What’s a Trillion, More or Less?

Elon Musk

Last week’s declaration that Elon Musk has become history’s first trillionaire has me thinking about what a dollar means in today’s economy. Not in the ordinary moralistic sense of it being wrong that he has a trillion dollars, while nearly one in five American children is food insecure. No, rather, I question what Elon actually has. Because it sure isn’t money in the sense that most citizens have money.

Start with how Musk became rich. He didn’t create or sell anything valuable. His IPO on SpaceX common shares enjoyed a price jump, causing the fraction of shares in Musk’s hands to increase. In other words, his “net worth” includes the promised future value of transactions he hasn’t yet made. You or I can claim future transactions as personal value only under specific circumstances, controlled by regulations and personal integrity.

This personal integrity component matters. Musk’s notorious buyout of Twitter caused massive financial losses that reduced stock values by half. Then he stopped the bleeding by selling Twitter’s successor company, X.com, to xAI, his tech startup. He moved his holdings from one pocket to another, giving himself a markup along the way. He later repeated the trick, selling xAI to SpaceX, mere months before selling SpaceX to Wall Street.

Each of these transactions created money without creating value. Neither Twitter nor xAI saw their corporate functioning improved by the transaction; in fact, neither has ever turned a profit. Neither has SpaceX. Smarter critics than me have analyzed the SpaceX IPO and determined that it involves nothing but high-minded promises and Elon’s personal financial network. Tesla’s mediocre cars have no resale value, and the Boring Company’s tunnels barely exist.

Please remember, when we discuss Musk’s “net worth,” we mean its dollar value, not actual dollars he has. Musk’s fortune mainly consists of his stock portfolio, which mostly comprises his own companies. He pumps their floating value by making his companies seem desirable, but he also controls the supply, keeping them scarce. He cannot ever sell his stock holdings, because that would flood the market and crash their value.

Musk isn’t a trillionaire because of products he makes, services he provides, or material he sells. He’s a trillionaire because of resources he owns. This is the definition of capitalism. Sometimes, when we reformists deride “capitalism,” conservatives accuse us of opposing free markets. Not so: markets exist in economic models other than capitalism. Rather, capitalism is the system that controls who owns which resources, and how they’re priced.

Home Depot is a market. So is the informal collocation of off-the-books day laborers in the Home Depot’s parking lot. Home Depot’s market is regulated by legislation, Federal Reserve policy, and labor law. The day laborer market is regulated by trust and honor. But only the Home Depot is capitalist, since it also owns its concrete slab building, its supply contracts, and the parking lot where the day laborers meet.

But Musk has reached a plane where Home Depot can’t reach. Home Depot has value only if it creates value for other people. It must sell product at sufficient mark-up to generate profit, but not so much that it discourages commerce. It must both read the present market, and anticipate future trends. And it must make moral compromises, such as letting undocumented day laborers use its grounds.

Let’s put it another way. A friend of mine, a registered Libertarian and outspoken Musk supporter, owns the local craft brewery. He owns his building, his tanks, his trucks, and his distribution contracts. But to remain solvent and pay his workers, he must produce beer. He can’t sell futures on his proposed ability to produce epoch-making innovative beer, eventually, then punt down the road. He must sell beer now.

This doesn’t apply to Musk. Of the six corporations Musk controls—Tesla, X Corp, xAI, SpaceX, NeuraLink, and the Boring Company—only Tesla currently sells products on the open market. And those, as reported by neutral reviewers, are good-enough cars whose resale value is undercut by limited battery life. Musk mostly sells the promise of future dividends, a promise he’s never consummated, and keeps moving into the future.

It’s apparently paradoxical. He’s charmless in media interviews, disdains workers and women, espouses small-f fascist politics, and sells mostly empty promises. Yet the retail value of those promises has made Musk a trillionaire. Which means that, ultimately, the foundation of that trillion is Musk himself. At least Cornelius Vanderbilt, for all his dick-swinging vulgarity, built actual railroads. What even is Elon’s trillion?

The White Privilege Party, Part 3

This essay is a follow-up to Dinner and Drinks at the White Privilege Party and The White Privilege Party, Part 2.

Woody Guthrie

If the fash hate one thing, it’s being called fash. Or even told they’ve done something fashy. Even when faced with their overwhelming fascism, or with subject experts like Timothy Snyder or Jason Stanley demonstrating their fashy tendencies, they become angry and defensive. President Taco’s claim to be “the least racist person there is” has become the tragicomic emblem fascists’ need to be seen as nevertheless good.

Returning this series to where it began, the question remains of whether protestors should use confrontational chants while challenging the current administration. Specifically, whether they should use Woody Guthrie-type songs to call fascists “fascist” to their faces. In conservative, semi-rural, and racially homogenous places, such boldness will precipitate conflicts, which discourages White protestors from getting involved.

“Fascism” is a notoriously slippery concept, since it adapts itself to local conditions. Snyder and Stanley have useful, but often inconsistent, definitions. For our purposes, let’s define fascism as the hardened and intolerant extreme of the hierarchy I described last time. Fascism not only requires some people to remain powerless for others to have powerful, and divides power racially, but enforces this mandatory division through arbitrary violence.

The history of hierarchical violence reveals something remarkable. As theologian James Cone writes, Jim Crow racial violence didn’t happen to kill the targets. It happened to remind survivors that the perpetrators would face no consequences, because they owned the system. Likewise, the Roman church didn’t burn witches and heretics to force conversions in early Christendom. It only burned nonconformists in the Renaissance, once its political power was unquestionable.

Put briefly, hierarchical violence happens when perpetrators know they’ll face no meaningful punishment. In my lifetime, Kyle Rittenhouse, George Zimmerman, and Bernard Goetz knew or suspected that the racially slanted justice system wouldn’t hold them accountable for shooting Black people or their White sympathizers. So they strapped on guns and went hunting on American streets.

We’ve watched “red states” legalize driving cars into protestors. We’ve watched them refuse to prosecute bullies attacking children. We’ve watched the current administration target harmless dissidents on camera, knowing they won’t be prosecuted, or even meaningfully reprimanded. The deferral of each consequence basically ensures that the next street-level fash will feel authorized to attack, maybe even to kill.

Equally importantly, perpetrators don’t see themselves as villains in this arrangement. Fashy narratives reinforce the belief that hierarchies are necessary, and therefore equality is oppressive. Any attempt to fix unfairness is innately unfair to those who benefit, or think they do. Therefore those protected by the status quo, even the poor and forgotten, are too likely to violently defend what dwindling privilege they have.

The term “extinction burst” has become modish recently. Once you remove reinforcement from previously rewarded behavior, the behavior becomes more extreme and calcified before it disappears. Recent discussions spotlight violence specifically, as America’s overall culture no longer rewards racism, homophobia, and other bigotry as openly as before. But that exact change puts protestors in conservative areas at greater risk.

Please don’t misunderstand, I know these forces are contradictory. People are violent because they know nobody will hold them accountable, but they know nobody will hold them accountable in the exact places where their dying ideology still matters. Florida, which legalized driving cars into protests, has one of America’s oldest median resident ages. Nebraska, where prosecutors won’t charge men who attack kids, remains substantially isolated from the larger economy.

This paradox underlies Critical Race Theory. CRT founder Derrick Bell claimed, with evidence, that racism has proven infinitely elastic as its successive justifications become obsolete. Violent economic necessity justified slavery, but morphed into organized bigotry under Jim Crow. Once the state withdrew support, bigotry became disorganized, like background noise. With each morph, the system excommunicates its former defenders.

The three vigilantes I named—Rittenhouse, Zimmerman, and Goetz—all retreated into anonymity after their acquittals, and became parodies of their prior selves, because their persons didn’t matter. They claimed “self-defense,” but their selves were an afterthought. Their supporters abandoned them because once they bolstered the narrative that White (or White-adjacent) people owned the system, that system no longer needed them.

White progressives fear angering the fash by calling them fashy to their faces, not only because fashies are violent, but because they’re as much displaced by the cultural shifts happening around them as the conservatives are. They’ll hang onto their illusions that they can persuade the fash, because the alternative is plunging headlong into uncertainty. The old system is dying, and to those accustomed to winning, that’s terrifying.

The White Privilege Party, Part 2

This essay is a follow-up to Dinner and Drinks at the White Privilege Party.

Striking teachers in the West Virginia statehouse, 2018 (CNN photo)

Political commentators conventionally date the decline of American labor unions to President Reagan mass-firing the PATCO strikers in 1981. But I think the process started much sooner. After peaking in the 1950s, union membership has declined steadily. Though reliable statistics go back to only 1983 (everything prior is estimates and probabilities), union membership rates have halved in that time. This decline has correlated with another powerful social force.

Desegregation.

Ian Haney Lopèz dates union desegregation to 1973, and claims that the battles surrounded seniority. White laborers, Lopèz claims, would rather relinquish all union protections, than surrender the senior standing they achieved under racially biased rules. Tacit within this refusal, though, is the corollary that White workers refused to negotiate alongside Black workers. Too many White workers would rather suffer than see Black people share their protections.

I cannot verify this 1973 date; FDR desegregated defense contractors by executive order during World War II, while Truman desegregated the military in 1948. The American Federation of Labor recognized its first majority-Black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1925. Union desegregation seems more gradual than abrupt. The point remains, however, that the more inclusive unions became, the more White workers abandoned them.

I’ve begun this essay with labor unions because they’re quantifiable. And of course, correlation doesn’t equal causation; White workers might’ve decided they didn’t need union protection and also that they didn’t want to work alongside Black co-workers coincidentally. But the third prong of the trident, the election of softball racist Ronald Reagan, of “strapping young buck” fame, suggests that racism directed White workers’ economic choices, not vice versa.

This pattern recurs throughout American history. Critics have condemned Nikole Hannah-Jones and her 1619 Project for suggesting the Founding Fathers created America specifically to protect their racial hierarchy. But the fact remains that, after the American Revolution, nine of the thirteen original states, including New York and New Jersey, still practiced slavery. White Americans who talked up liberty and autonomy needed ninety years to fully stop enslaving Black Americans.

And then Jim Crow began.

Bull Connor looses the dogs on protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3rd, 1963

Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison wrote that American values have long valorized individualism and autonomy; but such values have weight only to the extent that they’re denied to some Americans. Me being unfettered only means something while someone else remains restrained. Morrison, a novelist, meant this specifically in literary terms, because in fiction, we can abstract such values to broad moral precepts. But the same principle applies to society writ large.

In today’s America, “peace” doesn’t mean the stability necessary to pursue our physical and spiritual well-being, it means the absence of war. “Wealth” doesn’t mean physical comfort and a full belly, it means the power necessary to employ other people to look after your stuff. “Law” doesn’t mean reliable systems of social order, it means violent crackdowns on nonconformists and the poor. We define our shared values oppositionally.

And, as Morrison writes, we often use race as mental shorthand for this opposition. Sure, sometimes we signify “the other” with other external signs, like hair or piercings. But if White punk rockers want acceptance from the squares, they can shave their Mohawks and remove their tongue studs. Black and Hispanic people can’t stop being Black and Hispanic, and therefore can’t stop being shorthanded as “less than.”

It’s easy, considering American public mythology, to forget that when Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis in 1969, he wasn’t there to mobilize for racial justice. He was there to help unionize the city’s sanitation workers. Sure, those sanitation workers were overwhelmingly Black, but Dr. King had recognized the inextricable bond between American racism and economic injustice. Poverty and Blackness occupy the same headspace in the American imagination.

Concisely put, America organizes itself into in-groups and out-groups, then racializes the groups to simplify remembering who belongs where. The same redlining practices that preserve segregated neighborhoods, have also segregated labor forces. The minute Black people wanted union protections, White workers began embracing myths of radical individualism, even as such individualism left them broke and powerless against billionaire business owners.

Better broke than Black, amirite?

We’re somewhat seeing this rolled back. Black deaths caught on camera have ignited a sense of justice in some White Americans, though not yet enough. But it’s carried its own pushback. Capitalists like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison have sought political power that would’ve made Cornelius Vanderbilt or Andrew Carnegie blush. But it all for the same goal: maintaining the hierarchy of haves and have-nots. Which is, usually, racial.

Concluded in The White Privilege Party, Part 3

Dinner and Drinks at the White Privilege Party

Citizens protest the continued ICE presence in Minnesota, January 2026

What moral obligations do White people have, especially White men, to risk death when protecting the powerless in American society? This question confronted me this week when I answered a social media question. Somebody described her White friend in semi-rural Pennsylvania trying to organize a No Kings protest. She wanted to incorporate conventional anti-fascist songs and chants, but her White co-organizers feared becoming “too confrontational” and alienating their neighbors.

I admit I fumbled my answer. I said something mealy-mouthed about regions where somebody arriving with a Gadsden flag and a gun was entirely likely. Progressives living in broadly conservative areas know that those threatening our organized activities face few consequences. Just last month, in my state, an adult man attacked a line of protesting high school students—literal children—and local prosecutors declined to file charges.

Somebody answered my response by saying I failed to understand the Black American experience. Which, as a White cishet man, I probably do. This respondent pointed out that Black Americans face violent pushback for even the most anodyne protest. In fairness, I’ve shared enough protest space with Black and Hispanic people to have witnessed this firsthand, but like anything merely witnessed, that’s not the same as experience.

In all things, I strive to remain fair and broad-minded, and if I’m wrong, I want to amend my ways. So I’ve thought about this response. I could, if I wanted, mumble something about the limits of social media. Especially on platforms which cap character counts, like Xitter, Threads, and Bluesky, it’s impossible to make nuanced arguments. Conditional experiences, including the Black, queer, disabled, or womanist experience, will get elided.

But that’s merely an excuse. Several deeper issues conspired to reach this moment. First, humans naturally desire to stay alive. My sense of moral outrage at persistent American racism arose because racialized violence contravenes the human desire to survive, and places a sliding scale on human life. If some people deserve to remain alive more than others, autocrats could eventually use that relative deserving against me. Or you.

Accused vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, captured on a cellphone video

This isn’t new or unique. The “Women and children first” ethic made famous on the RMS Titanic was written after literally no women or children survived the SS Arctic disaster. Men on board wanted to survive so badly that they literally elbowed smaller, weaker women aside. Human-made moral codes like chivalry, law of the sea, and bushido generally arise to restrain powerful people’s tendency to value their lives over others.

Honestly, I don’t have to die for justice. As a White man, I could passively acquiesce, and pay little price. This, then, is the obverse of my respondent’s claim that Black people live with constant threats of violence. If White people can walk away from threats and survive, they will walk away. They won’t persevere if their lives are jeopardized, unless the threat of leaving is worse.

Forgive me bringing up old stuff, but here’s where Kyle Rittenhouse enters the discussion. Even I misunderstood the meaning when it happened, focusing on the red-herring language of “self-defense.” But Kyle Rittenhouse’s real lesson was that, if White people stand up for Black lives, human law won’t protect them. White lives don’t matter if they don’t prostrate themselves before a White political apparatus.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus Christ says: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (15:13 KJV) But Jesus never says anything unless its opposite flits through the common ethos. If we think morality should result in material reward, then dying for others is a failure. Only when justice is communal, not individual, does dying for the cause become an accomplishment.

And right now, in America’s White spaces, communitarian justice just doesn’t exist. That’s why private-sector labor unions are dying, protests are special occasions, and, as Charles M. Blow writes, White people can abandon racial justice actions when the weather becomes harsh. Community justice, once a shared value in America’s factories and farms, has dwindled as those spaces have become racialized, and White people live in atomized suburbs and single-family homes.

Under such conditions, asking White people to risk death simply because it’s right, is a non-starter. Not until our political, religious, and social leaders reclaim a vision of shared consequence, will that change. Unfortunately, that won’t happen while voters, congregants, and citizens don’t reward it—the ultimate circular reasoning. The feedback loop won’t break until, as the fash inevitably do, they turn against the people who first gave them power.

Continued in The White Privilege Party, Part 2 and The White Privilege Party, Part 3

Will We Ever Get Tired of Re-Fighting Old Battles?

Promo still from the last time someone dragged The X-Files out of the deep freeze

This weekend’s illegal American bombing of Iran arrives hand-in-glove with another cultural announcement: Hulu is relaunching The X-Files. Preliminary announcements call it a “reboot,” but deeper reportage suggests it’s more a soft reboot, a continuation with new leads. Simultaneously, reports suggest there might be a long-awaited season five for Veronica Mars. (This is more ambiguous, maybe misreading the series being acquired by Netflix; wording is fuzzy.)

I’ve complained before about the cultural currents behind constant reboots. Pop culture is always behind the times anyway, and the flood of streaming media has made the biggest entertainment conglomerates more timid, not less. But this feels different. The resurrection of two popular franchises, thirty-three and twenty-four years old respectively, amid a “Make America Great Again” culture feels more than timid. It feels like a hasty retreat from reality.

Throughout the Current President’s 2016 campaign, he decried urban violence and burning cities, despite such violence being at near-historic lows. But his rhetoric makes sense in his life context, as the Bronx famously caught fire in the late 1970s, the same time he moved into Manhattan real estate with his purchase of the former Commodore Hotel. The poor future President was simply trapped in the sociopolitical milieu of his thirties, unable to grow.

Similarly, this weekend’s bombing of Iranian civilian targets mirrors the President’s unhealed past. Consider his inability to stop heaving accusations against the Central Park Five, nearly a quarter century after they were exonerated. This President retains grudges and political interpretations molded by a privileged youth and segregated social set. In context, he likely bombed Iran, not really for its nuclear program, but as payback for the 1979 Hostage Crisis.

This has become the default for much American politics. We aren’t facing the past, we’re relitigating the past. In the 1980s, both political discourse and mass media desperately wanted to re-fight the Vietnam War, but correctly this time. Franchises like Iron Eagle, Rambo, and Top Gun promised to purge America’s Vietnam disgrace. More recently, Call of Duty and James Bond try to tweak our memory of the Cold War.

Caught in the interregnum between the Cold War and the Global War on Terror, the Clinton decade offered enforced cheerfulness, a frothy meringue of Empire Records and Ben Stiller’s early career. The X-Files directly countered that, maintaining post-Reagan cynicism toward America’s surface culture. Scully and (especially) Mulder walked through neon-soaked midnight landscapes, uniquely able to see the venality that made that era’s party ethos possible.

Kristen Bell in the original network run of Veronica Mars

Veronica Mars pushed this contrast to the extreme. Read superficially, the series presented a stereotyped Southern California panorama, all hypersaturated colors and loud, jangly indie pop soundscapes. Only Veronica and her father—and, eventually, those trapped in their decaying orbit—understood the vulgar horse-trading and human commodities that subsidized Neptune, California’s skin-deep glamour. Veronica, like Mulder, was ready to expose the lie, damn the consequences.

Both franchises took dim opinions of power structures. Veronica Mars fought plush-bottomed police as often as criminals, while Mulder and sometimes Scully brought official corruption to light despite, not because of, the law. But both presented a morally distinct, binary universe. Neptune’s Sheriff Lamb and the Smoking Man were clearly evil, and needed exposed to a public which their shows depicted as passive and sheep-like, desperate for an underdog hero.

Unfortunately, the political tenor has changed. From the impotent government depicted in the 1970s, to the malignant one of the 1990s, the problem has been presented as siloed at the top. The disclosure of the Epstein documents, like the Panama Papers before them, has revealed a network of politicians, capitalists, entertainers, academics, and scientists colluding to support an otherwise decrepit system. The “secret” isn’t secret anymore.

While politicians and media captains want to refight the battles of their, or our, childhood, rapidly unfolding news reveals their vision of the problem as charmingly naïve. Nary a top-tier capitalist or government insider didn’t share information with Epstein. Public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Richard Dawkins had their hands in his pockets. The rot isn’t an isolated, partisan tumor. Everyone, everywhere in the system, has been proved complicit.

Veronica Mars and The X-Files helped define a generation’s idea of acceptable villains. They showed our lawkeepers were complicit with lawbreakers in the anarchy most people felt in their ordinary lives. But reality has overtaken the scope these shows made possible. Bringing back the monsters of my twenties is worse than quaint. It offers audiences my age an excuse to avoid the monsters that have revealed themselves in reality.

Police, Paranoia, and the Streets of Minneapolis

Brian Klaas

American political scientist Brian Klaas, in his 2001 book Corruptible, describes two different recruitment ads for police departments. In the first, for the tiny Doraville, Georgia, PD, features a flashing image of the Punisher logo from Marvel Comics, six men in body armor and assault rifles, and the city’s M113 armored personnel carrier, owned by the SWAT team. The video unambiguously advertises the opportunity to bring the hammer down on Doraville’s terrible criminals and malefactors.

Klaas contrasts this to a New Zealand recruiting video. Several police officers race through the sunlit streets in conventional beat-cop uniforms, pausing to directly address the camera. Some of the featured officers are women or members of the Māori indigenous nation. The video culminates with the officers retrieving a runaway puppy and returning it to an overjoyed little girl. The quieter, lighter-toned New Zealand video emphasizes community, public-spiritedness, and a commitment to serving the citizenry.

From this, Klaas draws conclusions about which recruitment candidates each ad will attract. Doraville, with a land area of five square miles and a population barely over 10,000, will attract testosterone-fueled cosplay warriors, mostly men, who desire to manifest power. Its aggressive, violent ad will alienate the New Zealand video’s target audience of public-spirited and emotionally mature servants. Clearly the Kiwis want people unafraid to show their faces because they live and work among neighbors.

By now, we’ve all witnessed the dire footage of Wednesday’s broad-daylight murder of Minneapolis mother and poet Renee Nicole Good. Confronted by ICE officers bellowing conflicting orders, Good attempted to drive away. Agent Jonathan Ross fired three shots at Good’s moving SUV, killing her. Vice President JD Vance has claimed Ross acted in self-defense, while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Good a “domestic terrorist.” But phone videos from multiple angles categorically disprove these claims.

Alex Vitale

ICE agents aren’t police, let’s state that clearly. They have a specific law enforcement remit that doesn’t include traffic enforcement. But it’s impossible to separate the agency’s recruitment tactics from those Klaas describes. President Taco ran on pledges to deport “the worst of the worst” and declarations of a nation riddled with enemies. ICE recruitment relies upon the twin propositions of a powerful, destructive enemy, and a strong Anglo-Saxon defender who will subjugate that enemy.

However, law enforcement by identifying enemies creates a maelstrom of probable boogeymen. Alex Vitale writes how many urban PDs constructed gang units to crack down on groups that were organized as solidarity against prior police crackdowns. Indeed, Yale historian Elizabeth Hinton describes how police forces began stockpiling military-grade weapons in the 1970s because, in the prior decade, Black communities had pushed majority-White PDs out of their neighborhoods. The police see enemies everywhere, and prepare accordingly.

Nor am I the first to notice this. More informed critics describe warrior mentality in police training. Though instructors use guardianship language, the tactics taught resemble those of occupying armies. Many PDs have rules of engagement more draconian than those used in the Baghdad Green Zone. This warrior mentality, and this reliance on violent confrontation, happen because police expect a world full of enemies. And like most humans, they find what they’re paid to find.

The outcome is truly horrific. Almost simultaneously as Agent Ross executed Renee Good without warrant, ICE agents pelted a Minneapolis high school with chemical weapons because students resisted unwarranted seizures of their classmates. Teenagers, who by nature resist authority because they’re kids. We’re approaching late-1960s levels of state paranoia, when unarmed college students marching across campus in unison justified National Guard forces opening fire at Kent State. And it will happen sooner rather than later.

Elizabeth Hinton

Renee Good’s death, like the Kent State shootings or George Floyd’s murder, happened because America’s law enforcement agencies have paranoia baked into their structure. Police academies teach rookies to regard every traffic stop as potential prelude to a gunfight. Federal rhetoric makes undocumented roofing laborers equal to convicted murderers, justifying commando-style raids. Every encounter between law enforcement and ordinary citizens begins with them evaluating us—you—as potential enemies who may need stopped or killed.

You can’t reform this. Protesters said this with “defund the police” in 2020, but heel-draggers scoffed. Because law enforcement is institutionally paranoid, every moving car is an assassination attempt. They constantly demand bigger guns because they believe us peons have artillery. But when confronted by actual shooters, as in Uvalde, they do nothing… because they’re terrified of us. You can’t train fear out of entire institutions. You can only dismantle the institutions and start over.

Are Nation-States Obsolete?

The U.S. Supreme Court Building

The President Taco Administration has performed elaborate gymnastics to preserve its adherents’ notions about American identity. Within its first few weeks, it mistakenly deported a refugee, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom America was supposed to protect. It’s spent the subsequent months desperately excluding him, and others of a similar complexion, from the country. This has included snatching veterans and citizens in its absurdly wide net.

This emphasizes a question underpinning America’s foundation, a question that remains unresolved 250 years later: what is a nation-state for? Not a government, which exists to make and enforce laws, but the state itself, which exists irrespective of who holds power. Why do nation-states exist? Closely related, what purpose do borders serve? Why do we draw hypothetical lines, then demand citizens stay on their side, under penalty of law?

The Taco Administration clearly sees states as ordained to sort humanity into protected and unprotected classes. The protected class is apparently White, English-speaking, and at least implicitly Protestant Christian. Critics have documented the administration targeting suspects by superficial characteristics, like skin melanin and speaking Spanish in public. These standards of insidership are irrational and inconsistent, but serve a nationalist narrative.

If your 11^th-grade American Civics course resembled mine, you probably heard fuzzy bromides about “government by consent of the governed” and “rule of law in a free society.” Textbook writers cherry-pick these sayings from philosophers like John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Baron Montesquieu. Armchair political theorists browse these writers to justifiy a moral nation-state the way religious scholars once selectively read the Bible and Talmud.

Yet these Enlightenment-era thinkers worked backward to attribute purpose to the state. They mostly worked between the Thirty Years’ War in the 17^th Century, and the Seven Years’ War in the 18^th. During that century, old definitions of nationhood, founded on ethnicity or religion, seemed increasingly phony, as European states expanded beyond their homelands to claim vast overseas colonies. Nations needed new justifications simply to exist.

Charles, Baron de Montesquieu

Before this Enlightenment interregnum, states were the monarchs’ private property. Kings owned the military and the treasury, and commenced wars to gather riches, power, and personal glory. Longstanding wars, such as those between the English Plantagenets and the French Valois, were driven not by principles but by personalities. Monarchic dynasties didn’t influence ordinary people much, provided their battles didn’t happen on peasant farmland.

I’ve written about this before. If you dig back far enough, states basically existed as vessels to contain the military. “King” and “Emperor” are, in their origins, not political titles, but military ranks. When theoreticians like Rousseau postulate a “social contract” to justify the state, they’re imposing later moral expectations that simply don’t apply. States didn’t organize themselves to protect the hoi polloi, they fought for the sake of fighting.

Later thinkers, especially John Rawls and David Gauthier, further extend the social contract experiment. Their theories attempt to recreate primordial social selection, when states first organized themselves, and question how we can recapture that supposed purity. (I’m oversimplifying; stick with me.) But anybody who’s read Edward Gibbon knows that states didn’t emerge from social agreements, they arose from swordsmithing and horsemanship.

Modern attempts to repurpose the nation-state for moral ends create frequent slapstick outcomes. My personal favorite is when Paul Robeson—actor, activist, legend—couldn’t cross international borders during the Red Scare. So, he mounted a sound truck along the U.S.-Canadian border and sang to a multinational audience, while nominally honoring the law. The product highlighted borders’ inherent absurdity.

States invent laws to justify themselves, then draw invisible lines across the globe, demanding that people stay inside whatever lines they’re born into. Instead of the cultural flourishing that we regularly see where borders are loosely enforced, in places like Miami or New Orleans, modern borders become absolute walls that ordinary people must never, ever cross. Literal walls now, in Taco’s America.

Conservatives, especially American religious conservatives, are frequently terrified of a one-world state. Organizations like the United Nations, or even cooperation pacts like the USMCA, reduce them to pants-wetting terror. But I suggest we consider something else: a no-state world. Instead of inventing moralistic justifications for boundaries drawn during the horse-and-buggy era or earlier, maybe states themselves are outdated.

I can’t speculate what comes after nation-states. Future predictions consistently go sideways behind the forecasters’ personal blind spots. But the chaos emerging from the Administration’s attempt to define America’s purpose, shows we need to move beyond this medieval model. We don’t do polity for ancient reasons, so we can’t do it within ancient boundaries.

Samantha Fulnecky and the Assault on Learning

Samantha Fulnecky (source)

I’ve attempted to avoid OSU undergrad Samantha Fulnecky’s newfound celebrity for refusing to do her homework. Not because I don’t have an opinion, but because I thought I had nothing to offer. Despite my years’ experience teaching college-level composition, I saw this as a classic teachable moment distorted into notoriety by a partisan media machine. I wouldn’t have given Fulnecky’s paper a zero; I would’ve returned it ungraded and invited her to my office hours.

I would’ve offered Fulnecky two pieces of guidance. I would’ve stressed that a reaction paper needs to address the subject at hand, which hers doesn’t; her sprawling, disorganized essay addresses transgender standing overall, but scarcely mentions the source. Then I would’ve stressed that religious dogma isn’t an academic argument, except in theology classes. Appeals to Christian belief will only persuade fellow Christians—and not just any Christians, but those who share her specific theological interpretation.

Then something struck me. Long before I encountered the story, more informed critics pointed out that Fulnecky doesn’t cite the Bible in her text; she refers to Christian beliefs, but without actual textual source. She doesn’t present a Christian dogmatic position, she offers Christian vibes. Although standard citations exceed the requirements of a reaction paper, if you bring in outside sources, you need to cite them, not just snuggle into them like a comfy blanket.

I’ve noticed something similar in other venues recently. Prager “University,” a YouTube account where prominent conservatives deliver lectures about hot-button issues like science, world affairs, and liberal arts, doesn’t cite sources either. This isn’t incidental. Critics who exhaustively analyzed PragerU’s content note that, when lecturers do make claims of fact, those claims are often ephemeral, difficult to source, or easy to rebut with a fifteen-second Google search. Context, nuance, and complexity go out the window.

Conservatives love the trappings of universities. Besides Prager “University,” prominent examples include the now-defunct Trump University, where The Donald licensed sock puppet instructors to teach get-rich-quick schemes, and Hustlers’ University, where Andrew Tate… um… also teaches get-rich-quick schemes. Right-wing philanthropy networks keep endowing chairs and unofficial newspapers on conventional campuses. Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro love touting their Ivy League law degrees, right before floating proposals to demolish higher ed, and especially the Ivy League.

Dennis Prager

They’re somewhat less enthusiastic about actual higher education. In the 1990s, when I restarted my postponed post-secondary education, conservative outlets like National Review magazine were the vanguard of demand for a rich, robust liberal arts curriculum. By the 2010s, conservatives had abandoned such principles. Besides partisan opposition to higher ed, pundits like the late Charlie Kirk, who dropped out during his first semester, made a living encouraging youth to avoid schooling, mostly on university campuses.

Even where they don’t actively sabotage schools, they undermine education generally. In my state, the one-party government is actively torpedoing arts and humanities curricula, effectively turning state universities into trade schools. Samantha Fulnecky’s refusal to engage with her subject follows a pattern proposed by online firebrands like Kirk and Shapiro, to do everything within your power to avoid opening your mind or risk changing your opinions. Conservatives enroll in college to win, not to learn.

Dennis Prager and Samantha Fulnecky share a premise that truth is something we assert morally, not something we demonstrate empirically. Therefore, changing your mind when presented with contrary evidence is a form of moral failure. That’s why they eschew source citations, because it doesn’t matter what anybody else says, not even their own historically ambiguous holy text. Fulnecky demands experienced, credentialed mentors adjust themselves to her pre-existing beliefs, the God’s Not Dead model of education.

Let me emphasize, education shouldn’t aim to change students’ minds. It would be remarkable if a thorough education with a liberal arts core didn’t make youth change their minds on some topics, but changing one’s mind isn’t a prerequisite. But addressing complex topics more deeply, with a thorough topical understanding and a familiarity with prior knowledge and existing debates, is a prerequisite. And that requires knowing and citing sources, even those that disagree with you.

Conservatives once believed in difficult, diverse education; but conservatives like William F. Buckley and George Will have become rare. These pundits were intelligent, gentlemanly, and most important, willing to face evidence. Today’s conservative leadership doesn’t want to engage debate, it wants to silence it, and dogmatic belief is one tool to achieve that goal. When your goal is not to question but to clobber, making yourself a media darling is an easy way to win.

Megyn Kelly, “Kidult” Culture, and Me

When I was fifteen years old, I fell deeply in love with my geometry teacher. Let’s call her “Ms. Shimizu.” In my recollection, she was tall, thirtyish, and resplendent with confidence and grace. I would’ve gladly let her teach me the rudiments of grown-up romance. Ms. Shimizu possessed wisdom enough to strategically ignore my fumbling teenage flirtation. But she spoke to me like an adult, teaching me the respect I should expect to give and receive as an adult.

I remembered Ms. Shimizu this week, when former Fox News ingenue Megyn Kelly delivered her cack-handed and obnoxious defense of grown men chasing teenage girls. Kelly’s claim of a categorical difference between prepubescent children, and adolescent teens, provides just enough rhetorical coverage to justify those who already believe that. But it does nothing to address the question of whether teenagers can provide informed consent to adult sex.

My teenage infatuation with Ms. Shimizu taught me two tentpole principles of my philosophy of consent. First, yes, adolescents are sexual beings, and censorious adult efforts to squelch teen sexuality have maladaptive consequences later in adulthood. But second, adolescents don’t have sex for the same reasons adults do. Teenagers have sex for the reason grade-schoolers run and jump and scream constantly: they’re learning to control their rapidly changing bodies.

This carries an important corollary: I can only imagine three reasons adults would pursue sexual relationships with teenagers. Either they’ve forgotten the different reasons adults and teens have sex; or they’re enacting their own arrested adolescent psychosexual development; or they’re simply bad people. Each of these reasons carries its own appropriate response: education, treatment, or punishment. But fabricating excuses, as Kelly did, only makes other adults complicit.

Mass media in the last twenty-five years exacerbates this tendency. (Maybe longer, but that’s when I noticed it.) Prime-time dramas like The O.C., Gossip Girl, or Pretty Little Liars feature sexually precocious “kidults” who often pursue relationships with surrounding adults, including teachers. I still cringe at Veronica Mars, whose teenage protagonist dated an adult cop. Though targeted at teenaged and twenty-something audiences, these shows have significant adult viewership.

These are mass media caricatures, sure, but as our economy allows adults fewer opportunities to make friends their own age, it’s easy to forget the distinction. Age-inappropriate relationships reflect a common adolescent desire: many of us thought ourselves unfairly circumscribed by social standards. And many of us wanted an adult mentor to teach us the ways of adulthood, skipping the fumbling experimentation we needed to understand ourselves.

If the phrase “DNA evidence” took human form, it might look like these guys

Furthermore, these shows distort adult perceptions of what teenagers even are. Labor laws and the vicissitudes of puberty make real teenagers difficult to work with, so most mass media teenagers are played by actors in their twenties. Except for parents or working teachers, most adults have limited opportunities to even see teenagers regularly, and as we drift further from our own teens—when we considered ourselves very mature—we think TV teens are realistic.

Our society produces two equally deleterious responses to adolescent sexuality. Conservative parents advocate for “purity culture” and abstinence-only sex education. These movements keep teenagers swaddled in childhood innocence for years, then dump them on adulthood’s doorstep catastrophically unprepared. More progressive parents take a permissive hand, if not outright encouraging adolescent sexuality, at least providing insufficient adult guidance for making good choices.

Then there’s the third option. Jeffrey Epstein is perhaps an extreme example of adult exploitation, an attempt to commodify teenagers’ sexual inexperience. But almost every teenage girl, and no small fraction of teenage boys, has the experience of being propositioned by adults who see adolescents’ bodies as something to consume. When youths are mature enough to have sex, but not experienced enough to understand sex, they exist in a precarious balance.

Bill Clinton and President Taco may be extreme examples, insulated from consequences for years by power and money. But even before the Epstein revelations, both men were famed for their voracious sexual appetites, both seeing women not as fully developed humans, but as vessels for male gratification. Both men, born to absentee fathers, pursued wealth, power, and the attendant sexual attention, as shields to protect the festering wounds in their souls.

All this is to say, I understand Megyn Kelly’s intent; but she’s still wrong. It’s possible to acknowledge teenagers as sexual beings, and respect their arc of self-discovery, without throwing them to the ravening appetites of dangerous or damaged adults. If we don’t provide the guidance and defense they need, then we’ve failed an entire generation.

On a related topic: Are Age Gaps the New Scarlet Letter?

Are Age Gaps the New Scarlet Letter?

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (left) and his wife, Rama Duwaji (stock photo)

Let’s start with this reality: no serious commentator cares about the six-year age gap between Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji. The objections, which gained brief modish attention on social media last week, appear largely invented by a pseudonymous columnist for online gossip rag Nicki Swift. Yet it bothers me because it reflects a larger pattern I’ve seen developing in online sexual discourse.

The columnist claims Mamdani’s “marriage is full of glaringly obvious red flags,” but lists only two: the fact that Mamdani and Duwaji met on a dating app, and their age difference. Considering that apps have become perhaps the most common way couples meet, supplanting the previous favorite, introduced through mutual friends, this complaint seems disingenuous. But it also bears mention, because it bespeaks the author’s preconceptions.

Strictly anecdotally, I’ve observed a rising tide of moral panic around sexual mores. While American society has become increasingly accepting of the alphabet soup of Queer identities, we’ve become more puritanical, more prescriptive, about others. Age gaps in particular cause many armchair commentators extreme panic. Again, I’ve observed this purely through anecdote, but the paranoia about “groomers” and age-based abuse has become volatile.

Some weeks ago, another pseudonymous poster asked readers to settle a debate with her husband. A couple of their acquaintance had an age gap: he was 40, she was 30. The poster said her husband claimed this made the man in that relationship a “pedophile.” That reminded me of an older post I’d read, a woman claiming her girlfriends had called her boyfriend a “groomer” because he was 37, and she was 30.

Words like “pedophile” and “groomer” have specific meanings. In strict psychological language, a pedophile has a pathological desire to have sex with a partner who hasn’t yet experienced puberty. More generally, we use the word to describe someone who desires to have sex with a partner deemed too young to consent, regardless of biological maturity. And a groomer systematically coaches someone underage to regard “bad touch” as acceptable behavior.

These accusations share one theme: the capacity to consent. We deem minors to lack the moral capacity to consent to sex, even when their bodies are developed enough to have sex. And we deem minors’ moral development to be malleable, subject to being distorted by malignant influence. These considerations are real. Children, by dint of being children, don’t understand what it means to consent, especially to somebody who’s charming, influential, or dangerous.

My problem arises when we broaden the definition of minority. When we accuse somebody of “pedophilia” for having a relationship with a 30-year-old woman, we’re declaring that grown women are incapable of making moral decisions. We literally infantilize adult women, reducing them to the moral incapacity of a child. We take a serious concern, that manipulative adults will abuse children, and apply that in ways it doesn’t apply.

Our Nicki Swift columnist quotes a Twitter user saying, of the Mamdani marriage: “When he was 18, she would've been 12. Can I get a YIKES??” I respond with the counterquestion: so what? Had they known one another at that age, it would’ve been skeevy, and potentially actionable, depending on their relationship. But they didn’t, so the comparison is immaterial. They didn’t meet until their twenties, when both were adults.

The reasonable desire to protect children from predatory adults, has morphed into a belief that we must protect adults from each other. In so doing, we reduce adults, mostly grown women, to the stunted moral agency of overgrown adolescents. Please don’t misunderstand: I say “we” do this, but it’s in the hands of online moral scolds who mean well, but reduced the issue into caricature.

British sociologist Stanley Cohen coined the term “moral panic” to describe this distortion. A social concern, usually grounded in a kernel of truth, confounds people with media access. But those people perceive the problem as more pervasive than it actually is, and sell their audience on the imminent crisis. The Satanic Panic of the 1980s is a good example. So is QAnon, the accusation of sexual predation among America’s elites.

Social media puts more people in positions to start, or amplify, moral panics. That’s what the Nicki Swift article does: it takes a realistic concern about sexual abuse, and applies it in a slapdash way. But social media also gives more people the opportunity to stand in the way of cascading panic. That’s the point we’re at now: we need to refuse to lose our composure about made-up problems.

SNAP Disaster and Our Un-Free Market

By the time you read this, you’ll already know whether America’s federal government has suspended SNAP (“food stamp”) benefits, or whether President TACO has done what he regularly does, reversing himself at the last minute. This of course matters for millions of American families. But in the long term, I question whether the event itself matters more than the systematic weaknesses it exposes in the American economy.

Walmart, America’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer, receives almost a quarter of all SNAP benefit spending, according to Axios. This reflects multiple factors: for instance, that Walmart exists in all fifty states and most territories. But it also reflects their decision to place themselves in chronically underserved neighborhoods and communities. Walmart has a near-monopoly stranglehold on many areas’ food supply, and they use it.

I can’t be the only news junkie who remembers the Great EBT bollix of 2013. I’ve already written about the event itself, and the moralistic outrage it precipitated online. The ways in which Walmart has no only gobbled up its captive market, but has become the necessary go-to for its market’s rush buying, reflects that America’s consumer economy is not free. The corporation has established permanent colonies in its market’s collective imagination.

This didn’t just happen. Informed critics have described how Walmart utilizes public subsidies to corner markets. Their government largesse often totals in the billions of dollars, and includes many of their own employees relying on SNAP benefits. This isn’t news; I discovered it in the 1990s. Economist John C. Médaille even asserts that even the interstate highway system functions as a subsidy, as Walmart’s just-in-time restocking method depends on reliable, wide roads.

Nominally, Walmart remains a private entity controlled by shareholders, mostly the Walton family. But its success has relied heavily on public-private partnerships and government welfare. Given this symbiosis, and the corporation’s ability to manipulate Defense Department levels of money, it bears asking when Walmart, and corporations of its size, stop being private companies, and become de facto shadow government bureaus.

Current events, however, reveal how precarious that market stranglehold really is. The threatened SNAP shutdown has caused fears of Walmart riots—not from the company itself, which rejects the rumors, but from ordinary customers repeating scuttlebutt online. If Walmart controls a neighborhood’s access to food, clothing, and domestic goods, then cutting off that access doesn’t just hurt the community. It also radicalizes its members to demand the goods hidden behind the wall.

Nor do I use the word “radicalize” lightly. The French Revolution happened amid a combination of massive imperial wealth, and unequal distribution, to the point where Jean Valjean’s loaf of bread has become iconic. Argentina came close to a populist revolution in 2001 because people couldn’t afford groceries, although groceries remained available. Argentina kept exporting food, especially beef, during its economic nadir; regular Argentinians just couldn’t afford it.

Appallingly similar conditions exist now. Elon Musk is currently tracking to become the world’s first trillionaire, money he can never possibly spend. Meanwhile, Walmart, as the largest SNAP vendor, has food available to sell, but SNAP recipients, most of whom are employed, simply can’t afford to buy it. If working-class Americans go hungry long enough, one wonders whether we might, for the first time since Bacon’s Rebellion, develop a sense of class solidarity.

Before continuing, I’ll acknowledge I’m slightly contradicting my past self. I recently made excuses for the influence which dollar stores have on America’s rural communities, saying that they create a nascent sense of economic self-determination. Of course, Dollar General has an almost Walmart-like grip on many communities, and they’re as vulnerable to a SNAP shutdown as any other monopolistic retailer.

Yet I stand by my prior opinion. I admitted that Dollar General is imperfect, and called it a transitional stage for rural economics. By teaching country dwellers that they, too, deserve nice things, I’d argue they also teach country dwellers to join forces to demand nice things. I still believe that’s true, and it encourages small town people, who often swallow a “rugged individualism” economic pill, to see their situation as collective, not atomized.

These events reveal that Walmart, Dollar General, and other near-monopolies rely upon government support on both the supply and the demand ends. A market economy in a massively technological society requires a stabilizing hand that remains responsive to the populace, not the plutocrats. We may reorganize that stabilizing hand, but if it does the job of a government, then that’s what it is. Modernity demands, not negates, a strong state.

Crime News is Bad News

Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

I’d bet you a ham sandwich that, if you surveyed a reasonable sample of Americans, most would agree that we expect too much of the police. We expect them to investigate violent crimes, enforce traffic laws, provide crisis intervention, control wild animals, protect the environment, and safeguard private property. It’s unreasonable. Yet after the 2020 George Floyd protests and “Defund the Police,” most metropolitan police departments are even more overfunded and expected to perform miracles.

American police critics often say “copaganda” to describe mass media entertainment, particularly police dramas, that make law enforcement look both more necessary and more effective than they are. Defense attorney Alec Karakatsanis shifts focus onto mainstream journalism, which he accuses of papering over not only the police, but also any reasonable alternative suggestions. Our news media have the ability to decide what facts their audiences know, and what ideas the public considers “acceptable” or “mainstream.”

Why, Karakatsanis asks, do news outlets consistently lead with murder, sexual assault, and robbery? Police spend less than five percent of their time and budget on these crimes. Journalists regularly omit reporting on tax evasion, wage theft, or environmental degradation, which are crimes. But scary stories of violence sell precious ad space and keep audiences glued. Police know this, too; many PDs, hungry for voters and resources, have vastly increased public relations budgets since 2020.

Growing police budgets direct resources away from tools to address the root causes of crime. Attempts to redress poverty, housing scarcity, structural racism, and collapsing communities, seem abstract and squishy when crime leads the headlines. Indeed, many news consumers don’t know such attempts to redress even exist, because journalists cover them superficially, compared to the in-depth analysis that street crime regularly receives. What journalists bother to cover, winds up being what lives in audiences’ minds.

Karakatsanis sees three fundamental problems with crime reporting. First, journalists report words from politicians, police spokespeople, property owners, and other defenders of the status quo without meaningful analysis. Second, use of weasel words and deflections conceal the writers’ opinions behind seemingly neutral language. Third, news consumers lack critical reading background necessary to spot the first two problems. This leaves a voting populace frequently unaware that alternatives to the status quo exist, and have been tried.

Alec Karakatsanis

Scholars write extensively about law enforcement, and its alternatives. Karakatsanis describes many approaches to addressing crime without involving what he calls the “punishment bureaucracy.” (He finds the phrase “criminal justice system” falsely anodyne.) Some alternatives are strictly hypothetical, while others have been applied, mostly with success. But newspaper readers or basic cable watchers seldom see them. As Karakatsanis writes, “The news consistently fails to explain the substance of legitimate critiques of police, prosecutors, and prisons.”

Some readers might expect Karakatsanis’ analysis to have a partisan bent. Republicans have persistently made bank with “tough on crime” posturing. But journalistic defense of police has a bipartisan history. Nominally progressive politicians, and the reporters who support them, often use police to bolster their legislative bona fides. At least on “law and order” matters, there’s little daylight between the two major parties. Despite this, journalists frequently present any alternative as a Mad Max hellscape.

Worst, the problem is circular. Journalists lead with crime reportage, even now, when crime statistics are at near-record lows. Which crimes reporters consider worth covering, become the crimes politicians campaign and legislate on. The public’s perception of crime, irrespective of real-world conditions, justifies draconian police interventions, which wind up contributing to further crime. The statistically meaningless incident becomes the justification for crackdowns. Or, as Karakatsanis puts it, “Bad curation of anecdote leads to bad policy.”

These outcomes aren’t inevitable. Karakatsanis makes suggestions for how journalists could better handle volatile stories, though he admits that’s unlikely to happen under the current system of perverse incentives. Until then, Karakatsanis describes a more engaged, critical approach to news consumption. That includes a better understanding of the language, sourcing, and references which journalists use, and a willingness to seek what the current story omits. It also means asking who’s helped by the current framing.

The situation is indeed bleak. Karakatsanis makes a persuasive case that we have an incomplete, blinkered understanding of our justice landscape. The stories which define our knowledge and explain our opinions, are frequently slanted or poorly representative. But beneath it, he maintains an optimism that conditions could change, if we, the masses, consume our news more critically. We aren’t beholden to the news industrialists who distribute our stories. We can take control, if we want.

“Debate” Forever, Accomplish Anything Never

Charlie Kirk

Of the numerous encomiums following Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week, I’ve seen many writers praise his love of “debate.” They’ve extoled his supposed fondness for college speaking tours where the largest feature was his open-mike question sessions, where he used his proven acumen to dismantle undergraduates’ post-adolescent leftist idealism. He died under a banner emblazoned with his speaking slogan: “Prove Me Wrong.”

Recent public-facing conservatives have enjoyed the appearance of “debate.” Like Kirk, Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder have made bank playing college campuses, inviting ill-prepared undergrads to challenge their talking points. Crowder’s notorious “Change My Mind” table banner turned him into one of the most eminently memeable recent public figures. And almost without fail, they mopped the floor with anyone who dared challenge them.

Smarter critics than me have shown how these “debates” are, at best, fatuous. Kirk, Shapiro, and Crowder arrive better prepared, often carrying reams of supporting research that undergraduates just don’t have. Shapiro is an attorney, a graduate of Harvard Law School, while Crowder is a failed stand-up comedian, so they’re simply better trained at extemporaneous speaking. Kirk’s training was informal, but his mentor, advertising exec Bill Montgomery, coached him well.

Myths of Socratic dialog, high school and college debate clubs, and quadrennial Presidential debates, have falsely elevated the ideal of “debate.” The notion that, if we talk long enough, we’ll eventually overcome our differences, underlies the principles of American representative democracy. College freshman comp classes survive on the notion that we can resolve our disputations through language. As a former comp teacher, I somewhat support that position.

However, we’ve seen how that unfolds in real life. As Rampton and Stauber write, defenders of the status quo prevent real change on important issues by sustaining debate indefinitely. As long as reasonable-sounding people keep discussing how to handle racism, war, police violence, global warming, and other issues on basic cable news, they create the illusion that controversies remain unresolved. Conservatives need not win, only keep the debate alive.

Public-facing conservatives on college campuses are the reductio ad absurdum of this reality. When men in their thirties, trained to speak quickly, and notice fiddling verbal inconsistencies, try to tackle wide-eyed undergrads, they look victorious. But that’s an illusion, created by the fact that they control the field. Just because an attorney can conduct cross-examination, or a comedian can do crowd work, doesn’t mean they’re correct.

Plato and Aristotle, depicted by Raphael

Just as importantly, the changing technological landscape means students have less information in reserve for extemporaneous discussion. Back in my teaching days, technological utopians claimed that students having information in reserve was less important than being able to access information on an as-needed basis. But these “debates” prove that, in the marketplace of image, knowing your subject matters when your opponent is stuck Googling on their smartphone.

Since I left teaching, ChatGPT and other “large language models” have diminished students’ need to formulate ideas in any depth. As I told my students, we don’t write only to communicate our ideas to others; writing also crystalizes our vague, ephemeral thoughts into a useful form, via language. But if students delegate that responsibility to artificial “intelligence,” they can’t know their own ideas, much less defend them on the fly.

Higher education, therefore, leaves students ill-prepared not only to participate in Charlie Kirk-style “debates,” but also to judge whether anybody has deeper ideas than supported by street theatre. I don’t blame teachers; I’ve known too many teachers who’ve resisted exactly this outcome. Rather, it’s a combination of bloated administration, regulations handed down by ill-informed legislatures, and a PR campaign that made Kirk look more erudite than he actually was.

Socrates saw his dialectical method, not as an abstract philosophical good, but as an approach to civic governance. In works like Republic and Phaedrus, he declared his belief that deep thinking and verbal acumen trained up worthy, empathetic rulers. But his approach required participants whose approach went beyond mere forms. It required participants sophisticated enough to admit when they were beaten, and turn words into substantive action.

Charlie Kirk was an avatar of a debate structure that prizes fast talking over deep thinking. His ability to steamroll students barely out of high school looks impressive to people who watch debates as spectator sport. But his approach favors form over substance, and winning the debate over testing the superior ideas. He was exactly the kind of rhetorician that Socrates considered an enemy of the Athenian people.

This produces a society that’s talked out, but too tired to act.ac

Opening the Door to Violence

Charlie Kirk

Nobody cares what I think about Charlie Kirk’s recent public assassination, nor should they. Thanks to the internet, our public discourse is littered with opinionated cranks whose ad hoc platforms give them space to spew unbaked viewpoints and soak up citizens’ dwindling attention. Kirk himself might’ve become one such purveyor, had marketing copywriter Bill Montgomery not mentored and bankrolled him. Also, Kirk might still be alive.

I face two conflicting impulses regarding Kirk’s death. Historically, I’ve been a longtime advocate of nonviolent resistance, believing that shows of force only give powerful people the justification they need to instigate draconian crackdowns. Therefore, I would never advocate anyone actively assassinating Charlie Kirk, no matter how reprehensible I find his opinions. Anyway, that’s my longstanding historical opinion, which I still broadly believe.

Recent political trends, however, force me to evaluate my position. We saw, during the summer protests of 2020 and after, how the police used routine, lawful protests as justification for attacking American citizens like a Greek hoplite phalanx. More recently, we’ve seen ICE agents swarming over workplaces, businesses, and whole communities, in such number that Gandhi-like responses would be thoroughly impotent, and possibly even get people killed.

Concisely, you can’t hug it out with the fash.

Nonviolent resistance always contains within it the prospect of violence. Dietrich Bonhoeffer reached the point where he objectively needed to participate in the plot to assassinate Der Führer. Dr. King’s resistance to state authority always implicitly held groups like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam in reserve. Whenever we assert the primacy of nonviolent resistance, we tacitly also say: “For as long as that works.”

Demonstrations, language, and semiotics won’t work under current conditions. We can’t afford the time necessary to convince a critical number of Americans to withhold their support from an administration that shows thorough disrespect for the law. Not only the upper echelons of power, the White House or the complicit Congress, but also the boots-on-the-ground functionaries who get their limited scraps of social capital from helping enforce the administration’s goals.

Thus we hit my first impulse: the necessity, in dire times, for direct action. We must do something. Not just generating symbols or waving placards; these only work under normal conditions. Rather, we must strike at those who misuse their power for selfish, harmful, or venal ends. When the Einstatzgruppen invade, you don’t inaugurate a committee to build consensus. You shoot back.

But there’s my second impulse. Who or what gives us the authority to exercise violence? Under whose orders to we fire and reload? Mine? I’d make a terrible generalissimo; I can easily imagine getting so lost in my personal mythology that I forget the cause or ignore my allies. As Brian Klaas writes, power corrupts good people, but power also attracts those already vulnerable to corruption. And I’m Christian enough to know my vulnerability to Original Sin.

Revolutionary violence frequently starts well, but it seldom ends that way. Robespierre, the rhetorician of the French Revolution, couldn’t accept that he’d won, and launched the Reign of Terror. Chairman Mao called for perpetual revolution, which precipitated sectarian infighting after the Kuomintang collapsed. Contra Marx’s trust in collective wisdom, there’s no evidence that the next revolution will resolve any better.

Whenever we commence a campaign, we cannot anticipate where it will conclude. Society has too many moving parts to allow simple point-to-point planning. We can, at best, try to anticipate contingencies and make allowances. But the more people involved, and the more sweeping the social consequences we pursue, the more likely it becomes that we’ll unleash a monster we cannot control. The likelihood of that beast consuming us is high.

As I was drafting this essay, news broke that law enforcement had apprehended the probable shooter. Far from a leftist revolutionary, Tyler Robinson is apparently a conservative and a Nick Fuentes follower, who felt Kirk was too accommodationist. All reports are preliminary, and the accused deserves a fair trial, notwithstanding today’s political currents. But this only supports my belief that once you permit violence, you don’t get to stop it.

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes that strongman dictators generally only leave power in chains, or in a coffin. Either way, they require somebody, inside the country or outside, to oppose them. Nobody outside America can challenge our military, suggesting we’ll need insiders to take initiative. But history isn’t on our side; once we allow violence into politics, we can’t eject it easily, and the price may be steeper than we anticipate.

The “Epstein Files” and Conservative Economics

One of hundreds of photos of Donald
Trump with Jeffrey Epstein

If I despise one product of contemporary journalism most, it’s the “think piece” written by editorialists trying to keep neutral. In order to make meaning from ongoing events, like the Jeffrey Epstein “files” controversy, they want to appear cool, dispassionate, above the fray. Six years after Epstein’s spurious death in custody, the Trump administration refuses to release the files which Trump’s voters absolutely know exists. The first factional rifts have opened in Trump’s electoral base.

Too many “think pieces” have promised to explain to us outside Trump’s base why the Epstein files have proved capable of dividing the faithful. But I’m reminded of Duncan J. Watts, who observed that explanations must first explain things. Especially when dealing with unique or unexpected conditions, commentators fail to explain, and simply describe. I keep seeing journalists describing the controversy, the participants, the unanswered questions, but failing to explain anything, lest they appear partisan.

Explaining these events means first understanding the participants, especially the base. I grew up in a deep-red household, and internalized longstanding conservative beliefs. Let’s start with the core conservative economic principle: that hard work, honesty, and dedication lead to financial reward. Whether that means working hard as an entrepreneur to cultivate your business, or working hard as an employee to advance your boss’s goals, self-sacrificing labor is the only key to economic freedom and self-reliance.

Of course, if hard work were enough, then farmers would be America’s richest laborers. In Aristotelean terms, hard work is necessary—if you sit on your hands, you certainly won’t flourish—but it isn’t sufficient. Generations of conservative Americans got their first jobs and realized they saw no reward, no matter how hard they worked. When this happened, I changed my prior beliefs. Other conservatives refused to change, insisting that the world must be wrong.

Growing up Republican, so much political discourse I observed reduced to one underlying question: who’s stopping me from getting rich? If core beliefs can’t be wrong, then their failure to bear fruit must come from someone causing that failure. Immigrants undercut wage values, queer people change the social fabric, welfare recipients separate survival from work, Jewish bankers distort the value of money, or whatever. My poverty proves someone else’s culpability, failure is always externally caused.

Sexual perversion provides a useful metaphor to understand this external blame. From the medieval blood libel, to the Satanic Panic, to QAnon, “they” identify the people destroying our society by their sexual abuse of children. Jeffrey Epstein gives us something these prior blame points didn’t, because Epstein’s sexual abuse of children happened. We have named victims, sworn testimony from reliable adults, and a lawful chain of evidence, something almost no prior child sex scandal had.

But something else is also happening with Epstein. Conservative scaremongers have settled on a list that includes people whom progressives regularly hold responsible for society’s ills. Epstein’s list, if it exists, includes billionaires, financiers, hedge fund operators, landlords, and others who make their living off other people’s work. Conservatives seeking someone to blame usually land on small, powerless outgroups. This time, they’ve turned their ire on a cadre of powerful people who actually cause harm.

No wonder Trump’s administration submarined the investigation, despite having campaigned on it. The groups previously blamed for conservatives’ failure to flourish, including immigrants, Jews, and “welfare mothers,” were too poor and marginal to fight back, and it served powerful people’s interests to let the out-groups fight. For the first time in meaningful numbers, conservatives are tuning their attention to a list that includes lawmakers, landlords, and others. The powerful find themselves forced to close ranks.

I doubt whether the “Epstein files” really exist. When conservatives decided that somebody must be culpable for their poverty, they assumed that documents and paper trails must exist. Conspiracy nuts like Dan Bongino and Alex Jones reassured audiences that evidence surely, definitely existed, and would surface any minute now. Pam Bondi’s famous “It’s on my desk” claim was probably a utilitarian lie, like “the check is in the mail,” to defer consequences onto the future.

Trump’s True Believers ginned themselves to believe this list existed, and would provide the vindication they’ve spent their adult lives seeking. Then the administration committed a rug-pull. Whether officials were lying then, or are lying now, hardly matters. What matters is that, for the first time within my lifetime, conservatives have more than circumstantial evidence and innuendo of who, exactly, is keeping them poor. And for the first time, their outrage may hasten some consequences.