that he didn’t stop at propositioning her. And, it makes me sad that Weinstein’s lurking in Gwyneth;s life didn’t end until she got pregnant with her daughter.

Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan

If Jack Schlossberg (Vogue correspondent and JFK’s grandson) runs for Jerry Nadler’s vacated Congressional seat (NY-11), we will be in the worst possible timeline, albeit one that we collectively might deserves. I liked this book, and it feels extremely timely given our current Secretary of Health and Human Services (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) is decimating public health and trying to make life even harder for pregnant women by claiming Tylenol has been linked to Autism (it has not). This book just makes it clear that yes, misogyny is inextricable from other forms of oppression but it’s also increasingly obvious that a lot of people, men and women, who are ostensibly left-of-center just don’t think misogyny is worth caring about in itself. These people genuinely seem to agree with Lana del Rey when she quipped in 20142, “For me, the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept. I’m more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what’s going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities” (although maybe not with Elon Musk’s endeavors nowadays), and it’s very tedious.

My Good Side: A Memoir by Scheana Shay

This book wasn’t as well-written as Stassi Schroeder’s books and Scheana Shay is kind of annoying, but her husband having an affair when she was pregnant with their daughter, and right after she had miscarried, makes me support her putting him through the ringer on live TV regardless. Brock Davies just has zero redeeming factors, and like, I have no idea what Scheana was even thinking marrying the guy when he has an ex-wife (that he probably domestically abused) and children in Australia, but nonetheless, he should probably be in stocks so we can all throw ripe tomatoes at him.

Assorted Romance Novels (quick takes):

• The Earl That Got Away by Diana Quincy: Better than average for a romance novel written after 2020, but not as good as Quincy’s Her Night With the Duke

• Spiral by Bal Khabra: I’m sorry but I simply do not believe that any straight man in his 20s knows how to take off a woman’s makeup when she’s wasted, like that’s just not a real thing that ever happens. Romance novels generally involve some suspension of disbelief but like, especially in contemporaries, there needs to be some sort of realism in the human behavior therein, and this ain’t it!

• See Jane Score by Rachel Gibson: This book was published in pre Iraq War, Religious Right dominated America (January 28, 2003 to be exact) and honestly, it was so much more fun than the vast majority of contemporaries written nowadays! Speaking of the Religious Right, in this book, the heroine, Jane mocks Jerry Falwell, Religious Right icon, for saying the Teletubbies has gay undertones, and I laughed at that since the same Jerry Falwell made headlines about two decades later for being a cuck and swinger (with his wife and a bunch of Miami cabana boys)

• I’m Looking For A Man in Finance by Sabrina Waldorf: I honestly think that writing books inspired by viral TikToks should be criminalized.

• Only Earl in the World by Amalie Howard: Romance novels written after like 2020 are either totally closed-door, massively toned down in sexiness even from authors who previously wrote very sexy books pre-2020, or they’re performatively sexual to the extent it just seems silly, and it feels like the authors are just trying to shock rather than entertain . This book is in the latter category, which is a bummer because Amalie Howard is an engaging author with a great deal of potential.

Movies:

Superman (2025)

Superhero movies are hit or miss, and this one was really fun. David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan are fantastic, and Nicholas Hoult really has a talent for playing … evil bisexual men on Adderall (IYKYK). Also, I love Krypto (Jude does too).

The Wrong Paris (2025)

I generally like bad romantic comedies but this was pretty bad even by my standards. Miranda Cosgrove (aka Carly from iCarly and Megan from Drake and Josh) plays Dawn, and auditions for her favorite reality show, Honeypot, because she thinks it’s filmed in Paris, France (it’s filmed in Paris, Texas), and ends up falling for the show’s bachelor, Trey McAllen III. I don’t know what it was, but Dawn’s face just kept on distracting me because I’ve been watching Miranda Cosgrove on TV since I was a girl, and whatever procedures she’s done to her face make her look a bit uncanny valley. The guy who plays Trey is objectively attractive, but he has the same uncanny valley vibe to him, as if he wakes up every morning morning, applies a full face of makeup (which I, a 30-year-old woman, don’t even regularly do), and then, while looking in the mirror, meticulously paints on his washboard abs.

Mamma Mia! (2008)

This movie came out the same summer as The Dark Knight, and I saw it in theaters with my dad, but I watched Mamma Mia! at home on my DVD player (remember DVDs?), and I forgot just how much fun it is! Meryl Streep and Amanda Seyfried are luminous, and the dads are very fun like I’m way more of a Daniel Craig girlie when it comes to James Bond, but Pierce Brosnan in this movie is somehow way hotter than he was in Die Another Day (2002). My husband and I are actually going to Athens and the Greek Islands (TBD which ones) for our honeymoon next spring, and needless to say, I will be forcing him to recreate scenes from this movie3.

The Mummy (1999)

This movie inspired a theme park ride at Universal Studios, and it really feels like that. There’s a part in this movie where Evie is like, saying that she dreamed about mummies, and Rick’s like “You dream about dead guys?” and she’s like “Well yeah,” and honestly, that’s pretty much the summary of my marriage.

Dhaaruni:

Dylan:

TV Shows:

Scandal (2012)

I finally watched this show, and yeah, it gets really derailed around mid season 5, and I skipped around a fair amount in seasons 6 and 7, but man does it really hold up. It took me like half of the first season to really get into the show, and I honestly think that’s because it took me that long to come around to finding Tony Goldwyn (President Fitzgerald Grant) attractive. The final scene in season 3, with Fitz sobbing about his dead son while kneeling on the presidential seal, not even caring he’d won reelection and set to “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” really did it for me I’m not going to lie. And Olivia, Olivia Pope man, is honestly an unreal female character. Kerry Washington is both extremely talented and gorgeous4, and unguarded kudos to Shonda Rhimes making the protagonist of a primetime show a Black woman who has an affair with the white, Republican president of the United States, not shying from the elephant in the room Sally Hemings/Thomas Jefferson comparison, and still making her the unequivocal hero (and arguably the villain too).

The Royals (2015)

You know how the British Royal Family (BRF) wasn’t a fan of The Crown? I don’t remember what they said about The Royals if anything, but given that this fictional adaptation of the BRF is … not very flattering, I wouldn’t comment either. That said, between Queen Helena (played by Elizabeth Hurley, who Hugh Grant cheated on with a sex worker named Divine Brown back when I was an infant5) hooking up with her daughter, Princess Eleanor’s, bodyguard/boyfriend, Jasper, who’s sort of blackmailing her, and the antics of Princes Robert (faking his own death and maybe murdering his own father) and Liam (dating his brother’s girlfriend) and Eleanor (drugs, bisexuality, and aforementioned bodyguard), the show was great fun. Plus, I’ve always been very into the princess/bodyguard romance trope, which is in the queen/knight and its darker version, queen/huntsman family of romance tropes6. I would say I doubt the show creators would have leaned into the blackmail aspect if they’d realized from the beginning that Jaspenor was the best part of the show, but uh, given that the show creator is Mark Schwahn, I’m not sure about that.

All that said, many points made.

The Summer I Turned Pretty (2022)

I don’t like love triangles on principle, but I really liked this show! I initially started watching because I saw posts about how Lola Tung, who plays Belly, is fat (she is not) and I was like “Okay I’ll watch as a middle finger to those freaks,” but I really enjoyed it! As usual, people were unhinged about it, as they are with all media involving interracial relationships, but in general, I thought the show did a great job exploring how grief impacts the ones left behind.

Smallville (2001)

I’m only on season 2 in this rewatch but I watched this show before as a kid, and honestly, it’s better than I remember. Kristin Kreuk as Lana Lang is like totally luminous, and I don’t reel remotely guilty for finding Tom Welling as Clark Kent attractive given he was about my husband’s age at the beginning of the show’s run. Also, the theme song really hits, even almost 25 years later, and the episode with “Standing Still” by Jewel playing at the end made me cry.

Sex and the City (1998)

I’ve always been a big fan of this show, but on this rewatch I realized that this show, like Scandal after it, just would not fly today like it would be canceled in the very first season due to endless TikTok meltdowns about how evil all the main characters are, and I’m sure there would also be insane amounts of racism against Olivia Pope because being with a white man makes her white-adjacent and #problematic (I’d have said it was the rigging an election for a Republican but YMMV).

But regarding SATC, I think some of the Gen-Z/young woman hate for Carrie Bradshaw is because a lot of younger women aspire to marry rich like Natasha did when she married Big, and Carrie is the living embodiment of the reality that marrying rich doesn’t automatically equate to happily ever after. Plus, I think that people just reflexively hate on Carrie because she holds up a mirror to the parts of ourselves we’re embarrassed by, the vulnerable and pathetic parts, the parts that beg people, beg men, to love them.

Carrie isn’t even a habitual cheater or homewrecker, she just screws up once! I definitely don’t want to be friends with that lady who sleeps with married men as a lifestyle choice and justifies it, but everybody makes mistakes, even the most holier than thou of SATC viewers. However, in the words of Ariana Madix (from Vanderpump Rules), when people keep doing the same mistake, “These aren’t mistakes anymore, they’re pointed, choices. This is a pattern, a personality, this is who this person is.”

Plus like, people really seem allergic to understanding the difference between portrayal and endorsement like in the case of Sex and the City, the narrative indicates Carrie did something unequivocally wrong by having an affair with Big, it does NOT defend her, so it’s baffling but also interesting how mad this storyline and Carrie herself make viewers.

Links:

• “The machine in the garden.” by 7

  Social media is encroaching on what was a once a respectably literate walled garden — the machine is now in the garden**.
  […]
  Today, I can barely tell anyone apart. Many of the Substacks I follow use these big, figurative words that don’t really make sense in an attempt to go viral, which on this platform means getting subscribers and notes and comments. It’s like there’s this internet language that “works” for engagement (literal language, but also sense of style, and a range of trending topics to touch upon) but it all coagulates together and creates a whitewashed, boring internet.
  […]
  There are a lot of people trying to monetize noise.

• “How Problematic Women Become Pariahs” by

  When a person is painted as disgusting, and held to be beyond the pale, there are powerful incentives for the rest of us not to tangle with them, lest we be deemed disgusting too. In part this is a reflection of how disgust tends to work: when one object that garners disgust, including moral disgust, is associated with another, the second gets tarnished—rendered gross by association. And that is how merely problematic women become moral pariahs. They are rendered indefensible because those of us inclined to come to their defense—noting their talents, their virtues, and holding that their flaws are not fatal—fear being subject to misogynistic moral disgust too if we do so.

• “The top priority of progressive politics may be slipping out of reach forever” by Eric Levitz

  Even if the party is only willing to tax the rich, it can still finance targeted anti-poverty spending. But absent an AI-induced productivity revolution, building a holistic welfare state will require persuading the middle-class to accept higher taxes.

• “Polling is good” by

  Polling is obviously flawed, but where would we be without it? Judge the value of surveys against the alternative, rather than the Almighty.
  

  Determining what people truly believe is a core demand of democratic systems. Are elected representatives meant to learn about their constituents’ views solely through their conversations with the most-engaged voters? Should policymakers gauge public sentiment by looking at online posts artificially influenced and amplified by social media mobs? Are politicians supposed to assume that college-educated members of activist groups accurately represent the views of entire ethnicities?

• “The Forever-35 Face” by Bridget Read

  It’s true that there is something destabilizing about being among meticulously altered faces for a sustained period of time. They appear almost two-dimensional — like you should be looking at them on a screen. The handiwork is so subtle that the more you look, the less you can tell what has been moved, cut, and erased and the less tethered you become to the origin point: what a face modified by time and gravity should look like. Instead, the new faces appear as if they were always that way, belonging to an airbrushed species of another planet. “When you look at someone else with an elite facelift,” one surgeon says to me, “all you should be thinking is, How did you age better than me? The goal is you want to look genetically dominant to other people.”

First of all, re: Charlie Kirk, his murder unnerved me, but I don’t see a point to saying anything more on the subject beyond freedom of speech is good, and gunning down a young man in front of his children is unequivocally wrong.

This piece isn’t about Charlie Kirk though, it’s about Abundance™.1

As I wrote before, the colloquial moniker, “Abundance” comes from the the March 2025 book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson of the same name, which like 20 people in America have read in full, including me. However, since the book’s release, Abundance™ has come to colloquially refer not just to the thesis laid out in the book, that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities stymies development of housing, infrastructure, and general development and needs to change and pronto, but also the (socially and economically and environmentally) moderate platform people, most of whom haven’t read the book, have decided the book is advocating for.

There has been a fair amount of criticism from progressives directed at the Abundance movement as well as at prominent figures who’ve embraced it, including Klein and Thompson, , , and David Shor2. Examples include:

• Zephyr Teachout’s confusion at how Klein and Thompson’s work fit into her preconceived framework of politics (big vs. small government).

• Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg’s insistence that “Abundance liberals are almost completely silent on the alliance between corporate behemoths and anti-government politicians that is the biggest threat to the world of plenty they envision, not to mention the republic.”

• Sandeep Vaheesanan’s (overtly long) review where he accuses Abundance of being papered over “neoliberalism” and characterized by an obsequious deference to private capital

Full disclosure: I’ve never been good at economics. I’m great with numbers, and I enjoy statistics and calculus etc., but I got a 2 on the AP Macroeconomics exam3 in high school and my understanding of the subject isn’t much better now. That said, I do know enough about economics to understand the ideas expressed within these pieces miss the mark, and fundamentally misunderstand the arguments within Abundance (the book), as well as the problems it’s trying to diagnose.

On a holistic level, Abundance (the concept) is fundamentally about “MORE,” building more, doing more, achieving more, and a lot of progressive populist economics is rooted in scarcity mindset. A lot of progressive populists would rather everybody be equally poor than have a prosperous society with some people holding extreme wealth, and that’s evident in how they push back against Abundance. They insist that Abundance is recycled libertarianism and bankrolled by tech bros4, and falsely allege that Klein and Thompson are against redistribution, to the extent of insisting that Klein is guilty of holding beliefs espoused by his wife, Annie Lowrey5, beliefs that neither of them actually hold.

This may be my capitalist bias coming out, but I don’t really understand the left-populist brain on an emotional level. To me at least, it seems like the same mindset underpinning the worst and most inane Medicare For All defenses. I can’t find the link to this exchange, but back in 2021, a Bernie Sanders supporting progressive said the quiet part out loud, that she didn’t support any sort of universal healthcare that didn’t abolish private health insurance because she thought it was fundamentally unfair that some people had better health insurance than others even if everybody else was covered. She openly said that it’s better for everybody have equally terrible insurance (everybody knows that government health insurance is terrible6) than for some people to have better coverage.

However, while I think many progressive critics of Abundance aren’t approaching the subject with good faith and condemning Klein and Thompson as guilty by association to people like Matt Yglesias, I think that there are valid critiques to be made of the platform and its proponents.

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The first time I saw these, I was like “I don’t agree but to each their own”. But after I kept on seeing them, over and over, with people endorsing them wholeheartedly, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’m the crazy outlier for finding these posts at best, totally unrelatable and kind of embarrassing, and at worst, a blaring alarm that we’re sociopolitically regressing and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.

I just don’t really get why ostensibly liberal women are publicly taking other women to task for disliking men, and going to bat for men as a collective as well as the women who like them. I was under the impression that we all collectively accepted in like 2015 that men, including marginalized men, benefit from the patriarchy2 and that’s bad. Like what do you MEAN you like men? Do you like women? Do you like white people? Do you like Black people? Hindus or Muslims or Jews? People from Cincinnati? Libras? I know you don’t like every single member of those groups, so why are you declaring that you like men? Do you really think that liking men will protect you from the patriarchy? Because by seven, it’s marginal right?

Look, I was sentient during the 2016 election, I saw the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I witnessed the rise of Andrew Tate, I watched the now Vice President of the United States rant about childless cat ladies and his approvals increase by 20 points thereafter, I heard grown women simper about being “just a girl”, I scrolled through long-winded screeds by pro-natalists that are really thinly veiled pleas to kick women out of the paid workforce3, and in the wake of the 2024 election, I read about boys chanting at their female peers, “Your body, my choice” in addition to a seemingly endless collection of essays and posts and sanctimonious rants about how women being mean to men4 is how we got into this predicament.

Okay.

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Yesterday, I went viral for the following tweet1:

Apparently, this post caused a buzz in Democratic group chats (which I’m not in for many reasons) so I decided to explain my thought process.

At first, I was thinking about why there weren’t many female Democratic strategists slash consultants slash pundits. In other word, I don’t know who can be the next James Carville or David Axelrod, and that struck me as odd given that the party is almost 60% female. Then I remembered that we live in a sexist society: men can get away with being interpersonal degenerates2 and dressing like schlubs, but women in the public eye generally have to be (in no particular order):

• Conventionally attractive (and well-dressed)

• Squeaky clean personal life

• Extremely good at their work

However, any woman that meets all three of these criteria is, more often than not, Tracy Flick in Election (1999), the character that no female politician can avoid being compared to, no matter how charming and soft and unpretentious they may attempt to be.

Tracy Flick is an academic overachiever, smart and driven, a real go-getter, but so fixated on being liked by teachers and other adults and getting metaphorical gold stars on every aspect of her existence that she almost forgets, in order to become class president, she needs to be liked by her peers. Sound familiar?

But, the Tracy Flick Problem isn’t unique to women in Democratic politics3, it’s now the perception of the entire party, from the grassroots on up.

In 1992, after three straight terms of Republican governance, Bill Clinton (and his wife) resurrected the Democratic Party. The Third Way was brash and bold, lewd and crude, and powered through the 1990s, ending with a budget surplus. Clinton administration ushered in the Dot-Com Boom and the new millennium, but fell to George W. Bush and the Religious Right by 537 votes in the state of Florida (which just so happened to be governed by Jeb Bush, brother of W, funny how that works).

After 8 years of Bush, a deeply unpopular war, looming economic recession, and the destruction of the city of New Orleans, the country was looking for hope, and Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States. Along with him, Obama brought along a new generation of Democrats, who were committed to social progress and change and well, groping cardboard cutouts of Hillary Clinton. He won reelection in 2012, but like Bill Clinton before him, left office to a Republican administration, that of Donald Trump.

After Trump won the 2016 election, and education polarization began to really sink in, the Democratic Party become ideologically dominated by college-educated liberals, whose mentality then permeated throughout the entire staffer class4, and became the perception of the party at large even if large numbers of voters without a college degree still vote for Democrats.

Being a Democrat, professionally and amateurly, is not and never really has been a lucrative endeavor, so the people who engage with and work with the party are true believers: They genuinely think that they’re making the world a better place, and are willing to pay their dues. Young Republicans can rise quickly through the ranks and often end up cashing out early to make the big bucks on K Street, but young Democrats have to start at the bottom, bide their time, and at the end of the line, may be rewarded, not generally with large sums money or even electoral victories, but with the validation of their moral righteousness. Therein lies the problem.

The general perception of the Democratic party is that we’re hyper-sensitive, attuned to all forms of injustice, both real and fake, and extremely risk-averse to the point of dweebishness5. But, we are also (allegedly) avid cheerleaders for crime and homelessness, and gleefully endorse the upending the social order of the country at large through open borders and drag queen story hour (or whatever).6 We embody the worst of all possible identities. In other words, we became the party of people who wouldn’t dare use a fake ID, even if we knew where to procure one, and now, we are reaping what we sowed7.

However, my evaluation of how the Democratic party is perceived is not exactly universally accepted among liberals.

Here’s the thing: Maybe I would be happier as a Republican due to my temperament (finding public displays of emotion tedious and embarrassing for everybody involved), and approach to life (“Do not complain, work harder, spend more time alone”8), but I strongly believe that Republican policies are by and large, extremely harmful to the American people so Democrats are stuck with me, tough luck!

My finding land acknowledgements annoying and pointless doesn’t make me support the party of launching insurrections, stripping away healthcare for the poorest people in the country, and forcing preteens to have rape babies. However, that doesn’t stop other Americans from voting on how annoyed they get by candidates and political parties, or rather, what they perceive candidates and political parties represent.9

This is my unequivocal stance on the Democratic Party10.

Unfortunately for Democrats, a lot of people dislike annoying people more than dangerous people, and are extremely annoyed by do-gooders for genuinely believing they’re morally superior to everyone else.

Yesterday, my friend and colleague, Justin Slaughter posted this, and it made something click inside my brain.

I’m an atheist to the extent of being borderline religious about it, so naturally, I was disinclined to be a Republican for that reason if nothing else. However, a side effect of Democrats veering away from the cheerful libertinism and promise of youth of the Clinton and Obama administrations and towards the (intended) return to normalcy of the era’s standard bearer, Joe Biden, a devout Catholic, is that the Democratic Party became more subliminally and outrightly religious and in turn, moralizing since at the end of the day, what is religion besides a formal dictate of social mores?

The Religious Right which propelled George W. Bush to two terms in the White House still votes Republican, but the people who made Donald Trump president twice are not traditional Republicans. While Mitt Romney won 51% of college-educated voters in 2012, Donald Trump won 41% of college-educated voters in 2024. Trump’s voter base is less white,11 it’s poorer (despite his economic policies still primarily benefiting the wealthy), and it’s less socially conservative than the Republican Party of 2004, or even 2012. Amber Rose, a former stripper and sex worker, spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024, several states Trump won by double digits voted to enshrine abortion rights into their state constitutions, and Trump himself might fear God, but he isn’t exactly devout about it, and say what you will about Romney or Paul Ryan or George W. Bush, but they are genuinely religious men.

In any case, partly due to education polarization (college-educated voters are generally less interpersonally messy than non-college voters) and Biden becoming the Democratic Party’s standard bearer, the party became more ostensibly fixated on virtue, and signaling it to anybody who was paying attention, and unfortunately, people were. The thing is, while the party became more moralizing, it didn’t become more socially conservative, and there is little to no public appeal for religious progressiveness.

I’m a woman of color and was a national delegate for Kamala Harris to the Democratic National Convention in 2024 so I feel comfortable saying this outright: The infamous White Women for Harris calls were filled with progressive Christian women (Mallory McMorrow, Glennon Doyle, etc.) whose lifeblood is self-flagellation. They’re Exvangelicals (former Evangelicals) and hicklibs; they genuinely mean it when they say that trans children are children of God. And for better or worse, despite the United States’ official motto being “In God We Trust”, Americans seem to like the idea of God and signaling of religiosity far more than the subsequent follow through.

Lucky for me who can’t stand the associated rhetoric, virtue signaling is about as American as not turning on the AC in the dog days of summer12. The Religious Right lost the culture war: The (Dixie) Chicks are still around and crop tops will never go out of style, and its progressive counterpart isn’t long for this world either.

Earlier this week, post this thread about Bluesky and cancel culture.

It’s all elementary game theory. In a culture where shame is the referee, players have three options:

1. Follow the rules, say the right thing, receive a payoff for your efforts, social validation of moral superiority (or better)

2. Try to follow the rules, say the wrong thing, pay the price, social censure (or worse)

3. Opt out of the entire game, risking total ruin or being rewarded with total Nirvana

As I said, contemporary liberals are extremely risk-averse, so they never pick #3, but for the good of society, I think they should start.

Agree/disagree?

Yeah, Kavanaugh was confirmed regardless of what Democrats did, but Joe Manchin voting for him (after Susan Collins declared her vote and ensured he was in regardless) saved his seat, and I think that Bill Nelson, Claire McCaskill, and Joe Donnelly should have probably voted for him as well since Nelson in particular lost in Florida by like 0.10% and it would have prevented Rick Scott derogatory from winning.

But, I think a lot of Senate Democrats just opposed Kavanaugh on principle, and I have to respect it. Have you ever seen Heidi Heitkamp’s explanation of her “No” vote? She represented North Dakota after she barely won in 2012, and she ended up losing by 11 points in 2018. She said if it were a political decision, she’d have voted yes, but she can’t get up in the morning and look at the life experience she’d had and say yes to Kavanaugh.

But yeah, you’re right, Kavanaugh’s confirmation did hurt Democrats. I lost the poll but there was one that said that the Kavanaugh decision spurred Republicans to get out and vote for the Republican candidate on the Senate level.

And yes, Republicans will push Thomas and/or Alito to retire, likely before midterms because I think Democrats will win the North Carolina Senate seat that’s currently held by Republican Thom Tillis, who’s retiring, so they’ll have less of a buffer.

Kind of a dumb question, but re: Jasmine Crockett and men, is there any way a female politician could reasonably cater to male voters?

Idk, I feel like a subset of male voters are so misogynistic that any female candidate would be an immediate no for them, and that includes progressives: those men just want Bernie. I can’t see them voting for a middle-aged candidate unless the woman was reasonably hot and married. Crockett and AOC are younger and are both attractive, but it’s their outspokenness that doesn’t appeal to those voters. I get that they’re annoying and actively contradict the party, but it’s not like college-aged men care about that.

I don’t think it’s fair for them to censor themselves for voters who would never respect them, let alone vote for them, you know? It feels like a lose-lose.

I mean, AOC does a much better job of appealing to men. She’s obviously progressive and outspoken but she’s a lot less petty and mean, like she isn’t ridiculing her coworkers’ appearances or mocking Republicans’ disabilities (and then blatantly lying about it) like Crockett is. Fair or not, there are a lot of negative feminine stereotypes associated with being catty, and it’s not great to lean into that as a public official that’s trying to become a national leader of the party.

And, natsec Dems (Elissa Slotkin, Abigail Spanberger, and Mikie Sherrill in particular who are all going to be statewide electeds by the end of this year), who are middle-aged women, kind of escape the gender penalty, especially since they’re not running for president.

I know people mocked Slotkin for her alpha messaging but the thing is, her tone is ridiculously straight up, cut the bullshit, no posturing at all, and I think that’s way less off-putting to people, including other women, than raising her voice and calling people fugly. Like, Slotkin pointed out that Trump is screwing over people economically, and maintained that most Michiganders, including people who voted for Trump) oppose ICE kidnapping hardworking, law-abiding residents off the street (idk about that but optimism about your constituents is probably good), but she’s extremely no-nonsense when she states things, she doesn’t appeal to pathos, she just lays out the facts and expects people to listen to her. The confidence is what appeals to voters, male and female, and it commands respect.

Also, it might be a lose-lose to require female politicians to censor themselves, but if they want to be national figures and party leaders and not just backbencher House Reps, there’s no choice. Life is about tradeoffs, and if you want the privileges of prominence and everything that comes with it, you have to toe the line, at least to a point. Yeah, it’s unfair that women of color are held to different standards than white men, but you can’t change reality until you accept reality. That’s one of longstanding mantras and I stand by it.

(Link)

To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid. Imagine a pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the presidential candidate.

Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on. Unlike Republicans, they don’t simply have to assemble a campaign apparatus – they have to formulate ideas and a vision, too. Many Democratic fund-raisers join a campaign only after assessing how well it has done in assembling its pyramid of political, media and idea people.

There is no clearly identifiable funding base for Democratic policy organizations, and in the frantic campaign rush there is no time for patient, long-term development of new ideas or of new ways to sell old ideas. Campaigns don’t start thinking about a Democratic brand until halfway through the election year, by which time winning the daily news cycle takes precedence over building a consistent message. The closest that Democrats get to a brand is a catchy slogan.

Democrats choose this approach, I believe, because we are still hypnotized by Jack Kennedy, and the promise of a charismatic leader who can change America by the strength and style of his personality. The trouble is that every four years the party splits and rallies around several different individuals at once. Opponents in the primaries then exaggerate their differences and leave the public confused about what Democrats believe.

“A Party Inverted” by Bill Bradley (2005)

Me on November 6, 2024 after I’d spent the previous year informing everybody that Democrats would lose the 2024 election over immigration and inflation and that Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester would both lose their seats:

FWIW

How to Run Digital Like It’s 2025

Hi everyone! Patrick Stevenson here, back with Part 2 of this summer series on Democratic digital strategy. Last week, we looked at just how far behind legacy political media is falling — and why pretending otherwise is costing us votes…

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10 months ago · 14 likes · 1 comment · Patrick Stevenson

FWIW

Why Democrats are (still) bad at the internet

This newsletter is brought to you by the donor acquisition approach that helps you turn $1 into $2…

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10 months ago · 21 likes · 1 comment · Patrick Stevenson

Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change by Eitan Hersh

Do you think Kamala Harris was a good vice president on her own (as in, not comparing her to Trump and Pence bc she's obv better than them, but on her own?)

I don’t think it’s really possible to be a “good” vice-president, especially when you’re given unwinnable issues like immigration as a Democrat, and she definitely did everything she could and I was happy to vote for her for president.

Kamala’s only real mistakes during her 2024 presidential campaign were:

• Not rebutting the stupid they/them ad like Bill Clinton and John Fetterman (and Tumblr user Dhaaruni) pleaded with her to do because a candidate flip-flopping to a position that the electorate agrees with is much less damaging than saying nothing and hoping the issue stops existing. That’s why Zohran Mamdani’s 2020 support of “defund the police” didn’t kill his mayoral candidacy! He quietly disavowed it and maintained he wasn’t going to defund the police as mayor.

• Not putting any distance between her and Biden when they asked her on The View if she’d have done anything differently (“I’d have closed the border earlier and done more to combat inflation” was right there and voters quite frankly care more about the perception that candidates care about their grievances than the fact the president couldn’t actually just “turn off” inflation post-COVID)

• Ignoring Future Forward imploring her to highlight Trump’s brainwormed economic policies making things super expensive and laser focus on cost-of-living instead of waffling about the sanctity of democracy in the lead-up to the election because unfortunately, the only people who care about democracy™ are people who’d never vote Republican in the first place. Also, the Harris campaign throwing FF under the bus in the NYT last month after David Shor went on Ezra Klein back in March and said the Harris campaigned ignored his recommendation to focus on the economy and stay away from democracy messaging was honestly so tacky, like I’m not blaming her personally for that but the entire Democratic party needs to clean house in terms of staffing.

Even so, the concept of linking health insurance to employment remained a potent one for Americans. In my own reporting, I’ve often spoken to people with private insurance who were resentful that others who did not work suddenly had free health coverage. They would point out that Medicaid coverage seemed better than what they got at work. And those people weren’t necessarily wrong: Medicaid only rarely charges deductibles or co-payments, whereas the average employer plan now has a nearly $2,000 deductible before it kicks in.

A few years after Obamacare passed, several Republican states began proposing adding a work requirement to the program. Most were blocked by the Biden administration or the courts. Still, they provided a road map for Congress to use when writing a national version.

Two states, Arkansas and Georgia, did manage to implement the program, although Arkansas’s ended in 2019.

“It gains traction and momentum because it reflects common sense,” said Asa Hutchinson, who implemented a Medicaid work requirement in Arkansas when he was governor. “Somebody who is able-bodied and receiving a public benefit, they ought to have a responsibility.”

“Why the G.O.P. Thinks You Should Have to Work for Your Health Care”

Do you think we’re entering a period of competitive authoritarianism?

I think we’re entering a period of mass stupidity, other than that idk

You said that New Jersey is going to be purple in the future. What is causing this, and how can it be prevented and reversed? I want to get ahead of problems rather than just respond to them.

People of color are going right and white voters aren’t shifting left fast enough (or at all in many places) to prevent it. From 2020 to 2024, the only group to go left was white women, specifically non-college white women.

For instance, New York and New Jersey both saw crazy shifts right and that’s because they’re both roughly 55% white, meaning they’re 45% non-white, and they were two of the states that went furthest right based on the country at large. By precinct data:

This chart shows how the election would have gone if only non-white people voted. The only state Trump would have outright won is Iowa, so Harris would have gotten 525 electoral votes, but look at how NJ and NY (and California and New Mexico) look compared to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. Basically, white voters are why NY and NJ are so blue, not POC at this point. The entire western half of the country is so much lighter blue because of the Hispanic shift right!

I understand the pessimism about the Senate but I can't bring myself to write it off completely. If the midterm elections were held today the Dems wouldn't stand a CHANCE or retaking the Senate. But we've got over a year between now and the midterms. Public opinion is already moving against this administration, even on immigration, his strongest issue. And again, we have 12+ months of embarrassing fuckups from this admin and general middle fingers to his base. Another variable we can't account for this far out is candidate quality. Trumpism without Trump doesn't have a great track record (just ask Herschel Walker, Kari Lake, and Roy Moore) and it's arguably cost Republicans some winnable races. Like don't be Pollyanna-ish but maybe Dems should swing for the fences. AND ANOTHER THING thermostatic public opinion alone can’t put Congressional democrats over the top. There needs to be SERIOUS investment in social media presence, attacking hard on the unpopular aspects of not just the Big Beautiful Bill but everything this admin has been doing. In states like Iowa they need to go ALL IN on voter registration efforts (Laura Belin did a good article on this in Bleeding Heartland). so yeah maybe they’re not gonna flip Kansas but as the saying goes shoot for the moon land among the stars.

I’m not dooming to like, be cool, I’m just saying that my understanding of human nature has been historically correct even though I wish it wasn’t haha.

And, the reason voters are now more pro-immigration is that Trump actually shut down the border, nobody is coming in because they’re all too scared to do so. The sentiment will flip the moment a Democrat is back in the White House.

I think Dems are messaging against OBBB as much as they can, they’re constantly posting videos and infographics about it and begging people to care. But, the problem is that people don’t pay attention, and the media gets more clicks and coverage when it posts about other topics, immigration, whatever Epstein shit is going on, etc. so they’re incentivized to not extensively cover the fact millions of people are getting kicked off their health insurance.

Also, the problem with people that are plugged into politics being Democrats is that the people who aren’t plugged in are now Republicans, and they also skew poorer, so naturally, the people that read the news don’t care that much about people they don’t know losing their health insurance. The ACA repeal was a big deal because everybody knows people with preexisting conditions, everybody has children on their parents’ insurance until they were 26 or were those children, but college-educated Democrats aren’t often hanging out with people on Medicaid because of how little social mobility there is, and it shows.

Do you think that people are less sexist to Kamala compared to Hillary? Asking because I don't live in America but I am online a lot and look at US politics a lot on my time online and it seems like people like Kamala Harris so much better than Hillary Clinton. Is it because she's nice and smiley compared to mean ol' Hillary? Or is it because they didn't know how bad Donald Trump would be then and are scared of him now? I know you're not omniscient, just thought I'd ask for your opinion on the matter.

I think sexism was less salient in 2024 than it was in 2016, and I think active misogynists disliked Kamala and Hillary equally, but I think passive misogynists hated Hillary way more than Kamala.

Like, when people say that Hillary engaged in “identity politics” in 2016, they’re not talking about anti-racism or LGBT stuff, which Obama did too, they’re talking about feminism, and how Hillary identified as the first female candidate of a major political party. Kamala shied away from that moniker, and she didn’t wear white during her DNC acceptance speech and all, almost certainly because of how Hillary was treated and how she lost, but I don’t think it worked because at the end of the day, Kamala is still a woman, and people couldn’t ignore that.

The main difference is that the men who knifed Kamala weren’t white men, they were men of color. There’s something to be said for how men are more vitriolic towards women of their own race (meaning white or non-white) that “break” the rules, stuff like not having kids of their own, being very ambitious, etc., but that might be too speculatory.

The thing about racism with regards to Kamala is that there are some virulently racist white people who loathe non-white people and would never vote for them, but there are way too many Obama-Trump voters, especially in the Midwest, for racism to be the deciding factor to Kamala’s loss. Kamala also did markedly better in the Midwest than the Sunbelt, which is far more racially diverse!

At the end of the day, I think that white people as a whole are less racist than men of color are sexist, and that’s … not a fun thought to wrap my brain around.

How do Democrats win back the median American when they fundamentally desire evil things?

Wait for a recession and/or another war that the United States is directly involved in

How do you find compassion for people you think are awful and will never really change?

I’ve had a lot of therapy over the years, and what I worked the most on is learning to accept that I can’t control everything, including other people’s behavior. All I can do is my very best to make the world a better place. You can’t change what is until you understand and accept what is, and what is might just be people that are fundamentally and irredeemably awful.

This is a bit of a weird perspective, but do you think there's something to be said about how Democrats are losing support because of a feeling of abandonment from marginalized groups?

My first gut reaction after last November was that Democrats lost because they felt too "socially radical" for the median voter, and that the median voter just kinda sucked. So they need to move to the center, right?

Now, I'm not so sure. One of the biggest issues in the election was immigration. The current admin's policies are WILDLY unpopular in their extremity (see this past weekend), and they weren't exactly hidden or unknown. Except... The Dems tried to appeal to the "tough on immigration" sentiment by having Kamala go to ICE detention centers and the like.

So what voters were being offered was.... Republicans, and Republican-lites. So why wouldn't they vote for the ones who seemed like they would at least be hard-line and effective about it?

There's also something to be said for messaging and policy creating opinion, as opposed to following it. Eg, support for transgender rights was steadily growing, until it received a MASSIVE backslide once it became part of the Republican party's messaging. And Dems just kinda... Cede that ground with milquetoast efforts to make it more "moderate". The Overton window on tons of issues has shifted a LOT- trans issues are the most dramatic, but it's happened for lots of things.

Idk. Bit of a ramble. I've just run across a couple of your posts that say you think Dems need to move towards the center socially to ever win anything, and I'm torn on whether I agree or not.

I don’t agree.

Democrats didn’t lose in 2024 because of turnout among their base, they lost because of persuasion in swing states, especially in the Sunbelt, and even then, Kamala lost the electoral college by like 200k votes across the Blue Wall. Turnout was very high, and in swing states, Kamala got the necessary white support to win, but she crashed and burned with Hispanic voters who went ~20 points right in Pennsylvania and Michigan, and even if they’re only a small portion of the electorate, that basically swung the election.

Also, in blue cities, especially but not only in blue states, again, Democrats didn’t lose on turnout, they lost because a bunch of reliably Democratic groups, mainly non-college Hispanics and Asians but also some Black voters, all got really fed up with migrants in their communities and went hard right. Look at the precincts in Queens and the Bronx that went furthest right, they’re predominantly Hispanic and Asian. Look at the South Side of Chicago and how far right it swung; its residents were furious that migrants were being housed there while American citizens were struggling.

Plus like, Trump’s best issue is still immigration even after all the due process violations, and the reason he’s polling so low is because of his brainwormed tariffs and inability to actually fix the insane cost of living. People aren’t into ICE agents being in plain clothes and going into schools and raiding playgrounds for nannies, but Trump is still at -7.4 on immigration based on aggregated polls, and is at -8.9 overall so he’s doing BETTER on immigration than on all other issues even with all the atrocities that his administration are committing. Like, no matter how much Trump himself talks about bringing the smartest immigrants to make America great, Stephen Miller runs the show on this issue and he wants all brown people gone.

I also just don’t think you can change public opinion by changing policy on the national level. You have to meet people where they’re at and persuasion is on the scope of decades, not years.

So yes, I get what you’re saying but I disagree.

No offense, but you do realize a lot of the anger in your comments comes from people that are forced to care about politics, right? It’s irritating to have your right to marry or bodily autonomy be dictated by randos in Waukesha, Wisconsin. I’m not surprised most people don’t care more about democracy than that.

Actually, the people who get most mad at me are the people whose special interest is politics and hate voters for disagreeing with them. I get yelled at because these people scream at anybody who mildly disagrees with them instead of targeting actual ideological enemies, the narcissism of small differences.

The 2013 study, “Physical attractiveness and its relation to unprovoked and reactive aggression” gets to the crux of the problem. The experiment in question consisted of women and men being shown photographs of the opposite sex, and assessed how perceived physical attractiveness influence aggressive behavior in a laboratory setting.

The abstract of this paper reads,

“The results indicated that for male participants, unattractiveness predicted unprovoked and reactive aggression as strongly as callous/unemotional psychopathic traits. Among female participants, attractiveness predicted derogation of the opponents more strongly than any psychopathic trait.”

In summary, when women were shown unattractive men, they mostly were indifferently negative to them, but when men were shown unattractive women, they displayed proactive and reactive aggression, to the extent of psychopathy.

During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump called Heidi Cruz, the wife of his Republican primary rival, Ted Cruz, ugly. The implication was that because his wife was “ugly” (she’s not for the record, and is arguably smarter than her husband), Cruz wasn’t eligible to be president, because to Trump, a woman in the public eye’s first responsibility was to be beautiful. In 2016, at least in my circles, it was commonly declared that Trump was a misogynist, especially after the Access Hollywood “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape, and that the way he talked about women was disgusting, but then he won the presidency in 2016. At that point, we should have probably realized that our progressive views on gender weren’t remotely the public consensus, even though Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote.

To be clear, there was a substantial progressive backlash to Trump during his first term. The 2018 midterms were marked by the rise of left-wing firebrands like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the House of Representatives flipped to Democratic control, with Nancy Pelosi taking the gavel (again) as Speaker of the House. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer, George Chauvin, led to mass protests across the country that initially had over 90% approval, and even the endorsement of former President George W. Bush. Of course, approval of the protests plummeted as they became more violent, but with the election of President Joe Biden, there was an increased conviction in many corners that the country was ready for real bonafide progressive governance.

But spoiler alert: The United States did not want progressive governance1, and in 2024, the United States handed the House and the Senate to Republicans, and put Donald Trump back in the White House. He won both the electoral college and popular vote, the first time a Republican had done so since 2004.

Some people were astounded and horrified that this happened but in my mind, the signs were always there. On the Internet, and off it, there was an underlying current of strong malcontent that social progress had gone “too far”. Women were getting too uppity, JD Vance, the new Vice President of the United States raged against “childless cat ladies”, mass deportations won at the ballot box, and well, race science is apparently back and better than ever.

Let’s rewind on how this came about.

After Barack Obama won reelection in 2012 over Mitt Romney, a lot of Democrats thought they had an “emerging Democratic majority” in the words of Ruy Teixeira and John Judis. Teixeira and Judis stated that this so-called majority would only exist so long as Democrats held their margins with non-college voters (which didn’t happen), but a lot of left-of-center activists took this to mean that country was priming for radical shifts leftwards on economic and social issues and the culture responded accordingly. Slogans like “No Human is Illegal” and “Healthcare is a human right” took off on social media, and feminism was front and center with campaigns like “He For She” and in the latter half of the decade, #MeToo. But no progress is linear.

Alongside the normalization of feminism, ”body positivity” (including the somewhat misguided “Health At Every Size” movement) became more mainstream2, and for the first time, at least in certain circles, it became socially frowned upon to ridicule people that weren’t conventionally attractive, at least publicly. The Perez Hiltons of the world went underground during this time, and even Victoria’s Secret hired a model with Downs Syndrome. Obviously, this brand of social progress was on borrowed time, and by 2025, “woke” fashion was over, as was body positivity, and heroin chic was back and worse than ever. But the backlash did not stop at runways and magazine covers.

I am not a video gamer, I never played video games growing up and never wanted to either, but I am very well-versed in other forms of media, which is how I realized that the social regressions of the last decade stem from an online movement called Gamergate.

Gamergate began in the mid-2010s, and was ostensibly about “ethics in videogame journalism”, since it kicked off with an ex-boyfriend accusing Zoë Quinn, an independent video game developer, of receiving favorable coverage from a journalist she was personally affiliated with. However, it quickly escalated into a wider campaign of harassment and abuse towards women in the videogame industry, most prominently Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, who analyzed the portrayal of women in media, and Brianna Wu, who is a game developer and longtime criticism of sexism in gaming. While the original rationalization of Gamergate was pushing back against institutional nepotism, it was ultimately about gamers pushing back at people who they perceived as oppositional to their interests, and the repercussions of this anger were wide-ranging.

Sarkeesian was a longtime a creator of feminist videos for Feminist Frequency, an early one of which was called “The Straw Feminist”, in which she demonstrated that many movies and TV shows, make use of villainous, over-the-top feminists in order to spin a fantasy that we live in a world without gender inequality. But, what really put her on the map was a video she made about challenging stereotypes in video games, such as “Damsel in Distress”, “The Lady Sidekick”, “Women as Reward”, and “Women as Background Decoration”. Sarkeesian also pointed out that female videogame characters all looked the exact same, impossibly slender but also curvy and buxom. People did not respond to this point well, to say the least.

While Sarkeesian was accustomed to vitriol in her video comments, the harassment campaign, which included death threats that ultimately drove her into hiding, was on another level. A lot of people, men and also many women, felt personally attacked by Sarkeesian, and decided to get revenge on her and her industry allies as well as everybody who agreed with her, and they got it.

In my mind, Gamergate was the beginning of a decade-long backlash against women and feminism, especially in the United States. Prominent events in this backlash include Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 election to Donald Trump, the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018, the rise and fall of the #MeToo movement, the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson in 2022, and finally, the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024 over yet another woman, Kamala Harris.

What endured in the cultural memory of Gamergate, even to the extent of memetic mutation, isn’t Sarkeesian’s video series or even the vicious harassment campaign that ensued, it’s that evil feminists forced video game creators to make female characters uglier, and specifically, with smaller breasts. And honestly, that’s really blackpilling, because the natural conclusion to that point combined with the idea that Gamergate catalyzed a decade-long feminist regression is that men were so angry at having to see women they didn’t want to fuck in the media they consumed that they decided to punish women in collective for it.

But it’s not just the media, movies, television, video games, it’s also social media that’s driving the backlash. In the past, people only really saw the faces and bodies of those around them, on TV and film3, and in glossy magazines. Although “normal” people were also less polished than they are today, even in the upper classes, a regular person living in suburban Cincinnati didn’t have the entire Internet of people to gawk at. Sure, normies weren’t constantly comparing themselves to the Instagram baddies of the world, which probably helped their self-esteem, but they also weren’t seeing people they were, to be quite blunt, actively disgusted by as they scrolled through their social media feeds.

Fat people have always existed, non-passing trans people have always existed, people with bad skin and uneven teeth and lots of tattoos have always existed, but in 2025, those people’s lives and appearances are available for public consumption, with or without their consent. Unfortunately, I think that’s genuinely radicalized people, especially men, which is why ridiculing women’s looks goes viral, because that’s the cultural climate we’re in.

Kamala Harris did WORSE with men than Hillary Clinton did, which was previously considered a generational low for Democrats, and that’s just one manifestation of the ongoing gender war. Men now vote further right than they have in decades, and I’m not sure how to fix it, but quite frankly, it’s a real problem and I’m starting to think this country will burn to the ground if the people responsible for doing so aren’t satiated.

Today, I can’t scroll through my timeline on X/Twitter without seeing dating discourse, and it always ends up at the conclusion that women are to blame for the pandemic of singledom because we’re too fat and too ugly and too invested in our careers. This is obviously untrue, the vast majority of women aren’t nearly as ambitious as I am, and if women are too fat, so are men. But, the damage has been done. Hatred of women is more normalized and even encouraged than it has been in decades, and quite frankly, I don’t know how to fix it, or even if it can be fixed.

I can’t undo the last decade or more of history. I can’t prevent unattractive people from having a visual platform, and I can’t go back in time and stop women in the video game industry from advocating for female characters with somewhat realistic proportions. You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube, you can’t force people to forget society’s perceived slights against them, no matter how irrational those slights may seem to outside observers. All we can do is white knuckle it all, hope for the best, expect the worst, do what we can to help who needs it, and well, keep calm and carry on until thermostatic regression, if it even still exists, comes back around.

I recently finished all of Laguna Beach (2004-2006) and most of The Hills (2006-2010) on MTV, and since I’ve taken to writing about reality shows, I thought I’d offer my commentary on these moments in time. I watched Laguna back in middle school (when my parents weren’t home because I knew they’d disapprove) but it had been so long that I had to jog my memory.

Both of these shows “star” Lauren Conrad, a wealthy teenager that was born and raised in Laguna Beach, California, about 50 miles south of Los Angeles, and follow Lauren and her friends through high school in Laguna (including a “sordid” love triangle involving Lauren, Stephen Colletti, and Kristin Cavallari), and then college slash young adult life in Los Angeles. I found these programs fascinating as a microcosm of southern California culture in the latter half of the first decade of 2000s but there’s also some residual cultural commentary that’s worth looking into.

• Lauren Conrad is an interesting figure because she’s … boring in a way most public figures, especially on reality TV, are not. She’s a nice-ish girl but not overwhelmingly kind, pretty but not in an unrealistic glamazon way, not very intelligent or especially witty but probably knows who the Vice-President of the United States is if she thinks hard, and that sets her apart from the vast majority of her reality star contemporaries. In the words of Thomas Rogers back in 2009 on the release of Conrad’s first book, L.A. Candy:

  Much of the appeal of Lauren Conrad, like the Bella Swan character in the “Twilight” novels, is that she’s a near-perfect cipher for young women. It’s her very blankness that made her so well-suited for “The Hills” — and a much better choice of star than the woman who will replace her on the show, Kristin Cavallari, because she doesn’t create drama. Drama happens to her. It’s a feeling that many junior-high-age girls (and some grown-ups) can easily identify with: I’m just trying to be nice — so why is everybody being so mean to me? That blank innocence and persistent victimhood, not coincidentally, is also the appeal of the main character in Conrad’s novel — a surprisingly entertaining, if somewhat vacuous book.

  On a meta level, what Lauren Conrad’s enduring appeal teaches us is that a lack of agency and real ambition is one of the most desired qualities in women even in 2025. In other words, these articles and posts are pure rage bait that aim to demonize women who aren’t common in the first place. Even most politically liberal women don’t want deeply fulfilling prestige careers, and they could probably be paid to not work, but that doesn’t stop right and left-wingers alike from hating them. If Lauren Conrad wasn’t a reality star and from a wealthy family, I don’t think she’d be a businesswoman with a fashion line since she lacks any real ambition or drive to be anything more than who she was born to be, which is why the girls and women of America liked her so much.

• It’s kind of funny just how obvious the underage drinking and drug use was on Laguna and then The Hills.

• All reality shows are scripted to some extent, but the behind-the-scenes drama on The Hills has always been a touch beyond that. In The Hills, Lauren and her one-time best friend’s Heidi Montag fell out not over boy problems but over Heidi’s boyfriend (and eventual husband), Spencer Pratt, telling Perez Hilton that Lauren and her ex-boyfriend Jason (the same Jason that cheated on Jessica back in Laguna) had made a sex tape, and then calling Lauren’s vagina “beef curtains” on MySpace. I personally think the sex tape absolutely existed, and that Lauren’s wealthy father shut it down, which is why Lauren and Heidi’s friendship was irrevocably broken even when they worked together. All that said, Heidi and Spencer are still together even now, and they’re still just as fame hungry as ever so I guess some people really do find their true loves!

• Seeing Heidi go from the pretty but generally normal looking young woman on the left to the woman on the right kind of upsets me. I thought she was beautiful in the first place and I hate that she didn’t feel that way (or that Spencer1 didn’t feel that way). I know that I’m irrationally Pollyanna slash Andrea Dworkin on plastic surgery and all forms of beauty culture including makeup and high heels, but I genuinely do want all women to be happy about how they look in their natural forms. I wish for us all to not feel the desire to undergo any form of body modification that we wouldn’t do if not for the resultant social benefits or social consequences from abstaining. I know I’m never going to convince most women that they have inherent worth regardless of how they look, let alone talk them out of choice feminism, but that doesn’t change how I feel.

  

• Funnily enough, I liked Lauren’s high school nemesis, Kristin, way more as an adult than I did back in middle school. Kristin was always more agentic than Lauren and more difficult to like, but she had real self-respect in the Joan Didion sense, from the time she was a teenager. She never asked for sympathy she didn’t earn, and she owned up to her mistakes in a way very few women do at 17 let alone 70. In the season 2 episode “You Can’t Trust Him”, while imploring her friend Jessica to realize that she’s being cheated on, Kristin flat out goes, “Jessica, I’m telling you from someone that used to cheat on her boyfriend, those are signs of him cheating,” and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a woman, or in this case a girl, admit to cheating on national television. On The Valley, Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules spinoff that’s a horror story about what happens to women when they have children with the wrong men and what happens to men that refuse to grow up even after marriage and fatherhood, Michelle is rumored to have been (physically and/or emotionally) cheating on her now ex-husband Jesse for a year prior to their divorce. However, Michelle still has never copped to infidelity despite all evidence pointing towards it. I’m not sure where I’m going with this but it’s just interesting that a 17-year-old girl had the dignity to own up to her actions and indiscretions while a woman who’s twice her age didn’t, and honestly, I don’t think she ever will.

• Audrina Patridge dating and more annoyingly, loving Justin Bobby as much as she did and maybe even still does, back in her early 20s and over a decade later when she’s divorced and has a child, is so frustrating. I have had my share of romantic hangups but at the end of the day, I got over mine in due time, and never went back, and Audrina can’t say the same. It’s normal to wonder what could have been with your past flames, especially when you’re lonely, but when you’re 40 years old and a mother, you can’t be in love with the same person you were in love with at 20. That’s even more pathetic than Jax Taylor moving back in next to his friend and former roommate, Tom Schwartz (Bravo’s go-to sidekick for toxic men) after they both got divorced and are now to the rotten people they were at 25 (and probably dating women that age as well).

• Brody Jenner (who never actually dated Lauren) being Kim, Kourtney, and Khloe Kardashian’s former step-brother and is Kendall and Kylie Jenner’s half-brother makes perfect sense the more I think about it, especially when I conceptualize this dynamic in the larger Hollywood sphere of people in their general age group, including the Biebers and Hadids and well, Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift. It’s no wonder that Bella Hadid peaced out to Texas with her hot cowboy boyfriend; all her “friends” in Los Angeles kept on fucking her ex-boyfriends (or even her current boyfriends), and I don’t blame her for wanting nothing to do with it.

• All that said, I find it kind of nice that Lauren, Stephen, and Kristin have all buried the hatchet despite their “love triangle” from Laguna Beach. It probably helps that Stephen and Lauren were never serious and Kristin and Stephen have been broken up for over 15 years at this point, but still, I kind of love that Stephen and Kristin have a podcast together that Lauren guested on. Maybe time does heal all wounds, and then again, maybe some wounds, like Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag’s somewhat codependent friendship, go too deep to risk tearing open.

An ongoing fight on Twitter/X as well as in the backrooms of the Democratic Party is over “Abundance”, a term that isn’t unique to the book of the same name by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (which like 20 people in America have read, including me) that was released in March. The “Abundance Agenda” has come to colloquially refer not just to the platform laid out in the book, but also the platform people have decided the book is a Trojan Horse for.

The book is focused on arguing that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities, while well intentioned, stymies development of housing, infrastructure, and general development. Due to population losses in blue states, after the 2030 census, Democrats will no longer be able to win the presidency with just the Blue Wall (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania), they need to win at least one Sunbelt state (Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina), and since Kamala Harris did markedly better in the Midwest than in the Sunbelt, this topic is dire.

But, the Abundance Agenda has become synonymous with the moderate faction of the Democratic Party, focused on “popularism”, as propagated by several moderate pundit types, including Matthew Yglesias and David Shor. Since Klein and Thompson’s book was published, there have been endless intraparty skirmishes about what the Democratic Party should do next, and who, if anybody, has to be thrown under the bus. The popularists, most commonly Yglesias1, endorse moderating on policy across the board, and not just dog-whistling about it. They support giving up the trans sports issue, sticking to an Obama-era position on immigration, and stop prattling on about banning fossil fuels, and naturally, progressives push back against that methodology of doing politics.

WelcomeFest, which took place in Washington DC on June 4, is put on by the Welcome PAC, whose mission statement reads, “We share a commitment to protecting our democracy and building a big-tent Democratic Party that wins.” Despite the fact Klein and Thompson’s Abundance isn’t solely about winning elections, this conference is considered by many, especially in the progressive faction of the Democratic Party, to be an arm of it. I’ve been career pivoting lately, and I can’t provide details publicly, but I was flown out to WelcomeFest and while there’s a lot of commentary on this conference floating around, I thought I’d offer my opinions on some of it, not least because my perspective is not exactly what you might expect.

• In his piece for the New York Times titled “The Abundance Agenda Has Its Own Theory of Power”, Ezra Klein writes “A lot is lost when you collapse the complex interests of politics into a simple morality play.” I agree with Klein that a liberalism built on building is threatening to the anti-monopolist left but I wonder if he realizes the scope of what he’s asking, to get the morality plays out of politics, when at the end of the day, that’s what politics is all about. I’ve talked about how much I hate moralizers and people insist I do the same, and maybe I do, but I’ll be the first to admit that people’s subjective conceptions of right and wrong drive our political views far more than our objective understanding of how best to deal with the housing crisis (duh, it’s building more housing, but how do we decide when and where it gets built and who pays for it?). Putting things up to public opinion often does more harm than good, but uh, not putting things up to public opinion leads to the French Revolution.

• Something that I’ll give progressives for is having a coherent and consistent theory of politics2 that quite frankly, I think moderate/centrist Democrats sometimes lack and are in pursuit of simply winning elections. The thing is, negative polarization works up to a point but is not an enduring vision of politics because eventually the source of your negativity will either change or be neutralized and this definitely applies to the fragile anti-Trump coalition of 2020 that barely won, and was shattered in 2024 as Hispanic and Asian voters hurtled right. In other words, bashing progressives is not a sustainable vision of doing politics, and I say that as someone who the online Left is NOT a fan of, on a material and rhetorical level3. Moderates need a coherent thesis that is consistent and articulable across all factions of their part of the party. I have ideas but I’m not sure if the powers that may be are amenable to hearing them.

• That said, one notable exception to the “moderate/centrist Democrats lack a thesis” is liberal Zionists, whose emotional center is being pro-Israel and whether or not you agree with their ethos4, one reason they have so much enduring power in the Democratic Party is that they vote in lockstep on this issue, even if they’re otherwise closer on policy to Elizabeth Warren on policy than they are to Joe Manchin.

• Say what you will about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her lack of electability nationally or even in New York statewide5, she understands how to parlay her personal appeal into boosting her political agenda. AOC has grown out of protesting Nancy Pelosi in front of her office with the Sunrise Movement (derogatory), but if you actually look at the communications her office puts out and her social media, she is still just as liberal as she was in 2019, I do not believe she has moderated at all, but she has learned to be quieter about it. My point is though, AOC has rizz, the real kind; it’s not solely her physical looks, it’s also her genuine likability and charm and humor (her looks help a lot though). And, moderates simply don’t have an individual who can compete in that space, even if their policy positions are way more popular with *Democratic* voters as well as the general electorate6. I like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez7 (we’re both millennial PNW icons!!), but she’s too personally awkward and her district isn’t replicable enough to all swing districts to truly embrace that role, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. These tweets summarize my thinking on this topic.

  

• In terms of the actual event, I did enjoy myself at WelcomeFest; it was nice to see good friends and hang out with some people I’ve been wanting to meet for a long time. That said, I wish they’d provided a formal dress code (for one thing, I was the only one wearing color in the entire room), and the format of the event left something to be desired. I also think that there should have been formal breaks instead of going for 4 hours straight since I don’t think anybody caught all of the panels. That said, I understand that there were too many speakers on the docket so they had to go quickly.

• My friend actually described the attendees of WelcomeFest not as the theater kids that usually rule Democratic Politics with an iron (okay, maybe more of a glitter) fist, but as “shiny faced, pragmatic good boys and girls who were involved in student government and wore suits and jackets without a formal dress code dictum.” I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but like my colleague Justin Slaughter said to my now deleted joke about how Democrats need to hire more people who had fake IDs, “We’re not the people who can navigate a politics cleaved by trust,” and I don’t know if these are those people.

Holistically speaking, I think a lot of people who work in politics and care a lot about politics have a sort of arrested development to them, and this includes progressives and moderates and even conservatives. Politics appeals most to idealists, not cold-hearted pragmatists, and it’s hard not to moralize when your work is so meaningful to you, but to riff on President Trump, “Are you still a believer in the moral high ground? At 30 it’s marginal right?”

Politics isn’t about rewarding people for standing out in a raging thunderstorm and screaming, “This is real, this is me (I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be), and I’m superior to everybody who disagrees with me”, long after they ought to have grown out of it. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re beautiful and incomparable and Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper will write a big beautiful book venerating them, but that conviction doesn’t pay the bills or feed our kids or save the planet, it doesn’t prove anything to anybody who counts.

At the end of the day, politics isn’t a playground for moralizers, but it might actually be about love. This isn’t a love about who you are behind closed doors, it’s about what you do, for your family, your friends, your community, your country, people you don’t know, people you do know (which is arguably harder), and even the people who think you’re not worthy of licking the sole of their boots. There are the times and places you can breathe and the times and places where you can't, and being an adult (instead of a tall child8, holding an IPA, having a conversation you don’t understand), means keeping close all of the convictions and faith that defined you as a child without losing your mind and crashing out when they fall short.

You have to breathe in and breathe out, square your shoulders, walk back inside, dry your hair, and leave your self-indulgence out in the rain.

Suck it up and start all over.